By Lee Dong-il
A middle-aged man carrying a shoulder bag waits for an inter-city bus with a long line of fellow commuters behind him. Suddenly a fierce-looking man ruthlessly cuts in front of him and hops onto the long-awaited bus. The bag-carrying man instantly feels a hot surge of emotion boiling up but endures the rude behavior in silence. He suffers similar occurrences nearly every morning with just the players in the drama being changed.
The middle-aged man is me.
I should have mustered up the courage to sternly face these rude people ― mostly males ― and pointed out flatly the inappropriateness of their behavior. However, I remained silent in the face of their outrageous lack of manners.
Most humans have the desire to express their minds whether in the form of writing or speaking. This is a normal and natural reaction. What's the use of a thought if it is hidden and remains unspoken? What if the thought is Earth shattering?
Speech is a way of transmitting one's thoughts, whose blockage, forced or otherwise, is sure to arouse serious mental damage to the man concerned or those related to him.
I have always wondered if the time-worn proverb that speech is silver and silence is golden is still relevant, causing me to think that the man who invented the maxim may have momentarily had his speech organs severely damaged or his linguistic ability was somehow compromised. Anyway, the lofty saying needs to be overhauled if it is to be viable and effective for me.
Changing the position of the two words golden and silver was what I intended to do. Some radical men may think that the transposition of the maxim too tepid, preferring the word golden to be replaced with stone or some other less valued material.
In these times of cut-throat competition when every man is for himself, following this time-worn and obviously untenable ― for me anyway ― adage is a shortcut to becoming a failure, ceaselessly jostled, cornered and finally left in a sighing heap of bitter defeatism and rejection.
I have tried to apply this newly coined proverb, ``Speech is golden and silence is silver," in my daily activities. However, I regret to confess that I have not lived up to my self-coined maxim. No matter how desperately I have endeavored to change my behavioral habit, submissive silence with candid or courageous expressions miserably hidden in my mind is still what occurs.
The reason for this discrepancy between thought and behavior is as follows.
I was raised principally by my father, being taught by him that being silent is the cardinal virtue and that swallowing bad feelings and thoughts the gentlemanly thing to do. Thus, restraining candid expression and feelings of others, while categorically accepting their requests or words in spite of their obvious unreasonableness or exorbitance, has become for me second nature. I mean this undesirable habit; not being able to reject but rather embrace any demand from others seems to have been instilled in me from an early age.
As a family dominated by Confucianism we kept a strict hierarchical order in which my father was in the top position, reigning over every domestic thing and every member of family. Even my mother, enjoying the second most powerful status, was not equal to his absolute authority in the slightest degree.
My father had his meals alone at a separate dinner table, while the rest of us, including mother, ate at the same table, usually a circular one, where we sat and dined in utter silence, except for the continual clanging of brass bowls, spoons and chopsticks, added to the gulping, swallowing and chewing sounds of children busily eating.
Father used to instill in us the virtue of eating without speaking during meals. He never forgot to emphasize that eating is a paramount, even sacred thing in life, thus while eating one should not talk, as the very act would be enough to ensure an absence of luck.
We small siblings were not to question whether his words were true, nor could we have the willingness to argue with him because when he said something was right, we were obliged to believe it was.
Suppose one of my brothers or sister had made the grave mistake of opening their mouth to say something and actually talked, they would have had to withdraw their incomplete words instantly upon encountering my father's stern cold glance. There was no need for father to stop eating to reprimand the breaker of his absolute order, save for his steely freezing stare that descended on the unfortunate person. The mere gaze sufficed.
Of course, there is another aspect to my father's nature, a warm and soft side toward his kids. During winter days long ago, village children used to ride their own sleigh on a water-filled rice paddy. Some thoughtful adults and parents filled their fields with water, transforming them into ground on which skating or sleighing could take place. I did not have a sleigh so I had no choice but to watch other kids gliding over the surface of the ice, though on occasion my pitiful begging for a chance to ride resulted in my brief enjoyment of it.
Once, father, seeing me standing helplessly and covetously gazing at other children sliding on the ice, called me and asked me to help him make a sleigh for me.
My father sawed a few wooden boards, nailed them together and fashioned them into a beautiful sleigh, however, there were no suitable blades for it. So he took out two very big nails from a toolbox and started grinding vigorously against a stone to fashion them into temporary blades.
However, around the dinning table, he would revert back to role of semi-dictator.
This habit during my infancy, must have formed what became my incoherent stammering, uneasy `` backwards creeping voice into the throat" and poor expression skills.
What can I do except follow this altered maxim for my advantage?
Yes! Speech is golden and silence is silver if I intend to be more assertive and confident in expressing myself, along with building up non-verbal communication skills in a silent way like a well-aimed threatening frown.
The writer is an English teacher at Pusan Commercial Girls' High School. He can be reached at Dongilone@hanmail.net.