East Goes West by Younghill Kang

Author:Younghill Kang [Kang, Younghill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

2

I had decided that I wouldn’t enroll as a student that year. I would use the libraries for my own reading. And I would try to support myself more adequately. Useless, I thought, to work and to prepare for examinations at the same time. For a week or two, without going to the dean, I read assiduously, attacking many of the books I had not been able to read during my courses last winter, especially the books on Greek culture which had interested me. Then I became alarmed by inroads into my thirty-dollar capital. I stopped reading at the library and began to walk the streets again, looking for a job. The season at the New Hotel had not yet opened. Up and down I went, in and out, over the crooked hilly streets of Boston. No work anywhere, no work for me. (How the commercial people looked at me with cold and alien stares! Oh, how many thousand years would it take to have that Bostonian air with congealed pride all its own!)

While walking around, I encountered Charles Evans. We sat on a bench on the Common and talked. Charles was enrolled, of course, and taking classes. He was much disappointed when I told him of my decision to drop out for a year; he disapproved. A few days later, owing to this meeting with Charles, I received a note from Professor Burton (in charge of the foreign students) asking me to call at his office. Professor Burton expostulated with me and urged me to enroll at once, offering me again the part-time scholarship and the fifty-dollar debt (now increased to $100 by addition to last year’s). I hesitated. I asked if instead of taking a half-scholarship for a year, I could take a whole scholarship for six months. We went to see the president and the dean. My plan was all right with the president, but not with the dean, who said if I was having a hard time in Boston, I should go back to Maritime from which I had transferred. Again I refused the half-scholarship and said I would go on reading in my own way. Professor Burton would not let me do this. He talked to me very seriously, said in his opinion I was making a grave mistake. At all costs I must struggle on in the conventional way and gain my college diploma. Of course he was right. But there it was, as Kim remarked, the importance of the rubber stamp.

So against my better judgment, I embarked the second year on that ghastly business of studying on an undernourished stomach. There were distinct advantages, though, in not having a job. At least, one could get some studying done that way, by the use of libraries and borrowed books. I went without meals often, but a loaf of bread sufficed for a few days. My stomach shrank and became meek.

While the weather was fair, it must be confessed, in spite of attending classes in college like a gentleman, I lived like a hobo.

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