LTEA 142 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Curiosity
Into the Light
Hikari no Naka Ni
● Yamada Haruo: always kept to himself, watching other kids from a distance
○ Quick to laugh when other people felt pain
○ Other people picked on him
● Narrator taught two hours of English a night in the community education department
● Most of his students were laborers, were tired after working the whole day
● Narrator: Minami
○ Surname is actually Nam (Korean)
○ Would preferred to be referred to as Mr. Nam
● Yi (energetic man who trained as a driver)
○ Is Korean
○ Is angry at Minami for trying to hide his surname and not acting like a Korean
● Minami is afraid that if he told the children that he was Korean, the children would have
a morbid curiosity for him instead of affection
● He is’t tryig to hide his Korea idetity
● Yaada Haruo: I ke it -- our teaher’s Korea!
○ Began to target the teacher and play tricks on him
○ His other also eer shoed up to Mother’s Assoiatio eets
○ Discrimination against Koreans
● Tension between Koreans and Japanese
○ Haruo’s dad is Japaese, ad his o is Korea
○ His o ae y Yi’s house ad her husad got ad
○ Haruo never visited his mother, and neither did her husband (Hanbei)
● The I iagied a youg oy, of oth ailad Japaese and Korean blood, and the
tragic estrangement of those two diametrically opposed elements within him. I guess he
was torn between an unconditional devotion to something paternal and a blind aversion
to anything maternal. Growing up on such mean streets must have prevented him from
idulgig i the orld of his other’s affetios. He ould’t ee erae her i
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