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What Do People Do on the Subway?: Dreams of a Subway Peddler by Woo Seung-mi scrap
by Lee Yeong-gyeong
October 20, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Woo Seung-mi
They say that an average of seven million people use a total of nine subway lines in Seoul a day. What do those seven million people do on the subway? In one excerpt of the novel Dreams of a Subway Peddler by Woo Seung-mi, the narrator observes: “It seemed that the people on the subway trains that go around and around beneath the city have lost their sense of sight and hearing. Most of them have their eyes closed whether or not they are actually sleeping; eyes that are wide open are fixed on PMP screens or books.
Eyes that are neither here nor there are wandering somewhere up in the air, avoiding the eyes of others, and the ears are plugged up with earphones, headphones, and mobile phones.” The atmosphere is tense with passengers’ eyes and ears covered up, being carried off some place. The protagonist is a man on the verge of turning 30, just about to start peddling goods on the subway. But is it really possible to sell anything to people with their eyes closed, and their ears plugged up? To sell something, you must first get people to open their eyes and unplug their ears. In other words, in order to be good at selling something, a person must also be good at communicating. Perhaps because of this, Kim Cheol, who has been learning sales skills from Mr. Lee, the king of subway peddling, is hard at work learning how to communicate. His conversational partner is Suji, a girl he meets on the subway. At the time he meets her, she is handing out fliers that say, “I’m a deaf-mute. I can’t talk, and I can’t hear. I lost my parents when I was young, and am now living with my younger brother. My brother is seriously disabled—he can’t talk, he can’t hear, and he can’t see.” Isn’t that absurd? How can you talk to someone who can’t see or hear or talk, or in other words, whose eyes and ears are literally covered up?
Dreams of a Subway Peddler is a novel that illustrates the process through which strangers meet and come to communicate with one another by learning new languages—sign language and Braille. Learning a new language isn’t something that’s necessarily limited to relationships with the disabled. Communication between people without disabilities often fails. We should all learn a new language; it could make a new method of communication possible. The novel was awarded the Today’s Writer Award in 2009. 
Writer 필자 소개
Lee Yeong-gyeong
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