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CONVERSATION LESSON

HOMESICKNESS ON EARTH AND BEYOND

AC, how are you doing?

Pretty good, man. How about you?

Feeling a little homesick?

No, not today.

No? No?

No. Actually, I don’t feel homesick anymore.

No, because this is your home?

No, because home is where my heart is.

Which is with the human race, right? With me. With me. That’s what I wanted to say, right? With me. With the Deep English family.

That’s right.

Right. It’s a little hard to feel homesick when it’s so easy to be connected people all over the world.

Yeah, with modern technology and the internet and all the applications like Skype and Google Hangouts, you can talk basically for free with people anywhere in the world. But 20 years ago when I started travelling, it was really expensive to call home when you were overseas. So you really couldn’t talk for very long.

No, no. I mean it was like over $1 a minute.

Yeah, something like that.

And now it’s pennies or free. I was trying to think when was the rise of the internet when pretty much everybody had email addresses because I definitely didn’t have one. I don’t think I had when I first started travelling.

I, actually, when I was a senior in the university, this was 1994, I got my first email address and at that time, very few people had email addresses. I was just starting to come and I remember a friend of mine came and said, “Hey, when you’re job hunting, I got a really good tip: email the president of the company and he will be really impressed or she’ll be really impressed because nobody’s using email. It’s a way to get right through to him.” And of course, several years later, it just blew up. Everyone started using it.

So ’94 I think was when I first left the US and I didn’t have an email address. I wasn’t on the cutting-edge like you. But now it’s so easy. A lot of people probably don’t know that we worked for an American university, study abroad program before.

That’s right, here in Kyoto.

And we dealt with a lot of American students, some of them homesick.

Lots of them homesick.

I remember I had to talk down one girl almost every day from going to the airport. She always wanted to go home. She said she liked Japan but she really missed her family. And that was only, what, 8 years ago? I mean we had email. We had Skype then. Anyhow, homesickness. So this month’s story started out with a homesick astronaut who was working with cosmonauts. And today you reminded me that an astronaut and a cosmonaut is different, and how is that?

Well, the Russian… Well, this originated back in the, I would say, the 1950s, 1960s, during the space race and you had the American astronauts and the Russian cosmonauts. And I think the reason that it’s different is because in Russian, the Russian word for astronaut or cosmonaut sounds like cosmonaut. It’s very similar to that. And so Russians are cosmonauts, Americans are astronauts.

But apparently there is a difference in the job description.

That I didn’t know.

I just read today.

Oh, you just read today.

So the internet says…

Therefore it’s true.

A cosmonaut also is responsible for much more of the technical of flying the craft.

I see.

Well, I mean, I don’t know. Who’s flying US crafts, monkeys? I mean, I think they will be flying, too. Maybe it was more controlled by people on the ground?

I don’t know.

Maybe that’s it and the cosmonauts were more in charge of the actual craft. Cosmonauts, astronauts. This story was about a Nigerian astronaut. So I thought that was a really good twist.

You know, I’ve been getting these emails for years and years, it was for 10 years.

You’re talking about the Nigerian email scam?

Yes, scam emails where they say, “Can you help me access my family’s money. All I need is your bank account and I will give you a percentage of that money for helping me access this money.”

I actually got… The first time I saw that was by fax in 1997.

Really, by fax?

By fax. I was working in a manufacturer of hair clips in southern Taiwan at the time, and back in those days, we very rarely used email that much. It was just starting to come in. But we were using fax all the time and one day we got a fax and…

Hold it. Where was this?

This was in Tainan in southern Taiwan. And we got a fax from someone, that same story.

In English.

In English, yeah. And at the time, I’ve never seen anything like that before.

Did you think you had struck it rich?

Yeah, right. When I first saw it, it was like, “Wow, this really unbelievable. I can’t believe this. Why did they choose us?”

What was the story? Do you remember?

Yeah, it was just typical. I don’t remember the exact details.

Like somebody who was the ex-president who’s in exile.

Yeah, something like that.

You know, there’s loads of variations. I’ve gotten a variation where it was from somebody who was from a Nigerian church and they couldn’t access the church funds and they needed somebody’s bank account in America to help them. So there was this whole religious element which was an interesting variation but I went to look it up a couple of years ago, what’s the history of this. And if my memory serves, this basic scam of a rich person who can’t access their money and they need your help and in exchange they’ll give you money, dates back to I think the middle ages in Europe.

That doesn’t surprise me.

And they’ve dated it back to some story about like some French royalty who was in prison somewhere and he couldn’t access his money, and if you would front this ransom money then he would get out and he would be able to access and repay you tenfold.

Scamming is a form of art, if you will. It goes back a long way.

I was listening to an interview with some email scammers and they were talking about how they craft these stories, these lies. They choose them to be ridiculous. Sometimes we think like, who would fall for that? Who’s going to be believe that? But they want it to be so ridiculous that it will only be the stupidest people who are interested.

The most gullible.

Yes, the most gullible people and the biggest marks. So I thought that that was interesting.

Yeah, it’s like selective for a certain type of person. Have you ever responded to one of those emails?

No. I know some people, it’s their hobby. There are some websites devoted…

I did it once just to see what would happen. I got a reply within seconds.

Yeah, that was with your friend, Mark, right?

No, actually that was something different.

You responded to a couple of these because you responded to that one, too.

Well, because he’s my friend. I got an email from a friend recently, not that long ago. For him it was a joke. He was just telling people that he didn’t have any money and that he needed money to help some woman out that he met. He was broke and he needed to get out of the country. So I got really worried and tried to hunt him down and turns out it was just a joke.

Well, that was a joke but wasn’t there another story also with Mark where his email actually did get hacked two years ago?

No, I think that was the same story.

Or Steve Wolfe?

No, that was the same story.

No, no, no, no. There’s another story. Am I making this up?

No, that was the… We thought that he had gotten hacked, but it wasn’t the case. He had just… It was him that wrote that. We thought he got hacked but it wasn’t. He actually wrote that. Because it was scammy-sounding. And he’s a writer and I think he was just experimenting with the genre at the expense of the people who care about him. As you can see my friends are a little crazy sometimes.

There are still some people that are pissed off about that.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. I take it with a grain of salt because I know him quite well. Wonderful guy.

But email scams. But then we moved on to the very real idea of homesickness and space, and there’s so many plans. There must be at least 3 or 4 that I’ve heard about, some private plans and some government plans to go to Mars or deep space.

Mars One is one of them.

Right. We did a story. Yeah, I don’t know what happened with that.

It’s still going. It’s just not as they had planned. It’s evolved in different ways.

They’re looking at of course the physical stress of being in space. You know, what it does to your bones and your muscles and your eyesight. But now they’re starting to dig a little deeper and think what’s going to happen. It could be that values completely break down when you get separated from your culture so far that you’re actually on another planet when you look back. I mean, people who went to the moon, at least the Earth was still very big and visible. Can you imagine if Earth is just a pinpoint, just looks like a star out in the distance? But this is all just conjecture because nobody knows.

When I first read about this psychologist talking about how people maybe are going to hallucinate, it’s like, okay well, maybe or maybe they’re going to turn into a chicken. Who knows what’s going to happen? But it’s interesting just to imagine being so separated from home. And this idea that homesickness was a physical condition, of course there are physical symptoms of psychological problems but they seem to not see it as being generated from a psychological problem but being manifesting as a… It almost seems like they describe it as the psychological missing home was like a symptom of this physical condition with heart palpitations and lung problems. Yeah, 5000 soldiers sent home diagnosed with homesickness.

Well, it’s not surprising given how various mental states affect the body. I mean, we’ve talked about that actually in the video lessons this month about the connection between certain feelings that we focused on fear and anxiety but how that has… Of course it’s a mental, emotional thing but it has a strong connection to the body and the body can affect it and it can affect the body. So why wouldn’t homesickness affect your physical state?

Right. I mean, that doesn’t surprise me at all that they classified it as a physical ailment.

As a physical ailment rather than an emotional or mental one.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds so medieval.

Well, maybe at that time they just didn’t understand as much as we do today about the mind-body connection. And maybe hundreds of years from now we’ll look back at people in 2016 and shake our heads and say, “Wow, they really didn’t know much about…”

I wonder how many of those soldiers were just faking it, though. Crying, talking about how much they miss they mommy, hoping the doctor would give them that golden ticket home.

Yeah, I mean, how many soldiers really want to fight and kill people? I doubt there’s very many.

But they diagnosed 74 people as having died from homesickness.

Died. Wow, death by homesickness.

And then the last story we talked about was the story of Shin and…

Choi?

Choi. I’m not sure on that pronunciation. Will have to check that. But Shin and Choi, the famous movie director and the actress who were kidnapped…

By North Korean agents, in Hong Kong.

Yes, on orders of Kim.

Kim Jong-un.

That sounds like a movie.

Yeah, well. If they haven’t made it into a movie, I think they should make it into a movie. That would be a pretty amazing movie.

Yeah, why haven’t they made that into a movie yet?

It’s a great story.

So yeah, apparently Kim was a huge film buff and he decided, I can’t convince them to come; I’ll just force them to come. So the back story is the couple, they got divorced and Kim arranged this whole ruse where he reached out to intermediaries to Choi and said, you know, “We want you.” She’s an actress. He said, “We want you to direct the film and we’ve got this huge budget. Come to Hong Kong and let’s talk about it.” So she came to Hong Kong and next thing you know she’s being thrown on a boat. Kim’s father, he was actually the son of a late… He would become the leader later. He was still very high in the government but I think at that time he might have only been in his 30s.

You’re talking about Kim Jun-Il?

Yes and his father was…

I don’t know.

Well, that guy.

That guy. He was that guy.

That guy. She was afraid that she was being kidnapped to be his mistress, the father’s mistress, but then that never came to happen and she was just put up in this luxury and taken to these boring parties where she had to pretend like she was having fun and she never… It was years before she knew that the idea was to get her together with her ex-husband and have them make movies. Apparently, he was more interested in the ex-husband as the director. He thought to make him happy or grab the ex-wife and put them together.

I wonder what the timeframe was between the time that they kidnapped her and the time that they kidnapped him.

I think it was very recent because he was investigating what happened.

Oh, I see. So he went to Hong Kong and they got him, too. But why did it take so long to bring the two together?

I think because they were trying to indoctrinate. I think the main focus was on the husband, the ex-husband, and they were trying to indoctrinate him into believing that North Korea was the greatest.

But he spent two years in a prison camp, right?

So before that, he was in like a luxury house like her and he was being sent to like re- education classes even though he was staying in this luxury house and he was being driven around in Mercedes. And he told them that he needed a map because he wanted to memorize all the North Korean victories. He made it seem like he was totally brainwashed. And he got that map and he studied it and then when the chauffer of the Mercedes that he was being driven around in stepped away, he jumped in the Mercedes and took off, but the Mercedes got a flat. And then he jumped into like a cargo train and he was very close, like 10 or 20 miles or kilometers from the Chinese border and the train got stopped and searched, and the guards were like, “You’re the famous director who’s been treated so well by the dear leader?” Like, they couldn’t believe that he had tried to escape. And I think maybe it was his second attempt at an escape.

So they had enough of that.

So that’s when they threw him into prison. I don’t know how many… Actually, I think they were kidnapped in ’78 or ’79, and they were reunited in ’83.

Yeah, ’83 so it took several years.

So I think for a few years he was living in some nice house, and why they weren’t brought

together right away, I don’t know.

Anyway, eventually they were, and then they decided to play along and make movies.

Interestingly, Shin talks about it as being the most freedom he ever felt as an artist while being kidnapped.

Isn’t that ironic?

Because North Korea would give him or Kim would give him anything that he asked for. He once said, “I got this vision for this one scene in the movie where there’s going to be a train exploding, so I need like a model train set up in a studio. Can you do that for me?” Kim said, “I’ll give you a real train! We’ll just blow up a real train.” So anything he wanted in terms of budget or props.

Wow, that’s wild. So when he was living in South Korea, he had total personal freedom but he felt maybe more restricted as an artist?

Well, I think his heyday was in maybe the ‘50s and ‘60s. And then in the ‘70s, I’m not sure what was happening in South Korea but apparently the political climate had become a little bit repressive for artists like him and he didn’t have as much freedom to create what he wanted to make. So in North Korea he could do whatever he wanted.

That’s wild. So he had almost no personal freedom. He was a prisoner of a regime, yet he had complete artistic freedom. That’s really interesting.

And his final film, I think it’s called Pulgasari. You can see it all on YouTube. I watched a couple of minutes on it. It’s like a Godzilla remake but taking some mythical story, but it’s some giant monster like Godzilla. Now, we look at it. It looks silly but I think at the time it rivaled Godzilla which was, internationally, this amazing special effects film. So interestingly, I learned that after they made their escape in Vienna, they went to the US embassy. And I thought that they… originally thought that they just went back to South Korea when I first learned about this story a year ago, but as we talk about in the Core Audio story, they went to the US. And what I just found out yesterday was they went to my hometown.

No way. Really? You’re kidding me.

So in 19… I think the 1980s, like 1986.

You would have been there in the ‘80s, right?

I was a junior high school student while these two were in my hometown.

Wow, how about that.

Yeah, small world.

Small world. Interesting.

Some interesting stories. Homesickness. Pretty wacky stories but…

Well, homesickness is something that everyone has felt at some point in their life, so we all are familiar with the feeling and…

And what’s the… How do we wrap this up? What words of wisdom do you have about homesickness?

Homesickness? I have no words of wisdom about homesickness other than it is probably a very, very natural feeling that should be embraced and not fought.

Right. And with that, I bid you a good night. All right, buddy.

Okay, dude.