7/28/2019 A Tenor Voice

1/5

A tenor voiceChoi Sung Bong is a name on everyones lips, no? The youngtenors sudden rise from obscurity to fame on the televisionshow, Koreas Got Talent, has been captured for posterityon YouTube, with English subtitles. Posterity being definedtoday as, forever, or for a couple of years, whichever comesfirst, it grows even while it sheds, & the posterior of ourculture has become enormous. But fame is still fame, while itlasts. And we do offer enhanced, if belated coverage of AsianPop on this website (see, Gangnam Agonistes, Dec. 21).

By his own account the main points given succinctly &

modestly to the judges in reply to their direct questionswhen he first went on stage Choi was dumped in anorphanage by his parents at age three. At age five, tired ofbeatings, he ran away. The rest of his childhood was spenton the streets of Seoul, sleeping in stairwells & publiclavatories. He supported himself as urchin, selling chewinggum & energy drinks. There were bad things he did notwant to talk about, such as being sold to someone. By ageeight he had tenuously graduated to day-labour jobs, suchas delivering milk & newspapers. Twice he was hit by cars, &

went untreated; but after a serious fall he finally made it intothe Kun Yang hospital, where the cumulative effect oftraumatic injuries were diagnosed & given medical attention.

Choi prefers the name Ji-Sung, once given him by a kindlylady food vendor, to the name with which he was registeredat the orphanage. (He seems to remember every kindnessever done him.) His life-transforming event happened in anightclub. At age fourteen, selling whatever he was then

selling, he heard a performer who sang so sincerely. It wasclassical repertoire. Choi was only vaguely aware that Godhad endowed him with a magnificent tenor voice. The foodvendor told him he must take lessons, must get someschooling. He earned enough on the street to attend someclasses in an arts high school. He listened to recordings,

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2013/03/07/a-tenor-voice/http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2013/03/07/a-tenor-voice/

7/28/2019 A Tenor Voice

2/5

7/28/2019 A Tenor Voice

3/5

out. Still, they & other writers sprinkle their accounts withqualifiers Choi claims this, Choi claims that becauseour world is choking with cheats & frauds & imposters, & noone wants to be caught with his cynicism down.

This last statement is not entirely true. I am every dayamazed by media credulity at the imbecile level, typicallytowards self-serving demagogic politicians. But as I knowfrom first hand, the journalists are seldom so innocent or ill-informed as their reporting might make them appear. Theyidentify with party usually with the progressive side; theside of secular humanism & wish to help it swingelections against what they take to be the dark side, of

religious believers & the like. (And there will always bedarkness enough to go around.) Truth, for most journalists,has been relative for so long, that they can no longerdetect their own lies & hypocrisies. Good is whateverserves the agenda, even if it requires the suppression ofcontext to make it sound plausible. The hard simple truth,the big inconvenient fact, will be ignored or scorned. Often,the moral posture becomes the more strident, the moretwisted it becomes: & what is beautiful & inspiring isspontaneously derided.

Choi Sung Bong ran off every agenda. His claim, thoughunderstated, & made only in straightforward reply to factualquestions, was staggering. Choi unknowingly broke all therules, by failing to be a victim of his environment. There hadto be something wrong with his story.

Charles Dickens, that wonderful old hack, quite capable of

cynicism, was the man to tell dangerously sentimentalstories like this. He was the Victorian Solzhenitsyn, in asense. In a book potentially so mawkish as Little Dorrit,whose central setting was the notorious Marshalsea prison into which Dickenss own father had once been thrown, fordebt we find the figure of little Amy Dorrit. She was raisedin the Marshalsea, as ward of a father likewise imprisoned. A

7/28/2019 A Tenor Voice

4/5

swill of human evils surrounds the child, & reaches out in thepanorama Dickens presents, of moral posturing that extendsacross England, France, & Italy; by all of which Amy seemsuntouched. She does what she can for people, out of

unthinking loyalties, out of a nave & unquestioning humandecency; she takes her lumps without whining.

Out of a gorgeously colourful background, the vision ofDickens is assembled of this goodness rising from thevery mire; a goodness of which Amy becomes allegoricalsymbol: this angel rising from the squalor. (Dickens isreplete with child angels.) From the Marshalsea as fromSolzhenitsyns Gulag, it is a vision of salvation. The whole

world is a prison camp, & from the bottom of it, we arerising. In some details, the novel may seem overwrought; inits overall effect my heart still stops at its splendour, at thebreadth & audacity of the thing.

Dickens was no politician. The attentive reader will neverfind in him anything resembling a political agenda. He isclear that the corruption does not stop at any door; that theevils extend not only through the Marshalsea & out of its

gates through the streets of every city, but also through thecorridors of the Circumlocution Office. He did not imagineany solutions to the problems of society, short of thatrising. Only when men & women rise from within their ownhumble stations can the good happen. Dickenss faith wasof the simplest evangelical kind; he had no room in his mindfor precise theology. His God was of the simplest kind: theChrist child, & not the adult preacher. Yet from that childishangle he could depict a life force at work, that cannot bedisentangled from Grace, & by which, mysteriously, Love will

conquer all.

I have had the good or bad fortune myself, though only inmoments, to taste real hunger & life among some of thepoorest & most abandoned of mankind, & see how thebottom of society looks & feels. These were only little

7/28/2019 A Tenor Voice

5/5