Obituaries

In the evening before leaving Korea, I was invited to a dinner at the Seoul Museum.

To be honest, the museum has a gorgeous garden for us to appreciate sunset (well, I may not have used up all my quota of watching sunset. See http://ccszeto.blogspot.hk/2008/06/sunset.html), but the collection of exhibit is limited. Some antique pottery, ancient costume, modern painting, and so forth. Our pre-dinner tour could hardly be called interesting.

But, towards the end of it, I found a remarkable piece of work: On a casual look, it is a collection of newspaper clips sticked together to form a protruding craft. Under the camera, however, it appears as a flat sheet of paper with deep holes. Seeing that there are Korean as well as Chinese words printed on those paper clips, I naturally went as close as possible to try and read what's there.

"Dr. Szeto, can you read all these?" One of our hosts asked.

"Yes... quite a bit of the words are Chinese."

"So, what's written there?"

"My god! They are newspaper obituaries!"