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Personal stories warm up Seoul’s subway rides

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There’s the grown son bridging the distance with his alcoholic father, an old woman’s girlhood memories of working in her grandfather’s dumpling restaurant, a student’s search for an inspiring former teacher.

Like pages ripped from a diary, they’re personal stories about love, loss and just coping with everyday life in this crowded and stressful society.

But these private thoughts are presented in a public place: The short tales, signed by their authors, are part of a new storytelling program on Seoul’s Metropolitan Subway System. Posted above the exit doors inside trains, they provide emotional tonic — and perhaps a moment of escape — for some of the city’s 6 million harried commuters.

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A man tells of his boyhood shame at learning from a friend that the sneakers his mother gave him were the castoffs of another child. A woman realizes her selfishness after years of complaining how she had to care for an Alzheimer’s-ridden mother-in-law — guided by her own son’s devotion to his ailing grandmother.

Sometimes, the story’s inspiration comes from the subway itself. Like with the depressed young woman with a two-hour subway journey to work who wrote of how her mother encouraged her to keep a commuter journal about what was precious and worthwhile about each new day.

And the former soldier whose predawn subway ride challenged him to see how he’d been throwing away his life on self-pity and booze. Bleary-eyed from a night on the town, watching a less-privileged immigrant worker rise before the sun to find any type of day job, he vowed to follow through on his once carefully made plans.

“In that morning car, cutting across the middle of sleepy Seoul, I felt like I woke up from a long sleep,” he wrote. “I filled myself with the strong energy from the dawn. Sometimes I forget what I had promised myself, but now I remind myself, again and again.”

The storytelling program began last year as an antidote to the drudgery of Seoul’s daily commute in packed subway cars that hurtle along, funeral-home silent, on one of the planet’s most heavily used rapid transit systems.

In a nation with a soaring suicide rate, many choose the subway as the method to take their lives. In recent years, the subway system installed security doors on platforms that open only when the train arrives, to protect against people throwing themselves in front of approaching cars.

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The story placards, which include colorful cartoons along with the author’s name, age and hometown, also provide a break from the in-your-face ads for night school, weight-loss programs and personal-accident attorneys.

Subway official Yoo Bo-geun said the agency had received 1,500 entries. After culling the best, officials posted 16 last year and eight so far in 2011. Passengers now even find themselves on the lookout for new tales.

Hong Ye-won, 26, a doctor of Oriental medicine, recalled numerous subway rides on which she’d been lost in the endless internal film loop of her own problems and then spied a subway tale. “First of all, it’s nice to have something to read,” she said. “It’s inspiring to find other people with problems of their own. Then the subway door opens and you go on your own way.”

Pan Tae-ho, a 19-year-old college student, says many subway cars are so packed “you can’t even lift your arm to check your cellphone, let alone hold a book.… Then you see these stories, which unconsciously teach you a lesson. In a boring everyday subway ride, it’s a nice escape.”

One story posting even brought about its own happy ending. A woman writer sought to get in touch with a favorite childhood teacher, Yoo said. Not long ago, the teacher saw the tale and contacted the woman.

None of the authors are professional writers, so the tales often tend toward the melodramatic. Still, many contain narrative power, like the story of the widow who felt so lonely after her daughter left for college that she herself began attending university to land a job as a youth counselor.

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“For the past 50 years, I lived life as a wife and mother, but I had lost who I really was,” she wrote. “And now I have been given a new life, to take myself where I want to go.”

One popular placard tells the story of a third-grader who learned about sacrifice through a pair of sneakers. Bae Jae-hyong, now 37, remembers how he bragged to classmates about his new shoes, and a friend pointed out that the sneakers were once his.

“I felt like the world was collapsing. I felt so betrayed, and ashamed of our poverty,” and vowed never to wear them again, he related. But like in so many subway stories, the author eventually gleans a life lesson: One night he finally saw his mother for what she was, a struggling low-income parent.

“Her shoes were completely worn out, and her hands were rough, cracked and dry,” he wrote. “That night I went out for a run, wearing the shoes my mom brought me. I cried as I ran but felt better after running my heart out. I felt like I was wearing my mother’s love.”

On the subway recently, a woman stood on the train beneath the sneaker tale placard. She stared at her reflection in the window, lost in thought. Then she looked up at the story.

And she began to read.

john.glionna@latimes.com

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Jung-yoon Choi of The Times’ Seoul bureau contributed to this report.

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