INTRODUCTION

        A tuna has to swim from birth because a tuna can only breathe when sucking air from the water while swimming. Swimming is to breathe, and breathing is to be alive. So as soon as a tuna stops swimming, it suffocates to death. During sleeping, a tuna's brain just takes a rest, but the body continuously moves. So a tuna need the wide sea to be alive.
        However, a flatfish is the opposite of a tuna. A flatfish calmy hides in the sand under the sea, or moves with the waves. The expression of floating is more suitable than swimming for the fish. A flatfish moves its body for the first time only when a prey comes into sight. For this reason, though a flatfish lives in the wide sea, there isn't any difference with a small pool to this fish. A tuna's lifestyle or a flatfish' lifestyle?  It is very difficult to answer which of the two lifestyles is better?
        Korea, which was called "The Hermit Kingdom"  once, regarded a peaceful and leisurely life in a wooded area as the ideal life. But now, koreans are breathing in the world like a tuna weaves over the ocean at 100 kilometers per hour. But not everyone goes to a healthy way, anyone of them may fall in confusions which is what, how they do. I think that it is more important than any other things that keeps up with quickly changing the world and make dearly one's life. So the most urgent question to us is to find out the example who can be showed a type why we should swim ceaselessly, and why we should hold up a fin toward the wider sea, the deeper sea and the bluer sea. In other words, I think we need the example that can represent the person who keep up with changing the world. At this point, Hong Jung Wook (Ryan Hong) appeared before people.
 

THE SHORT, IMPRESSIVE HISTORY OF RYAN

        Hong Jung Wook is a man who is gifted with good looks and a good environment. Though there are many people born into an environment like Ryan's in the world, the people who use their good environment well are by no means common. He added his efforts to his born environment and he developed the most of his potential. At last, he achieved the surprising result which is worthy of note. And when we talk about his successful story, we must talk about his mother's love. She spent so many days alone  in an unfamiliar city, New York, where she knew nobody just for her son's success. She studied together with her son. Sometimes she used to spend a whole week summarizing her son's texts.
        Truly, Ryan couldn't enter a high school like the prestigious Choate, where only the very top students can enter, except for his mother's effort. In order for her son to enter that high school, she had to have an interview with the school principal for two hours. She graduated from a Department of English Language and Literature, and she studied English before going to New York. So she could use  high class words to convince the principal, so finally he suggested that Ryan had to receive all As in three courses--literature, composition and conversation--at Portsmouth Abbey ESL (English as a second language) School which is located in an area of Rode Island. It was lucky. From then on she lived by turns in New York and in Seoul. At last she was punished with a death sentence named cancer through such a painful life, but she fought against death through endurance and love for her son, and gained a grand victory. Now she lives in Seoul, watching her son's success. Ryan's success is based on his mother's love and his own efforts. Ryan's book shows his goal, courage, challenge, passion and effort of life just for eight years, from entering high school until he graduated from Harvard University.
        Ryan had gone abroad for study in America at age 15 because of his own ambition for the future. His goal was first to enter high school and second to enter Harvard University. He knew that he had to receive all As in three courses at Abbey School to enter high school. But it would be a miracle to expect to get all As in three courses for him, since he might have to look up over a hundred words in a dictionary for just one page. He studied, studied and studied in anxious suspense at the sound of the second hand of his watch. Life at Abbey was great pain to a boy of 15, and the dry nights and unfamiliar days were repeated endlessly. He had a rush of suffocating yearning unexpectedly from time to time, but all he could do was study.
        It was at that time he memorized a whole dictionary. He memorized about 200 words a day, until finally he had memorized almost all words from A to P in the dictionary. He struggled with English until 3 or 4 o'clock until dawn except for meal time. At midnight he studied wherever he could, such as a restroom because all rooms in the dormitory could not have lights on. He ate his meals in five minutes and took stomach medicine like vitamins. And he almost always looked at the rising sun through a window, seeing his sleeping roommates. He often felt homesick, but he studied awfully hard to overcome it. Consequently, the struggle ended in his victory. However, he was faced with a huge wall. In other words, the examination for entrance into Harvard was waiting for him.
        During high school, Ryan did his best to like life in Abbey School because he needed much more time and effort to keep up with his classmates, so later he became  superior even to any students whose mother tongue was English. When he stayed at Choate, these things happened. He studied all night but he couldn't get an A in English. One day, his English teacher suggested that if somebody memorized a poem of T.S. Eliot which had 131 lines, he would give that student an A. All the students laughed at the suggestion which seemed impossible, but Ryan thought of it as a good chance to get an A in English. So he memorized it in 48 hours without sleeping, and he recited the poem before his English teacher and received an A. Then his English teacher wrote the following in his records:

Ryan has been making his own successful story. He surprised me because he received 95 points in the final exam, which was 11 points higher than the average. Ryan is only the second student who accepted my particular suggestion to recite a poem which had 131 lines perfectly since I have been working in this school for seven years, and his perfect result against my challenge was very surprising to me.

CONCLUSION

        Of course, as I said above, to choose which of two kinds of lifestyles is very difficult. Maybe a tuna's lifestyle like Ryan's would be a terrible lifestyle to anyone who wants to enjoy life and live leisurely. I don't look to him only because of his variety and brilliant activity, or because he carried away all the prizes at Harvard where so many brilliant students of the world compete. He endured and sacrificed for happiness, while ordinary people enjoy the time with their family, hobbies and heath. Why? Because he didn't want to live just peacefully, he didn't think that a dream is a just dream, and he confirmed if he makes efforts continually, his dream will be achieved. So, he ceaselessly made efforts to achieve his ambition, and he had affection for himself and never gave up passion for life. These things are reasons that I admire his lifestyle.
        I think that until now his thought, activity, nature and wisdom have been a living text to modern young people who want to develop themselves and will be a future index for Korean youth, so he is a man worthy of respect. Ryan is the best model for a new life which this period has produced. He is the most progressive young Korean man in this century. He has shown us the tuna's lifestyle, which never stops swimming to breathe.  He has shown us an example of a Korean young man who has escaped  the fate of being "a big fish in a little pond" or "a flatfish under the sea," and he has suggested the model of being like a tuna swimming toward the wider sea.