What saved him, he said, was “music — and satellite television.”
“Music was my only friend,” said Lee, whose dream is to meet his idol, the American heavy metal rock musician Ronnie James Dio. “And because I couldn’t get much rock music on Korean television, I turned to satellite television.”
Satellite television introduced him to the wider world — to Japanese baseball, life on Pacific islands, Russian folk music and religions in India and Nepal.
He installed his first satellite dish in 1992, when he was 23 and had already returned to farming after completing a vocational college degree in electronics. Collecting secondhand satellite dishes has since become a hobby that has verged on obsession. When most farmers here look to the sky, they read clouds for weather. When Lee looks skyward, he says he imagines satellites in earth orbit. To him, the air is filled with broadcast signals, “like seeds from thistles.”
Farmers here at first did not know what to make of their bachelor neighbor, who listened to heavy metal music, often belting out the lyrics in English, sometimes in Japanese. They would see him on the roof under the blazing sun of summer or under the starry winter sky, fiddling for hours with his satellite equipment.
Although he does not understand most languages on the broadcasts he receives, Lee said: “It gets addictive. The more dishes you have, the more channels you can get.”
“Nothing compares with the joy of catching a new broadcast channel from a far-away country,” he said. “It’s like pulling in a big fish. It’s the excitement of discovering something from outside the boundaries of your usual world.”
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