A ten-hour delay, a red planner, and the man who turned strangers into stories. After more than a decade in the classroom, Joseph takes a seat at the bcd-W table.

By the bcd-W Editorial Team

The flight from Incheon to Shanghai was delayed by ten hours. Most of the gate settled into the usual silence: phones out, eyes down, time to be endured.

One man did not. Over the long afternoon he moved from seat to seat with an easy warmth, offering a red ginseng stick here, asking a small question there. Strangers who had nothing in common but a delayed departure board began to talk — about where they were going, and often about why. Some of them seemed surprised by how much they had said. Some of those stories he went looking for; others simply arrived, because he was the kind of person they arrived to.

Eventually he reached our publisher, Paul, and did exactly the same thing. Only later did Paul realize he had been interviewed — gently, thoroughly, and without anyone asking permission.

Between conversations, the man returned to a small red planner, its cover crowded with stickers from different cities and languages. He wrote quickly, in colored ink, with arrows running between names, dates, and fragments of what he had just heard.

"That notebook looks like it's been everywhere with you," Paul said.

He laughed.

Ten hours is a long time to watch someone work, especially when he doesn't know he's working. By the time the flight finally boarded, our publisher had seen what we look for in an editor: someone curious about people, who draws out the story they hadn't planned to tell, and who writes it down before it disappears.

His name was Gyeong-seop Seong. We now call him Joseph.

We had been looking for someone who notices. We found someone who listens first, and writes it all down.

bcd-W: You write down almost everything, and by hand. Why?

Joseph: Because if I don't, it disappears. A name, a sentence someone said at the gate, the look on a child's face when something finally clicks. Those are the things that matter most, and they are also the easiest to lose.

Writing by hand slows me down just enough to decide. I can't write everything, so every page is already an edit: what stays, what goes, and what connects to what. That's why there are so many arrows. The arrows are the real content. They show how one person, one idea, one city leads to the next.

For a long time I thought of it as a private habit. It took a ten-hour delay for someone to tell me it looked a lot like editing.

bcd-W: You spent more than ten years as a teacher. What did the classroom actually train you to do?

Joseph: People assume teaching is about knowledge. In practice it is about people and systems. You are running a small organization every day: thirty different personalities, one schedule, parents, colleagues, and a hundred small decisions before lunch.

I never took the conventional route. I didn't pass the public-school teaching exam, so I worked on contracts for years. By Korean standards that looked unstable. But every time a contract ended I had to design my next step myself and ask again, "Is this really what I want to do?" Looking back, that was entrepreneurial training. I just didn't have the word for it.

And what kept me in classrooms all those years wasn't the curriculum. It was the children. I remembered them, wrote about them, and kept track of who needed what. That care for people is the part I am bringing with me.

bcd-W: You say you ask "why" before you look for the answer. Where does that come from, and what do you do with it?

Joseph: In Korean elementary schools we teach the danso, a traditional bamboo flute. I could play it well, and I could teach children to play it. But the exam didn't ask whether I could play or teach. It asked whether I had memorized how traditional notes map onto the Western scale. I kept asking: does memorizing this really make someone a good teacher?

That question has followed me everywhere. "Why" wasn't very useful for passing exams, but it is the only useful question when you are trying to understand a person, a city, or a story.

The harder part is what comes next: how do you hand that "why" to someone else? In a classroom you learn to translate a big idea into something a nine-year-old can hold. Lately I've been trying the same thing in writing — turning the notes in my planner into short titles and pieces that others can read. Some attempts work, some don't. But the question is always the same.

bcd-W: Why a magazine, and why this one?

Joseph: Because my interest was never only in finding good stories. It is in connecting them to the world and delivering them well. A story that stays in my notebook helps no one.

I have moved from Seoul to Jeju, and now to Shanghai. Each move taught me that the same story sounds different depending on who hears it and where. bcd-W works exactly at that point — brand, city, design, and connecting them worldwide. It takes stories from specific places and people and makes them travel.

When I heard what bcd-W and IWBFD Studios do — finding people with irreplaceable gifts and helping their stories reach further — I recognized my own habit. It was the red planner, only at a larger scale.

bcd-W: What will you be looking after?

Joseph: Three things. First, bcd-W Magazine: helping decide which stories we tell and how they travel. Second, IWBFD Books: giving longer stories the time and form they deserve. Third, and the one closest to my heart, the care of our talent: the people whose stories we tell.

In a way it is the same job I have always done. I listen, I write it down, and I make sure it reaches the right person. The difference is that the classroom now has no walls — and no time zone.

He had spent his life a few years behind Korean Standard Time. Now the clock itself would fall an hour further behind, the way Shanghai keeps it. Gyeong-seop became Jo-seph — the same last syllable, carried across a language and a sea.

But the notebook was never really about keeping time. It was about keeping people — every name, every conversation, everything worth writing down.

So Joseph sets the clock down altogether. Korea time, Shanghai time — from here he connects people regardless of the hour, wherever in the world they keep it. That, it turns out, is the whole job.

He takes his seat at our table, and will look after three things — bcd-W Magazine, IWBFD Books, and the care of our talent: the people whose stories we tell, and who tell ours.

He wrote down almost everything. Now he helps us decide what is worth writing down.

Welcome, Joseph.

— bcd-W Editorial Team

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