The Girl in the Hof

She is the girl in the hof.  Maybe she isn’t much to talk about.  But she stands out to me.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe because she’s just there, in the hof.  She’s a part of the hof.  You’ve been to this hof before, maybe two or three times, only on certain occasions.  It’s buried deep in the mundane and ramshackle warrens of a suburban Korean neighborhood.  There is bare wood paneling with copious magic marker graffiti.  Old album slipsleeves of Korean crooners from the ’80s are tacked above the window.  When you press the call button, Christmas lights blink furiously in unison along the window frame.  An old telephone, record player, and space heater sit atop a shelf above a group of eight middle-aged Korean women who are blitzing through bottles of soju, clutching each other endearingly.

She’s precious, the girl in the hof.  I order in my awkward, stilted Korean for our group, my words basic at best.  She understands, even throws in a few English words in response.  She brings beer and juktongju, the latter a plum-like liquor served in a earthware jar shaped and colored like bamboo.  She periodically returns, bringing various elements of our communal meal.  She doesn’t seem to mind.  Maybe she thinks we’re strange, these foreigners, always asking for more glasses or an extra chair.  But she complies.

She’s here every night.  You can see it.  How old is she?  I don’t know.  Older than high school.  Maybe nineteen or twenty.  She’s in her youth, the prime of it, when impressions and ideals are formed, when there is still the courage to believe and act in spite of reality.

She is here, though, in the hof.  She is serving us.  You know she is better than this.  Her actions may be servile but she wishes to be something else.  She dreams, like we do.  Yet her dreams are more worthy than ours.

She is cute.  In a Korean way.  She is not a gorgeous or attractive girl.  No, not at all.  If most of us were to see her in a bar, we would pass her off, never give her the time of day.  But she is cute, in a plain way that has an appeal all of its own.  Perhaps part of it is the way she carries herself.  She wears a big sweatshirt, light grey, with a cute bunny design on the front left and the back right.  Some strange stylized words accompany the design — they look like Dutch.  Who knows.  The pockets are deep, the elastic skirt on the hoodie strangely wide.  Her hair is messy but endearing.  The ubiquitous Korean bangs, a few long ones dangling off to the side.  Long hair in the back, part of it bunched up in a hair clasp that looks like fake orange mother-of-pearl.  She’s dyed her hair a shade of brown.  She’s a good girl.  She tries.

She doesn’t come back for a while.  We drink, discuss work, talk about our own lives and whatever negatives aspects we might discern.  Every man’s misfortune fills the space he provides it.  But when I see the girl in the hof, I realize how stupid such gripes are.

She has little.  So very little in her life.  Now the Korean women next to our table have gone.  She is there, collecting the empty soju bottles and dirty plates with the proprietor.  He must be her father.  Work hard in the hof, he must say to her.  I can’t afford for you to go to college and learn.  You must find a good man to marry.

She must find a good man to marry.  Is that on her thoughts?  Perhaps.  She seems to stare at me and I cautiously look back her direction.  But maybe she’s just gazing at the window, seated in her chair at the dirty table, while her father removes the dirty plates.  She must find a good man.  Can she find a good man?  Is that what she dreams of?  What are her hopes?  Are they within her grasp?  Will she reach them next week, next month, next year?  Or are they nobler and wilder?  Does she long for something great yet seemingly, hopelessly beyond her reach?  I believe so.  Yes, yes.

She stands and helps her father fold the tablecloth.  She is here, in the prime of her youth, in the years which must count for something, working in a hof, in a bland, unsophisticated Korean suburb.  She is, as she is now, maybe in a temporary thing.  Maybe there is something I do not know about her.  Maybe she has a boyfriend who will marry her and take her away to someplace nice.  Maybe she has gotten into art school by sheer talent and a little luck.  The future, as much as we want to imagined it as determined, is never as we imagine.

She is here, in the hof.  I do not know everything she does.  But I can read a human face.  I can see hope and I can see longing.  And I saw both tonight.  It is the sort of look that makes you want to reach out.  It makes you want to be noble and give something to someone beyond their wildest hopes, whatever that thing might be.  You might not even know what that thing is.  But you feel you must give it anyway.  Yet you don’t.  You can’t.  Life constrains you in some way.  You wish to help, to extend your hand in whatever way, to lift up one single human being on this fucked-up earth, even if only in the smallest way possible.  But you don’t know how.  You will never know how.

She is the girl in the hof.  I will see her again, one day.  She will be in my thoughts.  I hope, I pray for her.  She deserves so much.  She may not get it.  She is stalked by tragedy, waiting in the shadows of dirty Jeongja, that hopes that the next few years will pass her by.  For if she does not leave the hof, that life may have hold of her forever.  And she will be like a thousand others, spinsters at thirty, left aside by the charge to the top and the charge to the future.

She is the girl in the hof.  Thank God for that girl.  May she find her own happiness, whatever it is, however it comes.

She is the girl in the hof.

Five Months

This past week marked five months in this country.  To be honest, it feels more like a couple of years.  The thought that six months ago I was driving around country roads in my truck and shooting my .357 seems ridiculous — there’s no way all that was such a short time ago.  Living in the United States seems like years past; college is an entire lifetime away.  Your maturation process is sped up living in a foreign land.  The daily stress and struggle not only to survive, but thrive, will certainly age you and turn you into an adult much faster than you anticipated.  I honestly do feel a few years older.

Five months.  That’s two months longer than I’ve spent in any other country, namely, Scotland.  I have a passion for Scotland and its culture, but at the rate I’m going I’ll know Korea far, far better than my ancestors’ homeland.  Korea will become my definitive experience of living abroad, which I never, ever previously expected to be true.  Everyday I become more and more accustomed to a place with which I have no commonality, no roots, and no shared tongue.  Yet I am embracing it at a level that I never did while in Scotland.

The other night, at an acquaintance’s apartment, I saw American TV for the first time since leaving the U.S.  He was broadcasting ESPN College Gameday over the Internet into his TV.  It was a very surreal and, to be honest, uncomfortable experience.  I couldn’t put my finger on what disturbed me about it.  Part of it certainly is the fact that, at least at a basic level, I have assimilated into Korean society and it has become perfectly normal to me.  Seeing hangeul characters everywhere is normal, people’s behavior isn’t strange, I’m used to the machinations of daily life here.  That’s disappointing in a few ways, since the novelty of just walking on the street is lost, but it makes your ability to delve deeper into aspects of Korea easier.

But it’s not just that I’m used to Korean society.  In many ways, I like it.  I appreciate how social people are, the ever-present camaraderie.  I like the focus on achievement and attention to family and friends.  But, maybe more than anything, the earthiness of Koreans is what really draws me in.  Wherever I go and whoever I meet, they are authentic people.  There is no artifice.  They do not try to hide anything and will speak honestly with you.  I went hiking on Daemosan yesterday, a little molehill of a mountain on the south edge of Seoul.  While on the trail, I befriended a Korean man, Mr. Kim, who spoke surprisingly good English.  We hiked and talked together and he asked me all sorts of questions: where did I come from?  What does my father do?  What is my religion?  How long had I been in Korea?  Was I intending to stay longer?  To the latter question, I said I was seriously considering it.  Mr. Kim laughed and said, “I know why!  You must like Korean girls!  Ho!  Ho!”  He later on expressed his opinion that America was a great nation because we respect human rights and make fantastic weapons that, as he witnessed while serving with the ROK Marines in Vietnam, killed lots of Vietcong.  “Fantastic helicoptah gunship-suh.  Lockets, always shooting lockets.  America is very good for this.”

I feel fortunate because I am here at a unique time in Korea’s history.  The next ten or twenty years are going to see rapid and unbelievable change.  Korea is modernizing and growing like mad.  This place is going nowhere but up.  They have the smarts and the determination to be in one of the top ten economies in the world, no doubt.  Yet such changes will bring seismic changes to the people themselves.  When my students become adults, there will be deep cultural and societal revolutions in Korea: sex, drugs, gender, you name it.  Traditional Confucian society and its moral ties will be strained and perhaps smashed.  What is orderly and placid now will become stressed and fractured.  Korea will undergo what the West has experienced over decades in the matter of a few years (Timelines are compressed here).  Once those changes come, too, there will be no going back.  Korea will leap forward into the wholly modern, globalized world just like the rest of us.

Yet that is all in the future.  Korea sits astride the river right now, a foot on either bank.  Prosperity and tradition bizarrely exist side by side.  There is still authenticity, earthiness, understanding of past and place.  It is a heady and wonderful thing to breathe in every day when I step out my door.  If I can have that here and not in America, then I think it’s clear where I should stay for the time being.  Because I can be challenged and broadened as an individual here.  I can truly live life.  Back in the States I would just be grouchy and angry as I watched society, culture, and politics go in repetitive, self-destructive cycles.

How fortunate I am to observe what will happen in Korea.  For I think that the 21st century might just be the Asian Century.  In the United States, we spend all of our energy, capital, and attention squabbling with each other.  Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, independent or libertarian, we are in a constant daily war with ourselves over who will hold the reins of power.  Perhaps that should not be surprising, since never in history has there been so much world-shaping power in so few hands.  But each side seems to think that they can achieve victory.  Both the left and right have an idea that the nation can be theirs and can be easily crafted into the vision they have for it.  Yet they do not see that the struggle for power between left and right in America is endless.  Our house is perpetually divided and doomed to be divided and fighting forever.

And while we spend all our precious treasure, time, and emotion fighting ourselves, Asia continues its silent ascent.  Things here are moving quickly and dynamically in one direction: up.  There may be debates or arguments but they are  on the periphery.  It is manifestly clear that there is a single goal and that is to become as modern and advanced as possible.  There is burning, driving purpose here in Asia, fueled by the allure of prosperity.  That is what will create the Asian Century and make Americans realize that we ignored our competitive edge to bicker endlessly with each other and, as a result, got left in the dust.

It is easy to be depressed by such prognostications if you are a patriotic American.  Yet perhaps that is because, at least for modern Americans, we have never failed, never truly suffered.  Everything has always worked out okay for us.  That is not the history of the world, though, and it is certainly not the history of Korea.  You see old Korean men and women in the park or on the subway and the lines on their faces are deep.  They have seen and suffered much.  Even forty years ago they perhaps had to forage for nuts in the forest when their rice ran out.  Yet are they worse off for it?  Deprivation and even failure can bring depression but also a sense of humility and, not least, greatness of soul.  Perhaps that is the thought that we, as human beings, should carry with us.  Empires rise and fall, people die, crops wither, cultures are eradicated — there is no fairness or justice under Clio’s hand.  Yet man can persevere because he is put here for that purpose, to live life out in whatever way has been ordained for him.  We each ought to go through dire and troublesome times with nothing but tranquility of mind and a sense of purpose, that we are here to do something, regardless of national or cultural boundary, in this world amongst our fellow men.

So I am here in Korea for now, content to watch history as it spins on in its terrifying and delightful madness.  After all, sometimes all you can do is pour a dram of single malt, put on some Tom Waits, and enjoy the show.

Market Days

Back-alley, ramshackle, dirty Korea: the Korea that keeps you here.

 

 

Deserted Sunday.

 

Shady dealers?

 

"Doosan Electronics"

 

Taeguk sketch-artiste

 

Makkeolli and jokbal = content old men.

 

 

Gwangjang Shijang

 

 

Classic faces.

Soondae (blood noodle sausage) and jokbal (pig's feet) for everyone.

Dirty Korea.  It’s homemade, crowded, a little shabby and worn around the edges, but still going strong, feeding hearts and bellies.

Nature, Not Nurture

I’ve written surprisingly little about what’s keeping me here in Korea: teaching.  Perhaps this because teaching is so repetitive and change in the classroom comes incrementally at best.  That is, at least in Korea.  Still, things continue to evolve.  You learn something new each week about engaging students, about what to dwell on and what not to, about getting words and ideas to stick in their exhausted little brains.    Some of my classes which used to be terrible, uncontrollable wrecks have magically turned manageable, the students actually responsive and approaching diligent.  Some classes remain complete and utter wastes of time for both teacher and student.

The latter is probably applicable to most classes in the private, after-hours education industry in Korea.  Textbooks are either over the heads of most students or full of useless exercises and dumbed-down reading.  You have to teach the book, plowing through it in a set amount of time, whether it’s accomplishing anything useful or not.  It’s all about metrics here: have you finished the book?  Are the kids getting two writing tests and a speaking test every month?  Metrics are essential in many endeavors but not if they are arbitrarily conceived and universally enforced, with no thought to whether or not they are promoting actual progress.  Yet that is the nature of the entire Korean education system.  Next Thursday, prospective students will take their college entrance exam.  The entire country will go to work an hour late to keep the roads clear; if you’re running late for the test, a police car will speed you to the exam with lights and sirens blaring.  College entrance is determined solely by your score on the test.  Not your grades, not your after-school activities, not your actual intelligence or worth as a human being.  Simply a score.

While I taught a TOEFL writing course tonight, I realized with a sudden and surprising power what I’d acknowledged many times before only with passing interest.  The education system has failed these kids, utterly and completely, in crafting them into full and capable people.  They flat-out do not know how to think.  I had a few bullet points on the board but I asked them questions repeatedly about the reading and listening sections we’d just reviewed.  I rephrased questions over and over, trying to examine details and points and overarching ideas from as many possible angles as possible.  It might take me ten minutes of explaining an idea, asking them repeatedly if they comprehend, before I even get a hint of understanding out of any of them.  Open-ended questions are utterly foreign to them.  “How is the lecture casting doubt on the reading?”  They don’t know.  It’s not entirely a language issue.  I speak slowly and loudly, enunciate like mad, and use the simplest and most direct terms possible to convey my message.  Still nothing.  Yet I have to accomplish something in this class, so I start writing examples on the board.

Now they go into a flurry, copying down with neat precision every word I write down.  Copying.  That’s what they know how to do: memorize, understand the formula, repeat it back again.  Don’t understand the reasoning or logic or art behind it.  Just copy and repeat.  It shouldn’t surprise me, though.  When you measure performance solely by tests, you should expect people to excel at learning how to test well and little else.  The SAT in the U.S. is a example of this.  You learn that process-of-elimination trumps any actual mastery of knowledge.  Yet because the SAT is a single measurement (one under increasing scrutiny) out of many, we don’t entirely ignore the other aspects of a person’s development.  But there’s no room for that in the scramble to the top here.

The presence of a parallel, symbiotic private education industry in Korea should therefore come as no surprise.  When you teach people to think, you give them time to do so.  Let them read, consider the questions you present them, and see if they find answers.  Maybe they’ll come up with their own.  Then you can critique the answers and find a new set of questions to answer.  There is repetition but it requires self-initiative and facility with the nuance of reason and ideas.  Yet teaching for a test doesn’t require breathing space for the mind.  It requires harsh and endless repetition.  Why do you think militaries around the world make their troops practice close-order drill for hours on end?  Why do soldiers and Marines properly dis- and re-assemble a rifle, only to do it again, and again and again?  Because repetition creates competence in that one single area.  The same applies to tests.  You don’t want someone who’s thinking.  You want someone who can act adeptly and as quickly as possible.  Unconscious competence, they call it.  So the more training you get, to reach that end sooner, the better.  Which means that you need lots of private academies, so that kids can get a leg up on the others.  If you can learn to repeat the drill faster and more accurately than others, you’ve got a chance at acing the test.  And with that, at least in Korea, comes the fast-track to status and security at the tip-top of society.

My kids thus have no background to learn to be deep, analytical thinkers.  They are not encouraged to think in that way, nor do they have the mental energy to do so.  Going to school six days a week, from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM on most days, puts an unbelievable amount of stress on these kids.  I can’t convey it well enough, so I’ll let them do it in their own words.  Here are a few essays from my students.  Recently, I’ve been trying to give them writing topics that allow some pathos to escape, to let them vent a little, because no one else will:

[Note: this is verbatim from the student's essay, all mistakes left in.]

I am very angry and frustrated in studying.  If we want to have a good job that we can  earn lots of money, we have to study very hard.  Also I want to be an elementary school teacher but it is very hard.  Because many womans want to be a teacher.  So I have to study very hard.  In the middle test or final exam, I have to study about 6:40 am.  I can’t sleep well.  I have big dark circles in my eyes.  It gives me a lot of stress and angry.  My parents are expecting to me.  But I had low score.  Everyday I said to them “I will do best next exam I’m sorry.  I can get great score next exam.  Trust me.”  But I don’t know what I should do.  My stress are very big.  So I play computer or sing a song or read an internet novel and watching TV.  They give me enjoying and smile.  Only they can laugh at me.  When I went home from the institute, I watched TV or computer games.  Besides playing piano gives freedom to me.  I can’t play the piano very well, but if I play the piano I can forget everything.  It is my life.

This is a thirteen-year old girl.  Her soul is being crushed.  The push to succeed, to define success by scores, by college, by a ‘good’ job, by status, even at a young age, is stunting her.  Yet she’s a drop in the ocean.  If a kid wrote an essay like this in the States, they’d be placed on suicide watch.  But this is the story of thousands and thousands of Korean kids, suffering silently at their desks, heads down, demeanors drawn.  When someone says their workload is killing them, they might literally mean it:

[From another student, again verbatim]

I hate the test the most in the world.  Maybe, every student in the world, hate the test (especially Korean students.)  We are exposured to the test very young.  It is not our mind.  However, we must take a lot of test.  Life is continuation of the test.  We must take the test when we die.

I’m a middle student.  So I have middle test, final test.  I need to study to take these tests.  It is very stress.  Test kill many student.  If student get bad score, student feel very tradegy [tragedy].  So they suicide.  I’m very sad.

I think if there are not test, I will very happy.  And study will more easy.

Students literally kill themselves because they fail tests.  She’s not exaggerating at all.  South Korea now has the highest suicide rate in the OECD.  This is partially thanks to old people taking their lives due to their children neglecting them.  But youth suicide is undoubtedly a serious problem and will continue to be so.  At subway stations all over Seoul, sliding security doors are being installed at the platforms, to prevent people from throwing themselves in front of trains.

I feel pointless trying to expand upon this more.  You read their words.  These are not isolated students.  They represent a lot of schoolkids out there.  The bottom line is that this education system is not designed with a mind to a person’s worth as, well, a person.  Their value is defined by the role that they can play in the system, how well they can contribute to the whole.  It’s easy to argue that such devotion to bettering the whole has performed an economic miracle for Korea.  But there’s only so much that you can achieve by sacrificing the well-being of your citizens.  Korea is going to create a generation of stunted citizens who know how to imitate but not be dynamic and original.  They may be mathematic and scientific whizzes, but without building the human capacity to innovate, Korea will find itself as the sweatshop of the high-technology and knowledge economy.

What is my complicity in this?  I like being in Korea; I’m learning a lot about the country, the people, and myself.  I have a job with steady pay and an apartment, a huge deal in an economy like this.  But am I only furthering these kids’ misery?  I hope and pray not.  I do my best to build rapport with them, talk to them as human beings, to answer their questions, show interest in them as people.  I expose them to new ideas, tell them funny stories, explain things about the U.S. in detail and in ways that will interest them.  Yet at some point I must give them those writing tests, must make them do the pointless reading and answer the foolish TOEFL questions.  I must perpetuate the system.  Moral actions are always a quandary when the bad intertwines inextricably with the good.

And yet, and yet,  out of these miserable students emerge some who exhibit a spark of intelligence, an irrepressible brilliance and luminosity of soul, a maturity that transcends their young bodies and minds.  They speak with you intelligently, as an equal.  One girl named Ally told me in nothing short of eloquent terms how she wants to be a diplomat because Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, inspires her.  These kids are not products of their environment.  The daily forces of their life have not touched them a whit.

In the West, there is a constant debate over nature versus nurture when it comes to raising children.  Korea demonstrates the falsity of the idea that there is a choice between the two.  Nurture is bullshit.  These kids are nurtured from a young age to be miserable.  Their education or upbringing, except perhaps in the youngest years just around their family, is not intended to craft them into empathetic, principled, thoughtful, interesting human beings.  Yet some emerge as just that.  Only some inexplicable, God-given gift could have turned them into what they are.  They will go far in spite of, not because of, they way they grew up.  They will endure immense, unfathomable challenges to their selves and come through it all intact, a trial which your average Westerner cannot truly comprehend.

Yet I suppose that’s because nowadays we expect things to be done for us.  The solution will be better if something greater and more powerful than ourselves takes care of it.  But the Korean education system, and how it dovetails with society as a whole, demonstrates to me that you can’t expect someone else to do the heavy lifting for you.  Just because a service is universal and accessible doesn’t mean it’s beneficial.  Just because it gives you something better than before doesn’t mean it’s all that great.  You must watch out for yourself, even in the best of systems.  Some people understand and can act on that; some cannot.  That fact is one sadly not reflected in the Declaration of Independence.  Not all men are created equal.  They should be equal before the eyes of the law and God.  But there are inequalities which you can never erase, not with universal education, not with notions of meritocracy, not with low cost of living and cheap healthcare.  Systems inherently limit.  The smart and capable inherently move beyond.

Every Friday when I leave class, I tell my students, “Have a good weekend.  Don’t study too much.”  They sometimes laugh, thinking I’m making a joke.  I wish I could make it clear that it’s an order, not a request.  These kids deserve a better, happier existence.  While many of them won’t get it, there are those few that give you some hope and excitement, the ones you enjoy talking about with your friends over late-night sashimi and beer.  Here’s to them, the handful of little ones who are going to be okay after all.

So decide now that you are worthy of living as a full-grown man who is making progress and make everything that seems best be a law you cannot go against.

And if you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic Games are now and you cannot put things off any more and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and single action.

- Epictetus

Makkeolli Breakfast

Yesterday I went for a brief excursion away from the box city that is Bundang.  I trekked north an hour and a half via subway to Bukhansan National Park, a collection mountains just north of Seoul.  If there is any natural element that is fundamental to understanding Koreans, it is the mountain.  Their whole country consists of hills and peaks of one kind or another.  And climbing them is in their blood.

Baekundae.

The path on the way up was lined, at least for first kilometer or two, by huts.  Enterprising (or desperate) merchants sold various foodstuffs, alcohol, walking sticks, outdoor clothing, etc, from ramshackle huts that seemed half-abandoned much of the time.  They had cheap concrete floors, piles of empty soju bottles in the corner, maybe a tarpaulin covering a makeshift patio with rickety tables and chairs.  I thought this place was supposed to be a national park but I guess that has a different connotation here.  After less than a kilometer, the Korean couple in front of me stopped at a bench and the Korean man called for me to sit down.  Wishing to be the hospitable foreigner, I obliged.  We conversed back and forth in broken Korean and sparse English.  I gave him part of one of my chocolate bars.  He and his wife were very thankful.  I awkwardly walked with them for the next kilometer or two, at a pace much slower than the one I wished I was taking.  Still, I didn’t feel like I could abandon them.  The man kept pointing out various sights in English and seemed to enjoy my company for the most part.  He only spoke to his wife perhaps four or five times over the entire journey, something I found curious.  Yet perhaps I should not have, given the propensity of older, more traditional Korean women to remain in the shadow of their husband.  I lost them at one point when I stopped to take a picture.  Marching ahead, I was stopped by a group of Korean men who had left the parking lot at the same time as me.  Instead of charging to the top, as I intended to in good American fashion, they had stopped for a leisurely snack.  The ringleader beckoned me over with an underhanded swing of the fingers.  “Hanguk makkeolli,” he said, as he poured me a tiny paper cup full of carbonated rice wine.  I took it and an apple slice and two slices of kimbap with a hearty “Kamsahapnida.”  So here I was, on the side of a strange trail I had no map for, drinking milky rice liquor with Korean men at little past 9 in the morning.  Such are the regular and bizarre ocurrences of my life.  The men showed little interest in talking to me and seemed to take my offer of more chocolate almost as an obligation.  I thanked them again and we parted ways, a weird, slightly uncomfortable, yet enriching encounter between two very different peoples behind us.  Eventually I caught back up with the old man and his reticent wife.

A walk in the woods.

The trail to the top wound past several temples, each a strange combination of traditional painted-wood architecture along with adjacent cast-concrete modern buildings, with the ubiquitous double-hinged glass doors you will find in every building in this country.  Toward the top, the trail got steeper and I encountered steel cables threaded through posts sunk deep into the rock.  It was the sort of intrusion that most Americans would find abhorrent in any remotely distant area.  We prefer our wilderness as pure as possible.  Yet Korea is a small and heavily populated country and, given the sort of traffic they get, I am not surprised they choose to install helpful handholds along the way.

The final approaches were treacherous, even with the immense rusty cables aiding my grip.  The rocks, though textured to the eye, were slippery under the ball of my foot.  The top was beautiful, although you could see little.  Baekundae looks down on Seoul, theoretically, as well as surrounding mountain ranges.  But in reality you could see little because of the pollution.  I’ve seen smog from the mountains, it’s nothing new to me.  But this was something else entirely.  Visibility here was limited to a matter of miles at best, and that was from almost 900m up over a fairly flat  coastal plain.  Strangely, the photos represent the day much clearer than the naked eye did.  You’re supposed to be able to look right down into Seoul from Baekundae but that was impossible.  The city just wasn’t there.  Still, I stayed for a while, soaking in the natural serenity as much as I could, even with people coming and going noisily about me.

Noisy.  That’s what Koreans are.  Not in a bad way.  I confess I must make a retraction regarding my last post.  My criticism of Koreans I believe was based far, far too much on the limited crowd I regularly encounter in the city.  Once outside the concrete and asphalt, Korean become a different breed.  Perhaps that is the case with any people: their true nature lies somewhere in the countryside, somewhere they can let down their guard and relax, allowing themselves to act human again.  I realized, or perhaps re-recognized, today that Koreans are an energetic people.  At a superficial level, everything seems placid, orderly, harmonious.  People follow rules, seem reserved, do what is required.  But when on their own, away from the strictures of modern life, they are very passionate.  They speak and interact with vigor.  The old men at the top of Baekundae accented their words with such guttural fury that I doubt even the most ardent German could replicate it.  Koreans laugh and poke fun and shouts exclamations at the top of their lungs and don’t care a damn.  They question, probe, and wonder deeply, and seem genuinely interested in the answer.  There is little artifice with them.

Bukhansan

I realized today how fortunate I am to be in this country and learning from it.  Though I have only been here a little over four months, experiences like today have shaped me in positive ways that are inexplicable in their scope.  Korea has taught me the power and importance of the heart.  That is the place that Koreans draw their every action.  For them, the mind resides not between the ears.  It resides in the heart, equal to their gut instinct.  It gives them passion, determination, an understanding of their place in the harmony of the universe.  How many times I have wondered why Westerners became entranced with the East.  It is only now that I understand that, at least in terms of Korea, there is a unified and wholesome understanding of life here, one not readily visible but ever-living beneath the surface.

My college education is perhaps one of the greatest tools ever bestowed upon me.  Furman University, and the handful of professors I studied under class after class, crafted my mind into a sharp tool.  I know how to assess a situation, to tear it apart, separate the good from the bad, understand nuance and subtlety.  I can research, I can reason, I can argue and stand my ground in the face of well-founded opposition.  I feel completely capable of handling any intellectual challenge thrown across my path.  Yet it is only now that I have come to understand a fundamental failing in the liberal arts education and the system of thought that has built it.  For the well-rounded liberal arts graduate, the world seems to have unlimited possibilities.  Only the boundaries of your mind can restrain you.  Yet what few recognize are the limits imposed upon one’s mind, and one’s self in general, by the liberal arts.  For such a school emphasizes reason above all.  We must criticize, we must analyze, we must always ask questions.  But there is a moral failing in that criticizing and analyzing and questioning becomes an end, not the means to Truth.  One must doubt, question, and believe in as little as humanly possible because of that mandate, the mandate of Reason.  It is what I was trained, for four long, long years, to believe was right.  Yet now I recognize the folly in its ends.  We drive men toward rationality, to believe only in what their minds can teach them.  That is the modern, Western way.  Be it a priori or empirical, we must judge everything by ideas and information, by the measurable and quantifiable.  Yet if our minds can ascertain nothing, and we are incapable of discovering Truth, what good is that?  I have experienced such a quandary over and over, which, if one is not careful, can turn a wise person into a solipsist.  I am fortunate that I have survived with my values and beliefs, for whatever reason.  Others are not so lucky.  I see my peers walking about, healthy, successful, and confident, yet a complete and utter vacuum when it comes to any scrap of meaning within themselves.  These are the people who will run our world in the years to come; they are the future corporate leaders, lawyers, bureaucrats, and academics.  And reason, in the form of the infinite and perpetual Socratic question, has turned them into amoral beings, hardly recognizable when compared to humans from any other century.

Yet Korea has saved me from that.  I came here knowing that it would shape me in many shapes.  But I never expected this way.  Koreans have shown me the inalienability of the heart from the mind.  In the modern West there is forever the debate over objective truth, how elusive it is, how no one ever lives up to it, how utterly broken and despicable we are until such an ideal is attained.  Korea has cast such sophomoric notions out of my mind.  We cannot be objective because there is no separating emotions from reason in the first place.  That is what we don’t want to acknowledge in our critique of the failure of objectivity.  The mind is utterly and intractably tied to the body and the spirit.  We may try to be objective, to approximate such an ideal as best we can.  Yet there is something deeper and more wholesome that does and, in the Korean mind, should drive us.  It is that sense of heart, that grasp of emotion, a sense of place within the universe, whatever it may be.  It is a contentedness and acceptance of where and who one is, and a desire to do right by whatever inexplicable virtues and motives drive a man.  Naturally, the rationalist will poo-poo such notions as foolish and illogical.  But then again he is defining things in utterly different ways and rather hypocritically, too.  He is unwilling to admit that his values are definable in emotional terms while he simultaneously subjects emotion to rational evaluation.  I doubt that he, the complete believer in what is reasonable, material, and definable, is nearly as happy as the Koreans I have met who carry such enthusiastic spirit within them.

And isn’t happiness what we seek?  As an American, I find such instruction from a foreign people not degrading but uplifting.  Koreans have a great yet tragic history, one spattered in blood and strife.  Yet through it has survived a sense of self, of community, and of that ill-defined yet powerful connection to the world about them.  They understand at a gut level what happiness must be.  They can be materialistic, they can be status-obsessed, just as we are.  Yet that is tempered at a basic level by a deep and abiding sense of heart and emotion, one that ties them to other people and the world around them.  As America becomes more fractured, more affluent, more distant from its past self, it would do us well to learn from Koreans.  Our nation is rapidly becoming one of pretense, artifice, and incomprehensible complexity.  If we are to remain a free and noble people at a political and societal level, as well as (perhaps more importantly) at a personal level,  we should reflect upon our ‘pursuit of happiness.’  The ideal is a pursuit, a chase, not something that can necessarily be achieved.  Yet it is what we seek.  Happiness is a simple virtue, an emotion of contentedness and sense of place.  It is not something that we can measure by census or income or ideology.  Reason holds no power over it.  This is what we have forgotten in the last forty or fifty years, as we have used our minds and our reason to build more and more complex systems which will never give us what our most basic document says we need as human beings.

I hiked down from Baekundae with a strange sense of belonging.  Suddenly I felt no longer a stranger in this country.  People may stare at me and they may make fun of my pronunciation.  But I know in my heart the sort of people they are — their actions tell me.  I see it in the freely-given cup of makkeolli on the mountainside, in the energetic “Hello!” passing on the street, in the young man lounging with his girl on a mat in the woods, talking endlessly, both of them gazing at the changing leaves and thinking only of what they mean to each other.    The universe has purpose here in Korea; we all have a place, a role — it is merely ours to find it.

Eye Candy

Four months is not a long time by objective standards but the past four have seemed eternal.  Perhaps that never-ending quality is what makes groups of people bond quickly.  One of my fellow American teachers at the hagwon, Heather, is leaving and going back to the U.S.  Such is the nature of English-teaching industry in Korea: visas are only for one year, which creates a revolving door system.  People come and go and to an outsider any relationships made between friends or co-workers must seem transient.  But, at least for us, having a fellow teacher leave is a big event.  Our school has strange working hours, almost to 11:00 pm, which means that most of the time, the only people we have to bond or hang out with are our fellow teachers.  So it is a bit like losing a member of a clan.

But we always send out the departing with style.  And that means Hongdae.  We all assembled in the lobby of our apartment building.  The whole crew was there, even a few Korean teachers, peripheral friends, and friends of friends.  It would be big, we knew.  We took the bus up into Seoul, foreigners packed into the back like Rosa Parks as old Korean men glared at our big, loud American mouths.  The bus wound its way through the Saturday night streets which were teeming with people.  I can handle the crowds in the day.  But at night it’s overwhelming.  Maybe the darkness is like a roof pulled down close over your head.  Maybe it’s the endless sea of ajummas, hand-holding couples, occasional families, drunken businessmen, all spilling off the sidewalks into the street, crowding into every possible space like scurrying ants.  Maybe the uniformity of dress has something to do with it, all blue jeans, Converses, leather jackets, girls in high-heeled boots, knock-off NY Yankees caps, shirts with absurd English slogans on them.  It’s a spectacle, for sure, one which is both uncomfortable and energizing.

We hop in some cabs and we’re off, headed west through the city center.  This cab driver is making turns left and right, going all over the place.  He hits open patches of expressway and guns it, maybe doing 120 or 130 kmh.  Looking at the skyline whipping by, the city seems more massive and sinister at night.  During the day it’s a drab monotone of concrete, steel, and polished chrome.  But at night the ambient light silhouettes apartment complexes everywhere.  They stretch on toward the horizon, never-ending.  Neon red crosses indicate churches lost somewhere out there in the murk.  You know there are people out there, living in those tiny rooms, jammed right up next to each other.  But you can’t fathom it, that each of those little lights represents a person, typing on her computer, watching TV, cooking, arguing with their wife, studying.  You’re surrounded by endless, breath-in-your-face humanity, yet you realize that, as people, we do a damn good job of trying to hide it.

Finally we get to Hongdae.  This place is raw.  Not in traditional Korean sense, with aromas of delicious food or raw fish or feces wafting out of backalleys, old women bent on the sidewalk drying chilis.  No, Hongdae is the new Korea, the hip Korea, flush with money and leisure and a desire to be something else.  Swanky lounges and grungy bars are in equal numbers.  The filth is crazy.  Trash stuffed into nooks and crannies on the street, dirt and grime caked on everything.  I never wear anything nice to Hongdae.  Yet so many people do, flaunting their trendy new clothes and sullen, distant attitudes.  We descended into the depths of Club Funky Funky for some live music.  The crowd was half foreigners pouring alcohol into their bloodstream as fast as they could, half cool and hip Koreans who lined the walls and tables, letting the white people do their antics out in the middle.  Several bands rotated through the lineup.  The live music scene in Korea is devastatingly bland.  There was one band that was awesome, a lineup of three American guys who churned out bluesy rock that was either an ode or straight rip-off of Hendrix.  I didn’t care.  It was the first beauty and texture I’d heard in music in months.  It was music only Americans could play and rock at the same time, feeling the soul in the music, riding that edge of improvised riffs like a surfer in barrel of the perfect wave.  But the other bands were just numbing.  Koreans seem to think that quality music is some sort of cross between late ’70s punk (without the anarchism) and contemporary hardcore music.  Despair-core, more like.  Just lots of smashing chords, loud bass, and a mohawked Korean guy screaming into the mic.  The Korean hipsters in the room were eating it up.  For them, this was the New World.  Just like people from every nation who are rising in their fortunes and status, this breed of Koreans was trying to enjoy foreign things to seem sophisticated.  They were redefining themselves through their stylish clothes and appreciation of music that surely must be popular in the West.  Never mind that their equals in America would never be found listening to this schlock.  In the States they’d be shoulder to shoulder with community college students in skinny jeans and the guy with the nose piercing who runs the tattoo parlor on the corner.

The few hours we spent at Club FF highlighted that strange dualistic attitude Koreans have towards Westerners.  They are curious (and often obsessed) with the West.  You run into some Koreans who will befriend you and practice their English with you and invite you to their house for dinner.  Koreans want to have Western style, success, prosperity.  They want to send their kids to college in the States and drive Mercedes and follow Major League Baseball.  Yet there is a simultaneous rejection and revulsion towards outsiders.  Koreans will ignore you or seem interested in conversation only to disappear quickly with a modicum of an excuse.  People stare, people glare, people judge your every move.  They have difficulty accepting those outside of the group, that is, the Korean race.  They are protective and insular and are harsh to anyone who ‘betrays’ the race.  Korean-Americans often have a hard time here, as well as Koreans who grew up in the States and have American accents and speak less-than-perfect Korean.  They are not accepted as one of the family but viewed almost as one of the ‘others.’  Korea wants to have it both ways.  They want to be like successful foreigners, get to know us, and emulate our every move, yet they will not allow the proximity and intimacy necessary for such a relationship.  There is no trust.

Our mob spilled out of FF and down another street to some bar called Tinpan.  This place was completely packed.  You were stepping on people’s toes to get through the crowd.  It was a fascinating scene but the sort of place I hate.  Pounding hip-hop, people gathered around a central bar or jammed together on the dance floor.  Hip people, cool people, looking about, casting looks equally aloof and judging.  Korean guys dancing way too close for comfort.  Bottles of liquor on the bar shelves glowed from colored lights beneath them.  A waitress would hand over a whole bottle to a Korean guy who would take it back to his table, trying to spend his way into the heart of the pouty girl who sat with him, the spoiled little sneer on her face indicating her general disgust with the world.  Again, the hip crowd was here, but much richer.  A bottle of Jack Daniel’s for your table at this place would probably run . . . I don’t know, maybe 120,000 or 130,000 won?  Like maybe a hundred dollars?  This was the place for that certain type of Korean girl, who wants a man with expensive style, pretty boy looks, and an bottomless wallet.  In return, she’ll look sulky, get furious with him in public and slap him, and look nice on his arm.

But the Koreans were beautiful.  Eye candy galore.  Not just at Tinpan but all over Hongdae, and, to a lesser extent, anywhere you go in Seoul.  Koreans dress well, take care of themselves, carry themselves well.  There’s an element of reserve and composure to them, an aura of mystery.  Compare that to your average American, here or back in the States, usually some guy in ratty cargo shorts and an Oakland Raiders cap shouting things that involve certain anatomical regions,  or a girl who squeezes her rolls of soft American fat into an extra-large tube top that exposes an enormous pink butterfly tattoo and is just as crude and profane as the guys.  I never expected this before coming here, but Koreans beat Americans in the aesthetic and classiness department any day.

Conversations were impossible in this bar.  The music certainly didn’t help.  But people weren’t here to talk.  They were here to dance or look good or pick up some stranger to go home with.  People cast looks about, looking for someone attractive, hoping for eye contact.  Looks were hungry and yet distant.  No one was letting their guard down.  Whatever intentions or desires had driven people to this place tonight were not getting fulfilled.

Yet perhaps that is the paradox of modern life.  Cities are fundamentally social and alienating.  You can have a nearly endless supply of people about you.  Your possibilities for relationships are endless, at least in theory.  Yet we cannot have conversations, cannot truly speak to each other.  We are cut off, going through our routines, our defenses up, trying to survive and make it through the day on our own.  Again, there is no trust.  You begin to think, “I can meet people, we can hang out, maybe even discover that we have things in common.  But how can I trust them?”  Indeed, how can we trust?  As this world gets more complicated and more fractured and we are taken further and further from anything representing a true community, how can we trust?  How can we have anything approaching meaningful relationships?  We have satisfied every material need imaginable.  Yet our intangible needs are starving, a sense of gnawing hunger for something greater eating away at our souls.

Politicians and pundits and the think-tank bigshots who all confidently prop their Allen Edmonds up on the desk and proclaim that our future is going to be bright may only have it half true.  Maybe their fanciful pontifications will make us all healthy, give us clean energy, and rid the world of war and nuclear weapons after all.  We’ll all be happy, the statistics say we must be.  But try telling that to the businessman riding home from work on the bus at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, shell-shocked from a grueling pace of work.  Or one of my students, who literally breaks down in class and can’t even respond to basic questions because she’s literally cracked under the pressure to succeed.  Every century has had its massive wars and famines that took countless human lives.  But we can count those, we’ve got hard numbers.  I believe that the 21st Century will be the one of silent casualties, of people crushed by the weight of the modern world, yet uncounted because they’re still out there, walking around, looking productive.  It is a fool’s errand to think that human suffering stops once you’ve got universal healthcare, high median income, and a growing GDP.

But we’ll make it through.  Cyril Connolly, speaking of his old friend George Orwell, said that Orwell was the sort of man who like acknowledging the worst of things because, once you did, it made everything a bit more fun.  And perhaps that’s how we’ll make it through.  Realizing that, as the song says, “it’s a wonderful world, if you can put aside the sadness and hang on to every ounce of beauty upon you.”

Riding back in the cab, swapping playful insults with friends, I watched the sun come up over Seoul.  A rising warm orange glow made the surrounding hills look like construction paper cut-outs under the fading blue sky of nautical twilight.  The steel and concrete buildings actually looked beautiful this time, as lights came on and people began a new day with new opportunities.  It’s great to be alive.

When Korean Cultists Attack

I try to remain a patient and polite person in most of my interactions with people, including those who are trying to sell me something, spiritual or otherwise.  Even when they pressure me beyond what feels comfortable, I try not to be insulting or rude.  It’s usually a positive character trait, but from time to wish I wish I could just become really, really insulting and pissed off in a split second.  The past few days have been one of those times.  This is thanks to the World Mission Society Church of God, which, as you will discover, is not really deserving of the the title of ‘church.’

My first encounter with the WMC crowd happened for the first time a few days ago outside my apartment building.  They were polite and well-dressed.  The man smiled and apologized for his bad English.  They asked me for a survey about religion.  A slick move, I thought they were the Korean Zogby at first, but soon found out otherwise.  I had a backpack full of defrosting groceries but I figured I’d humor them for a least a minute.  I know it must be tough work out all day like that, often with no success.  At least I could be polite.

That was a tactical error on my part.  For the next fifteen minutes, this suited Korean man flipped back and forth through a Korean/English Bible, showing me verses in quick succession.  I really couldn’t figure out the logical connection between them but just said, “Mmhmm,” to humor him.  This dog and pony show all seemed fairly harmless and straightforward.  I just wanted him to get to the part where he asks me for money and I tell him ‘no’ and leave.

“Will you think some more about what we’ve showed you?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

“You should, for it’s for the salvation of your soul.”

Wait, what?  The moment anyone starts telling me they know the current state of my soul I start looking for the nearest verbal (or actual) 2×4 spiked with nails.  I suddenly wanted an explanation from this kook.

“Wait a second.  Explain this to me again.”  I actually listened this time.  You got to admit, the guy knows how to hook a listener.

The fellow started explaining to me about the “Spiritual Mother.”  What exactly is the Spiritual Mother?  Well, boy, let me tell you!  By tangentially linking few select verses from Genesis and Relevation (rather out of context and with no consideration to the rest of the canon), this guy claimed that there was a female equivalent to God.  Now, this isn’t like the discussions within more liberal branches of Prostestant Christianity about whether God should be referred to by male or female pronouns.  It’s not a debate about the gender of God, most of which I find to be rather abstruse and pointless.  No, this is a straight-up extra member of the heavenly family.  The man showed me a diagram of a happy smiling family.  “In heaven, just like on earth.  Heavenly father, heavenly mother.”

“Wait a minute.  So there’s not a Trinity.  God is in four persons.  Father, Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Is that correct?”  I said.

“Yes,” he said, with a bit of hesitation.  I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to understand what I was asking or if he was reluctant to admit an answer to my direct question.  He spoke English well, so I think it was the latter.

I about called him a heretic right there, but those damn Southern manners got the better of me.  He asked me to talk more with him about it.  “You can go and get your Bible and come back down.”

“No, I need to go to work.”

“What about when are not at work?”

“I work six days a week.”

“What about Sunday?”

“No, not Sunday.”

“Will you come to my church?  It is in Imae Station.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

That was the end of that discussion.  Later on I thought more about the whole Spiritual Mother thing and realized that, yes, it was actually quite heretical.  And, furthermore, the way they tried to make a sort of cyclical connection and mirror image between earthly and spiritual families seemed rather syncretic, as though trying to reconcile latent Confucian ideals with Christianity.

Today, being a good Presbyterian, I walked to Seohyeon to buy a glass for my new bottle of whisky.  I saw the suit-and-tie crew out near Sunae Station but I managed to avoid them.  On the way back, though, another pair stopped me in Bundang Park.  I decided to talk to them, strangely enough.  I honestly felt combative today, something which I rarely if ever feel.  This pair didn’t launch into the whole Spiritual Mother tirade, but rather began talking about Passover.  The one guy who ran the conversation spoke pretty good English.  I’ll call him Ddong.  The other guy with the glasses I’ll call Piji.  Ddong’s logic was rather long and convoluted but I seemed to gather from it that you had to observe Communion on Passover in order to be attain salvation.  “Our church is the only church in the world which observes Passover.  Does your church know of Passover?”

The absurdity of the statement floored me.  “Yes, we do.”

“Do you celebrate it?”

Celebrate?  Do we go out and spread sheep’s blood on the lintels?  I had no idea what to say.  “Only communion on the Passover can lead to eternal life,” Ddong said.  Piji was smiling like an idiot off to the side, holding open some sort of loose-leaf with colorful diagrams.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.  Ddong took this as a key opportunity to introduce a new concept.  Wow, helluva guy, being so nice like that.

“You know the name of God?”

“You mean Yahweh?”

“Yes!  And the name of the Son?”

“Jesus.”

“Yes!  And what is the name of the Holy Spirit?”

Again, this was either the most brilliant or most unbelievably stupid question I’ve been asked in ages.  Holy Spirit, right?  I mean, I don’t exactly recall the exact term from my Greek class back in college, but he probably just wants the English equivalent, right?  “What do you mean?”

Ddong then shows me Revelation 3:12.  “You see here, Jesus is talking about how he will write on each of us his new name.”

“Ah, I see,” I said, but not really seeing his point.

Ddong then launches into garbled Konglish about baptism.  “I’ve already been baptized,” I said.

“When?”

“When I was a child.”

“Ah, but you were not baptized in the name of the Holy Spirit.”

This is getting ridiculous.  “Uh, actually I was.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

“But you didn’t know the Holy Spirit’s name!”  Ddong says.  Piji is still the organ monkey in the corner, his bulbous, pockmarked face bobbing up and down.

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t know that Jesus’ name became Holy Spirit.  So your baptism is not true.”

The absurdity is mind-boggling.  I’m not even sure if what he claims is true but let’s pretend it is.  So my baptism, my unbreakable covenant with God is voided because I wasn’t aware that Jesus made some vague allusion to him being akin to something like the Holy Spirit.  Possibly.  It’s like saying your SCUBA tank gear will stop working during your dive because you didn’t know the name meant Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.  The logic is unbelievable.  And the statements are getting insulting.

“Look, I don’t really agree with what you’re saying.  I was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

“But other churches do not do this.  Only our church does.”

“Well my church baptizes in the Trinity and I was too.”

“Ah, no, it doesn’t,”  said Ddong.

“You don’t know that.  Don’t you tell me what I know and don’t know.”

Ddong physically recoiled.  I didn’t realize it at the time but in retrospect I realized my voice dropped an octave and I had moved slightly forward.  I don’t think Ddong was accustomed to having people get testy with him.  So he gave me that shit-eating Korean smile that says: yes yes, I will save face now for both of us and try to smooth things over.  Oh, no, I wasn’t going to let that happen.  Watch out, Angry American is here.

“Do you know my church?  Have you been there?” I said.  “No, you haven’t.  You have no idea.  So don’t you start telling me what I know is a fact.  You don’t know a thing.”

Why they even tried after that is beyond me.  Either they are patient, courageous, or straight-up morons.  They kept badgering me to come to their church.  I told them no.  “Would you like to study more?” asked Ddong.

“No.”

He seemed very disappointed.  “Are you sure?  It would be good.”

“No.”

“Please, this is important.”

“Give me your card.  If I change my mind, I’ll call you.”

People must not do this much, because Ddong had to go fishing into his wallet and produced a rumpled business card with a red ink smudge on it.  There it was, though, the name of his outfit:  World Mission Society Church of God.

“Can I have your cell phone number?”  Ddong asked eagerly, thinking that this sort of exchange must be mutual.

“No.”

“Please?”  He seemed deflated.

“No, if I change my mind, I’ll call you.”

“Okay.  Ah . . . have a good day.  God Bless.”

“Yes, God Bless.”  We shook hands and walked away.

What happened next struck me as very touching.  Two young Korean men came up to me.  They had to have been early college age (though it is really hard to tell in this country).  One only spoke Korean and he was saying something frantically to me.  I tried to tell him I didn’t speak Korean.  But his friend spoke English.  Their hurried manner and casual clothes told me they weren’t crazies.  One said, “Do not listen to those men.”

“Oh, I wasn’t.  I was arguing with them.”

“They are not Christians.  They are very bad.”

“I know.  They tried to say that God is in four people.”  I held up my forearms in an X, the Korean symbol for no.  “I told them that I don’t believe that.  I was debating them.”

The two spoke quickly back and forth to each other and then turned to go.  “Thank you,” said one of them.

“No, thank you for your concern, I appreciate it.”  And I really, truly did.  These guys must have known something I didn’t and were worried that I was getting sucked into some maelstrom beyond my power.  The kindness of strangers is always the best and it often shows itself in the most dire of circumstances.  That being the case, this must have seemed like one.  It got me thinking about who these WMC schmucks were.  Their headquarters was right there, I realized, on the corner of Bundang Park.

When I got back to the apartment, I immediately Googled the church’s name, which I now had thanks to the business card.  What I found out was quite interesting.  The WMC is, according to Wikipedia, a strange group centered around Ahn Sang-hong, who apparently is revered as the Second Coming.  But he’s dead and has been so for a while.  So, wait, Jesus came back again and is dead again?  The theological acrobatics these guys do must be incredible.  They certainly didn’t get that far in the sales pitch.  However, this guy died about 25 years ago.  The new leader of the church, Zang Gil Ja, is apparently the “Spiritual Mother,” or literally a female God incarnate.  These guys are nuts.  People get sucked into this bizarre cult which is far outside the bounds of Christianity, although they certainly call themselves Christian.  There’s an entire website titled Cult Watch that keeps tabs on this organization.  If there’s a whole group of former members calling it a cult, I’m pretty sure that it is one.

My guess is I’ll probably run into these loonies in the future because, well, their world headquarters is a quarter mile from my front door and right in the middle of where I go eat and drink.  Will I avoid them, walking out of the way to stay away?  Maybe, if I don’t have time to chat.  But I don’t like changing my behavior to avoid someone else who’s the annoyance.  Will I talk to them?  Hopefully I can avoid that.  But if I’m unfortunately roped into it, I think I’ll start off with a nice, civil opening:  “So, I hear you guys are serious heretics . . . how does that feel?”

Demonic Possession
His court’s in session
I sign my confession
Demonic Possession

It was raining on the day she told me
them things that fella sold me
Mama wasn’t there to scold me
No prison or cell could hold me
I still recall the date
I’z probably about eight
when I sealed my fate
You honor I rightly state

Suddenly I had a foot hold
I became such a butthole
I don’t need nobody consoling me
No one but the devil controlling me

I can kick ass and talk backward
I hang out with a whole bunch of slackers
and I know I can get some help from him
I listen to a lot of Led Zeppelin

Drive-By Truckers – “Demonic Possession”

Repeat after me: I will like K-pop.

I enjoy good music as much as the next person but for the most part my tastes don’t fall into the typical popular music categories.  My favorite band, Drive-By Truckers, pumps out brash and culturally insightful Southern rock.  Another, Mogwai, grinds down the listener with both apocalyptic instrumental rock and songs which are intricate and lush atmospheres.  So I don’t usually listen to mainstream music, especially pop and hip-hop.

But in Korea, you don’t have such a luxury.  Korea hasn’t had the sort of cultural upheavals that rocked the U.S. in the ’60s, which is nice because it doesn’t have a cynical, hedonic, selfish culture like the U.S.  But it also means that quality, cutting-edge underground music is pretty much non-existent.  What’s a music fiend to do?  Well, start appreciating K-pop.

The Korean Wave, or “hallyu,” is basically a term to describe how over the past decade or so Korean popular culture has become an export phenomenon.  Korean movies, TV shows, and music are immensely popular in East Asia, sometimes almost as much as or more than local pop culture.  To give you an idea of this, entire tour groups of foreigners will come to Korea with the sole purpose of visiting the sites where their favorite Korean TV shows and movies are filmed.

The Wave makes you reconsider a lot of the whining and complaining about globalization and ‘cultural imperialism’ that gets thrown about, primarily at the West and in particular the United States.   I think South Korea pokes a big hole in the argument that weaker nations are kept down for the malicious profit of the developed world.  It’s pretty hard to think that South Korea is out to make the world into its cultural and economic slave and rip apart traditional cultures with its bloodthirsty fangs of capitalism.  Here’s a country that fifty years ago was considered almost Third World after a devastating war.  They could hardly feed themselves.  Now they’re making better phones and TVs than anyone else and are right up there amongst the other economic powerhouses of the world.  So maybe all the grousing and grumbling by some countries and their sympathetic Fifth Column in the West is really just them upset that they are too incompetent to really compete.  They can’t (or won’t) make the sort of leaps forward necessary to pull themselves up and become an equally dynamic force.  So instead of actually working to make themselves better, they just try to guilt others into reining in their own success.

But I digress.  Because the purpose of this post is to enlighten you to the sublime and ridiculous music that is K-pop.  I will give you a smattering of videos.  I’ve learned about these bands from different places but my students are in general the best source of information.  A couple things to note: the bands will throw in English words or phrases here and there because to Koreans it sounds hip and sophisticated.  Also, I put up the original Korean version of the videos, not subtitled, because the English translations only make you realize how inane some of these songs are.  It’s better not knowing the lyrics.

This band, 2NE1, is my current favorite:

They’re one of the newest K-pop groups but they are immensely popular.  Their bizarre fashion sense is pretty hilarious.  Without a doubt they write some of the catchiest hooks out there.  Their live stage presence certainly beats out a lot of other groups and they actually can sing well live, which many groups could not do to save their lives.

Girls Generation (So Neo Shi Dae):

So Neo Shi Dae exemplifies this country’s obsession with cuteness.  American music is drenched in sexiness to the point where you wouldn’t know it if it hit you in the face.  In contrast, Girls Generation pumps out delightful bubblegum pop that is a pretty good view into the bubbly innocence that is a lot of Korean culture.  I’ve seen them live and they too have a good stage presence.  They have their own TV show called So Neo Shi Dae Hello Baby, which involves them playing with babies and doing all sorts of strange, motherly things.  Really weird and kinda creepy, since they’re all about 19.  But, again, that’s another insight into Korean culture: a definite focus on family and having kids and even the most popular girl group in the country isn’t tainted with the image of them learning about raising kids.  In the U.S. that would put some sort of stain on a performer, as though they weren’t really interested in success or being a sex icon.

BIGBANG:

Everyone here listens to BIGBANG.  They are the NSync of Korea, though arguably more creative and talented.  I love this video because it’s a pretty good condensed example of how love ends up portrayed in music and on TV.  Usually there’s a misunderstanding between lovers; the guy longingly looks back over his shoulder as the girl walks away, then as he turns to go, the girl stops and looks back, but it’s too late.  Or maybe one guy took another guy’s girl and there’s tension and crying.  Oh, and a lot of the time one of the lovers dies.  That’s a pretty frequent theme.  Lots of passionate, unrequited, and brokenhearted love floating around out there in Korea.

Brown-Eyed Girls:

This video caused quite a stir here because of its raciness.  Brown-Eyed Girls decided they were tired of the typical cutesy Korean girl group act and rebranded themselves.  Well, it’s a catchy song for sure, but their other music is not.  And they absolutely cannot sing live — autotuning has done wonders for them in the studio.

SHINee (pronounced ’shiny’):

I hate these guys.  Really, I can’t stand them.  But my students are crazy about them.  They might not know the word for “desk” but they can launch into an elaborate discourse about how great SHINee’s latest single is.  So, students of Room 304, this is for you.

Kara:

Oh, Kara, will you never leave middle school?  Again, the cuteness is hilarious and unbearable at the same time.

So that is a brief smattering of K-pop for you.  I like some of it, can’t stand some it, but it’s pretty much what I hear on the daily basis, from storefronts to cellphone rings to commercials.  Welcome to my life.

Korea: Life in Pictures

Bundang Skyline.

Everywhere you turn here, the sky will be scraped by an immense high-rise.  It will have a ridiculous name, wholly un-Korean: Royal Palace, Pantheon, Zenith, Pavilion, Paragon, Park View.  All are built by a massive corporation: SK, Samsung, We’ve, LG, or Doosan.  They are the future of humanity, where everyone is packed in close, separated by tiny walls, yet a million miles away from understanding their neighbors.  Food and education are in the building or close by.  The very small makes up the very big and grand.

The Future.

I captioned this photo because I thought the architecture represented something sleek and modern, with no shred of the past.  In retrospect, the pair of CCTV cameras furtively peering into our lives more aptly captures the title.  Which begs the question, if big cities make us just one in a faceless, teeming mass, what of individual interest is there for the camera to look at?

Surprise splash.

Goaded by her friends, this schoolgirl walked out into the middle of the fountain, expecting that the water wouldn’t hit her when it came on.  Obviously she was wrong.

Directions for ajoshi.

The younger man holds his left hand to his chest as a form of respect.  This comes from the days when men wore a hanbok, which had a long sleeve that needed to be pulled back to hand something to another person.

Annyeong, jamae . . .

There’s something quite precocious about lots of Korean children.  They’re well-behaved and seem to act like miniature adults at times, seemingly perfectly at home and competent in the world about them.  Not a lot of screaming and tantrums like American kids.

Goin' to the temple, gonna get married.

In the midst of the modern throng, two people take the time to follow the old ways.  They will be married but it’s not just a union of convenience.  No, it is the continuation of an ancient pact.  They are not ashamed of it, nor do they think it is backwards.  The past has given them purpose for moving forward.

Timeless couple.

History moves on out there, in the world.  Nations are crumbling, tyrants are rising, great deeds are done, horrible wrongs committed.  People die cruelly and pointlessly, grand ideas are found hollow, wars rage, famines linger.  We are all a part of history; it will inevitably touch us someday, somehow, in some way, big or little.  But we still carry on, still build lives for ourselves.  Maybe it’s the divine spark within, guiding us on our unique path.  Maybe it’s the innate cheekiness of human beings, that spirit which raises a middle finger to the grimness of the world and pushes us to do great things, take great leaps.  People get married, even if times are tough.  Others buy a motorcycle and ignore sane advice.  Still others cast aside stability and convention to take a job that thrills them.  Or is the right thing to do.  We live, in spite of the darkness out there.

Old men always talk furiously to each other.

Wherever you go in Korea, there will be old men sitting around, looking at things.  They seem to be waiting on something but what it is, I’ll never know.  They talk heatedly with each other or play chess or nap on a bench in the humid shade.  You can see the story of rough years worn into the deep lines on their faces.  These old guys have seen a lot.  They are tough bastards.

In between the cracks we can find the past.  Even if it’s not our own, we can appreciate it.  We can understand and smile, being glad to remember and think back.  For despite all the bad of the past, never can we deny the good that once was.  And that we wish could be again.

With each day, Korea opens wider and deeper for me.  Answers only leave more questions.  So down I go, into the rabbit hole, waiting to see when and where I’ll come out.

Enter the dragon.

To Byeonsan And Back

This past weekend my fellow teachers and I undertook the quintessentially American experience.  We got a van, packed it full of seven people, and went tearing off down the highway, blasting music out the open windows, on a road trip.  The difference being that we couldn’t read most of the road signs, you had to run red lights or risk getting rear-ended, and performance is measured in kilometers per liter.  It was a road trip across Korea and perhaps one of the best experiences here yet.

In order to make this excursion possible, we needed driver’s licenses.  Last Wednesday my friend Drew and I ventured into Seoul to locate the Driver’s License Agency.  It was actually the best experience I’ve ever had dealing with cars and licensing of any sort.  Unlike the DMV in North Carolina, where you wait for four hours in a tiny waiting room with forty Mexicans and their screaming kids, everything was orderly and efficient.  I found it completely ridiculous that they would give me a license.  I can barely read the alphabet, only know a handful of words at best, and here they are giving me a license.  Fill out the forms, go back and forth between counters, get stamps on different sheets of paper.  Take a physical test, which consists of squatting once and picking out three numbers off an eye chart and color-blind test.  Then the written test, which only consisted of twenty questions.  It was supposedly written in English but I had to stare at each question for a minute straight in order to make sense out of any of them.  For example: “Of the following of the questions which is NOT the most absurd of choices regarding the performance of driver in approaching the deaf-driving car in the lane?”  Most absurd of choices?  Are you asking me what Camus would do?  Somehow I passed with an eighty out of one hundred, which I attribute only my recall of process-of-elimination from the SAT.  And an hour later, I had a Korean driver’s license.  I was free to go anywhere, yet utterly incapable of any reasonable communication or understanding of traffic laws.  This country is nuts.

Sunday morning we awoke early and loaded our expeditionary vehicle, a KIA Carnival.  This is a minivan, but the interior certainly feels smaller.  I kept bumping my knees while driving.  We took off into the rainy morning, trying to work the satellite navigation attached to the middle of the windshield.  There were a few missed turns and we accidentally ended up in Yongin but by 9:00 we were headed south on the motorway.  Highway 1, the Gyeongbu Expressway, runs the length of the country between Seoul and Busan, the second largest city and a massive sea port.  We roared along, taking in the sight of countryside.  Everywhere you looked, there was some sort of civilization, even if separated by rice paddies.  Korea is a tiny country and proximity is inevitable when you cram almost 50 million people into it.  For someone used to seeing huge swaths of open desolate country, like West Texas or Wyoming, it was a strange, almost suffocating experience.  The thought that, even behind the wheel of a car, master of my own fate, I couldn’t escape from people bothered me.

In between the crude paper map I still had from the Korean Consulate in Atlanta and the useful but byzantine sat-nav, we managed to figure out our route from the highway.  From the Gyeongbu Expressway we took Highway 25 and then at Ganggyeong we pulled off onto Road 23 (I guess they call them roads).  The trip had flown by.  By the time we stopped outside Iksan for fuel, only two hours had passed and we were getting quite close to our destination.  Filling up the Carnival will diesel was a hilarious experience.  The look on the attendant’s face was one of bewilderment as seven foreigners all hopped out of this nondescript van.  We laughed about how baffled everyone we met must have been: How did these foreigners get here?  Why are they here? We were truly in the middle of nowhere.  What was even better was when we rolled down all the windows and began blasting homemade house music into the small towns we passed through.  One Korean couple in an SUV were laughing hysterically, though they didn’t roll down their window, despite Drew’s insistent waving.

At Iksan I took over driving.  Even after a mere two months away from the wheel, I felt rusty.  It was thrilling, though, the knowledge that I was in control of my own destiny.  I felt much more at ease with the world about me, much more confident.  Technology can be a crutch but in some cases it is a radically enabling tool.  The automobile, at least for me, truly is synonymous with a daily, nuts-and-bolts freedom.  I was bound to no one.

Hyundai pier outside Byeonsan.

Our destination for the first day was Byeonsan National Park, which covers most of a peninsula on the southwestern coast.  Once onto the peninsula, we saw a huge causeway that seemed to lead somewhere.  Naturally we drove down it.  It turned out to be some sort of pier owned by one of the many Hyundai subsidiaries.  Every now and then loud warning announcements would sound from the sealed-off industrial area, which we joked were warnings for the locals to ’stay away from the foreigners, they might have swine flu.’

The views were beautiful, even if rainy and overcast.  We wandered around for a bit, puzzled at the purpose of this random industrial pier.  Korea is all about the corporation.  Certainly small businesses proliferate; the presence of a FamilyMart convenience store or a restaurant on every corner, filled with middle-aged woman slaving away twelve hours a day, makes that undeniable.  But this country is not entrepreneurially focused.  Power and prestige are rooted in the corporation.  And the larger you are, the more the government will make sure you stay big and profitable.  The glossy cities with wide boulevards, shining skyscrapers, and grand electric signs blasting the company’s name into the darkness are a stark contrast to the worn and often trashed countryside.  The Korean countryside is beautiful until you get up close.  Then you run across abandoned buildings, vacant lots full of trash beside a rural road, and enormous industrial buildings surrounded by only rice paddies and farm houses for miles.  It outdoes even some parts of Appalachia.

We left from the pier and drove another fifteen or twenty minutes into the heart of Byeonsan Peninsula National Park.  From there we hiked to Jikso, a waterfall up in the mountains.  Regrettably, I have no photos of it, judging it better to keep my camera out of the falling rain.  But there was a flume of water pouring off of a rock into a very, very deep emerald green pool.  Chinese characters were carved into a high-sided rock that flanked the pool.  It was unbelievably tranquil.  We swam out in the pool for a while, the water surprisingly warm considering that it flowed out of the mountains.  That spot reminded so much of being back in North Carolina, with curling fog, cool drizzle, and thick woods around a waterfall.  Yet it was indescribably different from home, as I found later as we climbed several kilometers up a ridge.  Up there we were socked in with fog, but it would pass away at times, leaving only light rain.  There was something distinctly different about Korea’s nature.  North Carolina and other places in America are inspiring or magestic or simply beautiful, always in some sort of proud and enjoyable manner.  Yet I felt none of those emotions here.  It was tranquil, that was all.  Just peace all around.  Nothing stirring toward any particular end.  I began to ponder the extent to which the physical aspects of Asia have influenced religious thought, thinking to Buddhism primarily.

That was fitting, for we hiked down from the ridge into another valley, to a temple called Naesosa.  A thousand year old tree sat in the front of the first courtyard.  Honestly, it wasn’t particularly impressive, the oak in my backyard is bigger.  But the temple was quite old and was unadorned.  Most temples in Korea are brightly painted with ornate detail and lavish colors.  But Naesosa was mostly bare wood, with a few faded murals on the ceiling and beams inside the temple.  The temple was nearly deserted, save for us intrusive Westerners.  Again, an immensely tranquil place.  Nothing was out of place, nothing was hurried or loud, everything moved on slowly, steadily, towards no specific end.  Timeless is too brief for this place.

Once we left, we all expressed our amazement at how much territory we’d covered.  At 9 AM we were getting on the expressway and nine hours later we’d driven almost the length of the country and seen some spectacular sights.  Only with an automobile could we have achieved such rapid travel to such a distant spot.  The next few hours were not quite the best, as we drove all around the Byeonsan peninsula in search of lodging.  We hoped to find a ‘pension,’ basically a guesthouse with plenty of space and cheap in the off-season, but to no avail.  Eventually, all options exhausted to us, we ended up backtracking to Gyeokpo and staying at a Korean trucker motel.  It was a strange place, if only because the rooms were just doors on an open hallway which led from a nondescript central lobby that could have doubled as a storage room on the other floors.  But that’s Korean architecture for you.  Lots of buildings are just boxes that are thrown up and then adapted to needs later.  Purpose-built structures are not the most common, particularly in the countryside.

Gyeokpo from the Korean trucker love motel.

The owner of the motel decided to wake us up with a phone call on Monday morning.  “Chop chop!” he said, clearly indicating that we needed to get out.  We really got the sense that he thought we’d slept too long and needed to get out and do something with our day.  That was fortunate, for it got us on the road and roaring north to Gunsan.  There’s a United States Air Force base there and a port.  I feel sorry for the poor airmen who are stationed at such a remote spot.  Yongsan or Osan would be fine places to be stationed in Korea, since they’re near or in Seoul, but Gunsan is the equivalent of southwestern Oklahoma: nothing around and you wonder why people even have half a thought to stay.

We went in search of a ferry to take us to Seonyudo, an island that Heather had picked out as a cool place to spend a day on beautiful white sand beaches.  Sat-nav and roadsigns failed us, though, and we ended up at some waterfront military museum by a tidal river, fishing boats and rusting dredging barges littering the waterway.  A pair of policemen showed up and actually just stood watching us.  Maybe they were suspicious of seven foreigners driving in a van, maybe they were bored; in Gunsan, probably both.  As Drew and I climbed on some old Korean M48 tanks, the others shouted for us in a panic.  They’d found the ferry but it was at the tip of Gunsan’s peninsula and it was leaving in thirty minutes.  A helpful Korean punched in the destination on the sat-nav and I gunned the KIA out of the parking lot.  The next twenty minutes were an exercise in Korean roadway survival, as I drove intently, zooming around trucks, yanking out of the far right lane at 80 kmh as we rapidly approached a vehicle just parked in the lane, gunning through red lights on deserted roads when no one was around.  Drive slowly under the speed camera, then smash the accelerator down and send the Carnival ripping along deserted stretches of highway, past huge industrial buildings on a wide coastal plain that showed no signs of life.  We reached the ferry, though, just in time.

Spot the foreigners.

The boat was filled with old people and many of them gravitated to the bumping karaoke session down in the ship’s hold.  Old drunk Korean men tussled and each tried to shove the other into the dance room before the other.  What sort of ferry was this?

Sailing to Seonyudo.

Seonyudo is an island that is a part of a chain of islands called the “Polynesia of Korea.”  Seems that there’s always a “*Blank* of Korea.”  Jeju was the “Hawaii of Korea.”  Maybe we drove on the Route 66 of Korea, who knows.  There’s not much out here except lots and lots and lots of fishing.  Even more so than Scotland, whose islands I’ve visited a few times.  The ferry ride was beautiful and even better because of our unique position as foreigners seeing something so far off the beaten path.  And we had attained it all through improvisation, cooperation, and a little serendipity.

Distant traveler.

Korea is one of those places in the world that becomes rarer and rarer each day.  The outside world is visible on TV and in the papers but it still remains outside.  The nation’s daily reality is fundamentally Korean; people wake up and live their lives relatively undisturbed by the machinations of the great big, humming world about them.  In America, our lives are fractured more and more everyday as we grow more complex in every single facet, the very foundations of our civilizations changing silently but inexorably beneath our feet.  Korea is, in many ways, a hundred years behind the times: a monoculture and unified society in a strong state, made prosperous by the farmer and the brazen worker in the glowing factory.  They are technology advanced and adept but their roots are solidly Industrial Revolution.  In a world that revolves around buying shit, worthwhile or worthless, Korea will do well, far better than our own service-oriented economy.

Taegeukgi.

We spent very little time on Seonyudo.  There is only a single ferry per day, we discovered.  So we walked around for about an hour, saw what little there was to see on this peaceful but remote island.  Again, as foreigners we were a peculiarity.  Seonyudo would be a wonderful place to return to at some point.  Then we were back onto the ferry and back to the mainland.  It would be a long drive back through the dark.  Having driven for most of our two days of travel, I let Heather take the wheel and took a nap.  The sat-nav freaked out on us again and sent us driving back roads all the way to Daejeon but eventually we found the Gyeongbu Expressway and were soon back on our way to Seoul.

While unconventional, our road trip was perhaps the best possible way to see Korea.  We never could have gotten where we did in anywhere approaching that amount of time.  Departure to return time was at most 37 hours.  Trains or buses might have worked but would have required huge amounts of planning and local bus routes to get us places would have been incomprehensible even to those who understood the most Korean.  And we were free to venture into (comparatively) wild and unknown places (at least for a foreigner).  We were masters of our Korean reality.  Trains, buses, and taxis maybe be for the traveler.  But the car and truck is for the explorer.

This country is great.