Existential Geese

“Why is it that so many foreigners want to learn Korean?”

My girlfriend’s question struck me as a tad silly.  I mean, it’s her damn country, shouldn’t we be learning her language?

“Well, many of them are interested in living here,” I said.  “Not just for a short period or for study, but actually residing here for a long time.”

“Why?”  She was incredulous.

Indeed, why?

Ironically, the answer was right in front of me, between the pages of the magazines that lay on the coffee shop table.  You see, go into just about any chain coffee shop in Korea and you’ll find well thumbed stacks of magazines showcasing the best that money can buy.  For pure material indulgence, there’s Luxury and Muine, for your international hipster fashions there’s Cracker, but those are only worthwhile for showcasing Koreans’ avarice for anything foreign, without regard for taste, worth, or restraint.  The real evidence for my argument lay in magazines like M25 and, most of all, The Bling.

Thumb through the pages of the latter magazine in particular and you’ll see loads of pictures from the hottest clubs and the latest DJs spinning in Seoul and perhaps a couple of other places around the peninsula, as well as a spotlight on some other Asian venue.  Many of those in the photos could have been modeling for the other magazines: Muine if you’re an upmarket-oriented 된장녀 looking to hook the whisky-swilling sugar daddy at the corner booth or Cracker if you’re a bobbing and weaving student in over-priced vintage clothes and tattoos of ligament-wrapped skeletons.  But there are a lot of young, especially Western, foreigners in those pictures.  A lot.  All are partying it up and clearly loving the attention the photographers are lavishing upon them.

Now perhaps the photographers, because of their focus on capturing foreigners on film, distort the actual number of foreigners present relative to their numbers in the general population of Korea.  But, in a certain sense, the numbers themselves, or the perception of the numbers, is irrelevant.  Regardless of actually how many foreigners like myself there are clubbing it every weekend in Hongdae, Gangnam, or Sinchon, their very centralness to the reporting on the club scene is indicative of how they perceive themselves, which is inextricably linked to what Koreans expect of a good club.

Koreans value greatly the blue-chip credibility of foreign endorsement; I don’t think I need to write any long exposition on that subject.  Thus it makes sense that Korean media would want to emphasize the presence of foreigners at an event, for it makes a strong appeal to the 20s and 30s Korean globally-conscious set.  Yet that also makes foreigners think that this is their scene, that they are an integral part of it, that it exists in part for them.  I don’t know how many expats here actually read The Bling or similar publications, so it’s hard to gauge how much the magazines themselves influence foreigner perceptions.  But the act of the photographers seeking out foreigners themselves in the clubs, to take their picture in sexy poses or wielding a bottle of Jaegermeister like a stick grenade, makes it clear that they are valued.  Adjacent Koreans jump in and throw up a two-fingered peace sign or perhaps copy their foreign photo buddy and give the camera The Shocker.  It doesn’t even matter if the photo makes copy in the magazine — the very act of capturing the subject creates a (false) sense of worth.

That feeling of being up on a pedestal combines with the effects of absorbing aspects of Korean culture, whether one intends to or not.  Even most intransigent foreign transients who are not interested in assimilating end up appreciating some parts of Korea — bulgogi barbecue, K-pop, whatever.  I hear foreigners all the time spice up their own language with Korean — it’s not because they are really multilingual and can’t divide the two tongues in their brain, but rather because they think it’s cute or endearing, like it makes them a part of a club without having the pay the dues.  But they do pay dues, whether they realize it or not.  Many of them succumb to the Korean notion that there is only the top or the bottom, that there is no acceptable middle ground.  I noticed this when my girlfriend either spoke constantly of being ‘rich’ or ‘poor.’  There was no idea of being satisified with a middle-class stature.  That’s just a stopping point on your way up or down.  Many foreigners end up adopting, even if only slightly, this Korean habit of viewing everything as a win-lose, zero-sum game through osmosis totally unaware.  They start thinking, “I’ve got to be on top.  I’ve got to be at the best clubs, on the best days of the month.  I’ve got to look the best, have the best time, and hook up with the best people at the end of the night.”  They feel the need to establish themselves in the hierarchy of foreigners here, as the ones who have figured out this strange land, mastered it, made it their own.

Oh, is this what you mean by 'experiencing a rich culture'?

That effort is nothing short of pathetic.  It mimics the Korean trait of exalting the place at the top of the pyramid, but in a different fashion.  Koreans climb the pyramid to finding prestige and security within their own hierarchical society, for those are advantages easily passed on to one’s family or social hangers-on, thereby further increasing one’s worth and especially material well-being in old age.  But foreigners exist outside that hierarchy.  Despite the constant grumblings and rantings by long-term expats, Korea is not going to become an open-to-all, multicultural society, where everyone from anywhere can lounge about in a paradise of Western values.  Nor should it.  So foreigners, cut out of following the normal avenues, must gauge themselves by a totally different standard.

That standard is a combination of both the expat society, existing in large part parallel to Korean society, as well as the society which each expat left in their home country.  Air travel and digital communications has transformed not only the ability for people to go anywhere or experience anything from a distance, but also enabled them to do so without actually giving up anything about where they came from.  You can live in Korea and, through Facebook, Skype, your RSS blogfeed, etc, continue to participate in your own culture almost as if nothing had happened.  So, for a foreigner here, if you can’t join Korean society, you’ll just judge yourself in comparison to a) other foreigners here and b) your own culture and relations in your homeland.

Thus you go out to the clubs, pushing yourself to get a more ‘authentic’ ‘Korean’ club experience than those other foreign schmucks you work with.  And you imagine you are at the top when some skinny Korean dude with a V-neck undershirt, a Mets cap, and gauged earrings, brandishing a Nikon for the club’s PR department, seeks you out and snaps pictures of you grinding on some random Australian chick in red pleather go-go boots.

But the picture is only complete (and, in circuitous fashion, I return to my initial point) when you make these habits a qualitative judgement upon the culture across the ocean that you never really left.  You say, “Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t get stuck in Atlanta/Auckland/Hamburg/Lyon/Manchester/Melbourne.  Seoul is just so happening . . . like, even more than Tokyo.  It’s a great lifestyle.”

Lifestyle.  That’s all that it comes down to.  Not a better life, mind you — we’re not talking about Sierra Leone refugees finding some haven where people won’t chop off their hands; Korea actually admits very, very few people into political asylum — but a lifestyle.  Tens of thousands of people moving across the globe not in search of liberty, freedom of conscience, or religious practice, but for their own personal indulgence.  There is no deprivation for these foreigners who come from developed countries.  They could find a club in Atlanta or Melbourne, but choose not to.  The club, party, dining scene is ‘better’ here and they have travelled far to get it.  They ensconce themselves in it, think they have found authenticity in what is virtually the same as what they left, and, through their perceived mastery of a new life, establish themselves as superior to all their friends back at home who must toil on, ‘stuck’ in their hometown and all its terrible deprivation.

Thus the foreigner across from us cuts his hair like a Korean, dresses like a Korean, and studies the Korean language, because he thinks that all this is his, that he can enter into it.  For, coming from a Western country, he operates under the illusion of equality, that all things are open to him because, well, they should be.  He thinks that skin color, facial structure, blood, culture, history, language are all malleable constructs, that he can transcend them.  He thinks that this land can be his, that he has a right to be here because he chooses to be here, as though the choice was his all along, a pure act of will on his part.

He and his kind are not colonialist, though many of their attitudes are unconsciously the White Man’s Burden mashed several times through a progressivist strainer.  Rather, they are merely existential geese.  They flit about, migrating from one little spot to another, honking to each other about which pond is bigger or better, never remaining but always thinking that wherever they touch down is theirs, claimed by nothing more than frantically paddling feet and nasally squawks.

Tags: club, culture, expatriate, Korea

Three Nights in a Jjimjilbang

I recently did some venturing about Korea, not for any terribly specific reason other than I wanted to ride around on trains a lot.  I decided to check out Andong, for I’ve heard it’s an intransigently Korean place and I like intransigent stick-in-the-muds.  Being short on cash, I decided to sleep in a jjimjilbang, like many Koreans do when they travel.

Normally I’m rather averse to marinating myself in the various bodily fluids, bacteria, sloughed skin, and expectorate of total strangers, but I decided to give it a try.  For I’d recently gotten a blood test and my Hepatitis B antibodies turned out to be naturally almost four times higher than an ordinary vaccinated person.  I felt lucky.

Once I got in and started looked around Andong Oncheon, the jjimjilbang pictured above, I was kicking myself for not having come to one of these places sooner.  I mean, a shower, water from a hot spring (the meaning of 온천), sauna, baking yourself inside a kiln, roasting your back on lava rocks, freezing yourself in a room lined with ice-encrusted pipes, plus a restaurant, PC room, DVDs, a space on the floor to crash — all for 7 bucks — 7 bucks — how is anything wrong with this picture?  I was to discover later, though, that there was.

It being winter vacation, there were a lot of college students traveling and nearly all of them seemed to be using these establishments for their lodging.  With a small bookbag, most of them were just bouncing around on week-long cheap train passes, trying to see as much as possible.  I talked with several of them.  Two young guys, one with a glistening cubic zirconia earring, playing hwatu together on the mat next to me, had just finished their second year of university, which meant that it was the customary time to do their compulsory military service.  Except the Military Manpower Administration wasn’t sure whether they would send these two off in February or March or when.  Ear Ring Kim’s parents lived in Hong Kong and had insisted that he go to university in Daegu so his grandparents could keep an eye on him.  Well, he wasn’t having any of that right now.  He and his friend were just going to kick around the country doing whatever they felt like until the military let them know when it was time to report for training.  Nice guys, as most of the people there seemed — a real family establishment.  I felt fairly comfortable.  Actually, I almost always feel far less ill will for my skin color outside the main urban areas.  Usually country people look at me as a curiosity instead of with suspicion or loathing.  One big-nosed, leather-skinned rustic on the train even made the effort to catch my attention and give a wave and smile as he got off at a rural station.  It is indeed the people you meet that make or break any physical place you come across.

But the most, shall we say, memorable character at the jjimjilbang was the ajeossi in the hot pool.  He had surprisingly tan skin all over.  His hair was unusually curly on top and suffered from a orangish hue, making him look like a Korean Jerry Stiller.  He made his way to the corner reclining section of the big bubbling warm pool, which I too stood in, albeit on the opposite side.  He laid down and I lost track of him, zoning out for several minutes.

When I came back to the present, I happened to glance across the pool.  The orange-haired old guy lay in his corner, but was looking about with a wide-eyed, almost paranoid look.  I saw his arm moving back and forth and some movement down by his crotch.  Gross, I thought, that old dude’s cleaning himself in this pool.  It seemed odd, but, then again, there were naked grown men over in the shower room scrubbing each other’s backs with rough cloths.  It’s Korea, after all, and things are just different in a lot of ways.  So I brushed it off.

But I kept feeling the old guy’s stare flitting about the room like a schizophrenic lighthouse beam.  No one else seems to notice him, but he’s still glancing around nervously.  Looking back over, I see that the man’s former motion is continuing, only at a more frantic pace, and a certain part of his anatomy has, by this point . . . emerged . . . from the water.  It suddenly struck me that this weird looking ajeossi was gratifying himself in a public pool.  And I was sitting it the same water.

I stood up immediately and climbed out of that pool without a second look.  I went into the sauna, shut the door, and sat down.  No way I’m getting back in that pool, I thought.  The heater next to me banged and clanged and I sat, wondering if this was normal behavior in a jjimjilbang and if anyone else had seen it.  But no one makes conversations in the jjimjilbang.  You sit there and avoid eye contact as you sweat and scrub.  So I was left with the mystery all to myself.

Those who wander seek out authentic experiences, ones which illuminate either the universal or the particular.  We want a full spectrum of experiences, a broad, diverse array that will enable us to both make generalizations.  But on occasion you see something that just leaves you at a loss, that fails to fit into any preconceived categories you have or can be considered a rare outlier that conforms nonetheless in its own way.  Just because you spend three nights in a jjimjilbang doesn’t mean you’ll see the same thing that I did.  And that, my friends, is why you keep your eyes open, even if sometimes you wish you hadn’t.

Mystery Box

I saw many of these mysterious boxes passing through the northern parts of Gyeongsangbuk-do and the southern parts of Gangwon-do.  They were spread throughout sections of forest, sitting on cliff ledges, or, in the case of this picture, situated at a remote railroad siding.

Does anyone happen to know what these boxes are used for?  I speculated initially that they might be urns of some sort, or perhaps an urn is stored inside them.  They seem have some sort of common purpose, for various points of their construction are similar, particular the three bored holes at the base on the front side.  Are they for shamanistic uses or old Confucian rituals or just some old weird mountain tradition that not many know about?  I saw a lot of them in one place, perhaps forty or more scattered all about an old, run-down house.

If anyone knows, drop a comment or shoot me an email, I’d appreciate it!

Tags: box, Korea, mystery

FTA Power Struggle

The KORUS Free Trade Agreement (known on these shores in shorthand as the 한미FTA) has been ratified, but that hasn’t stopped the opposition against it.  In fact, the protests calling for its rescinding are as heated, if not more so, as those held before the National Assembly passed the law.  As I’ve noted before, the central areas of Seoul can fill up with heated street confrontations at a moment’s notice.  The video below is of the 한미FTA protests that took place last night in the capital:

Most of the protest’s momentum took it from the Cheonggyecheon area into Myeongdong toward Namsan.  It also ended up in Jongro, right on the main drag.

The fascinating thing about Seoul is that there can be an event like this going on and you can be but a few blocks away and have no idea that anything significant is happening.  I was in the city all afternoon, up toward Bukchon with my girlfriend, negotiating the crowds of fat Japanese girls shopping and Chinese tourists photographing overpriced shoe stores, and drinking overpriced coffee in tiny cups.  There were police about, mostly young conscripts doing their national service.  I’d seen them on other occasions in recent months, for the President’s house, Cheongwadae, is nearby.  For some reason, they were spread out in tiny groups throughout the area.  Turn down a street and, peekaboo! standing in entrance of a little alleyway are a cluster of neon-jacket cops, two with riot shields, another with a glowing red-orange traffic wand.  They just stand there, in the cold, looking fairly useless if any really concerned mob like that in the video came through.  My assumption was that it was all a precaution or a change in tactics just for the hell of it; I had no idea what was going down a kilometer away.

Down along the eastern wall of Gyeongbokgung, it was clear that they didn’t need manpower, ’cause they had firepower instead.  There was a truck that resembled a hook-and-ladder type operation, but marked police on the side.  Its boom was folded for the moment.  I realized that this was the exact same equipment the police used against labor union protests at the Hanjin Heavy Industries pier down in Busan (check out the photo in the first link, the truck I saw was exactly the same).  There was a water cannon mounted on the end of the boom, but what made it more nefarious was the mixing of tear gas compounds in with the water they were spraying.  Was the tanker truck behind it, also in police livery, filled with CS-laced water?  No idea, but I’ve never seen preparations on that scale for a protest anywhere in Seoul before.

But while I noticed the equipment and the police standing around, there was still no inkling of what was happening down in Myeongdong.  Ironically, we missed our turn to drive south down the plaza in front of Gwanghwamun and ended up stuck in traffic, heading west before looping back east by the river.  If we hadn’t been cut off and gotten into the lane we intended, we’d have driven right smack into the middle of the fracas.  And, still, no idea until I drove all the way home and just happened to see the news pop up as I switched on my computer.

***

The arguments for and against free trade or protectionism often boil down to one side shouting at other about principles or the lack of them.  Free trade is sancrosanct, one side shouts, as self-evident as any natural right.  Can’t you see?  You don’t see?  Well, then, you have no understanding of economics.  The other side jabs its finger back, screaming that it’s often a select few who benefit, especially those connected to political power.  It’s all a scheme by the rich against the people!  We’ll all be serfs, don’t you see!  You clearly have no understanding of economics!

The unfortunate part is that (and this is painfully obvious in the boring, dualistic responses to Occupy Wall Street) we have come to regard economics as a source of morality (or ethics, if you prefer), instead of responding to and a servant of an external source of morality.  It’s the same way that we live without any sense of our own history.  Modern life distances and insulates man from his past, the realities of those struggles, and the principles and lessons inherent to them.  We run around making economics a shrill sermon of fundamentalist rigor because we live in a world with no past, one created in material and culture by the economics of industrialization — what else should we expect?

Unaware of our history, we fail to see that economic systems are tools by which nations, or parts of nations, attempt to secure power, prosperity, or security for themselves.  American corporations may enjoy free trade today and wax on about the moral uprightness of it, but a hundred plus years ago the industrialists would have rather died than see the tariff gone.  For the fact was that, from the beginning of the Republic, American industry couldn’t compete with England.  The tariff held the cheaper English goods at bay, but placed enormous burdens on the sections of the country exporting goods to England.

True, this built up America to a world power by the end of the 19th century.  And you could make the same argument about the nation-strengthening policies of Park Chung-Hee back in the ’60s and ’70s.  But that doesn’t make it moral.  One section of America suffered because of the tariff, so much so that it was one reason to secede from nation as a whole.  And the other section used their newfound industrial strength to crush the other.  So when people are out protesting in the streets like above, I don’t think about whether free trade or protectionism are themselves right or wrong.  I think, Who is getting the shaft here?  Beyond the sham of fungible rhetoric, who wins and who loses?

The losers will not be most of the people in that video.  In fact, they might even prosper.  They and their children will fill the ranks of the rising middle class that is fueling all the speculative growth in the capital area.  They’ll move into one of the massive apartment complexes being thrown up in places that a generation ago were no-name villages, now covered with the scars of asphalt and concrete, with ridiculous names like “Gwanggyo Techno Valley” the label capitalizing on people’s hopes.  They’ll make money, forget that they ever said anything bad about the 한미FTA or globalization, and proceed to transform Korea into a land of PC rooms, coffee shop chains, designer clothes outlets, smartphone stores, and soaring towers of concrete soul-destruction, everyone crammed into tiny boxes, creating their worlds online because there’s no space outside.  Their culture will become the only Korea, the old ways dying not with a bang but with a whimper.

Yes, whimpering away, that is how the losers will go.  For they are too old and too few to make any noise.  The remains of the rural peasantry will be gone.  Korean rice is protected under the FTA, but other farm products will be hit by U.S. imports, without many opportunities to make up for losses in vulnerable U.S. sectors.  And no one will replace the rice farmers when they’re gone, for four acres and harvester doesn’t have any appeal for the younger generation, who are convinced that maybe if they study just a little bit harder, take one more interview, get a nose job, then they’ll finally land a spot in a corporation, safe for life.  Yes, maybe this time, just one more try.

And that will be it.  Korea as Korea will be done, gone forever.  The last thing really tying it to its past and its identity, an agricultural people and its traditions, will be gone.  After that, Korean culture as the urban masses believe it, as the world is shown — the Chuseok celebrations, the hanbok, the winter kimchi making — is a mere facade, a mimesis without understanding.

This struggle between an agrarian and an industrial civilization, then, was the irrepressible conflict, the house divided against itself, which must become according to the doctrine of the industrial section all the one or all the other. 

It was the doctrine of intolerance, crusading, standardizing alike in industry and in life.

- Frank Lawrence Owsley

Korea, the Korea as it was, had to be crushed out; it was in the way; it impeded the progress of the machine.  So Juggernaut drove his Hyundai across the peninsula.

Tags: free trade, globalization, Korea, protest, Seoul

Pleasant Peninsula

Si quæris peninsulam amœnam, circumspice.

Tags: farm, 팔도, 한반도, Korea, peninsula, photos, rural life, train, village

Jebudo Sunset

Tags: Jebudo, Korea, photos, sunset, Travel

Hope for Korean Beer

Mungyeong Saejae is yet another example of a beautiful piece of Korea’s fascinating and demanding past ruined by the ajumma/ajeossi weekend tour bus crowd, hordes of neon-clothed boomers showing up by the thousands, if not tens of thousands, to shove and elbow their way down a path whose ancient ruggedness has been ruined by the perpetual urge to park-ify anything remotely challenging with flat, wide paths, drainage ditches, and vendors and advertising running all the way up into the forest.  How incredible it is to consider the long treks porters made up the old Yeongnam Daero with their 지게 A-frames, up the narrow valleys and over the surprisingly formidable mountains into Chungcheong, and how impossible it is to envison the road’s past importance amongst all those crowds.

However, even a despiser of progress as recalcitrant as myself couldn’t be upset with one of the many vendors hawking their wares outside the first gate.  They sold Mungyeong Omija Beer, and only W2500 per pint at that.

Actually, it’s omija (오미자) and apple together, both of which the Mungyeong area is well known for.  I will go out on a limb and say right now that this is the best beer I’ve had in Korea, period, either domestic (both name-brand and craft-brewed) or imported.  The omija lends a tart edge to it and the apple a tad of sweetness, making the taste very well rounded, especially for the fall weather.  But even beyond the fruit addition, the beer had good body to it.  I was, quite frankly, shocked at the quality.  Most craft brewers in the States would be well satisfied to have this beer as a part of their lineup, and for Korea to produce a beer of that quality is damn impressive.

If you’re in the Mungyeong area, find all the 문경 오미자사과 생맥주 that you can and drink it up.  The contact numbers are obvious in the above picture; it would be great to keep this fledgling experiment in brewing going, as the addition of the omija is a very Korean twist, it supports the local farmers, and the quality should be an example to the rest of the brewers here of what they should be striving for.

Tags: apple, beer, craftbrew, hiking, Korea, microbrew, Mungyeong, omija

The Neighborhood

My neighborhood is a market.  There are no grandiose arcades with covered ceilings like some of the bigger ones; this is more of a street where all the local businesses congregate.  The market prides itself on a diverse array of offerings, but in truth there’s not much variety.  Businesses are either fruit and vegetable sellers, butchers, tofu and noodle makers, one of a whole host of fried chicken takeaways, phone stores, or hair salons.  Throw in the obligatory taekwondo academy and a couple two-room, top-floor churches and you’ve got a neighborhood that could be in any Korean city.  I do enjoy living here, in a perverted sense; it is dirty Korea at its finest.  There is nothing polished, high-tech, fake, or slickly-marketed about it.  There is only true Korea, how these people get on in their daily lives, lives that most of us would fear and recriminate ourselves for falling into.

Walking through the market, you get a feel for the different characters who inhabit the place.  There is the lazy 20-something guy at the discount mart.  He runs a cash register in theory, but really is glued to his smartphone most of the time.  You immediately gravitate to another register upon noticing this, which only reinforces his perception that he’s not needed.  He doesn’t stay behind the register, though.  He lazily wanders about near his station, bumps into things, takes lots of smoke breaks near the fresh produce outside, and in general keeps a sharp eye out for any work ethic sneaking up on him.  Another guy is like that, down the street a bit.  His haircut is ghastly: buzzed on one half, the long strands flopping over from the other side and forward.  His glasses are those enormous black, square-framed ones popular with both sexes here and which are surely a highly effective form of birth control.  This guy is always smoking, poking away at his own smartphone, while the girls in the butcher shop dutifully set up for the day.  Sometimes he starts up the motorbike to ride a mere hundred yards down the street to another store, smoking a cigarette all the way.

Another staple is the autistic guy who’s perpetually wheeling around on his bike.  I’ve never seen him off of it.  He’s got a half-dozen cable locks of different colors hanging from the handlebars.  He always wears gardening gloves, a collared shirt, and talks to himself most of the time.  He’s young, perhaps just out of high school, and one wonders what, if any, hope there is for him here.  Do his parents turn him out to ride around because they’re working all day?  Or because they don’t want to deal with him, the embarrassing autistic who will do nothing for the family name?

At one of the fried chicken places there’s a young woman who works alongside her father.  She’s a part of that strangely Korean phenomenon, the cute girl working an ordinary service job.  Never in America would you ask a girl behind a convenience store counter for her number, but you’d absolutely consider it in this country.  The girl’s father shows her the ropes of blasting the birds in boiling oil.  One time he had an enormous mug of beer and, after a gulp, shoved it over to her and told her to drink some.  She tried to refuse, but he kept jamming it in her face until she took a drink, all while flipping the frying chickens.

The old vegetable grandmas are a sight and are perhaps the starkest reminder of the roots of this country.  Burnt brown, the lines on their faces deeper than cigarette wrinkles, some of them are in their 70s or 80s.  They squat on the pavement, cabbage, roots, sweet potatos spread out on a blue tarp.  At the end of the day, they’ll put in all in an enormous bundle, drag it aboard the bus, and leave the bundle sitting in a aisle as they head back out to their farm on the outskirts of the city.  They are truly the old lost amongst the new.  They have seen their country go from under Japan’s heel to liberation to war with their brethren to military dictators and now prosperity unfathomable in their youth.  They grew up with wood fires and will die with LEDs.

The most sobering sight in all the market, though, is the cripples.  Harsh word, but here, that’s what they are.  Legs missing, always the legs.  There must be an unbelievable rate of workplace accidents here.  Strangely, I’ve never seen one of them with prosthetics.  Anyone who’s been down a street in Seoul has seen the ones rolling down the sidewalk on a cart, begging, but it’s more bothersome when they’re your neighbor, not even bothering for a handout.  One guy just sits in a wheelchair outside my alleyway somedays, both legs gone, smoking away, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes.

I see some real, honest-to-God bad shit like that where I live.  This ain’t news on TV or in a glossy National Geographic special.  This is the human price for progress combined with man’s eternal condition, in your face.  This is the dumping ground for the working class and the least fortunate of the petite bourgeois.  These people are on the losing end of the modern system.  They’re pinched for money, with food prices up, kindergartens, hagwons, and taekwondo for the kids, ridiculous sums for phones and other electronics that are ‘must-haves,’ and a culture which demands you look like who you wish people thought you were.

Want examples?  My neighboring apartment building has a pipe that vents waste water into the dying grass between their building and ours; the neighbors across the alley have jury rigged electrical wires running from the roof into their living room window; I’ve killed cockroaches in the street as they crawl across the road from one infested house to another; and my landlord leaves unbound bags of his personal trash outside my door.  Yet someone around me drives a new silver Hyundai Genesis.  He parks it right outside where people just pile their garbage and recycling (because there are no dumpsters) that waits for some grandma to pick through it at 3 a.m. in the hopes of finding a few won worth of scrap.  I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten keyed yet.  The pretension amidst the dirt, trash, cracked concrete, and pollution-blackened bricks is unbelievable.

My neighbor’s backyard sump.

That’s disappointing, but not heinous, though.  There are indeed worse things that take place.  I’ve seen domestic violence cases in the street outside.  The husband was arguing with his wife, screaming at her and shoving her around, right below my window.  In fact, everyone’s windows were open, I’m sure every family around heard it.  No one did or said anything.  Eventually the husband literally drags his wife off to their apartment.  A few days later, I saw a moving van packing up all their stuff.

The worst incident might have been the time my girlfriend and I found a guy, face smashed in, bleeding out of his nose, lying unconscious at the end of my alley in the full-on morning sun.  People just walked past.  When we called the police, the dispatcher chewed out my girlfriend, saying it wasn’t their problem to clean people up.  “He can go to a hospital, you know,” said the dispatcher.  Thankfully a benevolent policeman found out and came by to take care of the poor guy.  The horrific part was that the man had surely been laying there since the night before and yet no one, not even the owners of the cars that had been parked next to him, had done anything.

At times, the absurdity of the neighborhood can be amusing.  My girlfriend and I ran into a crazy woman who’d wandered away from her daughter’s house in the middle of the night.  She kept saying, “No Tae Woo (노태우) is killing my son!  Oh, he’s hitting my son in the face!”  I have no idea what made her think a former president jailed for anti-democratic excesses would have a vendetta against her son.  Maybe it was latent, suppressed fears from all those years ago finally worming their way to the surface.

Walking around, seeing the nice clothes people wear, the fancy electronics they tout, and yet the narrow artifice in which they reside and the unabashedly unfair and at times brutal events around them, reveals a different side to the Korea projected into the world.  The rest of Asia sees Girls Generation, Big Bang, and dramas full of gorgeous, successful people.  I see only stunted lives.  These people are not going to escape this shitty neighborhood.  The boom days of wild growth that lifted up Korea as a whole are done.  They are saddled with debt, so they can’t borrow their way to a better tomorrow.  Progress will be on the margins.  And these poor people will be stuck here, working ten, twelve, maybe fourteen hours a day, six (maybe seven) days a week, fifty-one weeks a year, hoping for a better tomorrow for their kids, but not seeing it pan out.

This is reality.  This is the hard fact that not everyone wins first draw in the lottery of life.  It’s fucking unfair, but it’s how it is.

I will leave this town knowing that fact forever.  Yet none of us can remember merely the bad; we inevitably find some good in every situation, even if it means inflating that good beyond its actual proportion to the bad.  I will always remember the small pleasantries that occurred here and there, in spite of the brokenness: the families strolling about; the hordes of schoolkids, always separated into boys and girls; the laughs and shouting; the music blaring from shopfronts into the street; the neon; the smell of fresh fish; even the reeking bags full of dirty toilet paper, tied up on the corner next to a fruit stand.  This is, through and through, Korea.

Tags: Korea, life, market, smells

Digital Whisky

It is impossible at some levels for cultures as different as East and West to comprehend the real, true essence of each other.  We can approach a general understanding or gain a sense of it, but never can we actually understand what it is at heart.

One extremely obvious case of this is Westerners becoming very ‘into’ Buddhism.  They think they understand what it is, they categorize and define its aspects and principles, and find its spiritual practices ‘really, like, you know, revealing and inspiring, man.’  But as much as they try, they will never (and indeed cannot) actually reach a full understanding of what such things mean to a person.  For they have not grown up internalizing such understanding in their every waking moment.  I’m not talking about mere tenets or ideals or individual experience; I’m talking about how the whole messy thing of a religion plays out on a human and cultural scale.  They don’t get it because they can’t get it.  They might understand the cyclical nature of Buddhist thought, but unless their own worldview, their thoughts’ unconscious prism, is cyclical in nature, they will never really get at what Buddhism is.

In the same way, though I write occasionally about Confucian aspects of Korean society, I really have no idea what I’m talking about.  I have an idea of Confucianism, its Korean variant, and I can see it in action every day around me.  I can have a view into how it affects people’s thought and behavior, as I find out my girlfriend’s reactions to everyday occurrences or relationships with people.  Yet I will never know what it actually means because I am constantly forcing myself out of my own frame of thought, attempting to adopt that of another.  I may almost touch it, like Adam nearly touching the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I will never actually, completely know it.  For I do not understand the unspoken meaning of words here, the ideas intrinsic and unuttered, understood intuitively.

Yet in the same way, one can run into Eastern assumptions about the West.  They assume that values they assign to something would be reciprocated by Westerners.

What made me think of this?  A bottle of Johnny Walker.

I grabbed it off the shelf and only looked at the box when I got home.  ‘Limited Edition’ it said, though the price was no less than a normal bottle.  Basically they’re luring you in with a fancy box.  I took a look at the fancy box and saw this design:

Yes, that it the Striding Man silhouette, but done as a lit-up telecommunications network, glowing in all its technological glory.

Seriously?

The artist, though, was completely earnest.  “Ji Hoon Byun,” the box interior read, “has been seeking for the aesthetic value in digital media art.  He uses engineering technique like programming languages as his primary method to create his work.  His works that respond to the movement of the beholders and to the nature have been invited to many local overseas exhibitions.”

This artist clearly has no idea of the essence of this important Western artifact, whisky.  He’s doing up the Striding Man to represent how cool and cutting edge whisky is, how digital technology represents the same level of excellence, etc, ad nauseam.

Except that the point of whisky is that it’s not digital, dammit.  It’s not immediate, instantaneous, available on your smartphone.  You can’t make it better by making it faster or in larger quantities or with brushed aluminum paneling or by live tweeting.  It takes lots of time, nature, and tough men in cold, lonely places doing things in the exact damn way they have been for as long as anyone can remember.  Whisky is the enemy of innovation and the antichrist of efficiency.

But Ji Hoon Byun doesn’t understand that.  The Audi-driving Samsung Men who shell out bucks for this stuff don’t understand it.  They may understand part of the whisky culture, that sense of connoisseurship fostered by men with too much money and sense of self-worth.  But they confuse that with the reason why whisky is sought after, enjoyed: it is not easily made or readily available; it can only be made by a old and insular tradition; and its taste can only in a certain sense be appreciated when you understand the physical environment from which it comes.  Go north up the coast from the Clyde and set your feet in Oban and you can see how that town’s whisky has both the sea and the hills in its taste.

But they wouldn’t want it even if they tried.  Because those Korean whisky connoisseurs, like secular Westerners dabbling in Buddhism, don’t want to actually understand.  Because that might mean coming up against the possibility that one can’t fully understand.  No, they’re looking for their own perceptions to be confirmed, perceptions rooted in the identity they have but try to escape.  Koreans drink whisky because they think rich, successful Westerners drink whisky.  They drink not to appreciate, but to socially distinguish.  And to be distinguished in Korea is to be ensconced in their worship of technology — hence the digital Striding Man.  Similarly, Western dilettantes like Buddhism because it doesn’t judge them.  They’re not interested in wholeheartedly embracing a different worldview, a whole new set of eyes, a real religion that requires commitment.  No, they’re interested in a perceived refuge from the moral and existential demands of Judeo-Christian culture.  Embracing Buddhism, they will be different, yes, but not in any objective sense, only relative to what they were before.

No matter what they do the box, those well-intentioned but meddling Koreans can’t change what’s inside the bottle.  Pure gold, and it only got there one way, a way not even Samsung can reverse engineer.  That is the lesson for our very selves when we look in the mirror.

Tags: Korea, West vs. East, whisky

Paris on the Peninsula

The girl at the end of the table was smoking mojito-flavored cigarettes. “Bohem Cigar Mojito” was the name. The dual fans on the porch were blowing in her direction, whisking the smoke away and off into the Gangnam night, so I never got a chance to see what the smell was like.

There were four of them, girls, university friends who rarely cross paths these days. After the wedding of one of their close friends, we’d come here, to this cafe. Each one of them was interesting. The girl at the far end, smoking the mojito cigs, was a part-time model, with an intelligent and mysterious air about her. She looked exactly like one of my old professors. I considered telling her this, but then thought better of it when I remembered the professor was Japanese. Comparisons such as that are a minefield in this country.

The girl at the other end of the table, to my left, was a tattooist. She kicked her shoes off toward the end of the evening and revealed the wings she had tattooed on her feet. I could only think of the Greek god from the FTD florist signs back in the States (Hermes, perhaps). The girl in the middle, on the far side of the table, talked energetically, asked probing questions, and burned through nearly a whole pack of cigarettes. Perhaps it was all the coffee. Her claim to fame was that she once slept with a Japanese film star. They were all artists by training and temperament. They looked and acted the part.

The talk amongst the three girls and my girlfriend was difficult to follow at best. My brain was fried from the heat and the acidic caffeine of too many americanos that day. From this rooftop patio, I could see across across much of Gangnam. The red glow of the giant Kumkang sign reflected off of every shiny surface around. Looking to the right, northward, you could look over Sinsa. The HanSkin building had nearly every light on, making it look like a cheese grater with a lightbulb inside. Beyond it was the blinking red light of the radio tower array that stands just southeast of N Seoul Tower on Namsan.

For some reason, I imagined anti-aircraft fire puncturing the warm, glowing night over this part of town. That seems slightly ridiculous, but not because there’s no threat to the city. Rather, it’s ridiculous because the North Korean air force would never establish air superiority over the South. No, the likely explosions would not be from tracers arcing into the dark, but rather from rockets or shells falling to earth.

My mind looked to war because Seoul itself has often reminded me of a different place: Paris. Not the eternal Paris, though, the Paris of love, lights, pleasure, and ease, but pre-Great War Paris. A poor comparison, you might say, but consider a few general points. First, Seoul is a flourishing metropolis. There is great wealth spread among the elites, the benefits of which trickle down to the lower rungs, especially in infrastructure. There is a great awareness of and interest in the international scene; Korea senses that there is an important role to play, though it may not have clear and realistic vision of what that is. Korean culture is an export in and of itself, seen as sophisticated around Asia. These things do indeed resemble Belle Époque France. Still, one may argue that such traits could also have applied to other European cities at the time as well.

But the Paris comparison is just when considering that which looms over the horizon. Fin de siècle Paris had a great, foreboding sense of the end of its flourishing. The 19th century seemed to be bringing material prosperity and high culture to an apotheosis, yet the Parisians felt only malaise at this prospect. Korea does not feel that now, but there are signs that this Miracle on the Han River is failing in its greatest moment. There is a growing gap between the rich and poor, with many who teeter in the middle slipping to the lower rungs, while elites see their income rise sharply. The economy is heavily dependent on exports and will suffer in a second, deeper worldwide recession. With that, the already tight Korean job market will be even more severely pinched. The promise of affluence and a better future will be delayed further, especially for younger Koreans.

But the greatest salience is in the threat that lies over the DMZ. North Korea is the Imperial Germany to Seoul’s Paris. Both were threats faced once before, with unsatisfactory results and a permanent imprint on the national psyche. South Korea must inevitably reckon with this violent neighbor again, hopefully without bloodshed. Yet the structure of the world order seems to preclude any sort of boldly proactive approach. Orders are important: Europe saw relative peace when the Congress of Vienna consensus discouraged permanent alliances and attempted to localize conflicts. Similarly, our world sees security as intimately connected to markets — the benefits of trade discourage violent cataclysms that disturb the order. Yet this order works on the assumption that the actors are rational. I think we can all agree that North Korea is not rational. Imperial Germany was not either. Its culture saw war as a romantic way to transcend soul-stifling bourgeois values.

An order which less and less resembles reality will lead to misconceptions, confusion, and, given the chance, cataclysm. Something must be done to prevent a war, nay, a catastrophe, on this peninsula, but there is a fear of doing anything, for an equally great fear of the consequences. There is a lurking sense that the current age of constant growth and ever-increasing plenty cannot be sustained, but we cannot imagine how to replace the system that we already have or tame its destructive potential. So nothing is done. And the order entropies more quickly, leaving us in even more of a predicament, fearing even more the consequences of failure.

I left the girls to their conversation about cute guys and stood at the railing. I looked at the rooftop gardens, the countless cafes restaurants packed with couples, the slick skyscrapers, and the older buildings grimy with pollution. When Seoul fights its own Battle of the Marne, I wondered, will I be here? Will I look down to the street and see the soldiers on leave kissing their mini-skirted, high-heeled girlfriends goodbye, then piling into Hi Seoul taxis that speed them to the front somewhere near Pocheon? Will this neon city of ceaseless diversion see its lights going out, not to be relit again in my lifetime?

When I sat down again, I didn’t share my thoughts. The girls would not understand this, not because they are girls, but because they are Korean. They are always optimistic, in spite of the challenges their young lives face. They don’t think of failure or unraveling orders or anything of the sort. They think of life and how they are living it. I realized my Paris reference was right, but of the wrong era. If one day distant artillery fire does silhouette Kyobo Tower, they will repose here and watch the show, like Rick, Ilsa, and Sam of a different Paris, with each cigarette and americano echoing Sam: “This ought to take the sting out of bein’ occupied.”

Tags: fin de siecle, Korea, Seoul, war