Too Many Mountains

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0900

I can’t make sense of Korea. How I’ve tried. In two months, I’ll be leaving, and in September my life is going to change, so drastically that the past will be unrecognizable. Again.

The first Korean I met was a man in a room in an office building in Houston. It was the consulate, and he was my interviewer. When I entered there was a big conference table, and he was the only one at it. I remember little of his features, except that he seemed to be smiling at some private joke. He asked me what I knew of Korea, and I admitted the truth: very little. I’d barely mastered hello. And I knew what bulgogi and kimchi were, and in short I was desperate, and the money was good, so I was going. I didn’t tell him this last part, but I guessed he divined it. I told him I’d be living in Apgujeong. “Nice neighborhood,” he said. His breath smelled like garlic. He told me I could leave and a few days later I had my visa.

When I arrived at the airport, Eric from work picked me up. He had a bowl cut and eyes that seemed to always look to either side of you. When I remarked how clean the airport was, he let out a strange, cough-like giggle, but didn’t say a word. In the car on the way, he was silent as well. Almost all of the cars on the road were black, silver, or white. “Wow, I’m jet-lagged,” I said. He giggle-coughed, then turned on the radio. He dropped me in an unfamiliar neighborhood, full of marts and neon and spinning barber poles I would later learn were code for something other than haircuts. When I got to my apartment the sink was leaking, and someone had left a pair of dirty shower shoes in the bathroom. The room was a box, and the single bed was lumpy. I woke up early the next morning, drank a canned coffee from a 7-11, and walked around. The place was quiet, and there were signs I couldn’t read everywhere. The ones I could read made no sense: Coffee Mama, Salad Dude, My Organic Story, and an office building with a single word written in bold letters at the top: “Trees.” Of those there were few here. The sun was up so early. It was warm. And no one looked at me as I walked. Occasionally I caught a sharp, acrid smell I would later learn was fermented bean paste.

Fast-forward 20 months. I’ve had pneumonia, swine flu, and six sinus infections. I’ve learned a new alphabet and two number systems. I’ve clocked 28 weeks of overtime teaching intensives at my hagwon. I’ve had one week to relax and remember what it was like to smile and flirt -- in Vietnam. I’ve driven myself crazy studying for a GRE that I took in Osaka, killed it, then walked out late after a strange buffet dinner full of raw fish and pasta and stared at a neon marathon man reflected in a man-made river’s water. I’ve ridden wave after wave of culture shock, and found that they even out the closer you get to the end. I’ve applied to grad schools and gotten into Georgetown, which is like West Point for diplomats, all without much counsel from anyone. I’ve done most of this alone.

One weekend this winter I walked out to the Han River (about ten minutes from my place) and it was near evening. The sky was a haze as usual and I realized I could not tell if the pale glow in the sky above me was the sun or the moon. I sat on cold concrete and dangled my feet over the water, and jazz piano tinkled from a grimy nearby riverboat restaurant. When the song ended, I went home.

April Fool’s Day, I decide to play a joke on Julia, my third-grade writing student, because she’s deadpan and resigned; I know she won’t see it coming. I print out a copy of the Wikipedia article on Samuel Beckett. I tell her, “We’re going to read this. Look at his picture. Doesn’t he look nice?” She blinks at his lizard-like wrinkles and piercing stare, but she begins reading without complaint. “Underline all the words you don’t understand,” I tell her. Every few words she highlights something in pink: “avante-garde,” “minimalist,” and “existentialism,” but she reads on in the same bored monotone. It’s not going well; she’s approaching this absurdity as she approaches everything she ever learns, without understanding or even the feeling that she ought to understand. And it doesn’t matter how far I go. “We’re going to have a vocabulary test on all the words you don’t know. Looks like it’s going to be about five hundred. And you need to write at least a five page report.” She groans but dutifully writes it down in pink highlighter: “5 pages least.” When I tell her it’s an April Fool’s joke, it lands dead on arrival. She says she is aware of April Fool’s. “I trick my mom. I say I do homework, but I don’t.” I tell her that’s not quite the size of it, but she seems nonplussed by this, as by everything. Later, when we’re reading the Indian in the Cupboard, she points to the Beckett article. “Oh, teacher, I want to read this.”

Some kids almost live at hagwon. They rarely see their fathers. Their mothers sometimes beat them and often berate them. During intensives I have a student named Charles, a third grader with a round, expressionless face he keeps shrouded under the hood of his coat. When I show up, he’s been waiting quietly on the stairs for thirty minutes.

“What are you up to Charles?”

“Yes,” he says, and I escort him to my classroom.

Charles is a legend at my hagwon. His mother used to drop him off for classes all day with no money for lunch. The teachers tried to report him to Korea’s version of Child Protective Services, but were told that for their own good they ought to stay out of it -- it was none of their business, like so many things here. In class, Charles does his work dutifully and without inspiration or interest. One day, I notice he is staring at my bottle of water. He has a slight smile on his face as he touches the side with his fingertip. “Teacher, what if a bullet go through here?”

In this hermit kingdom where they built the turtle ship, where the walls of the city once were opened only to let out the dead, you get the sense that the English you’re selling might as well be a Mercedes. Mothers want to tell their friends, “My son is studying English with a real American.” Meanwhile her son is going in circles. All that English ricochets off his skull as he buries his nose in a book that’s teaching him not to use the word “ain’t,” a word he’s never heard before.

One day I ask Sungsoo, a fifth-grader in an advanced level class who’s never written a word for me or progressed at all, to write a journal in class about what communication means to him. He takes half an hour. As he writes, he seems to be in pain. What he hands back to me, in tragically broken English, traces a closed loop of logic: communication is talking with other people, and talking with other people is communication. Like he’s circling the rhetorical wagons, like he’s trapped in the center of that circle. This is right before he leaves our hagwon.

Five months later I’m walking out of the building during break, and I see Sungsoo standing next to his bike. I greet him warmly, say what a coincidence it is running into him. “Actually, I came to see you,” he says.

I’m taken aback. He looks older now, has grown a bit into his body. His face, once round, has grown longer. He has the same buzz cut and the same round glasses, the same way of holding his mouth in a slight pucker, like he’s suppressing a smile or a nod of recognition. As usual, I must do all the talking. I ask him how he likes his new hagwon. “Little bit good,” he says. Then he goes on staring at me. I tell him I’m leaving soon, in about two months. “I will come again,” he says, “before you go.” Then he mounts his bike and pedals away.

The real heartbreakers are the ones who are creative, the ones you know could thrive in a different place but are stifled here. Jaehyun, my best student and a first grader, comes to school one day in a melancholy mood. He’s carrying house keys. When I ask him why, he tells me his mother won’t be home till later, and he has to let himself in. Later, I find out it’s because his brother’s in the hospital with swine flu. Jaehyun can’t go; he has to go to hagwon.

He writes well, with such fevered imagination. One assignment tells him to write down a bunch of ideas for a story about a skating party. He jots down: “Skating Horror” “Ice Versus Skating,” “I am Not Ice.” He settles on this last one for a title, and after briefly mentioning that he was happy after winning the skating competition, launches into a surreal, multi-chapter tale in which he enters a classroom where the desks are made of ice, where his fellow students are eyeless automatons.

A skeleton with no head walked into the class. He said, “I think you are a skeleton with skin. I can cut it off, if you want.”

I screamed, “I am human. I need skin.”

I show Jaehyun, in my own small way, that these things have value in the classroom. I let his absurd ideas fly, and we giggle together over robot pumpkins, ninja babies, anything to get us through the two hours and the numbing material. But when he gets below a 95 on the vocabulary test, he grows sullen. “Oh man, I am dead,” he says. I tell him that’s a good score, but for his mom, it needs to be a 100. I tell him nobody can be perfect. “Mr. Daniel, you’re just joking,” he says. I tell him no.

Two weeks ago, after getting the news about Georgetown, I decide to take what I assume will be a lovely victory lap to Jinhae, where every year they have a cherry blossom festival. The festival itself is a bust; 46 soldiers died in the boat that North Korea may or may not have sunk, so the military is not having its usual parade. And the winter was longer than usual, so the blossoms are mostly unopened buds. I spend most of my time sitting on the grass in something like a town square, while tourists circle me in horse-drawn carriages that play artificial horse sounds from a speaker every few seconds. I think, Poor horse. They don’t even trust it to make its own noises.

On the way there, though, a Korean man sits next to me, an older man. He’s in our meet-up group. We exchange hellos, but I’m tired and put in my earphones to avoid talking with him. Like many Koreans, he doesn’t pick up my social cues and finally taps me on the shoulder and speaks. I take out my headphones. “What’s that?”

“Too many mountains,” he says, and he points outside. He’s wearing glasses and a tan suit. In fact, every article of clothing on him, down to his socks and shoes, is tan. When he speaks, his manner makes him seem like he’s hesitant to mention some impropriety, a halting style of delivery I’ve learned not to read anything into. We get to talking, the usual stuff. When I tell him where I’m from, he pauses. “When did you come to Korea?”

I tell him September, 2008.

“And when did you go to the consulate?”

“For the visa? It might have been July of that year.”

Then, a split second before he says it, I realize it: “I may have interviewed you.” Yes, it was him. He didn’t remember me, but I certainly remembered him. He’s at the embassy in Seoul now, at the Latin American desk. He speaks Spanish, so we practice a bit together. His Spanish is very good; he’s the first Korean I’ve met who speaks a word of it. He asks for my email and I give it to him, thinking that’s it.

But a week later, he emails me: “Urgent request.”

“Hi, Dan.

Will you do me a favor?
Can you shape the following paragraph.

Andrew, we are proud of you for being a model son.
You had to move one country to another for the last 10 years and you've successfully overcome all the difficulties. We were thankful that you kept smile all the time. Your smily face has been the source of happiness in the family.

Now you are graduating elementary school, which may be your first achievement and step toward the outer world.
Mom and dad are very happy and grateful whenever you take each successful step on your own.

Andrew, we are always in your side with full of love, however, move foward as if you are alone. This world is not made for nobody's favor but would be the side of those who help themselves. We saw your excellant capacity to manage different enviroments and we strongly believe you will mange your future challenges successfully as well.

Having you as our son is the best thing that happened to us.
Andrew, remember again mom and dad are always on your side and love you.

That is for my boy.
The school needs that.
I hope you send me back until this evening.
It should be submitted tomorrow morning(Houston time).
Thanks

James.”

The rest of that day at work, I can’t concentrate. I am crafting this man’s words to his son. And I send him a polite but firm email, correcting his mistakes, teasing out the message he’d intended, and let him know I can never provide him this service again.

Saigon

Sat, 5 Sep 2009 11:08:29 +0900

Well, it’s a long time coming, and perhaps my memory fails me a bit, but I wanted to write about Vietnam, because it awakened something in me that had lain dormant for months, even years.

In brief: I remembered that life could, and should, be joyous. Upon arrival in Saigon, I instantly noted a difference in the people from what I’ve grown used to in Seoul: they smiled. There wasn’t that toxic mix of fascination and terror that seems to grip so many Koreans when faced with my white face. As I told a friend recently about my life in Seoul: “I’ve gotten used to being treated like a problem.” You enter a restaurant and the staff suck their teeth and seem flummoxed: what to do with this foreigner? Where to put him? How to communicate with him? Sometimes, you sense an internal struggle or debate, the details of which you’re not privy to. Sometimes, you merely note a heightened sense of vigilance, as though the enemy has entered.

In Saigon, none of this. People bother you. They try to sell you things. They want to know where you’re from. Then they want to sell you things. Cyclo drivers follow you down the street and ask where you’re going. Women flirt. Only some of them then try to sell you things. Hookers buzz by on scooters and say, “Good price.” It gets exhausting. But it is the opposite of Seoul. In short, it was a true vacation.

I ate mangos and fish. I saw a Buddhist temple filled with incense smoke, hanging beneath inert fans. A cyclo driver took me to the market; I paid too much for t-shirts, because the woman there was cute and knew how to sucker a foreigner. As she was measuring my waist for a swimsuit, a thin old man with a cane glided by and chirped a few wisecracks in Vietnamese. The woman looked at me, “His name is How Long You Die,” she said, and we burst out laughing. After that, the cyclo driver took me to the Vietnam war museum. I was greeted at the gate by a man with stumps for arms. He held out one of the stumps, and I shook it; a clever ploy. Next he asked for money; I was about to give him a bit when he explained he didn’t want a donation. He wanted to sell me books. He sat me down on a bench in something like a junkyard for old tanks and planes outside the museum. It was hot and bright. He showed me books about war atrocities. I told him I didn’t want them. I hurried away. On the way back, a few blocks from my hotel, the cyclo driver asked me for a ridiculous amount of money. This, I would learn later, was a common ploy. I told him no, gave him a third of what he was asking (which was generous) and walked to the hotel.

Within a few hours, I’d grown wiser. When someone beckoned me, I ignored him. I saw several westerners doing the same, and realized this was a necessary survival skill in Saigon. This isn’t to say I closed up, because I was still drawn to the genuine warmth of most of the people. Hotel operators, waiters, taxi drivers, all wanted to know more about me, and many without ulterior motive. They were being human -- and it was welcome. I flew to Danang on the advice of a friend, and I met a taxi driver there, Khoa, who agreed to take me to China Beach. “But it is not very nice to stay there,” he said. He had a wide face and big eyes that seemed always open. His face wore an expression of constant curiosity and puzzlement. He told me he liked American girls. “I only tried once,” he admitted. Since we were bonding, I admitted a weakness for Spanish women.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “How much does a woman cost in Spain?”

I grew silent. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really do that.”

Khoa looked at me, his face earnest and perplexed. “Why?” he said. “If you are a stranger in a place and you do not have a girlfriend, you have to pay.” I saw this differently, I told him. “Oh. Well, girls here are not expensive, but they won’t give you blong job. American girls love to give blong job.” I agreed that many did.

We came to China Beach, and it was dirty. There were only a few locals hanging out, and the sky was choked with clouds. A sleepy restaurant overlooked the desolation. “This’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll stay here awhile.”

Khoa looked embarrassed. “It is not very safe here,” he said. “If you wanted to stay here, I’d have to wait for you. There is better beach not far from here.” So I had him take me there. On the way, he took me on a detour to Marble Mountain. This was a tourist trap. As soon as I arrived, several women in matching yellow t-shirts who’d been hanging out on the backs of parked scooters suddenly leapt up and greeted me. “You buy something?” They showed me people slicing into marble with sharp electric saws. But mostly they showed me the shelves full of marble Buddhas. One, a twenty-something, sullen, asked me, “Where you from?”

“America,” I said.

“Totally awesome,” she said in a flat voice. I chuckled a little but she didn’t smile. “You buy something?”

“No,” I admitted. And quickly, I was ignored and allowed to leave. I had Khoa take me to a nice beach with a good restaurant. Here I was the only foreigner. And I gestured to the staff that I wanted clams, which were fresh and mixed with lime juice and lemongrass. I ordered a Saigon beer and she brought me two -- but it wasn’t a trick. The bill later was inconceivably small. I listened to the waves, drank the beer, munched the seafood and drank the rich broth. And I continued to feel a great tightness in me, years in the making, loosen further.

After that, I went to Hoi An. Another beach town. My hotel overlooked a river and a wide expanse of palms. I ate a whole fish on the rooftop and drank a mango shake. I met the staff, who told me they slept on the floor of the restaurant at night. I tipped them well.

The next day, I went to My Son ruins, and it was so hot I decided to cool my feet off in a river below the trail. There, a group of Vietnamese tourists doing the same asked me to take a picture. I agreed and tried to take their camera from them. They said, “No. With you.” So I stood among a group of twenty-somethings and lent them my white face for a while. The boys kept giggling, and they said of the woman, “She says you are very handsome.”

She waved her hands in front of her. “No no no!” she shouted.

“She don’t have boyfriend,” they said.

“No no no!”

I gauged that she could not speak as much English as they could. But I smiled at her anyway. She was pretty, and I was cooling off, and I didn’t want to move from this river.

When she left, she turned back to me. “My country is beautiful,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, then hesitated. “And so are you.” She smiled very big at this. I didn’t know if she understood or not. Then she turned, and she and her group walked away.

Leftovers

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 09:41:45 +0900

Last weekend, a friend and I had planned to start playing badminton. But on Thursday, she texts me: "Got fired." (Don't feel like recounting the whole confusing saga, but suffice to say it was wrongful and shady). She has to leave the country by Saturday. So there goes that plan. I go visit her on Friday (she lives out in a suburb, Bundang) and bring her some treats from Mr. Donut, her favorite donut shop. It was a bummer, but truth be told, part of me was jealous. She's in Belgium now, staying with her boyfriend. Greener pastures. She said she ate a lot of cheese, went to a music festival, and saw a lot of fat people (and an arrest). My eyes long for these new sights.

A week from today, I head to Vietnam for a week’s vacation. It’s needed. Though I’ve enjoyed the classes, intensives have been hard. All June I spent working -- 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. some days, 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. others. During these times, your life falls away. I have a reprieve now, but they start up again when I get back from Vietnam, the end of July.

A few quick images: On the way to the Vietnamese Embassy to pick up my Visa, on the subway, I see a grown woman with a white t-shirt that reads, "Cows provide us with milk." Only that. No picture, just the words. At an otherwise bland coffee shop called "Beans and Bins," the restroom is marked by a stick figure with an arc of piss pooling at his feet.

I head into work on Thursday in a torrential downpour and there's a note on my whiteboard, next to my computer: "Did I turn off the computer yesterday? NO." I thought, "Either I say something, or I feel like a chump all day." So I march down to the office to meet my coordinator, Harry, and ask him if he wrote it.

"Yeah yeah, that was me."

"Could you be a little more polite next time?"

He looks down at the desk. "Mmm, yeah, yeah."

"I'm sorry I left the computer on, but your note was insulting."

"Yeah, yeah, so, it happened a few times," he began.

"Then talk to me," I said. Later that day, and the next day, Harry is a lot nicer to me.

The next day, cleaning ajumma threw out my entire A4 box of goodies, which included a rather sizable bag of mate a friend had brought me from LA. Retaliation, you might venture, but I don't think cleaning ajumma ever talks to Harry. I just left the lid off on the box, and she inexplicably interpreted this as, "Please throw all this non-garbage-looking stuff directly into the trash! I enjoy wasting things!"

When you're living so far from familiar things, these little things become big. So I go to Harry and ask him what the deal is. He tells me he'll find out. That whole first hour during class, I'm a bit sulky. Not even my cutest student, Jae Hyun, can cheer me up. Fittingly, our journal topic that day is, "Have you ever felt left out?" Jae Hyun says no.

"Have you ever left anyone else out?"

"No!"

I believe him. "But can you imagine, Jae Hyun," and I'm a bit surprised by the emotion in my voice, "someone who comes to a place where he doesn't feel like he fits?"

"Yes," he says. "You feel like no one is your friend, and you feel the baddest every day." He then proceeds to tell me a story (all made up, and complete with theatrics) about a boy who had felt left out named Sander. Except instead of "left out," he keeps saying "left over." He's clearly making this story up on the spot; he seems particularly lost when he stumbles upon a scene where Sander plans to exact revenge by going into his bathroom and grabbing a toothbrush. "Now, his plan was ready," he said. Then he pauses, the imaginary toothbrush in his hand.

"So, what happened?"

"He goes to the boys, and -- do you know what he does? He goes to the two boys and says, "You made me feel small like this toothbrush. But you are small like this toothbrush. I will tell God and he will punish you!" At this point, Jae Hyun himself steps into the story and tells Sander that rather than getting revenge, he should play with these boys. "That way, you can all be happy every day." And he said, "Thank you, Jae Hyun." The end.

A couple minutes later Harry knocks on my door. He has my bag of mate in his hand. "Yeah, so, she found in the trash."

I am renewed.

Seorak

Sat, 4 Apr 2009 16:40:15 +0900

Days have been strange lately. I’ve come to know how hard Koreans work, often to no evident end.

The weekend before last I traveled with a tour group to Seoraksan, a nice mountainous area and national park. We hiked up an ever-steepening series of red metal stairs, which clanged as we walked. At the top, I noted with some awe that the view was not of a series of identical concrete towers, as are most hikes in Seoul, but of a sparsely populated patch of land leading to the east sea. I had a lovely time and met some new friends.

The following week, though, I was hit with an intensive at work. Just one week, but since we’ve got a new, longer schedule these days already, I ended up teaching 47 hours that week. It nearly broke my back. After 8 weeks of intensives in the winter, it wasn’t welcome, though the money was. I taught an SAT writing class to a group of 7th and 8th grade International School students. Most of these kids have been taught by Americans their whole lives, and they’re pretty inured to your sensibility. You ain’t nothing new to them. But I did manage to get them to think about things they hadn’t thought of before. I taught them the word “dichotomy.” One kid, Chan-ho, who had an English name but always wrote it beneath his Korean name on his papers, was quite brilliant, though his whole demeanor in class connoted a resigned sigh. I didn’t blame him. Kids here are in class all day almost every day with some kind of talking head barking at them. But I could tell he dug philosophy, so I digressed for a minute in class to name-drop Camus, and the Myth of Sisyphus. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him writing them down. They were the only notes he voluntarily took off me.

A woman at work, named Eileen, wanted to meet me for a language exchange, and she bought me a seafood pizza at Mr. Pizza. She speaks very little English, so it was awkward. I asked her about her family. Her father is a peach farmer. She is from the country and smacks her food when she eats. She wants to be a flight attendant. “This is my dream,” she says. I look at her. She has a heavily powdered face, a small nose, a demure look. She is pretty, but very young, I think. I do most of the talking, of course. I ask her what she likes to do most. I didn’t like that in my mind I predicted the answer: “Shopping.” But there was a strange sweetness to her. She wanted to visit Italy, she said. “Pen-e-jia,” she said. It took a while to realize this meant Venice. I told her the good parts of the city. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it smelled. To save up for her vacation, she works every day, five days at my heogwan, making much less than me, and two days at a convenience store.

Halfway through our meal, she asked. “Help? You want?” I told her I didn’t understand. Did she mean with my Korean? “No,” she said, making an X with her hands. Then she typed in her cell phone. She showed me the screen. It said, “Deep and profound.” I shook my head. She typed again. Then she spoke haltingly, her eyes cast toward the screen. “You have been help to me.”

I wasn’t too sure that was true.

Animatronics

Sat, 7 Mar 2009 16:06:04 +0900

I went to Seodaemun Prison today for a meetup group that never materialized. So I paid my 1500 won anyway and went inside the museum, which memorializes the imprisonment and torture of Korean dissidents by the occupying Japanese in the early twentieth century. The English of most of the signs was poor, often repetitive to the point of absurdity (one paragraph was repeated verbatim in a cut-and-paste error). And to anyone who has spent even a few months in Korea, the villain was familiar: the imperialist Japanese, whose history of oppression of the Korean people still looms large in the collective imagination.

This is always a touchy subject with my students, and I never get involved. It shows up in the subtlest of ways, like when Sam blurts out that wasabi sucks, but at Seodaemun nothing is subtle. In the basement are a series of tableaus depicting torture and confinement, some of them with movement and sound. Across from one of these scenes, the figurine of a Japanese prison guard relaxes in a chair, a slight smile on his face. The English translation reads, “Japanese officer watching torture.”

I got out of there pretty fast. The meetup was supposed to take us on to a hike, so I looked for a trail, and finally came upon one along the road stretching behind the prison. An hour or so later, I was atop Ansan mountain (photos here) overlooking the city along with a pretty sizable group of Koreans, many of whom were stretching themselves. Along the way I’d seen the usual clusters of exercise equipment -- the leg-swinging machine (occupied by a vigorous ajumma), the pull-up-bar, the torso twister. It occurred to me as I passed these places that Korean culture is unusually oriented toward utility, and that most of its built landscape reflects this: these workout spots that pepper all the parks, the rows of numbered concrete apartment towers. At the top, there were none of these machines, thankfully, just an ancient stone smokestack that had once been used to alert the kingdom to invasion. The prison grounds looked small beneath me. The day was sunny and the sky was clear, though there’s always a haze masking the distant mountains.

I left by a different trail and ended up at the bottom, not knowing where I was. At a bus stop, I tried to decipher the routes, and a schoolgirl nudged her companion, pointed to me, and the two began to laugh. I walked on a bit, found a bus stop and made it back to my neighborhood, where no one acts surprised to see you.