"What's going on?" My friend David was on the other line with a slight chuckle in his voice. He would be getting into the Tongyeong bus station at 9:30 that night, so he said.
"9:30 exactly. Korean buses are ridiculously on-time." Dave had been in Korea for nearly two months when I finally arrived in Tongyeong. Of the three of us recent college graduates who had started sometime last June, first together and then separately figuring out a way to get over to this side of the world, first aiming for three open positions at the same school before conceding that simply applying for the same city would be more realistic before dispersing in the middle of August to apply for visas in our respective states and provinces, desperately seeking out opportunities of any kind, in any location, Korea serving for all of us as the only viable plan of any duration longer than a week, David had had the easiest time finding a job. Lion is still working on that visa.
I worried about those seven extra weeks Dave had on me. Those were seven extra weeks of fermented vegetables and screaming children and being stared and occasionally pointed at in the supermarket. Talking to him on the phone, I wondered if they didn't make up a kind of pedestal that he was standing on above me, not on the same level. He was the acclimatized veteran who had gone native. He had been to Seoul and he knew the names of all the street food. I still felt like I was settling in. I still do.
With a job up in Gangneung, a coastal town in the thinly populated province of Gangwon-do, four hours away from Seoul and another five away from Tongyeong, this was to be our first time meeting up on this side of the world.
He was calling from Seoul, where he was staying with a friend of his and an acquaintance of mine, Blake, whose decision to come to Korea, made likewise under the duress of unemployment and general existential anxiety, had likely inspired our own: from Blake to Dave; from Dave to me. Dave told me about his Christmas; how he had taken the Seoul subway to the end of the southern-most line, out to the most distant of suburban satellites, Pyeongtaek, a cultural vacuum with a U.S. military base and very little else. It had snowed, he said, and he had eaten a real turkey at a friend of Blake's. It had been ordered online from Australia.
Dave was still ending every sentence with a slight giggle--or something that sounded very much like a giggle. A quick sequence of constricted exhalations expelled a bit too close to the receiver, I imagined someone outside of Blake's apartment punctuating all of David's remarks with a short burst of machine gun fire. That is, if machine guns could shoot with quiet anxiety.
Whatever the phonological contortions may have been that produced the chuckle or giggle, the rat-a-tat-tat of the sweaty-palmed tommy-gunner in the courtyard below Blake's door somewhere in Seoul, the point is that I don't think I was imagining it. I was wondering if he also anticipated the awkwardness of the coming reunion. I wondered if the logic that sustained our friendship for three years in Montreal made as much sense here in Korea.
He asked me where and how he ought to meet me. I didn't know what to tell him. My colleague Greg was due to play a show with his K-Pop band that night and I had promised to go. I didn't know how long the show would last and whether anyone had any plans afterward. And I don't have a cellphone. Dave told me to call him later once I'd figured things out.
I spent the day preparing. I cleaned my apartment and did a bit of shopping. I bought a second cup, realizing at the last moment that Dave might like one of his own. And I tried to get a hold of Greg, who does not have a cell phone, through his girlfriend Britney, who was not picking hers up. I finally called David back and told him to go to the Turtle Ship. The cab driver ought to know what and where that is, and regardless of how other plans developed, I could meet him there easily enough.
At around five, I left my apartment on foot and headed for the Tongyeong cultural center. Located on top of a steep hill overlooking the harbor, its white stone facade expressed a particularly Korean kind of governmental authority. The geometric white facade could have been that of a cathedral belonging to a well-supported Protestant sect. But it also could have belonged to the Ministry of Truth. I had never been up there before. Having asked a few of my friends about it during my first few weeks in town, neither had any of the foreigners it seemed. "I think there's a swimming pool in there," was the most common response. "I'd go, but I don't feel like getting stared at like that."
I scaled the near vertical driveway and, finding myself a half-hour early, meandered slowly through the adjacent sculpture park. Constructed along a series of switch-backs against the side of the hill overlooking the mouth of the harbor, the sculptures were all resolutely abstract, most of them done by Japanese artists, and all the more difficult to make sense of in the dark. With numb hands, I walked back to the cultural center and entered the foyer of the secondary theater.
Like the glaring fact of his relative youthfulness within the band, about the event, Greg had again provided me with only the most necessary information, leaving me to discover the remainder of what I think most would agree to be pertinent, or at least relevant, details. I had assumed at first, for example, that the show was to be performed at a bar or some similar commercial venue. Only finding out at the last minute that it was to be held at the Tongyeong Cultural Center along with a line-up of four or five other bands, I then assumed that the band was participating in some sort of music festival. I envisioned a "Battle of the Bands"-type of scenario. It was only after getting inside the theater and glancing through one of the many brochures littering the floor that I learned that the event was actually sponsored by the music studio where Greg practiced, a studio, I read on, that also happened to be a music academy serving primarily a student-body of young teenagers and tweens.
This was a school performance then, put on for the benefit of friends certainly, though, a quick glance around the audience told me, more so for the parents. Across the isle from where I took my seat, a middle aged couple sat tapping their feet to the beat of Stevie Wonder blasted in hisses over the loudspeakers. They were waving a set of glow sticks back and forth. The husband offered me one. Smiling and bowing slightly, I accepted it.
The warm-up acts started. The lights dimmed and three girls strutted deliberately to the center of the stage. They were wearing low-waisted silk skirts and matching tops with narrow straps. Music began to play over the speakers, a strobe light was cued, and the hundreds of medallions clinging and jangling along the hip scarves of these hipless pre-pubescent bellydancers exploded in an epileptic array of reflection. The music was a kind of hip-hop infused pop. Three tiny bellies gyrated with semi-coordination as the dancers beckoned to the audience with twirling hand gestures before launching into a more elaborate, geometrically inspired chorography in the final moments of the song (think "Walk Like an Egyptian" meets the Macarena). The smallest of the girls wore mascara and bright red lipstick.
I glanced hesitantly around me. The couple across from me were bouncing their knees and waving their glow sticks as contentedly as ever. All of the other parents, and everyone else in the audience for that matter, seemed to be doing the same. I hesitate to generalize or speculate on what it might say about Korean culture that a performance of three undulating half-naked nine-year-olds wouldn't strike anyone as slightly inappropriate as opposed to, say, the unchaperoned get-together of two adults of the opposite sex. Either way, I spent the entire four minutes of the strobe-lighted performance wondering if the police were going to barge through the door.
After a second warm-up act, a dance routine made up this time of legal adults (except for the young boy who made a last minute, rhythmless appearance alongside a woman whom I assumed to be his mother), Greg's band finally came on. In awkward single file, the drummer, Helen, who has a son my age, trotted out, followed by the rhythm guitarist, a slightly overweight father of two, followed by the lead singer, the lead guitarist, the keyboardist, two out of three in their third decade of marriage. Greg (labeled "Grag" in the program) followed last. With his bass guitar and his thick beard and his white face, he strolled out to meet his band mates like a seal of approval from American Rock and Roll. The younger section of the crowd cheered; Greg raised a triumphant fist and everyone else on stage looked satisfied. "Forever" is the name of the band. "That was not my choice," Greg explained to me later.
The band ran through ten or twelve songs, an exclusive set of K-Pop hits from the late 1980s. There was one with a harmonica that I found kind of catchy, but that is the extent to which I can distinguish or remember them now. I took a number of photos for Greg, congratulated him and his band-mates after the performance, and left before the next band started, hoping to get a hold of Dave.
The next hour and a half were spent ducking in and out of phone booths all around the harbor and then along the way into Mujeon-dong, trying to get a hold of Dave to tell him not to meet me at the Turtle Ship, since upon even the shortest of second thoughts, that destination made absolutely no sense given where we were likely to end up that night. He finally picked up a few minutes before getting into Tongyeong. He had been sleeping. "The bus is like a womb," he explained. "They shut off all the lights and crank up the heat. It's impossible not to fall asleep." I told him to meet me at Angel-in-Us Coffee in the center of Mujeon-dong. He was familiar with the chain. Like Wa-Bar, apparently they have those up in Gangneung too.
After all of that, I can't say that there was anything particularly remarkable about our reunion. It was strange to see him at first, but not for any of the reasons I anticipated. Not because it had been four months since we'd last talked to one another face-to-face, and not because he or I looked or acted differently, and certainly not because he had so developed a life up in Gangneung physically and in every other way removed from the only other social context in which I could place and understand him that we simply had nothing to talk about. It was strange to see Dave because Dave is 6'4". Nobody in Tongyeong is 6'4".
He was wearing a hat that he had purchased in Seoul. "Africa City" ran around the dome in clunky yellow letters printed inside a red and green band. As he saw things, it was the quintessential Korean hat. "It takes a very loose understanding of English, combines it with a completely well-intentioned cultural insensitivity, and displays the product in as bold a way as possible with absolutely no context. I figured the only thing that could make it worse would be if I bought it."
Thinking back on it now, I'm not sure why I was so worried. Out the door, we headed towards Kimbap Nara, the Korean diner equivalent, sliding seamlessly into a conversation about every other aspect of Korean culture that didn't make sense to us. Soon after we met up with Greg. The night was still young.
Ben
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your description of the concert.
Rock on!
When are you going to sit in with the band?
Love
Dad