"We're in a mall," Dave says. "We're in an underground network of malls." And then, "Korea, man." I can only agree.
Korea, man. All week it's been a reoccurring theme, an ongoing conversation. Just minutes before, while trying to decipher the map of the Busan subway system, we came across a particularly egregious example of Konglish (Korean-English; bad English). "Tickek Vanding," it read over an informative black arrow pointing left. Ticket Vending. Dave took a picture. He was laughing, but genuinely outraged."How much do you think it would cost to pay some idiot American to glance over a few sentences before you go plastering nonsense all over your city? That is official city signage! You'd think they would care enough to look over these things."
If it wasn't signage it was something else. Bars, for instance, were a constant reminder of what we characterized as Korea's collective irrationality. Dave might gulp and grimace from a bottle of one of Korea's two options in beer, Cass and Hite, while I might shudder down a glass of soju. "You'd think as a country they would be able to produce or import something that's actually pleasant to drink," Dave would marvel.
And then there was virtually any discussion about work--about how little the children benefit from the system and about how much the parents pay for those meager benefits; about how our hagwons do their best imitations of real schools by loading down eight year olds with nightly homework assignments and about how we as teachers are then prevented from fairly evaluating those assignments since to do so might demonstrate to a tuition paying parent that their eight year old is either a hyperactive dolt or, more likely, is nothing but an eight year old who is absolutely justified in refusing to do additional homework, but either way, has no business being at an after school language academy. "You'd think Korean parents might figure out that the whole thing is a scam or that they might settle on a non-academic, non-hypertension inducing after school program, or if they're that committed to their kid learning English, that they find a way to teach it to him or her properly."
And then finally, sitting in a complex of malls a few floors beneath the city of Busan, having just navigated our way from the subway stop outside the bus terminal to one that our friend Yoojung had told us to go to, we wondered again. "You'd think if you really wanted to honor all of this breathless, subterrainian consumption with a chintzy to-scale replica of a Roman fountain, you'd at least give it a few more meters distance from that ad with model very nearly having sex with a blown up bottle of C-brand soju." You'd think, you'd think, you'd think. And yet.
I couldn't help but feel that the more time I spent with Dave, the less I liked or (more accurately) respected the country in which we were living. I thought at first this might have something to do with our newness in our respective towns. At the time, this being the end of December, I was still very much the new guy in town. And since arriving I had learned that attempting the "Another Thing That's Weird About Korea" conversation with any of my fellow teachers or piers was a bit of a non-starter. They've all already made it through the culture shock. They've all already had that conversation. And then Dave showed up. With him, I could run through the list of all the things that, even a month in, still didn't make sense to me about Korean food or etiquette or music or fashion sense. And instead of getting "yeah, yeah, yeah"-ed in response, Dave would enthusiastically verify that I, after all, was not the crazy one.
But there's something else to it. Dave pointed it out to me a few weeks ago. "When you meet people here in Korea, even if they're American or Canadian or South African or whatever, they're all still just as much a part of your Korean experience as anything else. And then I see you. And I remember what life was like a few months ago. And I remember how much none of this makes any sense."
"You want some coffee?" Dave gestured to the Dunkin' Donuts. Back home, the two of us had been as snobbish about our coffee as our wallets permitted. But there is no coffee to be snobby about in Korea. I shook my head.
"Yoojung said to meet here." Dave looked around. So did I. We were sitting in a thriving, chattering, sea of straight black hair and dark eyes and cellphones jangling with attached stuffed animals.
"Do you think we'll recognize her?" Dave laughed. So did I. We both stood up and craned our necks. Then glancing at Dave's "Africa City" hat sitting askew, 6 feet and four inches above the white tile, I mentioned that she'd probably recognize us first anyway.
She did. Coming down one of the many escalators feeding into the underground plaza from one of the many surrounding malls, Yoojung waved and called out. "Oh my god, you guys are actually here!" she said. "You're in Korea. That is so weird."
Dave and I might have responded at the exact same time: "You have no idea."
Coming up out of the underground and onto the street, Yoojung interrogated us about our respective towns and schools and experiences. "So what do guys think of Korea?" she asked. Our responses were, I suspect, uniformly disappointing in their vagueness. But Yoojung didn't seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to understand completely. "Korea is pretty weird," she agreed.
The street was busy, broad, and surrounded on all sides by office and municipal government buildings. This particular section of downtown, Yoojung informed us, was the center of Busan's plastic surgery industry. To look around, the industry was booming. Emblazoned across every other floor of every other building ran tactfully phrased bilingual advertisements for various different doctors offering various different procedures: tummy tucks, liposuction, facelifts, nosejobs, colligen injections, but most popular and distinctly Korean of them all, epicanthoplasty--that is, removal of the epicanthal fold, the "Westernization" of the eye.
Yoojung suggested we go to her favorite restaurant in the neighborhood over. Only a few blocks away, beyond the major thoroughfares with their canopies of Befores and Afters, it was buried deep in a network of clustered streets thick with cafes and restaurants and street vendors and noraebang. It was a younger person's neighborhood. "They have great fried rice," she assured us. Turning left at the corner of a massive arcade, she checked the street sign twice. "At least they used to."
Yoojung left Korea just before entering high school. She has lived in North America more or less permanently ever since. In the meantime, Busan has undergone its own share of implants and tummy tucks and Westernizing surgical procedures. So much so, in fact, that Yoojung sometimes seemed to have trouble remembering exactly where it was we were going or where we were. After finally finding the restaurant--it was still there, still serving fried rice--we asked her, with only one day in Busan, what Dave and I ought to go do and see. She seemed unsure. All of her references and memories were the references and memories of a preteen, a pre-teen from over a decade ago who had not yet been exposed to the distinctly North American or Western or not Korean sensibilities of the contemporary Yoojung—her irony, her self-deprecation, her take on gender relations. "Korea is pretty weird," Yoojung had agreed. "And the food here is so spicy. My first few days back, I'm always sick."
But Yoojung was still Korean enough for us. “Bok-kum-bap,” she announced as the food arrived. Our waiter offered Dave and I a feeble, tired smile before placing with ritual precision an assortment of chopped vegetables and chicken parts, rice, and egg, onto the oiled steel skillet embedded in the center of our table.“Fried rice,” she said. We repeated."Bok-kum-bap."
After lunch, Yoojung took David clothing shopping. Yoojung is in the process of starting her own clothing line in Montreal. Which is to say that her understanding of fashion exceed an unthinking familiarity with ironically sloganed T-shirts and a few pairs of four year old corduroys. So Dave, who was in need of a new sweater after accidentally shrinking the hoodie that had got him through his entire university career, was more than willing to let Yoojung pick his clothing out for him. And then we went back to her house.
Yoojung's family live in a complex of apartment buildings just north of the downtown. The buildings are tall and brutally rectangular and, except that these are cleaner and their colors slightly less drab, share the same economically-minded functional style with all the other apartment complexes that dot the skyline of Tongyeong and neighboring Masan and every neighborhood of Busan and, as I am soon to discover from the viewpoint of a highspeed train, Daegu and Daejeon and Seoul and every other village, town, and city of Korea. I do not know if these buildings were all constructed at the same time after the war left the penninsula an infrastructural tabula rasa, or if it was part of a coordinated government housing program, or if, more likely given Korea's economic history, they were part of a coordinated corporate housing program financed and partially planned by the government and then given, along with the rights to the entire national market, to one of the country's few oligopolistic "Chaebols," mega-conglomorates so enormous and diversified in scope that they defy the logic of the single firm, but in any case, they are really, really ugly.
"These used to be the nicest apartments in Busan," Yoojung told us as we approached one of the seven blocks guarded at the front by a doormen. "Everyone used to want to live in them, but only the really rich could."
Dave gazed up along the uniform sheerness of the building before passing through the sliding glass doors. "They're cheaper now?"
"No, only rich people live here still," she said, shrugging. "But now they're all old." The elevator door opened and we stepped inside. "Like my parents."
Yoojung's mother did not seem that old, though it has by now become somewhat of a truism among my foreign friends here that it is absolutely impossible to tell how old a Korean woman is. The ubiquity of plastic surgery here does not help. Yoojung's mother ushered us inside. She seemed shy, even embarrassed around us. She was laughing constantly. She had us sit at the couch where she brought us drinks. In the kitchen she appeared to be preparing food. Dave and I offered to help and, after Yoojung translated, her mother laughed even harder. And then Yoojung laughed too.
The apartment was enormous by Korean standards. In a country so small and densely populated, every square foot is made to count. This was the first time I had seen a home with a corridor at the front, with actual wood floors, or with a kitchen separated from the dining room. The windows on the right side of the living room looked out over downtown. The television, the size of a small bed, was on, blasting incomprehensibly. Yoojung's mother had a white rodent of a dog named Luna and Luna had her own closet.
Yoojung's mother asked her daughter how long we'd be staying.
"We had planned to leave tonight," Dave said, slowly turning to me.
"You'd be welcome to stay here for the night," Yoojung said. Her mother was laughing. You can't see Busan in an afternoon, she said to Yoojung. They should stay the night. The tall one can stay in your brother's bed and the other one can stay in your sisters'. "You two can stay here," Yoojung interpreted.
Dave and I glanced around. We looked at the paintings on the wall and the bowls of food being prepared in the kitchen. We looked out onto the view at our right and then at the flickering television screen and then at the dog's armoire. And then we looked at each other.
"I guess we could stay," Dave said nodding at me. "As long as we get out of here early in the morning, I mean."
And then we were off again. We had to buy our train tickets to Seoul for the next day and then we were going to walk down by the water. "How long does it take to get down there?"
"Not long," Yoojung said as we threw on our jackets again. "My mom is driving us."
"Oh, how nice of her!" said Dave. He turned to her, this short, squat woman of indeterminate age with a perm. "Thank you so much!" "Gamsahamnida!" I said. Then she really started laughing.
Yoojung's mother had a Mercedes. "Compliment it," she told us in the elevator on the way down. Yoojung's mother was standing between Dave and I, checking something on her cellphone. "She just got it. So I'm sure she'd really appreciate it if you made a big deal when you see it."
After buying our tickets at the train station, the three of us were dropped off near the water. Across the street, a sign advertised the Jalgachi Fish Market. "We can do that later," Yoojung said. "It's cold and I'm hungry." We turned right instead and headed into another clustered network of narrow streets. "Nampodong," Yoojung told us. "Everyone comes here to shop." It was the day before New Years. The alleyways, cobbled with brick or tile, were lined with clothing stores and bakeries and bars, their awnings and doorways strung and glittering with white Christmas lights.
There was a kind of self-conscious commercially festive and festively commercial glamor to it all that, in the moment, in the auburn afternoon light, the three of us walking around with our hands shoved deep into the padded pockets of our snowcoats, actually felt pretty nice.
Yoojung needed to use the bathroom, so we walked into a Dunkin' Donuts. (Koreans really like Dunkin' Donuts.) Dave and I waited at the front, pointing out the regional eccentricities of the menu and basking in the warmth. And then Dave coughed.
"Don't make a big show of it," he said. "But slowly turn around. Look at the women." I turned around, but maybe not so slowly, because sitting behind me, staring at me with an unnerving kind of intensity, was a cartoon character. She was young, though as a Korean cartoon character, it was of course impossible to tell how young. But her features were soft. And then there were her eyes. They were enormous, taking up a disproportionate amount of room on her face. They were bulging too, so it seemed. She looked surprised or afraid or bewildered, but in any case, there seemed to be something terribly wrong and she appeared to be distraught about it. I turned back around.
"Epicanthoplasty," Dave whispered to me.
Back on the street, Yoojung led us a few blocks further to an open plaza cluttered with a few street vendors. The street food in Korea, as far as I have experienced it, is limited to only a number of offerings. There is tteokbokki, cylindrical rice cakes cooked in red pepper sauce, with fish and sometimes egg, odeng, the fish equivelent of spam, also usually served in red pepper sauce or mixed in with the tteokbooki, tempura vegetables, roasted chestnuts, and finally, hotteok, a fried pancake served with cinnamon, sugar, and nuts. It is this last item for which Nampodong is apparently famous and so, of course, we all got in line. For the same fifty-cent price, Nampodong hotteok put the various Tongyeong immitations I have so far sampled to shame.
We eat and then, because Yoojung tour of Busan is limited to the haunts and hangouts of a twelve year old girl, we stop at a photo room. Like noraebang and odeng and dunkas, Korea seems to have imported all of its most exaggerated and absurd cultural institutions from Japan. The concept, one that was apparently quick popular in Korea throughout the late '90s, is that you and a dozen of your closest girlfriends enter into what is essentially a glorified photo booth, take a number of ridiculous photos in which peace-signs and pouty-lips will likely play a predominant role, and then, on a computer, plaster the resulting images with non-nonsensical English slogans, sparkling floral patterns and anthropomorphic hearts and mushrooms. Needless to say, the three of us had a pretty good time.
We emerged from the photo room, still passing our novelty portraits back and forth and back again until our fingers began to numb and ache from the exposure, onto a street now suddenly swarming with evening shoppers, diners, and drinkers. There were a few white faces, all of them speaking Russian. And because the light was fading and the wind was picking up, we hurried back towards the water, crossing the main boulevard out of Nampodong. Following Yoojung down a side street, dark and frigged in the shadow of what appeared to be a four store warehouse, we walked quietly through the overwhelming smell of brine to the end of the block, where we turned right.
Suddenly, standing in what remained of the day's sunlight, we found ourselves surrounded and the horizon dominated by thousands and thousands of permed middle aged Korean women wielding thousands and thousands of steel knives with wooden handles bisecting, decapitating, and disembowling with ruthless efficiency thousands and thousands of species of what had just moments before been marine life. This was without a doubt Jalgachi Fish Market, Korea's largest bazaar for all things aquatic and presumably edible. As we began walking down the seemingly endless avenue that made up the outdoor section of the market, the ground beneath us running thick and frothy with sea water and animal innard, surrounded at all sides by stacked rubber buckets sloshing and writhing with slimy, scaled, and carapaced biomass, by hawkers and hagglers shouting Korean so drenched in salty, fish market slang that Yoojung could not decipher it, by animals and animal parts too enormously grotesque or grotesquely enormous to be fathomed, I felt a hard grimace solidify upon my face. We passed turtles packed into turtle sized buckets and octopuses mounting futile escape attempts and I started to make jokes. Fifteen minutes earlier, we had been waltzing beneath white Christmas lights and sniffing greedily at the chestnut roasters along Busan's interpretation of Rodeo Drive. It seemed hard to believe that such culture shock could result from walking three blocks.
Turning around the back of the fish market, we walked along the water. Fishing boats, having already returned with their catches, crowded side by side along the wharf. Some of the fisherman were stringing lines and laying down planks between the boats rocking side by side, forming a series of piers that would expand and contract like accordions with the bucking of the tide. Most of the fisherman aboard were smoking cigarettes and crowding around small television sets and generally ignoring the three of us. The smell of diesel was overpowering and every once in a while, another boat would sidle up to the edge of one of the chains and tie on, their engines cutting off with one last belch of oily black smoke. Across the inlet lay the rest of Busan. The prettier side, Yoojung said. Haundae Beach with its expensive condominiums and white sand.
"Too bad we can't get over there this time around," I said.
Down the wharf, beneath an aluminum roofed canopy where more knife wielding ajummas knelt on their haunches around potted fires, cooking their to dinners and warming their hands, seagulls were fighting over discarded fish parts. Dave shrugged. "Whatever."
Back at Yoojung's parents' apartment, Dave and I concluded that we had absolutely made the right choice. It was seven o'clock, the time by which we had initially planned to depart Busan on our way to Seoul. Instead, Yoojung's mother had prepared dinner for us. She laughed off our attempts to assist with the preparation, made us sit and eat immediately while it was all still warm. There was an enormous pot of bulgogi, beef, with sesame, onion, garlic, and chili. There was homemade kimchi. There was a plate of mysterious but delicious stringy vegetable mixed with what might have been roe. There was the crispy better half of a fish for each of us.
"No, no," Yoojung's mother said, waving us off and laughing. She placed a bowl of rice, steamed with red bean and sesame, at the center of the table. "Me Dinner before. Dinner before."
Yoojung's father was nowhere to be found. He had evidently come by some sort of success at work that day, doing whatever it was that he did--whatever it was one had to do in Korea to live so well--and so he would be out late, Yoojung explained apologetically. She seemed genuinely disappointed. "My dad loves to practice English," she had explained to us on our way home on the subway. "He'll insist that the three of you drink whiskey all night. You will have such a good time." Personally, I wasn't so sure. As fine and interesting of a person as Yoojung made her father out to be, I didn't relish the prospect of spending my only night in Busan politely listening to an increasingly drunk businessman espouse on the differences between Korean and Western genitalia. When older Korean men have been drinking, it is surprising how often this comes up.
And then there was the issue of that drinking. Like most Koreans, based on what Yoojung told us, it sounded as if her father approached his consumption of alcohol with a degree of competitive seriousness normally reserved for Greek system initiation rituals. "He drinks a bottle of soju with his dinner," Yoojung had said with smile. "He can drink anyone under the table." I could foresee immediately how things would go. So as not to offend the host, I would nurse down glass after painful glass of whiskey. A few hours in, I would begin to sweat profusely and I would fall silent as Dave and Yoojung's father would find a particular topic over which to get convivially and bombastically excited. With the clock striking three in the morning, I would inaudibly or incoherently excuse myself to the bathroom where I would vomit repeatedly into the Kim family's immaculately white porcelain toilet. The next morning's train trip would be horrible.
So thankfully perhaps, Yoojung's father had made other plans.
We spent the next hour or two digesting our meal on Yoojung's family's couch. We watched T.V. Earlier, while walking amongst the holiday shoppers in Nampodong, we had discussed Korean humor. Dave and I had taken the position, conscious of the fact that it was relatively uniformed one, that Korean humor didn't really exist or, to the extent that it did, it shared the plane of emotional complexity and sophistication with the Three Stooges.
"From what I can tell," said Dave, "having watched a lot of T.V. and spent some time with my colleagues, there are only about two situations that Koreans find seriously funny: men dressing up as women and fat men falling over." There was no such thing as Korean irony, Dave went on. Or self-deprecation. Or sarcasm.
But Yoojung protested. You couldn't watch a few hours of popular television in a language you don't understand and conclude anything about an entire country's sense of anything. And there was too Korean irony. "There's Kang Ho Dong, for instance," she had said. "He used to be a wrestler and now he's Korea's most famous comedian. If you ever watch him and if you could understand what he's saying, he's actually very funny. Very smart."
Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe, as Korea's most popular ex-wrestling comedian, Kang Ho Dong happens to occupy about half of Korea's national broadcast at any given time, but as we sat near comatose in Yoojung's living room watching T.V., Luna, the dog with a closet, repeatedly climbing atop Dave's head (this actually was funny), Kang was on again.
"So, explain," Dave primed Yoojung. On the screen, Kang sat at a table between two panels, one comprised of men, the other of women. Most of the men wore thick rimmed glasses. The women were uniformly tall and thin, their noses very small, and their eyes wide and shiny. ("All the celebrities, men and women, get the same plastic surgery," Yoojung had told us earlier that day. "Styles change and so do their faces.")
"Okay," Yoojung sat up. "So those guys on the left are a bunch of famous comedians. This is their T.V. show. And those women are a few members of a famous girl pop group here called 'Girls Generation.' There are about 20 girls in the band, so these are a couple of the lesser ones."
Suddenly, the audience began to shriek and whistle. Everyone was laughing. One of the singers, in a typically Korean display of dainty femininity, raised her fingers up to her mouth, covering her smile. And then there was steam shooting from the top of her head. Someone in post-production had thought to emphasize her embarrassment with digital steam. The same technique was used to apply beet red blush to her cheeks. And then the margins of the screen were spattered with stylized Korean script, no doubt placed as such to further convey the hilarious awkwardness of the situation.
"Okay, what just happened?" Dave and I both asked at once.
"Kang Ho Dong just asked the girl if she would ever consider kissing that other comedian. The one with the glasses." There was a pause. Yoojung crossed her arms. "This is not a good example, okay?" But Dave and I were already smirking.
Because Yoojung knew nothing of either contemporary Busan night life, or, as a pre-teen at the time, even that of twelve years ago, she called an old friend of hers for advice on where to take us. The telephone conversation went on longer than expected and was punctuated by a few shrieks of surprise,--delight or horror, it was hard to tell.
"That was my friend from middle school," Yoojung explained after hanging up. "She goes to Oxford now. It was her birthday last week. She got a bunch of plastic surgery."
Evidently too embarrassed to come out with us, Yoojung's friend directed us to the university district, namely, to the bar "Ddong Ggo." "It means, 'asshole,'" Yoojung said, as we sat down. A waiter brought us a few bottles of soju and a piping bowl of soup that not one of us was hungry enough to enjoy, but felt obligated to order since the few thousand won for the drinks hardly seemed justify a seat at such a crowded bar. "Actually, it's more like 'butthole.'" She clarified. "Butthole bar."
"There's that sophisticated Korean humor," said Dave.
At some point in the night, shortly after Yoojung confessed to not having any idea how and in what order to throw the provided food items in the broth, I offered my own confession. I confessed how fun it had been to spend the day with her. I added that I was entirely comfortable speaking for Dave along with myself in saying that we had gotten so much more out of the city, having had the chance to spend our time in it with a real native, and that though I had not had a chance to be any more than an acquaintance of hers in Montreal, I was very happy to have had the chance to become her friend in Korea.
Dave offered a toast along similar lines. But I was not finished. I told her how hanging out with her really offered the best of the two social worlds available to me in Korea. On the one hand, I explained, she was after all a real-life Korean, who spoke the language and knew the food and understood the majority of the cultural references. But on the other hand, I said, she was enough of an American or a Canadian and had so thoroughly absorbed what those English speaking cultures have to offer that talking to her actually felt like talking to a real human being. "You are the ideal translator in every respect and I am so glad you have no idea what to do with this soup."
I would like to claim that I put things in slightly a more tactful manner than all of that, but I am confident that I did not. But Yoojung did not seem offended in the slightest. The bar was loud too. Maybe she didn't hear me. "Let me teach you how to order another one in Korean," she called across the table. Hana deo, juseyo!
There is a Korean truism that the perfect night out must consist of three parts: 1st night, 2nd night, 3rd night. First, there is usually a meal which you, second, subsequently wash down with a few drinks at a bar. And third? This seems to be less well-defined, but in my experience, the 3rd night is usually spent, for better or for worse, at a noraebang. So was the case with my one night in Busan. 1, 2, 3.
I slept in Yoojung's sister's bed. The next morning, the Kim household seemed busy. Mr. Kim was still missing, but Yoojung's mother and sister were frantically preparing food and cleaning. Some cousins from Seoul were on their way. Dave and I tried to make our departure as discrete and uneventful as possible. Yoojung walked us to the bus stop, pointed us towards the train station, and said goodbye. We all exchanged hugs. "See you in Montreal," she said. And I believed her.
The highspeed rail trip from Busan to Seoul crosses the entirety of the country in under three hours. At 150 miles an hour, much of Korea appears as the same kind of blur. There are thousands of the same green topped hills clustered around thousands of the same chemical laden farmed valleys broken up only occasionally by one of the thousands of villages and towns and cities that dot the countryside, all of them dominated by the same brutal architecture. The only thing that really seemed to change as we made our way north was the thin dusting of snow that grew thicker with each passing mile.
wonderfully evocative. I am either eager to eat or throw up. you are blessed with a good friend with a sense of humor (korean style).
ReplyDeletePlease tell us more soon.
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