Author: Peter

Back on the evening of April 29th, 2009, though, I was too busy being amazed by things to care about all that.

So many things amazed me. One thing especially stands out clearly in my mind’s eye: The cars in the parking lot all seemed to have retractable side-view mirrors — that is, the mirrors folded-in automatically when the car turned off. Amazing, I thought. I concluded that it must be because space is at such a premium in Korea (being that South-Korea is the size of Indiana and something like 75% mountainous, as I later learned). I remarked to Melinda that the cars in the USA didn’t have automatically-retracting side mirrors. She seemed puzzled.

I really thought Korea would be filled with those narrow trucks (like the one I found at right) and the like. I thought most cars would resemble the Hyundai Pony. In hindsight, this seems truly naive, to the point of stupidity: Didn’t I know South-Korea was now among the richest countries on Earth? In defense of my 2009-self: Okay, South-Korea is rich, but Germany is even richer, and Germans’ cars are generally on the small side, as I remember clearly.

We were racing along, and stopped for gas at one point. The attendant asked, gesturing at me, “Who’s that?” (or so Melinda translated). I was surprised to see gas station attendants at all, a rare sight in today’s USA.

The car navigation system spoke to Melinda steadily, giving directions. Our destination: Ilsan, my home for the next year. Writing from the vantage point of 2013, it’s a place I have fond memories of, though actually living through it was often tough for me.

Ilsan is one of South-Korea’s “New Cities”, which went from rice-fields in 1990 to a more-or-less integral part of the Seoul megalopolis by 2010, when I lived there. It’s northwest of Seoul. Much, or most, of it is closer to the DMZ than to central-Seoul.

Below is a google-map of Ilsan. If you are reading this and have an interest in orienting yourself, to follow along with this meandering narrative, zooming in and out would help. The airport is far off to the southwest. The red-marker is anchored on a park area in central Ilsan, not far from where I lived. Zooming in, this park connects Jeongbal Hill (forested, to the east) with Ilsan’s Lake Park (to the west). Now, in Korean and Chinese, “Il-San” means “one mountain” or “one hill”. I tried for a long time, in vain, to figure out if Jeongbal Hill was that “one”. No one ever seemed to know. My friend Jared, who knows many things like this, had another idea about it referring to a different specific hill, but I’ve forgotten which.

My mind, drawing on previous linguistic experience, was making wild and certainly-wrong linguistic connections on the fly: “Im-nee-dah” sounds a bit like the Estonian word for politely expressing thanks, “aitah”. Perhaps they are connected, I speculated. / [Speaking of Estonian: I have various “go-to” attention-getting / unexpected-change-of-pace mini-activities I use on bored or unmotivated ESL classes: One is to write the numbers one-to-ten on the board in all the languages I know them in (English, Spanish, German, Estonian, Russian, Korean, Chinese-Korean). For the Spanish, German, Estonian, and Russian numbers, I ask students to guess which languages those are. They can typically get Spanish and German quickly, and sometimes can get Russian, but no one ever gets Estonian.]

The car ride continued, as I pondered whether an Estonian-Korean linguistic connection were possible at all.

We were stopped at an intersection, waiting to turn. Before us was a large facade full of neon. I asked Melinda what all those signs meant. I was so confused: What could they all possibly be for?!  She glanced at them and said that many are the names of hagwon — private educational institutes, mainly for K-12 students.

This dizzying array of neon lights (even more onerous-to-a-Westerner’s-sensibilities than the one I found online at left), meant we’d just about arrived. I didn’t know it yet, though: For all I knew, we’d have to drive through another half hour of this. I had no concept of scale within the Seoul megalopolis.I have more of one now, but it’s hard to truly wrap one’s mind around a 25-million-person urbanized region. / No, we had nearly arrived. No more driving. I’d later learn the informal English-name of the road onto which we were turning: It is commonly called “Hagwon Road”. It parallels the Gyeongui Rail Line.

My eyes had been darting everywhere since I’d gotten in the car. Deja Vu: I remember doing the same in January of 2007, when I arrived in Berlin, the first time I left the USA. In both cases, I was so excited that I tried to catch a glance at everything outside the window. I rued each blink. Seeing all this was a joy of life like few others.

As such, I was almost disappointed when we actually arrived, because it meant I’d no longer be able to be a passive observer, taking-in this new universe into which I was about to stumble. I was about to meet lots of new people, soon-to-be coworkers, and hopefully would impress them. I could not have foreseen that, before the night was over, one of these new people would tell me that I should be “deported”!

After some confusion on where to park, Melinda, the recruiter’s assistant, turned off the car, opened the trunk, and I took my suitcases out. We wheeled them over to the door of the building in which the language-institute was housed. We got in the elevator. She pushed the button. Up we went. . . .

As I was making my way through the baggage-area — which was still in the secure area, so no “normal people” allowed — a Korean man approached me and asked if I was in the military. In preparation for this…endeavor, I’d recently gotten a haircut and so my hair was on the short side, so his question was fair. He wanted to guide me the appropriate way. His face took on a look of puzzlement or surprise when I responded with a ‘No’. Or maybe it was just plain old indifference.

I walked out of the baggage-area, and thus out of the secure-area of the airport, and into the “Arrivals” area. A woman was waiting, holding a humble little sign bearing my name. Her name, she told me, was Melinda. I thought this was pretty interesting, being that I have a cousin with the same name. I have no idea how old she was, though I assume she was 25-30. I remain bad at guessing Koreans’ ages. She said she’d been in Washington state, I think it was, some time ago, perhaps studying. She was now the assistant to this recruiter who had gotten me the job. I’d thought that recruiter was a one-man operation, but it seems he had an assistant after all, and she got stuck doing the “pick the new guy up at 10 PM” chump work.

She was tired and a bit annoyed. I think she was good at hiding her annoyance by Western standards but not particularly good at hiding it by East-Asian standards (as I look back on it now). It was the late evening, after 10 PM.

My plane was late. No wonder she was annoyed.

The plane had been delayed in Japan due to the worldwide H1N1 “Swine Flu” virus scare, then in full swing.

We then had to fill-out cards about our health status, and obviously they’d be ferrying-away, for isolation, anyone who answered that he or she had flu symptoms, a big disincentive to answer “Yes” to the “I have been coughing recently” prompt. The Japanese authorities instructed us all to wear masks like those at left. They provided the masks, but few of us wore them. I remember murmurs of “Do we have to wear these?”  An Indian woman from New Jersey, sitting next to me, was among the first to take her mask off. She was married with adult children, and was visiting Tokyo as a tourist, alone, she told me. Anyway, that Swine-Flu inspection slowed everything down.

[Next: Part II and Part III and Part IV and Part V]

An easier question is “when”:
I arrived, for the first time, almost exactly four years ago, in late April of 2009.

I lacked even basic knowledge about the place in April of 2009. I lacked experience teaching. I lacked experience with East-Asians, besides a few acquaintances here-and-there. And I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

_______________________________

Four years on, the memories of my first night in Korea are vivid. They are more vivid than many of the things I did just this past weekend! In the coming posts, I will write down my memories of that first night.

This is the 44th post. I aimed for 10 posts per week, or 1.43 per day. I have just about kept that pace.

Ten posts per week is an achievable goal, and I’m glad I set it. Still, I may consider significantly slowing that pace in the future, or maybe even increasing it. There will be a period in the fall of this year (2013) when I will probably not post at all for a few weeks, being away from a computer for an extended period as I will be. I will make a post about this plan later.

                The British [in the Korean War] were absolutely devoted to the ritual observance of tea-time.
                They dropped everything at 4 P.M. to consume tea and cookies, even during combat. British
                artillery ceased firing for tea-time and then picked up the tempo afterward.

He made those comments shortly after mentioning the battle at Gloster Hill, in which an entire British battalion (800 men) was encircled for three days and compelled to surrender in April of 1951. This led me to wonder if the Gloucester Battalion also found a way to stop everything for tea, at the appointed times, on those three days of encirclement. Gen. Paik implies that they would have.

Maybe the story would have three acts, each act depicting tea-time on one of above-mentioned each days.

            Act I: Day-1 Tea-Time — High Spirits — Maybe they can repulse the attack?
             Act II: Day-2 Tea-Time — Defeat Looming — No escape
             Act III: POW Tea-Time [As I understand it, the Englishmen all surrendered before noon on the 25th.
             Maybe the third act we have them on the march north, bound for POW camps. Maybe the Chinese
             commander would have allowed them drink tea on that first afternoon as POWs, as a show of good-will].

I am struck by the positive and optimistic Weltanschauung on display. There is a purity, a distinct non-cynicism. (Is there a word for non-cynicism?). / Their descendants today are more cynical and pessimistic. / There are many kids in the audience: If the kids of today were teleported back and attended this event, they’d roll their eyes and think “that high-pitched yelling is so gay“, no doubt.

April 25th was the day the Battle of Gloster Hill ended in 1951.

There were 700-800 men in the Gloucester [Gloster] Battaltion on April 22nd. By noon April 25th, all but 40-60 (pictured below) were dead or en-route to NK/Chinese POW camps.

The city in which I live and work is Bucheon. “Bucheon is the Best in Korea“  is what I’d always guessed that slogan meant, which is wrong. (I recognized three of the five words. My Korean skill is not good enough to understand it fully). This kind of bragging is not uncharacteristic for Korea. The city itself uses these kinds of self-promoting slogans. Anyway, this translation is definitely wrong.

Thursday, I had a class of one, a very low-level 9th grade girl. Seeing the banner again, I decided to solve the mystery once and for all. I asked her. Aided by the limited efforts of this 9th grader, my first real translation effort was this: “Beyond Korea’s Best Competition is Bucheon“. This sounds awkward, so I knew I hadn’t gotten it yet.

My second effort was “Beyond Bucheon, Korea’s Best Level of Competition”. There should be an implied [We have] inserted, as in “Beyond Bucheon, [Our Language-Institute has] Korea’s Best Level of Compeition”. This seems like needless boasting, I thought, although I was satisfied with the translation. Again, this kind of ‘boasting’ is not uncommon here. (This language-institute has had a reputation for ‘poaching’ elite students from elsewhere, and offering them highly-discounted tuition, so the claim is true: Many top students are certainly here).

I was still unsatisfied with the translation, though. What was I missing?

Finally, a Korean friend told me: The last word carries a “let’s”. The best translation (rearranging word-order) may be:

I dream of summer.

This was true in my own experience:
I was in the Boy Scouts in the 1990s. I witnessed my own troop’s decline as an institution. The troop actually folded, for lack of members, in the mid or late 2000s. The reasons were various. The biggest reason, or so was my conclusion at the time, can be seen in the thousand-words spoken by the paintbrush of Norman Rockwell, over there —->

The typical kid born into the 2000s-USA will not identify with that image. It is an “America” that Whites associate with the 1950s. That was (and I guess still is) its appeal.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
I tried to find numbers. The best I can come up with:

2.7 million : 2011’s tally for number of boys in the Boy Scouts. [Official, pdf]
3.5 million : The 1990s tally, when I was involved. [Apparently official / excluding “Learning for Life” members]

The USA, has [I think] a legal mandate to give ‘substitute’ days off (e.g., Monday July 5th off, in lieu of Sunday July 4th). As of 2013, South-Korea has nothing like this. This is one of the many small blemishes on work-life in South Korea. Yes, it may be one of the richest nations in the world, but so often it doesn’t…act like it.

Now, though, the government is proposing adopting U.S.-style ‘substitute holidays’:

One caught my eye:

I thought the caption gave recipient’s name as Mu-Sang Hahn [한무상], but it turns out that word means “charity”.

No, spring has still not really arrived in force. I don’t understand it. The typical day here has been in the 0-10 Celsius range (30s-40s Fahrenheit) through April so far. [It should be in the 10-20 Celsius range by now].

• The nightly-low in Bucheon has stayed below 10 Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) all but twice so far this year.
• The daily-high has stayed below 15 Celsius (60 Fahrenheit) all but six times so far this year.

A Korean folk tale has it that Winter is jealous of humans’ love of Spring, so it angrily throws one last burst of cold weather at us humans before Spring takes over. I heard this on the only non-military English radio station here.

Koreans even have a special term for sudden spring cold-snaps (꽃샘추위). This one is prolonged, though.

I don’t mean to ‘compare’ the American rebels of 1775 with a pair of Chechen terrorists of 2013. A more-valid synchronicity to note would be this:

• October 2002: The sniper terror attacks around Washington, DC (discussed above) occur.

• October 2002: The Chechen Tsarnaev family arrives in the USA. The family came in on a tourist visa, claimed to need political asylum, and were allowed to stay indefinitely. The future-terrorist brothers were 9 and 16.

Finally, I find it interesting that the younger one’s Twitter account shows he was a bit of a “whigger”. It’s likely he would have protested if you’d called him “White” to begin with, though (a prerequisite for being a “whigger”).

Yesterday, it was due to a manhunt for the “Boston Marathon bombers”. Everything was “locked down“, a euphemism for martial law. (The euphemism is arguably scarier than the term it replaces, in this case). In 1775, it was amidst a wild political climate which saw Paul Revere ride through towns of Massachusetts shouting “the British are coming!” (forevermore to be learned-about by American elementary school students). Fighting followed.

I will transcribe the lyrics myself: [Read more]

I see in this song several messages:
(1) Success is fleeting.  (“The rope’s straight down when you drop” / and the line about grass). “Hic transit gloria”.
(2) Beware of wanting too much, for it’s very possible “it can’t be found”
(3) Don’t get too excited about things in a negative way (“wound up”), or if you do don’t do anything too belligerent — as the woman-subject of the song did — because when things settle down (“wind down”), you’ll probably regret it.

I cannot deny I am intrigued, but there are so many things I don’t understand / don’t trust about it. Here is their informational video:

As of now, their constitution allows a president to serve only a single five-year term. Korean leaders’ increasing unpopularity and seeming ineffectiveness may be due, partly, to being lame-ducks from day one.

Yet, one can understand why the South Koreans established this one-term-limit cap in the 1980s:

The value of Bitcoin has fluctuated a lot: It reached over $200 in early April, but is now in the $60 range. Speculators cashed-out. My coworker explained to me that he intends to be a speculator, too. If he buys 10.0 Bitcoins at today’s $66 price (total paid: $660), and the value goes back up to $200, his 10.0 Bitcoins will be worth $2,000+.