{"id":108,"date":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/07\/11\/post-101-ilsans-suburbs-or-heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown\/"},"modified":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","slug":"post-101-ilsans-suburbs-or-heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/07\/11\/post-101-ilsans-suburbs-or-heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-101: Ilsan’s Suburbs (Or, Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Early on Sunday, I took a picture of Ilsan’s “suburbs”. (Ilsan is a city northwest of Seoul. I lived there for one year and was back visiting.) Here is the view I had from the tenth floor:<\/div>\n
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\"Picture\"<\/a><\/p>\n
East-Central Ilsan, looking east<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/span>Most of Ilsan’s residents, along with most residents of the Seoul Megalopolis generally, live in buildings similar to those in the background (monolithic highrise apartments). A select few in Ilsan live in actual detached\/single-family houses, similar to those in the foreground below (I think these foreground buildings are mixed-use, and may even be multi-family. I assure you that nearby are thousands of smallish single-family houses, though). They have no yard space. A few feet separate the wall of one house from the wall of the next. Most are relatively small by U.S. standards, and sell for $1 million, I’m told.<\/p>\n

In the center-left of the photo above is a building with a South-Korean flag on one side and a U.S. flag on the other. It is the “Korea Christian International School” (\ud55c\uad6d\uae30\ub3c5\uad6d\uc81c\ud559\uad50), which I’d never heard of till now. The existence of such a school is testament to the strength of <\/span>Christianity in Ilsan, and in South-Korea generally. Actually, it’s hard for me to imagine a “Korea Buddhist International School” in Ilsan. If there were <\/em>one, it wouldn’t be so conspicuous or “self-confident”, I’d imagine. Buddhism is so lethargic\/undynamic in Ilsan as to be near invisible, in my experience.<\/p>\n

Here’s a (3D model) view from near the same spot, but looking wes<\/span>t. You can see a lot of small single-family homes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Picture\"<\/a><\/p>\n
3D Model of central Ilsan from Naver Maps.
\nSingle-family houses in the foreground, “downtown” in the center, apartments on the right, the Han River far in the background<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A few minutes’ walk from even the remotest of these “suburban houses” allows a resident to find a bus-stop to elsewhere in Ilsan or to Seoul, or to a train station to enter the region’s huge urban rail network. Korea thus has nothing like American suburbs, of course. Some people call Ilsan itself a “suburb”, which is mostly wrong. It may be a bedroom community for Seoul to an extent, but it’s not a suburb at all in the American sense. It’s proper designation is “new city” (\uc2e0\ub3c4\uc2dc). The “new cities” in South Korea are just transplants (onto former farmland) of high-end Seoul, just better-planned and better laid-out.<\/div>\n
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In my first year in Korea, when I lived in Ilsan, I had a student named Lee H.J., who lived in one of those houses in central Ilsan, I somehow learned. Many of the students were a bit spoiled, but H.J. was particularly bad. She was smart and worked pretty hard, but her attitude was persistently gloomy and usually hostile. She complained almost every day. I started to realize that “heavy is the head that wears the crown”. Being brought up wealthy in South Korea must seem like nothing but a punishment. She went to four or five after-school institutes, and was the object of constant pressure from her mom. If she were poorer, she wouldn’t have been so burdened by all that extra studying.<\/p>\n

Lee H.J. (who was in 6th and 7th grade when I taught her in 2009-2010) provided me with a memorable line I’ve pondered ever since. She wrote, “Today is only tomorrow’s yesterday.”<\/strong> She wrote it in an essay. What does it mean? It seems like it could\/should have some deep meaning, but when I try to grab onto that meaning, it always conceptually slips through my fingers, like trying to grab onto a cloud.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early on Sunday, I took a picture of Ilsan’s “suburbs”. (Ilsan is a city northwest of Seoul. I lived there for one year and was back visiting.) Here is the view I had from the tenth floor: East-Central Ilsan, looking east Most of Ilsan’s residents, along with most residents of the Seoul Megalopolis generally, live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}