Postcard from Vladivostok

One vignette stands out above all others from my trip to Vladivostok in February.  It is of Dmitri (whose named I have changed – for obvious reasons), our guide, hopping the parapet in front of a Czarist-era warship’s mooring, intent on arranging an unscheduled tour.  A glance one-way, then the other, and he was over.  Casual, effortless, efficient – his leather trench coat barely even rippling.  Yanking open a hatch, he disappeared into the ship.  My traveling buddy Mike Kellogg, our Italian friend Simone, and I all exchanged incredulous glances.  We waited nervously.  Across the street Naval Headquarters loomed, all crumbling concrete and right angles. Guards stood watch over the active-duty missile cruiser at the neighboring berth.  The waterfront bristled with gantries, and the cries of seagulls echoed eerily in the chilly morning air.  Just as suddenly as he’d vanished, Dmitri reappeared, gesturing for us to join him.  The ship’s caretaker, a grizzled Russian with a shaggy mustache, accompanied him.  A long, should-we-or-shouldn’t-we moment ensued.  Then Mike climbed over the parapet as well, and Simone and I followed him.  Dmitri ordered us to pose for pictures with the vessel’s water cooled machine guns, pictures in front of the wheelhouse, pictures on the prow, pictures on the stern, pictures next to the gunwales, pictures with the neighboring cruiser in the background.  He took most of the photos himself, using Simone’s high-quality Canon, which he had commandeered.  

“Say cheese,” Dmitri said, his accent cartoonishly thick. 

The musty-smelling caretaker followed, eyeing us.  In the middle of all the picture snapping, the caretaker said something about our nationality. 

Mike translated, “He’s asking where we’re from, again.”

Simone, being Italian and olive-skinned, glanced at the man, disbelief on his face.  The caretaker scowled and said something menacing.

             “Don’t look at him,” Mike hissed. 

The caretaker demanded to see our passports.  Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at Mike.  His face was gray.  Looking back now, I realize just how serious this situation actually was.  At the time, though, it just seemed totally dreamlike and unreal.

We pulled out our documents, and, careful not to look at the surly Russian, handed them over.    

The caretaker gave Simone’s documents a particularly long look.  He muttered something, cracked a smile, and shot Dmitri a glance.  Reluctantly, he handed our passports back.  Through Mike, Dmitri instructed us to pay 100 Rubles (roughly $3) to the caretaker.  Vodka money.  Feeling suddenly lighter, we dug the bills hastily from our wallets.  Dmiri dashed back to shore.  We followed, breathing sighs of relief that grew longer and deeper with every step. 

***

Vladivostok is exotic and unpredictable.  Brash as red caviar and butter on black bread.  Pitiful as a frayed Russian flag hanging from a rusty tug’s mast.  Shameless as the sex toys for sale in the grocery store checkout line.  Awesome-yet-decrepit as the 9200-kilometer-long Trans Siberian Railway with as its dimly-lit, platzkarte coaches.  Ostentatious-yet-threadbare as the gold lace draperies hanging in the barely-running busses’ windows.  Resurgent as the cable-stayed Russky Island Bridge – longest in the world – being built for the APEC Forum next year.  Tragic as the wholesale-size liquor sections in every corner store.   

Most folks have the same glazed, leave-me-alone stare.  Their body posture and speech radiate defiance and bluster.  Weathered faces, tawny hair.  Older women preen synthetically gilded manes; many younger ones have the blue eyes of wolf pups.  Lots of track suits and furs are in evidence.  The leather of their shoes is usually polished with religious dedication.  Russian fashion sense mixes with precision-tailored, overstarched Korean style about like oil mixes with water. Korean-Russians, who look East Asian but speak and carry themselves like Russians, are thus a very strange sight indeed.   

Architecture is a riot of odd juxtapositions and bizarre comparisons.  Czarist-era façades, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Apartment blocks of Soviet vintage – fortresslike hulks that seem to have been designed for maximum ugliness.  Large sections of town are simply falling apart.  Rarely is there grass.  Instead, mud, garbage, and congealed hunks of ice are everywhere.  In bad places, the city seems like a social experiment to see what would happen if Kiwanis, Boy Scouts, the Rotarians, and every other community organization ever to sweep up a cigarette butt or raise money for a playground were all simultaneously switched off.  Minutes from these slums, brand-new infrastructure is going up, including the gigantic Zolotoy Rog and Russky Island bridges, an upgraded airport, and dozens of kilometers of new highway.  After two decades of post-Soviet stagnation, hopes for a brighter future are high.  Whether or not it will actually come to fruition, I cannot say.  The paradox of this place makes Vladivostok seem the new Wild West – an unvarnished place where both danger and a certain sort of opportunity are unbridled.

Spider

A spider lives in Itaewon. Perched atop bronze legs ten meters high, it broods -- an eight-legged crack in Seoul's smog. Its egg sack dangles, bulbous and vulnerable. The net effect is a blend of menace and some other emotion I can't put quite my finger on. Loneliness? Fear? Longing? The spider's name is Maman -- Mommy in French. Ironically, Mammon is also Latin for corrupting, debased riches. The spider is a sculpture by the artist Louise Bourgeois. It has been placed here to guard the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. To me, the spider seems the personification of Samsung itself -- Korea's largest chaebol, a $173.4 billion conglomerate with arms in the electronics, auto, shipbuilding, construction, and insurance industries. Both seem ominous to me, despite their seeming benevolence as evidenced through all the beauty contained inside the museum.

The buildings which house the museum are an ultra modern amalgam of plate glass, steel, wood-simulacra, and granite. Jutting angles and evocative curves abound. Mood lighting and strategically-placed darkness robe the exhibits. There are three museums housed in the complex. The traditional section features collections of metalwork, pottery, paintings, and calligraphy. The modern art museum contains contemporary work by Koreans and foreigners. The final museum is a collection of installation and video pieces.

Spider or not, Samsung is, of course, hardly unique as an ultra-wealthy entity with an interest in supporting the arts. The Vatican commissioned Micaelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. The Hapsburgs paid Beethoeven's bills. Hitchcock's films are inseparable from the Hollywood studio system. Modern Western megacorporations support the arts just as much as their Korean counterparts. While there are striking examples of artists who somehow managed to produce without rich benefactors, the fact remains that much of the world's most fully realized art has been created, maintained, distributed, and exhibited through the efforts of entities like Samsung.

A jade-green vase swollen with dolphin-esque curves glimmers liquid inside one of the museum's Plexiglas cocoons. Another such vase has been painstakingly etched with the form of a dragon flying. Scale by scale and not a single flaw. The artisanship is overwhelming. A floor below, the faces of Gim Hong-Do's Immortals sigh with an emotion I can't put into words, but which lies somewhere between serenity, wry mirth, and absolute weariness of life. Their robes practically ripple off the page.

In the second gallery, Song Young Soo's sculpture, Standing Face to Face, looks like a welded copper lobster warped by black hole-grade gravity. Work like this reminds you of the confusion, despair, and struggle that fills 20th Century Korean history. Lonely Planet’s Korea guide quotes a Korean proverb as saying, "When the house is burnt, pick up the nails. Pieces like Lee Jeong-seoup's A Bull reflect such sentiment. Rendered with simple strokes in a style that reminds me of expressionism, the painting depicts a brindle bull, teeth bared and muscles bulging as it tosses its head in defiance.

Kang Ik Joong's piece, I Have to Learn English, is especially resonant for the ESL teachers living here. The piece consists of hundreds of three inch by three inch wood plaques, each with an English phrase carved into it. A monotone recording drones out the plaque phrases. "FISH FORKS," "FERTILE WAY, "HAPPY ESTHETIC," and "LAW SCHOOL," were a few of them. Some made more sense than others. The loneliness and alienation of life as a Korean who sweats blood to learn English, but can never really master the language seemed to have been etched into the wood along with the words.

How should we feel about the symbiosis of art and commerce that places like the Leeum represent? Decisions based upon emotions like love, passion, or revenge are frequently illogical, but for better and worse, they are also regarded as quintessentially human. Rationalized, profit-motivated corporate decision-making differs fundamentally from this. Although corporations need people to exist and operate, this disparity marks corporations as fundamentally extra-human. This begs the following question. If the purpose of art is to illuminate that which is human, then doesn't art's association with inhuman corporate entities undercut this aim?

My favorite pieces at the museum were those by the post-modern artists. With its hyperfast internet, Korea may be even more exposed to the reactor cores of image culture than America. How are people who live in such a context changed by it? This is the question these artists wrestle with. Kim Hong-Joo's Untitled, compares stencil-made paintings of various buildings to a birds-eye-view of a lake shaped like the artist's face. Each of these approaches to rendering reality is effective by itself, but, when juxtaposed, neither one appears very real at all. This idea leads to all sorts of interesting questions about what the relationship of media to reality actually is, and what constitutes realism. Atta Kim's 110-2: Times Square, New York, is a photograph of NYC's most famous urban canyon taken with an eight-hour exposure. This technique renders passing traffic as a ghostly flicker of passing lights. In this picture, humanity itself seems to have become fleeting and insubstantial due to the speed at which it moves. Finally, Paik Nam June's My Faust-Autobiography is a cardboard cathedral stacked to the ceiling with television monitors. Each is a riot of distorted images, SMPTE bars, static, and mind-numbingly fast editing. Antennas bristle from the building's roof. Newspapers coat its walls. Sitting on the tower’s pinnacle, a TV camera peers down, its monitor carrying the same stream of electronic consciousness as the others inside the building -- the cherry on the cake of this amphetamine-driven McLuhan thesis.

Ultimately, Samsung's relationship to art – embodied through this museum – is really a work of art itself, albeit an unintentional one. We may prefer to identify emotionally-motivated behavior as human, but coldly-rational social-engineering projects are no less typical of our species. War, commerce, and many religious activities are examples of this uglier strain of humanity. Simultaneously embodying passion and reason, empathy and barbarism, the human and the supposedly-inhuman, the paradox of Samsung's support for the arts stands as a pyramid-sized metaphor for the dualism of human nature. If one purpose of art is to offer the opportunity to think/experience/feel in a manner beyond the everyday, then this museum is a work of art.

A spider lives in Itaewon. The spider is Samsung. I love this spider's treasures, even though I fear the spider.

Weird Little Worlds

Hapduk Steel High School (Hapdeok Jaychul Godonghagyo in Korean) is a weird little world nestled inside the weird little world that is Korea. A mostly-boys’ high school, the place seethes with adolescent angst barely straightjacketed by ultra-conservative, ultra-communal Korean culture. It also seems emblematic of some of the bizarre paradoxes which typify the New Asia of the 21st Century.


Situated near the edge of Hapduk, the school complex probably dates to the 60s. The high school building is squat, three stories high, and made of brick. As you approach, the shrieks, yells, and thunderous, galloping footsteps of the building's teenage Hakseng waft from the large windows. Green plastic awnings run across the courtyards between the middle school, the high school, and their shared cafeteria. These are a total godsend, because when it rains in Korea, it RAINS. Positionally-speaking, if these three buildings were a sandwich, the high school would be the meat. Facing the street, a garden is lush with flowers, evergreens, and slightly-ragged bushes trimmed into poodle-esque shapes. A jumbotron announces school news to interested motorists on their way to Dangjin. To one side of the cafeteria sits a machine shop where students learn to TIG weld or take the occasional third-year English class. Graffiti (a very rare sight in Korea) adorns one red-brick wall.


The cafeteria itself serves three meals a day, although I have only had lunch and dinner here. It's a chop-sticks and spoon operation. You couldn't get a fork if you begged and pleaded. Rice and kimchi are ubiquitous. Soup and salads are also SOP. One common salad contains cucumbers drenched in a heavy, sweet-and-spicy dressing. Another features lemon grass and shaved carrots mixed with an oil-based sauce. Small fish (usually barbequed or fried whole), quail eggs, and the hated-"mystery meat" supply protein. The food is pretty good, but palate-meltingly spicy. Spaghetti Bolognese and corn dogs are the only Western food I have ever seen served here.


Beyond the cafeteria's other side sits the new dormitory where male members of the freshmen class lives. Second and third year students (high school here is only three years long), are generally local kids (unlike the freshmen) and do not live at the school.


The school headmaster is a forty-five year old Korean named Chang Gyu Chan. He is deeply tanned and has brown eyes that by, turns, seem to laugh aloud or leave burn marks on your face. His temper is mercurial and swings rapidly from the wide-grinning, slap-you-on-the-back manner of a favorite uncle to a Marine D.I.’s level of ruthlessness. When he is happy, his laugh is raucous and friendly, with a ridiculous sign-song note to it that makes it impossible not to laugh with him. Ebullient and impulsive, he radiates life and energy and confidence to any group he commands. He loves good food, and seems to be on a first name basis with most of the restauranteurs in Dangjin-gun. Like most Korean men, he also loves to drink makgeoli and soju in huge quantities, at punishing speed. He doesn’t know a stranger, and this includes me, even though most of English syntax and grammar evade him. He insists that I call him Gyu Chan Hyung (meaning Elder Brother Gyu Chan -- a sign of friendship). More than once Gyu Chan has bought most of the teachers at Hapdeok Jaychill food or alcohol or both. Raised a farmboy, he seems to have an unconscious desire to return to his agricultural roots, and has carved out a farm-sized garden behind the school. Here, the students raise many of the vegetables we eat in the cafeteria. He also has rabbit hutches and two six month old Labrador pups that wander at will over the school's property. All in all, Gyu Chan has the vibe of a grown up jock, the kind of guy who was probably once an athlete, a hell-raiser, and very bad news with the ladies. During the week, he lives here, even though he has a wife and children in Daejon. It is his responsibility to make sure that life in this circus of steel runs smoothly, and it is obvious he takes this responsibility quite seriously.


Lee Chu Ho’s, the principal, has a personality and manner that stand in contrast with Chang Gyu Chan's. Cerebral and reserved, he has a face so patrician he seems to belong to a different species than most of the students here, and is usually clad in a gray, school-issue windbreaker. His office is the size of a classroom, and features marble floors, a menagerie of leather chairs and a conference table the size of a small boat. His English is quite good. Where Gyu Chan's manner usually makes you forget that he is above you on the school's totem pole, with the principal it is impossible to forget. His aura is one of magnanimous detachment, the benevolent lord of all he surveys. You would expect that a person with such a hegemonical vibe would be able to kick some serious ass pretty much at will. In practice, the limits of Lee Chu Ho’s power are difficult for me to understand. On the one hand, I once saw him sentence a good chunk of the freshman class to a day of toothbrushing floors over trivial lateness. On the other hand, my sociopathic co-teacher Mr. Lee (see my post “The Ballad of Mr. Lee” for a more complete description) has somehow managed to return to work from medical leave despite beating his students and repeatedly telling every teacher in school that the principal is incompetent. Back home, such behavior would get you fired. Apparently, here it is more complicated. In any event, the principal praises my work more than I’d say I deserve and my checks always clear, so, the paradox of his authority/lacktherof notwithstanding, Lee Chu Ho is a pretty cool guy in my book.


Lee In Hark is another senior teacher. In his late 60s, he stands maybe 5'5" with his shoes on -- significantly shorter than most Korean men. He wears rimless bifocals the size of a windshield. His hair is thinning, his skin wrinkled. A devout Catholic, he always crosses himself before meals. He recently became a grandfather, and will produce pictures of his newborn pride and joy without warning or provocation, even though everyone has already seen them before. He is compassionate and warm. He always smiles broadly, revealing SERIOUSLY crooked teeth and a gold mine of gleaming crowns. If the office is giving away cool stuff like lime green souvenir hand towels, squid jerky, or bottles of super-concentrated Vitamin-C drink, Lee In-Hark always makes sure that I get some.


The students themselves are an odd lot. Juniors and seniors at Hapduk Jaychul wear a white uniform shirt similar to that of an American garage uniform, do not live in the dormitory, and are not required to meet the new, much higher standards of personal conduct and academic performance to which the freshman class are held. They have grandfathered into Hapdeok Jaychul. Apparently, in the bad old days, Hapdeok was know far and wide as the school to which the worst of the worst in these parts were banished when no other school would take them. To say they are unenthusiastic about learning English is an understatement to about the degree that the town of Hapdeok is small and rural.


By and large, teachers hate the juniors and seniors, and complain endlessly about their behavior. A few have sprouted tattoos (even though this is forbidden). The most popular is a green, five-pointed star tattooed on the back of the hand -- which is reportedly the insignia of a local gang. Many smoke behind the buildings across the street (also forbidden). With a few notable exceptions, they are all slouches, jeering laughter, and gazes that never cease to peer out the classroom windows. Corporal punishment is alive and well at Hapdeok Jaychul, and most teachers carry sticks to class. My refusal to hit students places me at a decided disadvantage when it comes to maintaining order in this place.


The freshmen, by contrast, have worked really hard to get where they now are – squarely under the thumb of an unbelievably strict academic program. They wear a militaristic gray blouse and slacks that seems to have drawn its inspiration from Luftwaffe battle dress. Epilets, shoulder patches, a school insignia reminiscent of a black-and-blue ninja-star, and English-Korean name badges round out the look of the Meister School students. These students are required to live in the dormitory, forbidden to smoke (and pee tested to ensure their compliance), and are either exercising or in class from nine in the morning until ten at night either five or six days a week, depending. The workload is fascist. I pity them, although they are likely to get good jobs thanks to a recent agreement between the school and Hyundai.


Maybe twenty female students are enrolled in Hapduck Jaychul’s three grades. Attitude/performance-wise, they range from the lowest dregs of the second and third grade to the top of the Nazi-uniformed freshman class. Regardless of their level of achievement, they are shy towards Westerners such as me. Most will collapse into red-cheeked, face-covering fits of giggling if I so much as look one of them in the eye. The exception to this rule is the girl freshman, bright-eyed, maybe 5’4” – with bangs and horn rims that look nerdy even by Korean standards. She studies obsessively, speaks brilliant English, and is possessed of an efficient, clean-nosed approach to life that seems simultaneously childlike and uncannily adult. Her presence here is the result of her fascination with steelmaking. I wish her well, though I am also a bit creeped out by the intensity with which this fifteen-year-old girl devotes herself to study – in the process seemingly foreswearing virtually every quintessential pursuit of Korean teenage girlhood.


The hallways and corridors are decorated with paintings that look like what would happen if Matt Groening, Gary Larson, and Claude Monet all lumped their genetic material together to produce an impressionist painter indentured to IKEA. Many show a sculpture of a Classical or Enlightenment-era personality juxtaposed with some contemporary household item. A chalk white bust of Micaelangelo’s David sits next to an overflowing trash bucket. Minerva-in-profile shares the frame with a bottle of glass cleaner. Thomas Jefferson is paired with a single well-worn hiking boot. Renoir for Starbucks – decorating a school for future steelworkers.


This mishmash of aesthetics reeks of the smugly postmodern. It simultaneously seems uncannily appropriate and utterly out of place at Hapduck Steel High School. Both profound and profoundly kitschy. Because of this, I have a love/hate relationship with the pictures. They juxtapose the refined with the banal, the ancient with the brand-new, the Western with the non-Western. In some ways, this school and the town it is in are like them. Hapduck Jaychul – Schicksal of those banished from Chungnam’s more gentrified schools – now reborn as a selective haven for Hyundai’s backbone-in-training. Hapduck – remote, poor, backward, and agrarian – ugly sister in a suddenly-ultramodern country that was itself remote, poor, backward, and agrarian less than forty years ago. The artwork seems oddly microcosmic of the same contradictions which the town and the country itself embody. Symbols used to decorate that very thing they symbolize.  Pictures inside the depicted.

Parsing Patriotism

Main Entry: pa·tri·ot

Pronunciation: \ˈpā-trē-ət, -ˌät, chiefly British ˈpa-trē-ət\

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle French patriote compatriot, from Late Latin patriota, from Greek patriōtēs, from patria lineage, from patr-, patēr father

Date: 1605

: one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests

Patriotism is a lightening rod of a word to about the degree that Mount Rushmore is big and made out of rock. To mention it at a bar or party is to tap a fount of human passion -- some positive, some negative, some whimsically indifferent. War. Love of land and landscape. Freedom. Ethnic strife. History. Shared suffering. Indigenous industry. Folk music. Oppression. Food and drink. Fashion. All these things are connected to national identity, which is inseparably linked to patriotism. Each is a canvas on which the human spirit has been sketched. Thus, patriotism is intrinsic to civilized human identity because most of the things we think of as quintessentially civilized are intrinsically bound up with patriotism. That said, patriotism also seems to be a driving force behind virtually every act of barbarism from the dawn of history to now. With all this in mind, what then can we say about patriotism? Is being a patriot a good thing or not?

***

I am an American living in Korea -- a country thirteen time zones from my home. The far side of the world. Geographically, ethnically, and culturally, it is hard to get more un-Western than this. Now and then I need a break from all the kimchi and komapsamniddas. I become intensely conscious of the fact that where I am from makes me who I am, makes me different from everybody who is from here. The wave of brown hair in the tide of black. The guy who claims to "get" banjo music and doesn't flip over 2PM or The Wondergirls. The only person who isn't programmed from birth to bow to his elders, accept drinks with two hands, and carry toilet paper with him when he travels. All this makes me the perpetual outsider. It reminds me that place makes a person, and the place I am from is very far from here. It makes me feel that my American-ness has, for once, become something precious, small, and slightly under threat.

"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?" Lin Yutang, a Chinese author, asks.

If, as Mr. Lin and the first part of Webster's definition assert, to be patriotic is to love your homeland and its culture, then I think that living overseas draws out the cornbread-mandolin patriot in me. Makes me conscious of this side of myself in a way that I am not back home.

And, from this angle, patriotism does not seem an evil thing at all.

***

But what about the 'supporting your country's interests' part of the definition? Especially when some of your country's interests are dangerous, immoral, or at least one-sided? To live in South Korea today is to be constantly reminded of the flesh-blood-and-razorwire consequences of American foreign policy. Compare Seoul -- a glass-and-chrome hornet’s nest of life, commerce, and ultraconsumerism -- to Pyongyang -- with its famine-ravaged Stalinist chic. Patriotism is without question one of the reasons why the two Korean capitals are such different places.

Amongst Koreans, the range of opinion about the United States is wide. Old men I've never met before often ask to shake my hand simply because I'm American. I can’t fathom this. Faces tanned to rawhide, vice-like handshakes. They smile broadly, give me thumbs up, tell me "Americans are gentleman." Sixty years later, MacArthur is still a rock star in Korea. Other people, usually younger, say that they hate America because of the misdeeds of our soldiers and the inflammatory effect American diplomacy has had on North Korea.

Almost every day, I hear the roar of American or South Korean jets tearing across the hazy blue sky on patrol. A few weeks ago, a U.S./Korean armada including the supercarrier George Washington ran war-games in the Sea of Japan -- despite North Korean threats of war. More such exercises were scheduled for the Yellow Sea. Nuclear poker is an everyday thing here.

Even living in Hapduk -- backwater of Korean backwaters -- fatigue-clad Korean Army personnel are omnipresent. All my students -- pimple faced boys who can barely grow a mustache -- know that after graduation they must serve twenty-one months in the military. My coteacher's little brother just started his service this summer. She says she fears for him. Given the tension between North Korea and the West after the Cheonan sinking, I can understand this. One the surface, few seem worried, but many are nervous.

All of this is inescapably a consequence of the second, "supporting-its-interests" part of Webster's definition of patriotism. Neoliberal, free-trade patriotism. Nuclear-powered patriotism. Guns-and-butter patriotism.

Tolstoy draws a bead on this strain of patriotism when he writes in Christianity and Patriotism:

Patriotism […] for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. […] Patriotism is slavery.

Balances of power and deterrence and all that usual necessary-evil type jazz notwithstanding, such patriotism seems does seem pretty evil indeed.

***

Propaganda, past and present, has worked on many levels that you can pretty much unequivocally denounce. Oversimplification of conflicts that are just not simple. Dehumanization of people who are just as human as us. Obfuscation of important-but-inconvenient details. These are easy targets. The basic implicit premise of most propaganda, though, is not so easy to condemn. Virtually all such appeals imply that the things its audience loves -- home, culture, identity as a person -- are under threat. The “under threat” part usually is not true. But the part about loving one's home/culture/identity is absolutely true. If it wasn't, all the oversimplifying/dehumanizing/lying that propaganda does would not work. So, in a weird sort of way, the very-human food-and-music part of patriotism actuates the nuclear-poker parts that dehumanize other people and us through the acts of violence we commit against them. Thus, patriotism is not two disparate sentiments shoehorned into the same word, but rather a microcosm of dualistic human nature itself. A paradox – beautiful-but-damned. The best thing about us, and the worst. Pascale's scum and glory of the universe in miniature. 

Here's to the scum, and the glory that is woven into it.

Edge of the Map

Originally Posted August 11, 2010

Visiting the DMZ is a surreal experience. It is a surreal place, and excites a cocktail of strong-but-difficult-to-parse emotion. I traveled there last weekend, and my writing this is the latest in a series of attempts to sort out what it all means to me.

***

A rather po-dunk carnival awaits at visitors at Imjingang, the pick-up point for the tour busses, and the northern-most place tourists are allowed to travel on their own. Vacationers from every corner of Asia are in evidence here the day I visit, as well as a few Westerners. English speaking tours with the USO are often booked up three weeks in advance. Apparently this is quite a popular tourist draw. To me, this seems vaguely sadistic, and perhaps masochistic as well. Fifteen minutes drive from here, people are living in a Stalinist-style dictatorship -- a famine-ravaged, nuclear-armed military state, pariah to the rest of the world, where trivial acts of self-expression are punished with forced labor and death. And this is a tourist attraction? But I am here too, unable to resist the attraction of -- I can't quite say what -- the guy who can't look away from the train wreck.

Everyone crowds around the ticket booth, passport in hand (you can't get in without it), and then stands around killing time until the next tour. Nearby, a row of shops tempt us with fake North Korean souvenirs, including the obligatory hard alcohol and knurled wooden canes. Circus tents and merry-go-rounds offer to separate you from your tourist won in other ways. A giant clock pendulum supposed to resemble a sailing ship is the alpha male of the ride-wolf pack. Its name is "The Super Viking," even though its gunwales seem more inspired by a turtle ship and its figurehead is clutching a scimitar. Finally, the bus arrives and we all pile inside. The bus drives maybe five minutes before reaching a bridge across the Han River. Fences capped with razor wire line the banks. South Korean guards in military fatigues board the bus and check passports a second time. The bus crosses the bridge, passing an army barracks where more soldiers armed with automatic rifles patrol. A feeling of anticipation begins. Like being at the zoo, with the bears' cage just a little further away.

The first stop is Dorasan Train Station, a modern glass-and-chrome facility which provides the only train tracks to North Korea, although these days there is no traffic between the two countries. A sign over the ticket counter points the way to Pyongyang. According to a map, whenever train travel through North Korea becomes possible again, it will be possible to travel by train all the way from Busan to Bordeaux -- from one end of Asia to the other end of Europe. A note of longing is plainly evident in this, despite the less-than-grammatically sound nature of the sign's English. We get back on the bus and take off. The suspense builds as the bus wends its way up a forested hill. We are getting close to something.

Next stop is the DMZ museum. Various East Bloc small arms sit in glass cases, along with digging equipment recovered from the four discovered tunnels North Korea has dug under the border since the armistice. Signs announce that up to thirty thousand troops an hour could pass through the largest of these -- and that there are probably more which have not been discovered yet. Decades of border tensions, occasional commando raids against Seoul, and a bizarre incident involving the axe-murder of some UN troops over the cutting down of a poplar tree are related through more signage.

After a few minutes, we take our leave of the museum in favor of one of the aforementioned tunnels, now the centerpiece of the DMZ's tourist exhibition. This turns out to be one of the coolest parts of the DMZ -- a circular gash, maybe 5'6" in diameter, blasted through solid granite one hundred forty meters below the surface. The air is stale and the walls are moist. Drops of water fall occasionally. It is claustrophobic, and if the lights suddenly went out I wouldlose my mind. I walk for maybe one hundred fifty meters or so and eventually arrive at more razor wire and a steel blast door. A slit window allows no hint of what lies on the other side. Beyond that door lies ... something. Touching the passage's rock walls somehow brings home the fact that the Korean War, a bloody conflict which killed roughly 6 million people, is not over. And this is a tourist attraction. Whoa.

Back to the surface. The final stop on the tour is the Dorasan Observatory. The bus ascends the steep blacktop in mountain gear,inching towards the summit, climbing and climbing until suddenly we are there. Two minutes walk, and there is a wall with large, pay-to-use binoculars. Beyondit lies four kilometers of jungle, deserted, except for the numerous wild animals that live there. Endangered species including Asiatic black bear, several types of crane, and the Amur leopard find a bizarre safe haven inside this death strip. Signs announce the presence of the millions of land mines that lurk unseen. And, finally, mountains, a road, and a rather normal looking North Korean village lie off to our northeast. I shell out 500 won and peer through the binoculars towards the village. Busses make their routes. Cars pass. Leaves flutter. I cannot see people. It's super surreal, because on the one hand, this is supposed to be the edge of the map beyond which there be monsters -- and yet all this kind of looks normal. I have been told repeatedly that North Korea works hard to put a facade of modernization and nonchalance near the border, that if you travel far inland, it all goes to rack and ruin real fast. Despite this, though, the fact that there are still fields and houses and roads -- the trappings of people, that, though citizens of an isolated and enigmatic country, still apparently have some of the same basic desires as me comes as sort of a shock. I am embarrassed to say it, but I guess all the official static from both sides of this border made me believe, if only subconsciously, that I would look over this wall and see Martians engaged in unfathomable work, pursuing unintelligible goals. Instead, I look over the wall, and see the evidence of people doing things not that different from the rest of us. Strange people, for sure. Dangerous people, maybe. But people. And I find this a comforting thought. I hope that someday very soon this border will open, that by a grace no one seems to imagine possible now, the two Koreas end this holdover from the Cold War.

Here's to a United Korea. Dae Ha-Min-Gook!

Internship Gong Show

Originally Posted June 15, 2010

Picture a montage of Korean teenagers. Navy blazers and lots of pimples. Plastic framed glasses which look very seventies. Most are nervous; a few are knees-knocking terrified. A few have faces which twist and contort as they struggle to remember the words in their memorized scripts.

"I am positiv-uh person..."

"Electricity dangerous but interesting..."

"I very much like-a to weld..."

Now picture three very bored Westerners trapped behind a long table across from the current sufferer. Brad, middle-aged, ex-Peace Corps. Neatly-parted hair cropped close. Tired eyes. Cedrick, South African, mustached and wears a tie that has ostriches on it. And me. Little old me, who knows that most of these kids desire to go on the internship is matched only by their complete inability to speak English properly. Knows this, and feels vaguely guilty because it's up to us three to decide these kids fates. All this process needed to achieve its full Kafka-esque potential was a talent segment -- although the thought of one of the poor, terrified Food Science Girls from trying to make water glasses sing or do a tap dance seems too barbarous even for Korean English instruction.

"Can you tell me your major?"

"Describe your character."

"Why should we accept you for this internship?"

It is necessary to be efficient, since there are over fifty kids here to interview. At five minutes apiece and no bathroom breaks ever that would still keep us busy for four hours. It is also necessary to be humane -- to sit patiently through the awkward gaps in the memorized litanies, to radiate confidence to kids whose throats constrict with fear, to recognize that most of them sweat blood to make their bad English as good as it is. Recognize this and respect it -- even as we fight to maintain our own sanity in the face of the fourth rendition of the "Dangerous electricity interesting" spiel. Judging quickly begins to feel oh-so-arbitrary, even though for the kids it incredibly consequential.

"I want to go Australia. I think Australia beautiful country."

"After internship, I hope my own welding company have."

"I want Korean culture the world to share."

There are some bright spots. A precious few of the students spoke English so well we all marveled at it. Listening to them was refreshing beyond refreshing. Pop songs and TV shows and Hollywood movies apparently are good for something after all. In the vast majority of cases, though, the question that seems to matter most is when to say "That's enough, stop please," make a few savage flicks of the pencil, and summon the next terrified Korean teenager. Brad summed up the atmosphere at Internship Exams best when he called it the "Internship Gong Show." I like this description. Wearisome. Savage-seeming. Endless, painfully-likable contestants who are just not good at what they need to be good at.

Internship Gong Show it is.

The Ballad of Mr. Lee

Originally Posted June 9, 2010

Mr. Lee wore gold rimmed, Soviet-issue glasses, a rice farmer's tan, and plastic shin guards to protect himself from snakebite while hiking. He was deathly scared of snakes. Mr. Lee's otherwise-impassive face featured the squint of Clint Eastwood, reincarnated as a middle-aged Korean. He knew more about English grammar than me -- no mean feat -- and when he wrote on the blackboard, his script was like something you'd expect to see chiseled onto a monument somewhere. His face was a taciturn mask. When he spoke -- he didn't do so more than was absolutely necessary -- his voice was akin to the low growling of the Huskies many Koreans chain to their houses. Smiles seemed to split his face, as though his flesh were unaccustomed to the expression -- and when he did smile it was usually out of defiance or despair rather than joy. 

It was Mr. Lee's misfortune to be transferred from a girls' foreign language middle school to a boys' vocational high school. He hated his students, and they hated him right back. Much of this was the students fault -- since most of the senior class at Hapdeok Jaychil are of the slouch-and-drool variety, and thus notoriously contemptuous of the notion that they need to learn English. To be fair, though, some of the responsibility also rests with Mr. Lee, who I think had recently had two sad realizations -- the first being that he was suddently 55, and the second that students in 2010 suck just as much as they did 30 years ago. As a result, when I saw him he was almost perpetually hung over from the previous evening's soju. He also chain-smoked on school property, even though this was strictly forbidden. Skirmishes between him and the students were a daily occurrence. Once a huge senior smarted off and Mr. Lee picked the kid up by his shirt front and shoved him to the floor. He then sent me back to the teachers' office, obviously intent on getting medieval on his senior pals. Say what you want about what I should have done -- in retrospect, I will agree with all of it. At that moment, though, being the new kid on the very foreign block, I was glad to go. 

My first clue that there was some tension between Mr. Lee and the school's brass was when he and the Vice Principal traded broadsides for something like ten minutes straight smack in the middle of the teacher's office. I sat fifteen feet away, pretending to be deaf as all the carnage unfolded. Everyone in the office could hear them. Yelling and shaking fists and stamping the floor. Eyes blazing with rage. It was awful -- and I bit my tongue to keep from laughing out loud at the horrible awkwardness of it all. I don't care what culture you're from -- any time you and your boss have a full-blown shouting match in front of all your coworkers, it is not a good sign. I never found out what they were fighting about. Mr. Lee tried to explain once, but for reasons of subterfuge or simple lack of vocabulary, all he told me was that his bosses "force me to do something I don't want to do," and that they blamed him for the disciplinary problems. To Mr. Lee, this was grounds for a blood feud. 

"What do you think of principal and vice principal?" He asked, speaking in a subversive growl. 

I hemmed and hawed, fearing the absolute power my feudal lords in the high school kingdom wielded. 

"I think they are bad guys," he said, every word forged from cold hard menace. 

One time Mr. Lee insisted on taking me out to dinner. We ate samgibsal, greasy-but-delicious bacon-like grilled pork. In between bites, Mr. Lee slugged down glasses of somaek -- the Korean version of a boilermaker. He told me about his sons, both of whom were studying at university -- and on whose account he couldn't quit his job. Not yet, anyway. Not just yet. His eyes shone with pride as he talked about his sons. I asked him about his wife, and a cloud seemed to pass in front of his face. He wouldn't say much about her. Apparently he had married very young, to a girl he scarcely knew -- their union the handwork of a matchmaker. I can still hear the sound of the words in Mr. Lee's bitter Korean brogue -- all the "Rs" ground out and the consonant clusters thick with menace. 

"Matchmaker." 

I felt sorry for Mr. Lee. Despite his bad temper and obvious drinking problem, he had worked hard and had a real gift for languages. None of this could save him from the fate the tides of Korean life had condemned him to. Hordes of lazy, insolent students, an obtuse academic bureaucracy, and, to add insult to injury, matchmakers. Mr. Lee seemed to sense this tenderness of feeling, and decided to play upon it. 

"Hey Erik," he said, eyes thick with beer fog, "May I stay at your home today? I want to get really drunk." 

And again, call me cold, heartless, anything else you like -- but, at that point, I decided that matchmaker or no, the thought of Mr. Lee, drunk out of his mind and inside my apartment was just not appealing. 

"Uh, not this time, okay?" I said, "Let me help you find the bus station." 

After that, things happened fast. First, Mr. Lee called a meeting of all the teachers to present his grievances with the Principal and Vice Principal and demand an apology. Apparently, word of the Mr. Lee/Principal War had reached the ears of the coordinator of foreign teachers for Chungnam Province, who had given specific instructions that I not be around for this particular bloodbath. As a result, when Mr. Lee showed up that morning, Grace rushed me off to another room where I surfed the internet and waited for Mr. Lee's storm to pass. 

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Lee told me that he was filing a lawsuit against the school brass. I am not sure what offense he claimed they had committed against him, but I do remember the vindictive set of his unshaven jaw as he pushed the neatly folded complaint papers into an envelope. There could be no going back after he filed them. From then on, I knew his fate was all but etched in granite. A few days later, Mr. Lee left Hapdeok Jaychil on "extended medical leave," leaving me to teach the senior English class on my own until a replacement Korean teacher could be found. Given that Hapdeok is remote and considered a bad place to teach, we are now two replacements down the road and praying that the current one, Young Hee, decides to stay. I'm not sure I would if I were her. 

As frustrated as I am by this situation, I have not been able to get angry at Mr. Lee. Maybe this is because, as little as we spoke, I felt like I understood Mr. Lee better than most of the other people I know here. Understood, and pitied -- loneliness and disappointment and pain transcend language. Between his sons leaving for college, his strained (or nonexistent) relationship with his wife, and his pariah status at school, Mr. Lee seemed terribly alone. Given the ultracommunal nature of Korean culture, I suspect he may have felt even more lonely than he seemed. I hope that the overlords of the Korean educational system will deal kindly with him in his next assignment after medical leave ends. I hope that he manages to find much more happiness than he seems to have now. Most of all, I hope that he manages to negotiate some mutually agreeable truce with the sometimes Kafka-esque strictures of life as a Korean. 

"Matchmakers..."