Whenever I travel I always meet colorful folks. This trip has been no exception.
That American Boy
Standing in line at O'Hare, I struck up a conversation with Steve, a Minnesotan who was on his way to Phnom Penh to meet a girl. Steve was the caricature of the American tourist. He wore a blue safari shirt and cargo pants. He was also taking anti-malarial pills and a dozen other exotic meds, because that's what American tourists going to Cambodia were supposed to do. Middle-aged, clean-cut, and very bald, Steve gravely explained in Fargo-Don'tcha-Know-lilt how he had always wanted to find a nice, conservative Christian girl. The sort of person who would have dinner cooked and on the table when he came back from work, you know? After a straight-laced but lonely life, Steve hoped he had finally met such a person in Judy, a woman who a Cambodian coworker of his at ConAgra had set him up with. They had never met, but had spoken often over the phone. The line was going nowhere, so, to pass the time, Steve pulled out a calling card and carefully dialed a mile-long string of numbers to call Judy. Judy, Steve was surprised to learn, was sleeping, because it was night on that side of the world. Steve apologized, told her he loved her, and let her get back to bed. He showed me her picture on the display of his cell phone. She was attractive, and looked like she was significantly younger than Steve. I wondered what Judy and Steve would think of each other when they finally met, and whether Judy was even the name this woman normally went by off in far away Phnom Penh.
The Wayfarer
Jaime sat to the right of me during the fourteen hours of Korean Air Lines Flight 38's journey from O’Hare to Incheon International. Jaime was stick-skinny and weathered looking. His sandy hair was thining. His toothy, yellowed grin was crooked and a few of his teeth had bits of black at their corners. His laugh -- part cackle and part wheeze -- was the laugh of the trickster and the roustabout. It held notes of wandering and desperation and the absurdity of life. He said he had traveled to seventy-seven countries during the course of his life, often with little more than the shirt on his back. Tales of his journeys flowed freely. Outside of Africa, there was almost nowhere he had not been. He'd dodged immigration as illegal help on an Australian fruit farm. He'd slept in the public parks of Tokyo. He'd lived with girls from Sweden and Switzerland. He'd nearly died of pneumonia in rural China. He'd had his passport stolen on the beaches at Tel Aviv. He'd rode the trains from Vladivostok to Moscow. If half the stories were true, this guy had been everywhere and done everything. He also was on his way from Seoul further on to Phnom Penh to visit a friend of his who was teaching English out in the Cambodian Countryside. I really liked talking to the guy, which is probably part of why I made sure to tuck my passport and credit cards into my underwear before I slept. When we parted ways in Seoul, he told me to have fun teaching English, and then seemed to fade into the corridors of the airport like a phantasm of the endless road.
The Schoolmarm
I met my coteacher, Lee Eun Hye, or Grace Lee as she prefers to be called, in Daejon, the day after I arrived in Korea. I spent the night at the Motel Pharos in Daejon -- one highrise among a forest of others -- all blossoming with neon and sitting on the edge of a rice paddy. Jason, my recruiter, told me that the motel was a favorite for married people having affairs. Among other amenities, it featured a special curtain over the garage door to hide the license tags of vehicles inside. The decor reeked of intrigue. Everything was mood lit and floral patterned and painted blood red. After a mostly sleepless night spent on top of the motel's not-quite-cloth sheets, I had just gotten dressed when Jason walked in followed by a slight, dark haired woman, Korean, with pale skin and a heart-shaped face. Dressed in carefully tailored jeans and a dark woolen coat, everything about Grace was scrubbed clean and starched and thoroughly out of place in Motel Pharos. She spoke good English. She was the daughter of a Baptist pastor (a rarity in this country) who had recently made the pilgrimage to Texas to collect his PhD from a theological seminary there. Now, anytime I see her, her expression and cadence suggest she is the kind of hardworking, idealistic, clean-nosed person who is bound to be underwhelmed by the mediocre realities of life. Particularly when she faces down a classroom of noisy seniors, all slouches and vacant stares in tweed uniform blazers, none of whom give a rip about their English homework. She often works later hours than other teachers. When she has free time, she likes to indulge the twin passions of the young Korean with money to spend -- eating foreign food and shopping.
"Girls like department stores," she tells me as her friends and I ride back from a supper of Korean not-pizza. "Actually we love it."
The Expat
I met Johan the South African toward the end of my first week teaching at Hapdeok Steel High School. I was sitting at my desk in the teachers' office, listening my coworkers jabber while making Korean not-coffee when he burst through the door. He bowed, and rattled off a greeting to the teachers in Korean, with what sounded like a very English accent. They smiled and bowed back. For a long, spaghetti-western moment, I stared at him. I hadn't seen a Westerner since I got off the plane to Seoul.
"You are not from here," I managed.
"Yeah," he said, "And I imagine you are the only Westerner in Hapdeok."
I was still in shock. Another white face. Whoa.
"I've got to teach a class now, but I will be back at four," he went on. "I can show you the bus to Dangjin then if you like. There are a lot of us there. This place can fuck with your head. You should check it out."
Later that afternoon we rode the bus into Dangjin. The bus was crammed with the boarding school crowd -- giggling, rough-housing teenage boys in tweed blazers and stained brown slacks -- all headed home for the weekend. Some half-bowed, showing respect, as we pushed our way into the bus's sweaty interior. I started to bow back.
"Don't do that," Johan hissed, staring down a particularly wild group who had stopped fighting for a seat to stare at us. "It screws with Confucius. And you *really* don't want to screw with Confucius in this place."
We arrived in Dangjin, an ultra-rich little city, bustling, filled with plastic highrises, golf courses, imported German cars, and neon. Everywhere neon. An anthropologist by training, Johan seemed to have the inside track on much of the beautiful, perplexing, super-saturated insanity that is life in South Korea. As we walked under the rainbow of signage, he explained how advertising here rarely touted the actual merits of a product, but instead played up the brand's appeal as a way of showing the consumer's personality. You buy a Samsung TV set because Samsung's values are your values. Western brands -- Calvin Klein, Levis, Dunkin Donuts, and the odd KFC -- were also at work in this teeming cauldron. The whole place seemed like the illustrated version of a Theodor Adorno thesis.
Listening to him talk, for some reason I thought of Apocalypse Now. Johan was Martin Sheen’s character – drawn, for better or worse, ever up the river even though much of what he finds along the way disturbs him.
"Go with the flow," Johan said. "Bow, eat the rice, play the foreigner, say gahm-sahm-nee-dah at every opportunity, and you'll be just fine here."
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