Here in Xiaoshan, The People's Garbage Trucks sing a 140-decibel MIDIfied rendition of a Communist anthem penned (supposedly) by Chairman Mao himself. Less revolutionary but more obnoxious are the street cleaner trucks, which pump out either Jingle Bells or The Birthday Song. Although they're loud enough to sterilize all the massage girls in a twelve block radius, it's impossible to tell how far away the trucks are or from which direction they're coming until one of them has already descended upon you with its 900 PSI Chinese tapwater cannon. I would advise against going anywhere near Chinese roads, in a vehicle or otherwise. But in a country overrun with bicycles and bicycle rickshaws, it is extremely worth your while to stand on a street corner with a cold version of your favorite beverage in hand, watching the bikers get tossed up onto the sidewalk like oysters in a tsunami.
Could there be a more ominous harbinger of death than a 6,000 gallon steel water tank on wheels blasting The Birthday Song as it pursues you at ten miles an hour? Only one among many in a place like this, where the pistons in the engine of random annihilation are pumping at a few hundred thousand RPM above the existential norm, where oversexed roosters rove the sidewalks, peckers at the ready; where live catfish come leaping out of buckets to chase you down the street; where restaurant proprietresses hoist their baby boys up to drop turds in the trash can at the next table over then stretch the kid out bare-ass on the glass tabletop to play pattycake; where a select few microbrews boast that they're formaldehyde free; where the cabbies won't let you buckle your seatbelt because they swear it's unsafe - everything's white-knuckle in China's more Chinese parts and it's hard on the hairline, particularly as a citizen of that half of the globe that puts choking disclaimers on its bags of pretzels. But if you're young and you've just spent a year teaching in a country that freaks out about electric fans, it's a welcome change of pace and a refreshing, life-affirming reminder of a grim fact that you'd almost forgotten about because you didn't have enough vacation time to notice it: the Happy Birthday truck is never very far behind, so you shouldn't stand around in traffic gawking so damn much.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Carnies.
Teaching in Korea is a carnival game. The object of the game is to teach children, seven or eight classes a day, five or six days a week, armed with Not The Best Resources In The World, with no time to sculpt those resources into a distracting never mind educational form, you must improvise; your students have already been in school for ten hours and they have cell phones and their cell phones have games and the kids are fairly ADD as it is; when you're not in school you're outside where the air smells like pitsweat and the water causes hallucinations and the beer turns your brain to petrified wood, and the Korean suburbanites hound you like a C-list celebrity, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and the restaurant next door has gone and dumped clams in your front lawn and clams are not a mollusk that smells better with age, and your toilet clogs, and the music sucks, and every morning the grape vendor comes megaphoning down the block at 8 o'clock sharp, and amidst all this Seinfeldian angst, the cruelest of all cruel Teaching In Korea ironies comes Hammer-dancing into your mind: everywhere you go you will attract attention (stares, leers, gawks; giggles, titters, guffaws) but not at school, i.e. the one place you want people to pay attention to you is precisely the one place where you vanish, fade, become invisible, cease to exist - and it. is. maddening.
So, good luck. A whole year, 365 days. If you survive, you win. If not, _______. The carny eggs you on. You'll never make it, he says, pansy. But he underestimates the shit you can put up with. He doesn't know that you've survived core-level theology classes at a Jesuit University, that you've worked at a non-figurative zoo, that you've spent a week living out of a Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin, that for four months you proofread catalogues in the Oriental Trading Company's Really Dark Basement Where the Dreams of Liberal Arts Majors Go To Die, i.e. you've been through some shit, or just enough petty shit to know that life is just that: going through shit. So the clouds begin to part around month ten when it starts looking like you're going to make it. The carny is rattled and starts throwing out jabs that go beyond mere gamesmanship, talking shit about your haircut, throwing bottlecaps at your head, flirting with your lady friend and that. You keep going, the days keep falling. You're on pace not only to win but to win big, one of those top-shelf stuffed frogs that weighs more than a human corpse. But in the face of triumph you begin to wonder whether this slithery carny is really a man of his word, whether someone who conducts such a corrupt racket with such compunctionless ease can be trusted to deliver the goods even if you win the carnival game fair and square, whether you oughtn't to have avoided the game in the first place and just held onto your money and stayed home and just I don't know and -
and that's where I stand. Whether the metaphor has a happy ending depends on the next 55 days, whether I am handed certain envelopes, whether I am still sane enough to understand what those envelopes are for.
So, good luck. A whole year, 365 days. If you survive, you win. If not, _______. The carny eggs you on. You'll never make it, he says, pansy. But he underestimates the shit you can put up with. He doesn't know that you've survived core-level theology classes at a Jesuit University, that you've worked at a non-figurative zoo, that you've spent a week living out of a Dunkin' Donuts in Berlin, that for four months you proofread catalogues in the Oriental Trading Company's Really Dark Basement Where the Dreams of Liberal Arts Majors Go To Die, i.e. you've been through some shit, or just enough petty shit to know that life is just that: going through shit. So the clouds begin to part around month ten when it starts looking like you're going to make it. The carny is rattled and starts throwing out jabs that go beyond mere gamesmanship, talking shit about your haircut, throwing bottlecaps at your head, flirting with your lady friend and that. You keep going, the days keep falling. You're on pace not only to win but to win big, one of those top-shelf stuffed frogs that weighs more than a human corpse. But in the face of triumph you begin to wonder whether this slithery carny is really a man of his word, whether someone who conducts such a corrupt racket with such compunctionless ease can be trusted to deliver the goods even if you win the carnival game fair and square, whether you oughtn't to have avoided the game in the first place and just held onto your money and stayed home and just I don't know and -
and that's where I stand. Whether the metaphor has a happy ending depends on the next 55 days, whether I am handed certain envelopes, whether I am still sane enough to understand what those envelopes are for.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Last thoughts before North Korea
Last Saturday was Children's Day in the Children's Republic of South Korea. The word that springs to mind is the present continuous verb screaming. We Brazen Expats call it Youth In Asia Day, ha ha, I hope you get the double entendre. My apartment is surrounded on all sides by Korean larvae spawning sites: three elementary schools, a day care, a kindergarten, two junior high schools, a BB gun shop. So I tried to avoid certain things that day, like the universe. But around noon I caved and ventured to the GS 25 for a bottle of Orange 500. I was ambushed en route by a flashmob of girls with pigtails. They were filing into a pink bus. They just kept coming. Hello!!! How are you!!! I'm pine tenk you and you!!! I gave them the peace sign, The V. This excited them. Screaming. Someone hit a seventh-octave high F# and oops, there went another crucial Jenga block from the crumbling wooden tower of sanity.
Right now I'm seated in an oversized leather chair in a PC room in Seoul, waiting to meet my tour group at the Hongik University train station. We're taking a bus to North Korea, under cover of darkness. A hundred people playing Starcraft in a small room sounds like a World Farting Federation battle royale. I've spent most of the day in train stations. Nine months into the game, mass transit facilities are sources of almost sexual temptation. A train to Incheon, a card swipe, a quick frisk and I could be in Indonesia by nightfall. The urge to vanish. I sit there entertaining the thought with a ticket in my hand. My cell phone says "KOREA - 81 DAYS." An inmate on outdoor work detail.
Train stations are the most diverse places in Korea. The train station wildlife features varying shades of Asian, Buddhist monks in Irish Spring Icy Blast-colored habits, already-homesick-looking U.S. Army personnel, the occasional African or Jewish dude on business, trembling 20-something waifs in the early stages of THC withdrawal who really have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.
A side effect of life as a stranger in an Asian metropolis with a population density greater than 7.2 broom-wielding hags per square inch is that you come to devalue the sense of individuality that seventeen years of feelgood American education tried so laissez-fairely to instill in you. You start to think of yourself as an off-colored piece of candy coasting slowly upward on a network of treadmills in a big hollow candy factory, not fundamentally different from the pieces of candy around you but definitely off-colored and therefore more likely to be thrown away without being eaten. Or if you prefer gamete metaphors to candy metaphors, you imagine yourself as one of a billion other sperm cells ramming head-first into some sort of invisibly gigantic mucousy egg with a circumference so great that the mucousy wall you keep ramming into isn't even slightly curved. You know intuitively that penetrating the egg won't satisfy you, but will more than likely kill you and in the process serve some sinister purpose that reaches beyond your spermatozoon imagination in its vastness and diabolism, but still you keep ramming head-first into the same mucousy eggwall day after day, at no small expense of energy/intelligence.
But both of those metaphors are too grim. In fact, there is no real metaphor that works to describe the bigness of the world. None that I can come up with anyway. All metaphors end up coming across too grim or too glib. When I think of the world, I just kind of sit there with my mouth open so wide that if you came up and rapped me on the top of the head I'd make a hollow coconut sound. It's just big. And intimidating when you're right up close to it, but neither positive nor negative. It's just fucking big. The world. Big and indifferent. Smiling creepily. Everyone ought to experience the bigness for a year or two before returning to one's hide-outs in law school libraries, office cubicles, bunkers 4,000 fathoms below the ocean floor, classrooms, micro-worlds where the world is smaller and heavily distilled and somehow more meaningful that way. When I get back home I'd like to lay low in grad school for a while.
There's an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Laughing with Kafka." He writes:
It is as he says. We spermatozoon have been inside the egg all along. Best to spare ourselves the head trauma and flagellate off in the other direction. Take a few laps. Take it easy. Go make friends. As another one of those anhedonic Omahans who strapped himself to a crude catapult and catapulted himself to someplace weirder than the American Midwest in pursuit of the big zygote, I have my suspicions that what we're all searching for isn't anywhere other than where we're at right now, or at least it is not localized in the Dongdaegu Station lavatory. I refuse to wax Zen Buddhist on the immediacy of the present because I am presently racking up a ridiculous internet tab. I need this money to buy some serious merch, Dear Leader ringer tees, juche rosaries, balsa wood replica Taepodong-2 warheads. K.J. Il, I'm putting your kids through college.
Right now I'm seated in an oversized leather chair in a PC room in Seoul, waiting to meet my tour group at the Hongik University train station. We're taking a bus to North Korea, under cover of darkness. A hundred people playing Starcraft in a small room sounds like a World Farting Federation battle royale. I've spent most of the day in train stations. Nine months into the game, mass transit facilities are sources of almost sexual temptation. A train to Incheon, a card swipe, a quick frisk and I could be in Indonesia by nightfall. The urge to vanish. I sit there entertaining the thought with a ticket in my hand. My cell phone says "KOREA - 81 DAYS." An inmate on outdoor work detail.
Train stations are the most diverse places in Korea. The train station wildlife features varying shades of Asian, Buddhist monks in Irish Spring Icy Blast-colored habits, already-homesick-looking U.S. Army personnel, the occasional African or Jewish dude on business, trembling 20-something waifs in the early stages of THC withdrawal who really have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.
A side effect of life as a stranger in an Asian metropolis with a population density greater than 7.2 broom-wielding hags per square inch is that you come to devalue the sense of individuality that seventeen years of feelgood American education tried so laissez-fairely to instill in you. You start to think of yourself as an off-colored piece of candy coasting slowly upward on a network of treadmills in a big hollow candy factory, not fundamentally different from the pieces of candy around you but definitely off-colored and therefore more likely to be thrown away without being eaten. Or if you prefer gamete metaphors to candy metaphors, you imagine yourself as one of a billion other sperm cells ramming head-first into some sort of invisibly gigantic mucousy egg with a circumference so great that the mucousy wall you keep ramming into isn't even slightly curved. You know intuitively that penetrating the egg won't satisfy you, but will more than likely kill you and in the process serve some sinister purpose that reaches beyond your spermatozoon imagination in its vastness and diabolism, but still you keep ramming head-first into the same mucousy eggwall day after day, at no small expense of energy/intelligence.
But both of those metaphors are too grim. In fact, there is no real metaphor that works to describe the bigness of the world. None that I can come up with anyway. All metaphors end up coming across too grim or too glib. When I think of the world, I just kind of sit there with my mouth open so wide that if you came up and rapped me on the top of the head I'd make a hollow coconut sound. It's just big. And intimidating when you're right up close to it, but neither positive nor negative. It's just fucking big. The world. Big and indifferent. Smiling creepily. Everyone ought to experience the bigness for a year or two before returning to one's hide-outs in law school libraries, office cubicles, bunkers 4,000 fathoms below the ocean floor, classrooms, micro-worlds where the world is smaller and heavily distilled and somehow more meaningful that way. When I get back home I'd like to lay low in grad school for a while.
There's an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Laughing with Kafka." He writes:
"... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home ... imagine [Kafka's] art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along."
It is as he says. We spermatozoon have been inside the egg all along. Best to spare ourselves the head trauma and flagellate off in the other direction. Take a few laps. Take it easy. Go make friends. As another one of those anhedonic Omahans who strapped himself to a crude catapult and catapulted himself to someplace weirder than the American Midwest in pursuit of the big zygote, I have my suspicions that what we're all searching for isn't anywhere other than where we're at right now, or at least it is not localized in the Dongdaegu Station lavatory. I refuse to wax Zen Buddhist on the immediacy of the present because I am presently racking up a ridiculous internet tab. I need this money to buy some serious merch, Dear Leader ringer tees, juche rosaries, balsa wood replica Taepodong-2 warheads. K.J. Il, I'm putting your kids through college.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Kae-mi
On a dead grass island at high noon, Lou and Brian are whipping ants with their jump ropes. I'm standing like Boss Godfrey from Cool Hand Luke with one hand on my hip, looking on as if to say That's some fine ant whippin', boys, though mostly just hoping neither of them zings me in the eye with a backlash. Together they pursue a fugitive - black, wingless - across fifty feet of barren terrain, whipping at half-second intervals, stomping, screaming, spitting, et cetera. Miraculously, the ant survives, or is not visibly killed. Brian asks, "Is it dead?" and Lou says, "No."
But in fleeing, the ant has unwittingly led the Koreans to his home base. I kneel in front of the anthill before the brats can go DEFCON 1 on it. The ants are darting about with Schröder-era Germanic diligence, hoisting blades of grass a bazillion times their mass, arranging pebbles and leafy bits into fortresses impervious to anything smaller and less malicious than a jump rope-wielding six year-old. Four grunts line up along the gashed left side of an expired roly-poly and start pushing. In a fatherly moment, I lure an ant onto my palm and blather, grossly exaggerating the freakish shit-hauling capacity of your average 9 to 5 worker drone, and the boys are fleetingly awed. The ant complex - with its sunblasted gravel, its hopeless brown grass, its frantic ant bureaucrats crawling all over one other - reminds me dimly of Phoenix, Arizona.
Lou challenges me to a jump roping duel. I accept, though my left Achilles tendon has been groaning all morning like a busted hydraulic shaft. I hobble a few steps towards the parking lot with a pink Hello Kitty jump rope that barely reaches down to my knees. A girl pedals by on a banana-seat bicycle and eyes me with blank curiosity, singing an amelodic arpeggiated la la la song as she passes. When I turn back around, I see that the boys are whipping the hell out of everything. The jump rope droops from my hand as I watch the ants scatter, some dashing back to defend the fort, others shooting out into desert space. Their home has been destroyed.
But in fleeing, the ant has unwittingly led the Koreans to his home base. I kneel in front of the anthill before the brats can go DEFCON 1 on it. The ants are darting about with Schröder-era Germanic diligence, hoisting blades of grass a bazillion times their mass, arranging pebbles and leafy bits into fortresses impervious to anything smaller and less malicious than a jump rope-wielding six year-old. Four grunts line up along the gashed left side of an expired roly-poly and start pushing. In a fatherly moment, I lure an ant onto my palm and blather, grossly exaggerating the freakish shit-hauling capacity of your average 9 to 5 worker drone, and the boys are fleetingly awed. The ant complex - with its sunblasted gravel, its hopeless brown grass, its frantic ant bureaucrats crawling all over one other - reminds me dimly of Phoenix, Arizona.
Lou challenges me to a jump roping duel. I accept, though my left Achilles tendon has been groaning all morning like a busted hydraulic shaft. I hobble a few steps towards the parking lot with a pink Hello Kitty jump rope that barely reaches down to my knees. A girl pedals by on a banana-seat bicycle and eyes me with blank curiosity, singing an amelodic arpeggiated la la la song as she passes. When I turn back around, I see that the boys are whipping the hell out of everything. The jump rope droops from my hand as I watch the ants scatter, some dashing back to defend the fort, others shooting out into desert space. Their home has been destroyed.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Chinese Yellow Dust Blues No. 48
Strap on your Hello Kitty respiratory mask: here comes the Chinese Yellow Dust. It's that muggy breath at your window, the fine tan powder that blankets your blankets, it's that sick yellow-brown glow all around like somebody's clapped a pair of sepiatone filters over your eyes. You step outside, into the cloud: where you should be accosted by the hyperactive Korean preschoolers at your doorstep, cat-called by the mulleted teenagers hocking loogies in the alley back behind the pig intestine shack, there's no such hassle today, you can drift for blocks and blocks and encounter no one, just a stray cat army-crawling under a Kia, a polyethylene bag somersaulting in the wind, even the windbags seem to be running from something ...
If you breathe in deep, you don't feel like you're inhaling anything per se, this Chinese Dust after all is not quite what you expected - see, you envisioned, oh, I don't know, like, swirling Saharan dust devils, beach sand being tossed around through the air, haboobs, etc. - while this is more of an omnipresent pee-colored fog, generally thick rather than particulately abrasive, not unlike the basement atmosphere of Your State University's High Society house, except sucking this smoke in for a while doesn't so much give you a contact high as it makes you queasy and itchy all over, then come rashes, hair loss, impotence, goiter, red-green colorblindness, sweet and sour syndrome, Andy Van Slyke's Disease, shingles, the odd schizophrenic fugue state ... the Chinese Dust kisses you on the mouth, leaves you with the dull taste of tungsten on your tongue ...
Fig. 1, 3: Ordinarily gloomy
Fig. 2, 4: Extraordinarily gloomy
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
If you breathe in deep, you don't feel like you're inhaling anything per se, this Chinese Dust after all is not quite what you expected - see, you envisioned, oh, I don't know, like, swirling Saharan dust devils, beach sand being tossed around through the air, haboobs, etc. - while this is more of an omnipresent pee-colored fog, generally thick rather than particulately abrasive, not unlike the basement atmosphere of Your State University's High Society house, except sucking this smoke in for a while doesn't so much give you a contact high as it makes you queasy and itchy all over, then come rashes, hair loss, impotence, goiter, red-green colorblindness, sweet and sour syndrome, Andy Van Slyke's Disease, shingles, the odd schizophrenic fugue state ... the Chinese Dust kisses you on the mouth, leaves you with the dull taste of tungsten on your tongue ...
Fig. 2, 4: Extraordinarily gloomy
Friday, March 23, 2007
I go to bakeries all day long
A three year-old tottering up the sidewalk starts to tip over backwards because she's lost herself in the sunglare of the passing ten year-old's bicycle spokes. He squeals his brakes to gape at the 24 year-old foreigner trudging the other way in yesterday's jeans and a synthetic fur-lined coat that looks thrift storey but really cost him close to 200 American dollars. In seven years, the 24 year-old thinks, the three year-old will be another ten year-old coasting along on a bike. In fourteen years, the ten year-old will be another 24 year-old floundering around a foreign land he knows almost nothing about because he can't find sane work in the country of his birth. Birth; walking by one, pooping in the can by two, reading by six, nocturnally emitting by 13, having second thoughts about everything by 24, what then? ... Our lives unfurl with increasing slowness while our surroundings speed up exponentially. How weird, he thinks, everything must seem to the elderly.
(/artsy-fartsy third-person)
(self-deprecating first-person)
By dinner time, a six year-old affectionately known as "Fart Boy" has kicked me twice, square in the crotch. After the first kick, I get that post-soccer-ball-impact upswell of nausea and hobble to the bathroom, hovering over the can waiting for the puke that doesn't come. After the second kick, I feel positively nothing, I just stand there looking nonplussed. On neither occasion do I use my powers of bigness to scare the shit out of the little shit. But then, a six year-old who is kicking his English teacher in the balls twice in the same day is probably on the right track.
Today has been one of those not infrequent days where the 3rd graders scream for the sake of screaming. A test of the emergency broadcast system. Children ought to be schooled on farms or, when plausible, in the depths of blackest space. Trapping kids in classrooms, arranging their desks so they can be hoppingly navigated like lilly pads, arming them with toys like ceiling fans and markers and whiteboards and flashlights and chairs and windows and electrical outlets and fire extinguishers to play with, giving their high-frequency sound waves four walls to ricochet off of before they come slashing down into my eardrums like drumsticks shaped into shanks, Why?
Teaching in tongues. Give me a black marker and I swear I become a different person. I dislike that person. He's loud and sulky, prone to ranting. Today's pearls:
(after I've kicked over a desk in the front row, I rear my head and bellow so loudly the plexiglas windows rattle in their wooden casings)
"You like being loud, huh? Well, guess what? I can be even louder than you!"
(intoned in a heartbroken warble as I doodle frowning stick figures on the whiteboard with my back to the class)
"Fine. If you won't listen to me, I'll just teach myself."
(truly excited)
"A superintendent is almost the same as a plumber. And who was the most famous plumber of all time? Mario. And what console did Mario Brothers come out on? That's right: Super Nintendo. And Super Nintendo is almost the same as superintendent! Um, but it's spelled and pronounced differently."
Who says these things? Where do these words come from? Not from any mental state that could be called consciousness.
The elementary schoolers blast out of school around 7 PM, leaving in their wake a murder scene of Dixie cups and red sauce. The middle schoolers ooze in with their humid troposphere of sweat and octopus chips. The ecstasy of early childhood, the heroin withdrawal of adolescence, the rickety Temple of Doom bridge that sags down between the two. I make my first class of 7th graders act out a skit.
Tony: Surp is up, doody.
Surf's up, dude.
Tony: ... surp's is up ... dude.
Denise: Hey. Tony. I heard you lik-ee to catch-ee some wabes? I'm Liza's priend-uh, Dennis.
Denise.
Denise: Denise.
Jamal: What's up. Dennis. How - [suddenly realizes he is black, points this out to Tony and Denise, the three of them keel over laughing]
What's so funny?
Jamal: Teacher. Oh my God. I am look like ugly monkey.
Ten o'clock. My last class, 8th graders. They're sucked into to their cell phones within the first five minutes, so I get sulky and start writing Polish on the board. It takes a few minutes for the ringtones to fade, but my cryptic scrawling of seemingly random c's and z's gradually woos their interest for some reason.
"Teacher, what that?"
"Przepraszam. It's Polish for 'Excuse me,'" I say. "You bump into some drunk on the tram, you say, 'Przepraszam.'"
"Teacher, how say?"
"Shuh-pra-shahm."
[in unison] "Shuh-pra-shahm."
[As if awakening from a prolonged vegetative state, several students glance from whiteboard to notebook, notebook to whiteboard ... I stare back, aghast ... they are taking notes!]
"Teacher, Poland speak, what hello?"
"Dzień dobry."
"How say?"
"Jen do-bruh."
By the time the bell rings, they are saying hello, excuse me, goodbye, thank you, goodnight, my cat is black, chattering away like little Copernici. They are saying things in Polish that they probably can't say in English. I leave class looking constipated. In the water cooler reflection I can see the new cowlick that's sprouted from the back of my head flapping around like a car antennae; I didn't have a cowlick before I got everything straightened out. On the heels of this marginal teaching success, I'm thinking that my foppish personality might not be the problem. Maybe I'm just teaching the wrong language. Tomorrow: Plattdeutsch, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, American Sign, morse code ...
My copy of Infinite Jest has a knife wound that doesn't heal until page 157, where there is only the faintest dot of a dent under the word "fellow" in the sentence, "She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son." The book was stabbed on a Sunday morning before dawn two years ago by Jared in one of his whiskey knife rampages. With the same miniature bowie knife that he had earlier used to gouge a chunk of plaster out of our living room wall, he pitched Infinite Jest into the air and stabbed it in the heart, sending it tumbling an impressive ten feet across the room, where it thumped onto the couch and sat there bouncing up and down on the seat cushion for maybe ten minutes.
Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long, not including inside covers (of which there are several), a section dedicated to critical acclaim, and copyright pages. The margins are creepily slim.
Reading Infinite Jest is going to make the next four months more inconvenient than they're already going to be. After a day and a half of lugging it around, my right lugging bicep is already bluish and lumpy from so much lugging. On top of all the lugging, there is the added burden of explaining to people why I'm lugging around this brightly colored pretentious-looking book, and as most of the people I encounter in my lugging are Korean, there is the added added burden of explaining to them that the tome I'm lugging around is not The Bible, though it may one day become something like it.
I just devoured a marine eel (acoustic) in its entirety. According to the local folklore that surrounds all slimy, red, phallic-shaped beasts of the murky depths, choking down all those tiny eelbones is really going to do wonders for my stamina.
(/artsy-fartsy third-person)
(self-deprecating first-person)
By dinner time, a six year-old affectionately known as "Fart Boy" has kicked me twice, square in the crotch. After the first kick, I get that post-soccer-ball-impact upswell of nausea and hobble to the bathroom, hovering over the can waiting for the puke that doesn't come. After the second kick, I feel positively nothing, I just stand there looking nonplussed. On neither occasion do I use my powers of bigness to scare the shit out of the little shit. But then, a six year-old who is kicking his English teacher in the balls twice in the same day is probably on the right track.
Today has been one of those not infrequent days where the 3rd graders scream for the sake of screaming. A test of the emergency broadcast system. Children ought to be schooled on farms or, when plausible, in the depths of blackest space. Trapping kids in classrooms, arranging their desks so they can be hoppingly navigated like lilly pads, arming them with toys like ceiling fans and markers and whiteboards and flashlights and chairs and windows and electrical outlets and fire extinguishers to play with, giving their high-frequency sound waves four walls to ricochet off of before they come slashing down into my eardrums like drumsticks shaped into shanks, Why?
Teaching in tongues. Give me a black marker and I swear I become a different person. I dislike that person. He's loud and sulky, prone to ranting. Today's pearls:
(after I've kicked over a desk in the front row, I rear my head and bellow so loudly the plexiglas windows rattle in their wooden casings)
"You like being loud, huh? Well, guess what? I can be even louder than you!"
(intoned in a heartbroken warble as I doodle frowning stick figures on the whiteboard with my back to the class)
"Fine. If you won't listen to me, I'll just teach myself."
(truly excited)
"A superintendent is almost the same as a plumber. And who was the most famous plumber of all time? Mario. And what console did Mario Brothers come out on? That's right: Super Nintendo. And Super Nintendo is almost the same as superintendent! Um, but it's spelled and pronounced differently."
Who says these things? Where do these words come from? Not from any mental state that could be called consciousness.
The elementary schoolers blast out of school around 7 PM, leaving in their wake a murder scene of Dixie cups and red sauce. The middle schoolers ooze in with their humid troposphere of sweat and octopus chips. The ecstasy of early childhood, the heroin withdrawal of adolescence, the rickety Temple of Doom bridge that sags down between the two. I make my first class of 7th graders act out a skit.
Tony: Surp is up, doody.
Surf's up, dude.
Tony: ... surp's is up ... dude.
Denise: Hey. Tony. I heard you lik-ee to catch-ee some wabes? I'm Liza's priend-uh, Dennis.
Denise.
Denise: Denise.
Jamal: What's up. Dennis. How - [suddenly realizes he is black, points this out to Tony and Denise, the three of them keel over laughing]
What's so funny?
Jamal: Teacher. Oh my God. I am look like ugly monkey.
Ten o'clock. My last class, 8th graders. They're sucked into to their cell phones within the first five minutes, so I get sulky and start writing Polish on the board. It takes a few minutes for the ringtones to fade, but my cryptic scrawling of seemingly random c's and z's gradually woos their interest for some reason.
"Teacher, what that?"
"Przepraszam. It's Polish for 'Excuse me,'" I say. "You bump into some drunk on the tram, you say, 'Przepraszam.'"
"Teacher, how say?"
"Shuh-pra-shahm."
[in unison] "Shuh-pra-shahm."
[As if awakening from a prolonged vegetative state, several students glance from whiteboard to notebook, notebook to whiteboard ... I stare back, aghast ... they are taking notes!]
"Teacher, Poland speak, what hello?"
"Dzień dobry."
"How say?"
"Jen do-bruh."
By the time the bell rings, they are saying hello, excuse me, goodbye, thank you, goodnight, my cat is black, chattering away like little Copernici. They are saying things in Polish that they probably can't say in English. I leave class looking constipated. In the water cooler reflection I can see the new cowlick that's sprouted from the back of my head flapping around like a car antennae; I didn't have a cowlick before I got everything straightened out. On the heels of this marginal teaching success, I'm thinking that my foppish personality might not be the problem. Maybe I'm just teaching the wrong language. Tomorrow: Plattdeutsch, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, American Sign, morse code ...
My copy of Infinite Jest has a knife wound that doesn't heal until page 157, where there is only the faintest dot of a dent under the word "fellow" in the sentence, "She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son." The book was stabbed on a Sunday morning before dawn two years ago by Jared in one of his whiskey knife rampages. With the same miniature bowie knife that he had earlier used to gouge a chunk of plaster out of our living room wall, he pitched Infinite Jest into the air and stabbed it in the heart, sending it tumbling an impressive ten feet across the room, where it thumped onto the couch and sat there bouncing up and down on the seat cushion for maybe ten minutes.
Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long, not including inside covers (of which there are several), a section dedicated to critical acclaim, and copyright pages. The margins are creepily slim.
Reading Infinite Jest is going to make the next four months more inconvenient than they're already going to be. After a day and a half of lugging it around, my right lugging bicep is already bluish and lumpy from so much lugging. On top of all the lugging, there is the added burden of explaining to people why I'm lugging around this brightly colored pretentious-looking book, and as most of the people I encounter in my lugging are Korean, there is the added added burden of explaining to them that the tome I'm lugging around is not The Bible, though it may one day become something like it.
I just devoured a marine eel (acoustic) in its entirety. According to the local folklore that surrounds all slimy, red, phallic-shaped beasts of the murky depths, choking down all those tiny eelbones is really going to do wonders for my stamina.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Brigadier General Relativity
March. My eighth month. I will soon be expatriating from Korea, the aptly named "Land of the Morning Clam," and I have this fear, you see, of leaving this wretched place behind without having kept an adequately thorough record of events and non-events as they occurred or didn't occur. So, for the last quarter of my term, this is my pledge: to divert you with sweltering tales of homoerotic sauna rendezvous, to write bimonthly reviews of local dog eateries, to defect to the North for your slight amusement; to fencehorth, forcehenth, henceforth spew forth more words, more pictures, more non-sequiturs, more naughty words, more misspellings, more misspelled naughty words ...
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
The best mimes of my generation ...
I'm a father on Saturday afternoons from twelve until two, at the rate of 15,000 Korean won an hour. My kids are Lou, 8, and Brian, 6. Lou is the cheeky precocious one who asks too many questions about my Friday nights, and Brian is the whiny sissy boy who is still too young to have any real talents besides crying and wetting his pants at the same time. My wife is Lee Ho-Geun. She puts the coffee on for me. And once in a while, she makes a mean bean paste stew.
Under the loose guise of teaching the kids English, I come over to the apartment and hang out for a couple hours. Sometimes we play chess, other times we play Chinese chess. But in all the times I have been there, I have never once seen their father. I don't imagine they see much of him, either. So far as I know, he has not left his plexiglass bank telling chamber ... bank telling, telling banks ... since the Lee Family Ski Trip last December.
It's Saturday. My alarm - this time, "Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project - startles me into a confused sort of awakeness. After three hours of sweaty sleep with a tornado tearing up my stomach, I have difficulty re-locating the Lee apartment, though I've been there maybe fifteen times. I am lost in the Korean morass of rectangles and squares. I finally straighten out the numbers in my mind - building 206, room 503 - climb the five flights of stairs, tidy my hair in the peephole reflection, dial the security code, 3, 2, 7, um, 2? ... The wife pops out and tells me to take the kids to the park and teach them how to play basketball, in English.
The three of us bring a sad collection of deflated spheroids down to the sandlot between apartment buildings. I dazzle them with a few missed layups and a series of airballs from behind the three point line. Then, I rebound while they granny shoot at the hoop. The only things they're managing to hit are each other. Enthusiasm wanes and our shoot-around dissolves into a soccer-like sport where we're punting the basketball around, and then we're just drop-kicking assorted deflated spheroids at the backboard. We experiment briefly with dodgeball, but the ball is so light, the wind so strong, the kids so weak that it feels like we're playing on the moon.
We get fished into a pickup soccer game with the usual neighborhood riffraff, The Kid With The Prominent Earlobes, The Kid With What Seems Like Nine Fillings, The Kid With Five Dimples Minimum, The Bob Hope Kid ... I am drafted in the first round by The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener, who strikes me at first glance as a shrewd and loyal general manager to be playing for, someone with experience. Brian is on my team. Lou winds up on the other team. The family has been divided.
The other team takes a commanding three to nothing lead early on, partly because The Bob Hope Kid is a juggernaut, partly because the ball is bigger than our goalie, partly because our lone defenseman, Choe Seong-Ook, is sulking and throwing sandballs at the ground. Lou gets cranky and demands that I stop going easy, so I humor him and do some trotting around in circles. I refuse to take any shots on goal. Legitimately trying to score goals in pick-up soccer games against kindergarteners makes you a pervert.
I try to suspend my disbelief and get caught up in the game, but my imagination doesn't fire me up the way it used to when I was ten, when the kids on the other team – whether best friend, churchy kid down the street, unibrowed heir to a local vacuum repair empire – in their striped rugby shirts and dusty Starter jackets, in the flurry of elbows and name-calling, took on suddenly evil hues. Those transmogrifications don't happen today. They are just little kids and I'm their big lumbering servile oaf, an oaf who gets rebounds, shags balls, climbs fences to retrieve things that have been thrown or kicked too far, an oaf who can't move one way or the other without crushing the tiny humans scuttling between his legs, an oaf who is drawing a crowd of ogling fans, who is feeling like a real sicko in doing something wholesome for once. While the kids chase each other around, the oaf stands at midfield, arms akimbo, casting a small Forrest Gump shadow in the early afternoon sun, waiting for a cleared ball to come his way so he can pass it to someone smaller than him.
The score is seven to two, them. A duststorm has kicked up and the game seems to be winding down due to mutual exhaustion when a skirmish breaks out. I decide to be cute and, reaching into my pocket as I trot towards the squealing mass, I produce an off-yellow bus pass, roll my tongue in a high pitched mock whistle, and stand there officiously holding the bus pass up in the air, hoping my idiocy does not go unnoticed. Lou glances up and smiles nervously, nudges his friend, hey, hey, get a load of this big creepy foreigner my mom makes me hang out with, and then there's a scream as The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener knocks Brian to the ground and pounces on top, clawing with both hands at Brian's face.
Brian fights back, grabs both of Baldy's cheeks and yanks down as hard as he can. Baldy punches him in the neck. Brian screams and spits upward, but the spitwad comes splattering down on his forehead, so he screams louder. I grab Baldy by the shirt collar and pull, looking around, hoping some nearby Korean adult will be drunk enough to intervene ...
... but the bystanders have cleared out and it's just me and these little kids on a deserted playground, surrounded on all sides by 14-story apartment buildings but completely alone. Brian and Baldy are both bleeding from the eyes. Every time I manage to subdue them, one dashes past me and roundhouse kicks the other in the chest. Taekwondo. I scream, "Stop, stop, stop," but my voice comes out weak, the sound waves dissipate instantly, scattered by the wind.
Baldy's face is flushed purple and caked with orange, somebody's blood. He's kicking Brian in the gut, trying to rip Brian's face off like a mask. I grab them both by the arms and pull. I am amazed at how tiny and fragile they are, and yet they overpower me, I can't make them stop, though I stomp, bellow, belt out sermons ... Sons of South Korea, peace be upon thee! Peace be upon thy greenish-brown heavily militarized peninsula overflowing with soju and kimchi! Peace be upon thee, ye corporate supermen of the future! Ye aspiring Woori Bank bank tellers! Ye Samsung Life Insurance life insurance brokers! Thy destinies grin sadistically at thee! Fourteen-hour school days! Drunken sexcapades in dimly lit karaoke rooms! Two Starcraft channels! And lo, one day at the end of the rainbow, feathered fedoras and hiking! Nay, drunken hiking! ... but to no avail. They are determined to kill each other, these two six year-olds, calling each other fucking sons of bitches in the sort of Korean that even I understand.
In the swirling dust, the flailing arms, the loogies ... I experience a flashback: grade four, John Beckett brings his yellow hamster, Peaches, to school ... decides Peaches really ought to mingle with the reddish hotdog-shaped class hamster ... drops Peaches into the cage ... in a flash the two furballs are one ... it's a moment before we realize they are tearing each other to shreds ... John, a classic Steinbeck Lenny if you knew the guy, miraculously pries the hamsters apart without crushing either of them in his meaty paws ... but it's too late ... when he holds Peaches up to the light, the critter's right eyeball is dangling out of the socket ... a sad little black circle, like the pupil of a plastic googily eye ... Peaches is trembling with what appears to be hamster rage, but is completely silent, no squeaking or anything ... Johnny's crusty lips tremble, these big blue bags well up under his eyes, he starts to weep ... Peaches, look what he done to Peaches ...
I separate the kids at last. Lou has pinned down Baldy. Brian has collapsed and is weeping into a tree trunk. Their faces are smeared in blood.
"Go home," I tell Baldy. "We go home, you go home."
He's staring, fascinated with the blood on Brian's face, like he wants to make more of it.
"I am big," I say, "you are small. Go home."
Baldy is unfazed, but Brian gets up and tearfully tromps home. Baldy spits in Lou's face and kicks out of the pin, gets to his feet. He charges and tries to tackle Lou, but I fend him off with a basketball. Then, with a strange Van Damme-esque "get into the chopper" sideways head toss, I gesture for Lou to go home. Lou disappears around the corner and then - truly strange - it's just me standing there in this empty sandlot, aiming a basketball at a bloody child who is glaring at my torso like he wants to fight it.
"Hey. Go home."
When I get there, Lou is waiting for me in front of apartment building number 206.
"See you next time," he says, waving.
"Should I come up to check on Brian?" I ask. "He seemed, um, bleeding."
"No, that's okay," Lou says, "but thank you for help in fight. Now I sleep."
A nap sounds good. I give Lou the victory sign and walk home. The clouds have snuck in and it's suddenly cold. The tail end of my coat keeps kicking up in the wind. High school girls float by in their black uniforms - crows or nuns, pick or choose - giggling at me as I pass, spitting out phrases like "Where are you prom?", "I'm pine thank you and you", and "Puck you". Giggling, giggling, giggling. I give them the peace sign. As I walk, sucking on the right corner of my moustache, "Get Together" by The Youngbloods plays in my mind, and this fades neatly into "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson as I'm coming up the stairs to my apartment.
There's a note on my door from The Bostonian, who I have been unintentionally but not accidentally avoiding since he and The Torontonian cremated that cat a few weekends ago. He wants to know where I've been. I shrug to myself. Where have I been?
If I could have any superpower, or if there is any superpower I suspect I may already have, it's obscurity.
Under the loose guise of teaching the kids English, I come over to the apartment and hang out for a couple hours. Sometimes we play chess, other times we play Chinese chess. But in all the times I have been there, I have never once seen their father. I don't imagine they see much of him, either. So far as I know, he has not left his plexiglass bank telling chamber ... bank telling, telling banks ... since the Lee Family Ski Trip last December.
It's Saturday. My alarm - this time, "Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project - startles me into a confused sort of awakeness. After three hours of sweaty sleep with a tornado tearing up my stomach, I have difficulty re-locating the Lee apartment, though I've been there maybe fifteen times. I am lost in the Korean morass of rectangles and squares. I finally straighten out the numbers in my mind - building 206, room 503 - climb the five flights of stairs, tidy my hair in the peephole reflection, dial the security code, 3, 2, 7, um, 2? ... The wife pops out and tells me to take the kids to the park and teach them how to play basketball, in English.
The three of us bring a sad collection of deflated spheroids down to the sandlot between apartment buildings. I dazzle them with a few missed layups and a series of airballs from behind the three point line. Then, I rebound while they granny shoot at the hoop. The only things they're managing to hit are each other. Enthusiasm wanes and our shoot-around dissolves into a soccer-like sport where we're punting the basketball around, and then we're just drop-kicking assorted deflated spheroids at the backboard. We experiment briefly with dodgeball, but the ball is so light, the wind so strong, the kids so weak that it feels like we're playing on the moon.
We get fished into a pickup soccer game with the usual neighborhood riffraff, The Kid With The Prominent Earlobes, The Kid With What Seems Like Nine Fillings, The Kid With Five Dimples Minimum, The Bob Hope Kid ... I am drafted in the first round by The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener, who strikes me at first glance as a shrewd and loyal general manager to be playing for, someone with experience. Brian is on my team. Lou winds up on the other team. The family has been divided.
The other team takes a commanding three to nothing lead early on, partly because The Bob Hope Kid is a juggernaut, partly because the ball is bigger than our goalie, partly because our lone defenseman, Choe Seong-Ook, is sulking and throwing sandballs at the ground. Lou gets cranky and demands that I stop going easy, so I humor him and do some trotting around in circles. I refuse to take any shots on goal. Legitimately trying to score goals in pick-up soccer games against kindergarteners makes you a pervert.
I try to suspend my disbelief and get caught up in the game, but my imagination doesn't fire me up the way it used to when I was ten, when the kids on the other team – whether best friend, churchy kid down the street, unibrowed heir to a local vacuum repair empire – in their striped rugby shirts and dusty Starter jackets, in the flurry of elbows and name-calling, took on suddenly evil hues. Those transmogrifications don't happen today. They are just little kids and I'm their big lumbering servile oaf, an oaf who gets rebounds, shags balls, climbs fences to retrieve things that have been thrown or kicked too far, an oaf who can't move one way or the other without crushing the tiny humans scuttling between his legs, an oaf who is drawing a crowd of ogling fans, who is feeling like a real sicko in doing something wholesome for once. While the kids chase each other around, the oaf stands at midfield, arms akimbo, casting a small Forrest Gump shadow in the early afternoon sun, waiting for a cleared ball to come his way so he can pass it to someone smaller than him.
The score is seven to two, them. A duststorm has kicked up and the game seems to be winding down due to mutual exhaustion when a skirmish breaks out. I decide to be cute and, reaching into my pocket as I trot towards the squealing mass, I produce an off-yellow bus pass, roll my tongue in a high pitched mock whistle, and stand there officiously holding the bus pass up in the air, hoping my idiocy does not go unnoticed. Lou glances up and smiles nervously, nudges his friend, hey, hey, get a load of this big creepy foreigner my mom makes me hang out with, and then there's a scream as The Prematurely Balding Kindergartener knocks Brian to the ground and pounces on top, clawing with both hands at Brian's face.
Brian fights back, grabs both of Baldy's cheeks and yanks down as hard as he can. Baldy punches him in the neck. Brian screams and spits upward, but the spitwad comes splattering down on his forehead, so he screams louder. I grab Baldy by the shirt collar and pull, looking around, hoping some nearby Korean adult will be drunk enough to intervene ...
... but the bystanders have cleared out and it's just me and these little kids on a deserted playground, surrounded on all sides by 14-story apartment buildings but completely alone. Brian and Baldy are both bleeding from the eyes. Every time I manage to subdue them, one dashes past me and roundhouse kicks the other in the chest. Taekwondo. I scream, "Stop, stop, stop," but my voice comes out weak, the sound waves dissipate instantly, scattered by the wind.
Baldy's face is flushed purple and caked with orange, somebody's blood. He's kicking Brian in the gut, trying to rip Brian's face off like a mask. I grab them both by the arms and pull. I am amazed at how tiny and fragile they are, and yet they overpower me, I can't make them stop, though I stomp, bellow, belt out sermons ... Sons of South Korea, peace be upon thee! Peace be upon thy greenish-brown heavily militarized peninsula overflowing with soju and kimchi! Peace be upon thee, ye corporate supermen of the future! Ye aspiring Woori Bank bank tellers! Ye Samsung Life Insurance life insurance brokers! Thy destinies grin sadistically at thee! Fourteen-hour school days! Drunken sexcapades in dimly lit karaoke rooms! Two Starcraft channels! And lo, one day at the end of the rainbow, feathered fedoras and hiking! Nay, drunken hiking! ... but to no avail. They are determined to kill each other, these two six year-olds, calling each other fucking sons of bitches in the sort of Korean that even I understand.
In the swirling dust, the flailing arms, the loogies ... I experience a flashback: grade four, John Beckett brings his yellow hamster, Peaches, to school ... decides Peaches really ought to mingle with the reddish hotdog-shaped class hamster ... drops Peaches into the cage ... in a flash the two furballs are one ... it's a moment before we realize they are tearing each other to shreds ... John, a classic Steinbeck Lenny if you knew the guy, miraculously pries the hamsters apart without crushing either of them in his meaty paws ... but it's too late ... when he holds Peaches up to the light, the critter's right eyeball is dangling out of the socket ... a sad little black circle, like the pupil of a plastic googily eye ... Peaches is trembling with what appears to be hamster rage, but is completely silent, no squeaking or anything ... Johnny's crusty lips tremble, these big blue bags well up under his eyes, he starts to weep ... Peaches, look what he done to Peaches ...
I separate the kids at last. Lou has pinned down Baldy. Brian has collapsed and is weeping into a tree trunk. Their faces are smeared in blood.
"Go home," I tell Baldy. "We go home, you go home."
He's staring, fascinated with the blood on Brian's face, like he wants to make more of it.
"I am big," I say, "you are small. Go home."
Baldy is unfazed, but Brian gets up and tearfully tromps home. Baldy spits in Lou's face and kicks out of the pin, gets to his feet. He charges and tries to tackle Lou, but I fend him off with a basketball. Then, with a strange Van Damme-esque "get into the chopper" sideways head toss, I gesture for Lou to go home. Lou disappears around the corner and then - truly strange - it's just me standing there in this empty sandlot, aiming a basketball at a bloody child who is glaring at my torso like he wants to fight it.
"Hey. Go home."
When I get there, Lou is waiting for me in front of apartment building number 206.
"See you next time," he says, waving.
"Should I come up to check on Brian?" I ask. "He seemed, um, bleeding."
"No, that's okay," Lou says, "but thank you for help in fight. Now I sleep."
A nap sounds good. I give Lou the victory sign and walk home. The clouds have snuck in and it's suddenly cold. The tail end of my coat keeps kicking up in the wind. High school girls float by in their black uniforms - crows or nuns, pick or choose - giggling at me as I pass, spitting out phrases like "Where are you prom?", "I'm pine thank you and you", and "Puck you". Giggling, giggling, giggling. I give them the peace sign. As I walk, sucking on the right corner of my moustache, "Get Together" by The Youngbloods plays in my mind, and this fades neatly into "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson as I'm coming up the stairs to my apartment.
There's a note on my door from The Bostonian, who I have been unintentionally but not accidentally avoiding since he and The Torontonian cremated that cat a few weekends ago. He wants to know where I've been. I shrug to myself. Where have I been?
If I could have any superpower, or if there is any superpower I suspect I may already have, it's obscurity.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Animal World
Standing on the corner in the gas station glow with the Torontonian, the Bostonian, two high school dudes in matching blue uniforms ... the first dying moth of spring swims in circles on the pavement ... the Torontonian is peering down at his iPod with a green flask in his hand ... the Bostonian is emptying a bottle of soju into this high school dude's wide open mouth, molar fillings catching the light ...
A white girl enters the convenience store ... the Torontonian and the Bostonian peek at her through the glass ... the Torontonian pronounces her ugly ... the Bostonian diagnoses her a dyke ... she comes back out with a carton of milk, the Bostonian gives her shit ...
"Sup, cracker?" he snaps.
"Fuck you," she says.
"Just being friendly," shouts the Torontonian, flipping her off.
"Some party you got there, fags," she snarls as she crosses the street.
The wet sound of passing cars fills the silence ... the high school dudes are red-faced and beaming ... it is 2 AM ...
"What are we gonna do now?" asks the Torontonian ... the question makes me shudder, or maybe it's the wind ...
"We are standing here on the corner," the Bostonian says, "and we are keeping quiet until something happens."
While the Torontonian is quacking about the burgundy fitted suit he bought in Phuket, a cab screams to a stop in the middle of the intersection ... there is a sick muffled pop ... the Torontonian shuts up ... with the engine humming, the driver gets out of the cab, walks around front, squats before the bumper ... something's pinned under his right front tire ... a bag? ... a loaf of bread? ... grey and white ... fuzzy ... a tail ... it is a cat ... the driver lines himself up, free kicks the cat corpse and it tumbles, rolls over twice, tail windmilling, limp paws outstretched and bobbing ... he instep kicks it six times until it's nestled with its nose up against the curb ... the driver gets back in the cab and peels out, careens through a red light ...
The Torontonian removes his headphones ... "Christ," I murmur ... the Bostonian staggers into the convenience store and returns, leading the gas station attendant by the arm ... the attendant, his whole face marred by some terrible blueberry-colored bruise, spots the cat, nods grimly, speaks a soft aside to the high school dudes, they nod grimly ...
Minutes pass ... a white Kia pulls up to the curb ... two women get out of the car ... one woman is carrying a black Adidas shoe bag ... she kneels while the other nudges the cat into the bag with her toe ... the bag is carefully placed atop an impromptu sidewalk garbage heap ... the women get back in the car, the car changes lanes, coasts through a red light ...
"That ain't no way to bury a cat," the Bostonian says and I nod grimly, unsure of what he means ...
A man in a tan trenchcoat swaggers by, points at us, baptizes me with his bottle of soju ... drunk, Korean, man ... a drunk Korean man ... he says to us: "The cat has died. Let's go home."
The high schoolers bow to us and chatter to each other en route to the PC room across the street ... I wander into the convenience store to buy a cup of ramen ... the Bostonian and the Torontonian linger on the corner planning a cremation ceremony, but I'm in bed before that happens ...
A white girl enters the convenience store ... the Torontonian and the Bostonian peek at her through the glass ... the Torontonian pronounces her ugly ... the Bostonian diagnoses her a dyke ... she comes back out with a carton of milk, the Bostonian gives her shit ...
"Sup, cracker?" he snaps.
"Fuck you," she says.
"Just being friendly," shouts the Torontonian, flipping her off.
"Some party you got there, fags," she snarls as she crosses the street.
The wet sound of passing cars fills the silence ... the high school dudes are red-faced and beaming ... it is 2 AM ...
"What are we gonna do now?" asks the Torontonian ... the question makes me shudder, or maybe it's the wind ...
"We are standing here on the corner," the Bostonian says, "and we are keeping quiet until something happens."
While the Torontonian is quacking about the burgundy fitted suit he bought in Phuket, a cab screams to a stop in the middle of the intersection ... there is a sick muffled pop ... the Torontonian shuts up ... with the engine humming, the driver gets out of the cab, walks around front, squats before the bumper ... something's pinned under his right front tire ... a bag? ... a loaf of bread? ... grey and white ... fuzzy ... a tail ... it is a cat ... the driver lines himself up, free kicks the cat corpse and it tumbles, rolls over twice, tail windmilling, limp paws outstretched and bobbing ... he instep kicks it six times until it's nestled with its nose up against the curb ... the driver gets back in the cab and peels out, careens through a red light ...
The Torontonian removes his headphones ... "Christ," I murmur ... the Bostonian staggers into the convenience store and returns, leading the gas station attendant by the arm ... the attendant, his whole face marred by some terrible blueberry-colored bruise, spots the cat, nods grimly, speaks a soft aside to the high school dudes, they nod grimly ...
Minutes pass ... a white Kia pulls up to the curb ... two women get out of the car ... one woman is carrying a black Adidas shoe bag ... she kneels while the other nudges the cat into the bag with her toe ... the bag is carefully placed atop an impromptu sidewalk garbage heap ... the women get back in the car, the car changes lanes, coasts through a red light ...
"That ain't no way to bury a cat," the Bostonian says and I nod grimly, unsure of what he means ...
A man in a tan trenchcoat swaggers by, points at us, baptizes me with his bottle of soju ... drunk, Korean, man ... a drunk Korean man ... he says to us: "The cat has died. Let's go home."
The high schoolers bow to us and chatter to each other en route to the PC room across the street ... I wander into the convenience store to buy a cup of ramen ... the Bostonian and the Torontonian linger on the corner planning a cremation ceremony, but I'm in bed before that happens ...
Friday, February 16, 2007
Sometimes I'm the slave, sometimes ...
It's dawn and the foreigners are pushing each other around in shopping carts, frightened giggles and metallic rattling noises coming from the illlit alleyway between chicken places. Meanwhile, Korea sleeps: mommy curled up in bed with her 20 year-old son; daddy splayed out naked, lying unconscious on a medicine-white futon down at the neighborhood rub 'n tug. Soon, Korea will wake up, jettison the kids off to school for twelve hours. Mommy will strap on her sun visor, go out and price haggle with vegetable vendors, come home and cook kimchi stew, stare pensively out the window, watch KBS dramas all afternoon. Daddy will wear a silver suit for fourteen hours and he won't come home after that. The foreigner gets up at one PM, groans, watches videos on the internet until three, walks to school munching on a cornbread thing, thinks this is all a pretty raw deal, public restrooms ain't got toilet paper ...
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Request
If anyone happens to find themselves in The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Universe: please let me know whether they still have The Best of Roxy Music and Exile on Main St. in the jukebox. So I can sleep at night.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Inclined pushups in the buff
I am lying there in the sauna, drifting off as I watch some tubby old guy do inclined pushups in the buff. He does twenty, stands back up, claps his hands, jumps around, everything jiggles. Then, he turns to me and bellows something. I sit up and stare at him through the mist. He's pointing at a spot on the floor and bellowing, cackling and bellowing. He is challenging me to an inclined pushups in the buff duel. I am wearing nothing but sauna steam.
I get in the wheelbarrow position with my legs propped up on a two-foot-high stone bench. The man bellows again, indicating that my toes need to be pressing against the front of the bench, not perched on top of it. I reposition myself accordingly. Then, while this nude Korean man looks on, I start doing pushups. He claps and bellows and cackles. I get to ten and can probably do more, but the tediousness of doing pushups - even naked, even with a nude Korean man watching me - entices me to quit out of sheer boredom.
The nude Korean man cackles, squeezes my bicep, bellows that I am strong. I say, bashfully, no, no, no, you are strong, though he is almost all gut. We talk briefly about his family, about his wife's cooking, about his daughter who is studying something in college, but I don't know the Korean word for her major. He asks if I am coming back to the sauna tomorrow. I nod noncommittally. He squeezes my bicep, cackles, turns and disappears into the mist.
On the flatscreen in front of the hottub is a Bob Saget Era episode of America's Funniest Videos. Seated around the hottub is a ring of naked Korean men, watching Bob Saget. It's one of the $100,000 Contest episodes, so I take a seat. The grand prize winner is someone dropping a toilet down the stairs. Nobody laughs.
I get in the wheelbarrow position with my legs propped up on a two-foot-high stone bench. The man bellows again, indicating that my toes need to be pressing against the front of the bench, not perched on top of it. I reposition myself accordingly. Then, while this nude Korean man looks on, I start doing pushups. He claps and bellows and cackles. I get to ten and can probably do more, but the tediousness of doing pushups - even naked, even with a nude Korean man watching me - entices me to quit out of sheer boredom.
The nude Korean man cackles, squeezes my bicep, bellows that I am strong. I say, bashfully, no, no, no, you are strong, though he is almost all gut. We talk briefly about his family, about his wife's cooking, about his daughter who is studying something in college, but I don't know the Korean word for her major. He asks if I am coming back to the sauna tomorrow. I nod noncommittally. He squeezes my bicep, cackles, turns and disappears into the mist.
On the flatscreen in front of the hottub is a Bob Saget Era episode of America's Funniest Videos. Seated around the hottub is a ring of naked Korean men, watching Bob Saget. It's one of the $100,000 Contest episodes, so I take a seat. The grand prize winner is someone dropping a toilet down the stairs. Nobody laughs.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Walking home.
I feed the beasts some word puzzles and while they tear each other apart, my mind melts into the white paint on the wall. It is six something and I have taught nine classes today. Two of them weren't anywhere on my schedule, but I taught them anyway, because I am a slave for children.
Walking home. I'm two blocks from my dumpy little flat where a clogged toilet and a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal await me. It's like the afterlife. But first, I stop for a bowl of take-out kimchi stew. When I get inside the restaurant, the owner guy approaches and embraces me. What? Oh, right. This man befriended me whilst he was staggering drunk one night several weeks ago; I think it was a Tuesday. He insists that I stay and eat at his restaurant, so I do. I'm sitting by myself and in Korea, this means you are insane. The table of high school girls next to me bubbles over with giggles.
The owner guy asks me if I want a cup of coffee and I say yes. I wait outside in the cold, breathing clouds. He comes out and hands me a little pee cup of sugary milkwater and then practices his English on me for half an hour. He seems to know 30,000 vocabulary words, but not how to pronounce or use them. He embraces me again, says he is very jubilation, and asks me to come by his restaurant every day for good pood. I say sure.
A block away from home, I stop by the bakery for a cornbread thing. I'm browsing the cornbread thing shelf when the door opens behind me and one of my middle school students walks in.
"Teacher. Buy me pood. Puh-lease-uh," he says.
Ordinarily, I would drop a quip and disappear into the night, but my will is so decimated at this point that I cave in and buy him a pig-face cheese danish. He says thanks.
"One day," he says, "I buy you pood."
I'm in the convenience store across the street from my apartment. My canned coffee rings up for three bucks which strikes me as vaguely ludicrous, but I'm too spaced to argue. As I pull my wallet from my back pocket, it vomits all my cards out on the floor. While I'm bent over trying to claw the cards up off the tile with my untrimmed fingernails, five Korean geezers cut in front of me in line. When I finally get out of there with the coffee, I'm stopped at the door by a woman holding a gurgling fetus/baby thing that's about six hours fresh from the womb.
"Excuse me," she says, "please talk to Jae-Min."
Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: [ogles, spits up on self]
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello, Jae-Min!
Jae-Min: Wagghhhhh.
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: Blughhhhh.
Mom thanks me, bows, and walks away.
I shut the door and lock it behind me. I'm home. On the dining room table is a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal. In the bathroom is a clogged toilet.
Walking home. I'm two blocks from my dumpy little flat where a clogged toilet and a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal await me. It's like the afterlife. But first, I stop for a bowl of take-out kimchi stew. When I get inside the restaurant, the owner guy approaches and embraces me. What? Oh, right. This man befriended me whilst he was staggering drunk one night several weeks ago; I think it was a Tuesday. He insists that I stay and eat at his restaurant, so I do. I'm sitting by myself and in Korea, this means you are insane. The table of high school girls next to me bubbles over with giggles.
The owner guy asks me if I want a cup of coffee and I say yes. I wait outside in the cold, breathing clouds. He comes out and hands me a little pee cup of sugary milkwater and then practices his English on me for half an hour. He seems to know 30,000 vocabulary words, but not how to pronounce or use them. He embraces me again, says he is very jubilation, and asks me to come by his restaurant every day for good pood. I say sure.
A block away from home, I stop by the bakery for a cornbread thing. I'm browsing the cornbread thing shelf when the door opens behind me and one of my middle school students walks in.
"Teacher. Buy me pood. Puh-lease-uh," he says.
Ordinarily, I would drop a quip and disappear into the night, but my will is so decimated at this point that I cave in and buy him a pig-face cheese danish. He says thanks.
"One day," he says, "I buy you pood."
I'm in the convenience store across the street from my apartment. My canned coffee rings up for three bucks which strikes me as vaguely ludicrous, but I'm too spaced to argue. As I pull my wallet from my back pocket, it vomits all my cards out on the floor. While I'm bent over trying to claw the cards up off the tile with my untrimmed fingernails, five Korean geezers cut in front of me in line. When I finally get out of there with the coffee, I'm stopped at the door by a woman holding a gurgling fetus/baby thing that's about six hours fresh from the womb.
"Excuse me," she says, "please talk to Jae-Min."
Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: [ogles, spits up on self]
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello, Jae-Min!
Jae-Min: Wagghhhhh.
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: Blughhhhh.
Mom thanks me, bows, and walks away.
I shut the door and lock it behind me. I'm home. On the dining room table is a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal. In the bathroom is a clogged toilet.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Run DMZ
2100 hours
I am due at Camp Kim by 0700 hours. Decisions await me, like where will I sleep? How will I sleep? Will I sleep? But for now, I can only leer out the dark window watching the lights as they hover by.
Korea has two trains, the fast one and the slow one. The fast one is named KTX. The slow one is named Mugunghwa, after the Korean national flower. I am riding the slow one.
0100 hours
The Mugunghwa groans to a stop. The doors hiss open and I step off the train. I climb the stairs between two escalators. Under the white lights of Seoul Station, I scout out a bench I can drop dead on for a few hours. But the lights are suddenly shut off. Next thing, I’m being hustled out the door with the rest of Seoul’s poor, mad, disfigured, drunk, foreign souls. After the doors are locked shut behind us, we stand together for a few minutes at the top of the stairs, a confused mass of grumbling, flailing human beings. It’s like the aftermath of a shipwreck.
0130 hours
I am standing at the end of a long line of people waiting for cabs. But the cabs ain’t coming. A taxi scalper seduces me into riding with him for ten bucks. I get in the back seat and tell him Camp Kim.
0200 hours
The cab stops on a darkened street. I hand the cabby my last ten bucks and get out. Ahead of me is an open gate flanked by two Korean MPs. I ask them about Camp Kim. The one glances at me briefly then stares straight ahead. The other doesn’t budge at all.
"Hello. Where is Camp Kim?"
The one glances at the other, glances at me again, mumbles "I don’t know," stares straight ahead. I shrug and walk through the gate.
I come to a small brown building and peer into the window. Inside are four Korean soldiers sitting around in their fatigues eating ramen noodles. One of them gets up and comes to the window.
"Is this Camp Kim?"
"No," he says.
He invites me in and draws a map on the back of a napkin.
"Is it near?" I ask him in Korean.
"Yes. Near," he replies in English.
0230 hours
It is a nasty kind of cold. I walk down the ice-scabbed sidewalk. It’s been half an hour and I haven’t seen anything but barbed wire and the occasional Korean MP. Perhaps the Koreans meant "near" in some relativistic Seoulian sense. I decide to hail a cab, but I’m wondering just how many cabs come down this way.
0300 hours
A cab stops. I get in back.
"Camp Kim," I say.
"Camp Kim?" I ask.
No answer. The cabby watches me in the rear view mirror.
The passenger’s side door opens and a pudgy crew cut drops in shotgun.
"What time is it?" he asks.
The cab driver puts his index finger on the clock radio.
"Fuck all. Late for curfew."
I ask the guy where he’s going, but he mumbles and sinks into his chair, falls asleep with his eyes open. He is stoned. I tell the cab driver that we’re both going to Camp Kim. The cab driver calls an English interpreter, but the interpreter’s English is no better than the cab driver’s.
After a few minutes sitting in the dark, the cab driver has an epiphany and starts driving. The stoned soldier wakes up, gives me an uncomfortable frontseat/backseat embrace, and says thank you like he’s about to cry.
0330 hours
Arrival at the Hotel Gaya. I rifle through my wallet for the fare, but find nothing but receipts. My pockets yield no change. The stoned soldier produces a crumpled 1,000 won note and holds his palm out to the cab driver. It is assumed that through some unspoken bond forged during our travels that the driver will not expect us to pay. This is not the case.
I suggest to the cabby that we hit up a cash machine, but he’s not having it. I search every pocket in my pants, my coat, my body. Nothing. I open up my backpack and unzip an out-of-the-way compartment. On most occasions, this reveals exploded pens and old boarding passes. This time, I find twenty dollars in change that I didn’t know I had. I hand the cabby the fare and a generous tip. When I get out, the stoned soldier hugs me.
My room has two beds and a bottle of aftershave in the bathroom. I catch the last ten minutes of Charlie’s Angels before I sleep.
0700 hours
I report to USO headquarters wearing the bland formal wear specified in the tour information packet. But glancing at the crowd of westerners around me, I see that I am laughably overdressed. I buy a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine and sigh. I have ironed my fancy pants for nothing.
0730 hours
We get on a bus.
0800 hours
We escape Seoul’s gravitational pull. The roadside turns all mawkish and brown, like the floodplains of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The highway traffic thins out until it’s only semi-trucks and square blue vans on the road with us. We stop at a gate. Next to the gate is a billboard with a cartoon depicting a boot stepping on a shiny metal thing. Above the boot is a fireball. Above the fireball is a bright red Korean word. One assumes this word means "land mines" in Korean.
0830 hours
A craggy-faced lieutenant steps on board. The name on his uniform is Polish, encoded in Cs and Zs. Miraculously, he pronounces it "Spinski." He is holding a stainless steel coffee mug the size and shape of a cremation urn.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DMZ," he says. "Your debriefing is at 0900 hours. Any questions?"
Someone in the front row ogles his mug and asks, "How much coffee do you drink?"
"About three of these cups a day in the winter," he says. "I don’t drink coffee during the summer because it gets hot up here."
0900 hours
We file into the conference room. While we're waiting for our debriefing, we sign waivers. We are on a covert tour group espionage mission. The lights dim.
Spinski takes the stage and gives a Powerpoint presentation. He starts out booming like a drill sergeant, but after a few minutes he is stammering like a buck private. By slide six, he is sputtering out. Things start to unravel. Behind him is a half-red half-blue map of the Korean peninsula ...
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
He clicks ahead to the next slide, a grainy black-and-white photo of Kim Il-Sung.
Spinski: ... Communist North Korea was ruled by Kim ...
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
He leaps off stage and dashes out of the room. Nobody makes a sound. Another officer takes over. The name on his uniform is Dawkins.
Dawkins: Apparently, Lieutenant Spinski woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m not sure what just happened. In 1948, Kim Il-Sung took control of Communist North Korea ...
0930 hours
We are back in the bus. Spinski is gone, Dawkins has taken control.
"When we arrive at the Joint Security Area, you will be on your best behavior," Dawkins says.
"You will see North Korean soldiers," Dawkins says.
"Do not flip them the bird. They know what the bird means," Dawkins says.
"Do not shout at them. Do not shout at them in Korean, because I will not understand you," Dawkins says.
"Do not shout at them in English, because I will understand you," Dawkins says.
1000 hours
The bus crests a hill and stops. We get out and stand in two lines. Dawkins leads us up the stairs, through an empty white building of polished granite and glass.
"This 49 million dollar facility was built by the Hyundai Corporation to host North/South family reunions," Dawkins says. "It has never been used."
"On the other side of this facility," Dawkins says, "is North Korea."
We file slowly down the hall. Mr. Kim, our Korean civilian tour guide, drifts towards the back.
"I am something nervous whenever I go," he says. "The North Korea is knowing my face. I am fear, that they shoot me one time."
1030 hours
We step out onto a grey cement platform. Ahead of us are two long, light blue compounds. Behind them stands a drab three-story building, a Maoist pagoda. And twenty feet away are the North Korean soldiers.
There are fifteen of them. They are milling around, mingling, meandering idly along the border, watching us.
Dawkins orders us to stand in a straight line facing the North Koreans. He peers across at his brown-uniformed nemeses.
"There are a lot of them out today," Dawkins says. "I don’t know why."
"Don’t point, don’t shout, don’t taunt them," Dawkins says.
"They may taunt you. They may make throat-slashing gestures. They may flip you the bird. They misbehave. That’s why we call this The Monkey House," Dawkins says.
"Right now, they are taking hundreds of pictures of you. There are cameras watching you from guard posts hidden in the trees," Dawkins says.
"They are taking hundreds of pictures of you and we encourage you to return the favor," Dawkins says.
I snap a few photographs but anxiety keeps me from focusing. These men in the funny hats have guns and they are separated from us by twenty feet and a four-inch high cement beam. And they are staring. Contemptuous stares? Curious stares? I lower my camera and stare back, wondering ...
Three of the soldiers suddenly break from the rest of their comrades and stand in a row facing away from us. A commanding officer drops down on one knee in front of them. Our side is silent as we crane our necks to see what exactly they are doing.
Soft gasps as the officer reaches into his pocket and pulls out ... a camera. The three soldiers glance behind them and reposition themselves accordingly. There is some time before we realize fully what is going on. They are taking pictures with us. Not for strategic reasons, for espionage, to stick to Kim Jong-Il's fridge; but for curiosity, amusement, bragging rights ... They are tourists. Two or three at a time, the North Koreans line up with their heels right up against the wall. The others wait in line. They pose next to each other with our blurry black and white faces watching them in the background. This goes on for ten minutes. I take pictures of them taking pictures of me. You stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you, that sort of thing.
1045 hours
A daydream plays itself out in my mind. Keith Petit – a lowly space dilettante from Bellevue, Nebraska – sprints headlong into a wall of North Korean soldiers. Naturally, the North Korean soldiers respond by blasting him with machine gun bullets until it is objectively clear that he is dead. The South Koreans respond accordingly by firing on the North Korean soldiers. As there is only a four-inch high cement barrier separating the two of them, soldiers from both sides cross this barrier freely in the ensuing gunfight. With relations between the two Koreas strained as it is, the North views Petit’s bellowing, bow-legged infiltration as a declaration of war. After examining Petit’s dossier, America views it as an act of unexplained idiocy, but seizes the opportunity to nuclearly annihilate North Korea. Radioactive dust meanders into China. China – already tempted to stick up for their North Korean chums, furthermore slobbering over the recently vacated Korean peninsula – jumps in on the side of what remains of the North Korean army. China nukes Seoul, Busan, Daegu – note that if Petit hadn’t been killed in the gunfight he started, he would have almost certainly met his demise at this point – Japan nukes China, Pakistan nukes India, France nukes Iceland for some reason ... a nuclear orgy ensues and the whole world wants in. When the smoke clears, intelligent life on earth has been extinguished. The three-toed sloth survives but does not evolve quickly enough to spread its three-toed wisdom to the stars before the rapidly expanding universe disperses to the point that matter can no longer form. Nothingness comes into existence, somethingness ceases to be. I blink and slide my finger up my crotch to make sure my fly isn’t down. We are all very powerful, depending on what time it is.
The North Koreans arrange themselves single file and march dodderingly away, a sluggish mopey march, not the frightening clockwork we see on the news. Dawkins leads us down the stairs and into the light blue compound on the left.
Inside the compound are two dark wooden tables, a display case full of plastic flags, and in the corner by the door, a mauve Samsung heater. In front of the back door stands a Korean soldier. This is the door to North Korea.
"This is a Republic of Korea special forces officer," Dawkins says.
"He is trained in the martial art of taekwondo. Do not get too close to him. Do not try to touch him. He will ... stop you," Dawkins says.
"On one occasion, the North Koreans opened the door behind him, seized him by the coat, and attempted to drag him across to their side of the border," Dawkins says.
"He beat them both up pretty bad," Dawkins says.
"See that display case with the plastic flags?" Dawkins asks.
We stare.
"Those plastic flags used to be silk flags, but a little while ago, when President Bush came to town, two North Korean soldiers broke into the display case," Dawkins says. "One used the American flag to shine his shoes. The other used the South Korean flag to blow his nose."
"We have replaced the silk flags with plastic flags to deter the North Koreans from repeating this performance," Dawkins says.
You can’t really blow your nose with a plastic flag.
We take pictures standing next to the gatekeeper. Most people flip the peace sign.
1100 hours
The bus takes us to a South Korean village nestled inside the DMZ. The South Koreans call the village Daeseong-dong. The Americans call the village Freedom Village. I’m not sure what the North Koreans call it.
We stop at a restaurant. I eat bulgogi with two scarf-wearing Irishmen and a Swede who is the brother of a mediocre Korean League soccer player. Someone asks where I’m from and their faces blanch when I say Nebraska. USA. I am ignored. After ten minutes, I’ve quipped my way back into the conversation, but by then the topic has shifted to America’s airport security policies. They are staring at me expectantly.
"I just live there. I didn’t invent the place," I shrug. For that, you have George Washington Carver to thank. He also invented the peanut.
1200 hours
Our bus passes through the thick of the DMZ. Though billed as an environmentalist’s wet dream, in winter it is above all a bleak place. The grass is brown, the trees are gnarled, the terrain has the look of tussled hair. Dawkins tells us that a photography ban is in effect and that our cameras will be confiscated if we try to take any pictures. But nothing out here looks especially picturesque.
1230 hours
The bus huffs and puffs up the side of a mountain. When it reaches the top, we get out and pay 50 cents to stare through binoculars at the southernmost swatch of North Korea. We see brownish farmland nestled in between green-grey mountains. Square concrete slabs. And a flagpole.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the North Koreans call Peace Village," Dawkins says.
"But we call it Propaganda Village," Dawkins says.
"We call it Propaganda Village because nobody actually lives there," Dawkins says.
"Propaganda Village is maintained by a few North Korean servicemen who clean and turn the lights on and off every so often to make the buildings look inhabited," Dawkins says.
"The flagpole you see is the tallest flagpole in the world. In the 1980s, the South Koreans built a 328-foot flagpole on their side of the Demilitarized Zone. The North Koreans responded by building a taller one," Dawkins says.
"The flagpole you see stands at 525 feet tall. The flag you see weighs 600 pounds. On a wet day, it cannot fly," Dawkins says.
"The US Army is offering a one million dollar reward to anyone who can cut a one meter square off of that flag and return it to camp. One day, I hope to claim that reward," Dawkins says.
High up as we are, the two Korean flags are twiggy models, you could crush them between your fingers. And they're only a couple inches apart from each other. The buildings of Propaganda Village and Freedom Village lay strewn in the grass, little bits of paper. On the north horizon is the city of Kaesong. A few flecks of silver glisten in the sun. These are North Korean cars.
(This picture was taken from ground level. If you squint, you can see Kim Jong-Il's face chiseled into the side of the mountain. Kidding.)
1400 hours
We watch a video.
Introduction: a small Korean girl walking through a field, weeping into a handkerchief. Suddenly, an explosion. The girl gasps and turns around. Building guitar feedback and a fuzz bass riff. Drums. Black-and-white footage of tanks thundering through the brush, soldiers crawling forward on their elbows, shells ejaculating, explosions, explosions, explosions. A History Channel voiceover.
In June of 1950 ...
The 38th parallel ...
Communist forces ...
4 million casualties ...
A guitar solo.
Suddenly, everything is Technicolor. The camera pans over an animated landscape of luscious green tropical vegetation. Deer dashing between the trees. Toucan Sams pirouetting through the air. Kim Jong-Il is vigorously shaking hands with a South Korean president. Uniformed Asian men are sitting around a dark brown table. Families are strolling hand-in-hand along a barbed wire fence.
The Demilitarized Zone is ...
... an environmental treasure trove ...
... 1,000 square kilometers of hope ...
... a seed of peace planted in the hearts and minds of all Koreans, North and South alike ...
A harp flourish. The screen goes black. The projection screens roll back up and the lights come on. Blink.
1430 hours
We stop at the gift shop. Against my better judgment, I buy a DMZ t-shirt because the smiling anime soldiers on the front are too ridiculous to pass up. I avoid the North Korean hard liquor cabinet. A concerned shopper - a chubby bearded guy in a black t-shirt - asks Dawkins whether any of the gift shop's proceeds go directly to North Korea.
"No," Dawkins says. "All of the North Korean products for sale here are purchased by a South Korean agency that does business directly with the North Koreans."
"So," says the bearded guy, "the money I'm paying goes to the South Korean agency. But the South Korean agency's money goes to the North Koreans, doesn't it?"
"Yes," says Dawkins. "But none of the money you see here today is going to end up in the hands of Kim Jong-Il."
The chubby guy looks a little bewildered, then turns around to go see about the Pyeongyang brandy.
1500 hours
Since the de facto end of the Korean War, the North Koreans have dug at least four tunnels winding from the North/South border all the way to Seoul, some 3.5 kilometers away. The tunnels - if they weren't stuffed with tourists - could pump 30,000 North Korean troops into downtown Seoul within a couple of hours. Ostensibly, these tunnels were dug for the purpose of invading South Korea, but the Capra in me imagines that the North Koreans were just lonely, that every now and again when Kim Jong-Il was feeling drunk or horny or magnanimous, they received his supreme permission to take a weekend in Seoul, to drop in and surprise old friends and relatives, maybe hit up a karaoke room or a massage parlor or something ...
We don yellow hardhats and trudge down a sharply descending two-mile long shaft until we reach the bottom. Stretching towards the north like a clogged artery is a narrow, jagged yellow-lit tunnel. Inside, water drizzles down from the ceiling and pools up on the ground. I notice the rocks are the same rocks they use to build most of the office stairwells in Korea. Granite?
We follow the tunnel to the end. At the end of the tunnel is a patch of barbed wire in front of a metal door. Watching the metal door is a CCTV camera. Who is watching the camera?
By the time the South Koreans found this tunnel, the North Koreans had abandoned it and painted the walls black. "Just coal mining," they said ...
1630 hours
We have parted ways with forty bucks and thus, our mission is complete. We’re in the bus, riding back to Seoul. I haven’t seen the city in the daytime yet. It looks like any other Korean city, but bigger. Apartments, smokestacks, cars. It’s as bleak as I expected. But as we cross the Han River, the setting sun sits at just the right angle to glance off the water and obscure the nastiness as it rushes at the speed of light to meet me. There’s a wreath of brightness surrounding all those grey rectangles. It’s almost relaxing. The British teenager in the seat behind me is bitching, asking her dad when we’re gonna get back to Seoul.
"This is Seoul, cupcake," her dad says, "I think."
"I can’t wait to get back to the room," the girl says. "I’m bored."
I squint out the window and think, it’s been a real long time since I’ve been bored.
I am due at Camp Kim by 0700 hours. Decisions await me, like where will I sleep? How will I sleep? Will I sleep? But for now, I can only leer out the dark window watching the lights as they hover by.
Korea has two trains, the fast one and the slow one. The fast one is named KTX. The slow one is named Mugunghwa, after the Korean national flower. I am riding the slow one.
0100 hours
The Mugunghwa groans to a stop. The doors hiss open and I step off the train. I climb the stairs between two escalators. Under the white lights of Seoul Station, I scout out a bench I can drop dead on for a few hours. But the lights are suddenly shut off. Next thing, I’m being hustled out the door with the rest of Seoul’s poor, mad, disfigured, drunk, foreign souls. After the doors are locked shut behind us, we stand together for a few minutes at the top of the stairs, a confused mass of grumbling, flailing human beings. It’s like the aftermath of a shipwreck.
0130 hours
I am standing at the end of a long line of people waiting for cabs. But the cabs ain’t coming. A taxi scalper seduces me into riding with him for ten bucks. I get in the back seat and tell him Camp Kim.
0200 hours
The cab stops on a darkened street. I hand the cabby my last ten bucks and get out. Ahead of me is an open gate flanked by two Korean MPs. I ask them about Camp Kim. The one glances at me briefly then stares straight ahead. The other doesn’t budge at all.
"Hello. Where is Camp Kim?"
The one glances at the other, glances at me again, mumbles "I don’t know," stares straight ahead. I shrug and walk through the gate.
I come to a small brown building and peer into the window. Inside are four Korean soldiers sitting around in their fatigues eating ramen noodles. One of them gets up and comes to the window.
"Is this Camp Kim?"
"No," he says.
He invites me in and draws a map on the back of a napkin.
"Is it near?" I ask him in Korean.
"Yes. Near," he replies in English.
0230 hours
It is a nasty kind of cold. I walk down the ice-scabbed sidewalk. It’s been half an hour and I haven’t seen anything but barbed wire and the occasional Korean MP. Perhaps the Koreans meant "near" in some relativistic Seoulian sense. I decide to hail a cab, but I’m wondering just how many cabs come down this way.
0300 hours
A cab stops. I get in back.
"Camp Kim," I say.
"Camp Kim?" I ask.
No answer. The cabby watches me in the rear view mirror.
The passenger’s side door opens and a pudgy crew cut drops in shotgun.
"What time is it?" he asks.
The cab driver puts his index finger on the clock radio.
"Fuck all. Late for curfew."
I ask the guy where he’s going, but he mumbles and sinks into his chair, falls asleep with his eyes open. He is stoned. I tell the cab driver that we’re both going to Camp Kim. The cab driver calls an English interpreter, but the interpreter’s English is no better than the cab driver’s.
After a few minutes sitting in the dark, the cab driver has an epiphany and starts driving. The stoned soldier wakes up, gives me an uncomfortable frontseat/backseat embrace, and says thank you like he’s about to cry.
0330 hours
Arrival at the Hotel Gaya. I rifle through my wallet for the fare, but find nothing but receipts. My pockets yield no change. The stoned soldier produces a crumpled 1,000 won note and holds his palm out to the cab driver. It is assumed that through some unspoken bond forged during our travels that the driver will not expect us to pay. This is not the case.
I suggest to the cabby that we hit up a cash machine, but he’s not having it. I search every pocket in my pants, my coat, my body. Nothing. I open up my backpack and unzip an out-of-the-way compartment. On most occasions, this reveals exploded pens and old boarding passes. This time, I find twenty dollars in change that I didn’t know I had. I hand the cabby the fare and a generous tip. When I get out, the stoned soldier hugs me.
My room has two beds and a bottle of aftershave in the bathroom. I catch the last ten minutes of Charlie’s Angels before I sleep.
0700 hours
I report to USO headquarters wearing the bland formal wear specified in the tour information packet. But glancing at the crowd of westerners around me, I see that I am laughably overdressed. I buy a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine and sigh. I have ironed my fancy pants for nothing.
0730 hours
We get on a bus.
0800 hours
We escape Seoul’s gravitational pull. The roadside turns all mawkish and brown, like the floodplains of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The highway traffic thins out until it’s only semi-trucks and square blue vans on the road with us. We stop at a gate. Next to the gate is a billboard with a cartoon depicting a boot stepping on a shiny metal thing. Above the boot is a fireball. Above the fireball is a bright red Korean word. One assumes this word means "land mines" in Korean.
0830 hours
A craggy-faced lieutenant steps on board. The name on his uniform is Polish, encoded in Cs and Zs. Miraculously, he pronounces it "Spinski." He is holding a stainless steel coffee mug the size and shape of a cremation urn.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DMZ," he says. "Your debriefing is at 0900 hours. Any questions?"
Someone in the front row ogles his mug and asks, "How much coffee do you drink?"
"About three of these cups a day in the winter," he says. "I don’t drink coffee during the summer because it gets hot up here."
0900 hours
We file into the conference room. While we're waiting for our debriefing, we sign waivers. We are on a covert tour group espionage mission. The lights dim.
Spinski takes the stage and gives a Powerpoint presentation. He starts out booming like a drill sergeant, but after a few minutes he is stammering like a buck private. By slide six, he is sputtering out. Things start to unravel. Behind him is a half-red half-blue map of the Korean peninsula ...
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: In nineteen-forty ...
He clicks ahead to the next slide, a grainy black-and-white photo of Kim Il-Sung.
Spinski: ... Communist North Korea was ruled by Kim ...
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
[pause]
[pause]
[pause]
Spinski: Kim ...
He leaps off stage and dashes out of the room. Nobody makes a sound. Another officer takes over. The name on his uniform is Dawkins.
Dawkins: Apparently, Lieutenant Spinski woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m not sure what just happened. In 1948, Kim Il-Sung took control of Communist North Korea ...
0930 hours
We are back in the bus. Spinski is gone, Dawkins has taken control.
"When we arrive at the Joint Security Area, you will be on your best behavior," Dawkins says.
"You will see North Korean soldiers," Dawkins says.
"Do not flip them the bird. They know what the bird means," Dawkins says.
"Do not shout at them. Do not shout at them in Korean, because I will not understand you," Dawkins says.
"Do not shout at them in English, because I will understand you," Dawkins says.
1000 hours
The bus crests a hill and stops. We get out and stand in two lines. Dawkins leads us up the stairs, through an empty white building of polished granite and glass.
"This 49 million dollar facility was built by the Hyundai Corporation to host North/South family reunions," Dawkins says. "It has never been used."
"On the other side of this facility," Dawkins says, "is North Korea."
We file slowly down the hall. Mr. Kim, our Korean civilian tour guide, drifts towards the back.
"I am something nervous whenever I go," he says. "The North Korea is knowing my face. I am fear, that they shoot me one time."
1030 hours
We step out onto a grey cement platform. Ahead of us are two long, light blue compounds. Behind them stands a drab three-story building, a Maoist pagoda. And twenty feet away are the North Korean soldiers.
There are fifteen of them. They are milling around, mingling, meandering idly along the border, watching us.
Dawkins orders us to stand in a straight line facing the North Koreans. He peers across at his brown-uniformed nemeses.
"There are a lot of them out today," Dawkins says. "I don’t know why."
"Don’t point, don’t shout, don’t taunt them," Dawkins says.
"They may taunt you. They may make throat-slashing gestures. They may flip you the bird. They misbehave. That’s why we call this The Monkey House," Dawkins says.
"Right now, they are taking hundreds of pictures of you. There are cameras watching you from guard posts hidden in the trees," Dawkins says.
"They are taking hundreds of pictures of you and we encourage you to return the favor," Dawkins says.
I snap a few photographs but anxiety keeps me from focusing. These men in the funny hats have guns and they are separated from us by twenty feet and a four-inch high cement beam. And they are staring. Contemptuous stares? Curious stares? I lower my camera and stare back, wondering ...
Three of the soldiers suddenly break from the rest of their comrades and stand in a row facing away from us. A commanding officer drops down on one knee in front of them. Our side is silent as we crane our necks to see what exactly they are doing.
Soft gasps as the officer reaches into his pocket and pulls out ... a camera. The three soldiers glance behind them and reposition themselves accordingly. There is some time before we realize fully what is going on. They are taking pictures with us. Not for strategic reasons, for espionage, to stick to Kim Jong-Il's fridge; but for curiosity, amusement, bragging rights ... They are tourists. Two or three at a time, the North Koreans line up with their heels right up against the wall. The others wait in line. They pose next to each other with our blurry black and white faces watching them in the background. This goes on for ten minutes. I take pictures of them taking pictures of me. You stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you, that sort of thing.
1045 hours
A daydream plays itself out in my mind. Keith Petit – a lowly space dilettante from Bellevue, Nebraska – sprints headlong into a wall of North Korean soldiers. Naturally, the North Korean soldiers respond by blasting him with machine gun bullets until it is objectively clear that he is dead. The South Koreans respond accordingly by firing on the North Korean soldiers. As there is only a four-inch high cement barrier separating the two of them, soldiers from both sides cross this barrier freely in the ensuing gunfight. With relations between the two Koreas strained as it is, the North views Petit’s bellowing, bow-legged infiltration as a declaration of war. After examining Petit’s dossier, America views it as an act of unexplained idiocy, but seizes the opportunity to nuclearly annihilate North Korea. Radioactive dust meanders into China. China – already tempted to stick up for their North Korean chums, furthermore slobbering over the recently vacated Korean peninsula – jumps in on the side of what remains of the North Korean army. China nukes Seoul, Busan, Daegu – note that if Petit hadn’t been killed in the gunfight he started, he would have almost certainly met his demise at this point – Japan nukes China, Pakistan nukes India, France nukes Iceland for some reason ... a nuclear orgy ensues and the whole world wants in. When the smoke clears, intelligent life on earth has been extinguished. The three-toed sloth survives but does not evolve quickly enough to spread its three-toed wisdom to the stars before the rapidly expanding universe disperses to the point that matter can no longer form. Nothingness comes into existence, somethingness ceases to be. I blink and slide my finger up my crotch to make sure my fly isn’t down. We are all very powerful, depending on what time it is.
The North Koreans arrange themselves single file and march dodderingly away, a sluggish mopey march, not the frightening clockwork we see on the news. Dawkins leads us down the stairs and into the light blue compound on the left.
Inside the compound are two dark wooden tables, a display case full of plastic flags, and in the corner by the door, a mauve Samsung heater. In front of the back door stands a Korean soldier. This is the door to North Korea.
"This is a Republic of Korea special forces officer," Dawkins says.
"He is trained in the martial art of taekwondo. Do not get too close to him. Do not try to touch him. He will ... stop you," Dawkins says.
"On one occasion, the North Koreans opened the door behind him, seized him by the coat, and attempted to drag him across to their side of the border," Dawkins says.
"He beat them both up pretty bad," Dawkins says.
"See that display case with the plastic flags?" Dawkins asks.
We stare.
"Those plastic flags used to be silk flags, but a little while ago, when President Bush came to town, two North Korean soldiers broke into the display case," Dawkins says. "One used the American flag to shine his shoes. The other used the South Korean flag to blow his nose."
"We have replaced the silk flags with plastic flags to deter the North Koreans from repeating this performance," Dawkins says.
You can’t really blow your nose with a plastic flag.
We take pictures standing next to the gatekeeper. Most people flip the peace sign.
1100 hours
The bus takes us to a South Korean village nestled inside the DMZ. The South Koreans call the village Daeseong-dong. The Americans call the village Freedom Village. I’m not sure what the North Koreans call it.
We stop at a restaurant. I eat bulgogi with two scarf-wearing Irishmen and a Swede who is the brother of a mediocre Korean League soccer player. Someone asks where I’m from and their faces blanch when I say Nebraska. USA. I am ignored. After ten minutes, I’ve quipped my way back into the conversation, but by then the topic has shifted to America’s airport security policies. They are staring at me expectantly.
"I just live there. I didn’t invent the place," I shrug. For that, you have George Washington Carver to thank. He also invented the peanut.
1200 hours
Our bus passes through the thick of the DMZ. Though billed as an environmentalist’s wet dream, in winter it is above all a bleak place. The grass is brown, the trees are gnarled, the terrain has the look of tussled hair. Dawkins tells us that a photography ban is in effect and that our cameras will be confiscated if we try to take any pictures. But nothing out here looks especially picturesque.
1230 hours
The bus huffs and puffs up the side of a mountain. When it reaches the top, we get out and pay 50 cents to stare through binoculars at the southernmost swatch of North Korea. We see brownish farmland nestled in between green-grey mountains. Square concrete slabs. And a flagpole.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the North Koreans call Peace Village," Dawkins says.
"But we call it Propaganda Village," Dawkins says.
"We call it Propaganda Village because nobody actually lives there," Dawkins says.
"Propaganda Village is maintained by a few North Korean servicemen who clean and turn the lights on and off every so often to make the buildings look inhabited," Dawkins says.
"The flagpole you see is the tallest flagpole in the world. In the 1980s, the South Koreans built a 328-foot flagpole on their side of the Demilitarized Zone. The North Koreans responded by building a taller one," Dawkins says.
"The flagpole you see stands at 525 feet tall. The flag you see weighs 600 pounds. On a wet day, it cannot fly," Dawkins says.
"The US Army is offering a one million dollar reward to anyone who can cut a one meter square off of that flag and return it to camp. One day, I hope to claim that reward," Dawkins says.
High up as we are, the two Korean flags are twiggy models, you could crush them between your fingers. And they're only a couple inches apart from each other. The buildings of Propaganda Village and Freedom Village lay strewn in the grass, little bits of paper. On the north horizon is the city of Kaesong. A few flecks of silver glisten in the sun. These are North Korean cars.
1400 hours
We watch a video.
Introduction: a small Korean girl walking through a field, weeping into a handkerchief. Suddenly, an explosion. The girl gasps and turns around. Building guitar feedback and a fuzz bass riff. Drums. Black-and-white footage of tanks thundering through the brush, soldiers crawling forward on their elbows, shells ejaculating, explosions, explosions, explosions. A History Channel voiceover.
In June of 1950 ...
The 38th parallel ...
Communist forces ...
4 million casualties ...
A guitar solo.
Suddenly, everything is Technicolor. The camera pans over an animated landscape of luscious green tropical vegetation. Deer dashing between the trees. Toucan Sams pirouetting through the air. Kim Jong-Il is vigorously shaking hands with a South Korean president. Uniformed Asian men are sitting around a dark brown table. Families are strolling hand-in-hand along a barbed wire fence.
The Demilitarized Zone is ...
... an environmental treasure trove ...
... 1,000 square kilometers of hope ...
... a seed of peace planted in the hearts and minds of all Koreans, North and South alike ...
A harp flourish. The screen goes black. The projection screens roll back up and the lights come on. Blink.
1430 hours
We stop at the gift shop. Against my better judgment, I buy a DMZ t-shirt because the smiling anime soldiers on the front are too ridiculous to pass up. I avoid the North Korean hard liquor cabinet. A concerned shopper - a chubby bearded guy in a black t-shirt - asks Dawkins whether any of the gift shop's proceeds go directly to North Korea.
"No," Dawkins says. "All of the North Korean products for sale here are purchased by a South Korean agency that does business directly with the North Koreans."
"So," says the bearded guy, "the money I'm paying goes to the South Korean agency. But the South Korean agency's money goes to the North Koreans, doesn't it?"
"Yes," says Dawkins. "But none of the money you see here today is going to end up in the hands of Kim Jong-Il."
The chubby guy looks a little bewildered, then turns around to go see about the Pyeongyang brandy.
1500 hours
Since the de facto end of the Korean War, the North Koreans have dug at least four tunnels winding from the North/South border all the way to Seoul, some 3.5 kilometers away. The tunnels - if they weren't stuffed with tourists - could pump 30,000 North Korean troops into downtown Seoul within a couple of hours. Ostensibly, these tunnels were dug for the purpose of invading South Korea, but the Capra in me imagines that the North Koreans were just lonely, that every now and again when Kim Jong-Il was feeling drunk or horny or magnanimous, they received his supreme permission to take a weekend in Seoul, to drop in and surprise old friends and relatives, maybe hit up a karaoke room or a massage parlor or something ...
We don yellow hardhats and trudge down a sharply descending two-mile long shaft until we reach the bottom. Stretching towards the north like a clogged artery is a narrow, jagged yellow-lit tunnel. Inside, water drizzles down from the ceiling and pools up on the ground. I notice the rocks are the same rocks they use to build most of the office stairwells in Korea. Granite?
We follow the tunnel to the end. At the end of the tunnel is a patch of barbed wire in front of a metal door. Watching the metal door is a CCTV camera. Who is watching the camera?
By the time the South Koreans found this tunnel, the North Koreans had abandoned it and painted the walls black. "Just coal mining," they said ...
1630 hours
We have parted ways with forty bucks and thus, our mission is complete. We’re in the bus, riding back to Seoul. I haven’t seen the city in the daytime yet. It looks like any other Korean city, but bigger. Apartments, smokestacks, cars. It’s as bleak as I expected. But as we cross the Han River, the setting sun sits at just the right angle to glance off the water and obscure the nastiness as it rushes at the speed of light to meet me. There’s a wreath of brightness surrounding all those grey rectangles. It’s almost relaxing. The British teenager in the seat behind me is bitching, asking her dad when we’re gonna get back to Seoul.
"This is Seoul, cupcake," her dad says, "I think."
"I can’t wait to get back to the room," the girl says. "I’m bored."
I squint out the window and think, it’s been a real long time since I’ve been bored.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Feal and Roathing in Seoul City
Wake up around 1:30, New Years Eve. Pull on some dirty jeans, a dirty Radiohead t-shirt, my new fuzzy coat, my old Pumas. Wander outside and down the road, wave down a bus. Ride the bus to the train station, buy a ticket to Seoul. 12,000 won. Twelve dollars.
Standing room only. Contort myself into a stairwell and read Hesse. Frantically. Must finish by midnight. Must ...
Make fast friends with a mechanical engineer dude from Seoul who studied in Poughkeepsie, pronounced Pyeo-kyeup-shi.
"Feeful who live year in foreign country," dude says, "go crazy. Like me. And one day you also."
Dude scribbles a crude map of Seoul on Hesse's inside cover. Streets look like the small intestines of a small rodent. Where do you begin with Seoul?
Disembark. Embark. Buy a DaVinci coffee, brood over a subway map. Crumple up the map and buy a subway ticket. Ride towards Namdaemun, where CNN has led me to believe the festivities will occur.
Emerge. Look around. Seoul City Hall. Lights. Music. People, a handful. Glance at my watch. It is 7:30. Wander. Wander down neon streets, past the PC rooms, karaoke rooms, DVD rooms, corporate strip clubs, the Starbuckses, the silkworm larvae vendors. Wander out into a dark space. And there it is, across the street: Namdaemun, Carmen Sandiego's holy grail. Wait ten minutes to cross the street. Cross the street.
Namdaemun. Empty, dark. Glance at my watch. It is 8:00. Where's the party?
Wander back to City Hall. Lights. Music. People. But not many. It is 8:30.
Stop at a kimbab place and order a bowl of ramen. Read. Slurp. Finish my Hesse book, slurp down the salty dregs. En route to mouth, the final noodle splashes red sauce all over my Radiohead shirt. It is 9:00.
Wander back to Namdaemun. Empty. Wander back to City Hall. Slightly less empty. Arirang Konglish Radio has set up on the far side of the square. Shove hands in my pockets, wander over there. It is 9:30.
It is 10:30. Square is suddenly jampacked. Korean dude taps me on the shoulder, asks me do I speak English. Yes. Dude says good. Dude leads me by the arm to the Arirang booth. A microphone thrust into my mouth. Microphone is connected to a hand, hand is connected to an arm, arm is connected to a Texan.
Texan: This guy doesn't look Korean!
Keith: 아니요. 한국 사람입니다. (No. I am a Korean.)
Texan: Haw haw. What's your name?
Keith: Keith.
Texan: Nice to meet you, Keith. Where are you from?
Keith: Daegu.
Texan: Haw haw. No, I mean ... where are you from?
Keith: Nebraska.
[Nebraskan in the crowd hoots]
[Keith tosses up feeble hand gesture of some sort]
Texan: And what brings you to Korea, Kevin?
Keith: I have no idea.
Texan: Haw haw. Well, what do you do here?
Keith: I am here to teach 초딩 (cho-ding).*
[scattered Korean laughter]
(Korean laughter sounds like this: ku ku ku ku)
Texan: Oh ... no.
[silence]
Texan: Well. Kevin. Is there anything that you wish you had accomplished in 2006?
Keith: [reflects for several seconds, tugs on his right sideburn] ... that is a very difficult question.
Texan: ... and we're going to give you a long time to think about it. Because right now, sitting with us in the Arirang booth, we have the Mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon!
*Cho-ding: Korean derogatory term for children. Similar English words: anklebiters, rugrats, little shits. See my as-yet-unwritten Cho-bo's Guide to Korean Lewdness and Nogoodnikery for further lewdness and nogoodnikery.
Korean DJ takes over. Sit Indian-style on stage and watch the interview. Understand very little. Texan hands me a digital camera.
"Hey, get some pictures of this. Thanks, Kevin."
Snap pictures of the mayor, an opera singer and his depressed synth accompanist, a Korean reggae band ... Rastakoreans?
Man wearing rabbit ears keeps hugging me. Maybe he's drunk, maybe ... want badly to leave. Demonstrate this by standing up and looking around listlessly. Texan comes to retrieve his camera, presents me with two harmonica-sized boxes wrapped in wax paper.
"Thanks a lot, Kevin."
Vanish.
It is 11:30. Crowd is large but not riotous. Perhaps I am in the wrong place. Wander.
Follow a herd of Aussies for several blocks, dead end, they stop at Outback. Shadow a troupe of grey Korean suits, halt before the entrance to a strip club. Tag along with some Indians making a beeline, cutting through the crowd. They are getting somewhere. Somewhere big. Perk my ears. Can hear a whooshing in the distance, like the sea ...
Turn the corner and we're swallowed up by a sea of humans. Here we are. A hundred thousand people, there is no end. Four blocks away the whole time.
Shoulder my way forward, towards something bright and thunderously loud. A spaceship? Children cackling, blasting their Korean Roman candles at cars, trees, each other. Cover my head and charge.
Starts as a murky drunken chant, but as it loudens it starts to come together. The countdown. Look around, opt not to kiss the Korean man next to me.
O.
Sa.
Sam.
I.
Il.
At first there is only light and sound. The sky turns white. Ears crackle. Smell returns slowly with the taste of a billion burnt Pop-Tarts. And then the sensation of being chewed, swallowed, muscled down through the bowels. Turn around to fight the tide, but it's no use. Seoul is digesting me. Human waves thrust me into other human beings, we are stuck together in compromising positions for speechless breathless minutes at a time and we just stare.
We collide with the police. Riot shields come out. Korean profanities. British profanities. German profanities. Faces smooshed hockey-style against the windows of a 24-hour pharmacy. Behind the glass an old man peruses the herbal laxatives.
Untie myself from the crowd, dash down a yellow alleyway. Dude's arm stops me.
"Hey," dude says, "happy new year."
"Happy new year."
Shake his hand. Dude looks me in the eyes.
"Fuck you, mother fucker," dude says.
Smile. Dude does not smile. Nod. Dude flips me the bird. Turn and dash down the alleyway.
Step out into a black mist. Cross a four-lane warzone. Mounds of grey confetti, beer cans, expired ammo. Foreigners tromp by, tilting back their tallboys to the sky. Out from the fog marches a band of blue-and-white uniforms, smashing cymbals together, a rhythm so deafening and redundant it can't be looked away from. Ring forms around the drummers. Ring forms around the ring around the ring. We watch. Koreans, Westerners, Middle Easterners, Indians, drunks, stray dogs, plastic bags. We dance for a while, hugs are exchanged, politics and fuck yous in back alleyways momentarily forgotten about.
A murderous beeping. Big orange machines come and brush the rubble away. The screeching of whistles. Policemen come and chase the people away. Minutes later, the street is once again clogged with Hyundais and Kias.
Wander up and down the same sidewalk for hours because the bars are charging covers. Find a pirated copy of Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot in a street vendor's tent. Linger but do not buy.
En route to the subway, stop at a Subway. Order the Spicy Italian, but it does not exist. That's okay, settle for the Italian BMT. Sit down, start reading Nietzsche, feel more than pretentious for doing this at 3:30 AM on New Years Day sitting in a Subway in Seoul. Eat my sandwich.
Train station is vast and empty and lit up on the inside like a basketball court. Buy a ticket to Daegu. 32,000 won. 32 dollars. Sit amongst the scattered hoboes slumbering in their three-room cardboard boxes, breathing in my vending machine cappuccino.
Ride the train to Daegu. Take the bus to Chilgok. Walk home. Drop into bed. It is 8:30. Drooling ensues.
Standing room only. Contort myself into a stairwell and read Hesse. Frantically. Must finish by midnight. Must ...
Make fast friends with a mechanical engineer dude from Seoul who studied in Poughkeepsie, pronounced Pyeo-kyeup-shi.
"Feeful who live year in foreign country," dude says, "go crazy. Like me. And one day you also."
Dude scribbles a crude map of Seoul on Hesse's inside cover. Streets look like the small intestines of a small rodent. Where do you begin with Seoul?
Disembark. Embark. Buy a DaVinci coffee, brood over a subway map. Crumple up the map and buy a subway ticket. Ride towards Namdaemun, where CNN has led me to believe the festivities will occur.
Emerge. Look around. Seoul City Hall. Lights. Music. People, a handful. Glance at my watch. It is 7:30. Wander. Wander down neon streets, past the PC rooms, karaoke rooms, DVD rooms, corporate strip clubs, the Starbuckses, the silkworm larvae vendors. Wander out into a dark space. And there it is, across the street: Namdaemun, Carmen Sandiego's holy grail. Wait ten minutes to cross the street. Cross the street.
Namdaemun. Empty, dark. Glance at my watch. It is 8:00. Where's the party?
Wander back to City Hall. Lights. Music. People. But not many. It is 8:30.
Stop at a kimbab place and order a bowl of ramen. Read. Slurp. Finish my Hesse book, slurp down the salty dregs. En route to mouth, the final noodle splashes red sauce all over my Radiohead shirt. It is 9:00.
Wander back to Namdaemun. Empty. Wander back to City Hall. Slightly less empty. Arirang Konglish Radio has set up on the far side of the square. Shove hands in my pockets, wander over there. It is 9:30.
It is 10:30. Square is suddenly jampacked. Korean dude taps me on the shoulder, asks me do I speak English. Yes. Dude says good. Dude leads me by the arm to the Arirang booth. A microphone thrust into my mouth. Microphone is connected to a hand, hand is connected to an arm, arm is connected to a Texan.
Texan: This guy doesn't look Korean!
Keith: 아니요. 한국 사람입니다. (No. I am a Korean.)
Texan: Haw haw. What's your name?
Keith: Keith.
Texan: Nice to meet you, Keith. Where are you from?
Keith: Daegu.
Texan: Haw haw. No, I mean ... where are you from?
Keith: Nebraska.
[Nebraskan in the crowd hoots]
[Keith tosses up feeble hand gesture of some sort]
Texan: And what brings you to Korea, Kevin?
Keith: I have no idea.
Texan: Haw haw. Well, what do you do here?
Keith: I am here to teach 초딩 (cho-ding).*
[scattered Korean laughter]
(Korean laughter sounds like this: ku ku ku ku)
Texan: Oh ... no.
[silence]
Texan: Well. Kevin. Is there anything that you wish you had accomplished in 2006?
Keith: [reflects for several seconds, tugs on his right sideburn] ... that is a very difficult question.
Texan: ... and we're going to give you a long time to think about it. Because right now, sitting with us in the Arirang booth, we have the Mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon!
*Cho-ding: Korean derogatory term for children. Similar English words: anklebiters, rugrats, little shits. See my as-yet-unwritten Cho-bo's Guide to Korean Lewdness and Nogoodnikery for further lewdness and nogoodnikery.
Korean DJ takes over. Sit Indian-style on stage and watch the interview. Understand very little. Texan hands me a digital camera.
"Hey, get some pictures of this. Thanks, Kevin."
Snap pictures of the mayor, an opera singer and his depressed synth accompanist, a Korean reggae band ... Rastakoreans?
Man wearing rabbit ears keeps hugging me. Maybe he's drunk, maybe ... want badly to leave. Demonstrate this by standing up and looking around listlessly. Texan comes to retrieve his camera, presents me with two harmonica-sized boxes wrapped in wax paper.
"Thanks a lot, Kevin."
Vanish.
It is 11:30. Crowd is large but not riotous. Perhaps I am in the wrong place. Wander.
Follow a herd of Aussies for several blocks, dead end, they stop at Outback. Shadow a troupe of grey Korean suits, halt before the entrance to a strip club. Tag along with some Indians making a beeline, cutting through the crowd. They are getting somewhere. Somewhere big. Perk my ears. Can hear a whooshing in the distance, like the sea ...
Turn the corner and we're swallowed up by a sea of humans. Here we are. A hundred thousand people, there is no end. Four blocks away the whole time.
Shoulder my way forward, towards something bright and thunderously loud. A spaceship? Children cackling, blasting their Korean Roman candles at cars, trees, each other. Cover my head and charge.
Starts as a murky drunken chant, but as it loudens it starts to come together. The countdown. Look around, opt not to kiss the Korean man next to me.
O.
Sa.
Sam.
I.
Il.
At first there is only light and sound. The sky turns white. Ears crackle. Smell returns slowly with the taste of a billion burnt Pop-Tarts. And then the sensation of being chewed, swallowed, muscled down through the bowels. Turn around to fight the tide, but it's no use. Seoul is digesting me. Human waves thrust me into other human beings, we are stuck together in compromising positions for speechless breathless minutes at a time and we just stare.
We collide with the police. Riot shields come out. Korean profanities. British profanities. German profanities. Faces smooshed hockey-style against the windows of a 24-hour pharmacy. Behind the glass an old man peruses the herbal laxatives.
Untie myself from the crowd, dash down a yellow alleyway. Dude's arm stops me.
"Hey," dude says, "happy new year."
"Happy new year."
Shake his hand. Dude looks me in the eyes.
"Fuck you, mother fucker," dude says.
Smile. Dude does not smile. Nod. Dude flips me the bird. Turn and dash down the alleyway.
Step out into a black mist. Cross a four-lane warzone. Mounds of grey confetti, beer cans, expired ammo. Foreigners tromp by, tilting back their tallboys to the sky. Out from the fog marches a band of blue-and-white uniforms, smashing cymbals together, a rhythm so deafening and redundant it can't be looked away from. Ring forms around the drummers. Ring forms around the ring around the ring. We watch. Koreans, Westerners, Middle Easterners, Indians, drunks, stray dogs, plastic bags. We dance for a while, hugs are exchanged, politics and fuck yous in back alleyways momentarily forgotten about.
A murderous beeping. Big orange machines come and brush the rubble away. The screeching of whistles. Policemen come and chase the people away. Minutes later, the street is once again clogged with Hyundais and Kias.
Wander up and down the same sidewalk for hours because the bars are charging covers. Find a pirated copy of Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot in a street vendor's tent. Linger but do not buy.
En route to the subway, stop at a Subway. Order the Spicy Italian, but it does not exist. That's okay, settle for the Italian BMT. Sit down, start reading Nietzsche, feel more than pretentious for doing this at 3:30 AM on New Years Day sitting in a Subway in Seoul. Eat my sandwich.
Train station is vast and empty and lit up on the inside like a basketball court. Buy a ticket to Daegu. 32,000 won. 32 dollars. Sit amongst the scattered hoboes slumbering in their three-room cardboard boxes, breathing in my vending machine cappuccino.
Ride the train to Daegu. Take the bus to Chilgok. Walk home. Drop into bed. It is 8:30. Drooling ensues.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
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