I struggled with the reality of China for the entire month of September. It was one thing to read about it, and to swim around in it amidst a school of foreign fish, but to confront China head-on every time I opened the front door was too much for my neurotic circuitry. That was September. On the first of October, I woke up and suddenly loved the place. Overnight, my brain had formed a protective callus that screened out all the noise and allowed only the loveliness to seep through.
These stages of loathing and loving were foretold by any number of Peace Corps manuals and cultural integration seminars, so I saw them coming. But again, it is one thing to know about them and another thing to experience them.
Last month's euphoria has faded and November is looking to be a blend of September and October. I have a more nuanced outlook now, a wiser one perhaps. I am ecstatic to be here but mindful of the challenges. Three days out of the week will be good days. Three will be absurd days. And one day (today) will be catastrophic: you will forget all the Mandarin you've learned; after days of invisibility, China will suddenly notice you and follow you about like the pied piper; so you'll lay low in a restaurant, ask the fuwuyuan for a menu, he'll point at the board on the wall, and in the heat of the moment you'll find yourself ordering the bitter melon and bacon combo for ten kuai; winter will arrive later that evening and you'll discover the hot water in your apartment has fizzled out. On those days, you ball yourself up like an armadillo and wait it out. What makes it bearable, even laughable, is the realization that other volunteers elsewhere in the world are reading this paragraph and thinking: bacon? hot water? apartment? and the locals love you? Why don't you write about Nietzsche some more, you goldbricking ninny?
This is easy for me to say, goldbricking Nietzschean ninny that I am, but I believe that the human ability to extract happiness or misery from his surroundings doesn't vary much from one set of circumstances to another. I imagine I would be precisely as happy as I am right now whether I were huddled over a heap of smoldering charcoal while a typhoon made scrap metal out of my Micronesian hovel, or supping on crawdads and Chablis in a dining room the size of the Fleet Center. And precisely as unhappy, too. What matters is having some sort of trajectory, a plot to usher you from one day into the next. That involves finding a cast of characters to support you, and keeping a long list of mostly unattainable goals. It also involves conflict and complications. And laughter. I'm not sure I could endure anything at all if I couldn't every so often collapse face-down on a table laughing so hard I lose track of time and finally, as if waking from a sleep, lift my head, mop my brow and say, "Whew, where did that come from?"
Showing posts with label nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nietzsche. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Have Fun
For exactly one month I lived in Xiaoshan, China with my friend and fellow hobo, Jared. It was an arrangement I settled into with a sense of permanence even though its fleetingness was dictated by a return ticket to South Korea. I slept in something we called the Hamster Bed: a heap of comforters, sheets, pillows, and bedding accessories piled on the floor across from the washing machine. During the day, I took Mandarin lessons with a girl named Koko who I paid in KFC value meals. Jared and I spent our evenings at a club frequented by the glam-bohemian sons and daughters of the Communist Party, and we would drink watered-down Johnny Walker Black until it got light out. There wasn't much to do while Jared and Koko were at work. I was deathly afraid of the group taxis to Hangzhou, coffee was expensive and the beer caused migraines, so I spent most of my afternoons leaning against buildings and watching the traffic. And this was how I met Lennet.
He rolled up to me on a bike. He told me he wanted to learn English and that if he could speak English perfectly, he would jump around a lot. He invited me to go with him to the West Lake and take pictures. It was an innocuous invitation from an innocuous-looking guy: prematurely bald and bespectacled, sporting a General Electric polo shirt with a laminated ID card clipped to the right breast. I agreed to meet him, gave him my phone number, and beaming, Lennet rolled away on his bike.
He called me eight times before the next morning's sun came up on Hamster Bed. When I called him back, he sounded peevish but eager as hell to see me. Jared had the day off and insisted on meeting my new buddy. We met him at the same wall I had been leaning against the day before and he was wearing the same GE polo shirt. Jared interrogated him in Mandarin and as Lennet spoke, I thought I saw a wave of sadistic glee pass over Jared's face. Stifling a cough, or laughter, Jared turned to me and said, "Have fun."
Lennet and I took the bus to Hangzhou and chatted for ten minutes before a deep mutual boredom set in. He started singing to himself and I fell asleep. I was jostled awake by an elbow to my breadbasket. Lennet was poised to jump out of the bus. I parachuted after him and Lennet surged ahead of me. For several blocks, it was all I could do to keep up with him. Then he stopped suddenly. He told me to strike a pose next to a lamppost. Unsure of whether I was supposed to straddle the pole or what, I draped an arm around it and stood there looking constipated while Lennet snapped photo after photo. Then he was off again, gesturing frantically for me to follow. A few yards away, he made me pose in front of a garbage can. Snap, snap, snap. And on we went.
When I am in a strange place, I tend to assume that the individuals I encounter are not insane, but enmeshed in a vast net of cultural norms and values that are insane. But as Lennet and I orbited the West Lake and the photographs grew more dadaistic - me in front of a stray dog, me in front of an information booth, me in front of a pay phone - I noticed that even the Chinese tourists were staring at Lennet, that for once they weren't staring at me. He began accosting strangers to take our picture together. We posed on opposite sides of a recycling bin, a mailbox, a stack of watermelons. I began to suspect that I wasn't dealing with a photo-happy Asian stereotype, but with a lunatic, or a Caucasian-Voyeur-Porn monger.
This went on for three hours. It was a cloudy day and the lake stretched out alongside us, black and rippled like a pit full of garbage bags, the city of Hangzhou glowering in the distance. I'd sunk into a mood and I was about to say something curt and girlish - "Lennet, take me home." - when I noticed a sign by the pier that put me in better spirits. The sign was large and white with two imposing lines of Mandarin followed by the words "HAVE FUN." I stopped and fumbled for my camera, but Lennet was already forging ahead: he had spied an intriguing steam pipe on the horizon.
"Hey Lennet," I said, indicating the sign. "I want to get a picture of this."
"But that?" Lennet asked, incredulous. "That is only sign!"
And he was off again.
I could only take solace in something Jared had once told me: that no Chinese man in his right mind would ever let a foreigner pay for dinner. We walked to a dingy restaurant sufficiently removed from the lake to be somewhat cheap. I sat across from Lennet and waited for him to finish snapping pictures of the menus, of me holding a menu, of me looking thoughtfully at the menu. Then he asked me how much money I had.
"125 RMB," I told him.
I watched as Lennet combed through the menu and found five dishes which, combined, cost exactly 125 RMB. He let me pick up the tab.
Lennet wanted to go to the bookstore, so we went. A Chinese bookstore can be an astoundingly dull place when you only know the words for "big" and "small." I watched him shop for an hour. Then, having purchased nothing, Lennet led us out to the taxi rank and it seemed like the end of our night was finally coming into view. But when we arrived in Xiaoshan, Lennet followed me home. He wanted me to come over to his apartment to see the 274 photographs he'd taken of me that afternoon. I told him several mutually contradictory things: that I had class in the morning, that I needed to sleep in, that I was going to Beijing, that I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend. He would not be dissuaded and tailed me for several blocks on his bike. It was dark and the whores were out. I panicked. When I came to the STD clinic on the home stretch, I started into a trot, then I ran. I darted through side streets and alleyways, dashed out into traffic, and finally lost Lennet by throwing myself into the back of a trishaw and telling the driver to step on it, which he did by pedaling vigorously.
For the next several days, the phone buzzed and buzzed. I buried it in the depths of Hamster Bed, but still it mocked me like a deathwatch. A week passed before the calls began to drop off. Eight a day, four a day, two a day, until finally the phone lay dead, smothered under three feet of cotton.
I suppose the tragedy in all this is that, in cutting ties with Lennet, I lost 274 photographs of me looking constipated next to every inanimate object in the vicinity of Hangzhou's West Lake. I could have printed them out and bound them into a flip book, one in which an afroed white guy's expression sours and turns to rage, forehead veins bulging, bloodshot eyes burning into the camera lens, slowly drawing a knife from his pocket. Less tragic (but also tragic) is that I didn't get a picture of the "Have Fun" sign, though I recently found it in the Chinglish book my mother got me for my birthday.
A week later, I was sitting out in a public park, reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. An older gent took a seat next to me on the bench. I was relieved to see it wasn't Lennet. The man offered me a cigarette and I did the Chinese thing and accepted it. Amateur smoker that I was, I ended up getting ash all over myself. The man began brushing it off. Looking up from my book, I saw that the ash was long gone but the man's fingers were still combing my armhair, lost in the mystery of it. Then he moved in close enough that I could smell the rice wine on his breath. Suddenly the book caught his eye. He took it from me and stared at the cover illustration for a long time. I blushed: the illustration showed a merry throng of nymphs and nymphets, nude, dancing with streamers around a maypole. He handed the book back to me, gave me a thumbs up, and smiled broadly, toothlessly. I read for a while longer, though it was difficult to focus on Nietzsche with my admirer picking at the lint on my shirt, tracing circles along my wrist, breathing mustard gas into my ear. I thought about pulling out my phrasebook, opening it to the Night Life section and pointing - "Let's just stay friends" - but I sensed that the old man was about to neck me and time was of the essence. I got up and ran away. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that he was waving, so I waved back, ran, waved, ran ...
As I was being frisked at the Hangzhou Airport security checkpoint, Jared bid me farewell and said, "Don't take shit from anybody." It was one of those moments as an introverted pacifist where you think, "Maybe, from now on, I won't." But my demeanor has not changed since then. If a Chinese stalker were to kidnap me today and take me to the zoo, I would pose for all 247 of his photographs and buy him dinner afterward. And I would probably still read twenty pages of Nietzsche with some vulture breathing sweet Mandarin nothings in my ear. I have this capacity for shit absorption, you see. I'm beginning to think it is a superpower.
He rolled up to me on a bike. He told me he wanted to learn English and that if he could speak English perfectly, he would jump around a lot. He invited me to go with him to the West Lake and take pictures. It was an innocuous invitation from an innocuous-looking guy: prematurely bald and bespectacled, sporting a General Electric polo shirt with a laminated ID card clipped to the right breast. I agreed to meet him, gave him my phone number, and beaming, Lennet rolled away on his bike.
He called me eight times before the next morning's sun came up on Hamster Bed. When I called him back, he sounded peevish but eager as hell to see me. Jared had the day off and insisted on meeting my new buddy. We met him at the same wall I had been leaning against the day before and he was wearing the same GE polo shirt. Jared interrogated him in Mandarin and as Lennet spoke, I thought I saw a wave of sadistic glee pass over Jared's face. Stifling a cough, or laughter, Jared turned to me and said, "Have fun."
Lennet and I took the bus to Hangzhou and chatted for ten minutes before a deep mutual boredom set in. He started singing to himself and I fell asleep. I was jostled awake by an elbow to my breadbasket. Lennet was poised to jump out of the bus. I parachuted after him and Lennet surged ahead of me. For several blocks, it was all I could do to keep up with him. Then he stopped suddenly. He told me to strike a pose next to a lamppost. Unsure of whether I was supposed to straddle the pole or what, I draped an arm around it and stood there looking constipated while Lennet snapped photo after photo. Then he was off again, gesturing frantically for me to follow. A few yards away, he made me pose in front of a garbage can. Snap, snap, snap. And on we went.
When I am in a strange place, I tend to assume that the individuals I encounter are not insane, but enmeshed in a vast net of cultural norms and values that are insane. But as Lennet and I orbited the West Lake and the photographs grew more dadaistic - me in front of a stray dog, me in front of an information booth, me in front of a pay phone - I noticed that even the Chinese tourists were staring at Lennet, that for once they weren't staring at me. He began accosting strangers to take our picture together. We posed on opposite sides of a recycling bin, a mailbox, a stack of watermelons. I began to suspect that I wasn't dealing with a photo-happy Asian stereotype, but with a lunatic, or a Caucasian-Voyeur-Porn monger.
This went on for three hours. It was a cloudy day and the lake stretched out alongside us, black and rippled like a pit full of garbage bags, the city of Hangzhou glowering in the distance. I'd sunk into a mood and I was about to say something curt and girlish - "Lennet, take me home." - when I noticed a sign by the pier that put me in better spirits. The sign was large and white with two imposing lines of Mandarin followed by the words "HAVE FUN." I stopped and fumbled for my camera, but Lennet was already forging ahead: he had spied an intriguing steam pipe on the horizon.
"Hey Lennet," I said, indicating the sign. "I want to get a picture of this."
"But that?" Lennet asked, incredulous. "That is only sign!"
And he was off again.
I could only take solace in something Jared had once told me: that no Chinese man in his right mind would ever let a foreigner pay for dinner. We walked to a dingy restaurant sufficiently removed from the lake to be somewhat cheap. I sat across from Lennet and waited for him to finish snapping pictures of the menus, of me holding a menu, of me looking thoughtfully at the menu. Then he asked me how much money I had.
"125 RMB," I told him.
I watched as Lennet combed through the menu and found five dishes which, combined, cost exactly 125 RMB. He let me pick up the tab.
Lennet wanted to go to the bookstore, so we went. A Chinese bookstore can be an astoundingly dull place when you only know the words for "big" and "small." I watched him shop for an hour. Then, having purchased nothing, Lennet led us out to the taxi rank and it seemed like the end of our night was finally coming into view. But when we arrived in Xiaoshan, Lennet followed me home. He wanted me to come over to his apartment to see the 274 photographs he'd taken of me that afternoon. I told him several mutually contradictory things: that I had class in the morning, that I needed to sleep in, that I was going to Beijing, that I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend. He would not be dissuaded and tailed me for several blocks on his bike. It was dark and the whores were out. I panicked. When I came to the STD clinic on the home stretch, I started into a trot, then I ran. I darted through side streets and alleyways, dashed out into traffic, and finally lost Lennet by throwing myself into the back of a trishaw and telling the driver to step on it, which he did by pedaling vigorously.
For the next several days, the phone buzzed and buzzed. I buried it in the depths of Hamster Bed, but still it mocked me like a deathwatch. A week passed before the calls began to drop off. Eight a day, four a day, two a day, until finally the phone lay dead, smothered under three feet of cotton.
I suppose the tragedy in all this is that, in cutting ties with Lennet, I lost 274 photographs of me looking constipated next to every inanimate object in the vicinity of Hangzhou's West Lake. I could have printed them out and bound them into a flip book, one in which an afroed white guy's expression sours and turns to rage, forehead veins bulging, bloodshot eyes burning into the camera lens, slowly drawing a knife from his pocket. Less tragic (but also tragic) is that I didn't get a picture of the "Have Fun" sign, though I recently found it in the Chinglish book my mother got me for my birthday.
A week later, I was sitting out in a public park, reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. An older gent took a seat next to me on the bench. I was relieved to see it wasn't Lennet. The man offered me a cigarette and I did the Chinese thing and accepted it. Amateur smoker that I was, I ended up getting ash all over myself. The man began brushing it off. Looking up from my book, I saw that the ash was long gone but the man's fingers were still combing my armhair, lost in the mystery of it. Then he moved in close enough that I could smell the rice wine on his breath. Suddenly the book caught his eye. He took it from me and stared at the cover illustration for a long time. I blushed: the illustration showed a merry throng of nymphs and nymphets, nude, dancing with streamers around a maypole. He handed the book back to me, gave me a thumbs up, and smiled broadly, toothlessly. I read for a while longer, though it was difficult to focus on Nietzsche with my admirer picking at the lint on my shirt, tracing circles along my wrist, breathing mustard gas into my ear. I thought about pulling out my phrasebook, opening it to the Night Life section and pointing - "Let's just stay friends" - but I sensed that the old man was about to neck me and time was of the essence. I got up and ran away. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that he was waving, so I waved back, ran, waved, ran ...
As I was being frisked at the Hangzhou Airport security checkpoint, Jared bid me farewell and said, "Don't take shit from anybody." It was one of those moments as an introverted pacifist where you think, "Maybe, from now on, I won't." But my demeanor has not changed since then. If a Chinese stalker were to kidnap me today and take me to the zoo, I would pose for all 247 of his photographs and buy him dinner afterward. And I would probably still read twenty pages of Nietzsche with some vulture breathing sweet Mandarin nothings in my ear. I have this capacity for shit absorption, you see. I'm beginning to think it is a superpower.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Last Man Shuffle
My Intro to Philosophy professor described Nietzsche's Last Man as "an appetitive creature, roaming from sports bar to sports bar." Either he made this speech several times or he unveiled it only once with the lights dimmed, the curtains drawn, and a thunderstorm raging outside. The image of the Last Man nursing a Bud Light down at TGI Friday's has stuck with me well into my decadent twenties and it haunts me as I find myself roaming from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, as it were.
The Last Man Shuffle is an exhausting dance. I've caught myself performing it on several continents, so it isn't necessarily endemic to America, though it might be endemic to Americans. Step One: Set aside an afternoon to pursue an artistic venture of your choice. Step Two: Choose one of your three favorite bars or coffee shops as a venue in which to write, sketch, or photocollage. Step Three: Wiggle your ass in a stiff-backed chair for thirty minutes until the urge to leave becomes unbearable. Step Four: Having accomplished nothing, get into your early-90's sedan and either zip off to another coffee shop or bar (where you will encounter the same discomfort) or just head home to twist one off, take a nap, and call it a day. Now you're doing the Last Man Shuffle.
The worst part is that the Last Man, unremarkable though he is, is plagued by artistic delusions. He works a dull job and has ample time to think about what he'd rather be doing, and what he'd rather be doing is creating a work of art so staggeringly brilliant that all of the kids who picked on him in middle school would rip out their own hair and mail him reparation checks for the rest of their miserable lives. The daydream gets him through work. But the moment he punches out, he finds that he'd rather be at home twisting one off. And so the days pass and all that is achieved is a marginal reduction in the Last Man's sexual tension.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes a French torture device called le malconfort, or the little-ease. It wasn't terribly inventive, but I imagine it worked. The little-ease was a small prison cell that was neither long enough for the inmate to lay down, nor tall enough for the inmate to stand up. So it must have been very uncomfortable. Life in a society that is rich in Old Chicagos is probably preferable to le malconfort, but there is the same kind of restriction on one's range of movement. You feel as though you can't stand up and do something truly remarkable - because that could involve failure and financial ruin - but to lie down, twist one off, and call it a day would be a waste of life. And so you drift from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, and one day you'll write that novel that will bring western civilization to its knees. In the meantime ...
The Last Man Shuffle is an exhausting dance. I've caught myself performing it on several continents, so it isn't necessarily endemic to America, though it might be endemic to Americans. Step One: Set aside an afternoon to pursue an artistic venture of your choice. Step Two: Choose one of your three favorite bars or coffee shops as a venue in which to write, sketch, or photocollage. Step Three: Wiggle your ass in a stiff-backed chair for thirty minutes until the urge to leave becomes unbearable. Step Four: Having accomplished nothing, get into your early-90's sedan and either zip off to another coffee shop or bar (where you will encounter the same discomfort) or just head home to twist one off, take a nap, and call it a day. Now you're doing the Last Man Shuffle.
The worst part is that the Last Man, unremarkable though he is, is plagued by artistic delusions. He works a dull job and has ample time to think about what he'd rather be doing, and what he'd rather be doing is creating a work of art so staggeringly brilliant that all of the kids who picked on him in middle school would rip out their own hair and mail him reparation checks for the rest of their miserable lives. The daydream gets him through work. But the moment he punches out, he finds that he'd rather be at home twisting one off. And so the days pass and all that is achieved is a marginal reduction in the Last Man's sexual tension.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes a French torture device called le malconfort, or the little-ease. It wasn't terribly inventive, but I imagine it worked. The little-ease was a small prison cell that was neither long enough for the inmate to lay down, nor tall enough for the inmate to stand up. So it must have been very uncomfortable. Life in a society that is rich in Old Chicagos is probably preferable to le malconfort, but there is the same kind of restriction on one's range of movement. You feel as though you can't stand up and do something truly remarkable - because that could involve failure and financial ruin - but to lie down, twist one off, and call it a day would be a waste of life. And so you drift from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, and one day you'll write that novel that will bring western civilization to its knees. In the meantime ...
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.
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