高延戰

Starting school this week was great. The campus is crowded again with Sogang students in the first days of their fall terms and the classroom atmosphere is friendly and fast-paced. In the last days of the summer, I started having dreams in which I was walking along Wall and High Streets on the way to class, and I was wondering if I was going to really miss campus. As a sophomore, on my first night in Trumbull, I looked out at the lights coming on all over Alvarez Court and was stunned to think that at this certain point in August all these people all over the world start gravitating right back to this one spot. Planes arrive, trains arrive, cars arrive, and these people pour out from all over onto campus as if they were made for it. I guess that after 16 years in school, I am made for it.

But those dreams didn’t last too long before Sogang’s campus became a nice place to spend the coming fall.

And to kick off my school year, Bo invited me to Ko-Yon Jeon (고연전), two days of sports competition between Korea and Yonsei Universities and two nights of partying and drinking back in Sinchon and Anam. Since I got back from Busan, the streets in Sinchon have become strung with banners taunting the Korea University “kitties” (Korea’s mascot is the tiger) with puns or just plain insults, and sponsored by the neighborhood businesses. Here is a picture of the games from wikipedia. I made it to the last competition, the soccer match at the Jamsil Olympic Stadium and joined Bo and the Kodae crowd.

I haven’t been to any college bowl games in America, but I imagine that they must be something like this. There was no need to tailgate because students could bring their own food and drink into the stadium, so thousands and thousands of students and alums were dancing, singing, cheering, and jeering as cheerleaders dressed up in these indescribable costumes set off fireworks. It was amazing. The only problem is that every time I go to one of these games I’m on the losing side.

Humility

The Week of July 30

Monday was back to school and sluggish. We sat around rubbing our heads and eyes and lobbing empty coffee cups into the door or wall, by which we meant trashcan. Our Korean had taken a hit during the vacation, but our teachers had already prepared review lessons to whip us back into shape.

But that made two times for me that day, as I’d “gotten up” at 6 to go to the gym. (I joined just before vacation, so I until Monday I hadn’t yet put my morning-workout-to-avoid-wasting-precious-afternoon-time plan for a valuable gym experience into place.) I had been a horrible student in Spanish class through high school because I’d always hesitated to speak, and it wasn’t until I took SPAN 130 in my freshman fall that I got over that apprehension and began feeling comfortable in the language. Fortunately, I’ve been learning Korean in a similar atmosphere, so while my speaking is still terrible, apprehension hasn’t really been a problem. But just in case, there’s also the experience of chatting without any clothes on every morning to really allay self-consciousness.

In the afternoon, we had our last pronunciation class with 김지은B, as it’s 김지은A that teaches us speaking. We’d learned great things throughout the MW afternoon course, including 자음동화 (Consonant Assimilations) and 모음조화 (Vowel Harmony), but when my question about quickly reviewing double consonant pronunciation led to another one about vowel sounds, we ended up reviewing basic letter sounds to all of our disappointment, and I felt responsible.

On Tuesday Sung Ho returned and we all went out for 돈가스 (pork katsu) at our favorite place across the street, 왕돈가스, to catch up with each other. After grammar class, I met up with Yoon Ji in Hongdae, where she attends Hongik. She spent a year in high school as an exchange student in Minnesota, where she learned to bake some of the most delicious things I’ve ever tried, including the chocolate biscotti she brought with her that day. It was only the second time we’d met, so she told me a bit more about her friends, most notably Turtle, the cute back-pack-toting, glasses-wearing character from Gangnam who is always up for eating and exploring Seoul, and Trash, the perpetually-guest gourmand who hates studying even more than the Turtle and always shows up to join them for food, usually when it means cutting a class to do so. Person, as Yoon Ji is known in her circle for how she is to be treated because of her “untouchable” status when it comes to pranks as a result of her 군대-serving boyfriend, bestowed these names upon them. Most young people acquire an embarrassing nickname at one time or another, and my friend Hye Ji is currently thinking up one for me. She showed me around pretty Hongik and we went to her club’s room (at Hongik and Sogang, clubs have their own space inside the student center) where she taught me GOSTOP, a card game her friends play after drinking. I talked with her boyfriend, who is on the school’s pistol team, over the phone for a while.

Later, I met Hyeon Ju, and she showed me some of the proverbs she’d written down. One of them was something to the effect of the humble person can only expect a humble life and we talked for a bit about American humble’s two meanings, a linguistic “insight” I only partially believe in. The beginning of our dialogue went something like:

“Do you know what this one means?”
“No.”
“Humble means both the good quality of being modest and polite about yourself and also the bad quality of being average, meager, modest, or unimportant.”
“Oh. In Korea it’s only a good thing. 겸손. Being poor or meager is 그롯이 작다.”

and continued on into my guesses about the American nation and my generalizations about American culture and values that I managed to cobble together with my citizen’s public education, and hers about Korea. Reading over David Silva’s reconstructed conversation, his point about cultural differences and language is clear:

Hasuksaeng: How do you say 재수생 (jaesusaeng) in English?
Author: Do you mean “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 (hagw0n ‘academic institute’) so he can take the exam the next year”?
Hasuksaeng: Yes! How do you say that in English?
Author: Uhm . . . Well, you have to say “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 so he can take the exam the next year.”
Hasuksaeng: Yes—what’s the English word for that?
Author: There isn’t one.
Hasuksaeng: Really? So how do you talk about 재수생 in English?
Author: You don’t. There’s no such thing as a 재수생 in America.
Hasuksaeng: So what happens when a student fails the college entrance examination?
Author: Nothing, because there’s no way to “fail” the exam. You might earn a low score, but there’s no specific passing grade.
Hasuksaeng: How strange.

[From Silva, David J. “Western Attitudes Toward the Korean Language: An Overview of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Mission Literature.” Korean Studies. 26.2 (2003). Access it here.]

But for us in a Sinchon Starbucks, I’m not sure how much I believed that I was introducing something important or even exclusive. Searching for the lost proverb online, business America in its pushy off-the-rack suit and toting some CEO’s biography was telling me to bold, and know myself and act on my abilities, while religious America, in its Sunday oxfords and khakis and holding a monogrammed Bible, told me about God’s altar. This is not to get all sappy and drone on about post-nations and globalization with eyes so bright there’s nothing behind them, but after so many meeting different kinds of people this summer, or seeing the wry ballet of 지하철 1호선, it’s hard to give language this much credit when people are just walking around reconciling themselves with what they’ve been told they are.

On Wednesday I went to visit Hye Jin in Suwon. I had to write a newspaper article for my writing class, and I’d chosen to fake an interview with Steven Felix about cycling, which I worked on on the ride over. Hye Jin and I walked around the lake that her institute overlooks, which is in the center of a pretty Suwon park. As at Lotte World’s Seokchonhosu, we were passed right and left by ajummas outfitted in full mountaineering gear, including matching black nylon sweatpants, bandanas, boots, and workout gloves. We climbed up onto a traditional pavilion and stretched out our legs to watch the sun set. Afterward, we wandered a through a rice field and made it over to a samgyeopsal restaurant for dinner. It was scrumptious. Wrapped in lettuce leaf, seasoned with sesame oil and rock salt and ssamjang, eaten with the kimchi sizzling in the fat collecting at the bottom of the inclined grill, it was a new and gorgeous flavor.

Thursday afternoon I ran over to a panel on education around the world put together by Athena for her teacher training module at Ko Dae. I learned a lot from my eloquent Algerian, Guatemalan, German, Malaysian, and Korean peers during the discussion, including the fact that the weekend in Algeria means Thursday and Friday. I had no idea she was doing this, so I unwittingly blew Athena’s surprise by mentioning Jeong Woo by name a few times; she had tucked her son in among the panel as “Jay from Canada.” I liked the questions I was asked, didn’t like it when the room was so ready to agree with one of the panel members that migration itself was at the core of social and economic problems dismantling the parent-teacher relationship in his country. When I posed back the same question to the packed room with only one male teacher in it about why they thought “there are so many more women than men in primary education,” they answered me with: “What [the Algerian panelist said]. Only women are patient enough to put up with the kids.” But at other times, the teachers debated with one another, such as when one teacher asked if parents in our countries had lost trust in their educational systems only to be interrupted by another “clarifying” that trust hadn’t been lost, just “supplemented.”

Over lunch, I talked some more with my peers and learned that political parties run overseas operations as NGOs in Korea, and that my Algerian and Guatemalan peers were studying in Korea as part of economic negotiations between their countries and Korea. Neither spoke much Korean, and both had spent their time in Korea improving their English through their graduate studies at Ko Dae, a fact impressing on me just how strange the English situation here has become.

I saw Ratatouille in Yongsan with Presca and her cousins, which made me feel warm and great.

On Friday, the Deans Farley visited us at Sogang. My class predictably went wild over this 멋있는 pair, and my teacher had Masato do his presentation over again. He’d just finished the brilliant, memorized sum of his travels, study interests, experience in Korea, and world view told through a touching series of vignettes about tomatoes, and we were all eager to show him off.

We went out for boribap, and back for our meeting with Sogang about our travel assignment for next week. Again, Sogang, which got us all into the trip in the first place, prepared a small orientation for us about how we should prepare to ask intelligent questions, keep an 일기, and get the most out of the trip culturally and linguistically. 마음에 들다.

We met our guests for Milky Road and headed over to Daehagno to see 지하철 1호선 (Subway Line 1), a musical about Seoul life that’s been playing since 1994 and, like Nanta, changing to fit the times. I loved it — its Woodcutter and the Angel allusions, its dialects, its hip-hop subway salesmen, its IMF crisis — because it hurt so much. Most of all, I loved the Ladies of Gangnam number:

The picture comes from here.

It made me happy, sad, and amazed about life. We ate dinner at a nearby ddalk kalbi restaurant.

On Saturday, despite Kaila’s call to confirm I was awake, I woke up late and had time enough only to 세수하다. Feeling dumb and worried that my dark jeans would not suffice to meet the dress code at the DMZ, I piled into the cab with the others and headed over to the Hilton, where the Dean and Victoria and a whole tour bus were waiting to leave. Veronica handed me a heavenly almond croissant while the tour guide confirmed that we had our passports.

I didn’t.

Feeling ever worse, I called Presca to make sure that at least she’d be able to make it. But in a mix-up, she was waiting at the wrong hotel and had gotten in a cab to make it across Seoul in time. I held off the tour guide to wait out the three more minutes for Presca to arrive only for her to arrive at the wrong Grand Hilton. I sadly waved off the bus and waited for Presca. We had brunch and headed to Sinchon to see a movie.

A few weeks ago, I mistakenly wrote that we waited out a 폭풍우. I meant to say that we waited out a 소나기 (sudden rain shower). Walking around E Dae with Presca, even my earlier admission of the error to her didn’t help me as the sky opened up its tanks on us, soaking us both through. We slid into the Migliore a few blocks down, wrung out our clothing in the entrance, and made our way up to the Megabox. I dried my hair in the hand dryer and we killed our waiting time looking in vain for a towel.

We saw 화려한 휴가 ( Splendid Holiday/ May 18 ) about the Gwangju Uprising. Professor Hwang taught us quite a lot about Gwangju and I was eager to see the film. Weeping along with everyone else in the theater, I was staggered to remember how much the people around me remembered. Presca was right when she pointed out that the worst part of the movie wasn’t when everyone died; it was when everyone was celebrating in front of the guns that would cut them down.

We went wetly to meet everyone for lunch in Insadong. The Farleys took us to Sanchon, the Buddhist temple cuisine that Kaila discovered, where we ate terrifically.

Dean Farley sniffing the nasty rain smell that Presca
and later Kaila would gang up on me about.

These photos are from Mark’s camera and by Kaila’s hand.

Afterwards, we watched noodle-making and parted ways. The rest of us made our way back through the alleys to the Old Tea Shop, where as soon as we’d sat down to order, Dean Farley walked in and chided us for wanting a free tea so badly as to intercept them.

Noodle making.

En route.

Sipping on delicious sikhye, ginseng, pear, jujube, and cinnamon teas, we contemplated actually intercepting them later on.

Thanks for showing us such a great time, JE Deans Farley!

Losing My Name/ "No girlfriend in this or any country."

The Week of July 2

Started with a sleepy Monday and a cash withdrawal. Following Sung Ho to a coffee shop to study, I found out firsthand what Athena meant when she told me about the Starbucks Index that everyone in Seoul seems to know about (and the linked article is 3 years old): the prices here begin where the Ventis in America leave off. I’d been leaving my writing assignments 3/4 finished, so I’d set aside time to get my work done that afternoon. The topic that day turned out to be 첫 사랑 (first love), and I imagined my teacher chortling over my newfound writing resolve and felt like some cheeseball character like Gyeon Woo in My Sassy Girl. Anyway, as I scribbled away diligently at my composition, Sung Ho got a new text-message every thirty seconds, and I understood how he’d gotten so good at Korean.

On Wednesday, I patted my back pocket while walking out of the goshiwon in the morning to discover that there was nothing there. I tore my tiny room apart and retraced my morning route through the place and even looked around in Kaila’s room, where I’d been sitting earlier, to no avail. During class, I went over the possibilities in my head, and when I couldn’t find my wallet after class, I had to call home. My father and I set about canceling cards and ordering replacements. After a few hours on the phone and a long time spelling out “Changcheon-dong, Seodaemun-gu”, I was all set to receive my emergency replacement debit card from Visa when the person I was talking to in Singapore said something like, “Alright, Bank of America, can you confirm?” and an unexpected voice from America piped in, “Yes, thank you.” Then the voice told me that this was a one-time-only service, to which I replied that I had no plans to lose my wallet in the future. But it was done, and a new card was to come on Friday.

Presca and I headed off to meet up with Nate, a 2006 alum that Professor Hwang introduced me to. Right before we met him at Anguk Station, I’d convinced Presca to buy a pig like Kaila’s, which didn’t take much. So when Nate walked up the subway stairs looking for me, “wearing red and Presca’s wearing a dress,” he found us, fingers still sticky from the delicious hoddeok we had eaten, flinging the gelatinous pig onto the stairs and squeaking with glee. He handled this first impression very diplomatically, and as we walked to Samcheongdong, we struck up a conversation about his life here as a teacher. Over pasta at a cute sidewalk place called Dal 1887, we talked about John Smith and the discovery of the Book of Mormon in Upstate New York, the recent switch in Seoul eating vogue from French to Italian as reflected in our Samcheongdong surroundings, teaching, and life in Korea. Nate puts a mirthful twinkle into his stories, so I really enjoyed chatting. Afterwards, we went looking for dessert.

The phone rang, and another voice from America asked me to confirm my delivery to “Phang-phun-dong, So-da-moon-gu.” Crouched in a quiet corner between a parked SUV and the wall of a hanok, away from the noise of the street running along the east wall of Gyeongbokgung, I spelled out my address so that my card company could find me.

We wandered into the area around Gwanghwamun. The gate itself is currently undergoing restoration. With demolition beginning on December 4, 2006, the 613th anniversary of when King Taejo broke ground on the site to build Gyeongbokgung and the 518 year Joseon Dynasty, the restoration is scheduled to be completed by 2009. A huge Gwanghwamun Plaza in the middle of Sejongno will face the new gate, which will be rotated 5.6 degrees clockwise and reassembled at its original site 14.5m to the south and 10.9m to the west, away from its realignment in 1968 with the Japanese Government General Building when Park Chung Hee re-poured the gate, destroyed by the GGK and the Korean War, in concrete. In the fall, I was just reading Chizuko Ueno’s point about history as “a continuous recomposition of the past in the present,” but now, I’m watching it happen. With Memory so wounded and so powerful, made of ember and cement, is it really possible to stop it and ask it Quo vadis?

Then we heard engines. Around the corner was the American Embassy, its perimeter thick with buses and buses of Korean soldiers and police, smoking, sleeping in bunks, walking from flood light to flood light.

We passed the place and crossed Sejongno, with its huge statue of Admiral Yi, and made it over to a place called The Place for a waffle, which in our case came with two huge scoops of green tea and vanilla ice cream, blueberry syrup, and a cherry tomato on top.

John, Presca, Masato, and I met up on Thursday afternoon in Hannam-dong to meet “Edward,” who we had come to know as a quasi-monk, traditional Korean breathing/dancing/meditation practitioner who insisted that we come down to his center in Suwon, where we could fully experience the culture surrounding his art. The dusk drive down to Happy Suwon (working with the Korean National Tourism Organization, most of the towns in Korea have acquired similar names) was gorgeous. We did not learn or even see any live meditation dance, but I liked it very much nevertheless. Edward showed us some of his videos, and he’s a fantastic dancer (he even had a meditation dance set to “Canon”).

Screenshots from one of Edward’s performances.

The institute was a center for well-being, with a clinic and training center and consultation center built in. A number of things seemed to be practiced there, including the traditional Korean breathing exercise and oriental medicine. The center seemed to be a culture-based business: Edward introduced us to his boss on our way out to dinner. This spring, I took an Indonesian meditation martial arts dancing class through Yale Silat, so I was eager to talk about what I had learned in relation to what he practiced. It wasn’t so easy. We had dinner at a place nearby — doenjang boribap — and Edward explained more about himself.

(When I first walked around Yonsei with Hye Jin, she told me that Ko Dae students are famous for being a bunch of rough-and-tumble farmers drinking makkolli while Yon Dae students are a smoother bunch of beer drinkers. This has proven to be a very useful bit of knowledge when meeting Ko Dae students.)

Since Edward was a young man, he’s been preoccupied with the meaning of his existence. This led him to major in French literature at Korea University. But this in turn led him to makkolli. Learning that Masato was a student of Chinese history, he began to tell us that, based on the height of the ground above sea level, Korea could have conquered vast swaths of land in China in ancient times, but that it refrained from doing so. Later, though, he taught us about Korean kimchi pots: their strength and breathability have allowed Koreans to effectively refrigerate their foods for centuries.

On Friday night, I saw Yohangza Company’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Arko Arts Theatre in Daehagno with Presca. You can see a clip here. I loved it: the characters had all been changed into puns on Korean words or creatures from Korean folktales, the actors wove pansori and samulnori into their parts, and the dancing and pranking were delightful.

The Yohangza Theater Company.

owns this photo. But I had to put something up.

Afterward, we met up with Jane and Kaila and Bryan in Gangnam, where Bryan and a gaggle of his classmates from Sogang’s Summer Korean Studies Program were holding down a bar. They were beautiful, young, loud, and friendly; together we drank yogurt soju.

The next day, I met up with my Mom’s friend from graduate school, Athena, who is now an instructor and administrator at Korea University’s English Language Program. On the way over, Kaila texted me to tell me that she’d found my wallet as she stripped her bed for the wash.

It turned out that when I’d visited on Tuesday night, Kaila was sitting in her chair, so I sat on her bed (our 1 pyeong rooms leave no choice.) My wallet fell out of my pocket and made its way between her bed and the wall, then back up under her mattress cover. I have no idea how this happened. But I was glad to know that my name and face and numbers weren’t just gone.

Athena showed me around Korea University, which has been renovated beautifully to celebrate its centennial. When I asked her about her students, she responded that they had really changed since she’d gotten to Ko Dae in 1997. No longer the shy farmers’ kids she had first met, she told me that her students had become worldly and gregarious since she had gotten back from Indonesia a few years ago to resume her post. I met her fellow instructors, and as I tuned my ears to demodulate a whole English-speaking realm of slang, I could hear Korea changing itself. English-language instruction and the education system itself here might be the flagship mess that the Times on both coasts report on with their harried students and their alien school worlds, but change, wherever it’s going, was as hard to ignore on Saturday as difference. It isn’t just the instructors; it’s the students who bring them here to teach them. Students and teachers at Ko Dae have set up queer film festivals, cooking parties, and trade experiences from the provinces as from Afro-Cuban homes in Chicago, or Canadian and Venezuelan and New Zealand cities. And while I toured Ko Dae’s English Program, I feel the same way when my conversation partner puts away her Kanji lessons or Japanese fashion magazines to swap languages with me, or when my Hanmunpyo friend says “goodnight” before heading off to Chinese lessons at his hagwon. I was told a lot of things before I got here, and sometimes clerks at Artbox giggle when I ask them about a gift bag, and most people handing out fliers on the street don’t give me one, but in most of my interactions, I am hard-pressed to label Korea a static or closed society.

Athena, her husband, and her son, Jung Woo, who I last remembered falling asleep on our couch in Quartz Hill and crashing into the LEGO fortress that I’d been building for a week, took me to Nanta!

(I remember that one of the greatest feelings in learning Korean was looking at my growing stack of vocabulary cards last September and realizing that only 3 weeks back I couldn’t even read the alphabet. But soon after, that feeling was replaced by the know-how-much-you-don’t-know plan that most Korean learners start to form after a few TA sessions of jumbling words or pausing for minutes to recall something they’ve just heard: learning hanja. Sexy like the girl you loved in eighth grade who was learning Latin and going to Italy one day in high school; sexy like graduate students in physics think they are when they use the word to describe anything that’s beyond the scope of the conversation at hand; sexy like Chinese characters; sexy like not mixing up 양 (sheep) with 용 (dragon) while responding to a story about the girl-eating snake of Jeju Island with a story of the girl-eating sheep/dragon of Krakow, hanja is what we always reply when they ask us what extra classes we’d like at Sogang; hanja our new books piling up for the day that we start to decode them. Nearly every time something is explained to me, it’s “from the hanja.”)

Nanta, from the hanja for crazy and hitting, was just that: a musical about 3 great-looking chefs and the caterer’s nephew preparing a last-minute feast. The musical was a modified samulnori about food and samulnori. The excellent drumming, chopping, mopping, taekwondo, dancing, and singing gave us the appetite we needed to get through the scrumptious samgyetang, and ginseng and raspberry wines we had afterwards. As they drove me back to my place, Hugh advised me to practice Korean with a girlfriend, which reminded me of the question Athena had asked me earlier:

“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Well, do you have a girlfriend in America?”