[Note: While this post was nominally meant as a summary of
my experiences leaving Korea, due to time constraints it was not finished until
well after I left left Korea.]
So the other day I remembered the Deftones did a song they
named “Korea” for some reason, and I decided to give it a listen for the first
time in a long time and see if I could figure out the connection between the
song and the country, if any:
After listening, I’m still not sure if I get the connection,
but I guess it does kind of remind me of a night out in Itaewon…
It seems to me like I’ve been seeing Korea show up a lot
more in Western media in the last few years, and I don’t just mean that song
with the dance and the guy in the sunglasses who was in literally every last
advertisement the last time I went to a movie here. (I’m still here at the
moment, in a hostel in Hongdae in Seoul, but I’ll probably be at Incheon
Airport, or on the plane, or maybe even at my layover in San Francisco or home
(home… what a problematic term…) in LA by the time I finish and post this.)
Writers and artists often seem to look to foreign lands when they want to make
a strange location seem more forbidding or exotic (or, dare I say, inscrutable?
Or, perhaps even, oriental?) and when they seek that perfect mystery-shrouded
locale halfway around the world their imaginations somehow almost always end up
in the Far East. For years, I would say Japan probably had the most prominent
place in the Western imagination when it came to oriental exoticism, but these
days Japan seems a lot closer than it used to – after all, our kids grow up on
Pokemon and Power Rangers, our baseball league has Ichiro and Matsui, there’s a
Toyota in our garage and the local 7-Eleven is selling sushi and coffee in Domo
coffee cups. So who is the new Empire of Strange and Far Away, now that we
can’t depend on that far-away land on the edge of the world where people are
descended from the sun? The Middle East is too dangerous, Eastern Europe is too
European, South America is too colonized, Bangkok is a little to grimy, Hong
Kong is soooo 1997, Bali a little too touristy and most people wouldn’t know
which continent to start looking in to find Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta. Where do
we turn? Shanghai, with its sexy new skyline, has definitely been making waves.
But increasingly, it also seems like we’re imagining ourselves in the Land of
the Morning Calm in order to get more lost than we’ve ever been.
I thought a little about this when I was watching “Cloud
Atlas” in a Korean theater, since part of the movie takes place in a
nearly-unrecognizable imagined Neo-Seoul. Usually I’m used to seeing the “Neo-“
tag stuck in front of some form of post-apocalypse Tokyo, and to be fair I
think the filmmakers forgot which city they were in a couple times as well.
(Tatami mats in the apartment? Really, production designer?) I kind of wondered
how the Korean audience felt about getting stuck with the culpability for
(spoilers abound) the future society of good-looking, pleasant, female
slave-clone-drones rather than some other Neo-Corporate capital of the
Neo-World. They chose a very colorful, East Asian type of pop look for the
restaurant, but honestly other than the Korean obsession with appearances I
didn’t see anything particularly East Asian about the type of sexism or wage
slavery represented in that part of the film. Relations between the sexes and
among workers may be a little different here, but let’s face it, sexism and
worker exploitation exist all around the world with different faces. In terms
of the story, I kind of felt like Seoul was plucked randomly from a short list
of relatively wealthy, far-away places. It’s possible the audience in Korea never
even felt any sort of connection with the Neo-Seoul represented in the movie.
Koreans are probably used to seeing misrepresentations of Korea by now.
(Vietnamese-style straw hats? Really, “Lost” production designers?) Plus they
were probably too busy wondering why all the white people in Neo-Seoul had such
weird-looking faces and odd accents. The only notable moments of shock I heard
from the audience were for the man-on-man kiss (one guy, loudly) and the reveal
at the end that Doona Bae had played the wrinkled older Mexican woman (all the
girls, audibly).
Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about these things as I prepare
to leave this inexorably unfamiliar place and return home to the United States.
Is there a “Korea” inside of all of us – some far-away, alien place that we
seek to discover, and maybe even live in, but know that we will never
understand? What does that “Korea” have to do with the Korea that I’ve been
living in almost every day for the last three years? Which one will I remember
most strongly? Which one will I miss first?
Winter break and the winter session of school, which
followed my trip to Thailand and Cambodia, were a little busier than I expected
them to be. I learned a few days before the end of the school year that I would
have an additional camp for incoming freshmen that I hadn’t anticipated, but I
managed to pull together enough old summer camp activities to cover those
classes. Then, during the winter session, by surprise, I had two weeks of
classes spread over three weeks to do with the returning first-year students
starting their second year of high school. This was a big surprise considering
that in no past year had I ever been asked to teach anything during the short
February session, not to mention that one of the previous middle school
teachers had been given pretty much that entire time to pack up and leave, and
the Lunar New Year holiday fell in the middle of that time. I suppose that
previous teacher might have been given the time off because he was applying for
a visa to move from South Africa to the United States to rejoin his wife, and,
knowing what I know about US visa paperwork, he probably needed the time.
[Note: Here in the blog (dammit, I can never get used to the immediacy of this
medium) comes the time and space gap between being in Korea at the end of my
contract and encountering Los Angeles, Buffalo, Los Angeles and most of a
bottle of North Coast Sauvignon Blanc (I needed it to cook, I swear) on the way
to the plastic folding table upon which I am now typing this.] So (oh god, I'm
starting sentences with "so," I've been in Korea for too long) the
process of leaving Korea was a little more compressed than I expected it to me.
I remember that at some point, about a month before I was suppose to leave and
after I had gotten home from Thailand, I suddenly realized, "Damn, all
this time I've been so focused on how much I miss my friends and family back
home and I never thought about how much I'm going to miss the people I'm
leaving behind here." As I think I've mentioned before, I suppose that
missing people and places is an inevitable consequence of traveling and exploring.
But I have to wonder, in retrospect, how much of the time I spent in Korea was
spent focused on what I was missing back home when I could have been focusing
more on the good things going on around me.
Thankfully, due to the ending date of my contract I was able
to squeeze in a couple days in Seoul before I left the country completely. I'm
glad I was able to make the transition back to the United States in steps
rather than doing it all at once—I felt a little bit like I was going through
the same process as one of the pet fish I used to buy for my fish tank, which I
would have to leave in their plastic bag from the pet store floating in the top
of the tank for fifteen or so minutes before I could introduce them to the
tank, so that the temperature would even out and they wouldn't die from the
shock of suddenly being introduced to unfamiliar waters. I don't know how I
would have handled it if I had gone straight from the emotional shock of rushing
to catch a bus in Daegu to Incheon Airport and hurrying to say goodbye to my
co-teacher, who was such a good friend to me over the course of the three years
I was in Korea, and his family directly to boarding a plane to the United
States and being launched headlong, fourteen hours later, in to the hustle and
bustle of Los Angeles, California, USA. In Seoul, I got to spend one last night
(or was it two?) out on the town with one of the teachers from my town and got
to meet and hang out with a couple of friends of mine from film school back in
America. Oh, and also I got to make a late night stop at Taco Bell which turned
out to be a bad idea. One of my film school friends actually invited me to
visit her on the set of a film shoot for a low-budget Korea movie. I think the
idea was to get my blood pumping for being back in the world of film
production. I have to say it worked, to an extent at least. I mean, I don't
think I have the stomach or spine to back into freelance electric and grip
work, but it sure would be nice to be a part of something creative again...
I managed to squeeze in a couple touristy things on my way
out of Korea via Seoul, and one of them was finally visiting the Korean War
Memorial in Seoul. The Korean War Memorial appears to be curated by the Korean
military, and I was a bit surprised how militaristic the message was at a
museum dedicated to something I always understood as being remembered as a time
of great suffering and pain for the Korean people. I mean, yes, the segments
dedicated to the actual Korean conflict were quite mournful, but most of the
other sections were surprisingly upbeat about "The Glories of War!"
(quotes are mine to denote a concept I voice facetiously rather than a quote
from the actual museum), including probably the cheeriest summary of any
country's involvement in the war in Vietnam that I've ever seen. One thing that
really stuck with me, though, from the whole experience was seeing the
inscription over the wall of the wing of the museum that enshrines the names of
all the foreign soldiers who gave their lives during the Korean War. I can't
recall who it's attributed to, although I think it's from the Korean War
Memorial in Washington, DC. It reads, "Our nation honors her sons and
daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a
people they never met." To me, the idea of traveling to a foreign land,
and giving your life in a violent conflict there, without ever getting to know
the country and never meeting the people is just horrifying. I'm glad to say
that, no matter how I look at my experiences from the last three years, at
least I can say that I got to know the country and met the people. How terrible
to leave one's homeland to travel the world, and never get to know the world
beyond your homeland!
Well, my days in Seoul ended all too quickly, and soon I was
on a plane back to the United States. I spent a week in Los Angeles, where I
was hoping to see friends and perhaps land a job interview or two, but managed
to do not nearly enough of the former and none of the latter. I headed from Los
Angeles to my parents' home in Buffalo, where I was planning to look for some
temporary position that could help me save enough money to move back to Los Angeles
comfortably and without worry of having to spend financial bounty from teaching
in Korea (I may get brave enough to write a blog post on how to use your
teaching job in Korea to get out of debt, but I'm not sure if I want to take on
that much braggadocio at the moment) but soon learned that the temp market in
Buffalo is, not surprisingly, rather barren. An opportunity to take on a room
and a roommate in Los Angeles came about, and after scrambling to unload a
treasure trove of childhood Lego sets onto several generous eBay buyers, I
ended up back in Los Angeles a little sooner than I had imagined.
So that's where I am now –scribbling these words as I take
care of an unfamiliar cat and wait for the newest episode of Mad Men to begin here
in Los Angeles. It's been quite a journey from when I left three years ago to
my return now, and it's a little strange to ponder the fact that the whole
thing took me from here to halfway around the world and then back to a place a
short trip up the 405 and down the 101 from where I began. Fate? I don't know.
Trying to get anyone to take my résumé seriously in Buffalo taught me that, to
some extent, you really never can go home, and to some extent to you have to
continue following the path you've chosen to its end, no matter where it leads
and no matter what byways you attempt to take along the way. I guess the only
direction you can ever really move, no matter which direction you face on the
map, is forward. What's that thing in The Great Gatsby, about those boats being
inexorably dragged forward? Wait, no, that was about being borne into the past,
wasn't it? Damn. I'm sure it'll come back to me when I see the Hollywood
adaptation this summer. Perhaps I should avoid respected literature and stick
to the pop music references. Well, at any rate, here I am, for better or for
worse, home sweet home.
