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2004 July 3 - Three weeks later, still alive. I've been in Korea for only three weeks, but the novelty of every experience here has made it feel much longer. I definitely feel like my Korean is improving, although still can't follow conversations, or for that matter, about 1/3 of what the teacher says in the classroom. Need to work on that. On Wednesday (June 30) I teamed up with my Korean guitar playing friend for a street gig here in Sinchon. We alternated Korean and American tunes and drew a sizable audience. Rock! Friday night--stayed out till 5:30 AM. Yikes. I am still recovering, hence the less than spectacular prose of this section. Oh, and they revamped the transportation system here in Seoul. The biggest change is with the bus system, but computer glitches have plagued the entire system. Definitely not a good thing when it's rush hour and the turnstile won't read your card. Sometimes you ride the subway, and sometimes the subway rides you. 2004
July 4 - Let freedom ring. On behalf of all the expats here, I'd like to wish everyone at home a happy Independence Day. Allow me to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on our great nation. America is a great country. Not because our people are more industrious, more talented, nicer, or better than everyone else; not because God decided to bless America more than any other country. No, America is a great country simply because for me (and for the majority of my readers) it is home. America is where I was born, where I grew up, and where I will grow old. It is where my family and my friends live. It is where my sons and daughters will live. And no matter how acclimated I will get to Korean culture and the Korean language, I know will never be able to feel as comfortable here, or anywhere else for that matter, as I would in America. I am an American. I love baseball, rock and roll, college football, cheap beer, and hamburgers. So do a lot of other Americans. This may sound superficial, or at least heinously obvious, but I really like being around people that I have a lot in common with. In other words, I like being around Americans. That being said, I am certainly enjoying this cross-cultural experience, and I feel like I will be the better person for it after I'm done. But I will also certainly come to appreciate the things back home that most of us take for granted. The diversity, for example. Jews, Italians, Asians, Blacks, Hispanics--they're everywhere in the states (or at least where I went to school). Here, there are...Koreans. A lot of them. Okay, I live with a lot of Japanese people, but the diversity that one experiences in America is truly unique and certainly something that I miss. I know a lot of things are wrong with America right now--Americans make headlines these days for being obese on a horrifying scale, performing poorly in school, and abusing prisoners in Iraq. The country is about to split itself in two during the upcoming Presidential election in what promises to be a bitter, polarized campaign. Still, it is home. It's the only one I have, and I love it for all its good and bad. My fellow Americans (whoo, there's a doozy! I sound like a politician. But I know not all of my readers are U.S. citizens. But I digress), on this day, our nation's birthday, I hope you find it in yourself to love your country, if for no other reason than because it is your home too, and it needs your help now more than ever. They say you can't go home again. I hope they're wrong. Happy Fourth of July. God bless America. -MSL 2004 July 7- One month. Author's note: this one is long and not so cheery. You've been forewarned... I've made it one month in Korea. Barely. A bad Tuesday night and a bad Wednesday morning led to a bad Wednesday afternoon that I have spent the rest of the evening recovering from. So my Korean guitar playing friend has turned out to be quite a disappointment. We were supposed to do a subway gig on Monday, but after I waited 10 minutes for him, he shows up only to cancel. The next day he calls me out for a subway gig; my instincts told me to blow him off, but my desire to play got the best of me and I hauled my guitar and set out to meet him at the Sinchon subway station. What followed was two and a half hours of some of the most mediocre busking I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I was expecting to set up camp inside the subway station, where rush hour traffic was bustling, and play for a while. Much to my surprise, he informs me that he plans to play in the subway cars and hustle people for money. I was skeptical, to say the least, but I decided to trust his instincts and see how this tactic would turn out. Not surprisingly, it was a bust. As I watched him strum his out-of-tune guitar and sing with his barely passable raspy voice, I felt about as awkward and uncomfortable as I'd felt during my whole time in Korea. He tried this for a couple more stops until the empty money bin and I convinced him to try a different tactic. So we got off at the next stop and played out on the street for about an hour or so. Net profit, the Korean equivalent of about 5 bucks, in spite of his efforts to hustle passer-byers for money while I played solo. At some point in the evening, I'd decided I'd had enough of this joker, but the breaking point came when we were playing the Radiohead standard "Creep." You know that part where the singer's voice hits the high notes in the climax of the song? Yeah. As he did his best Radiohead/slaughtered cat impression, I recalled the words of David St. Hubbins who, after the departure of Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, uttered the phrase, "No, we shan't work together again." St. Hubbins and Tufnel would eventually reunite Spinal Tap for a successful Japanese tour, but such will not be the fate for the Lee-Won (I think that was his name, I honestly can't be sure) English-Korean Guitar Duo. He asked if I could play tomorrow; I said I was booked for the rest of the week, shook his hand, and waved goodbye. With that rock and roll dream dashed in the gutter, I trudged home through the rain and impossibly muggy night air. Once home, I decompressed, rehydrated, and eventually set to my homework and lesson planning. Next thing I knew, it was late, I was tired, dissatisfied, and I faced a meager six hours of sleep before my daily four hour class regimen. Wednesday's class. Some class days are good; I can understand most of what the teachers say, and I feel confident in my Korean language ability. Some days are bad; I phase out for minutes at a time, unable to comprehend the rapid-fire Korean sailing around and above my head. Wednesday's class was of the latter type. I'm sure the lack of sleep didn't help, but I spent most of the day in a daze and feeling like I would never reach anything close to proficiency in this obscenely difficult language. I made it back to my room after class for a brief respite before heading off to the other side of town for tutoring only to find bad news from home. I won't go into the specifics, and it hopefully isn't that serious, but it was enough to induce my first post-collegiate breakdown of sorts. It was long overdue, to be sure; Yale withdrawal and the stress of adjusting to a completely foreign environment were taking a serious toll on me in spite of my new friends and crowded weekly schedule. In short, I felt powerless, alone, and impossibly far away from my loved ones. After a while I was able to pull myself together to head out to my tutoring session. After laboring through my two-hour lesson, I chatted with my student's mother (this is the family friend who met me at the airport and took care of me for my first few days in the country) who helped me pull myself together a little more. She had lived in the states for a year and a half and could empathize with the way I was feeling. While talking with her, I realized two things: first, I'm doing everything I should be doing. I'm meeting people and getting involved in Korean life. Second, once I attain a functioning level of ability with the language, things will start to come together. As Mrs. Song said, I just need to give it some time. I have, after all, only been here one month, and I've had only about two weeks of class. After waiting out the rush hour and teaching her two younger children some cowboy English ("Howdy partner" and "Happy trails, partner") I headed home in somewhat better shape. I bought tickets to see Spiderman 2 and spoke passably in Korean with the man at the ticket window. Then I made arrangements to meet a Korean friend for language practice--the first phone conversation I've successfully conducted entirely in Korean (save for the "bye" at the end). So now I'm back in my room, still tired, but in better spirits. If you've kept with me this far, I salute you. Some final thoughts: adjusting to life here is not easy; in fact, it can be inordinately difficult at times. Some things are little, like the lack of drying machines or the strange smells. Other things aren't so little, like homesickness and the language barrier. Still, I know I'm not alone, and I do have friends and family to turn to. And in spite of a very trying last 48 hours, I can still say with some confidence that things will turn out OK and this experience will be all that I hoped it would be, and then some. So today was not a good day. But to quote Scarlett O'Hara, "After all, tomorrow is another day." And to quote David St. Hubbins again, "I'm sure I'd feel much worse about this if I weren't under such heavy sedation." Hope all is well wherever you are. -MSL 2004 July 10 - Kickin' it old school.
Of course, I couldn 't understand any of the lyrics, but I surprisingly found myself entranced by this strange new music. I actually found a lot of similarities between p'ansori and the blues: both have very emotive, often raspy vocal delivery styles, and both are occasionally punctuated by the audience's outbursts of praise for the singer (in other words, like shouting out "right on" or "yeah!" while Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy lays it down). This, I thought, is way cooler than the cheesy, unimpressive K-pop I'd been listening to for the last month. Now, I'm someone who believes in the unversal nature of music; i.e., that a black kid born in the Mississippi Delta has as much potential to become a concert pianist as a Jewish kid from Brooklyn has to play blues/R&B guitar. When I've worked in the soul/R&B idiom (shout out to all the members of John Nash and the Beautiful Minds), hopefully I've demonstrated this principal in action. That being said, I knew I was seeing something special, something different at last night's concert: Korean musicians working in the Korean idiom. It was so different from Western music in every way that I couldn't help but recognize how this music really belonged to the Korean people. For all you musicologists out there, check out this link to some video clips of p'ansori. It's not as impressive in these little clips as it is in person, but I especially encourage blues fans to take a look. Today, I finally got around to visiting Geongbokgung, the ancient royal palace of Korean kings. It's huge and impressive, and as I said to my friend while emerging from the subway stop, "OK, now I'm in Korea." No more flashy neon signs, no more concrete apartment buildings, no more clogged streets. Just a huge expanse of traditional Korean architecture all around. We also checked out the Korean Folk Museum, which I took some issue with for its portrayal of traditional rural Korean life as an idyllic, pastoral existence. I guess you can't really blame them though, and the Koreans did to a pretty good job of portraying the unequivocably hellish conditions during the Korean War. Such was my traditional Korean weekend, replete with p'ansori and the splendor of Korea's royal past. Oh, that and my class went to noraebang on Friday night. Pictures from that, as well as Geongbokgung, coming soon. -MSL 2004 July 14 - Pictures + Random updates First, and most importantly, new pictures! Check out karaoke with my Japanese classmates, Korea's ancient royal palace, and the Mickey Mouse cop here. Nothing particularly earth-shattering in this updates, so here's just a few fun nuggets:
Rock over New Haven, rock on Seoul. Diet Pepsi: Uh-huh.* -MSL * for all the Wesley Willis fans out there. 2004 July 19 - Kickin' it Old School, Part 2. This past weekend (July 16-18) I took a trip with the Song family to Asan, which is a 2-3 hour drive south of Seoul. For all you denizens of the Northeast, this is the Korean equivalent of going to the Berkshires or the Hamptons for the weekend. Except of course, that the Berkshires or the Hamptons doesn't have ancient Buddhist temples, monuments to prominent 16th century Koreans, or acres upon acres of rice fields. That and Berkshires vacationers probably don't sleep on mats on the floor in their condos. OK, so the accomodations weren't exactly what I'd come to expect from vacationing around in the States, but the trade-off is of course the ancient--and I mean ancient--heritage sites and the strange yet beautiful scenery. I can't really think of much to say right now, so I'll share a picture instead--obviously the best way to relate this largely visual experience. I'll get a proper full photo album together soon, but until then, check out this bell from the Buddhist temple.
The Liberty Bell it ain't, that's for sure. -MSL 2004 July 22 - Jesus is just all right with me. So there's a subway worker strike going on in Seoul right now. This is not as bad as one might think, although the city is running fewer trains than normal. During my fifteen-minute wait for a train (the normal wait is usually no longer than five minutes), I noticed a conspicuous group of well-dressed young white men chatting together. "GI's...or missionaries," I though to myself as I moved closer to the group to eavesdrop on them and determine their particular vocation. You have to understand that in Seoul white people stick out. A lot. When I'd heard that people in Seoul sometimes stare at foreigners, I thought it strange, but now even I still do a double take whenever I see pale skin and blond hair. As I was trying to look non-chalant (and Korean), one of the white men suprised me by asking me a question. In Korean. Which I couldn't understand since I was listening to my headphones. And because my Korean, in a word, sucks. After I awkwardly told him that I'm an American and in fact do not speak Korean well (and after I recovered from the embarassment of this white dude speaking Korean better than me), I soon found out that these men were in fact missionaries. Not just any missionaries, though. Mormon missionaries. He asked if I was religious; I told him I was a practicing Catholic. Of course, he wasn't dettered by this--in fact, he told me, with more than just a touch of smugness, that his family used to be Catholic before converting to Mormonism. As we rode the subway, he delivered the pitch--quite well, I must admit--and gave me his English language copy of the Book of Mormon (with his phone number written in the inside cover, just in case I came around). I thanked him for the book, commended him for his faith, and scurried off the train. Weird. That after living for twenty-two years in the states, eighteen of which were spent in the Deep South, that I had my first bonafide evangelization experience here in Seoul at the hands of a very eager Mormon who had been living in Seoul for a year. This kid was fresh out of high school when he was assigned to South Korea. Admittedly, I think Mormonism is more than just a little strange. I learned today that Mormons believe Jesus appeared to Indians in South America (there's this fantastic illustration in the Book of Mormon of a radiant, very caucasian-looking Jesus with pyramids in the background and various dark-skinned indigeneous peoples looking on in awe) and converted a segment of the population who unfortunately later "turned to evil" (as my Mormon friend put it). Nuts, right? I thought so at first, but then again, I stopped to think about my Catholic beliefs, which include the priest being able to change bread and wine in to the actual body and blood of Jesus H. Christ himself for our convenient consumption. There's probably plenty of people out there, my readers included, who find such an idea ludicrous. Or "nuts" if you will. But what has affected me more than this little nugget of pluralistic religious perspective is the incredible amount of courage and conviction possed by the missionary. This guy really believed that Jesus went to Inca town and that Joe Smith translated the Book of Mormon at age fourteen. He was ready to give his schpeil in Korean to me, as he assumed me to be a regular Seoul-ite, and do his damnedness to add me to the approximately 60,000 member Mormon community of Korea. One white guy, sticking out like a sore thumb in a sea of Koreans. I found this note scribbled in the margin of the Book of Mormon given to me by the missionary:
Say what you will about Mormonism, but this kid certainly has more than his fair share of chutzpah. -MSL *note: the [sic]s are not meant to demean this guy's spelling. I was a history major, and old citation habits die hard. 2004 July 27 - Jesus is just all right with me, part 2. This past Sunday (the 25th)my little experiment in Korean Catholicism came to an official end as I finally faced reality and went to an English language mass. Granted, I had to get up early and ride the bus/subway for almost an hour, but let's face it: there was no way I was going to be a functioning member of a Korean parish. Sure, I could read Korean enough to sing along with the choir, and the group had more than its fair share of fun-loving young adults, but they made little effort to communicate with me, either in English or in low-level Korean. Not their fault, really, but all the same it was a situation that wasn't working. Fortunately the English language parish seems to be a very hospitable community, so we'll see how this turns out. Midterms: Monday and Tuesday were midterm exam days here at Yonsei. Monday's speaking and reading batteries were for the most part pretty easy; today's writing test wasn't so bad but the listening, alas, still plagues me as my weakest language skill. Just over a month left in the summer term. Where did the time go? Okay, this is a pretty lame entry so to compensate here's a new picture: sunset over Seoul, taken from the 9th floor of my building:
Cue the Elton John music. -MSL 2004 July 31 - Midterm results Midterm results: apparently I'm doing A work in reading, writing, and listening, but only B work in speaking. I feel like this is more an accurate assessment of my test taking skills as opposed to my actual Korean language skills; the reading, writing, and listening tests were for the most part multiple choice. Hence the lower score on the speaking test, which was largely determined by my performance in a one on one interview with the teacher. According to weather.com, it is 91 degrees farenheit here in Seoul, which works out to a 104 degrees heat index. Thank God for the AC; I honestly don't know how people living in different boarding houses are surviving without it. That's it for now...DMZ trip tomorrow, so look out for an entry with pictures early next week. -MSL 2004 July 31 - They can't do that. Can they do that? For the last several weeks, I've been unable to access various blog websites from Korea, including Blogspot and Live Journal. At first, I wrote this off to some weird Internet congestion/traffic/routing problem, but today I came across information that confirmed my worst fears: The South Korean government is censoring blog websites. Apparently, their justification for doing so is to restrict the distribution of, as well as any destabilizing effects of, the video footage of Kim Sun-Il's beheading on the Internet. Of course, it doesn't take Thomas Jefferson or a Chinese dissident rotting in a jail cell to realize the frightening implications of a government censoring something to limit its "destablizing effects." This is wrong. This is a direct attack on freedom of speech, and a shameful incident for a country still struggling to establish democracy in the aftermath of decades of dictatorship. I'm usually not one for polemics, and I certainly realize that my inability to access my friends' musings about their jobs and college lives is chump change compared to the tragedy of Kim Sun-Il's death (read my entries on this subject in the June archive). But I believe in these things called democracy and civil rights. In the 60's, people from all walks of life marched against segregation in the U.S. because they believed that if any of us lived without the blessings of liberty, then none of us were truly free. The same holds true today. I cannot stand by idly as my host country excersises blatant censorship. I say all this knowing that I risk looking like I'm making too much out of such a little thing. Yes, I know South Korea is immeasurably more democratic now than it was twenty years ago. Yes, I know that it's a lot worse in China, where I have a few readers who can't access this blog on Geocities because of rigorous government censorship there. And yes, I know that I'm complaining about not reading blogs when millions in Africa are still living in chattel slavery. Talk about a lack of freedom. But in the end I stand by my outrage. South Koreans deserve better than this. To my readers: wherever you are right now, please, don't take your liberties for granted, and be wary of those who, even with the best intentions, try to deprive them from you. -MSL For further reading:
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Yesterday
(Friday, July 9) I went to a pansori concert, which was described
to me as something along the lines of "boring, traditional
Korean opera." Here's the setup: solo singer delivers a dramatic
monologue that dips in and out of song, accompanied only by a drummer.
