Korean soccer fans in Seoul, South Korea. Source: New York Times World Cup Coverage

Below are two pictures I found from a family trip to Korea in 1984 (incidentally, the only time my dad returned to his homeland since leaving in 1976 before finally returning on the recent trip that this blog has devoted much attention to).

Top row, L-R: Mom, Grandmom, Mom’s sister, Mom’s brother
Bottom row, L-R: My older brother, me, unknown.

What strikes me about these pictures is how rural this scene is. This is the real deal: dirt roads, huts with grass roofs, and no high rises in the background (which is how my dad’s old village is like now). I again feel compelled to state the obvious: this is where I came from.

Below is a great picture of my grandmother serving a pitcher of Coke at my brother’s 8th birthday party (1986). Upon closer inspection, I realized that this was at a Show Biz Pizza (now Chuck-E-Cheese).

Think about this. In 1984, this woman was in the first two pictures, on a dirt road in Korea. In 1986, only two years later, she’s in suburban Augusta, GA, at a Show Biz Pizza. I can only begin to imagine how out of place she must have felt during this time, but here she is, three white kids on her right, her three Korean grandkids on the left, at a gaudy American pizza parlor.

I really know how to read too much into photographs. Moving along, on a similar vein, my grandmom and my sister at a roller skating rink, circa 1990.

Also circa 1990, my gradmother and my two uncles who made it to the US first at my first communion in Birmingham, AL.

What struck me the most about these pictures is that these folks have really been with me for the vast majority of my childhood. But I think the language gap created an artificial sense of distance from them, as if they had just showed up sometime the mid 90′s, then slowly faded out of view.

Such was not the case. For my grandmother, she had made it about 20 years in the USA, and she saw all of us grow up from children to young adults. She was there for it all.

This is a small country in a strategic location with a deep sense of grievance about being manipulated by the great powers around it. Chinese emperors demanded tribute from Korea; Japanese occupiers forbade Koreans to speak their own language; American, Chinese and Russian cold war rivalries divided Korea in two. While mostly approving of their alliance with the United States, South Koreans remain acutely sensitive to any suggestion that they must do America’s bidding.

Sigh. I don’t know when Korea will get over this whole complex. The sooner the better; this sort of knee-jerk nationalism and protectionism will get the country’s economy nowhere and fast.

The article deals mostly with the massive highrise developments in these cities, but the situation bore many similarities to Korea; namely, incredibly rapid growth and a lack of a workable local vernacular from which to draw inspiration. From the article:

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told me recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old?”

Replace “city” with “country,” and you pretty much describe the situation in Korea. Granted, Korea does have plenty of ancient Buddhist temples and palaces, but before the war, it was a largely agrarian country, and pretty much anything “urban” was destroyed during the war. Thus, given a somewhat blank slate, this is what one Korean architect came up with:

Augh!! My eyes!!!

This was spotted in Kunsan, South Korea, a medium size city, but one that has also seen rapid growth in recent years.

The sign on the front says “Opera House Wedding Hall” in Korean (or should I say, Konglish). It’s someone architect’s terribly misguided effort at creating an elegant, European-style, sumptuous banquet hall to allow young couples to fulfill their westernized wedding ceremony fanatasies. It just unfolds in layer after layer of unrefined gaudiness.

Every time I see this building, it hurts me in some new way. Sometimes it’s the crazily repeated cheapo renditions of Italian cathedral domes. Other times it’s the oddly reflective/tinted windows. Maybe it’s the ridiculous trim on the windows. Whatever it is, for some reason, I found this thing so offensive to the architectural standards instilled in me by twenty six years of life in the US, four years of life in NYC, and one semester of Vincent Scully’s History of Modern Architecture at Yale.

I obviously chose an egregious example to get my point across, but I saw eyesores similar to the “opera house” across the country. Countless hotels looked like ersatz Disney castles. Church steeples made of nothing more than bare metal frames poked into skylines of all cities I saw while I was there. And there were even worse wedding halls that I didn’t capture on film.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Another quote from an architect in the article struck me as particularly relevant:

“The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become something on which you can base an architecture.”

What is the “vernacular” in Korea? Well, it’s this, and for whatever reason, Koreans haven’t been able to integrate it into modern architectural practice.

I will go out on a limb and say that, by and large, Koreans have done a poor job of adapting certain elements of Western vernacular architecture in their buildings. But should I fault them for trying? After all, they’re new at it. Americans have been doing it for 300 years; Koreans are a little late to the game.

Unfortunately, I’m not too optimistic about the future. The rest of the architecture that dominated Korea was largely in the form of repetitive, monotonous high rise apartment buildings that came straight out of Le Corbusier’s notebook:

I admit it; I’m a snob when it comes to this stuff. I adore the quaint brownstones of Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan. I rage at the new glass monstrosities that threaten the unique character of these old neighborhoods. But I know that Koreans don’t have the same reference points that I do. One high rise apartment complex in Seoul is even unironically named “Brownstone.” Few people in Korea really know what a real “brownstone” is.

So I guess I can forgive the high rises. And I could even see how someone might consider the above to be boring and monotonous.

But I can’t forgive the “Opera House.” I truly hope that I’ll go back to Kunsan several years later to find that the place has been razed to the ground.

Here’s the final itinerary. I realized that the dates are off by about a day or so in previous posts, so this should be correct:

• Seoul (April 24-27)
• Kunsan, via Daejeon (April 27-30)
• Back to Daejeon (April 30-May 2)
• Seoul sightseeing (May 3)
• Ganghwado island sightseeing (May 4)
• Golf (May 5)
• Visit to the International School (May 6)
• War Museum, Great Uncle, last dinner with random cousins (May 7)
• Outta here! (May

I’ve covered several different themes in my previous posts: family, war, culture, education, pretty much everything under the sun. If there’s one subject that needs to be explored more, it must be this:

Why is this all of this so important to me anyway? Why does all of this necessitate the navel-gazing, semi self-aggrandizing exercise of writing a whole series of blog posts about how all important all of this stuff is?

This being a blog, I really don’t need a justification to navel-gaze and write exorbitantly self-reflective travelogues. But stating a justification feels like a good thing to do, so here it is:

I’m trying to solve the puzzle. I’m trying to piece together something that doesn’t feel whole: my family. I feel like we’re this random offshoot, this odd clump of puzzle pieces scattered in the corner, while the rest of the puzzle is largely intact, but missing a key element. The missing pieces have come back to the rest of the puzzle, but they don’t exactly fit anymore. They’ve been changed by time and distance.

l should probably be OK with the fact that the puzzle can’t be completed anymore, but I’m stubborn. I keep trying to make the pieces fit. I kept studying Korean after I moved to New York. I worked for a grueling year and a half in a Korean-American nonprofit organization. I watch Korean movies and soap operas. I visit the motherland to see how the pieces fit and don’t fit, and I analyze every angle of the experience to see why they do and why they don’t.

The pieces will never fit back into the puzzle, but that’s OK. In fact, the puzzle is really not the best analogy at all. A puzzle is a single picture that’s been cut into many different parts, but a family is an organic, growing, living entity. Right now, almost all of the Lees are in Korea, but there will be more Lees in the United States as the years pass. Who knows? Maybe forty years from now one of the Korean Lees will come to the US looking to fit himself into the puzzle of the Lee family over here.

Until that time, though, most of them are over there, and we’re over here. They’re very different from me, and I probably never will get to really know them. My dad, on the other hand, clearly was able to reconnect to a great extent with countless long lost relatives. But even if he makes more frequent trips in the future, he will always be a visitor from another place. It’s a sobering thought.

Which reminds me of one of the most important realizations I made just a few weeks into my three month stay in Korea in 2004: my home is America. Korea may be the motherland, but America is the homeland. It’s the only home I have, and it’s the only home I ever will have. I knew that all along; it didn’t take two trips to a familiar yet strange place for that to finally dawn on me, but after a long journey, it feels good to say it again.

I’m home.

• Seoul (April 24-26)
• Kunsan, via Daejeon (April 26-29)
• Back to Daejeon (April 29-May 1)
• Seoul sightseeing (May 2)
• Ganghwado island sightseeing (May 3)
• Golf (May 4)
• Visit to the International School (May 5)
  

“My friends don’t teach English, they teach in English. That is, they teach English Literature and Social Studies at an English-language international school in Korea.”

I had to explain this several times when I told other friends and relatives that I was visiting my friends Justin and Nana (link to their blog) who are teaching in Korea. As many of you are aware, it’s become quite common for Americans and other native English speakers to get jobs teaching English to Koreans. It’s a simple supply-demand equation: there’s a huge, limitless demand for English language instruction in Korea, and there’s a very limited supply of native English speakers who are in Korea or are willing to move to Korea.

Young recent college grads tend to take these jobs and make the leap overseas: they’re relatively easy to get, the pay is not bad, and it’s a serious adventure. All of this is to explain why even I thought that, when I heard that my college friends Justin and Nana were going to Korea to teach after they got married last summer, I assumed they were teaching English, just like all the other expats I had met during my previous trip.

I eventually learned that, as I mentioned before, they’re not teaching English, but they are teaching other subjects at this international school in Seoul. Naturally, I was fascinated by what kind of school this might be, as it seems that nearly every conversation I have with Koreans tends to drift to the subject of their rather strenuous education system (link to previous blog post on the subject). And you can imagine my enthusiasm when, after meeting them for dinner during the first part of my trip, they invited me to visit their school and observe their class!

Needless to say, I was super stoked. A school in Korea run entirely in English? With American-style curriculum? What is this, bizarro world?

Not exactly. Let me try to give the run-down on the nature of this school and why there’s a need for such a thing. Since it’s an “international” school, not just anyone can attend. Students must meet one of three criteria to be eligible for admission:

1. At least one of their parents holds a non-Korean passport
2. The child holds a non-Korean passport
3. If neither of the above are true, if the child has attended school outside of Korea for at least five years

From what I gather, students have been placed into this school for two primary reasons: 1) they want the obvious benefit of being in an English immersion environment and 2) they are essentially opting out of the mainstream Korean education system.

The second point is an important one. Though Americans often marvel at the wonders of education in Asia as demonstrated by international math and science achievement scores that tend to trounce those of America, the sad truth is that education in Asia, or at least in Korea, is deficient in many serious ways. Based on what I’ve heard and read, pedagogical methods emphasize rote learning and memorization instead of critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Lectures are the norm; open ended classroom discussions are rare. Students get locked into specialized tracts as early as middle school. And there’s the relentless pressure and competition which drives many students (literally) crazy.

This school, the Asia Pacific International School, was created to counter all of that with, surprise surprise, American-style education. The curriculum is based on the California school system, and the text books were the familiar McGraw-Hill fare that I grew up with. Problem solving, creativity, and open discussions rule the day. Apparently, “hands on” projects like these Boston Tea Party boats are unheard of in Korean schools, but in Nana’s, er, rather, Ms. Massie’s classroom, they’re an integral part of the curriculum:

It’s a simple concept, really: a well rounded, comprehensive, balanced educational environment is the best way to prepare young people to be flexible adaptive learners who in turn will be the most prepared to succeed in a constantly changing twenty-first century globalized world.

What about the students? I was surprised by how well they spoke English, but there was clearly room for improvement. Some of them spoke English very comfortably, while others spoke with thicker accents and more problematic diction. When I listened in on a class discussion of the novel they were reading for English Literature class, I heard this exchange:

Student 1: [The character in the novel] probably felt useless.

Student 2: What does that mean?

Student 1: Useless. ?? ??. (Pil-yo-ob-soh, which means “not needed” in Korean.)

Student 2: Ahh, ????. (Yoo-ssuh-lae-ssuh, basically, “useless” with a thick Korean accent.) I get it.

I got a kick out of that one. Student 2 clearly knew the word “useless,” but couldn’t understand it when he heard it spoken with Student 1′s natural English accent.

I could go on and on about the experience, but if you’re really interested in learning more about the school, you should get it straight from the teachers at their well-written and well-titled blog, School of ROK. Overall, I was quite impressed by the school’s audacious mission, by the quality of education my friends Justin and Nana were providing, and by the fact that they were indeed surviving and thriving in a place so far from home.

In a way, I was a little jealous. I wish I could have done that when I had my chance four years ago, but it wasn’t meant to be. I had to bail after three tough months; they’ve signed on for another school year, and I wish them all the best. I know how hard it is to be so far away from home, friends, and family, even while you’re having an adventure beyond what most people can imagine.

Lastly, the group shot: here we are, three Americans in an international school in Korea, all of us separated from our homes by all of that blue on the map:

It’s a good thing we know how to pose Asian style for photos, just like my niece:

They’re not gang signs. At least not to my knowledge.

The timeline, once again:

• Seoul (April 24-26)
• Kunsan, via Daejeon (April 26-29)
• Back to Daejeon (April 29-May 1)
• Seoul sightseeing (May 2)
• Ganghwado island sightseeing (May 3)
• Golf (May 4)

First, a little background. I knew before going on this trip that golf in Korea is ridiculously expensive. I don’t have exact numbers handy, and a quick Google search didn’t yield anything promising, so just take my word for it when I say that though many Koreans aspire to play golf (it’s something of a national craze especially as female Korean golfers have gained notoriety for their disproportionate share of the LPGA leader board), few can actually afford it. So when I learned that my dad’s retired (and somewhat well off) friend decided to take my dad and me out for a round of golf, my first thought was, “damn, that’s going to cost a pretty penny.”

I quickly learned why: the whole thing, at least at the course where we played, is designed to be a full service luxury experience. And first among these luxury experiences is the caddy:

The caddy is the woman in the red vest in the above picture. As I mentioned before, she pretty much did everything for you except hit the ball. Below is a partial list of services she provided to us during our round of golf:

• Provide distance from your position to the hole (in meters, which was something of an issue for someone used to measuring in yards)
• Suggest an appropriate club based on your distance from the hole
• Take said club out of the bag and hand it to you
• Say “nice shot!” after a nice shot
• Take the club from you after you hit your nice shot
• Wash the club
• Once you’re on the green, clean your ball with a towel
• After cleaning the ball, align the markings on the ball to help you read the curvature of the putting surface
• Drive the cart

Being a typical do-it-yourself independent American male, I had issues with basically all of the above, but I took particular issue with the last point. For those of you unfamiliar with golf, one of the best parts of the game is driving the cart, as there is so much more to do than just drive. The lucky one behind the wheel gets to careen around corners at dangerous speeds, go down hills at dangerous speeds, and otherwise drive like a maniac all over the golf course. If you haven’t done it before, trust me, it’s great.

So much to my disappointment, the caddy drove the cart at reasonable, safe speeds and kept it on the cart path at all times. But just as I was getting my mind around all the things I wasn’t doing that I consider so integral to the game of golf, I noticed that when nobody was in the cart or behind the wheel, the CART WAS DRIVING ITSELF.

Let me repeat that. THE CART WAS DRIVING ITSELF.

Actually, what happens is the caddy pushes a remote control button to advance the cart slowly down the path. The cart is guided by a wire buried underneath the path, and it never goes faster than 5 miles per hour or so. Still, I was completely flabbergasted by this level of technological innovation on the golf course. The whole experience, from the cart that drove itself to the caddie that did virtually everything for you except hit the ball, to the overall environment of luxury, was so vastly different from the casual, somewhat “redneck-ish” feeling of playing golf in good ole’ Alabama, even on some nicer courses. In Alabama, I grew up carrying my own clubs on my back, picking my own club, cleaning the ball myself (or not clean it at all, as was more often the case), and coming back to get a hot dog and Coke from the grill. Nothing about it was luxurious at all. And to be honest, I was rather uncomfortable playing golf in this cushy atmosphere.

I am often reminded when writing about experiences in a foreign countries that it’s important to keep some level of cultural relativism in mind. Our first instinct is to describe foreign foods, customs, etc. as “weird,” “crazy,” or “exotic,” when in reality, we just mean “different from what we’re used to.” I would say that this rule does apply to me when I say that golf in Korea was “uncomfortable.” I’m not passing a value judgment on those that are lucky enough to have the money it takes to play golf in Korea. They really have no choice to playing with our without a cart or caddy in Korea; my understanding is that by and large, they are a standard part of the experience. I’m just saying that it was such a different experience from what I’m used to that I felt uncomfortable doing what was otherwise a familiar activity (playing golf).

That and I wanted to drive the cart, dammit.

• Seoul (April 24-26)
• Kunsan, via Daejeon (April 26-29)
• Back to Daejeon (April 29-May 1)
• Seoul sightseeing (May 2)
• Ganghwado island sightseeing (May 3)

Ganghwado is a small island due west of Seoul and notable for at least 2 things: 1) a heavy Korean marines presence due to the island’s proximity to North Korea and 2) plenty of historical sites.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, I was often dismayed at the hyper-modern and westernized feel of most of urban Korea. Since pretty much everything was built after the war ended in 1953, this was largely inevitable, but me being the overseas Korean looking for what exactly makes me different from all those “Americans,” I was looking for the elusive “authentic Korea” that I got in spades at the royal palace ceremony. I didn’t have to wait long to find more of what I was looking for on this far less modernized island.

Korea during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) was known by the outside world mostly by its unwelcoming stance towards other nations; hence the nickname “The Hermit Kingdom” (North Korea is also referred to as such, but the phrase was first used to describe Korea from the 14th through 19th centuries). Proof positive is this stone monument warning foreign ships to essentially keep out of Korean territories:

Unfortunately, French and American soldiers exploring Asia in the late 19th century saw little reason to heed the sign’s warnings and engaged in several skirmishes against Korean forces, as depicted in rather gory dioramas in the island’s museum:

These two images depict Korean forces repelling a French incursion in 1866 (see Wikipedia article for background info):

Take that, Frenchie! Korea wins this round, but as anyone familiar with their 19th century world history knows, western powers were hell bent on opening up East Asia to trade and thereby extending their influence to this part of the world.

In 1871, Uncle Sam’s US Navy took their turn cracking the Korean defenses at Ganghwado:

Ouch. Looks like Corporal Kim took one in the stomach courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue. Though only a minor victory for the US Navy (Wikipedia), it did in some ways pave the way for the eventual forceful opening of Korea to international interests, including Japan’s colonial ambitions.

One interesting historical footnote resulting from this battle is that the US Navy captured a Korean battle flag, and, upon returning home, displayed it in the Naval Academy in Annapolis along with other flags captured in victorious battles. Only recently did the United States agree to return the flag (Navy Times article), and lo and behold, it has returned home to Ganghwado:

It’s always interesting to see how the United States portrayed in other countries, particularly when it’s the country that you consider your “motherland” and the country of your father’s birth. I don’t think any of us (myself, my dad, or my dad’s friend) considered this portrayal of the US as the conquering enemy as particularly strange or profound, but it is worth noting what lessons they took away from this little historical episode: stronger nations forced their will upon small, weak Korea, and would do so again unless Korea became and remained a stronger nation.

Of course, South Korea has become a stronger country, both military and economically, since the war. Nevertheless, I often get the feeling there’s a certain inferiority complex that Korea still struggles with as a result of being humiliated by foreign powers, particularly Japan, and partially relying on US military might to counter the North Korean threat. It’s as if the country is constantly trying to prove itself as the real deal. International troop deployments to Vietnam and Iraq, and even the ’88 Olympics and the ’02 World Cup, went a long way to “proving” South Korea’s status as a serious player on the international scene, but Koreans are still very conscious of the image they portray to the outside world.

As I wrote this, I was reminded to a previous incident in Kunsan which sheds a little light on this particular aspect of modern Korea. While visiting the family gravesite, I noticed some dying flowers left over from a previous graveside ceremony. I raised my camera to snap a photo, but my aunt yelled at me, “Don’t take a picture of that! People will think Korea is a dirty country.”

I know it may be a bit of a stretch to connect a country’s projection of geopolitical strength and one woman’s concern over how Americans may judge the tidiness of its gravesites, but I think they’re both connected to the same inferiority complex I mentioned above. Everyone knows that Korea was once a small, weak, and yes, maybe even dirty country. It’s spent the last fifty years trying to project an image as a modern, westernized power.

Which brings me full circle to my desire to find the “authentic” Korea, the Korea before Baskin Robins, Outback Steakhouse, and cookie cutter high rise apartment buildings, the Korea that is neither modern nor western. I think I found all of it on this trip, and I also have a greater realization of how much this country is still struggling to find the balance.

Korea may still be small, but it is certainly not weak…and no more dirty than, say, New York City. If my aunt is concerned with how outsiders see her hometown, I wonder what she would think of the New York City subways:

(Picture by Rigmarole from Flickr)