The Mid-Speed Train

Carlos and I were on a train bound for Seoul to meet a friend of mine visiting from America. A man lost his wallet in Daejeon, and according to the porter who was standing over us, he was sitting in our seats. The porter smiled and adjusted his shoulders in the too large suit; he looked like a wrinkle child wearing his father’s tailored pilot uniform. The neck protruded at an angle like a vulture and the cap sat awkwardly on his egg shaped, balding skull.

                The first time he came in the car his eyes came straight to us. Carlos sat up like a pitbull noticing a stranger at the fence of his yard. “If he asks us for our tickets…” he growled glaring at the bent, square shouldered wire man as he passed. The electronic card machine in his hand looked too large and hard for him to carry, but he soldered on through the slow moving car. I’d told Carlos for months if you want to see South Korea’s countryside you need to take the mid-speed train, the Saemeul. The KTX shoots across the country through gun-barrels of gray, dimpled metal that slice through mountains and blur the nation as if it were spinning by while you were on an acid trip. On the Saemeul everything floats passed like a moving pastoral landscape of beetle-shell metal hoods in the junkyard and cornrows of crops braided into the earth like dew covered green hairs. The man stopping the second time and leaning forward to ask for our tickets caused Carlos to miss a hillside memorial site glittering with a marble headstone.

                “See, this is fucking bullshit, he’s not asking…” Carlos growled. I pulled out my wallet and Carlos grumbled and did the same. We handed the small man our tickets. He had appeared for a third time in the car and after looking from side to side had come straight to us. He looked at the tickets and then began chewing some words in Korean. He had spoken the word, “Tickets,” like a square gumball that was cutting up his mouth. But the Korean was a finely minced meat that slid in out of his papyrus, ancient lips.

                “Chee ank…” it was all ch blends and ks to me as he waved his wallet around and pointed at our seats. I looked out in front of me at the large amount of leg room, and I pulled out my passport wondering if he thought that we hadn’t only snuck onto the train but somehow we had snuck into the country. He waved his head no and shuffled off.

                “This is fucking bullshit, man. This is that racist shit,” Carlos said rising in his seat and twisting backwards. The porter returned with a young woman in a glittering white dress and riding boots, she looked like a really expensive hooker or a really easy date.

                “He wants to know where you got on?” she asked looking bored and annoyed as if she had been talking to her boyfriend and playing video games at the same time.

                “Daejeon, he looked at our tickets,” I said. Carlos balled his fist and sat like a half stick of dynamite waiting to be lit.

                She shot a few sentences at the porter who smiled and chewed a few back.

                “He says someone lost their wallet in Daejeon, have you seen a wallet?” she asked.

                “We’ve been here an hour and I didn’t see anything,” I said. We twisted and looked around the floor in our seats and finally shrugged.

                “Okay,” she said. They both left and Carlos slid back into his seat.

                “Didn’t ask anyone else on the train,” he said.

                “True, but it’s usually foreigners that sneak on these trains and then pretend to not understand any Korean to get a free ride,” I said. The porter bowed at the doorway, and I watched a small town pass by the window. The scenery is what makes the Saemeul so wonderful, and with the extra forty-five minutes the porters have to find new ways to entertain themselves, and come up with new ways to catch lazy foreigners.

Saturday Night

This past Saturday I saw two young men dancing in the trunk of a car. I was seated at a red light, bored and waiting for the night to end. After heckling several pedestrians, and telling one man in a spandex shirt “Your brother’s going to be pissed that you stretched out his favorite shirt,” Tony and I turned our attention to a thumping car in a long line of traffic.

 They were stopped at a red light trying to push their way into the fortress of lights and bars that is Timeworld when the entire car began shaking. The car looked like a human bouquet with arms and legs and fingers flopping out of the windows. It was some macabre psycho’s dream driving down the street.

                “I bet there are people in the trunk,” Tony chuckled. As if he had said some magic words, some incantation reserved only for films and fairy tales, the trunk popped open at a break in the thumping techno and two young men with died hair began flopping and gyrating on the floor of the Kia. I say it was their car, but clearly they were only passengers. And we were grateful spectators as they danced towards the bars and the nightclubs where they would finally stand on two feet.

Attack of the Personal Trainers

People are working out everywhere these days. In Daejeon, South Korea the corner outside the Dunkin Donuts is a popular place for a few local Personal Trainers to convince people that they know all about fitness. They ambush the street corner while I sip my coffee and leaf through a book of poetry. They caught me unaware. They hang a banner over the plane tree and small diamond of grass outside of the window. One man in a track suit and tank top points and marks where the weights will go, who will stand where, and where the small step platforms will be placed. He is clearly the leader.

                Inside no one notices the beginnings of this live work out video. This is the first work out video shot with no cameras and to come with a free flyer. The workout begins. They march in a phalanx taking their positions at the handicap dip in the sidewalk. They move like a small scouting party wading into the enemy’s river. They erupt into lunges, clogging the sidewalk like a blood clot. The businessmen and shawled old women weave around them like blood cells trying to make their way back to the heart. But they’re lunges are too far and too sturdy to allow anyone to pass. They move to squats, and a man smoking a cigarette hands a bundle of rolled flyers to a woman standing next to him at the banner. At first I thought this was some Asian advertising ploy that I didn’t understand, but judging by the laughter and the slowed traffic moving through the lights, it’s just as strange here as it would be in America. The kickboxing coach steps forward. He has a Flock of Seagulls haircut and his shorts are nothing more than baggy speedoes. His punches look as if his wrists are broken and he is trying to twist his arm into a noodle. The two men and women behind him follow along in perfect unison. Each movement is synchronized, except, in the back, the woman in the white hoodie becomes confused and misses a right hook and instead throws a right leg kick that almost causes everyone to lose their place. The head Trainer turns to her, he has the tight Fu Manchu of an evil ruler in a kung fu movie. He contorts his face into that of a viper and curses her, I assume, for the practice that she missed. The boxing ends and it’s the woman in the white hoodie’s chance to redeem herself. She has thick, runner’s thighs and a plump ass and I watch it float back and forth as she gyrates and points her fingers to her dance routine. They step and bounce and blend a disco style with some bad moonwalking.

The kickboxing coach seems to enjoy it more than her as he thrusts his pelvis humping the air around him and almost shoving his cock in an old woman’s face that is passing with her shopping cart. They finish and fall into each other in a rugby huddle. I can see the head Trainer drawing out a new game plan on the concrete. They break and pack everything up, and in a blitzkrieg they’re gone squeaking down the sidewalk. The swooshing of nylon and polyester moving to attack another street corner in hopes that they can fill their six o’clock tae bo class, and get a few people to come to the seven o’clock weightlifting seminar.

The Bastard Son of the Dragon King

It’s Saturday October 1, 2011, and yesterday I learned how Korea was founded. The Korean creation myth begins with a bastard Dragon Prince, a bear and the want of two animals of the Korean peninsula to become human.

                Nate began by telling us what he had heard from our Korean managers.

                “They claim the son of the Dragon king came down and found a bear and a tiger,” he began.

                “Okay, I’m with you,” I said taking off both of my headphones and turning away from my worksheets and game of Bubble Spinner.

                “All the animals had heard about people…”

                “So, the animals could talk?” I asked cutting in.

                “Yes.”

                “And there were no people in the world?”

                “No, there were people, just no people in Korea,” Nate said putting down his iPhone and turning towards me. “The Dragon king and his illegitimate son are like Zeus and the Greek gods, they come down to Earth and turn into humans and what not.”

                “That makes sense,” I said.

                “The Dragon king’s bastard son found a bear and a tiger that wanted to be human and they went to a cave together. The bastard prince waited for one of them to turn into a woman, and the tiger gave up. So, he had sex with the bear and that’s where the Korean people come from.”

                “That’s awesome,” I said. The rest of the office began asking questions, such as, “Koreans believe they are the progeny of a bastard?” and “Was the bear a woman before it changed, or did it become a woman after it changed?” and “How could the animals talk?” We all began asking students who either smiled at our interest in their history, or just shrugged at our questions. After piecing together what I found on the internet with what I could learn at work, this is what I came up with:

                In ancient Korea there were five family names and if you were born without one of these names you were considered a bastard because you had no legitimate ties to any of the ruling and aristocratic families. As a bastard you were unable to hold any government office, you couldn’t hold land; you couldn’t inherit money or have any power. Only the nobility of Korean society had these names, which meant large masses were bastards. The masses argument against the ruling class claiming they were all bastards was that the country was founded by the bastard son of the Dragon King. The Dragon Prince’s son became the first ruler of Korea, and his kingdom was near modern Pyongyang. This story’s importance can be found in the fact that Kim Jong Il claims that Tan’gun’s (the Dragon Prince’s son) bones were found in a cave near his father’s village. The myth became a source of pride and was central to the Korean shamanistic religion.  The importance of the masses is remembered each year on Foundation Day, October 3^rd.

               

See These Rocks

I’m watching a video of a black man, with dread locks and a fitted argyle and turquoise baseball cap, argue with a Korean man on a bus in Seoul. This week in Korea, in the foreign teacher community, this video has been the topic of much discussion and conversation.

                The man puffs out his chest and begins laughing and stabbing a finger into the face of the elderly Korean man who looks like a bamboo pole that sprouted arms and a crumbling skull with seaweed black hair. The large black man pushes the elderly man’s wife and holds out his fist calling them rocks. He yells with no fear. As he steps forward the crowd around him steps back as if they were a moving circle around him.

 I imagine that back in America this dreadlocked man would never think of doing this on the bus. He would keep quiet if someone had something to say to him, probably slink off the bus at the next stop to avoid confrontation. He wouldn’t point his finger into the chest of man with boulder arms and Thug Life tattooed across his stomach in Detroit. But he is certain that he can do it to an obsequious Korean man who bows and asks him politely to sit down while he yells and compares his hands to stone, or concrete, or iron.

But because he lives in Korea, and the only other people that live in Korea are English teachers, he feels like the toughest man in a pre-school. Then, of course, there are Koreans. Koreans who make it a point of national pride to give you the best impression of their country. They will walk you five blocks to find the restaurant you are looking for. They’ll allow you to leave the dry cleaners with your clothes, and return later to pay them for their service. They’ll invite you to their house for dinner and then take out for a drink afterwards, clawing at your hands and growling when you reach for your wallet.

 While some racism does exist, and you could even say it is prevalent, this man is a perfect example of what many of us call a Loser Back Home.

                These are people, for whatever reason, who never fit in to American society or even understood anything about it or themselves. I’m not talking about nerds, or science lovers, or that awkward musician who hangs around other awkward musicians in black make up. All of those people found a group that understands them, and they learned to understand and like themselves. I’m talking about people who try on personalities like hats. They wake up and keep trying out a new lie until they find one that gets someone, anyone to listen to them for a moment. In America their back stories are known, and they drift from city to city like a barge of trash trying to find a dump to rest in. But in Korea they are perfectly free from any of the cultural clues that allow other Americans to realize how lame they are. Here, surrounded by other actors and actresses, they can reinvent themselves.

They talk to women freely here, because they know that the story about them hiding in their ex-girlfriend’s bushes while she’s on a date, or them buying gifts for the happy hour bartender who filed a restraining order against them, are far, far away.

I listen to them in the bars trying on different accents and hometowns. They talk out of the bottom of their mouths, or they stretch out their a’s to sound like they’re from Boston. Maybe they play the wounded loner, or even the tough guy. The tough guy is the most common pantomime by these pod people. One man, a graphic designer from the richest town in New Zealand where the people are different shades of ivory and everyone mows their Kentucky bluegrass on Saturday, had Thug Life tattooed across his stomach. He buys two pitchers of beers and says hello by cocking his thumb back and shooting his finger at people he knows.

                A friend of a friend, we’ll call him Jim, once told me that to get laid in Southern California he told women he was Leonardo DiCaprio’s cousin. This was after a diatribe about how he hated any guy that lied to get laid. “I never did…except that one time.”

                The Greeks had a great little saying, “Know thyself.” These people could benefit from ruminating for an hour over which personality they want, and then learn to stay in character all of the time. Either that or they could just accept the fact that they’re awkward, weird and crazy and move on with their lives. I hope they never do either and continue to entertain me with their attempts to resemble a caricature of a human being.

Attack of the Perm

A disease festers and spreads each day in South Korea. It isn’t an immune disorder or a venereal disease; it doesn’t destroy organs or weaken limbs. No, it is a follicle epidemic that is voluntarily, and enthusiastically, contracted by the men of this country. It is the long standing love of Korean men with the perm.

                I began noticing this trend at the start of spring when the snow was receding from the sidewalks and hats were receding from pressed down hairdos. The men strutted free from galoshes and overcoats, ready to take long strides in vinyl, shimmering pants and sparkling jewel-like shirts. Everything was glistening from the studs on their bow-ties to the opulent watches that weighed down their wrists like diamond shackles. Then, slowly, their hair began to grow. They sprouted up like skyscrapers. The bouffant, the beehive, the pompadour, all of the styles worn by crooning singers and doo-wop groups from the 1950s paraded the streets of Daejeon—at one point I even saw a Jerry-curl. I began watching them and taking notes.

I discovered that much like peacocks Korean men drape themselves in bright colors and jewels to attract the attention of the opposite sex. They became walking bank accounts, wearing their wealth, and sometimes lying about it, in their clothing.  

                But it didn’t stop with the men. The disease was passed on like gonorrhea blinding a child. I thought they would give the boys a fashion choice, a chance to see why this style had faded with oversized Robin Hood hats and platform shoes with fishes in them. I thought if I asked the children, I could discover at which age this love of the curling, feathered hair occurred. And then I could persuade a new generation to abandon it—unless they decided to become pimps. I was distraught by the information given to me by a group of seven-year-olds.

                “Very manly,” was the reply of most students. “Korean men good looking,” was the other.

                I thought they would stop at tales of the splendor of the perm, and only prepare their children for it in adulthood the same way an aging, patriotic soldier tells his son that one day he will fight for his country if he chooses. But these Koreans would not leave the fate of their young men’s hair to chance and predilection. It began with one little boy showing up looking like a member of the Marcels. His hair swirled up to a rounded dome like a cone of soft-serve chocolate ice cream. I passed him three times before asking him about his new hairdo.

                “My mother take me…you like?” he asked with a wide smile as he rose out of his seat to show the rest of the class. I nodded in shock, and avoided any insult to Korean fashion culture. At first I thought this one hairdo was innocuous and it would have no effect on the school. I was wrong. They began flowing in like plagued rats boarding a ship headed for Venice. Glistening helmets streaked the walls in pomade and gel, slug trails that stained the tiles and wall paper leaving behind the memory of failed fashion. I tried to be culturally sensitive, and waited for the adults to see the lunacy in a child in soccer cleats, a basketball jersey and magenta Umbro shorts having a hairstyle meant for a bell-bottom, wide lapel suit, but they never did.

                I began making subtle jokes to a few Korean women I knew, hoping they would influence the men. “Wow, I never knew they made motorcycle helmets out of human hair.” Most of my jokes were met with raised eyebrows and questions as to what I meant. The sickness had taken their eyesight away. I saw pictures of their husbands, all shorter than five-foot-five with hair that plumed out of frame.

 I gave up asking, and inquiring. I am now working on containment and tolerance.  I cannot argue fashion—and have no desire to—with a  country that believes asphalt sparkling black pants and a black belt go well with scuffed, brown patent leather shoes. I only seek to make a few Koreans appear less ridiculous to Western eyes. But then again I wear slip-on black dress shoes with jeans and a black baseball cap, so I have little fashion wisdom to pass on to these people. They will just have to avoid mirrors and foreigners, and let their glinting hair fall over their ears to stop the roars of criticism. The male perm will continue to happily infect generations and remain contained on this small peninsula.