Tracing My Roots - Inspired by Korea, Part 2

When my friend in Texas recently told me she wanted to take the Transsiberian railroad trip starting spring 2014, it sounded like the perfect opportunity to visit the motherland. The seeds for the journey had already sprouted.

This past weekend, instead of firemaking, I called up a Korean friend that I had met by chance (magic?) and travelled to where she lives, one of the better cities, Chuncheon. It wasn't random - I was finally picking up a guitar! She was working the afternoon-evening shift both days, but first we met for spicy Mexican food. 

My friend encouraged me to visit an art gallery while she was at work. Sadly, I couldn't find it the first day and so I wandered around the increasingly cold city, which although nice, is still a city. Once I got my hands on the guitar, I was happy to just sit inside the warm apartment and listen and watch my fingers making sounds. She got back from work with three of her girl friends from high school visiting from Seoul and we all squeezed in together. Over drinks, late night snacks and endless music videos until the wee hours of the morning and the next day, we also discussed both of our future travel plans. She tells me she is endlessly surprised at foreigners' positive reactions to Korea and how many interesting people and places I've been able to find. I showed her my most recent magic Internet find, a book written by a Korean woman raising her daughters in nature by herself. For her, it is almost time to take off for Western shores again and learn farming and nature in Europe. I was happy to share Jo's blog with its wealth of information. 

When I first arrived, almost immediately, she told me about her recent visit to an art space not far from her place, called '야생 갤러리' which means 'Wild Gallery.' As she told me the story, I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing. An established Korean wildlife documentary filmmaker and photographer, who teaches part time at Kangwon National University where my friend has gone to school, runs this small space in Chuncheon. But that's not even the half of it. 최기순 Choi Ki-sun has been working in the Russian wilderness for 15 years, documenting wild animal life, particularly amur leopards, bears and tigers. He also owns a property in Hongcheon, outside of Chuncheon, where Korean students and nature lovers come to stay.

Finally, on Sunday, before we parted ways she gave me his phone number. "I remember - he is not here now," she said. "He is in Seoraksan looking for a cat." Wow, said my brain and probably my face. So I finally found 야생 갤러리.

And then, after a couple of days of text messaging in which I foolishly pretended I could speak Korean, 최기순 drove to meet me in Sabuk on his way to work in Taebaksan. After a brief misunderstanding, we ended up meeting for nearly 4 hours. In broken Russian and Korean, he showed me endless photos of his work in Russia. He has followed a family of amur leopards for 10 years, a nearly extinct species. With some rangers, he has taken care of orphaned bear cubs for 2 years, nursing and sheltering them before letting them back out into the wild.

His eyes were bloodshot from fatigue, from staying in a dugout cave in the snow near Seoraksan and Inje, on the watch for wildlife. He would be working more in the next days and soon going back to Russia to shoot more footage. After years of work in broadcasting, he hopes to make a full-length film for showing in theaters. The Russian word for wildlife photography is "foto ohota" which literally means photo hunt. Though I don't want to make light of serious work, I can't help but think of this well-loved cartoon from my parents' generation.

When he is not living and trekking in the wilderness, 최기순 is teaching at the university and putting his heart into the Hongcheon center, which he named 까르 돈 'cardon' after the Russian name for the special house where the natural preserve guards live. His partner, an American musician who is also an English teacher in Korea, now helps run the center, which flourishes in the summer with students and visitors.

When he showed me his work, I felt no sense of bragging or showing off. Only 100% laser-sharp focus on his passion and sharing it with the world. The leopards, bears and tigers' eyes seem as though they are looking through at your soul in the photos and videos. Between his trips to Russia, I was so fortunate to have a chance to meet this person. When I told him I was interested in having land and building a community somewhere, maybe Korea, he immediately said 'no! buy land in Russia, there's so much wild beauty!'

So from seeing these photos, I am really hoping I can see at least a few of these places next year. Vladivostok and Kamchatka, for a start. Maybe I won't get close to the animals, but I can at least get close to the land.

The journey continues.

Tracing My Roots - Inspired By Korea

In just one short year in an ever-modernizing South Korea, I have seen commonplace things that are remarkable to my American eyes. Boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives are often together but hardly touch. Instead, girl friends hold hands and link arms. Boy friends sit on each other's laps with their arms around the other's waist. Young mothers to old grandmothers strap babies to their backs, holding them securely as they stroll through the neighborhood. In public, fathers cuddle their little sons and daughters as they sleep. Mothers, sisters, daughters, girl friends shower, bathe and steam naked together, scrubbing each other and chatting away about their everyday lives. (Probably similar on the male side). Families and groups of friends and coworkers dig into communal plates for their meals, no matter whose chopsticks or spoon or lips have touched the food. If it is a restaurant, there is no question that the older or senior person will pay for the meal. So normal. So natural.

Why is this is so striking to me? I was born in Russia, but I was raised in the United States. I have spent most of my short life in a culture that at its best is open, friendly, and fiercely independent. At its worst, American culture - especially in The City - is isolating, alienating, devoid of communal feeling or solidarity with those around us. Families live divided and far apart, friends have time to text and instant message but are too busy to meet for a drink, aging sickly parents and grandparents are put away in retirement homes, out of sight and out of mind. We barely exchange words with the next-door neighbor with whom we share a wall. Touching people of the same sex means you're gay or creepy. Family members overly touching children, especially naked children, raises eyebrows. Everybody needs their own personal space. We are afraid of making a commitment.

So what do we do? If we are alternative-minded, we try our best to recreate the communal structure that we so yearn for but have grown up without. Those who identify as women organize special circles to discuss our struggles, our hopes, our dreams, our triumphs. We choose our friends to be our family in collective houses. We cook, eat and do chores together. We try to support each other in our individual pursuits while also working for common causes. We work to be honest and transparent in our romantic and sexual partnerships.

People who value freedom may say that having no rules is a virtue. Relationships are naturally rife with uncertainty and complications. But after spending time in a culture with an unwritten social order, where everyone knows their place - I have come to see this flip side as a kind of liberation and a blessing. As opposed to the West, where laws seem to govern just about every part of our lives and we are encouraged to police one other, Koreans are brought up with certain implicit behavior codes. This is the only place I have lived where people routinely leave their personal belongings in a public place - train, bus, cafe, restaurant, movie theather - and don't worry about it getting stolen. People look out for each other and help each other because it's the right thing to do.

***

In the fall, I wrote this in an email to a friend back home:

Being in Korea, a land where people have roots going back thousands of years, who are descended from the flesh and blood of early nomads, villagers, farmers. Most of us in Amerika don't know this meaning of identity, of truly belonging to a piece of land instead of owning it. Amerika committed a great crime by systematically erasing people whose identity was bound up with the forests, mountains, rivers, valleys of this land.

But as you say, we have paid the price for our freedom. We have paid with our psyches, with the violence, seen, heard, felt, that we inflict on ourselves, on each other, on our surroundings in a desperate attempt to own and to control that which is just outside of our grasp - belonging.

After a year here, I have become determined to see if going back to Russia and tracing my family history will help me become a whole person. My family comes from the city and they were blue and white collar workers, whatever that means in Soviet times. But what secrets may lie within these intertwining stories? What kinds of things are hidden in the past that may help me understand who I am today and where I may be going? From Moscow, to Moldova, Ukraine, Belarussia, Siberia, all scattered across the great Eurasian continent, what kinds of men and women were my ancestors? What paths led them to create an evolving family tree? What were their passions, their skills, their hopes and dreams?

I know longer want to be a rootless creature with no attachment to the land. I want to know the place from where my life has its roots. So, in 2014, after my second year in Korea finishes, I plan to take the Transsiberian railroad from China and Mongolia to my true motherland. I want to visit villages, farms and forests. I want to see and ache for the disparity between the crumbling countryside and the gleaming cities.

I want to unlock the doors. More to come...

[Jan. 2, 2026 Note] For some reason, this journey did not happen in 2014 but in the summer of 2017, and it was very different from how it was described here. Here are the photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/26711227@N06/albums/72157686008021722/

How the City Became the Illusion and Nature Became the Reality, Part 2

December 2010

A cold winter night in the 5-story Lille house. I'm trying to sleep. In the morning, I'm taking the train to Paris. From there, I fly to Athens. Greece, the land of riots and possibly the end of civilization. All I know is, it must be less cold than the air in here.

I'm trying to sleep. It must be 3 a.m. But above me, there is clanging. There is stomping on the old creaky floor. My housemate is packing to go stay with a woman he doesn't know but thinks he loves, in some snowy remote corner of Western France. I can't stand it. I want to get up and shout, to bang on his door and tell him to stop being an asshole.

But I stay put in my bed, quietly seething. I'm trying to sleep. From somewhere in the distance, I hear music. Cocteau Twins? Elisabeth Fraser, 'the voice of God?' Do I have my music on? I get up and follow the sound. It gets closer. Light slowly filters through the room. I walk through my door into the light.

I seem to pass through the door directly onto the tree in the garden. The big, beautiful live-giving tree. The one in the eastern corner of the impossibly high garden wall. The wall that keeps out everything but birds and cats. How did I get so high up in this tree, sitting with my legs swinging down from this huge branch? It must be summertime. I'm wearing my red dress.

Something compels me to turn my head slowly to the west. It seems that my room has been transplanted outside to the garden. There is my bed, right in the same corner that it should be. Only it's not a bed. It seems that my bed has fallen through a hole of its same size and shape in the ground, leaving what looks like a grave.

I never climb down from the tree, and I can't feel the ground but I am approaching the bed. I'm so close. Almost there. It's right before me, ready for me to lay down to sleep again. Suddenly, an intense, split-second spasm of dread goes through my body, up to my brain. And then my body is no longer my own. After dread and fear comes total liberation. In my red dress, I can almost see myself as I am stretched out and lifted from the grass. Suspended in the air, hovering next to the bed in the ground, I feel for the first time what it must mean to be free.

From answering the call of the music, to floating in the garden, the whole thing lasts no more than 15 seconds.

And then I wake up.

What happened? Where did I go? I go back to sleep and in the morning, I am still the same.

Or am I?

Summer 2011

Greece had struck such a chord from the first visit, even though most of what I saw was the sprawling Athens metropolis. I sat on four hilltops and from way up high, I saw a city sprouting like a concrete forest. When the ancient Greeks looked down from these hilltops, what did they see?

There is more to Greece than this. I knew I wanted to go there for my first WWOOF stay, three weeks of Greek mountain magic.

Seeds. Oak trees. The Rhodope Mountains. An old woman on the porch. A dog following me on my bike ride through the woods. A tiny monastery. Coffee shop conversations. An ancient Christian ceremony of dancing barefoot on coals. A bike group riding from London to Palestine.

This was my first extended stay in a small town and natural place. Sandwiched between two short stops in the northern, second-largest city Thessaloniki. Bursting with revolution, people camping out at the harbor, a several story squat on the main street near the train station, an anarchist free school.

Going from the endless mountain expanse to the city feels like being trapped back under a snow globe. Someone is shaking us to make us move. We are not in control, it moves whether we want to or not.

But during a Saturday morning service at the monastery, the dream came back. Only I wasn't sleeping. The flash light as I stood with the sun streaming through the windows told me that the East, Korea was where I had to go next. There would be something awaiting me there, if I only answered the call.

And so I did.

Houston, August 2011 - February 2012

Worn out from travel and needing a space and a job before Korea, I put myself squarely back under the snow globe. The longer I stayed there, the less certain I became of the future. Would I stay here and engage with the radical community, living collectively, gardening, cycling, never being cold?

I worked a crappy job. I struggled with family relationships. I strugged with other interpersonal relationships. I developed new friendships. I read books. I had long bike rides. I danced to live music. I learned to appreciate Houston.

Korea, February 2012 - Present

I came to Korea because I wanted to explore Eastern culture and find inner peace. WWOOF Korea, living in the mountains, Jeju Island, meditation and most importantly, the people I've met every step of the way have put me back on a path that is no longer so easily reversible.

Suspended in the air, hovering next to the bed in the ground, I feel for the first time what it must mean to be free.