Learning to Breathe on Jeju, Part I

January 5-7, 2013 
Seoul - Jeju

I'm lying on a tattoo artist's couch in Seoul. Next to me, the only female artist in the studio is tattooing a huge and painful-looking flower pattern on another Western woman's ribcage. She is wincing and nearly crying. Me, I'm just getting my long-awaited sailboat with "you come in on your own and you leave on your own" in a circle around it. A new marking, new memory for a new year.

At the Silim jimjilbang, I can't go into the baths because of the new ink. But I'm able to give instructions to some Singapore tourists. Never thought that would happen. At the lockers, I meet two Western female university students - it takes me too long to realize they are Moonies. Strange encounters. I sleep soundly. The KTX train to Mokpo the next morning doesn't seem too long. There is still snow on the ground all over Korea.

I enjoy the time with my friends and suddenly realize I'm travelling again. I'm ready to go to Jeju for the second time, 5 months down the road. I board the ferry from Mokpo and begin to conjure up the same feelings of adventure I had going last time. I spend as much time as I can to handle the stares and wind on the roof of the boat. Some college kids from Jeonju ask for their photos taken, but otherwise, it's a noneventful 4.5 hours. Grey. Windy. Chilly. Peaceful. Bikeless.

Sunrise From Mokpo - Jeju Ferry

Goodbye For Now Mokpo

Pink Dolphin Jeju Ferry Fins

Hello Jeju City

As Jeju City comes into sight again through the distant fog, I'm wondering about what magic this nearly 4 weeks will bring. Four weeks - that's a long time. The taxi driver from the ferry is friendly and tells me all about the biggest cities in the world, Jeju being one of the smaller ones. The people of this island are some of the best I've ever met.  I'm loaded down with luggage and it takes me a while to catch the right bus from Jeju City Hall to Susan-ri, where I'll be spending the next 2 weeks as a WWOOFer at Mulme Healing Farm.

The city seems endless, but finally I realize the bus is nearly empty save for a few farmer ladies. The Jeju countryside appears out of nowhere. The bus comes to a final stop and Susan-ri it is. I walk west up the hill, passing a field of lovely greens. I stop to look, to listen, to feel. The world is full of noise, but less so in the country. Birds and near silence. Another bend in the road and finally there are the totem poles. They surround a quiet guesthouse, which says WWOOF but it's actually the big orange house next door. A gray calmness in the late afternoon. I have arrived.

Greg, the American farm manager and friend of Yang Heejern the farmer, tells me I missed the big crowd. A Korean from Busan had brought students from her nature school to learn primitive bamboo firemaking, gathered in the forest near Mulme. My timing is never quite right, but I believe that things happen as they happen. I will meet them sometime in the future.

I didn't expect to see a second WWOOFer, but I'm somehow also not surprised to see Ben, an American traveller I met at Hansol Farm's December Hankyoreh newspaper report day. Heejern the farmer and meditation master makes a brief appearance, but takes off back to his house in the city. This would be the trend for the remainder of my time at Mulme. No matter, his presence is somehow felt even in its absence.

It's a Monday evening, the sun is beginning to set, we have no work until the morning. So what is there to do? Run from the guesthouse to the tangerine farm, of course. I'm not a runner and I don't enjoy the temporal experience very much - the actual experience of having a body. But I know that our bodies are meant to be used and not for sitting on chairs and desks all day long. As the colors spread out across the sky, I'm feeling the rush of the mild Jeju winter's country air.

Jeju Field of Greens

Glowing Tangerines

I had just finished reading Derrick Jensen's "The Culture of Make Believe" and as we ran, the conversation naturally drifted to the destructiveness of civilization. Greg and I agreed on a lot of things, but Ben provided more balance. By the time we got to the farm, the locked gate wouldn't open and we slowly headed back to the house, with the promise of fresh tangering picking looming in the morning.

When people move from the artificial city clock time to country time, our bodies often seem to adapt to the rhythm of the sun. Early to bed, early to rise. Greg made us dinner, and I knew I would be eating more meat during this stay than I hoped. When working hard, food is food I guess. The guesthouse was heated by copious amounts of chopped wood in the stove and this made for a smoky hot shower. And yet a not-so-warm night.

I am ready to start breathing.

Jeju Winter Sunset

Money & Appearance

Jeongseon Station at sunset
A peaceful spot on the Jeongseon "Sky Walk"

Pictures stand in contrast to topic.

According to one of my Korean coteachers, a vegan and very alternative-minded woman, this is all that many people care about in modern Korea. Money and appearance. Even some of our high school students, she says, dream about nothing but making a killing one day. A fellow teacher in a nearby town says she notices a lot of mixed-race students at her elementary school. This is because, despite a lot of racism and xenophobia towards even other "darker" Asians, a growing number of Korean men look for wives in Southeast Asia. Though complicated, the trend stems partially from the fact that many Korean women wouldn't be caught dead marrying a poor man, especially poor farmers in our supposedly redneck Gangwon province, so some men have little choice.

Money and appearance. Two values generally associated with Western capitalist culture. When it comes to money, South Korea has literally catapulted from near-poverty to great wealth and rapid innovation within the last 30 years. The social changes have been just as rapid and hard to grasp. Co-teach agreed with my observation that the shift to extreme materialism is fast and frightening. In many ways, this country is surpassing the U.S. and other highly developed places in modern advances. Yet, at the social level, the general rules seem to be stuck in something akin to conservative 1950s America - or rather, traditional Korea. Understandably, even younger-generation Koreans haven't quite figured out how, why, or if to make the transition to a modern society, whatever that even means. It seems that "progress" without the nuanced cultural filter of the West amounts to a pure obsession with looks and possessions.

Regarding appearance, this is one of the few countries where employers seem to care more about how you look in your resume photo - a non-existent requirement in the U.S. - than what your references say about you. If they're near a mirror, Korean females and males alike will have a thorough touch-up. Despite more lax rules for foreigners, it does make you feel self-conscious sometimes. I shouldn't care at all, because the people I get along with most - like the alternative coteacher - care about my character more than anything. Seriously, though, I thought that the U.S. was the height of unhealthy beauty standards. But in South Korea, plastic surgery is common, acceptable and encouraged, even among teens. One of my high school students got the "double eyelid" procedure as a gift over winter break. An interesting discussion of plastic surgery and body image in Korea, from another foreign teacher's perspective, can be found here. I could go on and on about similar reflections, but since I'm not a part of this culture, I only know things from second-hand sources, reading and observing. Reading too many K-blogs during my free time at school, that's for sure.

 In other news...

... it's the 3rd day of April and this is the heaviest snowstorm I've seen since I've come to Korea.  Hoping against hope that this is Mother Nature's last winter scream before ascending into lush green beauty. I did throw a snowball at some kids, though, so it can be good for something.

I'm coming down with something and it's put a strain on my mood as well. To cure the persisting - though not delibitating - winter and "homesick" blues, I've really taken to Taekwondo, online yoga and I just ordered an awesome-looking new bike from online shopping paradise GMarket.

Today in class, I had a particularly funny moment. Since coteacher helped propel me into the Korean 21st century with an inexpensive new smart phone, I decided to plan my lessons around cell phones this week. So I was working on a "scramble" where the students had to listen to eight lines of dialogue, each assigned with a digit from my phone number. The goal was to see who would be the first person to call me, but instead of a student, the first call I got was a telemarketer! I didn't realize this until it became awkwardly apparent that it wasn't one of the students.  (Seriously, Korea, what's up with the mass marketing through texts, calls, Cool Messenger (school IM) pop-ups and everything.)

Solitude, the 11th Commandment

More coal mining history, Sabuk Station

This weekend sort of came and went, without much interaction. I was feeling especially sick and tired, but also restless so despite the annoying wind, I took a solo trek out to Jeongseon. Originally meaning to meet up with a teacher and check out the bike shop, I ended up climbing a part of the Sky Walk, a mini hike up a part of Mt. Gariwang. I was seeking peace and there weren't that many hikers on my trail, but on the train ride back, there was a whole post-hiking party partying it away. Koreans take their outdoor sports seriously, dressing to the nines and soju-ing it up for the occasion. When I get around to doing a real hike in nicer weather, I'll have to document.

Almost the same view from my balcony window, within 2 days.

The Wind-Up 'Girl' Chronicle?

My new home

I'm about to finish Murakami's 600-pager. It feels good to have the time and focus to read fiction again, especially epic fiction with crazy twists and turns. For a while, I was reading mostly political texts, if anything at all. Novels help to calm my fire, especially when traveling or relocating to a new place. Next, I'm going to reread the $3 ancient copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being  that I found in a San Francisco used bookstore. It's true, I don't know when I will be able to lovingly rummage through one of those again.

Oh, that's right. I'm actually living in Korea! On Monday, February 27, tension and anxiety building, Gangwon-do-ers got our final town placements. Or rather, county placements. We unceremoniously shoved our luggage onto the buses once again and finally, we were off to our new lives out of the big city. I was so exhausted from the crazy week we had just endured, I mostly slept through the ride. In Yeongwol, we were met by our coteachers and whisked off to wherever it is we were going. In my case, a general teacher's conference all in Korean. Oh and a teacher introduction ceremony where you bow in front of everyone? That's cool, when you're in a daze.

The Teacher Goes To School

It's the beginning of March, so starts a new Korean school year which will run until the end of July. Little did I know, I would be teaching in a high school with only 150 students and 22 teachers. Not only that, but high school essay writing. Never heard of anyone doing this, so I treat myself as the guinea pig and roll with it. So far, I'm only scheduled for eight classes a week, which is technically supposed to expand to twenty-two hours. I'm spoiled with my very own classroom and office.

Classroom "Africa" 

My coteachers are lovely people, but since I only have a computer in the classroom, I don't get to see the other staff much. The infamous teacher's dinner went down on Monday night, with an entire restaurant taken up with tables. I ended up mostly babbling away in the English corner, slightly tipsy on soju, but nothing too eventful or embarrassing. Going out for food is always going to be an adventure in "what can I eat this time?" Oh there's plenty of tofu, yay! Oh, there's only rice and seaweed? Wish I had pre-eaten more. But, I like the food so I can't complain too much.

Thanks for the side dishes, 'cause the rest is BBQ

Where The Clean Air Comes From

Sabuk is the name of this small town. This isn't exactly what I would call the boonies, but we are nestled in the mountains, with amazing fresh air.  Just what I wanted in my landscape, but I didn't realize it would kind of come at cost. Not to me, but to the town itself. In the 1930s, this was a coal mining community that made the sky black. Eventually, they shut down the coal mines and Sabuk suffered massive unemployment. Now, this stands at the entrance to the town:

Welcome to Sabuk!

Kangwon Land Casino apparently creates a "healthy gambling culture" by giving people jobs and letting them gamble away their already meager life savings. The only casino open to Koreans! I haven't been inside the place itself, but I've heard horror stories. Maybe I'm cynical and should stop thinking about it, but coal for casino doesn't seem like an awesome trade to me, no matter how nice the air. Of course, coal is still heavily used here for heating, though maybe to a lesser degree now. I'm sure I will find out more about this somewhat sordid history as time goes on.



I'll Take a Quiet Life...

A series of firsts has begun in just a few short weeks: first time on the Asian continent, first time teaching high school, first time living in a rural area and first time living alone. These are not insignificant milestones, especially the last two. I needed to get out of the city so much, I dreamed about it. And no matter how lonely it gets here, the mountains and rivers and railroads will keep me company even in the lowest times. Spring is approaching and we had two really beautiful days that lifted up everyone's spirits. At lunchtime, I choose to go home and sit and listen to the stream under my window. 

View from my balcony, on a nice day

I make schedules, set goals, get enough sleep during the week and cook good food. Of course, this is the only the beginning and life could become more hectic, but that would be my own choice. I'm not a Korean teacher, so I don't work more than 40 hours a week. I'm not a Korean student who spends 14 hours a day in school, with self-study sessions going until 10 p.m. I have friends from orientation in neighboring towns that I can visit anytime and it's nowhere near the hurdle it was in Houston. And maybe best of all, I see my students everyday around town. They wave and say hi. They offer me snacks. Sometimes groups of teenage boys follow me and say weird things in English. Teenage boys are a frightening bunch - they're bigger than me! I'll start taking Taekwan-do soon to work off the nervous energy and keep myself more in shape. I've also got gardening in the works and soon soon soon I will get a bike! I can make life as familiar as I want it, even in this unknown territory. I feel extremely fortunate and mostly that I don't deserve what I'm getting for the little work that I do. Privilege. Class. Inequality. What can I do? It's still a beautiful experience. 

I Want More, Impossible To Ignore

I still want to volunteer on a farm. And travel around. And meet activists. But right now, the right thing may be to find out who I am, without all the frills and confusion. Finally, a year in Korea may give me this gift. 

A walk home in the falling snow

Inexplicably awesome mural by the school

From a bridge in Gohan