Big in Korea: My New Life in the Hermit Kingdom

I’ve always been in possession of something of a frustrated wanderlust. I grew up in a city called Cleveland on the south shore of a gray, cold lake, where there weren’t a lot of jobs and it felt like the faceless suburbs would go on forever. My childhood was spent wishing I was somewhere else. My family took vacations, including a few great ones. I crawled up to the very edge of the Grand Canyon and marveled at how much greener it was than in the Roadrunner cartoons of my imagination. I stood in the mud of the National Mall in the rain and watched fireworks go off behind the Washington Monument. And all the time in the back of my head was the notion that as soon as school was over I would light out for the territories. I didn’t want to choose, I wanted to see everything.

I tried to explain this to a friend a couple months ago and they just asked “Why?” I’m not really sure I can give that question a satisfactory answer, except that as far as I could tell great things sometimes happened, just not to me and not in Cleveland. A couple years ago I finally saved up enough and took a few weeks’ trip to London, Paris, and Amsterdam and it felt like that period had dropped out of a far more interesting alternative version of my life. Then I lost my job in Ohio and jumped at the opportunity to make the largest change I could think of.

All of this is to give a long, involved explanation of how I ended up moving to a smallish city on the South Coast of South Korea to teach English. Korea is an interesting place, fifty million people crammed into the same area that Ohio uses for less than half that many. Fifty million people who are almost entirely of the same ethnicity and share the same eight-or-so family names, many of whom live in row after row of monolithic apartment blocks. This is a country almost leveled by a war that remains within the memories of many who lived through it, and completely rebuilt into a thriving modern economy. South Korea likes to brag about how it is the most wired country in the world these days, and I have seen little to dissuade me of that. At the same time it can be a beautiful place, with the modern buildings nestled into crannies in overarching green mountains that run to the edge of the beautiful blue sea.

Americans link North Korea and South Korea in their minds, and it is a bit strange to be living within an easy bus ride of the world’s most secretive, most bizarre dictatorship. For the locals, living with this has resulted in a sublimated level of preparedness rather than open worry. The North has not come up in conversation once since I arrived here several weeks ago. However, its presence can still be felt… in the Busan subway I found cabinets full of gas masks, ready to be broken out at a moments notice. The other day one of the schools where I’m teaching held the local version of a fire drill, which much to my shock involved setting actual fires in barrels around the school, I suppose to add to the realism of the exercise.

The single most startling difference for a Westerner like myself when moving to Korea may be that the place is what Wikipedia terms a “monoculture.” That is to say, this is a place where being just like everybody else is valued, and outsiders are viewed with a mixture of gawking and suspicion. I often catch my students staring at me, and when prompted a few have said something about how they’ve never seen anyone with blue eyes in person before. It’s true that I can go whole days without seeing another “western” face here in Changwon, a town big enough to support a big-league pro soccer team but a long way from the somewhat more international streets of Seoul.

I grew up in an American school system that constantly drilled into me that our nation’s strength came from its diversity. It’s a whole different outlook here. In America, if you ask someone what their favorite kind of food is they might say “Italian” or “Mexican” or “Chinese”, or maybe “Barbecue” or “Cajun.” Here if you go up and ask fifteen people that same question you’ll get the exact same answer fifteen times: “Korean, of course. I’m Korean, after all.” I was in a restaurant with some local teachers the other day and a kid from one of the other families eating there ran up to our table, pointed at me, and laughed. “Waygook!” he shouted, then giggled as he ran off (“waygook” is Korean for “foreigner”). This kind of thing happens to me a couple times a day. If I wanted attention, well, I’ve got it, even if I can’t understand it much of the time. There’s a reason Korea was once nicknamed “the Hermit Kingdom”… even in the modern age, it feels somehow isolated.

As time goes on I’ve settled in more and more here in Changwon, gotten a bank account at the local bank, received my “Alien Registration Card” (which just feels like something out of Alien Nation, doesn’t it?), figured out the weird garbage system. I still wonder if I made the right choice. There are more differences between here and the States than one would immediately realize, and some have made me tear my hair out and wonder things like how such an advanced society could have evolved without the use of addresses for navigational purposes. I hope to talk more about these in future editions of this column, as we bring you the trials and tribulations of a geek trying to make a go of it in a country very different from his own. In the meantime, annyeonghi kyeseyo, and be grateful that they have sliced bread where you live.

About Dan

Dan Joslyn grew up in Ohio but now lives in Las Vegas, NV with his lovely ginger girlfriend, Tiarra, where he works as an office monkey. He enjoys reviewing movies and television for the site, and over-analyzing such things. He may be the Chosen One… but he probably isn’t.

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