Shopping and Studenting in Seoul                                                                                                                   October 15, 2010

This week (09/29/10)  Korean for Foreign Faculty began with three students:  a biologist from Bangladesh, a biochemist from Kiev, Ukraine, and myself. One of us stutters at times, one of us has English diction difficulties, one of us needs a life jacket in a sea of sound. The young woman teaching us is from the Korean Language & Literature department; I thought that perhaps she might have been from English. She has been drilling us on pronunciation which is demanding, and when there are only three students in the class, each with a different native tongue and concomitant accents, it makes for a Tower of Babel situation.  And these guys are quick. Boris said to me the other day that philology (my academic training) was difficult. I told him that philology was simple compared to biochemistry.

My other classmate gave me an article of his to proofread. Hmm…community of scholars…who could say no?  It turned out to be nearly flawless; I had special instructions to pay attention to the use of verb tenses. Yes the article was in English…impeccably so.  Korean has defiant sounds for me: 3 different “K” sound productions, the same for “T.” “P” and “B“ seem to be insurmountably indistinguishable, as we exclaim in unison for two hours each class period.

Our instructor is somewhere between 22 and 29 I estimate. One has to pay attention  — serious attention – to the way she forms the letters with her lips, otherwise you’re not going to make it unless you follow the acrobatics of mouth,  tongue, and teeth, and if you’re off course  well, she wastes you with her eyes.  If I could only attach her supple speech mechanisms to my brain. Maybe Americans don’t truly open their mouths when they speak, a reflex of our romance with the shady. “You have to open your mouth when you speak Greek ,” one of my modern Greek teachers once told the class.

On the 18th Barbara was in Gwangju for a biennial  art exhibition. This was an outing with faculty and three long busloads of art students.  I took the day to work the city on my own.  First to the cleaners for the first time. What will happen when I bring my shirts to the store I have been passing for three weeks, almost every day?  Piece of rice cake.  No ticket necessary;  write your name  in a book and that’s it. No waste of paper in Korea, not a shred and chopsticks here are almost always metal, so are the water cups in many of the eating establishments. That’s an apt answer to recycling. Water coolers (which also heat water to a temperature high enough to turn a tea or coffee bag  — oh yes, that too; instant is king here) into a beverage. Overwhelmed with the ease of this encounter, I walked back up the hill for the #20 bus  (I think this bus may have served time in the Korean War;  it’s stick shift because of the heights it has to ascend and descend) whose route we had finally charted.   On then to the  Shinhan  Bank, where I had to go to pay a 500 won fee for the delivery of Eddie Bauer’s staunchest all-disaster proof winter parkas; a week before they nailed me for 40,000won tax for receiving an imported item worth over a certain amount. FedEx Rules, that was the first bank encounter, and Eddie wacked me with a cosmic fee for shipping. Guess that I won’t do that again.  From the bank, where I watched a soap on tv while waiting to meet and ask the inevitable question: Yonggo?  English? Service here is almost always with patience and understanding.  I went into a bank on Madison Avenue  and 77th Street once  to ask for two rolls of quarters, NYC’s magic passport to  parking, and they wouldn’t comply because I did not bank at their institution.  I left in disbelief and called in an airstrike.

The big event of the day was to buy a printer for our Macs, because not having a printer is a form of silence I cannot get comfortable with. I simply love to click on “Print”! It’s miraculous to be able to publish yourself or anyone else’s work for that matter, an amalgam of potency and birth. I had carefully phoned, inquired, and mapped my way to Myeoung-Dong, the city’s smartest most upscale shopping district and a haven for young, solvent, and beautiful young people of Seoul,  marketing  Mecca up to the hilt with contemporary everything  everyone has to have,  automobiles prohibited.

The Internet had assured me there was an Apple Store right in the heart of the district.  Nevertheless, it  wasn’t there and as the sun rose to its highest point the sweater and suit jacket I had put on at our mountain retreat began to overheat me in my frenzy to find the Apple Store.  Men hate to ask directions; this is a solid fact. Of course I know where I am going…I’ve never been here before but I know I can find it.  Relationships could dry up, wither, and blow away over the issue. But being here has cut my drive to wander endlessly before I declare early Alzheimer’s and abort the mission.  All you have to do is say: “Shillehamnida,” “Excuse me,” and you’re going to get help or at least an “I don’t know the neighborhood,” in Seoul it’s not an excuse, it’s the truth. “I’m not from here, I’m sorry,’ and it’s sincere because people here enjoy helping, and although the US has been a military presence here for sixty years, Miguk[s] are still a novelty, with adults, and particularly with the younger kids who just plain stare and must be saying to mom, “Why does the dude look so different from me? Was he bad and is he being punished? Did his face freeze while he was crying? Orwhat? The frozen face was a common threat when I was a kid, or as poet John Rodriguez writes, “When we was boys.” “I hope your face freezes while you’re crying,” a maternal instinct welling up in a rush to succor one’s child’s anguish. I was dragging my right knee along by now as it turned toward 1pm, and in my search and many pointings, I approached a business man in his early forties and sharply suited, herked out my  best Shillhamnida, and he started to call all of his business buddies on his I-Phone; he was determined.

Some embarrassing, for me, seven calls  later he looked at  me, and said “Well, it’s just not here. No one knows where it is, but, listen, I am going to Yongsan,the electronics district in Seoul, and I’ll be glad to take you with me so that you can buy a printer.”  I hesitated, stammered some reasons why I didn’t want to bother him – after all, I didn’t know him; maybe he just wanted to take me to his taxidermist. “New Yorker Freaks Out at Kindly Offer in Seoul” or “New Yorker is Found Stuffed,” what would the hometown papers say? Being from NYC here is nearly instant NYC celebrity.  “I was in New York,” my new guide told me.” When,”
I said, “Twenty years ago.”  Mr. K  (and that’s not for Kim) turned out to be an executive in marine shipping, a graduate of the Korean Maritime College. His trip to NYC was only one stop of many among visits to all the major ports in the US.  After we arrived at the electronics district, which is huge and also has stall after stall of  traffickers in DVDs near by, Mr. K. escorted me to several different locations: Epsom, HP, and on and on, but no one had the printer I thought I needed.

This man had   devoted half of his afternoon to befriending and basically chauffeured me around town  —  on Seoul’s amazingly immaculate and comfortable Metro.   Although I never found the machine I was after, the encounter made me think about how astonishingly generous my guide was to get himself so completely and totally involved unfazed by the expedition coming to nothing. It wasn’t a waste of time for him but really an investment in a total stranger, and you know I could have felt guilty about this if I crossed the wires of my background with the usual resignation to the tune of “That Old Feeling,” but I was only mildly tempted because I realized that I was feeling that I had deserved his companionable attention. This turned out to be just one of several similar chance meetings I have had in Seoul and elsewhere in Korea subsequently.

The next day Barbara and I found the actual store in Myeongdong on a Friday evening buoyed up by a wall to wall almost oceanic crowd of turned-on shoppers, and of course the Apple Store didn’t have a sign outside even though the place was just as thronged as those in NYC.  Still no printer nearly three weeks later, but there is one on order through the international office at Sungshin. Teresa Zyung and Stacey Cho, who have been ready at all turns to help us, came up with the idea of ordering it through the university.