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Today marks one month since my daring escape from South Korea, and my return to a humdrum suburban life in Western Australia. I’m not unhappy at all – I’m hanging out with my best friend again, I’m in a relationship for the first time in more than a year, and I’m generally enjoying a return to normalcy, peppered with news from my past about other native teachers at my school quitting in frustration. The only thing that bothers me is that I still don’t have a job.
After several weeks of failed applications I went crawling back to my old supermarket job, but they can only offer me enough shifts to stay afloat, not to actually save enough money for travelling in 2010. (Besides which, I’m sick of working at Coles.) So the jobhunt continues. I’ve lost count, but I think I’ve applied for around 30 positions so far. In the last ten days alone, I’ve applied for bookstores, wine stores, a video rental store, a pharmacy, a travel agent, two telemarketing jobs, three copywriting jobs, JB Hifi, an editorial internship, a bar on Rottnest Island, and a slew of generic marketing/sales/PR/promotional positions.
Of my entire jobhunt so far, I’ve had two interviews. One of these I got through a friend. The vast majority of applications are either ignored entirely or rejected by email. I’m becoming more and more depressed and convinced that I’m unemployable.
Of course, this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to hunt for a job. My first two I got through friends, and my third I got in a strange and illogical country where anybody with a police clearance and a university degree can earn $24,000 a year.
And of course the most important thing is that I’m not a prisoner of Wonderland anymore – that I escaped intact – that I can thank God that I am…
Only one week after fleeing Korea and returning home, I have received – with virtually no effort expended on my part – a free suit, a job interview and a prospective girlfriend.
I did something bad and the universe rewarded me.
It’s a complicated situation. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to explain even to myself the tangled briar of ennui, naivete and determination to prove something that made me go there in the first place, or the subsequent knot of stress, misery, exhaustion and antipathy that drove me home again. But I can take a crack at it.
Firstly, the hagwon industry is one of the most unappealing I have ever encountered. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Koreans believe, for some reason, that the best way for kids to learn English is to have a foreign “teacher” (actually anyone bright enough to get through three years of university and not answer the phone drunk). Okay. That’s not so unreasonable – exposure is a great way to learn a language.
But the Korean mindset twists this into something that is borderline racist. Having a foreign teacher at a school is a massive selling point. Schools with more English-speaking teachers are more appealing to the pushy parents who want their precious flowers to receive what they are told is the best education their money can buy. Here’s something else about Korea: looks are everything. Makeup goes on like concrete, plastic surgery is rampant – and I was apparently hired because I am attractive. While that’s flattering, it doesn’t speak highly of my employers’ business ethics. Korea is also an extremely homogenous society. The idea of other races walking amongst them is still a novelty and as such they haven’t really grasped the idea that stereotypes aren’t true. It’s apparently harder for black and Asian Westerners to find work in Korea, even if they were born and raised in the US and went to Harvard. This is because they don’t fit the notion of what an English teacher should look like. Again: it’s all about looks.
Combine this with the actual poor level of education I was giving the kids (considering I was given no training, feedback or supervision whatsoever), the way we had to bow to every pedantic whim of the parents, the presence of CCTV cameras in every room so the parents could watch classes, the fact that I was told to adjust tests to a level where the kids could easily pass (so they would feel good), and the time I was told, when sending the kids’ completed textbooks home, to tear out any incomplete pages (so the parents wouldn’t realise they’d missed anything) and you’ll see how my hagwon was not concerned with how well the kids were learning English, but rather with the impressions their parents received. For the third time: in Korea, looks are everything.
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a completely corrupt institution so hungry for cash that it steals the kids’ lunch money. My coworkers and employers obviously cared deeply for the kids and many of them were learning English very well, particularly those who started from a young age. But the primary concern was always, always, always keeping the kids and parents happy in order to retain clients. Everything else was secondary. It’s a highly competitive market, supported by a disturbing amount of zeal in wider Korean society. Before I came, I found it convenient that these strange foreigners would give me a job based on nothing more than my white skin and pretty face. Now that I’ve actually been there and done it, it makes my skin crawl.
Basically, I felt like I was working for the bad guys.
I never felt particularly welcomed by the school. Aside from the fact that they threw me into the classroom on my first goddamn day, they also housed me in one of the shitty apartments on top of the school, which was the plumbing hub of the entire building, so there were pipes running across the ceiling and the place alternately smelt like sulphur, salt or human faeces. Or all three at once! And while living upstairs saved me a commute, it also meant I was stuck in that awful place 24/7, blurring the boundary between home and work.
Nor were they particularly helpful. They made us pay for our own medicals. It took them three weeks to reimburse my airfare and they dragged their feet all the way. When Valerie arrived, she gave them her passport, and a week later she received her alien card. They paid for it and did all the work for her. When I got there, I was told to go and get it done during the holiday break, and was left to my own devices to figure out where the immigration office was, find out which documents I needed, and go there to get it and pay for it myself. In a country where I don’t speak the language. It didn’t cost much, and it wasn’t that hard to figure out, but it wasn’t very accommodating of them when I’d just arrived in the country. Throw in the fact that was generally treated by Korean administration as a pretty white face/walking dictionary/swine flu vector, and you can see why I don’t feel particularly guilty about leaving my bosses in the lurch.
The job itself was awful. I worked 40 hours a week, for roughly $2000 AUD a month. That works out to about ten bucks an hour. And before you scoff at the lazy 20-year old who thinks working a 40-hour week is a terrible injustice, bear in mind that I was teaching (not for the entire 40 hours, but still for a good chunk of it). And teaching, for me at least, was mentally and physically exhausting. You have to be switched on 100% of the time. You have to be checking every kid every spare second you have, because they’re talking or drawing or wandering off to pick through the crayons. I already thought the people who write letters to the West Australian whining about how teachers have it so easy are wankers; now, I’d actually take a swing at them.
I could handle exhausting and stressful work if I enjoyed it, or had a passion for it, or was building towards a career. But I hated it. I like to think I’m okay with kids – not great with them, but not bad either. That’s when I have one or two of them, and I’m just playing and messing around with them. Not when I have a class of ten and my job is to actively prevent them from having fun. I took a few videos of myself teaching, and my clear lack of passion is painfully obvious (it had my relatives in stitches).
The country itself? Not great. Seoul is a much cooler place to live than Perth, but then, Leicester is a much cooler place to live than Perth. In many ways Seoul is what I imagine Perth to be in a hundred years time: a huge city, but with with no heart or spirit to it, just endless repetitive apartment blocks and freeways and franchise stores that were all cut from the same mould, sprawling out across every horizon, with every district looking pretty much the same as every other district, the sheer blandness driving the populace to alcoholism. I’m not alone in commenting on the Korean landscape’s uniformity; apparently is has something to do with Confucianism, which is also responsible for the shitty ant-colony hierarchy system. Confucius sucks. (Cultural apologists can fuck off. Civis Occidentalis sum.)
Okay, so I’m being a little harsh. My job negatively coloured my experience of the country as a whole. I don’t mean to say that Korea is a bad or uninteresting country. There’s lots of cool things to see and do here if you know where to look, and while the culture can border on infuriating at times, so can every culture. It’s just not amazing enough to outweigh all the negative aspects of my personal situation. Few countries would be.
To sum it up, I simply wasn’t happy there. Towards the end, in fact, I was starting to have a mental breakdown. I could do it. I probably could have done it till the end of my contract, although my brain would have been stretched and warped beyond recognition by then. I just didn’t want to. Life is too short to spend a year doing something you detest.
So why did I just run, rather than give notice? Well, in addition to paying my airfare back, I would have had to stick around for another month while they sought my replacement. Given their behaviour towards me, and how displeased they would be at my decision to leave, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided not to pay me for that final month. There would have been very little I could do it about this; in Korea, the legal system is quite heavily stacked against foreigners. I preferred to take matters into my own hands and rob them of the chance to exploit me any further.
I feel bad for my fellow teachers, who will have to cover my shifts for a while. I also feel bad for the kids, who don’t deserve that kind of upheaval in their lives (although, in the long run, they’ll be much better off with a teacher who actually cares about his or her work). I don’t feel bad about admin at all. Maybe they should treat teachers better if they want to retain them. The Korean faculty actually fared a lot worse than the foreign staff; all the Korean teachers quit shortly before I arrived, and one of the new ones was talking about quitting right before I left. Several times the director or the supervisor would ream them out in Korean in the office in front of everyone. I don’t feel any remorse whatsoever for abandoning rude, arrogant people who treat their employees like dirt.
Tony, who isn’t any happier there than I was (but who is a lot more committed and determined) contacted me on Facebook after the run. He seemed to find it funny and congratulated me on having balls. He mentioned that a few of the other teachers said what I did was unprofessional, which is true, but guess what? I’m not a professional! I’m a 20-year old kid they plucked out of a supermarket because I had a university degree and a pretty white face. You reap what you sow.
I don’t regret going to Korea. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience, and I could count the number of times I was genuinely happy there on one hand – walking down Cheonggyecheon, exploring the city on my first weekend, hanging out in Hongdae with Alex and his friends, the few times I went out for drinks with some of my fellow teachers and drunkenly bitched about management. But even considering that 99% of my time there was awful, I learned a lot, grew a little and got a lot of great stories out of the experience. I’ve proved to myself that I can do things on my own, that I can live overseas, that I’ll be able to take another crack at a working holiday as long as I land a job that doesn’t wear my sanity down like a belt-sander.
In the meantime, it’s fucking amazing to be back home. I went for a drive along West Coast Highway on my first day back (which was probably a bad idea given that I was on 60 hours of no sleep, but whatever). I had my window down, Triple J playing, the salty wind coming in off a beautiful blue and indigo ocean. Rottnest on the horizon. You could see the sky and the air smelt good.
Perth has a lot of problems, and I don’t want to live here for the rest of my life. But this city will always be my home.
Chronicling the events of September 13-14, 2009
4.25 AM – Sitting in my dark and empty apartment. Turn off laptop. Shove it and the charger into my carry-on. My pockets contain my passport, iPod, wallet and 3,000,000 won in cash.
4.26 AM – Load my huge backpack onto my back, and sit on the bed listening quietly. The building is silent. Adrenaline starting to flow.
4.29 AM – Take a deep breath.
4.30 AM – Open door, lock behind me, leave key on ground.
4.31 AM – Walk right past boss/neighbour’s front door. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. If she steps outside right now it will be the most painfully awkward freeze in human history.
4.32 AM – Emerge from stairwell at bottom of building, and quickly head down sidestreet. I have now left the Red Zone: my apartment, the corridors, the stairwells and the immediate exterior of the building, all places where I could conceivably bump into the six or seven people who could blow the lid right off this thing.
4.33 AM – Heading down the sidestreet to the canal, it occurs to me that I severely understimated the Red Zone. I am walking down a street full of bars and restaurants, all of them still full of people and open to the street. What if my boss is in one of them? Or her family, or friends? Jesus fucking Christ I can’t believe I’m doing this.
4.35 AM – Reach canal.
4.40 AM – Still walking down canal, but much further from my building now. Okay. Passed the first hurdle.
4.55 AM – Arrive at Jeungsan subway station, which is still closed up for the night. Plop bags on floor and sit down for a while. Hope I don’t get mugged.
5.10 AM – The roller doors are pulled up, and I am granted entry into the subway station along with several early morning aj-folk.
5.11 AM – An insistent ajumma tries to help me recharge my T-money card. I guess with the bacpack I look like a tourist. Despite reassuring her that I’m fine, she calls for the subway attendents. I KNOW HOW TO DO IT OLD WOMAN STOP DRAWING ATTENTION TO ME.
5.13 AM – Take a seat at the far end of the subway platform. Sit there quelling panic.
5.21 AM – An ajossi wearing a shiny silver suit and holding a briefcase is slowly shuffling up and down the platform. Where is he going? Work? At 5.00 AM on a Sunday? This is the country I am escaping.
5.45 AM – First train of the day arrives, and I scamper onboard.
5.50 AM – Subway stations I will never see again slide past: Susaek, World Cup Stadium, Mapo-gu Office.
6.15 AM – Several transfers having come and gone, I am now sitting down on the purple line and nodding off. Nearly everyone in the car is. Slap myself to stay alert.
6.25 AM – Gimpo Airport station. Drink shitty vending machine coffee before boarding the AREX Express.
6.34 AM – The Arex emerges from her tunnel into daylight. When I entered the metro system it was still completely dark – now the sun is rising over the green hilltops to the east. Concrete apartment blocks and rice paddies shrouded in mist slide past as the train powers on towards the islands of the West Sea.
7.01 AM – The AREX Express arrives at Incheon International Airport, a vast complex that is fresh and clean and new… everything Korea is not. Koreans believe in the power of first impressions. Or just impressions, actually.
7.05 AM – Push my bulky, backpacked form through a convenience store to refund the 5000 won left on my T-money card. This may seem petty when done by a man with the equivalent of $3000 AUD stuffed in his pockets. Duly noted.
7.09 AM – Take the travelator across to the main terminal.
7.10 AM – Begin lugging my tired, nervous ass up and down the three kilometre width of the terminal looking for the Cathay Pacific desk, carrying 22 kilos on my back.
7.22 AM – Success! A Chinese desk clerk informs me that check-in is not until 12.15, a five hour wait. Hoo boy.
7.45 AM – I have now been without sleep for nearly 24 hours. Caffeine is a neccesity.
7.51 AM – Cafe Pascucci located.
7.55 AM – Jesus Christ, why is all the coffee in this country so fucking awful?
7.58 AM – Incheon’s wifi is also awful.
8.10 AM – For some time now I’ve been having severe stomach cramps; it has become clear that this is not merely stress, but an urgent message from my nether regions. Shouldn’t have had Lotteria for dinner.
8.11 AM – Urgently begin looking for somewhere to keep my backpack, which will be quite cosy in a toilet cubicle.
8.21 AM – Locate a locker room and shell out 7000 for storage.
8.25 AM – Locate bathroom.
8.26 AM – Ahhhhhhhh, yeah.
9.00 AM – Have breakfast at Paris Baguette’s. A woman who resembles a Midwestern stripper is eating lunch with her blonde, mullet-haired son. If that kid’s name isn’t Tyler I will eat my hat.
9.08 AM – Why can’t I find a bar? What kind of fucking airport doesn’t have a bar?
9.17 AM – Fuck it, Bennigan’s will do.
9.18 AM – Order a draft beer and sit down. Just as the bartender starts walking towards my table with it, my iPod shuffles onto “Shining Star” by Earth Wind & Fire. Maurice White wails out “Yeaaah!” just as I take my first grateful gulp.
9.34 AM – Too goddamn fidgety and nervous to sit still. Drain the last of the beer and start wandering the airport again.
9.49 AM – Settle down in the viewing lounge next to Bennigan’s, watching sky blue Korean Air planes taxi and take off.
10.03 AM – Fucking awful hip-hop blaring out of the speakers drives me a’wandering again.
10.35 AM – Shuffle from couch to couch and chair to chair all over the airport. Sitting still for too long makes me nervous. Well, more nervous. I passed the first hurdle, which was getting out of the neighbourhood. Now I face the second: clearing customs. Time drags, its natural passage held back by the claws of worry and fear. Oddly enough it reminds me of scuba diving, of the low-key anxiety, the barely suppressed terror I always felt whenever I was breathing underwater. So I wander, and sit for a while, and wander again. It’s so fucking hot. Or is that my imagination?
11.23 AM – I must have passed the same pair of patrolling security officers five times by now. And these are the intimidating ones, the paramilitary dudes with black uniforms and Ray-Bans. I’m a sweating, nervous wreck with bags under my eyes and a bloodstream full of alchol, caffeine and several litres of adrenaline. Not for the first time, I realise that I probably look like an uncommonly well-dressed drug mule.
12.07 PM – GODDAMNIT DEPARTURE BOARD DISPLAY MY FLIGHT ALREADY I CAN’T STAND THIS ANYMORE
12.15 PM – Ok, check-in open for business.
12.17 PM – Pick up backpack from storage.
12.25 PM – Display passport at counter and receive two Cathay Pacific boarding passes: Seoul – Hong Kong, Hong Kong – Perth.
12.26 PM – Stare at the customs gate with swelling panic. I have been warned that, passing through customs, I may be detained and interrogated by officials who are well aware of what I am doing. It is not a crime and they have no legal right to arrest me or make me miss my flight. I still don’t relish the idea.
11.28 PM – Come to think of it, while the soundtrack to Waltz With Bashir fits my mood right now, it isn’t really calming my nerves. Turn off iPod.
12.30 PM – Okay. Time to run the gauntlet.
12.32 PM – Push bags and laptop through X-ray machine. Pray that the tightly rolled wad of cash in my jeans pocket isn’t too obvious.
12.33 PM – Wanded, and given the all-clear.
12.34 PM – Permit myself fifteen seconds to briefly scan the immigration lines and find the friendliest-looking customs officer. Settle on the single female.
12.36 PM – Have conversation with customs officer:
“You have alien card?”
“Yes, here.”
“You come back?”
“No, leaving.”
“You leave… but visa not finished?”
“Yes. Quit.”
“Okay. I keep card then.”
“Yes, okay.”
“Thank you, have a nice day.”
12.37 PM – Holy shit. Did that actually just happen? Am I really free?
12.38 PM – I have never been this relieved in my life. The knot in my stomach untwists, and the pressing weight on my shoulders is lifted. Am I really free? I can’t afford to get careless. Not until I am off Korean soil will I let myself smile.
1.00 PM – Locate boarding gate. The plane is being prepped outside, a spectacular machine gleaming in the sunlight. The Cathay Pacific flight attendents seem like the most beautiful women in the world to me.
1.01 PM – Flight doesn’t leave for some time yet, so I set off to find lunch.
1.06 PM – A convenient food court with a number of different restaurants. As one final act of contempt, I order Japanese.
1.12 PM – My udon noodles and fish arrive… with a side of kimchi. Oh, Korea. One last ditch effort to win me back using the same failed ploys? I do not hate you, Korea – I pity you.
1.40 PM – After finishing lunch, I duck into a toilet stall to check that my three bundles of cash are still secure, tucked away in various pockets in my jacket and jeans.
2.05 PM – Sitting around at the boarding gate, I am approached by a friendly young man doing a tourism survey. He’s quite nice, so I’m more generous than I really should be in my answers. When I come to “Would you recommend Korea to others?” my pen trembles and I just barely manage to settle on “Not sure.”
2.55 PM – Begin boarding Cathay Pacific Flight 411, bound for Hong Kong.
3.30 PM – Takeoff. Yes. Yesssssss.
3.35 PM – Naturally I have a window seat, since I was five hours early for check-in, so I’m treated to my last glimpses of Korea from high above. It seems strangely satisfying to be leaving by plane, to look down on this place from above. I am untouchable now. I am invincible. I am in the sky.
3.38 PM – The last of the islands disappear as we climb above the cloud layer. After a few minutes, I permit myself a Michael Clayton smile.
3.40 PM – Insert iPod. Listen to “Exogenesis Part 3: Redemption” by Muse while the plane gently rolls left and right through the cloudscape, sailing towards freedom.
5.16 PM – After three hellish hours of constant nodding-off and re-awakening, the half-sleep that torments the body and soul (with a timezone change thrown in for good measure) we land at Hong Kong International Airport in heavy fog.
5.30 PM – This airport has the longest corridor I’ve ever seen. I can’t actually make out the finer details of the far end, and I’ve already been walking down it for five minutes. Fuck my legs hurt.
5.45 PM – A frustrating search for a meal in a very inefficiently designed airport. WHY IS EVERY RESTAURANT CHINESE WHY WHY WHY oh yeah
6.12 PM – Burger King for dinner. I’m burned-out on Asia.
6.55 PM – Locate boarding gate, settle down in chairs with laptop.
6.59 PM – Email Internet acquaintance who gave me advice on pulling a midnight run, having done one himself the previous month (customs detainment and all). Never heard from him after the first email, in which he wouldn’t tell me where he fled because his school was sending him death threats, but I wanted to let him know I’d made it. Somewhere between the use of codenames, the phrase “off the grid” and listening to “Extreme Ways” by Moby I feel like I’m living in a thriller movie.
7.34 PM – Watch a dry thunderstorm roll over the city. Lightning flashes down and stabs at the dark outlines of the mountains above Kowloon.
7.57 PM – Why the fuck is it so hard to find a single place selling water? No I don’t want your touristy knick-knacky airport shit, I want water. I NEED IT TO LIVE.
8.01 PM – In a chemist, of all places.
8.15 PM – Back to the gate to kill some more time.
8.35 PM – Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, but the CNN anchors look like aliens. Their skin is stretched too tightly across their faces. Are they some kind of advance scouts for a coming invasion?
9.12 PM – My legs hurt bad. Whether I leave them on the ground or cross them or stick them on the chairs, they hurt bad.
10.55 PM – Boarding begins for Qantas Flight 68, bound for Perth.
11.25 PM – Plane begins trundling out to the furthest runway.
11.55 PM – Delayed, waiting at the end of the runway because of a tropical storm in the South China Sea. A Cathay Pacific plane crawls past, an enormous dark monster in the shadows.
12.04 AM – Finally take off, the plane rumbling down the tarmac and powering into the night sky. Hong Kong drops below us. Pulses of cloud-damped lightning flicker over the city, and in the harbour fishing boats are lit up like golden scarabs.
12.07 AM – After arguing with his wife and calling her a cow, the cunt in front of me reclines his seat all the way back into my face. I think you can judge a lot of a person’s character by how far they choose to push their seat back on a plane.
12.17 AM – I want to sleep. But I also want food and drink. Oh, God, how I want a drink.
12.44 AM – Oh come on, this is minor turbulence. Take the seatbelt sign off and serve us dinner already.
1.10 AM – Flight attendent asks me if I would like the beef or the chicken. “Whatever’s the least Asian, please.” They forget to give me a coke with my bourbon, but my psyche is so ravaged by the last 24 hours that I barely notice.
2.00 AM – Try to get some sleep, face up against the windowpane, shoes off, curled up underneath my jacket and an airline blanket. Feel half-drunk and empty.
5.00 AM – Emerge through a very thick layer of noise, dream fragments and blindness into full consciousness. Pull sleeping mask off and rub eyes. Another three hours of awful half-sleep. Not sure if they even turned the cabin lights off.
5.30 AM – Because, this being Qantas, they have to serve us both dinner and breakfast! Who cares if we only get three hours of sleep in between! What if the passengers began to starve to death, and resorted to cannibalism, the flight crew holing up in the cockpit while the rest of the plane became a bloodbath of violence and anarchy? That would make QF72 look like a joyride.
5.31 AM – I guess I am hungry though.
5.40 AM – Eat some kind of potato cake and fruit salad. Insert iPod to drown out the domestic dispute in the two seats in front of me. Bloc Party, “So Here We Are.”
6.00 AM – Daybreak over the desert. Out the window below is the rocky landscape of the Pilbara, blue in the pre-dawn light. Endless plains of rock, trees clinging to the creases of the creeks and streams. Ancient and weathered by time. As the sun rises it shifts from blue to violet to pink to red. No buildings, no sign that humans can even inhabit this place. Borne across it by the white wings and red tail of the flying kangaroo. Australia. Home.
It is 4.30 AM. My bags are packed. My apartment is clean. I have $3000 cash, my passport, my wallet and my iPod in my pockets. The streets outside are as quiet as they ever get around here.
Zero hour. Time to go.
I went for a walk tonight, listening to my iPod and ruminating on my destiny. It started raining. The wind swept a few yellow leaves down from the trees, the first casualties of autumn. By the time I was on the street back towards my school/apartment, it was lashing down with rain, melting the headlights and traffic lights and neon hangul into one huge colourful blur.
It was just a simple circuit around Yeoksan (memo: change this to the actual neighbourhood later, when I’m in the clear) – the canal, Emart, the dozens of interchangeable streets with identical franchise stories and creepy red crosses and noraebongs and PC bangs. Yet somehow it seemed different. I was looking at it through less jaded eyes, through a temporary lens. A man who understands he will not be here for long and needs to soak up what he can, whether he likes the place or not.
I love big cities. And I love living overseas: I love not being able to understand what people are saying, I love being a stand-out face in a crowd of black Asian eyes, I love being constantly bombarded with strange glyphs and signals that mean nothing to me. I love being in a place I don’t and can’t understand.
And I’m not done with it yet. My plans for this weekend are not a rout; they are a retreat. I’m not going back to Perth forever. It’s just a fallback point where I can figure out my next adventure. I tried Korea, I gave it my best shot, and it didn’t work out. Such is life. I don’t regret it one bit.
Tony got into a fight with admin today. Two of the kids were screwing around in his class, and one of them slipped over in the puddle of water which pools beneath the broken air-conditioner (I also teach that class, and have been urging the school to fix it all week because it’s a fucking liability, along with the whiteboard hanging from a single bolt in my other kindy class, just waiting for the chance to buckle and injure a child). The kid hurt himself moderately, and Tony was blamed for it because he was sitting down at the time.
Apparently we’re not supposed to sit down. This is news to me. Maybe we really aren’t supposed to and they never told us that, or maybe it’s a bullshit buck-passing backpedal made by a gaggle of morally bankrupt weasels. Tony was understandably pissed, especially when they handed him an official warning letter, and he responded by announcing that he is quitting on Monday.
Yeah.
He went off to have a meeting with admin after work hours, and I don’t know how that turned out. Maybe they reached a resolution, maybe not. Like me, Tony has never been particularly happy here, but unlike me, he always takes a “let’s solve this” attitude as opposed to my own preference, the “withdraw all my cash, book plane tickets and leave in the dead of night” approach. (And I prefer to think of my way as “cavalier” and “adventurous,” rather than “irresponsible” and “selfish.”) But he doesn’t actually want to quit – he said that to me several times – which is the thick line dividing the two of us. As we were discussing this over dinner I considered revealing my own plans to him, but the conversation never went that way, which is probably for the best.
So basically Monday will either be a shitstorm, or a Category-5 Kimchi Bowels Splatterfest.
It won’t make much difference to me. Leaves are falling all around, and it’s time I was on my way. YEAH I WENT THERE. I’VE HAD A BIT TO DRINK OK.
Time in korea is odd. I guess any time when you’re not enjoying yourself stretches out, but in Korea a week feels like a month. It’s an agonising crawl across a hellish wasteland with no end in sight. Harpies shriek and dive at you while the relentless sun beats down, and you’re dragging yourself across the hard-packed clay with shredded fingertips, but it NEVER ENDS BECAUSE THERE IS NO END IT’S ONLY HERE AND NOW FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER
I’m a little drink. I guess. What’s wrong with that? You want to start something? I have less than 100 hours to shove some mpre glorious raspberry wine down my throat, rapsberry wine being the ONE AND ONLY good thing about Korea (okay, barbecue restaurants are cool too).
(and kiwi soju)
Anyway. Anyway. I was going to talk about how… I don’t know, I think about how I’m starting to count off the ‘lasts?’ last Monday, last Tuesday, last Wednesday. Last time I’ll eat at the awesome restaurant downstairs with those onions soaked in that glorious vinegar sauce. last time I’ll have to sit through a bullshit meeting. Last time I’ll haave to draw up a bullshit weekly plan, write some bullshittests, serve some bullshit lunch to the kids which apparently doesn’t count as work seriously come the cufk on charles all the other kids were done fifteen minuts ago and you’re jsut sitting there slowly shovelling it down what are you storing it for winter i want to have my lunchtim nap hurry the fuck up.
I had my last gym class today. I’mnot meant to teach gym but “the government passed laws saying all teachers have to speak English” (translation: we felt like firing the extra teachers to save money and getting you waegukin monkeys to do their jobs 9instead) so i’m meant to teach them gym/PE every wednesday. They gave me this bullshit curriculum which basicaly said “make tghem stand one leg the whole time” and said the exact same thing for the next week, so I jsut let them run around and play instead. God knows they get precious little of that in the grand master plan for Asian ant colony supremacy, STUDY STUDY STUDY, FIVE-YEAR OLDS! Nice break for me too because I get to wander around and give them dizzy-whizzies or let them stand on my feet while I walk around. THIS is when I’m good with kids, when I get to let them play. Not when I have to actively prevent them from hacving fun and force them through a textbook way too hard for them. Every five minutes or so I have to solve some dispute about toys or who hit who, but their language skills are pretty limited (and when they’re in tears they tend to clam up and only speak Korean) so I generally let anarchy rein. I am an indifferent and impotent god, children.
Am I really going? Am I really doing this? it seems so easy when I’m drunk, or when I don’t think about it. I’ve tracked down every single story of a midnight run on the Internet. Not once have I come across anyone feeling guilty and awful about abandoning theirnfellow teachers, even people who were close to the end of their contract. Not once. Am I close to these people? Not really. Do I feel bad about walking out unexpectedly. yeah. A lot. Does that make it okay?
Maybe… it does?
Moot point because I’m doing it anyway. Today was exhausting and felt like an entire year of my life was drained from me. I was banging my head on the table at some points, I didn’t care about the kids or the windows or the Orwellian CCTV cameras. I don’t care anymore. I just want out. This is killing me.
88 hours to go.
I made the mistake of talking to Swine Flu Sally for a few minutes during one of my breaks (after all, she lives next door to me). Somehow the director found out and organised an emergency meeting during the lunch break to discuss about how deadly serious the swine flu pandemic is, how it could shut the school down if even one child gets infected, and how under no circumstances must we break their half-assed quarantine by having any contact with Valerie. A paranoid hypochondriac who has no concept of how respiratory diseases and airborne pandemics work, fed on a diet of media hysteria, ranting at us for half an hour in Korean. This is why I love my job. Sarah awkwardly translated for her, but she was only saying like three sentences after a ten minute spiel. It was like that scene in Lost In Translation where the commercial director is talking to Bill Murray for ages and then the translator says “Um, he wants you to look at the camera.”
I suspect Sarah was toning down the recommendations a little, because she knew the native faculty would find the original script ridiculous. “Be careful in public,” I’m pretty sure, was originally “Don’t go to Itaewon or Hongdae.” Maybe even “don’t leave your apartments unless absolutely neccesary.” They have this perception that Korea is a hermetically-sealed, sterile bubble, and that only foreign contaminants could possibly be vectors for swine flu – probably from Japan, that’d be typical, just like those bastards to infect Korea with disease.
Like I said, they clearly have no idea how the spread of disease works. Let’s say that Valerie really does have swine flu (which she doesn’t). Even if I don’t have any contact with her this week, she’s still going to visit Homeplus to buy groceries to stay alive – where she’ll infect the staff and the customers, who will then pass it on to me when I pop in the next day to pick up my usual shopping load of alcohol and chocolate. Once the disease is in the country, it’s in the country. I’m more likely to catch it from the kids than they are to catch it from me, because they have contact with far more people in more diverse locations than I do (my average working day consists of teaching at the school, going to Homeplus, and then sitting in my apartment drinking wine and wondering why I decided to exile myself to this awful place). If you really want to ensure that there is no chance your students will catch swine flu, you need to dress them in biohazard suits and shuttle them from school to home along enormous plastic tunnels like the government used in E.T. Not slap one of your teachers in bullshit “quarantine” because she went on a weekend jaunt to Japan. For fuck’s sake. There have been four thousand cases of swine flu in Korea and only 4 of them were fatal. It’s not like we’re in the deepest basement levels of the CDC and sombody dropped a fucking test tube. It’s a standard flu strain that’s slightly stronger than usual, which happens roughly every three years. The only difference between now and the last thirty years is that we have a 24-hour news cycle that encourages us to freak the fuck out over every little thing. And like many other things that also exist in the West – an obsession with physical appearance, racism, excessive nationalism – Korea takes media-inspired panics to a whole new level. Throw in their natural hypochondria and it’s a recipe for frustration.
For the record, my flu-like symptoms disappeared with a good night’s sleep, leaving me with nothing more than a scratchy voice and a metric fuckload of phlegm in my sinuses. Naturally I tried to cough and sniff as much as possible during that farce of a meeting, but it’s just not the same as shivering weakly with pale white skin.
I went to the Korea vs. Australia international friendly match at World Cup Stadium on Saturday. We lost 3 to 1, with an own goal to boot. Translate whatever kind of symbolism for my own personal battle you want out of that.
Went out drinking afterwards, at some expat bar where the music was awful and the women too intimidatingly beautiful. Stumbled home drunk at 3.00 am and woke up at 9.00, like I do every day, whether I want to or not. My window faces directly towards the rising sun and my blinds aren’t worth a damn. I’d cover it with garbage bags and duct tape… if I was here for much longer. I realised today that I’m leaving in a week, and it made me happy. Really happy. I’m still nervous about it, of course. I still feel like I’m doing the wrong thing, I still worry that something will go badly awry, and I know that there’ll be other issues to face when I get home. But all of that is blown away by the merciful thought that I won’t be working at this hagwon anymore. I won’t have to go in every day and spend nine hours at a job I’m clearly unfit for, slaving away for brazen charlatans, trapped in a classroom with the rude, spoilt, taekwondo-trained brats of Korea’s upper tax bracket.
If I make it out.
Korea’s going through something of a swine flu scare at the moment. Take the kind of media hype about swine flu you see in the West, and now imagine it applied to a nation that is already full of kneejerk reaction hypochondriacs. One of my coworkers had a trip to Japan planned this weekend, for quite some time now, and on Friday the director informed her that she could not go – because, obviously, the world beyond Korea is a flu-ravaged wasteland similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, with the few lucky survivors battling it out in corpse-strewn cities for the last remaining fuel and water resources. She flat out refused, because everything was planned, and the director relented and merely imposed a one week quarantine on her. I’d complain about having to pick up some of her shifts thanks to completely baseless Korean paranoia, but since I’m about to inflict the same thing on everyone else for a lot longer, I’ll let it slide.
Anyway I mention all this because I woke up with a terrible hangover/head-cold this morning, which didn’t go away, and by sunset I had acquired – in addition to a runny nose and constant hacking of phlegm – a sore throat, a headache and pervasive chilliness in spite of the heat and humidity. While I was eating dinner I even felt nauseous. It’s gotten better in the last few hours but that might just be because I took some Nurofen. Basically I’m terrified that I have swine flu (or indeed any flu). It wouldn’t normally bother me, because like SARS and bird flu, swine flu is trumped-up media bullshit that’s about as likely to kill you as a lightning strike or a clocktower sniper. But it sure is an issue if I’m getting on a plane in seven days. I’ll be drawing enough attention to myself without sneezing all over the place.
Admittedly, I would personally find it very satisfying for the school to have one teacher go to Japan and come back healthy as a clam, and the other stay in Seoul all weekend and come down with swine flu. But not quite satisfying enough to lie in bed feeling awful all week.
During my daily life, what with all the screaming children and endless officework and borderline alcoholism, it’s often easy to forget that I live in South Korea. Even after two months it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. So it’s a completely abstract notion that I also happen to live only 30 kilometres away from the most reclusive, bizarre and batshit insane nation in the entire world.
I find the division of Korea to be pretty fascinating. No two nations in the world are more alike and yet more different. They’re both racially homogenous countries with a shared language and common history, and yet one is a democratic technological prodigy rocketing into the 21st century, while the other is a starving Stalinist dictatorship clinging onto the Cold War. Check it, yo:
We all have a subconscious tendency to categorise the brainwashed denizens of communist dictatorships as Others, and reassure ourselves that it could never happen to us. Yes, it’s odd that they all worship the Dear Leader and believe that he can manipulate the weather and was born on Baekdu Mountain underneath a rainbow, but, well… they’re not like us, are they? They’re different.
But not to South Koreans. You could pick up the average South Korean, plonk them down in Pyongyang and they’d be able to walk the streets having a conversation with people who were just like them… except completely brainwashed. Actually the average young Korean man, with his tight jeans and styled blonde hair, would probably last all of thirty seconds in Pyongyang before the military realised something was up and dragged him away for interrogation. But you get what I mean. Imagine if Queensland was surrounded by landmines and razor wire and ruled by a mysterious dictator with an elaborate cult of personality.
The Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, cuts the Korean peninsula in two roughly across the 38th parallel. It’s two kilometres wide on either side of the official border, which adds up to a four-kilometre wide band of land running all the way across Korea. It’s completely uninhabited, strewn with landmines and overgrown ruins, and contains not a single soul… except at one place.
That place is Panmunjon, or the Joint Security Area, where roads run into the DMZ from north and south and meet at a cluster of “temporary” buildings. This is the one and only place where North Korean and South Korean soldiers come face to face, staring each other down only a few metres apart. The purpose of the JSA is to hold official meetings and discuss reunification. In theory. What they actually use it for is sabre-rattling, and lots of it.
It’s a tense area. The two Koreas never officially ended the war, and hostilites continue to this day. Shots have been fired, defections have been made and axe murders have occurred (really). It might seem odd to bring tourists into such an area, but I suppose it’s appropriate – after all, this is Capitalist Korea versus Communist Korea and it’s fitting that the southern side should therefore exploit the fascinating military stalemate to rake in the cash off Western tourists. You might even say it’s their patriotic duty! (For this to work you have to ignore the fact that North Korea also runs guided tours from their side of the DMZ.)
I went on the USO tour, which is run by the US military and includes by far the largest amount of DMZ attractions. Unfortunately it also requires getting up at 5 am to be at Camp Kim by 7 am. I guess the US Army feels that’s a natural time to start things in the morning. Sucks for a teacher accustomed to sleeping in until noon every day, suddenly thrust into an environment where Saturday and Sunday mornings are precious sanctuaries of rest, but whatever.
So after spending the previous night trying to find an iTunes alarm that would wake my computer up and then play a song, so I don’t have to start my days with the fucking ear-splitting shriek of my apartment’s alarm clock anymore, I rose yesterday 5.00 AM, knocked on Tony’s door at 5.30 AM, and the two of us arrived at Camp Kim around 6.30 AM. It was a pretty big tour group, about 90 people. Mostly Americans, but not nearly as many soldiers as I expected. We waited around for about an hour while they checked all our passports, and were then piled onto two tour buses.
I’ll mention now that I absolutely hate guided tours. I hate being shepherded around, I hate having no independence, I hate the corny jokes and dull statistics dispensed by the guides and I generally hate the whole atmosphere. But you can’t exactly wander around the DMZ on your own, so I had to put up with it.
Our tour guide was a Korean woman who spoke decent English and had an obvious and amusing hatred of North Korea, her mother having barely escaped with her life to the south in 1950. As we drove north we came to a river, the name of which I forget, which empties out into the Yellow Sea just north of Seoul. This close to the coast, the river itself forms the border, and on the north side of the wide estuary we caught our first glimpse of North Korea. It’s strikingly different from the south. South Korea is covered with rice paddies, vegetation and towering apartment blocks. North Korea simply showed a few clusters of single story buildings and bare mountainsides, the vegetation having been stripped clean for food and fuel. Coils of razor wire ran the entire length of the river, and regular ROK (Republic of Korea) Army observation posts lined the highway, soldiers staring north with binoculars.
We eventually drove over a bridge (further east now, the north shore of the river being South Korean territory), and headed into Camp Bonifas, the northenmost US/ROK military base in the country. It’s right below the southern border of the DMZ, as close as they can possibly be to North Korea without violating the armistice agreement. The camp’s motto is “In Front Of Them All,” which could also mean “First To Get Our Asses Kicked If The North Invades” – although that could also apply to whatever equivalent exists on the northern side. (And yes, the North would lose a war in a matter of weeks – not that it would do me any good, since Seoul would be flattened in a matter of hours by the thousands of pieces of long-range artillery they have hidden just over the border.)
We were ushered into a small meeting hall where we were issued UN visitor badges and signed forms absolving South Korea, the US and the UN of any responsibility in the event of our deaths. (“The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”) Then we watched a slide show given by an MP who seemed in a rush to get through the whole thing. It outlined the history of the war and some examples of the aggression that the JSA is a hot point for, such as the Axe Murder Incident, which took place in August 1976.
Before the unpleasantness of the Axe Murder Incident, both ROK/US and North Korean soldiers were allowed to freely move about within the entire JSA, crossing the demarcation line (official border) whenever it suited them. There was a particular tree within the area at this time that, growing larger and larger, was starting to block the view between a ROK/US command post and a ROK/US observation post. They decided to trim some branches, and dispatched a fourteen man team of both Americans and South Koreans to do so, led by Captain Arthur Bonifas – at the time, the camp to the south was called Camp Kitty Hawk. Since it has subsequently been named in his honour, you may guess that this story does not end well for him.
The tree-pruning team wasn’t carrying guns. Few soldiers in the JSA do, even today; just a few MPs. It is, after all, a demilitarized zone. They did have a few axes and mattocks to prune the tree.
Shortly after they began cutting back the branches, a North Korean force of equal size appeared and ordered them to halt, because the tree was apparently personally planted by Kim Il-Sung, and was growing under his supervision. Bonifas ignored this bullshit, which was probably imprudent, because a few minutes later a truck full of 20 more North Koreans showed up with clubs and crowbars. The North Korean officer again ordered Bonifas to stop, and Bonifas again ignored them, which was definitely imprudent, because the North Korean officer then ordered his men to “kill them all!” and personally karate chopped Bonifas in the neck and then bludgeoned him to death.
In the enusing melee, the outnumbered ROK/US forces were badly wounded, and the fight was only broken up when one of them drove their truck into the fray and over Bonifas in an attempt to protect him. When the North Korean forces retreated they dragged their own wounded with them, and also US Lieutenant Mark Barrett. Nobody realised Barrett was missing until later, when an observation post saw North Korean soldiers jumping down into a ditch and hacking at something with an axe. A medevac was dispatched, but it was too late for both Bonifas and Barrett.
Three days later the US/ROK forces dispatched into the JSA 23 trucks containing 60 soldiers, 16 chainsaw-equipped engineers, 64 Korean spec ops with M16s, grenade launchers and Claymore mines strapped to their chests, 20 utility choppers, 7 Cobra attack choppers, several B-52 bombers and F4 Phantoms, and the aircraft carrier USS Midway sitting on full alert just off-shore in the Yellow Sea. The purpose of this enormous expeditionary force wasn’t to retaliate, or to start a war. They just wanted to cut that fucking tree down.
This would all be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high.
Anyway, after hearing about all this, we jumped back on the tour buses and drove north, passing under a blue archway into the actual DMZ. Immediately there was a fence on both sides of the road lined with signs warning against landmines. I personally figured the fifty-odd metres to either side would have to be safe, because they surely would have sent mine-sweeping teams in to make sure the area around the base was clear – after all, how else could they build the road? But apparently the torrential rain Korea experiences every summer causes a lot of mudslides and constantly buries or re-exposes the mines. So yes, the danger is very real. There’s a one-hole golf course at Camp Bonifas considered the most dangerous in the world because the rough is full of mines.
As we headed north we passed by Daeseong-dong, also known as “Freedom Village.” It’s small South Korean farming community whose existence inside the DMZ is either a gesture of peace, reconciliation and determination to reunify, or a propaganda exercise, depending on who you talk to. The residents all have to be indoors by nightfall, with doors and windows locked by midnight. In return for this, and for living so nerve-wrackingly close to North Korea, they are exempt from taxes and national service, and have a hell of a lot more land to farm than most South Koreans do, so they make about a hundred grand every year.
And then we were arriving in the Joint Security Area, a fairly plain-looking collection of buildings patrolled be extremely fierce-looking ROK soldiers wearing Ray-Bans and maintaining motionless taekwondo stances. After being told several times that we must absolutely not try to communicate with the North Korean soldiersin any way, including gesturing and pointing, we were ordered into two lines and slowly led through the main ROK/US building out onto the other side, where the official border is. Several small blue and grey meeting rooms sit right on the border, the demarcation lines running right through them and over the conference tables. On the north side is the main North Korean building, an ugly and imposing structure of grey concrete.
It was eerily quiet, and I was a little disappointed, because only ROK soldiers were in sight. Sometimes there are North Koreans stationed right there on their side of the border, staring their counterparts down. Today we could only see the ROK soldiers, standing half-behind the edge of the walls so as to present a smaller target for snipers. I don’t see why they don’t just stand behind the wall entirely. Or, if that presents a problem for visibility, have them stay inside the main building behind reflective windows or something.
Before I could scan the northern side trying to spot one of those strange, elusive creatures of the People’s Army, we were led inside one of the conference rooms. As I mentioned earlier, the border runs right through the room (and the table), so you’re allowed to walk around in what is, strictly speaking, North Korean territory. The fact that there was a South Korean guard there blocking the door to the north sort of spoiled the effect, although it was pretty amusing when one of the girls strayed too close to the door and he barked gruffly and put an arm out to block her. She freaked. They are pretty intimidating; apparently all ROK soldiers at the JSA are the cream of the crop, hand-selected by the government.
Our US soldier guide talked about the conference room and dispensed some more amusing stories of dick-waving; at one point the North Koreans brought in a flag slightly larger than the UN flag, so the ROK/US forces responded by bringing in a slightly larger flag, and it escalated, until the flags were almost too big to fit in the room and they held a conference just to discuss the size of the flags. Mature and professional!
After that, we were led back out onto the steps of the South Korean building while the second half of our group entered the conference room. And this was where I spotted my first North Korean soldier, standing far away on the steps of the North Korean building.
His job is to watch us through binoculars and photograph us. The dress code for these tours has relaxed in recent years, but there was a time when you had to wear dress shoes, a collared shirt and either slacks or khakis – because the UNC didn’t want photographs of scruffy Western deadbeats showing up on propaganda posters in Pyongyang.
After a few minutes I spotted another soldier in the foliage off to our right. Not sure what he was doing.
And then a few minutes later the first guy’s superior came out, borrowed his binoculars and peered at us himself.
It was only later when I zoomed in on this photo that I realised they were smiling, as though one of them had just made a joke. I think seeing that was probably the most surreal part of the whole experience. They may be brainwashed tools of a brutal police state, but they still laugh. Weird.
Anyway, the obvious question that comes to mind when you’re observing the only direct border between the two countries is: what would happen if you made a break for it?
It happens from time to time, usually by North Korean soldiers who have uneasy doubts about just how Dear their Leader really is. There were no North Korean guards standing by the conference rooms when I visited, but typically, one stands right on the demarcation line with his back to South Korea. His job is to watch all the other soldiers to make sure they don’t bolt.
Anyway, the answer to what would happen if you tried to dash across the border is that it would be a really messy situation. Regardless of which side you’re on, the guards will do everything they can to stop you. On the northern side this would involve shooting you. On the southern side, I don’t like your chances of making it over the line before being crash-tackled by the badass motherfuckers of the ROK Army’s finest. And no matter which side you fail on, you’re going to be in serious trouble: execution in North Korea, and jail in South Korea.
Where it really gets interesting is if you make it over the line. Korean guards from either side are not, ever since the Axe Murder Incident, allowed to cross the line. But in pursuit of a defector they very well might. This would result in a heated battle between unarmed (but taekwondo-trained) Korean guards, and the one or two MPs that have handguns. That would last for about two minutes before fully-armed reinforcements from Camp Bonifas and whatever its opposite number is arrive, at which point the JSA would become a raging battleground while the defector is rushed to safety.
This has happened once and once only, in 1984, when a Soviet citizen on a North Korean tour fled south to defect. The ensuing firefight lasted forty minutes, with three North Koreans and one South Korean killed. I’m not sure how they defused something like that. I’m not sure how it didn’t escalate into a fully-fledged war. Either way, the Soviet guy made it to safety and now lives in Los Angeles.
I don’t think anyone has ever fled from the south to the north (at least not in the last twenty-five years, when you started actually being able to distinguish one Korea from the other). If you did, and you made it, you would probably be welcomed by the North Korean guards because a Western citizen would be an invaluable propaganda tool (and it would definitely be a Western citizen, because Koreans aren’t allowed on the tour). You’d be put up in a nice house, have to learn Korean and the Juche philosophy, and probably be employed as an actor playing white villains in propaganda films, or teaching English to the select few North Koreans who will themselves be used by the government as diplomats, spies or propagandists. You’ll be quite well off by Noth Korean standards, but you’ll have no freedom whatsoever, and when the two nations reunify on South Korea’s terms (which will probably happen in your lifetime) you’ll be in a lot of trouble.
So the moral is, don’t defect to North Korea.
That was it for the JSA tour. We stopped off to buy souvenirs (yes, there is a souvenir store in the JSA, and yes, I did buy a T-shirt) but after that we were heading towards Dora Observatory.
I’d heard of this place before, and my mind automatically assumed it was an astronomical observatory inside the DMZ, some relic from before the war that was kept operational purely for symbolic purposes. It’s not an astronomical observatory at all, and it’s not in the DMZ – it sits just south of it, and commands an impressive view of the north. On a clear day, which today was, you can see for several dozen kilometres into North Korea with the aid of coin-operated telescopes.
You are not, however, allowed to take photographs within a certain limit of the observation balcony. There’s a yellow line painted marking the limit, which resulted in a whole heap of tourists standing on their tip-toes with their cameras held over their heads, trying to take photographs of the North. (I was one of them, which is why that last photo was of such poor quality.) A ROK soldier patrolling the area watched us like hawks and made anyone who took a photo past the yellow line delete it. He was a pretty nice guy though, spoke fluent English, and allowed me to cross the line and take a photo pointing the other way to illustrate how ridiculous this situation was:
I have absolutely no idea why they don’t let people take photos. Normally it’s because they want you to buy postcards in the gift shop, but that wasn’t the case here. Plus it seemed like a pretty arbritrary cut-off point, since you’re only about four metres from the balcony anyway. After a while I stopped trying to get good photos and just took in the view.
From Dora Observatory you can see the small city of Kaesong, a light industrial centre which essentially looked like a typically bland South Korean city – but minus the flashing lights and corporate logos that lend this country the appearance, if not the entire truth, of being a completely developed country. Further south you could also see a good chunk of the DMZ, including Camp Bonifas, Daeseong-dong and the JSA.
On the Northern side of the DMZ is their equivalent of Daeseong-dong, a small town called Kijong-dong allowed to exist within the DMZ for the same reasons the South permits Daeseong-dong. While the South’s is nicknamed “Freedom Village,” the North’s is nicknamed “Propaganda Village,” and for a much better reason than the typical American obsession with that word. Kijong-dong is completely empty. Nobody lives there, and the buildings are concrete shells without window glasses or interior rooms. The lights are automated and the streets swept clean by caretakers bussed in from Kaesong. It was built from scratch in the 1950s, a time when both Koreas were impoverished, devastated nations languishing under military dictatorships, to encourage South Korean defection. Loudspeakers would blare propaganda about how easy and wonderful life was in the north; after several decades, when that proved ineffective, they started pumping out anti-Western speeches and patriotic marching music, and turning up the volume. The South responded by blaring out K-pop from Daeseong-dong, and as somebody who works with kindergardners who recite K-pop all day long, let me assure you that the villagers of Daeseong-dong suffered the most in this whole debacle. Eventually both sides agreed to stop broadcasting just to give themselves some peace and quiet.
Kijong-dong also contains one of the world’s highest flagpoles, standing 160 metres tall and just barely visible in my crummy photo further up the page. It was built after the South extended the height of their flagpole to 100 metres so it was taller than the North’s; they responded by building the current record-holder. I think this is the perfect symbol of the pointless pissing contest that goes on between these two countries. And while one would be inclined to assume that the North Koreans usually start it – they’re the bad guys, right? – the South is reponsible for their share of childish bullshit too. After working in South Korea for two months I understand much more clearly how the North operates. Confucianism and saving face – North and South both operate under these same frustrating, illogical values. Westerners may be inclined to believe that the South is always in the right, because it’s a reasonable and rational nation. Wrong. I’m not defending North Korea at all, or suggesting the two countries are basically the same. But their fundamental, traditional values are basically the same. Kim-Jong Il owes a lot more to Confucius than he does to Stalin.
Apparently there’s a gold statue of Kim Il-Sung (which isn’t quite as ludicrous as Saparmurat Niyazov’s revolving gold statue) somewhere in Kaesong, but my binoculars snapped shut before I could find it. There’s also a huge radar mast sticking up from one of the mountains, placed there to disrupt radio signals originating in the South; it’s a crime in North Korea to listen to broadcasts from the south. What our tour guide didn’t mention, and which I later found out myself, is that the reverse is also true.
After the observatory we made a final stopover to visit one of the most insane things North Korea has ever done (the other being the kidnapping of South Korean film director Shin Sang-Ok so that he could personally make films for Kim Jong-Il). During the 1970s, residents just south of the DMZ reported hearing strange rumbles and noises, but couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. It was only after a defector tipped off the military that they realised what was going on: seventy-three metres below their feet, a team of North Koreans was digging a tunnel all the way to Seoul in preparation for a surprise invasion.
The South Koreans drilled down to it and took control of it, and today you can walk down a very long access ramp and go through the wet, rocky, low-ceilinged tunnel yourself. It’s quite cramped, but easily large enough for three soldiers abreast, and would also accommodate field artillery. At the end of the tunnel, below the demarcation line, are several concrete walls and a CCTV camera constantly watching them. I sure hope they have more walls and some minefields further up. I’m not sure why they didn’t just fill the entire tunnel with concrete.
There are several other tunnels, the most recent one discovered in 1990, and the South Koreans now have to drill all over the place looking for any new ones. North Korea’s response to all of these is that they were coal mines. They even put black paint on the walls to support this theory. The South Koreans claim this is a lie because the tunnels are dug through granite, which doesn’t contain coal. Personally I would consider it a lie because they are two-metre wide tunnels with no other branches running in a straight line directly towards Seoul. Oh, and North Korea? You’re not actually allowed to dig for coal beneath another country’s territory!
We were also treated to a short feel-good documentary about how the DMZ’s lack of humans has made it a natural wildlife preserve. My favourite excerpt: “The DMZ is now home to living fossils such as the… goat!” Then we were herded into another gift shop (fucking guided tours, man) where I bought some North Korean blueberry wine, which I assume was exported via China.
And that wrapped up the tour. We all fell asleep on the bus ride back to Camp Kim, having gotten up at the crack of dawn, and then hauled our exhausted asses back home.
I thought it was pretty good. I mostly went on it because I wanted to visit the JSA and see some North Korean soldiers, which was kind of disappointing because they were shy, like when you go to the zoo and all the interesting animals are hiding at the back of their exhibits. But it was still well worth the 90,000 won (90 AUD, 70 USD). Overall a fairly surreal experience and something that few people can say they’ve done. Also something that won’t be around forever.
I suppose I could also go on a tour to North Korea if I felt like blowing thousands of dollars.
