Dispatches from the Peninsula

by Chris Tharp

  Dispatches from the Peninsula

  Six Years in South Korea

  By Chris Tharp

  Praise for

  Dispatches from the Peninsula

  Tharp is like some punk-rock Huck Finn, as aware and humane as he is blithely non-PC, drama springing up around him with every choice he makes: another country, another drink, another thought he maybe should have kept to himself–but his brain is bigger than his mouth, and Dispatches from the Peninsula gives us the whole show. And somehow, amid all its intelligence and humor, the book packs a deeper wallop too, as a serious meditation on the lifelong experiment of growing up.

  Lawrence Krauser, author of Lemon, The Joy of Google, and The Day in Question

  Tough and true is Tharp’s journey in South Korea. I found myself back there, welcoming anew Korea’s wonder, her wrangle, the distinct spirit of the peninsula and her people. All along the way, Tharp is an observant and steady companion.

  Cullen Thomas, author of Brother One Cell

  Dispatches from the Peninsula

  Six Years in South Korea

  By Chris Tharp

  Published by Signal 8 Press

  An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 Chris Tharp

  eISBN: 978-988-15161-5-2

  ISBN: 978-988-15161-1-4

  Typhoon Media Ltd: Signal 8 Press | BookCyclone

  Hong Kong

  www.typhoon-media.com

  www.bookcyclone.com

  www.signal8press.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.

  Cover design: Clarence Choi

  Cover and author photos: Will Jackson

  For Chaunce and Glo

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1: NEON CROSSES

  CHAPTER 2: GORILLA TEACHER

  CHAPTER 3: SAFE IN A WAR ZONE

  CHAPTER 4: TERRIBLE CHILDREN

  INTERLUDE: FEBRUARY 2005 HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM

  CHAPTER 5: THE SOUTH’S SECOND CITY

  CHAPTER 6: YELLOW FEVER

  CHAPTER 7: HIGHER EDUCATION

  CHAPTER 8: TRAIL UPSEOYO

  CHAPTER 9: TAKING IT TO THE STREETS

  INTERLUDE: FEBRUARY, 2006 SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA

  CHAPTER 10: TIME TO EAT

  INTERLUDE: JULY 9TH, 2006 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  CHAPTER 11: DON’T BITE THE HAND THAT ISSUES THE VISA

  INTERLUDE: AUGUST, 2007 OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  CHAPTER 12: COMMUNITY COLLEGE

  CHAPTER 13: KIMCHEE FLOWERS

  CHAPTER 14: THE TALE OF AUSSIE MACK

  INTERLUDE: CHRISTMAS DAY, 2007 TE ANAU, NEW ZEALAND

  CHAPTER 15: DAD

  INTERLUDE: JANUARY 26, 2009 SHANGHAI, CHINA

  CHAPTER 16: HERE FOR THE HOLIDAYS

  CHAPTER 17: MOM

  CHAPTER 18: ALMOST KOREAN

  INTERLUDE: JUNE, 2010 TUMWATER, WASHINGTON

  CHAPTER 19: GOING UP THE COUNTRY

  CHAPTER 20: TENSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1: NEON CROSSES

  The first thing I noticed was the crosses–red, lit-up crosses–attached to the steeples of the city’s many churches, floating in the darkness of the early August evening. They popped out in contrast to all the restaurant and shop signs in the blocky circles, squares, and right angles of the Korean script known as Hangul. There were churches everywhere, each displaying its own garish cross, reminding you of Christ’s sacrifice with a burning, neon fervor. Despite my agnosticism, I found all this incandescent evidence of Christianity somehow reassuring: At least some of them worship the same God as us. This assuaged my Western anxiety, and–in my mind–reduced the likelihood of me being maimed, killed, or eaten.

  The bus I traveled on was a “limousine bus,” though there was neither a wet bar nor a sunroof (not to mention any smooth surfaces off of which you could snort cocaine), and it wasn’t stretched out longer than any bus I’d ridden on before. It was nice, but unless you’re a touring rock band, there are very few ways you can dress up a bus. This bus simply served as transportation from the airport to several key points in the city of Busan, South Korea’s largest seaport and second biggest metropolis… and my new home. Calling the bus a “limousine” was fine with me: I could imagine I that was riding in style and forget the fact that, despite having traveled over the world’s largest ocean to a country where I didn’t even know the word for hello, no one had bothered to pick me up at the airport.

  The bus careened through the car-clogged city at obscene speeds, only to jerk to a stop within minuscule distances, sending bags sliding and causing my head to slam into the seat in front of me. Despite the trappings of affluence on the road–shiny new cars, high-definition digital reader boards, working traffic lights, a pothole-free surface–Korean bus drivers drove Third-World style. Later I would find that the drivers of the blue and orange city buses are worse: they pilot with even more violence, and the smashed-together payloads of standing passengers just endure the jostling without complaint. At least I had the privilege to sit, though I’m sure my fingers left divots in the plastic armrests as the driver barreled through the crowded streets. He smoked skinny cigarettes and loudly sang along with Korean trot music, its mournful vibratos and Casio keyboard cha-cha beats blaring from the speakers. Korean bus drivers, it seemed, were culturally mandated to drive like meth addicts on their way to a score.

  As we shot up the highway, over the Nakdong River and away from the airport, I took in the approaching skyline. A ridge of medium-sized skyscrapers reached up in front of an imposing mountain. I took this to be the core of the city, the downtown. Of course I soon realized that these weren’t skyscrapers as I knew them, but rather a cluster of apartment blocks, and that we were still deep in the suburbs. This first visible line of urbanization was merely a sliver of a disconcertingly long city that snaked its way along the coast, up valleys, and between rises of ancient fortress-topped mountains. Korea is an extremely mountainous country, with only about thirty percent of its land suitable for building. The cramped panorama of apartment towers that jutted in front of me served as a testament to this. Every bit of available space was utilized–people were literally stacked on top of each other–so it was crowded. With the exception of the crosses, this was Asia as I had imagined it. I was in Korea, and it was already weird.

  Jimmy, my local contact, didn’t want to come pick me up at the airport. Something about traffic, he had muttered in halting English a few days before, over a trans-Pacific phone connection. We had spoken one last time before I boarded the plane to fly over and work in the language school where he served as vice-director. Like many Koreans who speak any English, he had adopted an English nickname, drawing out the second syllable as he spoke it: “Hello, this is Jimeeeeee.” I had called him from the airport, deftly navigating the forlorn payphone (Korea has one of the highest rates of cell phone ownership on the planet; it’s amazing that payphones even exist) and receiving instructions on which bus to catch. I was to get off at the Marriott Hotel in Busan’s famous Haeundae Beach, porter my bags (a year’s worth of shit) to the nearest payphone, give him a call, and wait for his arrival. Upon stepping off the plane, this was the warm embrace I was wrapped in.

  After over an hour of blazing through the city, the limousine bus arrived at Haeundae Beach, a one-and-a-half-kilometer stretch of imported sand, hotels, and raw fish restaurants that is one of Korea’s most popular tourist attractions. In the summer, the hordes descend southward from Seoul, fleeing the choking combi
nation of smog and humidity that smothers that city during the hottest months, turning the beach into a wall of bodies and parasols. As we pulled up to the Marriott, I took in the surrounding buildings: most were brightly-lit love motels, with motifs of palm trees, sexy girls, and ocean waves plastered on the side. One architectural monstrosity loomed prominent: it housed a Bennigans, TGI Fridays, and Starbucks. Sixteen hours of traveling and here it was, the mysterious Orient, splayed out before me in its very Western glory. Perhaps I wasn’t as far from home as I thought.

  Unlike most Koreans, Jimmy drove an economy-sized car. Koreans are smallish people living in a smallish country, but the cars they drive don’t reflect this. Most drive large, Korean-made, four-door sedans–with the odd SUV, even. But Jimmy rolled up in a Hyundai Tico, the Korean equivalent of the old Geo Metro or AMC Gremlin. When he got out to help me with my bags, I saw that he was shockingly tall and thin as a famine victim, with small glasses and a very reasonable haircut in the style of most East Asian middle managers.

  “Hello… welcome to the Korea. The flight was… uh… okay?”

  We weakly shook hands. He held his left hand to the middle of his right arm while we shook, a display of respect in this still-very-Confucian culture.

  “It was fine.”

  “It was very long?”

  “About eleven hours from Seattle to Tokyo, a small layover, and then about two hours to here.” I didn’t mention the bottle of duty-free Jameson that I had dipped into somewhere around the Alaskan coast, which made the time melt away like ice cream in a hot car.

  “Good. Good.” He beamed an extra-forced smile and nodded enthusiastically.

  “I met a Japanese student on the plane. He gave me this for good luck.” I displayed the tiny owl on a string that the kid next to me had given me as a gift. It was one of those charms that you attach to your cell phone. Jimmy sucked through his teeth and eyed it suspiciously.

  “As you may know… we Koreans do not like the Japanese.”

  After a slight pause, he gave a gummy laugh, cueing me to do the same. The tension broken, we got into the car and he started the engine.

  “So this is the main beach?” I said, gesturing toward the darkness beyond the hotel as we pulled out.

  “Yes, yes. Haeundae,” he replied, lighting a skinny cigarette. I was soon to find out that Korean men are a nation of Virginia Slims fans.

  “Hyundai, like the car company?”

  “No… no… Hae-oon-dae. It is not same.”

  “Hae-oon-dae.”

  “Yes… yes. This place is very famous. Now is beach season. Girls are many. Sometimes wearing bikini.” He smiled again and gave me the thumbs-up sign, nervously chuckling through his coffee-stained teeth.

  Jimmy made more small talk as he drove me to my new apartment, provided gratis by the school. His English was decent, and though his accent was heavy, I could easily make out most everything he said. But I got the impression that conducting a conversation required his complete concentration, as if every word was chosen after an excruciating search. This is the case with a lot of Koreans who study English for years in school but have little experience using it in actual conversation. They have a large bank of vocabulary words and a grammar framework in which to put them; it’s just the retrieval system that runs slowly. Having made some strides in learning Korean, I can now sympathize with their predicament.

  Jimmy escorted me to my new digs and unlocked the door. We slipped off our shoes and walked into the tenth-floor one-room, as they’re locally known. It was in a new building and actually quite a nice little studio apartment. Little is the operative word here, but I was very happy to have a place of my own, after many months of semi-nomadic wanderings back home. I had done a lot of crashing around while figuring what step two of my life would be, and here I was in the first moments of the new phase. My expectations were exceeded, especially after reading about other teachers who had been put up in microscopic hotel rooms that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and semen. I was more than pleased. I took a quick visual inventory: twin bed, television, air conditioner, basic kitchen with a bar/countertop that divided it from the rest of the room, bathroom with actual toilet and glass-enclosed real shower (a luxury of which I knew nothing at the time).

  “Okay, Chris. Here are keys.” He actually pronounced my name “Kuh-rees-uh.” Koreans, like the Japanese, tend to put vowels between English consonant pairings, transforming the mono- into polysyllabic.

  After a three-minute tour of my one-room, we took the elevator down, and he walked me to the school, which was located in a building just one minute on foot from the main door of mine. Everywhere I looked were blazing neon signs, bolted to the sides of the buildings, often stacked three or four high. I felt as if I was wandering through a pinball machine, and thought, The sign makers must be minting cash.

  “Here is our academy.” He pointed upwards toward the shiny side of the ten-story silver building. “Go to third floor. Tomorrow. 9:30… in morning. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay okay okay.” He accentuated each one with a pat on the shoulder.

  Nine-thirty? This was less than twelve hours away. I was hoping for a day or two to get my bearings. It seemed I would be afforded no decompression, no time to recover from jet lag. I’d be getting straight into the classroom with no training or prep, doing the thing that I’d come to Busan to do.

  And what was that thing, really?

  By the mid-‘90s, Koreans had decided that the best way to get a leg up in the competitive global marketplace was to train the coming generation to become fluent in English. It became a national directive, embraced with a nearly fanatical passion in their already education-obsessed society. You could say that the country went English-crazy, with private language academies (known as hagwons) popping up faster than acne on an adolescent’s face. Learning English became the order of the day, and soon–taking a cue from the Japanese (who had been at it since the ‘80s)–Korea started importing large numbers of native-speaker English teachers from abroad. Most of these teachers came from North America and tended to be young, fresh-out-of-college sorts, looking to travel, save some money, or pay off onerous student debt. The bar wasn’t set too high, either: Come to Korea and teach. All you need is a degree and a pulse. This derisive saying, whispered around and within the English teacher community itself, wasn’t always (and still isn’t) far off the mark. The main requirements for teaching in the country are a four-year degree and a passport from one of seven designated English-speaking countries. Being white, attractive, and young helps, but the reality is that Immigration isn’t turning too many people away at the door. The demand is simply too great.

  One can imagine the pull this opportunity has for the masses of slackers with liberal arts degrees and little career advancement back home. After all, your employers in Korea pay for your flight; you are given gainful employment, health insurance, and an end-of-contract bonus; and best of all, you don’t have to pay rent.

  For me, that alone was worth the flight over.

  I fit the profile for an ESL teacher in many, many ways. While I didn’t possess a liberal arts degree, I did possess a fine arts degree, which is even more useless for securing a proper job in the pecking order of practical college educations. I definitely had a thirst for travel and adventure, and had reached a point in my life where I needed a serious change of not just scenery, but makeup, costume, lighting, and script. I had spent much of the ‘90s and early ‘00s in Seattle and then L.A., plunging into the world of improv comedy and fringe theater. I graduated from the Professional Actor’s Training Program at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts in 1995, and immediately poured myself into the then-burgeoning performance scene.

  I had been active in the music scene before that, playing in a number of loser bands, trying to ride the rising tide of the grunge explosion. Lacking a band with looks, talent, or non-awful songs, this phase fizzled, and it was only after graduation that things got serious with a
cting and comedy. I started a performance troupe called Piece of Meat Theatre with some fellow Cornish alumns, and we became notorious in both the theater and music scenes for our testosterone-driven theatrical shows, which often featured gallons of blood, chainsaws, and giant stunt cocks.

  In the meantime, I was donning the anarchic trappings of a self-styled revolutionary theater artist, working a shopping list of nowhere day jobs and ingesting most every nasty drug I could get into my lungs, nostrils, or veins. At the end of 1999, just after the infamous WTO riots (a going-away party of sorts), I, along with the Piece of Meat boys, relocated to perpetually sunny L.A., in the grand quest for a development deal, or at least a screenplay that would guarantee us a lunch table at Spago and Ben Stiller on speed dial. Our cult status in the underground of Seattle had gone to our heads. We had developed an inflated sense of showbiz destiny. We did have a good run of it, cranking out pages of scripts and performing in dingy theaters all throughout Hollywood–glad-handing bottom-feeder agents and chatting up C-list celebrities at parties–but after three years, the City of Angels had worn me down.

  I inauspiciously bowed out, fleeing back to Seattle and even doing a stint as a guitarist for a washed-up industrial band in Chicago. By 2004 I was back in my hometown of Olympia, staying with my parents–who were just entering into a long slide into ill health–and seriously contemplating borrowing frightening amounts of cash to finance a couple of years of graduate school.

  So there I was: a failed actor, over thirty, broke, with no girl, shitty prospects, and even shittier credit. I had taken to spending my days dodging white-belted hipsters on the streets of Olympia, poring over grad school applications, and scouring the pages of Craigslist for a gig to lift me out of my funk. What was I to do? One day I found it:

  Have you ever wanted to get to know a foreign culture? Do you want a taste of adventure? Come teach English in South Korea.

  I had known a couple of people who, straight out of school, had come to Asia to teach. Both had spent short stints in South Korea and hated it, but I was in no position to be choosy. So I answered the ad, and within a week I interviewed on the phone. Two weeks later I had a contract and a work visa and was 30,000 feet over the Pacific en route to Busan, wherever that was.