My friend Mr Kim picked me up at the bus terminal at around 4 pm. His younger daughter, 7th grade, had just finished taking a major hanja examination (there are 1800 characters that Korean middle-schoolers are required to learn), and was sitting looking miserable in the back seat of his car – this was the first time I would meet his family.
We had to pick up his older daughter (12th grade) but we had some time to kill, so we went to the Gwangju wholesale agricultural market (화물 시장 [hwa-mul si-jang] which I thought meant “wholesale market” but really means something like “freight market”) which is in the northeast corner of the city. We walked around and he sampled various fruit, and we bought some 낑깡 (gging-ggang = grape-sized mandarin oranges). These are eaten whole, with peels on, at least by Mr Kim, and then spitting out the seeds. I actually like them a lot, but this was the first time I internalized the name of them.
We picked up his older daughter, who was more sociable. When I asked her the standard English-in-Korea question “what is your dream?” (which means, roughly, “what do you want to do with your life?”) she said she didn’t know, but then her father said, “She wants to be a lawyer.” I said, with good timing, “No, that’s your dream,” pointing at him. This gave me an instant rapport and respect from both girls, who thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in a long time. Later, I learned she was thinking of writing novels or being a translator – which seemed more in line with how a teenager might think about the future.
We went to dinner for galbi at a place near their apartment in northwest Gwangju, and then later, we left them at their home and I also met his son (1st year college), who seemed stressed out by studying (which is natural I guess, in such an academically-driven family – dad is a pretty successful nuclear operations engineer, after all). I was somewhat dismayed by the kind of uncomfortable, formal relation that existed between Mr Kim and his wife – but it certainly wasn’t a surprise, based on how I already knew him. I just don’t understand marriages like that, but I know they’re very common in Korea. In Korea, rather than get divorced, unhappy marriages just “stick together” as a sort of loveless business partnership, with clearly delineated roles and formalized nagging from both sides.
Then Mr Kim insisted we go out to a bar. I wasn’t really into this… I rarely am. But I went along with it, because I tend to let my Korean friends “lead” when I hang out with them. The bar was one of the so-called “hostess bars,” which have a bad name as prostitution fronts, but played straight they’re just about bars with a high staff-to-customer ratio, where the staff are women who “chat up” the customers as they’re serving them. This is all Mr Kim seemed interested in, although I was a little bit uncomfortable as he told ribald jokes to the woman serving beer. But this is an inevitable part of Korean culture, and I was interested to visit this place roughly in “native mode,” to see how the average Korean businessman navigates these kinds of social spaces.
Actually, the highlight of the evening, for me, was when we were finding a place to park. Mr Kim was driving around, finding a place to park, and couldn’t find one. He saw a car with some people sitting in it, that was in front of a garage door. He rolled down his window and asked if they leaving. They said no, and then he said he needed to get into the garage. This was a lie. As soon as they pulled away, he took their illegal spot in front of the garage door. Mr Kim has shown evidence, before, of this creative parking style, but this is the archetype, now, as far as I’m concerned.
He popped another gging-ggang into his mouth, and smiled slyly. At the bar, we talked a lot about why I wasn’t renewing at Hongnong, and about his work at the nuclear power plant, which has been a never-ending sequence of training and drills, since the Fukushima events began unfolding (and as is only appropriate, I can imagine). I think his English has been improving – he’s definitely been studying English more than I have been studying Korean, which left me feeling a little bit discouraged and depressed.
[This is a back-post, written 2011-04-11]