Category: Life is a Dream

It was a full-fledged blizzard when I stepped out of my building this morning at 7:40. Wet, sticky, dense snow falling sideways due to the strong north wind. I made my way to the bus terminal. By the time I got there, the snow had stuck to my long woolen coat and I looked like an abominable snowman. The Koreans were unimpressed. I caught the 7:30 bus at 8:01 – because it was running so late. So I actually ended up at work 5 minutes early. By the time I landed in Hongnong, however, the sun was shining. Men were throwing salt on the slippery roads, and arguing about something. My classroom is getting warm. The clouds, the clouds, at ten minutes to nine in the morning, look like sunset: silver, grey, white, gold. Blobs of snow packed onto the sides of pine trees.

…was my first day in Korea.  Twenty years ago, today, I stood in formation for 3 or 4 hours outside the transfer offices of the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.  I was still in my dress uniform that I'd worn for the MAC flight over, and I was freezing my ass off.

I was a Specialist (E4) in the US Army.  A week before, I had completed training as a Heavy Wheel Vehicle Mechanic and Vehicle Recovery Specialist at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  Rather than going off to Kuwait, as so many of y fellow trainees had been doing over the previous months, I got to take a week of leave, seeing my dad, step-mother and siblings in California, and now I was being stationed in South Korea.

I had joined the Army because I was depressed.  Seems like a crazy idea, but it was working out for me, weirdly enough.  At least, at that point.  I was very amazed that I had not only managed to complete basic training, but had gone on to graduate from advanced training at the top of my class.  I had gone from being a 140 lb weakling nerd to being in the best physical shape I'd ever been in my life.

Arriving in Korea was the next step in that adventure.  My first impressions were lasting ones:  a disorganized place that nevertheless managed to get things done.  The US Army in Korea seemed to be just as chaotic, vaguely corrupt, and disorganized, as the society which hosted it.  I've since developed the sociological theory that there is a causality there, and that it goes in an unprecedented direction:  much of the character of modern, crazy South Korea is, in fact, a direct legacy of the US Army's seminal role in the forging of the nation.   It explains so many things that blaming Confucius really fails to do.

The MAC flight had been mind-blowingly unpleasant.  MAC means Military Airlift Command – essentially, a charter civilian flight for the purposes of transporting military personnel.  I had left my dad in San Francisco on a civilian, ticket flight, and caught my assigned MAC flight at LAX.  The flight had then proceeded to stop at both Anchorage and Narita, Japan, before finally arriving at Osan air base.  I'm not actually certain it was Osan air base – it may have been Gimpo airport (Incheon didn't exist yet, as an international airport).  I think it was Osan mainly based on the fact that the bus ride to TDC (US Army acronym-slang for Dongducheon) was at least 3 hours.  If the arrival had been at Gimpo, it should have only been maybe an hour or two. 

The bus finally entered the gates at Camp Casey at around 3 AM.  And we ended up standing in formation, in the freezing cold wind and snow of Korea in late December, until the first light of dawn.  Perhaps they were trying to acclimatize us newbies to just how damn cold it can get in Korea – most US soldiers coming from balmy places like South Carolina or Texas.  Personally, I just think they were being disorganized.  I was exposed to plenty more of that, over the following year.

Finally, they let us go into the barracks.  They were very crowded – bunk beds, barely 2 feet apart, in rows in a quonset hut.  I had a Sony Walkman (yes, a cassette player – it was 1990), and I had 4 tapes:  Guns n Roses Appetite for Destruction, Nik Kershaw The Riddle, Kate Bush Hounds of Love, Peter Gabriel So.  That was my soundtrack, for my first months in Korea.  I remember the barracks being overheated, crowded, miserable.  I remember standing in offices waiting for paper work.  I had the lasting impression that the 2nd ID didn't know what to do with me.

In the end, I ended up with 296th Support Battalion, at Camp Edwards, Paju.  Which is why, even now, I refer to Paju as my Korean "home town."  Paju is the northwesternmost county against the DMZ in Gyeonggi Province, in the far north-west suburbs of Seoul.  And I loved the fact that when I eventually came back to Korea in 2007 to work as an English teacher, my job was in Ilsan, only 7 km down the highway from Paju.  One October day, a few years ago, I actually walked from my apartment to my old Army base – now abandoned and overgrown with weeds.

I grew to really, really hate the Army.  When I was offered an "early out" at the end of my year (the US Army was downsizing in the post-first-Gulf-War, post-Cold War era), I grabbed it and got the hell out.  But I developed and enduring love for the physical beauty of South Korea, and the seeds of my love-hate relationship with the culture and fascination with the language were planted.  I have deeply embedded memories of the fields and hills of Paju, which often provoke an undesired nostalgia – like remembering a home town that hosted a particularly unpleasant upbringing. 

There were good times – the long, rainy summer during which I had a "work detail" that involved me spending a lot of time with Korean civilians, off base, were perhaps the best.  Stopping at roadside bunsik joints, eating cheese ramyeon.  Zigzagging all over the pre-expressway highways of northern Gyeonggi Province, dangerously tailgating "kimchi rockets" – 2-wheeled tractors hooked up to trailers overloaded wtih cardboard or farm produce.

Rural Jeollanam, nowadays, where I am now, reminds me a lot of what Paju was like, back then.  Paju has been radically altered by subsequent development and urbanization – and so, except for the physical familiarity of the hills and roads, it doesn't really resemble my memories that much.  But everyday, here in Yeonggwang, some hillside vista will flash me back to the smell of gunpowder at the firing range at Camp Howze, or the icy winter marches through the pine forests bordering the DMZ, or the chilly spring afternoons spent using the winches on my "big green tow truck" to extract a Humvee mired in some annoyed farmer's rice paddy.

I haven't had a "nuclear war" dream since about 1984.  I had a few vivid ones, back then.   This dream I just awoke from was both vivid and weirdly cinematic, although also seemingly satirical, toward the end.

I was on a bus, going toward Hongnong along the expressway.  It wasn't the commuting bus, it was a charter bus – I had been on some work-related excursion with my fellow teachers.  It was dark, and the flash of the explosion was obvious.  It was like the sun was rising, to the west, out of the Yellow Sea.  I had no doubt, immediately, about what I was witnessing, although a lot of the other teachers on the bus, whether through ignorance or denial, had no idea – until cell phones started ringing, and text messages exchanged, and internets surfed via smart phones.

Then the reaction was disbelief, awe, shock.  Yet we continued to drive the rest of the way to Hongnong.  It seemed logical, partly – the town is nestled behind the mountain, protected from the nuclear plant which had been the obvious target of the blast.  And then the chaos, as the real sun dawned, Korean Army units moving in, people evacuating. 

The focus of the dream seemed to lie in the Kafkaesque confusion of what to do, where to go, who to meet with.  I was told that I had to go to my apartment (in the dream, my apartment was in Hongnong, not Yeonggwang) and that I was allowed to get one suitcase.  When I got there, I couldn't decide how to pack, and was thinking that it would have been so much easier to just tell me I could take only what I had on me.

Ambulances and then Army trucks were zooming around, delivering serverly wounded from behind the mountain.  There was some hotel on the top of the mountain that isn't there in real life, and it'd been right in front of the blast wave from the explosion.  The building had crumbled and fallen down the hillside.  Oh, ghastly. 

Mr Choi came into my apartment, and he was trying to read my books that I was debating packing.  And meanwhile, I was overhearing conversations, learning about where the bomb came from.  The bomb had come from Argentina.  Not even North Korea.

Argentina nuked South Korea?  Well, no.  It turned out that it was a disgruntled former English teacher.  Hah.  That's where the dream suddenly seemed satirical.  But the backstory was complex.  He was from a very wealthy family, and he'd spent his family fortune to acquire a bomb in Argentina using Russian and Argentine materials over a period of years, which he then delivered to Gamami (on the west side of the hill in Hongnong, next to the power plant) in a shipping container, where it successfully detonated.  His name was Edwards – a name that will live in infamy, according to some stentorian announcement on CNN.  Someone in my dream said to me, sardonically, "maybe not a good time to be an English teacher in Korea, now." 

And then I woke up.

It was a very up-and-down day.  Or down-and-up day.  Or something like that.  Great mood!  Terrible mood.  Great mood!  Terrible mood!  Great mood.  Like that.

First, I was in a good mood.  I had really good classes with the preschoolers.  I could tell they liked me.  I could tell the Korean teachers over there like me.  I thought we had fun with the kids, too.  We did monkeys jumping on the bed.  We read a story about drawing rainbows, and then we drew rainbows.  We talked about colors.

Then I was in a bad mood.  We were testing the kids, today, for the 4th graders.  It was kind of a last-minute thing.  Maybe not for everyone, but for me, since I'd only heard about it yesterday.  Communication (and lack thereof) works that way, in Korean workplaces.  And my coteacher for the 4th graders changed how she wanted me to do the "speaking part" of the test at literally the very last minute.  So I felt like I was testing the kids without much of a footing.  But I tried my best.  I kind of know where these kids stand, ability-wise, at this point, anyway.  So, as usual, some of that subjectivity came into play.

Then I was in a good mood.  Lunch was tasty, and at least a dozen kids said, "teacher teacher!"  and I said, "what?" and they said, "hi!"  

And then I was in a terrible mood.  Haewon said that lesson plans for the month of July for the afterschool program were due today.  I doubted this (and, retrospectively, I was right – no one said a thing about lesson plans today – they WOULD normally have been due today, but today was staff volleyball day, and volleyball trumps minor administrative things like monthly lesson plans).  I had been planning to work on my lesson plans and finish them tomorrow, since I have an easy schedule on Thursdays.  But grumblingly, I set to work on my plans in my one free period of the day, after lunch.  And I finished them up, roughly.  And printed them out.

And then it was staff volleyball day, and Beopseongpo Elementary came to Hongnong for inter-school staff competition.

And I was in a good mood, because I saw my colleague Donna, who works there at Beopseongpo and who I had gotten to know during training back in April.  Donna's cool.  Very clear headed.  Kind.

And then Mr Kim (the PE teacher, and exactly like PE teachers anywhere, in any culture – he requires no further description) asked me to join the team, during game number three among the men staff.  I was thinking that because it was inter-school play, the game was too important for such a bad volleyball player as myself to be included.  But I took it as a friendly gesture that he was inviting me to join.  But too much was on the line:  it was one game to each school, and Hongnong was losing.  So after about a third of the game, he was making disgusted facial expressions and he switched me out.  I mean… I understand, from a "gotta win" perspective – I don't belong on the volleyball court.  I know this.  But it feels just as humiliating now as it did in highschool PE in 1981.  I'm better at "solitary" sports: running, hiking, etc.  I'm terribly uncoordinated.

And I was in a terrible mood.  I was walking to catch a bus home to Yeonggwang, feeling dejected and grumpy.

And then one of the preschool teachers, with three hyperactive preschoolers bouncing good-naturedly in the back of her car, pulls to a stop beside me on the streets of Hongnong and asks me where I'm going.  In Korean.  And I answer.  And she offers me a ride.  She's going that way – one of these kids isn't hers, and she's got to deliver him to his mom.  So I get in and  I ride with this frazzled mom/teacher and three very happy, excited (because the English foreigner teacher is riding in their car!), loud children down the expressway to Yeonggwang.  

I'm in a great mood.  The mom is talking to me in a sort of gentle Korean monologue of which I understand more than I expect but less than I need, punctuated with entirely comprehensible, repeated reminders to the kids to sit still, stop kicking the seat, don't throw things please, etc., etc.  The life of moms and preschool teachers, anywhere.

And she drops the kid with the kid's mom at the main intersection in Yeonggwang, where's she waiting with her car.  And she drops me off at the traffic circle, a block south closer to my apartment, and goes zooming off, reminding the kids to stop bouncing in the back, but smiling kindly.

And I realize I've left my cellphone on the seat of her car.  Which is bad enough.  But if it was just that, I'd have lived without a cellphone until I could chase her down tomorrow at work.  But my apartment key is dangling on a bauble attached to my cellphone.  I can't get into my apartment.  And I can't call anyone to say that I can't get into my apartment. 

So I'm in a terrible mood.  Trying to think of what I should do.  Stay in a motel for the night?  At least I have my wallet.  Find a pay phone… and call someone who can call someone else to find out this woman's number so I can call her and get my cellphone and apartment key?  What to do, what to do?

And then  I recognize the other mom, driving by.  The one we just left the little boy with, at the other intersection.  I flag her down.  And in my halting Korean, I explain I've left my phone in the other woman's car.  She grins, and scoops up her own cellphone and speed-dials her friend, the woman I'd just had a ride with.  Explains that I'd forgotten my cellphone, and tells me she'll zoom back to the traffic circle shortly.

Did I mention it was raining?

I wait in the rain for 4 minutes, and the white Hyundai zooms back up with the frazzled, friendly mom-slash-coworker, and she rolls down the window and the little boy in the back hands me my cell phone.  "아주 고마워요," I bow gratefully.

I'm in a great mood, as I walk back home to the distant rumbling of thunder.  

I was all achy and exhausted yesterday, after staff volleyball. At least, I availed myself somewhat decently, taking into account my non-athlete status and the fact that the last time I made an effort to play volleyball was probably in the 9th grade at Arcata High PE class. I was watching soccer, Chile vs Honduras. I suppose I've always associated Chile with being "into" soccer, because the time that I lived there, in 1994, was the only time in my life when I followed soccer in a dedicated manner – because I had friends who were into it and it gave us something to talk about, and because I actually had opportunities to attend games. I have a vivid memory of a Catolica vs U Chile match (they are the great #1 and #2 rivals in Chile pro soccer), eating hotdogs in the stands (with mayo and tomato and avocado, as a good Chilean). It was by far the most intense sporting event experience I've ever had.

So I was watching Chile play against Honduras, and fell asleep. I began dreaming of World Cup brackets (because, since having been remonstrated – justly – for not being a "real" soccer fan because I didn't understand the brackets, I had been studying them). And then at 11 pm, I woke up in a burning sweat. What's this, a fever? I turned off the TV. The night outside my window was loud and the air in the room felt sticky. I turned on the air conditioner – only the second time since moving into this micro apartment that happens to have air conditioning. I went back to sleep. Dreams!

There was some kind of tournament going on at Hongnong school, where I work. It was structured like the World Cup. That makes sense, but I never saw what sport it actually was. Anyway, some North Koreans showed up and were participating (or trying to participate), and the locals were resentful. They weren't bothered by the North Koreans' ability, but their behavior – they were being prideful and insensitive.

So the local kids started sabotaging the competitions. It became a big deal when the media became aware of it and began discussing it on Korean news television. But it's not that it was a scandal – more like it was being admired admired, as if it were a sort of kids' "green revolution protests" like had happened in Iran, or something.

Then the dream shifted, and I was living on the streets in some big city. It was definitely an American city, maybe Chicago or Los Angeles. I was looking for a bathroom (such is life on the streets in an American city – a Korean city wouldn't have that issue – Korea is the "land of the convenient public restroom"). I went through a police station, but chickened out about using the criminal-dominated public restroom there to clean up. Then this guy comes up to me on the street, randomly. He's a big guy – like 300 lbs. – but he's clearly well off. He asks me what I want, and he works out that I'm "homeless," although I manage to elide over this a bit in the conversation. Generously, he takes me to his apartment. For some reason, I trust him. He's extremely wealthy, with very eccentric apartment – inside, it looks like the set to Blade Runner or something. I finally go to use his bathroom, after he has told me some about himself, and then I see the bathroom has moldy walls and damp, dirty laundry on the floor. He comes in and says, "I thought maybe you could help me clean this up." There I am, dreaming about cleaning filthy bathrooms again – clearly I was traumatized by my first two apartments in Yeonggwang. Fortunately the dream doesn't go on. What's with my subconscious, anyway?

Then, the dream shifts again, and I'm teaching some kids – 3rd graders. I seem to have developed some fairly high level of rapport with them, in actuality, and I guess the dream reflects that. But… there is another foreign woman "observing" my class, along with me and Lee Ji-eun (which doesn't make sense since Ryu Ju-hui is my coteacher with the 3rd graders). This foreign woman is haughty and detached, but she keeps trying to change the lesson plan, as if she's dissatisfied. Finally she just says something to Lee Ji-eun, and I'm told to sit down, while this woman, apparently named "Pat," takes over our class. Weirdly, she has brought (in a bag!) several of these pre-schoolers – including some toddlers. She puts them out on the desk and begins her lesson. Very weird. Actually, she's doing some very interesting things with them, but I'm feeling grumpy about having my class pre-empted.

I'm not really paying attention… I'm contemplating World Cup brackets again. Then my student Sally comes back to where I'm sitting, and she's looking bored and deeply annoyed with the goings-on (which is generally how she always looks). She whispers, "Pat said you must leave now!" I'm pissed, and I think maybe that's not true – maybe Sally is just being manipulative or trying to trick me. It wouldn't be the first time, for that. So I say, "Fine, but you're coming with me." I pick Sally up and leave the room.

And then we're back on the street of the big city from before, and Sally, far from being angry at having been taken out of the class by me, seems oddly pleased that she's gotten both of us out of there. I realize that that was her plan – so it she had been lying, after all. Somehow, though, she knew how I'd react, and she'd played me to get out of the class herself. Instead of feeling upset, I reward this behavior: I decide it's time to go get some ice cream, in the store I'd noticed next to the police station earlier.

Yes, weird. And then I woke up. 5 AM. I turn off the air conditioner. I open my window – a thick fog has rolled in to Yeonggwang, which seems really common here – not sure if this normal early summer in this part of Korea, or something specific to the relatively dry weather (compared to what I think of as normal Korea summer), which renders things a bit California-y.