At the risk of boring everyone with a third blog post in less than 24 hours, I feel compelled to observe that today is the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Korea. On September 1st, 2007, I landed at Incheon and made my way to Ilsan, where I was met by my new employer, Danny, of the eventually-defunct Tomorrow School, to begin my new teaching career.
I have spent all of the last four years in Korea, with the exception of a three-month, unemployed hiatus back in the US in the fall of 2009, and several shorter vacation trips – two to Australia to visit my mother (with side-junkets to Hong Kong and New Zealand), and one to Japan to resolve a visa issue.
I like Korea, But I’m not really a Koreanophile. Although my linguistico-aesthetic infatuation with the Korean language refuses to go away, I’m actually only lukewarm when it comes to Korean culture in more general terms. It has a lot of shortcomings, and I’m not always happy with it. But… I will attach two caveats to that statement: 1) I think the Korean polity is less dysfunctional that the US polity, and that’s a notable achievement (the current state of the US polity is so depressing as to leave me feeling embarrassed to claim US citizenship); 2) I reached a level of alienated “comfort” with life in Korea that is at least equal to the perpetual alienation I have always felt within my own country and culture.
The consequence of these preceding observations is that, as things stand, I have no interest in (and no current plans for) returning to the US – except perhaps for brief visits. For better or for worse, for now, Korea is my home. If, for whatever reason in the future, my life in Korea has to end, I will seek to continue my expat life elsewhere.
I have changed a great deal in the last four years. I have acquired some confidence as a teacher; I have built some good habits; most notably, I have embraced a sort of meditative buddhist zen (선) atheism that works well for me. Although I’m hardly content – often lonely, often aimless in a philosophical or “spiritual” sense (as much as I dislike the concept of spirituality) – in fact I have found a kind of inner peace that my life prior to this most recent phase utterly lacked.
So, there you have it. And so begins a fifth year…
I took the picture below on a long hike in October 2007. It shows some scarecrows in a field of cut rice, across the highway from the former Camp Edwards, in Geumchon, Paju-si (about 7 km northwest of where I live), which incidentally is where I was stationed in 1991, during my time in the US Army as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Thus, you see, my “roots” in Northwest Gyeonggi Province go “way back.”
Apropos Korean language and culture, I heard a fascinating story yesterday from my Korean colleague here in the UW-Whitewater Music Department. Did you know that Korean Airlines pilots (and co-pilots, etc.) are only allowed to speak English in the cockpit? According to my colleague, this is because the myriad levels of formal discourse in the Korean language can make communication murky between subordinates and superiors (e.g., co-pilots and pilots). Analysis of black box tapes showed this after a Korean Airlines plane crashed several decades ago. The co-pilot tried to challenge a decision the pilot had made, but because of the circumlocution the co-pilot used, the pilot didn’t get what his colleague was trying to say. And the plane crashed, killing everyone on board. So now Korean pilots bypass the issues of formality and politeness altogether by speaking English. This sounded a bit far-fetched to me, but it came from a reputable source—an ex-pat Korean. Do you know if this is true? If so, it should give your linguistic/cultural interests something to chew on. Or perhaps you already wrote about this in a previous post at some point during the past 4 years?
Always love reading your blog. Glad it got a good score in your summer score card a few posts back.