I took the subway into the city today. It was grey and overcast – lovely. I listened to my mp3 player, and watched people. I’d love to go around taking pictures of people, but it doesn’t seem very polite to do so without asking, and my shyness, compounded with linguistic and cultural issues, prevents me from asking people. So… here are some verbal snapshots from the Seoul Metro.
1. The train isn’t very crowded. The bench seat across from me is full, however. Each bench seat, lining the wall between each set of doors on each side of the standard subway carriage, seats seven people. Six of the seven across from me are watching television on their cell phones, absorbed and in weirdly parallel poses: a disheveled-looking and too-skinny young man with a pink tie, watching tv; a woman with one of those bangs-to-eyebrows anime-inspired haircuts, and deep brown liquid eyes, watching tv; another woman, older, with permed hair and a floral pattern dress, watching tv; a man in “exercise clothes” – not sure how to describe, but all the fashion these days here – slick sweatpants, sneakers, a windbreaker, black “gilligan” cap, watching tv; a school-age kid, glasses, with his cell phone down between his legs – the odd man out, since, instead of watching tv, he appears to be playing a game of some kind; two girls, one in a pink sweater with little hearts on it, the other in a sweater with brown and black stripes, apparently comparing notes on the show they’re each watching, as one drapes her arm tenderly on the shoulder of the other; a woman with long hair in “church clothes” and a rather large crucifix hanging around her neck, watching tv. The train rocks around the bend after Wondang-yeok, and, since it runs aboveground along there, there’s a nice tableau behind these symmetrically posed people of the green hills of the suburban landscape, interspersed with 8-lane streets, winding country lanes, vegetable stands and an uncountable number of cleverly-named convenience stores. On my mp3 player, Silvio Rodriguez sings about the Allende years in Chile.
2. Sometime later, the same bench across from me has changed character. Two people are sleeping. A girl is sitting on the lap of her boyfriend, the train is more crowded. The same limpid-eyed woman is there, but now she’s reading a book – I can’t make out the title (nor could I necessarily decipher it, if I could). The man next her is reading over her shoulder, more avidly than the woman herself, who glances up with great regularity, as if in thought or distraction. A man standing in the aisle is staring at my shirt, which says: “mi taku oyasin” – I’m always in favor of presenting linguistic enigmas to those around me, and I brought this old t-shirt with me to Korea knowing it would be a one-of-a-kind item. “Mi taku oyasin” is a proverb in the Lakota dialect of the Sioux indian language, and translates roughly as “we are all in the same family.” I wonder what the man is thinking. He hasn’t shaved in a while. On my mp3 player, Soft Cell is singing it’s punk anthem “Frustration:” “I am so ordinary / Frustration / I was born / One day I’ll die.”
3. I’ve changed subway lines at the Jongno3ga station, to the number 5 from the number 3. I’ve decided to go explore Yeouido today. There’s nowhere to sit on this train, it’s quite busy. A gang of young men dressed as if prepared to play football (soccer) has boarded with me. They’re roughhousing a bit and poking each other and peering at each other’s cell phones. There’s an African-looking man standing at the far end of the car, in an olive-green suit, smiling distantly. Suddenly the sound of a cat yowling fills the car, and drowns out the music in my earphones. Looking down the length of the car I see, just next to the African, an unhappy white cat is escaping from a box that a woman has placed on the overhead shelf. She’s a large woman, but not tall, and dressed, improbably, in a miniskirt and one of those fashionably torn-on-purpose red sweatshirts. The African looks amused but does nothing. The woman can’t reach her cat down from the shelf, and finally another man stands and helps her fetch the cat down and stuff it back into its box, at which point it begins to quiet again, eventually. But not before a woman sitting across from me makes a rather loud remark of apparent disgust, and, standing quickly, stalks from the car, passing through the door at the end into the next carriage. The two girls next to where the angry woman had been seated giggle, and continue to gaze down toward the fat woman and her cat-in-a-box with evident curiosity. The African looks like a handsome Buddha, smiling beautifically. On my mp3 player, Saving Jane begins singing “One Girl Revolution.”
4. I get out of the train at Yeouinaru and follow the crowds up the stairs, my ears popping at the change in elevation (the subway is quite deep here, as it has just burrowed under the river from Mapo to the Yeouido island). On my mp3 player, the Beatles begin “All the Lonely People,” which seems so relevant and appropriate it sends shivers up my spine. I stand on the long escalator, watching the masses in slow motion. There are two Indian gentlemen in front of me on the escalator chatting in very soft tones, and climbing the stairs next to me is a trio of American-looking tourists, probably heading for the “63” building (the tallest building in Korea). I was thinking of going there myself, to try out the observation lounge at the top, but as I climb the last set of steps myself, I see that it has begun to drizzle, and I think about when I was climbing steps on pyramids at Teotihuacan, not so long ago. A lot of steps. Catching my breath. I come out next to the park on the south bank of the Han River on Yeouido island, and suddenly recognize the locale where the movie “The Host” filmed the first emergence of the monster from the river. That was a pretty funny movie – a female Olympic archery champion hunting the giant mutant monster through the Seoul sewers and desolate industrial neighborhoods along the river, after the creature has kidnapped her younger sister, who meanwhile, in her disheveled classic schoolgirl uniform, pluckily saves a fellow victim, a little boy, from the monster’s apparent wrath. The Beatles fade from my mp3 player and are replaced by Beck’s “Loser.”
I walk along the river in the rain.
Seoul Subway Map.
… and something happened. He was struck by an awesome vision. But he dismissed it as a ridiculous if terrible dream. It was nothing, he thought to himself. Nothing real.
