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The waeguk-in (foreigners) (other than the migrant workers, about whom I’ve written an essay elsewhere in the archives), the human flotsam that wash up on the shores of Korea are a motley lot, and they tend to fall into three or four broad, hairy, buttah-nemseh categories. (Tangentially, I’ve always wondered how flotsam is differentiated from jetsam…)
There are the young ‘uns have just finished university in Canada or the States, with a fresh and sparkly new degree in Interpretive Kinaesthetics or Theatre or Information Technology or some damn newfangled thing, and they can’t find a job to save their souls back home, wherever that may be. It doesn’t take them too long to discover that in Korea you can make pretty good bucks babysitting children or having a chat with university students, and they’ll take anybody. Anybody who managed to drink their way to a whateva cum laude, that is. A prospect that’s a damn sight better than sitting in your parent’s basement trying to roll joints out of old roaches and collecting pogey… getting paid to live abroad – damn, that sounds good! Over they come, in droves. Some last a month or two, or even six, before the psychotic boozer that is their ‘Academic Director’ drives them over the brink, and they bug out. Some make it to the end of their contract, but are emotionally scarred for life. In a weird parallel to hostage syndrome, some come to actually like the abuse, and sign up for another Tour of Duty.
A number of these become the long-termers, mostly men, mostly of a certain age (ahem), many of whom have had the great good fortune (in most cases) to fall in love with a Korean woman. They are the ones who’ve been here for years, or the ones that ricochet all over the damn place, but inevitably seem to boomerang back to Korea, just because once they reach a certain mellow, equitable, detached attitude about how f–ked-up everything tends to be, through sheer weariness if nothing else, well, it becomes clear that Korea can be a remarkable easy and occasionally pleasant place to live. There’s also a subset of these long-termers that I think of as ‘the predators’ – they are single and towards the younger end of the scale, and they are here for the women, who very frequently are very lovely.
There is also a large contingent who simply don’t, or can’t fit in anywhere else. Why these folks would decide that coming to Korea, of all places, where they are virtually certain to be ostracized by the vast majority of the population, overtly or otherwise, is a Great Idea™, after failing completely to make themselves part any tribe back in their homeland, is inexplicable to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that the multitudes of bottom-rung private schools will literally take anyone with a heartbeat and a North American accent. It’s an adventure going to a bar here and chatting with whoever ends up on the barstool beside you. A scary adventure, that sometimes ends in violence, as were are led to believe the best adventures do. There are some very odd foreigners floating around this country, and I’m a connoisseur of odd. Which is why I do most of my tippling at home, these days.
The reason I tell you about all of this is to set a bit of background to an anecdote about this certain new arrival I met about 4 years ago, whom I’ll call Chuckles. A Canadian, he showed up to teach at the school where I was Head English Teacher, and it fell to me to orient him (pun intended) a bit. After a week or two, I was pretty sure he’d be a washout – he just didn’t seem to have the slightest ability to build a rapport with anyone, never mind his students. A few months later, I left for Australia, and he was still there.
Well, he’s still here, apparently. Since my return to Korea, I’ve been regaled with a few amusing stories about him from a mutual aquaintance, but the latest one has got to be the topper.
It seems Chuckles recently applied for a teaching job in Japan, and was shortlisted, since he’s been teaching, if not well, at least steadily, for almost 4 years here. The school in Japan said that rather than flying over for an interview, he could send them a video tape.
I know, you can see this coming, can’t you?
It seems Chuckles made the sample lesson tape, but he neglected to erase the part after the lesson was done, encoded on which was a rather long segment of him in Laos, ‘chasing the dragon’.
Yes, as part of the interview process, he sent a video of himself bogarting a massive pipe full of opium, while someone off camera apparently urged him to ‘Be careful – that’s the first time you’ve smoked opium, man!’
I haven’t heard yet whether he got the job or not.

Although in my experience, Koreans often seem to be skilled beyond measure at cheapening and vulgarizing just about anything to which they lay their hands, owing perhaps to the mercantilism-at-any-cost modernization of recent decades, Sorak San National Park, and the countryside around it, were a pleasant revelation to me.
An astonishingly beautiful place, organized and modern. The air is clean, the water’s clean, and I was surprised and bemused to observe that, as far as I could tell, at least, the Koreans seem to be better stewards of their forest resources than my fellow Canadians. I saw nothing that could compare with the vast, brutal areas of clearcut in British Columbia. In a tiny little country, with 49 million people crammed into it, there’s more of what appears to be virgin forest in the 275 kilometres or so between there and the smoke-shrouded urban hell that is here than I had ever expected.
We spent some time at Naksan Sa, one of the Buddhist temples in the region. The temple buildings and gardens perch amid fragrant pines on a bluff beside the sea. It is a testament to the upheavals of Korean history that it has been rebuilt no less than eight times in the fourteen centuries since it was first constructed. The entire coast in the region is lined with a three-metre fence, topped with razor-wire, a legacy of the latest upheaval 50 years ago. Sokcho and Sorak National park are disconcertingly close to the North Korean border. Soldiers patrol the beaches, along the inside of the fence. North Korean spies are kept out, but the people who live along the coast are kept in. It was surreal to see a gun emplacement, draped with camouflage netting, hidden in the rocks beneath the hermitage at the temple.

Sorak San itself (‘san’ means ‘mountain’, and derives from the Chinese character ) is as beautiful as any place I’ve ever seen, although even in the shoulder season, it’s mobbed by huge crowds. The day we spent there, bushwalking and generally wandering about, there were literally thousands of high school and middle school students, in enormous groups, repeatedly shouting “hello!” at me, which is always something I enjoy immensely, in much the same sense that I enjoy having my nipples sandpapered.
But it takes more than boisterous schoolkids to ruin my ki-buen. We spent the days in the mountains, and the evenings at the hot springs/waterpark/public bath near our condo, which was incredibly clean, modern, well-designed and well-built. A testament to what Korea could be like with a little more attention to detail, a little more pride in workmanship, a little less focus on the short term. A preview of what Korea will hopefully be, in a decade or two.
Our brief holiday was an unqualified success, and I look forward to going back and spending some more time there when this semester finishes.

We’re home. Korea’s a pretty goddamn nice place, after all.
It’s got to be the fifth circle of hell for those who appreciate the fine art and science of architecture, though. If I see one more mock-St. Peter’s onion dome or one more Castle-Auuuuuughh-esque turret on one more purple-painted f–k-hotel, I’m going to run screaming just over there near the couch, then run screaming back.
Not that you folks would actual hear my screams of aesthetic dismay, but I’d tell you about them later.
That’s what the web’s all about, right?
(Note to self : explain the f–k-hotel reference, and the fact that we did not in fact stay in any of those over the last couple of nights…)

In the Chosun Ilbo newspaper this morning : around a hundred North Korean refugees were rounded up by North Korean agents in China recently. “Rounded up” is the appropriate phrase to use, as not only were these people, amongst whom were children and grandparents, bound hand and foot with wire, but holes were punched through their septums and rings inserted, like cattle, to lead them back to the f–king fatherland.
Is this front page propaganda, or did it really happen?
Who knows any more? Recent experiments by the scum in power in America have shown pretty conclusively that propaganda doesn’t need to be subtle to be effective, just emotive. And the image of these poor, hungry people, strung together via iron rings passed through their noses, blood dripping down their upper lips as they are led back to the living hell that is North Korea, is certainly emotive.
But this comes a week before more visits between separated families are scheduled to happen, and not long after the South Korean envoy returned from an extended and fruitful visit to the North, so it seems unlikely that the report is sheer propagandizing, perhaps.
My vote is that it did happen, and the Chinese allowed it to happen. Aren’t people great? Don’t you just love them? Sweetness and light, beauty and peace, follow us all the days of our lives, don’t they?
Like f–k they do.