1. Seoul is big. This isn’t the part of my observation that was unanticipated, but I’ll get to that momentarily. While Daegu is also very large, it is still about 3 or 4 times smaller than Seoul. The other major difference between Seoul and Daegu is that Daegu isn’t a major international city whereas Seoul is. What this means is that there are a lot of foreigners living in Seoul, and the city is quite a user-friendly one in which to live a foreign existence: the signs and audio announcements are in English as well as Korean, a lot of people speak proficient English, the foreign districts are massive, Mexican restaurants exist in sufficient quantities as well as qualities, and I don’t get stared at with curious amusement every time I choose to leave the depths of my apartment. Of course, I was fully expecting that Seoul would be more Westernized (and therefore easier for me to function in) than other cities in Korea; but what I wasn’t expecting is that I would find this fact to be somewhat off-putting.
I've never been so happy about mediocre fajitas in my life...
I have been living here for almost three months now. I have grown acclimatized to my environment, and I am comfortable within it. When I go to a restaurant, a grocery store, or any other place that requires an interaction, I have come to accept that I will awkwardly fumble with the Korean language in order to get what I want; at the very least, I will point at things and grunt like a caveman. It might not be the most respectable method of getting what I want, and it might be altogether detrimental to my ego, but it yields results. So when I came to Seoul and I realized that I didn’t have to have incompetent interactions, I was thrown completely off guard. I wanted to speak fragmented Korean to cashiers, but they insisted upon speaking less-fragmented English. At a Mexican restaurant when we were served by someone who appeared to be from Mexico, I wasn’t sure if I should speak English, Spanish, or Korean. Not knowing whether to say, “mul, juseyo,” “agua, por favor,” or “water, please,” had never been an issue before, and I hated the uncertainty that came along with something so simple. Would I sound presumptuous if I favored one of these particular phrases over another? Should I have asked for “mul” because I was in Korea, should I have asked for “agua” because my server was Latino, or should I have asked for “water” because he spoke English to me first? It probably would have been easier to just hold up my glass and grunt...
The other unusual issue that I had with Seoul was that I quickly discovered that I didn’t like being surrounded by native English speakers. Because we were staying in Itaewon, a largely foreign/tourist district of Seoul, I would estimate that roughly 30% of the people we passed on the street looked like us. And for reasons that I cannot fully articulate, this annoyed me. Perhaps deep down, I really enjoy it when Koreans on various mass transit systems in Daegu indiscreetly point and stare at me while saying something about “wagokins” (i.e. foreigners) to whomever they are sitting next to. But this won’t happen to you in Seoul, because “wagos” exist in abundant quantities there. There was just something that felt both distracting and inauthentic about sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Seoul. Distracting because I constantly felt the impulse to listen to other people’s conversations, just because I could. Inauthentic because I didn’t feel like I was in Seoul; I felt like I could have been in any city in America. At the end of the day, I enjoyed Seoul immensely and am looking forward to going back, but I’m ultimately glad to be living in a city that somehow feels much more Korean.
2. We met a North Korean. I refer to this encounter above as being “fortuitous.” I’m not so sure that the chance meeting was fortuitous for him, but I felt very fortunate to meet someone from North Korea, as I have a tendency to forget that just above the DMZ exists a completely different country with an authoritarian government and impoverished people.
We met him in a pub that was inhabited almost exclusively by white people. He was there with his girlfriend who was from Chicago. She was rather intoxicated, and I was approaching that state of mind as well, but because it was a fairly significant moment, I remember most details of the conversation quite clearly. He likes to hang out in “foreign” bars because South Koreans evidently don’t like him because he is from North Korea. They know that he is from North Korea because the accent is apparently quite different. He and his father tried (unsuccessfully) to escape from North Korea once before along the Chinese border. When they were caught trying to escape, they were sentenced to hard labor. His mother and sisters were murdered by the government because their family was trying to find a better life. One of his sisters might still be living, but he has no way to find out. He then tried to escape again through China, this time successfully, where he stayed for four months. When he was hiding in China, he didn’t have a place to stay, nor did he have food to eat…for four months. He managed to get to the Philippines, where he lived for six months, followed by Japan, where he lived for four months before sorting out the paperwork necessary for him to get into South Korea. If a North Korean wants to escape into South Korea, this roundabout method is one of the only ways it is possible…
Sadly, our new acquaintance’s story is not an uncommon one for a North Korean. I have seen a few documentaries and my friend Diana has read a book in which more or less this same plotline happened to different families in North Korea. But there is a certain level of desensitization that occurs when you see these stories through film or read about them in print, a desensitization that doesn’t occur when you sip a gin and tonic across the table from someone who can tell you this story firsthand because he lived through it. It was one of the most surreal conversations of my life, and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t at least briefly question the story’s authenticity. While I don’t know what possible motive two complete strangers could possibly have for fabricating a remarkable story to randoms in a bar, there was something about the outrageousness of the story itself that made it difficult to unquestioningly believe, even though I unquestioningly believe the same story when I see it through the secondhand source of a documentary. Perhaps my initial skepticism suggests that I am willing to believe harrowing tales if I can remain disconnected from them, but I am less willing to believe that the same harrowing tales could happen to someone who is sitting at a neighboring table in a bar…in any event, true or not, this young man’s story reminded me of just how lucky I am. It’s truly an injustice that the quality of every individual’s life is in many ways determined by geography…
Well, so much for writing a non-epic post. I should have known that my fingers have a mind of their own…
On a slightly lighter note, this is Diana and I at the top of what we later learned was known as “hooker hill,” where we stumbled upon our sketchy motel. We didn’t intend on sleeping amongst prostitutes and the men who love them, but I wasn’t all that surprised when I learned where we were since I routinely find myself in the midst of such farces.
