Putting the pieces together

So why go to Korea?

I've spent 28 years teaching Koreans, living with Koreans, working with Koreans, eating Korean food, and more recently, studying Korean literature and history, but there's nothing like being in Korea and being surrounded by the people and the language and the culture to really start making sense of things.

Flushing and Palisades Park (the latter with perhaps less English on signs than in Korea!) are fascinating, but they're not Seoul.

It's as if all this time I'd been assembling a collection of puzzle pieces but didn't know what to do with them until now.

It' s not enough to go to a Korean restaurant or buy a bucket of kimchi at H-mart.

But . . . .

-after spending nearly two weeks eating Korean food with Koreans three times a day, sitting a low tables, using metal chopsticks and having only Kleenex for napkins and only a half glass of water after the meal and having my young homestay mother feed me with her chopsticks;

-after wandering through the endless market stalls selling fish and fruit and dried food and condiments and sauces and seaweed;

-after going for days with nothing but melon for dessert;

-after realizing that a meal is truly an interaction between host and guest, mother and child;

-after seeing every oddly-shaped bit of ground wedged between houses and roads and fences planted to the last inch with a variety of crops;

. . . only then did it all begin to make sense. Only then did I start to get a grip on a culture.

Even though I know only a handful of Korean words (most of them dealing with food), only by going to Korea and interacting with Koreans did I start to have a feeling not only for the rhythms of their language, but also the nameless aspects of their communication and interaction.

So that's why you go to Korea--to put the pieces together. (Duh.)

Love & kimchi

A wayward son, on the lam for an accidental murder, misses his mother's kimchi so much he risks returning home. His old mother, weeping with joy to see her son again, prepares an elaborate meal while her son takes a nap. He wakes up at a knock on the door, only to be arrested by plainclothes police, who screech out of town with him the back seat. His mother runs after the car, shouting, "Wait! I didn't get to feed him yet!"

This scene, from a Korean movie I saw on the plane home, seemed very emblematic of certain important themes in Korean society. I watched five Korean movies during my trip to Korea (3 on the bus, 2 on the plane). And except for what seemed to be a Korean version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all dealt with the extremely strong bond between mother and child, often focusing on a child's longing for his mother's cooking, or a mother's yearning to cook for her child. Often, this separation is related to a child's leaving of an almost mythic country home with a chong-dok (a collection of large, brown ceramic pots for kimchi, bean paste, and other home-made culinary necessities that were prepared once a year and buried in the backyard to ferment) for the crowded apartment blocks of Seoul or other cities, a move that millions of Koreans have made in recent decades.

I knew that Korea, a very Confucian society, placed a great emphasis on the parent-child bond; but I had no idea it would all boil down to a longing for your mother's kimchi. This yearning tells a story that reflects some of fundamental changes that have occurred on the Korean peninsula over the past several decades. And it also sheds some light on the Koreans I've known in Bergen County.

For the past 28 years, dealing with the fruits of Korean parenthood has been my business. Over the years, I have come to know Korean parents indirectly, through the worries, obsessions, and behavior of their children, whom I teach and tutor. From my extensive study of the matter, I have come to conclude that Korean parents are hardworking, dedicated, demanding, involved, and not to be messed with. Oh, and they think that no child who can walk should miss school. From the pleas of Korean children who beg, "Please don't call my parents," I know that Korean parents are really old school. They remind me of my father, something of an anachronism even in the 70's, who would say, "If the school calls, it's always your fault." But I also know that they will go to great extremes to obtain the best education for their children, even if it means sending them to the U.S. while they work abroad.

But parenthood was greatly on my mind during my nearly two weeks in Korea for the simple reason that several of the young people I was traveling with were in search of identities that had been at least partly complicated by bold decisions made by parents.

I'm talking about Korean parents who decided to move to northern New Jersey to seek some sort of better life for their children. And Korean parents who decided to give up their babies for adoption. And Caucasian American parents who adopted Korean babies. And Koreans and Caucasians who decided to marry and raise mixed-race children.

I realized that, even with all the struggles and illnesses and accidents and challenges that can befall one's child, I have it so incredibly easy as a parent, simply because of my wife's and my undeserved good luck in having been able to produce our own biological offspring. My children are under no pressure to decide whether or when to search for their birth parents, and they will never have the threat of being unsuccessful in that search.

As a parent, I never have to steel myself for the results of my children's search for their birth identities.

As an American with American children, I never have to worry that my children are growing up without their true identities. I never have to see my 17-year-old Korean adoptee son return with tears in his eyes after playing with Korean orphans, as I did on this trip.

And as an American living in the U.S., I never have to go for months at a time living in a country where I have a job in order to support my family, who live in another country where the educational opportunities are better.

But, sadly, I'm also not part of the kind of universal societal shift like the one Korea has been living since its war, from rural hunger to urban plenty. Like most Americans, I'm relatively rootless. My history doesn't go that deep.

For me, there never were the kimchi jars in the backyard of my rural mountain homestead.

Charming Korean quirks

You know you're in Korea when . . .

•People wave goodbye with both hands simultaneously.

•Every dish at a meal is purported to have some special quality -- this one induces appetite; that one helps your digestion -- except water, which is apparently bad to drink at meals.

•Female friends walk hand in hand down the street.

•People say "Kimchi!" when having their photo taken (for real).

•Men never wear shorts, even in the hottest, stickiest weather.

•To gesture "Come here!", people loosely flap their flattened hands up and down, in a gesture that looks like an American signaling "Slow down!"

•No matter what, people always bring you a gift when they meet you.

•You see Korean ladies of a certain age wearing enormous visors in the sun (which, no doubt, help make them look younger than they are).

•Everyone seems to have a cell phone charm.

•In hot weather, you see people wear full-length tight-fitting sleeves underneath their short sleeve shirts -- to keep cool?

•You see little old ladies (and sometimes men) working at cutting grass or weeding, but instead of wielding noisy, obnoxious weed whackers or power trimmers, they use charming, old-fashioned, wood-handled curved knives.

•Said landscapers wear floppy hats with loose bandanas in back, gloves, and long, baggy pants and sleeves, all of which suggests an improvised beekeeper's suit.

•You see men pulling metal carts on which they collect cardboard boxes.

•You see women bobbing through the open markets, carrying on their heads lunches on metal trays covered with newspaper to deliver them to vendors who will eat them while working in their market stalls.

Market life: the soul of Seoul

Like so many of the most memorable places I've visited in my travels, Korea's soul seems to be in its markets. Seoul is packed with markets, from open air vendors of dried dates and pickles to fishmongers cutting up and cooking wriggling sea creatures inches from the feet of passing pedestrians to multi-story indoor clothing markets in modern buildings that stay open practically all night.

The fishmarket in Busan, famous throughout Korea, was a non-stop series of sideshows of doomed sea creatures, from the living to the dead to the dried. Fish swam in bubbling tanks, lay piled on ice, hung in chains of yellow plastic to dry, and sizzled on grills. I saw slime-oozing hagfish being impaled with screwdrivers and filleted, the pieces of flesh still moving as they cooked over coals. An octopus escaped momentarily from its tank, only to be recaptured, weighed, and ripped apart by the gloved hands of a smiling fishmongeress. I walked past endless stalls of fish and seafood -- tanks of sedentary flounders, heaps of tiny dried shrimp, freshly caught octopus and squid with their tentacles neatly laid out -- and I kept wondering, who could possibly eat all that?

Chungbu Market, just around the corner from my Seoul hotel, seemed like a typical open-air market (protected by plastic and cloth awnings) with a lot of the same kind of fish, though more of the dried variety, and lots of dried dates, seaweed, chilis, condiments and fruit, some with homemade electric devices that rotated long strips of thin plastic to keep away flies. Stalls were already open when I first walked through at 8 am, dodging overloaded motor scooters and women carrying on their heads trays of hot meals covered by newspaper to be delivered to market vendors.

But not many blocks away, Dong Dae Mun market stayed open practically all night. Sleek, modern mall-like buildings held floors and floors of fashionable clothing, cafes, and restaurants connected by escalators. Nearby, another, more old-school indoor clothing market had dozens of small stalls on every floor, each barely big enough for two or three people to sit, surrounded by clothes piled up or hanging from floor to ceiling. At 1:30 a.m., vendors sat watching small TVs hidden under piles of goods, or shared full meals (including stews and kimchi and rice and side dishes) off of metal trays delivered by local restaurants, or simply dozed on their merchandise. With closing time at 4:30 a.m., they still had a ways to go. Outside, packed lanes were lined with vendors of clothing, souvenirs, and food. At 2 a.m. it was as busy as lunchtime in Manhattan; piles of dumplings and eggs sat ready, skewers of meat sizzled on charcoal grills and pots of spicy red fishcake stew bubbled on portable stoves.

These markets become the focal point of a kind of streetlife you just don't see in most American cities, where businesses tend to retreat behind walls of glass that separate merchant and customer.

In Korea, many stores that aren't even in officially designated market areas have a sidewalk presence. Outside of the very modern, central areas of the city, it seems that stores everywhere open up and spill onto the sidewalk, with goods arranged appealingly in fully open-air storefronts monitored by merchants perched on plastic chairs. A walk down Uljiro Street took me past dozens of shops selling lightbulbs, hardware, lumber, housewares, sheet metal goods -- none of them hidden behind glass storefronts. There's an immediacy about the connection one can make with the goods and the vendors here that is missing in most American shopping areas. A single object can catch your eye and bring you to a stop, or a nod from a shopowner can slow you down in a way that simply isn't possible in the impersonal world of American storefronts. It kind of makes me feel bad for the loneliness of American merchants, isolated from the public by barriers of glass and window displays.

Maybe it's just an illusion, but walking through the stalls of these Seoul markets, being beckoned by shopowners, or seeing them chatting or laughing or eating, or even simply making eye contact with them, I just got the feeling I was less alone, more in touch with the soul of Seoul.

Stumbling upon spirituality

One of the things I love about Buddhist temples in the Asian countries I've visited is that I often find them by accident. I'll be walking through a town thinking of other things and then I'll hear a faint drumming which at first may sound like a distant hammering, but then as I proceed combines with a humming which turns into a chanting. Or I'll be walking down a street of unintelligible store signs and suddenly I'll see tucked away among the visual noise a painting of a Bodhisattva, or a string of paper lanterns.

This is what happened just the other day in Busan, while the group was going to see the view at the top of an observation tower. I slipped down one of the sets of stairs along the steep streets of this hilly town (in this hilly country, as my quadriceps will attest), and soon saw the telltale lanterns and heard the faint chanting, which led me through a twisting series of steps and paths to a small temple overlooking the city where a dozen or so people were chanting led by a monk sharply rapping a wooden object with a stick (don't know what it's called).

I get the sense sometimes that this is typical of the way one encounters Buddhism and shamanism, two of the three major forms of spirituality in Korea.

Christianity is very visible. As in the U.S., steeples are often the first thing you see when entering a town. When I arrived in Bucheon outside of Seoul my first day, churches seemed to be everywhere, sprouting out of tightly packed high rise offices and apartments, their angular steeples projecting oddly from the blocky rectangles that make up the city blocks. The steeple here has almost become a suggestion or a symbol of a church based on an architectural form that doesn't seem to exist here. Many of the steeples are merely Eiffel-like towers bearing across on top of an office building.

This impression completely comports with my experience of Koreans in Bergen County, which seem like a uniformly Christian community. But the truth is, according to several estimates I've read, that about 30-35% of Koreans identify as Buddhist and about the same identify as Christian.

Buddhism seems just a little less evident. You'll occassionally see a swastika among a jumble of hangul signs, but so far I've not seen a major Buddhist structure stand out visually in a town or village. One reason may be that while Buddhism was dominant during the Koryo dynasty, when the Choson or Yi dynasty began around 1400, Buddhism was suppressed and many temples were burned. So Buddhism withdrew to the kind of semi-hidden mountain retreats like the beautiful temple where I slept Sunday night on the ondol floor, rising at 4 am to witness the monks' meditation.

Shamanism is even less discussed but is so clearly evident in the many of the folk rituals and festivals all over the country. There is certainly the veneration of ancestors, horoscopes are consulted before weddings, and the Seon Buddhism here does have its deities, but I'm talking about rituals meant to invoke the cooperation of a spirit to get what you need. Interestingly, the Korean government has been trying to preserve some of these rituals as 'national cultural treasures,' as if they're curious social artifacts. But I've also heard that people still do hire shamans when someone needs a hand getting over sickness, infertility, or bad luck.

But I haven't directly stumbled upon evidence of that yet.

Defined by food

It must seem hardly original to suggest that a culture is defined by its food, but I can't help thinking that this is even moreso the case with Korea than with other cultures. Sure, American food suggests our emphasis on speed, quantity, and convenience, while French cuisine suggests a love of tradition, authenticity, and long, slow meals, but for me, Korea's food was, more than anything else, the key to understanding its culture.

Even though I'd eaten many Korean meals in the past, I was really struck by this fact as I sat down to eat with the gracious Ahn family in Bucheon for my first three days. Just as the heavily Confucian culture is very much structured on the individiual's place in society, so the meals are completely social, communal events. Except for individual bowls of rice or barley, everything is put in the middle and everyone eats from the same dishes with the chopsticks and spoons they've already put in their mouths. I'd always wondered about this when I'd eaten meals in Korean restaurants in the U.S.: How do Koreans serve themselves? Do they turn the chopsticks around to serve themselves, as I've seen done in Japan? Do they have more serving spoons?

Nope. There may be a jigae (stew) in the center, and maybe 6-8 panchan (sidedishes) including several types of kimchi, and everyone just digs in and takes what they want repeatedly, chopsticks and spoons flying and nearly avoiding midair collisions. I can't imagine there would be a Korean phrase for "double dipping." (Do they spread germs more easily? or does the spiciness of the kimchi keep microbes in check?)

The fact that at each meal everyone is facing each other, eating from the same dishes, throws in sharp relief the American notion that "I am an individual, and I will order what I want, the way I want." What do all the fussy people with food allergies do here? Wither away and die off? I can't imagine Koreans ordering completely separate dishes, and then wrapping up their leftovers to take home. (Though I CAN imagine them eating dinner food for breakfast.) Of course, the best way to please a Korean host, I was told, was not to leave any leftovers (but this seems a somewhat more universal attitude).

I also know that it's customary to wait for the oldest person to start eating before others may eat, which explains why my host Hongbom always addressed me first, pointing to the food and saying, "Try." At my age, a Confucian-based culture is starting to sound pretty good.

Then there's the omnipresence of kimchi--literally at every meal, and in so many forms, and combined with rice or tofu or just eaten plain. Korean families traditionally make their year's supply of cabbage kimchi in a communal event in the late fall and then bury them in the ground in dark brown earthen pots to be used throughout the year. These days Koreans (especially the millions living in all the high-rises in the Seoul area who have not even a scrap of earth to bury something in), if they make their own kimchi, store it in separate kimchi refrigerators that keep it at the optimal temperature.

Along with the rice cooker, this is another appliance one doesn't see in a typical American kitchen. That's o.k., the Ahns didn't know what a toaster was, and had a long conversation trying to figure out how they could orchestrate the complicated process of offering us toast, butter, and jam for our final breakfast there. They thought maybe they could fry the bread, but all they had was "hamburger" buns. (They do have an oven, though; but they haven't used it in four years.)

There was very little bread, but of course rice in every form. Bab, the word for rice, is also the word for food. Two traditional greetings are "Have you had rice yet?" in the morning and "Have you had lunch yet?" later in the day, both surely legacies from a history of want and deprivation. But, as in so many ways, the morning greeting has become Americanized to literally "Good morning," -- joeun achimimnida -- reflecting the new prosperity in this once suffering land.

Hi-tech Hanguk

If you want to see what technology will be like in the U.S. five years from now, just go to Seoul. My Korean-American students have been telling me this for a while, but now I see what they mean. Here are a few examples:
--the metro tag everyone has dangling from a cell phone or purse that not only pays for subways and buses with a touch, but also covers taxis and some store purchases as well-- rendering the idea of counting out coins to pay busfare a quaint American anachronism
--the sliding glass doors in businesses and offices that whoosh open at a touch
--the modern Metro stations with tracks completely enclosed behind glass walls and doors, sealing in AC and keeping out smells and noise
--the subway tunnel walls that somehow magically play animated videos as the trains speed through
--the advertising videos that constantly play wherever you look -- on small monitors hanging from the subway ceilings, on vending machines, in elevators, even on the electronic signature pads in stores -- so that it seems as if someone is constantly addressing you, or trying to et your attention, like something out of Minority Report
--the interactive touch-screen subway maps in the metro stations that act like a GPS or Google Map.

One day we'll catch up!

Bibimbap and Burgers for Breakfast

Although I arrived in Korea not much more than 36 hours ago, it seems like I've already eaten a week's worth of meals. It may have to do with the 14 hour flight which started with a 2 am (NY time) dinner of bibimbap and ended with a 2 am (Seoul time) breakfast of Korean fried rice, which was followed six hours later by an 8 am breakfast of homemade bibimbap, beansprout soup, and panchan, (side dishes, including homemade kimchi) on a low table in the 10th floor apartment of the Ahn family, my homestay hosts in Bucheon, a Seoul suburb. (Bibimbap is a hearty, everyday meal of rice, vegetables & bits of meat, topped by a fried egg and mixed together with a spicy sauce.)

Bibimbap for breakfast? I'm told Koreans traditionally have no distinct breakfast foods, which is actually fine with me, even though I normally love my eggs and toast. But then that was followed a few hours later by a hearty lunch of kalguksu, hand-cut noodles in a seafood broth, at a traditional restaurant on the gritty outskirts of town, apparently worth long waits in blue plastic chairs on a patch of dirt behind the restaurant, not far from the kimchi jars. Orange-aproned waitresses patrolled the low tables of the restaurants, topping up the water and the kimchi, while carefully eyeing the progress of the cooking noodles, one of only three dishes the restaurant offers.

That had to hold me till 7 pm, dinnertime in the Ahn house, when, practically delirious from staying awake all day and tromping around Seoul (I was seriously dreaming while straphanging in the Seoul metro), I sat down to a meal of homemade bulgogi, rice, and more panchan, followed by chunks of melon.

After that I gave in and slept like the dead for 12 hours, only to wake up to a special Sunday breakfast of ramen noodles, rice balls (jumabab, or rice fists), kimchi, multi-colored corn on the cob (which my hosts ate by wiggling the kernels off the cobs and popping them into their mouths), and beautifully prepared "hamburgers." I mean, literally, HAMburgers: a pre-formed square of ham on a bun, topped by relish, a slice of tomato, shredded cabbage, and some sort of Korean-style red paste.

I can't wait for my next breakfast adventure!

Asia, again

Within a year of my leaving China three years ago, the Tibetan monks I saw on the streets of Lhasa erupted in violent protest against the Chinese who were dominating and transforming their city, an earthquake devastated the streets of Chengdu where I had seen swarms of bicycles directed by orange-jacketed traffic monitors, and the Olympics took place in a Beijing that was rapidly shedding the few scraps of architectural history I had tried to see.

I'd traveled one summer to Indiana to study the literature of China, Japan and Korea, and the next to Koreatown in Los Angeles to study Korean culture. I'd written curriculum and taught my first year of a new Asian Literature class, including the literature of India as well as the three mentioned above. I'd visited Asian restaurants, museums, and temples in the United States.

And now I'm preparing to visit Korea, a country from which many of the students I've taught over the past 29 years have emigrated.