Turning East

Kyoto temple ritual

Welcome to Turning East.

This website features the stories I collected from 1984 to the present, all having to do with China, Korea, Japan or the Philippines. In many cases the names of people I interviewed have been changed. Their stories include different aspects of living, working and traveling in Asia, including religion, commerce, education, home life, economics, politics, health care and life on the road. Occasionally I include a story of my own. (Please click on any of the pictures for a better view.) There are now over 70 posts, indexed on the next page. I’m posting every two weeks, so please visit regularly for new stories or write me to register, which means new posts will automatically be sent to your email account. The posts are archived and indexed  for easy access.

Until I can get better security, I’m restricting registration to this website. At one point, some hacker sent 815 “comments” on these stories, all advertisements, then “posts” to sell products. If you’d like to comment on one of the stories here or to be added to the subscriber list or my email list, please contact me at dussere@yahoo.com. I’d be happy to publish comments for you or add you to the subscriber list. When I get better security protection, I’ll activate registration again.

Please do not use any of the content without permission.

New Link: The Cultural Revolution Cookbook.  <http://www.npr.org/2012/01/22/145468366/cultural-revolution-cookbook-a-taste-of-humanity>

The speaker is a lawyer, a twenty-year resident of Japan and a good friend of mine.  The interview took place in 2011.

Cathy’s story

I first came to Japan in 1982 to live with the family of my first husband, a Japanese photographer. We’d met in France when I was twenty-two years old. I’d wanted to get married because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with my life. So at twenty-three I came to Japan, as the foreign fiancée of the eldest son in a conventional Japanese family, and lived with his extended family for six months, got married and continued living with his entire extended family. At that time the family consisted of his “grandmother,” his grandmother’s sister, his two younger sisters and his father and stepmother Kayoko, who came on weekends. After several years, one of his sisters got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids, so it really was quite an extended family.

My life was divided into two completely separate and distinct worlds. My first job in Japan was teaching English in a chain of English-language schools. Like a lot of foreigners, I taught English at multiple locations throughout the Kansai area in Western Japan, usually in the afternoon and evenings, and studied Japanese at a YMCA in the mornings. I quite liked this school since the teachers came from all over the world. The school I worked for was somewhat unusual in that it didn’t hire only blond, blue-eyed Americans. There were a lot of Asian teachers as well, which is unusual. We’d go out drinking in and to discos all the time (this was in the 80s). I felt like a tourist.

After this, I’d go home, where I’d try to be a typical Japanese daughter-in-law, wearing a kimono at home, doing Japanese cooking, even doing family ancestor worship ceremonies. This particular ceremony involved putting some rice in what looks like a small china teacup on the family Buddhist altar. You also put out sake an there are certain flowers that you change every two or three days. There are certain things that you dust, and there are certain things that you don’t move.

For me this part of my life in Japan was like acting. I wanted to experience the culture, and frankly I thought the only way to be accepted by a Japanese family was to be exactly like them. In my first few months in Japan, I learned from personal experience the maxim that the “nail that sticks out will be pounded down.” Conformity is highly prized. Individuality and self-expression is suspect and can be punishable by ridicule and isolation. At twenty-three I had no idea who I was, so I imitated what I saw and allowed the culture to define me.

With this kind of schizophrenic lifestyle, I’m glad I had a sense of humor because I really needed it. I was pretty independent, and I remember such things as going to the supermarket and buying what looked like organic peanut butter, taking it home, spreading it on bread, putting it in my mouth and discovering that—oh my God—it was miso. I got into so much trouble with my family. I’d decide to clean the house when they were gone during the day as a kind gesture, and I’d go out and buy cleaning products based on the size of the bottle and the color, assuming they would be the same as in the U.S. So I ended up using toilet cleaner to wash the dishes.

Yoshi and I were married for five years. After a couple of years of this Japanese-type existence with his whole extended family, I decided that we should move out. I thought married couples should live by themselves instead of with a whole boatload of relatives. I wanted out of this small town in which we were then living where I was the only foreigner. I thought that living in the either Kyoto or Kobe would work, since both of us would be within commuting distance of our jobs. He said no, he couldn’t do that. At the time we were living in a fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, left to Yoshi by his grandmother. He said he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. Six weeks after she met me, his grandmother had died from a heart attack which I’m sure it was brought on by her grandson’s marrying a big-breasted foreigner. She’d told everyone he’d only marry me over her dead body, and that was what happened. Yoshi’s grandmother left him this fourteen-room house, which is huge in Japan, and he couldn’t leave his sister living there on her own. At the time his sister was twenty-four, and I thought why the hell not? Then she got married, and her husband moved in, and they had two kids. So for a while there were two couples living there with two kids. Our marriage turned platonic, and in a way it felt like being married to my brother.

Looking back, there are a lot of things I really liked about his family. When I first got there, his parents were still really young and fun. They lived in Osaka and came home to this house on weekends. We spent a lot of time visiting temples all over the country. My mother-in-law was a Japanese kimono teacher who also taught Japanese tea ceremony and that sort of thing. I learned a lot from her about Japanese culture.

A family tree

My first husband’s family was quite unusual from an American perspective, but perhaps not terribly unusual for Japan at that time. When I learned about the complicated relationship of Yoshi’s family, it seemed like something from a Japanese novel. Yoshi’s father came from a poor but honest, hard-working farming family. Yoshi’s adoptive grandfather had only one child, a daughter, and they needed a son to marry into the family in order to carry on the family name. (In fact, Yoshi’s mother herself was not the birth daughter of Yoshi’s “grandfather” and “grandmother,” but was herself adopted. She was the result of a liaison between Yoshi’s “grandfather’s brother and his geisha mistress). So they went out scouring the villages for an eligible man to marry their daughter. They found Yoshi’s birth father—we always called him “Frank”—who at the time was seventeen or eighteen. He moved from his natural birth parents’ home to Yoshi’s grandparents’ home and was legally adopted as their son. He lived with them for two years before marrying their daughter. So for a couple of years, on paper, Frank and Yoshi’s birth mother were brother and sister. They got married, and he then legally became the son by adoption and was registered as such on the family register. This type of adoption of a son is a very common practice in Japan in families without sons. Yoshi’s grandfather, who was a wealthy banker, put Frank through college. Frank and Sumi had three kids, Yoshi and his two sisters. So the people Yoshi called his grandmother and grandfather were actually by blood his great-uncle and great-aunt.

Sumi had had a troubled childhood as the offspring of a long-term liaison between the brother of the man Yoshi called grandfather and a geisha mistress from Kyoto. This long-term liaison produced five children. To me what was interesting was that every time the mistress got pregnant, she would always go to her lover’s wife’s house to give birth, which was quite common in the Japan of the 1920s or 1930s. According to Japanese law, the lawful wife had the right to keep the children or have them adopted out. Of the five children, one was kept as a male heir and the other four were given to relatives for adoption. Yoshi’s mother was one of a set of identical twins who were split at birth and adopted by different relatives. Some of the relatives called Sumi flighty, and others called her slutty. After she married Frank and had three kids, she started running around and disappearing for long periods of time. Finally, when Yoshi was fourteen she disappeared altogether.

Yoshi’s father married a wonderful woman named Kayoko, my first mother-in-law. It turned out that Frank and Kayoko had also been having a long-term affair as well. What was amazing to me was that, by the time I got there, there was a grandmother who wasn’t really the grandmother and a father who was still legally the son of the grandmother whose adopted daughter he had divorced. Frank and Kayoko came on weekends. When the grandmother was ill and dying, it was Kayoko who came to take care of the grandmother, do the laundry, the shopping, the cooking, and all kinds of things like that, even though she was no blood relation.

This told me a lot about how Japanese families were constructed. It’s a kind of social fiction in a sense. Once you’re in a role it doesn’t matter what the reality is. Your role gives you your function, and there’s no way out of it. That’s really Japanese. I would ask Yoshi, “Have you ever met your natural grandmother, the geisha?” “Yeah, once.” “Weren’t you curious? Didn’t want to know more about her?” “No, why?” He thought it would be disloyal to the grandmother who had raised him.

I think the unusual family history made Yoshi’s parents really open because they themselves had been screwed by Japanese society. For example, some of the relatives said that when the grandfather was out scouring local villages for an heir, he already knew that his daughter had problems, but he didn’t divulge this to Frank.

In November, 1983, when I arrived in Japan, Yoshi met me at the airport and drove home to his house. It was Saturday, eight o’clock at night. His grandmother was already asleep. She just didn’t want to meet me. But Kayoko was there and Yoshi’s sisters and the great-aunt, who was wonderful, a real character. Frank worked for an architectural firm, and he was still at the office, but he called, and said to me in English, “Cathy, welcome to Japan and our family. Everybody crazy!” He came the next day bearing all kinds of gifts, including Japanese language tapes. His children weren’t fond of him because he had been absent so much during their childhood, but I think he saw me as a way to fill a hole in his soul.

We all lived in that big house. Through my English teaching we collected a whole menagerie of foreigners who used to come over for parties. Frank really loved that. One wing of the house had a huge room the size of a ballroom, but it was Japanese-style with tatami mats on the floor. That’s where we had all the parties. We had a stereo there, and Frank was really into disco dancing with the foreigners. Everybody was young, and it was a fun time.

Since the town was so small, I got to know the neighbors pretty well. I was the only foreigner for miles around. People often asked me to help their kids with English homework or to practice English conversation. I was never paid for any of it, but it gave me the chance to visit a lot of Japanese homes and see different types of lifestyles. One thing that was really fascinating about the town was that it was still divided into communities of ten homes, which was a system set up by the Japanese secret police in the 1930s as a way of group control—group spying, that sort of thing. In the 1980s, if somebody in one of the ten families died, all of the women would go to the house and manage the funeral, which would be held at home and last five days, from the wake to the Buddhist interment. So I got to be a part of that bunch of women. It was really amazing. They taught me how to make tofu and grow rice. That sort of thing was what made living in Japan an adventure.

I liked many things about Japan but I didn’t like my living situation enough to stay. I was getting tired of what I saw as a purposeless existence. I wasn’t using my mind enough teaching English [which can involve a lot of rote repetition and mind-numbingly simple sentences]. I got tired of playing a role. I didn’t know where Japan started and I stopped. I didn’t know how to tell my husband that the marriage wasn’t working out for me. .

I told Yoshi, “I want to go to Boston for a year, and then I’ll come back to Japan.” I thought of it as a permanent separation, but I didn’t say that. He decided he was going to come too. I taught in an ESL program t a U.S. University for a year, and I really liked that. Yoshi was in an English program at Harvard. We went through his inheritance from his grandmother. We bought a car and did a lot of traveling.

By that time I wanted out of the marriage, but I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to go to law school, but I knew that enhanced language skills would be a plus, so I returned to Japan and went into a full-time Japanese language program from 9a.m. to 2 p.m. every day. I also needed to save money for law school so—this was in Osaka—I would rush out of the Japanese language school at one-thirty and start teaching English at two. I taught from two to nine at night, Monday thru Friday and all day on Saturday. I studied until midnight. I would study on the trains. I’ve always been like that. Even starting from age fourteen, I always combined working multiple jobs with studying.

I applied to U.S. laws school from Japan. Basically I chose the University of Denver because my undergraduate roommate was from there, and I’d visited, and it seemed familiar. In my early thirties I noticed that, although many people thought I was adventurous because I’d lived overseas and I’d moved a lot, every time I moved or changed jobs I went where I already knew someone. So I went to Denver, and Yoshi came with me. He found a job working for a real estate agency that put out magazines with pictures of the housing. He didn’t like that kind of photography, but he did it, and he also worked as a chef in a Japanese restaurant. I worked in the library, and I was a hostess at a Japanese restaurant on weekends.

Halfway through my first year of law school, I had a crisis of confidence and indecisions and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue either in the marriage or at law school. So I took a year off from law school. I found a job doing ESL in Chinatown that first summer, and then I found a job working for a really cool American lawyer who had worked in Hawaii and who had a Japanese speculator-billionaire as a client interested in investing in wine country properties and wineries. The lawyer needed somebody with Japanese language skills.

After about nine months, Yoshi and I decided to get divorced in Japan for various reasons, and we did. Then I went back to the States as a transfer student to a different law school—the Denver school had felt like a commuter school. I thought, “Okay, now I’m really done with Japan this time. I’m divorced, and I’ve said my goodbyes to friends and family. I’m going to a new school, and this is a new life.” Then the first week at school I met the man who became my second Japanese husband, which changed the whole course of my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.

Donna Miscolta

I first met Donna Miscolta in July 2009, when we were both in Chris Abani’s workshop at the Centrum Writers Conference at Port Townsend, Washington. I was impressed with her submission, a short story called “The Last Canasta,” which was later revised and then appeared in the Spring, 2010 issue of The Connecticut Review. Through the Squaw Valley Community of Writers alumni group, I learned of the publication of her first novel, When the de la Cruz Family Danced, which deals with the immigration from the Philippines. I read the novel and immediately loved the style and the interaction of the characters.

Dance is the dominant metaphor, and great attention is paid to nonverbal and verbal communication as a part of that dance. The narrative shifts with ease from the Philippines to Southern California and from 1971 to 1990 and to flashbacks of World War II. The point-of-view is always third-person limited, that is, restricted to the perspective of one person, but it shifts from one person to another. All shifts in location, time and perspective are clearly marked. At the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the world through the eyes of the two main characters, Johnny and Winston. After the other family members have been properly introduced to the reader, we see Johnny and Winston through their eyes as well. This gives the characters and their actions a rounded, three-dimensional quality because they are observed from several different angles.

When the de la Cruz Family Danced was released on June 28, 2011 by Signal8Press. Donna and I talked in December, 2011.

Link: Donna Miscolta’s blog http://donnamiscolta.com/notes/includes a link to the video trailer, a synopsis and reviewers’ praise. The trailer is also available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sEOr2WaBbR0#!>

Hopefully, Filipino book dealers can be persuaded to carry this lovely novel, In the meantime a look inside the cover can be found at Amazon, which offers both the paperback and the Kindle versions. http://www.amazon.com/When-Family-Danced-Donna-Miscolta/dp/9881989590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325239806&sr=8-1#reader_B0055X0CEQ.

Donna’s story

The genesis of When the de la Cruz Family Danced was a class assignment: write the first chapter of your novel. I hadn’t anticipated writing a novel. After all, we were beginning students.I think the assignment was meant to make us consider the differences between short stories and novels and think about which story ideas were big enough to become novels. I started the assignment while waiting for a flight from Seattle to San Diego for my father’s funeral. I thought about my father’s life, about how little I really knew about him. I wondered what kinds of dreams he’d had and whether he felt he had achieved them. I thought about what it was like for someone to leave his home country to start a new life. What things got lost along the way? What things were sacrificed? Though the book isn’t about my father, I got the idea for it by thinking about him and the circumstances that led him to leave the Philippines. From there, I created the character Johnny de la Cruz and imagined his life.

Johnny’s aloofness and his reticence to touch–a simple hand on the shoulder, a playful slap on the back, an impromptu hug–comes, I think, from his sense of loss, of leaving something behind or perhaps never having it in the first place. For instance, the relationship he has with his daughters suffers because he was absent, away at sea in the U.S. Navy, during the early years of their childhood. He doesn’t know how to relate to his daughters because he feels removed from their experiences and emotions. Then there’s also the cultural preference for sons. Johnny think she might have had more of a connection to a son, but the appearance of young Winston Piña in his life challenges that belief. Leaving the Philippines as a young man and coming to a new country, making the transition from one culture to another, causes a gap in Johnny’s psyche, his soul. That gap can be hard to close, particularly for someone as introverted as Johnny.

In the novel, dancing is how people connect to one another. Dancing is important in many cultures, including Filipino culture. But Johnny doesn’t dance–something I can relate to in my own life. I’ve taken some dance lessons, and I’m a passable partner, but I don’t really have the confidence to go beyond basic steps. I love to watch people dance, which is why I had so much fun making a book trailer. Dancing is such a beautiful way to connect with music and with one another, and when you’re not good at it, I think you do have a sense of missing out.

You noted, Carol, in our email exchange that Filipinos tend to be warm and demonstrative. That’s absolutely true. But it’s not universal. It wasn’t my experience growing up in my particular Filipino (and Mexican on my mother’s side) household. I don’t know whether my father’s personality just didn’t fit this cultural pattern or whether something in his experience affected how he behaved in his interpersonal relationships. The story I gleaned was that my father’s rebellious adolescence coincided with World War II and the Japanese occupation of the islands, during which my father engaged in some guerrilla activities. Post-war, my father’s rebellion hadn’t subsided and my grandfather dealt with that situation by helping to engineer my father’s exit from the islands. My understanding is that there was some manipulation of my father’s birth year on the enlistment papers for the U.S. Navy. So my father left his home in Las Piñas because my grandfather wanted his son to have some direction in his life, not to mention opportunities that could accrue from eventual U.S. citizenship. It seems that my father left the Philippines not necessarily of his own accord. And I don’t think he ever liked the Navy. I think he just made the best of the situation and put everything behind him—the Philippines, his language, his customs—and made a concerted effort to become an American and to adopt American behaviors.

In our Southern California neighborhood there were quite a few Filipino families. My father rarely spoke Tagalog, preferring to speak English with the neighbors. I think it was also important to him to sound like an American. You could barely detect his Tagalog accent. He wanted us to be an American family. We ate American food, though on occasion he did cook pancit for us. The friends I hung out within high school were from households where both parents were Filipino. They knew the language, the food and the culture. So I did experience this sense of not quite fitting in—of being more of an observer of Filipino-American culture. Quiet and shy, I spent a lot of time observing inside and outside my family, comparing how we interacted with how other families communicated, both verbally and non-verbally. I became practiced at the “unsaid,” which I think plays a big part in my writing.

My father never shared much information about himself. When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to ask my father about his past. He never volunteered information, so it was easy to believe there was nothing to tell. Of course, anyone who lived in the Philippines during the war had some experience it. In the novel, there’s a flashback to the war when the teenage Johnny encounters a Japanese soldier in the rice field. That scene was based on an event my father shared when asked by my husband about his role in the war. It was really a revelation to me–my father as a teenager in real peril. You don’t imagine your parents being in such situations. That bit of information my father shared made me realize that there was so much about him that I didn’t know—and that I’ll never know.

Writing this book might have been an attempt to connect in some way with the Philippines and with my father. My knowledge of the Philippines has come through books, movies, photographs, articles, and talking to people about their experiences there. I felt very relieved that the two Filipino-American writers who read my book and wrote blurbs for it seemed to think that my scenes set in the Philippines felt authentic.

I think you can say that my fiction is a way of connecting with my roots. I have a short story collection that I’m hoping to have published. Three of the stories have been published in literary journals– “Rosa in America” in New Millennium Writings, “Strong Girls” in Calyx, and “The Last Canasta” in Connecticut Review.  The collection has three sections. The first is about four women—one named Lupita—who emigrate from Mexico. The next two sections are about Lupita’s children and grandchildren.  For these stories, I mined my family for a lot of material—things I observed or heard. I sort of appropriated them and made them my own. Again, the themes center on how one goes about making a life in a new country, how things are lost, how belonging can be an elusive thing and how the hopes of immigrants are often invested in subsequent generations.

My grandparents and parents did not go to college, but my circumstances were different. I have an undergraduate degree in zoology, and I have master’s degrees in education and public administration. I didn’t have much of a background in literature or writing, but I’ve been a lifelong reader, which served me when I decided at the age of thirty-nine that I wanted to be a writer. I think I’d always wanted to be a writer. I just never allowed myself to believe I could be. Maybe it was from reading so many books by long-dead authors. When I was in junior high school, I read a lot of William Faulkner and in high school it was Thomas Hardy and Henry James. After college I had my D.H. Lawrence phase. But I also had my Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen phases. Eventually I came around to writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gish Jen, writers of color who made it easier for me to believe that I could become a writer.

I do think those writers I read early on influenced me in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In 1998, when I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, I had a one-on-one consultation with DeWitt Henry. He remarked on the stream-of-consciousness quality in my story and asked me if I’d read much Virginia Woolf. I wondered if he was suggesting that I was imitating her. I wasn’t aware of consciously having a style. I think at some level, we’re influenced by everyone we read. Like Henry James with his long, long sentences and pages of description. I’m sure I was influenced by him to some extent.

When I first started writing, all I did was exposition. Writing exposition is easy for me. It took me a while to really figure out story. I’ve attended a lot of writer’s conferences, I’ve taken classes, I’ve read how-to books, but still it took a lot of practice to figure out how to write the story. I wrote a complete draft of this first novel and was fortunate enough to have had an editor look at it and give me feedback. She was encouraging, but in the end, I saw that the novel wasn’t really working, so I tossed out all but thirty pages and started over.

The first chapter was published in an online journal called Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. That led to the book being published by Signal 8 Press, a new press based in Hong Kong. The press released four books last year, most recently a short story collection by Xu Xi called Access. Also released was a story collection by Bay Area writer Philip Huang and a non-fiction book by Chris Tharp on his experiences living and traveling in South Korea.

With my story collection completed, I’m working on a new novel. I came relatively late to writing, not starting until I was nearly forty. I’m fifty-eight now, and I have a sense of urgency about getting work done and out into the world. That’s what we want to do when we write something. We want to share it.

Reader feedback:

Excellent!  I liked it very much; felt like I was right there, listening to her talk.

Dr. Sandra Fahy

Dr. Sandra Fahy has been a close friend of mine since we first met, shortly after she arrived in Seoul. I couldn’t be more proud of her for reasons that are quite evident in this interview, which we did in September of this year. We plan to do two posts, one on the story behind her book and a second on the book itself, entitled The Biography of Loss: Collective Suffering and Social Fracture in North Korea.

Here’s a link to an interview Sandra did with Dr. Kang, the director of the Korean Studies Institute at USC for National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/19/143958745/what-will-the-dear-leaders-legacy-be.

Sandra’s story

It began with my fascination with the holocaust as reflected in the arts, philosophy, psychology and the writings of genocide survivors. When I was majoring in literature in Canada, I read the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Frankl and Alexander Kimel, which were really insightful into the dynamics of suffering. I studied famine and social suffering for my master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, and I discovered that famine survivors had produced nothing like the work done by survivors of other crimes against humanity. There are two autobiographies, Grass Soup and My Bodhi Tree by Zhang Xianliang, a Chinese writer who survived the Great Leap Forward. A group in Canada collected oral testimonies from survivors of the Ukrainian genocide famine. Other than that, the writers are historians or journalists, so maybe 99.9% of the material was written by people who were never there. John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, excellent books that describe the experience beautifully, but he was not a survivor of it. The absence of work is astounding considering that famine is a human experience of Biblical proportions which is known to all people and all places.

I wondered why the silence. I knew what was going on in North Korea, and I saw the lack of research as a glaring omission. I’m a scholar at heart, inherently curious. So in 2000, when I finished my master’s degree, I got a job teaching English in Seoul. I learned Korean in the evenings. With this topic in mind, I went to the UK to work on a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of London. I learned how to do field research and how to approach, examine and digest my material and be respectful of it. In 2005 I returned to South Korea and started working with non-governmental organizations, and in 2006 I began my field research.

I wanted to get involved with the North Korean community in Seoul, so I volunteered as a translator for an NGO. This group was pretty radical. A lot of the members had survived North Korean political prison camps. When we went to dinner, there would be talk like “We’ve got to assassinate that mother-fucker, Kim Jong-il.” This was the group sending helium balloons into North Korea. Inside the balloons are plastic envelopes which contain flyers about who really started the Korean War and historical information about North Korea and its leadership. The flyers are obviously not safe reading material, so as an incentive to pick up the envelope they add a US dollar bill which you can be seen clearly through the plastic. Foreign currency is used a lot in North Korea on the black market.

I got to know people and started interviews. I told people exactly what I was doing and why I was working with the material. I had written consent forms, but often people just gave their consent directly into the tape recorder. I was a little hesitant at first to ask people about their experience. My focus was on the famine in the 1990s: what it was like, whether their political views changed and whether it led to a desire for rebellion. Given the lack of literature by famine survivors, I expected people to be a little embarrassed, a bit shy or reluctant to sit down and talk to me about it. But everyone who had direct experience of the famine said yes. I interviewed thirty people in total. Two seemed to be acting from a sense of duty, but everyone else said they really wanted to talk about it. They were extremely gracious.

I told them I was born in Ireland, which was also divided and colonized and where there had been famine as well. They knew about the history of Ireland. They were immediately sympathetic to my interest. When they asked why I learned Korean, I said, “So I could speak with North Koreans.” That always won them over. I never told South Koreans, but it embarrassed them if they found out.

It was weird to be in Seoul, a brilliant metropolitan hub, with people who were foreigners like myself, who were outsiders and social outcasts in a way. We knew that as we were talking the other reality north of the border was continuing. South Korea has given a lot to the world in terms of technology development and all kinds of things. I looked at the rich, well-dressed South Koreans and thought of the potential that was lost in North Korea. If the peninsula were one nation, capitalist or semi-socialist like Canada, it would be a powerhouse in a totally different way. I think reunification is impossible. The amount of work that would be required—economic, social, psychological, intellectual, infrastructural—is unprecedented on a global scale.

Of course I also worried about whether I could get the information I needed, but there was another kind of stress which made me reluctant to do the interviews. I became depressed. I had dreams of being in a landscape of deprivation. Eventually I became a bit numb, but even that was weird. I got very sick, but the doctors in Korea and the UK when I went back could never find out what was wrong with me. Maybe it was some kind of sympathetic, psychosomatic sympathy. I was eating just as usual and doing everything I normally do, but I became very thin, my hair started falling out and my skin got very bad. It was really bizarre.

Strangely, often the interviews would involve eating. If we were at someone’s house, for instance, they might arrange food, which was a bit awkward. A scholar working with holocaust survivors said that, while they were talking about hunger in the ghettos, they would have big buffets of food. Maybe it was a form of reassurance for the survivors, a tangible proof that the deprivation was over for them. I always took people out to eat after the interview as a way of thanking them.

I’d expected to hear anger toward the North Korean government. I thought there would be more disillusionment and criticism of the nation state as a failure, more camaraderie between individuals and more solidarity in overcoming their difficulties. I wondered whether this material would provide insights like the works of Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, but I didn’t expect that level of self-reflection or intellectualizing. What surprised me was how long and how much my interviewees trusted that the North Korean government would eventually provide for them. All thirty people had been happy, contented with life and the status quo. Since the division, the whole population in the North had adjusted to or become acclimated to rationing and under-nutrition. So when things started to go bad at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s—and of course in the middle of the 90s with the flooding—the people were already used to a situation which was far from ideal. So their reaction was “okay we’re going to hustle, but we’ll do it.” Often they didn’t see that things had gone bad because the government was inconsistent: it would promise to deliver the food and do it, and it would promise and not do it.

They might first notice something was unusual when returning after an absence—for instance, a soldier who’d come back from military duty and seen that things had changed. One person said, “I noticed that my brother and sister were selling on the black market, and I wondered what the hell they were doing. We’d been educated not to do that.” Later he realized there was nothing for them to eat. His siblings had become more acclimated to the changes, possibly because in the military he’d been fed a little better.

People would notice that the children were falling asleep in school. Former school children would say, “I’d go to school, and the teachers would tell us we needed to bring certain items for the teachers to eat, and if we didn’t bring them we’d get punished.” People started locking their doors more. They saw more orphaned children wandering around, and they wanted to feed them, but they didn’t have enough. Someone in charge of the apartments in a building would notice that people didn’t have enough to eat, or they had only one set of clothes, and they would wash them, but then they had nothing to wear while the clothes were drying outside. It was really bizarre because they couldn’t even help each other out too much. We’re talking now about the most northern regions. Gradually the famine spread to Pyongyang.

At the time I was surprised at the willingness people demonstrated to stay and wait and trust as long as they did. In hindsight I’m not, because the North Koreans would talk about being much tougher than South Koreans and being able to put up with a lot more. They also have a lot of ingenuity, they’re creative and they know how to solve problems, and of course that’s something to be proud of. The context of South Korea shaped how people spoke about their lives in the North.

Anyway, we would meet in my apartment, their apartments or a third location. I had my cassette recorder, a map, consent forms, note paper and my electronic dictionary to use for translation. I would begin with, “Tell me about your home town. What was it like?” Individual personalities impacted a lot on the interviews, but no one was angry about the North Korean leadership or said they hated everything about North Korea. If they were angry it would be with the South Koreans—living very well, wasting food, worrying about their diet, wanting to be thin, dressing extravagantly, acting silly on television—while their so-called brothers are dying up in the North. I guess it was misdirected frustration.

The interviews got very emotional. The men my age—I was thirty at the time—didn’t want to tell me how hurt they were, but everyone else was really open and started getting very upset about it and crying. I’d be crying too. How can you not? The South Korean woman who transcribed the tapes said she cried when she was typing. Every South Korean I met who knew I did this work got emotional about it, although it was hard for them to approach North Koreans and show their feelings directly. But when they read the interview material or heard about it from me, they would allow themselves to feel their emotions.

So it was really sad. My interviewees would be upset because of a child or a neighbor who died of hunger, but also because everything they knew of their country had changed. They no longer had a part in the dream of what the country could be, even though they wanted to. They knew the decision to leave was final, even though it might not have been in their hearts. The state had decided. They might have gone into China to get medication or food or to sell lumber or whatever, they might even have been so sick they didn’t know they were being taken out, but then they were at a point of no return. There had been cases where people were successful at returning and talking their way out of punishment, but you couldn’t count on that. Some people were reluctant to move from China to South Korea.

Now, Koreans in Los Angeles may have a distilled understanding of Korean-ness going back as far as the 1960s when they emigrated, but that’s not how people in Seoul would define what it is to be Korean. The North Koreans lived in a time capsule, a sovereign nation with another version of Korea. In human history I don’t know that there’s another case that approximates this, not even the north and the south of Ireland. North and South Korea are so economically much farther apart from each other than East and West Germany were. The literacy rate in both North and South is very high except for the huge number of orphaned North Korean children. But the differences are vast, and they’re growing more each year. So the refugee is basically stepping from one world into another—having had the expectation that there would be more similarities. It’s heartbreaking for them. For example, they may think they speak the same language, they have the same blood line, they look the same and talk the same. And then they get to South Korea and they find they don’t have standard Seoul pronunciation. Even people from Cheju-do or Kwangju [in the southern part of South Korea] are discriminated against in Seoul.

The language of North Korea includes no borrowings from English. A huge percentage of the Korean vocabulary comes from borrowings from Chinese, but the North Koreans won’t know the Sino-Korean characters. [This limits what they can read]. Most North Koreans are shorter from being undernourished; their skin is darker and more worn. The South Korean standard of beauty is different. Then there’s the fact that both nations have been waging propaganda campaigns against the other. [In the recent past, South Korean school children had textbooks of North Koreans with as wolves or red devil faces and guns under their arms]. So the end result is that these underdogs are coming into a majority pool where they’re seen as people who failed. In some ways the society in North Korea may be superior to South Korea. There must be something because 23 million people live there—solidarity, community, who knows.

During the interviews, I really just went into their world, listening as carefully as possible and asking for clarification when I didn’t understand. One guy said, “I’m only going to talk for ten minutes.” Then he talked to me for about an hour. People found it strange that I was just interested in doing this without expecting anything from them. They didn’t see what we were doing as an exchange. Sometimes they wondered why we were talking about this, although they might have needed to talk about it for emotional reasons. Some people wanted payment or expected something in return.

Well, I went back to London and recovered from whatever illness I contracted. I finished my PhD in anthropology. For the dissertation I went over to the British library and selected sections of the interviews which seemed really pertinent, interesting, relevant, and I translated them. The dissertation had a different structure than the book I’m working on. There was a review of the literature. There was a chapter about what led up to the choice to defect. There was a chapter about control over the language North Koreans were allowed to use. That was the big thing that people talked about, how they were censored in North Korea. [People were not allowed to say they were hungry. They had to say they were in pain.] I looked for patterns in the testimonies, patterns of metaphor or how they referred to Kim Il-sung versus Kim Jong-il, how men coped with the famine, how women coped with it. How women talked about it, how men talked about it. The signs of trouble that told them they had to find another way to live. Going off into the mountains to look for food or planting their own private plots. Then there was a section about trauma and PTSD in a non-western context.

So I finished the PhD in 2009 and then I did a post-doc in Paris for one year, and got I did a post-doc fellowship here at USC for two years. I’m on my second year. My current employer at USC is incredibly supportive, but I think there’s a lack of understanding about how taxing research like this can be for the academic.

The book I’m now working on is a rewrite which follows the chronology of the famine. That’s the backdrop, but the greater topic and the theme that runs throughout the book is loss: loss of country, loss of loyalty, loss of trust, loss of family and friends. It continues into South Korea where survivors have a loss of identification. Their hopes are dashed in many ways. That’s the direction I’m moving in with the book now as I revise it. I’m still in touch with the North Korean community.

Reader comment:

Reader comment:

In the mid-80s and earlier, most international tourists in China traveled with organized tours to places the authorities wanted them to see, while university students and faculty were more likely to be independent travelers who might well find themselves in areas that were “closed,” or off-limits to foreigners.

In 1986, I spoke with Valerie,  a fair-complected Australian studying Chinese at Xiamen University, or actually attached to the school but learning Chinese by traveling.  Her modest, unassuming manner gave her the ability to blend in almost anywhere without being noticed, except China.

Valerie’s story

I love the minority areas. The Chinese don’t always understand that. When you’re on these long train trips, and they say, “Where’ve you been?  Have you been to Beijing, have you been to Shanghai?”  Then they say, “Where do you like best?” and you say someplace like Kashgar or Mongolia or Yunnan, you can see they’re thinking, “God, the minorities—how do these people—they think that’s China—they go and see the minorities.”  They say to you, “But that’s not China!  China is in Beijing and Shanghai. These people out there are so luohou, so backward. You’re not allowed to go out there and think that’s China!”

It’s funny. I’ve met quite a few Han Chinese who really look down on the minorities. When I was in Xinjiang there were several incidents. Once when we were coming back from Kashgar on the bus—it’s about a three and a half day trip—there was a Uyghur lady sitting near me, and we got to be quite good friends. She was a very intelligent lady. When she spoke it wasn’t perfect Mandarin, she still had an accent, but you could understand her very easily. She was an interpreter for the Uyghur people. She had been to Beijing and had studied in the university, but you never would have guessed it. She was still a typical Uyghur lady in the scarf and thick stockings and purple dress.

When we stopped for the night, she and I were in the same room. She went in first and put her things on a bed, then I came in, and a Han man came in. Apparently we had registration numbers, but they’d gotten them all mixed up. Well, who cares. There was an empty bed, and she put her things on it. But this man’s wife had the bed, and this Uyghur lady should have taken another bed. He was talking to her as though she were a child. He turned to me, and when he found out I could speak Chinese he spoke to me at normal speed. But he spoke to her as though she were an imbecile, and he said, “These minority people don’t understand a thing.”

She was speaking to him in beautiful Mandarin, and it was just as though he wasn’t even hearing her. He had this idea that she couldn’t understand—even that the numeral four was different from the numeral five.

Quite a few times I’ve seen things like that. The Uyghurs, because they’re looked down on like this, hate the Hans. They’re friendly to us, and they say to us, “Well, we’re foreigners too. You’re like us.”

I have a very good friend who was sent to this place in [Inner] Mongolia to do experiments. She said it was a beautiful place, and I should go up there if I could. We knew it wasn’t open and there was no way they would give us permits.

We tried a few places, and they said, “Nah, you can’t go up there.”

We went as far up as we were allowed to go, and then I went to the railway station and said, “I want two tickets.”

“Why are you going there?”

“To see some relatives.”

The ticket seller turned around and said something to the people behind her. I could just make out “Russian.”

I thought, “Oh, good. They think I’m Russian.”

When we got there, as soon as we got off the train we made a dash for the bus station because we figured, “If we book in any hotel here, they’re going to tell the gonganju [police or public security] and they’ll be sending us back.”  So we just went to the bus station. We had no idea where we were going, and there were just crowds of people around us.  We thought, “God, any minute there’s going to be some officious-looking person coming.”

Then a large woman appeared over us who reminded me of an actress on an Australian television show, this huge woman who was half-Russian and thought I was a real Russian. She’d been sent out to talk to us and to ask us where the hell we thought we were going. When they found out we were students—because of course we couldn’t fool her, so we told her the truth—they thought that was fine.

“Well, great. Good to see you coming out here.”

We just said we’d take a ticket for “anywhere you think is nice” and hopped on a bus.

When we arrived it was nearing dusk. We had to book a hotel, and immediately we heard them go into the office and ring up the gonganju and tell them, “There’re two foreigners here. What should we do?”

So we thought, “We may as well go for a walk because they’ll be coming to find us soon. We’ll go and see what there is to see.”

It was a lovely place out in the grasslands. It was summer, but the roads were still in very bad shape because of all the rain they’d had in the spring. There was mud everywhere. We came up to a tractor pulling out a little truck. This huge Mongolian leapt off the back of the tractor and came over to us and said, “Hi. I’m from the foreign affairs department. I’m the newly assigned member to this area.”

“Hi. That’s nice.”

“Welcome, welcome here. How did you know that we’re about to open up this area?”

“Oh…oh…a friend told us. Yeah, we knew about it.”

“Oh, that’s great. And you’re students?  Good, good. I like to have students coming out to have a look at things. That’s what you should be doing.”

He was a lovely man. He took us to dinner, put out this big spread. He was hitting the baijiu [white grain alcohol] and getting very merry and had a few friends in, and we were getting on very well.

Then he said to us, “Where do you want to look?  I can arrange to take you anywhere. There’s a photographer from Hong Kong coming out here tomorrow. He specially asked permission to come out here because he wants to photograph the grasslands. Why don’t you go along with him?  Good opportunity–you’ve got a car and so on…”

“Great!”

“We’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”

Then this woman came in. She was quite young, and I decided immediately that this might be her first job because she was pretty unsure of herself. She was from the gonganju , and he was from the waiban [foreign affairs], which was separate.

As I was easing out the door she said, “I’ve been told you were out here. Where’s your permit?”

“But we’re students!  Ask this man. Here he’s looking after us. He says we don’t need permits.”

He was backing us up. He was so jolly by this stage he said, “Yes, they’re fine. I’ll look after them. I’m in the foreign affairs department.”  He hadn’t even met this woman.

So she went on her way. We got back to the hotel, and about one or two in the morning there was a knock on the door. She had come back with reinforcements.

“OK, where’s your permit?”

We kept saying, “Oh, you’ve heard the man. We don’t need one. This place is open. Or it’s nearly open.”  We just talked on and on, and she gave up in the end.

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning. We’re not going to bother you, don’t worry. We’ll leave.”

So she went off.

We had a good time with this man. He sent out a car, and we went way out into the grasslands. The photographer had permission to go to an area so close to the Soviet border that even the Chinese who live there need a special permit to get in. They were a bit apprehensive that we wouldn’t be allowed in, but the photographer had his papers all written up properly, so we just sat quietly in the back of the car. When the officials had a look in and said, “What about these two?”

We just said, “We’re with him…we’re with him.”  They let us through.

It was beautiful. It was a bit put on. The photographer only had a certain amount of time, and he’d arranged for the local minority people to come in traditional costumes. It was hot. I was dressed in a skirt and a shirt with short sleeves. Some of the minority people came dressed as the Chinese usually do—in a shirt and slacks—and then changed into the traditional clothes, but most of the women and men wear these warm costumes year round. They had brought a big herd eight hundred or a thousand horses and they were galloping them back and forth in front of the photographer so he could take pictures. Instead of catching them like our cowboys do with a lasso or a rope, they have this big long stick with a loop on it. They’ ride up right beside the horse and then just put the loop around his neck. It was fun to watch.

The photographer was treated like royalty up there, and we were included in everything. It was wonderful.

After three or four days we said, “Well, we think we’ll have to get going now. How do we get back to the road so we can try to catch a bus?”

“Oh no, we’ve got a car here, and we’ll take you back in.”

“No, no. That’s too much trouble.”

“You don’t think I’ve been sitting around here waiting all this time because I think it’s hao war [great fun] or anything, do you?  They all know you’re out here.”

He drove us back to town. We said, “OK, just let us off at the station, we’ll be getting on our way now.”

“No, no, no. I’ve been told to take you to see the Big Chief.”

So we had to go and see him. He gave us a little talking to about what we thought we were doing there. It was strange. He was very interested in why we picked that particular place. I don’t know if he really had ideas I had some Russian contacts, but he wanted to know why we had chosen that area specifically. When we just came out and said that it was pure chance. We told him the whole story and said, “This happened like this and this, nothing behind it…”

“Ah, ah!”  He was very relieved.

We were all forgiven and had to promise that if we came again we would tell him first. We were sent, sort of escorted, to the station. The man waited until we got on the train and waved to us and saw to it we didn’t come back again.

Actually, I’ve had very few run-ins with public security even though I’ve just gone where I wanted to. Now there are so many more places that are open. You don’t have to go running around behind someone’s back.

There was another incident the second time I went to Hailandao. I went there to see a friend I’d met the first time I was there. She had a new job teaching Vietnamese children in a school quite a ways out of the city. I never did find out much about it because her parents were ill or something and she’d had to leave suddenly. I just missed her. I’d written and told her I was coming and just assumed she’d be there, and normally she would have. Luckily a friend of hers overheard me saying where I was going and who I was going to meet, and she knew my friend had left that morning, so she said, “Well, come and stay with me.”

Word spreads so quickly, and we’re very obvious, of course. That night we were visited by public security, who came and wanted to know what I thought I was doing there.

“Oh, I’m going in the morning.”

I had come on the last bus that evening. That was okay. I didn’t know whether they were putting me on or not, but they were so concerned about my safety. “We want your things, we want them put here, and we don’t want anybody coming in because there’d be a big mess if any of your things get taken, so we want you to stay here and we want your things to stay here.”

The Chinese authorities want us to see all the concrete and the modernization. “There are no facilities there for you, and you wouldn’t be happy there. It’s best you leave.”  They just don’t like us to see areas that they we think are lovely because they’re so simple and left alone.

I think the railways are quite marvelous. I mean, there are so many people they’re moving from one place to another, and they still manage to stay pretty much on time. The trains are kept clean. They’re crowded to the roof, and yet they manage to keep order, and there’s little theft. The people are very friendly to each other, not just with me. Watching the Chinese, you see they’re very happy to strike up a conversation with the people beside them. Even though they know they’re going to be together just for a few hours, they’re concerned about each other and look after each other. It seems well organized in a way, though it can be chaotic. But just think what they’re so many people. I’ve heard many travelers complaining about the inefficiency, but I think the trains are just great.

There are so many little things people do. That’s why you want to be in China. It’s the people. When I was in Hailandao the first time, I was walking along the beach and met this guy, a fisherman or a worker who would have been sixteen or seventeen or so. We were just walking along and talking and picking up shells. We didn’t have long because I had to catch a bus in about ten minutes. He knew I was studying here, and I think he knew my name was Valerie. A few weeks later I got a beautiful letter from him. He had wanted to send me some shells, but he couldn’t find any he thought were nice enough, so he sent me some coconuts instead. There was this big bag with three or four, I think. It was a lovely thought. I couldn’t thank him because I didn’t even know his name.

The first year I was here, a couple of days before Chinese New Year, I was going down to Nanning to see some friends. On the train a little girl came and sat down beside me. She had a comic book or something, and we were talking about it when her mom and dad came over and asked, “Is she bothering you?  She’s always like this with people.”

I said, “No, no.”

We started chatting. They asked me to come and stay with them at her mother’s place. They were halfway to Nanning. They insisted I get off with them, and many, many times I said I couldn’t do that. I refused endless times. They would not listen to me. I put up any number of arguments why I couldn’t and so on. But they said, “It’s two days before New Year, so you’ve still got time to get to your friend’s place. Stay with us for a day.”  So I did.

Again it was a place I wasn’t supposed to be. We just got off at the railway station. Because they lived just down the line, we didn’t go through the main gate, we just walked along the tracks and over a fence or something. We came in the house, and here was this poor mother. She hadn’t seen her daughter for a couple of years, and then her daughter and son-in-law walked in dragging this foreigner. You can imagine how she felt. But immediately everything was under control and I was to stay with them. I ended up staying a couple of days, and I didn’t get to my friend’s for New Year, but that didn’t matter. It was so lovely. There are so many, many little experiences that don’t seem like much when you talk about them, but you know you’ll never forget.

The original buildings at Xiamen University

I tell my students, “Whatever characteristic you have, unless it’s something you share with a dog or a cat—like fear of loud noises or fear of falling—you learned it, and if you learned it then it’s tied up with culture in some way.

This is also true on the basketball court, as I learned in 1985 when I interviewed two tall Westerner students at Xiamen University.

Steve’s story

During the next two weeks I’ll be playing in the Fujian Provincial College basketball tournament on the university team. I think all my teammates are really looking forward to this because they have a real center. They always used to complain, “Our team’s too short, we don’t have anybody who can play center.” But almost all Chinese teams are that way. You may not have a center, but nobody else does either, so don’t worry about that. Now they have a giant center, and they think they’ll do pretty well.

A few weeks ago they had a round-robin tournament with the student’s team, the graduate students’ team, and the teachers and workers’ team. I was practicing with the students’ team. I was going to play with them. I went down the night of the first game, and we were going to play the teachers’ team. The teachers said no problem, I could play, but there were several graduate students sitting there, and they said, “We don’t want Steve to play on Saturday against us.”

Before the tournament they were supposed to have decided. They talked about it, but they hadn’t really made a final decision about whether foreign students could take part in this competition. Last semester for the volleyball tournament they came up with this rule that in order to participate in intramural sports, the competitions within the school, a foreign student had have to been here for two years or have plans to stay for two years. So if you only stayed for one year, you were not enough of a university student to take part. I don’t know how much my height was a factor in the decision that I shouldn’t play, but in this case it seemed like it really was the major reason. “He’s too tall. We don’t want him to play. So what can we say to make it look legit?”

That evening I decided that if I couldn’t play in the game against the graduate students I wouldn’t play in this one either because I might as well let it be the same all the way through the tournament. After the game started one of the guys in the graduate students’ team came over and said, “I’m sorry you can’t play. We have these rules.”  He went on and on.

It was the first time I’d been treated that way as an athlete. I’ve played on basketball teams in both Chengdu and Xinyang. In Xinyang there was some question before the tournament whether I could participate. The other team didn’t like the idea, but it was decided that I could play, and it was no problem. But this was the first time I’d been excluded from playing. You used to hear the Chinese phrase, “Friendship first, competition second” all the time. I wrote to a few friends about this incident, that I was really disillusioned now. I really believed the maxim, “Friendship first, competition second,” but it’s not that way anymore. I’m not sure how much it ever was that way.

Supposedly, they’ve decided I can play in this tournament next month, which will take place in Fuzhou. I guess there was a big discussion about that. The coach from here asked if foreign students could play. At first the other schools didn’t like the idea, but he convinced them that I am a student here at this university, and I should be able to play on their team. So I’m interested to see what kind of reactions I get in Fuzhou from the other coaches when the tournament starts. He probably didn’t tell them that this foreign student was 6’8” either. Let’s see if they can come up with anything to keep me off the court this time.

Mark’s story

The only sport I’ve played here has been basketball, and that’s because—being a Briton—I decided I wanted to do something to keep myself fit. I’ve always played something. First it was rugby, recently it was squash. I used to play basketball at school, and I really enjoyed it. In China there’s no particular cult of keeping fit.  You see people running, but they are runners, not people who are doing it for fun or to keep healthy. I don’t think tai chi makes you very fit, though it might make you supple.

The Chinese who do some sport are all incredibly thin. If you pushed them they’d probably fall over. Most of the guys I play basketball are pretty small, but they’re actually quite strong, they have a kind of wiry strength and a lot of stamina, though none of them is strong in terms of having big muscles.  They’re by no means weak and puny, which seems quite surprising to me, given how little meat they eat. They always seem to eat rice. They can’t throw as much weight as I can, but it doesn’t really matter in basketball.

I started playing basketball here by just going to one of the outdoor courts and using sign language to get myself on. I started playing and after that you don’t really need very much communication. I went out there and messed around with whoever was there. The university team noticed me because I was a foreigner, and they came round and asked me to come play with them. That was just before the 36th anniversary celebration [October 1, 1985], and they were having a tournament of basketball matches in the open stadium. I was really out of form at that time. I hadn’t played basketball seriously for ten years. It was difficult trying to explain that because the captain’s English and my Chinese weren’t up to it.

I’ll remember that for a little while, the first time that I played for the university team. It was this kind of round-robin competition. There were about three hundred people in the light ground watching this match, and when we warmed up I could feel everybody watching me miss all those baskets. I was benched for the first fifteen minutes, first quarter or something like that. Then they brought me on. Ann was sitting in the crowd, and she told me the people behind her had been saying for the first quarter, “There’s a foreigner over there. Wonder when he’s going to come on?”

“Oh, he’s coming on. He’s coming on.”

Somebody in the other team threw a long ball down the court, and I virtually threw myself at the ball to put it out of bounds, and it sort of glanced off my arm. It was nothing dramatic, just the sort of thing you might do automatically that might get a hao chou [good move] from someone. But since it was the first thing I did, I got a tumultuous round of applause.

From then on, I’m afraid it was laughter. It was a bit of an embarrassing experience, but when you go out and play basketball, you’ve got to be prepared to face that. It seemed unfortunate, when we were in defense, that I didn’t understand who the captain wanted me to mark [guard]. This guy shot four baskets in a row from a long way out, and I think the captain thought I should have been out there. That was a bit embarrassing. Then the first time I got the ball in my hands I think I made a complete mess of it. Over the whole place there was laughter. If it had been someone else, probably the audience would have laughed, but maybe not so heartily. I didn’t take any offense at that, but they took me off after ten minutes.

Then the next night there was a game inside that gym where we had dances. Of course this time it was even worse because it was simply a court with three hundred people crammed in around the side of the court. From the edge of the court to the wall it’s maybe six or seven feet on one side—there’s enough room for maybe a foot outside the court and then there’s people’s feet and a bench and then people standing behind the bench and then a wall. More space at the ends of the court. If you were running and you couldn’t stop yourself, you would just run right into the crowd. That made it even more immediate.  There were also people outside. The windows and the doors were packed very close.

They put me on straightaway, but again I was off after ten or fifteen minutes. I’m not quite sure what the whole idea was of me playing because there were plenty of other players around. I was by no means really worth putting on. I’m not sure, but I think maybe the captain thought added interest to have a foreigner playing, and as long as I didn’t make too many cop-ups or really give a lot away, having me on for ten or fifteen minutes was a nice gesture.

In the team talks, the captain was giving a pep talk for a long time, and I was just standing there, and didn’t understand any of what was going on, and then at the very end he said, “MacGregor, cover this man.”  That’s me—done in a short sentence.

That was very early on. I played quite a bit after that, and just before I sprained my ankle I was certainly getting a little bit better. I was actually scoring a few baskets and I was more than pleased.

By British standards, which are very high, the basketball they play here is really not good at all for a university team. It’s nice in a way not to have any of the pressure I know American and British universities have. Every Wednesday and every Saturday you have a match, and probably at least one, and maybe both, are important matches you have to win. There’s a lot of competition about it. Here it seems to be much more laid back, and people really do just play for fun, because they enjoy playing. It doesn’t do their basketball very much good. Because what you find is that—and this is something that Bob also noticed when he played—Chinese students who play here are very, very selfish. When they have the ball and they’re running up, they’ll go for the big shot–the dazzle stuff—and try and get it in the basket instead of passing to the next man. Part of that has got to do with the fact that it’s more “fun,” so it doesn’t matter that they miss it. Whereas perhaps with the American teams and British teams, it’s much more important that you play a tight game. You make sure when you shoot at the basket you have a pretty good chance of getting the shot in, so you don’t have quite so much fancy stuff. These students love to run up, put the ball around their waist under their leg and up into the basket. Not just simple straightforward straight-in. You see a lot of them doing that, but it means that they don’t play so well in terms of teamwork. They’re much more a set of individuals. In a way I found that quite surprising for China. In the political rhetoric, there’s so much emphasis on the masses, if you like, and less emphasis on the individual. [The same thing was true in my classes, individual students asking questions rather than listening to the answer to the same question I just gave someone else.]

It’s not always true that the team doesn’t work well together, but it was the very first thing that I noticed. The first time I just went to look at this team playing, I found myself thinking, “Now here you have five men defending and your five men outside. In an American basketball team you’d see the ball get passed to the other players, like boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—boom—SHOT. Here the ball goes boom-boom-SHOT, and it’s just one or two little passes. Our way is to stretch people out, to create something, and then you’ve got a basket. I wonder, if they had the pressure of competition on them, if they were playing matches twice a week, whether their style would change and they would come to that. Look at something like China’s top volleyball team. They play together.

It seems quite contradictory. The theory of everybody pulling together in this kind of a society, the whole theory of socialism, which is what my students tell me this is, is more to do with helping each other than cutting each other’s throats. One doesn’t get in front of the other and say “tough luck,” but it doesn’t seem to work like that in practice, at least on the basketball court.

In 1988, I interviewed a petite, pretty, blond and blue-eyed Englishwoman in her early twenties about her experiences in a Korean bathhouse. Later, from my own experience, I discovered that little had changed since then except for the prices. Around 2005, in a basement-level neighborhood bathhouse, I was still able to get all the services Jane describes here—except for the massage—for about 10,000 won or about ten dollars. At a window I bought a ticket, went below ground to rooms with concrete walls. I put my clothes in a wooden locker, took the little hand towel I was given and went into the larger room with the showers, shallow concrete tubs and massage tables.

With a group of friends, I also tried out a fancier place, a jjimjilbang, where people were allowed to sleep overnight after the massage. Some people use them as surrogate hotels. I found the windowless space too claustrophobic to sleep in, though, and took a late night taxi home. Other luxury bathhouses also have rooms with healing stones of various kinds, computer rooms and snack bars.

Although the bathhouse is a Korean and Japanese tradition, several Korean women have told me they don’t feel comfortable going.

For a very multicultural view, here’s a link to a luxury bathhouse [jjimjilbang] in Fairfax, Virginia, as reported on Al-Arabiya TV. This one even has a traditional restaurant. < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cBOsXd04M0>

Jane’s story

The women who work in the bathhouse know me now, but the other customers I meet there are always different people. They stare. For the first five minutes I have to force myself to stay. The staring is bad when you’ve got clothes on, but when you’ve got no clothes on you feel really vulnerable. Then of course the Korean women my age are all really thin. They just stand there and look at you. You want to hide. But after a few minutes they’ve found out that you have exactly the same bits and parts that they do, and they stop staring. Then most of them are friendly.

The first time I went, my friend Nancy took me. I was worried about it. I’m really modest. In England I don’t even like changing rooms [dressing rooms]. But then I thought, “Well, I’ll take my contact lenses out, then I won’t be able to see what’s happening.”

You go in, and you sit on these funny little plastic stools. They remind me of potties, actually. You sit on there with a hand shower and wash yourself off. The Korean women shower for about half an hour. They scrub between their toes and the soles of their feet and between their fingers. They must think I’m really dirty, but I can’t sit there that long. It takes me about ten minutes to wash all over, and then I can’t work out what to do.

Then you go and get in the sauna and sweat for a while. You have to wet your towel with cold water first and put it over your face because it’s so hot in there that you can’t breathe otherwise.

Then you’re supposed to go into the cold pool. The Korean women just leap out of the sauna and into the pool. But it’s so cold, at first I couldn’t do it. I just stood there pathetically splashing cold water over myself. Once this old woman took a big bucket of cold water and threw it on my back right after I came out of the sauna. I could have killed her, but of course I had to just turn around and smile. She thought it was really funny. I’m getting a little more used to it. Now I can throw a bucket of cold water on myself before someone else comes along and does it.

There’s a Jacuzzi, a bubbling pool that you can go and sit in. It’s so big the children swim around in it. They’ll swim up to you and have a look at this strange creature who’s sitting in their Jacuzzi.

If you want to be scrubbed and massaged, you have to go and tell the woman, and when it’s your turn she’ll come and drag you out of the pool. The women who do the scrubbing wear black underwear. I suppose it’s the most sensible thing to wear if you work in a bathhouse, but the first time I saw it I thought it looked really sleazy, like something women might wear if they gave sex massages in a man’s bathhouse.

She has you lie down on this table, and she gets a green cloth which looks like a Brillo pad. She starts at your feet, scrubbing really hard. The first time I had it done it was quite painful, but now I’m used to it. As she scrubs you, all the old, dirty skin starts to come off in big lumps. You’re lying in it, and as you move you can feel it underneath you. The first time I went, tons of my skin came off, and she must have thought I was really horrible. Many Korean women get exfoliated every week, and they have really nice skin. I feel if I were to go every week I would have no skin left. I usually go once a month.

She turns you over on your side, and she lifts your leg up so she can scrub everywhere. Inside your thighs is the worst bit. The first time I went it wasn’t relaxing at all because I was frightened about what she was were going to do with me, so of course I couldn’t relax, and she kept telling me I was too tense. She kept picking up my leg and dropping it and picking it up and dropping it, and of course I wasn’t relaxed. She thought it was really funny. She kept calling her friends over and trying to say in English, “Relax, relax.” But I was frightened because I didn’t know what they were going to do to me or what bit of me they were going to attack next. Now I’m better, but sometimes I still can’t relax, and they still pick up my leg and drop it and laugh.

She scrubs behind your ears and your neck and between your toes and the soles of your feet. It really tickles. Then she turns you over on your back. When she’s scrubbed you all over, she puts some kind of frothy oil all over you, and then she throws water over you.

If you want a massage as well, you have to dry yourself off and lie down on the bench again. She puts really hot towels on your face—I assume to open the pores. Then she puts something which smells like baby oil on your face, massages your face, wipes the oil off and puts hot towels on again. Then she grates a cucumber up and puts it on your face, just leaving your eyes and nose free. While the mask is on, she oils over your body and starts to massage you. It’s a different sort of massage than we expect in England. It’s thumping your body with a cupped hand. It’s very loud. You can hear it when you’re in the Jacuzzi waiting for your turn, and you feel like changing your mind because it sounds really painful. Some of it is painful. It feels as if you’re going to be covered in bruises afterwards, but you’re not. If you’re sore somewhere, like in your back, the masseuse always seems to know because she hits the sore place more. It hurts at the time, but afterwards the soreness is gone. The massage must be really good for you.

Then she covers you with warmed milk which is slightly perfumed. It must dissolve the oil. She washes it off and washes your hair. She swishes you around on the table, pulling your hair really far back so that your head and shoulders are off the end. Because you’re really greasy, you feel as if you’re going to fall off onto the floor. You can’t hold onto the sides because your hands are really oily. It’s quite frightening. She washes your hair in a bucket, and you stand up, and she throws water all over you from the troth at the end. Then as a kind of finish, she puts some soap on her hands and washes under your arms and between your legs. I don’t know why. Then she pushes you off and toward the showers where you wash all the gunge off.

It’s brilliant afterwards because your skin feels so smooth, especially on your face and neck and thighs. The smoothness lasts a couple of weeks.

When I went with my mum, we were both being done at the same time, and they were talking about us. I couldn’t work it out properly, but I think they were saying that we were exactly the same shape but my mum was bigger than I was. They always tell me I’m pretty, and that’s kind of an ego boost.

At the place I go, the whole thing comes to about 10,000 won [$13.50]. I went to a really deluxe bathhouse with Susan and Nancy. That was much more expensive, 25,000 won. There they did a different kind of massage, much more relaxing. Afterwards I fell asleep. It was morning, and I’d had a good night’s sleep, but after the massage I just went to sleep. When I woke up my friends were  standing around laughing at me.

The women told Susan that they could tell a lot about someone just by looking at her body. She didn’t have a wedding ring on, and she hasn’t had any children, but they said they could tell she was married, and that Nancy, who is about the same age, wasn’t married. Obviously they thought I was too young. They could guess our ages as well, which most Asian people aren’t good at guessing.

Korean women spend four or five hours at the bathhouse. They just sit around and talk. I suppose it’s one of the few places they can go where they don’t have to wait on men all the time. It’s nice also because they bring their children. Sometimes they set the child in a bowl and the mother will be scrubbing her daughter’s back, and the grandmother, the mum’s mother, will be scrubbing her daughter’s back, so there are three generations in a line. It’s really good to watch.

People usually talk to you. They come by to talk or throw water on you. And afterwards then you can buy little yogurt drinks to refresh yourself. Now it’s a pleasant experience.

[Above diagram: Layout of the first floor of the KCIA building, showing where the bodies were found: 1) Park Chung-hee, 2) his bodyguard Cha Ji Chui, and 3-7) other bodyguards.]

For many years the military dictator Park Chung-hee, self-proclaimed “president for life” feared assassination, particularly by communists or North Korean agents. His wife was killed in 1974 by an assassin gunning for her husband. Ironically, the deed was finally done by Park’s own head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Kae-won, who was angry at his declining influence over Park and fearful of losing his job. He invited Park to dinner at KCIA headquarters, killed Park and Cha Ji Chui and had his five KCIA henchmen finish off the remaining bodyguards. Almost immediately, all of the culprits were arrested and questioned. The “Friday night massacre” was reportedly plotted and led by Kim alone and was not part of a coup. The assassination was the subject of the controversial black comedy The President’s Last Bang (2005). Looking Back, Part 2 contains links to the Youtube version of the movie as well as several other links to texts and videos of the period. For an excellent Korean history, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun. For a quick look at the period on this webside, try A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea <(http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea>

The following conversation with my friend Frank took place in 2007.

Frank’s story

When I came here in 1970, there was all kinds of martial law stuff going on and police stuff. Korean police were like stopping Korean boys with long hair and dragging them off and cutting out hunks of their hair [like just on one side so they’d have to go to a barber to get a haircut to even it out]. They were arresting people for long hair and so forth. Of course, I had come through the Boston sort of hippie era, and I was outraged by it. Now I had a job at The Korea Herald, proofreading and writing headlines. I worked with these two older foreigners. One of them was an ex-military guy, and the other had left the priesthood and gotten married. They were both nice enough guys, but I was having these big arguments with them at work. “They’d say, “Aw, Frank, these are Korean kids. They don’t need long hair.” I’m pretty sure that even in the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s there were street thugs and scummy sorts of people that were attached to the police.

I had a beard when I was a professor in Tokyo. I came here with a Japanese-American who had really long, straight, jet-black hair. We were traveling around the country, hitch-hiking out in the middle of nowhere. This black military jeep came along, slammed on the brakes, and these two thugs in leather jackets—they were obviously official sort of guys—jumped out of the jeep and started manhandling my friend, grabbing him and yelling at him. I couldn’t understand the Korean, but I was trying to get between them. I said, “He’s an American. He’s an American.” Finally I got through.

The main attacker stepped back and said “American?”

I said, “Show him your passport.”

So Rod pulled out an American passport, and these guys started laughing and apologized. They said, “Where are you going? We’re going this way.” With a little bit of trepidation I got into the jeep.

Those were crazy times. I think people were just really afraid to talk. South Korea was a real police state. For example, at the U.S. Osan Air Base [located near Songtan, Korea], there was a Korean guy who worked at the education center as an administrator. He’d go to the public bath over the weekend. Apparently—or the story was that he had said—while bathing—that Pres. Park should step down. He was locked up for a couple of months for making a comment like that. I used to watch out in restaurants and bars when people would start saying “Taehan Minguk” [Daehanminguk in the revised romanization, the ethnic-nationalistic slogan for Korean land and people]. It was always some drunk right-winger I wanted to steer clear of.

One of my in-laws worked in the legal system. Sometimes I would make critical comments about Park, but even within the family he would never say anything critical. But at a family gathering after Park was shot, I said, “After all Park’s done for the [economic development of the] country, it was a shame he was shot down like a dog.” This in-law said, “How many people did he kill?” It was a complete 180-degree turnaround.

Every office had a picture of Park on the wall. A priest I knew, a foreigner, used to get drunk and go into the police box when he was drunk and point to the picture of Pres. Park and call him an asshole and saying what a jerk he was and the police would just laugh and say, “Go home. Go to bed. You’re drunk.”

It’s amazing today. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but out near out near Songnam, before Bundang, there’s a Korean air base—Seoul Air Base. The U.S. Army has helicopters out there, too, but the bases are kind of separated. I’m out there sometimes. That’s where the Korean presidents and dignitaries fly in, as well as Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush. Whenever an important person is coming in, there is a Korean Secret Service guy and a policeman at every street or alleyway, any road that would have access to the road that the motorcade is going to be on. This is for miles and miles. They have police downtown, right through the tunnel, down across the bridge route, blocking traffic for two or three minutes before the dignitary arrives. They time all the lights so that the traffic never stops. The driver can just drive straight through, and it’s so well timed with the police in walkie-talkie communication along the way blocking off the traffic. So the traffic hardly changes from its usual routine.

At Osan Air Base, there’s a big overpass that goes to the base. I remember once in the Park Chung-hee era I was driving on the overpass, and suddenly these ajǒssis [middle-aged Korean men] and paramilitary guards stopped me. They were all blowing their whistles and waving their arms. So they pulled me over, “Get out of the car! Down the stairs! Down the stairs! Down the stairs!” Next to the sidewalk on one side of the overpass there was a concrete stairwell. I walked down about halfway down thirty to fifty stairs, and they blew the whistle at me and said, “Come on back up.” So I got up to the top of the stairs, and I said, “Number one?” and held up my index finger. They laughed, and they said, “Number one.” Park had just driven by.

I mean, it took the CIA chief to kill Park Chung-hee. There were only maybe two or three people that were close enough, and even then they had to have some luck. If I remember correctly, a pistol was put in the bathroom, and during a drinking party, the CIA chief went in there to take a whiz and came back with the pistol and shot him.

Korea is still a place for rumors. But back in 1974 when Pres. Park’s wife was shot, there was a rumor that he had her shot, that he was tired of her. [The rumor is not surprising because Park was in the National Theater giving a speech, and the gunman fired several shots from the back row, wounding Park’s wife, Yuk Young-soo, and another person. Park continued to speak while his dying wife was carried off the stage.] After the KCIA chief, Kim Jae-kyu, shot Park, there was a rumor that they’d executed somebody else and that Kim was running a grocery store in Minneapolis. In a police state anything was possible. There was no freedom of information, so any rumor was considered more plausible than a reported account.

Another interesting story was that the martial law commander before Chun Doo-hwan, a general several years older and senior to Chun, was arrested for complicity in the Park assassination. I think probably that was how the coup was staged. As martial law commander, he was up on the side of the Namsan, down in Hannam-dong. There’s a bunker up there in the woods [and buildings where dissidents were tortured]. Soldiers loyal to Chun or Rho Tae-woo went up there and surrounded it. One or two guards were killed. They arrested him, claiming that he had met with the Kim Jae-kyu before Park was shot. They framed him so that Chun could take over as martial law commander, which enabled him to seize power. Later it was shown to be all completely nonsense, and the general was exonerated, his name cleared and so forth.

When he was arrested, my wife was down on the bridge down in Hannam-dong, and she heard the gunshots up on the hillside. All the traffic was paralyzed. She was in a cab, and she got out and walked across the bridge. I guess that would have been directly before. The Kwangju demonstrations were in reaction to Chun’s illegal seizure of power. Chun responded by launching the suppression and massacre down there.

In 1970 there were only one or two bridges over the Han River. There wasn’t one in Hannam-dong, for example. Where the highway now crosses the Hannam Bridge there was just a dirt road down by the river. I remember getting directions to somewhere in Seoul, which is now filled with highrises, and hearing. “You can’t miss it. It’s the only 5-story building around. They didn’t mean it was the smallest. They meant that it was the biggest.

Seoul's Banpo Briidge and apartment blocks south of the Han River in 2007

I think it was about ‘73 or ‘74, when the first high-rise apartments went up in Youi-do. A friend of mine moved there to a place along the Han River. We went to a party at his place on the seventh or eighth floor, and we were just amazed. The thousands and thousands of apartment blocks started springing up in the mid to late ‘70s. South of the river was just pear trees. Yangjye [at the southern end of Seoul], which is now one of the biggest real estate areas in Seoul. But back then my wife and I rode a bus out in the countryside, a country bus, all through the rice fields to Yangjye. It was called Malchiguri, that means “horse” something-or-other.” I wanted to live there and commute into Seoul, but she didn’t want to live out there because it smelled of manure and it was just so country. She said, “No way I’m going to live here.”

In ‘79-80 there were a lot of hakwons [usually for-profit cram schools]. In ‘71 or ‘72, I was lost staying in a temple in Incheon. I went down to the waterfront and got lost. A woman took me in for the night. There was a story that she’d been seduced by a priest, gotten pregnant and had a child. She was a little crazy. But she ran an institute for half-Korean kids who wanted to get to the States or be adopted. I taught there for a while, and then later when I was traveling through and I got a job teaching English around Osan.

For this post I’ve added video links and links to older posts in order to give readers a fuller picture of what Korea was like before and after Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiesTVHu1eE –Scene of Yushin Era in South Korea (English, pro-American)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKyHWvbC4SM&feature=related–Park Chung hee’s coup in 1961 (Korean)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBMFXdJo8U –Park Chung hee assassination (Korean)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i4I5SOZsAI&feature=related–The President’s Last Bang, part 1 of 11. (Korean with English subtitles)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gSjrTsHepc–State Funeral (no narration, video with music)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S03jongVTwA–State Funeral of South Korea (Korean narration, end the same as above, good video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7hQyd5bxFQ–Movie “A Single Spark,” about the labor martyr Chun Tae-il. English subtitles. 1 of 12.

From this website:  A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea(http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/09/a-priests-view-of-human-rights-in-korea/), Working with Women Workers (http://caroldussere.com/2010/05/), A Skeptic’s View of the Korean Student Movement (http://caroldussere.com/2010/04/.

Kimchi pots outside a traditional house

Michael is an Irish Catholic priest with many years serving in South Korea. This is from an interview in 2007.

Michael’s story

The night Park Chung-hee was shot [October 27, 1979], I was at a party at Konguk University, where an ex-Peace Corps guy was celebrating his birthday. I took some English students to meet the foreigners and speak a bit of English. A friend was visiting from England, looking into setting up a program for justice awareness, and after the party we stayed up talking about injustice in Korea and the Philippines. In the morning I was taking a shower when he rushed in and said that Park Chunhee had been shot just as we were coming home from the party. I thought he was joking. I got dressed and went out. Everything was quiet. In those days whenever an incident happened, people passed out free, quarter-page sheets bulletins from news agencies. The news was just that he was shot. Curfew was moved from midnight to an earlier time.

At that time I was running a center for Catholic students, a place for them to come together, where they could do debates and discuss literature or whatever. Across the street was a station for the police and the KCIA. One of these guardian angels, a Mr. Hong, was watching to see who came and went. About a week before he’d come over because of a flyer on the wall about an educational event on secular developments in Europe. One of the students had told him it had to do with communism. Just saying the word “communism” made you a red at that time, and informing on others was quite common. I’d had to go over to the police station and explain myself. On the morning after Park was shot I saw Mr. Hong a few other guys on the street, and they looked at the ground. They were ashamed that Park was shot by the KCIA chief. I shouldn’t have done it, but I said, “You guys were accusing me of communism, but we didn’t shoot the president, and there were no troops coming over the border. It was your guy that shot the president.” After the assassination everybody was very quiet, and the KCIA didn’t come around the center. Because of the curfew everybody was afraid. The news came out slowly how he was shot and all of that.

Before the funeral a friend and I went down to the south to Naedamsa to see the fall leaves. On the way back there were very few cars on the road, and those cars were all being pulled in by the police. It was kind of a free-for-all for the police to accuse drivers of speeding. I’m sure they were lining their own pockets because the king was dead and they could do whatever they wanted.

We watched the funeral on television. A motorcade and the coffin with a whole carriage all made up of yellow and white flowers. It was a beautiful sight, and the daughters and the sons and the officials were all in mourning clothes. It was very solemn. Whether people were for Park Chung-hee or against him, they had a lot of sadness about his being shot that way.

All along we’d been told that the North Korean communists were going to come down and shoot the president. And now there was a lot of fear. What was going on? Then in the election Pres. Chae was chosen, but he only lasted a short time. Then there was the coup of December 12 when Chung Doo-hwan took over. I remember being over at the center a few nights before, around curfew time. There was me and a New Zealander. We heard this rumble like a whole movement of army trucks moving. We ran to out a small little window that onto the main road, the one that went across the bridge. It looked like the whole army.

Seoul apartment blocks in 1975

Background

I first came here in September, 1969. I was amazed by the throngs of people on the road and everywhere. Seoul was still undeveloped. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of old Korean houses with tile roofs, which later on were preserved as a kind of national treasure. In the countryside at the time there were mainly thatched cottages with no indoor plumbing, and some of the rural areas didn’t even have electricity. There were some paved roads, but especially up in the mountains there were still very few. The roads were set up by the army, part clay and part gravel, so they could get around in their black jeeps. The few private cars were mostly in Seoul. You could see lots of punctured tires on jeeps and cars and buses.

The electric trams had just gone out before I came here, but there was good bus service, with a conductress at each of the front and back doors. They took the fare as you got in and hit the side of the bus to tell the driver it was time to leave, and then they’d announce the station. When the bus was really crowded they had to turn their back to the crowd, take hold of the barriers and push the people in with their behinds. In 1974-75 the girls who worked on the buses had demonstrations—they had no unions. They were protesting against being strip-searched at the end of the line by men. At his Christmas mass, the Bishop at Wonju [who went to jail for protesting against Park Chung-hee’s declaring himself President for Life] said if they are stealing money there was nothing sinful about that, they were just taking what they should be getting anyway.

Yushin Constitution in 1971 [Revitalizing Reform Movement] brought in the Saemaul, or New Village, with in much needed cleanliness, getting rid of the dirt and squalor in back alleys, having people take responsibility for cleaning up around their houses. There was a big push to get rid of a lot of old things, and a lot of good houses probably were destroyed. Yushin was also about saemaum, or New Heart, New Attitude. It was tied up with politics and control and the old Confucian respect for elders. In reality it did a lot of good.

In ’69 when I came, Seoul was mostly one and two-story buildings. In the back alleys there were open sewers, especially the outskirts where poor people lived. It was all squatters’ area. People who had failed in the city and were in debt, they moved out to those places. No running water, living in boxes in the summertime. Then people were moved out of the poor areas, probably just loaded on the back of trucks and taken further out of the city. By 1979 saemaul would have replaced the thatched houses within the official inner city with houses of concrete block, but probably not out in the outskirts where squatters lived. After the reforms they’d put a metal roof, but that can be really hot in the summer and cold in the winter. So they’d keep the thatch and put that on top of it.

In the early ‘70s, there was a big market in textile production. The sweatshops were keeping wages down in order to produce as much as they could and send their products to and Hong Kong. There was an organization for young Catholic workers which had branches in the factories, and we would celebrate mass at a table in the middle of the factory floor. There were at least three, if not four platforms stacked on top of each other, where the girls sat cross-legged in front of their machines. The idea was to get as many girls as possible and as many machines as possible into a small space. At first one of the big issues the girls were fighting for was one day a month, and then much later they got one day a week off. Of course, the factories and those sweatshops had all kinds of goons working for them. The girls were protesting about being beaten or raped—threatened at least. If you complained about anything, you were branded a communist. Nobody wanted that, but at the same time you had to fight for your rights. With the textiles there was a lot of dyeing. When I was mountain climbing, I’d see dye coming down all the streams—blue, and pink or purple with the overflow from the factories.

Working conditions were bad, in crowded rooms with bad air. There was a lot of tuberculosis. Girls had problems with their eyesight from being on the sewing machines for a long time. I know because we ran a night school which started in 1975, with girls from the factories or guys who worked in these fitting shops. In the late ‘70s they started demonstrating. If they’d sit down or go slow work or no work, the factory with the help of the government would send in the goons. In a few incidents these goons brought in buckets of shit and threw it on top of them. The demonstrators were sent to jail for a while. [See “A Single Spark,” link above.]

In the center for Catholic university students, we organized a night school for kids up from the countryside who had no middle school education. They came after work, at 6:30 p.m., for a year and a half to do middle school education, Korean and math and English and history. School finished at 10:30. There were very dedicated university students teaching the program. Some volunteered extra time to help those who were slow. It was a model school in some ways. As the school got very strong, we had up to 40 students. A lot of them had to drop out, but we had a graduation celebration in the countryside with own school song. Some of our students went on to the university after that and became teachers in the school. That went on beyond ’79 and into the ‘80s. Then after ’82 teachers were coming in who wanted to focus on the class struggle, democracy, change and labor laws. We had a big struggle among ourselves. One teacher said, “These students want to go on to high school or the university. That’s what we’re here for.” By 1986 enrollment was way down. There were maybe 15 teachers and 4 or 5 students. So the school was closed.

In the 70s there was a photocopy machine in every church. The political activists would copy their book of rallying songs with Catholic hymns. Farmers’ bands were banned. [For a look at a farmer’s band, see part 1 of “A Single Spark.] They used to have them at festivals. They took harvest stories and used them to make modern day plays with masks representing the factory owner and the workers and all that. They’d practice and put it on in front of Myoung-dong Cathedral, but then it got so widespread that the government stopped it.

After the Kwangju Incident in 1980 [see “A Priest Talks about Human Rights”], students found out that they alone could not take on the government. A lot of them started to go into the factories to create awareness. You could say that was part of the reason the Kwangju Incident started. So now the university students wanted to take over everywhere, including the churches. A Korean priest took over the center and closed the whole office. Movement decisions were made outside, like where there was going to be demonstrations and what the issues would be this month and next month. Of course phones were tapped, and there were KCIA informants everywhere.

I lived for nearly two years on an island off the south coast where there was no phone, no electricity, no roads. The boat took over seven hours, stopping at all the other islands. Especially in the summertime they’d be crowded, people getting seasick, carrying chickens and things like that. It was one of the beautiful spots in Korea, but I watched a lot of people perish out there. Sometimes the skin scabs would break out from malnutrition. We were doing relief. Yellow cornmeal came in from American agencies. People were hungry so they had no choice but to eat it, although some people exchanged the cornmeal for rice. We ran a kitchen as part of our middle school, and we gave the kids a hot lunch. Although we were living on an island, it was the hardest place in the world to find fish. Any fish that was caught was exported directly to Japan. Very few of the people could afford to buy it themselves.

Many of the mountains around were bare after the Korean War. After 1968, every May the big thing was to go out and plant trees, green belts around the cities. About 1968 or so the troops came from the North trying to assassinate Park Chung-hee. So places around Seoul were out of bounds, and army camps were brought in. That preserved the trees because people were stopped from cutting them. In the wintertime the women went down and collected the pine needles, and carried on their heads big loads of pine needles, which they made into bales and used as firewood. Collecting branches was allowed, but you were liable to be accused of cutting trees and fined if somebody needed a bit of money. In the countryside you’d see smoke coming up from the houses for the evening meal. The fuel was either straw or pine needles.

The army ruled the roost. I remember having an argument with them, hot-blooded Irish that I am. In the summertime I used to go out with the students to work in the countryside with the farmers. Afterwards we’d go to the seaside for a few days. Once we were staying in a hostel with a courtyard, and the students wanted to have a campfire. The army said they couldn’t. So the students argued back and cajoled, and finally they were told,

“OK, build a campfire, light it, take a photograph and then put it out immediately.”

“Why?”

“Well, the North Korean boats will see it.”

We were inside a square building with only a small door coming into it. This was completely illogical. It was all about control, really, and a lot of it was done by young soldiers out of envy and jealousy for university students who were enjoying themselves.

The beaches were barricaded off by wires and guarded by soldiers, but some of them were opened up in the summertime. The students used to go there with tents and music. One night I was there with a group of students, and a soldier came in and turned off the music with no explanation. One of the students said, “He’s on guard duty, so how dare we enjoy ourselves.”

Another time there was a school sports competition, and on the third day in there were army trucks set in position all around the playing field. They were going to be there for two weeks for army maneuvers. Nobody apologized. The soldiers were the same age as our students. They put a truck on the basketball court, and they were driving onto the soccer goal area. We asked if they could wait just five minutes, but of course the guy wouldn’t move the truck off the soccer field. It was a strange game trying to move around a truck to score a goal. The army wouldn’t give an inch.

[Above diagram: Layout of the first floor of the KCIA building, showing where the bodies were found: 1) Park Chung-hee, 2) his bodyguard Cha Ji Chui, and 3-7) other bodyguards.]

For many years the military dictator Park Chung-hee, self-proclaimed “president for life” feared assassination, particularly by communists or North Korean agents. His wife was killed in 1974 by an assassin gunning for her husband. Ironically, the deed was finally done by Park’s own head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Kae-won, who was angry at his declining influence over Park and fearful of losing his job. He invited Park to dinner at KCIA headquarters, killed Park and Cha Ji Chui and had his five KCIA henchmen finish off the remaining bodyguards. Almost immediately, all of the culprits were arrested and questioned. The “Friday night massacre” was reportedly plotted and led by Kim alone and was not part of a coup. The assassination was the subject of the controversial black comedy The President’s Last Bang (2005).

The end of the 70s and the early eighties was an interesting time for Korea. The next few posts will give the observations of expats who were in Korea at the time.  These come from interviews conducted in Korea in 2007. First, a banker whose story was posted as “More Than One Right Way, Parts 1-2” on February 18 and 25, 2011. Another post about the military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan appeared as “A Priest’s View of Human Rights in Korea” on May 9, 2010.

Lawrence’s story

On October 27, 1979, I was sitting in my office in our branch bank in Tokyo, where we were getting market information about currency trading. The news came over the Reuter’s telex that South Korean President, Park Chung-hee had been assassinated, and nobody was certain whether Korea’s economy would be totally destabilized or not as a result.

Our loans to Korean companies were backed by letters of credit or letters of guarantee from Korean banks, which required that we present these letters and demand payment in case of a threat to the stability of the country or the companies. We knew that after we presented the letters the Koreans would say, “Thanks for the documents, but we don’t have any money.” But legally, if you didn’t try to get the money back—this was many millions of dollars—you no longer had a valid claim. The documents had to be delivered in person because the documents being lost in the mail in light of the crisis was an obvious defense that might be raised. We checked with the American embassy in Tokyo and the US government had not issued a travel advisory against going to Korea, so I was chosen to go.

Now, at that time it was fascinating to fly to Korea from Japan. Tokyo was the most modern city in the world, even more modern than Singapore then and Korea, in terms of economic development, was in its infancy. As we were flying in, the land we were flying over looked like a moonscape. The mountains that ring Seoul were absolutely devoid of trees – nothing but rocks and clay soil. I was told that the people had cut down all the trees for fuel. An announcement came over the loudspeaker, “Do not take any pictures looking out of the aircraft. Your camera will be subject to seizure if you do. Please respect the military authority and follow all instructions carefully.”

It was a cold, gray day. I arrived at Kimpo Airport, where there were machine guns and military police in khaki uniforms with hats of the shape that airplane pilots wear. They were saying “there” and “there” and pointing at the line snaking in this cold and cavernous arrival hall that reeked of cigarette smoke. The crowd coming in was much smaller than usual because people didn’t want to walk into the eye of a storm. Nobody was just strolling over to Korea to find out what was going on. There were no immigration windows like in normal times. Everything instead was a makeshift affair with long Formica tables, two set up together, then two more and two more and two more. We all went through the same search and questioning procedure four different times. Why the first time wasn’t good enough was beyond me, but I knew better than to ask questions. They were opening cigarette packs and looking through the cigarettes to see if there was anything coming in that shouldn’t be – anything related to espionage, for example. The Korean customs officials were examining documents (such as my letters of credit) in English that they couldn’t even read, and they were obviously under heavy pressure, knowing they could suddenly end up dead if they made a mistake. Punishment came swiftly in Korea.

At the first station the senior-looking guy took my passport and asked questions in broken English: what are you doing here, “what do you know, who are you going to see, why is it necessary for you to come now?” No matter how good your answers were, you got a very nervous reaction because the officer’s English was limited, and he didn’t know what he was looking for. He was also checking the passengers’ names off against a list. It could have been as innocent as a flight log, or it could have been a list of people to watch out for. Meanwhile, his partner went through everything in my bag, opening the can of talcum powder, squeezing the toothpaste. They were seizing cameras—of course writing down the serial numbers.  If you had one, you didn’t get it back until you exited the terminal.  Then I was herded over to another table, where they seemed to have a different list. At table two I was frisked. At table three they took my coat off and took it into a room and then brought it back. They were very serious about anything electronic—a tape recorder, anything like that. If you had a tape in there, they were playing it and fooling with the buttons, very paranoid about what the outside world was finding out and what they knew.

The new Lotte Hotel

Several times a day four military men would unlock my room at the Lotte Hotel with a passkey and suddenly burst in with their machine guns, shouting, “room check.” They were so rude. They’d go through my luggage. They’d go through my notebook. They’d go through my wallet. They’d ask questions. “What’s this a picture of? Where did you get this picture?” Maybe it’s a family photo under the Christmas tree. “What is this a photo of and when was it taken? What country? Why did you bring it here?” The favorite question was “How many foreign cigarettes do you have? Where did you get them? Let me check.” And they’d check for the duty-free stamps showing where they originated from. They wanted to make sure there were no hookers,  no North Korean spies, no Koreans of any kind in the room because they didn’t want secret meetings that couldn’t be monitored. If a Korean businessman was in a foreigner’s room smoking Marlboros, that guy was going to jail for possessing contraband at the very least unless he had a lot of money to purchase the military policeman’s “good will.” They wanted everything under open sky. That’s why coffee shop in the Lotte Hotel seemed at the time like something out of Casablanca, providing a perfect forum for the spy vs. spy thing that was going on. It was all so silly, because no foreigner coming to Korea had any information that could have changed anything. We didn’t know how many U.S. troops were amassed on the border and what they would do in the event of an invasion from the North. People were constantly asking foreigners, if x-number of American soldiers were killed in one week, would the U.S. abandon its defense of South Korea and leave Korea to its fate. We had no answers, but people were curious and constantly asking the same question nonetheless.

So we had martial law, and we had machine guns in the streets, and we had curfew. I was across the street from the Lotte Department Store in Myoung-dong listening to bad Korean folk music and drinking awful instant coffee. Curfew was 8:30PM. I left the coffee shop and was walking across the street to the Lotte Hotel when a military policeman stopped me, pointed to his watch and explained that it was 8:31; I had violated curfew and I couldn’t cross the street to go to my hotel. He was not budging, and it was too public for me to purchase an ounce of his goodwill so he just said, “Go back.” Go back? The coffee shop wasn’t going to let me stay overnight. I figured that the policeman wasn’t going to take me to jail because that would take him away from his post. He was just going to get me to find a place in Myoung-dong. I ended up staying at a three-dollar-a-night Korean yŏgwan, sleeping on the floor, until sunrise when I could walk across the street to my $150-a-night hotel. It was a very pleasant diversion as I recall it now.

The military police were really running the country. They were the authority in Korea and the KCIA helped. The military had total impunity to act in any way it deemed necessary with foreigners. They were everywhere. Everything was screened. Every call was monitored, every telex was intercepted and then retransmitted. I was constantly trying to figure out what they were doing, but they didn’t really seem to know what they were doing, It was a very unprofessional screening job because there was a lot of duplication in it. They just seemed uncertain and nervous. For military people, they seemed frightened too and they had machine guns. As a matter of fact, on the streets in front of the brand-new Lotte Hotel, there was very little traffic, but everywhere there were soldiers. There was a soldier within eyesight of another soldier throughout the city. Soldiers with a machine gun, stopping people, checking papers, asking questions at random. “Where are you going, what are you doing, what’s your business here? Show me your passport.” And they were stopping Korean citizens too. Even before the assassination, all the windows facing north were shuttered or painted black—all windows in all of the buildings. Korea was in a state of permanent blackout, facing north so the North Koreans could not observe their development or their activity and to make targets more difficult to spot if the North Koreans were to invade the South. From the first day I arrived here for several years.

The building our bank’s representative office was in was new, but to save precious heating oil the temperature was kept just high enough so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. It was so cold you could see your breath. I remember having to take my gloves off to sign checks and vouchers. I met with people from Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo—Korean companies which are now giants—which were then very small and very risky companies to lend money to. They were assembled on a shoestring budget, and their staff was living pretty much hand to mouth. They didn’t have presentable offices, so they would meet us at the Lotte Hotel in the coffee shop. That was where you did business in Korea. People would wait in line for tables. It was just round-robin marathon of meetings with the Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo people. Foreign cigarettes opened doors. It was illegal for Koreans to smoke foreign cigarettes or to own foreign cigarettes because Korea was desperately trying to keep all the foreign exchange in the country. It didn’t want to be importing things and sending dollars overseas because the country was desperately short of capital. So you’d be having a meeting with bankers or businessmen in Korea, and you’d give them a cigarette and they would be very grateful for it, and if they lit it and smoked it then, they would hide it under the table because the military police were everywhere, and they would go into a restaurant and look, trying to catch a Korean smoking a foreign cigarette because the fine, payable in cash, on the spot, was about a ten dollars—a month’s wages in those days, which led to a lengthy negotiation for a discounted bribe.

Koreans were hungry for news of the outside because news was heavily censored. Our office had to get case by case written permissions to receive foreign publications like The Wall Street Journal. The government employed professional readers and redactors who would cut things out, and the paper would look like confetti by the time you it on some days. I recall a 64-page Time Magazine our office received. It had eight pages remaining by the time the redactors were finished. You knew a lot was going on behind the scenes in Korea when most of the articles were cut out of the paper. And then you’d be on the phone trying to talk in code because there were listeners on every phone call you made overseas. All the lines overseas went through government offices, and every overseas call was recorded and monitored. Korea was so paranoid. They were afraid of infiltration. They were afraid of an invasion from the north. They were so afraid of an inability to control people’s hearts and minds, afraid of losing control of the public will, that they monitored everything very, very carefully, and they were quick to take action if they sensed you were being too American or too British or too French.

In those days telex information from the Japanese office was almost instantaneous with our offices in Manila and Hong Kong and Singapore. We could talk live. I was a fast typist, and often we would have conversations over the telex because it was cheaper than calling. Yet when we got a telex from Korea at the Tokyo branch it was three or four hours old. On days when there was a lot of news that Korea was sensitive to—news about China or about Russia—there were telexes which people couldn’t understand. Of course a lot of our telexes from Japan to Korea were written in jargon that only our American representative would understand because we wanted to convey information that the bank needed, but if the telex got too obtuse on a day when there was a lot of scary information going back and forth, the telex wouldn’t arrive at all. We were transferring money through Korea’s central bank by telex. We were also transmitting a lot of information, but it was interesting. The thought police, the Korean Intelligence Agency, came to visit our branch and question us almost weekly, but they never acknowledged that they were intercepting our telexes and reading things, asking questions like what would an American mean if he said this or that. Even our telephones had keyword cut-offs. If you mentioned North Korea—click—your phone went dead. Other words or phrases were also unacceptable. They would threaten to cut off your phone entirely if you abused it. You get an arrogant American or an arrogant Frenchman saying, “Nobody’s going to tell me what I can say,” and they’d find themselves without a phone and the president of their bank would have to come out to Korea apologize in person and get the telephone reconnected. People learned to behave pretty quickly.

Cart hauling paper

In 1984-86 I taught at Xiamen University in Fujian Province, China. (See First Year, Second Year–July 24, 2010) My friend Jim is now teaching in the province to the north of Fujian. When we did this interview over Skype in July 2011, it was clear that some circumstances in China had changed, like technological and economic growth, but others, such as the living conditions of Foreign Experts and the behavior of people in public places were much they same as they were twenty-five years ago. (Jim has kindly supplied the photos.)

Jim’s Story

Heading out of town

It was great moving to Asia at the age of 50. I needed a change. Now, Toronto—my home town—is multicultural, with about half a million Chinese and some of the world’s best Chinese restaurants. In my opinion you shouldn’t move to a country if you don’t like the food. I really liked Chinese food and culture—Japanese and Korean culture too, but not as much, and I wasn’t too crazy about Korean food. And some of the worst horror stories were from people teaching English in Korea. The Japanese seemed more uptight,  and because of history I felt more sympathy with the Chinese, who didn’t invade Japan and kill 100,000 people. Although I believe around the world—everywhere—most people are good.

I wanted to go somewhere warm, without snow and ice. In Taiwan the weather is hot and humid and rainy like Florida. You can go without a jacket almost twelve months of the year. I like the night markets and being able to roam the city, anytime, day or night. I never saw any crime there, or in China. They have the best subway system I’ve ever seen. It’s just amazing—very convenient and very crowded.

I went over on my own to look for a job teaching English. I’d talked to people who’d been there and who advised against signing a contract without seeing the workplace and meeting the people. In some ways what I got was a good job. I mean, they paid on time, and they were fairly professional. I think it was a good place to be for my first year.

To get a job in a college or university I needed a graduate degree. I only had a BA, so I taught at an “institute,” an English-teaching business offering classes for adults who want to improve their spoken English, mostly evenings and on weekends. Their biggest selling point is having foreign teachers. In fact, this school was in a prominent location on the corner of a busy downtown street, with big, glass walls so people outside could watch all the foreigners at work. To me it felt like a car showroom.

It was like a fitness center which charges for the use of the facilities. A student paid and was allocated a certain amount of class time, without having an assigned class. The students could just show up, and they’d be put somewhere, not in the same class as before and sometimes not even with others at the same level—although they did try with the proficiency levels. But I liked teaching, and I think I’m suited to it. I like people, and I’ve been trying to learn Chinese, which helps me relate to the difficulties the students might be having.

I was there for a year, and I found it quite exciting. I met lots of nice people, both foreigners and Taiwanese, and traveled around. I took my first trip to Hong Kong. But the first six months I had a lot of culture shock. In Taipei there’s McDonald’s and Starbucks, but even buying a coffee can be challenging when you don’t know the language. The frustration would turn me into an ugly foreigner—or arrogant foreigner. I’d often get angry and upset about things like noise. Taipei is one of the most densely populated places in the world, and Taiwanese and Chinese people tend to be so loud it would drive me crazy. The politics also got to me, the anti-mainland fear-mongering with daily items in the newspaper about an eminent attack from the People’s Republic. I found myself taking the Chinese side, which the Taiwanese didn’t like very much. It’s a little better now that the separatists have lost power. With time I’ve gotten better at handling my frustrations.  I think traveling and living here is making me a better person. I try to accept that things so, instead of getting upset that I didn’t get what I wanted, I enjoy what I did get.

After a year in Taiwan, I went back to Canada and lived in Vancouver for two years. I had a job working with homeless people, which was very depressing. I’ve seen far more homeless people in Toronto and Vancouver than in Shanghai. In mainland China you don’t see much poverty, although it is here. But most people seem to have something to eat and a place to live and a job if they want it. China seems to be trying to make life better for everybody, including the poor whereas in Canada it the attitude often was that if you were poor or unemployed it was your own fault. Like two months ago there was a news story here that they were going to double the minimum wage.

After another nine months in Taiwan I moved to the mainland, to the prosperous Zhejiang Province, the province north of Fujian and south of Shanghai. I’ve be here two and a half years. Officially, I’m a Foreign Expert at a college. This contract will run out in about six months, so I’ll have to decide whether to stay here or experience another place. This is a small city of about half a million people, with about ten Westerners. The weather here is like Tennessee. It gets cold in the winter, but we seldom have snow. The summers get into the nineties. We’re a landlocked city, but outside of town there are some beautiful open spaces which remind me of Canada—but with food growing everywhere. I just took my motorcycle out there this afternoon.

In China there are different levels of college and university, and students qualify on the basis of their marks and test scores. My school is one of the low-ranking ones, owned by a corporation whose specialty is construction and development. About three-fourths of the students are boys who are learning building and things related to that. Most of my students are girls majoring in business English and hotel management. Nowadays the students aren’t assigned jobs like they used to be. After they finish their two-year course they have to go and get a job. They get some help, but mostly it’s up to them. A lot of my students want to have their own businesses.

There’s a lot capitalism and a lot of money. In this small city there are two or three Rolls Royces, a lot of BMWs and Mercedes and Audis. I’m sure 20-30 years ago it must have been different. [no private cars, just owned by the work unit]. Even ten years ago there weren’t many cars. It’s just really amazing to see things change before your eyes, with buildings going up and people getting cars for the first time. On the other hand, China is building a lot of railroads and the bigger cities are having subways built. That’s one thing about the political system: they can decide to do something and  do it on a big scale.

At the college many people belong to the Communist Party, which is just a way to make contacts and get ahead, like the Republican Party. Every class has a monitor. I’m sure they report on me, but I can’t read or write Chinese. Maybe ignorance is bliss. On the Internet we can’t access certain sites like Facebook or Youtube. There are so few foreigners that it’s probably very easy for them to monitor us. We’re registered with the police, they know where we live and work, they know everything. I don’t have a problem with that because I’ve got nothing to hide, and it also keeps me safe. A few times it’s looked my mail was opened, but I’d never be able to prove it. On the other hand, in the United States and Canada studies have been done about employers spying on their staff.

Most of the English teachers are Chinese who teach reading and writing. The two native speakers do spoken English. Every week we have an English corner, where the students can talk about anything they want. In class I focus on getting them speaking. I tell they’ll become better at English by doing it, like learning basketball. It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. With time I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t work. Each class has about forty students, so it’s hard to spend much time with an individual or with a small group. A small number want to learn, and some who have no interest. I see my job as helping and encouraging them improve. The college is on holiday now, but I have one student who calls almost every day to talk for five minutes.  Unfortunately, not very many would do that, for many reasons: they’re not interested, or they’re too shy, or they don’t want to impose on me, or they’re afraid they’ll make mistakes.

A lot of things are similar to home. Almost every kid at the school has a cell phone, many have computers and the rest have computer access. All the teachers and students use an instant messaging system called QQ. I have students keep in touch on QQ. Students from two years ago who are doing business in English, if they come across something they don’t understand will send me a message, and I’ll help them sort it out. We also talk occasionally by telephone or on Skype. I don’t think I could live here without modern technology. The downside to life here is the isolation. I don’t know how people did it years ago, but even though I spend many hours in the computer I sometimes wonder if my quality of life wouldn’t be better because without it, because then I’d be interacting with people face to face or reading books.

Pedicab

My starting salary was 5,000 RMB [$774 USD] a month, which according to what I’ve seen on the Internet is around average. In Canada that would put me below the poverty line, but I also have a nice, free apartment, and it would be no problem living her on 1,000 or 2,000 RMB a month. My last Canadian job didn’t pay much. I was always in debt and just working to pay bills. That was true even when I had a business and a house and a car. But at this stage of life I’m not trying to save to buy a house. My focus is on having a decent life now. I like to travel, and in the past few years I’ve taken the best trips of my life. I had two months in Canada, a week in Hawaii and three weeks in Thailand. I feel I’m in the right place at the right time, given what I have and what I can do. China badly needs foreign teachers, and the students appreciate my being here. In Canada I spent forty hours a week in the office, and my employer’s attitude was that I was lucky to have a job. If I didn’t like it, I could leave. I got two weeks’ holiday a year and not necessarily when I wanted it. Here I have three months off and have money to spend on holidays. If I can keep on working, I’ll just stay in China.

I’m just an ordinary middle class person, maybe lower-middle class, but in my mind I’m like Walter Mitty, wondering why I’m not rich and famous. Because we’re so few foreigners, being here is like being a rock star or a minor celebrity. Every time I go out, people stop and stare, and little kids point and say, “Hey, there’s a foreigner.” It can occasionally be annoying, but most of the time I get a kick out of being special.

Part of the culture shock came from getting questions westerners would consider rude. You meet people, and in less than five minutes they’re asking you how much money you make and how old you are and if you’re married with children or why not. When I arrived on the mainland I was surprised at behavior like people spitting right on the floor inside—men and women, but the men were worse—but here it’s accepted. Before they spit, there’s the loud hawking, clearing the throat of phlegm. [At one time the loud noise was believed to ward off devils.] In restaurants, they’ll spit bones out on the table. And screaming to their friend across the room. Smoking is allowed everywhere.

Duck heads

In China people are learning to wait in line. Younger and more modern people are getting more used to the concept, but it’s common for someone to cut in front of you. Bus and train stations have physical barriers and security guards who try to enforce the rules. In a hospital I went to, patients sign up and wait for their numbers to appear on the electronic board. There was a nurse at a counter supervising, but people still pushed ahead. It was bizarre. One patient might be talking to the doctor while three or four watched. In western countries we have this thing about our personal space and first come, first served. But here, if I’m a fast food place where people are pushing ahead, I push also because otherwise who knows how long I’ll have to wait. I find that strange, but also sometimes very funny.

People blow their noses out on the street by holding one nostril shut and then forcing the mucus out, which is accepted. [Chinese are repulsed by the idea of using a handkerchief and putting it back in your pocket.] I think that’s one reason the Taiwanese who have never been here think mainland Chinese are like animals. Even now the word “peasant” is in common use. People keep the habits they’ve had for many centuries. [After Liberation, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, having bourgeois habits was dangerous. Peasant/worker behavior was in.] I see so many things that would make westerns wonder what was going on. Babies don’t wear diapers. They have like a trap door open in the back [split pants], so when they have to pee or poop a parent will hold them so they can go on the street [in the gutter. Parents also whistle as a signal for the baby to pee]. There’s no toilet paper in restrooms, even in fairly decent restaurants in Taiwan. So I got in the habit of always having tissue paper with me. [Which you need to do anywhere in Asia.] My first year in Taiwan I was bothered by things like that, but now I’m just used to it.

I call China “the opposite world.” For example:

* Toronto is very multicultural. Here over 99% of the people were born in China.

* Driving here is crazy. Traffic lights were just introduced a few years ago. People often drive right through them. There are no stop signs, unlike all the four-way stops we have in Toronto. People are not required to stop, but most people slow down and see if anyone else is coming and then weave in and out.

*In Canada there are so many safety restrictions, like mandatory seat belts and government-approved car seats for children. Here people drive on motorcycles carrying the baby in their arms.

* In Canada you have to have lights at night and wear reflectors on your bikes, but here half of the people on the road at night have no lights. People walk down the street with no street lights, wearing black.But here people try to cooperate and work together. I don’t want to hit anybody or get hit. When I do see accidents they’re minor, just a little bumping into each other and no personal injury. [China has the highest rate of fatal traffic accidents in the world, but that fact is unlikely to appear in the state-run media.]

* In Canadian parks it’s an absolute no-no to throw litter on the ground. We have a saying, “Take only photographs, and leave only your footprints.” Here people throw garbage around everywhere, although there are garbage cans around, and many people employed to go around to pick it up. Near my college they’ve been building some beautiful parks which are kept clean. Of course, one of China’s biggest challenges is pollution. My students talk and write about how important it is to have clean air and water. A lot of the motorcycles are electric now to cut down on pollution, and they’re investing a lot in wind and solar. They’re launching huge projects and learning very quickly.

* The values here are amazing, and it’s not just lip service. Many of my students have stood up in class and said, “I love my mother, I love my father.” At home you’ll here students say, “Man, I hate my parents. They’re divorced, and my father lives in another city.”

* The Chinese love their country, and they’re proud of it. I really think the government is trying to make life better for everyone. Education is very important. A lot of new schools are being built, as are new homes and new train systems and subways. The Chinese want to catch up with the developed world, they are catching up. . China has a huge military, but I believe it’s for defense, peace keeping and disaster relief.