Hungry Ghosts: Part 2
by Leigh Hellman, ETA Alumni This is part 2 of a 3 part series, published weekly here on Infusion’s website. hungry ghosts “What did they say was going on? What did the broadcasters say?” “Mostly just to stay inside. They said it was North Korean spies who were making trouble and getting everyone worked up, and that the government was taking care of it.” “Did you believe that?” “I guess.” They look away. “몰라.” [1. ‘Mulla.’ “Don’t know.”] — Gwangju is a city for the brash, for the bluster, for the underdogs. It’s built on the backs of the farmers and the fishermen who brought the central business of the region to it and is sealed up with the sneers from the north and the east that brand it the equivalent of a hick town in a backwater province. Even its dialect—according to posh Seoulites and midland conservatives—is crude and harsh. “Gwangju?” People—Koreans and foreigners alike—laugh brittle like they’re sucking on sour sugar drops. “Can you even understand what they’re saying down there?” “I don’t know.” I smile without teeth. “Can you even eat the bland, limp kimchi up here?” Koreans tell me that I speak with a Gwangju accent myself, although that only ever seems to come up after I’ve mentioned my hometown. Gwangju is more thready back alleys—dotted with neon-tarp fortune teller booths and striped awnings shading food trucks selling cups of spicy fried popcorn chicken and sweet red bean-filled pastries pressed into the shape of carps—than it is ritzy thoroughfares, especially in the older east district. As the tendrils of urban sprawl creep farther out, the roads become wider and the steel-and-cement buildings grow up instead of over. In the west across the river, in the north past the public university, and in the south under the shadow of Mt. Mudeung (Gwangju’s favorite local landmark) neighborhoods that desperately aspire to the wealth, the sheen, the excess and the legitimacy of the nation’s first cities have taken root like garish weeds. Ask a person in Seoul, in Busan, in Daegu or Incheon or Daejeon—ask them if regionalism is a historically relevant problem and they’ll probably say no. Probably say that people who complain about it are just disciples of conspiracy who can’t let things go. Say that some places are simply better—cleaner, richer, more developed, more invested-in. That’s how it is; there’s nothing else to it. This doesn’t even feel like Gwangju might be taken as a compliment by the city’s nouveau riche but a one billion won[2. $1,000,000—give or take.] address can’t unmake a history, and Gwangjuans tend to give themselves away rather quickly. If it’s not the aggressive slang, it’s the contentious mix of city naiveté and a combative unpretentiousness. The joke is that a Gwangju man—a South Jeolla man—would much rather fight than talk. At least, that’s a joke in the city; I’ve been told it again wide-eyed and straight-faced outside of the region. Gwangju is a city with something to prove, a city that cares too much or none at all. Gwangju is proud like a twice-mended school uniform and defiant like cinderblock walls without insulation, daring the February frost to bite back. And maybe I’m drawn to it because it matches a streak of me that’s already there—an echo of a train yard jungle, a city of big shoulders that has always tried to elbow its way to the top. The new city hall looks like a bloated white ship, everyone says so. Fifteen minutes down the road from the glitzy bus mega-terminal, smug faces and shiny oversized suits and white envelopes stuffed with green and yellow bills are in the perpetual process of rebranding the city on paper in bold, swooping fonts: Dynamic! Colorful! Creative! A Global City of Light! Twenty minutes in the opposite direction, the road dead-ends at a massive roundabout and a perennial blue construction wall. Silk-screened signs announce a new pan-Asian cultural complex in the works; eventually, it will occupy the same block that housed Gwangju’s original Provincial Office three decades ago. — Park Chung-hee is often celebrated as the father of modern Korea, a nation categorized by economic prosperity and social restructuring. But it was a feat achieved while Park declared martial law, dissolved the National Assembly, and recast the still-young Constitution as an authoritarian document that granted the president theretofore unprecedented power. Although the Park regime had resembled a military dictatorship from the start, noticeable backlash only began surfacing after the new Constitution was introduced in 1971. For eight years, protests flared up and were suppressed in cycles but never gained enough momentum to pose any real threat to the increasingly totalitarian state. Park survived numerous assassination attempts over the years—including one that ended up killing his wife instead. And then in 1979 one of the highest ranking members of his government sat down to eat dinner with the president, pointed a gun at him, and pulled the trigger. — May in Gwangju is just on the uncomfortable side of spring, when sweat stains start soaking through thin t-shirts and gauzy blouses. The days stretch long and the air hangs rank with pollen and arid dust swept across the Yellow Sea from the far western deserts of China. The humidity is thick like four layers of spongy foundation; it won’t dissipate until the rainy season breaks in July. The cherry blossoms have withered off their branches—for the most part—so there’s not much urban greenery left to distract from the exhaust fumes and grit kicked up by cars-motorcycles-taxis-trucks that weave in and out of traffic like it’s the last day they’re ever going to drive and they have to make it count. Kids are restless in their academic shackles come May, even though they still have two months of school to go until summer break. Winter uniforms—thick wool blazers, white button-ups, sweater vests, and dark skirts or pants—are traded out for their material and pigment-ally lighter counterparts. Name patches, sewn onto breast pockets, start to show their
Hungry Ghosts: Part 1
by Leigh Hellman, ETA Alum The following is part 1 of a 3 part series, which will be published weekly on here on Infusion’s website. hungry ghosts “Tell me a Korean ghost story.” “Like Frankenstein—or Twilight?” “No. Those aren’t Korean. Aren’t there any Korean ghost stories? Any Korean monsters? There have to be.” They shrug. “몰라.” [1. ‘Mulla.’ “Don’t know.”] —– Park Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26th, 1979. He was shot in the head and in the chest by his security chief—and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency—at whose safehouse he was attending an official dinner. Born in a single Korea strangled under Japanese annexation and colonial rule, Park rose through the Imperial Japanese and Republic of Korea Armies to the rank of general and finished his career off as the third president of the post-war Republic of South Korea. This Third Republic framed itself as a return to democratic civilian rule after a two-year military junta, and for the seventeen years that spanned the Third—and later Fourth—Republics, the Korean national economy witnessed staggering levels of growth that would ultimately set the stage for what Western capitalists sanctimoniously termed “The Asian Miracle.” In huge stretches of the southeastern province, which houses two of the six largest cities in South Korea as well as Park’s comparatively small hometown, he is a legend. In the province that helped elect his daughter as Korea’s first female president fifty-one years after her father’s reign began, the Parks are immortalized on screen-printed banners strung between street light poles at major intersections. There, Park Chung-hee is a national hero. In its neighboring province to the west, he is not. — It’s easy to forget that South Koreans have only lived under democratic rule—as propagated by American ideology so hopped up on misarticulated amendments that it can barely tell its Socratic from its Thermidorian—for less than thirty years. Gazing across the LED-backlit supernova of Seoul, weaving in and out of impeccably dressed herds with bi-gender heels clacking and the fastest fingers in the world typing texts out on domestically-engineered smartphones screens, in a land where calls don’t drop in tunnels or elevators and public subways have heated seats and run on military-precise schedules, foreigners can be forgiven for their misconceptions. When subtitled CNN newsfeeds telegraphing over plasma-screen TVs anchored delicately to corner walls in cafés aggressively debate on the despotic state to the north, I and you and them and we don’t remember what we were never truly taught to begin with. — “What was it like back then, during that time?” “It was different. A lot of things have changed, but not everything.” “What happened?” “We don’t usually talk about it.” They pause. “몰라.” [2. ‘Mulla.’ “Don’t know.”] — We say—us expats who land in Incheon as updated MacArthur pantomimes, full of millennial swagger and skin-language-passport season passes that whisper an inheritance to rule this place like our high-waisted ancestors ruled every place before it—we say that Korea gets to you. Gets in you. Korea grafts itself to your flesh and burrows down into your marrow and it becomes you, even though you can never become it. Stay long enough and you won’t be able to shake it, like a peculiarly virulent cold. Korea becomes an impulse to push through crowds without apology, a repetition of the question “밥을먹었어?” [3. ‘Babeulmeogeosso?’ “Rice ate?” (“Have you eaten today?”)] instead of “How are you?” It becomes assertions that sweet plum juice can help with digestion and that a scalding hot bowl of whole chicken stew on the hottest day of the year is objectively refreshing. It becomes an appropriated resentment of Japan, a fierce attachment to two craggy rocks [4. The islands of Dokdo.] that jut out of the sea between the Korean island of Ulleung-do and the western shores of Okinoshima. It becomes V-signs in pictures and staring at yourself in any passing reflective surface without shame and without arrogance—without realizing it at all. It becomes brushing your teeth after breakfast, lunch, and dinner and slurping hot noodles through lips and teeth and grilling meat with metal chopsticks. It becomes being surprised by shower curtains. It becomes waking up to phantom scents of spicy pickled cabbage and dropping articles in spoken English and a suffocating fire in your belly of you’ve got to get out got to escape that turns to chalky, ashy, lingering embers once you’re gone. — More than Korea, it’s Gwangju that’s sticky thick in my blood now. — Park Chung-hee and his Third Republic promised a reprieve they couldn’t—perhaps never intended—to deliver. The preceding ten-month military junta (known as the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction) had been touted as a temporary transition between the autocratic governments of the First and Second Republics and a more democratic system; it began as a coup orchestrated by then-Major General Park himself. As the junta’s power buckled, now-General Park left his military post so that he could run in the civilian elections—elections which he and other influential junta members had pledged not to enter. On October 15th, 1963, Park Chung-hee was elected president of the Third Republic of South Korea. Records indict that he defeated the Second Republic incumbent (and US-backed figurehead) by a margin of only 1.5477%, or 156,026 votes. — Koreans, if they’re being traditional about it, don’t do cemeteries. That’s not to say that there aren’t cemeteries in Korea, or that every Korean is stuffed into the soil when they die. There are bureaucratically bland sand-colored buildings that are filled floor to ceiling with small-stacked marble lockers labeled by uniform white plaques with three Chinese characters[5. For administrative purposes—birth, marriage, death—Koreans use the Chinese characters that represent their name instead of the Korean alphabetic spelling.], written top to bottom. The implication is urns, although it could (in many cases) be symbolic. I never really found a good time to ask. “어머니, 도와드릴까요?” [6. ‘Eomeoni, dowadeurilkkayo?’ “Mother, help will give?” (“Mother, can I help you?”)] My Korean is stunted, like a frustrated five-year old
Fried Cabbage in the Kyomushil: A Poem
a poem written and read by Victoria Su, ETA ’15-’16 I wrote a poem on the eve of Thanksgiving. That morning I was still suffering from the hurricane of homesickness that had struck me all of a sudden the night before. My host family’s extended family had been visiting, and while they were friendly and warm, I couldn’t help but feel like an outsider in the midst of this joyful family reunion. I thought about how I had spent all my past Thanksgivings surrounded by family, friends, and the irresistible smell of my mother’s candied yams, and how this year I would just be alone in my room staring at my computer screen, worrying about how to make the Lesson 9 “target language” interesting for my middle schoolers. The simultaneous thoughts of missing Thanksgiving this year and how far away Christmas (when I would go home) was, mixed with feelings of guilt and regret for wishing away the precious time that remained between me and my third graders hit me hard, and I cried silently in my room all night. There is a famous Chinese poem that goes like this: 独在异乡为异客，每逢佳节倍思亲。 Roughly translated, it means “Alone in a foreign place, I am a foreign guest; every holiday season brings a double measure of longing for my family.” When I learned this poem in middle school I didn’t really understand it. Who knew that it would be in middle school again that I would experience this poem’s core sentiment as reality? The next morning (Thanksgiving Eve), when I had finished my first class of the day, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the teachers cooking paechu jeon (배추전), which is a cabbage pancake (basically just sheets of cabbage dipped in a flour-water mixture and fried). Korean cabbage tastes pretty similar to Chinese cabbage, so even though we never eat it in pancake form like this, it reminded me of home. The warmth of the smells, the sounds, and the taste of the food and more importantly, the inviting mirth of my fellow teachers filled me with an unexpected joy and inspired me to write this poem in the little time I had before my next class. Fried Cabbage in the Kyomushil (teachers’ office) Eager noses pressed up against doors and windows, peering in, breath fogging up the glass What is it? What is it? I can’t see! Smells good— Here comes Teacher, will she take pity? it’s cold outside— oh! Time for class. Kids scurry off—still, a few noses and sighs Linger in the corridor. A chuckle slides opens the door: Welcome. Step into the room now, another world— Warmth. tips of Ears, Nose and Fingers suddenly aglow the hearty crackling of grease permeates the air, paechu jeon sizzling in a pan. The room is bright with anticipation as six or so surround the expert hand— flip! crack! sizzle… a steady buzz of chatter and cheer complement the spitter-spattering of the prize— Do you have cabbage in America? —a deft motion, deference (or maybe preference) to the delicacy at hand and—flip! crack! startled! for a split second by the flying object momentarily poised to wreak havoc break—disrupt, disturb, suspend—our heady expectation of perfect satisfaction to come then, swiftly as it came, summoned back as if by magic SNAP! Perfect landing. sizzle, crack, sizzle… back to the same simmering state, just sizzling, sizzling, smelling of simplicity And common grace fills the room. Soon—a Feast! It’s not quite Thanksgiving, but the spirit is here Chopsticks separate at lightning speed Dip, drip, devour Crispy cabbage with a kick of spice Flavor of delight.