Army Lessons
by Leanndra Padgett, ETA ’14-’15 When I began learning Korean, little did I expect that I would need to know the sentence, “저는, 군대에서, 군인에게 영어를 가르칠 거예요,” or “I will teach English to soldiers at the army.” But after moving to Hwacheon, a South Korean town close to the northern border, it has become an essential phrase which I have often repeated. The middle school where I teach has an agreement with the military police wherein the middle and high school foreign teachers lead a weekly English class at a local base. In exchange, soldiers tutor our students. Every Thursday, a fellow native English teacher and I walk to the base, which is only about five minutes from my homestay. As we approach the gate, the guards say “Hello!” wave and smile at us before raising the barrier. Then we eat a slightly awkward dinner in the dining hall that is known for quantity over quality. We usually sit at the officials’ table, and the younger guys who we teach are either quite friendly or ignore us completely (usually indicating whether they plan to attend or skip our class that particular week). After eating copious amounts of the rice, greasy fried chicken and kimchi that we have generously been offered, we walk to the conference room that doubles as our classroom. Once the officials clear out, the students make their way in. I have never quite understood how the participant selection process works, but I know that some are there by choice while others are under a type of obligation to attend our class. Different soldiers come each week, but after several months, we have our regulars who keep the visitors and new students on track. There’s Shawn[1. Names have been changed.] who is highly motivated because he will move to Australia soon. He often stays behind after class to ask questions about living abroad. Then there’s Doug, who spoke English while living in the Philippines and has the skills of a native speaker. We rely on him and a couple of others to help translate when our lessons are misunderstood. Others come and go but by now, we have worked with many of the men of this division. Eating army meals, walking through the base and interacting with soldiers gives us, young foreigners teaching soldiers close to our own age, a blurry view of the world of the ROK army. Before Hwacheon, I never envisioned that my time in Korea would include glimpses into such a world, but it has, resulting in unique memories and unexpected lessons. I have been most surprised, not by the discovery that soldiers are just ordinary people, but by the realization that ordinary people are soldiers. South Korea’s compulsory service regulations mean that every Korean man will serve in the army by age 35. While there are career soldiers, many of these men (if not the majority) are just recent high school graduates and college kids fulfilling their national duty. As I consider the danger and solemnity of their roles, I am shaken to think that every one of my rambunctious middle school boys, every one of my adorable male host cousins – every Korean man – will serve in active duty. I understand why my host mom once said that she was happy to have only daughters. While they have various motivations and causes for doing so, all American soldiers choose to enlist. For Korean men, it is a predetermined course; they must join, just as they must attend grade school. This leads to a unique combination of people from all walks of life, many of whom are not individuals that I would peg as soldiers. They are just ordinary people in a situation of conflict, patriotism and camouflage. Even after months of living here, I am still surprised and affected by the mingling of the military world and the Korean Mayberry that is Hwacheon. For instance, one day a few weeks into my grant year, I heard what I assumed was a train roaring by my school, only to wonder how I had missed seeing the train station before. Looking out the school window, past the soccer field and convenience store, I saw tank after tank charging down the main street. It’s just not what I expected in this town with only one traffic light. Then again, I didn’t expect to find a combination stationary and army supply store either. Colorful stickers and notebooks are shelved next to camouflage jackets and army paraphernalia. But no one in Hwacheon seems to question this unlikely combination. Locals know that you have to get to the bus station early on weekends in order to reserve a seat to or from Hwacheon before the soldiers take them all. I have made the rookie mistake of showing up too late and missed my ride because there were so many soldiers going or coming from their weekend vacation. Daily I see mothers, fathers and girlfriends making the most of their beloved soldiers’ time off, as they walk the streets hand in hand. While in no way does the village feel occupied or in conflict, the military presence is strong here. Hwacheon seems to be, not a military town full of ordinary people, but an ordinary town full of the military. Perhaps the most poignant demonstration of this was a moonlight festival that I attended. It was held at an elementary school a few kilometers north of my town, and a few kilometers south of the DMZ. A fellow native English teacher had invited the foreigners in the community to come participate in her school’s festival. There were carnival games, cups of odeng [2. Odeng is a fish cake on a stick, often sold as street or festival food.] and other traditional foods, group aerobics, field day competitions and a concert put on by students and their teachers – who were also soldiers. I had expected to have fun and see something new, but had not anticipated to be
Web Feature: Moments
Written by Jacob Rawson Too much wine – I must have dozed; my boat drifts into rough water. Make fast the lines, make fast the lines! Now peach petals float around us; maybe paradise is near. Chiguk-chong chiguk-chong oshwa! At least we’re far away from the dusty world of men. -From The Fisherman’s Calendar, Gosan Outside the window of the Mokpo ferry terminal the sea churns with the frothy consistency of bean paste stew. I am anxious as I watch for the ticket girl to signal the captain’s decision. It is a small flat-bottom ferry that will motor out some thirty nautical miles into unprotected waters. If the wind is too strong it will not sail, and I will be stuck waiting another two days for one more shot at the next scheduled sailing. A giddy old man from Anjwa-do chuckles in the seat next to me. He is reliving tales from his world travels in a monologue that I am somehow a part of. Have I seen Huang Mountain in China? I really must go. Have I been to the Thai beaches? He continues to rattle off his world tour checklist until the captain finally appears and gives an expressionless nod. The ticket girl waves to me happily and I sigh. The Island Love 10 chugs through dull beige water out of Mokpo Harbor. Orange shipyard cranes spin overhead as tankers and freighters glide by, their girthy bellies sagging fully laden. The harbor opens and whitecaps curl across the choppy straight. Laver plots and eel rafts disappear into a sliver of shoreline off the stern. This is deep water, and the ferry begins to roll in a slowly mounting swell. The few other passengers aboard are octogenarian islanders huddled together and peeling oranges on the heated vinyl floor of the main cabin. I have the windy extremities of the vessel to myself until the ship’s engineer climbs down from the bridge to light a cigarette and finds me on the stern deck. Can I speak Korean? And where am I from? Washington state? Why, that’s where the White House is! He invites me to share a pot of barley tea in the small crew’s kitchen. We are now chugging through the northern Jindo islands. They are small, each no more than a few lengths of a tanker ship. The islands bounce in my peripheral vision as if they are floating on top of the foaming breakers. The engineer has worked on passenger ships like this for thirty-five years. He asks why I have come to such an isolated place, and I explain that I am tracing a path across the South Sea coast on foot, but that the scarcity of ferry runs between islands has made the going tough in places. My trip would have been a cinch if I had set out during his youth, he tells me. Back then there were regular ferries for each little rock – thriving island communities from Mokpo to Busan. Now as the network of expressways and sea bridges spiders out to every crack and corner of the peninsula, the ferry lines are dying one by one. Those who live on rocky crops too far out for the bridges have dropped their fishnets and plows and moved to the cities to find work sitting in stacked cubicles punching sales figures into glowing spreadsheets. The engineer recites the populations of each island as we pass. “Eight… Three… Was three, now one…” He and the captain are old, both in their seventies. The island residents are older, and they will soon be gone. It is no longer a question of decades; it is a matter years or even months. This ferry has twenty-one scheduled stops – twenty-one stepping-stones into the Yellow Sea. But most of the scheduled stops have no passengers, and today the ferry stops only six times. At each island it rams its bow up onto a concrete ramp and drops its iron jaw just long enough for one or two sun-beaten fishermen to climb off. No one boards. The engineer and captain are well past the age of retirement. When the last of the island residents die off, the engineer and captain will move in with their children in the city. The old iron-hulled Island Love 10 will find retirement in a shipyard somewhere before it is gutted for parts. It is a sad story the engineer tells, but he is unmoved as he tells it. Like the waxing of the moon and the rising of the tide, it is an inevitability. And these islands will not die altogether. Under their original caretakers, the azalea, the deer, and the magpie, they will thrive once more. This is not a story that speaks to the gall of human endeavor, and this is perhaps why I find it sad. But these human concerns are somehow transcended by a greater kind of perfection. In the ebb and flow of civilization this place has reached a sort of cyclical completion, and this is something the old ferry engineer and master of the tides understands well. *** U-do (“Cow Island”) is so named because its shape resembles a bovine in recline, or so professes the glossy wisdom of the tourist brochures. The island’s volcanic soil is black and rich, and the interior teems with fields of broccoli, chives, leeks, garlic, peanuts, and the yellow canola blossoms that blanket the island with patchwork precision each spring. On the sea the mackerel and abalone keep the men busy while the women dive under the waves for sea-grass and urchins. On a cool morning in April a horsehand at Genghis Khan Ranch drives his six horses into their corral. Few riders are expected on a cold day so early in the season, but he smiles and hums all the same. I climb a volcanic cone to the lighthouse at the highest point on the island. Horses graze below next to more volcanic mounds, which are in turn covered with
Fulbright Korea Infusion: Volume 8, Issue 2
The Infusion staff is happy to announce the publication of our newest issue, Volume 8, Issue 2 (Published July 2015). Below you can find the web edition of the issue. To access individual pieces from this issue, use the links on the left-hand side of the webpage that are listed under “Current Volume: 8.2”. Enjoy!