Web Feature: A Return to Normalcy
Written by Lea Crowley, ETA 2014-’15 As I began planning for my return to the United States, the phrase “A Return to Normalcy” kept coming to mind. This phrase was Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign promise; he was offering what nearly every American sought after the instability of World War I. After bringing WWI to an official end, the American people wanted to return to the way things were before the war. Back to normal. However, the definition of “normal” had completely changed after the war. American society had undergone innumerable drastic changes in a short window of time: women as wage earners, a lost generation of men and boys, transformation of technology, fashion, music, and art. Nothing was the same, but Americans desperately wanted to return to “normal.” After living in Korea for nearly a year now, I’m surprised at how well I can relate to that desire for normalcy. I have decided to return to the United States, and I am beginning the process of accepting my decision. Throughout this process, I keep finding myself revisiting the phrase “a return to normalcy” and wondering, “What is normal?” Normal in Korea is nowhere near normal in America, and vice versa. I have spent the past year adjusting to normalcy in Korea, and I finally feel comfortable with Korean norms. It’s normal to walk down crooked cobblestone sidewalks, to bow and be bowed to by my coworkers and students, to buy vegetables from grannies sitting on the curb. It doesn’t faze me that I’m completely surrounded by a foreign language; whether it be blaring from a radio, on a restaurant sign, or spoken aloud, it’s all completely normal. When I return to Chicago, what will normal be? Before I came to Korea, it was completely normal to be constantly prepared for a stranger to attack me in some way, shape or form. It was normal for the public transportation to be dirty, smelly and relatively unreliable. I became hardened to the negative aspects of my city, because I had never known anything else. Now that I’ve lived in Korea, my expectations for public cleanliness and personal safety have been drastically altered. I can walk around outside while looking at my phone without having to worry that someone will snatch it out of my hands and sell it. I don’t have to clench my fists and wear an angry expression to prevent people from trying to attack me whenever I step outside. And it’s really nice. I like this sense of safe normalcy. But in a few months’ time, I will have to get reacquainted with everyday, normal parts of life in Chicago. Don’t get me wrong, though. I do not hate Chicago, nor do I only recall the negative aspects of living there. Although I’m anxious about my capacity to readjust to Chicago’s low standards for normal public behavior, cleanliness and overall safety, I am looking forward to the more positive aspects of normalcy in Chicago. I’m ready and willing to embrace Chicago’s food scene once more – real pizza, tamales, curries, hot dogs, falafel, Chipotle – as well as the weight I’m sure to gain from enjoying it so thoroughly. I am excited to explore the diverse neighborhoods of my city, and rediscover the treasures each has to offer: thrift shops, cultural centers, yoga studios, musical performances, and views of Lake Michigan. Chicago may be rough around the edges, but that’s part of why I love it so much. Korea has become familiar, comfortable, and absolutely normal; how can anything else feel like home after this? Like the Americans who wanted a “return to normalcy” after the chaos of WWI, I am desperately hoping that I can adjust to life in Chicago once more. I am not hoping for things to return to the way they were before I left. I’m afraid that the intense changes Korea has wreaked on the way I think, speak and live, will make it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) for me to feel normal anywhere else. For example, living in Korea has changed the way I perceive social situations and how I decide to interact accordingly within specific social situations. I cannot shake the habit of being subconsciously “polite”; by Korean standards, younger people are expected to show politeness and respect to their elders in very obvious ways. Some of these obvious ways include: bowing to anyone who may look even slightly older than you, pouring drinks for others while eating a meal together, always handing things to people with two hands, and not crossing your legs in public. I feel afraid that these subconscious and completely normal parts of interacting within Korean society will earn me nothing but dirty looks and rolled eyes back in Chicago. In addition to affecting the way I perceive social situations, living in Korea has changed the way I communicate with others. Because I speak broken Korean seemingly more often than I speak fluent English, I have found myself attempting to speak English in a more Korean way. My grammar has become awkward, and I have begun using “aegyo” when speaking English. “Aegyo” is a Korean term used to describe acting intentionally “cute”; female Korean pop stars often use aegyo to win over fans. For example, these women will speak in a higher, more childlike tone of voice, overemphasize their “girlishness” by overdramatically failing at athletic activities, and use lots of cute hand gestures when they speak. In general, women in Korea (foreign or not) are expected to show off their aegyo, especially when addressing their elders. However, I know that my interpretation of “aegyo” would not be seen as cute or normal in Chicago; in fact, I am positive that Chicagoans would find it weird, annoying, frustrating, or some combination of the three. In a way, I’m grateful that I feel so conflicted about moving back to America. Feeling this apprehension about going back to my hometown made me realize just how meaningful my experience
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
Foreword: Volume 8, Issue 2
Written by Josephine Reece, Editor-In-Chief 2014-’15 In this issue of Infusion our authors draw attention to moments of transition and revision. As foreigners living, working and teaching in Korea we are constantly faced with situations that require us to reevaluate our perspectives. Mostly these situations are exciting. Yet, with all the little and large things that life throws at us, we all have moments when excitement gives way to exhaustion or annoyance, until something happens which surprises us into joy and compassion again. This cycle of ups and downs is incredibly common when adjusting to a new place — so common that people who study culture shock have names for the various stages: honeymoon, disintegration, independence. These stages don’t just happen once, but repeat themselves throughout time in a foreign country. As such it can be difficult to find a still place from which to take a step back and see where we have been. But during this time of constant movement — ups and downs and interruptions — the one thing we rely on is each other. Our friends are there for us when our schools change the schedule unexpectedly and also when we manage to get tickets to the sold out Kpop concert. They give us a lens through which to view our history, showing us where and who we have been. Knowing that someone has had the same experiences of hilarity, annoyance, and joy lets us appreciate and understand our own experiences more, even the terrible ones. This year our Fulbright family was touched by the sudden loss of two members — Morrow Willis and Jim McFadden. They are remembered by their friends through the experiences they shared together, many of which they documented in past volumes of Infusion. Even though those memories are now touched with sadness they can still bring great joy to the people who knew Morrow and Jim. The authors in this issue navigate through everything from stereotypes to city streets. As they explore Korea they give themselves and their subjects the liberty to be in transition — imperfect, uninhibited. It is the same freedom we give and hope to find among our closest friends and family. Family can be frustrating, infuriating, but in the end they are always our biggest supporters. Whether long-distance or near at hand, our friend and family relationships grow with us through the grant year and our authors explore their changing relationships alongside their changing views of Korea. As you turn the pages of this issue, I hope these pieces will challenge you to appreciate the times of change in your own life as well as the relationships which keep you whole. Please enjoy Infusion Volume 8, Issue 2.