I get up at 6:50 a.m. Kyung-Mee left around
6 to go swimming. She has been taking swimming classes
at Sajik Stadium for the past month or so. Usually we
have a western breakfast together: pancakes, French toast,
or eggs and toast. Because I am alone, I do not feel
like cooking so I have some cold cereal with bananas, honey
and home-made yogurt. The cereal was made by the Kellog's
Company, but I've never seen it in the States. It looks like
dark brown corn flakes but is made of a traditional Korean
grain called "hyun mee". I listen to the VOA on my short
wave radio while I eat. The main news stories are the
Iraq crisis, the Nagano Winter Olympics and the healthy U.S.
economy (despite the problems in Asia). Gradually, the
signal is overcome by a stronger one which is sending out
traditional (Asian) Indian rhythms. I cannot hear either
broadcast very well so I shut it off. I brush my teeth
and shave with my Braun razor (switched to 220 volts).
I do some stretching exercises; I can now palm the floor while
standing up with feet together and knees straight. Flexibility
is especially welcome in Korea where folks spend so much time
sitting on the floor.
When I get ready to go out I decide to leave
the bed on the floor. Our one-room apartment is quite
small, maybe ten feet by twelve feet (plus an attic and a
tiny kitchen). We could have gotten something bigger,
but the good deals in Korean rentals require a big security
deposit and no monthly rent. We opted for the security
deposit but could not afford the luxury suite. Anyway,
we like the neighborhood. Consequently we don't have
enough space for a western style bed. We use a traditional
Korean bed called an "ee-bool". An ee-bool is a thick
soft mat that's placed on the floor and usually picked up
and put in the closet every morning. It took me about
a week to get used to sleeping on it, but now I consider it
very comfortable. I think ee-bools are dying out.
I did an informal poll of about 100 of my high school students;
they said all their grandparents, about half of their parents
and maybe five of them use ee-bools regularly. Regardless,
I should have picked up the bed before I left. I guess
I didn't for two reasons: 1. I'm a lazy American man, 2. The
floor is cold in the winter.
As in all Korean houses, we don't wear shoes
inside. The traditional Korean remedy for cold floors
is called "ohn-dohl", a system whereby the heat from the kitchen
stove is diverted under the wooden floor. In modern
Korean houses, hot water is forced through tubes imbedded
in the concrete floor. The concrete is then covered
with spongy cushioned linoleum. However, I don't find
Pusan winters to be very cold (same latitude as North Carolina).
So if I have an extra shirt on and an ee-bool between my butt
and cold concrete, I don't generally need the heat on to keep
warm.
Perhaps our kitchen deserves some words here.
It's ten feet long and maybe five feet wide. Two of
those five feet are taken up by a row of cabinets and a sink.
We have a gas range on one of the cabinets (no oven).
There is a drain in the cement floor; water from the sink
comes out of a plastic tube, runs along the floor and goes
out the drain. Consequently, you have to mind your feet
when you empty a large pot in the sink. We have no bathroom
per se so we brush teeth and take bucket baths in the kitchen.
For those who find such behavior indelicate, there are several
public bath houses in every residential area in Pusan.
Each "mohk yohk tang" (bath house) is divided into sections
for men and women and has pools for hot, cold or tepid bathing.
At 8:30 I put on my blue winter coat and go
outside. My schedule varies every day, but my first
class starts at either 9, 10 or 11 a.m. I try to leave
an hour and a half before class starts even though it doesn't
take that long to get to work. Wednesday classes start
at 11 for me, but I am leaving especially early today to make
some careful observations.
My first stop is the rest room. We share
two communal toilets with our neighbors. They look like
two little tool sheds until you open the door. They
are Asian style toilets; there is no throne, just a white
porcelain trough in the floor with a small hood to catch any
incidental splash. Westerners in Korea affectionately
refer to them as "squatters". When they are used properly,
they are, in my opinion, more sanitary and more anatomically
correct than sitting style. Unfortunately, the men and
boys in the neighboring units don't always use them properly.
(Surprise!) Also, because the toilets aren't heated,
their reservoirs froze up for three of the coldest days of
January. We could guess where the neighbors were headed
if they were carrying a bucket of water with them.
Our building is a two-story affair with a small
hardtop courtyard surrounded by a modest wall, as per Korean
tradition. Stones, mud and tiles have given way to concrete
and cinder blocks, but it is difficult to find a house with
no wall around it. On the first floor of our building
there are two families who reside in two rooms each.
One family has two middle school daughters and an elementary
school son named Yong-Suck. They own a nearby restaurant
selling inexpensive traditional food. Consequently,
they use a corner of our courtyard to store food. The
containers are made of red plastic but mimic the shape of
the traditional clay crocks. Some of the containers
are four feet tall and hold (I'm totally guessing) 70 gallons
of salt, pickled radish or "kimchi" (pickled cabbage).
The other family consists of parents, paternal
grandmother and elementary school son, Hyo-Bean. The
mother is a factory worker and the father is a stone cutter
(but he seems to spend more time playing soccer and hanging
out at the local Chinese food restaurant). The father
has two dogs, but it's the grandmother who feeds them and
cleans up after them, complaining all the while.
There is also a pair of female university students
in one room and a male student in another room. The
male student's mother comes every week or two in order to
bring him food and to do his laundry. The female students
have to do their own chores. By trying to help their
sons so much, Korean mothers often seem to make them helpless.
I've never said more than "hi" to any of these three.
Kyung-Mee and I have the room on the end nearest the gate
so, besides the sliding glass door, we have one window more
than the other rooms.
On the second floor lives our landlady, a widow
in her fifties. She is exceptionally kind and polite
to us. Her daughter lives nearby and drops off her young
son most mornings before she goes to work. He used to
whine constantly, but he is getting accustomed to living with
Grandma. I have never been upstairs, but there must
be another small room up there. Two young women, probably
high school dropouts come down occasionally to use the toilets.
On February 18th the sky is overcast.
It is actually one day of a string of 14 where we haven't
seen the sun much at all. Behind our house, there is
a pair of four-story buildings. In between them you
can just make out Gum Jung San Mountain which towers over
the northwest corner of Pusan. Across the valley there is
another mountain range which fences in Pusan on the east.
The valley widens out to the south until land gives way to
the East Sea (Sea of Japan). The mountains have accomplished
the feat of checking urban sprawl and providing clean air
from the forests.
Korea's geography has given her people two notions
about natural beauty: mountains and coastline. As Korea
is a peninsula, the seashore here is never more than an hour
or two away by car. The fruits of the sea (including
fish, shellfish, squiggly invertebrates and many kinds of
seaweed) make up a major portion of the Korean diet.
On the other hand, virtually every vista in Korea includes
mountains. In fact, there was a communication system
created during the Chosun Dynasty, which was designed to warn
of a Japanese attack. The mountaintops were prepared
with bonfires and manned with soldiers. When the enemy
ships came into sight in Pusan, the bonfires were lit in succession
all the way to Seoul, 420 kilometers away. All the flat
land in Korea is either living space or farmland, so the only
place you can find forests in Korea is on a mountain.
Consequently, the word for mountain, "san", has become synonymous
with forest. There are no natural lakes, prairies or
deserts in Korea. Consequently, all the traditional folk stories
take place in one of the two areas.
I walked out through the gate, down three steps,
onto our street. I have never met the neighbors in front
of our house. I do know that on top of their wall is
an iron grate entangled with a woody vine. In the summer,
the vine sprouts new green growths and beautiful purple flowers
that look like drooping lupines. On February 18th, I
notice for the first time that last year's green has been
trimmed off leaving the clean naked woody vine exposed.
Other people I see in the street: a man on a
red bike, a woman carrying a child, some elementary school
kids on their way to school, walking past the parked cars.
The woman is carrying the child in the traditional style;
he is wrapped and secured to her back with a "po day gi".
This is basically a small soft cotton blanket with straps
which are used to tie the bundle on. Although it seems
tiring to wear a loaded po day gi all day, it does keep your
baby clean and comfortable while allowing you to use your
hands for something else. The baby in front of my house
is also wearing a white surgical mask, presumably to protect
him from colds. Two small dogs run nervously a short
way, turn around and run back. Some Pusan National University
students walk towards my right against the flow of the other
pedestrians, towards the back gate of the campus.
After turning to my left and walking a short
way toward the corner, I hear water running in the typical
Pusan drainage system on my street. It's a trench covered
by flat removable slabs of concrete. Sometimes you can
see work crews around town shoveling them out, heaping black
sludge along the side of the road. They usually leave
the sludge for a day or so to let it dry in the sun.
At that time, it's best to vacate the area.
I can hear the sound of a vending truck in the
distance. These trucks often cruise slowly through residential
areas playing recorded messages and selling many kinds of
foods or food products. I can not make out what they
are selling today. My favorite is the "jay chup gook"
vendor. Jay chup gook is a transparent broth, which
is made by boiling nickel-sized clams. It tastes all
right, but the real attraction is that it is supposed to get
rid of hangovers. Another guy whom I often see in the
morning is the "go mul jang su". I call him the "yut"
man. Yut is a Korean taffy made from pumpkin or rice
syrup. In the old days, the yut man would walk the streets
pushing a big cart and making noise by clanging a pair of
thick-bladed scissors. Children would bring large pieces
of reusable garbage that they scavenged, like a broken fan,
an old tire or a big hunk of iron. The yut man would
cut the taffy with the scissors and trade a piece for each
piece of garbage that he thought was useful. These days,
the yut man trades money for the goods (probably more sanitary)
but he still clangs the scissors to tell the folks that he
is coming.
When I get to the corner, I note that the garbage
pick-up area is full of kitchen utensils and equipment.
It seems as if someone is either moving or completely renovating
her kitchen. One of the earliest Korean religions was
Totemism. Before Buddhism arrived from India through
China in the fourth century A.D., most Koreans believed that
inanimate objects had souls. They worshiped nature and
made important decisions according to her signs. Some
say that these beliefs have survived in the Korean psyche,
in modified forms, until modern times. An example of
this is that people feel that using another's used goods will
transfer their luck to you. If you don't know the previous
owner, it's best not to buy used goods. This, combined
with the affluence of the late 80s, resulted in a huge glut
of decent but unwanted used goods. It's possible to
find perfectly good refrigerators or living room sets abandoned
in the street. Intrepid foreigners (me included) have
furnished entire apartments for free. I have never seen
a Korean flea market. However, the current economic
crisis is likely to put a damper on that kind of behavior.
We live on a quiet side street. When you
walk to the corner and turn right, the street slopes gently
downhill, away from the mountain, towards the Chang Jeon Dong
Subway Station. The neighborhood is a combination of
residential and small business. Many people live in
their shops. There is always someone in the street,
but it's usually only crowded in the late afternoon and early
evening. Because the businesses are open at different
times, there is always someone keeping an eye on things.
There is low crime, and some milk or a package of salt is
just a short walk away. To me, it seems like a model
for urban planners. The buildings are all four stories
or shorter. A representative list of businesses is:
a bakery, an ice cream store, a make-up store, a book rental
store, a Chinese restaurant, several inexpensive Korean restaurants,
a hardware store, a flower shop, a tailor, a photo shop, a
traditional food shop, a street food vendor, some fruit stands,
some pharmacies, a town office, a jewelry shop, a real estate
agent, some convenience stores, a video rental and several
clothing stores. Some small businesses have many products;
one tiny shop sells jeans, yogurt and cigarettes. Some
businesses cater to the university students: a few bars, some
video game rooms, three fried chicken restaurants, a video
room (where some close friends can watch movies together)
and several karaoke rooms. One of the most unusual places
is the traditional oriental medicine shop where you can watch
the proprietor make extracts of such things as jujube, ginseng
or dogs.
Walking down the street toward the bus stop,
things are relatively quiet. I hear the call of a magpie,
a sign of good luck in South Korea. A flock of sparrows
alights in a nearby bush. Merchants are opening businesses.
Live fish swim in the tanks in front of the seafood restaurants.
There are too many boxes at the fruit stand for the owner
to close the protective fence. Some small-time vendors
have simply wrapped their goods in a tarp and left them on
the sidewalk all night long. These folks and others
have trusted in the goodness of their neighbors for yet another
night and come up winners. When was the last time you
saw a merchant in any American city of three and a half million
people do that?
I walk two blocks. The street to my right
holds a tiny traditional market. There are two butchers,
a bakery, a traditional cookie store, a shoe store, a small
supermarket, a grain store, a kitchenware store and several
fruit and vegetable stands which spill out onto the pavement.
You can go here to get your sesame seeds toasted or to have
some rice ground into flour. You can buy a pig head
or a cow tail. At first glance, I thought that the supermarket
was bound to do in the smaller merchants in the area.
However, it seems that the proprietors have, consciously or
not, worked out a system to coexist peacefully. The
supermarket has vegetables and meats, but not in varieties
or at prices that are going to put the neighbors out of business.
I walk by one of the pharmacies. There
is a long counter, which divides the shop into two parts:
a large section for the clerk, a small section for the customer.
Customers are not allowed to browse. They tell the pharmacist
what they want and he or she gets it for them, even Band-aids
and aspirin. It is like what I imagine the old-fashioned
country general stores once were. One way that pharmacists
have increased profits is selling what they call "power drinks".
In my opinion, they trick hung-over and overworked middle
aged men into drinking a combination of sugar, water, nicotine,
caffeine, vitamin B and perhaps the extract of a dried mushroom.
Apparently they get the jolt they expect because they keep
going back for more.
I walk past a woman cleaning a coffee vending
machine. Coffee has replaced tea as the hot drink of
choice. Apparently some college student or an older
man at a company party drank too much alcohol last night.
He left his evening meal partially digested by a telephone
pole. Not an uncommon sight in either residential districts
or the city's hopping nightspots.
I walk past a Tae Kwon Do gym on my right and
the neighborhood police station on my left. There are
usually three or four old or handicapped men sitting on the
bench in front of the police station chatting and playing
with their canes. The morning of February 18th is a
bit cool for socializing; there is only one person there,
an older man I do not recognize. He is not a regular.
He is smoking a cigarette and has a blue surgeon's mask hanging
from his left ear.
Next to the police station is the neighborhood
playground. It has a slide, some swings, a merry-go-round
and a jungle gym. The ground is covered with sand, and
a few short trees line the side adjacent to the bus stop.
There are also a few waist-high stone planters. In the
summer, the city fills them with flowers. In the winter
they contain a hardy, colorful plant which looks like a blue
and purple cabbage. Apparently those three cold days
in January were too much even for the stout cabbage. The cabbages
are keeled over and emitting a last gasp.
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