Well, it finally died. The TV
that is. To tell the truth, 'finally' wasn't a long time coming. It
took about three months from the time a departing teacher lobbed the
junk onto my doorstep to the time its fuzzy and oddly tinted images
receded into a symbolic pastiche of wavy lines. I had even bought a
dedicated pair of pliers to wrestle with the stalk of a channel
selector -- the knob itself was AWOL -- and lovingly wiped away a
strange white powder that seemed to collect on the screen each day.
My hospice care didn't help. When the gods call their electronic
children back into the sky, they have to go.
Being without a TV is no great
entertainment loss, especially when it only talks in foreign
tongues. But it can't be denied that for all the inanity of the
tube, or maybe because of its inanity, television does create a kind
of umbilical chord to whatever culture one happens to be parked in.
Behind the makeup, the stage props and carefully selected scenarios
of a country's TV mask, lurks a kind of official version of the
national illusions. Since the bulk of any population mostly think
what they are told to think, believe what they are told to believe,
and admire what they are told to admire, knowing the flavour of
these official illusions is important. You don't have to personally
believe, let alone agree with, what you see to understand that
zillions of people do believe and agree with the version of Korea
(or wherever) which is playing as electronic wallpaper in their
living rooms. It is truly a case of life imitating art.
This is a long winded way of
saying that I knew the inevitability of surrender in my heart of
hearts. Sooner or later I would actually go looking for another TV.
Heck, I would even pay money for another TV. Not much money though.
One of the tough lessons of living from contract to contract in a
foreign country is that whatever won't fit in your shirt pocket
should be begged, stolen or extorted, but never actually bought new.
War, pestilence or an employer's frown can turn all your capital
investments into very expensive excess baggage tomorrow.
For years I have heard tales of
foreigners in Japan furnishing whole apartments from last year's
fashions in furniture, which have just been dumped in the street by
status conscious salarymen. A decade of genteel recession may have
cooled this Japanese extravagance a bit. Anyway, from the moment I
arrived in neighbouring Korea it was clear that a sizable number of
Koreans had to swallow their pride and buy second hand. The passion
for keeping up with the Kims is just as potent in Korea as keeping
up with the Suzukis is in Japan. Nevertheless, there are any number
of working poor. My own low-status suburb of Bansong-dong sports
half a dozen second hand shops for furniture, white goods and
electronic throw-aways. In strategic spots like bus stops your can
see slotted boxes with weatherproof plastic flaps. These always
contain copies of five or six fat giveaway papers for classified
advertising. Basically, there is everything for sale, from
clapped-out motor scooters to cousin Han's used wedding dress. It's
a cultural milieu I find oddly familiar.
In this world there are those
who live as to the lord's manner born, cheerfully indebted for
millions (it seems) while they enjoy the best restaurants, swishest
clothing , late model motor cars, elegant apartments and European
holidays. Long ago I wryly understood this, but lacked the cheek to
imitate such munificence, which seems unrelated to anyone's actual
income. I have a theory that some branch of the
Mafia/church/banking/funeral industry has an ancient and thriving
system for disappearing these shooting stars each midsummer eve, and
rebirthing them with pious hearts and a perfect credit rating ....
Ah well, another of life's mysteries forever closed to the
unblessed.
Personally, I was born beyond
the pale, indelibly branded as a second hand man. I have happy
childhood memories of combing unofficial rubbish tips in the
mountain bushland west of Sydney. One day as a grubby ten year old I
triumphantly presented my mother with a set of cooking pots that had
been dumped with the garden cuttings by a weekend litterer. Later I
graduated to my own beat up old cars, and cheap apartments furnished
with a lumpy collection of cast-offs from the Wednesday auctions. In
short, I have never been in debt in my life, which has left both the
credit card companies and ambitious women deeply unimpressed. They
know a loser when they see one.
With a background like that,
hunting down a used TV should have caused no grief. When you are
effectively deaf, dumb and illiterate however, life does get a bit
harder. Trawling the free ad' rags for a household bargain in
Bansong-dong was out of the question. Nowadays I can read the blocky
hangul writing letter by letter, but the words it forms
mostly don't mean a damn. I have no wheels, and telephones terrify
me; (the rare phone call is always a mistake, which I have learned
to fight off with incomprehensible English, rather than fielding a
rush of incomprehensible Korean if I try jeonwa jalmot
geosheoshiyo - wrong number). So that left the second hand
shops. Now if a history of surviving used goods dealers teaches you
anything in the West, it's that a sucker is born every day. Maybe it
was a sad injustice to the probity of Bansong shopkeepers, but every
bone in my body said that a mug foreigner (rich by definition) doing
a mime show plea for old TV sets was, well, asking for trouble. No,
I would have to find help. But that too turned on my own particular
"foreigner profile".
The expatriate dwellers of Busan
are found in a variety of subspecies, from beachcomber, to
matrimonial refugee, to the deadly respectable. Luckiest archetype
perhaps is the strapping fresh-faced North American lad, slumming it
in Asia for a year or two before settling into a good ol' hometown
business career. He is awash with the pheromones of expected
success, potent with testosterone, innocent of doubt, and primed
with every marker of hip fashion.. Within an hour flat of arriving
in the country, this character will have some stunning Korean girl
as a constant guide and companion, so that all the little things
like mere language are never a problem. Then there the lepers, the
alcoholics and the psychopaths - creatures of the urban jungle who
for one reason or another any sane Korean will feed gingerly through
the razor wire of their mental cages, and keep out of clawing
distance. Myself, I fall into the Invisible Man slot, not obviously
mad (I hope), but too old, shabby and ugly to be anyone's vehicle
for sexual or financial ambitions. This has its upside, a kind of
unharassed freedom to wander through the crowds. It does mean though
that when you want to hustle for a second hand TV set, volunteers
don't rush to help.
My best hope seemed to be the
staffroom keepers, a couple of ever obliging students who make a
part-time buck decoding the inner sanctum of peculiar foreign
professors to the outside world, answering incomprehensible phone
calls, and sometimes even sweeping the floor. They were polite, but
somewhat nonplussed by my helplessness over so simple a project;
(only "foreigners" the world over ever really understand the
powerlessness that grows out of lacking a colloquial command of the
local language). I did learn that, this being Korea, even second
hand TV sets came in an expected range of prices.
If this were southern China ,
let alone India, the merchant would apply advanced brain surgery,
palm reading, or even charm to penetrate your innermost weaknesses.
He would then suffuse some shabby bit of merchandise with seven
auras of enticement, before naming a price that would buy the last
emperor's palace. You'd shrug and smile, knowing it was an ambit
claim, before settling in to the enjoyable contest of beating down
this price to a level that you were assured would leave the
merchant's children starving in the gutter. You would leave,
dazzled, bamboozled, knowingly cheated, but content that you had
engaged the local colour.
But this is Korea. You ask how
much. You are told, briefly and without emotion, and that's it. Take
it or leave it. A hundred and fifty years ago there was only the
bare bones of commerce in Korea, big time or small time. Just a
weekly market for bartering, or exchanging heavy strings of an
almost useless currency for some trinkets from an outcaste class of
travelling hawkers. In neo-Confucian Korea, the dogma had it that
trade was the lowest form of degrading activity (a line that a
healthy chunk of China's seething masses never bought), not that
this stopped the Joseon court from granting crucial monopolies to a
favoured few. Well, nowadays of course all Koreans know that someone
in the country must master trade, or even the kimchi will curdle.
They get around it by allowing a handful of giant corporations to
flourish though backroom collusion and government favours, while
tolerating a new class of small shopkeepers who mostly get to stock
their shops with the same narrow range of stuff from a few large
wholesalers. The spirit of your average Korean though seems
uninspired by the freewheeling profits to be won haggling over some
dongle in the marketplace.
Nature has apparently arranged
that in any collection of human psyches, there is a certain quota of
activity devoted to lying, cheating, betraying your temporary
friends and clawing for advantage. In the American dream that may
find an outlet by bulldozing your hamburger stall into a national
franchise chain. For, say, a Fijian village boy today, or for an
ambitious lad in many a past empire, it is and was expressed by
joining the military and beating your way to a generalship. For a
south Asian bazaar merchant, the challenge is that of the lone
hunter - never letting a customer out the door without buying some
trinket. The Korean dream though, for the majority, deep down still
appears to be fixated on the ancient Confucian ambition of getting
your son into the bureaucracy, using any and every stratagem known.
More abstractly, a typical Korean wants the reassurance of an
institutional structure, whether it is the civil service, a bank, a
trade union, or a weekend hiking club. Once there, all the human
genius for wolfish charm and double dealing is deployed to gain
power - power to dispense favours, accept bribes, wrangle
advantages, flaunt status .... But buying a lousy TV set ? Nah. Just
pay top dollar and stick it in your lounge room.
Eventually young Min agreed to
humour me. Perhaps it was a gesture in the name of kibun, the
Korean sense of a balance or harmony. When I came in to check my
mail each day after mentioning the TV set, there had been an air of
mild unease, like a bar of unfinished music. But having made a
commitment, Min immediately cheered up and one afternoon we took a
fifteen minute walk along the back of the town There an excavator
teetered dangerously on a ledge of munched hillside, eating a new
road out of the greenbelt. But our destination was towards upper
Bansong, to a nondescript shopfront out the highway. Old
refrigerators cluttered the footpath, while the fingerprinted
windows revealed an interior that was really a storeroom stacked to
bursting with rusty washing machines, refrigerators, air
conditioners, and against one wall, a pile of dusty television sets.
The owner, a slight, unobtrusive man in his thirties, put down a
spanner as we entered, and quietly taking in our purpose, led the
way to his TV sets.
There were three prices, he
explained at once - seventy thousand won, fifty thousand and thirty
thousand. Hopefully he switched on a larger, newer model. It would
never have fitted in the tiny corner of my "economy apartment",
a.k.a. dormitory, which can be set aside for such extravagance. I
pointed high in the stack to a small, obviously older model that was
slightly less decrepit than the other small TV sets. Min and the
second hand man looked at each other helplessly. Foreigners were
beyond comprehension. Neither of them, you could see, would be
caught dead with such an object displayed in their own apartment.
Still, it was brought down and dusted off.
"When do I pay him?" I whispered
to Min as the man went away for something. An dull question. MIn
shrugged and muttered something like "whenever..". "We had better
get a taxi", I suggested. Min looked startled at my stupidity. "Oh
no, he'll take us home in his truck ...". And so he did, after
sitting his young daughter down with some homework. We ground along
Bansong's narrow, congested streets to the college in a brand new,
dark blue, double cab one ton truck. Min and I nursed the TV between
us on the back seat. Working through my interpreter, the second hand
man asked a few friendly questions. Now, properly acquainted as two
human beings, it seemed more a gesture of friendship than service
when he humped my still unpaid for TV up five flights of stairs. I
graciously offered him the corpse of the old Goldstar as a trade in,
and at last handed over thirty thousand won. He bowed, not meeting
my eye, suddenly uncomfortable at being a mere merchant, and hurried
away. The TV flickered happily with the mush that TV sets are
supposed to flicker with.
The second hand man interested
me. He was the nearest thing I had encountered to a genuinely
independent businessman in Korea, so it was natural to wonder about
his origins. "If you were writing a novel", I mused aloud to Min and
Choi several days later, how would you describe the character of a
typical second hand merchant?" This left them completely flummoxed.
The concept of describing character with detached humour seemed a
weird activity, not something you could "use". After much pushing
they decided that such people were probably not good, meaning
perhaps, not quite respectable. In fact, they couldn't imagine
anyone going into the second hand business who wasn't a no-hoper,
unable to get a better job.
"Well", I persisted, "what do
you think of entrepreneurs?". This seemed a reasonable question.
They were, after all, students in a vocational college and destined
for some kind of business future. "Entrepreneur" turned out to be a
tough concept too. Big companies have big money, so they are to be
respected, and the trick is to get a job in one before you are
thirty. It was unthinkable to them that they might use their skills
to start a business. Small business startups were only done by
losers... I briefly reviewed Korea's almost instant
industrialization with funds from the Vietnam War, and suggested
that future growth would have a lot to do with more adventurous
business startups by individuals. They were baffled. The Confucian
mindset is still potent.
I sighed, exasperated once more
by the gag of language, unable to talk to people like the second
hand man who really might have a story to tell. This time luck
smiled. Grasping a bilingual dictionary, Choi suddenly offered to
walk with me to the second hand shop for a doorstop interview. It
was my turn to be startled, until I realized that for Choi this was
a heaven sent opportunity to rehearse his own ambition to interpret
for large companies. So we retraced the earlier walk along the back
of the town, while I did furious mental research on how to pose as a
drop-in journalist from a famous international magazine.
Choi is a native of Bansong
whose parents had been peasant farmers before the district began to
be buried under concrete, not so many years ago. With that
background, it had been revealing to learn of his contempt for small
business, and automatic assumption of the old Confucian gentleman's
dream of life in a large bureaucracy. Our short walk seemed an
excellent chance to gain a little insight into the dynamics of this
still semi-isolated, quasi-urban community. The twenty story tower
blocks which now house much of the population had only been here for
about five years, he said. For all Bansong's apparent insularity to
an outsider, he did not expect to be recognized by many people in
the street, and felt there was no cohesive identity to the place.
Who were the community leaders? A few politicians appeared around
polling time, and were invisible at any other time. Were there
informal community leaders whom people tended to turn to? He
wouldn't admit to knowing any. And this new road, smashing shanties
in its path, redefining the town limits, chewing up a great swathe
of the mountainside, ... what was it all about? He hadn't a clue.
Hmm.
Our interview subject gave no
sign of surprise when we barged in, Choi importantly explaining that
I was a writer and wanted to do an interview on the second hand
business. When I was a kid, the arrival of someone on journalistic
type business would have lead to a certain tightness in the chest, a
licking of lips and a nervous twitch of embarrassment. To the TV
generation though, interviewing seems to be an entirely normal thing
to do, something for which they have been coached by daily
observation for the whole of their conscious lives. The second hand
man was sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing serious things to
the back of a refrigerator with an oxy torch. He offered the barest
hint of recognition, a slight smile, but seemed happy enough to give
short, sensible answers to my questions while he got on with the
brazing job.
He had, he said, been in this
business for about four years. Why did he choose it? Well, he was a
refrigeration mechanic by trade, and that was a skill which could be
put to use in a business like this. What sort of people used second
hand shops? The second hand man was clear about this. They were the
naturally frugal, but only sometimes the poor. Some were even rich.
Where did he get stuff? At auctions? Some was from auctions. A lot
of it came when something broke down, so people just went out and
bought a new item. Then they came to him with the cast-off. What was
his best selling product? Refrigerators. What was the best suburb in
Busan to have a second hand shop? Namcheon-dong, he said without
hesitation, or explanation; (this is a seaside suburb with a high
socioeconomic profile, not far from the CBD). How about building a
chain or franchise of second hand shops. No way, he shot back with
unusual vehemence. Anyway, he was certain that the government has
restrictions on the spread of chain stores ... I explained the
innovation of Australia's 'Cash Converters' franchise, which has
borrowed from the old pawn shop system, but become hip. They have
wide open self-service walkways, presenting second hand goods with
all the style of new products, and often at near-new prices. It is a
boom business. Choi and the second hand man both looked disdainful,
probably for different reasons. Well, is the present competition
tough? Oh yes, it is very tough. And what did the second hand man
expect to be doing twenty years from now? For the first time he
hesitated, then answered with confidence. Why, he would have a
bigger second hand shop on this very spot.
What had Choi learned, I
wondered, from the second hand man? Was it still a business for
no-hopers, unable to get a better job? Cornered, Choi had to admit
that the second hand man was really quite a nice fellow. He was, I
decided myself, actually too nice a fellow to build another Hyundai
out of his ramshackle shop. A tradesman who would never be out of
work, he was comfortable with his oxy torch, and satisfied with a
small profit from the steady stream of people who wanted a cheap
replacement refrigerator. Perhaps the second hand man would not be
the architect of a cyberspace Korea, but he was in his own way
reassuring. He was no fool, but no pretender either. His ancestry
was probably similar to Choi's, but they had made different choices.
One had submitted to the social pressures of the old Confucian dream
and despised manual labour. He would spend his lifetime pushing
piles of paper around a desk, and compete for the stickytape
shoulder badges of institutional prestige. The other, unashamed to
use his hands, would remain honest, fix old refrigerators, and make
a decent, independent living.
* Note on personal
names: all names in this Diary have been changed to protect the
privacy of individuals, unless stated otherwise.
"The Second Hand Man"... copyrighted to
Thor May 2002; all rights reserved
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