"Sek-shee"

Add-On Story, adult ESL class:

“His girlfriend broke up with him.
He was very sad.
So I bought him a pet cow.
I think a pig is better than a cow.
I think a cow is better than a pig, because beef is more expensive.”

“Sexy,” or in Korean, “Sek-shee,” is a new and elusive concept in South Korea. Much more popular and achievable is “cute.” I think that one of the phrases I found myself uttering the most was, “That’s so cute and Korean.” Fuzzy sheep and monkey hats that tie under the chin, socks with babies whose lips purse out of the fabric, smiling ice cream cone fans, and sunny side up post-it notes are the norm. Baskin Robbins servers wearing little white elf hats are cute. Pop songs and music videos are cute. Young couples are sickeningly cute.

Because sexiness is so new in Korea, it is taboo for couples to kiss or walk with their arms around each others’ waists in public. They don’t gaze lustily into each others’ eyes. Instead, they just walk around being cute. They hold hands. They flirt. The boy makes fun of the girl and then she pouts in a squeaky voice. I don’t know how Korea gets away with this one, but matching couple shirts are cool. They are omnipresent – couples wearing T-shirts with matching corny love quips, couples wearing matching polo shirts, couples wearing matching winter coats, couples wearing matching sneakers. It was horrifyingly cute. Sexuality is a funny thing, though, and it would spring up in places and in ways I never expected in Korea.

For a woman to bear shoulders in Korea is scorned, although some youth can probably pull it off. They do not wear low cut shirts or tank tops, even if they are exercising outdoors. Once, I was spending the night in traditional Korean housing with my friends, ‘Anchovy Poop,’ and they were joking that with Okhee’s perm all mussed up and the fake long eyelashes she had glued on for the month she was looking pretty sexy. To complete the picture, I reached over and pulled her T-shirt collar down over one shoulder, and one of the younger women shrieked and grabbed her friend’s arm in disbelief. They had a good laugh about it, but it was something they would have never considered doing. Before I knew that shoulders were such a faux-pas, I went exploring my town in a tank top. A Korean pulled over and tried to take me home, not because he thought I was a good catch, but because he was an old man thinking I was a prostitute. Woops. And yet, mini-skirts are A-OK. While a shoulder might imply prostitution, a skirt ending just below where the cheek meets the thigh means a chic young lady.

That prostitution is so acceptable also seems a contradiction to the taboo of sexuality in Korea. Although every little kiss is hidden from the public eye, everyone knows that the buildings with double-striped spinning barber shop poles along highly trafficked streets are not actually barber shops. It is understood that many young men pay for a prostitute before entering the army for two years after high school where it might be hard to meet a nice girl. Even some singing rooms have pretty ladies that men can rent to sing with and enjoy.

Although it is not discussed, men are not the only ones who have fun before tying the knot. When I asked a co-teacher if she’d had sex before marriage, she replied, “Of course!” It seems to be a little bit more rare than in the U.S., though, and I’m not sure if this more traditional thinking about sex or if it’s simply because they tend to live with their parents until marriage. There is a solution to this problem, however, for those youngsters who wish to do the deed, or even for those who wish to cheat on their spouses. It’s called a ‘love motel.’

When I traveled to another town for a week in the winter to teach an English camp, the Korean government put me up in a lovely motel. It had red mood lighting, plastic ivy in the overhead light fixture, a pornography channel on the television, and a spotty couch. There were even ropes hanging down over the entrance of the parking garage to conceal the license plates of the men parked there from their wives! When my parents came to visit me, I was sure to find them an equally accommodating place to stay. Before they arrived, I tried to make a reservation at the Mirage (pronounced Miragy), but when I told the receptionist that I needed a room for 5 nights, she simply said “OK” without typing or writing anything down. Apparently, not very many people book the Mirage in advance, or for five days straight. Although it lacked the ivy and the spots on the couch, I had no doubts what the Mirage was. When I was walking down the alley to the entrance, three of my students from the previous school year saw me and waved. As I turned red and waved back, they stifled a giggle as they hurried past.

Even prostitution and love motels are a fairly contained space for sex in Korean culture. What really shocked me was the school talent show. Any form of sexual expression, or really any expression, is jailed up by the long gray skirts and pants of the school uniform, the dress code limiting hair length and banning makeup or accessories, and, in some classes, separation of girls’ and boys’ seating. At the school festival, though, no uniforms were required. And they were allowed to dance. After the initial shock of watching my naïve middle school girls undulating in cut-off skirts and heels, I went on stage for a cheesy performance, with eight cavalier 6th graders as my back-up singers, of “Where Is the Love?” (which was nowhere in the league of embarrassment that I felt at the 8th grade graduation ceremony in which my co-teachers dressed me in too-small red bellbottoms, a sequined scarf, and a fro and made me sing ‘Dancing Queen’). Following my act was Ms. Lee, the notoriously strict P.E. teacher who sat next to me in the teacher’s lounge in an Adidas sweatsuit reviewing her dance moves when the other teachers weren’t around. She walked onto the stage in a hot pink, midriff flaunting belly dance outfit. Every student began to cheer as she started to shake her hips. Before the song was over, she had shimmied, writhed, and gotten down on all fours to pelvic thrust. For the grand finale, eight gussied up students joined her onstage.

By far the most absurd outlet of Korean sexuality I was fortunate enough to witness was Hyesindang Park. For my birthday, four of my friends joined me for the excursion to Samcheok. Even though Samcheok is a small remote area in the northeast province, it is well-known for its beaches, a cave, and most notoriously... the Penis Park. According to the legend, a virgin drowned off of the coast of Samcheok. Since her death, the fishermen were bringing up empty hooks. After they urinated, though, they found that the fish were abundant. In order to please the virgin and sustain their luck, they dedicated a park to the girl. A park full of penises. Hyesindang Park was a pinnacle of masculinity and sex. Immense wooden penises sprouted from the ground in traditional and abstract forms, sometimes with Zodiac animals carved into the staff or nails hammered into it or even a fetus resting inside attached by an umbilical rope. You could sit on penis benches, hit a penis gong, and of course, gawk at the giant phallus cannon that bobbed up and down over a trickle of a waterfall. We frolicked among the erect statues until we found ourselves standing on the coast in awe. Suddenly, not a penis was in sight, except for a questionable lighthouse. We dove into the crisp water, dodging sea urchins and scrambling over rocks and accepting a plate of freshly caught sushi from the only others enjoying the scene, a group of teenagers fishing and cooking ramen on a hotpot. In a way, Hyesindang Penis Park seemed like the least Korean place I had ever seen, so out of place in the land of innocent monkey hats and ice cream fans. But in a way, it fit perfectly in the country that never failed to surprise me with its randomness and absurdity.

Mouse Disease

Acrostic Poems, After School Class:

Judy is not
Ugly even though she looks a
Duck,
Yeah.
– Judy, 1st Grade Student, Seokjeon Middle School

Do you like
Apple?
No, I like melon.
– Dan, 1st Grade Student, Seokjeon Middle School

On top of all my adventures in South Korea, I was lucky enough to travel around Asia a bit while I was in the neighborhood. Before my big trip in the winter, I had heard that a lot of people living in Korea felt that they missed it as they traveled around. For me, it came as a refreshing break as well as an eye-opener as to how different all of Asia is. Had I not traveled, I might have made the grave mistake that all of Asia, or at least East Asia, is like Korea. It isn’t. As far as I could tell, all of the countries I visited – Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan along with Korea – had about two things in common. They were full of Asians. And they all led to ridiculous escapades.

My first step out of Korea was in Taipei, where a couple of my college friends waited outside my gate at the airport waving my name on a sign. Although I was more or less all on my own in Korea, venturing into a ‘foreign’ country alone seemed much more overwhelming and I can’t say how glad I was to have my Chinese-speaking friends as a guide. As we made our way to their small city, I was hit with a wave of tropical island air. Palm trees lined the street. Everything was flatter and more spread out, and there were parks everywhere with young boys and older women were playing basketball. Taiwanese food was delicious, but a very different delicious from hot peppery, garlicky Korean food.

During my week there, I did many of the same activities that I would have done in Korea, such as going to a local festival, visiting a temple in the mountains, and relaxing in a hot tub. But unlike the understated wooden temples of Korea, the temple was gigantic, relatively new, and spilling over with intricate reliefs of dragons, and unlike Korean jimjilbangs, the hot tub was a natural outdoor hot spring in which we sat not naked. En route from the temple to the hot tub we needed to catch a bus, and when the one we thought was ours passed us by we chased it down until it pulled over for us at the side of the road. It wasn’t until we sat in an open seat in the back that we realized that the people singing karaoke around us were not Taiwanese. We had joined a Japanese tour group.

I had another confounding bus experience when I attempted to travel on my own while my friends worked to a park that the Lonely Planet recommended for spotting macaques. A convoluted series of taxis, trains, buses and subways took me about six hours, and when I was finally dropped off at the park entrance I didn’t see a park anywhere around me. It took another hour of walking through the residential area to find a path that might or might not have been the park. After a discouraging hike, I was about to turn back when I heard a rustle in the trees. There was my monkey. It was my first time to see a monkey in the wild, and I couldn’t believe how the creature, about the size of my Springer Spaniel, politely ignored me as I followed it closely down the road and took pictures from under it as it picked fruit out of a tree. Every country has its advantages and disadvantages, of course, and each country I visited made me lament the lack of wildlife in Korea, where magpies and banana spiders dominate. When I returned to the elusive park entrance, I realized I had no idea how long it would be before a bus returned for me and it was getting late, so I walked about 45 minutes in the dark on the shoulder of the road overlooking the shoreline to the city to catch my bus, subway, train, and taxi back to my friend’s house.

Compared to the difference between Taiwan and Korea, Southeast Asia could have been on Neptune. After waiting three hours for my friends, two fellow ESL teachers – Megan and Nate - flying in from Korea to meet me in Bangkok, we departed from the airport around 3 a.m. to catch our 6 o’clock train that we rode, tired, sweltering, and starving aside from the exotic fruits that we bought through the window during stops, to the border of Cambodia. We narrowly escaped a swindle in buying our visas to cross over, and at immigrations we overheard a guy our age speaking Korean. What really blew my mind was when we asked him where he was from and it turned out to be the same tiny farm town where I taught middle school two days a week – Yangmok.

Our three hour taxi to Angkor Wat was probably the most realistic impression of Cambodia that we got. We stopped to buy banana chips at a convenience store and were shortly after caught in a flash thunderstorm that left the cattle and schoolchildren walking along the side of the dirt road scurrying for shelter. Although the town of Siem Reap felt like a tourist resort, it was more than worth the extensive journey to see Angkor Wat. The reason that pictures don’t do justice to this ancient city of temples is because there was more to them than just beauty, although they were certainly beautiful. They were also shrouded in a feeling, and as I walked through the stone corridors I couldn’t help imagine the civilization that once inhabited them. Or the first person that stumbled upon as they were trekking through the jungle hundreds of years later. I think if it had been me, I wouldn’t have told anyone about them and instead spent the rest of my years frolicking through my secret stone kingdom with massive silk cotton trees weaving around the walls. I also, embarrassingly, couldn’t stop feeling as though I were running through the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, and I half expected a ‘Temple Guard’ to jump out from behind a corner and steal my tokens. I encountered my second wild monkey here, and it merited the term ‘wild’ much more than the Taiwanese monkey. After I got too close with my camera, it lunged at me full speed trying to bite and raced after me down the walkway hissing.

Unfortunately, my friends and I budgeted our time so that almost as much of it was spent in transportation as in relaxing and taking in the sights, but two plane rides and another long taxi ride later we were in Phuket, Thailand. There was no question that the beach was beautiful, but we’d found ourselves in yet another tourist hot spot and at night Nate and I were drinking Piña Coladas with retired American couples in Hawaiian shirts. It was liberating to walk around in a tank top again, and the fresh mango, pineapple, and fried banana chocolate crepes were definitely something I wished I could bring back to Korea with me. We happened to run into a few of our friends from Korea who were staying at a nearby beach and took a ferry with them to Phi Phi Island, which had also erupted in hotels, night clubs, and tattoo parlors since my brother had visited the gorgeous, isolated island a decade earlier thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio scampering across the rocky cliffs shirtless in ‘The Beach.’

We topped off our trip with a couple of days in Bangkok, again settling into the most touristy area of the city, but at least it wasn’t the red light district. I did enjoy the rows of cheap clothing and souvenir markets without the persistent, heartbreaking children that had been trained to push products on us in Cambodia, and street vendors were selling hot Pad Thai at every turn for under a dollar. We walked across the entire city for what was probably the best and definitely the most authentic part of the whole trip. We met my Thai friend who had been an exchange student at my high school and whom I hadn’t seen for five years, Bom.

I do not think that I missed Korea once during my two weeks of travel, and there were plenty of things that I liked better about Taiwan, Thailand and Cambodia than Korea, such as open spaces, wildlife, fresh fruit, tropical beaches, and in many ways, more liberal societies. When I returned from the trip, though, I was relieved to be back in a country where I already knew the ropes of how to get around and what to order in a restaurant and could speak the language a little bit and, finally, to sleep in my bed. It was a good affirmation that, halfway through my year, Korea was not a trip but my home.

Several months later I spent a long weekend in Japan. This time I was with my co-teacher Okhee, so I gained insight not only on Japan, but on Korea. I noticed obvious differences between the countries – Japan’s crazy, anime hairdos (despite their extremely more liberal appearances, Okhee insisted that it was a more conservative society), traditionally low housing rather than high rise apartments, expensive food that was greasier and saltier than Korean food, and some order to walking on the sidewalk whereas Korea has no designated side that they tend to walk on and people will walk straight towards you until you pick a direction to veer off towards – while Okhee noticed subtler differences, such as Japanese hanging laundry outside instead of on glassed in balconies and the men not sitting with their legs spread wide open on the subway. We visited Osaka and Kyoto and I insisted that we should be laid back travelers rather than model our trip after the typical Korean package tour - racing around to as many tourist attractions as possible in order to get a picture holding up the peace sign next to each one. Still, we crammed in quite a few sights in our three days, such as the golden temple, Kinkaku-ji, a deer park where we fed special wafers to the fawns that were following us around like Snow White, and Osaka Castle.

As we were walking through the airport in Osaka, there was a saying on the wall that was something along the lines of, “The memories you make are worth more than the stars in your guidebook,” so we decided to make that the motto of our trip. Even more than the towering pagodas and serene rock garden, we enjoyed the several Japanese people who led us down the sidewalk chatting when we couldn’t find our way, the restaurant owner who spread the plastic sushi displayed in the window across our table because we couldn’t read the menu, and the pocketknife toothpick sword that Okhee bought the school principal as a souvenir. My favorite was when we decided to have a picnic on the Imperial Palace lawn with takeout fried rice. Open spaces of grass are a rarity in Korea, and Okhee, who was sitting on her jacket, turned to me after eating and said, “I want to lie down, but I am afraid of getting mouse disease.” Apparently Koreans have justified their lack of grass to sit in with rumors of mice that scurry about trailing disease for all of those foolhardy enough to loaf about on the lawn to catch. After rolling around in the grass, I put a clover in Okhee’s hair, and learned that in Korea a flower in your hair signifies insanity. Soon after, we were laden with clover necklaces, rings, and flowers poking out of our hair in every direction.

The entire trip we had joked about how great it would be if our flight home was canceled and we could stay in Japan rather than returning to work on Wednesday. Our tune changed when we arrived at the airport after an hour long bus ride and with only pocket change left in yen to hear that there might be storms in Busan where we were supposed to land, and that our flight might take off anyways with the chance that it would return to Japan. Even though this trip had only been three days, we found Waegwan to be as welcoming as ever.