Sunlight spreads across my face and awakens me before my alarm. I can hear roosters crowing out my window. From the balcony, I can see only fog, like I am in an airplane flying through a cloud. But by afternoon, I can see that I am on the rim of a shallow bowl of mountains. I can see both rice fields and high rise apartments, interspersed like oceans and continents. I can see the Nakdong River, the longest river in South Korea, and at night, I can see crosses on churches lit up red as though they belonged in Las Vegas.
“Waegwan,” where I live, literally means “Japanese dwelling,” a vestige from the Japanese invasion. “Waeguk” is the Korean word for foreigner, which often follows me around like a theme song. Despite living in a town whose name almost matches the word for foreigner, Waegwan quickly became my home. Whether Waegwan is a city or rural community has always been a puzzle to me. Although my paycheck confirms that it is ‘rural,’ the Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins, the health center complete with a pool and climbing wall, and 20-story apartment buildings leave me uncertain. The handful of Koreans whom I have asked the population of Waegwan have given me answers ranging from 10,000 to 100,000. I can’t tell you whether this variance is due to Koreans’ difficulty in translating large numbers to English or a lack of an organized census. But Waegwan’s ambiguity between country and city is what appeals the most to me.
While some might complain that a small town is boring, Waegwan is fully equipped with bowling alleys, singing rooms, shopping, a sandy riverbank to run along, and a small mountain to hike. This mountain has been a bittersweet presence for me. Anytime I am feeling down, I climb to the top where dragonflies and magpies are gliding through my breathtaking view of Waegwan and the two neighboring towns, and happiness comes out my ears. It is also the only place in Waegwan that I have found solitude outside of my two-room apartment. But the mountain has also been a source of disaster. When a couple of friends joined me in the hike to the top, we got a late start and the sun began to set during our descent. I thought that I was clever and found a shortcut to the bottom in order to beat the darkness. As we slowly shuffled down the wet leaf-lined path, though, it became more and more difficult to see. Although I didn’t tell my friends this at the time, I had seen a snake before on the mountain, my co-teachers had warned me never to hike alone in case of dangerous men, and a soldier had cautioned that there were still small land mines, nicknamed ‘toe poppers,’ remaining from the war on the mountainside. Using our cell phones to light our way, we didn’t see an end to the path anywhere near, so when we saw an opening through the trees we decided to take our chances. We ended up tiptoeing past a hole that may have been an open tomb (Koreans traditionally bury their dead in the mountains) and were spit out onto a farm where we circumvented the crops and scrambled down a steep hill of briers to finally return to the road, happy to be in one piece.
The greatest small town charm of Waegwan is the friendliness of the people. Koreans in all parts of the country are known for their kindness and hospitality to the guests of Korea. It is unlikely, though, that in a large city your grocer driving past as you carry a heavy load down the sidewalk will pull over to drive you home. Any time I walk through town, I can hear students yelling my name and waving emphatically – even the ones who sleep in class – and young children, less exposed to foreigners than in the city, will stare in wonderment and say “Hi.” I am by no means the only foreigner in Waegwan, though. Aside from a small handful of English teachers, Waegwan is home to some 3,000 U.S. soldiers.
Camp Carroll, the army base spanning across the center of Waegwan, is like an unreachable oasis. The luxuries that can’t be found in Waegwan – peanut butter, Mexican food, size 9 shoes, a movie theater – are rumored to exist within the barbed wire-topped walls of Camp Carroll. But the closest I can get is to gaze into the base from my 7th floor balcony and yearn for their Taco Bell and their water park. Unless I make friends with a soldier. My attempts at this, however, have only ended in pursuit by men largely outnumbering English speaking women in Waegwan. I am sure that many soldiers are honorable men and upstanding citizens, but unfortunately my impressions of them have been of men who stick to the foreigner clubs and ‘juicy bars’ operated by Filipino women just outside of Camp Carroll’s main gate, who talk loudly and disrespectfully on the trains so that when I asked my students where they learned to say “Fuck you, man,” they tell me that they learned from soldiers, and who have lived in Korea for almost a year and know only the Korean words “Anyeong haseyo,” and “soju.” But perhaps some of my resentment stems from their experience so different from my own. I want foreigners to be able to think of Waegwan as the sweet old ladies squatting on the sidewalk selling onions and a festival of fire held on the riverbank to ward off bad spirits in the first full moon of the lunar new year. Not ‘juicy bars.’
