Mostly Harmless

When I was tentatively asked to move from working part-time to full-time at Busan International Foreign School back in February – a job I finally began last week – I understood that as part of this my son could be educated at the school during the duration of my contract, which my wife and I had decided would be a good idea since we had become concerned at his interactions with other children when he met them. Because of this, we didn't search for a place in a Korean nursery for him, but a couple of days after I signed the contract we found out he was 10 days too young to qualify for a place. The moral of the story perhaps, is to always check the small print yourself.

Our son was born in the Year of the Tiger, which is a Chinese zodiac thing people here still find important, and apparently it was a "White Tiger" year. So while the "White Tigers" might sound like a resistance group set up by foreigners^* in the Haeundae district of Busan^**, the term actually refers to the multitude of 'white tiger babies' born during that Chinese year, or 'lunar year' as the Koreans prefer to call it for some reason.

Tigers are important in Korea as they are seen as a symbol of strength (whereas being white is important in cosmetic adverts and hagwon teacher recruitment), so it is believed that white tiger babies will become wealthy and powerful as they are born with an extraordinary amount of potential, not like all those mediocre babies from lesser years you have to subconsciously write-off from birth. The upshot of this is that everybody who could had babies that year, and now two years later there are too many babies and not enough nursery places.

So by the time we realised we had to find a nursery place after all, the nearest place we could apparently find - after single-handedly boosting Korea Telecom's profits by 10% - was in somewhere called Pyongyang, and it seems there are no direct buses. My wife then resigned herself to another year of hanging around with our son in 'kids cafés', which are a form of disguised nursery which distracts you with food or drink you have to buy, while your child disappears and gets into trouble.

Then a miracle happened. My wife found a nursery which had 30 free places, which admittedly is slightly suspicious given the white tiger glut. It was beneath some kind of church. It was probably run by some kind of Christians. I was still working part-time so I decided to go the first day to make sure it wasn't actually a cult; I grew up a Catholic so I have a lot of experience in spotting them.

The nursery people were pleasant enough while not being suspiciously nice, there were some prayers on the wall and they said Grace before eating, but there were no models of crucified men hanging from the walls or fairy stories about a bad man with horns who knew what you were doing and probably made government policy. I concluded they were probably mostly harmless.

If the group did have a cult-like quality, it transpired to be in their attitude to the English language. After he'd been at the nursery for a couple of weeks, my wife was asked to "speak more Korean" to our son at home because the staff felt he was lagging behind other children.

From what I've read on the subject of bringing up children in a bilingual household, research suggests that it's entirely normal for children to initially lag behind in terms of language development because they have two vocabularies and sets of grammar rules to learn rather than one. It's logical enough.

I think everyone recognises that this situation is far from ideal, but it is the reality of your circumstances unless you want to take the radical step of only teaching your multicultural child one language and one culture. I have known of people who have done this – both in Korea and in England and I wouldn't advocate it in either country, but I would particularly question the approach here given that in the current cultural environment you are not really going to be accepted as a Korean if you have 'mixed blood' (or indeed, if you don't have any Korean blood and become a Korean citizen).

As I see it, the road ahead is potentially littered with this kind of attitude though, because in truth, the road behind us already has been. In the matter of the nurture or nature question, I have to say my attitude has been shaped by nurture. Bringing up a child in a multicultural family in Korea doesn't on the face of it have to be a constant battle, but somehow it regularly turns into one as people associate undesirable traits with 'bad blood' and try to force you and your child into being as completely Korean as possible, without seeing the irony in the fact that if you were they still wouldn't accept you for it. And this is the fundamental paradox of living here.

* I understand – not that I would know – that the local resistance actually goes by the name 'Busan Alien Residents Front' or BARF, and it is vaguely affiliated the the Seoul-based 'Resident Alien Liberation Front' or RALF – Korea's oldest foreign-based resistance movement which dates back to 1994.

** I use the "Haeundae district of Busan" here for simplicity – many here are increasingly of the belief that Busan is, in fact, a district of Haeundae.

Under Siege: Dirty and Smelly and Fusion Babies

"I'm not just saying this because you’re related to me, but I used to think that all foreigners were dirty and smelly... but you're not." - a close relative who I am not permitted to name by title until the statute of limitations expires.

Does this mean I've pushed down the barriers of prejudice in Korea by just a little? Perhaps not, because this close relative went on to expand on that thought by adding "When I pass them in the street, I can smell their bad smell, they look unkempt and their clothes look years old. But you always look neat."

And apparently I don't smell that bad either. If only foreigners could smell as wonderful as Koreans.

Filed under 'accidental truths close Korean relatives tell you when they finally let their guard down after five years'.

The observant among my two remaining readers will have noticed that I don't often write this blog any more. This is a function of many things such as my work as a writer elsewhere, aching fingers, a bad keyboard, my hatred of the updated Blogger interface that often no longer lets me post comments on my own blog, and the increasing amount of time I spend with the underground railroad here in Busan.

It is also - as I have previously mentioned - in no small part connected with the extra work and frequent interruptions that come with having a 22-month-old child, who is, shall we say, high maintenance. For example, this morning the wireless landline phone handset in our apartment was nowhere to be found until I finally spotted it in our aquarium, which led to a couple of hours of disassembling, drying, cleaning and re-soldering (it was not disassembly-friendly). This is the tip of the iceberg.

All small children can be a challenge I'm sure, but one of our close relatives evidently arrived at the conclusion that my son represented significantly more of a challenge than any Korean child they had previously experienced, prompting them to pose the following philosophical question:

"Do you think his temperament is the way it is because he has mixed blood?

August Rush: The First Birthday Party

The failure to go to England had another consequence. Our son would celebrate his first birthday in Korea. So we had four options in order of my descending preference: do nothing, have a meal with friends and family at home, have a meal with friends and family in a restaurant, or submit to the complete circus that is a baby birthday hall. Yes, they have baby birthday halls.

Tired, sick, rejected from a job I wanted, and generally extremely fed-up, when my wife broached the subject with me, I famously said “just choose the option you think best”. Tens of thousands of years of language development and men still haven’t learned not to speak those words in sequence to women. I suppose one would have to conclude at this point that it must serve some evolutionary purpose, but if it does I certainly can’t imagine what. And I said it in Korea.

So the baby birthday hall it was then, with all the consequences stemming from this that you don’t clearly think through until they are making your life a misery, such as the one-year photo shoot, the video, the invites, the hanboks, and the breakdancing.

The Photo/Video Presentation

Yes, it is not so simple as booking a time, sending out some invites and just turning up, because the first thing you’re going to need is to arrange the video and photo presentation that forms one of the centrepieces of the birthday celebration. Now in all probability you’ve spent the last year taking copious amounts of photos and videos of your baby – this is Korea after all - so you might be led to believe that these would prove sufficient, but nay, nay and thrice nay.

The photo presentation must contain pictures from the one-year photo shoot – it’s the law – so this involved another trip to a self-studio, a lot of silly hats, and an understanding wife. Understanding because just before we were about to set off for said studio, I received an email telling me I hadn’t got an interview for the job I wanted, so I spent twenty minutes writing a reply trying to persuade them to change their minds (they did), and telling them I’d go there immediately if they wanted to interview me that afternoon, which would cause us to miss the shoot (I ended up going the next morning). We were late arriving at the studio, but they didn’t have another booking after us, so they let us run over, which was pretty decent of them.

So we now had our full portfolio of photographs and videos, but they had to be packaged in a proper presentation format, because well... everyone else does and so like most things in Korea, it’s something of a social arms race.

There are one-and-a-half ways of doing this. Either have a specialist company produce one for around 70,000 won, or go down the cheaper road of doing it yourself. Well, we’re all into self-empowerment here at Busan Mike Inc. (i.e. we’re cheap), so we did it ourselves. And it can be both fun and therapeutic too. Once I’d produced an outline photo and video montage and a credits sequence where I was only listed under Professional White Guy as ‘Dada’ and which ended with the phase “No Piracy in Korea!” I really began to see the possibilities for indulging in a little satire for the purposes of self-therapy. It would have been lost on the audience of course, in fact there’s every chance they might have viewed the result positively as taking the process into a ‘new paradigm’, but sadly it was not to be. I became too sick to work on it any further and my wife did it instead. But I’m sorry my baby video as a parody of “Korea’s Got Talent!” never saw the light of day.

My wife’s video-photo montage was more conventional, and perhaps the Windows Live Movie Maker produced result was not as polished as the professionally produced videos we’ve seen at other first-birthdays recently, but on the other hand my wife also speaks English well-enough to know not to choose a soundtrack with the lyrics “ooh, my ass, my ass, my sexy ass” to accompany those videos of baby crawling around. It’s possible the singer was intending some action to be performed in relation to her ass, but I never did decipher those lyrics, and perhaps it’s just as well. Meanwhile, one of the English captions read “Let is wet the baby is head” and since it appeared at a point devoid of head wetting, its purpose and that of several other captions will remain a mystery.

Of course the other problem with burning a DVD is who does that any more? We had to go out and find a disc that was compatible with our computers and their DVD player, because you really only have one shot at this.

Hanbok

The next problem, if indeed it isn’t actually several problems further down the road, is that you need a hanbok, Korea’s traditional dress and method of ensuring that you take up twice the physical amount of space you would otherwise need. For some inexplicable reason, hanbok have failed to sweep the world to the extent that even Koreans don’t normally wear them or own them these days. So a trip to the hanbok-hire store is in order so that you, your spouse and your child can pick out matching hanbok. Matching is a strong word because in my experience many hanbok are something of a conflict of colour which rarely match themselves let alone anything else, but in the end we pick the ‘Microsoft Office’ hanboks which limit themselves to pale blue and white. They even have ribbons as well, though it’s unclear if anyone wants them.

It has taken us some time to reach this point however, because the small branch office of the hanbok-hire company located in the baby hall building has a very limited selection so we have to visit their headquarters, which much like those descriptions in Korea’s traditional fairy stories is “‘five minutes walk’ from a subway station in a land far, far away.” Which means more time wasted. Sorry, I mean more time usefully spent in subway trains with a crying baby.

But I am relieved to discover that on this occasion, the hanbok I have to wear does not include a square metal belt and badly fitting Wellington boots. And this is fortunate, because by attending other baby birthday parties recently I have discovered that it is customary in Korea to call upon the father to engage in the traditional Korean dance form known as ‘hip-hop’, ‘breakdancing’ or ‘b-boying’.

Can You Breakdance (in a Hanbok)?

“I’m the MC” announces a disturbingly wild-eyed youth who comes up to me at the start of proceedings – or at least as close as he can given my hanbok-exclusion zone. Except phonetically he says Em-Shi because Koreans pronounce ‘Ci’ as ‘Shi’ which is why Centum City is potentially such an immaturely amusing place to live. “Ah, Em-Shi-shi”, I greet him using the polite formal suffix for personal names, but it’s lost on him. “Can you breakdance?” he obliviously continues. I am wearing a large hanbok and after one year of being a parent I have the physical appearance of an 80 year-old. The correct response would have been a withering “Do I look like I can breakdance?”, but the best I can manage is “No.” One day, my language abilities will be good enough for my personality to escape its prison, and then the Koreans will hunt it down and kill it.

So he tells me to just copy him when the time comes, because obviously the only alternative is to go with my own routine that helped my crew win the R-16 Battle three years in a row, although we weren’t wearing hanbok at the time. I promise you that hanbok breakdancing will be the next big thing though. I might even email it in as a suggestion to the Ministry of Culture. They’ll go for it as well. You know it. I know it.

Guests or No Guests

So the guests arrive. I feel this requires mentioning explicitly since for the first 20 minutes, when nobody came, it didn’t appear to be a given. I was once setting up a meeting with some African-Carribean student leaders and their constituency, and they told me we’d meet at 8pm, which meant 9, “it’s a cultural thing” they explained. As a person who’s always been driven by each tick of the clock I admired that about them. Koreans are not always so unpunctual in my experience, but with our baby’s birthday and those of the other people’s we attended, people tended to drift over an extended period of time rather than actually turn up when you expect them.

To be fair, it’s not like anything particularly urgent is scheduled, and perhaps that’s why. These birthday baby halls are much like wedding halls insofar as food is organised around a extended buffet layout, with side rooms leading off from this central area. The prepared baby video plays on a loop in the room for around an hour, until the MC turns up for his 15 minute entertainment slot. In the meantime, guests come along, bringing their envelopes of gift money, which has largely replaced the old tradition of giving gold rings. In fact to some, the money is the most important part of the proceedings because before this point, an equation has been carefully calculated and much like an exam, this is when you get your answer.

P=(Gi*(Ga/100))-H-S-(R*i)-[(Ajeossis*Bottles)]

The equation is highly complex and normally requires several hours of supercomputer time to complete, or your Korean mother-in-law. Grossly simplified, the number of guests invited is divided by the ratio of guests likely to come, the costs of the wedding hall, per-guest buffet charge, hanbok hire and sundry expenses, versus the amount of gift money the guests are likely to bring (which is usually more than cost per head), plus the likelihood that these said guests will retaliate by subsequently inviting you to one of their baby or grandchild parties, which negates the financial advantage of inviting them given that you will, essentially, then have to return their gift money. There are many further sub-equations, such as the table-bottle amplification, which calculates the additional cost given that soft and hard bottled drinks are charged extra per bottle, and their consumption can rise exponentially if certain demographic critical masses occur, but they are beyond the scope of my explaining here.

Overall, the more people you can invite, the more likely it is you will see a profit. But one complication of being a foreigner is that I know very few people to invite, and even if all but one of them weren’t working on a live radio programme at the time of our party, the Korean gift-money system makes inviting your friends tantamount to asking for money from them.

Stress has been shown to be a major cause of health problems, so let me put your mind at ease now by revealing that we broke even on our baby party. We will probably end up running a small loss though as guests go on to have 20% more babies than us, according to our calculations.

Baby’s Future Career

So we reach the main event of the proceedings, which isn’t the hanbok breakdancing. After some gifts have been given out in faux-competitions by the MC, and more gift money has been begged for with a Catholic-church style collection tray, the collection tray, which has several other items within it, is presented to your baby for them to choose... their future career.

In the tray is a toy pencil (scholar), stethoscope (doctor), ball (sportsperson), hammer (judge), microphone (entertainer), mouse (dot-com millionaire) which alongside the recently donated and now untraceable cash (Korean politician) provide you with your career options. But there had been a slight complication. A few days earlier our dog had torn the ball apart and it no longer existed, thus potentially changing the future course of our son’s life. Our son chose the pencil instead, which I suppose means my wife and I had better plan for our own retirement, and not expect our son to take care of us financially. Oh well.

Next there is a fake cake with a candle on top to light. The cake is made out of some kind of material which – this being Korea – is probably highly flammable, but despite this it appeared to have survived several dozen previous parties.

Hanbok Breakdancing

The potential conflagration was followed by the threatened hanbok breakdancing. By this time our MC had been temporarily joined by two accomplices who were evidently either professional breakdancers or were used to being electrocuted a lot and had memorised the moves. I readied myself for my inevitable invitation to join them in front of the crowd as I’d witnessed with previous fathers at baby birthday halls. But it didn’t happen. I think our MC let his lack of English get the better of his clinically extroverted personality, and he decided against it. It was a wise choice. Deprived of their entertainment, the guests gradually drifted away seemingly destined to not eat again for days afterwards.

The Undiscovered Country

When I was told that there was a 100-day photo shoot for my baby, it came as a surprise because I wasn’t warned until the time arrived. The same is true for the 200-day photo shoot, and the one-year photo shoot. Similarly, the one-year birthday baby hall party had not been on my agenda. So I can not conclude this piece with a sense that I can put it behind me and consign the experience to history, because living in Korea is rather like the conquest of space – it’s a journey of exploration and you never know what you’re going to find next. Oh yes, and no-one really trusts the aliens.

August Rush: England

I was scheduled to return to England with my wife and baby son on the 25th, but that never happened; we cancelled our tickets on the 20th. Our baby is not a good traveller. In fact he is not a good sleeper or eater either, so this last year has been exhausting. Losing face in Korea is best avoided, so I’m not supposed to talk about it, but that’s the reality. It's been an extremely tough year. Our trip to England felt necessary for the sake of relatives and an ageing parent, but it was probably always the wrong decision, one made out of emotion rather than logic.

Our long and many subway journeys across Busan from Saha-gu to the east of the city where we were searching for an apartment during August were fraught experiences, because he was not a happy traveller. Sometimes we had to get off at stations to calm him down, and once it was so bad we gave up and went to the surface to catch a bus. Suddenly twenty-four hours of travelling and fourteen hours of flights with him appeared a reckless idea, and we took the emotionally gut-wrenching decision to cancel the trip and disappoint my family. But as parents we had to do what we thought best for our son, and that was not going.

There’s no easy solution to the problem of international relationships when the two countries are far apart; one partner is always going to make the potential sacrifice of being separated from friends and family. And for all the Korean government’s constant attempts to support multicultural families within Korea, there is one important respect in which they certainly don’t support them, and that’s in the provision of holiday time legislation, with a mere five discretionary days a year typical in many jobs. Contrast that with England, where twenty days is common. This means that when I get a job I simply may not have the option of returning to England except for a week, which stripping out travelling and jet-lag hardly amounts to quality time. It seems that sometimes the only solution to the problem is to quit your job, and apply for a new one when you return.

Another ominous sign of more difficulties lying ahead came in the form of ticket prices. We booked well in advance as we always do, but this time there seemed to be much fewer viable choices in terms of airlines, and the price we paid was over twice that last time we bought a return tickets three years ago. Of course, the major variable in airline ticket costs is the oil price, but as someone who sometimes traded oil and certainly has the charts to hand, I know that by coincidence, the oil price was almost exactly the same this time as last. The airlines would probably argue about such arcane subjects as forward buying and hedging, but I don't really believe a word of it. Until there's more competition again on those routes in happier economic times, the costs of returning home may be destined to remain considerably higher.

Lotus Lantern

If you ever want to know why I like living in Korea, it's because last Saturday evening at 9pm I was stood in the middle of Yongdusan Park with thousands of other people, immersed in the 2011 Busan Lotus Lantern Festival (there's another in Seoul). By contrast, the only reason you go to a park after dark in my city is to shoot up hard drugs or get murdered. And while there are things to do and places to go after dark, it involves locking yourself in your car and hoping someone doesn’t ram you from behind in one of the bad neighbourhoods which are too numerous to avoid, as part of an insurance fraud or carjacking.

During my first stay in Korea, I saw a lot of places and did a lot of things, and now I have a child I have to reluctantly acknowledge that it was a more carefree lifestyle which might never be fully regained. So whereas once we would have made a date to visit Yongdusan Park on Saturday evening for the Busan Lotus Lantern Festival, and culmination of the three-day Joseon Tongsinsa Festival – it was past our son's bedtime and we thought we probably wouldn't make it unless he was in a good mood. But Thursday was Children's Day in Korea, so we went then instead, after lunch. The lanterns were out but the effect was obviously less impressive in the daytime, and we're getting to that time of year where the heat and humidity are becoming uncomfortable, which also detracts a little from the experience.

As things were, we actually did manage to get back on Saturday, although it didn't quite work out as planned. The event was scheduled to begin at 8pm, but it was late starting, and we didn't really think through the nature of the event. We went for the lanterns, but there was a parade. Korean parades are often noisy affairs, and when the lights were finally turned on and this one arrived, it was no different. To an extent you can move away from the samulnori and other sundry musicians, but there was no escape from the on-stage performances which were so loud over the speakers I left the park barely able to hear myself speak - this is not an exaggeration. I haven't experienced anything like it since university. Add fireworks into the mix, which admittedly were rather nicely enhanced by the fog, and it explains why my wife - concerned about our baby’s hearing - immediately fled from the park with several other parents.

Now our baby is old enough to start seriously venturing from the confines of the apartment, it's occurring to me for the first time that, at least as far as festivals and other events are concerned, Korea may not be particularly baby friendly. Maybe there's a way of holding an event like this without getting noise complaints from Japan, but if there is it hasn't crossed the organisers' minds.

Unfortunately at the point at which my wife ran away we were separated, and she had my phone, leaving me with Korean Mother who had taken a seat near the stage and was largely inaccessible – not just because of the language barrier. I spent at least thirty minutes looking for my wife and child, although it could have been longer since without my phone, I didn't know the time either. I discovered why I couldn’t find my immediate family once I worked my way to Korean Mother. "Shall we go?" I asked in Korean, but she said no, she was having fun. I lacked the depth of language to ascertain whether she was saying this for my benefit or not, and I didn't want to press the issue by emphasising that it was really OK to leave, because I was afraid of dragging her away from something she wanted to stay at. Predictably, it later transpired that while she was enjoying the event, she also mainly staying for my benefit.

The misunderstandings meant that I saw the events through to their conclusion. Confusion, noise, colour, laughter, large crowds, barely organised chaos among the performers and the possibility of permanent physical damage afterwards - the Festival was a microcosm of life in Korea, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Busan e-FM Week 27: Baby Photo Shoots

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Back in January I talked about the birth of my son in Korea, and how we named him. This week, I wanted to talk about another apparently important baby issue – baby photos.

Counting days

Part of the significance of these baby photos is to do with the way people count days here. Actually, I found that Koreans are obsessive counters of days, formally marking such occasions as 49 days after the death of a loved one, 15 days after Seollal with Jeongweol Daeboreum, and even more modern examples, such as burning a wedding bouquet after 100 days to ensure a trouble-free marriage. Some of it is really quite inconvenient too – I used to live in Hadan, where there was a ‘Five Days Market’ - which occurs every five days, so basically you never know when to go. It would be a lot easier if it happened every Wednesday, for example.

We don’t count days a lot in England. Of course, we’re generally really bad at maths, so that wouldn't help. I find it especially confusing here because it’s not just the normal calendar you have to contend with, but also the lunar calendar. I don’t know how Koreans manage it – but maybe there’s a smartphone app that helps you with it all these days.

Apparently there’s not much counting with marriage though – when I asked my wife about it she told me “once you get married you tend not to celebrate any more” - isn’t that the truth? But babies are a different matter.

50 days

We had a few shots taken with a photographer for our baby’s 50th day, although it felt quite informal. At the time I didn’t think much of it because I thought it was part of the baby package that we’d bought through the hospital for my wife’s birth.

100 days

So we counted the 100th day for our baby, when I gathered photos must be taken. But evidently there’s more to it than this, because my wife started browsing the Internet intently for baby things, and making a lot of phone calls. Packages began to arrive. By the time the day came we had a big banner across the wall with my son’s name on it plus the words “Happy 100th Day”. And surrounding it we had the world’s entire supply of purple balloons. Then there was a cake with candles for ‘100’, which was surrounded by dishes of fruit, and of course, I had to take the photos.

So I figure we're done here right? Wrong. These were not the official 100th day photographs. No, we still had to go to a studio – except on the 130th day, because apparently this is when the baby ‘looks better’. I’m told it’s not uncommon, but then it’s all a lie really isn’t it?

130 days

So for the 130th day 100th day photo shoot we hired a studio, which was basically a big room split into six different themes with various props. And I took along my DSLR to take the photos. You can hire a camera, but this probably isn’t a good idea because most DSLRs – especially the high end ones – can take a lot of getting used to. I know a lot of men don’t mind fiddling around with their equipment, but trust me, you don’t want to be doing this against the clock, in-between bouts of baby and partner screaming, depending on the quality of the results.

It was quite stressful, and I hadn’t worked with big studio flash-lights before. Plus I had to keep an eye on what was going to be in the background to each shot, because the props were sometimes a little odd. Fortunately I noticed the words “Adolph Hitler” on the spine of a book in the background of one photo before I took it. These are probably not the words you want floating around above your baby's head in the family album.

Of course, the advantage of the self-studio is that you can take all the shots you want, but the downside is that you probably can’t take all the shots that your partner demands. And it gives you freedom, but the freedom to mess things up. So the next day it was my partner’s face that was the picture – she said only five shots were worth saving out of the 554 I took. For what it’s worth I saved 94 of the photos, but clearly it’s debatable whether it’s worth the stress; there’s something to be said for going down the professional route, rather than apparently as it was in our case, the unprofessional route.

200 days

So I thought, well, thank God I don’t have to do that again. And then my wife said to me “We have to do another photo-shoot on the 200th day”. No. You know, I do like this country, but sometimes it feels like a nightmare I can’t escape from.

The 200th day photo-shoot was booked, and my wife wanted to do another self-shoot, but I caught a break, at least, I think I did. My wife entered our baby’s photo into a photo competition run by a large studio here, and we won a free photo-shoot with a photographer.

In fact, my wife’s been entering our son into a few competitions. I think it’s very Korean behaviour, but being British I have reservations about the whole thing, because it just seems quite presumptuous to think your baby looks nice, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and think that if he does it can’t be from my genes. But it seems to be a very serious business in Korea – there was a national competition on an Internet site here, and when the last ten were announced, hundreds of mothers were so disappointed by the exclusion of their baby that they were posting lots of angry messages on the site, with levels of rhetoric almost approaching that of North Korea. I half-expected them to threaten to destroy the site in a sea of fire.

So it was quite a relief – in a way – to just be a bystander at the photo-shoot we won. Except there’s still some stress, because our baby was full of smiles before the shoot, and as soon as it started, he wouldn’t smile, and he began to cry. He did get better - but it helps to understand Korean, because eventually I discovered the photographer was complaining that he was smiling too much. Apparently the ‘concept’ was ‘being moody’. I don’t know why there has to be a concept, but there was. It seems they wanted to highlight his big eyes – and if he smiled, his eyes weren’t as big. But anyway, the photos are better than mine.

365 days

But remember I mentioned that before the competition win, we’d originally booked the self-studio for his 200th day shoot? My wife re-arranged it... for his 1-year shoot.

[to be continued...]

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-04-27 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 14: The Baby Experience

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Another important event in my life was the birth of my baby son four months ago. Actually, our plan to have a baby was one of the reasons we returned to Korea.

Hospitals

I though it would be better to have a baby in Korea rather than in England. We have our National Health Service, so the cost is very low, but sometimes the service is quite basic as well. Korea is more expensive, but there are many hospitals and treatment options to choose from. In the city I’m from there’s one really large city hospital which covers everything – including delivering babies – so this means if you choose to have your baby in a hospital rather than a home, that’s where you have to go, whereas in Korea our first task was to choose a hospital.

In a way it wasn’t a difficult choice. There are different options but we wanted to choose one close to our apartment because we don’t have a car, so that really limited our choice. Actually, one of the major differences between England and Korea is the 산후조리원 [sanhujoriwon] system – we don’t have that in my country, we just have midwives who visit new mothers regularly after they’ve given birth. In fact, I know Koreans find this a bit shocking, but the average length of stay in a British hospital for a woman who gives birth is just six hours. So when my wife wanted to stay in the 산후조리원 for two weeks, I was the one who was shocked.

And some more surprises

So at first I thought she’d give birth and come home shortly afterwards. If there are no complications that’s the way it works in England. It’s probably too short really, but then two weeks or more seems very long. Of course, then I learned how there’s a belief in Korea that women’s bodies are ‘shattered’ once they’ve given birth, and they are so delicate they aren’t even allowed to shower or bathe for a week because of the belief that it will leave them vulnerable to the cold in winter.

Looking back, I had a lot of surprises even before our son was born. Normally in England I think a woman only gets two ultrasounds during her pregnancy, if everything seems normal. Here, we went to the hospital every two or three weeks, and had an ultrasound scan every time. And every time they burned the scan to a DVD so we could watch it at home. At least, until about half-way through when the system changed – then they uploaded them to an Internet account instead. So the regular scans were a really positive difference.

Another big surprise was when my wife said “we have to choose whether we want to buy a stem cell package”. That’s not really common in England, so the whole process of going and meeting various stem cell companies at the BEXCO baby fair, and evaluating their packages, was not something I’d expected to be doing.

I didn’t cope well with the language barrier, and it was was of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in Korea. My wife’s pregnancy didn’t go completely smoothly at first, so every time we saw the doctor I was really desperate to understand what he was saying, but of course, I couldn’t.

The birth

The birth itself was also quite different from what I expected. My wife’s water broke late on Saturday evening, so by the time we got to the maternity room it was 11pm. That’s when I realised that the problem with giving birth in a small hospital – especially at night at the weekend – is that there aren’t many staff around. In fact, until the doctor came at 4.25am, there was only one nurse on duty and that’s the only person we saw – the rest of the floor was deserted, whereas in a large British hospital there are hundreds of doctors, which means that if something unexpected happens, there’s always going to be an appropriate specialist around.

Of course I couldn’t understand what the nurse was talking about, but having said that, at one point towards the end – after the nurse had made a series of calls – I sure she was saying on the phone “where’s the doctor, where’s the doctor?” So it wasn’t a happy experience.

But in the end it all went relatively smoothly. Our son was born at 04.57am, and I cut the umbilical cord – that’s another thing I had to do in Korea that I wasn’t expecting.

No contact rules

Then, after 30 seconds with his mother, he was rushed off to the maternity unit, and that’s the last time she saw him for 24 hours, which also shocked me. And then – this is not so much shocking as annoying – they wouldn’t let me hold my son. I really wanted to hold him, but he’d been rushed off to the maternity unit and the hospital had a ‘no contact’ rule for fathers. When we asked when I could hold him they said “in two weeks when he comes home”. It was a bit upsetting really at the time. In fact, there were really limited visiting times, and when you went the staff would show you your baby for between two to five minutes, then that was it. So in the first two weeks I think I saw my son for a total of 50 minutes despite twice-daily visits to the hospital, and of course there was no physical contact.

So in some ways the hospital was really strict. But in other ways, not so much; they let photographers from an external company into the maternity unit – but just not fathers. In fact the hospital was a bit of a disaster anyway. I was just before Chuseok, so a lot of women had chosen to be induced over the holiday. The hospital had basically taken the business, but then didn’t really have much room for the mothers afterwards. And despite this they gave their cleaning staff the week off, so you can imagine – the place was like hell after a few days. In fact, the woman in the next room had a big plumbing problem in her bathroom, and when she complained to the hospital boss, rather than doing anything about it, he just gave her a tool to fix the problem herself, even though she’d just had an operation.

Baby naming

So we were glad to get home, but it’s not as though the problems stopped there. Then there was the whole baby naming business afterwards.

Naming a fusion baby can be a difficult issue. We decided to compromise by having a Korean first name, and my Western surname. I thought we might be able to choose the Korean name, and I had an idea about naming him after a famous Korean physicist because it’s something to aspire to. But then I learned that what usually happens, is the fortune tellers recommend a list based on the parents’ times of birth and the baby’s. We had to wait until after my wife had left the hospital to consult the fortune tellers – so for the first three weeks of his life he didn’t have a name, which to me seemed really odd.

So my son was named by a fortune teller in the end. A fortune teller my father-in-law knew gave us a recommendation, but it was only one name when I thought we’d have more choices. We went to another fortune teller and got another ten choices, but finally we chose the first one we’d been given. It was a hard process because I wanted it to be a name that would be easily pronounceable for my family back in England, and it had to sound right in English.

Of course, being a former police officer, my father-in-law knows some... interesting people. So I sort of jokingly asked – he’s not a former criminal is he? And sure enough, that is how my father-in-law knew him. So that’s how my son ended up being named by a convicted fraudster. I just have to hope he’s good at reading fortunes.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-26 @ ~19:30

One Hundred Mornings

In England we have special days we mark down in our calendars, and when the day is done we move on, perhaps returning to remember them as annual anniversaries. But when I came to live in Busan, I learned that Koreans are counters of days. So whether it be 100 days after your first date, 100 days after your wedding, 49 days after the death of a loved one, 15 days after Seollal, or some other date of note, people are busy counting them off on a calendar, or perhaps more probably now, their iPhone apps. Maybe it’s this mentality which brought us Hadan’s ‘Five days market’, which being every five days essentially ensures that you never know when to go.

Sometimes the counting isn't indefinite though, because when it comes to personal relationships - as my wife so profoundly told me - "once you get married you tend not to celebrate any more."

The 100th day after a baby is born is a significant event in Korea. If it were not for all the other counting of dates, it might be sadly indicative of the historically high rates of infant mortality here, but as it is, it merely seems another manifestation of the need to mark certain intervals on a calendar. Photos must be taken, and much like with Buddhist offerings, it seems necessary to involve a good amount of food. I'd been busy with work, but had developed a suspicion beforehand that my wife was planning a little more than this, given the number of baby-related Internet browsing and phone calls she seemed to be making. Packages started to arrive.

So it was that by the time the 100th day came, the wall of our lounge was improbably covered with a large printed cloth banner featuring our son's name and face along with the legend "Happy 100th Day", surrounded by the entire world's supply of purple balloons. Our son was wedged in a sitting position on the couch, and the table in front of him was filled with fruit and a cake - into which three numeric candles '1' '0' and '0' were placed.

The photos were taken, but in that respect this was merely a warm-up for the big event that was to come.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Having a baby in Korea can expose you to a great deal of culturally odd experiences. There are rules about staying in hospital, rules about keeping the rooms there at high temperatures, beliefs that new mothers shouldn't shower for a week, and when the fortune tellers get involved, the minefield of baby naming to navigate. Eventually, those first few weeks pass by and you're left with your newborn at home, and you think things might start to get a little less strange.

But when my wife came into our office and said "I need a picture of a chicken to hang upside down over the baby's bed", I was hardly even surprised even if I had no idea what the reasoning behind it was. Does there come a point where you've been in Korea so long that nothing surprises you any more?

In this case, it seems there an old belief which has its roots in the practices of Korean Shamanism, and the upshot of it is that if your baby is a bit of a handful, doesn't sleep at night - or at all - and generally cries a lot, you should hang a picture of a chicken (or technically I believe, a rooster), upside down over the baby's bed as this will - apparently - be a calming influence. The reasoning is that during pregnancy the baby generally sleeps during the day and is active at night, so the rooster picture is supposed to reverse the cycle, although it's important that the red part of the rooster's head (the 'comb' - really) is exaggerated, hence the reason why my wife extended it with a red colouring pencil.

Now, it occurs to me that several hundred years ago there wasn't an Internet to download chicken images from, and even having the kind of tools and paper around enabling a person to draw a fair representation of a chicken might have been rare, so I can't help wondering if this means that people back then used to hang real chickens - presumably dead ones - upside down over their babies beds. But I'm afraid to ask. When you can walk into your kitchen and find a pig's head staring at you unannounced from the kitchen table - and I have - anything is possible.

By the way, before you rush out to procure your own chicken, drawn or otherwise, I have to tell you that it doesn't work.

Multiplicity

A few weeks ago I ran into problems registering my son's name with the local district office, and I said it wasn't likely to be the last time having a multicultural child was going to cause problems in Korea. Well I didn't have to wait long for the next issue to raise its head – our son's health insurance bills have arrived and because his Irish surname takes up four Korean character spaces (it's four Western syllables), there was only one character space for his first name rather than two – so he's lost the last syllable of his name. I should have seen this coming because – with my middle name - only the first syllable of my surname appears on my health registration – and this is how I get called out in the hospitals.

This can't be good because when it comes to dealing with officialdom in any country – and I know Korea isn't different – it's quite important to maintain a consistent identity across systems otherwise computers and bureaucrats start to insist that you are not the same person. And when computers start thinking you are different people, the complications can just multiply. Since my son is more Korean than I am – and he'll have to grow up here - I see how it could be a particularly irritating problem for him.

My wife was not confident of our ability to get them to add the extra syllable to his first name, and neither was I because I kind of knew deep down – speaking as an ex-software designer myself - that some incompetent Korean software designer (I'm beginning to wonder if there is really any other kind) decided there was going to be a five-character limit in the database. Because, you know, Koreans don't have such long names and who else would ever be registered in the Korean health system except people with Korean names? Right? (For more on the Korean IT mentality - read this).

I found my wife's initial reaction very telling - “I feel bad now about giving him a strange name”. And that is the wrong answer. Your first reaction is supposed to be righteous indignation, otherwise you've fallen into their trap.

Korea keeps saying it welcomes a multicultural society so I think it would be better if they started planning for it rather than mysteriously thinking that Korea's future multicultural society will consist of people from lots of different countries all pretending they are Korean. Or does Korea really think all the foreigners are going to change their surnames to Kim? Don't answer that – they probably do.

Horror Hospital

Recently I wrote about some of the problems my wife and I had experienced with the maternity hospital we were in, but things were going to turn out to be worse for other people in what seemed to me like a perfect storm of Korean cultural issues.

The first aspect of Korean culture which differs from my own country lies in the fundamental nature of the birth experience itself. In Korea, women can – within a period of around four weeks - choose when to give birth; they pick a date and then report to the hospital to be induced or – if this is their preferred option, to have a caesarian section to deliver the baby. Now add to this ability to schedule a birth to the Korean thanksgiving holiday of Chuseok, one of those extremely rare times of the year when family might not be out working 12-hours a day, apparently making it a good time to schedule said birth. Next add in the near total contempt some business owners demonstrate for their customers in Korea, nurtured through a pathological pursuit of profit that might even make a financial trader blush. Add a little of the legendary local construction quality on top, and mix all these things together to achieve predictable results.

So this is what happened. A large number of women checked themselves in to have their babies during the Chuseok holiday, and it was probably double what the hospital could cope with. Normally, the recovery area of the maternity hospital, the 'sanhujoriwon' (산후조리원), takes up three floors – over Chuseok, the hospital expanded it to six by commandeering other floors which were not designed for the purpose. Whereas my wife's room was solely for her with en-suite, a desk, a TV and double bed for the husband to sleep in, the Chuseok mothers ended up in shared rooms with four beds and little else. That makes it no better than a bad British experience, and possibly worse because the already seemingly understaffed Korean hospital had not employed extra personnel for the holiday rush. Crucially for the people here though, this was not what they are accustomed to expecting, and it certainly wasn't what they were sold in the brochure.

And it gets worse. I said the hospital hadn't employed any extra staff, but in fact they'd gone the other way. The cleaning staff had the week off. So you have these new mothers, packed into rooms kept at abnormally high temperatures because of the belief here that this is better for their 'shattered' bodies, there's a lot of sweating and a lot of clothes going in the hospital wash baskets. But now nobody is around to clean them, piles of smelly clothes are building up in the corridors, and mothers are running out of clean clothes to wear. You can imagine the situation with bedding, bearing in mind that many of these women have undergone operations or procedures and were still bleeding.

And then there was the woman in the room next to us. Like my wife, she had been lucky enough to have her baby just before Chuseok, so she had a room to herself as she was supposed to. But the bathroom had a drainage problem. It was fitted incorrectly with the drainage grate too high, so after showering water would just collect creating an indoor pool. The room isn't exactly new so presumably it's been like this since it was built two or three years ago. She complained to the Sanhujoriwon Director - he offered her a small tool to push the water uphill into the pipe. She'd just given birth and could hardly walk, but the Samhujoriwon Director apparently thought nothing of her bending over pushing water around the floor. She protested.

Was he embarrassed? Afraid? His response was “If you don't like it, I have plenty of other women who would gladly have your room.” And sadly he was probably right, because when you're packed into a small room with three other women with no facilities whatsoever, you'd certainly see a single room with an inch of standing water in the bathroom as an upgrade. This is not really a good excuse, and it reminds me of the time I found a long black hair baked into my pizza at an expensive restaurant in Busan, and when we complained, the manager looked at us incredulously and said “well, it's only one.” On the face of it, Korea often seems to have a positive customer service culture – but perhaps only because they want to sell you something – once the transactions is done, attitudes can rapidly change – not always, but often enough to make you feel like you're stepping into a minefield every time.

It must have been bad because the husbands got unionised and all went to see the Hospital Director to complain, and by this time you can probably guess how that went. 'If you don't like my hospital, pick another!' I understand that a private Internet forum for mothers in Busan is now buzzing with anger about it, so word of mouth may at least provide a little karmic retribution.

Given the appalling conditions in the lower decks it almost seems churlish to mention another area in which the experience fell below expectations, but I will for completeness. The 'samhujoriwon' experience is about recovery and education, with mothers attending various classes to help them transition from hospital to coping on their own with their babies. There were no classes during Chuseok which meant that of the ten days of activities promised, many women only got seven. It's understandable that this is just bad luck and while I would expect cleaning to continue during the holiday, educational classes are a bit much to ask for. But there certainly won't be any refunds for the women who were short changed in this and other ways during the holidays. By this time, I couldn't say I was surprised.

Can I name and shame the hospital here? Sadly, probably not. The way things seem to work here is that criticising companies in public can easily lead to lawsuits. And in a nutshell, this tells you a lot about reason why the Hospital Director all but laughed in the faces of his patients and their families.

The problems I detail above effected others far more than they effected my wife. We were lucky – if you can call it luck - to have our own room away from some of the horrors. But I asked my wife, in principle rather than with intention, what could we have done to formally complain about the hospital had we suffered like some others had suffered. I was curious. She really wasn't sure, because often it seems people really don't ask those kind of questions here. I had an idea that ultimately, hospitals had to be licensed, and medical companies that ask new mothers to crawl around the bathroom floors of understaffed hospitals in dirty clothes are probably not what the government have in mind when handing out those licenses. So one imagines there must be some mechanism for calling people who run institutions like this to account. But it's not really my problem and it's a given that the Koreans who suffered won't take action either. Nothing will change. Meanwhile the Korean Government will keep talking about their desire to promote medical tourism to Korea within the Asian region, with discounts for properly qualified plumbers, presumably.

In the Name of the Father

Having chosen a name, my wife and I went to District Office to register our son's birth. And of course, we immediately ran into difficulties.

I believe that the children of some male foreigners in Korea take their father's surnames, so I didn't think we were treading entirely new territory with our decision to give our son a Korean first name and my Western surname. However, the first employee at the District Office said that she didn't know how to enter it into the computer. A supervisor was called, but he didn't know either.

Specifically, the problem related to our desire to register my son's first name in Chinese characters. This would be fine for 'the computer' if his surname had Chinese characters, but it only has the Korean character transliteration of the Western surname. Picking Chinese characters for names is hard, and I don't have a Chinese version of my surname. So 'the computer' said no.

We'd actually gone to the District Office to do two things - register our son as an individual and add him to our family register. The computer allowed his name to be added to the family register, but it wouldn't allow the individual registration. While this might at least seem like some sign of social progress - it probably isn't; when I got married my wife was designated as the head of our household, so I believe the computer allowing the family registration has more to do with her being Korean than any anything else. The staff told us they would have to consult their regional office for guidance, and we left without registering our son's birth.

It's not the first time I've encountered the 'computer says no' problem here due to my being a foreigner, and I'm sure it won't be the last. I used to be a computer programmer and I know that all you do when you write a program is take a snapshot of your own world view and create something which makes the computer behave the same way.

Later came the phone call from the Regional Office. Along with the 'computer says no' syndrome, my patience for Korea's passive-aggressive 'it-would-be-better-if' society is beginning to wear pretty thin as well, so the caller's suggestion that "it would be better if" we dispensed with the Chinese characters for my son's first name - rendering it without meaning - did not go down very well. Neither did the bizarre but apparently legal suggestion that he have a Korean surname on his Korean passport and a Western surname for his British one. The elephant in the room of that conversation seemed to be - thankfully left unspoken - that actually it would be better if my son just had a Korean surname.

When my wife thoroughly rejected this proposal, it was then - and only then - that the unknown official said that it could be done our way by registering the name in Korean characters and adding the Chinese characters for his first name later in some official way. It does nothing to alleviate my sense that the bureaucracy here is continually trying to beat people into homogeneous submission and only gives in to diversity when all else has failed.

That said, I'm not a big fan of multiculturalism as a national policy. In my country it became the equivalent of inviting a homicidal maniac to stay with you in your house, and an incredibly boorish homicidal maniac at that. And while the leaders of my city perpetuated the big lie of multiculturalism, it was never multicultural - it was just increasingly bipolar, like - I suspect - many of its residents. But Korean politicians talk a lot about multiculturalism these days like it's a good thing. I'm not saying it won't be in Korea, but they haven't experienced what I've experienced. However, on a personal level - and this is the unavoidable paradox - my son will grow up in a multicultural environment, and while I think every native-English speaker who expects Korea to bend over backwards for them should be sent back home never to return, I draw the line at my son's name. He is half-Korean, half-English, and as much as a name reflects a more fundamental identity, I want that identity to reflect his twin heritages. I guess that's where I draw the line. This probably isn't going to get any easier.

Your Name Here

It's normal for Westerners to name their children once they are born - or even before. In fact, the traditional Catholic dogma of my upbringing almost demands it insofar as an unchristened babies are left in limbo, or at least they used to be until the infallible Church changed its mind three years ago. But leaving organised religion aside, it seems sensible that a baby should have a name, rather than simply being 'the baby' or any other range of personal pronouns.

This is not the traditional Korean way. The foetus is given a nickname which often sticks until a name is chosen two or more weeks after the baby is born, which is when the advice of a fortune-teller/Chinese character naming specialist is sought - they suggest the most fortuitous names, and how to write them in Chinese, based on the baby's date and time of birth, and the father's surname. You can't know some of these things until after the birth, ergo it is impossible to properly name the child beforehand.

Choosing a Surname

The first problem to be tackled was the thorny subject of the surname. Korean family names almost always one-syllable whereas my Irish one has four and consists of eight characters. This causes problems within Korea's bureaucracy because it doesn't always fit into databases which were designed exclusively for homogeneous domestic use. And if my son was to inherit my family name we feared it would really mark him out as a non-Korean, and only add to the problems he's likely to face growing up here. On the other hand we knew he was going to have to live with being different - it wasn't as though the surname was the only issue. An additional complication was that unlike the Western tradition, wives don't take on their husbands' surnames in Korea and neither did mine. So perhaps someone was going to feel left out one way or the other.

We made the decision to keep my surname, and choose a Korean first name. This condemns our son to having an impossibly long name by Korean standards, but on the plus side if he ever gets conscripted he probably won't be chosen for dangerous missions, because by the time they've called out his name the war will be over.

Choosing a First Name

I believed choosing the first name would be the easier decision. It wasn't, and not just because of the need to consult a fortune-teller/naming specialist whose decision we didn't want to be beholden to. We needed a name that my wife felt was a good Korean one, and which was relatively easy to pronounce for my relatives back home. It needed to be non-embarrassing if our son ever lives in the West, which ruled out a lot of 'hos' and 'suks' amongst others. It needed to be modern, which seemed to dash my hopes of naming my son after a famous Korean physicist on the principle that it was something more to aspire to than the usual bland meanings behind Korean names such as 'noble' or 'heroic'.

I tried to do some research but apparently Western websites mainly list Korean baby names which most Koreans have never heard of or find laughable. We spent six months before the birth gathering ideas but nothing leapt out at us and we had to wait for the naming specialist's suggestions anyway.

Korean Mother Comes Down From the Mountain

Then a few days after my wife gave birth I was sat at my desk when Korean Mother entered the room and announced a new name I hadn't heard before. I assumed it was just another idea but then she came back shortly afterwards with it written down. She repeated it verbally, pointing out while doing so the corresponding Korean characters which I was perfectly capable of reading on my own. It seemed to have come from Korean Father down in Namhae. The mood had changed. There was something serious about this. It was as though she'd just come from from Mount Sinai with the ten commandments on stone tablets and put them in front of me.

I didn't really know what she was getting at, but what irked me was that the name was written as my wife's Korean surname followed by the newly chosen first name. My surname was nowhere to be seen. I suddenly wondered whether to her, this was going to be his name, and this is what she'd be calling him, possibly along with everyone else. It's bad enough that my own identity is being eroded here, without watching my son's vanish before my eyes. I gave her my best "thanks but don't call us, we'll call you" look, and in return I got the "I find your lack of faith disturbing" face back. I texted my wife in hospital.

Our Plan Versus What Actually Happened

So here is what we planned to happen. When my wife finally escaped the hospital we would go see a fortune-teller, get a handful of suggestions based on the specifics of our baby's date and time of birth, and then we choose one of them, or something else entirely. It's the well-worn path a friend who has just given birth went down.

Here is what actually happened. Korean Father recruited an allegedly famous fortune-teller from his social network to do his thing and we got one name back - and only one - and this is the name that had landed on my desk. Through being a police officer, Korean Father knows some... interesting people, so, given that the name of our child is quite important, I just wanted to check how he knew the naming specialist. Well, yes, he had been in prison. OK, but at least tell me it wasn't for fraud I asked half-jokingly. Sure enough... But my wife liked the name anyway.

Several hours later two friends of ours visit the hospital and out of nowhere, and apparently on the spur of the moment while brainstorming, one of them suggested two names that I actually rather liked. In fact one of them seemed rather clever because it's a fusion of the Korean words for 'Korea' and 'England' and it's actually used as a real Korean name, although my wife feels it lacks the levity of the fortune-teller's option, and it might be a little old fashioned. Anyway, I'm in no position to decide on the suitability of a first name.

But we knew that if we chose the fortune-teller's singular suggestion then we'd always have the vague feeling that he named our baby, not us. If we didn't choose it, every time our son suffers a misfortune it's possible that my wife is going to think that somehow it might not have happened if we'd chosen the right name for him. In other words, the moment that name landed on my desk it was probably a done deal.

We decided to consult another naming specialist to try and break the spell, but I'm not sure this was entirely to Korean Mother's approval. An animated discussion on the subject took place in my wife's room at the hospital and although I didn't think Korean Mother was particularly happy I didn't read too much into it because honestly, Busan people can talk about what they had for lunch and make it sound like an international crisis. But here's the thing. I'd spent a lot of one-to-one time with Korean Mother since my wife went into hospital and we became something of a double act as we laughed our way from one attempt to communicate to the next. Walking home together after the hospital that night was no laughing matter, because it was in total silence.

The second naming specialist provided us with ten additional suggestions, and also told us that the name recommended by the first specialist was "no good". But predictably most of the new names could be immediately ruled out for incompatibility with English or English pronunciation. And my wife still liked the original name, so it stuck.

Although...

Just as we accepted our son's new name in our mind, it turned out that Korean Father had given the wrong time of birth to the first naming specialist, potentially changing the baby's fortune and rendering the name inappropriate. But Korean Father didn't want to contact him again to tell him because of the loss of face this would involve, which left us at an impasse. My wife eventually got in touch with the specialist to be told that the hour difference "didn't matter".

But somewhere quite far along the way it had also become apparent that the chosen name - and its 'flow' of strokes in Chinese characters, was in any case based on the incorrect premise of my son having my wife's Korean surname. Since this wouldn't be the case, it rendered the whole process suspect at best.

And that's the story of how I set out with aspirations of naming my son after a famous scientist and actually finished up having him named by a convicted fraudster.

Access Denied

Twenty minutes after my son was born, I was finally able to take my first picture of him... through the glass partition of the 'Baby Center'. But that was more than my wife, who despite being awake wasn't able to see him again until 4pm Sunday afternoon - eleven hours after the birth.

I said a mistake was made in those precious few seconds after his birth, and it was that my wife handed our baby back to the impatient staff at their beckoning, and not to me. I would have liked to have held him. But they wanted to take him away and clean him up. It didn't seem unreasonable and I didn't think it was going to have the consequences it did.

Holding the Baby

My only question after taking that first photo was when could I hold my son. The answer wasn't clear, but it certainly became clear over the next 24-hours. I couldn't. The staff were determined in their inflexibility, and I was completely mystified. I couldn't really conceptualise the notion that the staff could refuse me access to my child when both I and my wife wanted me to have that moment. Even though living here has conditioned me to live with the sometimes bizarre cultural mores such as fan death, which people doggedly believe in despite any rational argument to the contrary, this was probably the most surprising cultural difference I'd ever encountered.

When my wife felt better she tackled the staff about the subject. When could I hold my baby for the first time? "In two weeks when you go home." was the rather curt response. And there you have it. The first physical contact I will have with my son won't be for another ten days.

Five Days, 30 Minutes

The visiting times don't help. There are two one-hour visiting sessions and one which lasts 30 minutes at the 'Baby Center'. But that doesn't tell the whole story. What happens is you go, and they place your baby in a crib behind the glass partition, often for around two to three minutes. So five days after the birth I've spent less than half-an-hour with my baby, and of course what I have had has been through that glass partition. Before the birth I didn't know how I'd feel about becoming a father. And now I still don't know, because I don't really feel like one.

Germs and Hygiene

Their reasoning is germs. Fathers are not allowed access to their babies because of germs. I thought this was a little hypocritical of the hospital judging from what I saw of their hygiene standards when my son was born. It didn't really seem to stand up to much rational scrutiny either. Medical staff and mothers were coming in and out of the 'Baby Center' all the time, and they had to put on a gown and wash their hands. I didn't understand why fathers couldn't do the same.

It's also hard to take quite so seriously when you consider that until a few months ago - after we'd chosen this hospital - babies were allowed to stay in the rooms where mothers recuperate for two-to-four weeks after the birth, often with their husbands who stayed with them.

Bubble Boy

If my baby's isolation is rather questionable, mine seems more real. I'm unable to express anything beyond simple concepts in Korean so I have no ability to explain exactly how I feel to any of the medical staff. I know in reality I have no hope of convincing them to change their mind - whatever I have to say about Attachment Theory, my emotional position or basic human rights - but it would at least be a comfort if I could register that intellectual disapproval. I can't and that just adds to my sense of powerlessness.

The truth is that much of my life in Korea comes down to battling the sense of worthlessness which can easily arise from people constantly discussing issues concerning me, and sometimes in front of me, without my input. To an extent that's an inevitable consequence created by the language barrier, but it doesn't make me feel any better. It seems that being dismissed as a non-participant is also the modus operandi at the hospital, except it amplifies my existing sense of living apart from the society I'm supposed to be participating in. The glass wall which divides my son and I serves as a metaphor for my wider experience in Korea.

I feel I've missed out on something important because those first few hours and days are gone now. So to my mind the hospital have taken something from me which I'll never get back. And if anything were to happen without me ever having any physical contact with him I think it would be even more difficult to deal with.

That said, I think I'm getting to a point now where I've gone through disbelief and anger and am arriving at apathy. I'm resigned to not having any real contact with my son until the end of the month. What else can I do? The increasing sense of apathy is better for me than the anger I had before, but I do wonder what a psychologist would make of it - it may not be a healthy emotional start to the bonding process.

Primer

When we signed up this wasn't how the hospital operated and they never said "by the way, we've changed the deal". Once my wife had given birth, and realised they'd changed the way they operated. it wasn't a realistic option to change hospitals so we were stuck with it. I suppose you could argue that it's a breach of contract, but this being Korea there's little to be done about it; consumer rights are comparatively weak here and the law certainly gives the impression of favouring its corporate paymasters. Welcome to Chaebol Country.

If I could go back in time I'd do it differently. So my advice to anyone who finds themselves potentially heading towards the same situation as me here is to think very carefully about what you want out of the experience, and how it's likely to unfold. I wish I'd held my son after he was born and I lost that chance for two weeks. But ultimately it's about more than that. Visiting times are extremely short, my wife doesn't see her baby except when she feeds him which I don't think is emotionally healthy, there may be a worrying lack of emergency backup, and hygiene standards seem questionable at best.

Not all Korean hospitals are going to operate the same way or be the same. Next time - if there is a next time - things have to be different.

Baby

Five days ago my wife gave birth to our first child, a boy. Over the last couple of years, we'd talked about whether it was better to have a baby in England or Korea. I've always been impressed with the Korean health system - yes, it costs money, but it is fast and efficient in comparison to the slow lumbering bureaucracy of the British National Health Service. Korea seemed to be the clear winner. Now I'm no longer sure. I want to document my experience here as a possibly cautionary tale for other people who find themselves in the same position. Had I known a few months ago what I know now, things may have worked out differently.

I'm splitting what I have to say into the before and after - a tale of two halves if you will, and then there may be quite a lot of post-match analysis, so if you don't want to know the result, look away now.

She's Having a Baby

My wife's water broke at 9.35pm on Saturday evening. The hospital said she had time for a shower before checking in. That's important because Koreans firmly believe that women can not take a shower or bath for a week or more after giving birth otherwise it will damage their health for life - after giving birth Korean people's bones are 'brittle'.

An hour later we arrived at the hospital. It's not a huge state-run complex of buildings as you would expect to find in the UK, but rather eleven stories of a very small office block situated on a major road. Like most Korean hospitals, it's specialised - in this case, as a maternity hospital. When we reached the delivery floor, we stepped out of the elevator into a small empty waiting area. I soon discovered that the entire floor was being staffed by one nurse, although since there was only another patient there, who was busy screaming in agony, perhaps that was the appropriate staffing level. The nurse split her time between checking us in and disappearing into the first delivery room to admonish the woman for her behaviour. Really.

Korean Mother was with us, and she went down on the forms as the next-of-kin. My inability to communicate at the level of Korean necessary to deal with a medical emergency made it necessary, but that was to prove only the first of a series of unhappy experiences during the next few hours.

The Red Gloves

The unseen woman gave birth and the baby cried for around a minute before silence descended on the otherwise unoccupied delivery floor. Retrospectively, I see now I should have seen that as a clue, but my head was full of other thoughts. We were in the next door delivery room by now with my wife lying on the bed. The nurse entered with heavily bloodied surgical gloves and much to my shock began adjusting my wife's bed and bedding. Korean hospitals have always seemed to have good hygiene standards so this wasn't what I expected at all. It turned out my wife was already 30% dilated so we were told the baby was likely to come by the morning.

I suppose the room wasn't quite what I expected either. It was very cramped - only wide enough for one person to stand on either side of the bed - and it didn't fit my possibly wrong image of the clinically clean environment I'd expected. It was really just a room, with some rather dingy circa-1970s wallpaper.

I'd chosen to be present in the room during my wife's birth. I don't think this is really negotiable for British people and it would be very unusual if you didn't want to be. I got the impression that Korean men are not so enthusiastic about the idea, and I was told the husband of our neighbour stayed outside for the big moment. But again, the reality was different from my expectations. Korean Mother and I were regularly told to leave by the nurse and the pedometer that I wore eventually told me I'd walked over a kilometre in the corridor outside, partly out of frustration and partly just to keep myself awake. Korean Mother took to crouching by the entrance to the curtain-off delivery room chanting Buddhist mantras over and over.

The Wreck of the Mary Celeste

It was while I was pacing up and down the narrow and claustrophobic corridor of the Mary Celeste Maternity Hospital that I finally started looking at the crib positioned near to the door of my wife's delivery room. A green blanket sat in it and it was stained with blood and other bodily fluids. Another equally stained blanket lay underneath it. I suppose the hospital would argue that they were perfectly clean despite their appearances, but I was so surprised I took a photo of it. Unfortunately, I'd left my DSLR in the maternity room and was only carrying my compact digital camera, which I discovered had developed a fault preventing me from altering its settings, so the noisy picture didn't do the reality of it justice. Anyway, I was rather surprised, and not in a good way.

My wife was determined not to be a screamer so only moaned occasionally, but even after two epidurals she was in considerable pain by 3.30am, which is when apparently to her great surprise the nurse discovered that my wife was 80% dilated, suddenly moving the expected time of arrival up a number of hours. The nurse had now been the only person we'd seen since arriving five hours earlier, but she began making phone calls to a doctor, giving me some comfort that we really weren't the only people in the entire building. But lingering questions remained in my mind - if there was an emergency, how equipped was a small hospital like this to cope with it? How long would it take a crash team to get here? Did they even have one? No, say what you like about British hospitals, at least you probably have every conceivable specialist to hand if there's a problem. I began to think a larger Korean hospital might have been a better plan.

Push Pull

Within half an hour the nurse was giving instructions to push but there was still no sign of the doctor despite a series of phone calls. In my mind I'd editorialised them as increasingly urgent pleas of 'where are you?', but perhaps it wasn't.

Twenty minutes later the nurse, whose attendance throughout the night had been sporadic despite the theoretical one-to-one ratio of nursing care, disappeared, leaving Korean Mother to work with her daughter on the pushing. When the nurse returned, with the doctor, a second nurse, and a large vacuum pump in tow, we were bundled out of the room. I discovered later that the baby had been judged to be stuck, but my language isolation prevented me from understanding what was happening and Korean Mother didn't appear to know either. Her Buddhist chanting became louder which I didn't take as a particularly positive sign. It was a critical time in the delivery, and we were kept outside for twenty minutes, but they hadn't properly closed the curtain to the room, so occasionally I managed to see beyond the medical staff to the horrors that lay beyond. My wife had clearly lost quite a lot of blood. It's hard to know at the time what can be considered normal, so I wasn't especially worried, but later she had to have a transfusion.

30 Seconds Over Tokyo

We were finally called in three minutes before the birth, and for the first time we had to wear gowns - but no masks. Because of the cramped conditions - caused in no small part by the large vacuum pump that was already attached to my wife, I could only stand at the top of the bed, so when the baby came it's the only angle I could see it from. The umbilical cord was clamped and I was given what felt like the world's bluntest scissors to cut it with. Yes, Korean men apparently might sit out the actual delivery, but its normal for them to cut the umbilical cord.

We'd had all these grand plans about taking lots of photos and even filming the moment of birth, but in the reality of the situation it seemed heartless to take pictures like a tourist when my wife needed my full attention. When the birth happened at 4.57am it was so quick that I was taken aback. I didn't understand how rapid the vacuum pump could be, although having seen my baby sucked out of its home head first like that I think I understand why so many people in the modern world have nightmares about being abducted from their beds by aliens. I was quickly conscripted into cutting the cord and then the baby was passed to its mother while I struggled - and failed - with the now certainly faulty camera I had to hand to take a shot. I couldn't reach my DSLR in time. Thirty seconds later the baby was bundled outside by the nurses and I once again tried and failed to take a photo in the corridor despite the protestations of the staff. Blink and you'll miss it. Our baby was hurried away.

In the end, while giving birth is a terribly hard thing to go through, it ended up being comparatively straightforward. The baby was fine and after a couple of days, my wife was much better too. But a mistake was made during that thirty second period and it was going to linger with me and cause a great deal of unhappiness and frustration.

Stem Cell

"We don't have a contingency plan, because it's not likely to happen". - Anonymous Korean Stem Cell Company Representative.

Before we went to the BEXCO Baby Fair, my wife broached the subject of umbilical cord stem cell harvesting with me. Apparently the idea was that if the cells were harvested from the cord blood and stored, our child would potentially have a better chance of recovery from future diseases such as diabetes and blindness, and eventually also problems that would benefit from a regenerative medical solution, once technology allows.

I'd heard about stem cell harvesting, but thought it was a niche activity much more in the realm of fringe science than common reality. As far as I'm aware, it's not a subject which tends to raise itself in my own country for expectant parents, but I should have guessed that in Korea - which has pioneered some stem cell research - the question is much more in the public domain. And the three Korean stem cell harvesting companies with stands at BEXCO only brought me more rapidly to that realisation. This is a big business here.

So during our trip to the Baby Fair we sat down to talk to each company, armed with questions. Apparently this was not the norm for the company representatives we met, who implied that most customers just listen to their extended one-to-one presentations and sign up, quite possibly with the perception that everyone else was doing it, so they should too. It doesn't help that the business is premised on the collective guilt-trip that is doing everything you can as a parent for your baby's future health (the American Academy of Pediatrics in their review of cord blood banking nicely summarised this as "families may be vulnerable to emotional marketing at the time of birth of a child"), and worse that there is more than a small element of naked self-interest, insofar as treatments derived from the stem cells can also be used by the parents for themselves should they need it - in which case the child's guaranteed allocation is supposedly filled from a general stem-cell bank.

To be fair, one of the issues we were concerned with was the financial stability of the companies concerned. There seemed little purpose of going to the expense of putting stem cells in a tissue bank if there was the real risk of the operating company going under and switching the machines off at some point in the future. Since retaining these stem cells is a one-time-only opportunity, the benefits of which may not be called upon for fifty years or more, it stands to be a very long term relationship. I was not encouraged to discover that some companies in the industry had upfront costs but no further maintenance charges, because while it sounds financially attractive, the business model runs the risk of being little more than a stem-cell pyramid scheme which is financially unsustainable in the long term. The companies concerned might argue that all future costs will be absorbed by the upfront charge, but since they can't know what the future cost of electricity, storage and wages will be, any company operating this model might start running a loss on progressively more of their inventory. Such developments have a habit of bringing down companies very quickly. We were also quite inquisitive on what contingency plans existed in the event of extended power outages at the tissue bank. This possibly transpired to be a prescient line of questioning since the particularly hot summer this year is pushing Korea's low electricity reserve margins to the limit and threatening extended blackouts.

To their credit, one of the company representatives we talked to was armed with financial statements allegedly showing their robust financial health, demonstrating that they knew that there was a concern over long-term security of the stem cells in their care. The problem was though that the balance sheet concerned - impressive though it was - belonged to their publicly-listed parent company. Indeed, none of the three companies we talked with were truly independent or integrated operations, but rather financially separated units of larger publicly-traded groups which made it entirely conceivable that they had to be independently viable and may not receive backing from the parent company should the business make losses and become insolvent.

We didn't really make a lot of progress conducting limited due diligence on the companies we were considering entrusting our stem cells to, nor in truth did we expect to, but it wasn't a wasted effort on our part; a couple of companies stated that in the event they could no longer store our cells they would allegedly inform us, but we didn't choose to do business with the company whose representative told us of financial failure "we don't have a contingency plan, because it's not likely to happen"...

In truth, the whole business of harvesting stem cells is little more than a contingency plan - a little insurance and peace of mind if you will. The evidence of the efficacy of treatments is mixed, scientific progress may render the availability of umbilical cord stem cells less relevant, there's currently little evidence that donations from unrelated donors in stem cell banks are any less effective (or ineffective), and the wild claims that are made regarding the treatment of hereditary or genetic conditions such as leukaemia may be wide of the mark - these are pre-existing conditions which may not benefit from the use of stem cells which may carry the same problems.

We signed up anyway, because even if one of the companies we talked to didn't have contingency plans, we wanted to have one for our baby. The cost was 1,300,000 won (£702/$1,115), and the company will liaise with the maternity hospital to take the cord blood and rush it off to the tissue bank as quickly as possible when my wife gives birth. The cost covers the first 20 years of storage rather than it being an open-ended lifetime commitment, after which the company we signed up with "doesn't have a charging policy yet" - this is still a relatively new industry. It may not be ideal, but we tried to chose the company most likely to be around in 20 years. Because the stem cells are not really geographically portable, it also means that should our child need any treatment in future, we will need to return to Korea for it if we aren't living here.