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.

August Rush: A New Home and a Financial Setback

Since I last wrote I feel as though I’ve lived another lifetime and I’ll forever call it August 2011. It’s hard for me to explain recent events in my life in a short narrative so over the next few days I’ll post a series of entries under the theme of my ‘August Rush’.

My wife and I decided to buy an apartment. Since we returned to Korea we’ve lived with her mother, and that had both its emotional and logical reasons, but it changed the nature of our relationship and not for the better. Summer tends to be the slow season for apartment hunting in Korea, for the very good reason that people don’t want to hike around in the unbearable heat as I have just spent the last month doing, and with prices of apartments in Busan rising at a bubble-like pace, we were watching our relocation options dwindle by the month. We had to take advantage of any lull there was.

I became a full-time financial trader in December 2004, and I was quite successful for a few years, but since my wife stopped working alongside me last year - providing an all-important extra set of eyes and second opinion - my profitability just ebbed away and my heart wasn’t quite in it any more. I sat alone in my office trading London hours into the early hours of the Korean mornings, I wasn’t getting out of the apartment much at all, so I was failing to learn the Korean language. And the relentlessly negative financial macroeconomic environment of the last few years began to take its toll on me, because in the end I found it doesn’t matter whether you’re winning in the market if the constantly depressing news environment just wears you down. I started doing a weekly radio segment on Busan e-FM during trading hours just to get away from things, an unthinkable move during more motivated times.

But the end of my career as a trader in August came quickly. I have a rule that if the running annual total of my profits falls sufficiently below the level I could earn from a normal salaried position, then I have to accept that I’m in the wrong job. When you’re ‘in the zone’ in trading, as we call it, you feel untouchable, but when you’re not it’s easy to see extended runs of losses, because this is an activity where studies have suggest 90% of participants consistently lose money. When you find yourself in that 90%, when general market conditions seem no longer aligned with your trading style, you have to find something else to do with your life. And while it would make for a great narrative if could say I’d suffered a major financial blow-up, really it’s been more of a setback, albeit a significant one.

The culmination of my minor financial crisis was connected with the search for an apartment. I’d done a radio segment about ‘the gravitational pull of Haeundae’, and like a lot of Koreans in Busan I felt like I had to be there, but not just out of the need to climb the property and perceived social ladder; the two prominent foreign schools - Busan Foreign School and Busan International Foreign School - are both in the area, and with the prospect that this is where my son needed to go one day, we were planning ahead. But Haeundae is expensive, and it seemed like we had a choice – buy a nice apartment in a good area, or a bad apartment in a good area. We started looking around and it only seemed to make that choice seem even more stark.

I’d seen some nice apartments in Centum City, but they were out of our price range, and yet tantalisingly close enough that if I pushed hard with my trading accounts living there might be possible. So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time – broke my risk management rules, ignored the warnings I’d built into my systems, and went for it. If I failed at least I could say that I met my undoing out there on the ragged edge which so often defines who you are as a person. In earlier and more reckless times as a trader I’d done the same thing, and I’d always come out of it on top, but not this time. My decision came just days before the market entered a particularly high period of volatility, and in trading parlance, I was long when I should have been short and short when I should have been long. By the time it was over, I’d lost quite a lot of money and Centum City was no longer tantalisingly close but instead an even remoter dream.

You live by the sword and die by the sword as a trader. I knew what I was doing, I let frustration and impatience get the better of me, and now I have to pay the price. That was my first financial disaster. My second may be buying the apartment itself, because I’m convinced that Busan is in the midst of an unsustainable property bubble that could entirely conceivably implode in on itself at any moment. But we urgently needed a place to live, and rather presciently as it turned out, while watching what was happening in the international financial markets and the Korean construction sector, I predicted that Korean banks might stop lending, as banks in the UK had a few years earlier, excluding a generation from the dream of home ownership.

In fact when we were arranging our loan, in a remarkable and frightening admission the bank manager told us that he couldn’t guarantee the bank would still be willing to honour it at the end of September when it was supposed to be released. Despite this, it wasn’t certain then that the turmoil in the financial markets would translate into real-world actions, but just days after we arranged to buy our new apartment, the Korean banks made their move as I’d believed they would, but much sooner than I expected.

The Honey Pot

In my mind the angry husband eventually accused his wife of caring more about her plants than she did about him, and this is the reason he chose to start dropping them, one by one, out of the window into the car park ten floors below.

As heavy ceramic pots of the sort favoured for Korean balconies, complete with large exotic plants, surreally dropped down the side of our apartment building, the ageing building janitor was called in to negotiate for the safety of the remaining foliage, even if the marriage at this point was beyond saving.

It’s not always a given that people are going to listen to their elders in this country any more, but thirty minutes later, the man was sheepishly picking up shattered ceramic fragments and traumatised plants amongst the thin layer of earth that now covered part of our apartment block's car park.

Stress is a huge problem in Korea.

Busan e-FM Week 13: Weddings and Honeymoons

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

One of the most important events in my life was my wedding, and it happened only a few weeks after I came to Korea – in fact, that’s why I came, to marry my Korean girlfriend here.

Fortune tellers

The Korean wedding experience is quite different from an English one. For example, the first thing I discovered was that in Korea, you don’t really choose a date which is convenient for you – instead a fortune teller picks a wedding date they believe is the most fortuitous based on your dates of births and so on. But the second shock was something I only found out about once I was here – which is that whatever the wedding date is, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s not the same day you sign the official legal documents at the local district office. And of course, it’s the legal documents that really mark the official marriage date. That’s different from England, where you either get married in a local registry office, which is a bit like a district office for weddings, or you get married in a place of worship such as a church, mosque, temple or synagogue. Then, straight after the local official or religious person – such as a priest marries you in the ceremony, you go into an office and sign the marriage register, and that’s when you’re really legally married.

Marriage dates

So my wedding ceremony and district office dates are completely different. In fact, because I only had a three month visa at the time, we signed our legal papers at the district office almost a month earlier. But some friends of ours actually signed their papers after returning from their honeymoon, which is really surprising for a Westerner. I think in our culture we have a long tradition of changing our minds at the last minute and not going through with a wedding – like in the movies. But in Korea it’s not uncommon to sign the legal papers after returning from the honeymoon, and probably – like we did – people get their official wedding photos done a month before the ceremony, so it seems there’s a belief in Korea that once a marriage is planned, it will definitely go ahead. I suppose there’s a lot of social pressure.

Photo shoots and other surprises

We spent an entire day at the studio for the photo shoot, changing outfits and scenery, and I had to wear a traditional Korean costume, so that was a really interesting experience.

Other things about the wedding were surprising as well. For example, in England the bride and groom often organise a lot of the wedding themselves, for example – who to invite, what food to have and so on. In Korea, it’s usually the parents who do it, and it seems as though they invite who they like, and that’s who comes. So, it felt like the wedding ceremony was really for their friends more than ours. I soon learned that because of the whole culture and gift money business, it’s a case of needing to invite people who have invited you to their family weddings before, or might do in future, to recover the monetary loss.

The wedding

We had both types of ceremony – a Western-style one which all the ajummas and ajeossis attended, and then a Korean one with just close family. I had to stand with my father-in-law and shake all the guests hands, I had no idea who they were and I couldn’t really speak Korean at all, so I had no idea once I’d met them either. It was chaos really, and the ceremony was equally chaotic, because it didn’t quite feel real to me – it was more like a fake wedding for the cameras.

Of course, we were already legally married by this point, so in that sense it felt like more of an act that a wedding in England would have been. Then, as we waited to walk down the aisle, all the ajummas and ajeossis at the back were pushing us around, and when we walked down the aisle, the music played briefly and then just suddenly stopped in the middle, so it felt quite rough – you know, as if people didn’t really care about the experience so much as just getting through it as quickly as possible. It was at a wedding hall as well, rather than a church, so it already felt like some kind of commercialised nightmare to me. And as soon as the ceremony began, lots of the adjummas and ajeossis rushed out. Afterwards I found out about the whole buffet voucher thing, and the fact that some people just come out of social obligation and for the free food, and they need to get an early start so they can eat a lot of food to break even on the gift money.

I found it a bit disheartening. Coming here to get married as a foreigner can be tough I think. I didn’t understand anything that was happening, and it was too far for my family to come which was sad. That works both ways as well – last year my sister got married and I couldn’t really go to that. Whichever country you marry in, someone loses. Anyway, I didn’t have any friends or family at the wedding, so it was an oddly lonely experience. They didn’t even get my name completely right. I was 짐 영국 [Kim Yeonggug - Yeonggug meaning England but also occasionally being a Korean male name I gather] on the sign at the buffet. OK, I can see how that happened, and I thought it was funny.

I liked the Korean ceremony – it was quite intimate, and as a foreigner the experience was really interesting. But the Western wedding hall ceremony was really soulless and I’m not sure I’d do it again. Perhaps Korean people don’t mind the fake Western experience, but as a Westerner I did. In retrospect I would have preferred just a larger Korean ceremony.

The honeymoon

I was relieved when it was all over, but afterwards we got straight into a specially hired taxi and went down to Gyeongju for our honeymoon, so the hectic schedule didn’t stop.

We stayed in a ‘pension’ [Korean holiday villa], and you know... one of the top-ten things you don’t want to hear when you arrive is “oh yes, we know about the problem with the sewage smell”. So now every time I smell sewage in Busan – which is quite a lot – I’m reminded of my honeymoon. Looking back, the experience was like a comedy. As part of the wedding package the ‘pension’ offered an evening barbecue with wine, but because of the smell in our room we decided to go through with it, even though it was January. So we drank wine and ate barbecued food outside, in the dark, in temperatures around minus five degrees.

While we were there we hired a taxi for two days to drive us from place to place – mainly cultural sites, museums and temples around Gyeongju such as Bulguksa, but it was hard for me to understand some of what I was seeing because the tourist explanations were only in Korean in some places. If I’d just been a tourist in Korea on holiday, I think I might have been a little disappointed. There weren’t many people around because it was winter – so it was a strange experience, because with the taxi driver it felt like there were basically three of us sharing a honeymoon. But I have to admit, the taxi was a good way of getting around. Still, winter isn’t a good time to get married really. But that’s when the fortune teller set a date. Sometimes I feel that my life in Korea is secretly run by fortune tellers.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

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

Busan e-FM Week 4: Social Responsibilities

About 'Open Mike in Busan'
Listen to the segment on Koreabridge

Introduction

In the previous week at Busan e-FM, I talked about a few experiences I’d had living with my Korean parents-in-law. This week, I thought I’d expand on that, and talk about some of my experiences with families, and family responsibilities.

There can be a lot of social responsibilities in Korea

And I really wasn’t prepared for that. I work for myself and I like doing my own thing. So plugging myself into a society where I suddenly have a lot of formalised family obligations, and social responsibilities – well that’s difficult for me. Having said that, maybe a lot of foreigners living in Korea are the same, because I think if you really fit in well with your own society, what are you doing in Korea? But then it often seems to me that the type of foreigners who end up living here are exactly the type of people who really shouldn’t be living in a more socially ordered country like this.

So it’s true that I’ve experienced some serious culture clashes. Sometimes it’s little things. For example, when we first came to Korea my wife told me that we had to go to Namhae to visit her father’s parents to give them a ‘big bow’. The idea of travelling for an entire day, just to go and do the required ‘big bow’, in a place that sounded rather rural and remote, didn’t really appeal to me at all.

Big bows

I didn’t mind that as such, but back then I thought I was only going to be in Korea for a short period, and I still had my job to do, so I was racing against the clock to experience as much of Busan as possible, in what little free time I had. The idea of spending a day on a bus, just to bow in front of a couple of people because it was a form of social obligation – well it just made me wonder what else I’d have to do in Korea because other people demanded it.

Actually though, foreigners wrote about the ‘big bows’ last year on an Internet forum here in Korea, and I was shocked to learn that some of them actually refuse to do the ‘big bow’ - even to their parents-in-law. They say it’s dehumanising – demeaning. Well, I know I can be difficult sometimes, but maybe this means it’s nothing compared to some other foreigners.

So the grandparents got their ‘big bow’, and then there was a funeral

So I went to see my grandparents-in-law, and they got their big bow. And it’s just as well, because a few months later my wife’s grandmother died suddenly. Then of course, we had to go back for the funeral. That was when the whole family responsibility thing really shocked me, because it turns out that I’m sort of the eldest son of the eldest son, so I had to get involved and I ended up helping to carry the coffin.

There were a lot of rituals to go through – we were there for two days – and then there were more responsibilities afterwards, like going back for another ceremony on the 49th day after the death. My father-in-law had to move down to Namhae to help his father with the small farm he lives on, because apparently that was his responsibility, and that was a huge change – because it meant my mother-in-law was on her own then. So I really felt it was our responsibility to move in with her. Lots of things changed, and people didn’t seem to have a choice.

Do you take this country to be your lawfully wedded wife?

You know, I didn’t react so badly to all these sudden family responsibilities. I’d been here long enough by then to know that when you marry a Korean, you marry the culture, the traditions the attitude and of course, you definitely marry the family. But families are difficult things. I didn’t really agree to live with my brother-in-law, but he lost his job and came back home for a while. Each extra family member that lives with us feels like a bit more privacy and space lost for me, but what can you do?

I don’t talk with my brother-in-law, which is strange. He doesn’t speak any English, and I can’t really communicate in Korean. But the truth is, the job market isn’t good for him, so he hasn’t done much in the last year. If he spoke English we’d talk. Actually I’m a few years older than him so – according to my wife – if I were Korean I would have given him the talk by now, you know – get back up on your feet. It must be hard. He needs some sympathy and motivation, or maybe, in the Korean hierarchical system, he needs his older brother figure to put pressure on him.

The language barrier stops you living up to your social responsibilities

I can’t live up to my Korean social responsibilities because of the language barrier, but I’m not sorry about that. I don’t want to feel it’s my responsibility to kind of lecture people younger than myself.

Actually, he hasn’t visited his grandparents in a long time, and I couldn’t understand it until he said once “when will my job be good enough to visit them?” And that’s the problem isn’t it? It’s not only about showing respect fr your elders, but to go through that, you have to be happy with yourself first, because otherwise they are going to lecture you, and you feel bad enough as it is. To be honest, I understand that because I’ve got a similar problem with my Korean relatives – which is both job and language related.

But it doesn't stop you being on the receiving end of a lecture

There was a big family meal where I met some relatives for the first time. It didn’t start well because they demanded to look at my hands when we were introduced. Do you know what they said? “Soft”. In other words, I hadn’t worked hard enough in my life – I wasn’t one of them.

Then they criticised my lack of Korean language – I’d been here a year by that time - “it’s not good enough”, “you’re not working hard enough”, “this is typical of 미국 사람”, that sort of thing. Yes, I know I’m British, but in my experience, all 외국인 are Americans when we’re in trouble. My wife took this as long as she could, and then she turned to me and said “We’re leaving!” And I guess that was it – we stormed out.

And you can’t avoid them forever

Of course I have seen them since. You really can’t avoid it in Korea can you? But I’m used to family meals being a bit tense, because my family has a lot of differences between them – including religious differences. One of my aunts is a Buddhist fortune teller, and one of my uncles is a Christian pastor. They take their religion very seriously. Chuseok dinners can be... a little difficult. But people have to go because it’s their social obligation. Then again, I find responsibilities are everywhere in Korea, even with friends.

Social responsibility in friendship

We’d been out once in a group and several of us went back to a friend’s apartment for coffee. We ended up sitting in a circle playing this sort of number sequence game called Silent 007 – and if you make a mistake then you have to go into the centre of the circle to be beaten on the back.

We had this 9 year-old girl with us. So when she made a mistake... well, I wasn’t getting involved in hitting her – even if my wife called them ‘gentle poundings’ rather than ‘beatings’. So one of my friends really wasn’t happy about this, and he kind of told me off. “Everyone must take part in the beatings!” he said. And he really meant it. So you know, in the end, I really had to take part, even though I hated it. It was a social responsibility to participate – there was no choice.

Everyone must take part in the beatings

I’m not sure I’m learning to live with all these social responsibilities. As a Westerner – I’m not sure I’ll ever really get used to them. But I guess as long as I’m here, I have to remember what my friend said to me, and see it as good advice for living in Korea: “Everyone must take part in the beatings.”

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan
Koreabridge - Open Mike in Busan audio (MP3)

Air date: 2010-11-17 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 3: Living with Korean Parents

About 'Open Mike in Busan'
Listen to the segment on Koreabridge

Introduction

In the four years since I first met my future Korean parents-in-law, there have been plenty of ups and downs in our relationship. A lot of this is down to me and the cultural difference – I’m sure Koreans just see these things as normal, and of course, they don’t have the language barrier to struggle with. Well, hopefully not anyway.

The first negative experience

My first negative experience was probably before I came to Korea for the first time. My wife started stressing the importance of making a good impression with her parents, and the problem was – my future father-in-law sounded rather frightening.

He was in the police, where he actually investigated murder cases. And from the photos I saw of him, well what can I say? He certainly looked the part – he was a Korean Marine before he joined the police.

Different backgrounds

My background was a little different. I’d been President of my Students’ Union at university a few years before, and like in Korea, it’s a really serious thing in the UK, and it probably means you’re quite left-wing politically. So it sounded like one of those bad American buddy movies, you know - “He’s a right-wing ex-marine homicide cop, and he’s a left-wing political activist – who’s marrying his daughter”. Actually, if you ever saw that movie, Meet the Parents, that was pretty much my situation. If I’d been Korean, a few years earlier, we could have been throwing rocks and tear-gas at each other in the street.

But he doesn’t know about my background yet. That’s actually a serious issue – you know, the language barrier turns you into this kind of non-person here, like a blank slate, in a way you could be anyone. Even someone that agrees with them. What happens when my Korean language is good enough for him to understand how I think, and what I believe? Right now, he seems to think I’m Comedy Mike, but once the language barrier is gone, it might not seem so funny then. Sometimes language barriers can be a good thing.

Comedy Mike

There’s a story to the Comedy Mike title, but honestly, it’s not one I’m really proud of looking back. In my early days here he had a lot of advice for me – you know “this is the way we do things in Korea”. It’s like shaving. Some mornings I didn’t shave and he’d grab my face with his hand and rub it to highlight the stubble.

So after a couple of days of this I noticed he needed a shave, and I grabbed my face the way he did and then pointed to the stubble on his face. Now I’ve been in Korea much longer, I can see how that could have been hugely insulting, because it was basically saying “hey, how come there’s one rule for me, and a different one for you?” I don’t think that’s something a Korean guy would do with his future father-in-law – especially a scary one. Well anyway, when I did that, he let out a huge laugh and said “Ma-ih-keul – koh meh dee” and after that, every time he said something which I kind of didn’t really appreciate, I found some way of getting back at him in return. Most of what I said just seemed to make him laugh, and so he really began to grow on me. And maybe I stopped being so difficult.

A better father/son-in-law relationship

But in some ways I’m not sure we have a better relationship now. Sometimes he asks me when we’re going to go out for a drink alone together, or climb a mountain alone together – you know, all the things I guess his son-in-law is supposed to do with him. And it’s just really hard because of the language barrier – it’s not like we talk alone together.

I do feel sorry for him – I really mean it. I know that because his daughter has married a foreigner, he’s lost something he might otherwise have had. And the truth is, I really want to get to know him as well. So much has happened in Korea during his life, especially considering his job, that I’m sure he has a lot of interesting stories to tell.

The mother-in-law relationship

The relationship with my mother-in-law has been easier; she was always really kind. I thought we were going to have problems at first though because she’s quite a devout Buddhist and I was raised as a Catholic. I didn’t think about that so much before I came here. Fortunately I’d brought a book over from England with me – it was by the Dalai Lama. It wasn’t planned, it was just what I happened to be reading at the time. So I showed it to her and I think she was a lot happier. I told her I was open-minded – my wife’s Buddhist anyway of course, and I don’t really go to church any more.

In some ways it was easier living with her once we got over the religious differences, but in another way it wasn’t. When my wife and I lived here at first we had our own apartment, but then we moved into her mother’s place after her father had to move away to Namhae. So the experience of living in an apartment with Korean parents-in-law is so much different than living in your own place.

I know a lot of foreigners are appalled by the idea – we don’t have so much of a culture of living with parents-in-law in our own countries. We can be a lot more distant with our parents – and yes, you lose some of your privacy and freedom living with other people. But on the other hand, it can give you a much better insight into how Koreans really live, and of course, my wife’s just had a baby so her mother is absolutely invaluable to us now.

It can be unnerving though; it gets loud in the apartment sometimes. I think Busan people can have a conversation about the weather and make it sound like a huge argument. In fact – that example actually happened a couple of weeks ago.

Language

The loss of privacy which comes from living with my mother-in-law is not a positive thing, but I think that language is the biggest problem. Even though my Korean vocabulary has reached around 800 words, most of the time I can’t understand what on Earth she’s saying. But you know, it’s that Busan dialect problem – except of course, with her it’s a Busan-Namhae fusion dialect which, right now, I just don’t think I have a hope of ever understanding. That’s tough when you’re living with someone – there’s a lot of language pressure – every day.

I do understand some of what she’s saying – I think enough to be dangerous, not enough to be useful. I sort of understand bits here and there so, well, what can you do? I started saying “yes” to her when she said things, more in hope than anything else. “네, 네, 네” - see how good I am at that? That’s practice that is. But of course, it meant odd things happened sometimes. Strange food would suddenly turn up on my desk that I didn’t think I’d asked for, and once or twice she was waiting by the door looking at me saying “Are we going then?” when I didn’t realise I’d agreed to go out somewhere with her.

But then my wife told her one day “You know – he always says “네” to you just to have a quiet life – he doesn’t really understand what you’re saying.” So the secret was out, and she was a bit upset – but she got over it. And I am still talking with her, even if it’s just to say “네”.

The future of living with a Korean parent

I thought that living with my mother-in-law was just how things were going to be forever. As a foreigner, I had really mixed feelings about the responsibility, because honestly, sometimes it does feel more of a responsibility than a completely free choice. But then a few days ago I found out that she wants to retire back to Namhae, which is where she’s from. So maybe we’ll end up getting our own place again one day. It might be better, but in some ways I’ll probably miss my time living with a Korean family – it’s certainly... an interesting experience.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan
Koreabridge - Open Mike in Busan audio (MP3)

Air date: 2010-11-10 @ ~19:30

It Could Happen to You

I have a psychic Korean aunt, who makes her living travelling around the country dispensing advice about peoples' futures and occasionally cleansing evil spirits using a special dance, along with her spirit guides - an old man and a small boy. I always liked Psychic Aunt because like me she's clearly slightly unhinged, but I didn't much care for her younger spirit guide - while we were back in England he insisted on taking a stuffed toy from our office that we'd been saving for our child. When you're having difficulty having a baby, and someone takes something you'd been saving for if it finally happens, it has an unhappy subtext, especially when that someone is supposed to be able to foretell the future. Perhaps you're entitled to be a bit of an ass when you're dead, but personally I think the dead should hold themselves up to higher standards.

Despite foretelling that I would live an extremely long life and become quite wealthy, neither of which seem very likely at this point, apparently Psychic Aunt is quite well known and very good at what she does. I suppose you'd say she has 'the gift' if you believe in such things. A lot of people in Korea do, and it supposedly runs in my wife's family, so Korean Mother and Korean Brother are both 'seers' too, but they didn't accept the calling when it came to them in an ancestral dream, as it does. I had an ancestral dream once when I was 14. It involved some recently deceased ancestors dressed as death chasing me round a running track, and while I gradually tired they didn't. So I suppose I saw my own future, but they didn't indicate whether it meant I could see other people's.

Their failure to take up the calling hasn't stopped the dreams and premonitions within my immediate Korean family. And to be fair, after about a year of trying, Korean Mother finally had a baby boy dream about two weeks before my wife became pregnant with our son. My background is in science, so while I'm generally dismissive of apparently superstitious nonsense I also try to remain somewhat open minded, and recent psychological research and developments in rather frightening reality-challenging cutting-edge theoretical physics suggest that in actual fact, foreseeing the future might not be quite as ridiculous as it first appears.

I have to admit to being slightly unnerved by some predictions which have been made within my Korean family, and things that have consequently happened over the years. Enough that I've become more open-minded than polite-cynicism would normally dictate. Perhaps it helps that along the way I developed Meniere's Disease, which has given me a more reality-challenging relationship with the concepts of space, time and gravity anyway.

That said, I am not so open-minded that when a conversation begins 'Mother has had a dream', that I don't feel a slight sinking feeling in my stomach at what will come next. Although sometimes that could be the Meniere's - you can never really tell. At the weekend the dream in question was fortuitous money dream which apparently ranked quite highly on the spooky-scale. So my wife bought lottery tickets. Now to me that seems like a leap of faith - who's to say that the dream wasn't telling us to rob an armoured car instead? After all, it wasn't specific about how this money would fortuitously come to us. But lottery tickets it was.

So it was with great faux-excitement that I read the numbers to my wife when she woke up Sunday morning and entered my office brandishing the tickets. But as I read out the first three numbers, and she ticked them off on one of her two tickets, I began to get that unnerving feeling again. And indeed, we'd won the lottery - a prize of 5,000 won. Does this keep Korean Mother's psychic track-record? Perhaps, but the tickets cost 10,000 won.

Apparently she had another dream overnight...

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.

The Hornet's Nest

Apparently Namhae has killer bees. Or something like that.

Korean Father was out very early in the morning on top of an isolated mountain mowing the grass around his mother's grave, during the last days of the summer's heat. It has to be done otherwise it would become unkempt and that would be disrespectful, and since graveyards in Korea are generally small and don't employ anyone to maintain them, it's a family responsibility. The graves of those with no nearby or surviving relatives can often easily be spotted as isolated patches of chaos in an otherwise ordered scene.

This particular morning Korean Father was stung three times by large hornets. It seems that this is OK as long as they don't get you in the head. Then you die. Really. In fact I understand that earlier this year a forty-two year old farmer died in Namhae after this happened to him, and there have been other deaths and incidents. The fourth sting caught Korean Father right between the eyes. His right eye began to lose focus, his lips numbed, he started to lose movement in his jaw, and his arms and legs weakened. He called a friend who's the head of a health clinic, and he phoned for an ambulance, which had to negotiate its way to the top of the mountain Korean Father had walked up. Fortunately there is a road, of sorts, although it's one of those Korean ones you really don't want to look down over the side of.

Fortunately with rapid treatment Korean Father quickly recovered, unlike some other unfortunate victims, although his face was still swollen days later.

Before city dwellers lull themselves into a false sense of security, according to the JoongAng Daily the Busan Fire Department had to administer first aid to 145 people this year, so clearly it's not an issue just confined to the countryside. And while we have a lot of bees and wasps (hornets) where I'm from, they pale in comparison to the Asian Giant Hornet, which grows up to two inches (50mm) in length, and injects a venom so strong it can dissolve human tissue.

So it seems like this is an important safety tip, beware of Korea's killer hornets...

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.

Dollhouse

It's been clear to me for some time that the Korean maternity experience differs radically from the British one. One important respect in which this difference manifests itself is postnatal care - it isn't uncommon for a new mother to spend two to four weeks at the hospital's 'sanhujoriwon' (산후조리원') postnatal/postpartum clinic recuperating in Korea. By comparison, the National Health Service hospital in one British city states the average length of stay in their postnatal beds in 2009 was 1.2 days.

I went to the Maternity Hospital with my wife for a scheduled ultrasound, and after the scan we went up several floors to look at the postnatal suite. British hospitals tend to comprise of one or more sprawling low-rise buildings in their own grounds, whereas the smaller more specialised Korean hospitals often tend to occupy office buildings, and are easy to miss amidst all the other explosive activity of a typical Korean street. So stepping out of the elevator on the 8th floor, I expected the usual reception area and office-style rows of corridors leading off to various rooms. Instead there was nothing except a separate glass door, through which one could see an image which very much conveyed the message that you were now leaving the clinically sanitised hospital environment for something less dehumanising - beyond was a lounge with a TV on the wall, some couches with refreshments, and a colourful timetable on the wall with cartoon headlines promising treatments, massages, exercises and other activities. A narrow staircase led upwards to some uncertain destination. It was uncomfortably hot - apparently because of the recommended postnatal recovery temperature, otherwise known as 'slow cook'. It's a traditional Korean belief that new mothers should cover themselves with blankets and keep warm in order to protect them from 'loose bones' - failure to do so results in arthritis and rheumatism in older age.

We had to remove our shoes to proceed, emphasising the notion that we were transcending from a public environment to a domestic one. We were led upstairs, to be shown three types of room in which my wife could stay. The first comprised of a bed, a couch, a large LCD television and a desk with an Internet-connected computer, with a door to a separate private bathroom on one side of the room. The slightly cheaper rooms progressively lost the couch and the desk, so that the most economical option potentially had you surfing the Internet from the heated floor. The difference between the cheapest and most expensive rooms was 150,000 won per week (£87/$130), and the most expensive option was 800,000 won per week (£475/$718). I thought it best to go for the most expensive room, given that they were bigger and carried less risk of going stir crazy, especially considering that the view from most rooms extends approximately three feet out to the side of the next building, hence the prevalence of frosted glass. Also, since husbands are expected to stay overnight with their wives, more space is better, and I'd prefer to sleep on the couch rather than the floor.

I noticed something odd though. We'd looked at three rooms with three rather dazed and disconnected looking occupants, but where were the babies? It transpired they were all three floors below us being cared for. This was not what I had expected - to my mind this was supposed to be an important bonding time between mother and child, yet it seemed that the Korean approach involved separating the two for most of their postnatal stay in the hospital. Yes, when the baby needs feeding the mother is called down immediately to do this, but otherwise mother and baby are not together. As my wife sat discussing room options I was left pondering the Korean method and what they knew that I didn't, given that my initial reaction was that the idea was extraordinarily bad. At least it transpired that our 'sanhujoriwon' was not as strict as the one in Seoul whose head said "Mothers are not allowed to touch or hold other babies, we have strict visiting hours and don't even let the grandparents hold the baby."

We went down to see the newborn baby care facilities. This time on stepping out of the elevator we were confronted by a large artificial tree surrounded by a bench, behind which a glass wall separated this small island of faux-nature with a brightly-lit scene which could easily have been straight from a science-fiction movie. Four rows of perspex baby cots were lined up, ten per row, with three nurses moving around changing and checking the slowly stirring occupants. A separate control-room appeared to be situated off to the right. I felt the brightness was hurting my eyes but perhaps you get used to it. I watched a nurse change a baby. It was quick, functional, and not exactly gentle. The baby started crying, which elicited no reaction whatsoever from its carer - she finished and moved on. This did nothing to convince me that separating mother and baby was a good idea, but I understand that the separation may allow time for the mother to recover from childbirth, and it does provide round-the-clock monitoring and care for the babies.

The whole recovery issue though is an interesting one in Korea. Barring a sudden advancement of science or an unexpected alien abduction I'm never likely to experience childbirth, so I'm not really in a position to comment, but the impression seems to be given here that after giving birth a Korean woman's body is 'shattered', bones are fragile, and generally great care must be taken to bring her back from the brink of existence.

In the UK nobody I knew had stayed in hospital for anything like the extended period that appears to be the norm in Korea, and more than that the impression isn't created that women's bodies are completely broken from the experience to the point at which they should be relieved of any involvement in caring for their babies. It crossed my mind that keeping forty women in hospital at 800,000 won per week is probably a pretty good business, although this isn't to say it's necessarily a bad thing. But assuming there are no complications, my cultural background has clearly conditioned me to expect a much reduced recovery time to the one which my wife was envisaging.

This issue is a potential cultural battle which any sensible Western husband is going to carefully avoid with their Korean wife - so I told my wife it's entirely her decision how long she stays in hospital for. She has to weigh up the advantages of the rest and postnatal care versus the potential loss of immediate bonding, actual quality of care and the formal complaints which have been raised.

The Lost Words

In June 1950 the North Korean Army crossed the 38th parallel, invading the Republic of South Korea. By September, most of the Republic had fallen, with only the area around the city of Busan, or Pusan as it was then known in English, remaining under the control of anti-Communist forces. As the Republic collapsed, half a million refugees fled south to the coastal city, swelling the population to around 1.4 million. The Battle of Pusan Perimeter raged, and conditions within the titular city were equally chaotic.

The Bosudong area of Busan became home to a significant number of refugees who had fled the Nothern advance. One displaced couple began selling old magazines from the U.S. military, and this quickly expanded in scope as the impoverished sold or pawned their books. Even as the war continued into 1951, seventy percent of children in Busan still attended primary school, even if classes were held in the open air. The proximity of many such 'provisional schools' in Bosudong ensured the growth of the second-hand book market, and the number of shops grew until by the 1960s there were around seventy crammed together in the narrow 'Bosudong Book Street' ('보수동 책방 골목'). The speed of the North Korean advance during the war had separated many families and friends, and the 'Book Street' also became a place for refugees to meet, socialise and perhaps search for those they had lost, long after hostilities had ended.

Today, sixty years after the war began, 'Bosudong Book Street' still exists and has become part of Busan's cultural heritage, and there is also, perhaps inevitably, an annual festival.

The street is not really a street at all for most of its length, but rather a narrow passageway with book shops of various shapes and sizes on both sides. In itself, this might create a rather disorganised feeling, but the effect is only heightened by the contents of the stores, many of which feature chaotic stacks of books placed everywhere there is a space. Often this spills out into the 'street' itself, only serving to make it even narrower. Along with the tarpaulins over the front of the shops to protect the books from the elements, it combines to create a somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere.

Inside the shops, the chaotic theme continues, with careful navigation a priority, and an acceptance that this may not be a place for the tall - even I had to duck under a large beam to reach one part of the upper floor of one particular store.

Most books were Korean, but not all of them. I was surprised to find one shop filled with old books in English, most of the titles and authors of which must surely have been long forgotten in the West. An ageing and probably unloved tribute to Western circa-1970s pulp fiction.

In addition to the decorative sewer grates which never detract from the emerging stench but are a regular feature of Busan's cultural districts, the street itself features tributes to the great works of literature such as Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne and Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.

We'd planned on visiting 'Bosudong Book Street' for a number of weeks, but the night before the local news did a piece on an photo exhibition about the street that was being held until the weekend, so we expected that the publicity might result in the street being busy. In fact it wasn't busy at all, which was both surprising and a little saddening. It seems that in recent years, the character of the street has begun to change, as economic prosperity created more demand for new books. And while second-hand books can still be found in abundance, one suspects that the chaos of the second-hand book market is slowly giving way to a more ordered and modern consumer experience. As much as poverty created this place, wealth may be changing it fundamentally.

The black and white photos featuring the owners of the remaining Book Street stores looked out over an empty space at the Bosudong Catholic Exhibition Center.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Korea's Lunar New Year holiday ('설날') occurred over the weekend. It's a time of year that involves families gathering together, and all the inevitable responsibilities that go along with this, both subtle and overt. This year it clashed with Valentine's Day, leaving people with a choice of which to celebrate. With family being so important the New Year invariably won, although once again, ever-evasive Korean Brother managed to avoid any such obligations. As the eldest in her family, and with both parents having passed away many years ago, it is Korean Mother's responsibility to host to her young siblings for New Year's meals, and it's not an event without its tensions; with a sister who works as a Buddhist psychic and a brother who works as a Christian pastor, they are a microcosm of the religious differences which can sometimes bubble away uneasily in Korean society.

Pastor Uncle stipulated that he would only eat food which hadn't been in any way involved in any kind of Buddhist blessings or rituals, which theoretically required Korean Mother to spend the whole day preparing the dishes for the meal. This was unfortunate because Korean Mother was extremely tired having just returned from two days of New Year family duties in Namhae, and Psychic Aunt provides a steady supply of religiously-tainted food and dishes to our apartment. Thus a moral dilemma was created of whether to pander to someone's religious objections - or take the easy path of claiming an incorrect provenance. I was not keen on the latter but my limited experience in the murky world of Korean religion is that neither faction necessarily affords the other much reverence.

Korean Mother and Psychic Aunt wanted Makgeolli ('막걸리') - Korean rice wine whose popularity is rocketing - to drink with their meal, and phoned Pastor Uncle to ask him to buy some on his way to the apartment with his family. He was completely taken aback - he couldn't possibly be seen by his children buying alcohol (despite the fact that Jesus was well known drinker). Perhaps he's one of these people who've made up their own version of the Bible. So the two Buddhists had to go out and buy their own booze.

When Pastor Uncle arrived, our borderline-insane dog tried his best to feign a case of rabies and scare him into leaving. But Pastor Uncle had evidently been drinking the Biblical Kool-Aid and persisted in holding out his hand repeating "I love you, I love you", in English - oddly enough; our dog doesn't speak English nor does he have the gift of tongues. As usual, almost all the hospitals were closed for the holiday, so it wasn't clear where Pastor Uncle intended to have his finger sewn back on, but perhaps he felt that God would provide. He explained that the power of love could conquer any animal, which makes one wonder how these missionaries keep getting themselves killed overseas.

His children performed their 'big bows' to Korean Mother - a ritual at this time of year. It's extremely important partly because it confers respect on ones' elders, and affords them a formal opportunity to impart wisdom and/or lecture their juniors, but mostly because - from the point of view of the juniors - they are given gift money in return. We'd already done our bows earlier and made our profit, and while Korean Brother had to go, he'd somehow managed to stay long enough to get his pay-off too.

Before long the collected family factions were sitting on the floor around a long low table reminiscent of some medieval European banquet - if Europeans ate copious amounts of crab, noodles, rice and plants. But before we could eat, Pastor Uncle had to say Grace, and his faction put on their most serious looks as they bowed their heads while the rest of us waited. Once he'd finished, Psychic Aunt decided to immediately follow it with a Buddhist prayer, which is not normal and very much felt as though it was designed to make a point. I believe this was obvious to everyone and the atmosphere seemed to have become very uncomfortable. It looked set to be a long evening.

But if there's one thing that can unify Koreans it's food - so it wasn't long before animosities were buried in favour of devouring the feast of potentially questionable provenance. Bits of crab flew through the air amidst this fine social scene, with Psychic Aunt pausing at one point to pull a piece out of the hair of Pastor Uncle's wife. Perhaps there could be peace in our time.

I was not faring so well. The soup tasted of seawater, the meat was of the don't-ask-don't-tell variety so popular in this country, and by the time I'd finished I felt like I'd been sucking on a metal bar for fifteen minutes. Five minutes into my re-acquaintance with authentic Korean food the Makgeolli had started to look like a good way of conducting a mercy killing of my taste buds, but it seemed rude to ask the two older Buddhists for a glass of their hard-won liquor. Unfortunately, I'm not usually offered alcohol since I'm possessed by the evil spirit which is Meniere's Disease, and for my sins I go through much of life having the balance of a drunk while actually being stone-cold sober. So it was just me, the seawater soup, and the misery of being all alone behind the language barrier with only the partially-obstructed view of the South Korea v. Japan Asia Cup game for company.

But an interesting thing happened. The Christian wants to know how work is going and the truth is I'm growing fed up with it. My wife and trading partner doesn't want the stress while pregnant, leaving me to work alone, and I've finally realised that if there's one thing I really can't stand about trading, it's the people. So what about teaching he asks - after all, one of my wife's degrees is in English Literature which has to be good for something, and in my abortive attempt to teach English in Japan post-graduation I'd acquired a TESOL qualification, although the more I learned about teaching English the more underqualified I felt - and the more I didn't want to do it. The upshot of that was we may have agreed to a potential career change somewhere on the horizon, though unfortunately I can't blame it on the non-existent alcohol.

While the Christian enthused about all the potential clients he could gather - and he's a very well connected person - his equal and opposite sat in silence, making no offer to network for us. On this evidence, I'm not sure how Buddhists intend to win hearts and minds in this country against the onslaught of a group who so rabidly want to help.

Nine Months

My wife and I have been trying for a baby for a year, and were beginning to face up to the possibility that we needed to get ourselves checked to find out if there was a problem. I was facing up to the question of what life would be like if that problem was with me - it would have been bad enough in my own country, but to live in Korea and be the one responsible for a childless marriage was a burden I didn't know how to bear; my paranoia focused on all those deeply held suspicions that a certain section of society here wants to believe about foreigners. My state of mind not helped by the revelation that our newly-wed friend had become pregnant on their first attempt. If the worst was confirmed, my wife wanted to take the hit for me - recognising how intolerable life might be for me otherwise in this family oriented and foreigner suspicious culture - but to my mind there comes a point where the truth is what it is, and we disagreed, even though I didn't relish the prospect of facing up to Korean Father - or the rest of Korean society - in the worst case.

My wife began to feel unwell a month ago, and the family dog suddenly became very protective of her, biting me twice quite badly. Something was amiss. Was it too much to hope for? Psychic Aunt had proclaimed some time ago that my wife would become pregnant in the Chinese Year of the Ox - she had two months left and we were threatening to picket outside of her home proclaiming her as a bad fortune teller. She came around to the apartment one evening, touched my wife's hand accidentally, and her demeanour changed immediately - "you're pregnant" she said.

One of the problems of being in a foreign country is knowing whether over-the-counter pregnancy tests can be relied upon or not. The first was negative but later turned positive in the bin, and in the coming days the next two went positive straight away. We went to a nearby maternity hospital, where ultrasound scans confirmed a possible pregnancy, but one with complications. So while there was an enormous sense of relief that we weren't necessarily destined to remain childless, there was little happiness to be had in the situation either. While I sat in the waiting room, a woman emerged from her examination distraught, and cried while she fumbled with her phone to make a call. The horror of it all made me feel ill.

All we could do was wait and count off the days on the calendar to the next scheduled scan, but there were complications and we had to rush to the hospital unscheduled. We got through it. Our friends had already named their nascent baby - it being too early to know the sex, the gender-neutral temporary name 'bada' (meaning ocean) was chosen. It's a common practice here to assign names like this but we avoided it.

I was beginning to feel used to sitting around in the maternity hospital, surrounded by rather fatigued looking expectant mothers, young children and the occasional father, but nobody seemed to hold my potentially polluting the gene pool against me. The small children would sometimes walk unsteadily towards me to stare though, one even pointing and screaming. Perhaps they'll grow up to be a Chosun Ilbo journalist. Generally though, I felt isolated, and was glad when we reached a more normal, rather than emergency appointment, where I could go into the doctor's office with my wife. She was still ushered into a small side room though, leaving me left staring at the weighty Korean and English anatomical tomes in the bookcase against the far wall. It was at this point I noticed the screen on the wall to my left was not showing some generic image but was streaming my wife's latest ultrasound from within the room. But it wasn't so much what I saw as what I heard which left me rooted to the spot - a tiny heart beating rapidly. For all I wanted to be cautious and unemotional about what we were going through, hearing that heartbeat made it suddenly seem very real, and I don't think anything prepared me for it.

My wife had been unhappy because she'd seen other women at her stage of pregnancy getting their 'pregnancy diaries' and 'pregnancy certification' from the hospital, the latter of which makes things official with the government, and allows her to obtain a special bank card which provides discounts on medical bills. We were suspicious that mindful of the potential complications, the hospital had tactfully avoided issuing any such documentation to my wife. This week though, she finally got official recognition, and we gradually began telling people.

Korean Father returned from Namhae with a huge arrangement of flowers which now sits in our room, and later he returned from a hospital appointment with a large book - ironically translated from a British original - entitled 'Your Pregnancy Bible'. Curiously, it's full of pictures of a naked British woman showing Korean women what to expect their bodies to look like. My own father had not reacted well to the news that he was going to become a grandfather many years ago, but Korean Father was embracing the idea enthusiastically. I think he was secretly relieved, as we all are, but there is a long road ahead, and the nature of my life in Korea seems destined to change with it.

Wedding Crashers

Sunday was the day of our friends' wedding, and it would be the first ceremony I'd attended in Korea where I was merely a spectator, rather than a participant. Surely being on the other side of the fence would be less stressful? Maybe not so much.

Suiting Up
My wife and I were scheduled to meet the bride and groom at the wedding hire store early in the day, where we would presumably offer any moral support that was required. Also attending were the bride's mother in her hanbok, her brother clutching a camera, and the groom's 'junior'. The whole subject of Korean male hierarchies is one which I haven't fully understood, but suffice to say that formal relationships are bonded in universities and the army during national service, out of which come a complicated, but individually and specifically defined network, of seniors and juniors through which a lifetime of social responsibilities and obligations will follow. This was one of those times.

The bride's Korean Mother can't get her hanbok quite right despite numerous adjustments, and the bride herself has long since disappeared for her preparation, but aside from this the atmosphere is relatively calm in the waiting area, and good natured banter is exchanged back and forth between the groom and the others. I can only follow bits of the conversation - enough to sometimes guess at the context - and understanding the humour is out of the question, so before long I'm probably the second most stressed person in the room. When the bride is finally ready, we decamp in some haste from the clothes hire store to the wedding hall, which is probably about a mile away. This is when we discover that due to a slight failure in planning our attendance, there's no space in the cars for us, but fortunately the store owner kindly offers us a lift.

Dunkin' Donuts
The Wedding Hall is in the middle of Seomyeon, within a tall building in a narrow and busy commercial street several floors up above a branch of Dunkin' Donuts. We've rejoined the entourage in the street and when we make our way up the building to emerge chaotically from an elevator it is to be greeted by the sight of a large hall from which several separate wedding rooms open up - some large Western church-style affairs, with aisles and faux alters, and some Korean in the style of small traditional rooms. The reflections of disco lights are beginning to improbably roam the walls of one of the rooms, making it look not so much like a wedding as the beginning of Logan's Run



Hanboks and Mobiles
I am lost in a sea of Koreans, most of whom I don't know, but some of whom perhaps I should - the problem is it's impossible to tell who belongs to which wedding. There are suits, hanboks and mobiles every direction I turn. I'm suited up too - not a look I've promoted for myself in this country, but even though this may be radically different from my everyday thirty-something clothing style, I stick out like a sore thumb.

So I'm immediately recognised and greeted by people who look so radically different in their make-up and clothing I have trouble remembering who I'm supposed to know, and how well. This is important because one needs to say the right greeting based on familiarity - who I am saying annyeong haseyo '안녕하세요' to and who simply gets a more casual annyeong? Inevitably, it isn't long before I make a mistake and slight someone who I haven't met before but who I greet as though I had.

Additional rooms provide areas for photos before the ceremony, and it was in one such room that the bride cries ruining her make-up. So with five minutes to go before the ceremony is due to begin, a team of helpers are working on her with all the fervour of a formula one pit crew. A disaster is very narrowly averted. As we rush towards the designated room, buffet vouchers are thrust urgently into our hands from the bride's family like they are some form of contraband, which later turns out to be not so far from the truth.

Because we've been otherwise engaged the room is full when we get there, and as there's no designated seating we have to stand at the back, which seems a bit off - especially when my wife holds the semi-official title of 'matchmaker' to the couple. The bride enters shortly after us, and her immediate family have to fight their way through the chaos we are now part of. We end up watching quite a lot of the ceremony on a cheap screen, which has thoughtfully been provided for the cheap seats, although judging by the loud talking that goes on constantly through the entire ceremony, I think it is a wasted effort.

Food Beats Wedding
But the crowd did thin out - as did the initially crowded seating. Ten ajeossis and ajummas had left before the bride and groom had finished walking down the aisle with its illuminated fake rose petals and the music had abruptly stopped. Before the ceremony has finished, I roughly count around another thirty out, and those are just the ones I saw - because it wasn't long before I could take a seat and get away from the pub crowd behind me. I'm still perplexed by this incredible display of rudeness, and am no less staggered by it when it is explained to me that the people leaving are heading for the buffet. Apparently, this is very common in Korean weddings, and unlike with a Western wedding it's the back seats which are coveted, not the ones nearest the front - as these allow a quick getaway from the ceremony. I learn later that the bride's mother has apparently had to cajole guests to move forward before we arrived.


The groom plays his pan flute as part of the ceremony - and for the first time this quietens down some of the talkers. The boyfriend of one of the bride's sisters has announced his intention to sing as well, and we brace ourselves as he lifts up the microphone, but actually he's... quite good. There are rounds of photos - cut short by the next wedding party angrily trying to claim the room - and a Korean wedding ceremony to go, which few people attend as it's in one of those small traditional Korean rooms, and is really just for the families and a few onlookers. The bride and groom have to change into their traditional costumes - complete with a bizarrely uncomfortable (I speak from experience) square metal belt for the groom - so there is a lot of waiting around.



Lost in Buffet
We reach the buffet at 2.30pm, by which time those first ten people - who left as the bride and groom walked down the aisle - have an hour's head start on us. Not that this means that there's no food left; it's a big place catering to multiple ceremonies and the buffet is rolling. Much as there were several wedding rooms around the main hall, there are several eating areas off from where the food is provided - but with no guidance on where anyone should sit, the guests from the various weddings are hopelessly intermingled. By some chance, we are found by two other friends of the bride and groom who will probably be the next to marry, and then by the happy couple themselves, so some of us actually manage to eat together.

Over the lukewarm food I'm asked about British wedding traditions by the girl I'd slighted earlier. I got as far as explaining how we tended to marry in churches rather than wedding halls - which felt a bit like a wedding factory with four or five ceremonies going on at once. But I didn't manage to get far enough into our hybrid English-Korean conversation to explain that when we get married in church, that's when you're really married. In Korea, it's just a ceremony and the actual legal act of marrying is done in a local government office. Our friends won't do this until they return from their honeymoon in the Philippines - so technically they're still both single...

The Wedding Car


We escort the bride and groom out to the wedding car, complete with Kartrider inspired '100ton' aerial and windscreen wipers stuck out into the air - which thankfully weren't turned on as they sometimes are with gloves on waving in celebration, and they unexpectedly offer us a lift home. So there we are - four of us crammed onto the back seat - which seemed a bit hard on the newly married couple, even if they'd insisted on it. At a junction, the lights are out and a soldier is directing traffic, but the situation is difficult. Our driver jumps out and puts the windscreen wipers down - 'I can't see anything' he says, unsurprisingly. But he keeps the hazard warning lights on all the way home.


Despite the hazard lights and ribbons covering the car making it somewhat conspicuous, we are still carved up on the road twice on our way back, confirming that Korean drivers aren't willing to spare anyone an accident, no matter what the circumstances.

The Work Is Just Beginning
It is around 4pm when we reach home, and for us, it is over. I'd struggled through the day trying to understand conversations and make myself understood, mostly failing and feeling all the more frustrated for it. By comparison, my own wedding ceremony three months after arriving in Korea seemed so much easier; I was merely a passenger with whom there were few expectations, and after our honeymoon in Gyeongju we went back to our apartment to get on with our lives. Our friends would be flying to the Philippines later, and after returning would spend their first night back at one parents' house, and then the next night's at the others' as Korean tradition dictates, before finally moving into their new place together, and commencing a lifetime of new family responsibilities.