NewsRadio

“If you do a live radio show in the morning, nothing worse can happen to you all day.”

Open Miked in Busan

I’ve been very busy recently. It’s the kind of busyness where you’re basically on the move and working from the moment you awake after five to six hours of sleep to the moment you go to bed, seven days a week, and I’ve pretty much been like this since November. It seems like a superhuman effort for a foreigner, but it’s just normal life for many Koreans. Is it a sign my attitude is becoming Korean? And if I don’t care, is the answer yes?

Before I became one with the near catatonic mental state that the Korean work experience brings about, I used to write this blog – this post may well be a figment of your imagination – and along the way I tried, and failed, to keep up with posts taken from my Busan e-FM radio segment, Open Mike in Busan. For the sake of posterity, my desire to maintain a record of my Korean experience, I intend to complete these posts, which in the end will number 51, because my time on the show came to a close, something I was extremely glad of because after 51 weeks of strip-mining this blog, I’d run out of material and laid waste to the environment.

Zen and the Art of Radio Presenting

The radio station then posted an advert for writers and presenters, and I decided to apply because even though all the station’s writers are Korean, I like writing and the worst they could say was no if I expressed an interest. A phone conversation ensued during I was asked if I’d like to try out as a presenter, and even though I regard myself as having a face for radio and a voice for writing, I ended up going along with it because I’d decided to let the cards choose my fate considering how letting my intellect and logic choose the course of my life had turned out. There was also a strong element of my saying I was interested in writing, and the person on the other end of the phone hearing I really wanted to present. Many of my conversations in Korea seem to follow this pattern.

So it was that I turned up one day at Busan e-FM thinking someone was going to interview me about both options, but instead found an unfamiliar script thrust into my hands with the words “you’re on in ten minutes.”

As far as I understand the process, writers write pieces for the radio station, which are then translated into English by Koreans, and in my experience the results are invariably less than perfect in the way that a large asteroid hitting the Earth would be less than ideal. So I spent a tense ten minutes correcting what I was about to read in the studio.

During the reading, half-way down the second page and so far word perfect, I saw the end in sight and thought “I’m going to make it”, which almost inevitably was the trigger to make a small mistake. The producer immediately cut me off and ended the test recording. I knew it was over – live radio is a harsh mistress. As the producer clicked away on the computer, I stared out of the window contemplating the fact that if I’d had more than five hours of sleep the night before – which my baby son’s screaming had prevented – I might have been better. But in those moments I enjoyed the Zen-like realisation that my son was going to wake up at night for the foreseeable future, I was always going to be this tired – and hosting a live radio show was not for me.

I won’t pretend not to have been a little disappointed though; I was curious about how things would have turned out given that I’m just far enough beyond giving a damn not to try and have fun with it, which I expect would have ultimately pitched me against the people who run things.

This Segmented Life – Busan and More and Less

Something unexpected came of the test recording though. It was played to the station’s producers who’d gathered to formerly reject me in favour of someone better, but one of them was looking for a new segment guest and so it was that I was offered the role of writing and guesting on the Morning Wave in Busan show segment, Busan and More, which every Monday morning discusses the events taking place in the city in the week ahead.

On the downside, there was little scope to indulge in the kind of subtle freelance subversion I’d engaged in for Open Mike in Busan, but on the other hand I thought researching all those events would be a good opportunity for my wife and I to kick-start our social and cultural life which had ended after the birth of our son (I was wrong).

And then I unexpectedly got the chance to host a show after all, when – and I’m going to be necessarily vague here – the new presenter of a show was absent on their first day, leaving a hanging question of whether they would appear for their second. It was a one-time deal because no-one else was available and they were desperate, so I spent two hours the next day working through the translated English script trying to understand what it meant – no easy task - and correcting it. This certainly gave me an additional perspective on just how much work being a presenter at the station required, and how ill-advised doing such a job would be considering the hidden commitment.

I worked through that script correcting it and practising the Korean names within it, knowing that the missing presenter may resurface and I may not appear anyway – and so it was. I’d sent the station my corrected script anyway and later listened somewhat perplexed - and yet somehow completely unsurprised – as the new presenter awkwardly read out the original English translation, not my corrected version.

International Media Talk and Historical Figures

After this, I was offered another segment on the Weekly Review programme, called International Media Talk, which I would do every other week and discuss news in the global media. Finally things came full circle when the formerly absent presenter left the station after three months, the original host returned, and I was offered another segment on his show – Inside Out Busan – called Historical Figures, which essentially tries to discuss facts about famous people from history you possibly never knew.

Even by my standards, I knew the new segment would likely push me to breaking point, but the presenter and I had become friends along the way and I’d always said I would do more for his show if called upon. I also saw that the new segment potentially promised to be something I could have fun with because the entire premise bordered on the subversive. Seeing society through the perspective of the absurd is the only thing that motivates me to get up in the morning these days. Later in writing it though I’d discover that producing something that matched my expectations in the limited time I had would be a difficult trick to pull off.

About twelve to fifteen hours goes into writing those 30 minutes of radio for Busan e-FM every week, which I’d be the first to accept is probably far in excess of what most other people in my position would sanely put in. This is not work I’d recommend to anyone; I’ve long since developed a love-hate relationship with it, although I suppose at this point that could be said of most of my Korean experiences in general.

Koyaanisqatsi

4,000 Hours

A year ago someone told me that they’d read that it requires about 4,000 hours of studying to reach competency in the Korean language. I’d been struggling with finding the motivation to study in an increasingly busy life, and I seized upon this figure as a psychological tool which would give me a sense of there being an end point to my efforts to learn. To that end, I began posting a progress meter at the end of my posts to show my progress towards this fixed goal, fully knowing that any potential failure would be there for the world to see.

And I failed. With the year over, I’m just over 3% of the way towards that 4,000-hour target, which means that theoretically it will take me over 30 years to achieve competency in Korean at my current pace of studying.

Auribus teneo lupum

So what has gone wrong? I can give many reasons but when it comes down to it I believe that in this world you are either in control of your life, or your life is in control of you. Studying a language requires a commitment, mental focus, motivation and enough free time every day to make it happen, and these things are increasingly eluding me.

In retrospect what I believe I should have done when I quit trading for a living in August is taken a year off, and made studying Korean my primary goal with no compromises. Frankly, I’m getting too old to keep studying piecemeal here and there year after year, it doesn’t really work and it’s the road to becoming one of those foreigners who’s lived here ten years and who doesn’t speak the language and never will, but are living here with the delusion that they are still trying. It’s obvious though at this point that it’s the latter fate that awaits me. Perhaps I'm already there.

But with my wife not working after the birth of our first baby, taking a year off would have led to a substantial drain on our savings, even if we had stayed living at my mother-in-law’s place. Our living arrangements were becoming untenable for me though, so we bought our own place last year – in itself a project that took two months of our free time – and the upshot is that our costs have risen by 50% and now we have a mortgage bearing down on us. Despite all this I still could have afforded to take a year out to study, but watching my savings disappear is psychologically something it turns out I can’t easily accept.

So instead of studying Korean, I quickly found a part-time position working as a software engineer – my pre-trading career – and which officially takes 15 hours out of my week but is actually 22 hours with travelling. I was also offered more work at Busan e-FM and took that, I agreed to form a joint-venture business with a large Korean Internet company that approached me but ultimately didn’t manage to get their project off the ground, and I immersed myself in several side-projects which like a lot of things we ultimately do for our job prospects, were time-consuming and lacked any immediate return-on-investment.

My wife did an eight-week TESOL course around this time, which very much left me holding the baby – both figuratively and in reality – and combined with my 'dash-for-cash' efforts to put a liveable income together, this was how I didn’t study in September and October, following the two months I lost due to apartment hunting in July and August.

I began to realise that I used to complain about the long hours working as a trader was demanding, but while I certainly had to sit watching the screens, I did get a lot of other things done at the same time, which amongst other things included studying as well as writing my blog.

The final irony of my choices turned out to be that the financial chaos in August was a bad time to make life-changing decisions; by the year's end I'd still made 64.13% in my trading account, and while that didn't compare all that favourably with previous years, sticking with trading was still a better financial option than everything else I plunged myself into. But in my life I traded the uncertainty of trading for the certainty and greater respectability of salaried employment, and perhaps there's something to be said for stability.

The Maginot Line

Another wider question which has been on my mind in recent months is whether the greater goal should to be to learn Korean at all. In the last year I’ve met a lot of foreigners who have been in Korea for a long time. And one of them - who like the others is completely fluent right down to the body language - quietly told me that if he could live his time over again, he wasn’t sure he’d bother making the effort to learn the language. It’s a shocking revelation for an old Korea-hand, but one I increasingly understand as I reach the personal conclusion that more often than not Korea is a country that does not really reward you for your efforts as a foreigner. Of course, there are people who go native and find some contentment in their lives here - whether in reality or through wilful ignorance – but my own experiences are leaning me towards the idea that it might not be typical.

To wit, consider the case of an English-language radio station I’m aware of – I won’t say which one - that employs foreigners, or Koreans who speak English well enough to be hosts, and is officially run for the benefit of the foreign community in Korea (even though I’m sure the vast majority of the audience are Koreans learning English). There is no prospect of progression into production or management for fluent Korean speakers because that’s their Maginot Line through which the invaders must not cross. What’s more, those defensive fortifications do not just protect against physical incursions, but also the cultural – because one strongly gets the impression that foreign ideas are not really welcome in even this small corner of supposedly multicultural Korea.

Much like the Maginot Line though, I know these defences will eventually be swept away, but like a lot of things in Korea it’s a process which will take a lot of time, maybe even generations. But it’s 2012, and even in an organisation that is meant to be a beacon of multiculturalism I’m still left with the feeling that it's reflective of a multiculturalism that more often than not gravitates towards telling foreigners about your superior culture and trying to help them assimilate into Korea’s monoculture to become almost-Koreans. In fact I’ve long since lost track of the number of Koreans I’ve met who’ve told me they’d like to go abroad – not really to learn from other cultures but to tell everyone about bibimbap, Dokdo, Korea’s four seasons or some other repressed Korean secret they think the world should know and is going to be in awe of once it collectively realises, which it won't.

Now people of limited intellect who like to summarise entire articles in single words will say this is a rant, but I’m afraid it’s far more nuanced than that because personally I have mixed feelings about multiculturalism, and I think the Koreans are entitled to be Korean if they want to be. If part of being Korean means not really accepting foreigners for who they are and largely keeping us in our place so be it, but what it means is that learning Korean does not carry with it the rewards I might be hoping for, which is the prospect of a seat at the table one day, and maybe even a proper job.

Motivation

I say this attitude doesn’t put me off, but deep down, it doesn’t motivate me either, and after working all day in an office or spending my time babysitting I need more positive rewards than I’m finding to learn the language.

Time is running out. Life is running out. I hope this year will be different while knowing in my heart that it won’t be. But without the hope for change, what is left?

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi Indian term for "life out of balance".

33

I got a job working part-time as a software engineer for Busan International Foreign School (BIFS), developing and implementing a Student Information System (or 'SIS') using PHP and MySQL. The position is open-ended but because I’m working on a specific project it feels more like one of the IT-contracts I used to do.

The hours work well for me because my wife is doing a TESOL course at the moment and I’m babysitting when I’m not working. That said, I had notions that a part-time position would leave me with much more chances to study, but after my first day of babysitting duties, I managed no more than ten minutes, and it set the pattern for what would follow. Perhaps I’m never going to be able to study Korean effectively or do anything else I want to until my son gets older, or someone pays me enough not to madly chase around Korea after work as I have been doing of late.

Busan International Foreign School is situated in Gijang, which Wikipedia describes as "the most rural of Busan’s districts" consisting of "mostly of vacant and agricultural land", which just about sums it up. Getting to the school before I moved from one side of Busan to the other - another of the many things which have occupied my time this month - involved travelling thirty-three subway stops and then using a taxi, because Gijang is sufficiently off the grid that it lies some distance to the north of Jangsan - the last station on Line 2. After I moved, I managed to cut my journey time down from one hour twenty minutes, to fifty-five minutes, which I'm obviously very happy about in a sarcastic kind of way, but we bought the apartment before I got the job, so I wasn't to know how inconvenient it would really be. In principle my new apartment is closer than the travel time would seem to suggest, but having to change subway lines twice to get to Jangsan really slows the journey down.

It’s somewhat ironic that I’ve found myself working for one of the two foreign schools here - because the question of whether to send my son to Busan International Foreign School or its rival, Busan Foreign School, has been vaguely at the back of our minds since before my wife even gave birth. Now that I work for BIFS I’ve finally undertaken more research into both schools and the choice has become much clearer - there isn’t one because I probably can't afford either of them.

The campus is newly built and larger than I expected, and the vast majority of the teachers and students are non-Koreans. That might sound obvious, but in fact some foreign schools which teach foreign curricula in Korea end up doing so primarily for the benefit of more internationally-minded Koreans. Another interesting and probably highly unusual aspect to BIFS is that it doesn’t teach a US curriculum which the US is not a particularly good advert for, but instead the International Baccalaureate, which seems determined to produce the kind of well-rounded individuals which Korea is desperately lacking due to the latter system's tendency to overspecialise and focus solely on measured examination outcomes while discouraging critical thought.

While there are American teachers at the school, most of the senior staff are British, and a surprising number of teachers are non-American native English speakers, so after what I wrote about the number of jobs in Korea which advertised for 'North American passport holders only', it feels like part school, part search-and-rescue mission for non-American English-speaking expats.

And so a new Korean experience has begun for me. Three days a week, I travel the subway like the office worker I now am. I have my first salaried position in this country, and much against expectations, it isn’t teaching English.

August Rush: The Web Job

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
"Ulysses", Alfred Tennyson

I always liked that poem, especially those final lines. I learned something shocking during my early days in corporate life and public office. Most people are basically apathetic and most people actually don’t know what they’re doing. So the secret to success in life is generally to give a damn and know your stuff. That might sound deceptively easy, but most people are lazy, so it means that all you often need to do to pull ahead in life is to go the extra mile and put in some of those twelve-hour days I regularly work. Of course, if you want a healthier work-life balance, you’re not going to do that, and for all I know maybe you’d be right not to. In fact, I think you probably are.

As I’ve got older, the lines in that poem have increasingly summarised my life. Towards the end of my time as an elected representative serving 9,600 constituents I wondered if everything I would do professionally after it would seem like an anti-climax – it did – and before long I ended up in a job that, anti-climactic or not, paid such a lot of money really that nothing was ever likely to surpass that either, unless I progressed into upper management, a near impossibility for an IT person in the medical corporation I worked for.

So I’ve done my own thing past my peak, including working around the three years of my professional life that Meniere’s Disease wiped out, and actually I’m not sorry about much – but it has left me feeling like I’m a highly determined person blowing on the embers of past achievements. And while I know who I am and I know what I’m still capable of, my years out in the career wilderness working for myself means that I’m a riskier hire. I have to rebuild my resume. In Korea. Somehow.

It was becoming apparent that even with my TESOL qualification, getting a foot in the door of the English teaching circuit in Korea wasn’t going to be entirely easy. I was logging into Koreabridge every day and I applied for my first position, a short-term role teaching Business English, which I thought there might be a least a little chance of progressing with given that relative to some people, I have around sixteen years of business experience. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get an interview, because I’m feeling my way in the dark here with almost no expectations. As far as teaching is concerned, I probably have to work my way up from quite a low level, and I suppose Business English jobs probably go to more experienced teachers, not experienced business people, even ones with TESOL certificates.

So the upshot of everything which has occurred recently is that I’m down on my luck, with a baby and an apartment to support, unemployed with only savings rather than income to pay the bills and career prospects that look about as attractive to me as the front of a subway train. I was desperate to find something outside teaching, but I knew it was probably impossible... until the fifth day of my Koreabridge search, when a job was advertised for a web developer with an F-class visa living in or near Haeundae, which at the time felt like a highly unlikely combination of attributes to find here in Busan amongst the relatively small expat community.

The academic institution concerned - which is reasonably well-known - didn’t seem to have much in the way of expectations either, because they offered training for any candidate who was at least IT-literate. Yet here I was, a Computer Science graduate, former software and Internet developer with years of experience, a co-founder of two serious dot-com start-up companies behind me and a couple of mildly popular British websites to my name, which were still running, and which I thought nice and publicly demonstrated my proficiency in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL and PHP along with other equally relevant technologies they ought to want. I hadn’t kept up with some of the more peripheral or specialised tools in the way I once did, but I never let my core skills lapse - aside from anything else I’ve been developing my own desktop and intranet systems over the years to support my trading. Old habits die hard.

My wife saw the job first and told me excitedly “you have to get this job”. And when I looked at the details, I replied that if I didn’t there really was no justice in world, although my answer may have used slightly stronger language. It felt like the Universe, having gone through a phase of persecuting me – things haven’t really been working out in recent months - was now offering me a break; the job was perfect for me, I believed I was perfect for it, and it came at a time in my life when I really needed it. And what was so perfect you couldn’t even make it up, was that six members of the institution’s management were British, so for once I didn’t even have to worry about the disadvantage of not being a “North American passport holder”.

I saw the job on Friday and I spent the weekend brushing up my technical skills and analysing their website, which had issues, thinking about how it could be improved and developed to meet their business goals while applying a user-centred design approach. It was good preparatory work and while I was excited and I didn’t get too carried away, because I know my days of being a well-paid software engineer are long behind me. Now I have to be grateful for finding any job in Korea I can use my skills in, which until I’m fluent in Korean and lose ten years off my age are virtually none (age discrimination is a huge problem in computing in England - where 25-34 has often been touted as an IT contractor's prime period - and I imagine Korea’s little different).

Initially I didn’t get an interview partly due to a mix-up about when I was moving to the vicinity of Haeundae, but I made an effort to persuade them to change their minds, which to their credit they did. And despite the fact that it all happened so fast that I wasn’t geared up for an interview in the way I would have been in England – I own one suit in Korea and I took notes with me in an old National Union of Students folder rather than the expensive leather-bound document wallets or attaché cases I used to have back home, I thought I gave a decent interview - not my best - but then I was also feeling really ill, and not just because I wanted the job so much - more on that later.

I suppose I’ve been around a bit in the business world. In fact, last time I sat in an interview it was when I was the one doing the recruiting and interviewing. So I knew during the interview that I hadn’t got the job. My wife had gone with me to look at the campus for future reference, and when I met up with her afterwards I told her the bad news. It was a pretty long and depressing journey home for both of us, because it looked like I’d failed in the one shot I had at reviving my technical career proper before I succumbed to the seeming inevitability of teaching English to children, and we both knew how much I’d wanted it to be different.

I’ve been told many times, particularly in the last year as my enthusiasm for working alone and 2am finishes in the financial industry has finally waned, that I should draw upon my experience and find another non-teaching job, because the perception was that being a native-English speaker with an F-2 with my background in software and Internet development gave me a fairly unique selling point in an area that admittedly looked like a narrow market niche in Busan. But I discovered that the the institution I'd applied to had been overwhelmed with apparent talent and experience, so as much as anything it was depressing to discover that I probably didn’t have any apparent unique selling points after all, at least not in the activity commonly referred to as ‘web design’, so that illusion was shattered.

I suppose for a brief moment I felt the Universe was setting me up to give me a break, but it turned out that it was just setting me up, because indeed, I didn't get the job.

It transpired I did have one unique selling point - my experience in the field of web-based databases -  So the institution suggested they might employ me to work on something else, but it didn’t sound very hopeful at the time.

When you miss out on a job in your own country, you know another will come along shortly, but given the dearth of positions in my professional field here, it felt like I'd just missed the last bus home - leaving me stuck where I am, which is probably on the verge of becoming an English teacher. And with it this country moves a step closer towards turning me into to person it wants me to be, rather than me finding my own way in life here through having a plurality of options.

John F. Kennedy once said that "True happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope." That's a definition - if you hold it to be true - that raises a lot of unhappy questions in Korea for an expat in my position.

August Rush: North American Passport Holders Only

Chronologically, we signed to buy the apartment and then I lost quite a bit of money in the market, so I now had a major financial commitment and barely the funds to meet it. I remember my wife working through the apartment paperwork as I watched the London FTSE market futures drop a huge amount - 8.4% at one point - on my mobile phone. I was recklessly long overnight in the market on the ‘Centum apartment play’, and there promised to be an enormous progress crushing fall at the open, which there was.

So it was definitely time to find another job in Korea, and for the first time I had to truly confront one of the fundamental problems with living here - namely that while I’d always been able to use my software and web development skills in England to put food on the table, and there I was capable of doing a myriad of other things, in Korea apparently there is really only option open to me, which is teaching. This was a pity because the one conclusion I had from doing a TESOL course many years ago is that I never really wanted to teach English again, even though I got good grades. Worse, many of the jobs involved teaching children. This is not my thing, and if I thought having a child might kindle some enthusiasm for it on my part, it only made me realise that I need a break from that, not more of it.

Life is suddenly looking a lot tougher.

And then, after I decided I had to find a job, I discovered something I’d always been vaguely aware of in Korea, but the scope of which had never quite registered in my mind. I started searching in earnest for jobs on Koreabridge, and I began reading the phrase ‘North American passport holder’ rather more than I expected. I hadn’t realised that being a Canadian and speaking Canadian English was a class above being British and speaking English English, but I guess now I know.

I suppose it’s all aboot [sic] the accent, because while the job ad I saw which asked for an “american (but, if you have a very neutral accent, another nationality is possible.)” perhaps represented an individual preference rather than a corporate policy, it may well encapsulate the underlying prejudices Koreans have about anything which isn’t American English, or perhaps as I’m learning, Canadian English as the second choice.

Korea seems to get very little bang for its buck when it comes to the subject of English teaching, and perhaps part of the reason is the kind of profiling that prioritises people based on nationality and race rather than on actual English and teaching ability.

Another good one I saw recently - though sadly I can't find the link now - involved a group of male corporate executives who were looking for “an English tutor – female only”. Dear Sirs, I think what you are actually looking for, is a geisha.

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.