Busan Journal, Day 9

Welcome to Houghton, Brandi!

Sorry that we are not in Houghton right now to welcome you to western New York. It may well be as eye-opening an experience for you as your trip to London last September.

A different experience, of course, as you will know as soon as you step out onto soggy ground and sniff the farm-fresh air.

Ask one of your Houghton-in-London buddies to give the Houghton equivalent of the central London tour. It will be a walking tour, by the way, since we have no tube service in town. No bus service either. Not yet, at least.

In our absence, I must invite you to see where our lives take place rather than to extend the kind of hospitality we would usually offer. No hot meals from Donna's Kitchen. No crackling fire on the hearth. No evening of Dutch Blitz.

Someone can walk you by the big red house on Seymour Street, however. If Katie or Megan want to impose upon Tra, you might even be invited to see the inside. You are welcome inside, of course, just don't take any mementos.

Stop by my office, too, and look in the little window to see where I spend many of my waking hours. You may need to push aside the large Korean flag that I have hung across the door to remind folks where I have gone. I wanted to avoid the kind of benign misinformation that accompanied my semester in London. When I returned from London, I was asked several tims, "So, how was Korea?"

And you do know, Brandi, that you will be a bit of a curiosity to Houghton folks. In our part of the world people think it abnormal to go from Santa Barbara to western New York for a week's vacation in March. Have an explanation ready. Your behavior is a bit, well, unusual.

That's all I can do for you now, Brandi. We are sorry to have missed your week in Santa Barbara-East.

You are welcome to visit us in Busan any time.

Busan Journal, Day 8

The Foreign Professor

We did not get off to an ideal start. The classroom, due to a quirk in the modernist design of the building, is hard to find. When I arrived, it was locked. We needed a key-card from the Chinese Literature Department since it is their room. Apart from offices, I am not exactly sure how ownership of rooms is determined, but I guess it does not matter. I am not here to reform the system nor to foment rebellion.

I had been instructed to send a student to get the key, but the first few students to arrive also did not know where to find Chinese Lit.

As I was leaving for my own department office to find someone to solve the problem, one young woman told me it was the students' responsibility to handle jobs like this, not the professor's. She took out her cell phone, started calling, then disappeared up the staircase.

After five minutes of standing in the cold corridor feeling conspicuous while the other students carried on an animated discussion in Korean, she reappeared with the key card.

From that point on, the experience improved moment by moment. The class room was a fairly small box, four rows of metal desks facing a teacher's desk in front of the blackboard. My students began filing into the back rows, as students everywhere do, so I invited them to move forward before they got too comfortable. They responded cheerfully.

Ten women and one man, all of them in their first class in their first graduate school course, about half in their 30s and 40s. I am guessing about ages here, despite knowing that such guesswork is perilous. All Korean. All with a sufficient English proficiency to carry on a conversation with me in the course of our three hour session.

And what a delight! We filled our time together quickly, first with a get-acquainted writing exercise that they each shared with the class, then with an overview of the syllabus, and finally with some background, context, and cautions for their reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" for the next class. My intention was as much to create rapport and interest in our subject as it was to dispense information.

I left my first class feeling that Korean students are much the same as any students I have ever taught. Well, maybe a little better dressed students on average, and clearly more fluent in Korean than in English, but otherwise more than willing to meet me half way.

My second class was with 26 undergraduate students in a room with 100 seats and a stage for the professor to perform. If I were in Houghton, I would email James in Records and request a smaller room. But I can work with a stage if I have to. Teaching is 80% performance, after all, and I have had a lot of practice.

With only 75 minutes to work with, we did not have as much interaction as I had in my first class. Still, I think we made a good start. Here the level of English proficiency varies more. But then, that is what English classes are about generally, aren't they, proficiency with the language?

And I have a number of students who will resist opportunities to speak in class. In this class on the literature of Asian immigrants to America I began by asking them to define the American Dream. I think the responses could pass for "discussion" even though I had to keep jumping up and down from the stage to write on the board.

I think it will be a great privilege and joy to work with these students. I hope they will learn from me. I know I will learn a great deal from them.

Apart from meeting so many bright young people, my favorite part of the day was the answer I got many times from the question: Why did you sign up for this course?

Over and over they seemed to think it might be interesting to learn from a foreign professor. I hope they are right.

Busan Journal, Day 7

Total Animal Soup of Time

What was I thinking?

It seemed like a good idea months ago when I was putting together my "literature of rebellion" reading list.

I chose to begin my teaching stint at PNU with HOWL. It is, after all, thought to be the single most explosive literary work in the decades following WWII. It's the poem that created all the early excitement. Clearly, too, it embodies the cultural anger,anxiety, and antipathy that preoccupied American writers, artists, and musicians in those years.

Now that I am in Korea, thinking in concrete terms of the kids who will be sitting in front of me, anticipating real faces on real students, who will have serious questions about words and references -- for whom I will have to provide justification as well as explanation -- well, YIKERS! It's different somehow.

I mean, really, what kind of person would write a poem like this?

Maybe more to the point, what kind of person would assign a poem like this as required reading, especially as a visiting professor in a foreign university?

I was pondering these questions and berating myself as I read through HOWL again in preparation for my first class -- which begins in 90 minutes!

There are certainly less reputable poems around, but few that I know of that can offend as many categories of propriety as Howl. How am I going to do this?

On the other hand, how could I possibly avoid it, given the topic I set out for myself? To avoid Howl in a context like this would be roughly like explaining hurricane damage in New Orleans without talking about Katrina. Or something like that.

The key will be providing sufficient context, information as to time, place, circumstance, and reference. I don't imagine I will need to do much with what we used to call "four letter words." Anyone who has seen American movies on TV over here will have heard all of those before.

Still, explaining context is a complicated business. It is even complicated in America where students know less about their own recent history than they should.

The rational side of my brain says, "Relax, you know how to do this."

The other side of me brain is still shouting, "YIKERS!"

Busan Journal, Day 6

As I rounded the corner by the law building on my walk down from our hilltop dormitory, I heard the faint strains of music. It is early on a rainy day, our third in a row, and a national holiday, Sam Il Jul, so the streets were otherwise deserted. What a joy to hear what I took to be live music, a single instrument coloring a moment otherwise silent, damp, and gray.

The route to my new office takes me alternately downhill and then laterally across the face of the slope three times. As I approached an open, three layered parking garage that sits beside a series of tennis courts, I could tell that the music was coming from within the parking garage itself, then that it was a saxophone.

Immediately I felt affinity with the lone musician. I thought first of recent experiences hearing musicians in London, performing in walkways of tube stations or the pedestrian "subways" in the center of the city. Then I thought of the lone musician I had come across in Highbury Fields, our local park, practicing his trumpet in the cold twilight of mid-November. He was good, I must say, but no doubt the trumpet makes poor company indoors when you share thin walls, ceilings, and floors with a less tolerant audience.

Then I spotted him, or part of him, sitting on a folding chair on the lower deck of the parking garage, facing a fold-away music stand, practicing a classical piece unfamiliar to me, his huge bright brass horn almost touching the ground. I could not see his face and he did not stop while I stood for a moment in the rain, but I wanted to applaud. I would have tossed the coins from my pocket into his open case had he been closer and the way down accessible.

We have been here ten days. Life on campus has been quiet, although clearly campus life does not stop between semesters. Yesterday, new students arrived. The campus buzzed with life for the first time. A line of cars, bumper to bumper, snaked oh-so-slowly up the single narrow street toward the dorms; students armed with big yellow badges and light batons directed traffic; and hundreds of parents dragged suitcases and their somber kids toward their new rooms and this new life at college.

Now, this national holiday and a deserted campus. The lone musician with his over-sized saxophone filled the quiet air with notes we often call plaintive, melancholy, wistful. But what I hear is the joy of the introspective life, the shared emotion of this moment in which two lives understand something through music that we could not express in words.

I have been asked many times how the teaching is going. I would say it is going fine. I am having a great time with my saxophone, wailing away in the parking garage with its wonderful amplifying acoustics. On Thursday I get to do it again for my first real audience.

Busan Journal, Day 5

Apart from the fish market we explored on our second day, I have not yet ventured down any alleys in search of the old Korea in Busan.  

But we have been down a narrow street or two.  Tonight we ate out at Taco Family, which is two blocks down the main road from the university campus and a block north, at the  dark end of a street of better looking restaurants.

The first thing you notice about Taco Family is the heavy, clear plastic that serves as both an outer wall and a door.  Inside are four tables for four, an inner wall of real glass and wood, two more tables for four, a counter, and a small cooking area.

The owner, cook, and sole employee of Taco Family is the tallest Korean I have seen yet at 6’5” or 6’6”. He is almost too big for his kitchen, but he works there efficiently.  He is also congenial.  He smiled when we came in and said, “thank you for coming back.”

Good times, good décor.  The wall beside our table is decorated with labels from products that go into his “Mexican” menu: a plastic cheese wrapper, labels neatly cut from red kidney bean and sliced jalapeno cans, cardboard sides cut from taco shell boxes, and the like, tacked at jazzy angles with smiley face tacks.

Across the room are shelves like a grocery store with items for purchase: taco chips on the top shelf, tomato sauces, hot sauces, chili powder and seasonings on the second shelf, and so on down to table level.

All of this atmosphere, however, is secondary to the menu itself, which appears on a store-wide sign over the counter. In addition to the standard fare of burritos and refried beans are such  Mexican favorites as lasagna, Greek salad, and fish’n’chips.  Our personal favorite, however, is New England clam chowder in a bread bowl.  Just in case you are skeptical about the chowder, let me just say it is excellent.  We have had it twice – although we took the precaution of scooping the jalapeno peppers off the top before we dug in.

The impressive part is that the cook, owner, sole-employee cooks the clams up with each order.  He also cuts up his fish for the fish’n’chips on the spot.

About halfway through our chips (me) and chowder (her) tonight I realized that we had all of this and Mozart playing over the PA system.  A real touch of class in a place that has it all – friendly service, interesting environment, good prices, and great food.

There is one thing I might suggest changing, however.  If he would just get real paper napkins to replace the role of heavy duty toilet paper that sits on every table, it would mean a lot!

Busan Journal, Day 4

We have not seen enough yet to know whether Busan is typical of Korean cities.  We are told it is different from Seoul, the city everyone identifies with Korea.  But I do not know yet whether the difference is like New York and Boston, whose differences diminish with distance, or New York and Los Angeles, where differences are systemic.  The “New York state of mind” has its counterpart in the “LA state of mind” – without the pun. Perhaps that is the Seoul –Busan difference.  

Busan is built essentially among the hills alongside the Nakgonggang River delta.  A number of streams from the north have over time cut valleys down to the Sea of Japan, leaving high and rugged hills that loom above the urban centers.  The hills themselves are not built up with high-end houses as a similar city in the US would be, so they loom like dark elders over the bright lights of the city landscape.

Because it is built in the valleys, Busan itself is separated into districts by these hills. Add in the fact that there are over 3.6 million people and you have an idea how concentrated with people, streets, and buildings the valleys are.  Chalky gray or tan high-rise apartment buildings dominate certain sections of the city. New high-rise buildings are going up continually.  From my window on the hill, I can see the long arms of many construction cranes down toward the Haeundae Beach-front.

I do not imagine that these things are all that unusual for Asian cities.  Nor do I imagine it is all that unusual for life at street level to give an entirely different impression than my hill view gives.

Immediately out the front gates of Pusan National University the streets are alive with lights, sounds, smells, crowds, trucks, and cars. For an American village boy, the all-out sense blast can be dazzling and daunting. Immediate sensory overload. It is a little like walking in Times Square except, of course, that the signs are mostly in Korean.

In the morning, many shops remain closed and foot traffic consists largely of people with destinations. Even shoppers are focused.  By mid-afternoon, when sidewalks and coffee shops are full of young people dressed up for school, vendors begin to set up tables and lights on the sidewalks to display their wares.  I took particular interest in a pocketbook vendor whose “warehouse” was no more than three feet wide.  Her stock of pocketbooks lined the walls for twenty feet in an enclosed space between buildings. She displayed her merchandise on two metal racks set in front of her crevice with just enough room for her to slip between them to assist customers.

Dozens of coffee shops and restaurants and sidewalk hot food stands buzz with customers.  One would think that so much competition in so close a space would drive many out of business, but as night comes on all the eating locations come to life.

What I find most interesting are the streets, shops, alleys where an older Korea still lingers. These I have yet to explore sufficiently to offer comment.  We are seeing the modern Busan overtaking the older Busan. I will take this as a necessary sign of progress, of change that means the life-blood of the city is still pumping.   

Soon I must go in search of the old Busan, the older Korea.

Busan Journal, Day 3

We left Seoul on the KTX, the fast train to Busan.  It is so smooth and quiet that it begins to move with no sensation of moving.  It glides through Seoul past a forest of grey high-rise apartments before entering a tunnel. After several minutes of darkness suddenly the world opens again:  we are out of the tunnel and out of the city, the buildings replaced by farms and hills.

We travel through farmland patterned ingeniously on flat fields or jig-sawed into the small valleys between steep slopes.  The farmland is all efficiently managed. Neatly rectangular plots are bordered by ridges, some of which are long, straight irrigation ditches. Access roads are raised above field level. The larger, flatter areas are divided into these smaller plots.  Every corner and odd space is bordered, cultivated. 

No space is dominated by huge, unbroken fields as one would find in America. In places long, plastic covered green houses stand in close rows.

None of the farm buildings appear to be as neat or as well tended as the fields.  It is hard to distinguish farm houses from other buildings, although the usual kind of farm debris lies in the yards – old cars, old tractors, various beat-up tag-along machines, barrels, buckets, piles of discarded and rusting metal things, variously dull colored plastics (sometimes folded and stacked, sometimes heaped), junk, always junk. Occasionally board and sheet metal fences define areas filled with refuse, perhaps to be recycled.  Occasionally, too, narrow smoke from a trash barrel fire creeps slowly across one of these little valleys like a low-hung cloud.

If one is thinking of values here, if the landscape were speaking, clearly the farmland itself, the cultivated soil, takes priority over human inhabitants.

No livestock visible anywhere. In western New York, cows at least are out in the stock yards in all but the coldest weather.  Here, no trace.

The landscape in mid-February is dun-colored, desolate looking, except for hillsides, which are covered with dull, dark-green evergreen trees.  We pass through higher mountains white with snow, but mostly the snow is confined to irrigation ditches and the north side of buildings and ridges. We have not seen the sun all day.

We pass silently through cities – Osong, Daejeon, Dondaugu, Ulsan – before we reach Busan.  The cities are grey, concrete, industrial.  They remind me of Russia.  No one is out in the farm land, but the cities are busy with construction – high-rise buildings, roads, bridges.

Perhaps it is not an accurate conclusion, but in the cold and desolate light of winter one must conclude that it is a hard life for farmers, as it has always been. One imagines the pre-war look of poverty – poor people in poor housing, poor neighborhoods. 

In Central Gimchen, just below Daejeon , buried among new concealing structures I note occasional, compelling, lovely, heartbreaking pagoda type roofs. To the western visitor, this may be a glimpse of traditional Korea.  In Russia, 19^th Century wooden houses and mud alleys lie just behind the soviet era buildings that line the main roads. Perhaps that has happened here, too, to make progress visible.

Then Busan.  The train pulls in and stops so smoothly the man snoozing in the seat ahead of us does not wake.  Even when the train has emptied and we shoulder our bags down the aisle, he slumbers on.