Busan Journal, China Adventure, Part I

Getting There

If memory serves, we first dreamed of travel to China during the 1970s, shortly after Nixon greeted Mao in Beijing. 

At the time, our family was very young, three under five, with another child still to come, so we did not see how China would ever be possible.

 A lot has happened since then.

When our stay in Korea began to materialize, China became a possibility.  As we planned for our February 2011 departure for Korea, we had a rough notion we could use our base in Korea to visit other places in Asia.  Both China and Japan seemed within reach. Vietnam was a more distant possibility.

If we could visit Japan, we would want to see Naho, one of our first home stay daughters. If we wanted to see China it would need to be in late May or June, after our Chinese home stay kids returned home from their U.S. colleges. Largely because of tropical heat, which we are constitutionally unsuited to, the possibility of Vietnam would remain "remote."

Japan does not require a tourist visa, but China does.  Back in January, without precise travel dates for our visa application, we were advised to apply once we reached Korea.  There is a Chinese consulate in Busan, we were told; just apply when you know more.

Good idea. No problem.

We had originally planned to visit Japan during the university exam break in mid-April. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, Japan suffered an earth quake at the end of March that caused both a devastating tsunami and a nuclear reactor "meltdown."

Naho, who lives in Tokyo, said we should not come. But once life had normalized, our mid-term window had passed.

We continued to hold out hope for Japan even as we made plans for China. After settling travel dates with Edward, who had lived with us the year before, I hunted down the Chinese Consulate in Busan only to find myself lost in a hot, crowded, windowless, square room filled with signs in Chinese and Korean.  Not an English word in the place that I could see.

It was austere and unfriendly to the point of being forbidding. Chest-high counters along three of the walls were crowded with people filling out applications. Dozen of people were queued up to windows along the fourth wall, tiny openings covered almost completely with glass.

It would be fair to say, I felt a bit conspicuous.

In time, a young woman in uniform came out to me.  She asked what I wanted, which surprised me as this was the visa application office.  I told her.  She looked at my passport and my applications, then informed me that I needed a Korean Alien Registration Number.  No ARN, no visa.  No visa, no China.

I had no ARN, as I had been told it was not necessary.

What follows is the kind of bureaucratic run-around that we have come to call a "catch 22" after the ever changing regulations that kept servicemen from leaving the combat zone in Joseph Heller's famous war novel.

After the Chinese Consulate, we visited Korean Immigration to apply for an ARN.  After several hours in the small, crowded waiting room, we met Mr. Yoyo, who was both very serious and very helpful.  Not fast, but helpful.  His English was OK, which we thought was just fine as we had no Korean beyond "anyounghaseo" and "kamsamnida."  Hello and thank you.

Mr. Yoyo spent a great deal of time examining my Fulbright ID, our passports, our applications, and his computer screen.  From time to time he would ask a question for information that I had already written on the application; then he would get up and walk to use a computer on the other side of the room.

Several times he looked directly at us and said, "Mr. Zoller, welcome to my country."

I felt it was a nice gesture, welcome, as immigration offices have to be the least friendly places on earth, apart from war zones and prisons.  At any rate, I felt I was getting mixed messages. The room said "abandon hope" -- Mr. Yoyo was saying "welcome."

The short version of this story is that the three week wait for the ARN became seven due to a change in regulations while our passports we "in the system" somewhere in Busan. I found this out when I went down on the appropriate date to pick up the Alien Registration cards and our passports. Rule changes would delay our departure for China until June 20, way too late for us due to my teaching obligations and our departure date for return to the States.

It also meant we could not squeeze in a quick trip to Japan as we had no passports.

In the mean time, we learned that if we flew to Hong Kong, which has special status in the Chinese governance structure, we could obtain an expedited visa for China within 24 hours.So we did not need the ARN after all, just our passports, if I could only get them out of the system.

When I texted Mr. Yoyo in early June to see if I could move the process along or simply retrieve our passports, I received this text in return:  "Both AR cards and passports are here.  You can pick them up."

He did not say how long they had been sitting in the Immigration office. Kamsamnida

We did not go back to the Chinese Consulate.  Instead I booked a flight to Hong Kong for the earliest date I was free.  Then I wrote Edward to tell him when we would arrive and how long we thought we could stay.

From that point on, come what may, we were heading for China. After a long delay the wheels were in motion, the dream would become reality.  We would have to pinch ourselves later.

Busan Journal, Day 29

On the Rocks

From the beginning, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.

In early June two of our Korean home-stay daughters, Chloe and AhRa, rode the Korail Express Train (KTX) from Seoul to spend a few days with us in Busan. With all the laughter, chatter, and personality they bring with them, it was just like old times. 

We went to the beach, hiked trails, took a ferry ride, and ate in restaurants.  At night we all made space for ourselves in our two rooms, the girls on sleeping mats in the "living room."  Cozy.

I cannot overstate how much we enjoyed their visit; and I cannot choose some moments over others as being "the best things" about those few day, so I will just say that one memorable activity of their stay was our trip to a raw seafood restaurant on the rocks below the lighthouse on Taejongdae Island.

 These views from the top and bottom of the cliffs give necessary perspective on what "seaside" dining really entails.

This was an experience that falls into the "first and only" category for us.  Donna had come up with the idea of taking Chloe and AhRa by subway and then taxi out to Taejongdae for seafood on the rocks, thinking the seafood would be cooked.  Of course.

We had seen the restaurants from an earlier trip to the lighthouse; but as the wind on that day was daunting, we had not ventured down to the rocks for a closer look. We knew the food would be fresh but we had somehow missed its "raw" aspect.

What had looked like cooking baskets and pots from two hundred feet up the cliff were really just holding tanks to keep the creatures alive.

It took only a few minutes for the girls to select sea squirt and sea cucumber from the tubs of salt water, and it took the cooks only a few minutes more to dispatch the creatures by chopping them into bite-size pieces and bring the delicacies in on a tray.

The darker, grey pieces are the sea cucumber and the rest is sea squirt, so far as I know.  The white food in the small dish is sliced radish with whole green peppers of the hot variety, and the other two dishes have hot sauces. Apart from the raw seafood, which is common enough in Busan but not the usual fare, and apart from the reduced number of small side-dish bowls, this is how a Korean meal is served.  You use your chopsticks to take from the main dish or dishes as well as from the side dishes.

There are many variations, of course, but we saw this basic format many times. I might add that this meal was unusual because we were not served kimchi, perhaps the only Korean meal we had during our four plus months without at least one bowl of kimchi.  Whether this had anything to do with the fact that we were at the seaside eating raw seafood, I don't know.

Our reactions to the seafood was predictably different from Chloe and AhRa's. Donna dutifully took a piece of sea cumcumber, found that it was nothing like the cucumber she was used to, and could not swallow it.  After that attempt, she needed a few minutes to recover.

I managed a piece of each and swallowed both, but decided I had done my duty and took no more.  For the record, neither cucumber nor squirt had a distinctive taste to me, being both somewhat bland by themselves.  The issue, I think, is with texture.  Sea cucumber is rubbery, rather more solid than it looked.  At least for my aging molars, it refused to break apart after serious grinding, and I eventually swallowed it whole.

The texture of the sea squirt was opposite the cucumber, being soft.  I expected it to disintegrate quickly, but it too resisted chewing.  Nothing would make it fragment, so again after rigorous chewing I swallowed the whole thing.

AhRa and Chloe found our efforts to eat quite amusing.  I did not get a usable picture of them laughing, but in this one their attention to the seafood we could not eat is clearly evident.

Eating was not all we did on this trip.  We watched the big ships coming and going outside of Busan Harbor,

and we hiked along the Taejongdae Island shore with its spectacular views.

But as was true everywhere we went in Korea -- and China, too -- it was people, in this case our remarkable and beautiful Korean daughters, who made the memorable truly unforgettable.

As I said earlier, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.

Busan Journal, End of the Dream -- Almost

Almost Home

We have been back in the US for nearly a month and home for a few days here and there, six days total.  The rest of the time we have been traveling, first in New England and now for the last week in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

During the few days we spent in Houghton unpacking and sorting and repacking, we have seen deer wander across our back yard.  The picture above was a near miss of twin fawns and their mother, who surprised us. I scrambled to get my camera. Mama deer had disappeared over the bank into the woods before I got the camera ready. 

Our time in New England was spent mostly in Maine, where the pictures below were taken.  Maine usually brings to mind pine forests and rocky coast lines, lobsters and sailing boats. These pictures are of a harbor just north of Kittery, Maine, where we had met our son Ian and his wife, Kristen, for lunch.

Yes, the sky and the water really are that blue.  And, yes, we smiled for the camera for those who like people in pictures.

My T-shirt reads "Wicked Big Sox Fan" just in case you can't read the tiny print. "Wicked" is characteristic New England adjective meant to intensify the noun that follows, after the manner of "very."  "Sox," of course, means the Boston Red Sox, a major league baseball team and a New England obsession. The "Sox fan" designation is crucial to clarify loyalties, especially since the New York license plates on our car might suggest "Yankee fan" instead.

I add here parenthetically that my wife claims to be a Yankee fan although she does not follow baseball.  Her loyalty can be traced to her father, who was a Yankee fan of the "rabid" sort, another American adjective that both intensifies and colors the noun that follows.  "Rabid" indicates not only close support of the favored team but also necessary hatred of its close rivals. Further explanation makes for interesting story-telling, but it tends to raise more questions than it answers.

Most of our time in Maine was not spent at seaside, however; it was spent at Whitney Pond, a small lake with few boats and at least two resident loons.

I do not have photographs of the loons handy as they are "shy" birds that are more at home swimming for food underwater than either flying or trying to walk on land.  Photographing them takes more patience than I have had to date, as they will appear suddenly on the surface of the water looking very duck-like and then disappear just as suddenly under the surface again.

The lake may look like Golden Pond, the idyllic lake from the movie, but it isn't. This photo was taken from the little beach just after the sun went down behind the trees.

A week later, the morning  I was packing the car to travel south to Virginia, this yearling wandered into the side yard to chew on a bush near me.

She waited for me to get my camera and snap a few pictures -- undisturbed by my movements -- before she wandered off to graze on other things.

Apart from the traveling since we have been home, and apart from sleep issues we will attribute to jet lag, our readjustment to American life has been seamless. We had the same sense of seamlessness (again, with jet-lag issues) in December when we returned home after four months in England.

I suppose this seamlessness is all to the good, but I do find it a little unsettling simply because our experiences overseas were so good, so positive.  I must say that I am determined not to let our travels, in Korea, especially, slip away too fast. 

For that reason, I will continue to keep this blog going a bit longer, if only to recount some of our experiences and impressions before time bleaches them away.

Busan Journal, Day 28

So -- that's it, I guess!

When I meet someone, and especially when I meet several people at a time, I often have trouble remembering names. Faces usually fix themselves easily in my brain, but names slide around, disappear.  It's sad, but true.

Consequently, learning several classes worth of new student names each semester is a challenge. 

Over the years, I have learned how to make the process easier, but it is always a struggle.  Picture rosters have helped a great deal.

This semester the task has been particularly difficult as the students in my classes are all Korean and the roster is printed in hangul. No pictures. It's not that Korean names are especially difficult in and of themselves; it's that there are so many names that sound similar to dull American ears.

Those dull ears would be mine.

Still, over the weeks I learned to attach the correct name to a student most of the time. As always happens, one or two student names remain elusive.

Now the semester is over, and I have turned in grades. I tried hard to be sure that each name received the grade it was supposed to receive.

I have realized in the two weeks since our last classes that I really need to get better, not so much at learning names as at saying goodbye.

Odd as it may seem, when it comes to saying goodbye at the end of a semester, I find myself feeling awkward and shy, as I often felt growing up.  It is always that way for me.

It is a most unfortunate character trait, particularly regrettable in this present instance when my short tenure combined with our mutual struggles to get to know each other make the goodbye a significant moment. Things worked out well for my graduate class because my students took us to lunch after the final session, as is the tradition here at PNU.

There is no such tradition for the undergraduate classes.  Consequently, in my usual way, I let the moment slip by without the attention it deserved.  We had spent the last class in a review session for the final, and as different groups of students finished at different times, I dismissed them by groups.


At the end, a small group remained, eager to chat.  I dug out my camera and took their picture.  I had actually intended to take a picture of the entire class, but that intention had been forgotten somehow as I visited study groups.

Thank you to these five for making our "goodbye" significant.  To the other two-thirds of the undergraduate (Immigrant Literature) class, my apologies.  It was a great experience.  I had fun and I learned a lot.  I will miss you all.

And some day soon, because of my experience with you, I would like to return and teach more classes at PNU.

For now, however, I have packing to do and more posts to write about Busan, so I will just leave you with a heartfelt kamsamnida!


Later, dudes!

Busan Journal, Day 27

The Neighborhood


The morning after we arrived at Ungbikwan, our dorm condominium, we took a walk around the campus to orient ourselves.  Important as it was to walk the campus, the walk itself was disorienting.  We did a lot of circular wandering.

It did not help that it was graduation day, so a great many of the people on campus were visitors who had little more idea of where things were located than we did.  Even without the language barrier asking for help would have been a problem.

All we knew about campus, our new neighborhood, as we walked was that our dorm sits at the top of the hill. So, when it was time to go "home" we were confident we could get there by heading uphill.  Easy enough to remember, although the climb remains, well, a climb.

Looking for places, the Humanities Building, for example, was difficult in part because many buildings have a similar look and because signs are in Korean. English names do appear below many hangul letters, but they are often small, frequently puzzling, and occasionally hard to find.

On the way back up to our dorm that first day, I noticed a traditional tile roof partially hidden in the trees a hundred feet off the road.  Both the location of the roof and several other details led me to think it might be a Buddhist temple or shrine.  I remarked that we would need to walk down the path to see what was there in the next day or so.

Last week I decided to the time had come so I walked down the little path.  Sure enough, beside the building with the traditional roof was a ten foot stone Buddha and, behind it, a garden.

So my initial suspicions were confirmed, but what surprised me was the eating area above the shrine.  It is similar to the outdoor eating areas one finds all over these hills. All this time I had thought there must be a trail head onto the mountain, but all this time people were just coming to eat.

I did not go all the way down into the eating area, because that usually draws out the proprietors, the women who run these eating houses, to greet you -- even if you are only passing through.  More than that, however, I wanted to get closer to the shrine since there was no access from the path I was on.

Further down the road from my dorm are steep stairs that lead into a residential neighborhood.  Many students go up and down these stairs, but I had never done so. I went down thinking it would give me access to the shrine.

At the bottom of the stairs, just 150 feet from the sidewalk at the edge of campus that I know so well now is a different world -- small houses, tall apartments, well-tended gardens, and narrow streets.

Getting to the shrine was not as straightforward as I had anticipated, but eventually I got there.  It is not as public a place as I thought it might be.  The buildings were all closed up and there were no signs that visitors were encouraged. The pilgrims I had seen were not pilgrims after all, just hungry souls looking for a meal, a conversation, and a bit of relaxation.

Turns out not to be a big find, but at least it is no longer like so many other places I always intended to visit but never did.

Busan Journal, Day 26

The Rewards of Teaching

One of the rewarding elements of teaching in Korea is hearing from students who have connected with our reading or discussions in significant ways. That is, I suppose, always the rewarding part of teaching -- to see the light of understanding in student faces and to hear excitement in their voices.

My Korean students have rewarded me many times in this way.

After class a week ago one of my graduate students, whom I will call Mi-Won, mentioned to me what she had found so compelling about No-No Boy, the novel by John Okada that we had just finished discussing.  Interestingly, it was not the central character that she related to but his mother, whose role in the novel embodies a particular set of attitudes and characteristics.  She is an immigrant who, like much of the Japanese immigrant community, hopes to recreate the old country in the new. In this story she believes she can remain Japanese and raise her sons as Japanese.  Her dream is to return to Japan, with her family, as rich people who can live the life of the wealthy -- once the family has made its fortune in America.

Having lived for a number of years in both England and the United States as her own children were growing up, Mi-Won found the mother's plight both understandable and sympathetic in a way the rest of us had not. Mi-Won identified; she found a level of empathy that opened the story to her in a compelling way.

While the portrait in the novel treated the mother with dignity and sympathy, it also portrayed her as stubborn, aggressive, and enigmatic. The Japan she idealized and desired for her boys had been destroyed.

Mi-Won told of her own struggles to raise her children with a  Korean identity, even as they were being shaped by the English and then American cultures.  Her efforts led to misunderstandings and arguments with her son -- she arguing in Korean, he responding in English, using British and American vulgarities.  Mi-Won resonates with the mother's frustrations and sense of powerlessness as she loses her own children to their new culture.

Mi-Won's moments of illumination are what literature is all about.  And in the best of circumstances, those moments are what teaching is about too.

Busan Journal, Day 25

The Total Animal Soup of Time, Part II

Somehow the semester is nearly done.

Just yesterday I was wondering how to introduce "Howl" to students I did not know, who had no frame of reference for what I hoped to teach and brought unknown expectations of their foreign professor.  I was also wondering how well my new students would read English and understand my rapid-fire lectures.

Now we are finishing our last books and thinking about the final assessment.

On the first day of classes I worked hard to discover what my expectations should be so that I could attempt to bridge the gaps.  That first day the classes were quite big -- not the hundred I might have had in one classroom, but big enough. More significantly, I had no solution to the problem of getting affordable books in English, so my reading lists were tentative. I needed quite a bit of specific information quickly, but I was not sure how to get it.

Getting Korean students to talk, as a general rule, is quite difficult; most of them are accustomed to sitting without speaking in the classroom.The general idea is that the teacher lectures and students take notes.  It is, I suppose, flattering to think that I might have so much valuable information stored up. But all the same I prefer give and take.  My internal GPS functions on eye contact and body language, both of which Korean students have learned to keep under control.

By the second week, the classes were smaller.  I think some students, who were initially curious about the foreign professor, felt the work would be too hard or that there would be too much reading in English. Some may have found the prospect of facing me every week to be a bit daunting.  Perhaps it is true that I am intimidating, although the notion always strikes me as misplaced.

I was sorry to lose so many right off because I have been excited about the learning opportunities.  My learning opportunities, that is.

Whatever the reasons, it has been better with smaller classes -- fourteen in the undergraduate class on immigrant literature and nine in the graduate class on the literature of rebellion.  We have, at least in the graduate class, reached a point where interaction during class is common and fairly easy. I do not exactly teach through discussion, as is my preference, but we come close.



It is the graduate class where we used "Howl" as our first reading. That was a bit of chutzpah on my part, I suppose, but the choice actually worked well.  We spent a lot of time on "Howl."

It was not so much the objectionable stuff that concerned my students -- or me, after my initial what-have-I done!  Every language has its dirty words and every culture has its provocative behaviors, so these elements were not an obstacle to learning.  In fact, these things are part of a fabric of puzzling references and allusions that needed context and explanation, and the form of the poem can be dizzying.  All of this meant I had to approach the poem by explaining context and form. 

As Ginsberg graphically parades nearly every major American concern of the 1950s, I was free to discuss the historical circumstances that made the literature of rebellion necessary. As he speaks the unspeakable and reveals the hidden, we were in open territory.  In the process, the poem begins to make a great deal of sense. It becomes a map of the post-war American subconscious.

The undergraduate class has proven a different sort of challenge.  Part of that challenge is due to the size of the room;  there are fifteen of us in a lecture hall with 100 seats and with a raised stage for the professor. What this has meant is that the natural gaps are emphasized. It is more difficult to create the atmosphere of familiarity in which a Korean student might be encouraged to look up and, dare I think it, speak.

Now, as I have said, the semester is nearly gone.  We have reached the "end game" in both classes.  How shall we draw our studies to satisfactory conclusions?

In the Immigrant class we have finished our books and have begun what I call "ruining movies." We are watching The Joy Luck Club together over a period of three classes with suitable time before and after the segments for discussion.  I am  ruining this movie for my class both because the story is ideal for our topic and because it gives them time to write their final paper without the pressure of new reading for class.

The graduate class came over for lunch this week to see how the foreign professor lives, to meet his wife, and to enjoy a taste of American hospitality.  We had a good time.  We have reached a good point in this learning experience.



Too bad we are reaching the end.  If only we had world enough and time.