Busan Journal, Day 14

Public Art: Strange Faces and Right Places

From the moment we passed through the Incheon air terminal in a travel induced stupor, we have been surrounded by art in public places. Had the circumstances been different, I might have started my public art photographs then and there. But we were muscling a suitcase-burdened cart through the terminal, trying to find enough signs in English or in internationally standardized images to find our way toward customs, immigration, and the free world beyond.

Of course, my camera was stowed safely in one of those bags on the cart, too, and recovering it for a few snapshots would have required major time and effort for unpacking, retrieving, and repacking.

Suffice to say, between the long plane ride and lack of sleep we did not seem ourselves.

These faces, traditional Korean dramatic masks, are actually from a station on Busan's extremely fine subway line. There are four of them, two at each end of a long mural depicting fishermen hauling a long net toward the water. All in stone. We had passed in and out of this station many times before I remembered to bring my camera along for the ride.

London tube stations, which we rode frequently during the fall months, are interesting, too, but for different reasons. I did not detect the same civic devotion to art on the London underground. I photographed a number of stations there as well but for far different reasons.

When we arrived at our hotel in Seoul, this painting in the hotel caught my eye.

Sometimes, as with this painting, the art is distinctively Korean, even with its modern feel. At other times, such as with this sculpture from Seoul, the piece is distinctively . . . well, weird. Oddly reminiscent of Alfred E Newman, for those who can reference the old MAD magazine covers.

The campus at Pusan National University where we live and work is full of public art too. Sometimes the piece outside the building is just too revealing. I think you can guess who was on the committee choosing this piece for their building's signature sculpture.

I can just hear the guy with the pen nest in the pocket liner asking, "Do you think they will make the connection?"

OK, I'm sorry. That was a cheap joke. After all, it's not that the piece outside the Humanities Building is all that hard to figure out.

My favorite pieces so far tend to be traditional, such as these figures in the outer courtyard at the Busan Museum.

Or this one from inside the Museum. I think this rabbit is from the Korean version of Animal Farm.

Of course, the real artistic treat is art in performance, as with these students on the PNU public soccer field performing traditional dances.

The public art is not all compelling, but I enjoy the fact that it's there. From what I have seen, Koreans have made a serious effort to make art visible for everyone who passes by.

In my view that is ALL for the good.

Busan Journal, Day 13

All the Little Children


Everywhere we have gone in Korea, we notice the children. Perhaps it is because our own grandchildren, all five of them preschoolers, are so far away right now. Maybe we just need a grandchild boost.

Or perhaps it is simply that the little ones are just endearing.

We found this little girl entertaining herself outside the Busan Museum, on a plateau between the museum grounds and the UN Cemetery where many Korean War dead are buried. She was energetically kicking her legs when I spotted her.

We have encountered many school groups at the educational venues we have visited. Trying not to draw attention to myself, I have photographed groups at the Busan Museum and this one at the Gyeonbok Palace in Seoul.

When the field trip to the palace becomes a classroom, the Korean children are like school children everywhere -- some are bored, some are distracted, and most are dutifully struggling to stay seated while the teacher talks.

One of the funnier aspects of encountering these groups is that the younger kids, all of whom are learning English, will take special notice of us, since we are nearly always the only non-Koreans when we travel around Busan. They will smile and giggle. Many will wave.

The braver ones will shout out, "Hi!" "How are you?" What's happening?"

Occasionally, we will hear something genuinely off beat or surprising, like "I love you." One little boy shouted to Donna, "You're beautiful." Makes one wonder where those lines come up during language lessons.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the moving classroom is to really see it in motion. Yellow safety vests help teachers identify who belongs and who is wandering off; and, sometimes, a couple of border collies just might come in handy.

On occasion an older child will come up to us in a store and ask in a serious voice where we are from. Learning that we are from America or New York State usually is enough information for them; they say, "Thank you," and retreat. This kind of encounter has happened often enough for us to think that some English teachers must encourage their students to try out the phrases they have learned. "Where are you from?" is a rewarding question to start with.

We have also occasionally engaged children in other places. On our trip to Seoul two weeks ago we had the joy of meeting Grace Oh's three energetic children and her brother Andrew's daughter.

For grandparents deprived of their own little ones, it's great fun to have them around. No wonder Jesus reminds us that the kingdom belongs to such as these.

Busan Journal, Day 12

Ladies and Gentleman: Assistant Lee!

I have been negligent.

When we arrived at Busan Station on a cold afternoon in mid-February, accompanied by Mi-Sook, the first person we met was Joo-yub, who stood patiently at the exit with a sign bearing my name. As we were the last people to leave the train and he was the last person remaining at the exit and as we looked distinctly lost and distinctly American, he probably did not need the sign.

Still, it was a comfort to find him waiting patiently with a name we recognized. At last, Joo-yub from the email correspondence!

He had brought gifts for the two of us and for Mi-Sook who had sacrificed a free day to shepherd us through the confusion of both the Seoul Station and the Busan Station in those early hours of our visit.

How tentative those first steps in this, for us, foreign city.

In those days, Joo-yub did everything for us. He bought us lunch in the train station, then brought us to our new quarters in a taxi. That first evening he arranged to have Eun Jeong and another graduate student take Donna and Mi-Sook shopping for first necessities.

When we discoverd the rooms (we are living in a grad student dorm) had not been cleaned to expectation, he arranged to have a crew come in. He arranged for a plumber to fix an obviously faulty drain.

He sought out and brought us appliances we needed to sustain ourselves.

He brought us bread and snacks and books. He made visits and phone calls to "check on us."

He brought us a gorgeous flowering plant to brighten up our bleak "basic" living room.

The next day he took us to dinner, treating us to our first fusion restaurant, Taco's Family.

On Saturday he spent the day with us, riding the bus down to Haeundae Beach, treating us to lunch at Bulgogi Brothers. He showed us the huge Suyoung-ro Church and the even huge-er Shinsegae Department Store, noted by Guiness as the world's largest department store.

On Sunday, he picked us up at our dorm and rode the subway to church with us so we could attend an English language service before heading for his own church.

We knew we were finally making progress when his daily "check in" calls stopped altogether.

He came to the bank as interpreter so I could open a bank account.

He personally sponsored us so we could buy a cell phone, a process that is considerably harder for a foreigner in Korea than in either the US or England.

In those first day Eun Jeong, too, was a huge help, walking us down to the market street after her work day in the department office was over, showing us the way to the big HomePlus. When she found out we needed plates and dishes, she brought us pieces of her own set of China. I would display a picture of Eun Jeong right here but she has been unwilling so far to let me take one.

For the time being Eun Jeong will just have to remain a name.

But from here on, when you think of Busan think of Joo-yub. His face is truly the face of this city for us. To the extent Busan is no longer foreign and our steps no longer quite so tenative, it is a credit to Joo-yub, our extraordinary friend.

Busan Journal, Day 11

Culture Shock of the Weird Kind

We have had a number of cultural adjustments in our four weeks in Busan.

We have slept for weeks without a top sheet. We have learned to manage a shower without a tub edge or a curb to keep water from running across the whole bathroom floor. We have learned to expect greetings from the invisible electronic elevator lady when we leave our floor.

We have learned not to jump when the PA system beeps into our dorm rooms for important announcements that we do not understand. If there is ever a fire warning, we hope "the voice" will actually say the English word "fire!"

We have begun to make sense of the non-English layout of the grocery store, although we have a long way to go. We recognize categories -- fish, meat, vegetable, fruit, and so forth -- although finding familiar items is more difficult. And reading ingredients will remain a mystery.

On the positive side, every time we have eaten out, one friend or another will tell us "this is healthy, this is good for you." We have begun to recognize it as a kind of national refrain.

We are learning to manage without an oven, which is an immense obstacle for the chef, who uses her oven daily at home. Neither microwaves nor toaster ovens suffice. Sorry, the oven is just necessary for some things.

On Thursday this week, I had a different sort of culture surprise.

I left my classroom following a fun discussion of poems from Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind. Four or five doors down I passed the English office and looked in because the door had been propped open. [I note here that doors in my building are never propped open. In fact, none of them even have windows; they are all solid steel, close fitting fire doors.]

Consequently, a trip down the hall usually affords no sense of who might be in the building or what might be happening within. The offices and classrooms can be fairly "buzzing" with activity while the feeling in the hall is that you are alone, abandoned.

At any rate, the door was open and a group of students had gathered around something on the office counter. Several students I know waved me in.

The gathering parted to reveal a Smith-Corona typewriter.

Did I know what this was? Had I ever seen one of these?

These questions were as interesting as the fact of the typewriter itself.

Yes, of course, this was an old manual desk model typewriter. I originally identified it as "portable" like the ones we used in high school in an earlier century. But I realized later that it had an extra-wide carriage of the sort once common in offices.

These students had been trying to make it work. Joo-yub, the department's administrative assistant, who can solve any problem that comes his way, had no expertise to offer either. One of them had set a piece of paper sideways on the roller. The paper, naturally, would not hold still for the keys, which sent it sliding away when they crashed down.

The scene reminded me of the cooking sessions around our stove in Houghton. Everyone -- Chinese students usually -- took a turn in front of the stove, adding something, tasting, offering advice, stirring, reaching in to change this or that. Cooking is the ultimate group project!

The students were delighted that I recognized the machine. That is, I think they were delighted. They immediately switched from the English they were using for my benefit to excited Korean when I said, "Oh, yes, a Smith-Corona typewriter." I took this animation as encouragement to continue. Maybe it was simple admiration, who knows. Or maybe it was commentary on my age or the backwardness of American technology. It might have been anything.

As if I had done this just yesterday, I rolled the piece of paper into the machine and began to type away. I would like to say it was easy to do, but I have been spoiled by the ease of computer keyboards. I had forgotten how much physical force manual keys require, and this one was sluggish from disuse.

How old do you think it is?

Eun-jeong, who had brought the typewriter, no doubt as an alternative to discarding it, said her mother had used it twenty years ago.

Oh, fifty years, I should think. My quick answer. Likely your mother used it long after she needed to rather than switch to computers. To cement my place in their admiration, I went on to type a little note on the paper I had properly rolled in.

"Dear Joo--yub," I typed, "Thank you for the opportunity to relive my childhood."

Instead of the ground-swell of wonder I had expected, Eun-jeon gasped. "Oh, no! Don't use red," she informed me. "We would not use red unless he's dead."

Whoops! Sorry, Joo-yub!

Clearly, even the typewriter master has a lot to learn. In Korea as everywhere living is a continual lesson in humility.

Busan Journal, Day 10

Seoul Man

The monster earthquake that rocked Japan hit while we were traveling to Seoul. It may have happened while we were on the express train, the KTX, where extra rocking would not have been noticed. Or it might have happened while our taxi was weaving from lane to lane through heavy traffic between Seoul Station and the hotel.

Either way we felt nothing. From what I have been able to determine, apart from those who monitor seismic activity stations most Koreans were unaware of the unfolding tragedy until it appeared on TV.

Friday night we watched CNN to hear what we could hear in English and to watch the video loops that played and replayed in the now familiar pattern of "breaking news."

On Saturday we went to Gyeongbokgung Palace with our friend Mi-Sook and her friend Jong Myoung, whom she brought to help us bridge her weak English and our three word Korean vocabulary.

Like the royal palaces we visited in England last fall, Gyeongbokgung Palace is both hard to describe and hard to imagine from description. I took one of the English language pamphlets with its good and useful information, but found myself taking pictures instead.


What did I like best?

Well, aside from touring with Mi-Sook, was it the architecture?

Was it the painted surfaces with colors and patterns that reminded me so much of painted wooden structures in Russia.

The attention even to otherwise forgettable areas.

Struck as I was by patterned, painted beams and posts and railings, I was particularly fond of the carvings that appeared on gate posts:

on stairways:

or roof ridgelines:

After wandering and wondering the morning away on the palace ground, we decided to move on to Insadong Market, where we could bump through the crowded streets of this traditional market to paw and ponder strange goods in little shops.

Eventually, I remembered the unfolding tragedy in Japan. For a few hours we had been far away from it. How easy it is for those of us living in peace and safety to let the pain and suffering of others disappear from sight. No wonder it has often been observed of rulers that they grow remote and removed from their people.

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.