| Relishing
Narcissus in South Korea |
| By Barry
Walsh |
Barry Walsh
lives in Guildford, Surrey, and is currently jobless. He spent a year in
Kingston,
Canada, as part of his undergraduate degree sharing an all-male flat with
eight
other guys.
Hoping to amend this after graduating he taught English to kids in Taegu,
South Korea,
in a school with eight all-female Korean teachers. He is an avid reader
and
enjoys writing
philosophical/nonsense stories depending on his mood. Barry has a
burning ambition
to go to Greenland in the future but first he would like to sort his life
out
and earn some
money.
Where do I
go this weekend? I have made it through the week, once more only through
terrible neglect of the soul – an exile from my freedom. It's Saturday
morning in South Korea. |
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As soon as
I leave school I am a bird – liberated from social confinement. I jump
on the bus. I am meeting Jonny, another teacher, living elsewhere in Korea.
He’s from Northern Ireland. We flew over on the same plane. I am like a
child again, my self-inflicted alienation only serves for this brief but
acute weekend release.
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I stretch out
on my cotton wool armchair. Korean buses are beds on wheels. I listen to
music, watch the passengers, take in the view outside. This is bliss. I
am the only Westerner travelling today as always, but whereas during the
week I am detached, now I feel I belong. My weariness of heightened cynicism
is replaced by a tempered tranquillity. Unhurriedly gliding by, a mountain
looms over a flooded paddy field. |
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| Workers with
bent backs and straw hats tend the rice. Idyllic. Inside is in harmony
without.
My mind
drifts to anticipation of meeting Jonny. We will eat Korean food, drink,
go to a nightclub, and finish off with karaoke. I’ll probably be sick.
This is the standard routine. I hate routine, but we only meet every three
weeks or so (the rest of the weekends I escape somewhere alone)
and the deliverance from loneliness overwhelms any banality. Even so, we
manage to participate in something uniquely amusing every time. Every little
novelty in a foreign country imprints itself on memory.
This is
what occupies my imagination just now. I want to be reckless tonight.
Will we find a Korean friend to show us some good bars and then, giggling,
childlike, run away from him – his usefulness expired? Will we get into
a fight with some other who, frustrated at his lack of English proficiency,
torments us to help him out, and when we flee, still prevails and ensnares
us again? |
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| Or will we
find we are penniless, and so stay in a five star hotel making use of room
service, mini bar, Korean massage and public bath facilities courtesy of
my mother’s visa card (to be used in emergencies only)? Or dance
on the nightclub stage with cucumber in our ears, run across police cars
or pretend to be famous sports stars? The possibilities are tame and hardly
daring, but they sustain my excitement. It is enough.
Back on
the bus I pass pagodas, dried up rivers, template towns, smashed up cars,
and pervading all, mountains, neither lush nor barren, and fields waterlogged
in spring. This country, the Hermit Kingdom is a forgotten nirvana.
Up here, below the trees, are temples and hermitages and monks; I could
run outside and climb and disappear forever, taken in by the trees and
the monks, fed and nurtured, my body lost to civilisation, my spirit found
by renunciation. The service stop approaches. I think of coffee and a cigarette.
With amazing fluidity, the bus turns off the motorway, enters the service
area and parks. I start for the toilet still preoccupied with my serenity.
To me this
is what experiencing a foreign culture is all about. I have done nothing
uniquely Korean on my journey, but my self-assurance is sufficient. |
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| I ask the
bus driver in my limited Korean how long the stop is for. I already know
– it’s always the same – but right now my self-love is smothering my self-consciousness.
While in the toilet, I observe my appearance – why don’t I have a girlfriend?
Over a coffee
and a smoke I watch the clouds intermittently reveal a majestic mountain
surveying all. It is me. Today, I am a narcissist. The bus pulls out
of the rest area and I, we, are back on the road. I listen to Massive Attack’s
Mezzanine in expectation of tonight’s hedonism. The speed of the
bus and the smoothness of the road work in harmony with the music. There
is one direction and I am floating on an irrevocable stream.
Why does it
all affect me so? It is only a three hour bus ride to meet a friend. I
must have sunk so low during my weekdays – I am dimly aware of this. |
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| But the thought
of the return journey tomorrow never surfaces. Today, I cannot dispel my
tranquillity; tomorrow I will not dispel my gloom. I have set my moods
apart – they are in complete conflict and cannot co-exist.
I feed off
Jonny’s enthusiasm. He also has to ride for a few hours for our rendezvous,
and his state of mind is somewhat similar. We meet at the bus terminal,
find somewhere to stay the night, drop our bags off, get dinner and then
drink, drink, drink. It’s always frantic; I work on Saturday morning, so
Saturday night is all I have. On spring shoes we bounce from pub to pub.
Tonight, we are going to pull chicks, “For God’s sake, we’re Westerners.
Asian girls love us!" But first we lament about his school, my flatmate
and the gradual wearing down of our initial enchantment with the country.
This won’t do. We progress to talking about books and their meaning – 1984
and Brave New World. I feel my being intensified as a result
of having read these masterpieces of free thought while in Korea. He sees
Big Brother’s influence on the sometimes-tractable Koreans. Invariably
though, all our roads lead to frivolity, and we find redemption only through
absurdity.
It is here
I wish to dwell forever more. Do I hear monks high up in the hills
in a perpetual state of comic relief? I imagine I do. Passing over a river,
I notice its banks are an ugly brown, still showing from the dry winter
that has departed. Just as laughter washes away my troubles, so the monsoons
will erase all trace of this blemish and restore nature’s beauty. In summer,
the mountains and the rivers reign supreme; all else takes a back seat.
I may have to endure seasons of discontent, but the weekend is my summer,
and I have banished my demons.
We are nearing
our destination. It is in a valley surrounded by mountains. The road
spirals down from its high altitude right into the downtown area. As the
bus winds down, my thoughts gradually leave me, flushed away to subterranean
depths for another three weeks. Reality returns. Inside a continuous current
of anticipation remains. Jonny is here. And I have already met him. |
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Article
Index ~ Korea
Index ~ |
