What follows is a shaggy dog story – one that’s true, closely observed, but with no obvious point. But hey, I’m sceptical of coherent stories anyway – they’ve usually evaporated the funky unruliness and non-sequiturs of life as it’s actually lived. We neatly re-order things when we tell them, ensuring they conform to some Big Idea or self-flattering projection.
This shaggy dog story concerns my time living in South Korea in 2003 and ‘04. And the justification for its appearing here, in a musical newsletter? Well, it’s flimsy. I was thinking recently of the songs of which, even decades later, I can precisely remember the circumstances in which I first heard them. Yo La Tengo’s “Our Way to Fall” is one; another is Outkast’s “Hey Ya”, which I first heard in one of the Seoul bars described below.
Because I’m (unapologetically) addicted to making playlists, at the end of this weird tale I’ve included a 12-track list of songs I was obsessed with during the period I’ve described here – and which, when heard today, can usually transport me back to those strange days.
One Sunday morning twenty years ago, hungover and ashamed about my persistent unemployment, I spread the newspaper’s classifieds out on the living room floor. Two months had passed since the ABC had rejected me for a cadetship, and I was sour and desperate. And there it was: “English teachers wanted for South Korean schools. University degree necessary, experience is not. Travel and accommodation paid. Call...”
I wanted adventure. I wanted someplace that might usefully absorb my anxious energy. Plus, I couldn’t afford to travel and they were offering the fare. What did I know about teaching? Nothing. South Korea? Nothing other than its northern cousin was threatening it again. This bothered my father more than me. So I called the number, and somewhere in regional South Australia a woman, seemingly in possession of a hundred wild dogs, answered. Her desperation to recruit me, unseen, augured badly – but no matter. Sign me up, I said.
Two months later, I landed at Incheon airport. I was directed to a small, empty coach destined for Suwon, a city 30 kilometres south of Seoul. As we drove, I mistook giant provincial clusters of high-rise residential buildings, each embossed with the logo of a major corporation, for the edge of the capital. They could’ve comprised half of Perth’s CBD, but we weren’t even close to the city.
When I arrived at my apartment, my ego was stupefied. I regretted everything. For the first time since I was 10 – school camp, Vardo wagons, a wickedly flatulent Clydesdale – I was homesick. This was especially humiliating given only hours earlier I was commending myself for my courage and chutzpah.
Through an interpreter, I introduced myself to the boss of my school. The humidity, pollution and material strangeness felt almost sinister. “Hello,” I said. “It’s lovely to meet you.” The interpreter told me my new boss said I looked different from my photo. “They say you look like a very thin Beatle,” she said. My impression was that they strongly wished that I didn’t.
I was aware of the North’s recent threats – which for most South Koreans, I think, was just another fatuous belch – but when a formation of jets screamed supersonically overhead, I assumed they were intercepting an imminent firestorm and that my arrival had coincided with the outbreak of war. Visibly shocked, the interpreter laughingly explained it was a routine exercise – a US Air Force base was nearby.
I was led upstairs to my apartment on the fourth floor. When they opened the door, revealing a stark space of approximately three-square feet, I thought hard about running for the only window and fatally breaching it. “What do you think?” they said. I forced a smile, like one squeezes the last portion of toothpaste from its tube, and watched as a foot-long millipede scuttled across the toilet floor. “They’re good luck,” the interpreter said cheerfully.
My response was normal. At least for a 22-year-old. Attrition was high for young, single Western teachers. That’s why the schools preferred hiring couples. The companionship helped anchor you. I was alone, sick and frightened, but pride prevented me from returning home, and soon enough I was wandering the streets excitedly. I learnt just enough Korean to instruct taxi drivers and politely order beer. I carried a small backpack stuffed with books and notepads, and sat in bars writing letters, short stories and marginalia in my novels. And I went in search of my own companionship, which Korean hospitality guaranteed.
Adopted by high-spirited locals, who were inexplicably proud of chaperoning an Aussie around, we’d eat barbecue, swing in batting cages, drink in soju bars and invariably conclude the night in a raucous Noraebang – a private singing room. How glorious, how brave it all seemed then.
I also learnt that Korea’s near-clinical fixation on the education of its children – less for the development of their souls, it seemed, and more for the parental status conferred by their offspring’s acceptance by prestige universities – had encouraged an extraordinary flourishing of private schools that taught English badly. Some children I knew went to three schools – and still had private tutors.
There was huge demand, but the market for these private schools was poorly regulated, if at all. In my school, no-one – from the owner to the teachers – had any experience in teaching. Our textbooks – our whole syllabus, in fact – weren’t even tailored for the teaching of English as a second language. They were American books written for American children.
It was always about the United States. For those repulsed by American cultural hegemony, Korean life would have seemed like a cruel fait accompli. US fast food, clothing and cafe chains were not merely matters of convenience, but style. The dullest US icons – Starbucks, Mickey Mouse – were depressingly ubiquitous.
On my first day in the school, I was asked to teach my lessons in an American accent. I laughed. “Which one do you want? The Bwonx? Joisey? Texan drawl? – ‘Aah caint fit into this wed-din dray-ess, Mama!’”
The translator wasn’t amused. “Just American.”
“I don’t understand. If you wanted an American accent, why didn’t you hire an American?”
“We don’t like their attitude.”
“So you require no teaching experience from me, but you do ask that I have an actor’s possession of Yankee phonemics?”
“I don’t like your attitude either.”
The first thing to do in class was to assign students their Anglicised name. I was told that they could nominate their own, but that some names were more popular than others and not more than two children in each class could share one. Sure, I said. No problem.
“Anyang,” I said. “I’m teacher Marty and we have to figure out your names.”
“Teacher, teacher!” They all seemed to speak at once, hands earnestly raised. Each wanted first claim. I pointed to one kid who seemed especially animated.
“Teacher,” he said, pointing to himself, “Wolverine!”
“Wolverine?”
“Yes, teacher!”
“No. Not happening.” He looked as if I’d slapped him.
“Who else?” And I pointed again.
“Teacher, teacher!”
“Yes?”
“Green Lantern!”
“Are you guys for real?” They just stared at me. Except Wolverine. He was cradling his head and weeping.
“Hang on,” and I left to find the translator.
“Oh, that’ll happen,” she said. “There just can’t be more than two of any superhero. Are you doing an American accent?”
“Yes,” I lied.
Plenty of the foreign teachers were interesting: brash, bright, sardonic. Young, restless extroverts. But there were others, usually older, who gave off a psychic smell like damp socks. Their eye-contact was unglued and they preferred the deferential company of young Korean women. They weren’t surfing a wave like us, the young gypsies. They were ensconced – comforted by the anonymity and their improved sexual status. They could learn Korean, but their defining troubles were lost in translation. But we understood them. They were creeps.
Enjoying the absence of regulation, I thought Adam Smith’s invisible hand was too vigorously shepherding misfits into this teaching market – drunks, addicts, the otherwise socially maladjusted.
When I wasn’t pacifying a room of Hulks and Magnetos with games of no educational value, I was reading Rimbaud, enjoying cheap beer and cigarettes, and attempting some “heroic” absorption of the big city. Practically, this meant drinking in Western-themed dives, and occasionally brawling with American soldiers. In retrospect, sure: my “heroic” absorption was just an arrogant and culturally narrow repetition of life back home – albeit with more encounters with acned grunts from Kansas.
Then I met Rachel.
She was from the Mid-West, I think, read Vonnegut and had recently adopted a cat from Seoul’s mean streets. Perhaps she’d been a cheerleader – or perhaps I only thought she could’ve been. A pathetic recollection. In a novel, you might render richly complex characters. In life, I have only my inconstant memory.
The night that I met Rachel was the same night that I learnt that Elliott Smith had killed himself. His apparent suicide had happened months before, and it’s strange to think that there was a time when it took this long for me to learn the news that one of my favourite artists had plunged a knife into his chest.
The news destabilised me, and I went to the pub’s bathroom to settle myself and privately mourn. This would have been sincere, but overwrought, but only a toilet bowl saw my tears.
In those days, I was primed for romanticising things with my tongue. So after privately eulogising Smith in the toilet, and filled with an exquisite sense of the fleetingness of things, I returned to our table and thought of how I might express my yearning to Rachel. An orthodox listing of her virtues wouldn’t do. Moronically enraptured, I determined to create some poetic reflection of her. A uniquely powerful compression of words. A linguistic diamond.
“Rachel,” I said.
“Yes?”
“You are vodka and watermelon.”
I don’t recall her response. Probably bemused tolerance, replaced later with alarmed intolerance as I repeated it. I was more in love with my words than their subject.
“You have restored my sense of wonder,” I said. “You are... vodka and watermelon.”
This bizarre formulation sounded pretty good to me then. Not so today. Restored wonder. Vodka and watermelon. I was a drunk Dawson Leary1. Anyway – Rachel invited me home. Introduced me to her cat and CD collection. No sex, she said. No problem, I said. After all, one didn’t have sex with vodka and watermelon. The restoration of wonder was enough. We shared her bed, and while I was a little confused about her motives for this chaste sleepover – a little, dare I suggest, like Dawson and Joey’s – perhaps this might flower into a beautiful friendship.
Today, I can offer an educated guess to her motivation. It was simple companionship, however sudden, improvised and weighted with my eccentricity. We were all young; all consigned to claustrophobic apartments in a foreign country’s unforgiving winter.
In the morning, greasy haired and self-conscious, I riffed on the issue most concerning me then: the legal and philosophical implications of the consensual cannibalism case then being trialled in Germany. My enthusiasm was not infectious. And probably I was stalling, too. Delaying my long cab ride home through the smog and the Samsung towers, all the way back to my tiny apartment and its empty ice-cream tubs and overflowing ashtrays. That winter’s cold was socially atomising.
Meanwhile, depression was atomising me. I was familiar with the old writers’ melancholy – it was always “melancholy” – but I had never squared that word with “depression”. In my head, they were separate things. One was warm, rich and instructive. The other was disabling and faintly squalid. It turns out that they were the same thing, but I was yet to properly understand and diagnose my own. That the dead writers had lifted theirs to literature suggested to me not their skill, but a categorical difference between our afflictions.
*
It was Saturday, a week after meeting Rachel, and I was watching him approach our table in a busy bar in Seoul. He was young, nervous. No one noticed him but me. A few metres from our table, he stopped. He was holding a pitcher of beer and summoning, I think, the moxie to wrest our attention.
“Excuse me,” he said softly. “You like maekju?” And he lifted the pitcher.
“Yeah, man,” Dave said. Dave was from Portland, a teacher like the rest of us. Unlike our young guest, there seemed to be no social situation that could discomfort him.
“This is for you,” and he placed the beer on our table.
“Gamsahamnida,” Dave said.
“Can I please sit?”
“Of course, man,” and Dave pointed to an empty seat.
“My Korean name is Jun ho,” he said, “but please, you can say John.”
“Okay, John. Let me pour you one.”
“It is very good to meet you. Are you Americans?”
“Most of us, buddy. But don’t worry: we’re the cool ones.”
18 months before, a 50-tonne US military vehicle crushed two Korean schoolgirls who were walking to a birthday party. For a younger generation whose sympathies were inclining more to North Korea than the United States, the deaths cohered their increasing resentment of the foreign presence. When a US military court acquitted the driver and navigator of negligent homicide, US bases were picketed and firebombed and many thousands protested in the streets of Seoul. A month later, the South Korean presidency was won by a man with thinly disguised contempt for the superpower, a man who once wished for the complete withdrawal of its military from his country.
But none of this applied to John. He was infatuated with America. It existed for him as some magical factory, but beyond famous actors we couldn’t figure what, exactly, he thought it produced. Dreams, perhaps. He excitedly listed names of Hollywood stars – offered, it seemed, as a simple poem to American brilliance – but he demurred when asked to explain his passion. It was the country’s aura, its prestige, that had impressed itself upon his imagination. John was in love with a cloud.
After half an hour of John’s earnest, touchingly childish inquiries – Where were you born? Have you been to New York City? Disneyland? – my American friends were bored by the adulation and embarrassed by its implication of their superiority. Especially Dave, who was our company’s most eloquent but impatient member. (The following dialogue is a confection, but captures, I think, the gist of it.)
“Listen, John,” he said, stubbing his cigarette out. “You think too much of us. We’re just gifted at branding. And that’s what you’re in love with. Brands. Expensively manicured representations. Hollywood is a cartel ruled by rapists. Disneyland is an overpriced playground dedicated to American sentimentality. It’s not virtuous. Our motives are too extreme for virtue.”
John was baffled, but smiled politely. “My English not good. But you are very great,” he said, and raised his glass. “America! Gun bae!” And we forgot Dave’s jaundiced monologue, cheerfully joined the toast and called for more pitchers of beer.
“Brad Pitt,” John said, and laughed. He was pissed now, like the rest of us.
“What about him?” Dave said.
“He is America. Fight Club. Very cool.”
“My friend, he’s just an actor.”
“He is very cool.”
“Well, okay. Is George Bush cool? Does he seem cool to you?”
“I don’t want to...”
“What?”
“No Bush.”
“Why?”
“I remember.”
“What do you remember?”
And right then, John began to cry. It turned out that John’s cool older brother, the United States of America, didn’t just have the power to bewitch him – indirectly, the motherfucker could send him to war.
John was going to Iraq.
South Korea conscripts its young men for two years military service, and John’s conscription had coincided with his country’s membership of Bush’s Coalition of the Willing. This was early 2004, and the Decider had already declared Mission Accomplished. But the mission wasn’t accomplished, or even properly defined, and young John would soon be going to war.
“They say ‘reconstruction’,” John said, between tears.
“What does that involve?”
“I just go.”
And so John cried, and when his fitful diaphragm allowed, he apologised for crying. All the Americans were apologising too – John had chosen a table uniformly occupied by Americans who opposed the war. I don’t think John had intended this. Any of it. At least not consciously. I don’t think he approached the table to brag, or find solace, or demand justification for the war – and even less to provoke our shame.2
The apologies continued. So did the drinking. But even Dave was helpless to reconcile it all: That their country had obliged John’s deployment, but not their own; that the boy going to war knew less about it than those who weren’t; that his cool new friends, who might’ve been counted on to defend the war, were vehemently opposed to it; and, most touchingly, that John’s infatuation with them had survived his fear.
*
It was dawn now. Dressed with absurd and painful inadequacy for a South Korean winter, I waited for the opening of the subway entrance for the first train. Since saying goodbye to John, I’d lost my coat and scarf. It was sub-zero. I crouched against a wall, hugging myself and cursing my lack of cigarettes. At least it wasn’t snowing.
A young Canadian couple were nearby, waiting like me. They were bickering in whispers, and while their words were indistinct, a strange tension bloomed around them. This made me hesitate, briefly, from asking them for a cigarette. But I encroached upon them, and despite the tension, or because of it, the guy seemed relieved by my interruption. He gave me a few smokes, and I suspected the price was my staying and distracting them with idle conversation. Effusively thankful, I retreated quickly.
Fifteen minutes later, their tension continued on the station platform where we were joined by a security guard. There were no others. I stood a polite distance from them, conjuring the air of someone in deep thought and thus oblivious to their conflict, even though she was no longer whispering but screaming: “What am I to you?”
His responses were muffled – perhaps out of insensitivity, but I suspected out of fatigue and embarrassment. He didn’t want an audience, and the security guard didn’t want a performance – he’d now moved to the furthest point on the platform from them. I was caught in between. The train was five minutes away.
“You can’t do this!” As her screaming intensified, the context clarified: they had just broken up and she was suffering badly. He was silent, pathetically resigned. “Fuck you! Say something! You can’t even say anything! Fuck this, I’m done! I’ll kill myself. Maybe then you’ll say something! SAY SOMETHING!”
She walked to the edge of the platform, and then she jumped onto the tracks. And then she sat there. Defiantly. Wide-eyed and screaming. I looked at the arrival time, then at the boyfriend, then at the security guard. No one moved. “Fuck you!” she screamed.
There were only three of us on the platform, and regarding our hierarchy of obligation, I considered myself to reside at the very bottom. But still, no one moved. The security guard pretended it wasn’t happening; the boyfriend seemed weirdly paralysed. We were down to four minutes now, and I assumed that there was some margin of error. And so, I got moving.
Words, words, words. As I knelt on the edge of the platform, frantically negotiating with her, I sprayed lots of them. I was sufficiently immature and well-read in those years to believe too earnestly in the power of a story to save a life – the raconteur as lifesaver, and not merely court jester or hopeful lover. And so here I was, using words as desperately as I have ever used them, but I don’t remember what they were. Cliches, presumably, laced deliriously with profanity.
But still she sat.
Three minutes. I jumped down onto the tracks and seized the straps of her backpack. I was short, waif-thin and numbed with cold. But I tugged aggressively and toppled her defiant Buddha pose. I felt her body loosen. She still wasn’t moving voluntarily, but the slackening helped me drag her to the edge. And through this slackening, I intuited that she didn’t want to die, but wanted someone else to prove that they didn’t want her to die either.
Now that she was dragged to the edge of the platform, I lifted myself back up upon its ledge to continue my pleading and hauling. The boyfriend now joined me and helped me pull her up – but the mechanics required her assistance. She obliged, and up she came.
At the other end of the platform, the guard remained unmoved – until I woke his sense of responsibility by lighting a cigarette. He strode towards me, shouting and pointing to a “No Smoking” sign. Confident that I had earned this smoke – by God’s grace, if not by the law – I objected profanely. We didn’t share a language, but we understood each other well enough. I took a last drag, and threw the cigarette at his feet.
And then the train arrived.
I’d have preferred this to have ended my encounter with the Canadians, and when we boarded, I moved to the far end of the carriage, hoping to nurse my shock in solitude. I sat, blue and shaking, and stared with irrational intensity at the subway map. I’d been awake for nearly 24 hours now, and was becoming wretchedly beached by the retreating tide of adrenaline.
But the couple – or ex-couple – bashfully followed and sat opposite me. They sniffled their gratitude and shame. I told them it was fine, just fine, and suggested they must have a lot to talk about – with each other. But no, they wanted to engage me. They still required distraction from themselves. She gave me her coat. He gave me his beanie. “We call it a ‘took’,” he said. And then I rode the subway with them. Interminably. My transfer was only a few stops away, but I let it pass.
They wanted conversation – or, at least, the voice of someone that knew how badly broken they were – but they couldn’t provide much. So, I became an impromptu talk show host. I inquired about their families and hometown, and talked about my own. I was gentle, talkative, conjuring a scene of pleasantly distracting congeniality. Our subway line was a short loop, and we rode it a dozen times. But the effort was more exhausting than the original rescue, and eventually I returned their clothing and said goodbye. We exchanged no details.
Because of this, my collapse was delayed. When I boarded my connecting train, my nervous system was fizzing like wet wires. My improvised performance complete, my trembling returned. Sleep seemed impossible. I needed to talk.
When I arrived at my station, I bee-lined for the payphone. It was about 8.30am. I took from my backpack a notebook with phone numbers, and dredged from my pocket a fistful of coins. Then I called Rachel.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Marty.”
“What’s up?”
“This’ll sound weird. But I’m not great. I just pulled a girl from some train tracks. I’m shaking a bit, to be honest.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah... I just need to chat a little, I think. Would you like to get a coffee?”
“Ah... I’m still in bed, Marty. And I’m pretty hungover—” She left the implication unspoken.
“Oh. Okay. No worries. Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”
Vodka and bloody watermelon.
Leary was the titular hero of teen drama Dawson’s Creek, which debuted in the Great Year of Our Lord 1998. It concerned the travails of four children who speak better than any normal adult can write, and spend much of their time philosophising near water. There was a lot of hair, precocity and a statutory rape offered by the show’s writers as an enviable rite-of-passage.
As I watched John cry, I realised that he had the opposite problem to the young American soldiers I drank with two weeks before. Their problem was boredom, which they helped relieve by throwing frogs into their base’s radar systems. The frogs fried or melted, I don’t recall which, but I can recall their lusty belief that the “Arab theatre” would be vastly more exciting.