There and Back Again

After returning from two weeks of Korea and spending a day trying to conquer jetlag, I now give a review of my trip to the Asian state from which my bloodline stems from.

My feelings on the trip reflect the country itself - a stark and startling contrast. At some points, the only thing I desired was home; the only feeling in my heart was bitterness and resentment at the place I was currently in. Other times, I could not help but feel an overwhelming sense of endearment and love towards the people and the country.

The curious thing about Korea is how different it is from itself. Seoul's motto seems to be the city that blends tradition and history with modernity. And history it has! The city is steeped in it, and throughout the streets in between towering skyscrapers is the old castle of Seoul, along with the remaining gates of its ancient city walls. But it's not just old artifacts that cause reflection; a young adult in his twenties walks by in a crisp, sharp business suit, watching television on his amazingly advanced cellphone, whose screen will pop out and swivel into a miniature widescreen monitor. Traveling in the opposite direction is a struggling grandmother, garbed in traditional clothes, pulling an old handcart laden with foodstuffs and wares, most likely heading to her humble home after a long, hard day at the open market. The nearby restaurant displays its menus on a plasma screen, while it's bathroom consists of a ceramic hole and a sink (no soap, towels or toilet paper provided at all) underneath a single, hanging lightbulb. The skyscrapers stand defiantly proud, stretched towards the heavens, while the nearby apartments don't even have regulations on their stairs, and it looks as if the doorways were cut randomly in the wall, some not even straight, not even level with or touching the ground.

Seoul is dirty, gritty, full of humanistic soul. Its citizens come in several groups - the chatterbox teenage schoolgirls and boys crowding the streets and markets, the hardened veteran swaying gently with the undulations of the subway train as he races towards the business center, the kindly or bitter grandparent who has seen the horrors of the Korean War up close and personal, a passionate nationalism rooted deeply within his heart. A lot of the people seemed rude, or at least felt that way to me, a Westerner who is unused to living in a densely packed city full of 12 million people. At some points, I love the character, the deep, throbbing beat of fast paced city life, and at some points, hate the narrowmindedness as people chastise me in a harsh manner not to use English, even when I'm not talking to them. I make a most terrible Korean in that sense; I refuse to do what my elders tell me when I think it's silly. Of this, I not only incurred the wrath of the natives, but also my siblings, who were horrified by my iconoclastic manner.

Korea is curious and foreign. I wish I could bring elements of it with me, such as the abundance of cutesy anime characters for everything, from signs telling you not to enter through this door, to signs telling you how to use a urinal. At fast food restaraunts, their trash receptacles are of an incredibly complex nature - there are a million holes and swinging doorways, as they expect you to recycle everything you use, from the box your hamburger came from to the cup you drank soda out of, and seperate it yourself.

Then, there are things I'm glad I left behind - hellish humidity, for one thing. But the desperation of the older public at being forgotten and neglected by an increasingly distracted and hurried generation, the hard working peddlers who enter a subway and sell small goods to try and make ends meet only to meet with meager reception, and of course at night in some areas, the army of homeless who camp out every night next to sidewalks full of tourists who give no heed to another country's problems. Or the ever constant tension of the fact that just north of you is a border with an over fifty year long truce, and a hostile nation full of your brothers and sisters ready to march down and deluge your home country in a bloodbath of carnage and destruction, and the unfathomable depths of despair at those whose families have been sundered apart by a petty war between two selfish superpowers and a country that continues to feel the effects of the Cold War every day.

Perhaps that's why people here focus technology more on entertainment than everyday improvements in society. The commercials on television reflect it - hundreds of commercials on cell phones, televisions, computers, cameras and all the other latest gadgets and gizmos one can own, contrasted by the plethora of commercials involving sexual innuendo and getting more money through loans and mortgages and saving money on car insurance that plaster the glass screens of the United States. People have the latest cell phones and computers, but their houses lack a bathtub. Is it to forget for just a moment, all of the problems that the country has? It is painfully feeling the pinch of living on such a small land mass with so many people, and the flood of problems it brings with it. Korea continues to live on a razor edge, hoping against all hope that a peaceful reunification of the two countries will someday come about. One can count the hundreds of problems, imperfections and difficulties in living in such a country.

And while I am unduly harsh on my home country and the obstacles that plague it, I cannot help but admire the seemingly unconquorable Korean spirit that continues to carve out an existence in this giant, uncaring world. Would I live in Korea? Maybe. It would never take the place of Seattle in my heart, that is for sure. The place may not be my cup of peppermint tea, but I can't help but admire its strengths, hate its faults, wonder at the vastness and depth of its culture and its eternal influence on me and my future.