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Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (’rule of law’ not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.

Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk and fridge, located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.

† I liked it better pre-2001 when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners (’san’ being the Chinese character for ‘mountain’) so I could refer to the city as ‘Poo Mountain’ and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now.

The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I tended at that point in my life to enjoy the tipple too much to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and aimless sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.

The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.

The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithely exclusionary attitude that has traditionally informed much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with the hairy barbarians. To be fair, it has been in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, I admit). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call the most-favoured tenant demographic, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan ‘love hotels’ on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.

I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale sex and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than they deserve, though, I’m sure.

So when my contract at the university ended with a whimper rather than a bang last month, it was a fairly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).

The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our (well, my) chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.

So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.

Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.

Until we found the area we decided to plant our flag for a few months. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears when we started looking around there. It was the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’d seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like brobdingnagian barnacles nor consisting of streaked domino concrete slabs looming over echoing concrete courtyards, brutalist Pyongyang retro-soviet style. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and wasn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.

Seoul is a city (like most other urban environments in Korea) that hates its residents.

I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.

Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire life in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.

So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.

We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.

It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto – but it’s pretty nice.

One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we had been the first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with accreted filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That had been pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge had been enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.

The new area, Songnae, had a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved one day, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, the week before, to attempt to find my way up the closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, that far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.

The weather had been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer — unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I had been in a while, and it was good.

I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.

After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.

My meagre command of Korean being what it was, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f**k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.

They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the hell outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”

I got the hell out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.

And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.

[originally published September 2003, revised and updated June 2006]

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Korea was, until recent decades, a mostly agrarian society. The poorer segments of society scratched out a living by farming, and of course, this is still the case, although the farms and farmers are almost without exception aging and marginalized, because all the young folk have moved to the cities to seek their fortunes and educate their own children. What happens to your skin when you’re out in the sun every day, working in the rice paddy or the vegetable beds? It burns, it tans, it gets leathery and brown. If you’re rich — more importantly, if you want people to think you are affluent — you cannot have tanned skin. That’s the mark of the poor farmer, not the badge, as it is in the west, of ample free time with which to loll about in the sun.

Sunscreen makers have excellent opportunities to succeed in the Korean market. Beach towel manufacturers, not so much, although young people, as with so many things, are beginning to pick up the sunbathing habits of their western friends.

The surface appearances of appropriated western or Japanese cultural items are mimicked rigorously, but the meaning behind it is almost entirely lost, or deliberately subverted, or, as in the example of tanning, neatly inverted. A stage performance of heavy, industrial Nine-Inch-Nails-like industrial metal by a growling, pvc-clad singer is backed up by a troupe of balletic dancers. Education is all-important, but the ultimate goal is to pass tests, meet the correct people, and join a good company. Health potions and folk remedies are a daily concern, but the fattiest beef and pork is the conspicuous-consumption dish of the day.

Lapdogs are favored pets, cozened and dressed up and fetishized, but the flatbed truck stacked with wire cages crammed overfull of meat-dogs on their way to restaurants is studiously ignored, as is the evening TV magazine program piece featuring restaurants famous for their inovative dogmeat cuisine.

The careful attention paid to surface appearances diverges radically into schizophrenia when it comes to one’s surroundings here, too. Piles of garbage are everywhere, as are morning puddles of vomit, even in residential areas, that attest to the excesses of the night before. Construction is slipshod, somehow temporary in appearance. Windows, even on shops that have opened that very day are often streaked and dirty, and left that way. Litter abounds, and people casually throw more atop it. Men hork and spit great nasty oysters of mucous on the sidewalks, everywhere, which makes it not only traditional, but downright mandatory to take your shoes off when entering someone’s house. Industrial filth and noise back onto residential beehive towers at random. Streets are unnamed, and addresses as we are accustomed to in the west simply do not exist. Traffic rules tend to be a matter of ‘whatever feels right’ rather than any enforceable set of regulations.

So why is this? Why is there this enormous gap between the attention paid to detail and appearance at one end of the spectrum — one’s personal appearance — and what would seem to be a complete lack of it at the other? And why is it so obviously different than the (cliched, certainly, apocryphal somewhat, but not entirely illusory) approach of the Japanese, who seem to have a greater focus on harmony and order in their surroundings?

Although the cultural influence of the Chinese, cannot be underestimated, I think it’s the legacy of the recent climb out poverty for many, and rapid, pell-mell industrialization, in great part. More affluent, modern areas are much less littered and polluted, as are more stolidly traditional ones, of which there are not many left. The modernization-at-all costs drive of the Park Jung Hee era in the 1970’s paid scant attention to consideration of the environment, or creature comforts, or quality of life — industrialization, urbanization, and wider affluence were the goals, and they were achieved, at no small cost.

I wonder too if there is something historical, a legacy of the invasions and wars and widespread destruction that happened over and over again throughout the history of the peninsula, that left the culture with a feeling of impermanence, a sense that building for the ages, or even for the medium-term, was a fool’s game. All will be destroyed, probably, in short order, so why try?

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Piled on the edge of the curb was a mountain of garbage. This was the detritus for a number of shops and ‘love hotels’ and restaurants and low-rise apartments in the immediate vicinity over the last day or two. Dumpsters are, for the most part, unheard of, although there lidded upright plastic bins, always overflowing with rotting matter, for organic waste. Garbage collection here is not funded by taxes or fee collection – it’s user-paid in the most instrumental of ways. In order to have your garbage collected, you have to buy surprisingly expensive garbage bags, available in various sizes, which you then stuff to their absolute limit, and put on the street in haphazard piles for pick up. The revenue from the bags pays for the garbage collection service, is the thinking. Anything larger, and you have to take a trip to the local ward office and buy a sticker to slap on the item, again to pay for the hauling away.

The unintended consequences, of course, are manifold. Public garbage bins are rare outside of downtown Seoul, for example. Who’s going to pay for it? Not me! tends to be the normal response. When you charge someone for the very act of discarding waste, they’ll find a free way to do it: litter on the street, drop regular plastic bags of trash in front of the place two doors down when nobody’s looking. Drive your sofa or fridge a few kilometers down the highway in the middle of the night and toss it out on the roadside. Once a pile develops (always on the same unmarked corners, despite an absence of any ‘pile the trash here’ signs), feel free to drop whatever unwrapped garbage you like on top, without bothering to buy one of those expensive bags.

So, I was standing there, and the garbage truck pulled up. Not unlike what one might see in Canada or America or Australia, with the requisite couple of sunburned guys hanging off the back with wiry, ropy-veined forearms. Where it diverged from the expected is that they didn’t just hurl the bags into the back, they sorted the trash! They made sure all the cans went into can bags, plastic with plastic, and *shudder* organic stuff into the organic bags, and so on. After it had all been sorted, the driver came over with a large whisk broom, swept the leftover detritus into the gutter, and off they went, presumably to the next reeking pile.

Labor is very very cheap here. The cheapness of labor has all manner of consequences, of which this is just one. And there’s not a lot of room for landfills chockablock with random crap. It makes sense, but it’s just….that….different enough to make you think twice.

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