China

I had the pleasure of travelling in the PRC for a short time and have come back to sterile Korea now knowing there's something to be said for,

1. cute girls who praise Chairman Mao
2. bargaining for a plastic razor that will probably destroy my face
3. the street markets in old Shanghai
4. the intricate carvings of Ba Hei at the Leifeng Pagoda
5. the variety of two and three wheeled contraptions that fall under the rubric of bicycle and scooter
6. a free room at the Grand Hyatt in Beijing
7. sesame seed buns for 5 jiao
8. jaywalking en masse
9. the overnight sleeper from Shanghai to Beijing
10. the national silk museum of China

taking stock

The rumblings began on a Friday.

The coordinator called me into the office after work. I prepared myself. It wasn't often she sought out teachers. She was precise and quick. Apparently an English teacher for a special camp in Cheongju had dropped out and would I, since I had the requisite experience, education, and desire - I had complained the day previous about the lack of challenge I was experiencing in the classroom - be willing to prepare seventeen students for a one year stay in the States by giving them lessons on cultural appropriateness and study habits?
Sure, I said, when does camp start?

Monday morning I was on a bus to Cheongju with a contract in my hand stating I was to be paid half a month's salary, in cash, for the week's worth of work I was doing. I felt good knowing that this was on top of my normal salary. I didn't know that something was wrong, terribly wrong. I had forgotten that some people throw money at a problem to make it go away. I was about to find out that money simply wasn't enough to smooth things over at this camp.

My coordinator mentioned that the camp director was disorganized. She was wrong. The level of complete incompetence he displayed was astounding. It began rather innocently, I suppose. On Friday, he sent up a copy of the textbook the students were to be using. He had haphazardly photocopied three hundred pages from a textbook, covering American history from 1750-1880. I thumbed through it in the office on Friday night. A useful document for students who were supposed to be learning how to integrate into American culture and daily life across the Pacific.

I received the schedule, a rather scant sheet with hourly slots, from 9 am to 8pm, each hour designated by a simple word - introduction, conversation, writing, reading, history. I asked for a detailed outline of what they expected and was told that these simple words were my outline. I would have the freedom to do what I wished. The faint may have crumbled under such an auspicious sign. Indeed, this camp director was setting a teacher up for failure. How could one put together a cultural program with simply nothing but his wits to guide him? I suppose that's why the original teacher pulled out of the contract leaving this camp director in a lurch, and why I was being paid a ridiculous sum to come to Cheongju. The success of the program would rest on me, the only foreigner in what was supposed to be an immersion program with teachers from the States. And I'm not even an American.

I began to teach and soon found out that I was teaching the lion's share of classes, six hours a day, while two other teachers and teacher's assistants split the remaining two, math and science. It didn't bother me much until Tuesday when I heard the students complain about the program. Someone said they weren't happy and had left. On Wednesday things got worse and though I pressed ahead with my lessons on freewriting, scanning, paraphrasing, and speed conversation drills I felt that I was doing something wrong.

I found that the director had begun a campaign against me, slandering me to my coordinator for things I did not say. This bears no importance for the story save this, my classes on Wednesday were cancelled and I was not told until I went to class. A straggle haired teacher's assistant clutching her walkie-talkie intercepted me.

Your class has been cancelled.
Why?
We're moving your class to later tonight, to eight.
No you're not. I don't work after seven. It's in the contract.
You can't go in there.
Fine.

I came prepared for the next class.

Your class has been cancelled.
Tell me what's going on.
The boss has come from Seoul.
Oh God, I thought. Someone's told him that I think the book is useless and that we won't be using it. Or worse, I haven't presented any plans of what I've been doing or what I plan to do.

But it was worse than that.

I found out that the meeting had nothing to do with me. I began to feel good because despite the camp director's efforts to put me down and generally ignore my requests for simple things like getting photocopying done on time he was being trodden on. I found out that the science teacher he hired made several students uncomfortable. Perhaps it's not surprising that they were all girls. Eleven students left that night. The science teacher's classes were cut and he was forced to observe my classes.

I felt strange with Joe - he could have chosen a better name for himself - in my class, his ratty moustache sitting dirty on his upper lip. He tried to help the remaining six students but they too shied away from him.

The week crawled to an end and I found out that though my contract was up that the camp was scheduled to continue for another week. The camp director who spent most of his time watching baseball on his laptop and having the scores related to him by walkie-talkie by his second in command, had hired another teacher. The students met her Friday afternoon moments before I left.

I would have stayed if I had not been going to China the next day.

On the plane I got to thinking about Korea and the English business. I had heard that bungling the English business was just as big as the English business itself and now I had proof.

dobongsan, or on the subway.

Ajossi, your breath smells
Just like the other ajossi
Soju and stale cigarettes
On a Sunday evening
After a game in the park
And you bump into me
Not caring, eyes on the seat
You'll steal from the child
As soon as it gets off the subway.

You eye me with contempt
At least your left eye does
And you bump into me a little
Harder before the train hits its
Next turn which would pull you
Away from me.

I heard a child call my name the
Other day, playing in the dirt
In front of its house
"Ajossi!" it called and I looked
Around for you, the older man
With a smile that emerges from
Between crinkled lips.

But no one was there
On that darkened street
Where the lamps had burned out
And the shopkeepers had turned in -
No one except the moon and me -
And so when I turned into the moonlight
I saw nothing but the moon above
And shadow below.

The moon rides above us now
Not knowing the hiss of this train
As it pulls in to Cheongnyangni
And you take the child's seat
Pushing her out of the way
Before she gets off the train
Falling on a woman's shoulder
You drift into night -
Ajossi.

weekends

In school, on Saturday.

Houses in South Korea look like houses elsewhere in the world. Surprise, it's concrete.

The War Memorial at Chuncheon, one of the first and most heavily bombed places in the DPRK's assault back in 1950.

Daejon from Bomunsan.

cottage, dacha, villa

It was a hot day so I decided to take the bus out of the city. The countryside was hot, too, and it made me think of Chekov's story in which a man comes into town for the day only to hurry out again to his dacha his arms full of useless things, birdcages, presents, and special foods for his wife, things she couldn't get in the countryside. The story felt hot. The apartment in the city, where the man complained to his friend, was stifling and you felt that the heat never left him, even when he was in the country. He spent sleepless nights on his bed with mosquitoes buzzing around his head and the heat dwindling to a light cool in the early morning. Then before he knew it morning approached and he was leaving, again, for the city.

I had none of his sense of urgency in collecting things I would not use or need. I was simply going out of town but it was hot. Here the countryside suffers under the heat. The rivers run shallow and brown blue over hot white stones sticking out like broken bones, a cemetery aflood. The mountains drink in the heat. Leaves shimmer green from the light. The earth, scorched from the heat, has its revenge in August, giving back everything, burning children's soles, preparing for the cool which will lash the forests beginning with September evenings.

I sweltered on the way to the island, roasted on the lakeside walkway and baked in the shade of the Ethiopia Cafe. The sad blue plastic chairs, feeble in the shade of the cafe, bleached white by the sun and wear, surrounded little white tables from which I had the view across the parking lot, which was really no more than a few meters across, of the memorial to fallen Ethiopian soldiers of the Korean War. It sits there, a foreign tri-domed building, round and smooth. Its ribs are dark brown. They glisten in the sun. Haze rises off the ground like water and the building appears in front of you, out of the heat, like a vision.

Chuncheon was one of the first places the North Korean army attacked. It's the perfect town to shell. The town lies on a flat expanse around two lakes, dotted with pretty islands, and surrounded by hills, high and close. The North Koreans must have bombed this place to hell.

The town itself isn't attractive.

When the Americans recovered most of the peninsula Syngham Rhee went about building his villa on the east side of the peninsula. His life and reign is glorified in pictures and I blanched at the lack of information on this one and same autocrat who ruthlessly cracked down on opposition and riots. Princeton trained - oh yes - with a head for economics and tough love. How else would they have pulled out of a post war slump? Certainly, he was their man. His villa is simple. I went early one morning when no one was there. I looked into his office, his phone where he probably barked commands, the one room where he might have made love to his wife. Are autocrats able to make love?

The wind blows gentle there, the same way it does at my window, rustling the willows like feathers and the pines like clouds.

His villa sits on a rise above a lagoon and overlooks a spreading lawn with several trellises. He certainly had a splendid view. I took shade under the trellis and watched the water ripple. I traced the edge of the lagoon and followed a rocky headland up until my eyes met the sun.

He had his villa built here, within shooting distance of Kim Il-Sung's old villa. The latter's is now nothing at the top of that rocky headland across the lagoon. The only thing that remains are some steps up the hill. The view from the top is impressive and I imagined Kim Il-Sung climbing up the stairs to his retreat when this part of the country was still North Korea, before the 38th parallel moved for the last time. How he must have writhed at knowing that Syngham Rhee built his own personal retreat not far away! Perhaps the pain of knowing your enemy was in your land was a bit like feeling your wife a mistress, and her knowing that you knew she was unfaithful. Maybe that was the cause of the growth on his neck which became so obscene in his later years that bodyguards were positioned strategically around him so that even those who came close saw no more than what might have been a glimpse at something that may have been malignant growth, on the back of his neck.

The land here is magical.

The road runs straight, through Hwajinpo and north to Daejin. It is lined with tank traps and after passing the military checkpoint, razor wire. The Unification Highway appears from the woods, itself secure behind a double fence, barbed wire and invisibly placed dynamite in case of an invasion. It is thick, grey and beautiful. Its light posts feature small metal engravings of the full Korean peninsula, reunited as one country. Hope contained. The forest falls away quickly and the hills look as if they are covered in grass. They are not. The land is methodically razed kilometers before the observation post, which is still a kilometer and a half from the border.

This land, the contested land, I see as if through gossamer.

The road stretches towards the border. The rail line curves towards the checkpoint. Into the distance they both go, towards the mutual place where they disappear. Look into that distance beyond the border where the hills are exposed rock behind a veil of cloud.

fighting

I usually go down to Seohyeon subway station simply to get away from life here, on the mountain.

For the past two Fridays I've watched people pay to fight a boxer. Last week the boxer noticed me and asked me whether I wanted to fight. I declined. Last night the boxer asked me whether I wanted to fight and I declined, again. He insisted, dropping the price from 10 000\ to 3 000\. I tried to walk away but he simply stood there and the crowd was getting antsy at watching this foreigner try to back out of the deal. I turned around and put on the gloves.

Here goes nothing.

October

I was working in a small town on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, which twinkles so enchantingly in the summer, a line of silver dividing the country in two.

The Etchemin melds into the St. Lawrence just across from Ste. Foy, after the pounding Chaudiere Falls. Drive along the Etchemin valley and you'd reach a little town, one of the first Irish settlements in this part of the country. The old road heads up the hill and into the town but now the highway cuts around it in a curve, along the river valley. There is a small cluster of houses at the top of the hill. The church spire touches the sky and the library, named after Jack Kerouac, is eternally closed.

I was there in the fall. The trees were bare and the sky, grey as ever, threatened snow. I had signed up as a respite care worker in a town that claimed seven hundred.

The Irish named the town after the prophet Malachi as the Scots did Frampton and the English, Scott. It was a thoroughly English county which was named Dorchester until just recently, and the names, St. Odile de Cranbourne and Ste. Rose de Watford bear witness to the swell of anglophones who called both the Etchemin and Chaudiere river valleys home.

I first saw this little town in the depth of winter. It was a winter from Roch Carrier's book _The Hockey Sweater_, and the road, a thin ribbon, that snaked towards the little lake in the middle the woods at St. Lazare, afterwards ran frighteningly striaight towards his borderland hometown. Nothing stood above the snow. It lay deep, undulating, frozen. A hill appeared, thick with trees and the old road cutting straight through the woods. Houses lined up, small, cozy, hidden except for the thin pipes jutting into the air, smoke rising straight into the sky.

The town was now about to make its turn into winter. The autumn rains hadn't completely passed. Hallowe'en was dark, wet, and the rain felt like murder. I lived in an old white house that was once a schoolhouse I feared was inhabited by the ghosts of schoolchildren - I imagined they would be the worst - or telegraph operators, since afterwards it served as the communication centre for this small town. I worked in the red woodshed across the river. Work was good, though you couldn't hear the neighbours' horses galloping across the fields, whinnying with pure joy at being in the cold, over the scream of air vents and chisel scrapes.

The sun set as I returned from the woodshed, dropping until one day I walked out into the dark. Life was true, though I began to find it tiring.

I asked Marie where she went for vacation. Marie who was so carefree yet direct. She took her week long break not in the Gaspe or in Montreal but on the Etchemin in her one room cottage. Sometimes the river would rise and give her a scare but otherwise she loved the change right there. I couldn't imagine wanting to vacation so close to work, or even making work there a vacation, which is what Roland did, coming down from Quebec City every Thursday to have dinner with the family in /Les Hirondelles/ and then spending time working in the woodshed on the other side of the river.

I never did ask Marie to use her cottage.

I walked out to the bleachers behind the church one night and after looking at the purple blue Laurentides across the river I lay down. The sky turned black, clear, twinkling and I left St. Malachie for outer space.