teaching English

Pedaling through Gyeongju at night. This is a flat city, built millennia ago beneath the great sheltering wall of South Mountain, and unlike the near-vertical drops of Busan you can really get around in this place if you’ve got a bike: only the crisscrossing four-lane highways pose any danger, and the traffic lights go on forever. Even as I bike here I’ve got New York on my mind: there at least the lights change after just a few seconds.

Yesterday morning I was greeted at random by one of the university security guards, who smiled, bowed, and offered up such a polite peace-be-upon-you that I could barely respond to him. The baby had cried a bit the night before—we’ve both caught the same terrible cold, but as usual my wife’s implacable immune system has left her completely unscathed—and I was still smarting from the wounds leftover from battling random strangers on the internet, so it was not until I found myself conversing with one of my nicer students a few hours later that I realized how foul my mood was.

As the sun comes up on the horizon, its bright warming fingers reach out over Korea. Across the nation, the sound of cars, lorries and buses that restricted the natural silence and stillness of the previous night prevails into morning. The punters from the evening line the streets, piling into taxis to ferry them home or straight to work. Other droopy-eyed proletarians wipe sleep from their eyes as they drag themselves into their workplace. The elderly, alert and active, converge and power-walk together in circles. It’s the birth of a new day and the death of another.

Koreans take great pride in their country, their history, their ‘pure’ Korean blood, their culture, the patriarchal society, and – what is most admired by westerners – their industrial and economic growth.