Down In Andong

Down In Andong: English as a Korean Language

Steve Lehman

Published by Editit at Smashwords

Copyright 2014, Steve Lehman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Forward

Patriarch without Portfolio

Cave of a Graphomaniac

Soul Survivor Back in Seoul

Epilogue

Forward

Some of the names have been changed in this memoir, but the events are true to the best of my ability to remember them, and then remember them again after allowing the first draft to ferment for ten years. Special thanks to Brad Kullman and Jerry Heffernon for advice on the manuscript during preparation. Credit for the cover goes to Andrea Munster.

I would like to dedicate this ebook to my daughter, Wendy, whose unique radiance has inspired me since she first appeared in the world. I would also like to dedicate it to Ni Wang and the boys, whom I never would have found without Wendy's elucidation. Finally, this book is for the people of Korea. They are stretched across one of the major fault lines of global politics and have done more than their share to prevent the ultimate breach for more than sixty years. I hope their heroism is rewarded soon by genuine peace on the Peninsula.

Patriarch without Portfolio

August 23, 2003 - Two days in Seoul and I’m already homesick. It was not supposed to be this way. There was supposed to be a teaching job waiting, which would provide a place to live, colleagues who could become friends, and purposeful activity, but it vanished at the last minute. I was tricked. I had rented my townhouse and bought the plane ticket, but then the owner of the private school in Kyung Ju backed out of our deal. What choice did I have? I had to come anyway and ad lib it. So here I sit in the Jongnowon Yeogwan, a little hotel in the Insadong section of Seoul at 2 AM suffering from insomniac jet-lag. As I confront the echoing emptiness of the air conditioner’s drone, I ask myself whether I’m really reinventing myself, as I intend, or just running away from problems back home.

My last night in Montreal was spent with a casual girlfriend. She's involved in an on again, off again relationship, and we've stayed in touch for the last couple of years mostly as friends. But for the second time last night, we ended up in bed. I guess my imminent departure freed us for a last fling. Since this wasn't planned, I hadn't even finished packing, so I had to get up early in the morning after very little sleep and get organized through the fog of a hangover. I got everything together, made it to the Airport, checked some baggage, and boarded my flight. I seemed to be feeling OK, but that changed dramatically.

Fifteen minutes out of Montreal on the first leg, which was an Air Canada flight to Chicago, I noticed a burning pain in my lower intestine. It was similar to the nearly constant, false call of nature many men start to feel in their late forties, the nagging urge to the pissoir of benign prostatic hyperplasia. But this sensation was more intense and slightly dislocated. I soon realized I had a fairly serious problem of some kind and crawled over my seat mate to head toward the facilities at the back of the plane. Halfway down the aisle, I started to pass out. I stumbled against seats on both sides and then grab hold of a life raft, the back of another seat, appearing out of the fog on the left. A few steps more and I reached my destination, but the lavatories were both in use.

As I stood there trying to get hold of myself, that low-down feeling in my guts became a growing ball of fire with an irresistible, intensifying pressure. The building cabin pressure in the airplane was not enough to contain the discomfort in my large intestine. Climbing at about 13,000 feet somewhere west of Valleyfield, I helplessly stared at the Occupied sign on the lavatory door.

Was this a classic attack of psychosomatic diarrhea, as if the plane were falling in a nose dive of death? Could I be that frightened by the start of this new adventure in the Far East? Ridiculous! I’d done this kind of thing before. It must be food poisoning. Anyway, after a few moments the lavatory door mercifully opened, and I strolled nonchalantly, into the cubicle to straighten things out. Ten minutes later I returned to my assigned seat sans culottes. There were a few minor aftershocks, twinges from my rebellious colon, but by the time we landed in Chicago, I was practically back to normal, meditating on yet another inauspicious sign that I was making a big mistake.

August 24, 2003 - For the last several months, I’ve been scanning the Great Beyond for guidance with special intensity, but every time I think I’ve got an answer, things change. The evening of the day I put in the papers for my leave of absence from the College, my daughter Wendy called and said she thought she would move from Brooklyn to Plattsburgh, just across the border from my place in Montreal. I didn’t take the idea too seriously, because she’s talked that way before, and nothing had come of it for over ten years. But that phone call seems to have begun this series of reversals. She did move to Plattsburgh, and she came for a visit shortly afterward, bringing a load of dirty clothes to wash. That sure warmed the cockles of my calcifying heart. She starts a Master’s Degree program in counseling at SUNY tomorrow. Wendy is now living only about an hour and a half from my place in Montreal, so we would practically be neighbors if I had stayed there.

Last year I hated Montreal, but now I love it again. Let’s flashback to my arrival in 1971 with Wendy’s mother: it was literally pregnant with possibilities. I had a spot in the Ph. D. program at McGill in English Literature and a chance for a Teaching Assistantship that would pay the bills. We had put all our meager belongings in a rented U-Haul van and hit the road north out of Atlanta, Georgia on I85. We had a smaller truck for that move than the one Wendy used for her move to Plattsburgh last month.

Her mother and I spent the night of August 7, 1971 in the Adirondack Mountains and drove the rest of the way to Montreal in the morning. As we bounced along, Pam began to feel sick at her stomach. Just north of Plattsburgh, she vomited her breakfast into a plastic bag. That turned out to be a case of classic morning sickness, more heroic than my accident in the airplane last week. Wendy, who had been conceived in the USA, was born in Montreal in the early spring of the next year.

In those days Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was trying to attract Americans who were disenchanted with the Vietnam War to move to Canada. I had done the research and knew the requirements. With a few hundred bucks in my pocket and the right documents to present, I was able to become a Landed Immigrant right there at the border. It was a hell of a warm reception to such a cold country. My first sight of Montreal coming over the Champlain Bridge that evening confirmed my enchantment. The lights of the City reflected in the St. Lawrence River and climbed majestically up Mount Royal fading gradually into the shadowy forests of its upper reaches.

Pam had been as keen on the move as I, but when we actually arrived she was not quite as impressed. Maybe she had other things on her mind. We finally found a room for the night within walking distance of McGill, but the bathroom was shared and located a few doors down the hall. Pam didn’t demand pickles and ice cream, but she wasn't going to use any communal bathroom in her delicate condition. She went out onto the fire escape landing to squat and piss through the iron grating, splattering the alley two floors below.

August 26, 2003 – I had lived in other great North American cities before arriving in Montreal. In addition to two years in Atlanta, I had gone to high school in the Pennsylvania steel city of Pittsburgh, when my family lived there in the early ‘60s. But Montreal grabbed me like a possessive mother, and wouldn’t let go. As often as I’ve roamed since 1971, I’ve always gone back, whether in triumph or disgrace. Local poet and right wing agitator, David Solway, gave me that mother of a metaphor twenty-five years ago. Just when you’re ready to leave, he said, she gives you a good fuck, and you’re hooked again. David’s poetic license permits incestuous hyperbole, and for some reason the metaphor has stuck in my head.

The honeymoon lasted about five years. Until the 1976 Parti Quebecois Provincial election victory, I thought Pierre Trudeau was God and Canada was utopia. But in the campaign that year, Trudeau called Liberal Candidate, Robert Bourassa, a hotdog eater in a fit of arrogance that was to become more and more characteristic as he aged. It was his last public comment on the election, and I thought at the time that he was favoring the separatist Rene Levesque in some strange way by letting it stand. I wrote a letter explaining that observation to the Montreal Gazette. They were so desperate for commentary on this shocking transformation of Quebec society, that they featured it on their editorial page a few days after the election. Curiously, they edited out the hot dog eater quote.

The honeymoon with Montreal ended in 1976, also, because Wendy's mother and I split up that year, and she went back to the States.

August 27, 2003 - Yesterday, the sun came out for a change and I took advantage of it to walk around Itaewon. That part of Seoul is the shopping and recreation area supporting the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan. In that area I figured I could find swimming goggles and a cap, which is necessary in Korean pools because of the high level of chlorine they maintain, imperfect pool filtration, and/or perhaps some kind of hair phobia they have. I found the equipment, OK, and then decided to look for the Yongsan Electronic Market where I’d heard I might find a good deal on a hand phone, as Koreans call them. To get there I had to walk passed the Garrison and the Korean War Museum. In front of every gate was a phalanx of Korean soldiers dressed all in black and carrying giant truncheons, black metal sticks resembling fungo bats. They eyed me suspiciously as I walked along, obviously expecting my backpack to explode at any moment. I don’t know another place in the world where there is a major foreign military base in the middle of a capitol city.

Canada has its problems, but spending some time in the rest of the world puts the country in better perspective. The honeymoon I had with Montreal and all of Canada in the early 70s was caused to a great extent by personal and professional good fortune. But it was also encouraged by how the health care system took such good care of my wife during her gestation and delivery, all apparently without charge. Though of course, I've paid for it in taxes since then, at the time I could not believe the generosity of the State. The Canadian system is still very good, but it has degenerated and it is now under great stress. A couple of years ago I went down to the same hospital where Wendy was born for a CAT scan of my lower back and was shocked at the sight of old equipment just sitting uselessly in the halls. I was asked to change into a smock for the scan in an actual broom closet. The Canadian honeymoon with a Government monopoly of health care may also be ending. I read in the Gazette recently that only North Korea, Cuba, and Canada make it illegal for private companies and individuals to provide health care services that are also provided by the Government.

August 28, 2003 – Another day of pouring down rain yesterday. That makes three of the last four, and this isn’t even the rainy season. I walked around Itaewon again, this time in search of a used book shop that I had visited before. You have to climb hooker hill to find it, and the first time I took a wrong turn and had to retrace my steps for another lap in the drenching rain. When I finally arrived, I traded my copy of a disappointing Kathy Reichs book for Jimmy Buffet’s A Pirate Looks at Fifty. I got my daily exercise while getting soaked at the same time and saved about a dollar after balancing all the expenses involved. Since I don’t have a job yet, I’m beginning to count every won. Spent some last night, meeting a couple of friends for dinner and then a retro sixties type place in Sinchon called Woodstock. It was good to forget myself for a few hours in a flood of beer and boisterous camaraderie.

Every night was a party back in those honeymoon days in Montreal in the early 1970s. The sixties didn’t really happen for me until I moved up there. My life had been pretty serious and ambitious, I guess out of inherited family expectations. Then the Vietnam War put my identity in question in a soul shredding way. My father had rejected the pacifist teachings of his upbringing in the Church of the Brethren and enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII. But I was not able to believe in the Vietnam cause enough to follow suit. My image of myself as a red-blooded boy with big balls budding into American manhood shattered. I was not willing to accompany my teammates from the sports fields of Decatur, Illinois and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania into the jungles of Southeast Asia. I could not believe in the cause enough to kill for it. My case was a variation on a familiar theme in those days.

Arriving in Montreal in August of 1971 was like emerging from a pressure cooker. The struggle to get a basic education and to deal with these agonizing moral and political questions evaporated in a haze of pot smoke and egomania. My view of Canada, Montreal in particular, and myself was utterly utopian and self-indulgent, but I was having a great time. After finding my post at John Abbott College, I decided that a genius such as my humble self didn’t need to slave away in the library to crank out a Ph. D. I wanted to explore my consciousness and make the revolution in a form to be created in the process of making it. I thought that my friends and I had been responsible for saving the USA from self-destruction in Vietnam. The transformation of American foreign policy and culture, which of course proved fleeting, seemed to me a great personal vindication.

On a personal level I was blessed with the birth of a beautiful baby girl with whom I bonded deeply the moment she emerged from her mother’s womb. After being cleaned up and resting on Pam’s breast for a few moments, Wendy was transferred to a bassinet covered by an arc of glass. I remember putting my gross meat-hook under the glass, and her tiny hand reaching up to grasp my index finger. In that instant she became the number one priority in my life, and that remains true to this day. Like many immature fathers, I suppose, I did not understand the depth of my feelings for her until her mother and I parted ways about five years later. Still, she has been the beacon of purpose that I have followed in periods of confusion over the years. Unfortunately, now the beacon seems to have gone dark.

August 29, 2003 – I once referred to my daughter as an anchor, so maybe that’s a better metaphor, or maybe not. Daughter as anchor? Gazette columnist, Josh Freed, said with a judgmental smirk sometime back in 1977. This was Josh’s Ticket to Heaven period, and the woman I was dating back in those days was a charter member of his anti-Moonie entourage. She thought I was doting on Wendy, too. At least, she was determined not to play any kind of stepmother role. I’ve tended to remember that as evidence of rejection by her and a tight ethnic circle of friends, but maybe they were just being realistic.

Wendy made a comment to me a couple of weeks before I left on this trip to Korea about having too many fathers. Lately, I’ve questioned my attempt to separate from her mother but not from her. The former was absolutely necessary because her mother had separated from me. So maybe I should have cut the whole thing lose, like so many divorcing fathers do. Maybe clinging to an image of myself as Wendy’s dad has only confused her basic identity and kept me from creating another family. Has the illusion of maintaining that primary connection really been a form of emotional cowardice, providing an excuse for not starting my life over again after splitting up with her mother?

This question has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but it has come to the forefront since Pam’s death in January of this year. A general, metastasized version of the breast cancer she suffered in the early eighties resurrected in her body and wore her down over an agonizing period of almost three years. Her second husband and Wendy nursed her during that time, and together with Wendy’s half-brother, created the close family cohesion that seemed to have been lacking before. In particular, Wendy bonded with her stepfather in a way that has left me few illusions about my role in her life. Always before, I could imagine my daughter was connected to him only because of his relationship with Pam. Now, since her mother’s death, his primary role as father figure is impossible to deny. She called me from his place on father’s day this year to wish me a good one. She didn’t have to call at all, of course, but the gesture defines things between us in a very difficult way for me. So the beacon has been eclipsed and my ship drifts anchor-less on a bilious ocean of pre-retirement angst.

August 29, 2003 – I suppose that’s the main reason I’m here in Korea right now. I’m trying to get perspective on my grief, trying to outflank my fear of death. Despite all our problems, Pam was a dear old friend. I met her in the eighth grade at Ingomar Junior High in Pittsburgh’s North Hills. As my only child’s mother, she has been the most important woman in my life, so losing her companionship was painful. My feeling now of finally losing Wendy, too, is just as painful. I have to accept my own stupendous capacity for self-delusion. Her mother played me expertly against Wendy’s stepfather, but that’s only human nature and not Wendy’s fault. Even though I now see her tendency to follow her mother’s example, I still can’t really blame my daughter. I will always see her as the innocent being that she was at birth.

Another reason I’m here is to take a proactive approach to retirement. When I turned fifty-five a couple of years ago, I freaked out at the idea that John Abbott College