Dancing Lessons

I had to look on a map. It was 1993 and I was following up on a suggestion to teach English in Korea. I knew nothing about the culture, the language or the people. But I thought, why not? I sold my car and bought a ticket to Seoul and landed at Gimpo airport with an English degree, a few contacts and the general idea of finding a job. Seoul was an assault on my senses: pungent kimchi and seafood, noisy cars and machinery, unfamiliar language and print, glaring neon and the constant clatter of construction. People were hurrying everywhere on every kind of conveyance—feet, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, bongo trucks, subways and buses all weaving between each other into an indecipherable pattern of chaos and noise. Large bunches of people pushing onto transportation and surging through the streets in nothing that resembled the orderly lines of home. Korea in general and Seoul in particular were bursting forth into the modern technological age in every way possible.

Palace Garden, Seoul

That was 20 years ago. Then, last year my husband got a job offer to return to the Land of the Morning Calm. We had been talking about the possibility of his working overseas when he called and said “What would you think about returning to Korea?” I didn’t have to think about it. Yes, of course! This time I didn’t need a map. My husband accepted a job in Daegu working for the US Army, where we find our lives once again intertwined with this amazing country.

Adapting to a different culture reduces one’s life to its most elemental. At the beginning of my experience in Korea, finding my way home from the hagwan where I worked, learning new Hangul letters or successfully ordering a dish in a restaurant were causes for triumph. I still remember the first Korean word I read. I was on the bus and trying to sound out letters on signs as we were stuck in the constant traffic. In Songpa-gu, on a sign next to the subway, I slowly sounded out S….eo…ul. My neurons took a second or two to connect the sounds to the word. When I realized I had actually read something in Korean I grinned from ear to ear and looked around for someone to share the experience with. It occurred to me all of the tired people coming home from work would be nonplussed that I had learned to read the name of the city, so it was a private victory, but it still warms my heart 20 years later. As an English teacher I’ve had Korean students over the years who loved to hear me sound out Korean letters, struggling with their language as they struggled with mine. Even today in Korea learning to read and speak new words with the help of patient friends, shopkeepers and taxi drivers, I relive a bit of that initial joy.

As a foreigner I was an oddity twenty years ago. I’m tall for a woman, just under six feet, and my hair was long and blonde. I often felt like a local celebrity with students giggling and trying out English phrases and children sometimes wishing to touch my hair. As a new bride and then a new mother I was given plenty of attention and advice, often unsolicited, from elder Korean women. What mother doesn’t love grandmothers cooing over her little one? Once, when my daughter was very small a pair of grandmothers chastised me for having her out in the park on a warm day. I thought they were overreacting and maybe a bit backward. When I got home my precious baby was covered with a fierce heat rash and I had to work quickly to rehydrate her and cool her down. After that, even when I returned to the US, I listened more carefully to the advice of the older generations. I tried to be as curious about Korea and Koreans as they were about me and it changed my perspectives on many things. Since Korean elders garner so much respect, I often jokingly say “when I grow up, I want to be Korean.”

Kim Bap

Korea also changed our family’s eating tastes for the healthier. From the beginning, I started to find my favorite foods. If someone told me I could only subsist on one food for the rest of my life I know immediately what it would be: bibimbap—with kimchi on the side, of course. And boricha to wash it down. And perhaps a Daegu apple for dessert. Our children know the Korean names for their favorite dishes and ask for them as often as American food.

But these are the superficial aspects of culture, the outward manifestations of interior qualities and values. Korea was a hard-scrabble place 20 years ago. The country was fighting to make their mark in the world. Korean cars and electronics were barely in US marketplaces. Students were fighting to learn all they could to help themselves and their families succeed. Seoul was fighting to become a world class city. And sometimes all of this pressure caused outright fighting. It was not uncommon to see conflicts resolved on the street by fisticuffs. Once the driver of my bus clipped the mirror of another bus. The drivers exited their vehicles and began swinging at each other, until passerby broke them up. But I sensed all of this fighting wasn’t just anger; it was struggle, the struggle to create a future that was better than the war-torn, poverty-stricken past of the peninsula. I knew as I helped my students learn English, that I was a miniscule part of the fight. I was not surprised to learn that a popular rallying cry is Korea is now “fighting!” I smile whenever I hear it.

When I first arrived I noticed some Koreans I met were insecure about their country’s place in the world. They would ask me what Americans thought of Korea, and I sometimes had to admit that my countrymen and women didn’t know much about it at all, unless they or a relative had fought in the Korean War. It seemed incredibly important to many Koreans to be known in the world. I wondered if it were even possible for such a small country to have more than a minor footprint on the world stage.


Connie, Tim, Lauren, Seoul 1997

Initially we stayed for four years. Our daughter was one of the first foreign babies born at the brand new Samsung Hospital in Gangnam, which was a nice suburb of Seoul bordered by hills, trees and rice paddies on the outskirts of town. At nearly 10 lbs., she held the record for the largest baby born there at the time. Our lives became intertwined with Korea and the friends we made here. Although we returned home we continued to have visits from Korean friends, and together we watched all of our children grow up. Our children grew up on stories of Korea. They knew our friends from the Land of the Morning Calm and they learned to eat with chopsticks as well as forks. Once, while purchasing kimbap at a Korean grocery my blue-eyed, blonde daughter looked at the Korean woman across the counter and proudly announced “I’m Korean too!” The ajuma smiled and laughed and I didn’t correct my daughter, because in some ways, she was. And so was I.

Meanwhile, Korea came into its own. Imagine our surprise when we heard “Gangnam Style” for the first time! The song was sweeping the world and on the radio constantly. We thought “that Gangnam? Where our child was born?” The students at my suburban high school in the US talked about Korean dramas. There was even a K-Pop fan club and none of the members were Korean or even Korean-American. I remembered the long-ago questions from my students, “What do Americans think of Korea?” They would be so proud of the answer now. Meanwhile, the time drew closer for our return. Our daughter would finish her senior year of high school, her last year with our family, in the place where she was born and spent her first year with us. We couldn’t wait.

Tim and Connie, 2014, Viewpoint into DPRK

We arrived in the sweaty heat of summer last July. To my husband and me it was a homecoming. We soon began enumerating all of the differences we saw. My first shock was the luxury of our apartment. We now had established careers, so I expected something better than our previous studio, but our flat in Daegu was nicer than most of the nicest places I had seen in Seoul decades ago. It took months to figure out the high-tech gadgets in the kitchen and bathrooms. I felt like the proverbial country mouse as I gaped at our front door monitor which converted into a television that one could watch in the bathtub. Even the door reminds us in formal Korean if we forget to lock it. We took a trip to our old neighborhood in Seoul, at the bottom of Namsan tower. It was transformed by posh bistros and beautiful murals and public art. Our teenagers lost no time in adapting, using the metro to go to norebang and shopping with friends and purchasing large Korean smart phones. Teasing me about my American smartphone, they say it “looks just like a phone, only small.” I thrill when my children try to speak Korean.

Last week, stepping out of the shiny new Seoul Station after a lightning-fast but smooth-as-silk trip to the capital I took a look around me. Everything was orderly and efficient and using cutting-edge technology, people dressed and acted like the inhabitants of cosmopolitan cities everywhere. From this tiny southern half of the peninsula come some of the most well-known electronics and automobiles. As I hurried on my way to the airport express, nobody directed any attention to me whatsoever, even though I remain six feet tall and blonde (and gray). The streets are clean and busy, the sense of struggle was gone but the energy and vigor remained. It occurred to me that Korea had won the fight and arrived at its destination. So has my family. One morning I asked my daughter how she was adjusting and she said “I felt very homesick for America at first, but I open the window at night and the sounds and smells of Korea feel like home.” I couldn’t agree more.