The following is a draft excerpt from my novel, Gyeosunim. If you haven't read my previous novel, Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, be warned that while there are no spoilers, you may be missing some context.
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| Photo: Google Maps street view |
Though my friends worked in the downtown district of Myeongdong, which is on the north side of the Han River, their company placed their residence on the south side, in Gangnam-Gu, a swanky part of the city. Modern highrises were clustered together in this newly renovated part of the town and was one of the cleanest neighbourhoods that I had ever seen in Seoul, if not all of Korea. Judging by the Porsches, Mercedes, Land Rovers, and Maclarens, this type of resident would not stand for burning garbage on their streets. As our taxi headed to their apartment, I even spied a Lamborghini dealership.
Money, indeed.
“We live right by a subway station for a line that takes us to Myeongdong and even has a stop just to the north of Insa-Dong,” explained Brad, “but the line weaves its way under the south side and has so many stops that it’s faster to take a cab. We use the subway to get to and from the office but it gets packed between the two destinations.”
The cab let us off along the Nambu Expressway, near the wide boulevard that is Yeongdong-daero, at the southern end of Gangnam-Gu, and despite protestations from Brad and Wilma, I insisted on paying the driver. I wanted to break in my T-card, and I discovered that this trip took almost all of the money that I had on the card. We walked a block further along the expressway to a 7-Eleven, where I was able to recharge the card. This time, I only added another ten-thousand won to the T-card, vowing to only use buses and subways. Wilma confirmed that this would be enough to last me my time in Seoul.
My friends’ apartment was massive for the two of them, covering about five times the size of my largest apartment in Chŏnju. We stood on the top floor of the fourteenth-floor unit that occupied the northeastern end of the northeastern-most building—number 208—in the complex. Like so many apartment buildings in Korea, the hallway for each floor had units on only one side: the hallway for the floor ran along the opposite side of the building and ran with glass windows that looked outward. They could also slide open, allowing air to circulate. From this view, I could see more apartment complexes through which I could just make out bits of the Han River. The view mainly displayed the massive buildup of highrises that sprang up in this modern half of Seoul.
“Make yourself comfortable, Roland,” said Brad, leading me into their ample living room. The view only afforded similar buildings in this apartment complex. “Wine? We have a full-bodied Shiraz from Australia.”
“Sounds lovely.” When we lived in Korea, in 1997, finding decent wine was difficult, if not impossible. When I speculated that my friends brought wine back from a visit to Wilma’s home country, I was told that there were lots of wine stores in Seoul that offered quality wines from around the globe.
I looked around the living room while I waited for Brad and Wilma to return with wine and snacks. Several traditional Korean folk masks made various faces at me from above a leather sofa that rested along a long wall. On a shorter wall was a stand upon which an elaborate stereo system was set. Brad was a serious jazz aficionado and I could see a vast assortment of CDs and vinyl, alike. A large stand, opposite the sofa, held a 65-inch flat screen TV. Both Brad and Wilma loved movies of all genres.
“Your company sure puts its teachers up in fine digs,” I said as we sipped the wine.
“Teaching is such a small part of what we do now, Roland,” said Brad, who was reaching for a cracker and some Brie. “I direct our Seoul office. Wilma is the administrator for all of our teachers. There are eight full-time teachers who come from around the globe. Wilma and I teach one or two classes a week, or fill in for a teacher who is sick. I mostly look after advertising for the business and promoting it. Wilma takes care of hiring the teachers, scheduling, and course material.”
“So the teachers don’t live like this?”
“They have nice apartments but they’re smaller.”
“Not that he’s gloating or anything,” added Wilma with a smile on her face. It was obvious that they were happy about their living space and their careers.
“It’s a far cry from living and teaching in Chŏnju, that’s for sure,” I said.
“I shudder when I think of the shoe-box of an apartment that was offered by Happy Time,” said Brad, recalling the hagwon where both he and Wilma had worked in 1997. “A bedroom, a bathroom, and a fridge. That was basically it. Now, we have a living room, dining room, full kitchen, large bathroom with a full tub and a walk-in shower, a guest bathroom, and two spare bedrooms. You should have taken our offer to stay here, Roland.”
“You said you had a guest room but you didn’t mention how palatial this place is,” I said. When I had booked my flight, Brad told me not to get a hotel room, that he and Wilma had a room for me. I thought of the old place where I stayed with Jamie and Jody, and wanted something bigger, to myself. Also, when Brad had mentioned that they were on the south side of the Han River, far from the downtown core, I told him of my intentions to see some of the places I had missed and how I wanted to be right downtown. Looking at their living arrangement, I may have accepted their offer, had I known.
“Long-gone are the days of cheap hagwons in dumpy neighbourhoods, Roland. We’ve gotten to a point in our lives where living well is paramount.” He put his arm around Wilma to stress the point.
Dinner was a grilled T-bone steak with rice and vegetables, with lots more of the Australian Shiraz. Dessert was an upside-down pineapple cake with Ethiopean coffee. When we were finished I offered to help with the cleanup but Brad insisted that I sit and keep Wilma company while he rinsed the plates, loaded them in the dishwasher, and packed up leftovers.
Wilma and I reminisced over past trips we had taken together, over the years, our most-recent one being in Venice, in 2016. It had been all of our first time in this part of Italy, though we had been to Rome and Tuscany together, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. We had stayed in a privately rented apartment, in the Arsenale district, away from the tourists but a short enough walk to Piazza San Marco. While we marvelled at the architecture and culture, we found that Venice was our least-favourite city in all of our travels, to date, in Italy. Restaurants served mediocre food at extortionist prices and the service was contemptible. My biggest disappointment was the gelato, which was a huge disappointment, especially when compared to the quality of Florence and San Gimignano.
What had made that trip so enjoyable, despite these disappointments, was the company. Wilma and I reiterated that no matter where we were, we always found joy when she, Brad, and now Fiona, and I were together.
When Brad returned from the kitchen, he had a bottle of Connemara in one hand and two tumblers in the other. “I know you like single-malt Scotch,” he said, “but I have Irish blood in me. This is a peated, single-malt whiskey, and I hope you like it.” Indeed, it was good. Wilma stuck to wine, having displayed her dislike of malts, be they from Scotland or Ireland, when we all lived in Chŏnju.
As the evening drew to a close, I thanked my hosts for a wonderful afternoon and evening, but said I should get back to my hotel for a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, I was going to set out for Chŏnju.
“Are you going to seek out Mr. Kwon right away?” asked Brad.
“I’m going to wait a couple of days,” I said. “I’d like to see if I can find Mr. Lee, if he still lives in Chŏnju.” Before I left Korea, in 1999, Mr.Lee—my student from Kwon’s hagwon and later, a private student—and I had exchanged addresses. For a while, when I was living in Ottawa, he and I exchanged letters every couple of months. Mr. Lee had always been better at written English than spoken English, though I learned, over time, that it was more an issue of confidence than anything else. Mr. Lee was a proud man who didn’t want to say anything and appear to sound foolish.
When I sold my Ottawa home and returned to Scotland, I wrote Mr. Lee and provided my new address. I never heard back from him. Whether he had not received my letter and was still using my Canadian address or not was never discovered. Finding him now, after all this time, was going to be difficult. I still had his old address, in Hyoja-Dong, but there was no telling whether he still lived there or had moved. For all I knew, he may no longer live in Chŏnju.
When Kwon had met with Brad and Wilma, last month, he provided them with contact information to pass on to me. Though I had made the decision to come back to Korea, I hadn’t convinced myself that I would reach out to Kwon when I got here. I also had Soo-ah’s contact information, and I told myself it would be good to see her again, but I suspected that in doing so, she would reach out to Kwon.
“I also have plans to visit Jeonju University,” I said. When I worked at this university, there were a couple of western teachers who planned to make a life’s career with the Foreign Languages department. I wondered if they were still there. “I still have my identification card.” I reached into my wallet, no more than an RFID sleeve that was filled with credit cards and various identification, and pulled out the old plastic card. The print on the card had faded and the photo was dulled. With my Korean hair cut, I looked younger than the thirty-three years that I was. I was also about thirty pounds lighter, and my younger face showed lean lines from a year of having already lived in Korea.
“I don’t think they’ll accept it,” joked Brad.
“If I meet anyone I know,” I said, “I’ll show the card. It’ll be fun.”
“Where are you staying?” asked Wilma.
“I’ve rented a small apartment near Gyeonggi-Jeon, in Chŏnju’s Hanok Village.” Chŏnju had its own traditional neighbourhood, just like Bukchon Hanok Village, that surrounded the old Chosun Dynasty palace. In 1998, it showed its thousand-year-old age, with crumbling roads and cracked foundations. Over recent years, the city revitalized this neighbourhood and turned it into a tourist destination, with the ancient palace maintaining its reputation as the jewel of Chŏnju. “I’m looking forward to rediscovering that old kalguk-su restaurant." This was the restaurant that I was shown on my first day in Chŏnju, in 1997, when I was too jet-lagged to remember its location. Over that year, I had sought this noodle restaurant out and finally found it some months later. It became one of Tanya’s and my favourite restaurants, and we would go to it with Wilma and Brad as a special treat.
In 1998, I introduced it to my fellow teachers at Jeonju University and we would visit it at least once a month. The thick noodles in a spiced broth was a hit.
When I made my plans to revisit Chŏnju, I searched the Internet to see if I could find the restaurant. I typed kalguk-su into Google, along with best restaurants in Jeonju, and discovered that the restaurant still existed. The old, traditional-styled house had been torn down—it had always looked dilapidated, as though it was bound to be condemned—and a new building took its place. The restaurant was even given a name: Baetaerang, which was the Korean pronunciation of Veteran. The sign on the grey-painted siding, above brown bricks on what was now a square building with a flat roof, read that the restaurant had been established in 1977. I had found the kalguk-su restaurant’s exact location by using Google Maps street view. My rented apartment was less than a ten-minute walk.
“I plan to have dinner there,” I explained to my friends. “It was the first meal that I had in Chŏnju in 1997; it’s going to be the first meal that I have in Chŏnju in 2019.”
As the evening drew to a close, I thanked my friends for their warm hospitality and rode the subway back to my hotel. I had to change trains at Euljiro Station, where the second train took me to City Hall, just a few blocks away from my hotel. The long day had caught up with me and I had no trouble drifting off to sleep.
Tomorrow was going to be another big day.
