On being an animal person

Our dog Howie is at the vet today, for surgery. It’s routine (he was being neutered and microchipped) and the vet already called to say that he’s just fine.

I’m an animal person. I have friends who are afraid of animals of any kind, friends who are scared of dogs and friends who find cats to be evil. I have friends who think keeping pets in the house is unsanitary or weird. I have friends who are allergic to animals and consequently have never been able to build relationships with them. I accept these views, after all, they’re my friends and they’re entitled. But I have a hard time understanding.

I grew up with animals. A dog, then a cat, then horses. At some point I had a few fish, and in college I rescued a few mice from becoming a friend’s snake’s dinner. As a child I was fond of trying to catch frogs, salamanders and turtles. I wished for rabbits. I rode horses until the end of my high school years, and spent many of my days in dusty barns that housed not only horses, but the occasional goat, a wide variety of dogs, tough barn cats, and of course, (uninvited) rodents.

In college I knew someone who told me that his best friend, growing up, was the family’s collie. I laughed, but I also knew what he meant. As an only child, animals were — and are to me still — a source of companionship. I talked to them, and imagined that they could talk back. I loved C.S. Lewis’ A Horse and His Boy, because I thought my horse could talk to me, too. I considered my pets my friends.

And I’ve never been able to stand seeing an animal uncomfortable or ill. I hated (hated!!) the Lassie movies, with those awful scenes of the poor dog limping across some endless meadow to get home to help his boy master. I couldn’t (and still can’t, really) watch movies like that. Or read books like that: I hated Old Yeller. I hated Where the Red Fern Grows. The Red Pony — ack!

I should say that I’m not generally faint-hearted about blood or gross things — in humans. But in animals, even minor wounds make me queasy and upset. (What this says about me, in terms of my feelings about humans, I’m sure someone would have a swell time analyzing.) I have a tendency to put myself in others’ shoes, even when the “other” is an animal, and that means thinking about the fact that the dog (or cat, or horse…) doesn’t know what’s happening when he goes in for surgery, doesn’t understand. I don’t know, from a scientific perspective, how much dogs or cats or horses think or rationalize or feel. They can’t tell us how much pain they’re in. Despite wanting to communicate with animals directly, I cannot.

I haven’t had a pet in a long time, but already, after only two months, Howie has become a part of our house. He’s a friend who keeps me company during the day, who gets me outside (sometimes, on the fourth walk of the day, this can seem less lovely than it sounds), and who cheers me up. He makes me mad sometimes, but he also makes me laugh. His surgery was necessary, and I know he’s fine. But I’m not allowed to pick him up until tomorrow, so I’m thinking about him, because he’s no doubt sore and in a cage. I imagine that he’s wondering why I haven’t come back to pick him up, or why we’ve abandoned him to such an awful place. After all, he doesn’t know that I’m coming back, and I couldn’t tell him.

nuclear realities

I was up late last night watching TV, so I saw the news about North Korea’s nuclear test some time after midnight. All of the news channels were blaring about it, but after a few minutes of watching one, I changed the channel. They didn’t know much, and they were just rehashing the same satellite photos over and over again, the same tired footage of Kim Jong Il.

This morning it seems not too much more is known about the test, but there’s a lot more speculation and reaction by world leaders. There are ominous statements by President Bush, and I am trying not to imagine what he might mean.

I skimmed a number of Korean papers’ web sites this morning and doing so jogged my memory about a conversation I had while teaching in Korea ten years ago. The North has been threatening nuclear capabilities for some time now, and so even back then this was a topic of conversation and debate. I once asked the adult students I taught, a class of businessmen and housewives mostly, what they thought of the idea that North Korea might have nuclear weapons. One man said that if North Korea managed to produce nuclear weapons, he would be OK with that, even proud of the accomplishment. “If North Korea develops nuclear weapons,” he said, “it’s like South Korea has developed them, too.” He was not alone in this opinion among my students, that the North and the South, despite their ideological differences and fifty year separation, were still one country, or deserved to be, and the accomplishments of one could be shared by the other. I heard the “if North Korea has nukes, we have nukes” argument quite a few times from my students over the year I was there.

I’m curious to know whether this opinion is still prevalent in light of the North’s test. Has the reality of actual nukes, and of the North’s unpredictability, changed anything?

UPDATE: An article in the Chosun Ilbo reveals how South Koreans are feeling about the North’s nuclear test.

Watching North Korea

It looks like North Korea is serious about planning to test a nuclear bomb, possibly as soon as this weekend. All of the news stories on this subject keep repeating that such a move “could destabilize the region,” which seems a rather understated way of saying that relations between China, the two Koreas, Japan, the U.S. and Russia will be in a tailspin, and some kind of military response could follow. Disturbing.

Most people tend to forget that North and South Korea are technically still at war, as the truce that ended the fighting in the Korean War was just that — a truce, not a peace treaty. In working on my book, I have been thinking a lot recently about what it’s like to live with the specter of war constantly around you. In my experience, smaller misfortunes in Korea were more easily shrugged off — or at least accepted — as part of daily life. The country has a history of calamity and devastating loss — and those memories hovered over everything and made daily injustices, like arguments, or long lines, or fistfights, seem merely inconvenient. There was always some larger violence to be wary of: a building collapse, yearly monsoons, incursions from the North, and, of course, the possibility of continuing a war that never ended.

When I lived in Korea I was constantly stumbling across reminders that the country was technically at war, and in time I learned to shrug them off too, to see them as normal, even to not see them at all. For example:

My college roommate came to visit us in Korea, from Japan. She could not stay with us at our host family’s apartment, so we reserved a room at a hotel in downtown Seoul. The hotel was what guidebooks describe as “Western-style,” that is, the kind of mid-priced lodging you might find in any city in the world, with all of the same amenities.

We let ourselves into the room, dropped our bags on the beds and took a quick tour of our accommodation. Standard bathroom, two double beds, television, a window that looked out onto other windows, grimy alleys, gleaming high-rises. We could have been anywhere, and for that reason, the room had a reassuring quality. It felt like a vacation to stay — even three to a room — in the privacy of a hotel. No sneaking little boys trying to peer into our space, no host family, wanting to talk to us after we’d just finished a long day of teaching. No one would notice if we stayed out late. No one would comment if we slept in.

As I turned to open my bag after our quick tour, something caught my eye. By the entrance, instead of the standard map directing us to the closest emergency exit, there was a glass box hanging on the wall.

Inside was an olive green gas mask. The rubber-rimmed goggles stared at us, and it felt as though a sinister presence had come into the room. I studied the filter on the breathing apparatus and let myself imagine what horrors the mask was supposed to guard against. It took a few seconds for us to realize that there was only one mask for three pairs of lungs, and for a moment the mask and everything it represented sobered our giddiness at a getaway weekend, our stay with good friends in the anonymity of a Seoul hotel.

But in a flash, we shrugged, laughed it off and continued to get ready to go out to dinner. What else could be done?

Death by fan

When I lived in Korea, my adult students used to warn me all the time about sleeping with an electric fan on. I lived in apartments without air conditioning and about 24 hours after arriving in the intense heat and humidity that is August in Korea, I went out and bought a fan.

It was a great electric fan, and I still wish I could have brought it home. It had a remote control, and could be set to oscillate up and down, or back and forth, or both at once in a kind of wave pattern. It had various speed settings. Very hi-tech.

Anyway, living in a high-rise apartment building with little cross-ventilation and almost no air circulation meant stifling sleepless nights. I slept with that fan on almost every night.

Somehow this topic came up in the advanced English class I was teaching and one of my students got very frantic about it. As a student, this woman, an unmarried middle school teacher in her 30s, had always been cool-headed and rational when some of the other students could be argumentative and moody. So I couldn’t understand what she was getting so upset about. Big deal, I thought, so I slept with the fan on.

Then I learned that most Koreans believe that if you fall asleep with a fan aimed at you, you’ll die. When I asked my students how I could possibly die from the fan, the answers varied. My face would be paralyzed, one told me. Or I would suffer from hypothermia. Mostly, though, my students said that the fan would “take my breath away.”
My insistence that I had grown up sleeping whole summers with the fan on was met with shock and skeptism.

By the time I left Korea, I knew that this belief about sleeping with the fan on was a widespread one. But I had kind of forgotten about it. Until now.

kimono weather

One aspect of living in the Bay Area that I love is that I am always feeling like I live in another country. It’s the food, the weather, the architecture, the diversity of the population, the landscape…

Today, I felt like I was in Japan. I passed a Japanese woman on the street who was decked out in a summer kimono, obi, and even a pair of geta. I didn’t have a camera with me, but if I had, I might have taken an image like this. Just seeing her made me nostalgic for a scene like this.

The Situation and the Story

The other day I wrote about trying to cut chunks of text out of my book, trying to streamline, and how hard it is. I’m still resistant to it, but I am learning more and more to tell the difference between the “situation” and “the story” (as memoirist Vivian Gornick puts it.) As an example, the scene below. I wrote this during what in retrospect has become a problematic and annoying phase a while back, when I couldn’t stop writing in present tense. I knew present tense was a bad idea, but, well, I just got addicted. With the result being that now there are these passages of present tense in a book that is written 99.5% in the past tense. Thorns. My side. Ow.

I could, of course, just switch these passages to past tense, but I tried and I just don’t like the results. I’ve found myself moving the scene below from one chapter to the next, but it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere I put it. Today I considered (not for the first time, but for the first time seriously) that this scene must go. I’m attached to it, because what takes place here, in my first few confused weeks in Korea, seemed pivotal —— to me.

And there’s the problem. What happens in this scene is the situation. The story, however, as much as I would like it to, has no place for this scene. There is a situation and a story, and they are different. This I finally understand, after two years in an MFA program avoiding the very idea that what happens and how that happening is written are two very different things.

And so, while you’ll have to read the book to get the story, I give you the situation:

I am sitting on a cement bench behind the apartment clusters near the school. The bench sits along a wide sidewalk that runs between the buildings to either side of me. There’s a street on my left, and schoolchildren are walking home in noisy groups. It is dinnertime and I am eating the snacks I bought in the little shop behind the school: a bag of sweet potato “sticks” and a can of apple juice. I have been buying food so far based on the pictures on the packages (the apple juice) or the miraculous bits of English that might happen to be printed on them (the sweet potato sticks). The sweet potato sticks look like frozen crinkle-cut French fries from home, but they are crispy and salted like potato chips. They are delicate and delicious.

This is my hour break before my adult classes begin. Outside, the heat and humidity are less oppressive than the feeling of being ignored by my Korean co-workers in the cramped teacher’s area at school. I am letting the activity of Bundang seep into me, getting used to the sounds of the children laughing and pushing each other after school, watching housewives carry toddlers on their backs in soft hammock-like bundles. I am observing common birds of Korea that are entirely uncommon to me.

My eye catches a cloud of white in the distance. Soon the rough sound of an engine reaches me, and I hear children squealing and yelling to one another. Along the street, a dilapidated white box of a truck leaves a fog in its wake. A group of elementary school kids carrying brightly colored backpacks begins to run toward the truck. I consider that it’s the ice cream man, ignoring the part of my brain which tells me that the fog behind the truck doesn’t fit with this hypothesis. The cloud of white is drifting toward where I sit, and I tense. I put my open can of apple juice down on the bench and sit up straight. The truck turns and lumbers up onto the wide path between the buildings and slowly moves toward me. The kids follow behind, giggling and pushing one another into the truck’s hazy wake. Then I smell it and I realize: The fog is some kind of insecticide. I cover the top of my can of juice with my hand, then as the ghostlike smog reaches me, I cover my nose and mouth and begin to run. I cannot breathe. There is nowhere to escape the miasma, so I move to where the white has dissipated most, along the street. There are words like chemical, DEET and cancer and tumbling around in my head. The bitter taste of the insecticide is in my mouth. My eyes sting. I am coughing. I watch as the truck turns onto the next street at the end of the block. The children are still running behind it, dancing almost, in the toxic smog. My opened can of juice and bag of sweet potato sticks are sitting open on the bench, poisoned. When I fling them into a trash can nearby, I realize that I’m furious, though not at the truck, or Korea. I’m furious with myself. I’m helpless against my ignorance of the place in which I live.

Little earthquakes

I have decided that I don’t like earthquakes. The first one I ever felt was in Japan. It was early morning, I was happily sleeping in the 2nd floor bedroom of my host family’s house, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t sleeping and the house was swaying and creaking. I gripped my bed until it was over. Then I waited. I waited for the family to get up, to compare notes, to sigh with relief that it had ended, that it wasn’t stronger. But the house was quiet. I looked out the window. The neighborhood was empty of activity.

When I later saw my host family at breakfast I asked about the earthquake. “Did you feel it?”
They looked at me blankly. “There was no earthquake,” they said. I argued. They insisted I had been dreaming.

Later, in the newspaper, I found a tiny block of text buried on some back page. It listed the size of the earthquake I had felt at 3.3. Tiny, by earthquake standards. Not even noticed by most people, the blurb said.

Which is when I began to consider this: Are people who grow up in earthquake-prone areas born with some kind of alternate equilibrium that allows them not to notice when the earth shakes and their homes sway unnaturally back and forth, causing objects to rattle and fall of shelves? Because I sure am not able to ignore it.

Last night Billy and I were sitting on the couch when our building began to shake, then sway. The movement was visible — outside everything seemed to hold constant. We were the ones moving. An illusion, I know. The swaying and shaking continued for what seemed like a long time. Long enough for us to have a conversation about it; long enough for me to envision our new house jumping off its foundation before we have a chance to move in.

It was strong enough for Billy to get up and walk over to the TV (which is new and sleek and top heavy) and hold it against the motion; it had been rocking back and forth precariously, as if it would topple onto the floor. One of our picture frames tumbled from the mantle. Frames on the walls were suddenly askew.

And then it stopped. I have lived in California long enough now to know that it wasn’t a big earthquake. When I looked it up a few minutes later I discovered it was only a 4.4 centered some 45 miles away in northern Sonoma County. The problem is that they all seem like big earthquakes to me.

Out of curiousity, Billy called some friends of ours who live in Marin, closer to the center of the quake. J., who grew up in LA, said with the nonchalance I have grown used to in long-time residents of California, “Oh, was there an earthquake?”

I theorized that because our friends’ home is newer construction than our circa 1911 duplex, they might have felt less of the shaking. But I don’t really believe it. Am I more sensitive to the earth’s violence? Probably not. I just haven’t gotten used to it, I guess.

But I don’t know that I ever will.

Revisiting Japan through books

We have started packing up our apartment already. We aren’t actually moving for nearly a month, but we are eager to get on with it, and we don’t want to leave all of the packing til the end.
Aside from this meaning that our apartment is in a complete, utter state of disarray, strewn with boxes (both full and empty), packing means that I have been revisiting some beloved possessions.

It’s strange how you can live with the same books, pictures and other knickknacks on the shelf in your living room for five years, but still forget about them. This is particularly true of books. I have so many, and there are quite a few that I insist on lugging from one apartment to the next simply because I can’t bear to give them up.
Some of my favorites are my travel books, Lonely Planets and the like, which remind me of places I have been. But equally treasured are my language books, particularly my Japanese texts.
I guess I have quite a collection of books about Japan, which I am quite proud of. All those kanji dictionaries remind me of how hard I worked to learn Japanese, how many hours I spent flipping through pages, counting strokes, squinting at radicals and trying desperately to figure out the correct reading of a combination of characters.

(Of course, now learning Japanese –or probably any other language for that matter– is sooo much simpler. Not to be all “I walked barefoot in the snow uphill 10 miles to school” or anything, but seriously, I am amazed at the tools now out there to study Japanese. I stumbled upon Rikai not long ago, and wow, so cool. No more flipping through kanji dictionaries for hours to read just a few sentences. You just run your cursor over the characters you don’t know. This dictionary is pretty unbelievable too. Just click the boxes on the radicals you recognize that make up the character in question, and it pulls up possible matches. So, so cool. But I digress.)

All those fancy tools don’t make me want to give up my many dictionaries and other language textbooks. If anything, I want to hold on to them more. OK, so I don’t look at them much anymore (my Japanese is horribly rusty, something I hope to do something about once I finish my @#%!! thesis), but it’s nice to know they are there for when I am ready to pick up my studies again.

And it’s nice to be able to remember how far along I was in Japanese. Occasionally, I pick up one of my old textbooks and see my scribbles and notes in the margins of page-long Japanese texts, and I wonder who the heck it was who could understand Japanese so well. Because now, not so much. I blink at the characters and know that I once understood what they meant. Which I guess is a little depressing.

One last thing…One of my other favorite Japan-related books is my Bilingual Atlas of Japan. It’s a fun book to flip through, to examine the geography of the country, to remember where I’ve been. But as I’ve said, I love maps.

OK, two last things. This  is my 200th posting. Yay! Thank you, readerly people, for being readerly.

Place as character

Place has always been an important component of my writing. I don’t mean simple descriptions of locations. I mean the places always seem to have an impact on the plot or narrative development of an essay or story. My professor not long ago put this into words for me, when he remarked about a chapter I had turned in that it was the first piece of my book he’d seen in which Korea, the place/country/location, was a character.

And he was right. For me, place is a character that needs developing as much as any other. In my thesis, Korea is a character, one that both challenges and engages the other characters in the story, especially me. The country was a character that I had to get to know, just like any person I met there. And knowing the place longer changed my impressions of it, just as when knowing someone for a short time you might come away with a different feeling than you might when you get to know that person better.

I’m thinking about all of this because I am reworking a chapter – actually two chapters – in which the town I lived in in Korea features prominently. In reading through what I have written I realized that the focus of the two chapters (which I am desperately trying to weave together into one) should be more on the place. That I needed to treat it as a character, and that the personality of that character needs to be the central focus of the the chapter.

The place I lived in Korea, or I should say, the place I blindly chose to live in Korea, was a “new city” called Bundang. When I picked it from a list of names of towns and cities, I knew nothing about it. I didn’t know it was a “new city.” My students told me this later. They also called Bundang a “bedroom city,” meaning that everyone who lived there spent most of their time working in Seoul. Bundang was just a place to sleep.

This was pre-Internet, or in any case, before the Internet had really taken off, and I couldn’t just do a Google search on the place to learn something about it. As I began shopping for books and maps about my new home, I discovered there were not many available. Bookstores devoted entire shelves to guides on Japan and China, but they tucked in only one or two books about Korea at the end of a row on Tokyo like an afterthought. (Even now, ten years later, not much has changed.) It was difficult to find English maps of the Korean peninsula, too, save for topographical maps made for the U.S. military. I visited quite a few bookstores and travel shops before locating a civilian map in English. When I did, I found that the city of Bundang did not seem to exist. It just wasn’t on the map. And it wasn’t in either of the guidebooks I’d bought. But I’d already purchased my ticket and packed my bags. I had a job and a visa, and so I took the word of the broker who’d hired me: that Bundang sat just southeast of Seoul.
As it turned out, there was at least one reason Bundang wasn’t on the map: It was under construction.

I cannot accurately describe the sensation of knowing you have arrived somewhere that is not on a map. You are looking at the evidence that the place exists, in the form of buildings and roads and schools, but on a map, you see nothing. It was surreal for me. But that was not the only thing about Bundang that was surreal. When I caught my first glimpse of the valley that Bundang sits in I felt disoriented. I had not flown around the world, I thought, but to a colony in outer space. Bundang was a city out of science fiction. Hundreds of densely packed pastel-colored apartment towers shot into a polluted Korean sky. Enormous cranes angled into the apartment blocks, nested on mounds of ochre-colored earth. The space colony stretched along a line of piney mountains on the edge of the valley. As the car I was in descended into the flatter land of the valley floor, it passed rice paddies, a scattering of one-story cement-block homes and a few greenhouses — the scenery I had been expecting to find in my new home. They blinked by in an instant. Instead, the mass of foreign-looking highrises grew taller in front of me.

When I was settled into the 18th-story apartment where I was to live for the next year, the view was no less strange. The back side of the apartment opened out onto a full balcony, as did every apartment in the building, and, as I saw when I looked out, so did all of the apartments in the towers around us. Our apartment was in the newest section of Bundang, and the cluster of buildings we lived in was not yet complete. From the front and back balconies we could understand the scope of the construction projects going on around our building. Vast sections of land had been bulldozed and each plot housed an apartment tower in varying stages of construction. I don’t know what I hoped to see when I looked out —just something familiar, I guess. But instead, the exposed earth met the rise of mountains on the back side of our building and the busy highway that split the valley floor on the front. Though I could see denser clusters of finished towers in the older part of Bundang, our apartment building, standing with the two or three others completed nearby, seemed isolated. Looking down on the cement and steel skeletons rising below, I wondered how the place where I found myself could possibly be Korea. I felt I had been abandoned in a surreal sprouting of towers. For all of the recognizable scenery I might as well have landed in another time.

There were few stores in the section of Bundang I first lived in. I had to walk through construction debris to get to the subway, which had been completed before the city itself. Now, of course, Bundang is finished, and apparently much more developed. I get the impression it is no longer a “bedroom city.” There was even a reference to it in the drama Winter Sonata.

Ramen night

Or ramyun night, in this case. Korean instant noodles.

When Billy is out of town I tend to look for easy meals…I just don’t feel like cooking anything too complex when it’s just me. Sometimes, I cook things that I know he doesn’t like— dishes that have a lot of onions in them, for example. But last night I just made my favorite Korean instant noodles.

They are by no means healthy, filled with salt and MSG I am sure, but I love them all the same. I got into the habit of eating them when I lived in Korea; it was an easy meal after a long night of teaching English. The family I lived with always had a rice cooker full of hot rice ready in the kitchen, and so I often had a bowl of rice with my spicy noodles (no fear of carbs here!) and would dip a spoonful of the rice into the fiery broth. Yum.

My friend J. says Shin Ramyun are the “best ramen ever.” I don’t disagree; they are definitely my go-to noodles. There are occasions when I am not in the mood for spicy, and then I’ll choose one of Shin Ramyun’s more mild-mannered Japanese shelfmates. I prefer miso-based ramen (my favorite is actually a Chinese style ramen) to shoyu (soy sauce based), but there is even a shoyu brand or two that I buy every so often. My most frequent instant noodle purchase by far, however, is Shin Ramyun.

Of course, instant noodles have nothing on their fresh noodle cousins, and packaged fresh noodles have nothing on those made fresh by hand. Having lived in Sapporo, Japan, which many people say is the ramen capital of the country, I like to think I’ve eaten some the better ramen out there. But the best ramen I ever had in Japan was actually in Morioka, in Northern Honshu. (Sorry Sapporoites!)

Morioka is a quiet mountain city, prone to heavy snows. I visited in August, and I imagine the ramen would be doubly good when the temperatures were cold. The ramen that holds my best-ever title had a country-style flavor to it; made-that-day noodles sat in a hearty miso broth. The ramen was topped with assorted fresh veggies — the one that most sticks in my mind, perhaps because it was seemed an unusual topping for ramen, was fresh buttery corn shaved right off the cob. The dish was served in a heavy ironware pot —ironware being a craft Morioka is known for. Eating those plump kernels of corn in the salty-sweet miso….so delicious. I remember my friend Hiroko and I being so overcome by how good the ramen was that we had to keep putting our chopsticks down. We both ate past full, because the noodles were so good.

Despite the fact that my favorite instant noodles come from Korea, I actually don’t remember eating ramyun in Korea so often. When
it came to noodles, naeng myun (cold noodles), often made from wheat or rice, usually won out. But I did make ramyun with some of the elementary school students I taught. We added red pepper paste and tteokboki to make a kind of spicy stew.

When I lived in Sapporo, I was often told that ramen came about because when Ghengis Khan and his men roamed about Asia, they needed something convenient to eat. So they cooked noodles and ate them out of their helmets. I have not idea whether this is true or not, but it’s a fun image to consider.

Visiting the DMZ

About 10 years ago, I went to North Korea. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I stepped into North Korea, then I stepped back into the South.

I was taking a tour of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which is the only way the average visitor can go; shepherded through the area by a U.N. soldier (most likely, an American).

Our tour began on a bus that traveled from Seoul up the “unification highway” toward the North. Seoul is only 40 miles or so from the DMZ, which is, when you are living there, not so reassuring. I was constantly hearing how quickly the North Koreans could reach Seoul, were they to attack. Less than five minutes by plane, I think it was. The military fortifications, American bases, and South Korean soldiers posted along the border are routinely referred to as merely “speed bumps” in the way of an attack by the one-million-man strong North Korean army.

The tour bus traveled northward along the Imjin River, which is lined with coils of razor wire to prevent would-be infiltrators from climbing its banks. The highway passed through quiet countryside. Not too many people live near the DMZ. There were tank barriers every so often, and machine gun bunkers. There were contraptions that in the event of an attack would lower cement blocks and barbed wire across the roadway.

The tour began in Camp Bonifas (named for a Capt. Bonifas who was axed to death on the DMZ by North Koreans in 1976 while he was trying to cut down a tree). The signs we saw upon entering displayed the camp motto: “In front of them all.”

We sat through a briefing on what not to do in the DMZ (provoke the North Korean soldiers, take pictures of South Korean military fortifications, wander off paths, away from the group, etc., etc., etc.) and we had to sign waivers that said: “The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and the possibility of death as a direct result of enemy action.” We watched a slide show on the history of the DMZ, and Panmunjom, aka “truce village.” We were given U.N. visitor badges to wear.

Outside in Panmunjom itself, we climbed a pagoda for a view into North Korea. I took pictures of the North Korean soldiers, clad in brown uniforms, standing at attention on the steps of the building on the other side of the international boundary. All around us, seemingly innocuous verdant countryside. Birds tittered. But we’d been told about the landmines that riddle the DMZ, and the peacefulness that nature offered was undercut by the military presence and a certain, unspoken tension.

A series of one-story cement block buildings lie across the military demarcation between the two countries. There were conference tables inside them, and microphone cords than ran down the middle of the tables marked the international boundary. Our tour guide took us into one of the buildings, which was guarded on the southern side by two South Korean soldiers standing in ready taekwondo stance. Their hands clenched into sturdy fists. One by one, everyone on the tour was allowed to walk over into North Korean territory, then walk back. Outside the window, North Korean soldiers. We had been warned that North Korean soldiers might try to smile at us, or take our pictures, and that we were not to respond in any way. The soldiers outside the window did not look at us but instead stared straight ahead at the soldiers from the south.

Our tour took us past some of the 1,292 concrete posts holding up rusted metal signs in Korean and English that mark the line between the two countries from coast to coast – 151 miles in total. There are about 1,200 South Korean guard posts stretched long that length, facing three times as many on the northern side. The land inside the DMZ is so quiet and undisturbed by modern life that wildlife that is endangered elsewhere on the Korean peninsula flourishes there. But the creatures that thrive there have one commonality: none are large enough to set off a landmine.

The tour guide showed us the North’s propaganda signs — lettering on hillsides that faced the South. These read “Yankee Go Home” and “juche,” which is the North’s motto of self-reliance. The North blasts music and speeches for hours a day, in hopes of swaying South Korean soldiers to defect, I suppose. In response the U.N. command plays American rock music into a country with no access to world media. What, one wonders, do North Korean soldiers think about Pink Floyd?

Not long ago I watched the Korean movie “JSA” (Joint Security Area) which details a secret friendship between guards from the two countries. Having been to where the movie took place, the tension was very real to me. There’s an eeriness to the DMZ, an eeriness that must be worse at night, when you are a soldier, alone in a guard house, dreaming of home and your girlfriend. One of my students in South Korea told me he’d been posted to such a duty during his time in the army. He said the North’s music made him horribly homesick, and that there were times that he wanted desperately to cross over to its source. At the time I could not understand this — “it’s just music,” I thought, but I suppose if you are posted in such a tense, unreal place for a long time, anything that smacked of comfort and security might appeal. Even — or perhaps especially — if that security was your country’s arch-enemy, but also shared your country’s history, family, language.

Korean night

I stayed up way too late last night, but sadly The Official Day of Sleeping In did not live up to its name. The always noisy Cambridge garbage men woke me up at 7:30. Well, it wasn’t the men so much as the truck, which ridiculously plays that annoying beep-beep-beep (the noise that trucks make when backing up) when it empties the containers of trash into the bins on the truck. Every. Beep-Beep-Beep. Single. Beep-Beep-Beep. Bin. Beep-Beep-Beep. That, combined with the cacophonous sound the glass in the recycling bins makes when dumped into the truck, put an end to my goal of sleeping past nine. (It’s good to aim high in your aspirations, no?)

So, I’m awake, it’s gray outside, and I’m trying to get motivated.

Last night turned into Korean Night in my apartment. I came home after a few drinks with co-workers and realized that due to the beer consumption, I wouldn’t be reading or writing, so I turned on the TV. NCAA basketball was on, and I watched for a while, but I wasn’t in the mood — sports are more fun to watch with other people, I think. So, I popped in a Korean movie that a friend sent me to help inspire and motivate me on the book. I didn’t know anything about the movie, so I didn�’t have a clue what to expect. Springtime turned out to be a cute film, kind of a light romantic comedy combined with the same sort of story line as School of Rock (without the spastic character of Jack Black, of course) and well, in Korean.

As I started getting into the movie, I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner, so in keeping with the theme I made my favorite kind of spicy Korean noodles with an egg thrown in for protein. I used to eat this dish a lot in Korea. So it was definitely Korean night.

I don’t necessarily get nostalgic for Korea. I mean, I spent one year there ten years ago and it wasn’t always a great time. Korea was a challenging and often frustrating place to live. Which isn’t to say that I hated it; I learned more about the world living in Korea than I ever would have in Japan or Europe or any other more comfortable place. But when I see Korean films I can’t help but feel an affectionate recognition of that faraway place and time. What does it for me is the language. I hear the cadences of Korean, the phrases I used to hear over and over again, and…How can I explain? I don’t speak Korean, that’s for sure. But I listened to it so much and I listened so hard, that I feel like I do, in a way. When I watch Korean movies I realize that I understand more Korean than I thought I did. It’s funny: There were times when I lived in Korea that I didn’t think I could stand to hear the language for another second. And now, here I am watching a movie and repeating Korean phrases out loud because I like the sound of them, because I remember the sound of them, and because I knew what they meant all along. (For a taste of Korean, check out this page.

A number of behaviors that I have written about recently came up in the film, too, so that was neat. It’s good to know that I am still remembering things somewhat accurately. There were also gestures I had forgotten that the film reminded me of: the way that Koreans put their left hand under their right arm when offering something to someone else, or that sometimes, when respect demands it, they use both hands (with head bowed) to pass something to someone else. Or the way that Korean men slurp their noodles (loudly!) or the way that Koreans often eat at low tables on the floor. (Well, I hadn’t forgotten that, but it was nice to see it. Recently I turned in a chapter to my workshop in which I was sitting on the floor with Korean friends to eat a meal and my classmates couldn’t understand why we were on the floor, which just made me realize how usual it seems to me, and how unusual it might seem to many Americans.) Anyway, it was good to be reminded of these things. I’m feeling inspired to rent more Korean movies. And, of course, to write more.