South Korea is my home now. Although I heard before that the school I was hired to teach at is in a very rural area, 동송(Dongsong) is actually larger than my hometown in Ohio. So, me n my girlfriend are in Dongsong, dang. It's cool, let me tell you. Dongsong is a city of 20,000 people in 철원(Cheorwon) country, on the westernmost point in the province of 강원도 (Gangwon-do), straddling the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ). Plug it into your google.
Now that you have a specific idea where I'm coming from, let me tell you more generally: Korea is amazing. Korean people are incredibly welcoming, thoughtful and warmhearted. So far I have experienced absolutely none of the cultural tension that Westerners report.
Which is not to say that the stories about being ostracized or stared down are true or untrue. Negative stories tend to blossom online and in print, perhaps as a friendly precaution or when the person telling the story feels like the world is unfair because of a minor inconvenience. I am not telling my dear readers and fellow travelers to "toughen up," in fact I am advocating the opposite. Be gentle. Americans tend to speak loudly and throw things. Kindness, vulnerability, is a human universal. Not being loud, pushy, or rude is a prerequisite for successful living anywhere, particularly abroad.
I have been in Korea for three weeks but I was surprised by how quickly it felt like home or a home. I have studied Korean in earnest for 5 months and have been learning about the Korean political economy since I was in college. I remember attending a Korean folk music performance at OSU with a Korean ESL conversation partner and having my mind blown that Eastern music could be so badass. That's just the start man you don't even know.
That was then. Now that I'm in the flesh in the land I read about for months, I have a lot of work to do. Even with my studies I can understand less than 1% of spoken language, less than 2% of written language. It's scary, it's tiring, mostly it's fun. The tiniest of Korean phrases goes a long way in showing you care about the place and the people you live among. There are stories I dread of Americans who have been here for three years and don't know how to speak any Korean. I mean, it is possible to live like that, gesticulating goes a long way. My thoughts I give, when we communicate I live.
Language is like acrobatic sonar jazz for your tongue. Oh Yeah!
The cusp of the void is right up there. Every road running North-South in this town reaches end in a military base. Really, I long for a long steeped tea discussion with my new Korean friends about the middle class, democracy and economic development, but so far there have only been glimpses into their perspective, which is more than I expected. It seems many Koreans are very lighthearted about the potential for military conflict. There are cartoon paintings on some of the walls of the military bases.
The story of division is a lot more complicated than Dictatorial Communism versus Democratic Capitalism. I am still attempting to understand what it means. I'm attempting to unpack my Western culture and undermine the racist stereotyping that persists in other seemingly sympathetic media. I have no tolerance for intolerance. Love is really all that matters.
Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public. People in public are hard to understand, especially if you're cynical. So, let us expect the best and assume the best in others. Narratives of the ignorant, the victim-blamers, and the conservative reactionaries are all bound by their anticipation of what other people are like: bad. I utterly and completely reject such a mode of thinking. I've found it helps me not only accept what facts I don't find immediately comfortable but it also forges unity. I will be discussing reunification, democracy and domination at length in this blog, within the context of my own observations.
I mistrust the capitalist world system's promise of happiness and development but I am more certain that individual people are good. People are born good and slimy. Smell me? MF DOOM was 'born like this' forever longer ago than a GoGo problematic Gal who shall remain nameless. DOOM is a prophet for all that is good. He raps that if you don't get it then it's not for you. Nothing critical, just different strokes for different folks so on and so on.
My blog will not be coherent, it will not be ordered or orthodox. Pics may come later but I want the imagery to be literate for now. Start with a deep grove; old fashioned boom bap out cruddy shacks. Imagine if you will, a juke joint, Korea has that vibe. Old pals shooting the shit over at a 노래방 (Noraebang; a karaoke place). I have a hunch that privilege doesn't really have any idea what culture sounds like. Culture has to be off key a little or at least off the cuff. To a rich person music is like classical or popular, not the saved scrap and steamed stem and seeds that become an ersatz for high rise living. Music is life. There is signification space in this culture for improvisation and the unpredictable.
Without essential, generalizing and fetish-driven admiration, I do want to express my deep respect and adulation for the Korean people. I don't love explaining a person's character from her circumstances or race, but I have a tendency to love the common person. Low wage workers, poor folks, marginalized people, fat people. Love explains more than amusement does. A cosmopolitan worldview advances all over the travel blogosphere like the word blogosphere itself; peppy, ugly and shat out of the double millennia for want of genuine context. The travel blog is a uniformity of posture and content, while lacking any composure and contentment. I am writing to make common ground. With whomever. That's all.
Geography, history, social sciences, math, and economics are all tools of conquest. Orientalist scholars have endless explanations about the Other and they all share a common denominator: the other is other. Travel blogging is an amateur version of this. A dilettante version, but here's where it gets paradoxical- look up the word dilettante. The word means both one who dabbles and one who is deeply devoted. Enter jazz. Enter me.
I have written before and still believe that all wars are civil wars. Jazz came about in the American Civil War, when clashing souls rested over salvaged instruments to create complex simplicity. Poly-rhythm: the hearts together. Add more heat, it has to beat.
Jazz has a liking for a good dose of reality, which is always as weird as it gets. Music had to become modern with the crossover. White people had to give in and crossover because their European melodies had no ass. Baroque bullshit, say something real. Like Mingus' "Myself When I Am Real" I hope this blog will be true to myself and an honest reporting of one US citizen life on the DMZ.
Jazz is irresistible, don't resist. Affability makes life better. Bigger the sore, bigger the laugh. The first law passed in the New World was to ban the use of the African drum. This way the people facing enslavement couldn't communicate. They did anyway. Resistance is not pretty but it generates an art.
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