Not all my friends are foreigners. While Gwangju has a pretty good ex-pat community (certainly better than the provinces), it’s important to also make friends with the locals when you live in a place, right? Imagine an immigrant coming to the United States and making no effort at all to integrate, just hanging with his own people all the time, speaking his own language, living in his own community. May as well not come have all, right?
Thankfully, I’m working on that. My coteachers – Euna, Sabyeol, Hwang, and Chiyun are all very kind people and give me plenty of conversation at work. And I made friends with another teacher,* whose class I taught a few weeks ago: Jeong Ji-yeong.
Ji-Yeong is a Korean English teacher at a local girl’s high school, who also runs the after school English club. Her English is passable – good enough to teach it to high schoolers, but she’d never pass for a native. But she tries hard and she is open and friendly.
She learned it in the United States. See, a couple of decades ago, before EPIK, the Korean government had in mind to send its own people out into the English world, where they would learn the language, then come back and teach their children. Ji-yeong was one such. She packed her bags and headed off to the United States for 6 months on the government’s dime, ready for an adventure.
‘course, the Korean government didn’t send her to someplace like San Francisco or New York. They’re not made of money! No, instead they saved the good taxpayers of Korea’s money by sending her to Powell, Wyoming, population 6,000.
Not a Korean speaker for a hundred miles around. An embassy? Forget about it. And this, of course, was in the days before ubiquitous smartphones and translation apps.
She told me that she knew the name of every bartender in town inside of 2 months.
She also told me it wasn’t hard – there were only 4 of them. The town only had the two bars.
Nevertheless, Ji-yeong survived and returned to her old neighborhood in Gwangju, where 20 years later she met me while she was looking for a native English speaker to help her. (I wrote about that class a few weeks ago).
As a reward, she took me to the Gwangju festival downtown last week.
It was a rainy night, but no one seemed to mind. The evening was warm, the rain was gentle, and there was music filling the air from a dozen stages. I met Ji-yeong and her best friend downtown amidst the sea of people. She had warned me her friend was a bit younger than either of us. Turns out it was because it was her 13-year old daughter. Her daughter mostly tagged along in sullen silence most of the evening, resisting my efforts to draw her into conversation as only a teenage girl can.**
No matter. There was plenty to see and do. The festival had dozens of tents set up, selling the usual tourist trinkets and knickknacks, games, and food. Every kind of food – kebabs, fish cake, hot dogs (sorta), funnel cake (kinda), fried cheese (literally cheese that was fried. It was like heaven), Korean pancakes, soups, pastries, drinks.
Nearby was a traditional Korean village – traditional, as in from the 70’s. Maybe a retro village? There were tiny comic book stores, a police station (complete with signs instructing everyone to report any suspected Northern spies and posters proclaiming Death to Communism, Protect Our Democracy!!), even a small school. We wandered up and down, taking in the sights. We went into the little school and saw the classroom as it would have looked 50 years ago.
I had my picture taken in traditional school uniform. I think I clean up pretty well:
Elsewhere at the festival there were sculptures, art, games, stages blasting K-pop into the night sky. Ji-yeong took me to dinner at a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant – ironically the same that I had eaten at for my birthday a few weeks before (“that’s not what irony means, Brad.” Shut up). Sizzling, popping meat plopped down on the grill before your very eyes, the juices running down and cooking the vegetables around it, plates upon plates of side dishes and sauces – it was glorious. Korean barbecue is Korea’s greatest cultural achievement, undoubtedly.
We ate and talked for hours. Her daughter even cracked a smile at one point, although she tried to deny it. Ji-yeong is very funny and a bit cynical, with a certain blunt sensibility around her – she aims to tell the world exactly what she thinks, and be damned to anyone who objects. At the same time, she was a bit nervous to ensure that I was having a good time, which I very much was.
After a few good hours of meat, drink, and conversation, we took a walk to help ourselves digest. We wandered down through a sculpture garden.
The rain had come back by now. It was also getting kind of late, so I made my way home.
Getting to the bus stop was an ordeal. All of downtown’s streets had been swallowed up in the sea of tents, and there were tens of thousands of people crowding the streets. Every block found a new sight, a new sound, a new smell of something delicious wafting by. I passed a band blasting modern versions of Native American music, a nice little slice of home here on the far side of the world.
Eventually I was able to work my through the crowds and home. But I hadn’t seen the last of Ji-yeong – she invited me to chaperone a field trip the next Sunday up the coast, to a national park.
So I know my next adventure.
*All my friends are teachers. This is mostly true of my American friends as well.
**She spoke English – better than her mother. She’d often translate when her mom got lost by something I said.
Gwangju Dreaming 