Drift Reality

Once upon a time I dreamed of making film. While I was teaching English in Korea, I applied to USC and UCLA film schools and was summarily rejected - two additions to what has become quite a litany of rejections I’ve encountered through the years. After pouting for a month or so I said to myself, “F%#k it, I’m going to make a film anyway,” and I borrowed some money from my family, bought a camera and started filming everything I could over in Seoul.

When I returned to the States I spent an entire Summer teaching myself how to edit, and produced a 60-minute piece I dubbed Miguk.

Over the years, Miguk has been watched by literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them prospective teachers who wanted to learn about what life was like over in Seoul before going. I’ve connected to dozens of people through the film and one of them is now running what I consider one of the top online resources on life in Seoul.

He was recently kind enough to provide a review of Miguk on ZenKimchi for which I am very grateful to him.

No film is complete without drunken antics. Special thanks to Judd Hutchings for starring in these clips. The song is from Mauro Picotto’s Double Album.

I’m leaving now and there is a buzzing in my head and a wavering roar in my heart that seems to run down into my stomach. My clothes have that unpleasant smoothness that comes from sweat, especially my blue jeans, which are goading my boxers into gripping my crotch somewhat uncomfortably (curse Korean-style for making me wear tight jeans).

I got to the airport at around 1:00 PM and found out that there was a weight limitation on baggage of 20 kg. My two behemoth suitcases totaled 45 kg. At 10,000 won/extra kg, multiplied by a factor of three (one for every stop along the way), I was looking at paying about 750,000 extra won for the luggage.

After panicking for a few moments and feeling waves of adrenaline gush through my torso, I asked where the mailroom might be. The airline desk attendant instructed me to head “downstairs.”

After running up and down the stairs between the basement and the first and second floors, I finally arrived at the post office where Dong-Mi and I frantically packaged 25 kg worth of clothes into three boxes. It was not the romantic farewell I had imagined. Instead of sitting with Dong-Mi, exchanging promises while crying, we were running around frantically in the post office. Imagine me taking off my shirt because I was starting to sweat while Dong-Mi was using her teeth to rip apart the packaging tape and you will have a good image of my last moments in Korea.

Finally, we managed to get rid of the excess baggage and we had lunch in Sbarro. We sat down and chatted for a while. It was a bit depressing, but sweet. Soon, I realized that time was getting short, so I headed for the departure gate.

I looked into Dong-Mi’s eyes and promised that one day, I would see her again. We hugged and softly kissed, and then I began to walk through the gate. Suddenly, a stewardess jumped out and told me that I needed to pay a 15,000 won airport tax before I passed through the gate. I had already changed all my won to baht so I had to trudge over to the airport money exchange to get some won.

Once again, I looked into Dong-Mi’s eyes and told her that I would return one day. I began to walk in once again, handing the money to the stewardess, only to be informed that she couldn’t take the money and that I needed to exchange the money for a ticket that I would then hand to her.

Once again, I trudged to the money exchange to buy a ticket. This time, Dong-Mi just laughed as I walked through the gate. We hugged and then said our goodbyes.

And now I know that no one could have loved me like she did and that is probably the most important thing I can take from my experience. If you don’t know why, then it’s probably impossible for me to tell you because it won’t make any sense to you.

It’s not something that you can really come out and say because that would defeat the whole purpose of why it happened. How can I describe how she looked at me while I was sleeping? Or the way that she would stroke my hair in a way that would remind me of being a kid again and for a moment in time, everything was perfect and I could have died if it meant remembering that moment for eternity.

Or how despite all the shit she could find a way to chip away at my muddled soul until she found something inside of me that was worth recovering? Or how she was essentially the most singular wonderful thing that could have happened to me?

Waking up on a Sunday morning with her next to me, her smooth warmth pressed against mine, our mingling essence sparking me to consciousness of life in a delicately rare manner, superimposing images of childhood on existing frames of reality while lazily hovering my fingers over the small of her back, smelling the faded perfume interwoven with cigarette smoke from the previous night, that pain tingled fog in my head spreading into peaceful sleepiness drenched with her affection, opaquely aware of her soothing brightness over me.

It was all those different things for which I had been searching the Earth. I found it and I never realized it until it had passed me by. Transient statues of glorified life bludgeoned me into a sculpture of distorted proportions that was incapable of lucidity. They had pounded my eyes until my vision flew multitudinously and I became one of those insects upon that hill in Kang-Chun, living and dying in the breadth of a glance, twirling around life frantically until the dizziness became overwhelming and I was forced to immerse within myself.

One you are completely inside, it is the same as death: just one continuous sheet of black consciousness. Boredom turns to fear turns to hate turns to boredom and that’s when you realize what you had and didn’t realize, while you were concerned with the pursuit of glory you neglected happiness and you are left alone with nothing. Sitting immersed in dark, you begin to dwell on everything and anything. You see that energy that was once inside you, compelling you to dance and scream and cry and laugh and shout and fight and love and live and die, slowly fade as you push it away because, as you think to yourself, that is what growing up is about.

Sitting at your desk, you hear a song and begin to hum and something starts to grow: a resonance of your soul, but that was yesterday and now is today - time does not smile at soul you tell yourself, you grow up and see the real world you tell yourself, when you have people depending on you, you have to buckle down you tell yourself, I’m not a kid anymore you tell yourself. You tell yourself these things every day and push and grind and before you know it, you have arrived but where have your arrived?

Before you know it, you have more money than you could count in five lifetimes, you have vacations on the beach, and you have beautiful things. But you have lost life in the exchange and you realize that you got the short end of the stick. Frantically, in a desperate attempt to win back some of your chips, you hurl yourself into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. But it is too late, when you come to earth, you are dust.

Sensations flow from you like water until all that is left is consciousness. Visions pass like clouds in a state of ambivalent nihilism as you realize what had actually happened to you. Anger turns to apathy and slowly, you accept your fate - to die engulfed by boredom. Resigned acceptance of death seeps into your consciousness and you just sit there waiting for nothing.

Then, a very strange thing begins to happen: out of the corner of your eye, a spark flickers. As you tell yourself that it was a delusion, another spark flickers. As you watch intently, the sparks increase until you realize that they are revealing your black panel to be a window. You weren’t in darkness, you were just in a place that lacks light. Shapes and forms appear before you and then sensation reemerges.

Ready to do it over again?

It sounds so cheesy to write, but ultimately, the people are what you remember. The footage of my going-away party was shot at the West India Cafe, my favorite bar, in Dongjak-Gu.

It was warm outside, the first day of Summer. For some reason, Korea had decided to skip Spring in a typically impatient manner and go straight to Summer. Just the past week, the weather had dipped below fifty degrees and two weeks before, there had been a slushy snow descending from the sky. I had just returned to work after a four day vacation.

I was walking home from Taekwondo practice. We had been studying forms for the duration of the practice and consequently, my mind felt a bit more alive than usual. I think the vacation had done me well because I had gone through an entire day without feeling the rage that has seemed to typify my life at ECC, constantly surrounded by rude hyper Korean children.

The walk home takes about ten minutes and in an effort to pass the time, I decided to turn my thoughts towards images of the Washington Redskins. They had just signed a new Wide Receiver and I had been amusing myself by contemplating how he would fit into their long term schemes. Almost like a reflex action, the movement of a muscle, my walk elicited the thought in my mind. But almost immediately, I decided to ignore those thoughts.

I walked up the hill and my body felt terrific. I straightened my back and inhaled the warmish somewhat dirty Seoul air. I was young. I had so much in front of me and before me. Granted, there was a damn good chance that things might not turn out the way I wanted them too, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that I was young and my body was healthy and strong. My mind was in decent shape, especially considering that it had not received much exercise after a year of teaching young children with monosyllabic vocabularies.

I thought about all the older wealthy guys in this world, all the Hugh Hefners out there, with countless bank accounts and countless women. But this thought was intertwined with the idea that I had something that they would never have and that they would give everything that they had up for, youth and vigor.

Hugh Hefner can take all the viagra he wants, but ultimately, he has a wrinkled body and bones that are beginning to take on the same consistency as balsa wood. When I walk, I can feel a bounce in my step and firmness throughout my body. Youth and health is a feeling that I ignore way too often and I realized this now. I don’t know where I will be next year, or ten years from now, but in the present, I have something worth enjoying, and I should pay more attention to it. Stop thinking about trivialities in order to pass the time until I am old and simply enjoy the flavor of my youth.

If there is any real truth as to why I decided to pack 60 kg worth of luggage and travel half way across the country, it is that I had nothing better to do.

The idea initially sprung into my mind during the spring semester of my senior year at Georgetown University, when I was desperately searching the Internet for a way to not be unemployed after I graduated.

On a job web site, I had filled in the following fields of interest:

1. Arts/entertainment/media - After all, I had spent the past four years studying music and English culture. Plus, this category sounded like a lot of fun.
2. Internet/e-commerce - I threw this in because I had spent the past Summer making on-line advertisements for a small business located near my home in Cleveland, Ohio. I had learned how to use a particular type of software that I was sure would open doors for me.
3. Information technology - I added this field because, well, I felt that it had a lot of potential for upward expansion and it was an exciting and innovative field. This is what I would have told anyone who had asked me why I was interested in a job in information technology. The truth is that I could not really explain what exactly information technology was and I don’t even think I had made the connection between the words “information” and “technology,” and the commonly used acronym IT.

At any rate, I waited in excited anticipation as the job search commenced. Slowly, the blue screen that was to show me my future offered me the following list:

1. Java developer
2. Senior consultant
3. Web programmer
4. Senior Java developer
5. Receptionist

This was not what I had expected at all. Instantaneously, I began to imagine myself at thirty years of age, sitting and playing games on my Nintendo game system as I waited for my Mom to drive me to the local theater where I would sell popcorn for five hours.

I quickly scrolled down the list and I found something called VB developer with C++/Visual C++. This sounded like some kind of job on a spaceship to me, but out of curiosity, I decided to see what the job qualifications were like. This is what I found:

Technical skills: Perl, HTML, CGI, Java Active X, Visual Basic, ASP, IIS, C, C++. Mainframe experience: CICS, MQ, TSO, COBOL, DB2, Oracle. Use of triggers and stored procedures a big plus.

“Wow!” I thought to myself. “Thank God I learned how to use triggers and stored procedures.”

I looked at the next job, which was entitled “web design.” Now, here was a sure bet. The software that I had learned at my job was becoming increasingly popular on the internet and I was sure that all of these web design jobs were looking for someone who had experience with it. I was right, the job listed my software, but then proceeded to also list “HTML, DHTML, ASP, VB Script, Java Script, Database Interface (Oracle/SQL server), excellent capability with web browsers.”

I did know my one software package very well. It was just the other six thinks which made me start to imagine myself, this time at age forty, playing video games while waiting for my Mother to drive me to the theater. I had not even gotten promoted to ticket booth at the theater. The reason was that the ticket booth required that I know ASP, VB Script, MQ, TQ, R2D2, etc.

I was beginning to give up on the whole job search thing, when my eyes alit on a single icon, “international.” I remembered that my Father had mentioned something about teaching English in foreign countries, so I clicked on the icon.

A list sprung onto the screen, and I clicked on the first job, “ESL teacher.” I nervously began to scrutinize the job qualifications.

• native English speaker - check
• BA required - so far, so good
• Enthusiasm about teaching - why not?
• Likes working with children - sure.

Then, all of a sudden, the list ended. My heart leapt and immediately, the image of the forty year old me disappeared and was replaced with an image of me dancing and laughing with cute little Asian children.

I had basically learned that in a cover letter, you need to explain why you are interested in the job, and why you would be well suited for the job.

This is what I came up with:

Dear Ms. Mikeson,

In response to your advertisement on Jobweb, I am applying for the position of English teacher. I am extremely interested in the professional experience that this job opportunity would afford me as well as enthusiastic to learn about such an illustrious culture.

I am a recent graduate of University, where I majored in English and minored in Music. My English major has helped me to develop strong writing, speaking, and analytical skills. I spent my junior year at a College in London, where I focused on the study of English literature and English speech patterns. I would welcome the opportunity to utilize the skills that I have acquired in a professional atmosphere. Additionally, my position as marketing associate at I-site Communications brought me into contact with all sorts of people in various positions. I feel extremely comfortable relating to people of all types and would enjoy the opportunities that a student/teacher relationship would afford me. I have attached my resume for you to review. I will contact you via e-mail within the next week to discuss the possibility of coming to Korea. Thank you for your time and consideration.

I think that if I had been more honest about my cover letter, it would have come out like this:

Dear Mr. Whatever your name is,

I don’t know how to use CICS, MQ, TSO, COBOL, DB2, or Oracle. I don’t want to teach really, but to reiterate my initial point, I don’t know how to use CICS, MQ, TSO, COBOL, DB2, or Oracle. What I do know how to do, is to pretend like I’m enthusiastic about working at your school, at first. Gradually, I will become familiar with all of the intricacies of your working environment with the intention of learning how to slack off without getting caught.

I went to a University. I paid a lot of money to go there so I shouldn’t really have to elaborate on this point too much. I have enclosed a copy of my tuition bill. Oh yeah, I went to London for a year. In London, I learned how to take food from the communal kitchens and blame it on the quiet kid from India, I also became familiar with the location of various pubs in the Southwark area.

Please give me a job because if you don’t, then I will be living in my parent’s house until I am 40 years old and I will work at the snack bar in the movie theater.

I went with the first letter though, and within one week, I had heard back from about five different schools in South Korea. Satisfied that I would not encounter any problems finding a job in Korea on short notice, I promptly disregarded all of the letters of response and forgot about the whole thing really.

My final semester passed quickly and before I knew it, I was ambling along the front lawn at my University, garbed in a black robe and holding a College diploma. My friends would be traveling to Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City in order to begin their lives as Investment bankers, Financial analysts, medical students, etc. I was going to Cleveland to live with my family while I decided what the hell I was going to do.
 

One think that I’ve decided throughout my time in Korea is that I’ve met some of the most unique people in the world over here. I think it takes a special type of mentality to leave everything you know and journey to some place that is foreign and distant. In some cases, it is an insatiable thirst for adventure that drives people abroad and in others, it is confusion and/or mental instability. There is another teacher at my school named Bob. This is an actual conversation that Bob and I had the other day:

Jiyan: You know, I decided not to go to film school.
Bob: What’s this?
Jiyan: I decided not to go to film school. First thing is, it seems to take 8-10 years to break through regardless of. . .
Bob: Jiyan baby, how long have I been telling you not to go to film school? I’ve been telling you not to go to film school for like three months now.
Jiyan: Well, it’s also just that even though they tell you that you can probably graduate in about three years, it normally takes about five. That’s five years of tuition debt, on top of eight to ten years of struggling. . .
Bob: You would be seventy by the time you graduate.
Jiyan: Exactly. I think the best thing you can get out of film school is a feature length script and a short film.
Bob: I’ve been writing a script, I haven’t got very far, only about fifteen lines. But it’s a great fifteen lines.
Jiyan: What’s your story about?
Bob: Well, it’s about this guy who is just graduated from College, a bit of a slacker. And there is Mother Nature, I have to find some gorgeous girl to play Mother Nature, I don’t know where I’ll find her. Anyway, corporate business captures Mother Nature and they put her into a closet. Basically this slacker guy has to find her. It’s a coming of age type story.
Jiyan: So, does the guy have to break into corporate business’ office to find her?
Bob: Yes, but he’s with two friends. The beauty of this scene is that you only need a room. That’s all. I have about twenty special effects in mind for this scene.
Jiyan: I see.
Bob: The real story isn’t in the plot itself, but it is revealed in the conversations between the guy and his friends. It’s a real coming of age type story, you know, dealing with finishing college and trying to figure out what to do.

Anyway, that is tame in comparison to some of the things that I’ve heard from Robbie, a former teacher at my school who I met through a present one. He has made some of the most outrageous claims I’ve ever heard, including:

“Korea will go to war with China, sometimes in the spring of 2001. I know this for a fact.”

“I have three friends who work for the US government and they are undercover in Seoul. Each of them has at least 300 kills under his belt.”

“Every year, the US government kidnaps tens of thousands of children and turns them into killing machines. They teach them how to disassociate themselves from their psyche so that they can concentrate enough to hit a moving target in a crowd at 100 yards.”

“Each president of the United States has been a free mason. In order to achieve the presidency, they must have fought and defeated a lion with their bare hands at some point in their life.”

These are just a few amongst the host of fascinating things to have come out of Robbie’s mouth. The bizarre thing is that he says these with 100% conviction and will actually get quite belligerent when people try to call him out on the validity behind them.

This is my life in Korea.

Dong Mi is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting - I hope I do her justice in this piece filmed in Itaewon. Originally, I had a voice-over narration to support the piece but realized it was probably better to leave it out and just let the music, Moby’s Novio, and footage describe the moment.

A night in Itaewon is definately something to be experienced, but not more than once. The song is Black Legend’s “You See the Trouble with Me.”