Noun, Verb, Kimchi: Part 1

Written by Clayton Foster

Here's how it begins:

I'm in a late-model Hyundai on a sprawling motorway in a country I've never seen before.  The heat is raw, and I'm already regretting wearing the tailored suit I bought in Bangkok on the way over.  The driver next to me is Korean man in his 60s with a Bart Simpson buzz cut and a shiny silver suit, the same colour as his car.  I don't know who the man is, though the relief of seeing someone at the airport holding up a board with my name on it was good enough for me.  He doesn't talk, or smile.  I'm beginning to realise that he cannot speak English, and I can't speak Korean.  I don’t know where we’re going. 

In the West, we don't talk about South Korea as much as we discuss its more influential neighbours to the left and right, its badly behaved brother to the north, or its more famously travelled cousins to the south.  Prior to six months ago, I had never much considered South Korea beyond its role as the setting for M*A*S*H, and even then it was just an allegory for Vietnam.

My new friend reaches into his shiny silver jacket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, offering me one.  It’s the first indication he's given that he's aware of me since we got in the car.  I hesitate. I don't know it at the time, but I'm at the beginning of what will be a several day-long mix of jetlag and disorientation.  It’s a very real expat phenomenon of which I had heard but hadn’t expected to be victim to myself. 

I take a moment too long and the shiny silver man emphatically shakes the packet of cigarettes closer to my face.  I'm not a smoker, and I struggle to remember the culture guides I had read before departing Auckland.  Is it rude to refuse cigarettes in Korea?  I know it’s rude to refuse an offer to drink, or to eat, or to sing in a social situation, so maybe...  I take the cigarette, he lights it, I put it to my lips.  I'm 28, and I'm apparently still prone to peer pressure, if said pressure is applied by mute Koreans wearing shiny silver suits. 

After a couple of token drags, I surreptitiously rest my hand on the outside of the open window and let the cigarette burn down.  I wait as a police car carrying two impossibly emotionless officers passes before I drop the cigarette.  Just in case there’s some law I don’t know about, like dropping bubble gum in Singapore or making a crack about the king in Thailand, something that an ignorant Westerner like me would do.  I don’t know why, but I have a paranoid and largely irrational fear of police in Asian countries.  The officers both look at me as they pass, expressionless.  They pass, I wait another 30 seconds, I drop the cigarette.

We pass an off-ramp sign heralding Seoul, where I thought I was going to be living, and I tense up.  I had heard stories like this: expats arriving in Korea to teach English, just like me, and finding out after they arrive that the terms of their employment were not as clear cut as they believed when they signed the contract back in their home country.  I knew a girl who got placed at a school in a remote rural area where she was the only English speaker, to see out her contractually obligated 12 months. They'd told her she'd be working in Seoul, too.

Back inside the shiny silver Hyundai with the shiny silver Korean, the Tom Jones disco cover CD that has been playing since we left the airport ticks over into its third rotation.  The continued aural assault mixes poorly with the disorientation, the heat, the stomach full of bad airline food and the unfamiliar taste of cigarette.  We take an off-ramp that's written in Korean but points in the opposite direction to Seoul.  The driver leans over and pats my leg, suddenly erupting in manic, wide eyed laughter.  I start laughing too, I have no idea why, and he gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up.  He flicks his cigarette out his window and it hits the window of the car next to us; no-one gets arrested.

My blurry mess of a mind says: This will all make sense soon.
Which wouldn't be the last time in this country that I was profoundly wrong.

Next Column: I'm somewhere in Korea in a back alley love motel, the TV's playing Korean soft porn and I don't know where I am, how long I'm supposed to stay here for, or where my clothes are.