Today it was 10°C, so I decided to go for a walk. We're in the northernmost part of the city, only about three major intersections (with quite a few smaller intersections and side streets in between) from the reservoir that forms the northern boundary, somewhat less than a mile. Up to the reservoir, over a long block, then back down again. I had read, discouragingly, that one needn't bother walking more than a dozen blocks in any direction in an average Korean city, because of the ubiquity of franchises and a Korean preference for homogeneity means soon enough, the further you walked, all the features, the shops, would repeat themselves. I wanted to walk around intentionally to see whether this was really true.
The weather here has been cold, but usually warmer than Corning by about 5°C. Unlike the snow that everyone back home is getting dumped on them (sorry), winters here are dry on account of the monsoon patterns of East Asian weather. Very dry: the sort of dry where standing in a sustained wind is liable to make human jerky of you. I have never worn so much moisturizer in my entirely life. Anyway, the dry and slightly warmer weather means I can walk about relatively easy, if I can figure out where to go and what to do. (I give temperatures here in centigrade or Celsius because our phones automatically switch over to the metric system when we leave the country, since that's what the rest of the world uses. It's a pretty quick conversion, though. Zero is freezing, 5 is about 40 Fahrenheit, 10 is 50, and 20 is a comfortable 68°F. Really, metric isn't hard.)
One of the first things you notice is there are very, very few single or double-storey buildings. The city is very vertical, and most buildings have a minimum of five floors, the average being probably eight or nine. These buildings are very close together, made of concrete, and entirely covered with text in neon and on other lighted signs, all screaming for your attention. This visual cacophony even prompts some establishments to project their animated logos on the sidewalks at night. To make it all the worse, there is little in the way of greenery. One can go many blocks in any direction without seeing even a shrub. This is very much unlike Taiwan, where you could see efforts everywhere to green the urban landscape. Here, the psychological need for natural forms is somehow entirely repressed or sublimated or just disregarded. What greenery you encounter is the fancy of the business it's in front of, and few seem to want to sacrifice storefront that could otherwise be used for signage. Sometimes you'll catch a sight of a tree growing on a rooftop, which is pleasant and amusing, but also a little sad because of what it implies about Korean life.
This doesn't mean there are no parks. There's a small park only a few blocks from here. However, these parks are only found where the topography is difficult to build on, as if to say, "We don't know how to monetize this, so we guess we'll turn it into a park to stop all the bitching about a lack of greenery." We recently went to a "mountain" here in town, though I would guess it was no taller than Pine Hill in Alfred, though longer. This mountain was hemmed on all sides by dense development. It was also quite busy, being a Sunday afternoon, with people coming up for a gulp of air before plunging back into the urban abyss below. The steepness of the terrain happily coincides with the Koreans' fondness for hiking, the more nearly vertical, the better. Winters in New York strip you of your physical conditioning after only a few months of indoors indolence, so it left us a little breathless, though I have been making an effort to regain some of my summer fitness.
Now, I understand that Korea has many fine mountains and lakes, and a sparsely populated countryside full of all sorts of scenery, etc. These places, however, are something you have to travel to. Here in Cheonan, we are in the midst of concrete sprawl that begins in downtown Seoul and continues down the west coast of the country to some unknown point south of here. Nothing breaks up the sea of concrete and neon except for the odd bit of land that was too hilly to build on. It actually reminds me of the endless sprawl of Soutern California, which is more or less solid development from almost Santa Barbara (Oxnard, really) down to San Diego, bounded only by the San Bernardino Mountains. However, Californians concern themselves with the "buena vista" and lovely ornamental landscaping; here there is no corresponding impulse.
I should mention something about the traffic. Though the rule is that people in crosswalks have the right of way, it's not what actually prevails. You must, must, must look both ways, even at a green crosswalk signal, because people run red lights or come tearing around a corner with a certain recklessness. I typically allow the Koreans to begin crossing before I join them, just to make sure it's safe. Cars looking to turn will creep as far forward as they can, short of touching you with their bumper. I have mentioned before the Korean motorist, who is a road anarchist, if also wary of other anarchists. This lawlessness is particularly shown in parking. Cars routinely park on the sidewalk, even if it means pedestrians have to squeeze past, and it's not unusual to see cars randomly parked in the median at night. Trucks will compeletely block a lane of traffic while they attend an errand, and motorists just have to deal with it, which they seem accustomed to doing. Delivery drivers on scooters zip up and down the sidewalks, weaving around people.
This sort of lack of regard for others comes out of the social dynamic here. It is not controversial to say that Koreans are clannish: they owe everything to their family and friends and clients, but nothing to strangers. You, a stranger, are competition in a dog-eat-dog environment. Confucianism gets blamed, but that's a lazy excuse. Japan is Confucian, Taiwan is Confucian, and yet they are polite and courteous cultures. What happens in Korea, I think, is the scrabble for resources in a very densely populated country, combined with zero-sum thinking—I can only win if you lose, and your winning necessarily means my losing. Zero-sum thinking is actually one of the things I find most depressing about Americans, but here it's taken to a new intensity. That sort of unyielding social pressure cooker of hierarchy, conformity, and the need to achieve and win at any cost, is why South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world.
Usually when I go for a walk, I wear sunglasses to obscure my eyes, as Korea is a very racially and ethnically homogenous society, and Westerners often find themselves stared at, particularly if fair-haired or of African ancestry. Personally, I just prefer to blend in, and my dark hair and light complexion allows that. The mask only helps to obscure my features. However, I have two dead giveaways: hair loss is uncommon here, and everyone wears a long, puffy black coat. My coat is brown and decidedly unsegmented like a caterpillar. Wearing a coat of another color or cut, among Koreans, would be a declaration of nonconformity and rebelliousness. Foreigners (a bit of an ugly word, I think, but the one used here for foreign nationals or international travelers, as we'd say) get a pass on such things because we are clueless and would never fit in anyway. I've read that this is something expats exploit, the clueless foreigner feint, that angers other expats for feeding into stereotypes about Westerners in Korea. Regardless, my brown coat highlights me as an alien. (This would be a natural segue about Korean beauty standards, but perhaps I'll save that for another post.)
At one point in my perambulation, I attempted to waive a motorist through while crossing a small side street. Between my sunglasses and his tinted windows, I don't know what sort of face he was wearing, but he came to a stop. I imagine it was confusion. Bearing in mind what I said above about strangers as being competition, letting people by or holding doors is just not done here. When I do it, as I instinctually do, I'm often met with a stare of bewilderment, the person just standing there, unable to compute just what is happening. One time I was looked at like I was an escaped maniac. The few times I was greeted with a kamsamnida (thank you) were older ladies, who themselves were raised to revere their elders, but who now, as in the West, are viewed as inconvenient obsolences. The reminder of a time when the elderly were respected is doubtless an occasion for gratitude, which is why I don't try hard to suppress my urge to hold doors.
I couldn't quite figure out whether, in fact, everything is a chain or franchise, though there seems to be some truth in it. Go in any direction, and you will encounter a Starbucks, a Holly's, a Pascucci, a Tous Les Jours or a Paris Baguette. And almost every block has one or more 7-Eleven, GS25, or Emart. Around our hotel, there is one directly across the street, one at the intersection to the left, one right behind the hotel, and across the intersection from that one, too. And those are only the 7-Elevens! That said, there is a lot of stuff in hangul, the Korean script, that I cannot read. Hangul letters are actually up to three letters combined in a single block, which gives it a little bit of an appearance of Chinese, but is entirely phonetic. Chinese letters, which are also used in Japan, and in Vietnam before the 20th century, and Korea before 500 years ago, is ideographic. The symbol for man, fire, respect, entrance, washroom, etc., are all the same characters, regardless of the local pronunciation of those words. Person is jen/ren in Chinese and hito in Japanese, but both are written as 人.
I can actually read bits of Chinese and Japanese, but hangul script requires a knowledge of spoken Korean to make any sense of. Hangul was the invention of King Sejong in the 15th century, who believed the Chinese system of writing was unwieldy and contributed to illiteracy. The shapes are supposed to represent the mouth position of the sound being made, and the maxim is that an smart man can learn hangul in a day, and an idiot in seven. The Koreans are therefore rather proud of this combination alphabet-syllabary. I, however, am something less than an idiot, because it's figural static to my eyes. I remember things written in hangul by imagining the shapes are small pictures, backwards E and 21 over 0 for cream; kicking waiter, man on toilet, man pouring soup down a drain for Laura's brand of ramen; something written under the lid of our toilet, which I don't know what it says, but I see it as egg on a table, 2 on a stand, man on a platform closing a screen door. Google Translate is not helpful in this case, but from context I assume it's the washlet manufacturer's operating cautions. (Toilets here, if you didn't know, are high-tech, with their own control panel, heated seat, etc.)
So, this lack of being able to read hangul means I can't figure out if everything really is a chain, but I suspect the hangul obscures to Western eyes a number of small businesses and mom-and-pop operations. Whatever the merits of its writing system, Korean is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, and most visitors and expats (a large number of which are actually here as English teachers) don't try. English is, of course, an imperial language that stretches around the globe, while Korean is limited to a small peninsula. And Koreans are given English instruction from a grammar school age, which only furthers our reliance on English here. The more's the pity, really, because you don't really know a culture, and the mindset behind it, if you don't speak the language. I therefore have to file the "everything is a chain" claim in the unsolved folder.
But if nothing else, I did get in a good two miles' walk.
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