I've been told: "When you describe something as good, you generally mean it's terrible. It's when you use words like 'great' that you can be believed."
It's true. I try not to cast negative judgments, at least not outwardly. Who am I to say that so-and-so is a bad student, or that such-and-such country is ugly, or that such-and-such culture is lacking depth? It's easier on my conscience to say things like "So-and-so is surely very bright, she just needs better discipline," or "Such-and-such place is interested in utility and efficiency, not in making itself glossy for tourists." These aren't lies or mere euphemisms, I'd like to hope -- they are ways for my reactions and understanding of things to be framed outside the oversimplified bad-to-good spectrum. However, somewhere underneath this imposed structure, there remains a personal judgment.
For the first six months of our stay here, I answered every question of "How is Korea?" with "It's good," followed by many examples of just how good of a place it is. Clearly, I wasn't crazy about the country. It wasn't that anything struck me as negative or worthy of dislike, but probably that things weren't extraordinarily amazing often enough to satisfy my appetite for "gross and violent stimulants." In the meantime, the subtleties of Korean excellence were submerged under the occasional irritant of pedestrian-rage. The far-cleaner-than-the-Bronx streets seemed filthy after the enduring shock of the obsessively clean sidewalks of Japan. I didn't have any central conception of the
Korean, so the occasional novelties of the
jjim-jil-bang, the DVD-room, the stone-carved mountain temple didn't have a concrete foundation and remained isolated experiences -- somehow detached from their home. When things wowed me, they didn't have anything to stick to. So most of the time, even though I was overwhelmingly happy, it seemed to me that it wasn't for reasons of Korean origin. While nothing close to regret ever entered my mind, I didn't imagine I'd ever recommend the Korean experience. It was good, but it wasn't great.
However, I'm now here to say that Korea is goddamn awesome. Over the past three weeks, somehow the aggregate of experience finally clicked. There is a strong sense of the Korean that I now have, that has glued together the isolated impressions of the last six months and made them into a whole.
There is an almost allegorical tale about how it all happened. We arrived in Gimhae, so long ago now, before the winter. One of the first city landmarks to catch our eye was the old
fortress wall snaking around the head of one of the omnipresent hills. I felt an immediate pull towards it, there being something in it that corresponded with my imagination's view of Asia. I wanted to anchor those wispy ideas in reality -- after all, wasn't that why we were here in the first place?
But winter set it before we found an opportune day to explore all the way to the wall. In winter, even the six-minute walk to work was unpleasantly cold; hiking up hillsides was out of the question. So months passed. The wall was ever in sight, ever out of reach. It remained an object of imagination, no more a part of my actual experience than the Mariana Trench or Jupiter.
At last, April brought in sunny warm days, cherry blossoms and soft breezes. Dina and I eagerly embarked on the wall journey on the first Saturday of the month. We had heard vague stories of a busride to a trailhead, but not knowing which bus, and wanting a walk anyway, we set out by foot. Quickly leaving behind the familiar streets of Nae-dong, we ran into our first hill. "Straight up this way," we imagined. Following a semblance of a trail, we marched past men and women working in their terraced garden plots, over a car-tunnel through the hill, and up up up.... into impassable, thick brambles. This kind of "trail-invention" is not new for us (we'd done it in Glacier NP, Vancouver Island, Fish Creek, Moji -- pretty much everywhere we've been), so we stubbornly persevered. However, after I pierced my thumb courtesy of a thorn on steroids, we gave up and returned to street level.
I began to imagine the wall as a mythical place, if not straight up magically repellent.
However, our walk continued. Up through the streets zig-zagging up the hill, past tiny temples and men working in tadpole-filled rice paddies, through silent alleys and past terraces with goats our walk continued. Past larger temples and monuments to Gimhae's historic heroes, up sharp hills and finally onto trails, ever closer to the wall our walk continued. Winding through the forest, past grassy-hill tombs of unknowable age, sharing the path with middle-aged men with transistor radios our walk continued. And suddenly, the trail turned into rocks.
There were rocks beneath our feet.
There were large boulders, which we must climb. The boulders turned into a wall (not before a final obstacle of being contained within a closed-off construction/renovation zone). It was made of millions of rocks of large, medium and small sizes. It had been costructed to protect Gimhae's brave from the Japanese invasion and perhaps renovated as recently as yesterday. Its history was much less determinate than its physicality, it was under our feet and taller than our heads and around us and stretching forward past us. It was solid.
