Waking up angry
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
6
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheonan,
Korea Rep.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
The penthouse was changing too, crumbling, and turning into a greenhouse. Mould bloomed ripe on anything wooden, and flourished under the badly-laid flooring. The first time I lifted up this flooring I was greeted with an awful damp stench, a legion of panicking bugs, and some very damp and cold concrete.
Even the greenhouse became hard to keep warm, and impossible to keep clean to dry
all my worldly positions, teetering atop a truck..
. On the back of my closet the mould was evolving into advanced new forms, building great and magnificent cities, conquering the entire piece of furniture before turning its eyes to other nearby targets. I decided to abandon that room and sleep in the living room, the least mouldy room in the house. Suddenly for all the spaciousness of the penthouse, I was effectively living in a studio apartment.From the time of my first visit to Seoul, I had been acutely aware of how much better my situation could have been. Every weekend I visited friends and stayed on a new couch in a new apartment, and discovered that despite the economy of size, a studio could be a very very accommodating and happy place, especially if it was in a city, and opened onto a whole world of stimulation, rather than the bog of winter farmlands.
I had mentioned long ago that I wanted to move, but nothing had happened. As the mould bloomed and prospered I tried to press the point, that I needed to move, for the sake of my health and sanity. Still nothing happened, and I became more and more frustrated by the way things were done in Korea.
At the same time I was becoming aware of how little importance some of my schools attached to my position and existence there. Classes were changed around and teachers did or didn't show up, the students' work disappeared, and after ten weeks I still hadn't managed to make clear to one co-teacher that each student would need a pair of scissors, and that one pair per class wasn't enough.
So for most of November I found myself waking up angry, annoyed by my situation and my powerlessness, forced to dump my every woe on my main co-teacher Nan and then sit and wait. The weekends were a welcome respite but Sunday always ended in a kind of sad exhaustion as I made the long commute home, as late as possible so as to avoid the desolation of the penthouse in the sticks.
Other teachers were also waking up angry; Jules and Viv - my main accomplices in Korea, the first and second wheels of our crooked three-wheeled contraption - were having troubles that put mine to shame. While they struggled through the bureaucratic labyrinth of contracts disputes and vacation requests, Viv's co-teacher was storming about like a bull in a china shop, shouting at us in a supermarket, cancelling Viv's morning off, and refusing all the while to speak a word of English. Eventually they were told that the contracts they had signed were wrong, and that half of the conditions they were fighting for should not have been in the contracts at all. In the same week Jules' mum arrived from Canada, and about five minutes after leaving her hotel for the first time, had a glass door opened into her by a rather clueless group of Koreans that left her standing bleeding in the street. It was the week that almost broke Jules and Viv, and it added fuel to all our fires, ensuring that every morning started off in anger.
Throughout it all I continued to teach, and the students remained, by and large very receptive, and this has been perhaps the most constant part of my life in Korea. Despite waking up angry or travelling broadly on the weekends, and whatever else happens outside of class, the classroom remains the same, the children learn and I find myself thriving as a teacher, which is not something I could have said last time I donned the trousers of the pedagogue. It is a very pleasant surprise. But then I had to come home to the greenhouse.
The first snow of winter fell and left the sticks a rather surreal white. There seemed to be nothing left of the world, just whiteness and footprints in the snow. Kids got excited and forgot to wear gloves when they snow-fought, and were late to class, arriving with burning red hands.
At the end of October I threw a raging Halloween party. The sticks had ever seen such an event, or such an influx of outsiders. If the one Road had its own newspaper, we would have been front page news for most of November. This was the one redeeming point of the penthouse; that I could open it up and host an endless number of people, provided they brought their own bedding and didn't comment too rudely or repetitively about the mould-smell.
There were, however, no more events of this kind. The Halloween party will also have to suffice as the farewell party, because eventually - and with all thanks due to Nan and none to the rest of my school - a new apartment was found for me, right in downtown Cheonan. And suddenly, just like that, I had a date set for my move. Whether I liked the new apartment or not.
Moving day was December 1, the second day of snow, but not enough to change the plans or to warrant hiring a covered truck, apparently. In the days before the move I had tried to reclaim my furniture from the grasp of the mould, and had become sick as a result. I spent my last few nights packing everything into boxes - amazed at how much I possessed and how little of the apartment it filled. Amazed also at how dirty I had allowed the place to become.
When the time finally came a parade of people arrived at my house - all the faces I felt some anger towards turning out to help me on my way. The principal in his broken laboured English asked me if this was a good day, and I realised that, of course, it was. I had finally got exactly what I had wanted, and in hindsight the process had been relatively painless. I coughed and told him how happy I was. I watched all my things make their precarious way down the crumbling staircase and onto the back of the truck, the mound of belongings teetering precariously, held down by some flimsy elastic cables. It looked for all the world like the Korean Beverley hillbillies, and lacked only a granny to complete to complete the absurd tower.
Still, everything has arrived more or less intact, and I have begun the re-settlement process. The new place is not a penthouse or a guesthouse or a greenhouse; it's a small and cosy studio in what used to be a tiny restaurant. From the outside it looks like an abandoned shopfront, on the inside it is warm and easily big enough for me to live out my remaining nine or more months. And beyond the shopfront spreads the all of Cheonan, now very much on my doorstep, and the rest of Korea not much further away. The weekend of the move was the first in Korea in which I didn't either go to stay with people of have people come to stay with me. It was a form of leisure I hadn't known in my three months here. I suspect the future will contain a lot less compulsive travel and a lot more exploring of my own city; a lot more much-needed sleep-ins and quiet weekends. For the first time I think I begin to feel properly settled, like I the space I am occupying is not just a very temporary thing, but something worth owning and investing in. It is a feeling perhaps three months late in arriving, but it is here now, and all else can be forgiven, because the future is once again interesting and uncertain.
