In a special sort of room on the library’s first floor, beyond the beeping security turnstiles and the computers which you use, with your ID, to check out a specific chair in any one of a number of enormous reading rooms—bare, practical, fluorescent, uncomfortable affairs, guaranteed to leave you with an aching neck and back if you stay for too long—but in this special room, I sit for over three and a half hours, and write. I have not explored the stacks. I don’t even know where they are.

Other students work with me. There are just four long tables in this room, with a total of about forty carrel spaces with computer seats that just kind of keep leaning back with you, if you try to recline. It is apparently a desirable place to work; in the afternoon I see several students walk in, search quietly for a chair that is not next to the sole white person in the building, and then walk out, concluding that the place is full. Numerous spots are occupied by books and jackets which no one ever comes to claim.

The penned graffiti is instructive: someone has written the Chinese characters for the university, but in place of Dong, “East”, this person drew a pile of shit, because the Korean word for shit, dong, sounds exactly the same as the word for east. There are initials locked inside hearts, Korean declarations that so-and-so has studied here for twelve hours, and English proclamations—always strange, never correct—recommending like Boxer that you work harder. “Keep the faith, life is wild ride!”

As for the animate, a few young women cannot sit still and seem to come to this room so that they can walk in and out at the behest of their cellphones; some students are studious, others are enslaved to these devices; two annoying young men constantly whisper to each other even though, as always in Korea, there are signs everywhere informing them that they are behaving inconsiderately. Everyone is hunched over textbooks. Everyone. A number of older people are among their numbers. A head gleaming bald above a carrel, like an egg perched on a wooden nest.

I once saw what may have been a professor annoying her colleagues by leaving the room several times in the space of a few minutes to offer them unrequested paper cups full of the sugar water that sometimes passes for coffee here. A girl I knew when I was young always gave everyone she knew huge amounts of candy because she wanted them to like her; I remember being mean to her, ganging up on her like everyone else.

Last week two of my students and I began reading The Inspector General, which they definitely enjoyed even if I think all the jokes about government corruption were too subtle for their 70% comprehension rates. Still, with advanced students we won’t be using textbooks; A. has been working on teaching the I Have A Dream speech, which is actually so famous that it has seeped into the Korean consciousness without any of the attendant liberalism of the cause. People say I have a dream, and add that their dream is to become a dentist. I asked one of my students why he wanted to become a dentist, and he said “because I can make many—much—lots of—money!”, and then I asked if dentistry is exciting, and he smiled and shook his head, all the strands of his black bowl cut waving over his forehead like the swishing rubber flaps hanging from the ceiling at the car wash.

So, after three hours of exhaustion, on the last day, we decided to go outside and play soccer. There I realized three things. One. The boy who says that he loves soccer, and wants to be a soccer star, is not really a remarkable soccer player. He need not worry about his future, however, as he is an excellent and dedicated student. His name means “Luminous Star”, 明星, he looks like a smaller version of my brother-in-law, and his mother is a tall skinny trophy wife—unusually tall for any Korean woman, and particularly one of her generation, she is also a natural beauty, and somehow looks like the woman all Korean women want to look like, though she has not, apparently, resorted to the usual plastic surgery to attain this perfection. This woman is beautiful, but, like Kim Kardashian, she packs her face down with more makeup than any person could possibly need, and so she is obviously quite insecure about her own remarkable luminosity.

Her husband is, like all Korean husbands so far as I can tell—where do all the handsome Korean men go after they turn 30?—totally normal looking, and he likes golf. They were both stewardesses when they met, and together they somehow saved up enough money to buy a brand clothing outlet, which has subsequently made them filthy rich. They have the largest apartment we have ever seen, with a commanding view of the river, twenty stories up, perfect catastrophic earthquake height, as well as a large living room furnished in the new traditional way—with a massive flatscreen television as the centerpiece, and even a kitschy little statue of a Saudi Arabian oil baron, in white robes, red-white checkered kaffiyeh, and aviator sunglasses, guarding their carefully-displayed bottles of western alcoholic beverages.

Like the Martin Luther King speech, this western object, or totem, for lack of a better word, has been extracted from its original context, deprived of all but the barest of meanings and definitions, and transformed into a symbol of status. I doubt they have any idea that it is highly amusing to place a statue of a Muslim caricature next to several bottles of alcohol, although I should ask.

Two. Despite having given up on physical fitness for the last two months, after I drove my body over such a steep cliff that I was walking like C-3P0 for five days afterwards, I am still capable of movement—real movement, the thrill of a gazelle bounding over the savannah, and the equal thrill of the lioness chasing it:

No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
—Socrates

Now I am a bookish sort of fellow, but I tell you that I have a dream—to return to a land where I may sprint and dance over sunny green fields without fear of snide laughter, cell phone cameras, and proffered fingers; that I may leap up the branches of the greatest oaks, pines, and birches, barefoot, without a soul in the world to question my sanity, without the sound of a single engine roaring in the distance; that I may spend my mornings walking through the forests, listening to the quiet, awesome power of the natural world, the irrepressible force of life.

Three. That hauling one’s far-too-skinny wife over one’s shoulders, and then sprinting toward the goal while she laughs there, is pleasant; we will have to join Maine’s Wife Carrying Championship should we make the foolish decision to try our fortunes there.

So much fog the drivers can scarcely see the traffic lights switching from red to yellow to green again. Blasting horns, the gigantic engines of tractor trailers switching gears, speeding up to the top, stopping, speeding up again more slowly but with more power this time. Clacking over the segments in the road. Pouring through fog thick as water, fog mixing with car exhaust, fog seeping through the windows, whirling through clouds of blue cigarette smoke, pulsing through bare webs of tree branches, the stacks of grass curled up into bucolic rolls out in the harvested rice fields, with stains of thick damp blossoming on all the gaudy fliers choking the streets and alleys.

No foot traffic yet. Students all gone for vacation, the crosswalk out the window mere meaningless white stripes on the fog-grayed tar. At this intersection the bridge to the hospital and the university floats in the bath of fog, vanishing into the invisible river, where, unusually, not a single white heron can be seen banking, not one duck waddling along the thin ice.

In our apartment the baby splits the dim regular morning roar with a shriek, regular as a cockcrow, to let the world know that he is awake, and my time is up, so I’ve got to stop this poor imitation of the opening of Bleak House.

Then we head outside, pile into a taxi, and drop the baby off at daycare. The driver always turns into a truefalse cul-de-sac which looks as if it leads onto the highway, even though it is blocked by several pointless boulders.

Speeding along alleys, never checking to see if anyone is coming around numerous blind corners, only slowing down slightly, never stopping to look carefully, and sometimes being chased by wailing ambulances which no one on the road ever acknowledges, we at last come to the apartment complex, and sprint inside, just barely on time. It is 9. Both A. and I teach English to five rambunctious but talented Korean children for three straight hours; permanent hearing loss is the cost, but we’ve earned a fat wad of cash in the delectable process of slowly going deaf. Activities are focused on getting all of them talking, all the time; they only participate if there is a chance that they can shame their opponents in simplistic games, but it’s actually a lot of fun, and all of them are good students. The two girls speak and write with far more poise, but absolutely no creativity; the boys are creative, interesting, amusing (one has nicknamed A. Devilica, if you need a hint about her real English name), but wholly unscrupulous! One has an actual interest that ranges beyond sports, video games, and Korean comedy show: he is fascinated with herpetology. Another wants to be a dentist because this is practical. Korean children either want to be something practical, or veterinarians; no astronauts, no train conductors, no writers, actors, directors, clowns, pilots, have I ever encountered here.

After this “camp” we somehow lose an hour in getting home, even though it takes about ten minutes to get a taxi and ride it back to the apartment. Lunch. Waste time on the internet. Read a little, write a little. Five o’clock comes, and I’m out on a walk to pick up the boy. This is pleasant. It takes approximately one-and-a-third songs to get to daycare. Once I arrive I am greeted by the frizzled ajummas who are receiving less than five dollars an hour (total) to care for our son, though if the fair price is about ten times that amount. He is happy to see me. And I, him. We walk back together alternately laughing and crying. I hold him in a giant pink blanket of sorts, which threatens my masculinity (a redoubtable fortress), because pink is, speaking purely objectively, a woman’s color.

At 5:30 A. says hello to H., our son, for several minutes, and then leaves to teach for over three hours. I care for the boy alone. We play with all kinds of objects, walk around (I hold his hands and he improves noticeably every single day), examine everything, watch a trailer for a documentary about Ayn Rand which appears to suggest that all of her supporters possess a uniquely unattractive cretinousity (H. concurs with my assessment; “Didn’t Nietzsche say the same thing, and wasn’t he a much better writer, to boot?” he asks), watch a few clips from Lagaan (fiercely admiring one man’s massive beard), all while keeping the computer out of the boy’s reach, as he will try to smash it as hard as he can whenever it comes within range. Three hours somehow pass. H. may sleep for a mere five minutes, or for two of these hours. I feed him a banana, which really frustrates him because he just wants to play with it. He yells at me constantly as I spoon banana mush into his mouth, struggling to get a fresh spoonful as quickly as possible while also fearing that he will start choking, which never happens, for the boy’s gullet is positively Gogolian, and innumerable cherry cobblers will surely disappear down his chomping maw as soon as he is old enough to consume them.

The mess he makes with a kiwi is extraordinary. Our students’ diaries are slushed over with seedy green kiwi flesh. His yelling reaches its apex of fury. I am close to screaming at him. But, for once, reason gets the best of passion. I remind myself that screaming will only make things worse. And so we play and play until A. comes home. She eats dinner. It is 10PM. I get ready for bed, go to bed, read for maybe five minutes, and pass out, somewhat content with the knowledge that the next day will be almost exactly the same.

Ecce Homo---the shirt says Batman on the front and Blackman on the back.

The baby just fell asleep after drinking an entire bottle of goatmilk straight—one shot, 원샷, as the Koreans say, referring to when an ajoshi downs a glass of soju victory gin in a single audible gulp, at any of the thousands of company dinners he will have to attend over the course of his lifetime of paid enslavement to his employers. Both my wife and I are happy that our son will be able to participate in this equitable system after sacrificing every second of his entire youth to attaining a perfect score on the Korean college entrance exam.

But most of you are reading this because you want to know about the baby, since only a handful of you ever come here when I don’t write about him (while I get a deluge of hits every time I do).

He is just over seven months old, but he has been walking, with our assistance, for about five months now, and can stand on his own for perhaps half a second, and frequently leans on other objects in order to support himself—especially the porthole of the washing machine. This is his favorite object in the entire apartment, second only to the vacuum cleaner, which he loves and fears like an especially mercurial aunt.

Left to his own devices the boy will force me to support him as he walks into our bedroom to confront this vacuum cleaner, which he will then embrace, until I turn it on, at which point he will start with fear, only to embrace it again. The pattern will repeat itself for five or ten minutes, until he yells at me to take him away; during this time I am alternately zoning out while also wondering what this vacuum cleaner surrogate parentage is doing to his psychology.

All the same time, he will probably never learn to crawl, not even as an adult, as he screams at us the moment we put him down on his belly, and despises the act of lying down in much the same way as we despise the act of getting up. Yesterday I was able to trick him into slithering about on his stomach after I left a whole pile of (carefully capped and examined) markers on the floor for him to chase after, but still, I think he will find it difficult to shimmy about on his chest on the battlefields of the future—he will have to charge into enemy fire head on, while standing up, and I doubt he will ever attain any rank higher than Cannon Fodder.

In some ways it seems so difficult to describe his character in comparison to other babies—you must entertain him for two or three hours, during which time he will hurl mountains of abuse at you, until at last he collapses from exhaustion, waking again usually less than an hour later—and yet all the same he seems so unique to us, and when you put him next to another baby of the same age the difference in character is striking.

The boy is aggressive, and demands constant attention, and will scream until his lungs bleed if he doesn’t get it. He is insatiably curious about everything, and will yell at you if you don’t allow him to examine every single object before him, usually by placing it inside his mouth before clapping it together in his hands. Eventually he will drop it or throw it away in disgust. New objects can excite him for thirty minutes, old ones will usually bore him in as many seconds. He adores people, especially because they always seem to adore him, wherever he goes, and will invariably charm everyone around him with smiles and laughter, although the moment he’s left alone with his parents he will resume his steady stream of reckless abuse—reckless because both of us have finally gotten used to it and now have the ability to ignore it for whole minutes at a time. He has been crying wolf for seven straight months, almost nonstop, and the entire village has packed up and left.

He spends forty hours a week at daycare, and the strain shows on the faces of the unfortunate women who have to babysit him; this same strain shows over the weekends at our apartment invariably has my wife and I nearly tearing each other’s eyeballs out. Others will certainly (silently) criticize us for not taking care of him ourselves around the clock forever, but we’re both working, and the boy himself appears to enjoy his time there, and it may even be said that being in the company of small children has accelerated his own development. Only children left on their own have no one to compete against, and sometimes get kind of lazy when it comes to attaining those all-important milestones, but our son seems to be progressing at a fairly normal pace.

And indeed, the most extraordinary thing about him is how normal he is.

Ilya Repin's depiction of Gogol burning the manuscript to the sequel of Dead Souls, which was, apparently, not very good.

Every couple of weeks I find myself reading a book or a website which convinces me that everything I do is completely stupid and pointless. The last such treasure I stumbled across was Stuff White People Like, in which I learned that I was a hipster—don’t waste your breath trying to convince me otherwise—focusing on the little things I did and thought which made me completely superior to all other forms of animate and inanimate matter. I burned through that sucker in a couple of hours, thirsting for page after page of revelation, staring into the author’s somewhat-less-than-stunning-and-ultimately-predictable prose as though into a mirror. Portlandia, my current favorite show, is a warmer and more amusing take on the same rough question—why is it necessary for me to distinguish myself from the rest of humanity?

I just decided to discard this entire post, and then tried to edit my book, and concluded that the first sentence I looked at was worthless, though I could not say why, and then I resurrected these words from the trash, wrote this paragraph, and concluded once again that I should just give up, because there is absolutely no point: what am I supposed to do when an intelligent person reads this and concludes that I am an idiot, and says so?

It might be nice if I could run through a gauntlet of such people: two rows of everyone whom we all consider to be brilliant, every last godlike artist, scientist, and philosopher, castigating us for our inadequacies. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so afraid of critiques; I’d be able to get things done without allowing these petty moods to get the best of me.

But it’s been some time since someone has come out and said that I’m a moron. The last was a ridiculous, rambling attack on a job ad I posted a few months ago on koreabridge, which I didn’t really care about because, after all, I don’t take teaching nearly as seriously as writing. Nonetheless, even the potential for an attack on my literary abilities frightens me into the defensive posture of already agreeing that I suck, long before anyone else has said so.

As I write these words I should stress that I’m not looking for any affirmation from my readers so much as a simple exploration of the bizarre thoughts running through my head at this very moment.

At the same time as I conclude, once and for all, that it would have been better if I had never existed at all, I am seeking my rehabilitation, similar in its ultimate pointlessness to the one that Gogol desired for Chichikov, who was supposed to become something resembling A Good Person in the uninteresting sequel to Dead Souls. For all its faults I started reading Bertrand Russell’s A History Of Western Philosophy for the thirtieth time (skipping ahead to Thales, whose conclusion that everything is water (called a scientific hypothesis by Russell, who reminds us that most things are made of hydrogen) is oddly reminiscent of an enigmatic line in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, in which a dying relative’s last words are, you guessed it, “Aha, I see now, everything is water”, or something to that effect (at times these hidden connections (evidence for the muse, that every book has really just been written by one person, or dictated to us by psychic aliens) are all I’ve got going for me)) so as to convince myself that some things actually are good, that everything I do is not stupid, and that I should stop wasting my time debating whether I am up to the task of adding words to the universe and just shut up and do it.

But I cannot watch a stupid video, even a hilariously stupid video, without concluding that I am likewise stupid—and not even hilariously so.

This all comes back to the question of individuality. I am worthless. I am worthwhile. What is this I, really?—right now one of my friends is sticking out her tongue, rolling her eyes back, and pumping her fist as if to mimic the act of masturbation—but I is, first and foremost, the letter I use to start off most of my self-centered sentences. Two nights ago I went to my second Jaesa, or Korean Ancestor Worship Ceremony, translated far more coolly by google to “Sacrifice”, where we honored the memory of my wife’s grandmother, who was apparently a pleasant human being born into an age in which no one ever smiled while being photographed.

This got me thinking about atavism, a word I had been searching for in the back of my mind for a few days—that very old question of how much of who we are is really due to our ancestry? What agency do human beings really possess? Are we all really just genes? Yes! Absolutely! The answer is yes!

People say my son is handsome, and conclude that this can only be a result of the sexual union between myself and my wife, but really he is indebted to our parents for his handsomeness, and to their ancestors, and to all of the good genes that won out over the bad ones, thus eventually producing an aesthetically-pleasing human being.

I had nothing to do with his beauty, because I am just a single step in human evolution, and the idea that I could have had anything to do with how well our son turned out is merely a reflection of the illusion of personality and individuality, which I believe now to be an evolutionary safeguard against suicide. Human beings are smart enough to understand that the universe is meaningless, that there is no reason existence is better than nonexistence—and without this belief in the importance of the self, and its preservation, I think most of us wouldn’t bother with the struggle to be, because the eternal sleep of nonbeing is far easier.

So, truistically, obviously, in a manner befitting wide-eyed hippies and yogis both, I can declare here and now that it doesn’t matter whether you think I’m an idiot, because you don’t exist, and I don’t exist, either. The key to triumph is solipsism.

If I could realize this on a deeper level, and not just an intellectual one, I might be able to stop blogging and get to work—I have just under two hours before I have to go pick up my son from daycare.

Low maintenance kids have mothers, aunts, and perhaps even fathers, to take care of them; high maintenance kids have little beyond their teachers at school.

We can also guess how their families live by their clothes, as well: a student who changes his or her wardrobe more than once a week has parents who are not always busy. Back when I worked in Sasang as a public school teacher, or Entertainment Monkey, I noticed that about three-quarters of the students never appeared to change or wash their clothes, stains being the gifts that kept on giving.

But in knocking up a Korean woman, getting hitched to her, and acquiring a more useful visa, the F-2, a rough equivalent of the green card which allows me to seek as much employment as I like, I gained the opportunity to explore the country beyond the typical confines of the classroom, the street, the subway. I found myself inside an office tower and any number of wealthy apartments, and over the months as I’ve passed through home after home I’ve discovered a number of patterns which may help to answer the question of just what the hell is going on inside people’s living spaces?

Generalities

The first, and most obvious thing, is that almost every rich family fits their living room with an expensive-looking analog clock, usually with Konglish or even Kongcais or Kongtaliano plastered to the face in light pink or light blue Italics. This clock rarely hangs on the wall by itself but always sort of veers off from the side of a wall or a giant glass bureau (containing dusty, amber bottles of fancy-looking foreign liquors which have never been touched) on two very small metal pieces, or little arching girders. I don’t know what to call them. Most importantly, the clock is always set five or ten minutes fast, a fact which ensures that I never quite know what time it is unless I check my phone—furtively and under the table, lest my students discover sure proof of my boredom, the fact that I’m taking them for granted even as their parents are paying me astronomical sums of money.

The apartments are almost always completely unfurnished save for a giant leather couch and a giant flatscreen television mounted to the wall, in addition to bookshelves stocked with hundreds, yes, hundreds of textbooks and comic books. I cannot remember seeing an actual novel or a work of hard nonfiction anywhere.

Everything is plain, bare, blank, and people live without the joy of carpets because they believe that such examples of western decadence are far too difficult to clean, though there is sure to be a Korean map of oolee nala (our country) which includes North Korea and perhaps even a hint of the millions of Joseon-jok Koreans living up in Northern China. There may be one or two nice traditional paintings. Buddhist families will probably have a theme calendar hanging around (featuring bald children in monk’s robes, a phenomenon commonplace in Southeast Asia but nearly nonexistent in Korea) while Christian families won’t have anything at all, not even one measly crucifix, not one tortured Christ, because (I believe) most of them are Protestants, who find religious art pharisaical, so far as I know.

There will always be expensive-looking family portraits. Every time. Now you know why there are so many photo studios around; a family is incomplete without its poorly-shot, poorly-composed, uncomfortable and annoyed family portrait, including plenty of gloss, skin-whitening tones, and all blemishes photoshopped into nonexistence. The family gets extra points if dressed in uncomfortable, difficult, and gaudily-colored hanbok, which surely meant that everyone involved was yelling at everyone else for an hour or two up until the very moment the picture was taken.

The view out the windows, if there are windows, is always of other apartments.

The most amazing things they possess are dishwashers and driers, two very basic appliances that I have gone without for a stunning two-and-a-half years, wailing and crying myself to sleep every night specifically because of the terrible absence of such amazing conveniences.

Specifics

But I’ve encountered one wealthy family which has attempted to go beyond the typical spartan Korean lifestyles. As you walk into the first family’s apartment you are greeted by an enormous sort of stainglass painting of Napoleon raising his pointer finger up to the sky on a rearing horse, though you might not notice it because the lights are off. Walking through their apartment, and judging everything in sight, you encounter numerous similar instances of gaudy bourgeois nouveaux-riche materialism, wherein the mother (who else but the mother?) ran around on one or two internet shopping sprees and bought up everything she could find that stank of money, prestige, and status. Flashy rocks are prevalent in addition to gold, silver, brass, all of which is worked into swans and horses—poorly, in a way that will have future archeologists shaking their heads and remarking that such ancient examples of philistinism are more valuable melted down, too mediocre even for a kitsch museum.

The lights are always off here, and the heating is rarely on, because they’ve already broken the bank in getting the place and they can’t stretch their credit cards any further to pay for such luxuries as heat and light. The lights will also always be harsh and fluorescent because Koreans do not appear to be aware of the existence of lights that are not physically painful to live with.

Behavior

Most of the kids and most of the people I’ve encountered appear to be relatively happy despite leading lives that would strike many Americans as being famished of—what else can I call it?—fun. Children study, parents work, and neither party ever stops. I once saw the mysteriously gigantic father of a pair of wonderful twins stagger in from what must have been a very long day, wave at me and smile with a face that looked half-mummified, and then vanish into his dark bedroom. He runs a taekwondo hagwon. I was with my own father at the time (visiting from America), and the exhausted father didn’t appear to care that there was a new strange foreigner sitting in his living room. But I think, except for him, I haven’t met any other fathers; it’s the mothers who take care of kids here, and every last one of them looks strained and overworked; the whitening cream with which they’ve been slathering their faces for decade after decade also leaves them prematurely gaunt. The children rob them of their beauty.

One of them had been taking care of her baby son for almost two years nearly completely by herself, and it showed; she was in her early thirties, but she could have passed for twice that age, living in a packed neighborhood that is utterly destitute of open space, or even sidewalks. Last time I was at her place I heard her screaming at her son for twenty minutes, suggesting that the woman could really use a week on the beach—away from her toddler, away from the cesspool that is western Busan. Sometimes I see her young husband helping her out, but she’s always with the baby, and her man never seems to take over completely by himself. If you walk about the more liberal eastern areas of the city you may see some men taking care of young children, but you will almost never see them doing so by themselves.

All of the families I work for are rich, and all of them seem to work constantly, but I misjudged one family when I assumed their life was completely meaningless, passing by in an uninterrupted blur of classrooms and offices. In this family’s case, the father actually lives and works in Seoul, and comes back to visit his wife and kids on the weekends; these kids study, read comic books of amazingly dull quality, play on their cellphones, and go to church on Sundays. So I thought they didn’t have much going for them aside from their ignorance of the fact that kids in America lead much easier lives (though one girl, our best and brightest student, from the womb of the Napoleonic mother, told me she wanted to go to America so she wouldn’t have to study all the time).

But in the last three months this family has traveled to Thailand, Cambodia, and I think even Indonesia, feats which are not at all unimpressive, considering the fact that they hauled their kids along with them for the ride and voyaged out of the country with only the barest understanding of English. Other families have traveled all over the place. The Bonapartes are currently in the Philippines to pick up the younger daughter, who has been studying there for six months. The son of a woman who owns a brand name clothing store has been to like twenty goddamn countries, and he’s still in elementary school. It’s kind of amazing, and this level of travel, this level of exposure to strange foreign cultures, must be exceedingly rare for most children on Earth; I didn’t leave North America until I was in college. I think most of the English teachers assume, quite fairly, that Koreans know almost nothing about the outside world, but even in the poorest public schools and hagwons there are a few rich ones lurking about—probably quietly—who have visited more countries than even the most adventurous among us.

There are at least two different kinds of ands in Korean—I say at least because with this language the rabbit hole is truly infinite—one and for verbs, hago, and one for nouns, gwa. An incredibly expensive cafe just five minutes away from us (where they have the nerve to charge eight dollars for a cup of exceedingly normal coffee) is called Schumann gwa Clara; and a very common word you’ll run into in Korean sentences is mok-go, meaning ate-and, because mok is the verb stem of mokda, eat, while da is just a basic form of is, which you have to change to go, and, if you want to take a trip down conjunction junction.

Now I see I’m losing you with all this grammar. Baby sign language is the easiest language to learn of all, because there’s no grammar, just vocabulary.

Even though I’ve written this enormous post on Korean, both my wife and father in law consider me to be 하급, ha-gup, an underling, or low-class, Korean student.

I used to think that Asian languages didn’t have any articles because it seemed like I had never met an Asian who had mastered the difference between a and the, but Korean does have articles, which you use all the time (or only sometimes), and, again, there are at least three of them. You use one article for objects (는, neun) and one article for subjects (를, leul). I eat apples. In Korean, I(the1) apples(the2) eat—you’ve also got to switch your syntax around from English’s subject verb object (I eat apples) to Korean’s subject object verb (I apples eat). And as Saruman says, this is just the beginning!

These first two articles are the easy ones. The third, 가, ga, is absolutely impossible, and I honestly have only the barest understanding of how it functions; I’m sure any advanced speakers will correct my explanation here if they run across this blog. Supposedly ga’s purpose is to emphasize the most important part of a sentence. I know that I hear it most in the word chay-ga, or nay-ga, both of which apparently mean my—the first is a polite conjugation, the second is more intimate. But there are several other words which also mean my, and I basically use them all at random, sometimes correctly, sometimes not, which is one of many reasons I’m so nervous about speaking to other people—if you don’t strike the correct note of politeness, you risk alienating them.

Speaking very generally, I think Koreans are either incredibly polite and subservient or unbearably rude and boorish. A waitress is all smiles at work and all scowls on the subway; the same child will shove his fingers up your anus in the classroom and then, later, outside of school, when he runs into you on the sidewalk, smile and laugh with you as if anal rape had not taken place several hours before. People who are younger than you will never disagree with you, or question you; people who are older will constantly give you arbitrary commands, and anything except blind obedience will infuriate them. I wince at these extremist generalizations and I know there are many exceptions, particularly among westernized Koreans, as well as my family.

These cultural mores are reflected in, or perhaps even come from, the language, and although it would seem like you are either the master or the servant in Korea, with no gray areas in between, there are actually all kinds of variations on these two unchanging themes in the language.

I believe I know of one verb conjugation specifically used in the case of old people gently admonishing young children—I think it’s just verb stem + ha-gay. For a teacher to do the same thing, you would take your verb stem, such as gong-boo (study), and tack on a hay-bo-say-yo to the end, in order to politely suggest that a student study. The first conjugation I ever heard was the infamous im-nee-da ending (im-nay-da in North Korean), which appears to be used almost entirely in official contexts—news reporters and anchors, automatic machines, announcements on subways and trains, and women in short skirts dancing out in front of electronics stores and supermarkets. In English I think you would throw the magic word onto the end of most of your sentences in order to express roughly the same feeling, maybe with a would or a could mixed in for good measure.

When I asked my wife to list all the different levels of politeness for me, she said there were too many to count; in the days of the bone rank system there was a different verb conjugation for every different kind of noble and official you could ask for. Think of your highness, my lord, my liege, in English.

As for talking to themselves, or to their friends, Koreans use the intimate banmal, or half-speech, a word most foreigners here probably know, since most foreigners work with children, and most children seem to look down upon anyone who has not mastered their language—which means that they talk down to you. Korean can occasionally sound good, or even pretty, when more polite levels are employed, but in banmal the language is reduced to harsh, guttural Orcish, and this is unfortunately the most common way of speaking, since people usually speak to their friends if they speak at all. Mokda, eat, can be a euphonious mogo ha-say-yo (please eat!), or a very rough gruff mogo-la (eat it!). The tones usually shift along with the conjugation, as well. You’re not really supposed to speak this way to strangers but older men will sometimes use banmal to order things from waitresses if they speak, or use a verb, at all; for them, a grunt and a finger are enough to get the point across.

Speaking of banmal, there’s another word I ran into just two days ago, in the most unlikely place—Indiana Jones 4, also known as Indiana Jones Meh, wherein a scholar of some sort goes crazy and writes the word “return” in all kinds of different languages on his prison cell walls. The only word I recognized was Korean, 반환, ban-hwan, although I had to pause the movie to look it up; the fact that a scholar could write this word from memory in so many different languages is just as improbable and superhuman as translating an ancient language very quickly, and basically on sight, which happens in this movie as well as others; think of how many times people can read ancient Egyptian like it’s the Queen’s English in The Mummy.

Anyway, this Korean word is, like at least seventy or perhaps even eighty or ninety percent of Korean, mispronounced Chinese. You could summarize the Korean language by calling it Chinese, without the tones, and with such an inscrutable grammatical framework that no one can figure out where it comes from. I used to think that Chinese occupied roughly the same register as Latin and Greek does in English—a word like return is obviously a lot fancier than go back, because the Romans used it, and the Romans are, like, way up there—but actually even the most basic Korean words, like man, woman, hand, dog, house, car, are all derived from Chinese, to such an extent that it can actually be fairly difficult to find Korean words that are not Chinese. Salang, love; Nala, country or shore; sadali, ladder; sheebal, fuck.

But in some ways I think Chinese might be easier to understand because there are different tones you use to distinguish different words. In Chinese the syllable ma has five different meanings (at least!), and you can tell them apart by listening for the tone, but Korean is not a tonal language, and so the only way can to tell the different Chinese syllables apart is by context and memorization. In Chinese, the five ma’s sound noticeably different; in Korean, they all sound the same. This only adds to the difficulty of learning the vocabulary. Koreans also don’t really use Chinese to write anymore, since the Japanese forced them to use their own homegrown alphabet a century ago, and as a result newspapers and other publications sometimes have to employ the occasional Chinese character to help confused readers when context isn’t enough. Shee, 시, for instance, can mean poetry (詩, Shī) or city (市, Shì), in addition to god knows what else, and I remember that at my university, above one of many urinals, there’s a Robert Frost quote translated into Korean, and the quote says something like, poetry is the way to joy. Whoever chose to translate the quote also chose to employ the Chinese character to make sure that readers understand that Lo-butt-uh Puh-los-tuh is a poet rather than just some city slicker.

I started this post by talking about two different kinds of ands because I thought that would really freak out anyone who was used to learning French or Spanish—how could it even be possible for a language to have more than one and?—but because the syntax in Korean is so ungodly and out-of-control, you have to really fool around a lot and ratchet the level of insanity up a few notches when you decide to use a sentence with more than one verb. This vexed me a year ago when I started taking the language a little more seriously and it still vexes me now and there’s absolutely no way I can explain it beyond saying that everything is backwards and that if you want to read a complex sentence you have to start at the beginning and the end—at the same time—and then work your way toward the middle. It’s almost more like solving some kind of bizarre equation, and if you want to have any chance of speaking correctly you’ve really got to fit the different pieces together in your head before you open your mouth.

There’s a conjugation you use when you’re coming to the end of a sentence clause with the intention of continuing further (verb stem + day, 데), and then another conjugation for when you’re stating a fact that you’re going to explain later (verb stem + guh-dun, 거든). There’s at least three different whens (onjay, 언제; verb stem + sultay which I cannot spell in Korean; and then day, 때, which I have probably misspelled), and all of them have different grammatical functions.

In short, Korean is a bitch.

Most of the books for my son were at or above my level of Korean—a volume on different kinds of cars featured mispronounced English (dumpuh tuhluck) mixed in with mispronounced Chinese (주유차). Another was all about this frog who didn’t have a belly button. The frog wanders around looking for friends, to different animals, and even people, asking them where his belly button is, and each person or animal has a belly button, and so the frog gets pretty distraught, until eventually he finds a bunch of other frogs without belly buttons and they all become friends.

Now let’s put on our armchair anthropologist hat and use this book to extrapolate all the information we need to make sweeping generalizations about Korean society. Speaking as an American, which means that I believe American culture is neutral, even though it isn’t, I have encountered several Koreans over the course of my time here who claimed it was impossible for two people to be friends unless they happened to be the same age. Otherwise the relationship is skewed, and the older person sounds absurd if he speaks intimately to the younger, and the younger sounds disrespectful if he speaks intimately to the older. Language and culture prevent them from attaining intimacy.

At the same time the society here strikes the American as being fairly cliquish. Although there is some crossover, ajoshis and ajummas (old men and women, i.e., past the age of thirty) stick together if they stick with anyone at all, as do the suits, the drunks, the high school students, the college students, the grandparents (past sixty), even married couples. Only the strangest Korean race traitors hang out with foreigners, and then just white foreigners, not Southeast Asians; regardless of this fact, anyone who steps out of line and forsakes Korean waygookinphobia can expect to be glared at everywhere as a result; like the homeless, they become social outcasts. Koreans appear to believe that they can only make friends with people who are their own type.

Most Americans are pretty much the same, I think, but there is marginally more fluidity, and the ideal at least is to embrace differences—a children’s book in America written along the same premises as the frog book would have each animal complaining about some sort of flaw, and then they would all get together to help each other out and live happily ever after, or something (think the Wizard of Oz, one of many odd movies that never could have been made here, a country that appears to possess very little in the way of fantasy or science fiction (compare Korea with Japan!—my theory is that a culture won’t have science fiction without colonial guilt)).

Still, I don’t think there’s any harm in reading this book to my son, because he’s never going to fit in in this country anyway (one reason we, or at least I, plan to get the hell out, someday), and I suspect he’ll draw his own conclusions about how to deal with being a fairly new and fairly rare sort of person, and that most of his friends will either be open-minded or the product of two starkly different parents.