Looking Back

A year ago today I was in Korea. It is strange for me to think about it. Friends have told me they just had the coldest day in Korea in fifty-five years. This makes me think of my grandfather, the cold Korean winter. He was shipped off to Korea to serve in the war just before the cease-fire. When I hear him talk about Korea, the place he describes is entirely alien to me. I think about those army tents with their wood burning stoves. I think about the Koreans coming home from the traditional markets, taking their wet shoes off in the doorways of a chibi, a Korean traditional home. I think about the soldiers standing in the cold, young men smoking cigarettes, staring out at the mountains, staring with a mutual bewilderment into the eyes of the locals, wondering about their wives and their family on the other side of the planet, wondering about the lives and families so inaccessible, bustling about the army base. My grandfather talks about the young Korean boys who would do anything for a dollar. Now, two dollar bills are something banks give out for free. Businesses display them in frames by the front door, the American currency acting as some strange marker of beginnings, somehow now ubiquitous. Sixty years ago, the future was so uncertain. Outside of their vast arsenal, Koreans were living life as they had for hundreds of years. Very little Western influence touched the country, until the Americans came and brought hotdogs and cola, phones and computers, movies and English books. Even the lines that divided their country, the political lines, were imposed on them by the outside world. Now, Seoul seems to stretch down the whole peninsula. Everything seems plastic. The whole country is constantly renewed, faster, brighter, bigger, higher. People call dwarfing, cookie-cutter arrangements of highrises "the country," as if in Korea there were only tall buildings and wilderness, and anything but a street inundated with people was a farm. Even the farming takes place in between twenty-story buildings. The woman on the edge of my block farmed an empty lot in my first spring. She grew sweet potatoes, peppers, garlic. She raked the piles of garbage deposited over the winter into a pile, separated the plastic and the electronics from the things she could burn and set a fire before the thaw.