From Austin to Huksan-do to Fukuoka

In 1995, I made a three-week trip to Korea and Japan. I had lived in Japan from 1989 to 1992, and I wanted to make a return visit. My friend Dwight was going to meet me in Tokyo, and together we were going to travel for a couple of weeks. But I had real reasons for choosing Korea and Japan this time, both related to negative attitudes I had been developing.

I was working toward my PhD at the University of Texas, and I had had one of the worst semesters of my life. First, my major was teaching Japanese as a second language, but I was beginning to hate Japanese. I hated my major professor, as I believed she was working me to death for her benefit and not mine. Also, a Japanese girl who had been my student in Japan, had moved to Texas in spite of my declarations that I wasn’t in love with her—something I told her even in Japan. Still, she made it her life’s goal to get me to marry her, and her obsession with being around me was tiresome.

I had other Japanese friends, certainly those I was teaching with, but their kindness and friendship didn’t make up for the pain I was feeling from these two women, and I started to unreasonably blame all Japanese, the language and its people, for the hatred I was developing for my major. I resented them all because failure is almost certainly the result when one grows tired of one’s doctoral topic. It was very important that I maintain a love for my study, and Japanese people were getting in my way. Additionally, as a studier of multiculturalism, I hated the idea of hating a group of people, particularly the ones I was studying.

In the meantime, I had returned to teaching English at an intensive English program on campus. Austin is a popular destination for Koreans, as it turns out. If one goes to Seoul and asks people to name three cities in the US, the first three are often New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. One reason is because several principal company presidents received their degrees from the University of Texas. As a result, many of the employees and followers of these companies also attempt to study there. And they do! The number of Koreans studying at the University of Texas is staggering. Additionally, the Korean War and the maintenance of US military troops in Korea has brought many Koreans to the US Air Force base in Killeen, Texas, just 50 miles north of Austin. There are so many Korean people in Killeen that there are actually restaurants and grocery stores in Killeen that do not have English menus or signs.

Well, I had lived in Asia, and I had traveled through it extensively. I had been to Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, but I had never been to Korea. Therefore, when I had students in my intensive English classes from Asia, I could usually refer to where they were from, often because I had either been there or close to there. But I couldn’t do that for the Koreans. I hadn’t visited their country yet, and I always felt bad because I felt I was doing second best by saying, “Oh, I would just love to go there some day,” when it was clear that I had already made efforts to visit the other East Asian countries our students were from. So, I thought it would be nice to say that I had been to Korea and that I enjoyed myself there.

Finally, while I had escaped my Japanese professor somewhat by quitting my Japanese teaching, I was faced with an American boss who was just as nasty. She was always having us doing extra work beyond the necessities of our job. She had me and another graduate student present her with extra meetings because she thought we taught writing courses poorly. When we presented her with our syllabi and lesson plans, she thought they were fine, but she persisted in our demonstrating our teaching to her, much to our consternation. We received high marks from the students for our teaching, and yet she persisted, overtly stating that she thought we were bad teachers and were in need of refinement. We felt we were being punished because we were studying how to teach writing in graduate school, and we spent many hours together on the phone in commiseration.

One night, while doing a self exam on my body, I found a lump on my testicle. The next morning, at 7:30, as I woke up, I slipped on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of sandals, and drove as quickly as I could to the doctor’s office. No underwear, no shower, not even a comb through my hair! I went in unannounced and explained to the nurse that I found a lump. She had the doctor see me immediately, and he called me in straight away. He agreed that there was indeed a lump and it needed to be examined as soon as possible. The nurses then set up an appointment with me. I knew it was serious because they didn’t even ask me what my schedule was. They just called the hospital and set up the time. It would be Friday morning at 10:00, a time when I taught. I didn’t even ask them if I could switch to another time because I knew they wanted to get me in as early as they could. So I didn’t negotiate. Instead, I drove to the office to tell my boss that I needed an emergency ultrasound checkup.

It was Tuesday, and I raced to the office because I knew I had to make these arrangements as soon as I could. I ran up the stairs, and all sweaty, I knocked on my boss’s door and gasping for air said, “I’m sorry to interrupt but I’ve got a big problem. I have to have an emergency ultrasound done on Friday at 10:00, and I need to get a substitute.

Eric, you can’t walk into this office looking like this.

What?

You are not dressed professionally, and you just cannot be in this office like this.

Are you telling me you care more about how I look than my well being?

You can’t be in the office looking like this.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t care!” I shouted. “I don’t care! I come into your office as fast as I can from the doctor’s office to tell you that I have an appointment to figure out whether I have cancer or not, and you worry about how I’m dressed?”

I stormed out of the office. My friend and coworker Mary Lou followed me out of the office and followed me downstairs. She said, “Stop, Eric! Eric!” I turned around. I was crying. I was flustered.

“What the hell happened in there?’

I told her the story. I said, “I can’t believe her. Her priorities are just so fucked up.

They are fucked up, but let’s not talk about her. Let’s talk about you.”

I hugged Mary Lou at that moment because she was the first person I’d seen that day that cared more about me than anything else. She made it easy for me to forget about my boss, at least for a little while. She said she would teach my class and for me not to worry.

As it turned out, the ultrasound came out negative, and I had only a slight infection that was curable inside a week with antibiotics. Still, I had the weight of my boss’s constant meetings and the dramatic conversation to hang over me for the rest of my life. In dealing with my major and my job at the intensive English program, I just wanted to get away. In fact, Korea became even more appealing for one additional reason. If I went there, I wouldn’t be able to speak Korean, and few people, especially if I went outside of Seoul, would even be able to speak to me. That type of isolation sounded like luxury to me.

I chose to go to Jeju Island, a regular honeymooner’s resort island in the far south of Korea. When I arrived in Seoul that first night, I found accommodation at the YMCA. As I mentioned, my goal was to get out of Seoul as soon as I could, so I went to the train station and hopped on the first train to the southern port city of Mogpo. From Mogpo the next day, I would be able to go to Jeju Island.

While I was on the train, I spent half the time looking out the window and the other half studying a Korean language book a friend in Austin had given me. I was studying the Hangul alphabet, and I was trying to learn a few words that could help me get around. As I was studying, I noticed a woman in the aisle of the train, pacing back and forth and talking to her baby. The baby was a new baby, maybe not even a month old. The mother was having a lovely time talking to that baby. She spoke to it and sang to it. She embraced it, held its head in her hands, and kissed it softly several times. I noticed that as she spoke to the baby, the baby’s deep brown eyes were fixed on its mother. The baby was mesmerized by its mother. As the mother continued to chat and sing to the baby, I realized something. I realized that that baby, for all its existence of perhaps only a month, that that baby knew more Korean than I did. Oh, I learned some of the Hangul alphabet and was able to get on a train, but those were skills I learned in English, and they were essentially transferable. But when it came to Korean culture and language, that baby was miles ahead of me, and it would always be miles, if not light years, ahead of me in this respect.

In that instance, I think I came to understand why people, especially adults, don’t like learning a foreign language or going to a place where they don’t understand others and they can’t be understood. It entails their becoming a baby again. And I don’t think many adults like the idea of being a baby again, to be that dependent, to be enveloped by such a quantity of ambiguity, to be that helpless. And to learn a language well, especially when learning it in the country where that’s spoken, one must overcome this enormous obstacle to a point of comfort and even desire. Yes, to learn a new language well, one has to actually want to be inside that nebulous environment and then conquer it. For me, that’s the high of learning a language! However, I have a clear sense, having compared my own situation with that of that baby’s, that voluntarily placing oneself in that environment may not necessarily be desirable for most adults of the world.

I wasn’t entirely deplete of English, and as much as I said I wanted to escape communication, this was actually a good thing. I found a hotel in Mogpo, and I was able to find a nice room and information about the boat leaving for Jeju Island the next day. I asked several people, and I even tried my hand at asking them in Korean when the boat to Jeju Island would be leaving the next day. Each and every person told me that it would be leaving at 9:00 am. So I set my alarm for 7:30, had a Korean breakfast, and hopped in a taxi to take me to the boat terminal.

When I arrived at the boat terminal, I was told that the first boat to Jeju Island left at 3:30 that afternoon. 3:30? I didn’t want to wait until 3:30. I pulled back from the ticket window and sat on a park bench so I could think about what I wanted to do. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man carrying a book. I recognized that it was a guidebook that said “Korea” on it in Japanese. I thought, “Oh, he must be a Japanese tourist.” I watched him at the window, and he bought a ticket and started walking toward a boat. I followed him and said in Japanse, “Excuse me! I just noticed that you bought a ticket. It isn’t for Jeju Island, is it?

No, it’s for Hong-do.

Hong-do? What’s Hong-do?”

The man explained to me that it was a small island in the Yellow Sea, and he was going to spend five days there. Since I was speaking to him in Japanese, he asked me if I wanted to see his guidebook. I did. He pointed out to me that there was an island before Hong-do called Huksan-do that he was going to travel to first. I looked at the description of Huksan-do in his guidebook. It seemed far more isolated and quiet, and inexpensive for that matter, than the honeymooning resort type Jeju Island. I looked at him and said, “Look, you can say no if you’d like, and I’ll completely understand. I just met you, but would you mind if I came with you as far as Huksan-do?” I expected him to do the sucking sound and say, “Sore wa chotto . . .” That’s a little . . . from which I would gather that he’d prefer that I not. However, much to my surprise and delight, he said, “Ii yo!” That would be fine!

Then he explained that I had about two minutes to both buy the ticket and get on the boat he was about to embark. I ran to the ticket counter and said, “Huksan-do juseyo!” I paid the woman and ran back to the boat. The boat masters were just taking the ropes off the hooks and lifting the anchors, and I jumped on. When I jumped on, I realized that this was no passenger ship at all. I was suddenly surrounded by boxes of lettuce and oranges—hundreds of them. This was a fruit and vegetable cargo ship I had just bought a ticket for. The boat master who unhooked the rope then led me and the Japanese fellow to a room at the bottom of the boat. The ceiling was so low that neither one of us could stand up, and we crawled around on the burgundy colored formica floor like aardvarks looking for ants. There were windows, fortunately, that allowed for light. We were scheduled to be in this room for the next six hours as we sailed to Huksan-do.

I used my duffle bag as a pillow and took a nap, but of course the nap didn’t last for six hours. And of course, I didn’t want to sit in claustrophobia for a full six hours. My Japanese counterpart didn’t either. When I woke up, he was gone. I decided to go outside, have a walk around the boat, and see if I could find him. When I opened the door, the wind was blowing and it was raining slightly. The boat master was right outside the door and was carrying a box of oranges. He looked at me and yelled over the wind and the boat motor, “Hello!” and pointed to the door of the cropped room, motioning for me to get back inside. I laughed, wondering how he would feel if I pointed at some small confined place and shouted “Oboseyo!” I did go back in, but I watched out the door window until I saw the boat master had gone. Then I went for my walk, hoping to avoid Mr Hello at all cost.

I enjoyed the ride. Korea and the Yellow Sea passed by me in all its construction, rain, wind, and gray blue waters. The smoke and noise of the boat motor smelled like a combination of gasoline and seaweed. We made a few stops, each time collecting even more cabbage and more oranges, and I wondered if they might need our little room for extra storage. It got cold, so I did eventually go back to the room, and my Japanese friend was there.

We arrived in Huksan-do port where we were met immediately by a little woman in a navy blue jacket. The hood was tied around her head. As we got off the boat, she took my wrist and started leading me down a street. I was rather astonished that I let her do this, but the Japanese fellow was speaking to her, and she said the word nimbak, so I knew we were going to accommodation. We walked through a back alley, past a restaurant and a fruit stand specializing in strawberries to a small wooden building. She slid open the door and we walked over a dirt floor where there was a garbage can and a tank of water. Behind the tank was another sliding door pitched above a set of three stairs. She slid this door open and we saw our room. Again, we had the formica covered floor; this time it was pale yellow. The floor however was heated in the ondol architectural style famous in Korea. We needed the heated floor as it was indeed cold outside. There were several futon like cushions in the corner of the room, as well as several pillows filled with rice. We each took one, rolled it out on the ondol and stretched out. The woman returned to our room, slid open the doors, and gave us each a metal cup of water, saying a gravelly voice, “Mul.” And she dragged out the mul as if it were the last long note of a Gregorian chant. We each paid her about $10, and she grabbed my wrist again, looking me in the eye with a passionate sense of friendship that I had not seen since my grandmother gave me her last hug. I felt her wrinkled hands on my wrist, and I felt safe. It would be days before I would even think of my major professor or my boss again.

My Japanese cohort left the next morning for Hong-do, but I stayed on Huksan-do. I never learned his name, but he taught me how to order in a Korean restaurant. As a result, that afternoon, I went into the same restaurant we had entered the night before, and I tried my hand at reading the menu. As I sat on the floor I looked at the menu on the wall and started sounding out the names of the foods written on it. I hadn’t noticed that the waitress was behind me, ready with a pad and pencil in her hand to take my order. I sounded out the word, and I sounded like a kindergartner trying to learn to read: Biiii Biiiim Baaaaap. I sounded it out two or three times. On the fourth time, I smiled and said, “Bibimbap!” I was only saying the word out loud so I could hear myself pronounce it. However, the waitress shouted “bibimbap” back to me. I was startled by her voice and twisted around quickly in amazement. I saw her turn away and start toward the kitchen, most probably writing the word bibimbap on her tablet. Within a few minutes, I had all the small side dishes like kimchi all around me. Then the waitress brought me a bowl of rice, vegetables, hot sauce, and a raw egg, all ready for me to stir. I had bibimbap in front of me, and that was my lunch.

After lunch, I took a bus ride around Huksando—up and down mountainsides and to a beach and back to the port. I took a notebook and marked notes on what I saw. Back at the port, I walked past a large collection of dried fish. However, this fish looked like no dried fish I had ever seen before. These were the widest and flattest fish I had ever seen, and I looked at them puzzled, trying to figure out what they could possibly be. Then I realized that these were not fish at all but sting rays. The people of Huksan-do eat dried sting ray. I chuckled as I marveled at the human brain and how I was even able to figure out to begin with that these were indeed dried sting rays. But as soon as I recognized the shape, which was sting ray shape, and the color, which was dried fish color, I decided it could be no other thing. And I recalled my class in Texas with my wonderful professor Dr Schallert who discussed with us how we as human beings can put the experiences of our lives together, understand things we’ve never seen before, and call it learning. In my case, it was a case of “dried fish” + “sting ray” = “dried sting ray.” It seemed like simple addition; still the sense that the human brain can make such conclusions impresses me, much in the way it impresses me that one can create a sentence that has never been uttered in the history of man before, and another human can still fully understand it.

I took my notebook and my excitement over the dried sting rays to the beach and sat on a set of large concrete tetrapods that were holding up the port. I watched the sun go down in the west, observing that the next land to the west was China, and that I was far far away from my PhD studies and far, far away from my problems. And I wrote this poem:

Why Do I Travel Alone?

Huksan-do is closing down for the day

And I’m not the only observer:

Umsan Island across the bay

Dried stingray

A kind elderly lady who helps me; she’s my friend

Quiet boats against tetrapods in the harbor

A courier bus with passengers

Bibimbap with a raw egg

Red rocks with pine trees

Small children with primary-colored bookbags

Women trying to sell me seaweed

My minbak

A handicapped man yellow at a tired old woman

Fish, eel, and ray sashimi aquariums

Switchbacks

Grring dogs

Long sleeves

Children point at me and playing the recorder

Water cold and indigo

Unobtrusive motors

A yellow sun over The Yellow Sea

Why don’t people travel alone?

This is the time I’m most at peace

I love my life.

The day I left Huksan-do, the beautiful elderly woman met me at my room. I paid her for another night’s stay, and she walked me to the port. I bought a ticket for the boat back to Mogpo, and as people were boarding this boat, she stopped me, again grabbing my wrist with her strong wrinkled hands. I turned and looked into her face, and she looked back, not letting go of my wrist. She stared in my face for ten seconds, and then she took my wrist and turned me around to face the boat. She sent me off, pushing me lightly in the direction of the boat. As I walked toward the boat, I looked back at her. She stood and stared at me. I turned toward the boat. This woman perhaps had said one word to me in three days, “Mul!” and yet, I had felt her to be one of the best friends I had had in months.

I had dinner in Mogpo and I took an overnight train to Pusan. From Pusan, I hopped on a ferry to take me to the Japanese port of Shimonoseki. There I would use a Japanese Rail Pass to go all over Japan, see my old friends, and meet Dwight. But first, I needed lunch. I had a rail pass, and I had never been to the island of Kyushu, so I decided to go to Kyushu for lunch. I got on the next bullet train, or shinkansen, to Fukuoka, the last stop on the shinkansen going south and the biggest city in that area of Japan. As I walked out of Fukuoka Station, I entered a department store, full of Japanase things. There were things stacked everywhere. There were little deserts, and little earthenwares, and little gifts, and little trinkets, strewn from side to side, floor to ceiling, and throughout the department store. I was overwhelmed by the bright fluorescent lighting and all the things, as well as the musical bong, bong, bong, bong introducing loud speaker announcements that resonated through the station. There were cans of tea, both green and brown. There were chocolates and stacks of fruit, all packaged in baskets tied up with bows. The floors were bright white, and each woman behind each stack of things was dressed in a yellow apron. As I walked through the station, I said, “Ah!” This is the Japan I remember. How could I have forgotten it. Little things beautifully presented by elegantly statured people!

I walked out of the station and immediately saw to my right a sign that said “traditional Japanese cuisine” in Japanese. I smiled and walked across the street, into a large concrete building, and up a flight of nearly 30 stairs. As I came to the top of the stairs, a man in a coat and tie was at the front of the restaurant, saying goodbye to a group of customers. As I walked in, he stopped me and said, “Ah, English no!” I smiled and said, “Nihongo ha OK desu. Menyuu wo misete itadakemasen ka?” My Japanese is OK. Could I get you to show me the menu please? His jaw dropped, and I walked past him into the restaurant and sat down on in a chair in front of an old kitchen, complete with stone fire stove. There a waiter met me, and I ordered. I talked to the waiter for at least 30 minutes without stopping. The owner who had met me earlier also came and chatted. All of the sudden, after a week of being in Korea, I could communicate, and I could do it Japanese. And my Japanese wasn’t that bad. And the people were nice. And the food was fantastic. And I deserved to be there. And within only 30 minutes of being back in the country, I realized that it wasn’t Japan or Japanese that I hated—not in the least. I just disliked a couple of people here and there in my life, and if I could get them sifted out, life could be just fine. I would be able to return to Austin, teach English and study Japanese, and I knew that for the rest of my study and my career, I would love the topic and I would not fail.

Insert Never Give Up