The Boy and the Whale: At the Edge of Hermeneutics

What does this mean?

Below is a picture of a young boy urinating. From his urine a cartoon whale is keeping an old man aloft on its spout. This much I know for sure. It's just everything else confuses me.
This was one of the first strange, photo-worthy things I discovered when I moved to Korea but trust me, there have been a lot. Every time you walk into a supermarket the shelves are full of amusing interpretations and translations of the English we take for granted. Those pictures you see online of ridiculous Asian signs? I see them every day and after awhile the joke loses a lot of novelty. It's entertaining to read the English slogans on the side of products, but so does marketing hype and business jargon when viewed with the right level of irony. What really makes you laugh is always the same stuff – unintended, overlooked, fortuitous or coincidental sexual innuendo. Also cocks. Cocks are HILARIOUS.
But there is no misinterpreted English in this poster – furthermore, as a Westerner searching for contextual meaning we are taunted by the slipperiness of its signified. Without decipherable text, what does this picture mean? What possible message is being conveyed? This poster is an example of how language fails us. Of how utterly strange and different the world is. Here is a picture that defies my Western expectations of – everything. Of propriety, visual logic, interpretation, of universality. What is this a poster of? What the hell is going on here?



No really. What does this mean?

But we're educated, well-to-do English speakers right? We're intelligent, forward-thinking, culturally-sensitive, open-minded meatbags – we should be able to figure this out. We should be able to unpack what this means.
1.The boy is urinating.
This is unassailable. The boy's pants have slipped below his buttocks, his underpants are clearly down as well, his hands are holding something in front of his genitals that must be his genitals. This is not some kind of gushing blue energy shooting from the boy.
But is he urinating normally? Is this intended to visually represent a normal urinary experience? Does this boy's experience with his phallus fall into the normative category?
2.The boy is not unhappy.
There is an overall cheekiness to the boy's disposition – this supports the urine theory by showing a kind of bashful glee to his public display of his privates. If this is a poster about some sort of public health concern, or has a negative message one would assume the boy would seem ashamed to be caught in this licentious act of micturation. IF he had HAD urinary tract problems and they were now GONE perhaps the the rest of the picture represents his new-found health? (The blueness of the urine withstanding)
3.The whale is born aloft on the boy's urine and also happy.
So if the whale is happy (not bashful like the boy but simply glad) what is his connection to the picture? Did the boy produce the whale or was the whale present before the boy came along? Has the whale been inside this boy, or did the boy espy him from afar and deliberately (wilfully!) pee onto it? Does the boy even know it is there? (One might imagine the boy turning back to his stream with a slow confused horror, an O forming on his trembling lips.) Does the whale signify health? Exuberance? Is there a Korean expression whose translation is roughly 'spout like a whale' that portends to male fertility? Look into this whale's eyes. What you read there is what is writ large on the black walls of your soul.



4.The old man is born aloft on the whale's spout and is unhappy.
Unhappy is putting it mildly. He seems genuinely afraid for his well-being. He is balding (not bald), overweight (a drunk?) and wearing a Sunday cardigan and beige loafers (probably going out). To all intensive purposes, a normal old man. But he finds himself on a whale's spout. A whale born aloft by a young boy urinating. The question would then seem to be – who are these miscreants to assault this old man? Is the old man the bad guy? Has he done something wrong? If so we can rule out the theory of some kind of urinary disease – I simply refuse to believe there is any possible signifier connecting the health of one's plumbing to a ruddy faced old man. No culture yet has been so naively depraved. It is about here where the poster begins to fall apart for me. A boy pees and a whale comes out, sure. A whale sprays an angry old man with his spout, why not? But a whale comes out of a boy who in turn sprays an angry old man with his spout, I'm completely lost.
5.The stare of the boy and of the whale are towards the audience, the old man's is toward the ground.
If one follows the old man's eyes he seems to be turned towards the earth, flailing for purchase in the air itself. The boy and the whale see you. They have their eyes turned, looking to see if you can see. If you are watching. And they are pleased to see you, pleased by the old man's fear.

More evidence of a senseless universe

In all aspects of human endeavour it is true that the further you delve, the deeper the mysteries go. This is not idle metaphysics, it is verifiable fact and pragmatic generalisation – nothing is completely known and therefore the more you know the closer you get to where the mysteries begin. But the mystery extends as far back as you have travelled, extending towards your origin. The damn thing reaches for you – that is the creepy part.
On the poster, below the phone numbers and the logo are pictures of two children. The quality of the photos and the nature of the shots seem amateurish (familiar) and completely out of place on an advertisement in a train station. Next to these photos are details which I'm assuming are names (the letters in bold) and dates of birth below. There is something ominous about these details too – why include them on a poster at all if they are not warnings? True life testimonials of the damage urea-whales can cause in young children, or the health problem the urea-whales represent?



Conclusion: Wherein the problem is depicted as systematic

The answer to this whole problem is obvious – translate the sign. But the visual signifiers of this sign are completely indecipherable when seen without their textual referent. Unusual? Not really. You ever have that experience where you're watching ads at a bar and they seem senseless without the sound? That what you are seeing is so much broken fury, a cavalcade of colours and shapes? I guess this is similar to the experience of living in a country where you do not have access to every written sign. Where the information that flashes on the subway remains a cluster of sound you must laboriously puzzle together. It makes the act of interpreting completely absurd.
I'm a regular visitor to the ICanHazCheezburger Network because I have a lot of free time at work. I had a very odd experience recently when I saw a posted photo of a sign that I see every day in my elevator. The post was on 'Engrish', a page which I don't regularly go to (as I've said before, the joke gets old) but the strangeness came from recognising the photo on the site but realising the text beneath the picture was in Chinese. Meaning this picture that I had found vaguely amusing in my own building was being seen and commonly misinterpreted by other English speakers in other countries. That it was just another sign, commonly understood by native speakers. It turned my confusion into a common language of confusion. A re-contextualising of something not fully understood in the first place. Would this photo be strange if the text were in English?
To conclude this article is a picture of something I would consider sending to 'Engrish' if I was one of those degenerates that posted on that site. I hope it stands as further proof of the uniqueness of the sign above – that despite all this talk of complete incomprehension there are still simple misunderstandings. It happens in speech and text all the time. But to see the language hanging bare, to be unable to read something despite it being completely in the public eye? It is the strangest thing I know – or more rightly, the strangest thing that I cannot know.



East.


East is a cool wind which sometimes blows before a storm breaks.

A Korean Haunting

I apologise for how late this article is. Three months late. There may be postulations about Korea that have since been proven wrong but maybe there's a bonus to that. Hindsight without the...hind.


Seoul Land may not be Korea's most famous theme park but it certainly offered the most comedic comments: as James Brown would say, I'm in Seoul, man! It was small and beautifully surrounded, like a one-bedroom apartment overlooking a very big lake. In fact, there was a lake.



We had spent the day at Seoul Zoo, situated beside Seoul Land itself, a location I found to be a sick joke for parents treating their children to a day out: not one but two very extensive time commitments. And after the first we were tired. We were exhausted. The zoo took six hours to explore and it was an excellent zoo; we didn't rest and as day faded into evening all we did was seek out more food to energise our walking. Children were everywhere and their parents were still smiling though this may have been due to the soju sold in the zoo's convenience stores. It was early dark when we left for the steel blue gates of Seoul Land and already cold enough to necessitate the wearing of gloves. And the release of our childhood selves. We ran through the park, giggling and jigging for warmth and though our legs hurt we didn't stop and when we had to line up for the roller coasters we bounced on the spot to keep our blood moving. The coasters were underwhelming, the music pop-crazy and so we turned attention to the indoor entertainments: 3D films, a tilt house, shooting galleries and chewy Turkish ice cream served by an Indian man with an American accent. We were full of food, dripping adrenalin and dropping where we stood but half an hour before the park closed, five degrees from freezing, we visited the haunted house. It didn't look like much; a small building, black, rectangular, grown over with vines. Waiting between the cords we read a sign stating tours ran for fifteen minutes and the final was at 9:45pm. I appreciated the organisation but how would such perfectionism impact on my experience? Scheduled fear seemed less confronting than entering without expectation. I may glance at my watch and think 'ah yes, only five more minutes of fear to go. They'll be ramping it up any moment now.' But this was a small space and at a quarter of an hour, the haunted house was by far the longest ride in the park. Either the cars drove around in circles and an intricate series of backdrops were continuously looped upon the walls or it was a walking tour.

It was a walking tour. My interest piqued because suddenly a much more frightening possibility was realised. While walking we are vulnerable, weak and at prey to the many distractions of the curious human body. A car keeps us in check and contained but my legs can take me anywhere, far from the safety of other people and light. As we entered I felt faint stirrings of unease and took East's arm; a leather-bound, rained-upon and cold comfort. A Korean woman greeted us with a bow and offered hands. She explained what would come next and stood waiting for our reactions and here lay the inevitable hitch in our plans. We did not speak Korean, like it was a deliberate finger to the nation; we were rude in our ignorance. Even her requests that we stand at the edges of the room caused us to mill around uncertainly until she took our arms and pressed us to the walls. Five or six Koreans joined us and she turned and spoke to them and only them and I didn't for a moment blame her. When we were settled the floor began to shake, the lights flickered, a dial by the door counted us down an imaginary three, four, many floors. We looked at each other and felt awkward, not because we were outnumbered but because she was telling us a story and we were disrespectful enough to not understand a word she said. The language was beautiful but I began to think this was the tour and the foreigner in me felt I had wasted my time. I should have had more faith. These Koreans, they're crafty. The elevator, while in fact just a revolving room, ejected us into a different corridor and a second guide, clad in a robe and mask, came to wriggle a tambourine and usher us forward. His costume put him at a foot taller than East and I could see his eyes, tiny and black and when they met mine they crinkled like he was smiling. I thought he would care for us now that he was our leader but our original guide stayed, at the back. It gave me a warm feeling, like she was part of the family and didn't want to be left out. It didn't matter that she had seen it all before. We had lined up for her ride, listened to her story and committed to her walk. And walk we did, through corridors interspersed with red lights and dark portraits on the walls. Our masked guide stayed an allusive three feet ahead, directing our feet with a tremble of his tambourine. At the end of each hallway was a room, hosting a different setting played out by various animatronic characters. The first looked like this:



after which I was directed to put away my camera. Although these scenes were accompanied with haunting pipe music, they were quite beautiful and not the least frightening. Our guide spoke incessantly and with many gestures towards men conferring with weapons, a woman whose head bobbed up and down in a pond, children running and falling as though shot. He told me their stories, gave us their fear but without understanding the meaning of the words I was left with my own interpretation. One room contained a woman and man coming together underneath a pagoda to kiss and embrace, before being dragged away, heads turned aside, weeping. I didn't hear their pain, I only saw their movements and so this became not a horror story but a tale of love. I was entranced by these characters because I had the opportunity to write their lives for them. Without language I reached for whatever my imagination could grasp and what I created was tender and sad. So perhaps I never entered the haunted house wanting to be scared. What I wanted was the ability to choose and so the language barrier became the most freeing obstacle I'd ever experienced.



My whole life I have believed that we fear what we do not understand but this is a matter of psychology. Childhood fear comes from a lack of experience and logic, adult fear from what has no easy explanation. In that way, we do not understand why we are afraid. But Korea has offered up another possibility. What happens to fear when we can't interpret what we hear? As our haunted house proved, atmosphere alone can not hope to communicate what words so wonderfully portray. In those rooms, with the lights and mask and music, we couldn't be scared because there was no story to be afraid of. If the words we hear are impenetrable, are they still words or do they become mere sounds from which we pick what we desire? I'd like to think the power of language transcends translation but this is just not true. And what a beautiful lie to discover. The tour ended at a pair of wooden double doors and our guide bowed us out, leaning so low the top of his mask touched the rain drying on the ground.

Lara S. Williams


Lara is quite fond of the dark but don't mention zombies. Zombies are going too far.

Therese Raquin, With Vampires

This is the first of many alternating reviews East and I will be doing on Korean films. Some you will have heard of, many will be mysterious gems of cinematic flair and others just, awful. But Korean all the same.

And so:

I am belated. I am a belated person. I am the woman who stands in the centre of a room expounding the wonder of a film that was released years earlier and is a revelation to no one but herself. In Seoul I am no different, thus proving that equatorial placement does nothing to change a personality. Trawling the net one day I came across a great site for Korean cinema and was immediately drawn to Thirst. Feeling extremely big in my boots I told my co workers and was shot down when they told me it was an old film in Korea, released in 2008. Despite this, I went home drowning in enthusiasm; its lead role was played by Song Kang-ho, a stupendous actor who some may know as the lead in Bong Joon-ho's The Host. In Thirst he is ethereal, powerful and sexual dynamite. In reality he looks like this:



Ethereal, powerful and sexual dynamite. Kim Ok-bin plays alongside and while I feel little connection to her as a woman (she is tiny and child-like, I am not), her character is brilliantly fragile and furious. She is frightening. She is monumental. She doesn't need to bite you to make the hairs on your neck fall into rigor mortis.

Thirst is the most astounding combination of stories I've come across in a long time. There are haunting pictures of religious faith and love, sex scenes ugly and desperate and so sensual, murder for the right and wrong reasons. And there are vampires, make no mistake, but more compelling is the question asked throughout the film, 'can I be what I was and what I must without losing myself'?
Kang-ho plays a priest, Sang-hyun, helper of the sick, beloved by the people and unwavering in his faith. He volunteers to test a vaccine for the fatal Emmanuel Virus and, after falling ill, is given a blood transfusion. The blood is, of course, vampire blood. He goes into remission and is heralded as a miracle, a healer. He suffers no change of personality, no immediate physical transformation but soon notices the sun seems to burn brighter and he is weakening despite good health. The beauty of Sang-hyun's vampirism lies in its complete lack of drama; he recognises his thirst for blood, gives in to it without violence or disgust and ensures he will always have more. And where, you ask, would a priest turned vampire get his blood supply? Sang-hyun relocates to the city and works in hospitals, giving final counsel to the dying, praying for the terminally ill and stealing blood transfusion bags. His sermons are famous, drawing enormous crowds all under the belief that Sang-hyun is their saviour.
Enter Ok-bin, playing Tae-ju, the wife of Sang-hyun's childhood friend. Mistreated, emotionally twisted and beautiful in a kind of when-I-speak-I-am-raising-demons way, Tae-ju is drawn to Sang-hyun who, appropriately, hungers for her. And this is the exact moment when the plot of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin hijacks the remainder of the movie. No, I'm not joking and believe me, you will thank me for it. It happens abruptly and noticeably which is a shame for a film so intricately wound together. One moment I was watching a Korean film which hinted nothing toward its own end. The next I was anticipating every move and finding myself absolutely correct. I wont go into detail because those who have read it don't need me to and those who haven't will have one of the most controversial and fantastic novels of its time spoiled. I chalk up this sudden plot reveal as a negative but, in a way, knowing what was coming made it all the more hideous to watch. Characters become more vicious when you watch them carry out an inevitable evil; whatever you know of them is tainted by what you know they will do. And these two are truly diabolical.



At over two hours the film is long but too long? I don't think so. Whilst both Kang-ho and Ok-bin are superb actors, and their chemistry drips straight off the screen, it is Kang-ho's Sang-hyun that hurls Thirst forward. His moral dilemma is an undercurrent that breaks the surface during some of the most attractive cinematics I have ever seen. Fundamentally, Sang-hyun is a man of God. He takes what he needs to survive from people who will not miss it. He feels his faith diminishing but will not allow himself to be overcome. While he is alone he is able to separate his faith from his thirst. It is Tae-ju who brings him screaming to the door he has peeked into but kept so fastidiously closed. Their affair occurs almost subtly and with no sense of regret on Sang-hyun's part and it is this, not his vampire genes, that mark his break from faith. For Tae-ju he watches his religion fall into dust and for her love he loses his moral code. His downfall lies in an attempt to remain a priest in thought and man in action. He asks us if he can not be both and we say, well, we say many things.

Thirst's director, writer and producer, Park Chan-wook, must be a dark man. Maybe he lives in a house lit only with candles half-wicked and spends day light hours in dark-tinted cars and studios where lighting is restricted to the point of dictated. He communicates with colour and Thirst barely has any. Sang-hyun is pale and cassock-dressed, Tae-ju sickly and black-eyed and their scenes are shot mainly at night. Those located on the streets of the city are truly dazzling; lit with lamps, surrounded only by shadows and accompanied by the after effects of heavy rain. Everything is reflected but nothing can be seen. Chan-wook's utilisation of such dark atmospheres make the occasional scenes of violence all the more satisfying and show what is happening behind the eyes of the characters. The blood around Sang-hyun's mouth is piercing and brings out the colour of his eyes. Underneath his affair and sickness, if you will, he is honest. Though he may no longer be a priest he is what he is now and makes no apology or attempts to pretend. As is the blood he never wipes from his lips. The falsified assault wounds on Tae-ju's thighs look like rot coming through the canvas of her transparent skin. Her bruises hint at the darkness inside her soul and I, for one, asked 'where is the darkness in Sang-hyun.'

Watch this movie. Watch it in the dark, not because it will frighten you but because the colours are extraordinary and must be viewed within their own world. Watch this film and prepare to be attracted to every tiny moment that passes between the leads. And for the love of God, if you haven't already, go and read Therese Raquin.


Lara S. Williams


Lara, like a vampire, is much more active at night. Particularly when there is wine involved.

How It's Broken, Why It's Fine

Introduction


It is not the author’s intention in these rambling, blurred recollections to reinforce any tired clichés about the ‘necessity’ of travel. I do believe that the human spirit is malleable, that we can affect a change in most (but not all) aspects of our nature and that travel is a fantastic way of achieving self-realisation. But travel isn’t ipso facto self-realisation – just a method which may be employed to this end.
If this travel journal (if this “blog”, and god I hate the collocations and connotations of the word) is to have any expressed purpose, it is the merciless celebration of the world. To rattle and run a tin cup against the grey bar of horizon.
Anyway. Here it is, as truthful as prose can be, unabashed, unapologetic.
Enjoy.

Part 1 – Arrival/Departure/Arrival


I conjecture that we experience nothing unknown. As I type this now from my desk at Gwangmyeong Buk middle school, I am reminded of the groundswell sense of authority that the teacher's staff room had when I was in school. The silence deepened by prodded keyboards and the whir of the copier. Local time 10.31 in the am. Though I am further from home than I have ever been in my life this place feels known.
My cubicle adjoins my Korean co-teacher’s (Soyeon), and the desk calendar she gave me is beginning to accrue a scar tissue of interlaced dates and appointments though, as of my third day, I am yet to start classes. The closest thing to English language teaching I have done so far is waving to the students as they gawp in the hall. Sometimes, they will gather by the office door to stare at me, one will shout “hi”. When I reply a flock of Korean students will giggle and run away. I have been informed this is normal. About a dozen boys shout after me in the corridors that I am very ‘handsome’. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, this too is deemed “normal”.
I landed in the country on the 6th of April a little before 5.40 in the afternoon. It was my mother’s birthday and so broke and poorly organised was I that I had no other gift to offer her but my absence from Australian shores for the next two years. Waiting outside the security gate for my friend Adam to arrive, I received a call from my recruiter in America – informing me, roughly an hour before I got on the plane, that I would be picked up from the airport and driven to my apartment. Before this call the only information I had for sure was that I was teaching at a school called Gwangmyeong Buk, and that I had an orientation on the 7th in Suwon. Had no one come for me, I would have had to sleep in the airport and train it to Suwon the next day.
Adam arrived, in purple scarf and beige trench coatt, with ahard coverer Bukowski (The Last Night of the Earth poems) and with his usual élan hugs and smiles and words were exchanged freely between himself, myself, Lara (my girlfriend, soon to be flying into Korea to live with me) and my mother.
What happens then? Surely you already know. The same eyes glad-wrapped with tears, the same goodbyes, the same strange lost boy wandering through the international terminal ready to leave for foreign shores. Now without a scrap of Australian currency on his person. Now without a clue to where he was, or the language or culture of the place he was going to. Wondering how it is nothing changes and nothing stays the same.
By the laptop on my desk is a notepad that I first used in my last semester of university, way back in 2007. Like myself, it has travelled over 8 000 kilometres to be here too. But it looks no different in the office fluorescence, by the light of the northern hemisphere.

Part 2 – First Lasting Impressions

Off the plane at Incheon and into Soojung’s car, and my questions would not cease. When was this bridge built, what type of tree is that, why do those stores have fish tanks out the front, what should I know about my school, is it very big, are there bees, what type of bees, is it true you guys don’t eat cheese, I’ve never been in a left-side drive sedan before, etc. Soojung, a very well spoken Korean/Canadian from Y & G recruiting answered as best she could, but her fatigue was self-evident. Through interrogation I learnt one of the most tiring tasks of her job is picking up jerks like me from the airport and ferrying them to their apartments. She expressed the sentiment of the dual citizen – that she missed Canada, and longed to return, and should she arrive there she would miss Korea all the more. Empathising I told her my girlfriend also held two passports and had expressed a similar anxiety before. A scooter flew past with two young boys on it. Without helmets, they slowed alongside then shot through the red light, weaving between the bumpers of two sedans.
“The kids over here – they do that all the time.”
“It's a wonder there aren't more accidents.”
“There are lots.” It was weeks yet until my first personal experience with road safety in Korea – crossing at a green pedestrian light a taxi appeared in the third lane of traffic from behind a stopped bus – beeped twice as it shot past my girlfriend and I doing forty kph at least. Like the dry-mouthed look I gave my girlfriend, like the boys on their red scooter and yes, like the taxi itself, we slipped back into the urban ether.

Part 3 – A cartography of the human spirit

On the road and off again, and Soojung deposits me outside my apartment where my co-teacher Soyeon was waiting. I smile, we exchange Korean then English hellos. Her English isn't as good as Soojung's but her smile is reassuring and I feel invincible below the buzzing neon street, the angst I felt on the plane and at Sydney terminal completely dissipated by these warm greetings and kindly women. I am here! I have made it! Welcome to the unknown! Then, at the door of the apartment, I am met with an ancient Korean archetype – an infamous beast whose progenitors have ruled this land since time immemorial.
Meet the ajumma. Korean for “terrible sea beast” (though literal translation makes it more like ‘older married woman’), these terrifying matriarchs harass and harangue foreigner and native alike. The best way to put it is this. Imagine that shouty, elderly Asian stereotype from the movies. Now remove her from the celluloid and put her two feet below your eyeline, screaming at you in Korea. That is the tactile experience of the ajumma.
My ajumma, like some guardian spirit of the building, met us in the foyer and began her arcane screeching. Up the elevator to the ninth floor and she was still talking, nary a second glance at me, though occasionally a finger would stab out or an ungenerous nod be directed towards my person. Soyeon didn’t even have time to translate. Up to the apartment and she slows down enough to allow Soyeon to explain some of what she was saying – take my shoes off, the washing machine’s broken, how the hot water works – then continues a tirade about what the last tenant did and didn’t do (bathe and take out the trash, respectively) showing Soyeon the broken fixtures in the apartment with what was, I’m sure, the every explicit detail of how difficult foreigners are and why they’re ruining the country and how she should just give this whole building over to the rats, and how her children never call, not that she ever had any, etc, etc. When it came time to explain to me how the door worked, she assumed that I had never seen a door before, and ran over some of the basic features, such as which way it swung, how to operate a handle, not to eat it, again with the etc.
Down to the ajumma's apartment now and Soyeon and this woman are going full tilt. Long, unbroken minutes of bouncing, jostling Korean while I smile and look at pictures of the ajumma’s family. No children feature in the many group photos. After I finally signed for the keys and we go back to the apartment, I asked Soyeon what the woman’s name was. She said she didn’t even know. She’d never met her before.
“Really? But she was talking so much – she talked a lot.”
“I think maybe she is a little – ah – crazy.”

Part 4 – In a City of Red Night

Lara and I's apartment is “studio living”. One moderately sized room constitutes the lounge, bed and dining rooms. The kitchen is just some cupboards with an electric cooktop and a washing machine below the sink. An odd assortment of furniture (two wardrobes, a massive fridge and reasonable TV) with a sunken, suicidal mattress on a murdered wooden base. A pile of aged, uncovered pillows strewn upon it. The kitchen drawers bare except for my complete disbelief – not a scrap of cutlery or crockery in the entire place.
And I was short. Very short. My Centrelink pay was late because of a misplaced form, and a straggling bank transfer from Lara's account to my own left me with very little money. $130 Aus to be exact – roughly making 120 000 Won - which seems like a lot when a meal may only cost 2 or 3000 Won, but when you need to completely equip your bed and kitchen, and a simple blanket costs 30 000 Won, well. You wonder why on earth you came to the ball in a handful of rags.
After Soyeon helped me find a blanket, and impressed upon me her tiredness, I found myself back in my room, alone. Finally left to my own devices I literally jigged for joy. The worry that leadened my feet in Australia completely disappeared when standing on foreign soil (floor). I’m not sure if this is the usual process or a reverse for it, but for me at that moment I was DOING IT. No one could STOP ME. I was ALL UPONS.
So I took myself, jeans and shirt and jumper, threw on my 3/4 length leather coat, my jaunty hat, and walked that windy April night alone. I wandered through the markets, bumped and jostled as I stared at open fish tanks of octopus and abalone and flounder. I watched the market sellers making shallot pancakes on metre-long brass cooktops; admired the wealth of fruit and veg piled on cardboard at my feet; heard and smelt the unending song of the street, which is the song of man in embittered chorus.
But I am no hero – I did not chance a restaurant or food vendor. That first night I made two purchases for myself – a hand of bananas from the supermarket across the road and a loaf of bread from Paris Baguette (an ubiquitous Korean franchise).
And sat on my bed and stared out towards the river, out to the valley of four and five storey apartments stretching toward Seoul. The night itself was dotted by the neon red crosses of the half dozen Christian churches – as you see, all churches in South Korea have a flickering neon icon burning at all hours. Presumably, this allows the wicked to draw a bead on them in the dead of night, when traditionally they need to pound on the doors with their bloody fists and scream “Sanctuary!” as the heat draws close.
Me? I just thought it was pretty.
PRETTY AWESOME! Here it was – here was a city of the red night, and my apartment was warm, a belly with food in, and a place to be where I was expected. I even turned my notebook on and found a wireless signal in my building – thus effecting contact with my mother and my girl. And wrapped my blanket twice around me, and fell to a restless sleep.

Part 5 – Visible Cities, Invisible Cities

This tired frenzied man seems an age ago now. As I finish my drafting, sitting at the desk in my apartment (in the background sirens and the click and whir of the refrigerator) I am struck how quickly routine normalises the foreign. Lara sleeps in the now made bed (she brought bed linen over with her) her hands twitch and finger the blanket. Barring all the Koreans, this ain't Korea no more. The sentiment I felt when I first landed in Perth (the beginnings of my backpacking adventure, a tale for another time) was exactly reproduced and expressed by Lara on the way home from the airport:
“This road, the colours, those trees – it feels like I'm back in Heathrow. Like I'm back in England.”
New as I am to the northern hemisphere and its stark spring foliage, I recognise the sensation – that this landscape is copy pasted from somewhere else. That the whole world is repeating, like a mobius strip of a play's backdrop – though here you will never find a familiar face, never chance upon the smiles and customs and clothing of your loved ones. Here, further from your family than ever, and everything still the same.
But my girl is stirring. In her sleep, she can sense the acceleration of my typing which means my writing is near complete. Her skin is smooth and dark, almost hot to the touch, and I wonder why I have ignored it so long. A dog barks in the distance. The fern beside me shakes as I type. Tonight, it will shake no more.

East.

Daniel East photographed here at the discovery of beer.