Letter from Seoul - 11

23 Jun

Streets of Seoul: The Han River Bicycle Path

Down by The River

More than once, I’ve recounted how we live very close to Han Gang. This is Korean for the Han River. Like many rivers in the world, two smaller tributaries meet and form an even larger river. In the case of the Han River, two smaller rivers join together in the northern part of South Korea. As the Han River continues its course southward, it gradually cuts westward and by the time it reaches present-day Seoul, it moves from east-to-west, directly to the Yellow Sea on the west coast. This creates a natural division of north and south in Seoul

We live on the northside of the river, and this part of the city has some noticeable hills with neighborhoods featuring some steep inclines in places. The neighborhood of our apartment complex is elevated enough that – while there is mostly a flat topography, there are those reminders of walking up-and-down some hilly areas. To reach the Han River from our apartment means crossing the street, walking up a slight incline and then descending along a paved walkway to the river.

Seoul has done a magnificent job of turning the river bank area into a combination walkway, two-lane bicycle path free of any and all vehicles, some outdoor exercise equipment and benches for rest and relaxation. At the very point where we live, one can see Bamseom Island. Bamseom is Korean for “chestnut.”

Our address is:

Hangang Bamseom …Apartments

… Dong #…

Tojung-Ro …

Mapo-Gu,

Seoul, Korea

The first line is more eloquently: The apartments across from Chestnut Island on the Han River. The second line in Korean refers to location, like a building or even a street. Unfortunately, in American English, “dong” is a vulgar reference among white male teenagers for that very friendly appendage. Context is everything. I’m not sure what Tojung means, though Tojung-Ro translates as Tojung Road. Allegedly, Tojung-Ro has a reputation as an area for coffee snobs. Mapo-Gu is one-of-25 districts, which is how Seoul is organized. To make our marriage legal, we filled out the appropriate paperwork at the Mapo-Gu City Hall. Koreans refer to this action as a “paper marriage.” In America, a “paper marriage” is considered a sham or fake marriage, and the term gained prominence during World War II, when so many female refugees from Europe – especially Jewish women, were willing to marry anyone in order to gain a residency visa ... with divorces following the end of war.

Bamseom Island is relatively small, but Yeouido is sizable enough in the Han River to be the center of politics, finance and media for the country. The National Assembly, which we can see from our bedroom window, is a source of pride for all Koreans. Yeouido is also considered the Wall Street of Seoul. And because of your daughter’s love of Korean soap operas, she would enjoy a tour (if it’s offered) of KBS Studios (Korean Broadcasting System), just down the street from the National Assembly. We pass this way about every two weeks when we return home from our Monday morning trip to Costco to appease our international menu requirements.

This background information is to establish that the last time I crossed the street to walk along the Han River was sometime in mid-morning of a weekday in early May. The best time to visit this area is Saturday morning when 10-speed bicycle racers outfitted in sleek outfits that include protective plastic helmets and expensive sunglasses zip by with the power and dexterity of young people in their physical prime. Most of these cyclists are men, yet there are also women who can certainly hold their own.

It is an especially beautiful spectacle with the steel and glass skyscrapers along the river shores on the southside of Seoul, an area virtually wiped off the map during the Korean War. With a bright sun overhead evoking optimism and progress, it can feel glorious to feel alive in such moments.

To go for a walk has no appeal to me. Yet to go out and about with a camera gives me a purpose. I’m not a complicated person. I’m always in plain sight. I don’t jump out at my subjects. No surprises. If someone is uncomfortable, body language speaks volumes – especially if the subject moves to avoid my focus. For me, photojournalism – which is how I really identify, is a celebration of life and optimism and perseverance.

To photograph the cyclists along the Han River bike path is almost a Rite of Spring. A few images, and then I’ll be back again next year. This particular morning, there were a few clusters of cyclists – though nothing like a Saturday morning in excellent weather. My equipment is modest; just a medium lens, perhaps 47mm (Fuji), or 55mm lens (Nikon). Nothing gaudy or pretentious. A cluster of three or four male cyclists zipped by me ... yet I quickly heard the unmistakable sound of wheels slowing down. I knew what this meant and, as I glanced over my shoulder – a male cyclist wearing a helmet and sunglasses made his way toward me. He immediately established that he spoke English when he asked:

“Did you take a photo of me?”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“Erase it.”

“Why should I? You’re wearing a helmet and sunglasses. No one knows your identity."

“Erase it.”

“I don’t think so. This is a public area.”

“You didn’t ask my permission.”

“Does your government ask permission to keep all Koreans under constant camera surveillance?”

“It’s for our safety.”

“No, it’s not. It’s to keep you frightened and under control.”

“Erase the photo.”

“I’m sorry. You must be someone very special. Amuse me with your importance.”

The English-speaking Korean cyclist never addressed his status with me, instead he started punching the digits of his cell phone. The police, of course. Now that I have the F-6 Permanent Residency Visa for Korea, I cannot do anything to jeopardize this. I went through too much to make it happen. I have an appointment with the Immigration Office for May, 2025 – at which time the visa will be extended another two years; by 2027 – if I’m still alive, the visa will be extended for five years.

The incident with the cyclist happened across from a tunnel that provides a riding path with a slight incline to reach the street above. Once entering the tunnel, it’s just a few steps to a flight of stairs to the same street. I started walking toward the tunnel to reach those stairs. I looked over my shoulder to see the cyclist turning toward the tunnel, but I managed to ascend the stairs quicker than he could lugging a 10-speed bicycle. I’m very familiar with the neighborhood, which is close to our apartment complex. Yet there is an even larger apartment complex nearby. In short, I could be anywhere. Like Dr. Richard Kimble, the fugitive, trying to elude Inspector Philip Gerard, I ducked behind some older buildings on the off chance that my new nemesis was actually in pursuit. It turned out that he probably gave up as the steps ascended to the street. I returned home as if nothing happened. I said nothing to Sookyung who would only have offered a lot of “I told you so” criticism. How many older white American men are routinely visible in this neighborhood? Maybe two or three. A fucking Russian lives in our building on the second floor with his Korean wife. Why isn’t he in Ukraine, fighting for Mother Russia?

Yet that was now a month ago, and no police have shown up to question me. And certainly no Lt. Philip Gerard.

The incident down by the river left me flat for days; much longer, in truth. Yet gradually, I channeled Frank Sinatra and began to hum his old familiar song:

“That's life
That's what all the people say
You're riding high in April, shot down in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune
When I'm back on top, back on top in June.”

That’s Life (1966)

Streets of Seoul: Bicycle path neasr Tojung-ro in Mapo-Gu. The path follows the Han River throughout Seoul, and is very popular on weekends in good weather.

Streets of Seoul: A popular walking and cycling path that follows the Han River through the city. Seoul's financial district is in the background.

Streets of Seoul: - Central Headquarters at the Bamseom Xii Apartments on Tojung-ro, facing Han Gang.
In Korean, "Han Gang" means the Han River, which is about one kilometer wide as it flows through the city.

George Orwell (1903-1950) knew the score when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. The freedom technology promises has enslaved us instead. We are hounded by surveillance cameras, tracked and sold out by despicable social platforms like Fuckerberg’s Facebook and Musky’s X – aka Twitter, reduced to constructing the ideal police state, in which “there is no need for police,” since every person is under constant surveillance by every other.

Orwell laid the table about this potential dystopian world, but a decade later William Burroughs (1914-1997) gave us Naked Lunch with a scorched earth assault on the Pandora’s Box we had already opened and is now – more than ever, reducing us to being fucked hard without a reach around.

Facebook censorship is arbitrary and without warning. My account gets shut down once a week because of my criticism of a convicted felon and department store rapist running for President, a man who is the worst traitor in American history – but a useful stooge for white oligarchs who control American business monopolies. Did someone say: More tax cuts for Bezos, Fuckerberg, Murdoch and Musk?

To appreciate Naked Lunch one should begin from the premise that it is an epistolary novel by a writer from a distinguished St. Louis family. The author's grandfather invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, and this allowed the notorious writer to lead a life of leisure, foreign travel and romance while living on a private income.

The leisure took the form of paralyzing drug addiction. Burroughs once said he could stare at the end of his shoe for eight hours on end, while the travel was motivated by evasion of the law, and the romance was mostly paid-for sex with "boys" in exotic locations.

In 1951, while living in Mexico City, where he had gone to avoid a drug charge, Burroughs shot his wife Joan in the head during a drunken game of William Tell. After two weeks in custody, with the help of bribes paid out of Adding Machine profits, he was released. Of course, he immediately resumed the life of a fugitive addict, first returning to New York City, then travelling to Central America in search of hallucinogenic vegetable drugs, before settling in Tangier, Morocco.

The Expat Factor

I’m not aware of any book that lays out all the issues that confront an international couple. In respectful homage to Saul Bellow’s opening to The Adventures of Augie March, ‘I am an American, St. Louis born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.”

For Bellow (1915-2005), It's the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American fiction.

Call me Cinneide. This is the true Gaelic spelling of my family name. To be very precise, the full reference is Clann Cinneide as Paroiste Mainistir Muigheo, which translates as The Kennedy family of the County Mayo Parish.

The traditional Irish alphabet does not contain the letter: “K.” Since the British kept their boot on the throat of the Irish for centuries, to include banning the Catholic Church and all sacramental records for 200-years, the Irish have conformed to the British language standards. If success is the best revenge, Ireland has produced four Nobel Prize winners in Literature: George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

Across the Irish Sea, the British have collected eight Nobel Prize winners in Literature: Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, T.S. Elliot (from another prestigious St. Louis family, like William Burroughs), Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, William Golding, Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing.

For some extra trivia points:

Q: What two people have won both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize for Literature?

A: George Bernard Shaw and Bob Dylan.

A year after the 9/11 Attacks, I left America. I had to leave the country to achieve the American Dream of prosperity and upward mobility. Living paycheck-to-paycheck and staying on the hamster wheel of constant credit card debt was just a one-way ticket to Ward 81 at the Oregon State Hospital.

This is where Randall P. McMurphy struggled valiantly with Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

Interestingly enough, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange was also published in 1962, and both novels raise important questions about how far society should go in controlling our free will.

For stunning and powerful photography, see Ward 81, the book-length photo-essay by the masterful Mary Ellen Mark, who did all the still photography for Milos Forman’s 1975 film version of Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

By age 50, I had been drifting in an unlucky current far too long, and was slowly falling apart. I left America for one last chance to get off the hamster wheel of debt. I missed America, but I didn’t know where Miss America went. She left no address.

When I stepped away from America, the smirking chimp George W. Bush had just stolen the National Election of 2000 – thanks to his treasonous father (Iran-Contra), his half-wit brother Jeb (“What, me worry?”), Supreme Court stooges like Clearance Thomas, and political anarchist Roger Stone. Same as it ever was.

It is a natural reflex for me to identify as an American. My grandfather sailed to America from Ireland at age 10. He died identifying as an American. My father spent half his life in the backcountry of the Old Aztec Empire, and died identifying as a Mexican. Yet these are stories for another day.

As I have lived outside America for the past 22-years, this makes me an expatriate – more commonly referenced as an expat. And I have lived almost half that time in Seoul, which has roughly two million more people than New York City. Guns are outlawed in South Korea, so it is a safe place to live. Men do not enter elementary schools to use students for target practice.

And since guns are outlawed in this country, there is no National Rifle Association (NRA) to buy politicians in the National Assembly, like cheap side-walk sluts around Nana Plaza in Bangkok.

It’s safe to walk the streets of Seoul at any time, day or night. The subway system is world-class and English is widely spoken. There is a Starbucks on every other street. In many ways, it feels like California West.

As an American expat, I must maintain a U.S. residential address and file state and federal taxes based on that location. A screwball “virtual nomad” mailbox that forwards envelopes to your real location will not do. No bueno.

I claim residency in California, yet I have not been to “my address” in three years. As for a future trip ... maybe, maybe not, maybe it just does not matter.

Since I’m retired, Social Security provides a lifetime pension. The agency does not care where I really live in this world – as long as there is a direct-deposit for monthly funds with either a U.S. bank – or one that conforms to U.S. banking laws. Easy enough. My money is sent to a well-known American bank at the first of every month.

The Social Security Administration currently estimates that 760,000 U.S. citizens receive their benefits abroad. Some of the more popular locations for American retirees include Portugal and Spain in Europe, and Panama in Central America. There are other options with reasonable cost of living expenses, both affordable medical insurance and health care available. And no taxes on foreign income.

In Seoul, I could easily withdraw money from an ATM, but confess that I’ve never bothered to use one – ever. Why bother now?

Thanks to a specific Visa credit card, I hardly bother with paper money anymore. And that also means no annoying currency transaction fees. Yesterday, for instance, Sookyung wanted to trek back to Sinchon.

If you leave our apartment complex and head north, it’s a good 20-minute plus walk to Sinchon, a very international neighborhood with Yonsei University and Severance Hospital side-by-side.

If the weather is uncomfortable (too hot, too cold, or raining), there is the subway. Just go two stops to the west and transfer at Hapjeong for a quick two stop journey in a northeasterly direction to Sinchon. Senior citizens in Korea ride for free. So, in summer months a lot of older folks ride around on the subway with no destination in mind; they just want the free air-conditioning.

Every once in a while, Sookyung decides she “needs to see a doctor.” My mother was like this; nearly a full -blown Munchausen candidate. When I was eight years-old, my father and I sat in Dr. Hall’s waiting room every Friday night at 8 p.m. watching Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, while my mother met with the physician. I can’t imagine that Dr. Hall wasted an hour listening to my mother warble about how she was misunderstood. In the end he gave her some Mother’s Little Helpers. *

It was no surprise that the last time I saw my mother she was in lock-down in a mental ward at some nondescript Catholic hospital in St. Louis. Like a good Irish-Protestant, my mother had no use for Catholics. Yet the irony of her dying in a Catholic hospital is not lost on me.

Sookyung is light years removed from my mother’s Munchausen condition. Yet every once in a while, she “has to visit a clinic.” Sometimes I accompany her for some spouse points, and yesterday was such an example.

The scene is relatively unchanged from Dr. Hall’s office in 1959. A lot of old women sitting on generic thrift store couches, quite a few coffin-dodgers, perhaps one foot already in the grave. None are accompanied by husbands, who have either croaked or have been reduced to the dead man’s shuffle with a walker at home. Maybe a dutiful son accompanies his aged mother – but mostly it looks like Widow's Row.

Just like Dr. Hall from yesteryear, these women – Sookyung included, are given prescriptions and told “come back next month.”

With Korean National Insurance, everyone is really covered for basic medical expenses. The system is structured so that all recipients are charged based on their average income. As for prescriptions, they are nearly free.

Naturally, there is a pharmacy next door to these clinics, and the wealth is spread around – keeping the economy going. Soon there are three or four of the clinic’s gray panthers in the pharmacy waiting for their Mother’s Little Helpers – or some miracle salve. It’s like an impromptu Hen’s Club, with the women complaining about the price of food, or how North Korea has literally been sending balloons of shit southward .... that finally descend smelling of the most rancid and disgusting odors.

We all have Our Holy Grail, and for Sookyung it’s usually the perfect head of cabbage – or just the right choice of miniature tomatoes. It changes with each week. But she’s on a serious mission so that we have the best food at home.

This gives me an excuse to use my camera, and search for some ideal light. As always, I’m in plain sight, and everyone is free to sidestep me without going crazy and making these foolish demands that I delete photos – while we are all on CCTV cameras.

In a rare move yesterday, Sookyung decided we should go upstairs in the Hyundai Department where the restaurants cater to a slightly higher price clientele. We go to such a restaurant on average once a year. The food is quite good – and, not surprisingly, virtually all of the customers are women and they are full of lively conversation.

Yet this is a case where being an international couple comes into play. It’s common for the husband or the wife to say: “This one’s on me. My treat.” Yet the Korean won is weaker against the American dollar, so why pay 32,000 won, when $22 is much more reasonable. Thanks to a common cell phone app, I can do the currency conversion on the spot. All I have to do is slip my Visa credit card into the standard slot near every register. I sign my name and it’s paid in full. The restaurant gets 32,000 won, yet I’m only charged $22. This works for me.

For a time, we just added up all basic expenses (utilities, internet, insurance ... everything) and split everything in half. I paid my share in U.S. currency. Sometimes things blur a little, yet – as the saying goes: it all comes out in the wash. Really, it’s just easier for Sookyung to cover all our household expenses in Korean won, and then I pay for all our foreign travel expenses in U.S. dollars.

While in London recently, we discovered that we could use my American credit cards as “swipe” cards – or “pay-as-you-go” cards instead of forking over 15-British pounds (about $19 in U.S. dollars) for a day pass on The Tube. It’s the way to go, but you can’t pass the same credit card between two people. The card must be distinct. But it still saves a hell of a lot of money. While this approach is now standard in London, this has not taken hold yet in either Dublin or Paris.

It's only a matter of time.

*Mother's little helper refers to usually amphetamine based prescription meds often prescribed to House Wives back in the 60s / 70s to get them through another repetitive Boring Day