THE GUYS AND ITAEWON

Each night when I returned to the Inn Sung Do, my pace quickened as I approached the door. There was sure to be another teacher there, fresh off a stressful day and we’d head off to a place with lots of people and loud music to unwind. I was very lucky in the people who ended up calling the Inn Sung Do home.

One of the first I met was Lynda around the corner in Room 4. Her room was always neat as a pin and a nice place to lounge. You could knock on her door at almost any time, and she’d welcome you with a warm smile and invite you in. She was a very giving person and even if she was tired and didn’t want company she’d still force a big smile and make room on the floor. We’d sit on the floor with our backs to the wall huddled under an ibul and watch the fuzzy picture on the TV while snacking on junk food. She bought some baskets and shelves and had filled them with homey stuff. She even had an iron and an ironing board.

She had stopped her missionary work but found when she returned to the States that she missed Korea and she returned hoping to stay on as an English teacher. While working as a missionary, she had learned both Korean and sign language. One memorable day, she invited a group of us on a hike in the mountains with a group of deaf mute Koreans that she knew. I anticipated a very awkward day but it wasn’t at all. Communicating with them using only gestures was not dissimilar to my attempts to communicate with other Koreans. And the deaf mutes were experts at that type of talking and quite accustomed to language barriers.

If I was lucky, I’d find Ann already in Lynda’s room. Dave of the golden voice had brought Ann to the yogwan one day and introduced me to her and right away I felt we were kindred spirits. Ann was tall and slim and athletic and full of life. She had bright eyes and soft fleecy shoulder length hair. I particularly remember her hair because shortly after meeting her, she asked if I would do her a big favour. She was shy about it and I wondered what it could be. She had, she said, picked up head lice somehow in the U.S. and had just finished the treatment. She asked if I would mind checking to see if they were all taken care off. It was weird, but I would have blushed if she knew then what pleasure it gave me to run my hands through her hair. Perhaps she suspected for a short time later she made a deliberate point of showing me pictures of her last trip to Nepal in which this rugged Frenchman figured prominently.

This was a time when I hadn’t met that many traveler-types and Ann’s story fascinated me. She did a degree in (of all things) Communications and Consumer Relations, but after an internship gave it up and spent years concentrating on doing things she enjoyed. She worked in national parks during the summers doing a lot of rock climbing and hiking, and in winters she worked at ski resorts and spent all her spare time skiing. She’d just recently worked for five or six months in Australia at two jobs and had saved enough money to travel for many more months around Asia. She returned to the States for a visit at Christmas and now had come to Korea to continue the pattern. She had been given tons of “office” type clothing by family and friends and was eager to put it to use in the ESL classroom. At the end of the day, we would compare notes about our never-ending and frustrating search for work.

One evening, I arrived home to find Lynda not home and Ann nowhere in sight. I was sitting in my room when a knock came on the door. I opened it to Mathew and Graham a couple of newly-arrived British types. They’d heard I’d been around a while and had come to me for advice about finding work teaching English. They had been teaching in Hong Kong but heard the environment was much better in Korea and here they were. I couldn’t tell them much, but we ended up spending a lot of time together.

They were both in their early to mid twenties and had left their jobs in banking in London to travel the world. They were good friends and I find it difficult even now to separate them in my mind even though they had distinct personalities. Mathew was the taller of the two, quite thin with an infinite capacity for nightlife, which suited the teacher’s lifestyle perfectly. He taught his evening classes, went out all night and went straight to his morning classes after which he napped during the day. One time, he came back from a week on the hot and sunny beaches of the Philippines whiter than when he had left. I asked him about it and he said he hadn’t seen the sun once the entire week.

Graham was never without a cigarette dangling from between his fingers, Ray Bans on his nose, and never happier than when a fellow Brit showed up from Hong Kong with the latest editions of his favorite music and fashion magazines. Graham could easily match Mathew for stamina and could sit hour after hour at a pub table discoursing on every possible topic. Before Korea, I knew nothing about the British. Everything these two did was a revelation to me at first. I’ll never forget the first time we played baseball. Graham stepped up to home plate and knocked the ball practically out of the park and then stood there watching it fly, as I guess it is possible to do in cricket. We all jumped up and down yelling “Run, run!” He turned to us in typically unflappable style and said, “Where?” Till then, I thought humans were born with the knowledge of the game baseball.

And then there was Paul and Dave living in a room around the back of the yogwan. Paul was permanently in high gear. He reminded me of a giant bird with his quickness and perky manner. He was the ultimate tireless happy teacher and completely frenetic dancer. I never saw him brought down by anything, even the time they stepped on his mouse.

He was teaching classes of young children and had to teach a few easy placement words like ‘in’ ‘on’ ‘under’ ‘beside’. He decided to use a visual and built something very special for the class. He made a paper mouse. A toilet paper tube was the body and using scraps of wire and bits of paper he built his own cute little mouse. I could tell he was quite proud of it when he told me the story.

I know exactly how the class was supposed to go, I’ve done it many times myself. It’s a very simple question and answer routine. Paul was going to place his paper mouse on top of a desk and ask the children, “Where is the mouse?” They would reply “The mouse is on the desk.” He would move the mouse under the desk and again ask, “Where is the mouse?” “The mouse is under the desk.”

Paul went into the big class. It was the first of many, and he planned on using the mouse routine for all of them. He never got the chance. In the very first class, he put the mouse down on the floor and choosing one child brighter than the rest to demonstrate, he asked, “Where is the mouse?” Before she could reply a young boy ran out of his seat leaped high into the air and flattened the mouse.

Dave was Scottish and the only person in Korea who could make me laugh, and yet he never said anything funny. His manner of speaking and way of telling a story was what killed me. He managed to seize on the absurdity of any situation (and there was plenty of that in Korea) and beat it to death keeping me laughing all the time. Like Paul he also never seemed to lose his sense of humor. He even took over my classes at the Munwha after I left, thriving on the strangeness of the place.

There were dozens more characters that I met over the years but these were the ones I met first and with which I explored the madness that is Itaewon. During the day Itaewon was a thriving market place selling cheap clothing, leather jackets and shoes to foreigners. But at night it became a glitter of neon bars and dance clubs. It was born years ago out of the American soldier’s lust for Asian women and their need to cut loose. AIDS and influx of modernizing Korean young people has tempered it somewhat but it can still be a rough place.

There was a time when it rocked and rolled openly twenty four hours a day. But when we discovered it for ourselves, Seoul was on a midnight curfew. The whole city shut down at midnight, like someone drew a curtain across life. Itaewon too closed its front doors but then paid off the police and opened the back.

An evening in Itaewon followed a pretty regular pattern. It started at a hangout bar, a place where we could just sit around and drink and not be bothered by anybody or anything. Matthew and Graham usually decided where that place was by the price of beer. For a while it was Tiny’s.

Tiny’s Country and Western Bar sits on the second floor across the road from the Hamilton Hotel. It had long abandoned the Country and Western theme and of course Tiny was actually quite a large man, his substantial stomach always straining against a plain T-shirt. Tiny’s was a hostess bar and each time we entered, the girls looked up eagerly from their stools. But when they saw we were English teachers, they dropped their heads and went back to their conversations. The GI’s were their bread and butter. We only came for the cheap beer.

The hostesses were a marvel. They maintained a cheerful state of mind regardless of how gross their customers were. They danced and sang and laughed and convinced every single one of their customers that they were special. They remembered all their names and when they walked in the door again, the girls would leap to their feet and greet them like long-lost lovers. I suppose they had the advantage of the hypnotist in that the men wanted to be convinced. Many of the hostess bars were off-limits to us unless we were willing to pay for a woman’s time. But a few allowed us to take up table space. It made the bar look fuller and more fun for when the real paying customers poked their heads in the door to see what was up.

If someone was hungry, we’d often head a few doors down the street to the Nashville club. The Nashville was run by an American, and was still true to its country and western roots. The waitresses wore horrific little outfits with the tiny miniskirts then in fashion. I don’t know if they were coerced or not (again they had that knack of looking like they were enjoying themselves) but they’d occasionally get together in a line in front of the bar and do a cute dance routine while the good old boys clapped along to the music. Then they’d scatter and hop into the laps of the fat old men at the tables. These were often ex-military who’d been drifting ever since they were discharged from the army. They sat in bars like the Nashville desperately trying to convince themselves that since a few bar hostesses knew their names that they had a life. Meanwhile their bellies grew and grew and their stories got older and older.

At the back of the Nashville was another room where they showed movies on a big screen and thankfully didn’t play country and western songs. They had a grill there and served food from a limited menu. The waitresses were paid on the American plan, low wages meant to be supplemented by tips. But in Korea, tipping isn’t a common custom and the waitresses waged a steady war to increase their tips. Over the walls were computer printed pages stating in stark black letters, “Tips not included”. They hated to see seven or eight of us English teachers show up, for we always stayed for hours and put everything on one bill meaning mass confusion and a small tip. The waitresses had rubber stamps made up and stamped “Tips not included” in red ink on all the bills. They placed the bill on the table face up and kept their finger pointing directly at the red stamp. When they left the table, they’d get our attention and tap their knuckle against the sign on the wall.

At three a.m., you still can’t move. Thousands of tons of GI muscle absorbing alcohol. After every night there, I dream about backs, these huge shoulders spread across my vision. Military police stand at discreet attention moving carefully to avoid vomit stains on their uniforms.

On the dance floor, people are so desensitized by this point that you need not move. You get bounced around in approximate time to the music. GI’s pick up their bought Korean dates to kiss them. An image of kids playing with dolls flashes across my mind. I see these shapeless lumps in the dark. Bringing my eyes into focus and bouncing over that way I manage to make out a GI bent over a tiny woman – she not so much embraced as absorbed, wrapped.

Four a.m. and you still can’t move for bodies. The front door is locked. YOu are motioned through a side door and shushed silent. An unseen guide turns a flashlight off and on at intervals. Otherwise you work your way in the silent dark, down hallways, up stairs till you emerge in the alley. The charade ends there. Hundreds of people stagger about shouting and cursing trying to stop one of the dozens of taxis. The Korean prostitutes are far less friendly now. Their “dates” have long seen been fleeced of every available cent. They can curse them now, their 3 to 4 inch heels now weapons.

Taxi drivers have a lot of power here. You must shout your destination through the window. They may or may not take you there. The result is chaos. Dozens of people rush a cab shouting and pushing and then run to the next. Drunk GI’s kick the sides of taxis that drive away.

The taxis don’t like taking groups because they group fares. We send out one person to secure a cab while the rest hide out of sight. When we see our scout open the taxi door we rush forward and fling ourselves in before the driver can protest. At the end of the ride, we are told to pay 5 times the fare. We all climb out, pay him what we feel is fair and run away. We all run to Lawson’s where we buy more beer, chocolate chip cookies and chips. The party continues in someone’s room.

 

 

 

Tags: GI, Hong Kong, Korea, Korea - First Days Teaching English, music