Korea: When Memories Fail

After nearly twenty years, my memories are like crumbs scattered across a table.  What had once been a feast of incredible life altering experiences has been devoured by time, eaten in such a hurry that if one looks closely at the crumbs one can still see remnants of what they once were – at trip to the DMZ, a joke-a-thon between two friends at a party, Sorak-san, Christmas.  Visions of the past rise up on occasion like images emerging from a thick fog in the early morning before the sun has cleared the horizon.  Encased first in darkness and then shrouded in white, the images appear milky, cloudy and unclear.  I peer at them intently, hoping the sun will burn off the moisture and the contours of each moment will grow defined and crisp, that the shadows will dissipate and the colors become vibrant.  But more times than not, the fog persists and I find the images fading before I can fully grasp them.  Time has become my enemy.

            When I commenced writing my adventures in Korea, the early chapters were as fresh as if I had lived them yesterday, but after several installments I became overly aware of the holes, the gaps, and the absence of texture. I hold out my finger to touch the people and places I once knew, but the moment I make contact they blur, like a reflection on water disturbed by the drop of a pebble.  I remember enough to make me homesick – if one can be homesick for a temporary home. Songs and smells are magical when conjuring up the past, miniscule moments that might otherwise have been lost if they had not be encapsulated in a particular lyric or odor.  I remember enough to wish that I had done some things differently.  Instead of returning home, should I have taught abroad indefinitely, hoping from country to country?  I remember enough that smiles still arrive unexpectedly when I hear certain words.  And pictures, random pictures on-line or in the news send me traveling back through time until I am sitting at a bar in I’taewon, watching a movie with Yasmine or hiking at Namhansansong.  The past is still there, trapped, buried and sometimes broken, but if I work hard I can sometimes excavate enough to cheer me up on a particularly solemn day. 

To write a memoir, however, I need help.  And apparently a younger version of myself realized this.  A twenty-two year old me knew that someday I’d be sitting here struggling to remember and so I wrote instructions to my dad in an email, instructions he evidently followed because I found the documents I needed last time I went home for a visit.  On Wednesday, October 23, 1996, I ended an email, “PS – If I know Mommy she is probably saving all the letters I send home.  But if you aren’t, can you, please?  Someday I may write a book about my life in Korea and the letters are probably as good if not better than a journal.  Besides, writing to people is so much more fun than writing to blank pieces of paper.”  In retrospect, I’m not sure I completely agree with myself.  I think journals are better – they are private and as such enable one to be more candid and honest.  But letters certainly beat having nothing but memory to fall back on.  Once I left Korea, and traveled extensively, I never went anywhere without a journal and was more faithful to my writing than anything else.  I wrote every day I was away.  I logged every adventure, outburst, bout of sadness and all my dreams.  But those tales came later.  As for Korea, I must thank my parents for printing every email and holding onto them so that I have a record.  As incomplete as I may view my emails now, they are all I have and something is always better than nothing.

It is an interesting experience looking back at your life through the lens of a younger self.  Yesterday, I finally had a moment to start reading the emails that once upon a time kept my parents abreast of what I was doing, seeing and experiencing.  I read through a couple of months and found myself oscillating between disappointment and shock.  The things I once deemed extremely relevant, important tidbits regarding my life, seem so superficial now.  Really who cares about what it was like to work out in a Korean gym with all the women gawking at me?  Why did I go on and on about how boring parties could be and how awful the taste of soju is?   The more I read, the more I wished I had written.  How come I never described the smells of the spring afternoon when I walked home from work?  Why didn’t I elaborate on my time in Sorak-san?  Why did I not think it important to document exactly what Lauren cooked when she was kind enough to make Christmas dinner for those of us who were lonely and missing our families on the holiday?  How come I never deemed it important to write about my individual students, their personalities, their quirks, and my interactions with them?  In my emails I painted everything with broad strokes giving a wonderful overview of what my life was like, but I totally neglected the details, the shadows and subtle shifts in perspective.

What strikes me most is that in many ways I was that which I have grown to loathe?  Extensive travel has taught me to be culturally sensitive.  When I leave America, I do just that – I leave.  I have learned to adapt, to accept that some people make pizza with ketchup and that sometimes the best shower you are going to get is a cold water hose.  But apparently, that wasn’t always me.  I was the ugly American, the one who could not accept the fact that things were done differently, the fact that women were basically ignored in taekwondo or that Koreans double dip their odang (processed fish sticks) in sauces meant to be shared with strangers. I held everyone to the standards I had been brought up to recognize as being the best and had not yet learned to stifle my American bias.  I’m surprised in some ways I didn’t get myself killed.  I am not the same person I was twenty years ago and that difference will certainly impact my writing.  I don’t see how it can’t.  And that makes me wonder, the memories that are still in tact, the moments that I remember as crisply as if they occurred five minutes ago – how accurate are they? 

It is surreal to be on the receiving end of some rather intimate thoughts and rants.  How odd to have written letters to my future self?  To read things out of context, the way my parents might have read them, picking up pieces here and there but never really seeing the whole.  Every once in awhile my dad had asked me questions, and I cut and pasted them into my email before responding to a particular inquiry.  The questions and answers are always so disjointed from the rest of my narrative, belonging to some earlier statement written a day or two or perhaps a week earlier.  Sometimes I can find the thread if I flip back through the pages and sometimes I can not.  What I find extremely ironic is that I, who have professed for years my adaptability, my ability to live as a Roman in Rome, needed my Dad to continuously remind me not to be so critical, to put myself in someone else’s shoes and to be mindful of the fact that I was in a different culture and that I shouldn’t expect to change what I find upsetting, oppressive or unfair.  Yes, I have traveled a long way since my first visit to a foreign country, something to keep in mind as write, since the writer and the subject are not necessarily the same.  I could laugh at myself but mostly I cringe, thankful that I am less abrasive today than I was back then. 

In some ways it’s incredible that I did manage to document as much as I did via email. In 1996, email was still relatively new.  Today, it the developed world, it is extremely commonplace, everyone has it and everyone knows how to use it (except perhaps for my mom).  We’ve become so dependant on it that sometimes we wonder – even those of us that grew up without it – how we would ever get along in the absence of it.  How in the world would we ever correspond with anyone without a computer?  But back in 1996, I was just learning the rudiments of what a computer could do.

For a graduation present my parents had bought me my very first computer – yes, now I am truly dating myself.  In college, I did not need a computer.  I got through an entire four years with nothing more than a word processor and some professors even let me handwrite assignments.  My first computer was a laptop because my intention had been to travel the world and write about it.  I dreamed of being a travel writer of sorts – at least the dream hasn’t totally died, although for awhile the dream was on serious life support.  Anyway, my first encounter with email was in Korea.  With my new computer, I arrived eager to embrace the new technology.  And then I attempted to download the necessary files in order to get internet access and in the process I somehow – please don’t ask how, because I can’t even venture a guess and I’m totally mortified even admitting this – wiped out my entire hard drive.  Yep, not a single file remained.  That was the very first and very last time I ever tried to do something more involved than pressing the on button.  Since then if someone else isn’t around to install or download something new it doesn’t get done.  A child of the seventies and eighties, I’m petrified of technology. 

Luckily, Steve had the same computer and was social enough that he met and became friends with a Korean computer geek who quickly became my new hero.  One night, he met up with me and Steve for dinner, loaded all of Steve’s software onto my computer and set me up so that I could begin keeping a record of my time in Korea.  So a big thank you to the man who made emailing a possibility for me.  My memoir would certainly have skidded to a screeching halt without him.

And now, I must resume my research – research on myself, research of primary documents that I myself wrote. What a strange concept, to dig into my own past as if I were a stranger. And how disconcerting it is to stumble across something – a fact, an event, and emotion – and have absolutely no recollection of it.  Or to read about it and wait as it slowly takes shape in my mind, emerging – sometimes partially, sometimes misshapen - from the depths of my past.  I am discovering myself, and in the process, I will hopefully succeed in keeping you entertained and interested as I delve deeper into my life as an ESL teacher in Korea.