Category: Asia

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Bong Hits

There’s a scene in Parasite where fumigators come to the alley where the Kims live, spraying white clouds of insecticide. “Do they still do t hat?” someone asks. It was, among other things, a callback to Bong’s first movie, Barking Dogs Never Bite. In that film, kids ride their bikes in the poison wake of a fumigation truck, and a character disappears in the toxic fog. Those trucks were a real thing, at least in those days.

The unjustly neglected Barking Dogs was the first Korean film I ever saw. It was part of a Korean film festival in New York City in 2001, which I attended so I could learn something, anything, about the country I’d be moving to a couple of months later. No one knew much about Korea then. There wasn’t yet a Korean wave. No one talked about Korean fashion or makeup or hip-hop or dramas. All of that was in the future. But I was pretty sure I’d just seen a great film, and when I moved to Korea, it came back to me again and again. Somehow it captured perfectly the texture of Korean life in those days.

As the Korean wave crested, other films and directors got more notice, especially the brilliant Park Chan-wook. But for all the flash and dazzling weirdness of Oldboy and the rest of his Vengeance series, I was convinced that people were missing out on Korea’s greatest filmmaker. I went to see Bong speak at the Korea Society in New York a few years ago, and he drew a crowd of dozens. He was affable, charming, humble, and quietly very, very smart. Like his movies.

I’m glad that he’s getting the attention he deserves at last, and not for one of his crossover films — his English-speaking characters have always felt wooden to me — but for a movie rooted in the textures of actual Korean life (and starring longtime Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho). It’s a proud moment for Korean cinema and culture, and one that I hope will draw viewers to Bong’s other films, and to the work of other Korean filmmakers and artists.

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Dust

I tend to write about things in Korea that I like, or at least find interesting. It’s a fascinating place, and I’m in love with it.

But it does have its downsides. And this terrifying image of a face in a gas mask represents one of the worst: Korea’s fine dust.

Mise mise, named after the fine dust (mise meonji), is Korea’s most popular app for tracking air quality, and it says the fine dust is up to 171 micrograms per cubic meter, the ultra-fine dust up to 115. This is not good, not good at all. The air today was thick and visible, a fine gray-white murk, like breathing the Gowanus Canal. It wasn’t pleasant to be out in it. My throat’s been sore all day. When I stepped outside, I wore a face mask, and not one of those cute fabric fashion ones either, but something rated for keeping out fine dust. This is no joke.

I keep hoping this will get better as if by magic, but it probably won’t. Korea’s doing some things to mitigate the dust, but a lot of it comes over from China, and I think we’re a long way from solving this problem. It’s worst in the spring, but it’s not spring now, and the air is terrible, and the scary gas mask face. 

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Autumn Leaves at Buseoksa

I’m writing at a difficult moment. Today I woke up to the news that eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh. I want to share this nice, happy thing in my life here in Korea because there is beauty and life in the world and I am committed to enjoying it. My first visit to Korea came less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, and many people asked me whether I still planned to come here and teach English for a year. My answer now was my answer then: as much as possible, I don’t ever want to let terrorists decide for me what to do or how to live.

Busloads of apples

Apple farmers selling their wares at the Yeongju Apple Festival.

Apple farmers line the streets, old ladies with paring knives handing out samples, crates of their wares spread out for sale. Young men with batons direct traffic into special designated parking areas, while bus after bus rumbles in, belching out Korean tour groups led by tinny amplified voices. There’s a stage set up and rows of white plastic chairs, but at noon the Yeongju Apple Festival is still not quite underway.

There are a lot of ways to know you love a person, but one way is when she looks at the Apple Festival, looks at you, and suggests you get out quickly and go somewhere else.

Autumn leaves

We’d come to Yeongju and Buseoksa Temple for the autumn leaves.  We drove down on a Friday afternoon of spattering rain and dropping temperatures, crossing the Sobaeksan range in deep fog, but when we arrived at Road to Buseoksa Pension, the stars had come out. We were the only customers at a nearby restaurant, eating a dinner of fish and tofu while the owners and their friends grilled off-the-menu samgyeopsal in the other room.

In the morning we headed up to the temple, which boasts Shilla stone monuments and statuary, a Goryeo wooden building that’s among the oldest still standing in Korea, and spectacular views. It was interesting to see the unusual architecture of the Goryeo main temple hall, which has support structures that are related to, but different from, the typical Joseon Dynasty style you see nearly everywhere in Korea. Because there was so much destruction during the Imjin War in the late 16th century, examples of earlier architecture are rare. 

Autumn view from Buseoksa Temple.
The main temple hall, which dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty.
  • Here you can see the unusual support structure, quite different from the usual Joseon style found in most Korean temples.
  • The main columns have a “belly” shape, widening in the midsection and tapering again at the base.
Shilla stone Buddhas.
More lovely fall colors from the temple.

We were lucky to get to the temple early. By the time we were leaving, around lunchtime, the busloads of tourists had turned this quiet autumnal refuge into a circus, or really just a low-grade Korean amusement park without any rides. It was time to get away.

Mountain mushrooms

Not far away, near Punggi, across from the Sosu Seoweon (Confucian academy), we saw a sign for a restaurant and decided to pull in. It was styled like an old hanok, and we were shown to a private room.

As we were entering, I saw — and smelled — a bubbling dish being brought to the next room over, a heady, rich brew of earthy mushrooms. “Whatever that is,” I said, “we’re ordering that.”

Wild mushroom jangol.

We had lucked into the last available seating at Dageum (다금), an apparently famous restaurant about which I can find nothing online. Not long after we arrived, two buses showed up, but with our private room, we hardly noticed the crowds. Each dish is handmade, and the man who runs the place goes out into the mountains to gather the wild ingredients. In the jangol, you could taste and savor each different type of mushroom: this one purple and astringent, that one almost like kelp, another woody and chewy. We had the jangol plus a wild mushroom pancake, plus a bunch of side dishes, all for 40,000 won.

Wild mushrooms gathered from the mountains.

We rounded out the day with a visit to Sosu Seowon, Korea’s oldest Confucian academy. Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism is no longer an active faith, and these places, which were always austere, are now a bit sad too. But the autumn leaves were just as beautiful there, and you could feel some sense of what it must have been like for the scholars to observe the passing of the seasons in this beautiful place dedicated to learning and practicing the virtuous life.

And then we drove home, back to Seoul, through the traffic and the city lights and up into an apartment tower, where we ordered in Chinese food.

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Learning in Circles

Once a year, Orthodox Jews take the Torahs out of the case and dance around with them drunkenly. It’s the raucous, joyous holiday of Simchas Torah, which celebrates the end and beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses. You finish, you start over again. Yay!

This isn’t our typical way of learning in Western culture. We tend to learn sequentially, hierarchically: grade by grade, level by level. Working biologists aren’t expected to go back through their high school bio textbooks, and few of us reread the novels we read then, even though they were written for adults and not for the children we were at the time. (The Old Man and the Sea doesn’t hold up that well, but The Great Gatsby makes a lot more sense, and Holden Caufield’s prep school whinging is easier to take when you’re not reading it in a shitty public school.)

In language learning too, there are levels and hierarchies. By rights, my Korean is advanced intermediate or thereabouts. I’m certainly well past the beginner level, able to have real conversations with complicated grammar and vocabulary.

And yet.

Jews read and reread the Torah not because it’s new, or because they forgot what happens. (Spoiler alert: The Jews win and Moses dies.) We study because each time we can go deeper, or find something new that we’d overlooked the last time.

Language study is like that too. Have you ever gone back through an old chapter of one of your language textbooks, something you’re now way past? You’ll find that once knotty and intractable passages are now easy to understand. And you’ll also find vocabulary and grammar you’d forgotten, or that you couldn’t get then but can now.

With that in mind, I’m rereading my Korean language textbooks from the beginning. It’s not that I’ll finally learn how to say hello or what’s for breakfast. But already, even in the first chapter, I’m bumped into a few words I’d long forgotten, a few concepts that had slipped my mind. 

Learning isn’t always about moving forward. Sometimes you get more by going back over the same ground and seeing what you missed the first time.

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Second Seouliversary

Today is my Seouliversary: two years since I arrived in this city to make it my home, and I’m happy to report that all is well. Coming here was not a mistake. Over the past few months, a lot has happened that has made Seoul feel more than ever like the place I belong.

Life with car

I bought a car. I’m now the proud owner of a 2017 Hyundai Avante (what you probably know as an Elantra) with all the bells and whistles. I drive to work and can take trips to the countryside with ease. Getting to a decent grocery is easier. I walk less, but I eat more fruit and get out of the city more often.

Learning to deal with Seoul’s aggressive driving culture — not to mention the local habit of parking butt-in — has been a challenge. Seoul parking garages tend to be terrifyingly narrow, and I dented the car in the first week just trying to get out of the garage at my apartment complex. I was also caught speeding by one of Korea’s ubiquitous cameras, and so I’ve paid my first ticket (about $30).

Buying a car may be no big deal for most of you, but I haven’t really ever owned one as an adult, since I lived in New York. Owning one here is, among other things, a commitment to being here a while, and also to expanding my reach in this country I call home.

Gayageum

Over the spring and summer, I took a gayageum class for foreigners. A gayageum is a twelve-string zither, and I can now pluck out a couple of tunes. We had a performance at the end of the twelve-week course, and since then, I’ve continued on with the same teacher. It’s challenging but fun, another way of connecting to Korean culture and deepening my experience of being here.

Parents

My parents came for a visit in the spring, their first to Asia other than Israel (what continent did you think Israel was on?). Native New Yorkers, they were impressed by the sheer scale and density of Seoul. We packed a lot into two weeks: a baseball game, a shaman ritual, two traditional music performances, a couple of hikes, lots of touring around the heart of Seoul, a number of museums, palaces and temples, shopping on Insadong, antiquing around Dongmyo, and a Shabbos at Chabad of Korea. They had a blast.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to share this important part of my life with them. Now, when I talk about what I’m up to, they can picture it better. They have a sense of what I find so compelling about this place. It was sort of like introducing them to a girlfriend.

Love

Speaking of which, I’ve got a girlfriend, and my parents met her while they were here, which was a little weird because we’d only been dating about a month. But we’re crazy about each other, and my parents could tell, plus she’s awesome and loves jazz, so my parents thought she was great. If you want to get on my dad’s good side, ask him for jazz pianist recommendations, then later tell him you spent all day listening to Red Garland and Art Tatum. If you want to get on my mom’s good side, look at one of her children (or grandchildren) like they’re the best thing in the world.

Anyway, my girlfriend is Korean, we speak more Korean than English, she has an incredible smile, she’s smart and funny and thoughtful, and I feel good whenever I’m with her. We celebrated our 100 days together — kind of a thing here in Korea — at Ryunique, one of the best restaurants in Seoul.

I’m not saying much more about her or us because love is personal — to both people involved — but this is the biggest thing going on in my life right now, and I’m happy, and it’s another way I know, two years in, that I’m in the right place.

 

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Strategic Angles

Screens in the Samsung cafeteria are showing the Trump and Kim Show and Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. I’m not sure which dystopian vision of Pacific Rim globalization is weirder. Maybe it’s best to focus on the pocketless billiards on the screen in between? Oh, wait, a person in a giant cat head is cleaning the billiards table now. Never mind.

It’s an odd day, lacking the solemnity and gravitas of Kim’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in because nothing Trump does has solemnity or gravitas. The results, after all the pageantry and tears, were more or less what I expected: a vaguely worded agreement reaffirming commitment to peace and denuclearization, with plans for more negotiation down the line.

Peace games

Trump followed up the summit by declaring that the US would stop its war games on the Korean Peninsula, which has led some commentators to claim that the US gave up something while getting nothing. In the most literal terms, that’s true, if you focus only on the summit and not on what led to it or how it was reported in North Korea.

Taking a slightly wider view, North Korea prepared for the summit by dismantling some nuclear facilities to demonstrate its readiness for real denuclearization. How valuable the facilities really were is debatable, but these are at least irreversible steps, unlike Trump’s decision to suspend the war games. And ending the expensive, provocative war games is probably something the US should have done long ago, but the US felt constrained because it felt like a gift to North Korea, and there was never an occasion for giving them a gift until now. I’m not concerned that the joint US-ROK military command will forget how to invade North Korea for lack of practice.  Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are still in place, and so are America’s troops in South Korea.

The view from the north

North Korean reporting on the summit also matters.

When I first lived in South Korea, in the era of the Sunshine Policy, the english-language Arirang network had a show called Peninsulascope that did soft news about North Korea, looking for areas of commonality and progress. They would end each episode with a North Korean cartoon. I remember there was one about a family of squirrels who live near a fox. When a flood comes, the fox offers to save them; the squirrels hesitate, afraid of the fox, but at last they accept the offer, and the fox does indeed rescue them — only to eat them later. The moral of the story is that you can never trust your enemies because they will never, ever change.

The fox is America. This is how North Koreans are taught to see us: as devious and bestial in our very natures. And now Kim Jong-un has sat down with the king of the foxes and cut some kind of a deal.

I think of that cartoon whenever I hear someone saying this summit is boosting Kim’s legitimacy. In some hypothetical, domino theoryish way, the summit’s acknowledgement that Kim is the leader of a nuclear North Korea — which is true, by the way — may be giving some other dictator ideas. Domestically, though, it’s not that simple.

Kim has been preparing his people for a shift. Showing Kim talking to the enemy, and showing Kim admiring Singapore’s shiny prosperity, is something new. It’s something of a gamble, even if Kim’s position is for now secure. What might have been seen as capitulation or even treason — seen that way not just by the people, who don’t matter, but by the generals and politburo members, who do — has to be seen instead as a bold path forward. Kim needs to make it clear to his domestic audience that he’s not surrendering. I’m not sure how easy that is.

In taking these risks, Kim seems to be demonstrating his desire for something genuinely new. And really, for all that Trump and Moon can set timetables and fiddle with the requirements, it’s up to Kim whether he wants to denuclearize and cut a new path.

We shall see.

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Opening Closed Doors

f(x)’s androgynous rapper/singer Amber Liu has a new mixtape, and it’s a doozy.

The mixtape starts with Get Over It, a jab at the music industry that’s also a plea for freedom of expression, to the point that Amber whips a paper bag off her head. Closed Doors is the first of four love songs, all ungendered (pronouns are “you,” “me,” “we”), and the refrain is “Nobody has to know what’s behind these closed doors.” On Right Now, Amber duets with a male singer (her vocal coach), and an actress plays his love interest, rather than Amber herself. Lifeline features a moving pas de deux featuring two men. For the Three Million Years video, Amber wears a rainbow peace sign pin in the video.
In a Billboard interview about the mixtape, Jeff Benjamin does all he can to get Amber to bite on the obvious question. He asks what “Closed Doors” is about, and Amber says it’s about respecting her privacy. He asks if there were any rumors that got to her, and she deflects it by saying she didn’t like it when the press reported her family was rich. He asks a couple of questions about her love life, and she gives meticulously ungendered answers. He even implies that one lovesong might be about her and a bandmate. She talks a lot about LGBTQ representation and is very supportive throughout the interview. Some of her best friends are gay.
Now, Amber Liu’s orientation, and her public discussion of it, are her business. I have no idea whether she’s actually queer or not. Maybe she’s straight but feels that’s not anyone’s business either. Who knows? But it sure feels like Amber is pounding on the closet doors from the inside.
It would be a huge deal to have a kpop star as big as Amber come out as gay or bi. For now, though, enjoy the music, the ambiguity, and Amber’s strong statements in support of the LGBTQ community.
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Everybody Plays Games

“Everybody plays games.” That’s what Trump had to say after his sudden cancelation of his summit with Kim Jong-un, and then his intimations a day later that maybe the summit will go ahead after all.

This is not how diplomacy is usually done. Diplomacy is statecraft and it’s stately, building from the ground up, with lots of lower-level officials hammering out agreements over time. That kind of diplomacy can be effective, and it has the advantage of bringing thought and expertise to complex processes. But it hasn’t ever really worked with North Korea.

Instead, Trump is playing games. As a mode of running a presidency, it’s terrible. Playing games with immigration has been a disaster on too many levels to mention. Playing games with Iran — a country capable of the usual sort of patient, step-by-step diplomacy — also seems pretty dumb. Playing games with China on trade is like trying to play badminton with a grizzly bear. Playing games with Amazon and the Post Office is just batshit.

But with North Korea? Maybe games are where it’s at.

Games countries play

North Korea has a style unlike any other country’s. Negotiations even with very difficult counterparts like Cuba or Iraq never veered quite so schizophrenically from protestations of eternal friendship to foaming rants full of schoolyard insults. North Korea’s version of good cop-bad cop is Andy Taylor and Stacey Koon. In this case, after some admittedly unhelpful and possibly stupid and threatening comments from Vice President Mike Pence, North Korea failed to show up for a planning meeting and called the vice president stupid, along with some other amped up rhetoric.

The usual response, when North Korea throws one of these tantrums, is to backpedal, play it down, and coax North Korea back to the negotiating table like parents trying to keep their two-year-old from embarrassing them at a fancy restaurant. Trump tried something different. Before the tantrum even reached full crazy, he threw his own little narcissistic tantrum, backing out of the summit with a weirdly personal letter full of regret and disappointment.

Not only that, but Trump backed out after North Korea blew up its own nuclear test facility. You can argue that the facility was in bad shape anyway, but still, the timing was striking and devious. If this is where the diplomatic train stops, then the US got the destruction of North Korea’s only nuclear test facility, and North Korea got nothing. No cash, no lifted sanctions, no security guarantees, no future cancelation of US-ROK joint military exercises. Nothing.

Crazytown diplomacy

The Trump cancelation sent everyone scrambling. Moon Jae-in and Shinzo Abe were embarrassed and confused. China was probably both confused and relieved, if concerned that we’re going back to nuclear brinksmanship on their border. North Korea probably looked around and remembered that China is their only reliable ally.

If this were normal diplomacy, all of that would be very, very bad. But this is not normal diplomacy. This is Trump crazytown diplomacy. With Trump, everything is always contingent and always personal. North Korea made a conciliatory statement — a sign that Trump’s tantrum-for-tantrum approach might actually be an effective way of talking to North Korea — and now Trump is talking about reinstating the summit. So who knows?

The thing is, crazytown diplomacy might be the right tool for North Korea. Trump isn’t good at being president, or even at running a real business, but he’s good at sucking people into his orbit and using his B-list charisma to create buddies and sycophants. One of the only things we actually know about Kim Jong-un personally is that he has a taste for B-list charisma. It’s bizarre to consider that Trump’s Rodmanesque qualities just might win the day here.

Of course, any actual agreement will require the more ordinary diplomatic processes of working out details, resolving ongoing dispute, managing inspection schedules, and all that messy stuff that bores Trump. And at any point, North Korea could go back to the tantrum tactics. But they may be learning that Trump will tantrum right back. Mafia-style emotional overreaction might actually be a useful way of disciplining North Korea.

Can Trump do anything good?

Before you dismiss all this as my naivete (or, worse, before you decide I think Trump is wonderful and have finally come around to understanding his genius), take a moment to remember that bad people do good things. Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and engaged in petty theft against his political enemies, but he also restored relations with China. Stalin was a horrific murderer who led the Soviet Union in destroying Hitler’s armies. Keanu Reeves was actually pretty convincing in River’s Edge.

It’s also worth remembering how bad the previous Republican presidency was. Trump’s style is horrifying, and he has done much harm by appointing incompetent, corrupt people at every level of the federal government, as well as by doing outright bad things. But by this far into the Bush administration, we’d suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, instituted torture and kidnapping as national policy, lost track of Osama Bin Laden, started a disastrous war in the wrong country (we’re still feeling the effects of that failure), and even took time to destroy the career or CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Trump needs to be understood in this context. His fuckups are real and serious, but don’t let the style make them seem worse than they are — or, rather, don’t let the style make you forget what we endured from our bobblehead president. The outrage of the moment — and Trump is good at producing outrage — can make the present seem worse, and the past seem better, than they actually are.

All of which is to say that before you denounce the pullout from the summit as yet another example of Trump’s dangerous fecklessness (which it also is), check to see whether you’re just denouncing it because it’s Trump and it’s crazy and he’s awful. Because in this one case, Trump’s crazy awfulness might work.

Or not. Who knows? Crazy is crazy. But on North Korea at least, a little crazy might be called for.

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To Do Great Work, A Man Must Be Very Idle

I am now halfway through my Year of No Particular Ambition. I’m not sure how well I’m doing at it.

For one thing, I got a promotion last week. I swear it was an accident, but there it is. I’m now at the level of suseok, or principal, which comes after senior and before vice president. Before you get too impressed, I’ll note that one of my Korean textbooks has a joke about a guy who’s boasting about becoming VP, so his wife tells him it’s no big deal, there’s even a VP of prunes down at the grocery, and when the husband calls the grocery to see if she’s for real, the grocer says, “Sure, do you want the VP of packaged prunes or the VP of loose prunes?”

February

I did manage, in my first week of principality, to go down to headquarters in Suwon, attempt to give a presentation to a room full of VPs (not sure if loose prunes was there), and have the whole thing go down in flames in an argument over Pokemon syndrome (don’t ask). It was a surprisingly quick and effective lesson in why it is that so many suseoks are just kind of goofy middle-aged guys who don’t do all that much. Not all of them are like that, but suseok seems to be the level where you can just coast if you want, or if you’ve had the ambition bludgeoned out of you by too many years of corporate politics.

But the thing is, I don’t and I haven’t. For all that this is supposed to be my year of no particular ambition, I’ve been trying to do things at work. I would like to think of them as fundamentally lazy — trying to solve big problems so I can stop spending all damn day solving the same small problems over and over — but I suppose trying to solve big problems is ambitious. But at least I don’t have any clear ambitions of moving up or moving on.

 

The promotion had the salutary effect of knocking me back into the present, following a period of existential crisis that I like to call “February.” Every year, I wonder why the hell I’m working so hard to live somewhere so cold and miserable. The somewhere used to be New York, but same-same. This February I went to America and visited my brother and sister and their spouses and babies and wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake by not having a spouse and babies. Then I came back to Korea and went to the Olympics and watched people with more (and stupider) ambition than I will ever have do insane things like flipping 60 feet in the air and crashing face-first on ice, or skiing 50 kilometers in two hours and not immediately dying. I wondered if my lack of ambition meant maybe my life was already over, and I spent too much time doing financial math and looking at Thai real estate listings. The promotion reminded me that things are actually pretty good right here and now.

Keeping busy

Recently I saw a woman in the subway wearing a coat that said, “TO DO GREAT WORK A MAN MUST BE VERY IDLE.” I have no ambition to do great work — not this year, anyway — so I suppose I ought to keep busy, if a random article of Korean clothing is to be believed. That’s the whole point of this year of no particular ambition, isn’t it? To be engaged with the here and now. To do stuff without it having to mean something or go somewhere.

Now that the weather is turning, I can start going out again, walking over mountains or what have you. I went to a Purim party. I’m taking a gayageum class, which might sound ambitious, but I have absolutely no intention of ever being very good at it. I’m getting my social life moving again now that stepping outside doesn’t make my face hurt. I’m trying to do a hundred squats a day for a whole month. It’d be nice to find someone to date. And in another six months, I suppose I’ll still be right here, working at Samsung and living in Seoul and maybe noodling around on a gayageum. No big changes, no grand ambitions.

It might not be easy, but if I believe in myself and stay focused, I can achieve nothing in particular. Wish me luck!

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Conquering Umyeon Mountain

Between my home and my workplace is a mountain. I can see it from my balcony, looming up out of the density of apartment buildings. It’s there each day as we take our post-lunch constitutional around the odd little neighborhood of single-family homes that backs up against the Samsung R&D Campus. If you look at it on Kakao Map, you’ll see that there are trails running along it, but none that link Umyeon-dong, where I work, with Seocho-dong, where I live.

Still, the gap between the last marked road and the first marked trail looked to be no more than 500 meters. How hard could it be? I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a burst of confidence since I got a surprise promotion on Wednesday. Success in one domain doesn’t necessarily translate to success in another, but what the hell? It was clear and cool and I had a couple of hours until sundown.

I was aided in the first stretch by Korea’s relentless improvements. A new ecological park is being put in, and though there are great roles of jute carpeting still to be laid, the trails are in, and the railings and signposts too. After a while, though, the trail began to loop back down. I could see on my GPS the trail that would take me home, no more than four or five hundred meters away. And up.

Between me and the trail was a steep slope, covered in gray-brown leaves. It looked slippery, and I wasn’t in the best shoes for it. Do it anyway. Once I’d gone up a ways, there could be no turning back — no sliding down those slippery leaves in the encroaching dusk. So I kept going, picking out here and there what seemed like rough bits of trail. Crows laughed at me overhead. At 5:30, an electronic Last Post wafted in from a military post on a nearby ridge.

At last I came to a windowed pillbox: a sign of civilization. Soon I found the trail, and people too: hikers, some of them elderly, making their way up. If they were still ascending, I figured I was OK to follow the sign for Somang-Tap (tap means pagoda) just 150 meters on, rather than heading directly down toward home. I passed an elevation marker at 326 meters (1069 feet), then ascended a bit more and found the pagoda: a rock pile with commanding views of Seoul to the north.

Somang-Tap.

Look closely and you can see my apartment.

I now realize I could have followed an earlier trail fork up to the pagoda, without the scrabble through the leaves. If I ever do this again, I’ll know better. But that’s part of the fun: heading up into a mountain whose contours are uncertain and knowing you’ll just have to figure it out.

I grew up doing that on the ridges around Lucas Valley, in Marin County, California, and I learned then that you can never get too lost: just head down, and eventually you’ll find your way out. The same holds true for Seoul’s mountains, though they’re more formidable than Marin’s gentle swells. Still, back then I didn’t have a phone with a GPS and an emergency dialer.

From the peak, it was a long descent on mostly well-groomed trails, often with stairs, past the usual sorts of Korean mountainside exercise parks, until I stepped out of the woods and into the bright lights of Gangnam.

I had done it. Granted this wasn’t exactly Amundsen at the pole, but I’d rendered known what before had been a blank space on my own little map of the world. I hadn’t been sure whether you could get from one side of that mountain to the other. It turns out you can.

And once you do, you can take yourself to Butter Finger Pancake and get yourself a burger with barbecue sauce and a strawberry milkshake. Which is exactly what I did.