Category: Seoul

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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.