Category: Expat Life

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Pneumonia

Nebulizing in the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital.

A few weeks ago, I was struck with a bout of pneumonia. After several days of fever and burning lungs that antibiotics couldn’t tackle, my girlfriend took me to the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital on a Saturday night. They sent me home with a bag of drugs.

But by Sunday noon the fever was back up to 103.2 F (39.5 C). This time my girlfriend couldn’t come to me, but she called an ambulance, and back to the ER I went. I spent the next 28 hours there, and didn’t leave the hospital until the following Sunday. I spent another week at home recovering.

I’ve wanted to write something about what I went through, but I’m finding it difficult. Sickness, like dreams, is mostly interesting to the person experiencing it. Unpleasant as it was, it was nothing more than a few days in the hospital, a few days of feeling rotten and then less rotten. That it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through is maybe evidence of how lucky I’ve been in life. It was horrible, but I’m not sure it was interestingly horrible.

I’m also tired of thinking about it. I want to be well again, and mostly I am, though my lungs are still recovering. Maybe later, when this is fully behind me, I’ll be able to turn my hospitalization into amusing anecdotes. For now, it’s enough to say that it happened and that I’m OK again. And if you’re looking for things to do in Seoul, I don’t recommend pneumonia.

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Settling in Seoul

A year ago, I embarked on an ambitious Year of No Particular Ambition. Two days ago, I made the least ambitious move of my life. Happy birthday to me.

The unambitious move

Until two days ago, the shortest distance I’d ever moved was across the hall in college, into a vacant double on an air shaft. Now I’ve broken that record by moving into an apartment that was actually adjoining my old apartment, one floor down and one apartment over.

I had to move because the owner of my old place was selling. I didn’t want to go anywhere, and I have managed to achieve that goal pretty spectacularly. The new place has one major advantage, which is that instead of balconies — enclosed spaces, but not heated or cooled, and so unusable much of the year — it just has bigger rooms. Outside of that, it’s basically the same as my old place, right down to the interior fixtures.

Copy/paste

I was anxious before the move, and it took my girlfriend a while to figure out why, until she realized I’d never moved in Korea before. “It’s copy/paste,” she explained. “From your old apartment to your new apartment. Copy/paste.”

And so it was. In New York, two or three Israeli guys would show up, box everything up, and dump it in the new apartment. Here in Seoul, a six-person crew showed up and did stuff American movers can’t do, like unplugging things all by themselves. They refolded my clothes and put them in the closet. They hung curtains. They made the bed. The one woman on the crew — inevitably, she had kitchen duty — cleaned the built-in fridge at the new apartment before restocking it with the food from my old fridge. She also tried mightily to replace my knick-knack shelf exactly as it was, until I told her I’d fiddled with the details later. Then she vacuumed and mopped. Korean movers are efficient and sexist. Copy/paste.

The city gas guy showed up like he was supposed to. The Internet guy, scheduled for a window from two to three, sent a message apologizing for running late and then showed up at 2:30. And then it was done. I’d moved.

Unplanning

When I’m frustrated or unhappy, I have a habit of retreating into planning: calculating the cost of retiring in Chiang Mai or looking into Ph.D. programs in Busan. It’s the adult version of taking my toys and going home.

When I was actually planning something big — getting a master’s degree, quitting Google, leaving New York, traveling for a year, moving to Seoul — the endless fidgeting with spreadsheets and details had a sense of purpose. Now that I was finally here, it felt more like a tic.

It took maybe half the Year of No Particular Ambition for me to let go of that tic. As the long, cold winter gave way to spring, I felt a change. My parents came for a visit, which gave me a reason to look closely at what’s best and most interesting about my life here so I could share it with them. Partly so I could take them around more easily, I bought a car — a depreciating investment, money spent on now rather than saved for later.

And I fell in love.

Home

For a very long time, all of my relationships have had expiration dates on them: someone is leaving the country, or I just knew it wasn’t something I wanted for the long term.

Then I met Jihyun. We’re two divorced people in our forties, neither of us masters at sticking with relationships, but we’d each been preparing in our own ways. I’d been practicing the art of not running away. Jihyun had been learning how to love by raising her daughter, who’s about four (and delightful). Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but we’ve managed to keep it together for nearly half a year.

A few weeks ago I was at Jihyun’s place, playing with her daughter while she and her mom whipped up a home-cooked dinner of barbecue and and bean paste stew and side dishes. It was special because it wasn’t. I get startled sometimes, in these ordinary moments, at how comfortable I am here. It feels like home.

For this new year, there’s still no grand plan, but I intend to stick with what I’ve got and deepen the roots.

That’s enough.

That’s plenty.

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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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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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Unleashing Korean Productivity

Once again, Bloomberg has rated Korea as an innovation hub. And once again, Korea’s weakest statistic is productivity per worker, though a jump from 32nd place to 21st is impressive.

So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.

This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.

The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.

This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!

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Climbing Gwanaksan

On a cool, bright autumn day, my friend and I set off for a hike up Gwanaksan. We started at the entrance to the mountain near Seoul National University (after some morning confusion in which my friend went to the subway station for Seoul National University of Education instead). The road was thick with hikers in their gear, ready to take on Seoul’s second-highest mountain.


Armed with KakaoMap, we plotted a route. Everyone seemed to be headed along the road, but that looked like the longer way to the peak. If we cut across a stream and along the top of the SNU campus, there was a more direct trail.

We followed campus streets until KakaoMap indicated that we should make an abrupt turn up a steep embankment and into the woods.

That the trail was little more than lightly ruffled underbrush should have been an indication that we weren’t on the best of all possible routes. And we had somehow neglected the very obvious geometrical reality that a more direct route up a mountain is also a steeper route.

The hike was rough at first, but not impossibly so. It was just steep and not well marked. We climbed quickly, and soon we had spectacular views of the mountains and Seoul beyond.

But then things got tricky. Time and again we came to a granite outcropping with no clear way around, and each time the GPS showed that the path was straight up. These rocky passages were scary, with scrabbles along cliff edges and places where the only way forward was to grab a tree branch or a bit of rock and pull ourselves up. We kept going in part because the thought of turning back and going back down all these rocks was scarier than pushing on.

Eventually we came to a point of no return. There was a thick knotted rope hanging down a flat granite face, and also a kind of metal stirrup hanging from a chain, meant to be used as a foothold. It was dangerous. If we lost our grip, we would be falling straight down the rock, and the momentum would probably throw us further down still, over several succeeding cliffs. My friend went first and made it up, tugging hard and ignoring the stirrup. My adrenaline surging, I followed. There was no turning back now.

The hike continued, up over still more improbable rock faces, but at last our route merged with a more popular trail, and we were again surrounded by hikers. There were more passages with ropes and cables, several of them terrifying. I was glad I had my hiking gloves.

And then at last we emerged up at the peak, craggy and beautiful and topped with an elaborate weather and transmitter station.

It felt like getting back on solid ground after being at sea. From here on out, it was all marked trails with built staircases or stairs cut into the rocks, as we made our way to the spectacular Yeonjuam shrine.

We watched a cat leap among the cliffs, then made our way up, stopping to buy popsicles before entering the shrine and watching people bow as an amplified monk chanted.

From there, it was a long walk down the mountain again, this time on a much longer and less difficult path, until at last we emerged in Gwacheon and had ourselves a well-earned dinner of galbi-tang (beef rib stew).

Today, absolutely everything hurts, especially my right ankle, which I twisted on the long walk down when I was tired, and my right wrist, which took a lot of weight on those desperate tugs over boulders. Korean mountains are not high, but they’re no joke. I’m glad I took on that particular route up Gwanaksan, and I hope I never do it again.

 

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Breakthrough

Last night I did a very ordinary thing. I ordered a pizza from Papa John’s.

I used the Korean app, which would’ve felt like a breakthrough a while back, but by now I’ve gotten to know the menus and options. I’ve figured out how to select what I like, how to use the discount offers, how to move quickly through the six or so steps it takes to pay for things on Korean apps.

Last night I did a very clever thing. I’m in the habit of waiting until I’m almost home to put my order in, to make sure the delivery doesn’t get there before I do. But tonight I noticed there’s an option to set the delivery time, and I decided to use it. Just set the time for an hour later — 18시 30분 — and I’m good.

Last night I did a very stupid thing. I didn’t notice the date picker. I set the order for tomorrow.

Oops.

Last night I did a very brave thing. I figured out the problem when I went back to the app to see why my pizza hadn’t arrived. I was about to just call it a loss and order something for tonight. But then I noticed a phone number.

I hesitated.

And then I called.

These kinds of calls take courage. I live in fear of these moments when things go slightly wrong and I have to resolve them by speaking and then listening. Phone trees terrorize me. Doing this all in the Korean language is stressful. 

But tonight I got someone on the phone and explained my mistake. She asked when I wanted the pizza delivered, and I said now would be good. And she said OK. She understood me, and I understood her.

And then they delivered my pizza. And I ate it.

(Not all of it. That would be gross.)

 

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How to Respond to Hate

A couple of weeks ago, my sister and her husband, Shoshana and Ari Simones, came home from vacation to find a swastika and “JEW” spray-painted on their mailbox and on the fence beside their home.

This is in Phoenix, Arizona. This is in 2017.

This is a symbol that represents a policy of extermination of Jews through mass murder. It’s not nice to discover that someone who knows where you live wants to see you killed.

“We’re not afraid, we’re not ashamed”

A first instinct is to want to make it disappear as quickly as possible. A kind neighbor covered it with paper, and after calling the police, even tried to get it cleaned up before my sister and her husband got home. Although it’s probably good that she didn’t.

With great bravery, strength, tact and intelligence, my sister and brother-in-law decided to leave up the graffiti and go public.

With help from the Arizona Anti-Defamation League, Shoshana and Ari began talking to the press — AZ Central, ABC 15, Fox 10, 12 News, and more — making sure that the coverage always noted this was not an isolated incident, but part of a spike in anti-Semitic acts in Phoenix this year. Eventually the story went national, reaching the USA Today. “We’re not afraid,” my sister said, again and again. “We’re not ashamed. We’re proud Jews.”

The response from the community, at every level, was a rebuke to those who would intimidate and threaten Jews or other minorities. From the very beginning, to their credit, the Phoenix Police Department took the incident seriously, referring it to their special bias crimes unit, and the FBI stepped in as well. And the mayor of Phoenix, Greg Stanton, gave Shoshana and Ari a call to express his support. At a more local level, neighbors sent flowers, came by to ask if there was anything they could do, sent notes of support. Strangers became friends.

“I definitely smile when I see it”

Of course, my sister and brother-in-law weren’t going to leave up a symbol of hate forever. But rather than cover it up as if nothing had happened, they decided to throw a party, inviting the community to come and repaint their mailbox with messages of love and inclusion.

From a symbol of hate, Shoshana and Ari brought the community together and created a symbol of joy. “I definitely smile when I see it,” my sister told AZ Central.

It’s notable that in the middle of all this, after Shoshana and Ari said they’d leave up the word “JEW” and write “PROUD” above it, someone — presumably the perpetrator — came in the middle of the night and covered over the graffiti with what appeared to be the same black spray paint that had been used in the first place.

It’s impossible to know why. Perhaps the perpetrator felt ashamed. Maybe it was a local kid whose parents got mad and made him cover it up. Or maybe the perpetrator was angry that his act, far from creating the intended fear and intimidation, was turning into a rallying point of support for Jews.

My friend Alena Tansey works for USAID, has been stationed in conflict and post-conflict regions like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and studied genocide prevention at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. I talked to her about what happened, and she said that the best response to hate crimes isn’t to ignore them, and it’s not to be shocked, either. Instead, it’s best to acknowledge that these things happen, see any larger pattern that they might be part of, and then do whatever possible to empower the victims and disempower the perpetrators.

Which is exactly what Shoshana and Ari had done, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Do a mitzvah

Shoshana and Ari also made a request of the community. The “entrance fee” for their party was one good deed, or mitzvah, as we say in Hebrew. They asked people to join them in spreading light. So if you’re horrified by the act of hate that started this whole thing, please take one conscious action to bring positivity into the world. I’d be delighted if you could share it with me here.

For me, here in Korea, my good deed was to stand up and be counted at the Seoul LGBT Pride festival this weekend (I’ll have more to say about that soon). Like Jews, LGBT people are often the targets of hate, and the thousands of angry protesters outside Seoul Pride were intimidating, to be sure. But there was joy and celebration in the face of it. Despite the pouring rain, tens of thousands of people came to express themselves and their support for a more inclusive society at the largest LGBT event in Korea’s history.

There is no way to prevent every last incident of hate. The real danger, though, is not in these acts of hate themselves, but in the silence that too often surrounds them. We must stand up as individuals and communities to counter fear with love.

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A Communion of Music

As a destination, Daegu doesn’t have much to recommend it. I’d come down from Seoul for one reason only: to see my friend Dong-Won Kim accompany the great pansori singer Bae Il-dong. So when we arrived at the address Dong-Won had sent us, far on the outskirts of Daegu, and found ourselves in the office of a loan shark next door to a tire shop, I was not amused.

After some frantic messaging, we got an updated address that took us deep into one of those ubiquitous beige apartment complexes, and at last we spotted Dong-Won waving his arms on the far side of a parking lot. With Korean musicians, it’s always a little yeogi-cheogi, a little here and there. But perched above a GS25 convenience store in the unlikeliest spot was this delightful little music cafe with an upright bass against the wall and a pair of master musicians getting ready to perform.

We were exactly nowhere, which is where a lot of the best things happen.

Intangible

We arrived in the middle of a screening of the documentary Intangible Asset No. 82, which tells the story of an Australian jazz drummer who comes to Korea in search of an elderly percussionist he’s obsessed with. Dong-Won becomes his guide, introducing him to some of Korea’s finest musicians — including Bae Il-dong — and providing about the best possible introduction to Korean traditional music.

When the film was over, I at last got to hear Bae Il-dong in person. His voice is an extraordinary instrument, raw but supple. There’s nothing showbiz about what he does. His only real trick is absolute mastery of his art form born from total dedication. He once spent seven years singing at a waterfall to develop his voice and find his sound.

Pansori is a storytelling art form, born as a communal activity among the lower classes in Southern Korea in the 19th century, full of humor and pathos, moments of sorrow and moments of joy. Il-dong sang a famous piece in which an old, blind man is reunited with the daughter he thinks he sent to her death — a shock so profound that he recovers his sight. The performance was vivid enough that my friend could grasp the gist of it without understanding the words.

As for me, I was startled by how much I did understand. During the film and the concert — which had a lot of lecture mixed in — I became my friend’s Dong-Won, leaning in to let him know what was going on. And for the first time, I found myself following along with the words of the pansori, even laughing at a few of the jokes I caught.

Community

After the concert, heaps of food were brought in — hearty, traditional Korean stuff — and everybody stayed on to eat and drink together. Dong-Won explained that Korean music is communal, in which the musicians don’t just transmit emotion to the audience, but share in a collective emotional experience.

After a little while, an emcee got up and began to chatter. Dong-Won explained that he was actually a fine musician and dancer who’s known for his skills as a clown and comedian, and soon it was clear what he was up to. He started pulling people up from the audience and getting them to sing: traditional songs, sometimes with Dong-Won pressed into rhythm accompaniment or with a guitarist picking out some backing chords. And these people knew their stuff. No one was at Bae Il-dong’s level, but these were people who’d spent time learning Korean traditional music and dance. Or some of them were, anyway. As the evening went on, the emcee made sure everyone got a chance to do something, whether it was singing an old pop tune or doing a little dance. I got up to dance too, showing off what I can remember of my Korean moves and then putting on the traditional grandfather mask and doing the requisite drunkard’s dance.

Eventually my friend grabbed a guitar and sang some classic rock — Oasis, Pink Floyd — while Dong-Won played the box and I had some fun thumping along on the janggu. It’s not every day you get to play with a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, so you’ve got to grab the opportunity when it comes. My friend sang, I drummed, people danced.

The road to nowhere

I said at the start that the best things often happen exactly nowhere. I’m thinking of a night in the little Burmese trekking village of Kalaw, where some guys at the back of a bar called Hi Snacks & Drinks got out acoustic guitars and sang the night away. I’m thinking of a pansori festival I saw on the banks of a river somewhere in Jeolla province when I lived here as a teacher. I’m thinking of a night spent in an obscure temple with just one other person — my Swiss shaman friend — sitting by the pagoda under the moonlight and listening to the chorus of cicadas and frogs. I’m thinking of northern Laos, where nothing happens, and of the house where I grew up in Marin County, California.

At the heart of Korean music is cyclicality: strong and soft, yang and yin, breath in and breath out, in every note and movement. Right now I’m leading just about the most yang existence imaginable, living in Gangnam and working for Samsung, but there’s an undertow of yin that’s calling to me.

“So save your money and then run away!” Dong-Won said, when we had a chance to talk about it.

Maybe.

“You and I have the same blood type,” he said. “Blood type W. Blood type wind.”

In the film, Dong-Won used a different metaphor from nature: you can be a lake, or you can be a river. A lake stays where it is, but a river is always carving out new paths, flowing where it’s never flowed before. Yeogi-cheogi.

He could have added that a river does this by letting go, not by force of will. I suppose that to heed the call of the yin is first of all to stop worrying about the yang. Things will go how they go. My life has taken enough surprising turns that if I go back over it in five-year increments, I realize that I never really had any idea what was coming. Why should now be any different?

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Smile Day

Today is Smile Day, which is what Samsung likes to call payday, when once a month they encourage us to leave early, though I usually leave around the same time I always do. The weather here has warmed enough that a post-work wander is pleasant, and this evening the concentration of yellow dust in the air fell to manageable levels, so I stopped off for some Indian food (cooked by Koreans).

Life is good these days. There are buds on the trees, work is interesting but relaxed for the moment, and I have a few interesting events coming up.

TOPIK

On Sunday I took the TOPIK I exam, a test of Korean proficiency that will help me get points toward a residency visa, which is the first step toward permanent residency and also means freedom to change jobs or not work for a while, though I plan to do neither of those things in the near future.

I was recovering from a cold, but the test was pretty simple — I was taking TOPIK I — and I’m confident that I got the 140 out of 200 points necessary to get Grade 2 and a corresponding 12 poins toward a visa. The hardest part of the test was probably just registering for it. To take it, they gave us special TOPIK pens that have one end for writing and a blunter end for filling in test sheet bubbles.

Life among the (three) stars

Things are quiet at work these days, outside of a couple of last-minute apps, as we approach the big product announcement. Right now, our team is testing the new devices, looking for English that isn’t quite up to snuff. It’s kind of fun, and also a reminder of why our work actually matters. When we get it right, we make powerful technology — apps, tools, functions — available and usable for millions of people.

Next week our team is taking the afternoon off to see a touring exhibition of Egyptian art from the Brooklyn Museum. Then I’ll be spending the first week of April at Samsung sleepaway camp: a weeklong training for foreign employees that my colleagues tell me involves a great deal of cheerleading for Samsung (whose name, I have learned, literally means “three stars”), and also an opportunity to learn about the company history, feel more a part of it, and meet people from divisions I know nothing about, like shipbuilding and construction and chemical engineering.

At the end of April, I’ll be headed to Sri Lanka a week off during Korea’s string of holidays — May Day, Buddha’s Birthday, and Children’s Day fall out on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday this year. The national election, on May 9, will also be a holiday, and hopefully a moment of celebration for those who hope for a more progressive Korea. At the end of the month is the Seoul Jazz Festival, with a bunch of amazing jazz and non-jazz artists: Jamiraquoi, Tower of Power, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Zion T, 10 CM, Epik High, Cecile McClorin Salvant, Diane Reeves. And May 20 will be the opening of Seoullo 7017, a park on a converted elevated highway that’s designed by the same landscape architects who did New York’s High Line.

Into the groove

I’m enjoying my life here. Getting into a bit of a groove with it. I went to a Purim party in Itaewon where I met someone who was (probably) CIA. I’ve found passable tacos and kebab sandwiches and New York pizza in my neighborhood and even been to the Shake Shack nearby. I’m doing a little home sprucing and redecorating (Coupang is a dangerous addiction), and maybe this weekend I’ll get down to the Yangje Flower Market and buy a mandarin tree for the balcony.

Spring (and a lot of yellow dust from China) is in the air!