Hitchhiking Notes

This summer I took a trip to Portland, Oregon to spend time with my friend Kate and tour the west coast for the first time. I stayed in Portland for 1 week and then hitchhiked from Portland to San Fransisco over the course of 4 days. I jotted down notes of every person I rode with in between rides and thought that I would type them out on here without revision.

Day 1

PDX-City outskirts: PSU student, red-haired kid, who studied in the Dominican Republic and had the back of his truck crammed with outdoor gear.

City Outskirts -- Salem, Oregon: Hippie-type guy with long black hair and glasses. Stopped to get oil changed and tires rotated. Runs telepathic productions.org and was getting his dog from house in Salem to take to a sitter for his trip. Coming back to join fire crew and then moving to Montreal with his Eugene-based girlfriend. Used to live in Eugene. Lived in Golden Gate Park in Frisco for 2 weeks drinking whiskey and selling drugs, then hitched the 101 back to Eugene or Portland in 4 days in the rain when someone ripped him off and he and his friend had no money to take a bus back. Met guy named dumpster who took him to a punk farm party.

Salem -- Eugene: Record label guy (Romni Records) who had a "build it and they will come" philosophy. Bashed Oregon for being behind and not thinking the same as him. Wanted to explore making custom ipods with musci alrady uploaded. Complained about giving no one giving hitchers rides and how he had to walk a long distance once when he was hitching and no one would pick him up.

Eugene -- Florence: Baptist minister, born in Seattle, who runs a conservative baptist congregation in Florence, Oregon. Also teaches a class at the local high school on life skills. This was the most unexpectedly beautiful ride, pasing through a mountain pass that took us through pools of mist and large fields of flowers and dilapidated farm houses. This is where i saw a large field of purple flowers at sunset with a single person standing in the middle with a red sweater. I think it will stick in my memory for a long time, for some reason.

Day 2

Florence -- Grisam Bay: The type of person I was waiting to meet. Mountain man type guy with a tight mustache and intense "Hook" brown eyes and an intensity/ sincerity to his speech. He was a story-teller who people at his old Alaskan fishing job called "Daddy." Hitched the 101 when he was younger and actually hitched from San Diego to Anchorage in 2 weeks, ended up staying 29 years until his parents recently died. he had just been laid off from a carpentry job -- dubious lay-ff because he had recently been injured -- and there was this underlying tension in the car while he talked to his case worker on the phone and with his son. Lived in a camper in a different town than his wife. Was going crab fishing on this particular day with his son. Told me a story about winning a $100 when he was 8 for filleting a fish in under 10 seconds. Name, I think, was Stanley Kessner.

Grisam -- North Bend: Former trucker named Troy who now takes care fo the local trailer park for his dead mother-in-law. Tattered-looking man who had also hitched as a youth. Went on long tangents about the government and insurance companies and actually dropped me off 8 miles farther than he said he would.

North Bend -- Coos bay: Minnesota man who knew he was going to be laid off and so made plans with his wife to tour the Oregon coast to find a place to live. Started in Astoria and drove all the way south deciding on Coos bay because of the scenery and the cost of buying and fixing up a turn-of-the-century home.

Coos Bay -- Bandin: man named Steven. He had a large but well-groomed beard and a calm, medicated voice. Steven had gone to Reed for Biology and then enrolled in Cornell for his PHD. After speaking with many of the professors researching sodium channels in nerves he realized that he didn't want to be doing this with his life and dropped out. Enrolled in film school at boston University shortly after adn thought that he would like to make ethnography films. Marrying a rich wife, they decided that they wanted to live in east Africa for a while after seeing some souveniers that her parents had brought back from a trip. Steven spent a few months there, in Kenya, doing lots of acid and smoking lots of weed with the holy men there (whose exact name I forget). These holy men believed that if someone took your picture they stole your soul. Steven said that a man had been speared a few months before he had arrived for filming without permission. He realized then how a camera can be a weapon and topped watching movies for years afterwards. He then went on to get his teaching certificate from a college whose name I now forget. he now works for the county health department working on their anti-smoking campaign and earning his master's degree in public health on-line. His son now lives in east africa, moving there on a Fulbright after studying abroad there for many months. His project was seeing whether a butterfly farm would work on a mountain in Kenya. After research he found that it would and built a butterfly co-op that I think the community now runs. his son married a Tanzanian woman and now studies in Atlanta for his masters or PHD. Steven also really liked Peru and was from Massachusetts.

Bandin -- Gold Beach: Older man whose name I unfortunately now forget picked me up. He was originally from Texas, moved to California when he joined the service (and actually went to PGH a few times with a military buddy) and moved to Gold Beach after he finished a career as a park ranger somewhere, i think, outside of the east bay. He gave helpful advice about dealing with black bears, mountain lions, and rattle snakes when sleeping outside. His son is a diabetic and studying to be a nurse in Texas. his parents were some protestant denomination before studying eastern religions and then practicing nothing in old age. He grew up practicing nothing, became a staunch evolutionist in college and then was converted to Jehova's witness after meeting his second wife. I can't begin to summarize the religious conversations we had but they were prompted by me mentioning that I plan to live to be a 110 (he had said you don't really know anything until you turn 40 and I said that I'll have plenty of time to use that knowledge) he said that he plans to live forever through Armagedon. he pointed out helpful camping spots at the end of the ride and came back to bring me a Jehova's Witness book and a Snapple.

Sidenote: That night I was walking back into town after trying to hitch for another 45 minutes. On the way down I ran into this man and woman. The man was 30-40 years older than the woman, with a large white beard and no teeth. He called me "goin' to California" and asked if I had any bud. Then if I had any food -- which I replied I only had nuts -- which he responded by pointing at his teeth, or lack thereof. Then he asked for money and I said that I didn't have much. Before all of this though the man told me that the two of them were leaving their families to start new lives together. She responded that they were kind of free spirits and had no idea where they were going. They also had a dog and carried all of their things -- some pringles, pop, and blankets -- in a red wagon that they pulled behind them. They recommended that I sleep in a laundromat in town that they had slept in the night before. They ended up sleeping about 10 feet from where I had left them when I continued walking into town to get some food.

Gold Beach -- Brookings: Picked up pretty quicly on this one. Man pulled up in a pick-up, having just gone to his lawyer to pay for divorce proceedings. Jeffers complained that his wife had taken in her 23 year old son and when he didn't want him there she filed a restraining order, so he filed for divorce. he worked in the timber mills and said that he may seem a little screw-loose but that I have to realize he came from one of the craziest families. he then pulled out a pistol and said that it was his pedophile killer for his pedophile brother who messed up his arm in the recent past. His brother was actually a pedophile -- charged for raping a young girl and then in the appeal process acquitted because the girl filled out a form wrong or something like that. He went on to tell me that when he was younger he acrewed over $9000 in fines for driving without a license and other mischief. He said he often tried to outrun the cops and sometimes actually did it. He said that he may not know much but that he thought it was ridiculous that they shut down logging in Oregon. That spotted owls had never been around there. He did say that he thinks loggers should evaluate what they are cutting (by species) and be sure to replant them proportionally. He said that this was the problem with the black forest -- lack of diversity made it inhospitable for animals.

Brookings + 3 miles: People that worked at a gospel mission. One originally from Sacramento. Wante dme to come in to eat, sleep, and shower.

Gospel Mission -- Smith River: Hare Krishna guy. Bald with brown bandanna. He lived in an RV and was borrowing a friends truck. He was in the area to begin gold hunting. Currently lived on social security because he told welfare he didn't want to work for the sinful people. Wanted to get a 214 pot license because he said it was worth about $100,000. Growers will pay people with the license to live on their land so that they can legally grow marijuana, supposedly.

Smith River -- Crescent City: Large guy who fished in winter and did cement in summer. he said he made $85,000 on a 4 month fishing trip each year. Used to set up stage for the dead for 18 months and still set up stage for area concerts. Was in the service and was stationed in Japan (which he said was dirty) and Germany (which he loved).

Crescent City -- Crescent City: An old, single man with the most hilarious accent. He was originally from somewhere in the south. He wanted me to stay at his house for a night and said that he would drive me to Eureka when he went to visit his friend in the morning.

Crescent City -- Eureka: Deliver driver who took this route everyday. Had only picked up one other hitchhiker in the last few years and only picked me up because (a) I looked clean (b) he had made all of his delivers and had nothing but diapers in the truck and (c) was going right to Eureka. He played in a jam band that had former members of Grinch (some jam band from the east coast that he claimed was famous). He grew up in Philadelphia/ New Jersey/ Delaware area and attended art school out there. We talked a lot about Meth's impact on the Northwest and he admitted that he had done it a few times during art school to keep him awake enough so that he could finish assignments. He pointed out where the herds of wild elk kept to in the park.

In Eureka: Couldn't find place to sleep so I resorted to putting down $35 on a motel room: I was at the ATM when this girl started talking to me and eventually said that I could stay in her bak yard -- she was going to a party and hadn't warned her mom about visitors. it was a long walk and I was worried that I had laid down in the wrong yard and would have the police called on me because there was no house # labeled. The mother lived in this shed that had been converted in to a room and I guess chose peeing outside over walking back into the house bcause in the middle of the night I was woken by "who the hell are you?" I explained everything and she said that she would have accidently beed on me if I hadn't stirred at the last minute. She turned out to be really cool and invited me inside in the morning to shower and eat.

Eureka -- random truck stop: First woman to pick me up. She gave me a ride about 15 miles down the road to a truck stop. She had been grown up in a self-described "hick family" that didn't follow any religion too much. But she chose within the last year to become a baptized Christian (I forget the denomination, but I think that it didn't really matter much to her). She was a nursing assistant (I think) and worked as a caretaker for an older man (she said she asked God for patience and got patients). Her fiance was raised Buddhist and began attending the same church as her recently.

Random truck stop -- San Francisco: After only about 20 minutes of waiting on the side of the road this two-person band picked me up in an old station wagon they had borrowed form a friend. We listened to the microphones, talked about their first experiences attending anti-war protests and how they thought they would participate in activism in the future. The guy driving, who played drums in the band, had been arrested at his university in Tacoma, Washington for trying to block the transfer of some tanks to boats that were going to transfer them to Iraq. He also enjoyed biking alot. He had grown up in San Diego and the girl riding with him, the guitarist and vocalist of the band, grew up in Portland. They had played a show in Eugene Oregon the night before and were going to San Francisco despite having a show canceled on them, to look for a random club to play in. The guitarist was also meeting her mother there. We stopped in lots of random roadside attractions like "Gravity Hill" which was supposed to be a hill with a weird gravitational pull but turned out to be just a house turned at a weird sideways angle that threw your body off when you walked through it. From San Francisco they were going on to San Diego and then down through the southwest to tour for another two weeks.

Teacher trip

One morning at school I was told that the teachers were going on a hiking trip together and I still don't actually know where we went.

We left at 7 in the morning and packed 15 or so people into a tour bus that looked to hold around 40 or 50. After riding for a half an hour or so I was told that tour buses are not tour buses in Korea unless they have a no-rai bong (노래방) machine (Korea's version of karoake) and that the government had made laws against dancing in the aisles of moving buses. Soon after the explanation the no-rai bang machine was turned on and the lunch ladies at school began dancing in the aisles of the bus and pulling me and other teachers into the aisles to dance with them.

The mountain we planned to hike was a four-hour ride away from hongseong (the town i'm living in) and we ate twice on the way there, with a little to drink at the second meal. When we got to the mountain I was in disbelief that we were eating again, this time at a restaurant that served mountain mushroom soup and other mountain-specific herbs with alot of macheolli (rice wine). We hiked for about 30 minutes and when I say hike I mean that we walked along a flat path through some historical gates and past some old historical buildings. Even though I still don't know the name of the place we visited, it was a famous path during the joseon dynasty, a mountain pass that students on their way to the national examinations in Seoul had to pass through as they made their way from the southern provinces. The area was beautiful and had high rocky peaks that I was eager to climb, but when we stopped to eat and drink more after only 30 minutes I realized that we probably wouldn't be hiking to the top. The pattern continued and we stopped again another half an hour later to drink some more. The hike ended up being 2-3 hours after a four hour ride each way, and I couldn't stop laughing since I had no idea where we were going the entire time or what we were doing.

On the way home we stopped to eat and drink again and that would be the last of our many stops. I ate a type of miso soup and everyone else ate some kind of meat soup. The next day at school I was asked over and over if I was sore from all the hiking we had done.

Kim Jong

One of the first lessons I had to teach my high-level students at school was "what will you do this fall." I had only been living with my host family for a week or two and had no idea what there actually was that set Korean falls apart from America's, but I put down "I will make Kimchi this fall" as a phrase to practice, figuring that the dish was eaten so much it had to be made sometime during the fall. I had no idea how much it actually does mark the season here. During November its gotten to the point where piles of cabbage, red pepper bags, and mixing tubs have seemed more like some weird lawn decorations, stacked to all heights along houses or restaurants, than they do actual food staples.

Two Saturdays ago, my host family met with their extended family for Kim Jong (the hangul input on my computer is on a fritz right now, so I can't write the Korean) -- the proper name for making a large batch of cabbage kimchi in the fall. My host mother woke me up early in the morning and we drove to my host father's mother's house, where my host-grandmother cooked breakfast while everyone else gathered together the supplies that would go into the kimchi: red pepper, glutinous rice paste, oil, cabbage, turnips, garlic, green onions, and other odds and ends that I don't know the names of.

After a long process of mixing the red pepper, oil, rice paste, and turnips strips together we all sat on the ground and began to spread the paste all over the cabbage head. Then the cabbage heads were packed tightly into tupperware containers. The whole process took about five or so hours and we went through somewhere between 100-200 heads of cabbage.

Before the advent of refrigerators, greenhouses, and food imporation, Kimchi was one of the few ways for Koreans to get greens through the winters. Traditionally, Kimchi was fermented in large clay pots that you can still see outside of traditional homes, but the smell from the pots coupled with the fact that most koreans now live in large apartment high-rises where space is limited has made Kimchi refrigerators a better option for fermenting the cabbage. The big tupperware containers are put into the kimchi refrigerator and, for our family, the containers will sit in the refrigerator for a year before they are eaten. The refrigerators are specially designed to change temperature and moisture conditions throughout the year depending on the stage of fermentation that the cabbage is in.

Healthwise, Kimchi is great. It has high levels of carotene, absorbic acid, vitamins B1 and B2, and Calcium and Iron. The long fermentation process also provides a lot of bacteria that's beneficial for digestion. The American magazine Health ranked Kimchi on its list of the world's top 5 healthiest foods.

Kimchi's also resurrected a lot of the cultural tensions between Japan and Korea surrounding the Japanese occupation -- and Japan's recent attempt to claim kimchi as a traditional Japanese food, rather than Korean food. You can read about it here

The past month in Recap

This past month has been busy and has given me less time to update this blog, so here's a summary of the last month:

I've met some people in Seoul and so have been making the 2 1/2 hour trip between Hongseong and Seoul every other week or so to hang out. There I've gotten lost in a miles long auto tunnel, explored the "hip" districts around Sinchon and Hongik University, gone dancing at hip hop clubs, visited the interesting but ultimately bad Computer music festival at the Seoul arts center, and eaten some decent (at least for Korea) international cuisine around Hongik and Itaewon. Come January Korean schools go on a 2 month winter break and so I will be moving to Seoul during that time to take more Korean classes and, possibly, do an internship so I'm interested in exploring the city a little more. Seoul isn't a very appealing place to live long-term, but two months will be great to get involved in some stuff that isn't available in my small town. Also: the sort of youth culture that I am constantly missing being away from America has a bit more of a presence in Seoul.

The 19th-21rst F-bright held their fall conference in Gyeongju -- the capital of the Shilla dynasty for 1000 years. Called the "Kyoto of Korea" it has the largest collection of historical structures in any one place in Korea. We had two days of lectures and meetings, sharing our experiences, catching up, and discussing how we can improve our teaching methods. That Sunday we spent the entire day visiting historical sites and I have pictures for about half of them, but my camera was dropped and so they are stuck on there until I either fix it or get a new camera. We visited Seokguram, Bulguksa, Goeneung, Bunhwangsa, Anapji, Gyeongju National Museum, Cheomseongdae Observatory, and the Cheonmachong tombs. When I get the pictures off of my camera I'll post pictures of this stuff and explanations of what they are. Monday I went on a hike with some other ETAs in a provincial park just outside of the city. The landscape was pretty diverse -- ranging from rocky peaks to green valleys cut by pebble-lined streams.

On Friday last weekend the three other ETAs that teach in Hongseong and I held a halloween party for our host siblings. Everyone wore costumes and we bobbed for apples, carved pumpkins, gave out candy, and played a whole slew of games. It was interesting to watch the kids do these activities that I've done every year for the first time ever and to see how weird/ funny our Halloween traditions are. On Saturday of last week I went to a wedding reception dinner for a member of my host-family's family and then my host-family got in the car and drove to Naimjangsan -- a national park two hours south of our town. The park is one of the most popular in Korea for Tampoong -- the word Koreans use to describe the process of the leaves changing each fall. Koreans are obsessed with seeing the leaves beginning to change -- every hotel and motel around Naimjangsan were booked and so we stayed in a jimjillbang with so many people crowded in that dozens of people had to sleep on the floor of the changing/ lockers rooms and people had to be moved so that people could just open their lockers!!! We had to wake up at 4 in the morning just so that we'd have a chance of getting a parking spot in the park and already at that time the parks lots were almost filled and large groups had begun hiking up to the peak. We finished hiking and look around by 10 in the morning and by that time the park was closed because it had become filled over capacity. I'll write a longer entry on all this in the future.

My weekends are almost all planned until the end of December which is crazy for me. I'll be in Seoul alot through November -- attending a f-bright and us embassy thanksgiving meal and proctoring english tests at the end of the month. I'll also be helping my host-family make Kimchi which I am very excited for.

Brad visits Korea

Having someone from home visit I think helps validate the life you're living in a foreign country. Suddenly there is a connection between the life you knew and the life you're living that makes the two seem a bit more mentally compatible. I haven't experienced culture shock here and don't think I will, nor do I think that I'll have a huge problem adjusting to life back in the states (Although, I am really worried that the Korean habit of not flushing toilet paper down the toilet -- instead throwing it in a trashcan next to the toilet -- will stay with me in America. I can see myself now: thinking there is a trashcan next to me and then throwing toilet paper all over the floor. I can just imagine the bad assumptions people would have about Korean hygiene!). It is nice though to have someone familiar visit and know what you're talking about when you are describing where you work and live, who you live with, and what you are doing day in and day out.

My old roommate Brad visited over the weekend and now is that connection between home and here. After work last Thursday I took a train filled with old drunken men (on this ride at least alcohol + train + old Korean men = lots of random fights with the train staff) to nearby Cheonan station, where the high-speed KTX trains connect the north-end of the penninsula at Seoul to the South-end at the port city of Busan. From there I was locked out of my KTX train with 12 other Koreans and had to deal with an hour of prolonged arguments that eventually led to a partial reimbursement, lots of apologies about how this had never happened before, and a new ticket on the next train. An hour and a half late into Busan, I met Brad, who was worn from over 12 hours of traveling from Naruta Japan, where he works as a english teacher through the JET program. The next three hours we took cabs half-way across the city to a jjimjilbang that turned out to be closed and ended the night on a good note, by finding a hot spring motel that had a bathroom bigger than the bedroom (that's not to say that the bedroom was small, the bathroom was just HUGE and had multiple bath tubs).

The next day we gradually made our way to the Busan Film festival -- asia's largest -- and met up with other F-brighters in what turned out to be a huge reunion with almost everyone that had come over on the program. In all, Brad and I caught two movies because of the difficulty for foreigners without a foreigner id number (i don't have one because i am here on a diplomatic visa) to get tickets and the long lines to get them otherwise. Noteworthy was The Naked Summer by Kenji Okabe. The movie documents a summer camp run by Butoh dance master Okaji Maro and the creation of one of Okaji's performance pieces with the camp members. Brad and I left the movie wanting to join one of the summer camps at some point in the future.







With the rest of Saturdays movies sold out early in the day, Brad, I, and some other F-brighters, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a bus an hour and a half north to the town of Jinju, where a huge lantern festival was being held. The festival is meant to commemorate the 1592 invasion of Japan, when Korean General Kim Si-Min sent thousands of lantern down the Nam river to stop the Japanese from crossing the river and to relay messages to neighboring towns about the health of certain soldiers and general war updates. For us: the festival was a huge light spectacle with make-shift floating walkways through lantern floats, enormous walls of lanterns that stretched across the mile-long old wall of the city, and various lantern tents. We ended the evening drinking Makgeolli that was scooped into bowls from a big trash can with a group of young Koreans.




We returned to Busan early Sunday morning, with just enough time to eat a large meal and tour the russian area that surrounds Texas St. -- a foreigner district across from the train station. Brad came back to Hongseong with me and spent Monday and Tuesday playing with my students at school and spending time with my family in the evenings.

Bukhansan

On the outskirts of Seoul is a national park called Bukhansan. Its name means "North Han Mountain" and refers to its position north of the Han river. It also marked the northern boundary of Seoul during the Joseon dynasty. Me and my friend Jeremy hiked this mother two weeks ago, which turned out to be a 7 or 8 hour hike altogether. I've been getting in a fair share of hiking while hear, but this topped them all. The last 2 km of the climb were along a solid rock face that you had to pull yourself up with metal wires that were strung through poles bolted down to the rock. After the climb we relaxed in baths of yellow soil, charcoal, mugwort, and jade in what was hands down the best jjimjilbang I've visited here so far. Below are some poor quality Panoramas and pictures of Bukhansan.

Daejeon

Last weekend I got my first lesson in the minute differences between pronouncing ㅈ(a sound slightly between a j and a ch) and ㅊ (a ch sound) when I tried to buy my bus ticket to the city of Daejeon and ended up in a beach an hour south of here called Daecheon. So, back on a bus for another 2 hours through rain and over miles of beautiful, pine-covered mountains until I reached Daejeon, the fifth largest city in Korea.

Its sad being stuck in a place you don't know and especially with the rainstorm that blew into Daejeon on Friday, I was extremely lonely for really the first time since arriving in Korea. I ended up wandering through apartment stores until eventually I resorted to going to a DVD bang -- a mini theater type business that are all over the place here where you can watch a movie on a big screen tv in tiny, private rooms. The rain also ruined my plans to spend the night in this elaborate jimjillbang (Korean spa) that is supposed to be covered in plants and fake animals to resemble a mini terrestrium and, instead, I ended up in a jimjillbang for drunken Korea men who pass out next to tons of empty bannana boxes (I don't know what the empty bananna boxes were for or from???).


Anyways, Saturday was a step in the right direction. I randomly started climbing a mountain after the rains let up and wandered until I found the trail head to a mountain-top temple. Along the way I met an old man who had moved frmo his life-long home of Seoul to Daejeon so that he could be closer to the hospital that was treating him for cancer. He hiked the path we were on everyday to ward off the cancer and so showed me some amazing hidden views along overgrown paths through the curbs and woods of the mountain. We talked as best as my limited Korean and his limited English would allow us about the Japanese occupation, growing up being forced to learn Japanese, and how the man felt about the Japanese now. It was one of the most impressionable conversations that I think I've had with someone even though we couldn't understand half of what we said to one another. This weekend is generally how Korea has been treating me: for every miserable thing that gets me down, something or someone amazing pops up to let me know how much there is to know about this place.

Pol Cho

Sunday morning my host mother woke me up and said that we were going to meet my host father, who hadn't returned home the night before. We drove to the nearby town of Calsan while my host brother and sister slept in the back seat of the car. We arrived at a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant and gradually the whole Kim clan began to pour in with my host father and I was introduced to the extended family of close relations to him. We ate while my host grandmother and great-grandmother poked and laughed at me, complemented my handling of chopsticks, and asked various questions about what foods I do and don't eat and why. After the meal I was taken to my host great-grandmothers house and asked if I wanted to cut the grass. A week or two before Chuseok -- the Korean thanksgiving -- Koreans cut the grass on their family tombs so that they can have access to the tombs during the Chuseok celebration (that's held on Tuesday September 25 this year), when they will bring food offerings and perform worship rites to thank the spirits of the ancestors for a good harvest. My host-father's family is very large and few people have moved very far outside of the area and so when we got to the tomb plot there were about 30 men, all members of the extended family, who had gathered to help cut the grass on just that plot. The family has 5 or 6 plots total, so I can't even begin to imagine how many family members worked on the plots that day in total. It was a surreal few hours of me raking up huge mounds of grass on the side of a mountain while 30 men of took rakes and weed wackers to the overgrown grass on these enormous tomb plots, pausing every now and then to take gulps of soju. Afterwards old men squatted around and insisted that I drink with them, so I'd let them fill up my paper cup, take a sip and wait until they weren't looking to dump the rest in the grass so that I wasn't plastered at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning. My host father later took me to the oldest family tomb, a plot that dates back 400 years. A few years ago I got really into the genealogy of my family and tried tracing our history back, but got as far as the 1850s. Its bizarre entering into a culture where family history can be traced and remembered hundreds of years back with little research or effort.

The Deception of Korean Geography

In a country so populous, with 70% of its land taken up by mountains, its hard to escape the presence of others even when you head to the hills. This past weekend, botched plans to leave Hongseong made me explore a nearby mountain that I'd been scouring since I got here for a trail-head into the slopes. With the help of my host-mother I finally found it and did a one hour trek up a windy-paved path past primitive badmitten courts and rows of muscadine grape vines. Those that want the view at the top but not the slightly higher pulse can drive their car up a path just a bit bigger than the car, dodging hikers while being able to admire gorgeous views of an ocean bay and mountains from the asphalt switchbacks. With streams of cars and hikers I tried to find what I always took for granted about hikes: remoteness from others, a challenging terrain, an absence of more imposing human-made structures, and a panoramic view of the peak. Trying to find these things in random breaks in the foilage got me lost in family tomb plots and also led me to a beer bottle mosaic near a "medicine water" spring. Still totally great finds and well worth the trip. I'm starting to realize though, that whereas many mountains in the United States still stand as signs of remoteness (or maybe this is some unrealistic assumption of mine???), they've been transformed here from places to escape tax collectors and take up hermitage to recreational equipment that you can enjoy your weekend in.
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It seems like everyone over the age of 30 here hikes. Korea's doing for mountain climbing what America did for yoga when power yoga took off. Courses are short and usually have refreshment stands along the way (during a hike in Songnisan National Park in July we passed 7+ restaurants on our assent). As a university student in Chuncheon told me, "Old men with business jobs are the ones who go hiking because they never get any other exercise. Young people don't go hiking." Hikers are keen on gear too: dry-fit clothes, expensive boots, and tiny backpacks. My town -- a rural town by Korean standards -- has at least 5 hiking gear shops.

Even with my expectations, the hike was great. The delivery boy from a gimbap restaurant next to my house beat me to the top on his dirtbike with his girlfriend on the back, brushing her cheek against his ponytail. The top had a shamanist shrine. That night my family drove to the top so that everyone could see the view that night and we almost walked in on people carrying out a ceremony of chants and dancing at the shrine. We freaked each other out by pretending their were ghosts on the hillsides and then scrambled back into the car.

Domestic Life

Last Friday the F-bright orientation came to an end with a large ceremony held at Yonsei University, that the F-bright office has hyped into something slightly less than a national holiday. "Yonsei Day", as they call it, is a formal introduction to our principals and co-teachers. Our schools sign our contracts and we say goodbye to the 69 other English teachers that we've lived with for the past 6 weeks of training. It was an 8 hour ordeal of polite bows and awkwardly pronounced Korean formalities, a traditional dinner, and intermittent periods of sneaking in goodbye hugs to friends. After everything was wrapped up I was shuttled two hours south of Seoul, past growing mountains and a hint of salt water breeze as we drove closer to Sudeoksa -- a mountain-top buddhist temple near the coast that is surrounded by a street of small
shops and restaurants. Here, my co-teacher Shin Su Yan and Vice Principal pulled off and we sat down with my host family for a traditional meal of many herb pan chans (side dishes), soup, and milky rice and herb wine served from a bowl with wooden spoons.

From there I seperated from my co-teacher and vice principal and loaded my bags into my host family's van so that we could drive back to their home in a small rural town called Hongseong. When I first came to Korea I said I would jump from the balcony if I ended up in one of the ugly, white high rise apartments that pock up the otherwise beautiful landscapes fo every town, big and small, in this country. But i'm now living in one and its not so bad at all. What aesthetics are sacrificed on the exterior are made up for within, and I've been making myself comfortable in my family's small, but efficiently organized home.

Details about my family: my host father is a public school teacher and my host mother does something with insurance claims through Samsung. On sunday I went on a hike on a nearby mountain with my host father's coworkers, an event that takes place once a month. Afterwards we ate Sam Bap (rice wrapped in cabbage or lettuce leaves and stuffed with other vegetable odds and ends) and I met my friend Emily's host father and watched one of the teachers smashed the back end of his car after a few drinks in the restaurant. Which actually brings up an interesting point about driving here -- per capita Korea has one of the worst records for auto accidents in the world. Whereas in the united states wearing a seatbelt in the backseat is just seen as a personal safety measure because people realize that driving can be dangerous, in Korea the back seat belt is seen as unnecessary and its actually borderline offensive to wear it. The few times that I've tried to put it on, I've been told "we just don't do that here." If I say that I like to wear it, I get the hint that I'm making some unspoken comment on their driving. Confucianism pervails!

Korean Bridge to connect to Sorok Island: Aged Leper Colony

A Korean Bridge Must Span Years of Bias and Sadness

By: NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: August 9, 2007
New York Times

SOROK ISLAND, South Korea — After the clod-covered offramp is smoothed over with asphalt, after the road signs are put up and the construction cranes taken down, a bridge, long anticipated, will open here in September. Spanning a third of a mile over seawater, it will connect this islet to the Korean mainland for the first time.

Anywhere else, the opening of a simple bridge might go unnoticed. But Sorok Island is this country’s most famous leper colony, established on an island in the country’s most isolated region, a place of lifetime banishment and silent deaths for generations of people with leprosy.

So on both sides of the bridge, the opening is being greeted as a cause for celebration, proof, in concrete and steel, of the fading of ancient prejudices. The authorities are moving up the opening date so that it will coincide with Chusok, South Korea’s harvest festival, on Sept. 25.

“This will no longer be an island if there is a bridge,” said Kim Ki-sang, 69, who came here in 1946 and has never left. “Before, we were so close but we were not free. This bridge is releasing decades of sadness for us.”

And yet, some still question whether Sorok Island will truly become a part of the peninsula. Will its mostly elderly patients, particularly those who have lived here for decades and lost ties with those on the other side, dare to cross the bridge?

There is also great trepidation about letting the outside world so freely into Sorok Island, which is now accessible from the mainland only by ferry. Out of concern for the residents’ privacy, the islet’s seven leper villages will be sealed off from car traffic.

“Things will be harder to control with the bridge bringing in more people,” said Kim Chung-hang, 65, who first came here in 1957 and is now a leader of the 650 lepers here. “But if we want to gain something good, I guess we also have to sacrifice something.”

Officials say that despite lingering prejudices against the disease, they have registered few objections to the bridge’s construction from Doyang, the town on the other side. Kim Hong-sun, an official with South Cholla Province here, said shop and hotel owners in Doyang were more concerned about losing business, because once the bridge opened it would not be necessary for travelers to stop in Doyang.

The Sorok leper colony was founded here in 1916 by the Japanese, Korea’s colonial rulers at the time, and life has seemingly stood still ever since.

Roughly 100 of 130 colonial-era buildings are still being used on Sorok Island, which is about 1.3 times as big as Central Park. Even a Japanese Shinto shrine still stands on a small hill near one of the islet’s main intersections. Elsewhere in South Korea, traces of Japanese rule were systematically eliminated after the end of World War II, so that only a handful of colonial buildings now remain in Seoul, the capital.

Life during Japanese rule sometimes verged on the surreal. One notoriously brutal hospital director had a 31-foot statue of himself built and forced patients to bow before it each morning. Another, remembered to this day for his kindness, treated the patients like his family so that after his death here, they pulled together their savings and built a cenotaph in his honor. After Korea’s liberation, the South Korean government tried to have the cenotaph demolished, but the residents hid it and brought it out in 1961. The 31-foot statue is long gone, but the cenotaph is still here.

The good director was gone by the time Chang Ki-jin, 85, was brought here in 1942. Like other patients, Mr. Chang was forced to work, carrying bricks on his back.

“Even though I was a leper, I was still able to work,” said Mr. Chang, who, like the oldest of the patients here, bears the sunken face and other disfigurements caused by leprosy, which can now be treated with antibiotics.

One winter, Mr. Chang’s limbs froze, and his legs were amputated.

“Our Japanese commander’s name was Sato,” he said. “He carried a big bat and would hit us whenever we rested. He was very vicious.”

In 2001, the Japanese government acknowledged that long after cures for leprosy were found, it had continued to force patients in Japan into quarantine and sterilized many. Japanese lawyers then successfully pressed the government to compensate leprosy patients in Japan’s former colonies, Korea and Taiwan, who were often subjected to even worse mistreatment. Officials in the hospital here say that 222 South Koreans, including 105 here, have received compensation of about $70,000 each from Japan.

Life remained hard after independence from Japan. The South Korean government continued to quarantine leprosy patients here until 1963. Children born of patients here were sequestered in a nursery.

“They would allow us to see them only once a month,” said Kim Chung-hang, the patient who arrived here in 1957. “But there was a big fence between us. It would break our hearts.

“Back then, we weren’t treated as human beings,” he added. “This place was worse than hell.”

Kim Ki-sang, the patient who came here in 1946, said he and his wife were forced to give up their son on his first birthday. Mr. Kim’s uncle raised the boy.

Conditions here improved along with the country’s economic growth and democratization in the 1980s, Mr. Kim said.

“Things trickled down to us,” he said.

On a recent morning, a group of farmers from a nearby village paid a visit.

“Our guide told us we shouldn’t be afraid anymore,” said one tourist, Song Sun-im, 48. Asked whether she backed the new bridge, Ms. Song said casually, “Sure.”

On the other side of the bridge, in Doyang, Yoo Jae-hong, the leader of the local merchants’ association, said no one worried anymore about catching the disease from the island’s residents.

“Of course there was a time when we found them abhorrent, and bias still exists,” Mr. Yoo said. “But in the last 20 years our views have changed.”

Some merchants, he said, were opposed to the bridge’s construction, not because of prejudice against the disease, but because travelers would bypass Doyang on their way here.

“So for the merchants, the bridge means that Sorok Island is moving further away from us,” Mr. Yoo said. “And we’re sorry about that. But I can understand that the people on Sorok Island are waiting impatiently for the opening of the bridge.”

Videos of South Korean Labor/ Student Protests

At the National Conference on Organized Resistance this spring there were quite a few workshops on independent media and the representation of activism. One speaker coined a hilarious term -- "riot porn" -- to describe journalism/ video/ photography that glorifies active resistance while doing little to discuss the context, people, and stakes from which it formed. Since getting here I've become interested in finding information on the South Korean labor and student movement and wouldn't you know there is quite a few videos of protests available on right on Youtube. This stuff is riot porn to the core, and I was hesitant to post it on this blog for that reason, but I do find it interesting that these encounters happen as frequently as they do here and that the protesters get away with as much as they do without being obliterated by the police. If nothing else, they're valuable just to see how serious these protests are taken here.




Illegal labor protest in Pohan that took place, I think, sometime in 2006.



Korean National Labor Union Protest in Seoul, South Korea sometime last year I think. 1st - 5th and 2nd Mobile on the scene, with the 4th, 51st Mobile Company at the end.

South Korean Labor Movement

When I would tell people in the states that I was moving to South Korea, if they didn't immediately bring up the situation in the north they brought up the South Korean labor movement. One of my rides during my hitchhiking trip through California and Oregon this May-- a guy who had been heavily involved in anti-globalization protests on the west coast-- said that during a world bank protest he had attended in Mexico, South Korean auto workers were at the head of the march, smashing cars and confronting antagonistic police to make room for people to get through the streets. Since arriving I've tried to keep on top of the news through the Korean Herald (one of many English language newspapers here) and everyday its had at least 2-3 articles on unions and the labor movement. At least three major companies have had small strikes in the last few weeks and so far this doesn't seem too unusual for the country. Below is a good summary of the history and direction of the Korean labor movement that was featured in the Herald earlier this week.

[Insight into Korea(5)] Labor movement in Korea losing steam

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987 and the 10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our readers can gain some insights into the nation's future from these articles. - Ed.

South Korea is well known for possessing one of the most aggressive and militant labor movements in the world today. At a time when organized labor in most advanced industrial countries is severely weakened and remains in the doldrums, South Korean labor seems rather unique in demonstrating fresh militancy and class solidarity backed by powerful unions located in heavy and chemical industries. Foreign media often portray South Korea as a country with "endemic strikes," and foreign investors are said to be afraid of the powerful unions when they consider investing in South Korea. On the other side, international labor groups show great respect for the Korean labor movement in playing a leading role in fighting neoliberal globalization.

Looking inside Korea, however, we see a different picture. Korea's large unions indeed demonstrate militancy often enough, but they hardly make up a strong and cohesive union movement. The Korean union movement currently represents no more than 11 percent of the active labor force, and union membership is disproportionately made up of the employees of large firms, leaving the majority of the workforce at small enterprises unprotected. Also excluded is the rapidly growing number of irregular workers, who now comprise more than half of the national work force. Although there is a strong push for building industry unions, the basic structure of Korean unions is that of enterprise unions, which make it difficult to achieve broad solidarity among workers in diverse job conditions. Labor leadership at the national level appears hopelessly divided along ideological and factional lines, failing to offer an effective strategy to deal with serious structural problems faced by the working class in this age of globalism. There seems to be wide public disaffection with the militant strategy adopted by large unions in their wage negotiations. Labor groups seem increasingly isolated from other social movements, which are now led by the active citizens' movement. With declining public support, and with growing internal division, the current South Korean labor movement faces a serious crisis of identity and class solidarity.

Thus, in order to understand the nature of the Korean labor movement adequately, we must address the dual aspects of Korean labor - its militancy and its organizational weakness. And to do so, we need a little historical knowledge of the way the Korean labor movement developed in the process of rapid industrialization over the past four decades.

Brief history

It is rather conventional among many observers to see the origin of the current labor movement in South Korea in the huge wave of labor conflicts that erupted in the summer of 1987, in the wake of the political transition to democracy. Almost immediately after Chun Doo-hwan conceded to the demands of the opposition forces for a direct presidential election in June 29, 1987, Korea's industrial laborers broke a long period of imposed silence and passivity and plunged into collective actions. From July to September 1987, more than three thousand labor conflicts occurred, exceeding the total number of labor disputes that occurred during the two preceding decades. The great labor struggle in 1987 clearly marks a landmark in the development of the Korean labor movement.

It is important to realize, however, that the 1987 labor upheaval was not the beginning of the democratic union movement in South Korea. It started much earlier, though not well recognized by foreign observers. In many ways, the contemporary Korean labor movement started with the famous suicide by a young tailor, Chon Tae-il in 1970. He set himself on fire to protest inhumane working conditions in a sweatshop district called Peace Market in Seoul. Until his body was completely burned by the flames, Chon held a copy of the Labor Standard Laws in his hand and shouted: "We are not machines!" "Let us rest on Sunday!" "Abide by the Labor Standard Laws!" "Don't exploit workers!"

Chun's self-immolation had a tremendous impact on the working class movement in South Korea. It sowed the spirit of resistance and rebellion in the minds of millions of workers and provided a powerful symbol for the working class in a society that until then did not have a sacred symbol that could inspire and mobilize workers for a collective goal. What he fought for was justice and human dignity rather than simple economic improvement. Chun's protest therefore carried an enormous moral authority. More concretely, his tragic death played an instrumental role in bringing students and intellectuals to assist the grassroots labor movement during the harsh authoritarian period.

The grassroots union movement began following Chun's heroic self-sacrifice, and it was led by young female workers employed in labor-intensive light manufacturing sectors. The late-1970s to the early-1980s was a period marked by incredible episodes of labor resistance waged by women workers in the textile, garment and electronic industries. In one instance, women protesters stood naked in front of combat troops in order to prevent the cops from approaching them; in another instance, strikers threatened to commit collective suicide with broken bottles if the cops were going to attack them; and in still another instance, striking women workers stormed into the opposition party headquarters to secure a safer place to continue their strike. Women workers' struggle during this period demonstrated an amazing spirit of resistance and comradeship. An important feature of the union movement in the 1970s was the involvement of church groups and intellectuals in labor struggles. In the 1970s, two progressive church groups, the Urban Industrial Mission (UIM) and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC), provided a variety of educational programs to workers and defended the workers from state prosecution. In the 1980s, labor struggles became more politicized as a stream of student activists entered the industrial arena. The Gwangju massacre in 1980 contributed greatly to radicalizing the students. Students came to realize that they alone could not bring down the military dictatorship and that they must ally with the working class. The nohak yeondae, labor-student alliance, became their dominant strategy, and under this strategy a large number of students dropped out of college and became factory workers in order to raise political consciousness among factory workers.

By the mid-1980s, a large number of subterranean networks of labor activists had been formed both inside and outside the factories. Gradually, these subterranean networks extended beyond the Seoul-Inchon region and to the southern coastal industrial towns where heavy and chemical industries were concentrated. Male workers employed in these areas had been quiet on the surface until the mid-1980s, but they were not unaffected by this radical trend. Behind close company surveillance, many skilled workers in southern industrial towns, like Ulsan, Masan, and Changwon, were reading Marxist literature and forming small discussion groups.

Industrial workers all over the nation did not hesitate when the opportunity opened up in June 1987 to take collective action to demand humane treatment and economic justice in their workplaces. The significance of the 1987 labor uprising was that it brought new actors into the South Korean labor movement. The center of labor conflicts shifted from small-scale, light manufacturing sectors to heavy chemical industrial centers. The semi-skilled male workers in heavy and chemical industries emerged suddenly as the main actors of the South Korean labor movement, pushing aside women workers, who had played an active role in the grassroots union movement in the previous period. The union movement since then has become dominated by male workers employed in large-scale firms and women workers have become marginalized in the labor movement. The new unionism thus emerged represented a militant unionism with a strong antipathy and mistrust toward management and the government. This was undoubtedly the product of the extremely repressive labor regime during the authoritarian period of rapid industrialization.

The post-1987 development

The democratic transition in Korea since 1987 greatly modified the terrain of the Korean labor movement. Organized labor suddenly became empowered and emerged as a major social force for democratic reform and social justice. Many new and powerful unions were formed at large manufacturing firms, and many white-collar unions were also formed in the service sector. Union members increased from 1,004,000 in 1985 to 1,932,000 in 1989, or from 12.4 percent of the labor force to 19.8 percent. During the heyday of labor activism from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, production workers at conglomerate firms obtained hefty wage hikes with increased welfare compensation. Unions themselves also became democratized. The previously government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) was reformed to become a genuinely independent and representative union. But a more significant development was the formation of an alternative radical national center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995, comprising many powerful unions in the automobile, shipbuilding, health care and telecommunications industries, as well as in education and various service sectors. If democratization is one major force that influenced the post-1987 Korean union movement, another powerful force impinging on Korean labor was globalization of the South Korean economy, which has accelerated its pace since the early 1990s. If democratization opened the political space for the labor movement, globalization functioned to undermine the economic base of the unionism. Globalization in Korea brought new managerial practices aimed at creating a flexible labor force. The major focus of labor-management conflicts in the first half of the 1990s was on labor laws concerned with employer rights on utilization of labor and particularly on layoffs of workers. The conflict resulted in the Kim Young-sam government's ill-calculated legislative move to pass controversial labor laws, which were to give more power to employers to lay off workers, at a pre-dawn National Assembly session on December 26, 1996, with no opposition lawmaker present. This undemocratic move triggered a huge labor response. The newly formed KCTU and the old FKTU coordinated successfully to produce the first large-scale general strike since the Korean War, mobilizing millions of workers over a three-week period in January 1997. Since the strike was about job security and at a time when more and more people were experiencing job instability, as well as about democratic procedures, the public was fully supportive of the strike. This was one of the rare moments since the 1987 transition when organized labor appeared as a moral force fighting for social justice, democracy and economic interests not only of union members but of all working people in society.

This euphoric moment, however, did not last long because the Korean economy was hit by a financial crisis a few months later. As everybody well knows, the financial crisis and the IMF-mandated economic restructuring brought on devastating consequences to Korean people, producing a staggering number of business failures, a sharp increase in unemployment, frozen wages, decreased income, curtailments of non-wage benefits, a growing number of homeless people, and many other social problems. In order to overcome the crisis, the newly-elected President Kim Dae-jung proposed to form a labor-management-government tripartite body along the social corporatist model. In February 1998, the Tripartite Commission succeeded in producing a Tripartite Accord that, among other things, allowed employers to implement redundancy layoffs in case of business failures. Although this Tripartite Accord was welcomed as a historical compromise by most interested parties, the rank-and-file members of the KCTU were upset by the result and forced the union leadership to resign. Subsequently, the KCTU stepped out of the Tripartite Commission, and the bad feelings created at this time continued to haunt the radical leadership and operate as a source of deep mistrust toward the government's effort for labor-capital compromise.

Current situation

Two decades have passed since the great labor uprising in 1987. The Korean union movement has developed impressively since that turning point and enjoys a renowned status in the international labor movement. But the current state of the Korean union movement is far from enviable; it is beset with serious organizational, structural and ideological problems. As mentioned above, the union members now represent less than 11 percent of the wage workers. Union membership peaked at 19.8 percent in 1989 and has been falling ever since. It dropped to 12.0 percent in 2000 and to 10.6 percent at the end of 2004. Not only is the unionization rate low, it is limited largely to workers employed at large firms. Currently, more than three quarters of union members are workers employed at large firms hiring 300 or more employees. Less than a quarter of union members are found in smaller enterprises. Of enterprises with fewer than 300 employees, only 2.8 percent have unions present, while 69 percent of enterprises with 300 or more workers have unions. This shallow and skewed union membership structure raises a serious question about the representativeness of the current union movement - the union movement for whom? Organized labor is no longer looked at as the socially weak but as the unduly powerful and aggressive. Despite some efforts at the national union level, local unions are increasingly preoccupied with narrow economic issues affecting their memberships. Union leaders seem to be divided along ideological, factional and regional lines. Frequent revelations of corruption and violence within union leadership have destroyed public support. No longer is the union movement able to claim the moral leadership it had in the 1980s. More fundamentally, the union movement has been unable to offer any alternative vision or practical policy alternatives in opposing neoliberal globalization.

We can identify several factors that underlie the present predicament of the Korean union movement, structural, institutional and ideological.

The first is the structural source of the problems. It concerns basically the impact of globalization on the structure of the labor force. Since South Korea adopted globalization as official policy in the early 1990s, much change has occurred in the South Korean economy. Most salient was its impact on the labor market structure. Despite strong resistance from labor, large-scale firms have carried out extensive industrial restructuring in order to reduce their labor costs and increase labor market flexibility. As a consequence, the number of regularly employed workers has noticeably declined while that of irregular workers has increased sharply since the mid-1990s. In 2004, the proportion of irregular workers (including temporary workers, subcontract workers, casual hires and dispatched workers) reached 56 percent of the labor force. (The government's more conservative estimate puts the figure at 38 percent.) Obviously, these irregular workers are situated in a far inferior job market situation compared with regular workers. On average, the irregular workers receive about half of regular workers' wages and are typically not covered by statutory welfare policies. And most irregular workers are denied union membership, even when they are working at the same firm.

The fragmentation of the labor force associated with neoliberal globalization is, of course, a well known phenomenon around the world. But in South Korea, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The South Korean labor force was relatively homogeneous until the early 1990s. But serious internal differentiation has occurred in the past decade, especially after the financial crisis in 1997. The differentiation occurred not only between regular and irregular workers, but also between those employed at large firms and those at smaller firms. The recent economic trend in South Korea produced an increasingly polarized business structure. Large firms, especially chaebol firms, adapted to global competition relatively well, while many small enterprises suffered serious problems. This polarized economic structure is reflected in the labor force, producing two classes of wage workers, sharply divided by the size of the firms they are employed at and the terms of their employment. Union membership is correlated with these two factors. So, typical union members are likely to be those who are employed regularly at large firms or in the public service sector.

The second source of problems faced by the South Korean union movement is an institutional one, basically the decentralized, enterprise-based union structure. The enterprise union system was the product of the labor regime during the authoritarian government period. The authoritarian regimes maintained the enterprise union system because it was considered an easier system to keep enterprise unions isolated from one another and to prevent outside political influence. Unfortunately, the new union movement since 1987 did not challenge this union structure, presumably because many newly formed unions at large firms found no conflict of interest with the enterprise union system. And, once the post-1987 labor regime was settled based on enterprise unionism, it became very difficult to change it.

So, we can see that many of the problems faced by the Korean labor movement derive from structural and institutional sources rather than simple problems of union leadership or selfish motives of the unionized workers. These are difficult problems to overcome. One notable exception that has been made in recent years was the effort to form industrial unions to overcome the limitations of enterprise unions. Of several industrial unions formed in recent years, the metal worker union is the most important one, with about 143,000 members and representing powerful local unions, such as the Hyundai, Kia and Ssangyong automotive unions. But it is still uncertain to what extent these industrial unions will be able to work as effective organs representing broader worker interests and devising viable policies in the face of accelerating globalization. As revealed by the most recent case of the anti-FTA strike organized by the Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU), the power of the industrial union, let alone the national flagship union, over powerful local member unions (in this case the Hyundai Motor's union) is very limited. It is possible that this anti-FTA strike was an ill-timed, ill-considered decision by the metal union leadership without due consultation with local union leaders, but Hyundai Motor workers' vehement opposition to participating in what they consider a political strike was telling evidence of how difficult it is to organize class solidarity on an industry basis. It is particularly so because Hyundai Motor's union is known to be the most radical union in the nation, conducting annual strikes for the past 13 years, and because the KMWU is the most powerful union at the industry level. Nonetheless, there seems to be enough consensus among Korean labor groups that building effective industrial unions is the only solution to addressing the mounting problems of unprotected workers and the increasing fragmentation of the Korean working class in this age of globalization.

By Hagen Koo

Introducing Chuncheon

After a long, long trip here via multiple planes, buses, days, and sleeps I've begun the first leg of my six week orientation for the F-bright grant that I'll be serving out over the next year here in South Korea. I've been shuttled off to a mid-sized college town named Chuncheon with 69 other ETAs from all across the states and boarded in Kwangwon National University, where we will be taking intensive language and teaching lessons until we leave for our homestays and teaching positions when the monsoon rains begin to calm in mid-August. I still don't feel like I've gotten a good feel for Chuncheon yet -- this evening is the first I've had free and I spent it recovering sleep, studying Korean, and starting this entry. I'm dying to explore the neighborhoods here and its been an odd transition since that's usually the first thing I run to when I travel into a new city. When there aren't class obligations to go to here there's always outside activities planned so that we can get to know our grant-mates -- the people who will be our support system over the next year when people back home don't understand when we occasionally freak out about what is going on in our classrooms and homes.

So far I know little about where I will be placed, but I have found out that by random fate I've been made one of 10 elementary teachers here and the only male elementary ETA ever for F-bright Korea. This does mean that, unlike the secondary education teachers, I'll have little choice in where I get placed and will probably be put in a rural area somewhere along the west coast.

To the right is a picture of my roommate, Alec, who I think is trying to kill us by leaving his fan on while we sleep with the doors and windows closed. It may not seem like a big deal, but Koreans believe that it can cause a little thing called FAN DEATH that is backed by scientific research from Korean universities!