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.”