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THE SAGA OF WHORLCANE'S GRAMAMMY
or "We Were There at Tarzan's Descent into the Femalestrom"
or Why Bring a Caterpillar Sandwitch to a Diet of Silkworms Brunch? How to write about Korea? It was the major turning point of my life, an experience so complex that even a multi-dimensional account in enhanced and embellished surrealist jive vernacular can hardly scratch the surface. Maybe it'll be easier if I write the Commentary first. In 1972, Fleebus and I graduated from MSU. We donned our gowns and funny hats and went through the graduation ceremony. I then embarked on a graduation vacation to Atlanta. When I returned home I received a letter from MSU saying I lacked one-half credit-hour. I had to go back to school and pick up those thirty semester minutes if I wanted to get my diploma. So I went back to school, took a course on writing poetry, and officially graduated the following semester, Spring '73. Somewhere in there I met Harriet for the first time since high school. Fleebus joined the Peace Corps in November 1973 and was assigned to Korea (ROK) as a TEFL (Teacher of English as a Foreign Language) volunteer. I decided to stay in the USA. Gourd knows why! Applied my BA in Psychology to a career as a Rodman/Chainman in land surveying parties. It was excellent work for lazy young men who wanted to spend appreciable time gawking about in the countryside. In my free time, I read occult books and Tarot cards, tripped, and followed Aramie around. Surveying was the kind of work where even hippies were hired. In the sixties and early seventies, the only thing hardhats would do with hippies was beat them up. White-collar businesses wouldn't touch hippies with a ten-foot pole unless they at least cut their hair. If you had a beard, you were out of work no matter what. So you opened a head shop, made a living of sorts as a musician, panhandled, or lived off your family. Throughout my college years, I chose the easy route and lived off my family. Once I'd graduated, though, I began to realize that that was no longer a good idea. Guys who lived off their families for too long ended up with wet dreams as the high point of their day. Somewhere in there, construction contractors realized they could hire hippies at a lower level of pay than migrant workers. The next thing you knew, there were hippies working side-by-side with redneck hardhats at all the construction sites. The next thing you knew, hardhats had stopped beating up hippies and were now smoking pot with them. The hippies introduced the rednecks to pot and rockabilly music; the rednecks introduced the hippies to moonshine and country-western. The one thing surveying lacked bigtime was job security. America was in the midst of a recession. Every winter I got laid off, and every spring I was hired by a different company. In between times I worked at really odd jobs, like the year I was a driver for Minuteman Delivery Service. It was owned by four brothers who were hippies. They told us it was okay to smoke a joint once in awhile during working hours, but that alcohol was verboten. They quoted studies that had found that pot smokers actually had less accidents than sober drivers. They didn't have to twist my arm much on that account. We often carried a lot of heavy items in our cargo, like all-metal mechanical cash registers, some of them three or four feet tall. So it was quite satisfying in terms of macho status, also. In 1974, I got my first job working in a mental health unit, the A&D Unit at Tennessee Psychiatric Hospital. After seven months in the cuckoo's nest, I quit to go with Aramie and start a commune in the Ozarks. (See "The Aves of Aram".) When that fell through, I returned to Memphis and started job-hopping again. By 1975, I was beginning to worry about the possibility of an accidental nuclear holocaust. It was plain that neither the American nor the Russian oligarchy was stupid or crazy enough to start one on purpose. But the defense systems were astronomically complex and were run by people who did not have a good reputation for knowing the difference between commands like "Lunch" and "Launch". I decided to hie me to the hills. Nepal looked like a good place, what with its high mountains, jungles with tigers, attractive women, and country stores that featured bell jars offering different varieties of marijuana for sale. Who the hell would want to bomb Nepal? Meanwhile, Fleebus had been writing me glowing letters describing his adventures in Korea. So I applied to join the Peace Corps. The way they did it then, you could list, in order of preference, the three places you most wanted to be assigned. I listed Nepal, Samoa, and Korea. The only reason I listed Korea at all was because Fleebus was there. The only thing I knew about Korea was that it could get amazingly cold there. I'd gotten that from reading war comics in the 1950s. After a year of filling out and submitting forms, refilling out and resubmitting forms, etc. ad nauseum, I was finally allowed in. My Bachelor degree in psych was completely overshadowed by my three years' experience as a grunt in the field of land surveying. In autumn of 1976, I was to receive my Invitation to Orientation as a Water Purfication Volunteer in Nepal. I spent the summer of '76 working at my last land surveying job, losing some twenty pounds, and reading everything I could find on Nepal. I was delighted to discover that some regions of the Himalayas lack anything with which to make vegetable oil for cooking. These people, who practiced a mainly vegetarian diet, were forced to utilize oil of cannabis to cook fried foods. I could certainly help them with that! Of course, the government forgot to send me my Invitation to Orientation, so Nepal was out. I had already quit my surveying job, so I took a seasonal position in the Trim-the-Tree section at Goldsmiths Department Store, all the while communicating back and forth with Washington about possible alternative assignments. First they wanted me to go to Sierra Leone, Africa, as a Water Purification Volunteer. I would be given a motor scooter to ride around village to village and teach people how to boil water and run their sewage pipes downhill. This sounded good; I liked the idea of getting to know gen-u-wine African women. But when I looked up Sierra Leone in the library and National Geographic, I found it to be a swampy, mosquitoey, mud-bound flatland right smack-dab in the middle of the equator. It would be like Misipi, only more so! I phoned Washington and told them I felt unqualified. They said, "Well, all that leaves is for you to teach English in South Korea." Okay, Korea wasn't my first choice, and it was a prime target in the event of a nuclear war. But Fleebus was there, and he seemed to be having fun. I decided to join. I was scheduled to attend orientation in San Francisco in the first week of January 1977. This time they did remember to send me my Invitation. The Trim-the-Tree section at Goldsmiths was a cheery place to work, much as I have always hated retail. One day my old friend Harriet gave me a special accupressure massage, which she said would "polarize" my aura. It blew off the top of my skull, opening it to the universe, while my body retained just enough gravity to keep me from rising in the air to orbit over Midtown. I was flying that way for two weeks, sober as a Mormon, until I made the mistake of smoking a joint and bringing myself back down. Then my Dad passed away in November, just 14 years and a day after his own father had passed, right around Thanksgiving. I've been very careful every Thanksgiving since then. I hated to leave my mother and my sister less than two months later, but I knew it was what my Dad would have wanted. So in January I was off. Memphis was snowed under then, in conditions that even Yankees would call blizzard. Snow knee-deep, winds at fifty mph, ice everywhere. San Frisky was like spring weather. My fellow trainees and I (almost all of them Yankees) enjoyed what was to us shirtsleeve weather and laughed at the San Franciscans running around shivering in arcticwear. After three days orientation in SF, we boarded a plane for Korea. We stopped in Honolulu for a couple of hours and took off our shirts for photos in the 85 degree sunshine. Our next stop was Japan, which, like Memphis, was in blizzard conditions. Then we skipped over to Korea. It was 18 below zero, and everything was covered with ice. I had never been so cold in my life. Fleebus and his wife Sunhee met us at the airport. He almost didn't recognize me. It had only been a year or so since he'd seen me (on his last trip to America), but this persona was one he had never seen before. Fleebus was accustomed to seeing me with long hair and a bushy red beard, dressed in raggedy jeans, t-shirts, and cowboy boots. But the peace Corps had sent all us new volunteers a letter asking us to be clean-shaven and well-dressed. The letter had given the impression that men with facial hair would be stopped at the border and sent back. It also strongly urged that we wear suits and ties. So I had shaved my beard off, cut my hair short, and donned a suit topped off by a "butterfly" style bowtie. When I got off the plane, Fleebus and some twenty students and friends with him applauded my debut. Fleebus said that he had told all his friends about his fellow furry freak friend Ernie, and they had been expecting a Tommy Chong type. But then when I arrived I looked like Donald Duck. My ass and both arms were sore from innoculations, I had severe jet lag, and I was dog- tired from going through Customs. Naturally the Peace Corps had neglected to find lodging for us as they had promised. So I trudged through the ice-covered streets of Seoul, carrying a footlocker full of books, in my WWI American Army Officer overcoat and a pair of thin-soled Italian loafers with silvery buckles, looking for a place to stay. This is no mean trick when you can't speak the language, can't even read the characters it's written in. I was later to discover that this was business-as-usual in the Peace Corps. Miles and hours later, several of us checked in to a yogwan, or inn. Frankie LeVaunt and I were to share a room, but it wasn't cleaned yet, so we had to wait. About that time, Fleebus came to take me and show me the sights around Seoul. Unaware of Korean yogwan protocol, I took the key to the rooms with me. Six hours later, I returned to find Frankie waiting in the courtyard. He looked like one of Admiral Byrd's men at the end of a fifty- mile trek through the ice floes. He set me straight on what I was supposed to have done with the key, which was to leave it with the ajimoni (literally "aunt"), or proprietor of the yogwan. Well hell, how was I to know they had only one key to each room? Bimeby we were trucked off to Cheong-Ju to complete six weeks of intensive training. As cold and hilly as it was, it might as well have been the Himalayas. The high points of training there included being introduced to soju, a kind of sweet-potato vodka, drinking at bars where a pretty girl would sit in your lap and feed you dried fish, and taking handfuls of paregoric pills when I got dysentary. The Peace Corps cheerfully supplied us with as much paregoric and darvon as we wanted. I had unpleasant associations regarding darvon, so I never took any. I soon found out that paregoric was virtually useless for all purposes, licit or not. Still, it helped stretch the soju. Finally our training was finished and we were sworn in. I was the last one approved by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The others in my group, K41, had apparantly been approved before they left Stateside. Just as we were standing in line to take the oath, the Director of Training opened up my letter of approval, which he had just received, and read it aloud. There were congratulations all around, and then we took the oath. I just don't know whatever it could've been that caused such a delay. Snakes ate my resume, I guess. (Well, I don't know, but I'm sure the FBI does.) Frankie and I, it turned out, were assigned to the same site, Pusan, spelled with a "B" by its residents and a "P" by everyone else in the world: Busan. When the train left Cheong-Ju, it was knee-deep in snow. When it pulled into Busan a few hours later, it was already spring there. I looked out the window of the train and saw buds coming out on the branches of the trees. Right then, my metallic gray mood, which had started with my father's passing and continued throughout training, dropped away. It was like waking to a new morning. Bimeby I settled into my new job as a sunseng (teacher) at Busan Women's University. It was like being a guest of honor twenty-four hours a day. I was wined, dined, and paid for it. The university helped me in every way, including finding me a place to stay. I lived in a hahgweon (boarding house) over a Korean Chinese restaurant. For $80 a month, I got a room and two meals a day, mostly seafood and green vegetables. For four dollars extra, the agashi (servant girl) would do my laundry. The roof was flat and consisted of a porch. When the weather was good, I would get together with my neighbor Sang Jo, and we would bring our sleeping bags up on the roof and sleep there. Since there was a midnight curfew, nearly all lights and sounds in the city would end shortly thereafter. You could see the stars as well as if you were way out in the desert. For PCVs and civilians in Korea, pot was hard to come by. The American military had no problem; they could get it for three dollars an ounce from the prostitutes and gangsters that collected around our military bases. We were able to get cheap dexedrine and other medications at the local drug stores without a prescription, but no pot anywhere. So you can imagine how delighted I was to discover that Sang Jo, my next-door neighbor, could get it. We forthwith acquired a kilo (2.2 pounds) of tripweed (grown in no-man's land at the 38th parallel) for a hundred dollars. Heavenly daze... I found out I could go up to the roof of a building at my university and smoke it without anyone being the wiser. At least, I suppose they weren't. No one would tell you if they were, and as long as it didn't interfere with my work, I suppose it was all right. However, it would definitely not have been all right if I had outright told them I was doing it. This is one of the major differences between occidental societies and Confucian societies. Keeping up appearances is of prime importance. It's more important to look like you're behaving than it is to actually behave. The social scientist Ruth Benedict (or was it Franz Boaz? anyways, somebody important)
said that there were two major ways that societies ensured moral rectitude: guilt and shame. Guilt is self-control from within the individual's mind. Shame is control by sensitivity to how others see one. Although all cultures have elements of both, different cultures put different emphasis on each of the two. In America, we are predominantly guilt-oriented. If I do something I shouldn't, then I feel an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, accompanied by a sense of inner greasiness more metaphysical than otherwise. Ancient Greece, on the other hand, was a shame-oriented culture. To a large extent, something was only wrong if people found out about it. Of course, Greek culture also included guilt to some degree, just as we here in American are subject to shame to a certain degree. It's a matter of which predominates. Korea, like many East Asian countries, is a predominately shame-oriented culture. I would even venture to make a blanket statement in this regard: that the sway of shame over Korean society kept Korean people, at least those who resided in Korea in the late 1970s, on a tighter leash than has been the case with guilt-oriented Americans since the 1940s. It was as if the '50s and '60s had never happened there. There were signs on the doors of many businesses that stated that long-haired males would not be allowed on the property, and police had a reputation for arresting longhairs, beating them severely, and cutting off their hair. Women and girls who wore bluejeans were considered to be "loose women". Men were not to have facial hair until they had become grandfathers, and women were not to smoke or drink until they had become grandmothers. Yet, all Koreans loved rock-and-roll music, no matter how liberated the message might be. Since most of them didn't understand the lyrics, I suppose the police-state government figured it was pointless to try to control it. And let's be clear about this: South Korea in the 1970s was a police state ruled by a "benevolent" dictator, Chung-Hee Park. (To be continued when the stars are right.) Harriet Mythos, part Two
