Old
The permanence of what we take for granted and living through history
I once read somewhere that ADHD could be described as a sort of time-blindness, which would explain why so many of us procrastinate on projects or lose huge swathes of time when immersed in a fit of hyperfixation. Time-blindness would certainly explain my own inability to properly gauge how long things will take — from putting on makeup to the writing of an entire novel.
Maybe this is why I’m so fascinated with old, even ancient, things. It could also be my Cancer sun, of course, but the thing that fascinates me most about old or ancient things is this sense of connectedness I have to people long dead and gone. It makes me consider the permanence of things I take for granted, and whether or not they will exist long after I and my cohort are gone. Will future generations be studying our tools and our art in an effort to reconstruct our current lives? Will some teenager in 3467 CE1 stand before our monuments and wonder what life was like for someone like me?
On the grand scale of human history, 500 years isn’t an especially long time, but as an American, it seems like an age. An aeon. An era. The concept of the United States has only been in existence for less than 250 years. That’s barely a quarter of a dynasty in Korean terms. We think of so many events in history as happening in such a bygone era as to no longer be relevant in current political and cultural discourse, but slavery ended only 158 years ago on American soil. There are people alive who still hold memories of the enslaved.
I saw something in a program on something in Miami, and they were saying, "We've redecorated this building to how it looked over FIFTY YEARS AGO!" And people were going, "No, surely not, no! No one was alive back then!”
— Eddie Izzard, Dressed to Kill
경복궁 (Gyeongbok Palace) was first built in 1395, at the start of the Joseon dynasty, before being razed by the Japanese during the 16th century, restored two hundred years later, and then destroyed again by the Japanese during the colonial era. It is still undergoing restoration today.
Gyeongbokgung was one of those things my own mother took for granted when she was young. She attended high school in the neighborhood surrounding the palace, and it boggles my mind to think of taking something as monumental as a palace for granted. But perhaps that is the American in me talking again.
We’re up to here with fuckin’ castles. We just long for a bungalow or something.
— Eddie Izzard, Dressed to Kill
My mother’s biggest recollection about passing by the palace everyday as a teenager was the fact that the old Japanese colonial government building used to stand in front of it. “Put there to break the Korean spirit, or that’s what we learned,” she said. The building was finally torn down in the 1990s, nearly 100 years since the occupation. The Japanese never did manage to break the Korean spirit, but I can’t say much about the Korean sense of urgency.
The more I think about time, the more amazed I am by the relative recency of everything.
Perhaps it is because I myself am growing old, but events now considered historical and significant have happened within my lifetime and that boggles the mind. From the American perspective, I’ve lived through several culture-shifting paradigms — 9/11, the first Great Recession, a worldwide pandemic, a second economic recession, etc. I’m only 37 years old.
But if I think about the fact that South Korea did not have a full democracy until 1988 — three years after I was born — my brain starts to short-circuit. When it comes to economic and social progress, things have happened at record speed in Korea. I first started spending summers in Seoul with my grandmother when I was three years old, or the year democracy was won. Students were protesting left and right in the streets back then, clashing with police, and many were injured — even killed — while advocating for free and fair elections.
Naturally, I remember none of this. My memories of Korea during this time are purely sensory. Tasting raspberries for the first time. The sickly-sweet medicinal smell of Bacchus-D. The light of the citron coils we burned at night to keep the mosquitos at bay. The always-wet, constantly moist bathroom tile floors in my aunt and uncle’s house. It’s the bathroom I always remember first. Back then we didn’t have showers; we simply bathed (and did laundry) in the bathroom itself, filling large plastic bowls with hot water from the tub. There was a drain in the middle of the floor to carry away all the wash.
It’s a far cry from the fancy-ass bidet installed on the toilet in my hotel bathroom now.2 This shit has more buttons and modes than my car. Meanwhile, we're still wiping our ass with paper back in the States.
Of course, all this rapid progress comes at a cost. Capitalism always does. For the long time, Koreans called millennials 삼포세대 (samposedae), or “three giving-up generation” or the generation that has given up on three things: courtship, marriage, and having children. Later we became 오포세대 (oposedae), or the generation that gave up 5 things (courtship, marriage, having kids, stable employment, and owning a house), then 칠포세대 (chilposedae) who have given interpersonal relationships and hope in addition to the others, then finally n-포세대, which n representing an infinite number of things this generation has given up hope on ever attaining.
Despite this, many Koreans have retained a sort of revolutionary spirit. The entire oeuvre of Bong Joon-ho could be viewed through an anti-capitalist lens, as well as much of the discography of BTS.3 I arrived in Seoul only a few days after the Itaewon disaster, where over 50 people died in a crowd crush incident, to continually see throngs of people bussed in from other parts of the country to protest the misuse of resources by the government.4 Koreans are nothing if not very good at protesting and organizing protests, apparently. The last time they organized on a mass scale, they forced the impeachment and removal of a corrupt head of state.5
America could never.
I wonder how much of this is revolutionary spirit is due to the fact that for much of its history, Korea has been used as a pawn in the power struggles of its neighbors. My mother has always had a fascination with Ireland, and I joke that it’s because the Irish and the Koreans are essentially the same people. We drink more per capita than anyone else in the world, we are sentimental and melancholic about our homeland and wax poetic about it in song, and we are always fighting to assert our independence against a much larger continental force and an over-ambitious island nation. Once in college, a friend of mine related that one of her Irish literature professors said the whole of Irish literature could be summed up in one sentence, two words: They lose. One could say that about the Koreans as well.
Sometimes I wonder if my own leftist tendencies come from long-buried genetic memories of this generational trauma. Koreans even have a word for this feeling: 한 (han), derived from the Chinese character 恨, meaning hatred or resentment, but the word carries with it the connotation of grief or sorrow. My socialist stances certainly don’t come from my parents, who were registered Republicans before Trump and are now probably the textbook definition of neoliberal. The quintessential middle class California moderate — socially liberal, fiscally conservative.
But this is an exile’s rosy-colored view of the homeland. Korea is not inherently more progressive than any other nation; it is more socially conservative than America in many aspects, especially when it comes to queer rights. But then again, the issues don’t translate exactly to a direct one-to-one correlation, much like translating from one language to another. A Korean’s view on gender performance, especially masculinity, is not tied to sexuality in the same way as it is in America. People of the same gender express affection both verbal and physical in what Westerners would consider near-romantic terms while Koreans would understand those same interactions as familial. This is probably why Asian BL (boy-love, or gay) dramas are so popular across the world — they show a world where two boys can fall in love without the baggage of toxic masculinity. Much like fanfic.
Wandering around Gyeongbok Palace is a bit like going to a Renaissance Faire. The historical accuracy of the hanbok people are wearing is tenuous at best, but everyone is having fun dressing up like nobles, warriors, and princes. But the difference between Gyeongbokgung and an American RenFaire is the venue. At no point in American history have people dressed in plate armor. RenFaires are pure fantasy of the European sort, untethered from anything real. It’s a bunch of theater nerds coming together to play dress-up (and you’re automatically a theater nerd if you ever attend a RenFaire in costume, regardless of whether or not you’ve ever been a theater kid).
But the historical fantasy of Gyeongbok Palace is very specifically a tourist trap, and one I am still trying to wrap my mind around.
I want our nation to be the most beautiful in the world. By this I do not mean the most powerful nation. Because I have felt the pain of being invaded by another nation, I do not want my nation to invade others. It is sufficient that our wealth makes our lives abundant; it is sufficient that our strength is able to prevent foreign invasions. The only thing that I desire in infinite quantity is the power of a noble culture. This is because the power of culture both makes us happy and gives happiness to others.
— Kim Gu, Baekbeomilji (excerpt from March 1st, 1948)
It’s hard to escape the fact that Korea is cool nowadays, and it feels as though everyone is capitalizing on it. When I was a kid in the US, Korea was the forgotten East Asian country — people always asked my mother if she was Chinese, then Japanese. Korea was barely a blip on anyone’s cultural radar.
But now I see foreigners partaking of all the things I used to be made fun of for and I will admit to some complicated feelings. Some resentment, perhaps, for having been denied this cultural privilege growing up, in an environment where I had to strip myself of the very things people find so fascinating now. And sorrow as well, for feeling disconnected from the source of this culture.
And then I recognize this emotion. It is 한 (han).
Perhaps I really am Korean after all.
Providing humans even last this long. Given the state of the climate, it seems doubtful.
Speaking of which: Americans! What is preventing us from having bidets in our own bathrooms? Inquiring minds want to know!
To explain a little further, the current very right-wing conservative president has not moved into the Blue House, the residence of the executive office, because his personal shaman has told him it has bad vibes. As a result, Yoon Seok-yeol must now be guarded by an additional force of 700 policemen, which left the force shorthanded to deal with the crowds on October 31.
Park Geun-hye, an actual nepotism baby.