To the Ajeoshi Who Wanted to Fight With Me Near the Exit at Yongsan Station When I was Walking to Emart to Buy Sour Cream and Tinned Tomatoes, Or, How It Feels Sometimes Living Here

Posted on December 20, 2007
Filed Under Korea, personal | 18 Comments

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18 Responses to “To the Ajeoshi Who Wanted to Fight With Me Near the Exit at Yongsan Station When I was Walking to Emart to Buy Sour Cream and Tinned Tomatoes, Or, How It Feels Sometimes Living Here”

  1. Charles on December 21st, 2007 3:32 pm

    I think you did the right thing, more or less. Even better would have been completely ignoring him. I know that’s hard, but it’s the best thing to do–whether you’re in Korea or not.

    I’ve been accosted by a number of DPMBs over the years, and I’ve managed never to get into a fight. I did once almost get into a fight at a bar, when some guy actually physically attacked me, but luckily I had friends there to hold me back, and the DPMB had friends there to restrain him. In a small bit of justice, he was thrown out of the bar.

    Anyway, glad to hear that your calzones turned out good! Calzones beat DPMBs any day.

  2. gordsellar on December 21st, 2007 7:43 pm

    Charles,

    Yeah, I know. Ignoring this kind of crap is getting harder and harder for me, as I feel a growing need to assert that this shit is unacceptable, juvenile, and an embarrassment to the society that lets it happen.

    I’ve never been in a fight with a DPMB either, though one did try to feel me up once. He was lucky: I was new in the country and just left. (He was a professor at the uni I was working at, and yes, he actually tried to stick his hand in my crotch.)

    Good calzones make up for a lot. But I never blog my food — it never looks good enough, and it’s not a time when I feel like photographing things.

  3. David on December 21st, 2007 10:59 pm

    Great post. And it reminded me how pleasant it is to live in Japan.

    Can you (or can Lime help you) translate the post into Korean? That might increase the chances of getting the message across to people who actually need to hear it. (Probably not, but hope springs . . . .)

  4. Horace Jeffery Hodges on December 22nd, 2007 10:20 am

    Great story, Gord.

    I’ve rarely encountered such a thing. In fact, only once. No, make that twice — same guy, two different places but joined by the same mal-bus line and conjoined forever in memory by the DPMB encounter.

    I agree with you that those guys are lost in the past as Korea blasts off into the future. My undergrad students these days are often indistinguishable in their thinking from young students anywhere. They remind me of European youth — though not the ones burning cars in the banlieus of Paris, who are more like the DPMB.

    I hope that those young DPMBs aren’t the goodbye wave of Europe’s future…

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

  5. Charles on December 22nd, 2007 1:12 pm

    “But I never blog my food — it never looks good enough, and it’s not a time when I feel like photographing things.”

    If I let that stop me from reporting on my culinary adventures, we would never have had all those calzone reports in the first place!

  6. gordsellar on December 22nd, 2007 7:15 pm

    David,

    I don’t know if Lime’s even read it, but I don’t think she’d want me to translate it. I rather suspect a translation of it would probably bring a negative reaction towards me as a know-nothing, whining, insulting, rude foreigner, rather than waking up a few people. Though a more measured description might get more moderate, sane people thinking that. hey, maybe we don’t need to let drunk bastards behave as they like just because of their age and relative status. That’s the social revolution Korea needs on the street-level, daily basis: to soften the benefits of hierarchy somewhat. I’m not saying throw it out the window — though that’d be cool too, maybe — but rather, stop pretending it’s the way one must live. But once someone can be called to task for stupidity, irresponsibility, or unacceptable behaviour — once “annoying everyone around him” sloshes over into being considered “unacceptable” and not just “annoying” — then a lot of other things will change around here, too. Sort of like how it became possible for non-whites to criticize whites in North America some time ago, and things began to change.

    In any case, I don’t think a translation will be forthcoming. Unless someone else is interested. Charles is probably too wise to touch it with a ten-foot pole. :)

    Jeffrey,

    Yeah, my (undergrad) students are quite different from Western people of the same age, but that is to be expected, I think, and as going abroad is becoming de rigeur I think even more of a groundswell will follow. There’s also bound to be a backlash, but in time, it will improve. The problem is, the vast majority of DMPBs have a good couple of decades before they’re too feeble to start fights, and there are always disaffected youth. More frightening to me, though is the DMPBs of the future — the most disaffected Koreans of all will be North Korean men, and to whatever degree they’re in contact with westerners, South Korean men and women, and even “their own” women in a reunified — but imbalanced — South Korea, the worse it will be… especially considering the lack of reluctance to become violent described by some refugees here. Brrrrr. But hey, they have a cameo in a story I’ve got forthcoming in Interzone. I’ll let you read it sometime, if you like.

    Charles,

    Heh, yours looks lovely compared to mine. Seriously! Also, I really never feel like snapping pictures while cooking. Too busy, uh, cooking. :)

  7. Horace Jeffery Hodges on December 22nd, 2007 10:29 pm

    Sure, I’d like to read it.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

  8. Jérôme Carujo on December 22nd, 2007 11:41 pm

    Hello Gordsellar,

    I was very sorry to hear about this story. This kind of stuff is always really stressful.

    However, I’m not too sure about all this having to do with “living here” (i.e. Korea).
    Having some asshole coming looking for a fight for no reason can (and unfortunately) does happen in almost every country I’ve been to.

    I’ve lived in the UK, and it did happen to me there.
    I’ve lived in the US and it did happen to me as well there.
    I’ve lived in Korea and it did not happen to me there (but I put it down as having one lucky year)
    I’m French, live in France, and it happened to me me here as well.

    So my take on all this is that odds are that, wherever you live, you are bound to cross the path of some crazy dude at one point or another. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with you having a different skin tone, or coming from a different culture. It can just be you being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

    It doesn’t make all this any better, or any less stressful though.

  9. gordsellar on December 23rd, 2007 1:31 am

    Jeffrey,

    I’ll let you have a look sometime soon, then… :)

  10. gordsellar on December 23rd, 2007 2:12 am

    Jerome,

    Thanks for the comment, always nice to have someone new around.

    I agree that this kind of thing does happen everywhere — after all, there are crazy morons everywhere.

    However, I have to contrast your experience with mine: I’ve lived in plenty of parts of Canada, and stayed (for a few months) in places like Seattle and India. The only place where I felt as unsafe as here, and where the potential for unprovoked violence was anywhere near as high, was in the poverty-stricken, alcohol-sodden communities in Northern Saskatchewan where I spent much of my childhood. (Being beaten up. And race was overtly, explicitly an issue there, too.)

    There are some Westerners who exude arrogance, and this stuff happens to them regularly. But I don’t exude arrogance — I try to be as invisible as possible — and I still have run-ins enough… and plenty of Westerners I know have the impression this kind of outburst is more common here in general. There are some sensible reasons:

    1. The drinking culture is quite extreme here. It’s not unusual for adult men to drink simply to get drunk, and to do it at high speed, so that they’re completely hammered by 8pm. It’s not universal, but it’s common: most Koreans will agree.

    2. Intervention when behaviour crosses the limits of acceptable norms is rare, a pattern I long ago notice, but which baffles me still. Why did Korea go crazy about Dog Poop Girl? Because people here take that kind of discourteous crap on a daily basis here, and rarely confront the jerk directly. When they got a chance to do so indirectly, hundreds of people vicariously vented their myriad, pent-up rage at other, similar indignities. All of which adds up to these drunk bastards acting with effective impunity. If you doubt me, go ask a cop what they do with drunks who’re disturbing the peace. The fact is, Korean people usually don’t even bother to call the cops to haul away a drunk troublemaker, since it’s pointless.

    3. Discussion of (let alone treatment of) mental illness is taboo. When Koreans start going on about how pop stars kill themselves over internet slander, this always comes to mind. The result, though, is that a lot of nutters wander around freely, and get drunk as they like, and while some — like the happy drunk in front of us in the taxi line tonight — are friendly and silly and not a problem, others are rightly unhappy over their lives, and unfortunately take it out on anyone they meet who might fit the bill as punching bag.

    Dismissing those points and noting that there’s violence everywhere, and pretending that Korea doesn’t have a race-obsessed streak that lines up well with the kinds of middle-class older men I’m describing, is just silly. It’s impolitic, perhaps, to note the reality, but the reality doesn’t disappear just because we pretend it isn;t there.

    I’ve lived in some pretty violent places, like I mentioned. The sad thing is, my experiences in Seoul sometimes make me feel just as on edge. It’s not so much that the place is full of violent drunks — though I think the drinking culture does make them more abundant than in places where people drink more moderately — as much as that there’s not really anything one can do when they get violent for no reason, nor is there a sense that anything should or needs to be done.

    And the general Korean response is to agree that it sucks, and sigh sadly because they seem to believe that there’s nothing to be done.

    (While I agree one can never totally eliminate this, why is it that so many other places have a less profound problem in this area than Seoul?)

  11. Mark on December 23rd, 2007 7:15 am

    I don’t remember Koreans being all that violent or prone to fighting while I was in the ROK. I certainly felt safer in Seoul than I’ve ever felt in Winnipeg. On the other hand, I am six foot four my best friend was six foot six, and come to think of it, most of my acquaintances were either taller than average or played football in college…

  12. gordsellar on December 23rd, 2007 12:03 pm

    You’re six foot four? When did that happen? I remember you being, um, not anywhere like that big!

    As I say, I don’t think the majority of Koreans are — but there’s always a percentage of male drunks who get belligerent, and there are many more male drunks here on any given weeknight… and since mental health care is even more behind the times here than in Canada, there’s more violence than you perhaps noticed during that one year.

    I used to feel safe in Seoul, but I don’t anymore. Too many horror stories, and too many idiots getting in my face.

  13. Mark on December 23rd, 2007 12:46 pm

    It happened really suddenly, almost over night when I was 17. From about the age of thirteen, I drank a litre of milk every day.

  14. gordsellar on December 23rd, 2007 10:31 pm

    Weird! You figure it was the bovine growth hormones or something?

  15. Mark on December 23rd, 2007 11:04 pm

    Well, Dad is tall – about six foot two, but given the sudden, rapid growth, I wouldn’t discount the milk.

  16. gordsellar on December 24th, 2007 12:14 pm

    Right, I remember your father being a big guy. But yes, seeing the difference in size between Asians and Asian-Canadians — or even the difference between the older and younger generation of Koreans — I think diet is crucial to how big we end up.

    Unfortunately, in the horizontal sense as well as the vertical.

  17. fisher on June 24th, 2008 10:23 pm

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  18. gordsellar on June 25th, 2008 12:10 am

    Fisher!

    Hi there! You should be able to access it now!

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