The day I had my interview with my new school (February 22), it took me three and a half hours to get here. I missed the earlier bus in Chungju by fifteen minutes, putting my arrival time to Suwon fourty-five minutes later than expected. I was on the bus when my 10:30 appointment should have started. By the time the driver dropped us off at the terminal, I was still two subway stops and a cab ride away from my destination. It was still another one and a half hours before I would make it to the interview. I should have known from the start, then, that this would be a directionally-challenged place to live.
The wonderful information-booth attendant I found at the bus terminal spoke impecable English, but directed me to the Yeongtang campus of ILS, a school with the same name as my potential employer and a mere twenty minutes away but which proved to be the wrong hagwon. It was by the grace of God that I followed the man's advice, though--and followed it erroneously, I might add. I hopped on the 5-1 bus I thought he had directed me to and with my broken Korean tried to spy out the stop he had suggested. A fellow passenger asked in English if she could help--and when I pointed to my stop, promptly informed me I was on the wrong bus. "Opposite direction," she said. "Get off at the next stop and take the 5-1 the other way."
Unknown to myself at the time, my interview was actually at the Dongtan Campus of ILS, a place I hadn't realized would be in another city entirely. Instead of getting on another bus, what I actually had need of now was access to the subway. As I looked up at what surrounded the northbound 5-1 bus I was still on, an enormous mall-like structure loomed above traffic to the left while a sturdy concrete footbridge crossed the busy-ness in front of us. Apparently this was the next stop: Suwon Station.
I crossed the footbridge, found the city-bus lanes, and planted myself firmly next to them to wait for what I knew would be my bus. After five minutes and no sign of 5-1, I remembered my director's instructions: from Suwon, take subway line 1 to Byeongjeom station, then take bus 27 or 73 to the hagwon in Dongtan. But I thought to myself, wouldn't it be easier to take bus number 5? By now, it was at least 11AM and I was thirty minutes late. I knew where I was going! Taking the subway sounded awfully unnecessary for a hagwon that should have been twenty minutes from the terminal.
I called my director to ask if I could take the bus, but she was adamant: "Take subway line 1 to Byeongjeom and from there take bus 27 or 73 to Dongtan," she insisted. My mind returned to a comment I had heard among my foriegn friends, that Koreans only have one way of doing things. I chalked up the situation to their stubbornness and started on the way she had said.
Only because I have now lived here for three months have I realized the wisdom of following my director's advice that day. The area in which I am now in Korea--south of Seoul but still in the Kyunggi-do province--is so densely populated that cities bleed into each other on the landscape. Yet it is so district-oriented that a given building does not belong to another city. Metapolis, for example--a gigantic apartment mega-plex left ghostly unfinished--looms in the shadows of Suwon's skyline. You see its towers from the subway line just after the station, standing sentinal as silent watchmen on the walls. But Metapolis is not in Suwon; it is part of Dongtan, affectionately dubbed "Dongtan New City" by Korean locals.
According to my American co-worker Jack, who has lived in its vicinity for more than a year, this locale is only three years old. It's an adolescent, too new and hip to be considered part of a parent city, but not quite big enough to be considered its own. I asked a Korean co-worker of mine about it one day and he said, "Dongtan? Dongtan is just... Dongtan." Despite the lack of official title, the subway line has extended the mile or two east Byeongjeom Station to this new cluster of buildings in an effort to be more attractive to commuters and potential tennants. "It was a planned community," says Jack. "They're trying to play [it] up to get more people to live here." The appearance of the location is itself an incentive. From businesses to tall apartment complexes, everything is new and fresh and vibrant. The layout of streets and buildings is much more spacious and manueverable; it feels every inch the modern city that it is.
I live in neither Dongtan nor Suwon. When I arrived to my first apartment in this new part of Korea--there has been one other newer, smaller model since then--I tried asking Jack where we lived, as he was in the same building. I wanted to let everyone back home know how to reach me. "I don't know my address," he confessed. He's lived here how long, I thought, and he doesn't know his address?
He invited me up onto the roof of our apartment building one night and showed me his spectacular view. He pointed north to rows of innumerable dark columns with little flags of light: "There's Suwon right there," he said. Then in the other direction, he nodded to a pair of streetlamp rows running perpendicular to the roof and leading, like airport runway lights, to Lotte Cinema and its accompanying brightly-lit business establishments. "And this," he said proudly, "is Byeongjeom."
"I thought we lived in Hwaseong," I countered. By this time, I was armed with my address and the director's business card, both of which denoted "Hwaseong-si" as the city name. They were official--I was sure they had to be right!
"Hwaseong is like a county," Jack explained. "--like Bexar County. Byeongjeom and Dongtan are like cities within that county, like Live Oak and Schertz and stuff like that. I still have never been to Hwaseong."
I wasn't fully convinced of his argument then, nor am I now. I find the regional divisions among theses different locations to be highly unneccessary. I was at first surprised that there wasn't a bus terminal in the Byeongjeom area. Then I discovered that the Suwon terminal is only twenty minutes away by taxi--so what need is there for yet another terminal? In a space less than half the size of San Antonio, there are more than three distinct "cities," all of which somehow need their own spot on the subway line. And none of which can be allowed to blend in to any other city. Why the need for so much separation?
I thought about the interconnectedness of our respective communities as a sat on a hill in one of the sports parks in the Byeongjeom area. As I sat watching the setting sun, I gazed out at the thoroughfare not half a mile from me, which ran from Byeongjeom Station to Suwon. Parallel to the lanes were the tracks, from which shot subway trains headed to Seoul and back. I could see clear to Suwon from my perch. If this had been San Antonio, I mused, I would have only been looking at a fraction of such a large city. With such little effort could I go from the place where I sat to the place to which I gazed. I marveled that locations so close together could be so distinct. It all seemed part of the same city as I watched another caterpillar of a subway train crawl out from its cacoon-like station and race toward the north to continue the connectivity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment