Two things

Usually, to my ears, Korean doesn't sound anything like the stereotypes of Asian languages I heard as a child. I'm talking about ching-chang-chong talk. This was even true when I first arrived and wasn't able to make sense of anything I heard.

But, check out this tongue twister that Chris just taught me:

간장 공장 공장장은 강 공장장이고
된장 공장 공장장은 장 공장장이다.

Romanized:
(a makes an "ah" sound, o makes an "oh" sound, i is like ee in "see," "eu" is like oo in "book", and "oi" sounds like "way" (including the w). The consonants are straightforward.)

Ganjang gongjang gongjangjangeun Kang gongjangjang-igo
Doinjang gongjang gongjangjangeun Jang gongjangjang-ida.

Word-by-word translation:
Soysauce factory factoryboss Kang factoryboss-isand
Soybeanpaste factory factoryboss Jang factoryboss-is.

Or,
The soy sauce factory factoryboss is Factoryboss Kang, and
the soybean paste factory factoryboss is Factoryboss Jang.


In other news, my India visa came in the mail today. Now all I need is some work clothes, malaria tablets, and a bucket of sunscreen.

The Price of Travel, part 2

The previous installment recounted my pecuniary exploits between the months of December 2008 and July 2009. Now for the more interesting, less useful, more reflective, less objective installment.

Astute observers will recall that I have tried to do something like this before in a post entitled "Anniversary," which I wrote long after I had returned from Italy and shortly before I came to Korea. If you have 4.25 paragraphs' worth of extra time, read it and see for yourself whether or not I succeeded. [The post is also interesting for more introspective reasons - it to some degree prefigures my current writing style and it is, as a blog ought to be, I suppose, thoroughly revealing of my mindset at the time: the writing is so annoying and self-absorbed/referential that one can immediately see why I was unable, at that point, to even consider getting a "real job."] (I had read "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” just a few months before and was as enamored with Dave Eggers then as I am with David Foster Wallace now. Would any amateur psychologists out there who know the name of my earliest childhood friend care to make some conjectures?) I am not the only one who views the aforementioned post in such a despairing light. I hereby quote Adam's scathing response. Woe, such cynical wisdom for a lad of 23 sun-orbitations!

"I can't really blame you though [for failing in my attempt to create a meaningful account of my time in Italy], trying to say meaningful things is mainly a waste of time and if you actually succeed in doing so you are probably committing some sort of plaigarism[sic]." (Winner, "Paella, Flamenco, y Tapas." 02 August 2006. Sufficiently cited. This is not plagiarism and therefore does not, in and of itself, prove your point, Past-Adam.)

Though the task I have set myself may be impossible, I hope you’ll indulge me while I quote David Foster Wallace again, this time from his essay "Consider the Lobster" (from the book of the same name). The context: DFW is asked by Gourmet magazine to report on the Maine Lobster Festival and, eclectic genius that he is, winds up writing an essay on the ethics of eating lobsters, with some digressions on the meaning of intranational travel. Clearly, both are issues related to ones I think about and deal with frequently. [End Preface, Begin Post]

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way - hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all...To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is an inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

Doubtless, one may take issue with the rhetorical excesses of the passage and question the aptness of some of the metaphors – I wonder, in particular, what the “dead thing” he mentions is supposed to be. Cities, even ones full of zombietourists, are alive, are they not? It should also be pointed out that Wallace is talking about intranational (read: specifically contiguous-48 American) tourism, whereas my limited experience lies elsewhere. [staggered alliteration, booya]. Actually, I suppose that every time I mention tourism, tourists, and travelers, I am thinking of my experiences in Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, and not about Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, or Western Europe.

Nonetheless, I (masochistically?) love the way DFW’s paragraph skewers the (paradoxically?) indie-yet-standard image of the tourist who heads off to exotic lands (cf. above list) in order to experience a radically different type of life, enlightening and being enlightened by the natives he encounters along the way. This preconception of what a traveler is and does may seem like a straw man, but I promise you, many people do think this way. I frequently heard 20-something American, Canadian, and Western Europeans boast about how they had managed to “get off the tourist track” and how they pitied all those lame tourist-types with their noses stuck in their guidebooks who would have nothing to show at the end of their trip except for a mostly crossed-off checklist. I myself, not immune to peer pressure, and not wanting to argue with people I hardly knew, must certainly have participated in and even encouraged such scornful commentary, though I hate to admit it. Such conversations took place in restaurants in Phnom Penh with menus printed in English, over milkshakes, before hitting the hip-hop club and then heading back to the hostels. And they took place in a longhouse in a Hmong village in Northern Laos, over bottles of beer that some villager had lugged over our “trekking” terrain, and which he would carry back to town (or maybe just toss them into the woods), empty, sometime after we had had our fill. And so on.

Of course, one can’t blame travelers for searching out some sort of authenticity while on the road. Nobody wants to spend thousands of dollars on tickets and luggage and special water-wicking pants just to wind up at a McDonald’s ten thousand miles away. And yet, when a good number of people with a decent amount of money go looking for “authenticity,” surprise, a market springs up. People are willing to provide it for you. Food just like villagers eat. Tree-huts with zip lines that give you an exhilarating, if previously unavailable, view of the highest canopies of the forest. Traditional pants with elephant designs. Treks to see the Long-necks. Shuttles from the train station to your hotel, with AC and a bath tub and a mini-fridge and TV channels in 11 languages and a travel agent at the front desk for your convenience. Nevermind that “authenticity” is exactly what can’t be pre-packaged and provided at pre-determined places and prices (Incidental Ps, I swear.), exaggerated and molded to be exactly the sort of thing the traveler was hoping to see. “Authenticity” can only exist when nobody is looking for it, when it’s on nobody’s mind, when nobody cares whether it exists or not. This is what I take DFW to mean when he talks about how traveling ontologically spoils itself.

One can also view said elusive “authenticity” in another light – that is, everything that one comes across is equally authentic, simply because it is. If the ontologically self-spoiling conception of authenticity were to be depicted, I think it would look like Escher’s ants on a Mobius strip, walking endlessly, never able to corner what they’re after. On the other hand, the notion that everything in the (traveling) world is indeed authentic, in the sense that it is actual, reminds me of an Ouroboros, consuming itself until some event horizon where all logic breaks down. If this is the case – if everything is authentic, because it’s there and people made it and people are using it – then the concept implodes on itself, there are no distinctions to be made, nothing to open one’s eyes onto, other than the bare factual present of a place far away.

For rhetorical reasons, it’s tempting to say that the traveler is bound to confront these and other contradictions, or paradoxes, or apparent paradoxes, or at least twists and turns and snags, but the truth of it is, one can easily sidestep them. If one thinks of travel as another form of leisure, not too different from heading to a new restaurant that opened up on the other side of town, then such concerns vanish. This isn’t exactly “disillusioned” travel, but it does seem to me to be devoid of the hope and urgency that, for some reason, seem such an integral part of traveling in the less-developed world.

This is all on my mind, clearly, because I’m about to head to India for a while and I want, kind of, to be in the optimal mindset. Shall I, DFW-style, take the grim and steely-eyed approach of not expecting anything earth-shattering, life-changing, or perspective-shifting? Think of it just as an extended period of consumption of services in an unfamiliar place? Isn’t that a bit drab?

An alternate title for this post: Why would one go to India just to plant trees?

How to spot a fauxbo

On the left: visa photo taken in November, 2008, just before my wandering around Southeast Asia began. Stamped by the Laotian embassy in Ho Chi Minh city, booya!

On the right: visa photo taken in Seoul in late July, '09, while preparing for my Korean work visa, which of course will not be issued until...

In the future: photo taken in February, 2010, after I return from 5 months of farming and fauxboing in India. What will future Mike look like then? Does anyone have photoshop skills?

That's right, preparations have (mostly) been made and I have every intention (yes, all of them, collected over a few weeks or so) of leaving Korea for India in about 10 days, provided my visa arrives in the mail tomorrow, as the embassy just promised me.

I'm going to start my journey in Chennai (formely Madras), which is located near the Southern tip of India in Tamil Nadu province. A little south of there is an old French town called Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), a few kilometers from which one can find the Sadhana reforestation project. In addition to reforestation, there are also ongoing efforts to improve the water, grow organic vegetables, and live quiet and sustainable lives. The minimum stay is two weeks, but I might stay longer depending on how great it is.

After that, there is a whole network of other farms and volunteer opportunities, in addition to all the normal travel options. New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Sri Lanka. Food. Diarrhoea.