"Anneyong to All That" by Anthony Velasquez
Photo Credit: @shawnagg, licensed under Public Domain and obtained from Unsplash.
Anneyong to All That
“It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.”
-Joan Didion
Even today, I can remember the visceral unease of anticipation and the disquieting loneliness that set in when my life abroad began. While reading the instructions on how to prepare the bibimbap served on my flight, I remember how easy it was to remain afloat with that head-in-the-clouds excitement, embarking on what I thought would be a novel year-long sojourn for reasons I clearly didn’t know back then. All I knew was this: I was thirty-four years old, had quit over a dozen jobs, and finally graduated after sixteen years of college just to obtain a bachelor’s degree. And if I could find my bearings in the Orient, perhaps I’d be able to find a sense of direction in my life. From the glimmer of a dawn on the horizon west of the sun, ideas and plans that were initially formed out of mere abstraction started to make sense. That is, moving to South Korea made sense until I landed on the ground.
On the stretch of road from the airport, past the duck farms along the south bank of the Nakdong River to my assigned housing in New Myeongji Ocean City Queendom English Town, what first struck me was my illiteracy. The only English I saw was on the gas stations, the no-tell motel moral holiday inns, and the billboards effervescing “Korea Sparkling!”; everything else was expressed in glowing neon Hangeul. When out encountering locals speaking in their native tongue, I reverted to Spanish by default which didn’t help anyone.
“Con permiso. ¿Cuánto cuesta? ¿Qué es esto? ¿Qué es eso?” Excuse me. How much is it? What is this? What is that?
“Lo siento.” I’m sorry.
I was a superterranean, homesick alien living out of a suitcase. I departed San Francisco on a Saturday with two giant, second-hand rollies and a carry-on bound for Busan. Yet, here we were over two weeks later, their mouths agape, their contents dribbling all over my bedroom floor. I did tape up a vintage National Geographic map of Coastal California by the door and stashed a manila envelope of important documents in the closet, but everything else I just grabbed as needed. Since I was already regretting this move and I could catch a flight out of Gimhae International before anyone would ever notice, why bother to unpack?
* * *
One night, I took the village bus across the river into Busan and caught the subway downtown. Up the escalator, I was blinded by the light and disoriented from the constant craning up trying to see the narrow, vertical signs in Hangeul and English attached to the corners of multi-purpose buildings. The signs read:
B1 - a basement norae-bang (singing room), a Korean “Hof,” vintage shop, or “Western” bar.
1F - a coffee house, a chicken restaurant, a samgyeopsal (pork belly) restaurant, a convenience store, or a depot of “Pick Me” claw machines stuffed with plush Pikachus, Pink Panthers, and Smurfs.
2F - International chain restaurants such as Outback, TGI Friday’s, Bennigan’s, or VIPs.
From the third to ninth floors, a random shuffle of jacks of all trades in no particular order: a dessert cafe, a whisky bar, a yoga studio, a pan-Asian buffet, a CrossFit box, a blepharoplasty clinic, a rhinoplasty clinic, an English academy, a dental clinic, a dance club, a “Business Salon.” A Business Salon is a place a fresh waygukin (foreigner) transplant has no business in. A newbie mistake I learned the hard way.
I also learned that I arrived in the midst of a renaissance. Busan, this vital port city of four million of working-class grit was transforming into a posh metropolis with glass apartment towers eighty floors above the marina below. A welcoming Seoul by the sea on the southeast coast. Natives and expats were eager to introduce me to their favorite places to eat, initiate me at Bohemian coffee shops where poets, comics, and storytellers drew lots for the open-mic, and led me to dank subterranean taverns where musicians from around the globe would come together with indigenous Busanites until six in the morning. We were revelers innocuously striking sparks that quickly blazed into soju-fueled conflagrations visible from Tsushima.
Farther afield, out of Myeongji and beyond the Bu, I found solace in the mountains, on the islands, or at a simple pension in the countryside replete with soul-refreshing swimming holes and fellow teachers to spend the holidays with. That’s why for many years I always knew the expiration of my job contract, apartment contract, and my work visa, but the real ends were hard to find. I thought those halcyon days on the peninsula would never end.
* * *
2019 marked my tenth anniversary of living in Korea. Over the years, I’ve shortened my spells in California between teaching contracts. After my first year, it took me eight months before deciding to return to the ROK. The following year it was five months. Then just a month. Last year, Susanna and I only spent two weeks in the States back in her hometown near Rochester, New York. Yes, you can go home again, but every trip across the Pacific seemed so much farther away than it used to be. And though the setting is mostly the same, people change. Different family and job commitments arise, along with new interests and priorities. Trips back home now are like Christmas: less magical, more stressful. They no longer feel like a homecoming vacation, but just requisite boxes to check to satisfy familial duties and other obligations. While these developments can make one wistful, there’s something very disheartening these days, even dangerous: the state of our [dis]union as a nation. Hence, I couldn’t see myself moving back to the US anytime soon. Like the old-timey-looking sign I once saw in a North Texas dive bar next to a Greyhound station — “Free beer tomorrow,” I’ll move back to America next year.
Of course, my wife and I have had plenty of conversations about moving back to the States, often not in accord. She would remind me that she had already started moving her stuff back home before she met me. I would remind her that we both found our first forays in repatriation untenable. I’d say, “you know, Koreans like to brag about their perfect four-season climate, but to me it’s always summer. “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.” We don’t have to worry about jobs, housing, health insurance, car insurance, or commutes. And didn’t we expats choose this—to be distant from the burdens and vexations of living in America?”
* * *
That all changed recently when I went to the doctor with Susanna. We walked over to the Jamo Women’s Hospital near our place. It was her third visit for her pregnancy, but the first time I could accompany her. We walked up to the second floor into a narrow hallway and a lobby packed with Korean women sporting various paunches. There were just as many female nurses as patients, the staff dressed in pastel pink and teal scrubs. One middle-aged Korean lady really stood out with her belly protruding under a purple cotton muumuu of a knee-length t-shirt that said in big green letters “I’M SHY . . .” on the front, “BUT I’VE GOT A BIG DICK/Carlos’ n Charlie’s/Cancun, Mexico” on the back. My wife was trying not to laugh too hard while I was just trying to stay out of the way. Susanna was directed to take a seat over on a row of benches outside an enclave of plain brown wooden office doors and was told to “wait for Number Five doctor.”
We waited about five minutes before a nurse invited us into Number Five doctor’s room. He was an older gentleman who had a way of smiling while speaking softly at the same time. He made small talk with me while my wife was in a little adjacent room with the nurse next to the doctor’s desk behind a thin curtain. He assured me to just relax and have a seat.
Then I saw that a flat screen on the wall next to his desk facing me had been turned on. Just like my wife, the doctor, and the nurse, I could see the ultrasound images too, which I thought was like a movie. I had told Susanna from the beginning; I don’t want to know. I want to be surprised. Since she was only seventeen weeks at the time, I didn’t think I’d be able to see much or know which sex the baby would be anyway. I thought at least the doctor would ask us if we wanted to know, but I guess that’s not how it works in Korea. Or maybe this was just one of those common occurrences that happens when very limited language skills lead to such miscommunication.
The Number Five doctor went right to work. I could hear him from behind the curtain. I guess he was pointing things on the screen out for Sus. “Ok. Head good. Body. Heart. Arm. Leg. Female baby.”
I heard the doctor loud and clear, but my wife prompted him to say it again. “Head. Body. Heart. Arm. Leg. Female baby,” in exactly the same tone.
“You hear that, Ant?” she asked from the other room.
Stunned, I nodded my head a couple of times before softly responding, “Yeah.”
* * *
Students here have a real knack for going straight to the personal when given an opportunity to ask questions of their foreign teacher. Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? If yes, is your wife Korean? Do you have a baby? Do you want a baby? Do you want a boy or girl? Often these questions are asked before even asking, “What’s your name?”
I remember earlier in the year, before she was pregnant, one of my wife’s fifth-grade students said, “You should have a baby in America so the baby looks American. You have a baby in Korea, it will look Korean.”
After I broke the news to my best friend Big T that we were expecting, after the congratulations and how the doctor spilled the beans, I told him about what Susanna’s student advised on where to have a baby. That fifth grader still cracks me up. But Big T said, “Why are you laughing? I feel the same way about this shit! Why are you having the baby there?”
* * *
Let me just get right to it and explain why. Not just why we’re having a baby here, but also, why I’m beginning to see the end here after nearly ten years of living in Korea. It’s not just about health care in the USA versus ROK, but facts are cold, and they’re simply facts. As NPR reported on November 6, 2018, under the headline “How Hospitals Can Tackle The Maternal Mortality Crisis,” Mara Gordon writes:
Having a baby in the United States can be dangerous. American women are more likely than women in any other developed country to die during childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications. And while other countries' maternal death rates have gone down, U.S. rates have risen since 2000, a fact that has left both doctors and expectant mothers concerned about the state of maternity care in this country.
So there’s that. There’s also the benefit of two months paid maternity leave, or even more if my wife wants it from her school, and the national government-issued debit card worth ₩500,000 to help cover our costs. Though that does not mean that our daughter will have dual citizenship automatically bestowed upon birth, that’s still nearly five hundred reasons to stay. But that consideration of citizenship presages exactly why we are planning on moving back to our native ground.
* * *
I remember being at SFO with my parents in September of 2009 while I was waiting for my flight. I bought a Lonely Planet South Korea guide, the current Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist from the Hudson News shop at the terminal. On the flight, I read an article from one of those magazines about what makes America so admired, so respected, the proverbial beacon of hope and light, is its diversity. The author described that what makes the United States very special is that anyone can be American. He had spent nearly twenty years in Japan, and though one could be fluent in the language, unless one is born in Japan and of Japanese heritage, no one can ever be Japanese. This is also true in Korea. Susanna, me, our child, will always be, even if we all live our entire (God willing) long lives here, we will always be foreigners to Koreans.
While I understand that the States has a serious dysfunction due to increasing tribalism undermining the bedrock of America’s foundation once built on the strength of immigrants, and I’m writing this now at a time when brown families are being separated, incarcerated in different camps in conditions much worse than Manzanar, as this father imagines considers how the opponents of his daughter’s future run for Congress or President will incite those so-called patriots’ vile chants of “Send her back! Send her back!” or “Lock her up! Lock her up!”; despite the US’s pitiful record regarding race relations and its inability to stem the spread of hate and gun violence, coming from a decade spent living in a homogenous country like Korea, I’ve realized and can truly appreciate how colorful America is. I still believe in her ideals, her strength through unity and diversity. How beautiful she really can be. We’re not giving up on this.
Also, there’s something even more tangible that I hope our baby girl will understand someday. Her blood carries traces of the field dust that clings to brown, sweaty brows in a long San Joaquin Valley Indian summer. Her bones ossify with fossilized seashells and ammonites unearthed by the Pleistocene glacial activity that carved Watkins Glen and Western New York’s river gorges. Her family tree is deeply rooted in a composite of Tulare Lake silt and loam, Finger Lakes slate and shale. These elements transcend any citizenry, nationality, or birthplace, and are essential to her family’s origin story. That’s why we’re coming home.
Like the ultrasound images of this life growing inside my wife’s womb, with each visit to her obstetrician, my life is becoming clearer, more defined. While there’s still a great distance between me and my destination (a return to the States, a home for my family, maybe out in the country, definitely with some dogs), it’s now easier to see the ends. Or, at the very least, the beginning of things. Everything, really.
Anthony Huerta Velasquez hails from California's San Joaquin Valley. He recently repatriated after spending the last decade in Busan, South Korea. His essays have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Mount Hope, Concho River Review, Sierra Nevada Review, South Dakota Review, Foreign Literary Journal, Past Ten, and The Offbeat. He now calls the Finger Lakes region of New York home.