South Korea – One Really Long Errand

Reflections from a place in more of a cold war than Phoenix

5/22/11 to 5/27/11 – Seoul and surrounding area, South Korea

Crew – My entire family (Mom, Dad, and two sisters)

Who knows why this trip took so many years to write up. This is probably the most influential trip in my life that I’ve ever taken if we look at this from a “Things different in Sam’s life because of this” metric. But the reason for that title is because of something that will happen in the last 4 hours of a two week long trip. 

(We’ll probably cover it before then.)

To begin with I was in 6th grade and Lily was in 5th. And our parents told us one day that we would be leaving for South Korea in under two weeks. Get ready to go and be prepared to miss a lot of school. Looking back I didn’t think it was that surprising that this was happening. Or that random. After living in the midwest and now the southwest I can say that our nonchalant attitudes towards going to Asia were definitely not normal. But it’s not like I got a choice in the matter (and I was excited either way), so sure! Let’s go to Korea. We took the flight over and landed in Seoul. 

Now we had time to kill while in Korea, a week to be precise. So why not be tourists? The first city we saw was the one we landed in and that city has a lot to show off. With the rise of K-Pop, and media like Squid Game and Parasite, Seoul is a far more known city than it was when we visited only a little over ten years ago. K-pop wasn’t really a genre Americans even listened to at that point in Berkeley CA. For some fun contrast in college I went to a K-pop night at a bar in Ann Arbor. The idea of going to a music night of Korean music in the middle of the Midwest shows how popular it’s gotten.

But for our ignorant American selves at the time we didn’t know what to expect of the city. So low and behold one of the most crowded and modern cities on the planet. The city has layers to it. Neon lights and skyscrapers cover the landscape. With smaller teahouses and traditional restaurants built in-between the skyscrapers and the port. South Korea is per capita one of the most educated and richest. It also is expected by 2030 to have the longest average lifespan of any nation on the planet (source: South Korea Population 2024 (Live) (worldpopulationreview.com)

Not to say that this country doesn’t have issues. It is expected to have the most brutal population crash of any nation on Earth. With its peak population occurring in… 2024. Not really a problem one can kick down the road for future generations.

While in the city we had a chance to visit relatives of my mom’s biological mom that were living in Korea full time. This was the first time any of us had ever met each other. They were incredibly nice and I wish I could tell you more about what they were like but that’s what I remember besides that they ran a gardening store. My mom seemed happy to finally meet more relatives of hers however.

One day we visited the DMZ, which is a popular tourist destination for the country. South Korea is a small country, it only takes 2 hours by bus to get there by bus from Seoul. And I can give the DMZ this credit… It isn’t a traditional tourist trap. The first thing that I think gave it away was that every area off the concrete footpaths was dotted by bright pink signs that said “active minefield. Do not enter”. The second was the hundreds of soldiers walking around. Fully armed. Both things were not there for show.

If you didn’t know, the Demilitarized Zone of the 38th parallel, established after World War II, is the border between North and South Korea. Both sides maintain large standing presences in case the other one wants the war to suddenly go hot. And when we visited in 2011 the war was technically still going. The Korean War which ended in 2018 had been going on since 1950 and was the longest running war of the modern era. It hadn’t been a true war since 1953 but the sides had refused to agree to peace since then. Also both sides have enough conventional artillery surrounding the DMZ to level both capital cities in a matter of hours should someone decide the war needs to go hot. Cheery. This border with a particularly dangerous neighbor is also why all Korean guys have mandatory military service. It’s widely disliked and you would meet folks in college who either went to US colleges to avoid the draft or had recently gotten out of it.

But for us it was a fun tourist destination! With active landmines! You can even go explore the tunnels that North Korea tried to dig to South Korea. It didn’t work. The soil underneath the DMZ is made of pure granite so they had to use dynamite to try and burrow to Seoul by the time they reached the DMZ. South Korean soldiers on the border felt minor earthquakes underneath them every day. Once discovered North Korea attempted to pretend that first that the tunnels didn’t exist, and when that failed they switched to claiming that South Korea actually built them. [1]

To the shock of no one the attempt at gaslighting South Korea failed and they abandoned them. Now you can enter them from the South Korean side to where they’re blocked off somewhere down the tunnel I assume. My father wondered why there were mandatory hard hats right before he hit his skull on the roof of the tunnel. Tunnels weren’t made for comfort. 

(Neither are sewers. I hit my head on them a lot now). My favorite is the City of Phoenix large valve water ones that have a 90 degree turn into a 24-inch pipe to enter the main pipe, that’s probably 48” wide.

Besides hanging out around an active-duty cold war military base, we saw a Korean puppet show, a pretty funny martial arts comedy show, and ate more Korean Barbeque than I thought reasonable. I believe at one point we just gave up and got pizza to eat something different that night. This trip is old enough that it predates me being a vegetarian! Believe it or not I still miss Korea barbecue whenever we go out to eat it. And if my gut culture hadn’t been retrained to do something different I might eat it some days.

(Alas my gut culture unionized and will go on strike if I ever eat meat. And then I’ll break the nearest plumbing. So we don’t really break vegetarianism… ever these days).

I wish we had more time to explore outside of Seoul but the city did provide all sorts of entertainment. At one point we even visited a chicken museum where a guide showed us an entire museum devoted to chickens in paintings, sculpture, glassworks… Name the art style there was a chicken. I bought a stuffed chicken animal that I still own to this day.

This was also my first ever time in a country that wasn’t vaguely one hop over from American and a lot of time was spent just wandering around and seeing how the city breathed. Even something like a character based language was very intriguing to 4th grade me. Before then I had only been to London and Paris. And not to sound snooty or sad about it, I’m really not, but there is a certain amount lost when you’ve been around the world and the novelty of a truly new culture gets rarer and rarer.

(Also I ended up spending many hours getting acquainted with character-based languages when I studied Mandarin in middle and high school. Still try and keep up with it. Dumbest thing I’ve ever done to spite my parents. Story for another time.) 

I also have an unusually detailed memory of one night when we looked for the most off-the-beaten-path, hole-in-the-wall food place possible and it had us navigating through the inner parts of the city until we ended up in a wooden two-story building. The food was fantastic and between four people eating dinner the bill came out to $20. And yes, Korea is a 1st world country in terms of prices. This was not a scenario where everything was cheap. To make it a true dinner and a show though my parents tried to order the local Korean beer they served. The waiter laughed, told them it was an ill-advised idea, they persisted, and eventually got two beers. They both tried one of them and immediately had an evolutionarily honed reaction over millions of year when you eat something poisonous. Like spoiled fruit, a deadly mushroom, or some really exotic beer.

Not only did the waiter break out laughing but the other patrons around us as well. Look, we travel a lot as a family but we have still funded a non-zero amount of tourist stories for locals in where we’ve visited. Like the time my parents bankrolled the bar of German college students at the world cup. 

Now if you’re asking at this point “Why my parents were coughing up Korean beer next to their children”, I can provide some light on what we were actually doing in Korea.

But to discuss that, we need to discuss my 3rd sibling, the adopted one. Which if you didn’t know by the fact that she looks nothing like me, is adopted. And also a theatre nerd. Actually an even bigger one than me. And now is also going to live in the frozen wastes of Michigan, but even farther North than me! Get some original content sis. I locked down the character traits of theatre and Michigan years ago.

So to rewind the clock my parents wanted a third kid. Reasons for adoption this time around are hotly debated but I have a few theories:

1. My parents wanted a kid who could theoretically be taller than 5’-6”. keep dreaming it turns out.
2. Neither of my parents wanted to take maternity/paternity leave. What can I say they have a real healthy relationship with work
3. It’s really funny when people’s knee-jerk reaction to learning I’m with my sister is to say “We look so alike!”. We do not.

For when you want to adopt a kid from Korea, you need to enter a waiting list then once you’re called up you have 10 days to be in South Korea ready to pick up the kid. Why South Korea? Two reasons:

1. The adoption waiting period is a lot shorter than in other nations. It’s around 6 months on the waiting list is what my parents were told
2. You can choose the gender if you are at least half Korean. Which my mom meets.

Point number one was important because my parents were 43 and 44 by that time. And while they wondered why most adoption agencies won’t let you adopt a kid older than 45, they would learn in the company months when they groaned everytime they had to bend over or get up to help out a toddler.

Point number two I thought was going to be a more interesting discussion. Because with Lily and I the current score was split 1-1 on this point. When we asked our parents they answered in under 5 seconds, and with a resounding “We want another girl”.

Great. That’s a topic for therapy in the future.

Even with the reduced waiting list, my parents needed to get moving on the application to adopt another kid. And them being the high functioning important lawyers with two young children that they are, perhaps procrastinated this process. Or to be specific my father procrastinated. My mother put together a 27 page application for the process. But the date was coming up and he needed to have something written to turn into the adoption agency.

After enough nagging he threw up his hands at the thing that he had agreed to beforehand and went into work early one more morning to get it done. And that day he submitted his part of the application to the agency. With both applications in it meant that an adoption agent came to meet them to review the process and ask any questions. At the meeting the agent sheepishly said that actually they only really had questions about my father’s application. While it took my mother 27 pages to fully answer all the questions, it had taken my father all of 27 minutes. And no amount of lawyer voodoo magic can write that fast.

Let’s walk through some examples:

Question: “How are you going to pay for your potential child’s upbringing and support their future?”

Mother: 3 pages of income returns, expected college savings accounts to open for them, and projected future income alongside proof of their current ownership of a house

My father: “Money”. No, that was not a simplification of his response. He wrote on a form that had multiple pages of blank space available a single word.

Just to hammer this home. Let me do another: 

Question: “Describe your current kids if any”

Mother: A full psychological and physical profile that is probably more in depth than the profile the FBI has on me. And let me tell you the FBI does not like me

My father: “Two normal American kids”. My mom probably winced at this point.

Luckily for us the agent was willing to accept my father’s answers with some corrections in the meeting and approved us. So now all we had to do was wait until we got the call to fly over to South Korea. I’m not particularly qualified to explain the background on why the process was so complicated but there’s plenty of information online. The short answer is that there were quite a bit of issues bordering on human rights violations with adoption in the late 20th century and Korea was not immune to these issues.

But eventually we got the call and we ended up in South Korea. So to unpause and hop back to where we were, we realized with two days left in our trip that we had booked the dates wrong. We had no hotel room after meeting our sister, and no place to stay in Korea. Moreover, a conference happening in Seoul meant that somehow there weren’t any hotels open in the city. I remember my parents panicked on the phone listening to all manor of undesirable options until it was suggested that “Hey you could just pick her up and take her straight to the airport”

Comedic? Yes. A good first impression for your new child? Probably not.

With this foolproof plan in place the morning of our flight across the Pacific we went to the adoption agency to meet her. We met her and the foster parents of the time. It was emotional, a lot of crying and tears.

Only to get interrupted by some poor receptionist at the agency asking us how we would like to pay?

Comedic? Absolutely. A good first impression? Absolutely not.

You could at this point that we rallied together as a family and we had a totally normal first day with a new sibling similar by the way a brick flys: there’s a loud crash followed by a lot of yelling. 

Ok I am being too mean to my sister for this one, we did stick her on a 13-hr plane ride with zero advance warning which mind you I didn’t do anything that long until I was I think around 10 years old. And I’m not exactly someone who hasn’t traveled around the world.

I remember her eating a few bananas and being pretty chilled out about the whole new family in a large soda can powered by dead dinosaur part of the process. Good on her. We landed on Saturday of that week and went on with our life. My parents went to work on Monday.

Say this about my family. We are really bad at unpacking anything that happens to us. But we are great at getting past it! Just smile and wave.

So that was my trip to South Korea! Over a decade ago at this point some of the details have started to fade with time undoubtedly. All sorts of things I’ve forgotten. It’s also one of the few countries that I can bet I’ll be seeing in the future so there might be a part 2 to this as well. I had quite a few friends in college who grew up in South Korea and some have moved back so even more reason to visit.

(Side note: To not get too graphic, the South Koreans I knew in college could throw down alcohol. They are up there with checks notes, the farm kids from the midwest and the Irish in their ability to give life to a party. And if half the stories they tell me of nightlife in Korea are true there’s a certain appeal there).

Cheers,

Sam