Christmas Eve was my first time in Seoul. As in Korea. The dance dance revolution craze is going strong.
The snow started falling, and out the window of the bus, the West gate to Seoul’s old city centre looked so beautiful. We got off the bus, and walked along this long strip — people spilling out into the streets, despite the chilling weather and the late hour. There’s so much more life here than Tokyo.
Closer to the East gate, Dongdaemun, we ended up at 3:00 in the morning at Doosan Tower. The first 8 floors of the building are retail space. It felt more like a big wholesale centre than a shopping mall. Everyone was dressed so beautifully.
We wandered into a music store. I wondered if the new Wu-Tang Clan album might be out, but I didn’t see it. A cool looking cover caught my eye, and the words read In The Mood For Love, and then I remembered that’s the name of the new Wong Kar-Wai movie. For a moment, I hesitated to buy it. I felt fearful that it might inspire in me a new desire that I might not be able to satisfy. How could I think of listening to Nat King Cole, while accepting being alone?
With the new CD in my pocket, we continued walking around – the salespeople were sleeping, eating noodles, or talking on cell phones. I wanted to interact in this world, not to be the eternal outsider that comes with the skin I’m in. I want to be doing retail at 4 in the morning, feeling so tired and depressed, cause perhaps you’ll come one day to my stand, and the walls that separate our worlds will crumble.
There were signs in Russian, as well as Korean, and the only foreigners I saw were two beautiful looking Russian women (actually, I don’t understand Russian, so they could have been speaking a different language). I caught the glances of passer-by — and it later occurred to me, that they probably thought I was Russian, because of my long black jacket and white furry hat. I fancied that, cause I don’t think anyone’s ever thought of me as Russian before, other than the Vietnamese lady who mysteriously sat down me beside me in a Naha, Okinawa McDonalds, because she wanted to practice her Russian, and then proceeded to cold-shoulder me, when I told her that I wasn’t in fact Russian. Later at night, I looked at the majestic, classical architecture of Seoul Station, and in the cold blue light of a Winter night, from the back seat of the taxi cab, I imagined I was in Moscow. It helped that in the front seat, a girl was wearing a coat with a fur collar. This girl, I didn’t become acquainted with — she talked on a cellular phone. We were only ever that close, because in Seoul you can hire a taxi, and the driver still stops and picks up more people. To ride with strangers …
Three days later, in the mountains, 3 hours South of Seoul, I took In The Mood For Love out of its CD wrapper and played it, while I looked at pictures from my roommate’s trip to Thailand and Cambodia, and he told me about Angkor Wat. The next day, I noticed that about 12 movie-still-postcards came with the CD, and I showed them to my friend. He said, about one of the postcards, “That looks a lot like Angkor Wat.” And then I read the CD liner notes, and sure enough the finale of In The Mood For Love takes the viewer to Angkor Wat, one of the 7 wonders of the world. A strange conjunction.
Anyway, I know the movie ends at Angkor Wat. I know the soundtrack has 3 Nat King Cole songs. And I know what the characters look like. I plan on playing the soundtrack, and building my own life around it. I won’t watch the movie for years. And by then I wonder how much my life will be like a Wong Kar-Wai movie?
