I was idling away the afternoon in a park, napping and doing a little studying. This old Korean guy came walking by, and said “Hello, how are you” — nothing unusual, cause a Westerner is still so often treated like someone famous in Korea. Well, I ended up talking to this guy, and it really made my afternoon. I can’t quite express it, but it was beautiful. Love flowed from this guy. Just prior to him coming, I was questioning why I was even bothering to study Korean. But it’s for times like this — we had this amazing conversation switching between broken English and broken Korean. We talked about a bunch of books. He asked me if I’d read Herman Hesse, and actually I’d just read Siddartha. This guy was just so full of energy and life. He showed me these Taekwondo moves, and got himself into yoga positions. He’d been studying English for 2 years, whenever he could. And the reason is that he wants to travel to India, Vietnam, and Thailand. That’s the strangeness of the world, that Koreans study English to go to Vietnam. But this guy’s obviously not got a lot of money. He looked pretty scruffy, like someone who hangs around parks often does. The mobility, the freedom, the options of an English teacher are overwhelming. How different my life must be from this guy’s. I hope he gets to India.

While swimming laps in the Olympic swimming pool, I surfaced to find a fellow foreigner. A man who turned out to be Russian, involved in some exporting. I think he worked for a government office. Russians have quite a reputation in Korea. Apparently, even here, there’s a Russian mafia, and a huge population of Russian women brought in to work in night clubs. But I’m sorry I have to bring all this stuff up, just cause I met a nice Russian in a swimming pool. For some reason, I felt compelled to list the many Russian books I’d read in my life, and compliment him on Russian literature as if he wrote the books himself. And then I continued swimming.

On a recent Sunday morning, I was recruited to hand out pamphlets for an English camp in the annex building of a central Seoul church. There was this huge parkade and all the cars were double and triple parked — everywhere. I’d hate to be a kid forced to church in Korea. Sitting through the service, and then having to wait for the entire afternoon for the parking lot to clear. Wasn’t Sunday supposed to be a day for rest?

I get asked so many times if I’m Christian in Korea. It’s overwhelming. I know there’s persecuted Christians all over the world. But in Korea it’s far braver to admit to not being Christian.

I met a man last week who wrote a very large tome on American history. The man’s never been to America, and doesn’t even speak English. Since the book’s in Korean, I can’t imagine what it says, but it does strike me as very funny. The things that people write about. I wonder how many people all over the world are enrolled in American studies programs.

In the Korean apartments I’ve visited, the males all wear something like a Lacoste or Arnold Palmer golf shirts. And I’ve seen so many indoor putting mats in the various places.

In Korea, you can go to a photocopy place, and get a whole book photocopied and bound. I noticed this when I was teaching a student the other day — she had two copies of John Gray’s Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus. The books looked like publisher’s promo copies. Apparently, she’d had 4 photocopies made.

Apparently, despite the number of practicing Christians in Korea, intellectual property laws hold no sway.

Recently, I’ve accepted an offer for a job in Japan that begins in September. I think there’s little possibility for an active double life in Korea. The biggest difference between Korea and Japan I can locate lies in personal space. In Japan, so much is open-ended and vague, and nothing requires explanation. If you’ve got something to mask, then Japan is definitely the place to do it.

And I think back to Siddartha. This spiritual life, the double life. Could I live like that?

For better or worse, I’ve begun to imagine myself as something like a Somerset Maugham, or at least the writer character of Razor’s Edge, the link between the misanthropes and the society people, the one who can’t belong to either group, but the one that is the only link between these groups that don’t associate with each other.