Futureshock

This is neither a reasoned political argument nor a tourist post. Some context: I moved to Seoul in the summer of 2012 and set about finding academic work. I didn’t find any and spent 8 months sliding into debt. Finally I took a job writing in the ESL industry, which as I’ve detailed in far too many posts here, is the worst job I’ve held for nearly 20 years, (working in a factory making plastic sports equipment was worse, admittedly). My expectations of beginning a new life and starting work in my field have not been met, yet I’ve been too busy to chart an alternate course. I’ve booked a few days off over the holidays to slow down and think about where I might go from here.

To be clear, there are many aspects of life in Seoul that I enjoy. There’s my relationship with a wonderful woman, the friends both Korean and international I’ve made here, and the inspiring activists I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. What inspires me is the people: Koreans have been friendly and welcoming to me from the beginning.

However, other parts of life in Korea have been more difficult for me. I’ve resisted blogging about the hard-right government, the pollution, the lack of vegetarian options, the impossibility of cycling, the intense work ethic, conservative and patriarchal values, etc. It’s not out of a liberal reluctance to criticize my hosts – I’d have no problem with Koreans coming to the country I was born in and finding fault – but because it quickly turns into a project on comparative nationalisms, of the go back to Russia variety.

The content of my complaints isn’t important: what’s changed is my attitude towards it. When I first got here, for example, I thought the way drunk older men would expect me to say, “Korea is #1!” was quaint, a holdover of the wounded pride that’s a legacy of Japanese and American colonialism. However, my terrible job and lack of prospects have turned cultural artefacts into irritants. I don’t want to become one of those internationals who separates himself as much as possible from his host culture, and ends up hating a place in which a lot of people go out of their way to accommodate strangers. That’s neither healthy nor respectful. So, I need to find a way to climb out of my rut. The first task is figuring out how I got here.

Academic

Part of the problem is that Korean university jobs are very hard to find. Despite there being dozens of universities, there are no central jobs site like the Chronicle of Higher Education. Or, to be fair, there’s one in Korean, but not in English – despite English university instruction being mandatory. Sometimes English jobs are advertised solely in Korean. The sure way to find university jobs in Korean is to visit each university’s website and check their jobs board; however, these websites are usually poorly designed and translated, and often only work in Internet Explorer. Plus it’s not practical to survey dozens of websites regularly, looking for jobs that may or may not exist. As my Korean friend told me, the Korean government doesn’t actually want foreigners in Korea: they’re a necessary evil, so no one’s going to make it easy for them to work here.

If I’m lucky enough to find a job listed, it’s in politics, which is a conservative discipline. Disciplinary boundaries are quite rigid in Korea, which means that my being ‘interdisciplinary’ is not a selling point. Universities want someone to research and teach elections, post-communism, comparative state systems – all topics lying nicely within the bounds of bourgeois politics. They don’t want to hear about revolutionary theory or practice, nor do they want socialist interpretations of bourgeois politics. It’s funny to me that the American right thinks academia is the preserve of radical leftists. They needn’t worry: the inbuilt bias of academia, towards scrutinizing rather than strategizing, keeps out most radicalism. Of course, some of the best socialists I know are professors, but 99.9% of professors remain non- or anti-socialist, and they tend to dominate hiring commitees.

So there are two problems: the discipline of the profession itself, and the lack of that discipline in my own work. When I research, I’m interested in strategic questions about capitalism and social movements. That’s tangential to a profession which has the goal of problematizing and critiquing. I had the same problem in all my university classes: we never got to the interesting ‘what do we do?’ questions. We just observed. Now that I’ve graduated, I’ve learned quickly that however good my research and writing skills are, they’re in the wrong paradigm. And switching paradigms feels impossible. I can’t base my work on premises that I consider dishonest. Or I can, but it takes a lot out of me.

The narrow range of acceptable bourgeois discourse

Activist

By now I sound like a dyed-in-the-wool activist, too angry and rebellious for the system to contain me. But that’s not it at all. Plenty of my grad school and professorial colleagues were better activists than me. I was neither a rabble-rousing student nor devoted to groups and parties. I’m actually OK with the boring, administrative tasks of social movement-building, it’s very close to the boring administrative tasks of wage-labour. But the complex political negotiations involved in coalition-building, the ego management, the confrontations – I’m not good at those. I prefer to study and write and occasionally debate, but not fight in the streets or the meeting room. I’ve known for years that I don’t have a future as an activist leader.

That leaves me in a difficult spot: too activist to be a proper academic, to academic to be an activist. The perfect place for me would be in a party school, like the German Social Democratic Party had prior to World War 1. Today? I feel like I have a few, not-very-appealing options:

1) Stay in Korea and keep applying to universities. That means writing research proposals and cover letters after my office job. It’s not ideal, and the longer I go without proper academic work, the less chance I have of getting hired. It also gives me the sensation of banging my head against a brick wall. I’ve been sending out applications to posts I could fill for three years. When does persistence turn into a refusal to face reality? Moreover, this presumes keeping my office job. I’ve proved that I can handle six months of the latter – that in itself is an accomplishment, given that when I started, I thought I’d last a week. So, presumably I can handle another six months. But do I want to move up a trouser size, see my waistline expand further and compensate for my lack of sleep with wrinkle cream? (Not to knock good cosmetics: having a salary has enabled me to take advantage of them. Proof: I know that the proper order is toner, serum and moisturizer. But they don’t deal with work, the root cause of bad skin.)

2) Find another job in Korea and keep applying for universities. This is less obvious than it seems. It’s illegal for me to work part-time. The only full-time work available to expats is teaching English in private schools, and I think care-taking a bunch of six year olds would wear me out faster than office work. There are plenty of part-time contracts available, editing or teaching business English, but those are illegal. I’m too old to be an illegal migrant. I live in hope that my networking will pay off: for example, I’ve been offered research and teaching, and I’m grateful for both. But to do them legally (and to pay my rent), they have to be on top of my full-time job. And that’s killing me.

3) Quit my job, go back home and apply for university jobs. I left home because there were no job opportunities. I could teach adjunct, it’s true, but that would require picking up courses at far-flung campuses, making less than I made as a secretary. All for the faint hope that I might find a full-time position in a small town in a country I don’t want to live in anyway.

If I went back home, I could also begin the transition to a different career entirely. But to what? It’s very hard to get into NGO work: the networking and experience requirements are even more onerous than in academia. I’m a good writer, but there are dozens of good writers selling themselves very cheaply online. I’m only going to couchsurf again if I have something more tangible than ‘starting over’ as a reward.

I do, but what good are they?

This is the conclusion that I’ve been using fatigue at work, catching up on sleep, getting drunk, windowshopping, etc. to avoid: there is no conclusion. I have precise, analytical language to pinpoint exactly why I’m fucked. I understand how the confluence of neoliberal austerity, being political, and being underqualified for academia and overqualified for everything else makes me fucked. But I don’t know what to do about it. My circumstances are largely beyond my control, and all the Buddhist acceptance of ‘the moment’ doesn’t change that. Yet I can’t shut off that critical part of my brain that says life is more interesting and important than ESL. I’m not prepared to give up; I’ll fight. But what do I fight?

Working life

From I love old magazines

Mortality has figured in my thoughts as of late. For much of the last decade I was a grad student, so my ‘job’ was researching and writing. Of course, it’s work, but the point is there’s some creative control over it. You just don’t get paid for it.

But there is nothing to remind you of your mortality like going to an office every day. In the morning I open my eyes and realise that another week, another month, another six months has flashed by. And indeed, it’s been a half-year since I started my office job. My posture has slumped, my ass has gotten bigger from sitting in a chair all day, and despite my best efforts to network, build my CV and apply for new jobs, I’m still stuck there. On the 180th day there, I hate my job as much as when I started.

My coworkers don’t seem to be bothered. They socialise with each other, they take an interest in their work. At a meeting earlier this week, we went half an hour past quitting time, and I was the only person in the room watching the clock and ready to go. Everyone else kept extending the conversation as if they had nothing else to do with their lives. Even if I didn’t have a course to plan, lectures to write, editing to do, jobs to apply for, I would still leave the office at quitting time, because then I get my life back. I would rather stare at a blank wall than do any more work, because at least the latter doesn’t sap my creative energy and generate profit for somebody else.

My co-workers are not idiots or assholes. They all seem like quite reasonable, intelligent, sociable people. So why do I feel as if I’m hanging on with my fingernails, watching my life slide past me, while everyone else seems content to wave goodbye to their best years?

I get that we don’t have a choice: that’s why I’m doing this terrible job, because I’m in debt and have no other work to go to. But given those circumstances, I retain a little of my humanity by resisting, not giving up my time and concentration for the boss willingly and pretending like work has meaning.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it: there is no value to what I do. I’ve asked my co-workers what they get out of the job, and they tell me it’s a puzzle, a series of mind games that keeps them occupied. But there is so much more to life: there is learning about films, appreciating humour, seeing new places, engaging in great struggles, intellectual and practical. And most of all, there is not doing mindless busy work because somebody tells you to. And if under capitalism our lives are mainly mindless busywork, then rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gently into that half-walled cubicle.

Work has to be more than just money: a good job provides creative satisfaction. I’ve never experienced a good job, and I’ve had dozens (with the partial exception of grad school, but that was tolerable precisely because it allowed creativity. It’s still work, of course.) In a shocking lapse of Marxist discipline, I don’t want to take over the means of production of my office and run it collectively with my co-workers. I just want it shut down, never to be entered again. I can’t think of any circumstances in which what I do right now would be socially useful, or interesting. While unemployment is terrifying, I genuinely cannot understand the so-called dignity of labour. Dignity lies in hobbies, laziness, sex, all the things that make us human and express our innate creativity.

Most work is non-creative, tedious and repetitive. Those who say otherwise earn large salaries and have creative control over their work processes, and generalize their experience to all other workers. This means that when they say do what you love, they genuinely believe everyone has a chance to do so. This is classic bourgeois ideology, transposing their experience of relative autonomy onto everybody else. But capitalism doesn’t work that way:

labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.

Fuck work. Work is slow death. Next post: what can I possibly do about it?

Hong Kong vegetarian food

I think my favourite part of Hong Kong was getting vegetarian food. I used to love that back in Canada: entire restaurants where everything was meat-y gluten and mushrooms, manipulated to resemble animal parts. But also the tofu: Chinese vegetarians braise and serve it in a hot pot. So the first thing I did after dropping my bags at the hotel was look for a vegetarian restaurant. The concierge pointed me in the direction of one, which I never found. But I did find a meat place with a picture of braised tofu outside. They spoke no English, but I pointed and, in a few minutes, was served this:

It was hot and delicious. That night after my interview, I walked 45 minutes to a pure vegetarian restaurant. There are a couple of fake-meat places in Seoul that I frequent, but they’re run by the cultish, creepy Ching Hai, the spiritual leader/capitalist who fancies herself an envoy of world peace and who insists on decorating her restaurants with her terrible sketches. So it was a relief to go to a restaurant and not have to watch the Supreme Master’s TV speeches. Instead I had delightful gluten chicken with kiwi:

And the less-delightful but still quite palatable gluten beef on rice, which I was too full to finish anyway:

The thing about Hong Kong is that people know what vegetarian is. Unlike Korea, where you have to explain “no meat, no chicken, no seafood”, and small fish are ground up to use as salt for kimchi (or Russia, where people think you die if you don’t eat meat), it was easy to find. I went to a greasy diner, of which there are plenty, and asked the waiter for something vegetarian. There was nothing on the menu, but he brought me rice, tofu, vegetables and sauce, and it was delicious. Friday night I went to the Light Vegetarian Restaurant – look, a vegetarian restaurant that’s easy to find!

I had the sweet-and-sour gluten beef, which was just fine:

I also ordered shrimp dumplings, which arrived as cabbage dumplings. The waitress tried very hard to convince me that these were just as good, but I dislike having my order switched without being told, so I demurred. She made sure I knew that she didn’t charge me for them. I can’t recommend a place that tries to bait-and-switch diners, but if it was Seoul I’d still go.

Saturday was, as mentioned, Kung Tak Lam Shanghai Vegetarian Cuisine, which provided a great view and perfectly acceptable noodles, gluten chicken, and pumpkin soup:

Bibimbap and soondubu are great, but I really miss Hong Kong’s much-better-developed vegetarian cuisine. Damn, now I want lunch.

Hong Kong – Saturday, November 2 – Bad Art

Exhausted from my long day previously, I got a late start. I prefer modern to contemporary art (anything before 1970) but I’m still interested in the latter, so I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It was terrible. I’m not a philistine, I can look at photos, prints, even sculptures and appreciate how they depict reality or use space. But something I can’t stand is ceramics. Put a painting of mythical animals on a tureen – and the museum had lots – and it puts me sleep.

I think the museum knew this, because it attempted a multi-roomed ‘political economy of ceramics’ exhibit, which invited visitors to pretend they were ceramics traders, and stamp cards to figure out what kind of emotion they brought to ceramics trading… fuck, I can’t do it, I’m even boring myself with this description. Did you know Europeans stopped importing Chinese ceramics after they figured out how to copy it? Do you even care?

Yes, it was that dull – Alice In Wonderland, the far superior 1966 psychedelic version

While I’m at it, also dull are landscape watercolours and inks, and calligraphy is spectacularly sleep-inducing. There were lots of those too. The contemporary art wasn’t much better. Someone cut up Ozu movies and made high-school-quality alternative posters for them in pencil. Everything was fragmented. Really? That’s all you’ve got to say about the world? My problem with most contemporary art is it’s so firmly inward-focused, as if the inner lives of artists can reveal great insights about the world. I don’t think they can, because most of them are art-school graduates who express their distance from wage-labour by making interminable pieces about their feelings. I have feelings already, I don’t need yours. Show me something that reflects, in some form, the realities of most people’s lives.

In fairness, some artists did this. I liked the photographs of street vendor shops and minutiae of peoples lives… but I take these on my iPhone and never got into a gallery, eliminating the always-irritating ‘but have you done that?’ argument. In fact, there were two pieces in the entire gallery I appreciated: fake roosters on trolleys, and a rabbit and human organs pieced together by bits of cardboard, the latter opened to show tiny doors, as a statement on lives lived in small flats. Relevant, innovative. The rest sucked out valuable time I could’ve spent enjoying the Spectacle.

Or going to Pret a Manger. How come no one told me I was a 3.5 hour flight away from my favourite sandwich franchise in the whole world? I would’ve come here sooner.

Things got better across the street, at Kung Tak Lam Shanghai Vegetarian Cuisine, which I’ll mention in a separate post. This is the view of the accursed art museum from the restaurant window:

After that, it was back onto the subway, which wasn’t quite as grandiose as Seoul’s, but had some lovely reminders of my spiritual home – not just the British-accented subway announcer but the stickers too:

And some great subway posters:

The only thing left to mention is the Hong Kong Duty Free, which has an amazing, inexpensive (compared to Korea) selection of decent whiskeys. Sipping my sherry cask-aged Laphroaig at home made the return to stultifying wage-labour that much easier. I really liked Hong Kong: it was British enough to satisfy my cravings for good chocolate and alcohol, and Buddhist enough to have good vegetarian food. I had forgotten how much I enjoy being in a city where people speak my language. My opinion might have changed if I’d actually gotten the job I travelled there for (I didn’t) and been forced to live through summer humidity. But as a short-term visitor, I highly recommend it.

Korean soju is the best-selling liquor in the world

Soju is a rice spirit. Add yeast-like organisms to rice and water in a jar, let sit, and in a few weeks you have cloudy rice wine – makgeolli – at the bottom, a lovely concoction of 6-9% alcohol suitable for mixing with honey and fruit. I love makgeolli: it’s sweet, bubbly, tart, it’s refreshing even as it gets you wasted. Typically, there are major health benefits claimed by its manufacturers – but then, health benefits are claimed for a lot of natural foods, and I suspect not drinking is even healthier. But no one’s going to do that.

You also have a clear liquor – soju – of 20-25% alcohol at the top, suitable for disinfecting counters. I can’t stand soju, possibly because I haven’t tried the expensive varieties. But I also can’t stand sake or vodka that hasn’t been chilled to ice: I had a bad experience growing up involving 11 shots of lemon vodka that permanently impaired my ability to appreciate clear spirits. So soju just tastes like rubbing alcohol to me… not that I’ve had a lot of that, at least.

So, this seemed like a plant from the Korean tourist board. But if you follow the links, the Drinks Int’l report shows it’s true: not only does Jinro soju more than double sales vs its nearest competitors, but 4th on the list is Lotte soju. That’s two varieties of soju in the top 5-selling spirits of the world, selling millions of cases a year.

However… both are classed as ‘regional’ sales, meaning 80% of sales take place in the region. This isn’t the world enjoying Korean liquor; it’s Koreans getting very, very drunk. My respect for the salarymen and women – who have told me personally that not drinking is not an option when holding business meetings till 11pm on week nights – just moved up a notch.

However, I think the Korean government may have to think twice before celebrating its topping of the OECD list for alcohol consumption. Alcohol in moderation or occasional overindulgence is a pleasure; the socially enforced drinking rules – in which people drink till they wobble and puke because it’s expected of them – are just as tragic here as in North American freshers week, but here they last your whole working life. As a Korean friend of mine told me, in the west alcoholism is private, a matter of stashing bottles under your bed; here it’s public. And I watched enough after-school specials growing up to understand the power of peer pressure.

The report disabused me of one notion: that Koreans can’t handle their liquor due to the genetic component of alcohol flush reaction. On the contrary, they can handle their liquor much better than I can. They have to.