Dispatches from the Peninsula

by Chris Tharp

  It became quickly apparent to me that the visa violation–while technically real–served as a pretext: the actual reason they had hauled us in was for lampooning Korean culture. These cops were quite concerned and even hurt that we had sent up certain aspects of their society. When I tried to explain to the questioning officer that, in the West, we have a free-speech tradition of satire, I was cut off and lectured on how “Korea is a modern democracy with guarantees of free speech.”

  The last question of the interview had nothing to do with the content of the show. One of the officers alluded to “allegations of drug use” during those two nights. With the exception of alcohol–an Amazonian volume of which flows throughout the peninsula–drugs are almost nowhere to be found. In fact, illegal drug use is often blamed on “foreign elements” within Korean society. Foreigners are watched and targeted. Just two years before my arrival in Busan, a number of foreign English teachers had been arrested and deported for possession and use of marijuana. It was a big story, splashed all over the national media, cementing suspicions that many foreigners are indeed drug addicts, despite the fact that the nation’s militant attitude against simple marijuana use is rarely if ever questioned by any segment in society. Most Koreans believe that marijuana is a drug and all drugs are bad, so marijuana must be bad. Pot? Heroin? Same same. NOT different.

  So I wasn’t surprised by the request for a drug test. If the police could nail us for using drugs at the show, they’d have a slam dunk. One must also realize that, in Korea, a positive drug test is tantamount to possession. There really is no difference. Drugs in your bloodstream are drugs on your person. You can travel to a country where pot is decriminalized or even legal, but if it’s still in your pee while you’re in Korea, you’re holding. It’s enough to get you jail time, deported, or both.

  At first I feigned outrage over the drug test. I loudly protested that drugs had nothing to do with this event (as I knew they did not). I knew that these cops were heading down a dead end, and I wanted to make sure they knew it. I also resented the fact that they requested a test in the first place, a further indignity to be suffered. I refused. The police tried the age-old “if you’re not guilty, then you have nothing to hide” argument, which, despite the fact that it made my stomach lining crawl, convinced me in the end. After all, if we peed negative, it would be just one more thing that they couldn’t go after us on. It would be the first step to exoneration–or at least, a dropping of charges and getting on with more important matters.

  There was, however, another reason for my initial refusal. Just days earlier, over the weekend, I had been in Japan, where I had tagged along for a couple days on a tour with Skerik’s Synchopated Taint Septet, some American anarcho-jazz musician friends of mine who were there playing some dates. I was hanging out in the dressing room with the band, along with a couple of the Japanese promoters. At one point a pipe was loaded and passed around. I was feeling a bit sick that night and opted out when it came my way, which makes it probably the best bowl of weed I didn’t smoke in my entire life. But I surely had inhaled a few residual vapors, which was enough to have me worried. As it turned out, my fears were unfounded: Steve and I pissed clean. The hounds abandoned that tree, but the winds of the shitstorm were just starting to whip up.

  * * * *

  I came to Korea as an English teacher and was woefully uninformed about many aspects of the country before stepping onto the plane. One such thing was the Korean news media. Prima facie, it looked modern and healthy. There were many television stations with shiny, well-produced daily news programs; dour presenters delivered uninterrupted feeds from around Korea and the world. Glossy magazines and a variety of newspapers were widely available. The democracy itself–while somewhat young–was raucous and noisy and covered widely as such. One had only to witness one of the many brawls on the floor of the Korean National Assembly shown time and time again on domestic TV. This all seemed good and spirited and fitting with my idea of a free and responsible press.

  But I’m no expert in any media, let alone that of Korea. Before actually seeing how they reported on the Babopalooza fiasco, I had just heard stories from other foreigners. Many expats complained that the Korean press was sensationalistic and quick to jump on the nationalist bandwagon. This was seen in 2002, during the massive anti-American protests over the deaths of the two middle school girls who were run down by a US Army vehicle. It is said that the papers and TV stations beat the emotional drum, repeatedly displaying inflammatory photos of the bodies, playing to base emotions in order to sell papers and garner ratings. On the Internet it was worse, with pure rumor-mongering, which we saw again during the anti-American beef uproar of 2008.

  Of course the careless offenses of Babopalooza could not come close to the scope of the previous examples, but what this all points to is a general ethical laziness on the part of the Korean media, or at least a willingness to throw ethics to the wind when it suits them. We saw this straight away with a story that came out on Babopalooza in the Kyunghang Shinmoon, a newspaper out of Seoul. According to the article, our group’s name was Right Down, and the title of our show was Oriental Story. What depths of his own ass the author drew these claims out of remains a mystery to this day, but what is painfully clear is that he had no real information at all, so rather than track it down, he instead chose to make it up. Much of the article goes on to make completely bogus claims, including:

  The seven band members were ordered to leave the country (they were not);

  That we called the practice of dog eating “strange” (we did not);

  That we said Koreans “even shit three times” (we did not);

  That we performed four times, rather than twice;

  That we performed for a total of 600 people, instead of 150.

  Another, shorter piece was published on Daum.net, a popular Korean portal and news site. This piece went on to list the names of everyone who had gone to the police station. When a Korean friend of mine showed me the article, I could not recognize one name on this list. Once again, it was clear that the details had been fabricated. This may have been done for privacy’s sake (Korea has stringent privacy and anti-defamation laws), but I nonetheless found it shocking.

  We were braced for this thing to blow up in the Korean media, and for us to become the whipping boys and girls of Korea’s notorious netizens–those anonymous nationalists who swarm and push Internet stories in attempts to light the flame to anti-Western and anti-American sentiment. Luckily, this time, the match failed to ignite the tinder. While Babopalooza proved to be a very popular topic of debate in the peninsula’s English-language blogosphere, burning long threads on popular sites such as The Marmot’s Hole, Scribblings of the Metropolitician, Dave’s ESL Café, and Pusanweb, interest quickly abated among the Korean press… with the exception of the English-language dailies The Korea Herald and The Korea Times, which both ran fairly sympathetic (and much more accurate) takes on what had really gone down. The media coverage wasn’t limited to Korea, either. Angry Steve’s hometown paper, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran a story, along with Seattle’s popular alternative weekly The Stranger, which couldn’t pass up a write-up of a local theater son in hot water abroad for “artistic crimes.”

  After the police interviewed everyone involved that they could find, they shipped the files over to the General Prosecutor’s office, where they languished on deck for six long months. During that time, everyone named in the investigation lived in a sort of limbo. We all kept our current jobs, as the uproar wasn’t quite enough to get anyone fired on the spot and, for the moment, employers seemed to be willing to renew any contracts that came up. A couple of folks involved went back to their respective countries, flying the coop before any sanction could come down. The only people who got into trouble were the three people who changed jobs. Changing jobs required getting a brand new visa, and guess who still hadn’t forgotten about a certain sketch? That’s right: Immigration.

  The three members of the
Busan 9 (as we were known, despite the fact that about 15 were actually in hot water) who tried to change jobs were promptly denied new visas and told to leave the country, at least until the investigation had run its course. The first was my friend Sam, who got the news while vacationing in Thailand. The university that just hired him sent him a “We regret to inform you…” e-mail. This stung worse for him, since he had only appeared in one sketch, the only one that never even mentioned the word Korea. The two others managed to stick around: one by working illegally until everything blew over; the other by getting a new job under a second passport he just happened to own. Dual citizenship does have its privileges.

  As for the rest of us, we stuck it out with the sword above our necks. I wanted to stay in Korea. After all, it had been good nearly three years, and the thought of going to another country and starting over–or worse yet, going home–didn’t sit well. But none of us could predict what this prosecutor would do. It was up to him to move the case along or not. We had consulted with a Korean-American lawyer, but, without all of the information, he was unwilling to call an outcome, and to hire him to take the case was prohibitively expensive. My sense was, with the passage of time and general feeling of normalcy that had managed to return to our lives, that the prosecutor would wag his finger our way and let us off with a warning.

  And that’s pretty much what happened.

  Angry Steve and I were finally summoned to the Stalinist-looking building which contained the office. We were led upstairs with our translator and seated in front the man himself, Mr. Yang. Mr. Yang smiled and tried to make us feel at home. He was definitely playing “good cop” to the more offended police who had originally questioned us. He produced a copy of the tape, which he said had been made by the detectives who came to the show. He fingered it and smiled, saying that he actually had enjoyed it, that he wasn’t offended at all. It was as if he was playing his inferiors off as yokels and philistines for hauling us in to begin with, that he understood it was satire and good fun. But he did remind us that “this was Korea” and it would behoove us to be “more sensitive” in the future, and that there was no question we had broken the terms of our visas–something he was willing to forgive, providing we each wrote a brief letter “promising to not do it again,” which we gladly did on the spot. In the end we shook hands and bowed, with Mr. Yang suggesting that we meet for a drink sometime, an offer that I have yet to take him up on.

  But it wasn’t over yet. The cops and courts may have been done with us, but not everyone was so willing to forgive. The first was my university, where I had worked for two years. Once the case was settled, they fired me. Fired isn’t quite the right word, but in the summer of 2007, my request for a new contract was denied, via e-mail. No reason was given in their brief yet polite fuck off message. When I ran into the boss’s secretary later that day and pressed her as to why, she informed me that it had something to do with “a performance” I had done. That was news enough, and I dropped it there. Six months later the same thing happened to Angry Steve, as well as to one of the musicians involved with the show.

  I was quickly offered a new job at a two-year college in the middle of the city, and after a three-week stint in America I flew back to Busan and completed the necessary paperwork. Babopalooza was behind me, and despite the fact that I was canned over it, I had a new gig that in many ways was better than the previous one. I had just signed my contract and was waiting for my visa confirmation number when my new boss came knocking at my office door:

  “Uhm. I am sorry. There is some… problem. The officer at Immigration says that you did a bad thing. You must apologize before they give visa.”

  He led me into his office at once, where he sat me down at his computer, pointed to the open word processing program on the screen, and said “You must write a letter. Say I’m sorry.”

  “But I already wrote one for the prosecutor.”

  “Prosecutor? No. You must write for Immigration.”

  I nodded and began to type:

  Dear Sirs and Madams,

  Last year I was involved with a show that made fun of Immigration. This was a mistake which I wholly regret. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the men and women who don the uniform and risk their lives daily to enforce the most just laws of Korea. I apologize deeply and unreservedly, and promise to never ever ever ever do something so foolish again.

  Sincerely,

  Christopher John Tharp

  Two days later I had my visa.

  * * * *

  Though we all managed to make it through Babopalooza with just a stern talking-to, the effect of the ordeal was a complete chill for the performance scene in Busan. With the exception of a few musicians, most foreigners were afraid to step on a stage to do anything. We simply didn’t know if we’d be hauled downtown for performing without permission. Poetry Plus wasn’t performed for over a year, and when it did come back, there were just a handful of people performing to small, frightened crowd. It never found its feet again and since has been relegated to the past. Round Faced Productions–our nascent little theater company–was killed off before it could do any more. Everything went dormant for a while.

  The expats up in Seoul were never scared off, as the cops up there have larger whales to poach, and over the last couple of years we have seen an explosion in theater, comedy, improv, and public readings done by expatriates. Emboldened by our brethren in the really big city, this is now happening in Busan. It finally seems safe to come out of the cave, and Babopalooza is just a memory for the old guard and a legend for the new. God willing, let’s keep it that way.

  INTERLUDE: AUGUST, 2007

  OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  It’s good to be home, especially in August. Summer in the Pacific Northwest must be the best version of summer on Earth: warm days, cool nights, clear skies, cold water all around, and greens of every imaginable shade. The region’s famous rains are nowhere to be seen.

  I’m down at Batdorf and Bronson’s, the town’s signature coffee house. The place serves up coffees of the highest caliber and beans from around the world. The ceilings are high and light pours through the front window; it’s airy and relaxing. Students mingle with state workers and hipsters and downtown business owners, making Batdorf’s Olympia’s true community coffee house. No elitist attitude here, folks. Just damn good coffee, mellow music, and newspapers all around. I just finished a Wednesday New York Times Crossword and feel very good about myself. We’ll see if I can continue the streak into the week.

  I love Olympia. I wonder if I could live here again?

  I rode my bicycle down from Scott and Elizabeth’s, which is where I always stay when I come into town. Elizabeth’s at work at Intel and Scott’s mixing music in his little home studio. Tonight I’ll ride my bicycle into Lacey for dinner with the folks. I have dinner with them almost every night now. Afterwards, I stick around for a cup of coffee with Mom. We often watch a bit of TV–usually cop shows like Law and Order or CSI: Miami. Mom likes David Caruso’s character; I think she identifies with his sadness, overcooked as it is. Dad does his best to stay up, but turns in very early. His energy is waning, that is for sure. The man is battling three life-threatening ailments and doesn’t possess the spark he once did. That said, his appetite is still intact. Last night he downed enough spare ribs for three people.

  Tomorrow we’re heading to Offut Lake to catch some trout. Dad will stick to the dock, while I rent a little boat and take my nephews out on the water. We’ll catch some fish and savor the day. That’s all we can do, isn’t it?

  CHAPTER 12: COMMUNITY COLLEGE

  After the Babopalooza fiasco and my subsequent canning from Gaegum University, I experienced a spasm of second thoughts about staying in Korea. I had given the peninsula three intense years of my life and figured that this was a good time to make my exit. I didn’t plan on moving back to America. I was determined to get into the ESL thing even deeper, to begin a teaching tour that would take me to more obscure, exotic
, and dangerous locales. So I spent my afternoons scanning the international teaching job boards to see where my next adventure would take me: Mongolia? Kazakhstan? Ethiopia? I took in job ads from these places and more.

  Suddenly Korea had become staid, old hat, no longer something that kindled the fire inside of me. Besides, I was single and had no serious commitments, other than a black-and-white cat I had adopted off of the street the year before. I had enough savings to easily cushion the shock of any move, and was actually buzzing at the prospect of something new. I was more than ready to go, but had yet to chisel the decision into granite. I was still open to staying in Korea, but only if things played out a certain way. So I told both my friends and myself this:

  “I will only stay in Korea if a good job falls into my lap. I’m not going to go knocking on any doors. It has to come to me. If the phone rings and the offer is nice, I’ll consider sticking around.”

  I had actually answered an ad and was now seriously considering a teaching gig in China. Not just anywhere in China, but in far Western China, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, in an oil boomtown named Korla. The pay was just a fraction of what I was making in Korea, but the cost of living was next to nothing and the location sounded interesting enough. Images of Bactrian camels, sand dunes, and feasts of roasted lamb flashed in front of my eyes. It was totally isolated, in a place with few foreigners. This would be a wildly different experience than this modern Korean life, where I was surrounded by hundreds of other expats and could access the net via the fastest connections on the planet. I felt the pull in my gut and had pretty much agreed to the job, when, one afternoon while I was sitting at home, the phone rang.