Part Five: The Choir
September 25th, 2023
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was told at orientation to accept any offer to socialize with my co-teachers I receive, or else I would risk indefinite social exclusion. Consequently, I accepted my co-teacher David’s offer to try out his choir with as much forced enthusiasm as I could muster. It didn’t take me long to realize that I would be in over my head, as a few days after he asked if I could read music. I guess when I told him that I enjoyed singing he assumed it meant more than off-key karaoke singing.
For the last few weeks, I was not able to come to his Thursday night choir for a few reasons, all of them real. Because of this, he assumed (correctly) that I was not actually super enthusiastic about choir singing. But this past Thursday, I was finally free and prepared to join his choir. At the end of the workday, I lingered around waiting for him. He asked me what I was still doing there. When I answered that I was waiting for him to take me to choir, he responded with “oh, I didn’t think you actually wanted to come. You really are a man of your word.” This was the first time someone had called me a man of my word while I was in the midst of a a lie about my interest in something.
We met later for dinner. A man rolled up near me on a motorized unicycle and took off his full-faced helmet, revealing himself (to my surprise) to be David. I knew it would be an evening of twists and turns from that moment. We went for kimbap, the Korean version of sushi. As we ate, we discussed politics, as topics such as that and religion are not conversational taboos in Korea. David outlined to me a conspiracy theory, commonly believed in Korea, that Japan is lying about having treated the Fukushima wastewater it is releasing into the ocean and has paid off the International Atomic Energy Agency. He then proceeded to pitch me on the choir, telling me it was only 60,000 won a month and that it is renown throughout Korea, having won the national choir championships.
The plan had been for David to sit next to me and translate the conductor’s directions into English for me. However, David explained, “the conductor is absent this week so the vice conductor will be filling in…[dramatic pause]…that’s me.”
At the choir I was received warmly by the mostly older Korean regulars. They spoke much more English than the average Korean I interacted with on the street or in stores. In the lead-up to joining, I had been trying to figure out if the choir was a Christian one. David told me they were practicing Handel’s Messiah, but I figured that that was a famous enough to be something possibly performed by a secular choir. The other song sheets they gave me included a Latin hymn and a song praising the Lord, so that removed whatever doubt remained after David had told me at dinner that his father is a retired pastor.
I sat in the back row, at a seat assigned to me. There were maybe 30 people there. David was at the front, giving detailed instructions in Korean. The music sheets had different parts depending on your vocal range, but I just sang along very quietly with the basses, amongst whom I was sitting. I actually did like the first song that we sang, a jazzy cover of the Latin hymn “Benedictus.” We went through it slowly enough that I could pick up the tune.
I started to worry that the session would never end when we approached an hour and twenty minutes without reaching the break. Finally we paused, and David came up to me to ask me how it had been. He then said “this is my wife,” and the woman who had been sitting directly in front of me the whole time turned around and said hi. This again surprised me-I didn’t even know that he was married. He then asked me which vocal range I thought I was in, to which I didn’t have a good answer.
The break was quick and then we were back at it. David asked me to introduce myself to the choir, which I did. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sing a solo. The second half was quicker. Despite some of the regulars inviting me back, I told David that I thought the choir was a bit higher than my seriousness level and talent level. He understood. Next time we hang out we have agreed to play basketball, much more in my wheelhouse.
I don’t have too much to report for the rest of the week. On Friday, many of the EPIK teachers went to Seomun Market, an outdoor food market that is only open on weekends and supposedly Daegu’s top tourist attraction. However, it was relatively empty. We learned it was more of a daytime thing. Afterwards, we went to the small amusement park that is located on top of a building in downtown Daegu. We rode in the full-sized ferris wheel that sits on top of the building. Unfortunately, we didn’t know to get tickets to the capsules with noraebang (Korean karaoke) setups. The next day, the majority of my cohort of teachers went to a ‘lake festival,’ a small festival in a public park with street food stalls and live performances. We watched the main show which had a diverse lineup ranging from traditional Korean songs, plate spinning, and hat-rope-swinging to a cover of “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady to Italian opera singing (all by Koreans!). A group of us stayed out late after at a hof, the German word somehow adopted into Korean to mean beer house. We stayed out until much later than the subway closed.
This brings me to my two grievances about Daegu. The first is the subway closing time. The trains stop at midnight weeknights and weekends, and even if you are not at your stop you have to get off and find your way home. This makes it hard to stay out past 11 without being willing to splurge on a taxi. The second grievance is that Daegu’s downtown is not pedestrianized. Throughout much of the downtown area, the streets are narrow and without sidewalks and totally dominated by pedestrians. But they are not off-limits to cars, so cars will occasionally come down and force pedestrians out of the way, even parking in what is really the middle of the street or on the sidewalk if there is one. This is a microcosm of Korean urbanism-there are some great parts mixed with terrible parts. The city is very walkable, unless you are trying to cross one of the six-to-eight lane roads that crisscross the town. There are bike lanes for a while, but then they will randomly merge with the pedestrian area of the sidewalk. This may be why walking and taking transport are both common, but I rarely see cyclists.
In Korea, I often bump into people. This is totally socially acceptable here, but still makes me feel like Kramer. I think I am partially to blame. On escalators, if I am walking past someone I will try to move out of the way and expect them to lean slightly away to avoid us colliding, but they don’t. I went for a run this weekend and while in Canada people make lots of space for me while running, here I was dodging people left and right.
Korea is said to be a formal and conservative society, and while it was not obvious to me at first, I do now see some signs of it. The way my colleagues and I formally say “annyeonghaseyo” and nod our heads every time we see each other really differentiates it from a Canadian workplace, where a “hi” would be a sufficient greeting to an acquaintance (the Korean version of this would be a simple “annyeong.”). The conservatism hasn’t really affected me, but it has affected some of my female friends, as they dress more conservatively in public to avoid getting yelled at by an ajumma (a Korean middle-aged or elderly woman), something that has happened to several of them.
There is definitely some xenophobia in Korean society. For example, many bars and clubs simply do not allow foreigners in, so we often get turned away. More than anything else though, I feel as if Korean people (the general public, not my colleagues) see me as a burden. They understand that it’s necessary to have foreigners, but find interactions with us to be draining. This is fair-we are a burden. I make life harder for clerks and servers, as they have to read off my translation app or try to decipher my terrible Korean pronunciations. But it is still strange sometimes to be lumped into a category of ‘others.’