Daehangno

The cleaning out of the crawl space continues to provide trips down memory lane.  Yesterday it was this poster from my time in Korea.  It is from an area in Seoul known as Dae-hang-no or “University Street”.  It was (is) a popular student hang out spot when I was there in the early 90’s that included oodles of coffee shops, bars, food stands, and performance venues.   

On the weekends the main street down the center of Dae-hang-no would be shut down to traffic and young people would congregate in groups on the sidewalks or the street.  Some groups would have someone playing a guitar.  Others would be playing Jang-gi (“Korean chess”) or just talking and laughing over some KFC.  It had a very youthful vibe, like a commons area at a college or a huge tailgate party.

Speaking of KFC, this American fast food chain was wildly popular there.  The signs for it only ever said “KFC” because “Kentucky Fried Chicken” was too much of a mouthful for Korean speakers and it was marketed accordingly.  It was an easy landmark for an American to find and where I agreed to rendezvous with Korean friends in those days before smart phones.  It was not uncommon for someone to be an hour or more late for a meeting of this type which spoke to the problems of getting around in a city that constituted a quarter of the population of the entire country, though some Korean friends confided that there was a cultural component to it as well.  It required a lot of patience and a degree of faith to continue to wait for someone for that long and not give up!

It was the place that I learned that rice wine served in clay pots was not something I should imbibe.

Interestingly enough, it was also a place for student protests.  I remember on one occasion I was with Korean friends when a boisterous group of protesters came down the street with banners.  It piqued my curiosity, but my friends quickly spirited me into the closest bar to get me off the street.  I could only assume it was a protest that involved being disgruntled about foreign (read: American) interference in Korean autonomy and governance.   In a kind of surreal juxtaposition, the young people in the bar picked up on what was going on and they began joking with me to set me at ease and let me know that I was not unwelcome there.  It was a great example of my experience of Koreans as polite, humble, and selfless the two and a half years I spent living there, first as an American soldier and then as a civilian doing some post-college traveling.

So, it was during one of my many visits there with Korean friends that I came across this poster in an alley that paralleled the main drag.  There were tons of them taped to the walls and buildings along that stretch and I fancied that I wanted one and surmised it would not be missed, so I pulled one down and rolled it up as a prize.  On this “Les Mis” poster there are words in English disguised as Korean words.  By this I mean that the written Korean language, known as “Hangul”, is phonetic and foreign words can be transliterated into it.  This differs from Chinese which uses glyphs that cannot be sounded out phonetically.  

Koreans are very proud of this unique alphabet and their scholar-king Sejong the Great who developed it in the 15^th century to give Koreans an alphabet specific to their spoken language and not just a borrowing of the Chinese glyphs.  I was told by a Korean student who frequented my English language class that King Sejong used the shapes from a traditional sliding door to design the letters.  After I’d learned the alphabet and its pronunciation I was able to navigate much more easily by reading signs and learning some rudimentary words and phrases.

A game I liked to play while traveling by train, bus, or subway was to identify all the English words that had been transliterated into Hangul on signs and billboards.  With some practice I could find them quickly as they had a peculiar unKorean-like form despite being in Hangul.  On the poster just to the left of the large “L” of Les Miserables in a small blue box is just such a word.  The letters are two to four per grouping which put side by side constitute a word.  In the blue box there are three groupings (뮤 지 컬) making up an English word, the first pronounced “myoo”, the second “jee”, and the last one “kol” which when pronounced all together sounds something like “musical”.  This experience came in handy recently when my daughter befriended a Korean-American girl in her class.  I showed her how to write her name in Hangul so she could share it with her friend.

When I returned to Korea the second time around after a year’s absence I learned that they no longer shut down the street in Dae-hang-no on the weekends which left me feeling sad and like something important had been lost.

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