The Birth of Korean Cool Read Free

least what I imagined a medieval city would look like, based on Monty Python sketches. (Especially Pythonesque were Seoul’s many roasted silkworm
larvae stands; I could never get my head around those.)
    Every summer, a woman would put up a trampoline in an abandoned lot near my house, and for 200 won (around 15 cents), one could jump on it for half an hour. Standing by the trampoline was what
she did all day; sole proprietor, sole employee.
    These kinds of mini-enterprises, like the trampoline, prolonged the precious, Elysian period of childhood in a way that I did not see in the United States, where kids started hanging out at the
mall and acted like teenyboppers from age nine or ten.
    Childhood friendships in Korea were devoted and physical; it was common for same-sex platonic friends to walk the street holding hands or with their arms around each other’s waists. My
friends were astonished that it was not like that everywhere. In the sixth grade, a classmate asked me, “Is it true that in America, people call you a ‘homo’ if you hold hands
with your friends?” I had to say yes.
    I have not witnessed this kind of physicality among friends except maybe in the Arab world. As South Korea got richer, I saw a decline in same-sex hand-holding among children. I don’t have
a good explanation except for some platitudes about how wealth destroys intimacy. Or kids just got too cool to be so demonstrative.
    My real Proustian madeleine, though, is mothballs.
    The odor of mothballs always make me think of Seoul’s toilets, because when I arrived in Seoul, mothballs were hung in public bathrooms as a deodorizer. Nowadays, many Seoul toilets are
electronic and have self-cleaning features as well as nozzles that squirt water and rinse and blow-dry. Individual stalls also sometimes have buttons you can press to play light music so people
don’t have to hear how you’ve chosen to spend your time in the stall. Those toilet bowls are cleaner than the tables of some restaurants. But back in 1985, oh my god.
    First-worlders have the luxury of not having to think about waste elimination very much. But for a third-worlder, poop is a big preoccupation. To the average American, a toilet is a place to
enter and exit without being traumatized; there are extractor fans to erase odors; toilets flush all evidence of one’s activities, and blue bleach tablets kept in the septic tank save users
from having to see the real color of their pee in the bowl. There is soap and hot water and hand dryers or paper towels so that one can emerge even cleaner than when one entered. A toilet should be
like a waiter at a good restaurant: if it’s doing its job properly, one shouldn’t notice it’s there.
    So imagine my surprise upon arriving in Seoul to discover that the majority of the toilets were the squatting kind, where you had to stand with your legs spread wide, and void over a basin in
the floor with no water in it. It was not always flush-able.
    Then there was the annual school poop collection.
    As in many developing nations, some of the basic health procedures in South Korea were handled at the public schools. We all got our inoculations from the school nurse, for example. We’d
line up in order of student number, which was determined at the beginning of the year by height. The nurse used the same needle for all the students, disinfecting between each injection by running
the needle through the flame of a candle.
    Along the same lines, schoolwide tests for intestinal parasites  were conducted too. The teacher would distribute white envelopes the size of a credit card. Then the teacher would remind
us, “Please write your name on the envelope
before
you put your poop in, because you’ll find it difficult to write on it afterward.”
    The next day at school, the samples would be collected in a big bag. Invariably, some students would not have their sample, and the teacher would hit them on the head or the arm. The students