Vol. 114
BY RICHARD WILEYThe great old Willie Nelson tune Funny How Time Slips Away popped into my mind as I returned from a reunion of my Peace Corps group a few days ago. That group - the third to arrive in South Korea in October of 1967 - was made up of eighty-eight volunteers who would be assigned all across the republic to teach English in middle and high schools, as well as (the lucky few) in colleges and universities. We were young, enthusiastic, ignorant, afraid, and happy. We had finished an intensive twelve-week training where we studied Korean for six hours a day, were taught a few basic teaching skills, learned to eat kimchi, and talked incessantly about cross-cultural understanding. Among my fellow trainees, some joined the Peace Corps for altruistic reasons, some to put off getting drafted into the Vietnam War for another two years, and some in order to try and figure out just what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.
Me? I fit into that last group.
Of the original eighty-eight, only twenty-five or so came to our reunion. Some have drifted away, fifteen or more have died, and others, though they wanted to, couldn’t make the trip. We were no longer young, nor so enthusiastic, ignorant, or afraid… As for happy? That cup was either half full or half empty, depending on which one of us you asked.
When we arrived in Korea, Seoul had ox-drawn carts slogging through its streets, the Korean won was 270 per dollar, and my Peace Corps stipend was $15 a month - half for room and board and half for incidentals… like weekly visits to a public bath, buying myself a package of cookies, or taking the slow train on an occasional weekend to meet with other volunteers.
At first I was assigned to Taechon Boys’ Middle School, about a third of the way down the peninsula and right on the edge of the Yellow Sea. My Korean was terrible, there were sixty or more students in each of my five daily classes, and my school was a "terminal" middle school, meaning that once a boy finished 9th grade he was off to farm or fish. No more schooling for him!
So what was I doing there? Why did they need an English teacher?
No one knew the answer to that. The headmaster shrugged when I asked him, pointing up, either at the gods or the bureaucrats in Seoul, but my fellow teachers accepted me, took me out drinking far too often, even on school nights, and my students were… well, they were young, enthusiastic, ignorant, afraid, and happy, so I suppose I was where I belonged, though at the end of that first year I was transferred to the provincial capital’s middle school… one that had a high school right next door.
Returned Peace Corps volunteers, not only from Korea but from countries all over the world, are often asked variations of the following: “Did you do more for the country you served in or did the country do more for you?”
I used to answer by saying emphatically, "I did nothing at all for Korea but my life was radically altered by the experience."
The second part of that answer still holds, even after nearly sixty years, and here is why.
Before I left America I believed, however foolishly, that the world contained a single reality, ruled by American culture and by the nuances of the English language. As I got moderately good in Korean, however, that belief began to fall away. What a surprise it was to discover how differently people saw the world, shaped by the grammars of their languages and by the mores handed down over generations.
Simple, right? We are a multitude! Except, I didn’t know it and I might never have known it had I not left my homeland, heading off into unknown parts of the world.
Since leaving Korea in the summer of 1969, I have spent my life as a novelist, half the time placing the characters in my books in foreign countries. My early 1990s novel, Festival For Three Thousand Maidens, in fact, deals with an American Peace Corps volunteer in a Korean town very much like Taechon, where he learns how to be a better human being.
Was that one a sort of biography? Oh no, never! Perish the thought.
If someone were to ask me now why I have changed my mind regarding whether or not I made a modicum of difference in the lives of those Koreans I met or taught, I would tell them the following story:
I returned to Korea a few years ago when that country’s government invited all of its Peace Corps volunteers back, a few at a time, as a kind of "thank you." While there I visited both of the towns I served in, and met a few people who remembered me. We shook hands and bowed and smiled. But when one former student said in English, "We were both so very young," I realized that though I had thought of him as a middle school boy and myself as a wise young man, we had really both been kids. What mattered wasn’t whether I had taught him to say something like, "Every morning before breakfast I climb the mountain behind my house." What mattered was that we had learned to understand each other and, in doing so, to honor our differences.
That is what the Peace Corps was. And though it is more sophisticated now - sending folks abroad who actually have specific skills - that is what I hope it also still is today.
It is little enough to hope for, don’t you think?
Given the world we live in now.
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