Bundang Style

My year in Seoul.

Fall in Seoul.

A NEW ADVENTURE

As far as life choices go, my decision to move to Seoul in the fall of 2009 was like taking an album off the record player, mid-spin, and putting on something completely different. Beethoven to Beastie Boys. Motown to Metal. Salsa to Sade. You get the point.

I could practically hear a record scratch each time I’d tell a friend about my plans. I was on my way to law school someday. I was a budding politico. If anything, I was a Euro. So, why was I going to Korea?

I had my reasons.

My first postgrad year living in DC, from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009, had been an endless series of parties and celebrations mixed with agonizingly long days at my law firm, Kelley Drye & Warren. Also, it had only been a year or so since I’d come out, and I’d been spending a lot of money, drinking a ton, and doing a lot of whoring around — things which my Catholic guilt was starting to kick in over.

So a year away from home — one in which I could slow down, live healthy, and really hunker down and study for the LSAT — seemed just the ticket. And my interest in having an Asian adventure had been building since I was in high school.

During my senior year at BC High, the National Honor Society took a trip to Europe with EF Tours — a whirlwind tour of Rome, Paris, and London over 10 spring days. The trip was my first time in Europe, and it made an enormous impression upon me.

But one of its most memorable nights, on our last, in London, could have easily happened at home. Tired of sightseeing, my buddies Ryan and Nick and I went to the cinema in Piccadilly Circus to see this movie they were really excited about, called Lost in Translation.

I hadn’t heard anything about the movie, but I loved Bill Murray, and Ryan and Nick were film snobs — in fact, they both work in film/television today — so I trusted their judgment.

Long story short, I was absolutely captivated by the movie, and it’s no exaggeration to say I left the theater a changed man.

My idea of what a movie is and could be had been completely transformed. I had fallen in love with the beautiful, captivating blend of ancient and modern that is Japan. And I suddenly detected a thirst for spiritual connection — like the kind Bob and Charlotte find at the Park Hyatt Tokyo — that I hadn’t known I had before.

I carried this interest in Japan with me to college, where I took a bunch of Japanese history and culture classes, learning about things such as the era of the samurai, ancient Edo’s development into the modern metropolis of Tokyo, and salarymen, and read great Japanese novels, like the classic The Tale of Genji (源氏物語), by Murasaki Shikibu, and the transgressive Naomi (痴人の愛), by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Most of my Japanese history classes were taught by Jordan Sand, one of my favorite professors at Georgetown, and the man who introduced me to Studio Ghibli, via a class screening of Spirited Away. (Jordan also used to give us Altoids at the beginning of class to wake us up. Pretty smart guy.)

Jordan encouraged me to let my wanderlust take me to Japan as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and when I was trying to figure out what to do post-graduation, I briefly thought about doing the JET Programme, which places English-speaking college grads with teaching jobs throughout Japan.

JET is prestigious, but it came with one huge drawback — little control over where exactly in Japan you were placed. You might get Tokyo or Kyoto, but you also might be placed in a rural village in the snowy northern island of Hokkaido, population 85.

That possibility was a nonstarter for me. And as it turned out, teaching at a private school in Japan, while not impossible to do, required lots of patience and paperwork, and didn’t pay very well, whereas, right across the Sea of Japan, in South Korea, private schools were champing at the bit for English teachers.

Cram schools, or hagwons (학원), as they are called, provided English-speaking college graduates with free plane fare; free housing in modern, well-equipped accommodations; and a generous salary — particularly if you had a degree from a prestigious school like Georgetown.

I was sold on the idea of working in Korea instantly. I found out about a school, the Seoul Language Institute in Bundang (분당), from Nick, a friend of a friend who had taken a job there after graduating from Emory. Nick put me in touch with his recruiter, Don, I submitted my materials, and within a few weeks, I was hired.

The plan was set: I’d fly to Seoul, earn some cash, travel around Asia — including to the majestic country of Japan — and spend a good chunk of time resting and studying for the LSAT. I wanted to get into law school somewhere in New York City, so I needed a good score, and I had been too distracted to properly study in DC.

As my departure approached, I felt the familiar butterflies announcing yet another adventure. On one of my last nights in DC, I had dinner with a friend at my beloved Hunan Peking. My fortune cookie read, “You will soon arrive in a wonderful new home.” A serendipitous message — and one that turned out to be true, too.

As I boarded my plane for Seoul, by way of San Francisco, I thought about the year ahead. I figured it would be fun but productive, adventurous but relatively tame.

I was partially right.

I arrived in Seoul the day after my 23rd birthday, and woke up the next morning to two pieces of horrible news.

The first was that one of my favorite musicians — Jacko, the King of Pop, Tommy Mottola’s sworn enemy, the dangler of Blanket, the collector of the Elephant Man’s bones, Michael Jackson — was dead. Heartbreaking. Another music legend shuffled off this mortal coil much too soon by drug overdose.

The second was that I was now under a 10-day employer-imposed quarantine for swine flu — because that was a thing then, and Korean parents assumed every American had it.

A lockdown? That’s so… un-American!

LOCKDOWN

I thought back to the Air China flight from San Francisco, where they had screened a health and safety video that depicted all Americans as morbidly obese and diseased. It was as comically over-the-top as a Saturday Night Live skit. I was starting to get an understanding of the paranoia around the disease.

I was put up in a temporary apartment and left with nothing except what my Korean hosts figured was 10 days’ worth of food for an American and a (mercifully) fast and reliable Wi-Fi connection.

I had nothing to do but surf the web. I got a belated happy birthday email from Tom, who was in Africa. He wanted to know how I was doing. Did I feel invigorated? “Not exactly,” I said, explaining my plight, but expressing confidence things would improve.

Unfortunately, those ten days in captivity were enough time spent isolated and bored to become severely depressed, resentful of my hosts, and questioning of whether I had made a massive mistake in coming to Korea.

I slept a lot, and listened to sad music while I thought about Ziad and Oliver. During my incarceration, I also tried a kiwi for the first time. It was in the welcome basket my captors had left for me. Even though the outside of the kiwi did not seem like something I should be eating, I wasn’t sure how to properly peel it, either, so I just ended up taking big, furry bites out of it.

Not bad, to be honest.

WELCOME TO LEADERSVILLE — WHERE LEADER IS READER

When I was finally released from captivity, I was brought to the school, where I began to meet my colleagues.

Some hagwons have an array of English speakers from countries all over the world, but our school — which had recently changed its name to the laughably absurd Leadersville English Institute, with the ungrammatical “Leader is Reader!” as its slogan — only hired Americans. (The fucked-up slogan was an apt metaphor for the whole operation.) There were native Korean teachers at the school, too. They more or less kept to themselves. None of the American teachers spoke Korean, which was by design. We were there to be the solid wall of English against which our students could practice and attain fluency.

I took an instantaneous dislike to most of my male American co-workers at the school. Nick, who had put me in touch with the recruiter who hired me, was a nice guy, with anime eyes, apple-red cheeks, and dimples. But the other guys were incel types who I heard loudly speculating about my sexual orientation — within earshot of me! — on one of my first nights out with them.

And I wasn’t even acting particularly gay! They were simply jealous of all the attention I was getting from the girls as the new guy. They were nerdy straight dudes who were all in search of submissive Asian girlfriends (which, I believe, they all eventually found, too).

Most of the girl teachers seemed sus, too. One of them, Christina, a graduate of the all-girls’ Smith College, got really shittoed on the first night after I arrived, when all the teachers took me out, and savagely hit on me, groping me repeatedly and saying “hello friend,” over and over, which terrified me. She was clearly mortified of her behavior the next day, and although neither of us ever mentioned it, she backed off of me for the rest of my time there, most likely sparing me many more uncomfortable moments.

As is always a question for a gay person in a new place, I wasn’t sure whether or not it was OK to come out. And when it came to my Korean colleagues, I figured that conversation was a nonstarter. So for the time being, I planned to keep it to myself. It also became apparent over my first few days that this was a hard-drinking crew, and that worried me. I had come there in part to mellow out, spend time studying, and give my body a rest. It didn’t seem like I was going to connect with most of my coworkers. Thankfully there was one teacher who I connected with. Her name was Jennifer.

Jennifer, a beautiful, leggy, long-haired blonde from New Jersey, lived right down the hall from me at Paragon. We were the only two foreign teachers in the building; the others were housed in an older high-rise, the Royal Palace — which was anything but, compared to Paragon — about a half mile away.

When I arrived, Jennifer’s boyfriend Joey had just left Korea — I took his spot, in fact — and she was depressed. It took her a while to warm up to me, but we eventually developed a great rapport.

It turned out to be great living so close to Jennifer — it was like we were back in college again and living in the same dorm. We could hang out all the time, but also always had our own private space to go back to.

Over time, Jennifer and I grew extremely close. We were attached at the hip — practically married — and everyone else at our school was convinced we were sleeping together. It made me think about that Bonnie Raitt song “Something to Talk About.” Jennifer and I shared a flippant sense of humor, and developed all sorts of inside jokes and our own special vocabulary:

We called ourselves Mommy and Daddy and “nothing if not survivors.”

We’d call people we found charming absolute dolls, emphasizing every single syllable for effect. “Haeshin is an ab-so-lute doll!”

People who displeased us got alliterative putdowns: “Well, I didn’t know I was hanging out with Petulant Patty!”

We called hot guys bombs who had no right to be so hot, and hot blue-collar guys rough trade.

We had no difficulty complimenting people on their outfits, even as we took issue with other aspects of their behavior: “How dare you come to my apartment, in a great coat, and criticize my life choices?”

We even bent the Korean language to our purposes. Yogiyo (여기요), which means over here, instead became a jaunty way for us to say hello. Yogiyo! we’d yell. Jennifer wasn’t exactly what you’d call a girls’ girl, but every once in a while, we’d hang out with a few of the girls from our office.

Sometimes we’d hang with this teacher named Giuliana, who was one of Jennifer’s friends from New Jersey. We called her Giuliani, because Jennifer’s dad Ronald always called her that when he was drunk. Giuliani had a really hot British teacher boyfriend named Mike, who she is now married to. Mike was a huge alcoholic with great taste in music, like many Brits. He’s the person who introduced me to Grizzly Bear. Giuliani had her hair done really up, and she kind of looked like Snooki to me. When we were at school, she did what I called “stationing,” which was just staying in one place, making barely any noise or moving. Giuliani was repeatedly yelled at by our bosses for reading “megazines” during class, but I don’t think she ever stopped.

Going out with Giuliani and Mike and the British boys always intrigued me, because even then, back in 2010, they were always getting drunk and making out with each other. I have a lot of artistic straight male friends who I’ve made out with over the years, but to see a bunch of British lads, with tattoos and antisocial behaviour written all over them, sucking face was really hot, and something that I wish more American straight dudes (and straight dudes in general) were comfortable with.

I wonder if in another ten years the British dudes are all going to be cool with outright sucking and fucking with other guys, too. If so, I’ll be making my booking on British Airways toute de suite.

Another coworker we sometimes hung with was a Korean American girl named Heather. Heather was a kind person with a bright smile. We once played a game where each teacher was assigned a drug that corresponded to their personality, and Heather picked coke for me, which she said she picked because it was classy. So I liked her. Jennifer sometimes got annoyed with Heather for being too nice, though.

Case in point: we had another coworker, a girl from Indiana named Alex, who was a little bit of a drunken mess, and prone to make funky fashion choices, like wearing a watch around her ankle. She annoyed us.

We made up a song (a techno remix of sorts) of her whining, “I don’t want a mojito” (I d-d-don’t want a mo-mo-mo-jiii-toooooooo…) on one of the few nights we went out with her. Jennifer loathed Alex, so as a practical joke, I once left her a prank note that I made look like it came from our Korean bosses, written in their brand of broken English, admonishing her for telling stories to the students that they and their parents found terrifying. (FWIW I would not condone this sort of bullying today. But back then, I thought it was hilarious.)

We let the note hang over for a whole day (yes, cruel) until Heather, being Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, ruined things by telling her.

Every Tuesday, all the teachers went to this hole-in-the-wall place where they served raw tuna, slice after slice, for a fixed price. This was one of the few group events that Jennifer and I attended. We would drink Korean beer and soju (소주) and shoot the bull and hope that we were not slowly developing mercury poisoning. (I would have taken a little mercury poisoning, though, for how cheap and delicious the fish was.) The only other big group event I remember was a disastrous faculty basketball game that I organized and then performed horribly in. I have no coordination and can’t play basketball. I simply needed an excuse to create a spectacle and shit-talk the other teachers. #gayrights

The students at Leadersville were made up of elementary, middle, and high school students from wealthy families, who wanted to master English so they could apply to elite colleges in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK and Canada). Leadersville wasn’t their primary school — they came to the hagwon after school for several extra hours of study. Including Saturdays.

This meant as teachers that our days started, typically, at 4 p.m., with the final bell ringing at 10 p.m. And every other Saturday, we had a half day of school, which lasted from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Typically, we would teach three to four 50-minute classes per day. A group of Korean high school students who were called Supervisors (and who Jennifer and I called “the Supes”) was there to assist us. They wore red vests.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU…

The Leadersville administration was made up of a very mysterious Oz-like figure named HuiJang-Nim (회장님); our managers, a couple of younger guys named Jaemo and Seungha; and two underlings, Haeshin and Soo Jin. Soo Jin was pretty and nice, and I called her Cat Eyes, after what Jennifer and I called the popular emoticon people would make on their phones — ^^.

Jaemo, our primary boss, was tall, with a pompadour and a bored expression on his face. Seungha was a bit shorter, and had thick black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He once told me I looked like Jude Law.

Seungha was hot and standoffish, and I used to jerk off to him sometimes. A few times I even fantasized about him and Jaemo tag-teaming me. You have to do something to fill those free periods.

I didn’t learn until several months in, when I was arguing with a lobby attendant at Paragon over some repairs that needed to be done in my apartment, that HuiJang-Nim meant “owner,” and was not in fact someone’s name. But it goes to show what a mysterious figure this HuiJang-Nim was. I only met him once the entire time I was at the school — even though his visage was plastered on the side of the Leadersville building like a North Korean dictator.

THE FRESH PRINCE OF BUNDANG

The area I was teaching and living in, Bundang, is a planned district just outside of Seoul, in the city of Seongnam (성남시), a wealthy enclave with a large number of high-rise luxury apartment buildings, and home to a large number of Koreans who have lived abroad.

I was put up in a bright studio apartment building called Paragon, which had a gym and other modern amenities.

My particular neighborhood, Jeongjadong (정자동/亭子洞), was filled with charming cafes and other picturesque brunch spots. The street behind the building I lived in had a bunch of cute places, where Korean soap operas often filmed episodes.

Seoul has four seasons and a climate similar to my hometown of Boston. There are cherry blossoms in spring, and the fall offers crisp, cold air and colorful foliage that give way to snowy winters. It made for a perfect environment to walk to school dressed in my academic-chic J. Crew finest — tan corduroys, maroon shawl-collar cardigan with leather elbow patch, and Chelsea boots.

I dressed Jennifer similarly. (Basically, like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.)

South Korea is a highly developed, modern country, with high-rises dotting busy highways up and down the peninsula. Unfortunately, many of its ancient temples and monumental buildings were destroyed during the Korean War in the ’50s. But the city of Seoul still has some historic places remaining, and also boasts lots of gorgeous contemporary architecture and design.

I WANT A COFFEE FROM THE SLOW HAND

For my first month or so in Bundang, I mostly kept to myself. I had brought a stack of 13 TestMasters LSAT prep books with me to Korea, and I would park myself at one of Bundang’s many coffee shops and spend hours doing practice tests. Koreans love a cute Parisian cafe moment as well as a theme cafe moment. I remember one place that was rainforest themed.

I considered it to be a time of spiritual renewal and wholesomeness for myself, so as a joke, in my head, I started giving all of the coffee shop workers I encountered Biblical names.

One coffee shop I frequented was called The Slow Hand, and I named the owners Isaac and Rebekah, from Genesis 24.

Isaac was younger and darkly handsome, with a mop top like a Beatle. Rebekah was older and matronly, with cat-eye glasses.

I eventually brought Jennifer along to The Slow Hand, and she and I couldn’t figure out what Isaac and Rebekah’s relationship was. Mother and son? Brother and sister? Friends? Lovers? Merely business partners?

Eventually, Isaac and Rebekah got so used to seeing Jennifer and me in the coffee shop that they would give us study snacks, like fresh apple slices, and leave notes for us in English letting us know when it was their day off (we hadn’t been able to read the signs written in hangul).

Once we had gotten a personalized note from Isaac and Rebekah, Jennifer and I knew we were basically local celebrities, and we acted the part.

I jerked off fantasizing about going down on Isaac a few times. He was so kind and polite, and thinking about him being dom and slamming his cock down my throat, as the smell of coffee wafted over from the counter, was extremely arousing.

I always wondered why I was so anxious in Korea. Maybe it was my massive coffee drinking habit, where I was slamming americano after americano, day after day? No way to tell, really.

I would switch up coffeeshops each day, taking in a different scene and a different vibe as I escaped my studio apartment and did a little bit of exploring around Jeongjadong and the surrounding area. I oftentimes stood out as the only white person around.

Once, at a place called Cafe Selah (when I went there instead of The Slow Hand, Jennifer called me a “Selah-out”), I was studying, and left a tube of foot cream behind by accident. (I had wanted to smooth out my feet, which were getting banged up from running.) The following week, when I passed by the café, the proprietress, a middle-aged Korean woman I had blessed with the English name of Bathsheba, came out yelling at the top of her voice, “Foot cream! Foot cream! Foot cream!”

I guess I was the only white guy who had lost foot cream in there.

After the first few weeks, which I spent mostly on my own, I started to get depressed. I even considered going back to the States. I had left a nice life back home, and now I was stuck in a place where I had no friends, didn’t speak the language, and had to keep my sexualité a secret.

After a month of little to no drinking, and zero exploration of my sexuality, I gave in and went online to look up the gay community in Seoul.

CRUISING ON HOMO HILL

As it turned out, the community was centered in the neighborhood of Itaewon (이태원), which was also known as the foreigner neighborhood, and the neighborhood where U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea would go out and party in.

Itaewon was a bit seedy, with its central Hamilton Hotel serving as the unofficial headquarters of the LGBT community. There were street vendors, narrow alleyways, and neon signs all over. (You’ve probably heard of Itaewon, due to the horrifying crowd crush that happened there on Halloween 2022. I was devastated when I heard the news, and worried for all my gay brothers on the Hill.)

One very steep, narrow street wound its way up a hill in Itaewon that was affectionately (or pejoratively, depending on who you ask) referred to as Homo Hill. It had three or four gay bars, the most popular and well-known one called Queen.

Queen was no bigger than most studio apartments, with a bar in the back and a large slab of granite in the middle that functioned as a platform for dancing. There was a small porch out front where you could go to smoke cigarettes and chat.

Queen was probably the nicest and liveliest of the gay bars on Homo Hill. The others — Always Homme and Why Not — were a bit seedier. They were also almost always empty. When I think of Queen now, I can hear the beginning of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” start to play, and see people going crazy. The music they played there was a pretty even mix of Western top 40, dance music, and K-pop. Some of the K-pop songs still ringing in my ears are “Abracadabra” by the Brown Eyed Girls and “I Don’t Care” by 2NE1.

The very first night I went out in Itaewon was quite a weird journey. I went home with this guy Hyuk — or to what I thought was his home, at least. As it turns out, it was a friend’s place that he was staying at.

When we arrived at the apartment, he gave me a towel and some toiletries, and asked me to take a shower. I had never had someone ask me to take a shower before sex before, and I found it strange and somewhat insulting. Plus, a bit lame — what a great way to wash away all the sexy pheromones right before the big event.

Hyuk also didn’t want to take a shower together; he simply waited for me to be done and then took his shower.

Before we had time to hook up, his friend, who was overweight and had glasses and lots of acne, came home. Hyuk explained to me that he needed to talk to her, because she was suicidal.

So I sat on a mat on the floor, waiting for him, while they sipped beers, and she broke down in hysterical tears about not being able to find a boyfriend. Their faces were lit by candlelight, and the whole scene felt kind of spooky, like a séance. And for some reason, it also made me think of the song “Norwegian Wood,” by The Beatles.

The friend eventually cried herself to sleep, and Hyuk and I had awkward sex on the very thin mat.

We’re not talking a tatami or even a yoga mat. We’re talking about something rubbery and about half an inch thick.

After we came, Hyuk turned to me and asked, “Are you gay?”

I was like, “You’re asking me now? …Yes.”

But it turned out that was quite a common question in Korea — at least a decade ago, when I suppose some of them had the old Roy Cohn attitude toward homosexuality.

Adding to the fun of the whole experience, that morning, I also realized, just in the nick of time, that I had misread my schedule, and had to teach classes on that morning — my first Saturday morning classes.

So after my very bizarre evening of squeaky-clean domestic drama by candlelight, I had to throw my clothes on and take an ₩80,000 (~$80) cab back to Bundang in order to be at class on time at 10 a.m.

I never got my Saturday schedule wrong after that — nor have I had such a hilariously sad and awkward sexual experience. At least that I can remember.

Over the next few weeks, I went to Itaewon a few more times on my own, and one night, I saw a cute Korean guy, clean-cut, shorter, with dark hair and glasses. His name was Minjun. He was Korean American and spoke English fluently.

Minjun didn’t want to come all the way back to Bundang with me — it was about a forty-minute bus ride or ₩50,000 (~$50) cab — and he couldn’t bring me back to his parents’ place, where he was staying. So we ended up going into Tapgol Park (탑골 공원) in the dark of the night and having a really hot hookup there, where I got covered in leaves and dirt. My jeans burned my ass cheeks from all the friction of sliding around with him in the dark of the night.

The lingering adrenaline and euphoria from my hookup gave me the confidence to come out to Jennifer as we were having brunch one Sunday morning, at a place around the corner from us with a cute French theme that served a traditional American breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, and orange juice. We would go there to eat, sip coffee and trash talk our fellow teachers.

Telling Jennifer about my sexual orientation was a risk. I knew there was a chance my being gay would be a problem at work, if it got back to my bosses. But I also wanted to get closer to Jennifer, and I wanted to dish about the hot sex that I was having. So I decided to trust her.

She didn’t seem quite surprised — but it didn’t seem like she had expected it, either. I don’t know if Jennifer had been entertaining thoughts of us hooking up or not — I could be oblivious where that was concerned — and she later denied having an interest in me at first.

But at brunch that day, she definitely became intrigued by what she was hearing of the gay scene, which she hadn’t yet explored in her time in Korea, from me.

After a few more weekends of my raunchy stories from Itaewon, Jennifer started to get jealous.

Jennifer’s ex, the American teacher I had replaced, had left Korea, and she had been in a prolonged depression and sexless phase since. I had seen it myself — many of her nights would end in drunken tears, with her throwing a glass from the deck of a bar onto the plaza below, letting it smash into a million pieces, just like her shattered heart.

Fortunately, as it happens, I’m a great wingman, and this was one area where I knew I could make a difference. So I swung in with a proposal:

“Tonight is your night, baby! I am going to take you out and get you laid.”

And since it was a Saturday, we went out that very night. We hit up a variety of clubs in downtown Seoul, mostly straight places.

There were a combination of chic, high-end places that attracted a crowd of international white-collar professionals, and then there were the bars that attracted more of a bro element and had a lot of American, British, Canadian, and Australian teachers at them. Those bars would play pretty good indie music — songs like “Chelsea Dagger,” by The Fratellis, “Fluorescent Adolescent” by the Arctic Monkeys, and “All These Things That I Have Done” by the Killers were the kind of tracks that played heavily at those places back then.

HOT DOG!

Out in Seoul that night, feeling good on soju and cocktails, Jennifer and I were passing by a group of hot Korean guys in line at a hot dog stand, and one of them, who was particularly beefy and lizard-brained, basically woofed at Jennifer.

“That guy’s hot,” I said. “You should go for it.” (At that point in my life, I would one hundred percent give a friend the advice to fuck a complete stranger that they knew nothing about. I still might, in fact.)

Jennifer said goodbye to me, turned on her heel, and went off to get fucked. Wingman mission accomplished.

Jennifer saved the guy’s number in her phone under Hot Dog. That night gave her a renewed sexual confidence. Suddenly, we were like two pumas on the prowl. And we made quite a pair.

At first, Jennifer and I agreed that we would switch off, weekend to weekend, which bars we went out to. One weekend, we’d go to the gay bars, and another, we’d go out to the straight bars in Hongdae (홍대) so she had a chance to mix and mingle with fellow breeders.

However, Jennifer took to having so much fun on Homo Hill, and at Queen specifically, that she would say we should just go out to Homo Hill and party there.

This did not necessarily stop Jennifer from getting laid, though. There was one night where there were two bartenders working, one of whom was straight and the other who was gay. Jennifer and I worked our game on both of them, and we ended up making plans to go home with both of them at the end of the night. So we fully waited for them to sweep, wipe down, and close the bar, and then the four of us headed back to Bundang to fuck. ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

Jennifer had beautiful long legs, and we always pictured her as Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, with that black stockinged leg stretching out seductively in front of Dustin Hoffman.

She and I were both only in our early 20s. But one night, Jennifer bagged a guy who was 18 or 19, and they went to a love hotel together.

When Jennifer woke up in the morning, the boy was gone, and he had left her a haunting note, apologizing for leaving before they could enjoy the morning together.

“You say I am a young. Is true. I am a young. And I afraid.”

Jennifer saved the note. Not even 30, and already a cougar par excellence.

COME TO MY HOME

Jennifer would make fun of me for thinking that I had really smooth pickup skills.

“All you ever say is, ‘Come to my home,’” she said. She was right, and I cracked up. But it usually worked.

One late night, I took three guys back to my apartment to watch Gossip Girl. (Netflix’s streaming catalog was still limited and I was starved for American series to watch.) I poured us all whisky — my go-to was Johnnie Walker Black in those days — and we snuggled up on my twin-sized bed to watch.

It wasn’t long before one of the guys left. It’s kind of par for the course in most group sex situations that someone gets nervous at the beginning and begs off, so it didn’t particularly faze me. Part of the process.

That left the two other guys, Jiho and Hajoon, who were boyfriends, and me. Jiho was the beefier of the two, with a serious expression and narrow black eyeglasses. Hajoon was shorter and shier and was irresistibly adorable.

Jiho and Hajoon sat on each side of me, and we started kissing, then taking our clothes off. Korean guys were always wowed by my body hair, because the men there are generally smooth. They sometimes had a little patch of hair on their chest, and very rough, wiry pubic hair that would scratch your face when you were getting facefucked, which was very hot.

Before long, Jiho had his head between my legs, and started sucking my cock. I watched as his head bobbed up and down, his face painted with that deeply satisfied look that only a baby sucking a breast and a man sucking a cock have.

But after a few moments, the two of them started to get into an intense argument with each other in Korean. They went back and forth, hurling epithets, until Hajoon left. As it turned out, Jiho had been going down on me a little too enthusiastically for Hajoon’s taste, and so he took off in a huff.

Jiho ended up spending the night anyway, and we continued hooking up. I told him to sit on top of me, and I stuck my raw cock in his smooth, tight ass, watching his black Ray-Ban glasses bounce up and down on his nose as he slid up and down my dick. I didn’t even bother asking what had happened with Hajoon until right before we fell asleep.

In the morning, he used the translate feature on his phone to explain to me what had gone down.

“Fuck,” I said. “I feel kinda bad.”

It didn’t stop him from wanting to hook up some more, though; we made out, he sucked me off, and then we took a shower together before he said goodbye.

Not long after he left, though, Hajoon texted me, and said he wanted to come back over. I texted him okay and made myself some breakfast.

No more than an hour after Jiho had left my apartment, Hajoon was suddenly back. I was happy to see him again. He was cuter and sweeter than Jiho.

I asked Hajoon for his side of the story, which he also relayed via the translate feature on his phone, because he didn’t speak a word of English.

I wasn’t able to make complete sense of what was going on with the two of them. Either they were fighting or just sneaking around on each other. But Hajoon also made it very clear that he wanted to hook up with me and did not want Jiho to find out. So I chose not to mention he had just left my apartment an hour earlier.

I had some tutoring to do that afternoon, so I left Hajoon in my apartment for a couple of hours. I let Jennifer know about the entire thing, and she was tickled. When I got back from tutoring, she had already let herself into my apartment, and had been having a grand old time with my little paramour. They went out for coffee together and discussed all sorts of things while daddy had been at work.

Jennifer said Hajoon was chatting a mile a minute with her, but that he turned into a bashful and quiet geisha girl the moment I walked into the apartment — as though he were leery of doing anything to displease me.

Hajoon and I spent a couple of days together, mostly in each other’s arms in my bed, kissing each other all over.

Unfortunately, he was also texting with Jiho and his family the entire time, coming up with excuses for where he was and what he was doing. He felt guilty about all the lying, and this made him forlorn. He looked quite cute when he was forlorn, but I felt bad. While I found the entire situation and series of events to be hilarious from my end, I didn’t want the lil’ cutie to feel so sad.

It was time to let him go. I took him to a shabu-shabu (しゃぶしゃぶ), or Japanese hot-pot, restaurant I liked, and I said I thought he should go back to Seoul after dinner. He agreed, so I put him in a cab and waved goodbye. That was the last time we ever got together. I hope he and Jiho have both found happiness in life, whether together or not.

Despite arriving thinking that I wasn’t into Asian guys and that I wouldn’t be having any sex while I was there, I ended up having a boatload of hot sex in Korea. I got really into getting facefucked while I was there, and would love to feel a guy’s rough pubic hair scratching my face as he pounded away at my face, his smooth Korean cock sliding down my throat.

In fact, I ended up having so much sex when I was there that I bought toothbrushes and other toiletries in bulk so I could offer them to my guests in the morning. We would usually shower together, playing with each other’s cocks, and making comparisons of our white and Asian bodies.

When we’d dish about our hookups together, Jennifer would get jealous of this kind of male camaraderie. She felt straight guys just clammed up and closed off after sex and things couldn’t be footloose and fancy-free like it was with the homosexuals. Which is probably true.

HEY, PLAYBOY…

Sometimes, she and I played little games with guys. Jennifer would write bizarre and seductive messages on their mirrors in lipstick, and I would sometimes tell my conquests that it was an American custom to keep a guy’s underwear after a hookup, sending a series of very confused boys from my apartment, free-balling it, while I amassed a collection of boxer-briefs I kept as trophies.

I didn’t take most of the dates or hookups I had in Korea particularly seriously, considering the fact I knew I’d be returning to the US at the end of the year. But I did go on some serious dates with this Korean American guy named Daniel, who was a photography student at RISD and at home in Seoul over the summer.

Daniel and I had tender hookups with lots of kissing, me running my mouth all over his smooth body, gently tickling and scratching him with my five o’clock shadow. I loved hearing his low moans as I fucked him from behind, looking at the view from my window at Paragon, feeling the warmth of his smooth ass pounding against my crotch. When we weren’t fucking, Daniel would drive me around pretty areas of Bundang and take pictures for his school projects.

And we did some shopping. He had good taste. In fact, he was the guy who had the beautiful green coat that Jennifer and I complimented. Jennifer called Daniel “The Doll” because of his perfect porcelain features.

I don’t quite remember how Daniel and I ended things in Korea, but I ended up running into him the next year in New York, at Industry in Hell’s Kitchen. We exchanged phone numbers and made vague plans to meet up, but I never followed up on them. I never really felt a relationship connection with Daniel. But the few short weeks I had with him were nice.

CONCRETE JUNGLE FOMO IS MADE OF

Except for the goal of having no sex, which I abandoned with aplomb once I realized how hot Korean guys were, with their deep voices and beautiful skin, I stuck with most of my goals while I was in Korea.

I studied for the LSAT a lot, spending hours in coffeeshops. I ended up taking the LSAT twice, at Hosei University, one of the top universities in Seoul. It was one of the few places in the country where the test was administered.

After doing all my practice tests, I was psyched, because I was getting scores of 172-3 or so, consistently. I wanted to go to a good law school in New York City, and I considered only three acceptable: Columbia, NYU, and Fordham.

Fordham would be the easiest of the three to get into, and my third Jesuit school. Fordham had more of a working-class reputation than the other two schools, but put out plenty of white-shoe law firm lawyers. Columbia and NYU were what are known as T-14 schools — the best of the best. A score of 172-73 would make me competitive at all three schools.

Unfortunately though, test day jitters meant that my practice test scores were seven or eight points higher than my ultimate score. I heard from several law school admissions counselors that this was a pretty common phenomenon, the test-day score dropping considerably from a person’s practice score average. My eventual score wound up a 165, which is a decent score, but not enough to make up for my also just-OK undergraduate GPA of 3.6 or so.

The anxiety of getting into law school and being able to go to NYC hung over much of the year. I had legitimately no idea if I would get into an acceptable law school in New York. I had a big fear that my best option was going to be BC Law, which is a great law school, but also represented going back home to me. I didn’t want to do that at all, at that point.

And I was already experiencing preemptive FOMO knowing that so many of my friends were going to be in New York.

Tom was getting an apartment in Union Square in NYC. Arash was in law school at Cardozo in NYC. Annalise lived right around the corner from Fordham, at the Trump International in Columbus Circle. Lindsay was applying to grad school at Columbia, and my best friend Matt had just accepted a job with a white-shoe law firm there, after graduating from Harvard Law. So there was going to be a whole crowd that I wanted to be a part of.

SALARYMAN

Thankfully, it was very easy for me to make and save money while I was in Seoul, another of my goals I was able to meet that year.

While I was working at coffeeshops, I would invariably be approached by a Korean mother, who would ask if I was available to teach her son or daughter or a group of students. I always said yes, and charged ₩50,000 (~$50) per hour.

In addition to my tax-free monthly salary, which was about ₩2,700,000 (~$2,700 USD), this added up to quite a bit of money. I didn’t have to pay rent, there were minimal transportation costs because I lived near school, and eating in restaurants was a bargain compared to the US or the UK.

When I think of Korean moms hiring tutors for their kids now, I think about the unlucky family from Parasite, and how so many of the tropes about Korean society in that film are true.

Over time, I was tutoring about four students one-on-one, and also teaching outside classes a couple of times per week. My students ranged from elementary schoolers to high school students. It did not take much work to plan lessons, and it was fun to walk to class in different parts of Bundang, taking in the scene and getting little slices-of-life as I went from apartment to apartment, removing my shoes and opening my eyes and mind to new people.

At one point in the year, a guy who ran an English school stopped Jennifer and me on the side of the road, and asked us if we would be interested in doing recordings of English lessons for him to use with his students. We enthusiastically accepted, and could not shut up about our new “recording contract.”

Jennifer and I would show up to “the studio” looking the part, wearing dark shades and jaunty scarves, and sipping at our hot tea with lemon (to preserve our voices, of course). We sat in a makeshift recording space, and read from textbooks about people like Dick and Jane and the adventures they went on.

Our boss was incredibly pleased, particularly with Jennifer. He said Jennifer had “a golden voice,” which I was jealous of at the time, because he did not similarly compliment mine. But years later, I sent in a listener voice note to my favorite podcast hosts, and they both agreed, on-air, that I have a sexy voice. So I feel like I ended up doing okay in the voice department, too.

Between all my jobs, I probably made close to $80,000 while I was in Korea, quite a bit more than I had made as a paralegal at the law firm, even with overtime. The financial windfall of teaching English in Korea ultimately allowed me to pay off about $12,000 in credit card debt, and save another $7,000 for the following year.

And I wasn’t scrimping on my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle in Bundang, either.

DARK SARCASM IN THE HAGWON

At Leadersville, morale among the students was very low. But Jennifer and I were relatively popular with the students. They called me Charlie Teacher and Jennifer, Jennifer Teacher. One day, our colleague Keith asked the students which American teachers at the school they thought were the best looking. And the consensus choice, he said, was Jennifer and me. Badges we both wore with honor.

I would do things to try to brighten the mood in class. Sometimes I would pretend we were in Dead Poets Society or The Cider House Rules, and yell “Goodbye, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England!” as the students funneled out of class. Other times, when the bell rang, I would drop my whiteboard marker, and abruptly yell, “Get out!” Which always cracked the kids up, the boys particularly.

The high school classes were more fun for me. Their English was very good already and we could have actual lessons. One of the classes was designed to be like an AP English class. We read a few books together, like Animal Farm by George Orwell, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I also had characters that I made up and drew to use as examples when I was teaching lessons. Yvonne was a busty woman, with a high pony, tight sweaters, and pencil skirts, and she came out in so many different scenarios that soon, the students knew when I began drawing that Yvonne was coming out to play.

“Yvonne!” they would yell, when they saw me beginning to draw the high pony or the tits.

One time, with some of the middle school students, I held a fashion parade (inspired by Ja’mie King), where I played an instrumental version of Eminem’s “We Made You” and the students strutted down the middle of the classroom with their best runway walks. We would then repeat the English word for the item of clothing: “Sweatshirt. Sweat-shirt. Shhh. Shhhiiirt. Thank you, Joon Woo. Now, sashay away!”

The elementary schoolers were cute little kids, and their lessons were simple enough. The kiddos were pretty docile and well-behaved, and they mostly just smiled and laughed at everything I said. The vibes were good.

The high schoolers were already burnt out, and just wanted to get through the day, so they were generally pretty compliant, too. But it was depressing to talk to them, because their days were so heavily scheduled. For them, it was up early to get to school, then sports or extracurriculars, then hagwon, then doing homework all night. There was no time left for going outside or playing or being human.

I felt bad for them because of that, and it reminded me of one of the reasons I came to Korea — to get off the treadmill. Granted, I was still very much on it, too, with all of the studying for the LSAT that I was doing, and all the hours I had put in at my law firm and in getting into Georgetown before that. But at least right now I had time every day to simply exist and reset. My students didn’t have that. And many people don’t.

Sometimes the students were just so burnt out that I gave in and let them watch a video. I tried to keep the videos at least somewhat relevant to the lesson, showing children’s movies such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the subtitles on, so they could hear and learn dialog.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the middle schoolers were absolute nightmares to deal with. To this day, a class of middle schoolers at Leadersville are part of a select group of people to see me completely snap, after I lost all hope, patience, and willpower, after nearly an hour of trying to get them to quiet down and pay attention, or at the very least, just quiet down, and failing.

I would quiet the class down, finally get back to the lesson, and then suddenly, once again, the din would return, and it would be as deafeningly loud as before.

After what felt like the fortieth time asking them to quiet down, I finally screamed, at the top of my voice, “QUIET!” Completely involuntarily. It scared me a little.

My entire class went silent, and next door, I could hear Jennifer’s class erupt in laughter over my meltdown.

“It’s not funny,” I heard her say.

Thank you, Jennifer. It’s not. funny. at. all.

I stepped out of the classroom for a minute to collect myself. Jennifer came outside to check on me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “But, holy Mary, mother of fucking God.”

“I know,” she said.

I went back in and apologized for losing my temper. Kids that age truly do not know better, no matter how awful they are, and I knew that, even then. But I also decided that day that that year would be the last time I ever taught middle school students, and I haven’t to this very day.

Boys at that age have boundless energy and very limited attention spans. They would constantly interrupt class, making loud noises, taunting their classmates, blatantly playing video games with the volume on, and the like. You had to reprimand them again and again.

Sometimes I would do what one of my English teachers at BC High, Mr. Collins, did, and make them leave my classroom and wander the hallways.

Inevitably though, one of the Supes would scoop them up, bring them back to me, where they were told to apologize, and then they would return to their seat and behave for about five minutes, before acting up again.

But the girls at that age are worse. You could scold the boys, and they would be upset for a minute and get over it. But the girls, who would interrupt class by talking, doing their makeup, and complaining incessantly about the boys, would hold a never-ending grudge against you if you said anything to them. So you had to tread carefully, because one wrong move could mean your relationship with, and ability to get through to them, was kaput.

One particularly dastardly middle school nemesis of mine went by the English name of Joanne.

One day, I had her class write pen pal letters to my friends back in America, asking them questions about their lives. Joanne was selected to write to Elle, who she proceeded to ask, “Do you have baby?”

I feigned shock. “First off, Joanne, you’re once again blowing off the article. It’s ‘do you have a baby.’ And no, she doesn’t! Elle is a sophisticated, modern, professional woman who has a career and goals that are more than just being home and popping out kids!”

Joanne was incapable of not talking during class. Finally I took her aside and said that I was going to dock her grade if she did not stop talking during my class. She called my bluff, and when I stunned her by reading her C out loud to the class, she knew I wasn’t kidding around. The look on her face was ghoulish, like an Edvard Munch painting.

Usually, when I gave my students the grades that they numerically deserved, their parents called in to complain. So the administration started intercepting my papers and boosting the students’ grades, typically from B/Cs to As, before they were returned to them. Leadersville was a for-profit institution, after all. Money talks.

Overall, I think I did pretty well my first year of teaching, considering the circumstances. I don’t know how much the students were really learning at the hagwon, considering how tired and distracted with other responsibilities they were. I also don’t think it’s particularly humane to keep kids cooped up in classrooms like that for so much. Let the children play.

DIPLOMAZIA INTERNAZIONALE

I had another friend in Seoul, Nicole, who lived downtown and worked for a public relations agency.

I didn’t actually meet Nicole until I got to Seoul. She was a friend of my friend Tom’s, from high school in Atlanta, and he put us in touch with each other. Tom was great like that. And Nicole and I had an instant rapport. With her, I got a more professional experience of Seoul, which I definitely would not have gotten otherwise. (If there was one thing that the English teacher crowd was not, it was pro-fes-sio-nal.)

Nicole had a lot of cool friends in the city. One of her closest friends, Jean, was a reporter for the AP, who grew up in Korea and reported on the North. Nicole also had a group of Italian diplomat friends, who we hung out with from time to time.

I learned a lot of interesting things from the Italians. One of them was that Italy considers South Korea to be a hardship posting for its diplomats — a category I would have thought reserved for places such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. But when you consider the pace of life of Italy and Korea, and the fact that it is hard for white women to meet men there, it makes sense. One of Nicole’s Italian friends, a woman, would say, “Korea is a graveyard for white women.”

It was fascinating to hear Jean talk about North Korea, especially since, at the beginning of my stay in the country, American journalists had been taken hostage by Kim Jong Il, and Bill Clinton had been flown in to negotiate their release. (I believe he went on a State Department plane, and not on an Epstein plane, this time at least.)

I never made it to the DMZ while I was in Korea, and this whole incident may have been a subconscious part of the reason why. I had read the fascinating and terrifying book The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan when I was in college, and I really didn’t want to fuck around and find out about a North Korean jail.

(I did, however, greatly enjoy the eventual 30 Rock arc that dealt with the North Korean hostage situation. And you can see Jean talking about NK in a Netflix documentary called How to Become a Tyrant.)

Nicole and I spent a lot of time one-on-one, too. We would go have martinis and vodka tonics at the Park Hyatt Seoul, which, like its counterpart in Tokyo, had a sleek, modern piano bar looking out over the glittering lights of Seoul.

Quite close to the Park Hyatt was LP Bar, a dark, wood-paneled bar that served beer and cocktails, and spun old jazz and classic rock albums. These bars are now quite common throughout East Asia (and elsewhere), but at the time, they were a new concept to me, and I found them really cool.

Nicole and I would smoke cigarettes outside and talk about dating, or our friends back home.

One time, I introduced her and Jennifer over lunch, at this place in Seoul called The Flying Pan (a great spot with a hilarious name that is sadly now closed). We had a nice time, but after the lunch was over, Jennifer was cross with me because I acted differently around Nicole than I did when it was just the two of us together, back in Bundang.

It’s true — I am a social chameleon, and I will adjust myself to fit my surroundings. Nicole was a lot of fun, and had a good sense of humor, but she did not share the same raunchy and outrageous sensibility that Jennifer and I did. So when Jennifer was making obscene comments at lunch and I did not go along with her, her feelings were hurt.

Apparently, the concept of reining it in to make someone else feel comfortable was new to Jennifer. She initially thought this was inauthentic, and that I was judging her by changing my attitude around Nicole. It took her a while to come around to my point of view that what I was doing was a totally normal thing to do.

A few years later, I mentioned the incident in therapy and John, my therapist at the time, said that the argument was more about Jennifer’s feelings about how I felt about her than anything I did. Which I suppose makes sense.

For the record, I continue to be a social chameleon, and I still think that it’s completely normal to go into different modes, and slip on slightly different versions of your personality, with different groups of people. Gay people are used to code-switching just like other minority groups are, and it gives us practice. I honestly regard it as a strength, and think we’d be better off as a society if more people had this ability.

It’s not that chameleons don’t have cores; being flexible is our core. And of course, we do have a preferred mode. And if we can be unabashedly ourselves around you, then you are likely one of our favorite people.

I believe this was the line of argument that eventually brought Jennifer around, after our first real fight of our friendship.

Jennifer was not what you would call a girls’ girl. She would take an instantaneous dislike to other women, which cracked me up. Nor did she particularly enjoy sharing my attention with other women. She wanted to be the center of attention.

When she and I would go out to eat, I would often point-blank tell our server that it was our anniversary, and ask what we could get for free. Jennifer’s face would always turn red, but we would also always get free dessert.

When there were tables of other girls nearby, I’d prod her by saying, “I think those girls are talking about you.” Or, I’d quickly grab her hands, and say, “We’re just two people who came to Korea and found love,” as loud as I could, mortifying her, and attracting the attention of everyone in the restaurant. I’ve always thought little scenes like this make quotidian life more entertaining and more lol.

SUPE! THERE IT IS

Jennifer was always down to hang with Korean guys, though. After she and I got wind of the fact that the Supes wanted to be friends with us, we quickly introduced ourselves. We became fast friends, giving them all American names.

One of them we called Philip, because he was handsome and had a princely demeanor. His buddy was Dan, an artist. Another guy I named Ronny — which Jennifer insisted on spelling Ronnie, because the two of them fucked, and her dad’s name also happens to be Ronald. The one girl Supervisor we called Annie.

All the supervisors spoke broken English. They wanted to hire Jennifer and me to teach them, but I was honestly too burnt out to do any more teaching on the side, so I let Jennifer have them all to herself.

But we hung out with the supervisors all of the time. The Supes in tow, we would go out on the town, shopping at Uniqlo (株式会社ユニクロ) or Lotte Mart (롯데그룹), or getting shabu-shabu.

Sometimes, we would go to Japanese bars, which are known as izakayas (居酒屋), and Jennifer and I would use our comparative largesse to buy the Supes round after round, spending the night joking around and laughing the Korean onomatopoeia way, kekekekeke, for hours.

Dan did drawings of different characters, and I gave them backstories. One of my characters was an alcoholic pegasus named, yes, Peggy, who went on all sorts of misadventures with me, capers involving the commission of felonies and the possession of substances such as ether.

Based on how popular these tales were with the Supes, I think Korean television is primed for a cartoon about Peggy.

It took the Supes a while to get used to my dry sense of humor, because I would say things ironically that they sometimes took for truth. They were disappointed to learn, for example, that I did not own a fully loaded Mercedes SUV with tinted windows.

♦

You’ll end up really getting on people’s nerves if you’re correcting their grammar all of the time, even if it’s your job. So eventually, Jennifer and I adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-’em, join-’em attitude and just spoke broken English with the Supes. (And honestly, we sometimes slipped into it at school, too.)

Koreans often don’t add the necessary suffix to an adjective, so instead of someone being very stylish, they will be very style.

As it happens, our friend Annie was very style, and she ended up completely changing her look one day, from preppy to goth. It wasn’t a gradual change, where the prep gradually disappeared and the goth gradually took its place, it was a wholesale change that happened all at once — there was no looking back to the old Annie after that.

Jennifer and I were thrilled with this radical transformation. No looking back.

One night, after the Supes and their families brought Jennifer and me to a fancy dinner in Seoul (that I initially thought was a murder mystery night), we gushed over our new friends:

“Did you see the way Philip was acting towards me tonight?! Very respect.”

“Very respect.”

PAGING DR. FEELGOOD

Jennifer’s condom-less sex with Hot Dog led to a whole HIV scare, where I had to take her to the hospital to get STI tests, because she was certain that she had contracted it and was freaking out.

Because I was obliviously drinking three or four Americanos per day — sometimes with extra shots of espresso — I was even more jacked up and anxious than I normally was in those days. The stress of studying for the LSAT, and the uncertainty of not knowing exactly where I would be when I got back from Korea, added to it.

So when I brought Jennifer to the doctor to get her HIV test, I made my own visit to a doctor, who I pretty much bullied into giving me a Xanax prescription.

He tried explaining to me several times that these were very serious drugs, and suggested that I try any number of other ways of reducing my anxiety — including reducing my caffeine input.

But because I felt invincible those days, and because I was already doing most of the other things on his list — such as eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising, and cutting back on alcohol — I felt like I could handle the Xanax. And I wanted the relief that it would bring.

Nicole’s dad was a doctor, and had written her a prescription for Xanax when he was last in the country. She had given me one, one day when I was having trouble sleeping, and the beautiful, instantaneous relief that it gave me automatically hooked me. It was the beginning of a torrid, years-long affair with benzos that would end horribly for me.

I remember waiting for Jennifer to get out of her appointment. I got her one of those Japanese stuffed animals that’s just a head with big eyes and no arms and legs, like Bill Murray gets for Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

We said their lines:

“Is this for me?”

“It can be for you.”

It can be for you.

When we got back to Paragon, I merrily poured out all of the metal tins, filled with 0.5 mg Xanax tablets, that the man who I was now unironically calling Dr. Feelgood had given me.

I started taking them each day, and it was honestly so liberating to walk the Earth with not a shred of anxiety, only pleasant thoughts and confidence swirling around my beautiful, untroubled mind. I was very good at projecting confidence back then, regardless of how I felt, but being anxiety-free allowed me to take it to the next level, and I truly felt unstoppable. There was no situation I could not handle. There was no romantic prospect I could not seduce.

It was a nice ride that lasted for quite a while before it started getting really ugly.

Jennifer had a habit of pacing and gabbing nonstop when she got nervous. I remember her being stressed out about something one day, and doing this exact routine, in her very warm studio apartment, as I sat on her couch watching. I had not taken my Xanax that morning, and her intensity, and the fact that there weren’t any benzos flowing through my system, caused me to have my very first panic attack.

It was so scary. I thought I was having a heart attack. And Jennifer was useless during it, laughing because she knew she had induced a panic attack.

She eventually got me a glass of water (eventually — she was not the maternal type at all). But when I think back to that moment now, I realize how quickly my body and mind had become dependent on those drugs. I had only been using them for a few weeks at that point. And that is really scary to me.

Benzo withdrawals sent me to the hospital in a panic a few times over the years. Panic attacks do become easier to deal with once you know what they are, but the first few times they happened, I really did need to be convinced I was not about to die.

And benzo withdrawal can, in fact, kill you. I do not recommend fucking with these drugs at all. You know what? Just be fucking anxious! Meditate. Breathe. It’s better than becoming obsessed with a tiny little bar that will destroy your life.

But when I was in Korea, that destruction was still a few years away. So I will return to our narrative.

TREAT YO’SELF!

Probably the best part of our weeks and our routine together were our Sunday mornings, when Jennifer and I would go to brunch, and then go to the jimjilbang (찜질방), the Korean spa.

If you have seen the Japan episode of Girls, where Shoshanna works in Tokyo and goes to the spa with her friends, the Korean jimjilbangs are essentially exactly the same. They are split up into male and female sections. Whole families and groups of friends will go together, splitting up by sex to enjoy the saunas, steam rooms, hot and cold plunges, green tea baths, exfoliating massages, and the like.

There are also common areas, where you can get your hair cut, or get something to eat in your borrowed jimjilbang pajamas and slippers.

Jennifer and I went every Sunday. It cost less than ₩8,000 (about $8) to go and soak and luxuriate for as long as you wanted, and we would stay for hours. We would both leave feeling so refreshed, our skin glowing. It was a great way to reset after partying hard on Saturday nights.

I often got stares from the younger Korean guys and the kids there with their dads, due to my body hair. Koreans typically only have a patch of hair on their chest and then, very wiry pubic hair. Occasionally they have some light hair on their legs too. But this Irish boy has hair all over (except on his back, where it does not belong), so they would want to sneak a peek.

One time, I went to the jimjilbang with a Korean guy I had brought home from Queen the night before. I delighted in being transgressive by lovingly soaping and scrubbing down his body, like two very good male friends do, in front of all the Korean businessmen who were there, looking on perplexedly, thinking something seemed a little off about the whole situation, but not quite being able to put their fingers on it, or wanting to deal with riling up a surly foreigner.

I had some fun moments of running my wet and soapy hands all over the smooth olive skin of my beautiful Korean lover, and played with his cock in the steam room, as is all gay men’s right.

Another time, I had a straight Korean American bro named Paul hit me up in the green tea bath. He was home visiting family. We talked for a while, and he said he wanted to hang out and party in Seoul with me.

I wasn’t sure if he was gay or not, and I didn’t feel like coming out to him, particularly in the middle of the sauna. Luckily my friend Erika was visiting that weekend, so we ended up going out as a group. I told her that Paul had a pretty big, nice-looking cock (it was the first part of his body that I saw, when he emerged out of another pool to come say hello to me), and he made moves on her, but she was unreceptive to it.

I would have been down to fuck if he wanted to, but I didn’t get that vibe from him.

There was a huge guy who looked like a sumo wrestler who did exfoliating massages in the men’s sauna. I didn’t get one until one of my last weekends in Bundang, when I figured I should try it. It was the most painful massage I have had in my entire life. And when the sumo guy was done, he showed me a ball of dead skin the size of a tennis ball. It was horrifying. But I did feel catharsis to be letting go of all that was no longer serving me. Very Buddhist.

On Sunday nights, Jennifer and I would often get into our bathrobes and do face masks. Koreans — men included — are skincare superstars, and there were very good and affordable skincare shops all over Seoul. One of the best ones was called Skinfood, but there were American places like Bath and Body Works and L’Occitane en Provence, too. Koreans put a lot of care into their complexions, and it shows in their dewy, silky smooth skin.

And they are conscious of other people’s health. I was interested to see sick Koreans wearing masks on the subway, years before the pandemic ever happened. I kind of hope this becomes a thing in the US too.

TWINSIES!, OR KOREA: THE CANADA OF JAPAN?

Obviously, Japan being a former colonial power in Korea, and being so close geographically, the two countries share quite a bit in common. Most of the things that are popularly associated with Japan have slightly different Korean equivalents, like with Canada and the US.

The Korean equivalent of sake (酒), for example, is soju (소주). It’s slightly less refined than sake, and typically comes in green bottles, with a screw-top cap that is often used as part of a drinking game.

Koreans also love karaoke (カラオケ), or as they call it, norebang (노래방). I used to really enjoy norebang when I drank, and we went out to a few places while I was in Seoul. Norebang places are elaborately decorated and sometimes themed — I remember one that looked like a princess castle — and all over the city. I’m a good singer and I am also good at singing in different styles, like someone who has been singing along with the radio his entire life. So I used to have fun singing tracks as diverse as “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash, and “So Into You” by Atlanta Rhythm Section (another Lost in Translation reference).

Most people are awful singers, though. And the thought of having to listen to them while sober is too much for me. So it’s been years since I’ve been to norebang.

Like Japan, Korea is also big on convenience store culture. There are convenience stores like 7-Eleven all over the place, and you could theoretically eat every meal, and eat well, between vending machines and convenience stores on their own. There was a convenience store in the lobby of Paragon that Jennifer and I used to ransack for premade sandwiches, or what we simply called “premades,” at the end of the night. There were egg salad premades, tuna salad premades, and a seafood mixture premade.

Premades were honestly kind of disgusting, but they hit the spot after a long night of drinking.

One night, Jennifer and I went into the Paragon convenience store super blacked out, and the next day, we couldn’t remember how we had acted while we were in there. So we ended up avoiding it for about six weeks or so, after that. If we did act inappropriately, we were most likely tag-team hitting on the clerk in broken English, with a smattering of Korean words thrown in.

ROOKY IS INTOLERABLE

Jennifer and I loved to hit on guys together.

We were quite brazen with it sometimes. There was one bar we would hang out at that one of her exes, a guy named Rookie, ran. Rookie was obviously his nickname. I don’t remember why exactly, but it was because he was new at something. But the Koreans all pronounced it wrong, saying it with a long O, Rooky. Jennifer and I would sit at the bar, drawing cocks and women with their muffs spread wide open, while Jennifer said raunchy things to Rooky.

Jennifer and I sometimes liked to pretend that we lived in another era, where women did not have any rights, and so when it was time for me to leave Korea, I “signed” her over to Rooky for protection. They ended up having sex on my bed, in my empty apartment, the day after I left the country. Paging Dr. Freud! Jennifer claimed she didn’t want to take him back to her place, because it was filthy, but he thought she wasn’t bringing him there because she had something to hide, and they ended up getting into a huge fight over it.

They dated for a while again after that, though, and Rooky used a really hot line on Jennifer during sex that I have been using with guys for years since.

Towering over her, stroking his about-to-burst cock, he asked her, in his deep, husky voice, “Where do you want it?”

What a great thing to say to your partner when you’re about to come. It’s hot, and it also implies that they’re getting it on them, even though they have the option to say no. Jennifer asked Rooky to deliver his load right onto her heart. I thought that was super romantic.

So thank you, Rooky. You are not “intolerable,” as one of your colleagues at the bar once wrote about you, on a cocktail napkin that she passed to me. “Rooky is intolerable,” it said. I don’t know what Korean word it had been translated from, but Jennifer and I were calling things intolerable for weeks after.

We got wild one night a week, but Jennifer and I were otherwise on our game during my year there. We would get up early each morning, and I would make us a smoothie, with orange juice, bananas, and ice. I had a coffee maker that I would brew incredibly strong coffee from, and we would eat a healthy breakfast before I went to the gym and Jennifer went about her day. I called it Café Select.

CHARLIE POPPINS

Jennifer jokingly called me Charlie Poppins or Henry Higgins, because she said I My Fair Lady’d her by helping her dress better and refine her ways. Her previous boyfriend was a big drunk (an even bigger one than me) who was also from Boston, and they had drunk and partied a lot.

Whereas Jennifer and I had planners that we meticulously ticked off our goals in; went to Lotte Mart to go grocery shopping and picked up lots of leafy greens (“roughage,” as Jennifer always called it); and made sure to cook ourselves protein- and antioxidant-rich, low-calorie foods.

I ended up losing about 30 pounds or so while I was in Korea, going from 188 to 158 pounds or so. I was quite lean and athletic looking. It was the thinnest I had been in my adult life. (My average in college was about 185, at 6’2”.)

And honestly, I had never felt better in my life, or been eating more regularly. Rather than eating big meals, we would eat smaller meals throughout the day, and also have snacks — things like mixed nuts, grapes and little Babybel cheeses, hummus and crudités, all of which were easy to get in Bundang. For dinner, I would usually make some asparagus and grilled chicken, with some white rice.

One staple that I kept stocked that was new for me in Korea was aloe juice, which was great for rehydrating, and also for nursing hangovers.

I would hard-boil a carton of eggs each week, and put them in a bowl in my refrigerator to have at the ready. Jennifer always said that represented having your shit together to her, the beautiful bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator.

And it honestly did. For a lot of my life, I’ve struggled to stay on a set schedule, or keep up any sort of consistent routine. But I was very motivated that year, and I don’t know if it was the change of scenery, the more flexible schedule my teaching job offered, my very real hunger to get myself to New York City in tip-top shape, or a combination of all three, but that energy was like bottled lightning, and I wish it were easier to summon all the time.

Having a partner in self-improvement was honestly very motivating, too. Jennifer and I could be each other’s champions, comparing notes, staying strong together.

“You’re nothing if not a survivor,” she said about me.

“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels,” I would reply, quoting her favorite, Kate Moss.

Some weekends, rather than getting ready to go out, we would just post up in a cafe for the afternoon, each of us reading our favorite Haruki Murakami novel.

We spent a lot of nights in, doing masks and watching episodes of Mad Men, which I had gotten really into back in DC. I liked to joke that Jennifer was like Joan and called her Joanie, which she didn’t like, because she saw herself as more of a Peggy. She got back at me by saying I was like Pete, even though I’m clearly a Roger. Jennifer’s mother Rosemary later validated this, saying I was most like Mr. Sterling out of all the characters. (Although I do have a soft spot for Pete.)

When The Slow Hand put some tasteful nude art up on its walls and left postcard-sized samples to take home, Jennifer and I covered our studios in them, mouthing Peggy’s line, “They’re not dirty. They’re… nudes” to ourselves.

Jennifer and I also liked to watch Anthony Bourdain episodes, and documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Jennifer would laugh because I was such a busybody, gushing about the wine and the food and doing eight million things, while she just sat, watching the movie.

One night, we drank wine and watched the Academy Award–winning documentary The Cove, about the atrocities of Japan’s dolphin hunting industry. We became obsessed. The moment that cove turned (literally) blood red made our hairs stand up.

We talked about the movie for months afterward, and always had to say its entire epithet, “Academy Award–winning documentary The Cove.”

EAT-’EM-UP

One of the most unforgettable aspects of my time in Korea was the local food, which is incredibly good. I can’t possibly name off all the delicious food I had while I was there, but I am going to do my best to recount my favorites, and some of my other observations about eating and drinking in Korea.

Any discussion of Korean food has to begin with kimchi (김치), spicy fermented cabbage that Koreans believe has magical properties, and is regarded as a necessary addition to most meals. I have to say, kimchi is an acquired taste, but it does grow on you. And it will certainly pep you up and clear your sinuses. It also pairs well with other Korean dishes.

Another staple of Korean cuisine is bibimbap (비빔밥), which loosely translates to “mix it up.” Typical bibimbap is rice, topped with sautéed vegetables, beef or other meat, chili paste, and a fried egg, which you then mix together and eat. It’s delicious, and can be customized to whatever ingredients you have left in the fridge — because they’re all going to become delicious clumps of just a lil’ bit of everything when you’re done mixing ’em.

♦

Koreans drink heavily. It was not an uncommon sight to see red-faced businessmen passed out drunk on public benches at 8 p.m. And Koreans charitably believe that the way you act when you’re drunk isn’t really you — it’s like a ghost taking over your body. This alcoholic always appreciated that interpretation of things, and wished it carried over to the puritanical States.

Koreans love their drinking games. There are a few, including one where you take turns flicking the cap of a soju bottle, until it breaks apart. Whoever flicks it last has to finish the bottle of soju, as well as their beer, or something like that. Then there’s another numbers game, called Baskin Robbins 31, where the player who is eventually forced to call out the number 31 has to take a shot. There are lots of others, too.

Playing these games built camaraderie, especially with our new Korean friends. Korean culture is a bit more buttoned-up than in the States, and the alcohol afforded them a red glow, and the opportunity to cut loose and blow off a little steam. It allowed you to see a softer, funnier, crazier side of your friends and coworkers.

And god bless alcohol for that.

♦

Because of this heavy drinking culture, one of the country’s most popular dishes is haejangguk (해장국), or “soup to chase a hangover.” I had it a few times. It consists of a hearty beef broth, dried napa cabbage, vegetables, and beef. It’s delicious. I didn’t have too many blackout nights while I was in Korea, so my hangovers were generally manageable. But the day after Jennifer’s parents’ first night in Korea, when her dad and I got blottoed, we went for hangover soup. And boy, did it hit the spot.

Another popular dish is samgyeopsal (삼겹살), or pork belly, which is a popular meal at Korean BBQs, where you typically sit in front of a small grill to cook your own, with waitstaff bringing you sides, such as lettuce, perilla leaves, and ssamjang (쌈장), a mix of soybean and chili pastes.

One of my favorites was tteokbokki (떡볶이), a ubiquitous, extremely addictive street food with a captivating red-orange color. These delights are steamed and sliced rice cakes, cooked with fish cakes and scallions in a sweet and spicy sauce made of chili paste. The result is a soft, chewy, peppery delight.

A staple at bars and izakayas was pajeon (파전) (scallion pancakes), and haemul pajeon (해물파전) (seafood scallion pancakes), which are tasty, and often served alongside beer or wine. The seafood pancakes are particularly yummy, and can be made with shellfish, cuttlefish, and other types of seafood.

A huge staple of Korean cuisine is doenjang jjigae (된장찌개), a stew made with doenjang (된장), tofu, mushrooms, green peppers, scallions, and anchovies. Koreans typically eat it with rice and kimchi on the side. Koreans eat this meal as much as Italians eat pasta.

One of my absolute favorite meals was the decidedly low-rent dakgalbi (닭갈비), spicy stir-fried chicken. Known as a student food, the dish consists of chunks of chicken, marinated in a sauce of chili paste and other spices, and stir-fried in a large pan with tteok (떡), cabbage, carrots and slices of sweet potato.

There was a dakgalbi place right around the corner from Leadersville that we used to go to a few times a month. We would go in, take our shoes off, and take a seat around a huge pot filled with the delicious delicacy, cooking up. Wearing our protective bibs, we would sit and watch the students and businesspeople passing by, going about their days. It was pleasant.

It’s always nice to have to take your shoes off in a restaurant and sit down on the floor, because it really forces you to engage with the meal in a way you don’t when you go to a quick-in/quick-out place. Don’t get me wrong, I love my convenience, and I’m as antisocial as the next guy — but I also deeply appreciated those moments of communal eating, and would love to have some more of it in my life today.

Koreans eat most of their meals family-style, and to my amusement, this extends to when they visit Western-style restaurants. Seoul has a wide selection of Western-style restaurants, as well as Western chains, and so, going somewhere like TGI Friday’s, you might see a family eating together, a father picking away at his pancakes with whipped cream and maple syrup with his chopsticks, simultaneously taking scoops from his son’s gigantic bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, bites of his daughter’s country fried steak, and little bits of his wife’s sirloin.

My stomach would be confused — and disruptive — over that kind of indiscriminate meal-mixing.

Koreans also love their pastries and baked goods. They favor a bean paste that is quite good and less sweet than most Western desserts. It’s honestly a perfect level of sweetness, a more adult and refined level of sweetness than you get with an American cupcake or donut.

I enjoyed joining the sweet Korean tradition of giving out Pocky candy to friends and love interests on Valentine’s Day. I was also given purple Hi-Chew as a good luck gift from Haeshin, before I took the LSAT. They’re considered a good luck charm.

HELLO / ANNYEONGHASEYO (안녕하세요)

I had a few visitors during my time in Seoul.

There were a few weekends during the year when my friend Erika from Georgetown visited. I don’t remember quite how I met Erika, but we spent a lot of time together senior year, chain-smoking in her apartment, with its walls painted hot pink and covered with clippings from newspapers and magazines. We’d listen to indie music and she’d give me gossip from the House of Representatives, where she was interning for Representative John Dingell of Michigan, and going on dates with staffers.

During my time in Korea, Erika was living in Shanghai, doing what I can’t quite remember. I used to pretend that she ran a high-end hair salon with an international clientele, where she would distractedly cut hair and gossip in Mandarin, while Cut Copy blasted from the overhead speakers.

But I do remember Erika was studying for the LSAT too, and she took it at Hosei with me one time. Another time, she came to visit because she had broken up with her boyfriend, and she thought a weekend with me would cheer her up.

Like Shoshanna, Erika was one of those white people who intrinsically made sense in Asia, even though she grew up in a very wealthy suburb of Miami.

When she visited, Erika introduced me to a lot of her Korean friends, mostly guys from Georgetown, and we went out to a few higher-end clubs. Those types of places aren’t really my scene, but it was nice to see a little bit of the “Gangnam Style” up close.

For most of Erika’s visits, we chain-smoked those tiny little ESSE cigarettes they love over in Asia, looking out over my balcony, and looking forward to what the future held for us. Today, Erika works for a big law firm in London.

♦

Jennifer’s parents, Ronald and Rosemary, also visited us. I really hit it off with Jennifer’s dad, Ronald, who was Italian American, worked in investment banking, and was a total loller.

The first several nights they were in town, Ronald and I tried to drink each other under the table. Ronald tried to blame me for the revelry the next day, but his wife and daughter reminded him that he was an adult capable of making his own decisions — and his own mistakes.

Jennifer’s mother visited the teachers’ lounge at Leadersville one day, and in order to show off how thin all three of us were, she, Jennifer, and I all fit ourselves through the inside of a wire coat hanger. (It was yet another thing I had seen on 30 Rock. That and Mad Men were my big shows at that time, and remain so.)

It was quite a spectacle watching the rest of the teachers try to do it. None of them could. Jennifer almost couldn’t do it, because of her boobs. But she made it through.

JET SETTING

I had hoped to do some traveling around Asia while I was in Korea, and I did. But the school schedule didn’t afford us much time off, and halfway through my contract, they told us they would no longer give us advance notice of time off, which went against what I signed up for.

I threw a screaming fit in the teachers’ lounge after they did this, to let them know that I was a strong-willed American individual who was not going to put up with that bullshit. Back then, I wasn’t very good at being calm or rational when I felt like I was being fucked over.

Korea is a very hierarchical society, and it is a big no-no, and quite ballsy, to speak to your bosses in such a way there. Leadersville had previously put me in touch with potential recruits to talk up the school, but they stopped that abruptly after that day, when I promised to let everyone know that they didn’t keep their promises to teachers.

Thankfully, I did get to take a trip to Beijing, over the Korean holiday of Chuseok (추석), a three-day harvest festival and holiday, which is their version of Thanksgiving. And I met Arash and Annalise in Tokyo for a whirlwind 72-hour tour in the spring. They were both quite memorable trips that I’ll write about in another essay.

TURN ON, TUNE IN, GET ACCEPTED

Over the course of the year, the law school decisions came rolling in. Most of them were acceptances from schools I had no interest in attending, like BC Law. It was a little bit of a disappointment to my grandfather that I didn’t take the opportunity to become a Triple Eagle (which is a graduate of BC High, BC, and BC Law, and a mark of prestige in Boston), and he always let me know it.

When it came down to the wire, I knew that I wasn’t going to get into NYU or Columbia — my GPA was too average, and so was my LSAT score. I had a very interesting résumé, and a good undergraduate school going for me, but those didn’t make enough of a difference back then, compared to the almighty GPA and LSAT score.

Mercifully, I ended up getting into Fordham. There was a delay in my acceptance, and I remember emailing the dean of admissions every few weeks or so, asking if he had any updates for me. Week after week, he would say he had no update, but to “stay tuned.”

After a couple of months of this, one day, I emailed him, again asking for an update, and he responded, with pep, “Stay tuned… really!” Within a day or two, I received the news that I had been admitted.

I emailed all my friends back in the States, and I remember a bunch of congratulatory emails rolling in, along with everyone saying how excited they were about the growing crew of people who were going to be in NYC in the fall.

In the coming months, more and more of our friends would drop the news that they were coming to New York too. We were going to get to live out our NYC dreams together.

ROADKILL

And then suddenly, one day, everything came to an end.

It was a beautiful April day, and Jennifer and I spent the morning doing errands, then took a long walk along the Tancheon (탄천), the large stream that runs through Bundang, on our way to school. We were in excellent spirits as we bounded into the school building, and headed downstairs to the teachers’ lounge to get ready for class.

It was there that one of our bosses, Jaemo, was waiting for me. He asked me to come into the conference room, while Jennifer took a seat in the computer room across the hall, looking alarmed and puzzled.

Jaemo then brought up a joke lesson that I had done the previous week, with the middle school students. I had them write a menu for a fictional café that served roadkill. It was based off a T-shirt that said ROADKILL CAFE that a middle school classmate of mine used to wear, that our teacher then gave us the same assignment based off of.

Jaemo claimed the parents were up in arms about it, among other things.

But most of the so-called complaints were of the type that other teachers got all the time, things that were met with a light reprimand, and waved off with warning after repeated warning. I hadn’t received a single warning the entire time I’d been teaching. Something smelled fishy about the entire situation.

It was clear to me, as Jennifer began to shed tears from her computer room across the hallway, that she could hear, or at least had figured out, what was happening.

As for me, I felt my stomach drop instantly. I had finally gotten to a place where I felt comfortable in my new home, and had established a healthy routine and a good income stream.

And of course, there was Jennifer. After I left Korea, I didn’t know how much time we would have together. That was what hurt the most.

But I also felt a twinge of excitement when I thought about going home. It would mean a summer to do whatever I wanted before I headed down to NYC. I could get an easy job in Boston over the summer, and spend my free time down the Cape, or on the Vineyard.

I knew I wasn’t going to turn the situation around, so I quickly negotiated to cut two months off my contract and still receive my full bonus. It meant that I only had a month left at Leadersville.

I broke the full news to Jennifer soon thereafter, and she broke down in tears again. It took her a few days to recover, after which she accepted the reality that I would be leaving with the reserve of a good soldier. We decided to make the best of the time we had remaining.

As far as what really happened with my dismissal, there was a great deal of speculation. Our first thought was that one of the parents must have gotten wind of my homosexualité and complained to the administration, and they were firing me to protect their bottom line, due to the still-very-conservative climate of the time. The climate for LGBT people in Korea even worsened in the years after I was there, especially during the pandemic. I don’t know what the state of affairs is today, but I have been worried about my Korean brothers and how they’re doing. I suspect the conservatism still runs quite deep.

The other possibility we discussed regarding my firing was that the school was not doing well financially, and that I seemed like the weakest link — i.e. the teacher most likely to accept leaving early — who had a contract coming up relatively soon. The administration knew I had a lot of issues with them, and also that I wasn’t particularly fond of working with the middle school students, so they may have thought they could save some money by giving me a slight push out the door. And I would say the reports that I got from other teachers after I had left, about further cutbacks, bear this theory out.

I will never know if I was fired due to homophobia or budget cutbacks or simply because the administration didn’t like me. But I do know that I got a whole lot out of my experience in the ten months that I was there. And I am very thankful for that.

THANK YOU / GAMSAHABNIDA (감사합니다)

When I think back on that year now, I’m incredibly glad that I did it. Did it make sense from a career perspective? No. Did it jibe with what I had done previously? No. Was I always happy there? No — especially not at the beginning. Were there aspects of living there that were uncomfortable for me? Of course — I think the necessary secrecy about my sexual orientation at work, and the fact that I may have gotten fired for it, bears that out.

But in a way, these were also reasons that it was a great decision. Moving to Korea, and navigating life there, presented me with all sorts of new challenges, a different taste of life, and a new set of interests — as well as attractions. My year there added wrinkles and complexity to my personality that would otherwise not be there.

It toughened me up to be able to live abroad, again and again, and be used to, and even embrace, some of the difficulties of establishing myself in new places and new cultures. And I think all of these skills have made me a stronger and more dynamic person.

I am also so grateful for my relationship with Jennifer. We laughed so much together that my belly hurt all of the time. It was exactly what I needed at that time in my life. We could turn anything into a hilarious joke together, and we were great at keeping each other entertained, with our banter about everyday life and our private language and perspective on the world.

Korea was also an incredible country to get to know. When I first arrived there, they spoke of Hallyu (한류), or the Korean cultural wave that was supposed to wash over the world, and I chuckled.

A decade later, they’ve had the last laugh. With the international fandom for K-pop bands like BTS, movies like Parasite and shows like Squid Game, Korean culture has entered into, and reinvigorated, mainstream culture. Even Gwyneth is sharing her bibimbap recipe on Goop.

I would love to go back to Korea someday, in grand style, like as United States fucking ambassador to Korea or something. Really show HuiJang-Nim and those fuckers in the Leadersville administration who’s boss.

JUST LIKE HONEY

On one of my last days in Bundang, Jennifer and I went together to our Third Place, The Slow Hand, to say a wistful goodbye to Isaac and Rebekah. I finally mustered the balls to inquire about the nature of their relationship.

Rebekah confirmed they were husband and wife. Well-done, Rebekah.

On my last night, we went to Itaewon. Feeling reflective, I was out on the deck of Queen, having a cigarette, wearing a warm bomber jacket with a faux fur-lined collar that I had bought downtown.

A Black girl, around my age, presumably a tourist or fellow English teacher, called out to me to get my attention.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes?” I smiled. I thought she was going to ask me for a cigarette. But instead, she said, “I just need to tell you, you are the most beautiful man I have seen in my entire life.”

Quite a pickup line, huh? I thanked her. It was confirmation that my health and exercise regime and the grooming and dressing habits I had cultivated that year were paying off. Which was a great feeling. Because I had left DC feeling a bit schlubby and bleh.

♦

That night almost ended with Jennifer and me taking a guy home for a threesome. My feelings for Jennifer had grown deeper and increasingly complex over the course of the year, and I was definitely sexually attracted to her, especially after having a few. Her long legs, big boobs, and extreme confidence were a huge draw for me. As was her sense of humor, and the way I simply felt when I was around her.

It was going to be hard to leave her, and sleeping together at that point would have really complicated things at the wrong time. But I still wanted to go through with it.

Jennifer decided against it at the very last minute, though, before we got into the taxi to go back to Paragon. Instead, the guy scurried off, Jennifer went home, and I ended up going to the big gay club on the main road in Itaewon, which we rarely went to because it was always too crowded, and didn’t have the same heart and soul as Queen.

I ended up drunkenly fucking a guy who seemed dirty to me even while I was intoxicated, and who I realized, after I got back to the States, had given me crabs. That was a nice parting gift from Korea.

Trust me, kids — when they show up, just shave it all off down there and start over again. Don’t bother with the shampoo — those fuckers will just keep coming back.

♦

On my final morning, Jennifer walked me to the bus stop, where I was to catch a shuttle to the airport. We had agreed we weren’t going to hug or do anything too emotional — that wasn’t our style. Instead, we said we’d both listen to “Just Like Honey,” the Jesus and Mary Chain song from the ending of Lost in Translation, and give each other a salute goodbye, while we took a moment to reflect on the year we had together.

I saw Jennifer break into tears as the shuttle pulled away, and I did, too.

When you’re in your early 20s, you have no perspective of time. You are constantly on the move, going from one thing to another. Everything feels like it carries so much weight, like it is so final or eternal or something. The truth was, Jennifer and I had more chapters left to write, and our relationship would become deeper and more complex in the coming years.

But that year with her in Korea, and those experiences together, are sweet memories today. Just like honey.

Goodbye / annyeonghi gaseyo (안녕히 가세요)! ♦