In the summer of 2008, the New York Times ran “Urban Seoul,” a piece of about 800 words on life as an American expatriate in Korea. Its author, a writer in his mid-30s named Gabe Hudson, had arrived here the previous year to take professorship at at Yonsei University, becoming the founding chair of the creative writing program at its Underwood International College. This reflection on “the ups and downs of newbie life in Seoul,” as the Korea Joongang Daily‘s Richard Scott-Ashe writes, “sparked some lively debate on local blogs, foreign and Korean alike.” That’s one way of putting it. A decade after its publication, the collective Seoul expat memory still regards Hudson’s short essay as the standard-bearer for bad Western writing on Korea, the worst first-person sketch of the country to appear in a major publication this century.
One can criticize Hudson for writing about a foreign country from a place of ignorance, but he says as much himself up front. “I don’t speak Korean and most Koreans don’t really speak English,” he admits in the first sentence, “except my students, who speak as many as four languages and who bow to me when they walk by on campus.” A Korea-resident Westerner not speaking Korean is, as every new expat here discovers — some with a shock, some with relief — more or less par for the course. So is the expectation of English proficiency for students in Korea’s most prestigious universities, the top three of which, Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University, constitute the striven-for holy trinity of “SKY” schools.
That linguistic contrast alone could provide the basis for an entire book on Korean society, but Hudson confines himself to his own experience of awe and bewilderment. “When Ja-Won buzzes the front door to my apartment, an image of her face instantly appears on the silver Samsung video screen on my living-room wall,” he writes of the beginning of a night out with his Korean girlfriend. “When I step into the hall to greet her, the door behind me suctions itself closed, locks itself with a motor and speaks to me in Korean.” His description of Korea in the 2000s begins to sound uncannily like many a Western writer’s description of Japan in the 1980s: “In the elevator, all sharp angles and shiny silver, a computer monitor plays Korean commercials continuously.”
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.