This began in waiting. The two hours left over after I send my daughter through the door of her language school. I started walking the streets around it. And walking, I came to understand what kind of ground I had been standing on.
1.The Three O'Clock Bus
For two weeks we leave kindergarten at three every afternoon. That is what it takes to make the 4:20 class at the British Council.
The hour when the day's heat has pooled and settled. I take her hand and we stand at the bus stop. On the bus toward City Hall she watches the window and I keep checking the time. We cannot be late.
If I am honest, it is a nuisance. Pulling her out early, riding all the way downtown, spending two hours out in the open, then retracing the whole route home. And in the thick of a summer like this one.
Still, I counted what was good. Two hours of English for her. Two hours entirely empty for me. And the time that belongs to the two of us once the class lets out.
These two weeks were meant for English. But something else came with them. Not going straight home when the class ends. Since we're out anyway — dinner together, a slow look around the neighbourhood, then back. I quietly moved the hours I had counted as burden into the column marked bonus. Looking at the city I live in with a stranger's eyes. That is how I decided to live.
Until twenty past six. When the glass door closes and her small back disappears, I am left on the street holding those two hours.
And I walked. I thought I knew this street. I had walked it before, more than once, for other reasons. Nothing new here, I assumed. A loop around the palace wall, a coffee somewhere, and two hours would be gone.
2.English, a Hundred and Forty Years Ago
Only by going there did I learn what ground the building stood on — the building my daughter walks into to learn English. It was the site of Pai Chai Hakdang.
Beside it stands a house of red brick. A hundred years ago it held the school's classrooms; now it is a museum. In front of it, a statue of a man. Appenzeller.
The name was not unknown to me. I had learned it at school; it had turned up on exams. Appenzeller — Pai Chai Hakdang — modern education. Three boxes memorised together, then blurred by time.
I stood there and read the plaque. A name that had lain pressed flat inside a textbook took on thickness.
August 1885. A young missionary of twenty-seven, newly arrived from America, sat two Korean young men down and began teaching them English. The following year King Gojong granted the school its name. Pai Chai — to cultivate the gifted. Modern education in this country began here.
So a hundred and forty years ago, someone on this same hill was learning English. The very language my daughter is learning now. And with far more urgency than I have ever felt.
I had thought I was doing something very modern, bringing my child here. I was not. I was standing in a very old line.
3.The Girl from My School
The plaque recorded his end as well.
June 1902. A night ship bound from Jemulpo for Mokpo, carrying him to a Bible translation conference, struck another vessel in heavy fog. She went down in two minutes and he got clear of her. Then he went back in, to bring out the young Korean man and the schoolgirl travelling with him.
He did not come back. He was forty-four.
That much alone would have sat heavy in me. But what stopped me was a single word lodged in that one line.
The girl was a student at Chungshin Girls' School.
Chungshin Girls' Middle School. Chungshin Girls' High School. My school.
I had assumed there was nothing at all between me and an American who died a hundred and twenty years ago. But he turned back into a sinking ship for a girl from my school. That student whose name I will never know had passed through the same gate I did, only a century ahead of me.
There are moments when history stops being somebody else's business. Mine came standing in front of a plaque.
It must have been a strange country to him. He crossed over at twenty-seven and died at forty-four in the sea off its coast.
The young men who gathered to learn from him were no different. On this hill, in those years, English was not a way to a good job. It was the language of people who believed that to protect a country you first had to understand how the world was turning.
Standing there, I felt myself grow smaller.
Because that is not why my child is learning English. So she can see a wider world, and hold her own wherever she lands. A thoroughly private, thoroughly ordinary reason.
The thought followed me the whole way as I walked out of there.
4.Five Minutes on Foot
Five minutes on foot, it said.
The interest that had started at that plaque would not settle, so I began looking the neighbourhood up. That is how I first came across the name Jungmyeongjeon. The place where the treaty of 1905 was signed.
I hadn't known. I had walked Jeongdong-gil more times than I could count and never knew such a building was there. Invisible from the main road, reached only through a narrow lane beside the Jeongdong Theater — not a place anyone stumbles upon.
The street had not changed. My attention had.
I passed the church Appenzeller founded and walked into that lane.
Where the lane ended, a house of red brick stood. The moment I came to a stop in front of it, time seemed to draw back a hundred years.
It was beautiful. There is a beauty that comes only to things that have endured a long while. I looked up at it for some time, then went in.
This house had been Gojong's study. A room where he kept his books and his treasures and received foreign envoys. On the night of 17 November 1905 it was surrounded by Japanese troops, and inside it the treaty was signed. The Korean Empire lost the right to conduct its own diplomacy.
Diplomatic sovereignty. The right to speak to the world in your own voice.
Inside that beauty, a country lost its voice.
Standing where the scene has been rebuilt, I was angry. Some had come here to help. Others had come to take.
When the world came pouring in, what if we had been just a little stronger.
The will to learn was already here then. There was simply no power to protect it.
5.Twenty Past Six
Twenty past six. The glass door opens and out she comes.
How was today. Was it fun?
Yes. She says it with her whole face lit and throws up a thumb. It was fun. I want to come again. She seems sorry the class is over.
Thank goodness she likes it here. The nuisance of leaving kindergarten at three is paid back by this one face.
I take her hand. I don't tell her where I have just been.
We don't get straight on the bus. There is dinner to eat.
Jeongdong-gil has many old shops. Walking alone in the afternoons I had noticed them again and again. Houses that have held this ground far longer than I have. Someday, I thought, I would sit down in one of them and have a bowl of something.
But the two of us can't easily go in. Much of it is too spicy for her, and ordering a single dish between us doesn't quite work. Above all, if my particular child takes one spoonful and announces she won't eat, we are stuck.
So what we eat is gimbap, or toast, or noodles. Things you can get anywhere. I fold the wish away and choose what she can eat.
On a street a hundred years old, we ate gimbap.
The old things on this street are not shut inside a museum. They simply stand there, and they are simply open for business. People walk past them, push the door, go in, empty a bowl, come out. And in among them, there we were.
It was an evening of no importance at all.
6.The Same Street
After dinner we walked a little further. Along the palace wall, and past the plaza in front of City Hall.
The plaza is full of foreigners. Wheeling suitcases, checking maps, taking pictures in front of the palace.
There are many foreigners in our neighbourhood too. Students who came here to study have lived there a long time, and lately I sometimes see travellers as well. Seoul has become, without my noticing, a city the world comes to.
A hundred and twenty years ago this street was full of foreigners as well. Only their reasons for being here were not the same.
On the bus she falls asleep almost at once. I look at her face. The face that came out through the glass door a little while ago with a thumb in the air.
The answer to the thought that had been following me for days was in that face. It was not that my child's reason for learning English was too small to be worth anything. That it could be small — that was what they had wanted.
The right that someone on this street failed, in the end, to keep a hundred and twenty years ago, my daughter was simply born holding. And she uses that language laughing. Yes.
Some people board a plane to see this street. I came because of my daughter's class. It is the same street.
It turns out you do not need a plane to walk a hundred years.
Every day, I travel. I live my everyday like a traveller. Right here, in Seoul.