By the Sea in Korea
“I think they have music along the beach now,” said my bus companion with a happy gleam in her eye. She wanted me to enjoy my first trip to a Korean beach. And yes, they had, indeed, piped music all along the beachfront in competition with one of nature’s finest accomplishments — the sound of waves on a beach. Alas, 1984’s Big Brother in control of the switches chased me to a little patch of sand at the end of the beach that had, thankfully, been spared a speaker.
Music was not the only unusual part of my first Korean beach experience. It was the sun and warmth of May — somewhat early for the traditional swimming of July and August. Visitors came in significant numbers, but not one had on a bathing suit. Some ventured, or were thrown, into the waves, but fully clothed! Most wore jeans instead of shorts. Strangely (to me), very few were barefoot in the sand. They entered the water or scampered near the edge in street shoes — those same Clarabelle-style shoes that middle-aged American Howdy Doody watchers can quickly recall.
I felt sorriest for the little girls dressed in frilly Sunday dresses and shoes whose parents brought them to the beach, but wouldn’t let them get even the tiniest bit wet.
It was also on this beach that I saw in action what the Koreans call MT for Membership Training. In our university in Taejon, students were routinely and often excused from class when their departments sponsored an MT event. Held in faraway beauty spots like beaches and mountains, the students come in large buses to “bond.” Usually, hundreds of little rooms with rolled up mats serve as hotels. Here, they simply slept on the sand.
Their noisy all-night gathering resembled to my eye a cross between an all-night exuberance with college fraternity hazing. They stayed in defined groups singing and playing repetitive games to exhaustion, punctuated with throwing selected students into the cold waves. It is one of the favorite times for unlimited coed drinking, the strong alcohol having been brought by the university. It is during such MT gatherings that those who don’t drink, or cannot hold their liquor, suffer the most as outcasts. One of my students had graphically and poignantly written about his own experience of being forced to sing endlessly and then having to sleep in the puke of his drunken classmates.
Although the activities I saw only looked childish and innocuous, in fact the purpose is extremely serious — reinforcing the established groupiness of Korean society. It also sets a lifetime pattern, especially of the men, of frequent drunken social gatherings among friends and associates.
I was told very sincerely that Koreans require the uninhibiting qualities of strong liquor in order to allow themselves to be open and honest. My students were never ashamed, or even defensive, of their own or others’ drunkenness even when I saw them lying in the streets or vomiting along the road as I walked home from my late-night classes.
This excerpt is taken from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
Tags: Korean culture; drinking in Korea; beach in Korea; univ, Travel
