When we leave home and have our first years living on our own, many of us will experience situations less comfortable and with fewer amenities than what we knew in our childhood or later in life. We might spend some of our early years in a dormitory room or a shared apartment or similar rented space, and, if our means are limited, our lodgings may even be rundown and ramshackle. I knew such conditions in my early years in Korea, but today it’s a fond memory.
The Korean word hasukjip is usually translated as boarding house, but this cannot convey the reality of my living arrangements fifty-odd years ago when I was content to live in a space the size of a walk-in closet, and with the barest furnishings, or none at all. There was nothing unusual in my circumstances, and I knew a few other local school teachers from out of town who shared this experience, and I learned later that the neighborhoods around universities had many student living the same way. My situation was commonplace for a young single man living in any town with no family nearby. Such a lodging offered the barest essentials — a roof, a floor and bare walls, but for me these were enough. Moreover, it was all I could afford, which is always a persuasive argument.
I lived in a rented room as a hasuksaeng — a boarder, or lodger— but I had the sense that this Korean word conveyed other meanings, it carried the sense of someone not yet tied down by responsibilities and the burdens of life. In a society founded on Confucian principles, with all relationships hierarchical and interdependent, I was, in effect, a carefree spirit in an otherwise highly structured world. Or so I now remember.
During those first years in Korea, I lived in a series of these bare rooms, at first in Chunchŏn, and later in Seoul. Sometimes I rented a room at an inn, with the other tenants coming and going, most staying for only one night; other times I rented in a private home where the family had a spare room and wanted the extra income.
In my memory these rooms were all about the same size, square or rectangular in shape and about seven or eight feet each way and slightly more than one pyeong in size, (this traditional Korean measure is about 36 square feet or 3.3 square meters.) In a newer, post-war building, my room would have a wooden door, but in older houses the door would be wood frame and lattice with a covering of white paper which might have a tear or a ragged hole if someone had been careless, and the hole might be patched over with a bit of the same rice paper. Outside each room was a narrow, polished wooden verandah where one could sit outside on warm days and enjoy a breeze. In one of my rented rooms, the colored wallpaper extended right across the wooden beams of the ceiling, and at night the mice and some of their larger companions would enter under the roof tiles and scamper across the ceiling, their little claws making a tiktiktik noise on the paper, and I was always concerned that one of the big fellows (yes, a rat) might fall through and join me in my bedding.
Speaking of which, there was no bed in any place I stayed, and I slept on the floor on a thick pad — the yo — and covered by larger thick quilt — the ibul. The floor was heated by flues running under the house from a small fire pit at the edge of the building where charcoal briquettes burned. The heating of the ondol floor was always welcome in the long winter months, but there was the danger of carbon monoxide from the charcoal poisoning the air, so it was a good idea to check the floor now and then for any cracks in the heavily varnished floor covering, and I still recall the occasional newspaper reports of people sleeping with faulty ondol floors and never waking up, reports which encouraged my vigilance.
One thing these lodgings all had in common was an ajumoni, the woman of the house who took care of the tenants — preparing their meals, doing their laundry, and in my case often adding to my basic language education. In my experience, they were all kind women, and I knew some who treated their lodgers almost like their own children, which included scolding, if appropriate, perhaps if a fellow came home late, showing the effects of one too many with his teaching colleagues. And yet, by morning this scolding was replaced by a display of nopashim, the solicitude shown by an older woman to a young person acting unwisely, and this sympathy would take the form of a wonderful soup, haejangkuk, certain to dispel the symptoms of overindulgence and make one ready to face the day at school.
When I first arrived in the town where I would be a middle school English teacher for the next two years, the school had arranged for me to stay at a somewhat upscale inn, a new building, and my room even had a window, (a window!) but the rent was well beyond my means, so after a few weeks I took the measure of my meager resources and moved down market.
Indeed, my new room was at an inexpensive inn right off the main market street, the bustling center of the town, but I was the only regular boarder, all the other tenants being commercial travelers visiting from the province, or others who needed a place to stay the night. I recall living there about five months, until I came to understand that my vice principal and a few of his colleagues were concerned that the atmosphere of the inn was not appropriate for a school teacher. Aside from the noisy neighborhood, it seemed that some of the other men and — how shall I say?… their guests for the night — were not the sort of people I should have nearby. Moreover, there were not one but two ajumonis at my inn, and I learned from an English teacher colleague (who had probably looked up the words) that one woman was the husband’s true wife, but she had not produced a son, so now there was a second ajumoni, and my friend told me she was a chŏp, which he translated with some embarrassment as concubine, but he really couldn’t tell me any more about this, and the school would really prefer if I moved, perhaps to someplace quieter? I took this advice to heart — but first I wrote down the new vocabulary in my notebook.
I quickly found a new place closer to school, and in most respects it was like the place I had just given up, a quieter, improved version, although it offered less insight into the human condition. This inn was another old prewar building, so the outward appearance was essentially the same — single story, wood frame, paper covered doors — and the room size and shape were really the same, and again there was no window, but by then I knew that windows only meant losing some heat in the winter months. In another aspect it was identical to my old lodging, the outhouse was, in fact, out— a separate small structure just outside the main door to the house. The place for washing up was in the open air courtyard at a concrete washstand with a sink and single faucet, and the water was cold year-round, promising a refreshing start to the day, especially in winter when my morning shave was brisk and hurried. I could have tolerated this — indeed, it was the usual thing — but as the fall months passed I found that while the ajumoni displayed many good traits, her economizing on charcoal was at my expense. I discovered that the charcoal for my ondol floor was removed well before dawn to use in the kitchen for cooking rice, so that by the time I awoke shivering in my frigid room, I could see my breath in the air.
Clearly this would not do, and the winter of 1970 -71 became so severe that I moved again, this time to a place where I was the only boarder, and my room was right next to the family’s, and I could reasonably expect my room to be as warm as theirs. This last hasukjip would be my home for my remaining time in Chunchŏn. Again, it was an old house in the traditional style with the usual outhouse and a washstand in the open air, but now I had only a short walk to the public bath house where I indulged myself a few times each week with a long soak in the hottest pool, letting the heat deep into my bones before I faced the icy walk to school.
These are the things I recall about the rooms I rented then, the circumstances of my daily life in those far-off years. To some people, it may seem like a life of discomfort, but I didn’t find it so at the time, nor do I believe it now. No, the memories closest to the surface are mostly positive, even fond, and any discomfort was just a small part of a much larger adventure, and it was only the physical part, while the intellectual and psychological aspects of my adventure were far more consequential.
March 7, 2024