Today: Fred’s still adjusting to Korean life.

 

 

Cast of characters

 

 

Fred

 

 

*

 

 

He was sinking in quicksand.

 

 

It was the end of Fred Pineridge’s second week in Chinju and he was amazed at how quickly Korean life was swallowing him.

 

 

Looking back, his days as a security guard were receding into nothing and he really had to make a go of it here.

 

 

Korea wasn’t the sort of place you could just dabble in.

 

 

You had to fully commit.

 

 

Go all the way or go away.

 

 

You had to go on the attack.

 

 

He’d been rolling over in his mind Mr E’s revealing insights about what had happened to Thomas.

 

 

He could understand Damion’s motives in helping his sister get her job back after Fred had let it fritter away.

 

 

Yet what pissed Fred off were Damion’s foolish designs on Coffee Lady, a futile fantasy that had had a nasty spin-off:

 

 

Thomas had been screwed out of his job.

 

 

Fred vowed that next time he saw Damey he’d have it out with him.

 

 

Strangely, though, the wide-eyed waygook did a disappearing act and was nowhere to be seen these days.

 

 

 * Where has Damion disappeared to? *

 

 

After-hours in his own time, Fred embarked on a new personal project:

 

 

To suspend his own culture and become Korean.

 

 

It stemmed from alienation he’d felt from other ex-pats in Chinju, most of them Canadians.

 

 

He’d run into them in the street periodically; maybe make eye contact; but that was as far as it went.

 

 

Those other waygooks seemed to instinctively avoid Fred like the plague.

 

 

Why?

 

 

Maybe, he theorized, they were seeking out the pure Korean experience.

 

 

So he decided to follow their lead.

 

 

Yet even in his new, adopted Korean home, one Canuck tradition that Fred couldn’t abandon was Friday night beers.

 

Donna had told him that a small group of waygooks congregated every Friday night in a pub near the Chinju rotary.

 

 

Apparently the meetings had commenced only recently with just a few foreigners but with ‘Englishy’ schools multiplying like the plague, a steady stream of fresh (mostly) white meat was rolling in.

 

 

And even after only a week or two in Korea, the newcomers already had war stories to tell over cold beers.

 

 

* What are these ‘war stories’? *

 

 

Fred’s first waygook pub night was already in full swing when he arrived.

 

 

The dim, noisy establishment had about a dozen tables, all of them full with chatty, gregarious and cliquey college-aged Koreans or young business people.

 

 

Lots of hair gel.

 

 

Thick, stifling clouds of cigarette smoke.

 

 

Expensive, trendy eyeglasses.

 

 

The latest knock-off designer clothes.

 

 

Along the wall were additional booths.

 

 

When Fred entered, he scanned the room and even amidst the sea of Koreans, the foreigners’ booth stuck out like a sore thumb – way down at the end, sloughed off in a dank corner beside stinky washrooms.

 

 

Waygook ghetto-ization Fred chuckled to himself.

 

 

Except for Donna, he didn’t know any of the freshly-minted foreigners and no one acknowledged him as he got to the table.

 

 

This was the kind of mild intra-waygook alienation that was becoming second nature to him.

 

 

He slipped into the booth beside Donna.

 

 

* Will Fred have a good time hanging out with these other waygooks? *

 

 

*

 

 

Tomorrow: The foreigners share some of their negative experiences.