Hello and welcome to my newsletter, Offcuts! As the name indicates, this is the place for writing that didn’t make it into any of my books, but it’s also a place for musings and experiments. 

This week I’m taking a pause from talking about The Great Resistance (but you can still order it here!) to mark our second anniversary of living in Seoul, South Korea, which was earlier this week. We left London and decided to sail into a new horizon when a work opportunity came up for my husband. (He’s a journalist for the New York Times and you can support its excellent journalism here!)

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There are many things I love about living in Korea, but your eyes will glaze over if I bang on about the great food, the cheap public transport, or the efficient health care system. Rather, let’s tune into my own personal K-drama: two years on and I can barely say anything in Korean, and can only read and write a tiny bit.

Functional illiteracy has many facets and affects all areas of life, but to give a flavour of it, I should probably start with ole Stripy Top. That is the nickname we’ve given our landlord. His real name is on our lease, but without question we would garble the pronunciation. We refer to him as Stripy Top because of his penchant for wearing a jaunty, striped red-and-white shirt in the warmer months. It is a look, as is his grey mane, trimmed into what can only be described as a floppy mohawk, with shaved sides and a long strip on top. It’s not the usual style for an over-50 Korean man in Seoul, but then he doesn’t appear to be the usual landlord. 

However, as landlords go, he’s mostly hands off, except when he is fighting with his sibling about the electricity bill for the building’s common areas. He owns half the flats in our four-storey block and his sister and one other person own the rest, and they constantly squabble over the shared costs. Our lift hasn’t been switched on in six months, though mercifully we only need to climb one flight of stairs. The hallway remains untouched by a cleaner’s broom, and we fumble to the door at night because there are no outdoor lights.  

No doubt the backstory to this dispute is juicy, but we remain a long way from finding out. Whenever he comes to relate some matter, he does us the honour of assuming we speak fluent Korean. The words whizz past, but my husband and I are the slowest phone-slingers in town, unable to get our iPhones out of our holsters to so much as Google translate a single phrase before he wanders off or makes a phone call. Our only option is to text our long-suffering bilingual estate agent to find out what the problem is.  

I can’t say we haven’t tried. Chris and I are both taking lessons, but two years on, my language skills remain steadfastly frozen at little more than remedial. I can now say hello — 안녕하세요! – to Stripy Top without completely tripping over the sounds. He appears to understand me and sort of bows with a little grunt. This minuscule victory comes after months of lessons, online and in person. 

Having spent more than two decades smoothing out high school Spanish, and with some ability to order beers in a few Latin languages, I almost began to believe I had a ‘knack’ for foreign tongues. 

Then I started Korean lessons. 

It’s a pity, really, because Korean is an efficient, logical, and rather delightful language. The origin story of Hangul, the written version of Korean, is also worthy of long-form streaming-service treatment. The short history is that in the mid 15^th century, King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, decided to break the linguistic stranglehold that China had on his realm. Until that point, scholars and elites used Chinese characters, known in Korea as hanja, but this was not accessible to the greater public. More to the point, it was not how his subjects spoke. The king wanted a writing system that would reflect Korean vernacular speech and help spread literacy among his people.  

Within a few years, a system called Hunminjeongeum, later known as Hangul, emerged. It broke with the Chinese system of symbols with specific meanings. Instead, it was based on an alphabet composed of letters that were combined to make sounds and words, and written in blocks of syllables. The letters were also designed based on the way Koreans formed these sounds.    

Korean is incredibly versatile and can find ways to replicate other sounds even if the exact letters don’t exist. Here’s my name in Hangeul: 캐리 깁슨 and when a Korean says it, it will mostly sound correct, something that does not always happen even in European languages. It also means that there are a growing number of English loan words that can be adapted easily.  

Despite its many good points, Korean remains a difficult language for Westerners to learn. Or, at least, this Westerner. Its alphabet has 19 consonants, which are straightforward. It’s the 21 vowels that are tongue-twisters. English, by comparison, has 21 consonants and 5 vowels, but technically many more vowel sounds. (Maybe it’s just vowels that are the problem, in any language. Cn w jst lv thm t?) Anyway, whenever I speak, I sound like a toddler talking while chewing a mouthful of kimchi. Most of the times my feeble attempts to say something elicit replies in English or puzzled looks. Far more people have better basic English than I do Korean, so the conversation or even basic exchanges inevitably default to English, often to my own embarrassment. I will say, by way of a feeble defense, the Korean style of learning is accelerated. In one month I have had classes that have covered the three main tenses (present, past, future), and a whole bunch of other complex grammatical expressions like comparisons. Plus, adjectives can also be conjugated, like nouns. It’s a lot. You’re expected to go home and do a few hours’ work after class as well. Now I understand how the Korean education system has become so dominant. I shudder to think what a math class must be like!

Speaking is only one part of the linguistic puzzle of living here — there is also the constant stream of text. There seems to be double the amount of legal information on everything, compared with English. All the necessary tech, such as Kakao messaging (which is also a payment and taxi platform) or Naver (a mapping, messaging, and payment app), seems to generate a barrage of wordage. All of which I have to screenshot and then run though Google translate, only to find something quite simple, such as my order is on its way, or that the app’s T&Cs have been updated.  

Even in the analogue world, the office buildings that line so many of Seoul’s streets, with their colourful, incomprehensible signs, seem to taunt me, while the bookshops are pure torture. Seoul has some lovely bookstores, but wandering through them is reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode where a man survives a nuclear holocaust and realises he can finally read to his heart’s delight, with no interruption … except that a short time later he drops and shatters his glasses. He has extreme hyperopia, and losing his glasses renders him unable to read the small text of the books, leaving him in the worst of all situations. All the more reason to crack on with Korean: if I do find myself surviving a nuclear war here — and that is, er, not such a ridiculous notion, given our neighbour to the north — it would be nice to be able to read a few books to pass the time. 

On a good day, the language barrier is like waking up in a surrealist landscape, where the world is full of signs and symbols that need decoding, an adventure into the deepest levels of human communication. On a bad day, it’s not Dali’s clocks melting, but my mind, as I’m transformed into a puddle of sweaty frustration. It is unnerving, at some level, to board a plane as a writer — a person of communication, of books and blog posts — and to disembark completely illiterate. 

I’m still navigating this change, and amid the jumble of letters and sounds, all that remains is to keep practicing, trying to stop mixing up my  ㅏ and ㅓ, and working out the difference between ㅗ and ㅜ. It’s the least I can do to honour the innovative vision of King Sejong — and it’s going to be the only way I’ll ever really find out what happened between Stripy Top and his sister. 

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What I’m …. reading 

Amusing Ourselves to Death and Brave New World

The Neil Postman classic on the television age has never gone out of fashion, and now that I’m halfway through it, I can understand why. I’m taking it very slowly, for once, and trying to chew over it properly rather than gulp it down. Postman is incredibly prescient. He died in 2003, just at the dawn of the internet age, but so much of what he says about television and what visual culture means for the survival and health of print culture is applicable here.

In Amusing he references the Aldous Huxley classic, Brave New World, a staple of ’90s AP English (is it still, I wonder?), which I probably hadn’t read since high school and so felt that it was due a revisit. Again, it contains much that speaks to the world of today. Both of these books raise a more personal question for me as well: how did they see this coming? Or is it the case, as Margaret Atwood has always claimed about her work, that they were simply reflecting or showing the society they were living in at the time? Things are happening under our noses and we ignore it. As someone who is constantly peering into the past, I can’t deny there is a part of me that very much wants to develop that skill, but I wonder if such foresight is gift from the gods and thus outside of the realm of what can be learned. Or maybe I just need to be paying closer attention.