Oct. 28, 04:00
“Like a fish that is drawn from its watery abode and thrown upon land: even so does this mind flutter. Hence should the realm of passions be shunned.”
-The Dhammapada
About a week in Kwangju so far. I bought a bicycle and toured the city a bit yesterday, which was a rewarding exercise. I made it out to the International Kimchi festival and sampled their Kimchi Bossam.
I’m feeling a bit accident prone lately. The day I met Dr. Linton, he told me a story about the time my great grandfather’s house burned to the ground. Apparently the Japanese emperor had given him a prize, and the prize was lost in the burning, so he was ordered by the Japanese generals to commit “hari kari” (actually pronounced hara kiri). He abstained of course. The day after hearing this story, Dr. Linton’s own mother’s house in North Carolina burned down.
The other day I went out to see Kwangju with my friend Mina, who is studying medicine at Chosun University. The last thing I asked her about was her parents, and she said she hardly gets a chance to see her father because only her mother comes down from Seoul. Then the next day she hears that her father has been hospitalized, that his cancer had metastasized, and she took off to Seoul. It called to mind the fact that my uncle passed away just two weeks after I paid him a visit for the second time.
I take this as a reminder that I always seem to take things personally when people have other things going on in their lives. A reminder that compared to my own trials, other people’s problems are usually much greater than my own, and more often than not have nothing to do with me. I realize that I am not a cause of disaster, but rather I am an incidental co-arising phenomenon to the disasters that occur around me, from which I always seem to emerge unscathed.
It’s 4:00 in the morning. My sleep and eating schedule has been mostly thrown off, perhaps due to lack of a proper study/work schedule. Yesterday I turned 23. I’d like to say “I don’t feel any older” but it wouldn’t be true. On this day I feel quite a bit older. Time carries us along like a river, drifting us ever closer to the source and the grande finale.
Oct. 29, 18:00
I had an energizing couple of days in the interim of this blog entry. I’ll post it as a reminder that the brain truly has a mind of its own (…?) and can right itself within a short time period.
I rode the bus to Yeosu and finally made the acquaintance of Dr. Kim In Kwon. He’s tall and wiry with shiny eyes and wavy white hair. He looks like the Korean version of Richard Gere in Dr. T and the women. Dr. Kim is of course the director of Aeyangwon Hospital and the president of the Wilson Leprosy Center. I’m not sure how these institutions operate exactly, but they are the fruit of Dr. RM Wilson senior’s work in Korea beginning a century prior.
Some time in the 1920s (oh yes, quite the historian I am) Dr. Wilson and his flock of lepers (about 1000 all told) made a mass exodus on foot from Kwangju to a Peninsula near Yeosu. The peninsula was bought with grants to the Leprosarium. I am not sure who posted the money that the peninsula itself was bought with (this information is written somewhere and I will update this later) but a large part of the work was simply getting enough funds to care for the plethora of patients who traversed the country on foot and crutch to receive treatment from the missionary doctors. Major donors included churches in the United States as well as the Japanese Empress. It’s about a 90 minute drive from Kwangju to the site on the highway, so we can imagine a herd of lepers, many of them blind and missing limbs, making the trek in communal fashion with whatever possessions they had over several days.
Today the hospital still stands on that peninsula. It later morphed into a polio treatment center, and then a rehabilitation center and an orthopedic hospital. The original hospital is now a museum housing various artifacts from the earlier days. I will post pictures when I get the ability to send emails from my cell phone.
Dr. Kim met me for lunch in between his 36 operations he performed that day. I was impressed by how good-natured he is even in the midst of an enormous workload. He told me that RM Wilson also worked very hard. This contrasts somewhat to Dr. Linton’s depiction of RMW. “He would leave work in the middle of the day to go hunting. My kind of man, that RM Wilson.” Dr. Linton also reported that RM Wilson was the emitter (this is not the word I am looking for...) of the quote “Those who played, stayed.” If I had to interpret the quote, I might guess he was talking about those who stayed in Korea vs. those who left. The ones who saw the task as an adventure and a game rather than a burden or a cross to bear were the ones who saw it through. Inevitably it is evocative of the late baseball announcer Yogi Berra. But it just might be the best piece of advice I could begin this sojourn with: those who played, stayed. It’s important not to take one’s mission too seriously.
I couldn't help but marvel at the protestant work ethic which made the hospital possible. Of course, the patients themselves built their own houses and tended their own gardens. And the labor that laid the bricks to the hospital and adjacent church was doubtlessly the sweat and tears of cheap Korean labor hired by the church. The hospital, as far as I could gather, has no records pre-dating WWII. I am still not sure whether to think of the peninsular settlement as something of a leprosarium-cum-ashram or an internment camp several steps up from the veritable penal colony for lepers that was established on Sorok-do, a small island in the province.
Certainly the colonial government’s presence was strongly felt. There was a famous megalomaniacal Japanese director of the hospital on Sorok-do (that is, elsewhere) who was assassinated by his patients during WWII. Likewise I remember a picture that my grandfather showed me of a Japanese officer who was assassinated by a patient of my great grandfather’s.
My confidence in my ability or wherewithal to truly unearth these stories in a meaningful sense and weave together a meaningful portrait of the leprosarium is thin. It would take a more savvy individual than I more time than I have to truly work towards that end. In the mean time, speculation makes for fine stories.
To this day former patients live in the settlement around the hospital, though the majority have passed away or were resettled elsewhere many years ago. Yeosu is famous for its beautiful coastline, and were it not for this settlement it should have become prime real estate for some hotels. On this day, the village elderly were said to have been taken on an outing to the hills for tanp’ungnori, or “maple viewing,” a seasonal pastime of watching the changing colors of the leaves. The village is accented with a plethora of ripe orange persimmons standing on bare winter branches.
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