Cheryl Pallant gets oriented in South Korea

In 2007 Cheryl Pallant accepted an offer as Visiting Lecturer at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. She had "no images of its landscape and architecture, no familiarity with its language, people, history, or culture" other than that American soldiers fought against communism there in the 1950s. Pallant, in the middle of a divorce after a 15-year marriage, was moving from Richmond, Virginia, population 223,000 to Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people in south-central Korea. Ginseng Tango is a memoir of her year there.

It joins a tradition of naif Americans who go to a country they know nothing about to teach and write a book to explain the culture, customs, and people to the folks back home. (Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School by Bruce S. Feiler explained Japan.) Because Pallant is such a good writer—she currently teaches writing at the University of Richmond—and because she was a mature woman when she went to Daegu—the book's internal evidence puts her in her late 30s—Ginseng Tango is a superior example of the genre.

That she is in the middle of a divorce, that she comes to Korea with a background of Zen meditation, Buddhist practice, and dance, and that she is open (relatively) about her fears and flaws makes the book more than a simple report of what it's like to spend a year teaching in a Korean university. The title comes from ginseng—"a major ingredient in many a medicinal cocktail. Korean ginseng is known for its potency in treating ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, and fatigue"—and her involvement with tango and the people with whom she becomes friendly at tango club.

One of these is a doctor who invites her to his clinic and who tells her "My soul knows yours." He treats her with acupuncture and chiropractics, and says, "Curve spine I straighten." No western doctor "ever offered me a chance of removing the curve, only preventing it from getting worse. Is this the eastward pull I felt from the States, my body somehow clued that the idiopathic conditions contributing to my curvature might be alleviated?" She begins to visit the doctor's clinic regularly and they become friends.

Unfortunately, the doctor is married to a paranoid woman to whom Pallant is an insult and a threat. When the wife calls Pallant's university, the chair of the department, agrees the woman is crazy. However she tells Pallant, "In our culture, regardless of the facts, a woman such as yourself is guilty. You're a foreigner. Rumors and scandals cannot be tolerated at our school. If you don't stop visiting his clinic, we may have to let you go." Pallant's friendship with the doctor, his wife/s attacks run as a thread through the book making it more than a collection of set pieces.

The set pieces include Pallant's initial struggle with a Korean washing machine, a rock-climbing experience, a visit to a public bath, a day with a shaman that includes fascinating background on Korean shamanism, tango lessons, drinking with the ex-pat colleagues from the university, student interactions, Children's Day adventures, and more. She is aware from day one that this is another country. "Already I've sliced up a small orange sphere, thinking it a type of tomato. I added it to my salad sprinkled with soy sauce, not my preferred dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, items which, if available, I have yet to locate. The tomato greatly disappointed, given its true identity as a persimmon, a sweet untomatoey fruit that never passed my lips before."

She comes to realize that she is not, and probably never can be entirely welcome. A colleague who has lived in Korea for seven yers tells her he has yet to make a Korean friend. "Every foreigner I speak with says the same thing. We're treated with civility in the classroom, office, or during mandatory after work drinking parties, but sincere lasting friendship is rare. Koreans welcome us foreigners, but only to a point."

At one point, the doctor introduces her to a group of his (male) friends. A woman schooled in dance, poetry and the arts; able to talk on a wide range of topics; considerate of local etiquette she could almost be a modern gisaeng, Korea's equivalent of geisha. Pallant writes, "A poor fit among my western colleagues and a novelty to the doctor's friends, I don't know where I belong nor what, given the choice, I want. Identities that once held sway in Richmond don't carry the same traction her. Here I exist on the margins, a foreigner in a culture that prizes homogeneity and ancestral purity." At the end of the book, she has returned to the States and is settling into a new home—alone.

Ginseng Tango is an engaging introduction to the culture and society of a country that is in the news regularly but one few of us know much about and Cheryl Pallant is an appealing guide.

We are not, after all, harmless

Because a friend whose taste I trust recommended Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, I wanted to like the book. And there are many things I did like about the novel. One of the two main characters is Yukiko Oyama, a Japanese girl whose parents brought her to New York (her father was "a director of the East Coast branch of Japans most successful car company"). We meet Yuki when she is in high school in 1968, suffering from being neither an all-American girl nor a proper Japanese one. Her kanji is crude, her Japanese inadequate.

She makes a best friend, Odile, who lives with her single mother, Lillian. A romance writer, Lillian is much more casual about parenting than Yuki's mother and when Yuki's parents return to Japan Yuki petitions to stay on in New York with Odile and her mother. The adults all agree, and the girls are then on largely their own. Eventually, Odile connects with a fashion photographer and takes off for Europe where she becomes a top model. Yuki is seduced by—or takes up with—Lillian's boyfriend/lover Lou and moves in with him. That Lou is perhaps twenty years older, is a frustrated sportswriter (a frustration he expresses smacking Lillian and then Yuki around), and can be violently territorial do not seem to be issues with Yuki. 

Eventually, Lou decides he wants to marry someone else and evicts Yuki from his apartment. She finds shelter with Edison, a good, gentle, kind man she'd met some time earlier. He marries her, buys them a house in Connecticut, and they have a child, Jay. Unfortunately for Jay, Yuki cannot tolerate Edison's kindness, solicitude, or motherhood and she abandons Edison and Jay to live as an artist in Germany. Which brings us to Jay.

The novel follows Yuki's story and Jay's, and two chronologies, 1968-1983 and March-October 2016. When we meet Jay, he's a gallery owner, a new father, and dependent on a 17-year-old, diabetic, hairless Sphynx comfort cat he's needed since high school to keep from fainting. His kindly, gently architect father has just been killed in a car accident leaving the Connecticut house to Yuki, and Jay's wife has delivered an ultimatum: The cat goes or the baby and I go. It's a function of Jay's disability that these feel like genuine alternatives to him. 

Unfortunately, to me, Yuki comes across as a masochist. She has seen Lou smack Lillian (another masochist) and does not mind getting smacked herself. She feels, I think, the pain is something real, like the pain you get from cutting yourself. But I think that's hard to make sympathetic, let alone understandable. Jay comes across as a jerk, not only for his indestructible connection to his ancietn cat but for fucking one of his gallery's artists late in his wife's pregnancy.

It's tough. Readers don't have to like a main character to be engaged. (Who would like Humbert Humbert?) I believe Buchanan wanted to show the harm Yuki's abandoning infant Jay did to him, but I don't think it works. Buchanan wanted to show Yuki's torment growing up as a young Japanese girl in New York City, and those chapters are convincing. She wanted to keep a reader's attention so she switches back and forth between Yuki (written in the third person) and Jay (written in the first). Although she labels each section with the character's name and heads each chapter with the time it takes place, the reader is constantly being jerked forward and back in time. It makes me wonder if putting the chapters in strict chronological order would have helped. 

All that said, I'm glad I took my friend's suggestion and read Harmless Like You. For all my quibbles, it's an interesting portrait of two people I would not have known otherwise.