My life at a Korean law firm (part 45)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
Working at Korea.net involved mainly improving government press releases rewritten in English or finessing the texts of my Korean colleagues who wrote original articles on recycled themes about growth in Korea's exports, aspects of its culture, that month's festivals and so on. Of course, the tired trope of Korea's having “four distinct seasons” raised its ugly head more than once.
Under President Lee, the overseas promotion of Korean cuisine (branded hansik) was a priority. We wrote about Korean state-owned (or at least state-funded) restaurants abroad, and lots of pieces about “court cuisine.” I cannot recall how many articles included a paragraph or two on the dish “sinseollo.” I polled my Korean colleagues, none of whom had tried it. To this day I don't know any Koreans who eat it regularly, nor could I find a restaurant that served it without resorting to an internet or app search. All I know is it is apparently quintessentially Korean.
When late President Roh Moo-hyun tragically took his own life, our technical team turned the entire front page of Korea.net black and white as a sign of mourning, while the writing team added a mourning banner to the center of the screen. The text was in both Korean and English, and offered a standard expression of grief and hope for repose of the soul. In the English version I used the adjective “untimely,” which seemed appropriate. However, somebody outside our office read it and called the culture minister or someone high up to complain that this word was a reference to his suicide. That Roh had made the ultimate decision was true, but we were not supposed to make any mention of that on the government's website. I didn't (and still don't) think “untimely” necessarily meant suicide, but that was not an argument that stood up on the day. Heat was being applied from above, and all other work stopped in order to have a meeting to make sure the manner got changed. There were a couple of times something like this happened, and it gave an insight into how the things that we were doing, which I sometimes thought nobody else looked at, could sometimes become a Very Big Deal once someone high up paid attention.
One of the more interesting and fun parts of working on Korea's official website was the chance it gave me to research and write some stories of my own. Sometimes this meant a little field trip outside the office, which I enjoyed very much. Once I went to sit in on a social integration course, a program that was just starting to be offered to foreign citizens who wanted to obtain either permanent residency or Korean citizenship. The attendees of the class I visited were almost all ethnically Korean Chinese citizens working in nearby factories. They worked night shifts, so the only class they could take was during weekdays, and while they wanted to have a permanent residence visa in Korea for now, most saw their homes as being back in Northeast China. They had some sharp words to say about Korea and their treatment and place in it, but of course these did not make the final article, which was all good news about how the government was helping migrants to settle in to their new lives here.
Not all field trips ended successfully. I had long wanted to visit the residence of former President Yun Posun, whose family has long owned a magnificent hanok compound in the neigborhood north of Anguk Station. One man in the KOCIS office was not part of the Korea.net team but, as the ranking public servant (rather than a contract worker, as we were), had some degree of oversight over us. He offered to help me set up an appointment at the house. At least, that's what I thought he had said. I walked over to the Yun property one hot summer afternoon and rang the buzzer at the gate. A young man's voice asked through the intercom who I was, and I explained my name and business in my best Korean. Confused, he went and got an old woman, for all I know President Yun's widow, who explained that she knew naught whereof I spoke and that no such appointment had been made. Embarrassed and frustrated, I called the man at KOCIS to ask what had gone wrong. He informed me that that it wasn't the Yun residence he had arranged for me to visit, but some other place I had only vaguely heard of.
Somehow between his awkward communication style and my imperfect Korean (he appeared to possess no conversational English ability) a miscommunication had arisen. I trudged away, defeated, and found solace in a cool drink at one of the few extant Japanese colonial commercial buildings close by. I never did get inside the Yun residence. This same public servant later came to assume even more of a day-to-day leadership role over Korea.net, despite a paucity of proficiency in English, a fact whose irony was not lost on me.
One of my favorite stories was one about the four large city gates and what remains of the old city wall of Seoul. It involved a lot of research in both English and Korean to get the facts together. This was before Jongno-gu Office published its very nice walking map of the wall and the gates. Writing that piece and others like it gave me a newfound interest in the historical neighborhoods and buildings of Seoul and wider Korea.
Some articles I wrote explained new services or websites that foreigners would find interesting, such as a webpage that showed bus routes and helped you plot a journey from A to B. Another was a site to help you find the new street address from the old system address. One more was on a feature of a map website that enabled you to virtually walk your way around city streets and look at buildings as they would appear from the road. All this was in the era before mobile phone applications had really taken off, so websites were all that people had to get such information.