David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
This is why Korea works
Courtesy of Cedric Fauntleroy
By David A. Tizzard
It’s not often that I can’t make it to a lecture or public speaking event. I’m apparently one of those people whose daily planners resemble a game of high-stakes Tetris played at double speed. But earlier this week, I was forced to cancel all my appointments for the day and drive myself to hospital. Something wasn’t right with me. I wasn’t sure what it was. Google or Chat GPT was only likely to tell me I had some kind of rare terminal space-rot. So, I dragged myself to the local hospital.
I arrived at 9 a.m., to find everything already in full swing. I brought a phone charger and book with me because I half expected I might be in for a long stay. Not because of the hospital waiting time, though that was certainly a possibility, but I also feared I might become a permanent resident of a sterilized white room.
I collected my ticket from the machine and waited to be seen by the two young ladies operating the reception. Both were chatting away to elderly Korean patients. It only took about 5 minutes before they called my number and asked what was wrong with me. I described my symptoms (I now know how to say stomach cramps correctly in Korean). They took my ID, clicked through a digital ghost of my life on their monitors, and handed me a slip of paper. The initial fee was 11,000 won. About seven dollars. The price of a mid-tier ham sandwich and a black coffee in most cities.
Off I strolled looking for the Internal Medicine department. Perhaps suffering from brain fog because of my condition, I stopped to ask a passing nurse where it was. She looked at me with a confused smile and then pointed to the door right in front of me. “It’s right here,” she said.
I walked in, handed over my papers, and waited for further instruction. Go and check your blood pressure they told me. I was reassured that I also knew what that was in Korean so I rolled up my sleeve and offered my arm to the machine. It hummed and squeezed. My blood pressure was good. It always is somehow. A physiological fact that causes my wife a non-trivial amount of existential resentment.
"You’ll have to wait," the nurse said.
I looked at the electronic board. Four names. Mine was the third. It looked absurdly long, a sprawling mess of syllables in a sea of concise, three-character Korean ones. To protect privacy, the Korean system usually blurs the middle character of a name. Doing that to mine just made it look like a garbled transmission from a distant star you’d find in a short story by Asimov.
My long wait was about 15 minutes. It was time to see the doctor.
He sat me down and ran through all the questions. He then put me on a bed and went through some checks with his hands and stethoscope, the former warm and the latter very cold. I needed blood tests and x-rays apparently. He needed to be sure there was nothing serious going on. Blood tests and x-rays? I was in for a long day. Or so I thought.
The blood tests were like a Fordist production. You scanned your barcode at the entrance of the department and received a number. You then went forward when your number came up to one of the three windows where young nurses took blood from patient after patient, barely breaking rhythm. Smiling the whole time. Reassuring the patients as they tied the tourniquet round the bicep and tapped the forearm. “Dakum,” they say as the needle slides in. Total efficiency. It was time for my x-ray.
What was inside my body, I wondered to myself. Are they going to find something they shouldn’t? Something I don’t want to be in there? It was a hospital after all. And besides all the smiling female nurses, there were people being wheeled along in beds who didn’t look like they had long left for this world. A few children cried in pain. Elsewhere, elderly couples were tethered to each other by decades of shared history. Young parents cradled their children full of hope and optimism. And there I was, wondering what strange thing had crawled into my gut and forced me to stop my life on a Thursday.
I waited around ten minutes before being called in. The men in the room smiled, told me to take off my watch and necklace, and then placed me in front of a type of machine I thought only existed in sci-fi films. “Hold your breath,” they said. “Relax.” I was thankful for them and myself I wasn’t dressed in some small white pants like Sigourney Weaver in an Alien movie as the lights and buzzing commenced.
By eleven am, I was finished. The doctor, reviewing the data, noted some inflammation but concluded nothing catastrophic was afoot. He looked at the screen in front of him as he told me all the dietary prohibitions for the next few days: no spice, no salt, no grease. He then paused, looked me in the eye, and said, “And no alcohol.” I mumbled something that was both a promise and a despondent sigh. His expression brightened and he told me I could leave, I had medicine to take, and that everything would be all right.
You know what? All of this (the triage, the bloodwork, the imaging, the doctor’s time) cost me 38,000 won. For the sake of perspective, that will buy you a couple of pints and a packet of crisps in a London pub, or perhaps a couple of big mac meals in New York. It is a sum so modest it almost feels like a clerical error. The kind of billing mistake you hesitate to question for fear that someone will notice and correct it. And it took two hours. I didn’t have an appointment. I don’t earn outrageous amounts of money. And I was worried for my health. I left reassured, picking up some white porridge (juk) en route home, the mandatory, starch-based ritual for all Korean gastric distress. It’s easy to forget how unusual this experience is until you imagine it happening elsewhere.
This is one of the reasons I am happy to live in Korea. That peace of mind that comes from the health service. It’s not just the cost. It’s not just the time. It’s the peace of mind. The trust. The knowledge that you are going somewhere and the machines work. The equipment is clean. The people are educated. Kind. There to serve rather than to make a buck.
There are many topics that surround Korea online: the birthrate, the mental health, the K-pop industry, and the changing multicultural landscape. But when you live here, when you are part of everyday life, there’s a reassurance that comes from the health system. I can’t quite describe it except to say that having it there makes everything else around you seem easier.
I’m also sure that living here has made me healthier in terms of my diet and lifestyle. There’s no (legal) weed to smoke. Meals here are relentlessly horticultural and you constantly find yourself consuming things that, in my part of the world, would normally remain in the garden. Roots, radishes, and all sorts of leaves become things to be consumed. Meanwhile hiking takes place in the subway stairs and university campuses as much as it does the mountains.
I am alive. I am well. I am largely vegetable-fed and devoid of the lifestyle-related toxins common in my home hemisphere. And while I’m sure there are other geographies that offer a similar degree of civilizational competence, I am nonetheless intensely grateful to be experiencing this one here in Korea. Yet it is a peculiar and slightly maddening feeling to know that, in many other parts of the world, my Thursday morning would have resulted in a mountain of paperwork, a week of anxiety, and a bill large enough to require a small bank loan. All for the exact same result. It makes one wonder exactly what we’ve decided progress is supposed to mean.