My life at a Korean law firm (part 22)

Reuters

Romance and sorbet

By Jacco Zwetsloot

The first 4-week intensive session I taught at the teachers' training center in Pyeongtaek was in August 1997. One of the 72 elementary school teachers was a lady who was to become my wife, although of course neither of us knew it at the time. What attracted me to Ji-min, apart from her obvious beauty, was her sassy, independent character and her sense of humor. Here was a woman who not only got sarcasm, but who was able to dish out her own! Moreover, her English ability was easily among the best of the teachers in the session.

But she had a boyfriend already, and I was her instructor, so dating was off the cards. Nevertheless we stayed in touch as friends. At the end of the training session, when I asked the students for feedback, she gave the strongest criticism, but in a productive way, and without being hurtful. I still have it somewhere in my “memories box.”

More than a year later, she got in touch with me when she had been tasked by a committee to help put together a chapter in a resource book of teaching materials. This book was to be used to train other elementary school English teachers. Overwhelmed, she asked me to collaborate with her on this project. It was around this time that she in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend, and working on the book meant that we spent a lot of time together, so romance blossomed over English teaching textbooks, rough notes, and many meals eaten together ― shabu shabu, poor approximations of pasta carbonara, and overly spiced bibimbap. I don't know whatever became of that book, but by the time we finished her chapter, we were in love and seriously dating.

For Christmas 1998 we visited my father in Australia. He was very taken with Ji-min, and supportive of our relationship. She liked Australia, even Melbourne's idiosyncratic weather (it snowed on Boxing Day afternoon ― when in the morning it had been nearly 30 degrees!).

As the end of my third EPIK and final contract approached, I had to decide what to do with myself afterwards. Nothing in particular was pushing me away from Korea, but circumstances were pulling me back to Australia. My widowed father was living alone and suffering from Parkinson's Disease. As his only child, I felt a need to go back and live with or at least near him.

On Children's Day 1999 I took Ji-min to dinner at the Millennium Hilton. I paid for the meal with two vouchers I had received from this newspaper, for sending in a photo of a tourist information sign written in incorrect English. After dinner I awkwardly asked her to marry me and come live with me in Australia. She said yes!

I'm going to skip over the part where I asked Ji-min's mother for permission to marry her daughter, because it didn't go as planned. Suffice it to say that the sought after permission was not given, and in the loudest possible tones. That really put a dampener on our wedding day and the honeymoon. Even now, almost 20 years later, it's a topic that is a sensitive one, so we don't talk about it. Happily, though, I was able to patch things up with my mother-in-law and now we have a fine relationship, but that took time. In 1999, marriages between Koreans and non-Koreans were still quite rare, and some parents could not countenance the idea. Ji-min's mother has never gone into detail why she was so opposed to it, but it may have had something to do with the idea of her daughter moving overseas.

This is exactly what happened, but not forever. On?Oct. 4, 1999, Ji-min and I left Korea, to move to Australia and live with my father. Beforehand, we had packed our belongings into ten or more 20 kilogram boxes and mailed them to my father's house by surface mail. They took ages to get there, and because they were originally fruit storage boxes, and Australia has the world's strictest quarantine laws, the customs officials opened every single box and moved their contents into other ones, before sending them on to me.

On the way to Australia, we spent a honeymoon in Europe. First it was off to Croatia, where Ji-min's oldest sister lives. This was long before Croatia and its beautiful Adriatic coast had appeared on the radar of many Koreans as a tourist destination, after featuring in the successful 2013 TV program “Sisters over Flowers.” Therefore, we were quite surprised in Dubrovnik to run into a whole group of middle-aged Korean speakers. It turns out that they were Korean Catholic emigrants living in Los Angeles, on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, where the Virgin Mary apparently appeared(!) in 1981.

After a week or so in Croatia, we took a long train trip from Zagreb to Leiden, the Netherlands. Though the journey itself was scenic and pleasant enough, all I remember from it is struggling to move our bags from one train to the other at Munich Station, and a short stop at Duisburg Station, where an old university friend greeted us with hugs and a cold pizza for breakfast before our train took off again. In Leiden my cousin Hendrik picked us up and took us to a hotel, where we spent the first two nights, before moving to a guest room at another cousin's house for the rest of the trip (money was running low). Ji-min and I spent about 10 days in dreary late-autumn Dutch weather, cycling, eating and getting to know my uncles, aunts and cousins.

Finally in late October we made it to Melbourne. My father had hired a car with a driver to pick us up from the airport, which was a nice touch. We were to spend the next four-and-a-quarter years in Australia. Like a sorbet before the main course, this period formed an interval between my first three-year stint in Korea and the second much longer one.