@ 22 November 2000
Maybe I've been lucky. The winter crowds who shuffle off to a doctor at the first sign of a cold have always seemed a rather pitiful species to me. When co-workers took days off work with "the flu" it had the scent of those "headaches" which women get when they don't want to date some poor besotted man. If Australia was full of wimps, China was a basket case. There were rooms in Chinese workplace clinics which always seemed to be full of tender souls on penicillin drips, sitting in rows of wooden chairs with their arms tethered to overhead bottles strung across the room on wires. A kind of social club would coalesce around the drip rooms, so at 9am every morning you would greet old Mrs Chen like a long lost friend, and at 9.45am Mr Zhang would always arrive in his brown check jacket with the broken zip. When you asked what life-threatening condition had brought them there, it was usually a common cold. They were a kind of metaphor for the progeny of communist states.
Well, smugness has its comeuppance. I blame my mother's cat. This creature claims prior ownership of the bedroom pillow in my mother's house when I stay over. The evidence is circumstantial, but this time I reckon that it schemed to do me in. Germ warfare with one of those ghastly cross-species viruses. Anyway, one morning I woke to a world that was like a spaced out version of an eerie dream. The expected sharp bang of the bathroom door, the hiss of hot water, the ever-hopeful squawk of birds outside the window ... were, well, distant and abstracted. Like someone had turned the volume knob on the TV set way down. I guessed it was ear wax, and poured bottles of patented rubbish into the hole. You know, that business of lying sideways on a bed with tissues everywhere, and trying to read with your head flat on the mattress so that everything doesn't run out for half an hour. Damned nuisance. No luck; still in cotton-wool land. Then a quack got a big, ugly stainless steel syringe and gave my ears a bath. Squeaky clean ears maybe, but the world was marching to faint drums.
About this time an urgent summons to teach came from Korea. When the plane went up to ten thousand meters it was as if the champagne bottle had uncorked. Great. When the plane came down, someone put a cork back in the bottle, then did nasty things with a corkscrew. Hurt like hell. You've only got one pair of ears. Scary. Even Korea was unlikely to want deaf teachers. I fooled 'em for a while. During the first week I did a lot of lip reading, then things got slightly better, so I could make a smarter guess at what the shy students were trying to say. Still, it wasn't a great way to begin a new job, and I began to ponder gloomily on life's unkindest cuts. The trouble was, I couldn't even see a doctor. This world was a forest of spiky gibberish writing, and beings who uttered strange sounds. It didn't seem a wonderful idea to beg for help and reveal all to these Korean managers. Would they be thrilled to know that the new foreigner had his head in a bag? But worst of all, the ponderous Korean bureaucracy takes its time about recognizing strangers in its midst. You need some magic talisman called a Health Insurance Card... Well, time does go on, sometimes on sponge rubber wheels. One day, at last, the card came, a bit of paper in a clear plastic wallet, looking for all the world like one of those old bank passbooks we had before money turned into automatic teller machine fodder. It had been nine weeks since the cat had wrought its revenge.
By now the dogsbody for foreign professors at the college knew that I wanted to find an ear doctor. I have not learned the Korean word for what Chinese call a waiban yet, but Ahn Won-wung is it. Ahn Won-wung is a small Korean man with a Canadian accent, teeth almost as crooked as my own, and thinning hair. He is approaching that age when it is no longer socially safe for a Korean man to be unmarried. A remorseless mental conflict between settling down with a beer to watch the football, and fighting for at least the temporary admiration of some breeding female, distracts and depresses him. The paranoid whining of foreigners would also drive anyone to drink. Pulled by all of these invisible strings, Ahn Won-wung is by turns obliging, imperious and vague. It is never quite clear which is his official or private agenda of the moment. Right now I am as helpless as a baby in this culture, but I had not counted on much serious assistance from Ahn Won-wung in medical matters. I was surprised when he briskly invited me to jump on the back of a college motor scooter to find an ear doctor.
We had a definite destination. Down the steep hills, clinging on with knees, hoping for no sudden stops, dodging with centimeters to spare around trucks selling vegetables or fresh fish in the narrow alleys, until not more than a hundred meters from my own apartment we came to a fingerprinted glass door next to a shoe shop. Ahn Won-wung sent me in on a reconnaissance mission while he waited on the bike. Behind the glass door was a stairway of raw concrete, as steep and brutal as a coal chute. The grandmas who came here with gammy ears would need hearts like athletes, but that was the law of survival in this mountainous town anyway. The small landing at the top was unlit, the inner door firmly locked. On it, a notice, later decoded, to the effect that the clinic was closed in support of the Korean doctors' dispute with the government. Oh yeah, yawned Ahn Won-wung, they had been shut down for two months. It seemed that pharmacists in Korea shared a professional right to write prescriptions themselves, and doctors were fighting down to the wire to claim a monopoly. I discovered that the papers were full of horror stories from desperate patients. Perhaps the shamans and homeopaths did well out of it. So, health insurance card or no health insurance card, I too was condemned to join the ranks of the medically dispossessed. I scribbled down a number on the doorway that might have been a phone number (it turned out not to be) and retreated to ponder the options.
Along the highway that skirted Pansong Dong I had seen a small hospital. Although he had lived here for years Ahn Won-wung claimed to know nothing about it. Hospitals, doctors, blood, gave him the creeps.He had never ever been near any of that stuff, said my guide. I coaxed him reluctantly in the right direction. This is a pretty small burgh. We could do it on foot. He still couldn't see the building, wouldn't see it, within a stone's throw, until I dragged his unwilling eyes to the large green cross on the roof, five stories up. We approached some steps leading up to the entrance, which looked rather unlit. "See", said Ahn Won-wung triumphantly, "it's not open. Let's go..". At that very moment a woman appeared around the side of the place, towing a small child whose face was contorted with rage and outrage ... the standard expression of small children who have just encountered something venomous like a hypodermic needle.
The side entrance was certainly modest, but inside it was hospital business as usual. They took my magic health insurance card without demanding any cash, and manufactured another piece of plastic ID. We were waved vaguely to a stairway. There is no such thing as a warm and cuddly hospital, but this one had the advantage of being small enough for mere human beings to feel recognized. Unlike, say, the Southern Military Command Hospital in Wuhan (China) -- my last encounter with the body-snatchers -- you also had a feeling in Pansong that at least the walls had been painted since 1949. Up on the second floor we found a sort of short, wide corridor, with a registration desk parked against one wall. The nurse was a thin girl in one of those pink nylon zip-up work dresses. She looked at us, or rather through us, impassively, but since the corridor was empty except for two listless patients against the other wall, she could not ignore my newly minted "hospital card".
Interpreting must be in the range of those skills like carpentry, motor mechanics, the law and medicine which have countless pretenders, and a few really skilled operators. For shooting the breeze, my minder Ahn Won-wung had a fair command of English, but the inner tubes of the human organism were not his forte. I had had the wit to do a quick internet cram on things that could happen to ears. The net wisdom for public consumption came complete with bold, curly diagrams in bright green, red, orange and yellow. A bit off-putting at meal times actually, but it did give me some mental navigation equipment to talk around the subject. Ahn Won-wung, with none of that priming and an inherent horror of wet, squishy things from the insides of people, listened to my explanations with mute distaste. I am sure he interpreted the whole sorry tale to the man in the green surgeon's cap with something inane like "he says his ears are blocked". The man in the green surgeon's cap wasn't about to concede that a patient could say anything useful either. He took a ten second peek into my earholes with a torch gadget, and gave his solemn verdict. "Go and see an ear doctor". Yeah. Quite. Back out on the street, back in the sunshine, Ahn Won-wung fled in a burble of blue smoke. My ears slurped dully, like old soap suds in a washing machine.
Time is nature's own healer. Maybe my mother's prescription would have to be accepted. "Ears and noses", she harumphed, "you can't do anything with stuff like that. It just goes away." Well, she'd had seventy-eight years to learn about it, and bequeathed me, I realized, that disdain for the instant invalids with their "flu" complaints. Still, nine weeks of glugginess was getting to me. The next day on an impulse I clambered once more up the stairway to the ear doctor's cave. Amazingly it was open. Behind the inner glass door was a chest high counter where two young ladies, also in pink nylon zip-up work dresses, communed with computers. Sighting me they froze for a moment. One hastily reached over her shoulder for a dictionary, or was it a phrase book? There was a pregnant pause, then she looked up and brightly parroted "please have a seat!". I retreated three paces -- the waiting room was empty -- but she was already in frantic pursuit of the next phrase, and before my backside hit a chair she machine-gunned me with an accented command. "Give me your health card please!". The health care booklet was an arcane passport of hieroglyphics to me, but it yielded the girl in pink the key she needed to my identity. Much key tapping into the computer, long glances at the screen, and at last another phrase book command. "The doctor will see you now."
The doctor didn't actually SEE me for quite a while. I stood in the presence, waiting. He too was immersed in his computer screen. It dawned on me that delphic messages had been flitting to and from the receptionist, three meters away. The ear doctor appeared to be a man in his forties, of medium build, with a lean face, glazed to a deep tan. He chewed gum incessantly. He was dressed in the uniform of his trade, as per the TV soapies, with a pale blue synthetic gown, green surgeon's cap, and what always looks to me like a coal miner's torch on a band about his head. Behind him on a metal shelf was a plastic model of the human skull, cleaved in half between the eyes to give a cross section of all the messy stuff inside, and on the wall a large, fawn-coloured diagram of human plumbing above neck level. Poor Ahn Won-wung would have suffered vertigo just looking at all these squishy tubes.
At last I was motioned to sit on a stool. "What's the problem", asked the doctor in even syllables. I thought it best to let Ahn Won-wung give his version of the situation first, so I handed over a notebook containing the college's phone numbers. "This guy will explain what I want", I suggested. "I don't speak Korean." "Hmm", said the doctor, picking up a phone. Much rapid discussion in Korean, conspirational belly laughs. I had been socially pigeonholed in some acceptable way by the time he hung up, no longer a blow-in from the street. The doctor stared carefully at his computer screen for a full minute. The machine must contain a bilingual phrase book for medicos, I decided. "It is necessary to conduct a medical examination," he said slowly; "the examination will be in two parts." Hmm, would I get a diploma at the end of it? But it was unfair to be facetious. He was doing a pretty good job handling a complete foreigner in a part of the city that was essentially working class housing estates, and where international contact was zero.
For stage one of the medical examination I was moved to a kind of dentist's chair, adjacent to a large stainless steel tray containing vials of dark liquid, instruments for poking and grasping, cotton buds and sundry other tools of trade. The side of my head was seized and a something-or-other scope plugged into one ear, then the other for a quick reconnaissance. I had thought they were pretty clean ears after the Australian quack had a go at them, but there was a sucking of breath and some vigorous internal polishing with, maybe, a cotton bud and drain cleaning fluid. Then we migrated to the high tech area. This was a narrow room, slightly larger than your average toilet, but insulated for sound. It contained some kind of high frequency signal generator, transmitting pings via a wire to my ear. The idea was to press a button each time you heard one of these pings, so that hearing, or lack thereof, could be plotted. The second machine also emitted sounds, but it seemed to be more in the nature of a sonar, and made up its own mind about the ears it investigated. It was all rather civilized considering the unpleasant things that medical tradesmen are apt to do with some other parts of your body.
My advisor retreated to his computer, and stared at it again for a long time. Then at last he fixed me with a serious eye. "A diagnosis has been made," he declared. I have to say he memorized his lines well. " Two problems have been established," he continued. " First, there is a loss of hearing in the right ear. Sounds above 800hz are inaudible to you in that ear. This cannot be remedied. It probably happened a long time ago." Ah well, being condemned is always a downer, but this sure beat being told you had something unspeakable like cancer. "The second problem is an middle ear infection. It is not serious. I will give you medication for three days." The doctor returned to staring at his computer. I waited; several minutes ticked by. Eventually he looked at me with a hint of exasperation. "You must return in three days", he repeated, and looked at me steadily. I sat there, dumbly, and stared back. It was becoming uncomfortable. Finally the penny dropped. "Oh, is that all?" I asked. He bowed stiffly from his chair. Um, what about the prescription? "The nurse." Ah, lowly bits of paper were not in his domain. And WHAT exactly was the medication? He looked mildly shocked at such an indelicate enquiry, but I was after all a foreigner, and ignorant of proper deference. Determinedly, I handed him my notebook again and asked him to write in English. Some more communing with the computer, then he wrote slowly: "antibiotic, antihistamine, steroid". Hmm, well that was certainly covering the field. I bowed (this is infectious), and backed out of the room like a serf retreating from the presence of the town magistrate.
It was time to do commercial business with the front desk girls-cum-nurses. They were a rather different proposition from the brusque women in many Australian medical reception areas. That lot often seem to be A-level graduates from an anti-charm school. My Korean sample is restricted to two, but you have to start somewhere...
The flavour of gender typecasting is one of the clearest cultural markers you can find. An Australian male aiming for his stereotype is apt to carry a touch of vainglory, his voice a little too hearty, probably loud, but anxious to engage all-comers, from complete strangers to sworn enemies, in a profane and equal dialogue. The female of the species is also open to experience, will look you in the eye, and is not much given to deference. A stereotype is just that -- recognizable, but by no means defining all the carriers of that culture. My notions of Korean stereotypes are pretty hazy at the moment, but already coalescing around several observed features. Men of all degrees seem to invoke an outer shell of respectful ritual to bracket every encounter. Together with linguistic markers (honorifics on the verbs), this includes bowing from the waist and, where there is a status difference, avoiding eye contact. What happens within this bracketing may or may not be respectful. The youth with his hair dyed bright orange and fashionably torn jeans, or the nattily suited college professor are both quite as capable of bastardry, contempt or deceit as any human on the planet, but like the Tae Kwon Do fighter who always bows first, they play each round within their version of the social niceties, which are basically Confucian.
Korean women are also, of course, touched by cultural history. A hundred years ago women in Korea were mere chattels, secluded in their houses and living under restrictions that make modern Afghanistan look quite liberal. Normally they were not even referred to by personal names, non-persons until married, then named as so-and-so's wife or mother. Brutalizing as the Japanese occupation was (1910-1945), it undermined the old regime and laid a framework for industrial culture. Luckily both of those ages have passed, but the notion of the unmarried female as plaything still has strong echoes. The modern femininity of young Korean women often seems to be best summed up as a pursuit of "cuteness". Shades of Japan (but keep the comparison to yourself, if you value your friendships...). Cuteness is furry stuffed animals (or even a miniature dog), a mobile phone in a furry synthetic skin with black bead eyes and a mouse tail, tacky costume jewelry, lots of giggling .. definitely nothing to hint at schadenfreude. Cuteness is also the golliwog wave: forearm fixed vertical from the waist, the hand, fingers spread wide, rocking from left to right at the wrist. The ear doctor's girls in pink loved the golliwog wave. Each time in the following weeks that I left for the long, dangerous voyage down the coal chute stairway they saw me off with golliwog waves.
On this, my first visit, their dictionary had taught them to say "the money is two thousand and seven hundred won", and "you will take this to the chemist." "This" was a computer printout of the prescription. Doctors with lousy handwriting, eat your hearts out; your mystique is supplanted by a machine. The mystique was instantly resupplied by the hangul (Korean writing) which I could not read. A corner chemist had no trouble. I queued up behind doughty ladies in brown stretch-fit slacks with runny-nosed babies tied onto their backs. Pansong is full of these matrons with baby bundles on their backs. Korea may have a declining birth rate, but the breed of urban peasants is not about to die out. In a little while, for another thousand won, I was given a belt of pills, neatly sealed in plastic pouches which could be torn off at each mealtime. Per plastic pouch was a large, bright blue capsule, another two tone model of orange and brown, a monstrous white pill, and a white pellet. No doubt a large and vibrant population of workers is supported by these clinical substitutes for moxibustion and magic mountain mushrooms. Whether steroids and all the rest could put some lousy virus on the rack, or just help me to grow a hairy chest, remained to be seen.
In fact things did improve erratically over the next two weeks. Each ear would take it in turn to clear up for a day or two. I could hear my students. I could also hear something that sounded like soap suds in a bubble bath, and there is still some of that to this day. Every three days I'd make the journey up the coal chute, be admitted into the presence, and wait breathlessly while the computer yielded up its phrase book pronouncements. The sonar gadget made its own statements with a miniature printout which plotted its results against a normal bell curve for well-behaved ears. A morning came when the doctor proudly showed me this bit of paper and declared "the treatment is terminated". Well, who can argue with a machine, soap bubbles or no soap bubbles?
Winter comes to Pusan in baroque cycles of temperature through late October and November, so the balmy days of Autumn yield to a few perishing storms of grey rain and sudden freezes, then blue skies again. But on each spiral the thermometer drops another notch, deciduous trees begin to lose their leaves, and the clothing stores put racks of padded vests for sale on the pavement. My early morning 10km runs became a little harder each day, and about a week after bidding farewell to the ear doctor I had the first hint of a seasonal cold. Well a cold is a cold is a cold. Stuff like that just goes away after a while, right? So it did, but so did my voice. I mean, this had never happened before, ever. The morning class was OK, if a little hoarse. Over a lunch of spicy kimchee and fiery chili soup in the staff canteen I met a charming Korean lady teacher. It was a gruff conversation, but she seemed to find it engaging enough. An hour later in the main street of Pansong I bumped into the Korean wife of another teacher. "Doesss any chhhemissst ssspeak Eeenglishhh" I whispered. She regarded me with alarm, then grew stern. "Up there", she growled, "is an ear, nose and throat doctor. That's what you need." I followed her index finger. It was pointing directly up the coal chute.
The girls in pink squeaked hello. I pointed mutely down my throat. For once the waiting room was full of patients -- spluttering kids and exasperated mothers. I pretended to read the burble you always read in waiting rooms, but with pages of squiggles it is hard to even fake intelligence. It is fair to report that the ethereal Korean models in skin cream advertisements are dead ring-ins for their American cousins, and that the blue-rinse ladies in society photographs no longer use blue rinse, but their over-powdered faces and hard eyes would be at home on any Australian society page.
My good friend, the doctor, allowed his eyes to roll briefly, as if to say "what can you expect?". Our routine this time around was a bit different. Anchoring me in the dentist's chair, he wielded a large spatula and a sort of torch. The spatula levered my jaw open with a certain relentless force, and pressed on the back of my tongue. The doctor peered in with his torch thing. I retched violently, and he made a rapid retreat to the computer phrase book. "Breath deeply," he commanded. Whatever you say captain. The spatula made its invasion again. I breathed deeply and gagged. Well-tuned nerve endings. We moved back to the desk; I meditated, he composed the news.
"A diagnosis has been established," he declared at last. "Your vocal chords are badly swollen. It is essential with laryngitis that you remain voiceless for two weeks. You must not talk for two weeks." I tried to lip-talk, "I am a teacher". "Ah, teachers and singers, it is ..... [long pause for computer instructions]... the occupational hazard." "Aaagh!", I gurgled. No faking out of this one. "Medication is prescribed," he continued, "the condition is curable.... BUT talking is dangerous. You will grow nodules on the vocal chords. Very dangerous." Eeek, visions of dreadful nodules, whatever they were. Visions of dying of throat cancer or something awful. He called up the foreign professor's dogsbody, Ahn Won-wung, with his horror of squishy things from the insides of people. There was a long and vigorous conversation. Browbeaten, the college rescheduled my classes for two weeks.
Every three days I came to collect my plastic belt of blue, orange and white pills, plus an injection in the backside. Our Vietnamese teacher got the same bug, and took a day off. "We Asians", she sniffed, "just boil up some bean shoots for the vitamins, and drink the hot water." I cringed, a certified wimp. The good doctor lectured me solemnly on each visit, "NO talking for two weeks." He must have suspected something. After a week of bludging it became too much. I mean, how do you recover pity for the cripple after absent mindedly falling into staffroom arguments, then gulping to an embarrassed silence in mid-sentence? I went back to work.
* Note on personal names: all names in this Diary have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, unless stated otherwise.