Sadang is My Neighborhood
By Claudia Martin
13 Jun 2008
What city do you live in? What neighborhood?
I live in Ansan, South Korea. Sadang is on the outskirts of Seoul. While Seoul is home to 12 million people, it is en even larger metropolis if you consider all the surrounding cities and towns. Ansan is a city of factories, West and East Asian immigrants, dump sites, and many many stores. My neighborhood alone has many chicken shops, kindergartens, corner stores, and street food stands. There are also churches on every block, tall apartments, and playgrounds with giggling children, and old grandparents with wide-brimmed straw hats and canes. While the older generation walks around pushing trash and recycling carts, or weeding their gardens and their neighbor's gardens, the younger people are less inclined to be caught in an unguarded moment. The men and women alike usually tote compacts and hairbrushes. Ladies up into their fifties walk miles in stillettoes, through gravel streets, onto speeding, bumpy buses, and right into their entranceway, where shoes are traded for slippers, and hats are removed out of a general respect for interior space. I personally keep my hat on, scoff the stillettoes, and rarely get out of bed in time for any compacts. Fortunately, "small-faced" foreigners are forgiven.
What are some adjectives that describe your neighborhood?
old-school, family-oriented, busy, blue-collar, odorous, brick, pollution, homogenous, crowded, poor, active, noisy, wired
How long have you lived there, and what brought you there?
I have been in Sadang, in the Korean town of Ansan, for over nine months, and I will be staying here for almost three more. I am finishing up a year of teaching English at a public elementary school called Sigok, about a twenty minute walk from my apartment. My place is a little room with a view of a brick wall. It is stuffy and appliances work like old ladies with demensia. I'm not being dramatic, it's just Korea on a budget.
What is your favorite thing about this place? Your least favorite?
My favorite thing about this neighborhood specifically is the park. There is a park across the street from my apartment that if I run down it at a steady decline, I will eventually, after a few miles, pass a creek and reach the one Starbuck's in the whole city. The run takes me past three separate subway stops, past tall cathedrals, beautiful trees, purple park exercise equipment, and a spread of flower shops. Sunglasses in tow, I can run almost entirely through this long expanse of park, people watching, listening to my iPod, and running into the sun.
My least favorite thing about my neighborhood is like death from a salesman...it is most definitely the awful, awful truck with the awful loudspeaker belting awful sales in Korean. This is basically a monotonous drone of ads, over and over, at a screaming pitch as the truck slowly inches through the neighborhood. In the evening, when I am home doing whatever I do after work, (frequently photo-editing), the truck comes by at least two times, and each time lasts for about fifteen minutes.
Do you feel that you belong there?
No, I do not belong here. I prefer mexican food, I prefer year-long warm weather, (it is bitterly cold in the wintertime, and the park is useless then), a few people who can speak my language. This has seemed very much to me like a break from reality, and a trip into archaeological studies. I am fully living here, but I am not transformed into the culture or lifestyle. I am very much an outside observer, recording my impressions with photos, notes, and very wide open eyes.
What is the most common misconception about where you live?
I suppose other foreigners would consider my neighborhood a little unfriendly. It is very homogenous, and unlikely to extend a warm welcome to foreigners, but this is simply because they never see foreigners outside of TV, (white people) and don't really think of interacting with them. People have a tendency to stare if you are different. But, once you are kind and open to them, they can be the most sincere, simply sweet people. They are sensitive, and only seem to want good relations with everyone. It is a joy to see everyone, old and young interact. Especially the older generations. They meet in the park in the summertime, and walk together arms linked, drinking soju (korean hard alcohol) from small paper cups, and playing board and card games. Like Cheers, it seems this is a place where everybody knows your name, expect that goes for the park and church playground, as well as the pub.
What is a special fact about your city that you have to live there to know?
No one has a bathtub. Everyone washes from a shower head above the sink in the bathroom. And it's difficult to find a trash can. People usually seem to throw trash on the street and one of the older "trash" ladies picks it up in her trash cart.
What aspect of your city do you secretly love?
Now that it's warm, I love walking at dusk listening to music on my earphones. I often walk to an overpass a few blocks away, and stare out at the cars coming and going, and then get an iced coffee at the local 7-11.
Anything else you'd like to add?
There are some sex hotels near my place. They look like cartoony Norwegian ski lodges, with neon lights, and they are primarily for men. I wasn't sure what they were at first, but when I go near them, I am more likely to be mistaken for a Russian prostitute, because there are many prostitutes from Russia around Seoul getting work at "barber shops", sex hotels, and night clubs.
