One day, not long after my 23rd birthday, during those halcyon days when I was imitating Bashō and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Korean town just five or so miles from the Yellow Sea, I got invited to a funeral. I was a middle school English teacher. A relative of my school’s vice-headmaster had died, and since all the other teachers were going to her funeral, I think they felt they had to invite me, too.
My Korean was abysmal, I’d only been in the country for two months, but I asked a fellow English teacher - the only one who actually spoke English - to teach me how to say “Please accept my condolences.” I practiced it for half a week then I put on my only suit, and one late Saturday afternoon found myself careening into the hills in a twelve-seat mini-van with eighteen or so of my fellow teachers, “Please accept my condolences,” bouncing around in my head like the twenty-third psalm… at the “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” part.
I should say now - you’ll understand why in a minute - that I had been out drinking with these selfsame teachers just about every night since my arrival, and each time I was asked to sing one or another of five “American songs” that were popular in Korea at the time: Old Black Joe (the Stephen Forster minstrel song); Too Young (the Nat Cole version); Delilah (the Tom Jones hit); He’ll Have to Go, aka Put Your Sweet Lips a Little Closer to the Phone (Jim Reeves,1959); and Love Potion Number Nine, (by The Clovers in 1959 and The Searchers in 1964.)
Okay, back to my story.
When we got near where we were going, we parked the minivan at the edge of some muddy rice fields and walked across the narrow paths that divided them to the dead woman’s family’s thatch-roofed farmhouse, a place that looked like it had been there since forever, somehow avoiding destruction during the Korean War. It was baleful and wintery, but also picturesque; like a photo out of someone’s 1930s calendar.
“Man, I’m in the real Korea now,” said the voice inside my head.
The dead woman’s sister, or daughter, or cousin… hell, maybe she was even her mother, bowed as soon as she saw us, but then looked at me like she was suddenly Scrooge and I was Marley’s ghost. Until I said a well-practiced “Please accept my condolences,” I thought she might have been getting ready to chase me off her property with a rake.
But when she heard those magic words the musculature in her face did a series of subcutaneous cartwheels, finally rearranging themselves in a glorious smile.
“Aigo, he speaks perfect Korean!” she said, then she pulled me inside their house where I got down on my knees as I’d been told I should do, bowed to a photograph of the dead woman, said “Please accept my condolences” again, and gained cartwheeling smiles from everyone else in the family.
“Never in my life have I heard a foreigner speak Korean so well!” I guessed one man said, before adding “Come, let’s eat and drink!” and then dragging me over to a table ladened with mounds of delicious looking Korean food.
“Please accept my condolences,” I said when I sat down.
“Whoa! Whoa! Perfect Korean!” said many of my table mates, while one of them poured me a huge bowl full of makkoli - a milky rice wine - and also said something like, “Okay, American, enough with condolences! Do you happen to know “Love Potion Number Nine?”
Without waiting for my reply, he picked up his chopsticks, banged out a rhythm on the rim of his own makkoli bowl, then he and I, more or less simultaneously, burst into…”I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth, you know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth… She’s got a pad down on Thirty Fourth and Vine…” all in English, and with the rest of those at the table soon enough joining in.
Oh, it was marvelous! What a funeral! What a way to send someone off! And what a great lesson on how one can find beauty and understanding in every single corner of the world if only one is open to it.
She’s got a pad down at Thirty Fourth and Vine… Really? Way out there, high up on a ridge, just a half a mile from the… shores of the Yellow Sea? (apologies to Chuck Berry)
By the time we were ready to drive home again, some three hours later, we had gone though our litany of American songs two or three times, all of them sung in order to make me feel at home. And boy did I feel it! My fellow teachers had been drinking and singing too, though at a table outside.
Was it musical imperialism, this invasion of American pop music, as one unwashed wag once tried to tell me in Seoul?
Well, maybe. But I could also sing The Baldheaded Bachelor (대머리총각), Spring in My Hometown (고향의 봄) as well as several regionally different versions of Arirang (아리랑), Korea’s quasi national anthem, all in Korean. So if it existed at all it was a two-way street, this musical imperialism stuff.
As we traipsed back across those rice fields to the minivan - a much more difficult thing to do, somehow, than when we arrived - I slipped off the path, one leg sinking into the dung-laden soil just about up to my crotch. My fellow teachers laughed and pulled me out. My suit was ruined, but I was as happy as a dung-ladened frog.
That might have been the end of it, but some quarter of a century later, when I published my Peace Corps novel, Festival For Three Thousand Maidens, I used a version of the scene I just described, assigning my role in it to Bobby Comstock, my main character. In order to use the lyrics to Love Potion Number Nine I had to buy the rights from Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, its writers, for one hundred and fifty dollars.
It was money well spent, don’t you think?
By the way, if you’d like to know how to say “Please accept my condolences” in Korean, it goes like this… "Samga choui rul pyohamyo koin ui myongbok ul pimnida." (삼가 조의를 표하며 고인의 명복을 빕니다.)
Feel free to use it the next time you find yourself at a Korean funeral. I can guarantee that it will make you feel great.
(Many thanks to my old friend, John Duncan, for correcting my memory of the phrase.)
Wonderful, Richard! I must re-read your Festival for 3000 Maidens. Your memorising that Korean phrase reminds me of how I - much less courteous than you - learned to say in Swedish "I don't like Swedish boys", ready for when the local paper in Jonkoping came to interview me during my time working there when 19 years old. It was published - together with my many (softening, I hope) compliments about the Swedish girls/women and lingonberry waffles.
I wasn't much for karaoke when I worked in Japan, but often my best sources wanted to do it as a way to prove we were friends. 500 Miles (Hedy West) was the most memorable tune from those experiences. It went a long way.