hankyoreh

By Toumaj Tahbaz

It was seven months ago on a rainy day at the end of spring. On my traveling and working route through East Asia, I came to Korea.

Seoul was under a big cloud, gray but colorful. That was my first image of Korea and it has stayed with me ever since: gray but colorful. My Korean friend was waiting for me at the train station. We got on a bus to go home, passing through the sea of cars and people. That was the second image: a sea of people, but not a calm sea. It looked like a sea during a typhoon. It was a day in the middle of the week. People walked very fast, keeping their heads down, busy with their mobiles, eyes looking ahead. Fast, fast and fast.

“Do you know the word palli palli,” my friend asked me.

“No”, I said.

“This is what you see”, he said.

Like the sea in a typhoon I thought to myself.

I understood, this is the first word every foreigner learns in Korea. Palli Palli.

And then on my first Saturday, everything changed. I woke up in an absolutely new Seoul. Everybody walked slowly. Looking at streets, trees, building and other people, like it was the first time they had seen those things. Smiling with those amazing Korean eyes, in which there are two feelings at the same time. How is it possible that those beautiful eyes can be sad and full of smile at the same time? Like this colorful gray city, colorful and gray at the same time. I asked my friend again. He looked at me with same eyes and told me: if you want to really understand, you should stay longer. And I’ve stayed seven months instead of a few weeks. I fell in love with those sad happy eyes and I stayed to understand them more. To understand what happens, that those slow, calm, happy people on Saturday and Sunday change to fast, hard working and sad people on Monday. And this wired feeling came to me. I felt, like I was in Tehran, the city I was born but left many years ago to live in Poland, my new homeland. From a homeland ruled by dictatorship to a homeland freed of dictatorship.

Tehran is the city I cannot go back to because I am working for some western media outlets, which try to objectively inform the people of Iran without living in fear of being killed or be jailed. Of course it is not always as it looks. Journalists are always controlled, but it is good to feel you have the principle right when you work: freedom of speech. But the price we pay to exercise this right is sometimes very high. So I closed the door on my first homeland. And after few years I decided to stay a freelancer. Try to discover Asia again. With that big question in my mind: What happened to us, Asian born people, during these last decades?

And here I am in my own private way: Seoul.

So why do I have a very similar feeling to being in Tehran? It is so far from here in East Asia to there in the west end of Asia. I asked myself this question in the first weeks of being in this city, the city of happy sad eyes.

But soon I understood why.

“Change”. Dream of “change”. That was, what I heard everywhere all these months, from those young artists in Daehangno, to those young bartenders in Hongdae [areas in Seoul that are popular with artsy young people] to those young workers in the Han River area. Change. This dream makes me feel like I am back in Tehran.

But how? This is a democratic country, not like Iran.

One of those artists in Daehangno told me, “This is a democracy of working hard. Very hard.”

“Why do you work so hard?” I asked.

“To earn money,” He said.

“But you don’t have time to spend that money,” I said.

“This is exactly the dream… dream of change,” he told me.

Sure. The reason was not the same among all young people I have seen in Korea. But among most of them something was the same: dream of change.

I understood why I have that feeling of being in Tehran. In my sad and happy time of being young, in Tehran, when we made appointments with friends to go first to demonstrations and then to an underground party. To feel that in that crazily ruled country that we had a little time to dream. Dream, all of us together.

Of course it is impossible to say Korea and Iran are the same. But why do I get the same feeling? Why do I see same happy sad eyes?

In one country religious dictators want to send people to heaven by force, in the other they wand to make people happy by forcing them to work fast and hard.

But the price we pay in both countries is the same, I said to a Korean journalist.

“What price?” he asked me.

Today. We pay our “today” for an imagined future. A future which doesn‘t really belong to us, but to those who have power and always do everything to keep power. By dividing people into east and west, poor and rich, ours and not ours. By controlling media by amusing people with religion or pop culture, by giving them the feeling that they know better than us, what is good and what is bad for us. By making us mental slaves. It looks like there are huge differences between those people in Tehran and these people in Seoul. But both after many years of bloody history, war and revolution have the same dream. Dream of change. Dream of evolution. Those who always keep power tell us we are free, but we actually sold them our real freedom. Freedom of mind. Freedom to be human, not machines for their imagined future. This is why I have all the time the same feeling here in Seoul, the feeling that I am in Tehran.

But change is coming, a journalist friend told me.

It is coming. This is true, but first it should come to us. To every single of us.

That was just three days before elections in Korea.

We were standing in the rough of an old cozy house, looking at the calm sea of beautiful happy people on Sunday. Walking slowly down the hill, I felt my eyes are getting the same feeling again. The feeling of being in Tehran: happiness for the dreams of today with sadness for the past.

And I was in love again with those sad eyes full of smiles, the eyes of Korea.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]