in the aftermath of the retreat

[Originally posted on September 24, 2017, at 5:25PM.]

I spoke on Skype with my brother David on Saturday morning, before I left to go to the office for our retreat. (The boss had told us to assemble at the office; a company bus was to be there to take us all down to Anseong.) I bitched to David about how much I resented having to go through this bullshit theft of my weekend, and I took David through some possible scenarios when the time came to announce to the boss that I intended to walk out of this farce and head back to Seoul. "Maybe their bark will be worse than their bite," David ventured.

My brother turned out to be right, but Saturday still sucked. In my mind, the ideal scenario would have been this: arrive at the hapkido master's compound by 4PM, get the workshop portion of the day over with by 6PM (dinnertime), then walk out without having dinner. This would have given me time to get on a bus at Anseong's main bus terminal; the final bus was scheduled to leave the terminal by 9:20PM, and the walk to the terminal was thirteen kilometers, or about 2.5 hours on foot.

What actually happened was close to the worst-case scenario: we arrived a bit after 4PM; the workshop dragged until about 8PM; dinner came and went (I refused to eat because I knew I'd be walking, and I didn't want to have to poop by the roadside); the workshop restarted after dinner and dragged even more until 10PM. I was increasingly agitated as the clock ticked onward. Sitting through the workshop was an exercise in not hulking out and throwing tables around the room. I was at the limits of my self-restraint when the boss finally declared that the workshop was over for the night.

But unlike our recently disappeared coworker, I wasn't planning on just fading away from the retreat without a word. That would have been the coward's way out. So I sat outside while everyone else went inside to play beer pong, and I waited for the boss to come out and find me, as I knew he would. (I'm never far from his mind. He had texted me several times during dinner to find out where I was; I was in an upstairs room meditating, and the boss texted with irritation that "This is not a Buddhist retreat" and that I needed to come down to dinner to show some solidarity. I came down, saw everyone was eating, and went back upstairs for another 40 minutes' meditation.)

Sure enough, the boss came out into the darkness around the house and sat next to me on the open-air shwim-teo where I had parked myself. I told him flat-out that I was going to be leaving now, and he tried to persuade me to stay. "There's plenty of room upstairs if you want to sleep alone," he offered. I said no—I'd rather just go. The boss quizzed me as to why my coworkers were so fearsome to me (he normally tries pushing emotional buttons in a debate situation, so it's no surprise that he'd try to paint me as a scaredy-cat); I explained that it wasn't the coworkers, per se, as it was the forced togetherness of the situation, which made me feel like a trapped animal. I told him quite frankly that I thought the retreat was bullshit, even as I acknowledged the work that he and another coworker had put into crafting the retreat (the two had planned the activities, shopped for the food, prepped the huge dinner, and bought supplies for breakfast the following morning).

Eventually, the boss relented. "I just don't want you leaving here angry," he said into the night. I told him that I did resent the theft of my weekend, but that I wasn't furious with anyone. In fact, I was fairly relieved that the boss hadn't adopted a more aggressive or threatening posture: had he done so, I would have told him he'd be getting my sajik-seo (letter of resignation) on Monday. That's my nuclear option: I can walk away from this job shedding nary a tear because I have no particular loyalty to the company, and I have an F-4 visa that allows me to stay in Korea even if I'm jobless. The Golden Goose has dicked me over several times—beginning with their refusal to give me my promised salary—as is consistent with how hagweons normally operate, and I have a long memory for such things. None of this makes me feel any particular warmth toward the company. If I work hard in the office, it's out of a sense of pride and professionalism that isn't linked to my place of employment. Besides: I have no friends at the company, so there's nothing to lose, socially speaking, by leaving.

The boss and I talked about other, more personal, things, and then I said it was time for me to go. By that point, it was around 10:30PM. I was miffed about leaving so late: I had wanted to leave about four or five hours earlier. The country roads were initially dark, and we were far enough outside of Seoul, away from the city's light pollution, that it was possible to look up into the night sky and see more than a few stars overhead. I ended up walking much more slowly than planned: the 2.5-hour walk expanded into a nearly 4-hour walk. The path that Naver Map had chosen for me took me first along those country roads, then alongside a freeway for a kilometer or two, then into the downtown part of Anseong City, and finally along a creekside bike path that pointed me toward the bus terminal. I wasted three kilometers, at one point, when I had to backtrack so that I could leave the bike path and walk along the main road for the final part of the walk. This added forty or so minutes to the walk.

I knew the bus terminal was going to be closed at that time of night, but my assumption was that, as is true for most bus terminals, there would be a nearby neighborhood with motels and yeogwans. My plan was to hit a motel, then grab a bus the next day. As it turned out, though, Anseong resides in the Twilight Zone, and there was absolutely nothing next to the bus terminal except for a huge crossroads where two major arteries met. Too tired to do otherwise, I waited at the crossroads for a cab. One arrived within a few minutes; it was nearly 2AM by that point. The cabbie cheerfully asked me what the hell I was doing out at that hour. "Nobody else is out here!" he exclaimed. True: the paths I had walked had been largely devoid of people, but some random folks had been out and about. I didn't say this to the cabbie, though. I told him to take me to the nearest motel; he said, "We'll have to go downtown, then," i.e., we'd have to go back to the part of the city that I had already walked through. I smiled at the thought of backtracking yet again.

The cabbie dropped me off at Yes Motel, in central Anseong, where I paid W50,000 for a fairly decent room. I popped out to a convenience store to buy ice and drinks, then I settled into my room, sipping contentedly, happy to be away from that goddamn retreat. The boss had texted me while I was walking, telling me to message him when I had arrived safely at a motel. I did so. Bizarrely, he replied to my text around 3:30AM with a "See you Monday." I had thought he'd be asleep. As for me, I didn't get to sleep until after 5AM (too much Coca Cola in my system: I had hit a couple convenience stores as I was walking). Before I crawled into bed, though, I laundered my clothes, just as I'd done while on the trail, and hung them to dry.

The next day—this morning, in fact—I got out of bed around 9:30AM, showered, dressed, dropped my room key off with the yeogwan ajeossi, and caught a cab to the bus terminal. I went to the ticket window, got a ticket for Seoul's Express Bus Terminal (which runs along Line 3, which takes me right to my apartment), climbed into the bus, and rode back to Seoul. I was more than an hour ahead of my coworkers, who were scheduled to leave the retreat compound at noon and arrive in Seoul around 1PM.

I'll be curious to see how people react, on Monday, to my having skedaddled. They might see my walk-off as childish and cowardly, or they might see it as ballsy and rebellious. I don't particularly care what they think, but it'll be interesting to tally reactions all the same.

According to the boss, there was supposed to be another workshop activity on Sunday morning. I accused him of lying to me: I had specifically asked him, a few days before the retreat, whether we'd be doing anything on Sunday, and he'd said that Sunday would be no more than waking up, eating breakfast, and piling into the bus. During the conversation I'd had with the boss just before I walked off the compound, he flip-flopped and said there'd be some kind of lesson-planning activity. This sort of flip-flopping is par for the course with my boss, who will often say whatever it takes to persuade someone to do something. (This is how he cajoled me into working for the Golden Goose in the first place: with a "promise" of five million won a month. I'll be more wary of over-promising people next time.)

Anyway, I think I left the compound on more or less amicable terms with the boss. There had been no fight, no shouting match, no nuclear option. In the end, he relented and let me go, telling me he didn't want to make me do something I was dead set against doing. That's all to his credit; the bark had indeed been worse than the bite. For me, my nighttime walk was accompanied by a flooding sense of relief and liberation, but there was still some lingering frustration at my having had to start the walk so late at night.

I'm back now, and the work week awaits. I hope everything just goes back to normal.