Saturday night's 17.5K walk

This past Saturday, my buddy JW and I did our evening/nighttime 17.5-kilometer walk from Jeongja Station in Bundang (just outside of Seoul in Seongnam City) back to my apartment building in the Gangnam district of Seoul. JW told me his wife has sort-of caught the walking bug, too; she's now doing her own super-short walks of 1-2 kilometers—basically up the street and back. It's a start; we'll hook her eventually.

JW and I were supposed to meet at 7 p.m., but JW ended up being late, having underestimated the amount of time he'd need to arrive at Jeongja Station. We got under way at about 7:20 p.m., and we ended up arriving in my neighborhood around 11:20 p.m. In other words, we were both slower than usual: our average speed was 4.375 kph, which is well under my usual speed of 5 kph. My only excuse is that it's been a while since I'd walked any significant distance; in fact, the last time was with JW and his kids when we walked a portion of the North Han River bike path. JW, for his part, is capable of walking much faster than I can; he normally slows himself down deliberately so as not to leave me in the dust. But Saturday night, he was walking slowly for reasons of his own: about halfway through our trek, he mentioned that he was wearing his work shoes. I don't normally look at people's footwear, but I glanced down at JW's feet when he said that, and sure enough, he was in some tight-looking loafers. I called JW crazy for doing that; I know he has some bona fide walking shoes (which he'd worn during our previous jaunt), so it boggled my mind that he'd choose to wear shoes that were so obviously not made for distance walking. At the very end of our walk, I jokingly scolded JW, saying something like, "Well, I hope you learned a lesson tonight about the importance of footwear." JW didn't do much more than nod wearily. He had borne his agony stoically, showing weakness only when we were about two kilometers from our destination: at that point, he insisted that we sit down on a bench and take a load off for a few minutes before finishing our journey. Just before we parted ways, I mentioned footwear again, enjoining JW to engage in a thought experiment often used by people discussing the importance of good shoes: imagine that you're wearing a shoe that, when you take a step, produces a barely noticeable irritation. Now multiply that irritation 25,000 times, and you can see that a small pain can easily become agony in the space of a 25K-step walk, which is what we'd just done. JW listened to my thought experiment, and then he went, "Wow! What a way to think about that!" A light-bulb moment, for sure.

I had planned to make and serve dinner to JW (Tex-Mex options: tacos, quesadillas, nachos), given that our walk had started right at dinnertime. But along the way, we discussed our respective conditions and both concluded that we weren't so much hungry as thirsty. During those final two kilometers, we stopped at a convenience store so JW could pick up the thing he craved: beer. He grabbed maybe eight or nine tall cans of beer for him and his wife; they apparently like sipping at brews over the weekend, especially now that they no longer go to church thanks to the pandemic. I paid for everything since I knew JW would be paying for the cab ride back to his place from my apartment. I grabbed a Chilsung Cider plus some smallish bottles of "Blue Hawaii" fruit punch. Now loaded down with drinks, JW and I walked out of the convenience store, across the street, and into the park next to my building. We sat down heavily on another bench and soaked in the quiet night, quaffing our respective libations. After resting a bit, we heaved ourselves up, walked back to the main drag, and JW caught a cab back to his place. Terse goodbyes were exchanged; things're always terse with JW.

The most fascinating aspect of Saturday night's walk was a debate JW and I had over the fate of South Korea. It all started when JW disagreed with my notion that the US needs to get the hell out of Korea, and probably the rest of the world. I can't remember the exchange in detail, but what our disagreement boiled down to was how much faith we could afford to put into the South Korean people. JW is a modern Korean conservative (although that doesn't make him a Trump-lover by any means; the term "conservative" has very different resonances in South Korea than in the States), and he has little faith that South Koreans have the smarts and/or the fortitude to stay strong under the shadow of the North Korean threat. Too many young people are pro-North leftists, and the country is currently being run by a very pro-North president, Moon Jae-in (see Joshua Stanton's recent blog posts for more).

From JW's point of view, the US presence provides the spine that South Korea, as a country, currently lacks. I told JW I rejected the notion of a Pax Americana in East Asia for the same reasons that I reject the claim that the current United States is anything remotely like an empire. If you want to see imperialism, look no further than China. On that score, JW agreed that China has, for all intents and purposes, already eaten North Korea. Any mythical notions of North and South Korea being bound together as one single race or people (the concept of danil-minjok) are just that: mythical. From JW's perspective, it's too late for the North because the North is basically Chinese now. The only thing stopping China from sweeping farther south is the United States. JW therefore thinks I'm naive to want to pull the troops out (and I told JW that President Trump seems to be leaning more and more in that direction as a matter of economic necessity). If the US goes, nothing will stop South Korea from "zombifying" and becoming just like the North, which would put it under Chinese control. This would be as much about South Korea rotting from within as it would be about China's overtly taking over the South. Whereas I was arguing that the US and South Korea would still be military allies even if the US did pull its troops out, JW was arguing that South Korea would mutate into something monstrous, so in what sense would we be allies anymore?

We both agreed, at least, that South Korea ought to think about arming itself with nuclear weapons given that (1) the North already has them, and (2) Japan is seriously considering tossing out its largely US-made constitution and remilitarizing in the face of the North Korean threat. This would go against the US notion of a "denuclearized peninsula," but most of the smart experts agree that US policy has already failed in that regard. The North has nukes, like it or not. So that's where JW and I stood, with JW—the pure Korean in this discussion—having no faith that his own people could hold the line against North Korean and Chinese encroachment, and yours truly—the half-Korean American—having more faith that the South could hold the line should the US withdraw. So who's more correct—the Korean cynic or the American optimist? My main problem is that, to agree with JW, I'd have to accept that America is imperialistic, a notion I don't accept. Most people who accuse America of imperialism have no clue what real imperialism looks like.

Suffice it to say that Saturday night's walk was interesting and philosophically meaty. I was also pleased that my feet endured the walk just fine, despite being somewhat out of condition. No blisters, irritations, or weird pains to report. Sorry I don't have any photos of the walk, but it got dark by 8 p.m., about forty minutes into our trek.