Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I've written a lot of posts about things I've done and places I've gone here in Korea, but very few about my reactions to life here, or my thoughts on things I see, experience, or question. I'd like to start to shift the focus in my blogs from being anecdotal to being more reflective and ruminative. I hope that anyone who is reading can appreciate this change, and I encourage and look forward to any thoughts or discussions that come out of this shift.

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Pictured:
A view of part of my neighborhood from the intersection near my apartment. Just left of center is the building where I work: prominent, white, tall, and filled with English classes...
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Walking around Busan, I'm amazed at how many things have changed in the last year. Construction seems to be a constant here, making the streets feel like mazes of yellow and orange stripes, ground-covering, and upturned concrete. Dust layers the bricks on the sidewalks and fills in cracks, leaving a thin coating on the bottoms of shoes, which gets tracked inside and makes sweeping necessary more often than seems reasonable. The noise of heavy machinery, cranes, backhoes, drills and shouts act as both alarm and lullaby many days.

I remember when I arrived, the lack of safety precautions around construction sites was one of the stand-out differences I noticed when going through initial culture shock - and it's one of the few things that still stands out in my mind as being "foreign" in a way. While I've come to accept it as a part of life here, I've never really grown used to walking across a street while it is being paved, narrowly avoiding being hit by a bulldozer; or waking up to the sounds of pipes crashing down at the building site next door. This week they painted our garage floor and to help us avoid the wet paint, wooden brooms were laid out to show us where we should jump over it. No signs, just the smell and the possibility of tripping if you aren't looking where you're going.

So on the one hand, the construction strikes me as somewhat disorganized and inconsiderate in its implementation (I recognize my strong bias here). On the other hand, it's remarkably efficient, and because people accept it as a part of life, it gets done without as much fuss (or concern for safety) in a shorter period of time. It's only been a little more than a year since I arrived and yet I can see visible signs of successful projects designed to modernize the cityscape.

It's really interesting to compare the neighborhood I moved into a year ago with the one surrounding me now. New shops have sprung up where mom-and-pop shops were before. New buildings are rising up from the ashes of old buildings, torn down to make room for these changes. For months now they've been painstakingly working to add an elevator to our nearest subway station, which is currently not wheelchair accessible. Today I noticed new signs in the subway pointing the way to get the elevator, though they still have some work to finish before it's up and running. In addition, it seems that in the last two weeks the city has added electronic computer screens to almost all, if not all, of the bus stops, showing the timetable and wait time for every line that runs that way, all in color. Currently, they are also adding what appears to be a turn lane to the street in front of my apartment.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of these rapid developments. Part of me is relieved at the convenience and accessibility of the new additions. However, another part of me feels a twinge of bittersweet sadness that this side of town - which is generally older, a bit more run-down in places, and has a more local and perhaps "authentic" feel to it compared to the northern and eastern parts of the city - is changing to catch up. Something intangible is lost along with the very tangible changes, and as an outsider here, that sense of loss is odd in the sense that I don't really feel I have a claim to the loss I'm feeling. This neighborhood was never mine, I never really understood it, I can't speak the language, I'm not aware of the local gossip or neighborhood events - and yet I feel a kind of anxiety when I sense the additional changes which will further alter people's lives here - for better and for worse.

I am painfully aware of a connection between these changes and my role here in Korea as an English teacher as well. These new projects seem incongruous with their surroundings, and yet they also seem like a necessity if Busan wants to adapt to an expanding population, a changing economy, modern safety standards, and increased mobility of the population here. I see English education here, and thus English teachers, as being both a part of that, and as a parallel project to accompany the physical construction. English is a tool here, a way to achieve upward mobility in education and the workforce; a means to an end. Yet, by incorporating that tool into life here, other changes were inevitable as a result of the emphasis on learning a second language, in particular English, and the influx of foreign teachers to provide this tool.

As foreigners we continue to appear out-of-place in our surroundings, just as the computer screen below my window appears shockingly new next to the aging bus stop beside it, and our presence has irrevocably changed the way Koreans live, work, eat, play, speak, and, arguably, think. The intention, in both cases, was to provide people with a tool to make their lives easier, to achieve a desirable end - but the means are destroying things in the process, whether those things are buildings and streets or people's culture and traditional ways of life.

So I am left with questions, but no answers:
What are we/they gaining, I wonder, that could possibly make up for what we/they are losing?
Certainly there are benefits, but do they outweigh the costs?
Whose goals are we attempting to reach, and whose expectations are we trying to fulfill?
Who decides which changes are good and which are bad, and how many will be enough?
What are we/they willing to sacrifice, and to what ends?
Is the potential for real cross-cultural connection and/or understanding a viable and/or valid justification for any of the sacrifices being made?
What am I doing here that has value, and what am I doing that is detrimental - and do I have control over my role and the footprint I leave behind, or is much of my impact out of my hands?
Does appearance or presence alone have potentially more of an impact than the intention (or the lack of intention) to create change that lies behind that facade?

Pictured:
From a display at Busan (Yongdusan) Tower comparing Korea in 1954 with Korea in 2010. The top picture is Busan's port in 1954, the bottom is the port as I see it today.