From the backseat of the midnight blue cab, my face close enough to the window to blur my vision with each slow breath, I stared in silence, taking in mile after mile of disappointment. Nothing I was seeing of Tongduch'on came even close to what I had examined in the slick South Korean travel brochures sent by the embassy. On those pages, old men ambled down hard packed country trails, their long walking sticks tapping the earth, grey white beards floating downwards in haggard wisps so fine you couldn't tell where the beards left off and the air of the world began. I remembered seeing the fogged tops of jagged mountain cliffs surrounded below by clear green water, waterfalls exploding from quiet rock, wintry snow branches of bald trees haunting pavilion yards, immaculate streets. What I saw from the cab window was the sun going down on narrow winding alleys, children sitting beneath broken neon signs, the curved spines of elderly men and women tugging wooden carts of what I later learned was fried insect larvae. And when we turned down what was to be our street, I saw dilapidated courtyard apartments, sickly dogs nosing through trash piles, mint green lion heads roaring from the apartment gates. The cab driver whistled annoyingly for the third time to the tune of Yankee Doodle. My one and a half year old son began to cry. I could have sworn I saw the cab driver grinning in the rear view mirror.

That night, the three of us huddled close together on the smooth pink floor of our two room apartment, pulling a woven blue mat over our bodies. I began running through the mental calculations – how many more weeks and days before we retraced our long route and flew back to the States, how many more nights we’d have to spend curled together against the unforgiving linoleum. Throughout the night, the warmth rose up from our ondol floor, and I awoke the next morning surprised by how well I had slept.

Outdoors, I noticed the air had an oppressive, acrid smell.

“Kim'chi,” my husband told me, “You’ll get used to it.”

We pushed my son's stroller through the streets, clinging to where the sidewalk would have been in order to avoid speeding taxicabs and motorcycles. It seemed as if every person we passed stared at my son's blonde hair, his pale skin. On the corner, an old woman sat with her legs crossed, singing mournfully, a bamboo basket full of dried chili peppers in her lap. Her right arm came up and down, beating the peppers to powder with a long brown stick. My eyes burned and watered.

At the gates of Camp Casey, my husband handed his Army ID card to a young, gangly Private who looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. He nodded us through and we entered the base, heading straight for the PX and the bookstore. Under a local interest sign, I found a squat little tourist book on South Korea, and trailed my fingernail along the index until I found Tongduch'on. I flipped to the entry and the first thing I read was: "North of Uijongbu is Tongduch'on, one of the ugliest cities in Korea."*

On our return trip to our apartment, we walked more slowly than before, my husband's arms and my son's stroller weighed down with PX bags full of forgotten necessities: bath towels, a frying pan, a tabletop burner. A fat bumblebee hummed lethargically across our path as we pushed down our alley, the smell of fermenting kim'chi still sharp in the air.

Inside our apartment, I emptied four postal boxes of clothing we had sent out in advance and tucked the cardboard flaps inside. We used one box for storing the few books we had brought along, another for our son's toys, and the last two for our sweaters. Other than these boxes, our only furniture was a clothing rack my husband had picked up at the downtown market and a fold up navy yo, which doubled as a couch and a bed.

Over the next several days, I slowly grew more accustomed to my new surroundings. In the mornings, I showered in our bathroom, standing carefully between the toilet and the sink, my legs moving quickly on the concave floor. In one hand, I held a bar of soap; in the other, the purple hose which snaked out of the wall above the toilet. A metal ring in the center of the bathroom floor drained away the soapy water, and when I pulled on my robe, I almost felt clean.

I began a silent and cautious friendship with our landlord's wife, which was comprised of a lot of smiling, gesturing, nodding, and eventually, an exchange of spaghetti and kim'chi. I bought language workbooks from the PX and learned most of the Korean alphabet, but still hesitated when saying kamsahamnida to the cab drivers. I peeled garlic over paper sacks, assumed the local squat. The disturbing wail of the chili woman grew each day more familiar and when I entered our apartment, I began to remove my shoes first, setting them on the concrete step outside our front door.

One morning, my landlord stood smiling in our doorway. A towel wrapped around his aging neck accepted the black stains of dye that dripped from his hair. He pointed to my once white Keds, now wet and gray with mud from the previous night's rains. “Ha ha,” he said, but his voice was not cruel, “What you gonna do now?”

After a few more months, we moved into the nearby Tokari apartments, more American in style, with a kitchen that didn't double as a bedroom and a bathroom that had a separate shower stall. Our living room window overlooked a Korean gravesite, and we watched the soft mound of earth turn to white with each snowfall. The move was largely one of convenience: it brought us closer to Camp Hovey, where my husband was stationed as a Korean linguist. We walked onto base often, steering my son's stroller downhill, and winding through the alleys until we reached the checkpoint.

Camp Hovey was a small base adjoined to the more capacious Camp Casey. It was navigable by a series of dusty roads shouldered with row upon row of Quonset huts. A black goat roamed the base, rumored to be violated nightly by desperate soldiers too cheap or too shy to approach the local prostitutes. That prostitutes were so prevalent in Tongduch’on was, I suppose, a matter of supply and demand, American economics at work in a foreign land, exacting an incalculable toll.

Korea was regarded as a hardship tour by the men and women of the military, and Tongduch’on’s proximity to the demilitarized zone helped make it one of the least desirable posts in the entire Republic. Soldiers were strongly discouraged from bringing their families with them and could do so only at their own expense. As a result, many GIs made the trip alone.

For those families who ignored the warnings and flew the distance anyway, the military offered quarterly family drills intended to prepare us in the event of a North Korean attack. We lined up and went through a series of brief lessons. They filed each family member’s name on a roster, they double-checked our identification cards, they showed us the route an evacuation bus would take through the town, they told us what we could and could not bring with us on the bus, and they demonstrated the duck-and-cover procedure. But if you spoke with any of the soldiers working these sessions privately, they would tell you how the entire family drill was a waste of everyone’s time. They would tell you that if North Korea ever did decide to attack, the whole town of Tongduch’on would be little more than a speed bump.

After attending my first and only family drill, I walked back uphill to our apartment, thinking of how quickly everything around me could be decimated. Everything seemed loaded with the potential for destruction. At any moment, the walls erected at the edges of the main street – some with the lingering traces of artwork from the Seoul Olympics – could crumble to dust, the Korean gravesite visible from our living room could be transformed to an enemy barricade, long black guns resting atop the snowy mound, and each step I took could have been a trigger spot for future mines. The entire town seemed possessed by the ghost of what could happen. And to complicate matters further, the immense pressure didn’t only come from the North – it rained down on all fronts.

The Korean elders watched the younger generations as they purchased bootleg artificial Christmas trees from their American contacts at the PX. They saw Burger Kings erected next to Buddhist temples, their grainy pink burgers intended to bring in the business of American GIs. They flinched when American soldiers yelled out to older Korean bus drivers without a trace of respect, “Yo! Next stop, shi!”

Tongduch’on was a village where cultures collided daily, weighed down with the additional burden of a perpetual oppressive threat from the North. And yet the townspeople rode their bicycles to work as usual, they talked on the streets and smiled, they mailed letters at the post office and washed their windows on weekends and argued at the market over the cost of rice and laughed out loud when a neighbor told an off-color joke. In short, they lived. They lived in spite of the fact that they lived on a speed bump.

One Saturday night, when my husband and I were able to secure a baby sitter, we went out for the first time in many months. We had to make a stop at his barracks first, and as I walked down the second floor corridor, I watched off-duty soldiers criss-crossing the hall, talking loudly over the competing music that emanated from different rooms. One man was bragging about having deflowered his Korean girlfriend earlier that afternoon. I knew his wife, who had stayed back in the States with their two small children. I noticed that the man's wedding band was missing from his left hand. There wasn't even a mark where it had been. In the laundry room at the end of the hall, a small Korean woman with graying hair stood hunched over a table, silently folding stacks of soldiers' underwear and PT shirts.

While I leaned against a doorframe, waiting for my husband, I thought of the katusa who had warned my husband's staff sergeant that if North Korea ever advanced southward, he would join their side and begin shooting as many Americans as he could.

“Oh no you won't,” the staff sergeant had shot back, “because I'll make it my first order of business to put a bullet between your eyes.”

When my husband and I walked out of the barracks that night, we headed towards downtown Tongduch’on. We ate at a local restaurant, scissoring strips of beef and searing them over a flame that whipped out of the center of our table. After our dinner, we walked outside and hailed a cab. It slowed to the curb, came within sight of our white faces, and drove off. Across the street, there was a young girl in pigtails, wearing a traditional Korean hanbok costume. She was walking between her mother and father, who would swing her up and forward on every third step. Her laughter echoed through the street and I remember clearly that she glimmered in pink and gold each time her delicate body caught the air and moved easily forward.

*Robert Nilsen, South Korea Handbook, (Chico, California 1991), 220-221