The Chungnam National University Hospital is one of 6 major hospitals in Daejeon City, Korea. I’m sitting in the lobby lounge, mostly in the dark. Less than two hours ago, this place was bustling with chatter; patients streamed to and from the reception desks, doctors bellowed into cellphones and glowered at their clipboards, visitors clustered around blinking elevator doors. Now, it’s empty, and the lights are low. A patient slides by in paper slippers, leaning against his IV stand like an old friend, and his hacking cough reverberates against the high glass ceiling.
Korean healthcare is a thing of wonder to your average third-worlder. My mother had been working in Daejeon with a foreign passport for less than six months when she learned that she needed to check herself into the hospital, and the amount of coverage that insurance here offers is nothing short of astounding. In the Philippines, you’d be lucky to have your initial checkup covered. Here, they’re so busy writing off various fees from your bill that you wonder if they’ll end up paying you. (And mayhap they actually will, we haven’t gotten that far in the process yet.)
Of course, there are tradeoffs for this small fiscal miracle. For us, it is primarily a problem of language. If you took every English word understood by every person on staff in this hospital and strung them all together, you would have the rough word count of The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. I don’t mean that with any disrespect, I’m simply describing the difficulties inherent in our situation. As I listen to them struggle with the peanut-chewing sounds that pass for spoken English in this country, I think about the possibility of my family and I learning Hangol. A halfway meeting, such as it were. I imagine we would sound much, much worse. I cringe at the thought. Instead of peanut-chewing, we would sound like we were stricken with a waking bruxism, like Stephen Hawking without his magic chair.
That said, I have attempted to learn a few words, if only to satisfy my own need to communicate without having to start an impromptu game of Charades. (That, and I had spent $2.99 on a Korean phrasebook iPhone app.) “Yeh” (Yes), “Anyo” (No), “Kamsa Mida” (Thank You), and the quaintly specific “Oosong Kundei Humon” (Behind Woosong College) pretty much round out my Korean vocabulary. You couldn’t even write the first sentence of The Missing Piece with that.
And yet there is so much to love about this city. There is no tension in the air, like in Tokyo. No pushiness, like in Shanghai. No aloofness, like in Singapore. No rankness, like in Bangkok. Instead the people here seem laidback, warm, open, and bathed. Importantly: the internet connection in my mother’s low-rent apartment is a blistering 10mbps; one can only imagine what kind of bandwidth the technologists here are enjoying. If they could only speak some English, I wouldn’t mind living here for a few months. As it is, well, I’m already surrounded by Koreans back in Eastwood city, so no big change, really.