Memoirs: Trip to Korea

This was an article I submitted to The Stand Magazine that got woefully rejected.  Boo .  But now I post it here for you guys to enjoy since I have not updated in a long long time.

PC Bang, Thou Art My Only Friend

I went to my motherland this past summer, Korea, the land of the most beautiful people (obviously, myself included) in the world!  The moment I stepped foot off of my plane and onto the sweltering hot and humid land of my forefathers, there are two things that I learned in a hurry.  Number 1.  Damnit, I’m short.  Number 2.  Damnit, I’m single.

You know, in my preparation for the trip to Korea, my parents would spend every morning interceding on my behalf to find a wife.  Heck, after a while I decided I might as well too, and even asked for specifics.  I prayed that famous prayer, you know, the prayer that every man of faith prays: “Dear God, just let her be hot!”  The problem with this plan, and maybe a short oversight on God’s part to answer the prayers of my parents (mine as well) is that the girls there are just too freaking tall.  Okay well—that’s an untrue statement.  It’s not that they’re tall.  It’s that every single one of them wears four to five inch heels.  Good lord, I don’t understand how a 5’6” man is supposed to survive in that barren wasteland of reasonably short women.  I hate to admit it, but heels are a short man’s kryptonite.

Apart from that, I learned to my horror that all my fob Korean friends lied to me before I came.  They said that my American passport would be the key into the hearts of any woman I set eyes on.  I was even planning on wearing it around my neck with a big chain, flashing it here and there, utilizing it amidst winks and awkward pick up lines:  “Hey baby, you want to be an American citizen?”  But alas, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.”

In my destitute state, and quickly realizing that my hopes of coming back with a non-English speaking hot immigrant Korean wife was collapsing before my very eyes, I decided to resort to what every other single man resorts to in Korea, the PC Bang.  Now.  Some of you guys may be familiar with this, some of you may not.  For those of you who aren’t, let me explain.

The PC Bang is the blackhole of death for every Korean man who is single.  It is the harbinger of evil.  Men go there out of loneliness not realizing that once they go in, their fate of being single is now forever sealed. I sit down, and next to me are endless rows of men, most of whom have probably been there for eight hours straight, with only other lonely men to accompany them.  I swear I hear someone crying in a corner somewhere.

It is the net café.  The home of Starcraft, Counterstrike, and World of Warcraft.  It is the land of keyboard smashers, monitor lovers, and 200 actions per minute gurus (there are Starcraft players so advanced that they can actually perform 200 different actions every minute).  There are stories, I kid you not, of Korean men dying from playing three to four days straight, often forgetting even basic functions such as eating food in their obsessive desire to level up their pseudo character.  Incredulous?  Me too.

Here I am, lonely, cold, and it’s raining outside.  Surrounded by pillars of smoke (because everyone here smokes) I see a poster of SlayerS_BoxeR, a professional Starcraft player, and literally every single man’s hero.  This guy rose above the ranks of mediocrity, and rose to stardom.  This guy has a fan base larger than most Korean pop-stars.  If he walks on the street, girls scream his name, men drool in jealous desire, and parents wish that their own kids would one day grow up just like him.  Almost on cue, I hear the twelve year old kid sitting next to me say, “one day when I grow up, I want to be just like Him!”  I take a closer look.  Damn.  He’s good looking, too.

As I’m sitting there, my mind wanders.  “This wasn’t the Korea I imagined!”  That thought sticks.  It’s so strange, I had expected to arrive at a Christian Utopia, a land of zealous holy freaks, passionate about only one thing: God.  Wasn’t this the motherland of revival?  Isn’t it professed to be nearly completely Christian, up to 70%?  I learn an interesting fact the following week, only 4% of the youth generation are professed followers of Christ.  Ouch.

I take a swift look around.  A man is smoking a cigarette while maneuvering his level 57 mage through the dark lands of “I Have No Life” with a Bible next to him.  Another man wears a gigantic cross around his neck while clicking his mouse rapidly, fending off the attacks of Orc and Goblin, yelling some babble in Korean to his friend who’s also playing with him.  Five hours later.  Same two guys, still clicking away.  I swear I saw them both in church earlier today…

And as I sit there, a sudden realization.  159,000 people died today, and based on the statistics, up to 50% of them did not know Jesus.  And we just spent the last eight hours in front of a computer screen.