The first observation is that this hospital does not smell like a hospital. This massive complex feels more like an airport. Elevators and large foyers greet patients when they enter the automatic sliding doors. Natural light spills through the expansive sky lights in the roof, and an art gallery adjacent to the main hall draws the attention of a passerby.
Koreans whiz by me, left and right. Some in street clothes with masks over their face (a “Korean thought” surges through me – “this place is full of evil germs and I must protect myself”). Some in three piece suits with nice, shiny shoes. Interns? Business men? Lawyers? Are the health care system and the legal system as intertwined as they are in America? I am not sure if our litigious American customs exist in South Korea. Some are patients in hospital gowns. Some independent. Some connected to an IV crutch of dripping liquid. All make quick eye contact, and then dart their glance aside.
A line of ATMs gets worked busily as people line up to extract the colorful won that will no doubt pay for their services here. It occurs to me I have no idea how the health care system in this country works. As a teacher for the Seoul International School, I am well cared for with a favorable international health plan, but my thoughts drift to the native Korean. What is there health care system like, and how does it differ from ours? We enter the International Clinic room of the hospital, and my thought is quickly scattered. Brief introductions with the nursing staff, and we are off for the first part of our International Work Visa physical: blood and urine.
Having blood drawn here is a bizarre exercise only to be paralleled with going to the DMV. Patients sit in a small room and receive a print-out upon entry. The print out has the usual information: name, date, time of entry, and then a large number smack in the middle of the paper. At the front of the room is a line of 8 kiosks, with a pleasant Korean woman behind each podium. A digital sign hangs above each woman’s head displaying a single letter followed by 4 numbers-all in English. Patients sit with their ticket firmly grasped, eyes narrowed on the alphanumeric read out slowly changing on the digital screens.
My number appears just a few moments after I have found a seat. A seat that was briefly occupied by a native countryman. Upon our entrance, our seven person entrance, we groggily scrap to find seats through the early morning fog still obscuring our thoughts. The native countryman sits on the end row of a four person bench. When I move into the row, he spots the three people behind me and quickly vacates his post, smiling and gesturing to us to occupy the four seats. We all thank him, and try to convey that he does not have to move for us – we can scatter ourselves throughout the room. But he will not sit back down; he moves across the aisle to another row and sits next to another patient waiting for the inevitable pinch of the needle. We are slightly embarrassed and slightly happy to be all sitting together. We are socially conscious teachers here to learn about the culture, teach internationally, and experience this new terrain – but we also don’t want to disrupt the scene in the process. I was told, before my departure, that Koreans are very hospitable and eager to please foreigners, and I think this may be the first example of this hospitality. This notion is further confirmed a few days later when Amber and I go shopping at the grocery store.
We stare at a wall of soy sauce, hundreds of bottles with dozens of different labels – all in Korean. We are confident that it is soy sauce, but why is there so much? And so many different kinds? I try to ask an employee if it is, in fact, soy sauce, and if they have a smaller bottle as almost every plastic bottle filled with the black liquid stands a liter or more tall. The woman does not understand me, and hands me something off a different shelf – I think it is salt.
Suddenly, another patron standing behind me jets off from the aisle. She actually runs out of the aisle. Amber and I exchange a quick glance – have we broken some cultural taboo by asking for soy sauce? She returns quicker then she departed, dragging her teenage daughter behind. She quickly rifles something in Korean to the young girl, and then smiles at us. The girl rolls her eyes and responds in Korean. Her mom repeats the command and gestures at us again. The girl looks up at Amber and me through rimless glasses, and what pops out of her mouth is astonishing.
“What are you looking for?” she asks, in perfect English. Not just in perfect English, but with an American accent. I am suddenly not in Seoul; I am in a Korean district of San Francisco. This girl’s mother does not speak English, but this girl speaks flawless English with the inflection of a Bay Area resident. Weird. Amber and I stumble over our words at this new revelation.
“Ah, soy sauce. Yes, we are looking for soy sauce,” I say.
The Korean girl scans the shelves, “What do you want it for?”
Amber and I exchange another befuddled look. How do I respond to this without insulting this child whose mother is proudly watching the exchange?
“For rice, or putting on food. How about this one?” Amber says, pulling a bottle off the shelf. Any bottle, something to try and make sense of this. The girl looks at the bottle and shakes her head.
“No,” she says “that soy sauce is for soup.” Amber and I make the connection, and after a quick glance between each other, we look up and down soy sauce aisle and realize each one of these mysteriously labeled containers is soy sauce, but soy sauce for a purpose. Soup soy sauce, beef soy sauce, pork soy sauce, breakfast soy sauce, lunch soy sauce, dinner soy sauce, and soy sauce for everyday of the week (and two for Sunday). The girl scans the aisle again, and pulls another bottle, “This one will work.” We thank her and her mother graciously, and we bow politely to the mother. Mom smiles and is beaming as she exits the aisle with daughter in tow.
B5224 pops up on one of the digital screens. I stand up and walk to the front of the room and sit below my corresponding number. A soft spoken Korean woman greets me in Korean, “Annyong haseyo.” I timidly respond in kind. She deftly wraps my arm in a rubber surgical hose, slaps my arm, apologizes, and then gently taps my strained vein with the sharp syringe. She draws 4 vials of blood with rapid fluidity, unwraps my arm, and covers the pinhole with an alcohol wipe. Above me, the digital read out cycles to the next number. This is by far the most efficient, gentle, and vampire-like blood drawing procedure I have encountered.
The Korean women hands me a cup to pee in as I stand up, and I enter the bathroom. I suppose there is little concern for urine swapping or tainted tests, because I enter the bathroom with 4 other men and we all dutifully fill the cups at western style urinals. We place our cups into a window at the far end of the bathroom. I exit the bathroom and I am whisked upstairs for further tests. We begin to follow our Korean liaison from the hospital, and I eye the back of her hospital scrubs and see a magical word: volunteer. I notice many more hospital volunteers throughout our visit.
We are once again buzzing through large foyers and hallways. Koreans on my left and right. My feet shuffle beneath me. A sting in my arm reminds of me where I am, but I otherwise feel like I am in an airport or a large mall and we just haven’t reached the shops yet. I once again notice the lack of hospital smell. That stale medicinal smell that always permeates a visit to the land of the sick and healing is thoroughly absent here. It literally smells like nothing, kind of how water tastes like nothing.
I arrive upstairs and remove my shirt and put on a hospital gown for my chest X-ray. Despite the other visitors congregating in the waiting area, we are quickly brought in to the X-ray room one at a time. The technician giggles as she tries to pronounce our names, and directs me to hug the large square block at the front of the room. My name is recorded as my first and middle name, and they stammer out both names as one long syllable. When the technician speaks, she pauses before the last word of every sentence, and then says it a little louder, and with a tone of finality that she has completed a proper English sentence.
“Rogerphillip, please stand…HERE.”
“Okay.”
“Rogerphillip, please put arms around…BLOCK.”
“Okay.”
“Rogerphillip, please take deep breath and…HOLD.”
“Huuuuuuu….” I breathe deep and…HOLD.
The X-ray machine beeps behind me and the technician I can’t see calls again.
“Rogerphillip, please…RELEASE.”
“Wheeeeeeewwwwww.” I release my breath.
“Rogerphillip, please…RELEASE.”
I look at the technician with a blank stare. She is gesturing to the door, “Rogerphillip, please…RELEASE.” I release myself from the room and thank the technician, “Kamsahamnida.”
I change out of my hospital gown and I am back on the escalator downstairs to the International Clinic. We enter and take seats in the small waiting room. Our group occupies about half the empty seats, and a large, African American family occupies the other half. The parents are looking at each other through glazed eyes. Some of their children are playing games, and some are slouched over, asleep on the couch. They have the look of a family that has been waiting for hours in the International Clinic of Asan Medical center. That same look that is seen in airports around the world from the travelers whose flights have been cancelled or luggage lost.
The teachers of Seoul International School are quickly weighed and measured, and I struggle to convert the metric system to standard when I see the digital read out of my height and weight. I am called into the doctor’s office, and I greet the petite Korean doctor with the formal greeting I have acquired over the past few days.
“Annyong haseyo!” I proudly exclaim, entering the office.
“Hello,” she responds in perfect English, similar to the young girl in the grocery store. Not just perfect English, English with an American accent. I quickly realize this doctor has probably gone to school in America, and an expression of amusement rolls across her face in response to my confused countenance. After pointing and grunting my way through the majority of my Korean encounters over the past few days, her English and her American accent catches me off guard, and I can tell it is part of her routine. Maybe a fun way to break up the day. She knows my jet lag hasn’t cleared yet. My brain is still trying to function on Pacific Standard Time, and my quickness has been dulled by our hectic schedule, right off the plane, at Seoul International School. She flashes a clever smile, and we begin the routine.
Eyes, ears, throat, neck, reflexes, blood pressure, heart rate, and a check of the vital organs. We make small talk about my move to South Korea, and teaching at SIS. She tells me I am in great health and to stay active. In fact, she tells me I am the healthiest person she has examined so far, and she has examined almost 25 new staff members. I feel elated. Some good news in this chaos of a new, foreign city. I give her a formal thank you, “Kamsahamnida.” She responds in her native tongue, “Chon maneyo.” And off I go, back onto the bus and the afternoon meetings at SIS. Through the humming traffic and sea of apartments and beautiful green space that have come to symbolize my introduction to this amazing country. I have little time to talk with my colleagues as I bury myself back in to Still Life with Rice, by Helie Lee. The summer reading book for my incoming ninth graders, and an excellent window to the traditions of Korean life.
That evening I feel boastful and brag to Amber about my top score at the health examination.
“The doctor told me I was the healthiest person she examined,” I say proudly, chewing some American style Mac and Cheese Amber concocted from our visit to COSTCO.
“Oh yeah?” Amber responds, “She told me the same thing. In fact, I talked to people on the bus ride home, and she said that to everyone.” We crack up. My ego quickly deflates. I pop a spoonful of penne pasta soaking in pepper-jack cheese into my mouth, and the warm feeling is all over me. This new country; where people run to help translate a soy sauce conundrum, play musical chairs to accommodate a confused group of hospital patients, and drop sly niceties to make you feel a sense of happiness after a long day of pokes and prods; is starting to feel as warm and welcoming as the comfort food Amber put together for our evening meal.
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