Living in Seoul as an expat changed my life in a fundimental, existential manner. There was the me Before Seoul and the me After Seoul. And the person who enabled this change, for better or for worse, was the late Annie Shapiro. That hippie weirdo gave me experiences that I could have never otherwise had because she believed in me and believed in our shared dream of ROKon Magazine.
The late Annie Shapiro and me, back in the good olde days when I was young and cute.
I only bring this up because for some weird reason, I continue to get pings on this Website from Seoul. I have no idea why anyone from Seoul would care what I have to say. And, in all honesty, I don’t know if the people who occasionally look at this blog from Seoul even know me, if it they’re some third party who has heard a stray comment about me at a bar.
Who knows.
But the issue is, at the moment, I just want to be forgotten in Seoul. I was going through a really, really rough moment in my life for much of my time in Seoul and I did and said things that I regret. I was “pickled” in the sense that I was drinking way, way, way, too much soju. I was manic and I was self-medicating, never a great combination.
I’m 50 now and very definitely want to look towards the future of potentially being a traditionally published author at some point in the near future. I will admit, of course, that the process by which I’m writing my first novel requires a great deal of wallowing in nostalgia for the Good Old Days of Seoul, even though they sucked a lot of the time.
Anyway, the fact that anyone in Seoul cares enough about me to look at this Website is unnerving. It’s almost 20 years since I first arrived at Incheon Airport for my first tour in the country. The idea that someone in South Korea not only remembers me, but cares enough to see what I’m writing about….is kind of startling.
I was definitely a larger-than-life character at moments during my time in South Korea. I was so nuts at one point, in fact, that someone did a write up of me that ended up in a self-published book devoted to crazy expats. That was kind of tough, I have to say.
I suppose there is a greater-than-zero chance that I will return to Seoul at some point before I drop dead. But if it happens, it will because I sold my novel and it was a big enough success that I will have the funds to return.
At the moment, barring the DPRK collapsing and there being a bubble for ESL teachers there so intense that even a deadbeat like me can get a ticket to teach…it’s just not going to happen.
While the earnest, well-meaning nature of MAGA “thought leader” Catturd enrages me, I saw a description of him that gave me pause for thought. I’m really self-conscious about my current loser lot in life and the way some smug Twitter liberals were describing Catturd could very well be pretty much applied to me.
And, I hate to admit it, in some ways at this specific moment Catturd is actually on a personal basis a lot better off than me. And, in fact, I suspect there’s at least one smug liberal out there who uses her encounter with me in Seoul many moons ago as something of a cocktail party joke.
I’m talking, of course, of Jennifer 8. Lee.
Many moons ago, back in Seoul, Lee came to Seoul to work on a book about fortune cookies. And while she was polite to my face, I think she and her friend Tomoko thought I was completely fucking bonkers — a total fucking loser. And, occasionally, I will see in my Webstats random poking around about my various write ups over the years of that event from my point of view.
I can just imagine how much glee she gets in talking about the crazy, loser expat she met in Seoul. Her friend Tomoko, who was working for the Asian Wall Street Journal at the time, I think, really, really did not think much of me. So much so, that to this day it kind of rattles my personal self-perception.
And, going forward, if I should manage to write the Great American Pop Thriller, I think I’m going to have to prepare myself things not to be as great and wonderful as I want them to be. Any inspection of my personal life over the last 20-odd years will leave Normal Smug Wealthy Liberal Elites aghast at what a fucking loser I’ve been.
But I can’t change how old I am and I can’t change the past. All I can do is just try to write a good a novel as I possibly can.
The thing about my time in South Korea as an expat is, for one brief shining moment I was a somebody. I felt like I lived up to my “potential” because I was not only DJing at the best expat bar in Seoul, I was — at one point — the publisher of the only English language magazine in the city.
The events that left me emotionally kneecapped all happened in the course of a less than a year from late 2006 to early 2007, though there was an extended epilogue that would finally see everything come crashing down in February 2008.
I’m really leaning into my very, very romanticized memories of my time as an expat to flesh out a six novel project that is meant to be something of an allegory about the Trumplandia Era.
The thing that is growing more and more alarming is, of course, the fact that I’m no longer young. My looming 50th birthday is causing me no end of existential angst. Now that I finally have both ambition and motivation I’m kind of stuck with one clear path as to how to pull myself out of oblivion — stick the landing when it comes to writing my first novel.
But even then, even under the best of circumstances, it could very well be in my mid-50s before I actually see any sort of improvement in my lot. And, as I keep saying, if I get what I want, I don’t get what I want. I could write a successful breakout first novel and I’ll be so old that I won’t be able to date 24 year olds and become a smug “bi-costal” Twitter liberal who looks down on the Poors of middle America from first class on my way to LA or NYC.
I suppose some of all of this is coming from how I’m finally transitioning from the wilfully delusional stage of working on this novel to the point where I kind of have to sit up straight and take things a lot more seriously. Publishing is an industry and me being delusional just isn’t going to cut it in the world of the cold hard metrics of actually getting a novel traditionally published.
Anyway.
The point is — I still have a lingering desire to return to Asia for at least one visit before I drop dead. It’s not going to be anything like I remember and, in fact, it might just be really boring. A lot of the reason why I think about Seoul so much says more about my dissipated youth than it does what actually happened in Seoul.
Editor’s Note: I wrote this a really long time ago for ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I still think it’s one of the better things I’ve written over the years. — LSB
Mary DuMont and Myke Holliday before his death.
My first encounter with Mary DuMont was indirectly. Long before I met her in person, I experience the hailstorm of buzz amongst the expats I know in Seoul coming back from the Anmyeondo Beach Party last year. The more I learned about Anmyeondo and the story behind it, the more interested I became.
Months later, at a party held by Dennis Mitchell at his absolutely fabulous studio apartment in Hywha, I found myself talking to Mary. There was definitely…something about Mary. The older we get, the more difficult it is for those around us to not be just another brick in the dusty stonewall we call reality. But she seemed different. Her presence was a dollop of techno-color. “Who is that woman?” I thought when I first entered the room. I soon met Mary and her friend Joel. The two of them seemed to have a special relationship — like they’d be through a lot together. Mary and I flopped down on the couch and started to talk. Just as I was getting ready for a evening of flirtatious, wine-induced banter, the bomb was dropped.
She was a widow.
Not in the traditional sense, but a widow nonetheless. While currently she had a boyfriend — one of the more famous DJ’s in Korea, natch — her previous boyfriend, Myke, had died tragically and suddenly from cancer about a year before. I felt a bit of an existential chill. I was a character in the coda, the epilogue of a story that was on the cusp on ending. I found myself wanting to be a major character in whatever story was about to begin.
I mentioned to her the movie seemed to fit her situation perfectly — Moonlight Mile. The movie is a bittersweet, melancholy reflection on the effects of losing someone love suddenly and its after effects. Since we first met, I have frequently found myself thinking about her lost. I loved something a great deal, it was only a magazine, not a person, and I lost it, too. There is a reason they say that “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The thing that great loss provides you with is understand of the need, the power of compassion towards your fellow humans.
Since we first met, Mary has been just on the edge of my universe. She inhabits some magical land of DJs and cool kids where nerdy street urchins such as myself are allow to visit, but never live. Ever since my ROKon Magazine days, I have talked to her about doing a story about Myke. The more I got to know her, though, the more I realized the story is not so much about Myke as it is his effect on her. Myke seems ever-present with her, as though he’s just over her shoulder in her mind.
“I hated it here when I first arrived in March of 2004,” Mary says. “The people did not excite me and the superficialities that seem to be put in front of much bigger problems irritated me in amazing ways. Unsurprisingly, the more I settled, it became easier for me to want receive a culture so distant from my own.”
Before too long, Mary says, she found herself hearing about a fellow called Myke Holliday.
“I met him in the midst of a drunken night in Itaewon whilst waiting for my friends to grab a Kebab from the ‘Kebab guy’ I was shocked at the notion that this Myke Holiday standing before me, who didn’t make much effort to say hi at the moment, was the boyfriend of the ‘beautiful girl’ who worked behind the bar in the biggest club in Hong Dae, M2,” she said. “‘Who is this Myke Holliday?’ ‘Why I am always hearing his name scattered around town?’ At this point I had no recognition that he was a party planner and promoter. I didn’t really care either… “
Mary says later, their relationship would become more intense.
“My world revolved around his life, but I loved every second of it,” she says. “It’s so strange really, in the beginning he had small annoyances that I didn’t expect my heart to absorb. Not too long after getting involved, I was so empowered by this new love and life I was living. It was fun, exciting, and different. I was so devoted to him. Nothing else in my life seemed to take on as much meaning anymore. We always joked about being married from the very beginning. He would tell his friends “Mary will only marry me if it’s on a small island off of Greece. I’ll have to buy her a Vera Wang dress.. “
In the summer of 2005, Mary and Myke decided to organize another Anmyeondo party. It’s funny that something that seems such a important part of the expat experience in Korea is actually just a few years old.
“We began organizing it June and spent our Sundays in Anmyeondo,” she said. “We used to stay out all night Friday and Saturday promoting and then go straight to Nambu Bus Terminal and wait for the first bus to Anmyeondo at 7am. I learned so much from Myke. First and foremost, he taught me music. Myke had over 200 records (all of which were later given to me) and when he was at work, I would listen to the records he talked about and I would experiment on his decks.”
The 2005 Anmyeondo beach party was named Soulshine Summer Groove, 2005. Mary says that another foreigner, James from Australia, helped to organize and promote it. Myke would tell Mary and James what needed to be done.
“It was all brand new to me, but very very exciting,” Mary says. “Now that I look back, I didn’ t play such an important role on the organizing, but man did I think I did at the time. Myke taught me everything he knew about promoting. He used to always say “It’s all about getting people excited! that’s all promoting is.'”
The 2005 party did not go as well as Myke and Mary had expected, however. They failed to take into account a very important aspect of doing something on the beach — high tide. “We actually talked about it loads and thinking about it, we did take it into account. However, the problem was that we trusted a source and we went with it,” she said. It turns out the tide went up much higher than the source had said. There was a moment of panic, but ultimately some very expensive equipment was saved from destruction.
“It was crazy! I remember being so ashamed and embarrassed and Myke just laughed and continued to have an amazing time,” Mary says. “The party pretty much ended at 3am that night, but the music continued again in the morning. That’s one think about Myke, he always believed when no one else did. That was what was so great about him. He never let anything get to him…”
On the way to Thailand to recover from planning the part, they talked about the future. The two of them realized they wanted the same thing — a simple life back in the States. “He didn’t have a strong family background so the idea of genuine love was so appealing to him. He had grown up in Korea since he was 16. His father left when he was 18. Myke didn’t see him again until he got sick. He spent almost 9 years growing up in Seoul alone. He had loads of friends, but mainly just party friends. I think he starved for genuine love which is what I gave him… my family too.”
That didn’t work out, however, and they found themselves planning another festival the next year, the Anmyeondo Music Festival 2006. It was set to be a huge event, with international DJs descending upon Korea for the weekend event. Among them was InFusion, one of the best known DJs in the world.
This part of the story I learned face to face at the apartment Mary shares with her boyfriend. It reminds me of one I might see back home in Richmond. Mary brought out an assortment of teas for me to choose from. She pulled out a few pictures of her as a model in a lot fashion magazine. I thought back over the times I’ve seen her in the past. One image that stands out is seeing her with a brown ‘fro wig backstage of the big DJ event that took place on the Han River recently. The expression on her face as she watched makes the imagine iconic and leaves me wishing I’d taken a picture of it.
Mary says Myke had been complaining of abdominal pains for some time as we sip our tea. Whenever he went to a Korean doctor, they told Myke it was just too much spicy food. Myke finally went to an American service hospital to get a full check up. Throughout the experience, Mary stresses, Myke was the most positive person one could be.
It was July 6th, 2006, a Thursday, when he found out.
“He called me at work,” Mary said. The doctors said he had a tumor on his liver and it was inoperable. “That night, I didn’t stay at his house,” Mary says with a bit of sadness in her voice. Things went very quickly at that point. By July 10th, his father, Tom had come to Korea to be with him.
“By the end of July, he was in a lot of pain,” Mary said. “He was in so much pain, I didn’t know what to do.”
In the final days, Myke left the hospital and went to a hospice to die. Looking back, Mary says she has a few regrets she didn’t stay more with him while he was in the hospital. At the time, Mary says, she was so worried about her job that she didn’t stay over night. “Why was I so concerned about losing my visa,” she asks out loud.
As the days flew by, Myke “started to hate the doctors,” says Mary. Mary says she worried as the days went on that he might die without her being there. “I was so worried about that every sing night,” she said. In the end, however, she was there with him when he died at ahospice in Bundang, on July 24, 2006. He was 26.
She was determined, after his death, however, to see some sort of music event take place on the Anmyeondo Beach. Thus, with the help of some friends — most specifically well-known Haybonchon resident Hoppe — Mary was able to organize a new event that year, in honor of Myke. The called “Anmyeondo Beach Party 2006, A Tribute to Myke Holliday,” was a way for her to honor Myke’s memory in a way he would appreciate.
“I never had time to mourn,” Mary says of the time between Myke’s death and the beach party. “It was a tribute. this was his party. Everyone in Seoul knew it. It was his party.”
While there were numerous problems, Mary ultimately believes the party she and Hoppe organized was a success. “There were so many things that Myke wanted to do that he never got to do,” Mary said.
Mary says she learned a great deal about many different things due to Myke’s untimely death. She says it has put her life in perspective. She now knows to focus on the people who are really important in your life. “There are so many things that you don’t realize until you have an experience like this,” Mary said.
These days, Mary has her eyes on the future. She is taking online university courses and would like to snag a marketing job somewhere in the United States. “I don’t want to stay in Korea too long,” she notes.
I often see Mary around these days. She’s always got a smile on her face. Mary says there won’t be a Anmyeondo Beach Party this year and that saddens me greatly. I keep thinking of how determined she looked backstage at the DJ festival on the Han as her boyfriend played. My heart tells me that she was thinking about Myke and how his dreams will come true through her hard work.
We all want to believe in something. I guess I want to believe in Mary.
Man, does getting old suck. I have a very, very finite amount of time left to me on this planet and every day I continue to be a fucking loser, the less time I get to enjoy the “cool stuff” of whatever success I might ultimately have.
I was very creative in Seoul.
It’s all very frustrating.
One thing I might want to do if I ever become any sort of success is write picture books for children. I did an amazing job of writing little, short stories for Korean children learning English when I was in Seoul for the children’s newspaper I wrote for and I would love to do it again at some point.
But it’s just not practical for me to look into it at the moment — I would need an illustrator to work with and at the moment I live in something of a vacuum. So, being able to write little children’s books would be a side effect of a broader success.
Ugh. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I hate being an old loser. I have just wasted way, way too much time grieving over the failure of ROKon Magazine. All I can do, I guess, is try to bootstrap myself out of this particular situation.
Only time will tell how successful I am at it all.
I’m pretty much a starving artist at the moment so it definitely looks as though my upcoming 50 birthday is going to be extremely uneventful. It will come and go without any thing of note happening. I will note, however, that it was my 31st year, not my 30th that was Big for me — I went to South Korea the summer of my 31st birthday.
As such, I’m trying not to be too hard on myself for being a broke ass motherfucker. At some point this year, I’d like to take a quick trip up to New York City. What I really want to do, of course, is return to Seoul for about two weeks.
But that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
And, yet, I do hope to return to Seoul one last time before I drop dead. There are very few expats still in Seoul from my time there, so I could pretty much jump right in and stir up trouble in the expat community without anyone realizing who they were dealing with.
The question, of course, is when that visit might happen. At the moment — I just don’t know. And, really, the world is so big that I probably shouldn’t limit myself to just visiting Seoul. But I have a very strong personal attachment to Seoul.
Ideally, I would do a round robin of East Asia, starting in Tokyo, then flying over to South Korea then finally going down to Southeast Asia before flying back home. That’s the dream, at least.
But, of course, a lot is going to have to change for such things to happen. If I managed to write a breakout first novel then, yeah, I might be able to return to Asia. For the time being, though, just being able to visit New York City again for a weekend would be pretty cool.
There remains a part of me that is idly interested in visiting not New York City or Seoul, but LA. It would be a lot of fun to see if my hunch that I have a very LA personality would pan out the way I think. I think I’m probably be willfully delusional on that front, but I am, as the late Annie Shapiro said, “a delusional jerk with a good heart.”
So, lulz.
I do have a little bit of a hunch that Something Big is going to happen to me later in life. Of course, some of that is just me being my usual delusional self, but I do know my personality and skillset well enough to know that I might manage to pull off a third “hat trick” of some sort.
Only time will tell exactly what that hat trick might ultimately be.
When I first heard that Annie Shapiro was dead a number of years ago, I didn’t believe it. She was just the type of person who would fake her death specifically to hurt me. The thing about Annie was, she really knew what made me tick and she would push my buttons to great effect.
The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was cute.
Annie’s death is a tragedy and one thing that really bothers me about it is we never got a chance to reconcile in some way. The reason why Annie grew to be so important to me was I can articulate a vision but I have shit ability to persuade anyone to listen to whatever I think up.
She, meanwhile, was all persuasion. We made a great team and whatever success my version of the magazine had came from our specific relationship. ROKon Magazine — at least my original version — was never anything more than a glorified zine.
It was doomed to fail for a number of reasons, most of them directly connected to my own personal failings and inability to manage people. That’s why when it failed, I was kind of kneecapped emotionally in ways I am still recovering from. The other reason why Annie was so important to me for so long is she brought the magazine back without me — in secret! — and so I had to live through the deep shame of seeing what huge failure I was each month.
But that was a long time ago and nobody cares anymore.
The idea that Annie would be murdered in such a random way still rattles my cage. In fact, I think Annie is the only person I know personally to have ever been murdered. I still don’t believe she’s dead. Annie was very cruel to me on an emotional basis, but, then, I wasn’t exactly all that great to her during our “divorce” because of the magazine.
But she didn’t deserve what happened to her, nobody does. I like to think this six novel project I’m working on is something of an homage to what I remember of Annie.
The first big story I wanted to tell was what happened to me and Annie Shapiro with ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I struggled with telling the literal story a number of different ways but ultimately have settled for drawing upon my experiences at that point in my life as the basis for a six novel project set in the United States.
But it has occured to me that there is a way to tell the story of ROKon Magazine in fictional form. As much as I hate to admit it, the only way I can think of to tell the story would be with a framing device. I say that because I’ve always wanted to tell the story with a straight a-b-c chronology because I lived it and felt I could tell the story without the use of such a device.
And, yet, it has occured to me that if I ever had the means to tell the story here is how I would do it.
I would have a magazine reporter decide to investigate what happened all those years ago. As part of their research, they would track down different people who were involved with the magazine and then you would have extensive flashbacks of what they were doing in 2006-2008 as the magazine’s drama developed.
That way there is some sort of mystery that would keep people reading even though we would go into things knowing that the magazine ultimately failed pretty quickly because of, well, me. Or, at least, fictional me.
Anyway, the older I get, the more I realize I have romanticized what happened with the magazine so much that it’s something of a delusion. A lot of why I continue to think about the experience so much is it’s all kind of fused with my regrets about my dissipated youth.
In the end, I am telling the story of ROKon Magazine, just is a very defused, jumbled up way set in a small town in America over the course of 25 years.
It’s very interesting how in America we’re so busy talking about racism that we are pretty oblivious to another prejudice: class. I can usually fake a similar class as the smug asshole Twitter liberals who want to sell me MeUndies on their podcast. That is, until, of course, my natural bonkers kookiness comes out and they dismiss me.
Also, I’m just too poor — at the moment — for smug Blue Check liberals to accept me in any real way, no matter how much they probably would like me if they got to know me.
And that, my friend, is why class sucks.
I could win the $1.1 billion Mega Millions jackpot and it wouldn’t change how old I am and it wouldn’t change my class background. I have a relative who is far more successful than I am who acts like he’s some salt of the earth red neck when, in fact, if we both went to a cocktail party with snooty wealthy people they would definitely gravitate towards him in the end.
I would, however, probably get drunk in such a situation and have very loud, very interesting conversations with the best looking woman at the party. That’s just sort of my thing.
Anyway, the older I get the more I understand the invisible power of class. When I was an expat in South Korea, there was a regular communist utopia going on because everyone was getting paid about the same amount and everyone was doing pretty much the same thing for a living. The only real differences were one of origin, which is why you often get asked, “Where you from?” when you saddle up to a bar and find yourself talking to someone new.
As I approach my 50th birthday, I’m feeling a lot of existential angst because no matter what happens to me there are some things I just can’t change because of my dissipated, squandered youth.
Yet another expat from South Korea who I don’t know looked at my LinkedIn profile within the last 24 hours, which yet again makes me wonder if people in the South Korea expat community are still talking about me.
I don’t think you realize how colorful and over-the-top I was at the height of my bonkers behavior in Seoul in late 2006 – to early 2008. I was so over the top, so manic that someone even put me in a book about weird expats. That did wonders for my self-esteem, let me tell you.
“It was all long time ago and nobody cares anymore,” is what I like to tell myself, but I think maybe I’m underestimating the impact I had one my fellow expats all those years ago. There are two types of expats in South Korea — the ones who stay a short amount of time and the ones who never leave and go slowly insane. (I say this as someone who stayed too long and abruptly left South Korea because of “homesickness.”)
I love South Korea, but there is definitely a time limit for most people who live there for more than just a year or two. Something about Korean culture really, really gets to the Western mind and it takes a unique person with a hearty constitution to be able to survive for more than, say, five or six years.
Now that I think about it, my best friend from my Korea days is back in South Korea at the moment and I suppose it’s possible that in the process of catching up with people (she’s been out of country for a few years) I get brought up in conversation — expats love, love, love to gossip — and, ta-da someone gets curious enough that they look at my woefully unimportant LinkedIn profile.
The core of the six novel project I’m working on at the moment is pretty much what was going on in my life in late 2006 – early 2007 when I was running ROKon Magazine and DJing at Nori Bar in Sinchon. Those were the days, as they say. I am using my extremely romanticized memories of that era in my life — smashed into a few other eras of my life — as the basis of a murder mystery set in a small town in Virginia. The apex of my life to date. I’m hoping that I can ride those memories to sticking the landing with my first novels. Even if I’m going to be way too old to do such a thing by the time everything gets sorted out.
Anyway. I really miss South Korea, despite everything. But for the fact that little Koreans don’t like me (and I don’t like them) I would probably be still in South Korea, married to a Korean woman with a small brood of Amerasian children struggling to learn English like the rest of the Korean population.
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