Every Time I Fill the Gas Tank, I Think of Kim Jong-Il

[dr_pretentious]

All the pregnancy books advise that, once you really get into the third trimester, you should keep your gas tank at least half full at all times. You never know when you might have to take off for the hospital, or some urgent visit to a specialist, or whatever, and in most parts of the country half a tank is enough to be sure that you'll be able to get there without imperiling your baby by stopping for gas. So, okay, we always have at least a half-full gas tank.

Half a tank of gas is also enough to get you from Yongsan Garrison, where my family was stationed in Seoul, down the peninsula to Pusan, where the Navy would have been waiting to evacuate us if North Korea had invaded South Korea back in 1987. One of the first things we learned about life on Yongsan was that having less than half a tank of gas in your car was a ticketing offense--everyone was required to be ready, at all times, to participate in a mass evacuation. I was seventeen, and a licensed driver, so I got instructions on where to report in case I was needed to drive people out of there. "We would need every vehicle, and every driver," the orientation guy said. "It might be necessary to separate you from your family. Getting everybody out might require that you drive a car full of other people's children." This scenario was both irresistible to imagine and impossible to imagine. Although the army base where we lived was in the middle of the South Korean capital, it was also within artillery range of the Demilitarized Zone. I pictured massive traffic jams, explosions, family partings of the kind I'd only seen in black and white movies about World War II, you know, the kinds of scenes that play out at train stations in Paris, like the flashbacks in Casablanca. And I suppose it might have gone that way. It was the year before the Olympics were in Seoul, and there was a week when Kim Jong-Il threatened to invade if Pyongyang didn't get to host the yacht races because, of course, the two Koreas were really one country. It was the year of South Korea's first presidential election, and nobody knew whether the outgoing dictator might not change his mind at the last minute about wanting to be the first leader of his country to leave office alive more than he wanted to stay in office a little longer. Not infrequently, tear gas drifted to our part of town from the student riots in Myongdong Square.

I'd say it was a surreal time to be an American in Seoul, but I wonder whether there's ever been a non-surreal time to be any sort of person in Seoul since the partition of the country. No doubt it's surreal for the U.S. Army families who are there right now. I wonder how long that year of my life will need to compost in my unconscious before fiction starts growing out of it.

All that year, I pined after my boyfriend back in the States. Nobody had much patience with my teenage pining. "After all," they said, "it's not as if you're someday going to marry some guy you dated in high school." The joke's on them. Twenty years later, here that same old boyfriend is, driving me to midwife appointments in the week before our child's due date, and remembering frequently to top off the gas tank.

Comments

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Mmm, my brother might have been in those parts at that time. He was a navy sub man, and they were on deployment in the Pacific during '88. Exactly where and when is, I think, still classified.

I hope you'll post pictures when the little one arrives.

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

I was in Korea in '87 too! Up on the border though, pretending that we weren't violating the rules of the DMZ with all our heavy weapons hidden in the forts.

At the time, North Korea's military was so played up that we thought we'd mainly serve as speed bumps in case of an invasion. But, in retrospect, I doubt even a full scale invasion would have made it very far. The fact that Seoul was in arty range of the North was always pretty scary though.

[thecrimsony.livejournal.com]

My dad would tell you that pregnancy or no, you never let your gas tank get below empty.

Yeah, that didn't stick with me. Probably a lack of evacuation orientation. :p Then again, I've only run out of gas once, and it was 80% of the way to the nearest gas station to my house.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Ah, families - so frequently wrong about each other... :D

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

I love your posts. I love you!

{{hugs}}

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I was really glad my father's job didn't involve classified stuff. We had neighbors who'd go on temporary duty they couldn't tell their families about, and although people can get used to that sort of thing, they don't generally get to the point of liking it.

Pictures are part of the plan. Dan's put fresh batteries in the cameras and checked to make sure they're in good working order.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The DMZ is such a perfect study in the absurd results you get when you inscribe the larger absurdities of the Cold War in a landscape. I made the obligatory pilgrimage up to the DMZ, with the bus passing those miles and miles of concrete pylons spaced to serve as tank traps. And I got the official tour, with the guide's tale of the dueling flags on the negotiators' tables, and the telescopic viewing of the Potemkin village. The only other place I've been that had its craziness as perfectly expressed in artifacts and architecture was Berlin, but I didn't get there until many years after the wall came down. By then, Berlin's craziness had quirked around into a relaxed, self-conscious collective irony--something less pointed but more real than the Panmunjom official guide's attempts at laughing off the North. I can only imagine how weird it must have been to spend a whole tour of duty up there.

Our downstairs neighbor in Yongsan spent a lot of time in the DMZ doing something mysterious and classified that had to do with finding infiltration tunnels, but of course he wasn't allowed to say what or where in any detail. He had been (or maybe still was--I don't remember for sure) a Green Beret, and he liked making jokes about demolitions. One night the Seoul Olympic Committee sponsored a big fireworks display for the pre-anniversary of the opening ceremonies, to get the city counting down the days to its big international debut...but nobody thought to announce to the folks who lived on post that there were going to be fireworks. So right around the dinner hour, when explosions started going off, our neighborhood got very nervous. My father phoned around for information, and once he figured out out what was going on, he gave my sister and me the go-ahead to watch the fireworks. When we got out onto the balcony, we discovered our downstairs neighbor had told his kids to hide in their apartment's innermost closet, he'd gathered up all his guns, and he was readying himself to make some kind of last stand on the porch.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I've run out of gas a time or two in my life, and rolled into the station on the last fumes once, but so far only in places where it wasn't a big deal. New Jersey's such a gas-station-rich environment, you don't generally need to think about refueling until you're practically down to empty. Getting back into the refill-at-the-halfway-mark discipline really is a blast from the past.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I have to say, when Dan and I got back together after college, it was gratifying to watch my parents eat humble pie. It was also gratifying to see them start treating my sister's love life with more respect. You'd think, though, that it wouldn't have been so hard for my folks to take Young Love seriously, since they got married halfway through college, and that turned out really well.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I have to hold out for my brain to produce Cool Stuff to ruminate about at this point, because if I just posted regular updates about the pregnancy, the whole blog would degenerate into daily complaints about my sciatica. My sister phones me every day, and when I see her name in the caller ID, I just answer, "Still not in labor, how are you?" Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for the Rugosa Coven story development to solidify or dissolve, and it's not clear which is more likely--the ball's in somebody else's court right now.

At least grad school trained me well to tolerate waiting for really long periods of time. Even now, when the baby's head is engaged so firmly in my pelvis that the seams of my sacroiliac joints are starting to un-knit, I maintain that pregnancy is less distressing than writing a dissertation.

[ingridsummers.livejournal.com]

You and your honey rock. Good luck with impending baby.

[persipone.livejournal.com]

:-) it's funny how symbolic things in our lives can become. And-- may I have your address? I have a baby blanket for you! I'm persipone at gmail

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

I have been in the habit of refilling the gas tank at a quarter full or before for years. We were slightly worried about being in traffic getting to the hospital during labor but then it turned out it was 7 am on a Sunday so there was no traffic at all.
I have been thinking of you all week and wondering if the baby had decided to make his appearance yet. (Sending you thoughts of a short, effective, happy labor.)