street fighting man

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair on the back porch, a Moscow Mule in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I got into a street-fight in South Korea?

Honestly. I'm not kidding. This is one of my most jaw-dropping travel tales. I actually did get into a fight. What follows is a morality tale about combining alcohol with a language barrier.

It was mid-2009. My tenure as an English teacher on the island of Geoje, in the Republic of South Korea, was drawing to a close. We were old hands at this by now, my coworkers and I. We had our expatriate's routine down pat: teach 35 hours a week and then go kvetch about it at the local bar. Our favorite watering hole was a little place called Ganiyeok (which, loosely translated, means "Whistle Stop"). It was our favorite because it was close to us: in fact, it was just about perfectly in between all of our apartments. Mr. A & Ms. E, the couple from England, lived up the hill and south, down the boulevard; Jeff (the Canadian reprobate) was a furlong to the north; and I was just down the block and left (east), hardly 300 yards away. We'd duck in there every chance we got. The beer was cheap, the snacks were palatable (and often squid-flavored) and the company couldn't be beat. And best of all, it wasn't too far for us to stagger home afterward, if perchance we overindulged.

And we certainly overindulged that night. We got so greased up and friendly that we wound up sitting at the same table with a bunch of Samsung dockworkers. I don't remember whether we moved to their table, or they moved to ours. I was too far gone. One minute it was just A, E, Jeff and yours truly; the next we were squeezed in with four or five of these hefty Korean shipbuilders.

The next thing I remember is getting punched in the face.

There was obviously some span of time in between, of course. We were sitting with these guys, laughing and joking and singing, putting our arms around each other, downing beers and shots of soju, and then suddenly we're out in the middle of the street, a four-way intersection garishly lit by fluorescent streetlamps. Jeff and Ms. E are gone, Mr. A is grappling with two of these brutes and one of them has just sent a haymaker right for my jaw. I get the first inkling of this when a meaty, olive-skinned fist shows up about a hair's breadth from my face. If I had any pertinent or pithy observations to make, I don't remember them. The fist connects. I feel nothing. The breeze from a gnat's wing might just as well have brushed against me. But I go down hard. My head flies backward, my arms shoot up, and I topple over, landing flat on my back on the asphalt.

My memory takes another hiatus at that point. The next thing I recall is helping a Korean man to restrain Mr. A. This interloper is not one of the dockworkers, but another man, somewhat fluent in English, with longish hair which somehow reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's father from Little House on the Prairie. He is apparently the brother of one of the dockworkers, and is trying to stop Mr. A from beating the man to a pulp. No one else is to be seen; it's just me, Mr. A, the little Korean man on the prairie, and one of his friends. The dockworkers, Jeff, and Ms. E have disappeared. Mr. A is in a seething rage. His voice carries to every house within five blocks. Obscenities and invectives, all directed at the Korean man's shipbuilding brother, resound through the humid night air. He strains against our arms like an enraged bull; the four of us totter about the silent street like a blind centipede. I don't know what's going on, but the fight seems to be over, and I'd like it to stay over. My jaw would agree. So I help hold Mr. A. Using my facility with the Korean language (only marginally better than the average foreigner's) I help the Korean man calm Mr. A down. We go home. It is only later that I learn that some of the dockworkers, including the man's brother, took Jeff and Ms. E off to a deserted street and went to work on them. Jeff was held by the arms and punched in the gut; even Ms. E caught a blow across her face. It was this that had Mr. A in such a rage, and rightly so. Had I known I would have let him go, and the two of us would have trod right over the long-haired Korean and searched the streets until we found those Samsung bastards. Goodness knows what would've happened then, in our drunken state.

We disperse to our homes and finish sleeping off the effects. In the morning we regroup and try to piece together what happened. Ms. E is fortunately all right, and Jeff, though sore, is fine as well. Our recollections are ragged, but we manage to put together a semi-coherent picture. It seemed there was some disagreement over the bill at Ganiyeok. The dockworkers got hot because they thought we were trying to rip them off. A credit card changed hands. We had no intention of stealing from them, we were just looking to get everybody's money together and put it in the billfold for the Whistle Stop's proprietress to take to the cash register. The Koreans misconstrued this as an attempt at robbery, and a fight erupted. It boiled out of the bar and into the street, where chaos ensued. The police were apparently called (twice), but they arrived, got out of their cars, shook their heads, got back in and left. Only the Samsung dockworkers up to their old tricks, this time with some stupid foreigners. Nothing to worry about.

A few days later, we (in the company of Charles, our Korean liaison from the English academy where we worked) went back to the Whistle Stop to formally apologize to the proprietress. She was understanding and kind. She brought us in, sat us down, brought us a pitcher of our favorite beer, and apologized to us. Charles translated as she told the story. Those dockworkers, apparently, were all in trouble with the law, possibly even ex-cons. They were notorious troublemakers and the proprietress didn't like having them in her bar. She much preferred our company to theirs. We were supremely touched by this, and vowed to come to the Whistle Stop more often.

We never saw those guys again. Whether the proprietress banned them, or they got into a fight with somebody they couldn't beat down so easily...we never found out. Good riddance to them, I say. My only regret about that night (aside from the fact that I was so drunk that I couldn't prevent poor Ms. E or Jeff from getting assaulted) was that I didn't get a piece of anybody. If I'm in a street-fight I want to do the thing properly, you see. Get a few licks in. At least get one good swing at my assailants. That's all I want.

Next time will be different, you'll see.