Deluge

Monsoon season has started, and with it has come my nightly 4am wake up to crashes of thunder rolling through curtains of pouring rain.

These days, I just roll over and go back to sleep, or I stay up and watch the lightning bounce off the buildings outside our window, but a year ago, when D and I had just arrived and still gawked at the squids and octopuses (octopi?) in the tanks outside of the restaurant across from our school, I would panic.

Not the cute panicking of a ten-year old hiding under the sheets until the loud noises stop, but the paranoid panicking of a (nearly) full-grown man who in a half-awake delusion is utterly convinced that the North Koreans are dropping bombs on his new home.

I'd lay awake for what felt like hours, listening for any sign of Kim Jong-Il's fearsome infantry as they swept through Gwangju, rounding up all foreigners to be sent to a concentration camp somewhere, lest they be spies of the hated imperial dogs. I'd run through a mental checklist of the things I'd need if I wanted to escape – a pocket knife, some rope, my camera in case I saw Dear Leader or anything that might interest the CIA, and maybe a bottle of water. I'd plan my escape route – there's a mountain behind our apartment that I could run up and hide in for a couple of days, though surely the Communist army would search the woods once they secured the city. I figured I had a couple of days at most to try to get to the coast and find a fisherman who could take D and me to China or Japan. (Seriously, I planned this stuff out).

These days, I enjoy the crashing thunder when it wakes me up. I expect the nightly downpours that drown the city every night and carry an umbrella whenever I go out. And I no longer freak out when North Korea threatens to turn Seoul into a "Sea of Fire" as it did recently after they were accused of sinking a South Korean ship. The Koreans I work with aren't worried, and besides, Gwangju is a long way away from the border, and close to the ocean, so we'd probably have plenty of time to escape to China if Dear Leader gets any crazy ideas.