The air conditioning is losing the battle against the peak summer heat in Choi Bek-ki‘s optometric practice
in a quiet suburb of Pohang, an industrial city in
the south-east of South Korea. Although his two junior colleagues do not have
much to do, Bek-ki is busy fitting and glazing two new pairs of spectacles for
his cousin, Heeyoung, who is visiting him in the city during her holiday.
Heeyoung’s extended family, including her father, brother,
stepmother, and any number of other cousins – plus her foreign husband and
brother-in-law – are all gathered in a corner of the practice, eating
complimentary ice cream and drinking coffee and trying to keep her energetic
son Oscar under control.
Bek-ki manages to concentrate on the job in hand and the
spectacles are ready. The crowd leaves him in peace to finish his day’s work,
which, at 2 p.m., is already four hours in and has another eight or so to go.
When Bek-ki gets home from work, it is well past 10 p.m. He
arrives home to find the same extended family that visited him at work, having
made themselves at home in the apartment where he lives with his
wife and two children. They have been eating and drinking for the majority of
the afternoon and evening, although they did pause at one point to take an
evening stroll along the beach, a five minute walk from Bek-ki’s apartment. It is
now getting late, and the atmosphere within the gathering is starting to become
somewhat sleepy.
Not so for Bek-ki, who bounces through the door carrying fried
chicken and a couple of pairs of bottles of beer and soju, a kind of spirit that is as easy to drink as a strong G&T, if a little more potent at 20%. Although everyone
else has eaten enough to feed a small conference of hungry eyecare specialists,
the chicken is well received – after all, it is unthinkable for Koreans to
drink alcohol without accompanying it with a side snack. After several rounds of “Ganbei!” (“Cheers!”), the bottles are
empty.
Now it is definitely time to sleep, though, and the sleeping
arrangements are typically Korean – men in one
room, women in the other, and everyone finds a space on the mats laid out on the
floor. Bek-ki is the last person to put his head down, the time around 2 a.m.
At 5:30 a.m. an alarm goes off, but only one person is quickly up
and about. Just another day in the life of a hard-working South Korean
optometrist.
