A Cold Winter in Korea

Korean winters are famously cold; ask any Korean War veteran. Growing up in Wisconsin, I was used to cold winters. So when I went to South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1979, I figured I was prepared to take whatever northeast Asia could dish out. In statistical terms, winters in Korea were not that much worse than in Wisconsin. Temperatures rarely got lower than the 20s at night. The difference in Korea was that it was much harder to get warm.

In December, 1979 I moved from the almost subtropical climes of Mokpo, in South Cholla Province, to St. Lazarus Village near Anyang, near Seoul. The Village was a leprosy settlement run by a Catholic priest and a group of a half-dozen or so nuns. It also was the site of the Korean National Leprosy Institute. The nuns had a large dining hall halfway up the wooded hillside that they normally abandoned in winter in favor of a smaller, warmer dining room inside their dormitory. The hall had a large room with lots of windows, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It also had a small room, heated Korean-style with a wood-burning sub-floor heating system, where a cook would live. The sisters let me live in that room and have the run of the entire building. I strung a clothesline in the dining room and did my laundry in the kitchen sink.

Life was good -- until winter came.

Koreans traditionally heat their homes by heating the floor. In a culture in which people sit, eat, and sleep on the floor, that makes good sense. When the floor is good and warm, the air up to three feet above it is comfortable, too. But the moment you stand up, you notice the temperature difference between your head and your feet and feel compelled to sit back down again.

Evenings were good. Upon coming home from work I grabbed a few pieces of wood from the woodpile, shoved them into the receptacle under the floor, lit it, and soon the floor was nice and toasty. It stayed that way for the rest of the evening. Before retiring for the night, I took a quick trip outdoors to stoke the fire and put a few more logs on. By early morning, though, the fire had long ago gone out and I was shivering under the covers. I usually went to bed fully clothed.

"Fully clothed" means something different during a Korean winter. For me, here were my layers:

• Top -- t-shirt, long-underwear shirt, turtleneck, flannel shirt, a sweater vest, and a thicker sweater vest. If I went outside or into the dining hall to hang up my laundry, I added a down jacket.
• Below -- briefs, long-underwear pants, wool trousers.
• Feet -- regular socks, heavy woolen camping socks.
• Head -- the ever-present stocking cap.

And I was still cold.

By the way, that's a towel drying on the line.

Shameless self-promotion

My novel, "The Seed of Joy," is now available on Kindle and from iTunes. Please have a look. Great karma follows those who read and review! Here's the blurb:

Paul Harkin, a US Peace Corps Volunteer from Indiana, comes to Korea on his first trip away from home. The Peace Corps gives him more than he ever bargained for - from a comically inept public health official, to violent political strife in the cities, to a hard winter in a leper colony. But when he falls in love with Han Mi Jin, a troubled, politically active schoolteacher, he defies the Peace Corps, the United States government, and the Korean martial law authorities to take up her cause. Caught up in the bloodshed of the Kwangju Uprising of May, 1980, he wrestles with love and loss, freedom and responsibility.