Airport New Town: A Glorious Disaster
Kenken wanted to stay in Europe. I wanted to go back to Japan. Like the fabulous disasters we were, we reached a horrific compromise: Taipei, Seoul or Hong Kong, with the other following whoever found a job first. Naturally I won, except my job was not in Seoul. It was in Airport New Town, a half-finished settlement on Yeongjong Island up to 2 hours from the city. Kenken came anyway. Within 2 or 3 weeks we had broken up and he had gone back to Japan, then Germany, where he eventually married a German artist. Apparently he was always destined to settle down with an artist, just not this one.
Shindoshi meant New City, but the name was doing almost all the work. Reclaimed land between 2 little mountains had been filled with cheap apartments and retail units thrown up so quickly that plastic remained on doors and windows while rubbish waited indefinitely in the streets. On the van ride to work, desolate farms bred Alsatians for meat. Then winter arrived and the whole island froze. Joa spent much of it as a minor dicktim: genuinely heartbroken, but also the headstrong little sod who had applied for this job against Kenken’s instincts, manufactured the calamity and then looked betrayed when it exploded.
The work was one sparkle. Our intensive English camps gathered some of the brightest pupils in the Incheon region: charming, motivated children who could spend the week working mostly in English. After MountainMouth classrooms full of children who had not requested Joa, this was almost glamorous. Robin was the greater sparkle. We arrived together, and she converted the empty flat roads into rollerblading tracks and the rest of Yeongjong into beaches, hikes, snow days and brisk little adventures.
Seoul became to Airport New Town what Hiroshima had been to MountainMouth: the city of art, gay life, friends and emergency escape. Back on the island, loneliness, sexual frustration and spectacularly poor decisions restarted JoaFruit. I bought a camera in a post-break-up spending spree and eventually made the unfinished buildings and piled rubbish into Different Flavor, Different Taste. After 7 months I escaped the teaching programme, precisely one month beyond the point at which leaving would have meant repaying the airfare that brought me to South Korea. Airport New Town never became home. It became something much more useful to JoaFruit: a glorious disaster with excellent light.