What Melancholy Used to Be: A Foreigner's Story of South Korea

"I am happy for you Tomasuh," whispered Su Hee inside my jacket. "You are about to understand melancholy in Korea. You are about to learn arirang." It's 1997, and South Korean "LIKE" English Academy is looking for college grads to fill their growing ranks. Enter Thomas, who has never left the US and is stuck in a dead-end job in San Diego. Wearing surf trunks and a Hawaiian shirt, he arrives in Seoul in the dead of a Korean winter to discover he knows nothing of Korea and little about himse...