Courtesy of David Tizzard

I often find myself standing at the local school gates, waiting for my children to emerge. I love the responsibility of picking up our kids from school, watching them all come running out, seeing the mums chatting away with each other, the hordes of yellow buses waiting to whisk children to the next lesson, and the occasional dad, shuffling restlessly on two feet. The 10-15 minutes standing there is a wonderful break from everything else that happens in life: you forget your bills, you don’t think about work. You are lost in a moment, poised for one thing and one thing only. The sight of your children.

In a way, it’s like becoming a dog. You wait patiently by the door. Hoping that any minute now your sole reason for being will return. You know they will. But there is a wonderful moment of tension that arises. One kid emerges, then another. And another. But not yet the one you seek. Your head tilts to the side, curious. And then everything becomes right in the world. If you had a tail, you would wag it. But you don’t. Not anymore, anyway. We’ve evolved beyond the need for those. The universe has been here 14 billion years and life has been around for around 4 billion years. Civilization somewhere between 6-12,000 years. In that time, we’ve discovered one of the meanings to life: living in service of others. In a postmodern neoliberal world largely devoid of transcendence, it as the school gates where one can meaning.

The gates

The school gates are like no other part of Korea. And, if you don’t have kids here yourself, you’re never likely to see this part of the culture. It rarely features in Netflix dramas, the news only comes if there’s a tragedy, and the rest of our media has decided to focus on the single, sexy and solitary. Many of the people who have tasked themselves with reporting on and representing the country across Twitter and TikTok will never know the experience that parents, kids, and teachers go through twice a day. Every day. For years and years and years. More than politics, ideology, or popularity, one of the things that divides people is this experience of the school gates.

Compared to the subway or the high streets, the gates are some of the noisiest places in the country. They are vortexes of controlled chaos and cacophony. All around them, society might be still and quiet. But once you enter that area, it’s like the feeling of your ears popping when........

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