I love the new door to the park that got installed last week.  It even has a lock on it to keep out the undesirables, whatever or whoever they might be. Two years ago, I wrote about this park and how just after they completed refurbishing it, the kids in the neighborhood did their level best to destroy it.  The door, I think, failed due to shitty workmanship. The metal hinges just broke. Cheap metal. Lots of other things have fallen victim to the ruthless destructiveness of Korean children, bored by a place that has little or nothing to offer in the way energetic, constructive behavior.  In the two years since I wrote that piece, I’ve watched the two picnic tables get slowly torn apart and are now discarded heaps of wood in an unused corner.  The benches have all lost their arm and back rests. and are nothing but flat boards resembling more cadavers than benches. The fence itself, which now has a bright shiny new door, is riddled with holes torn by children too lazy to walk to that single door. And so now, the door stands as a gleaming reminder of all that once was new while the four walls around it stand in ruin.

The goal areas have their own tears in the fence. Once started, there is little to stop the kids from enlarging them, making that long walk to the door unnecessary.

The nets, having been replaced a few times, are shredded again. Kids continue to climb on them while parents sit idly by, refusing to chastise them.

When I was a kid, almost any adult would have chased us off had we been caught tearing up public property. Here, that doesn’t happen. They don’t want the precious little snowflakes to “lose face.”   There’s lots of things I like about Korea, but this isn’t one of them – that Confuscion tendency to save face and not embarrass others for their behavior.  They don’t need to worry about kids losing face – they need a piece of their asses trimmed off, though.

So now, we have a nice new door – for a room with virtually no walls.