Sea Story

16. 바다이야기

16. Sea Story

Yu Hui Jung

After a long work meeting, drinking together can be a warm occasion. Dressed in suits, we sat around a table underneath an old incandescent lightbulb, cooking up fish cakes in a silver nickel pot. Outside the glass window of the old-fashioned wooden sliding door, the night grew darker. It was raining.

I’m not sure how many rounds we had drunk. I could feel a tingle in my flushed face. The department director wanted to keep the night going, so he led us to our next stop: Sea Story. This was 2005, and signs displaying schools of fish were popping up in neighborhoods all throughout Korea, seemingly overnight.

I wasn’t sure what working-class patrons saw in these gambling arcades that made them go so wild for them. Mr. Kim suggested that we satisfy our curiosity and have some fun. It sounded good to me.

At the entrance, there was a station where customers handed over cash and received vouchers in return, minus a 10 percent surcharge. Passing a lounge where bleary-eyed men were eating cup noodles, we headed into the main hall.

There were no windows; it was closed off on all sides. In the corners, air purifiers stood to filter out the thick fog of cigarette smoke. Drinks were carried by young women in heavy makeup, wearing skirts with long slits up their thighs. Young men in bowties fielded questions from customers and ran errands.

It was my first time visiting an “adult entertainment arcade,” and I was in a daze. “Slot machines,” the assistant manager whispered to me. The machines had screens where images of octopuses, sea horses, sea cucumbers, pufferfish, and clams spun round and round; you pushed a button, and if the same pattern came up three in a row, you won a prize, he told me. It seemed dinky and dull. After using up my vouchers, I decided to do some people-watching.

A middle-aged woman with the front pocket of her shirt stuffed with vouchers was staring at a monitor, assiduously tapping the buttons with her fingers. I also saw a loafer type, dressed in a modified Korean traditional hanbok outfit and wearing his hair in a ponytail.

One lone patron had taken over an entire row of machines. He placed an ashtray over each of the buttons, took a step back, and sat down. He was waiting for one of them to hit the jackpot. A group of men were prowling around looking for machines that hadn’t hit a jackpot in a while. They were using the principles of statistics to do some “clever” betting.

My co-workers and I reached the end of our allotted hour and gathered together again. Those who had managed to salvage some of their money converted their vouchers back to cash again at the station, minus yet another 10 percent fee.

The owners of arcades like this are free to set the win-loss ratios. It’s an open secret. Obviously, they choose to do it in such a way that they make money. The conversion fees are just an added bonus. Yet people flock to them nonetheless, betting and often losing the house on “what ifs,” chasing the bright lights of the gambling den in the hopes of striking it rich.

The world is a playground built by the powerful. The rules that hold sway are the rules that they make. After spending their daily lives underneath the heel of those rules, Sea Story was the straw these people grasped at in the hopes of a windfall that might usher them up the ladder. But the invisible hand of the “haves” is forever at work behind those games—and the pockets of the weary ones hoping for good fortune are plundered once again.

As long as the snake of greed lies coiled and writhing in our mind, we will continue to fall into the traps laid out by the powerful and amoral. But a full 2,500 years ago, the Buddha had already driven away his greed and broke apart the traps laid to ensnare him, wielding the vajra with prajna wisdom.

And to the sentient beings he said: In awakening to the truth, may those who are powerful and good and those who are foolish and weak teach and learn from each other, breaking the fixations within us and the traps that lure us in as we proceed together toward the hill of liberation.

This is the rule of the game as decided by the Buddha. It is the true nature of the Dragon Flower Assembly in the Maitreya Buddha world—something that we must achieve, however slow it is in arriving.

Sailing in boats of wisdom, rowing on in Buddha's sea

Men and women of a single mind gather, east, west, north and south.

Raise the mast of truth, sailing on, rowing the oars of justice

Sailing on the boat to Paradise, forging ahead on our journey.

forging on as one.

On a holy mission, moving forward, pillars of Buddhism.

—Song for Won Buddhist, Hymn no. 19