Michael Stephens is (or was) a professor of English at Princeton. Lost In Seoul is the somewhat fictionalised account of his journeys to Seoul to meet the extended family of his Korean wife, whom he married after a two-week courtship. Stephen's narrative is also hard evidence in the case to prove one of my long-standing hypotheses: that people who do not speak an Asian language visit a fundamentally different Asia than do I or anyone who is fluent. Stephen's narrative, while enjoyable in places, is alarmingly shallow for someone with close to two decades of "experience" with the land and the culture, although it would probably be fascinating reading for anyone unable to locate Korea on a map.

Lost In Seoul contains copious amounts of Koreans "conversing," yet strangely enough their dialogue sounded nothing like the way I "hear" spoken Korean in English, and neither did his rendering of (what should have been) specifically Korean tics when his Korean characters speak imperfect English. Given the fact that the author openly admits that he knows precious little Korean after a decade of exposure, needing his wife to translate for him during most interactions, I have no choice but to assume that he is making large portions of dialogue up. (The fact that he frequently mentions "translating" Korean poems into English while being unable to carry on an everyday conversation gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

Furthermore, Stephens doesn't appear to have done much editing on the various sections of text, which one can only assume were written throughout his fifteen year span of visits; his phonetic renderings of Korean into English are both horrible and inconsistent, jumping between several Romanisation systems and his own imperfect attempts to transcribe sounds he's not hearing correctly. This lack of editorial consistency, and the fact that English-professor Stephens is both rather fond of florid prose and seems to have trouble with subject-verb agreement, makes me rather skeptical of his narrative.

Finally, Stephens married into one of the richest families in Korea; the hordes of domestic help, casually-dropped references to diplomatic and industry big wigs, and the family's apparent ability to shit won at will makes me very skeptical that Stephens experienced the same country as most of its native-born citizens. That said, the book is worth at least a casual flip-through for the fact that he visited the country during a seminal period in its history: the elderly still wore hanbok and gat, handphones didn't exist, and Hermit Kingdom was experiencing military "democracy," political assasination, and the Kwangju massacre. All in all, Lost In Seoul is a pretty mediocre entry into the travelogue/expat biography genre, but if you're completely unfamiliar with Korea, it might be worth a look. ( )