Her father lived in the countryside near the town of Hapchon, in Southeastern Korea. So we rode the bus to a small village just off the main highway, where we got off. From there we walked. First back to the highway, and then up a side road that lead to the back end of a narrow valley where her father lived. While we walked through the winter quiet of the Korean countryside we talked, and she told me again about her parents and how they had divorced when she was still a girl. Divorce is still relatively rare in Korea compared to most Western countries, and I thought that along with the trauma of seeing her parents split up, the divorce must have been accompanied by a big dose of social stigma. Even today, and even in a thoroughly modern and Westernized city like Seoul, some Koreans, especially the women, will initially lie and say their partner has simply gone away for a while. In the Korean tradition, she had a deep feeling of obligation towards her parents, mosly directed at her father who was still living alone, while her mother had settled down into a relationship with a long-term boyfriend.

After an hour's walk we reached her father's house just as dusk was settling in. Her father had built the small house himself using a mixed bag of materials that included metal piping, blue vinyl tarp, and plywood. From the outside it looked like an old polar explorer hut from the early 20th century. Inside, there was a hard-packed dirt floor and no electricity. The old man had plenty of portable electronics, however, even a cell phone which he had to recharge by going down the road to a friend's house in a neighboring village. The kitchen had a dual personality; at one end was a propane fired gas stove, at the other end of the room was a traditional Korean clay stove and furnace with bundles of firewood propped up against it. Snuggled in some straw next to the warmth of the stove was a chicken for laying eggs.

The stove was used to heat the only bedroom's "ondol", the Korean home's traditional under-the-floor heating system. Since the nearest population center was only a hamlet up a winding country road, there was no "minbak" (a Korean boarding house with shared bath) for me to stay at so it was quickly decided by Nan Young and her father that I would spend the night with them in the bedroom - the only heated room in the house.

A little later as we bedded down early for the night, my hosts spread quilts on the bedroom's polished wooden floor and I sprawled out in the corner while Nan Young and her father conversed softly by candlelight in Korean. A fat white candle filled the entire room with a soft, flickering golden light, giving everything in it an antique brass look.

But the most striking effect came when I looked at my girlfriend's face in the glow of the candlelight. As she talked to her father, she leaned forward on one elbow, her hair tied back severely in a bun. She was facing almost directly into the light when I was suddenly hit by the realization of just how great was the cultural gap that existed between Nan Young and myself. With her baseball cap, her yen for pizza, and her cell phone, the cultural differences had been blurred by the modernity of even a small city like Tongyoung where we lived. On that January night, however, deep in the Korean countryside, with her face lit by the wavering light of the candle, it seemed as if she had slipped off her very thin 21st century skin and had travelled back in time to the Korea of the Chosen Dynasty of three centuries ago, a Korea that had existed long before the Hyundai cars and Samsung laptops. Before coming to Korea, I'd lived in mainland China and Hong Kong and I had thought I was capable of dealing with just about any problems created  by the clash of cultures. But looking at how naturally and seamlessly she had shed her modern Korea for the traditional one disturbed me, for it forced me to think about how the two of us were going to bridge the suddenly yawning gap in attitudes revealed by the light of a single candle.