I'm Henry The Eighth, I Am

In November of 1991, I received one of those invitations that, in those early years in Korea, always felt like a small doorway opening into another world. 

 

One of my students invited me to what she called an “opening party,” one of those bits of Konglish that seemed perfectly clear once you understood it meant an open house. The gathering was being held at a friend’s boarding house near Ewha Womans University in western Seoul.

 

I expected an interesting evening.

 

I did not expect to end up singing Herman’s Hermits on the floor of a Korean boarding house.

 

There were perhaps twenty people there that night—students, their friends, and the husband and wife who owned the house. We gathered in a large downstairs room and sat on the floor around low sang tables, the kind that always seemed to bring people closer together, as if conversation itself became part of the meal. 

 

The tables were crowded with food: kimbap, fried rice, japchae with its glistening noodles, little dishes of pickled vegetables, kimchi, tteok, fruit, and more beer than anyone was likely to admit the next morning.

 

It was the kind of spread that made you feel welcomed before anyone had even spoken.

 

Before we began eating, each person introduced themselves and thanked the hosts. The room moved along easily in Korean, the words flowing past me faster than I could catch them. 

 

When my turn came, I did what I often did in those days: stepped forward with a mixture of English, hesitant Korean, and goodwill, hoping personality might cover what grammar could not. It seemed to. People smiled. Someone nodded encouragingly. I sat back down relieved.

 

By then the evening had settled into that happy, loose warmth that comes when people have eaten well, had a few drinks, and feel no particular urgency to be anywhere else.

 

And then the singing began.

 

This did not entirely surprise me. Even by then, I had begun to understand that Koreans, and especially university students, were rarely far from a song. Music had a way of appearing naturally at gatherings, not as performance exactly, but as participation. 

 

One by one, people around the table sang. Some offered folk songs, others tunes everyone seemed to know, and each singer was rewarded with clapping, encouragement, and the kind of generous attention that made refusing impossible. The song moved around the room, person to person, until at last it reached me.

I had only a few seconds to think.

 

What song did I know well enough to sing alone, without accompaniment, in front of twenty Koreans who were all waiting politely and expectantly for the foreign teacher to do his part?

 

For one panicked moment, my mind went blank.

 

Then, from somewhere deep in the back shelves of memory, up came “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.”

 

Why that song? I cannot say with any certainty. Perhaps because it was catchy, impossible to overthink, and had lodged itself in my head after I had heard Peter Noone sing it in concert back in the States the year before. In any case, it was there when I needed it, and so I went with it.

 

With everyone clapping along, I launched in.

 

I’m Henry the Eighth, I am… Henry the Eighth, I am, I am…

 

And somehow, wonderfully, it worked.

 

By the time I got to “second verse, same as the first,” the room had come fully alive. The applause grew louder. People laughed. Some joined in, or at least tried to. Whatever barrier had remained between me and the rest of the room dissolved in that ridiculous, cheerful old tune. For a few moments, I was no longer the American guest trying to navigate another culture carefully and respectfully. I was simply one more person in the circle, singing because everyone else was singing too.

 

That was one of the small gifts Korea gave me in those years: the realization that hospitality is not only about food or drink or kind words, but about being drawn in, gently and completely, until you forget to feel like an outsider.

 

Looking back on that night, I still smile at the absurdity of it. Out of all the songs I might have chosen to represent myself, I offered a British pop novelty number to a roomful of Korean students and boarding house owners in Seoul. Yet for that brief moment, it did exactly what songs have always done at their best. It crossed distance. It collapsed awkwardness. It made strangers feel, if only for the length of a chorus, like old friends.

 

And I have to admit, when the applause came and the room answered back so warmly, I allowed myself one private, slightly foolish thought:

 

Peter Noone, eat your heart out.