So today I called English teacher 1 who lives in the same town, wondering if she’d like a low key cup of coffee or something, since I was going to explore her neighborhood today.  Only I got English teacher 2 who’s phone she had borrowed one time, and I had saved the number under the wrong name.  Teacher 2 had already made plans with teacher 3.

Later, I called teacher 1 and she and teacher 1,2, and 3 were all hanging out together.  They knew I had tried to hook up, yet had not bothered to includ me in their get together.   OK.  This is the second time this has happened.  I understand how these teachers maybe don’t want to hang out with someone twenty years older than them.  But it still hurts to never be thought of, or to be thought of and dismissed.

Anyang is very vibrant.  Not only is there a huge department store, but about six square city blocks of 2-4 storey buildings with a colorful variety of boutiques and eateries, all of which is pedestrian and cut off to most cars.  Lots of people out and about.  Lots of fashionistas too, suitable for street style photo ops.  There is also a below-ground level of shopping running from the department store, under the streets, and who knows how deep into the commercial district beyond.  It’s pretty overwhelming – almost as overwhelming as Dondaemmon’s vertical fashion malls.

Traversing the above ground shops I saw across the street some outdoor tarped street venders in the distance, in an area where the buildings were even a smaller scale of 1-2 storeys tall.  Walking across the street I found about three full square blocks of traditional Korean market – most of it in arcades – there might have been about six of these, with little restaurant alleys in between.  I got really excited. Here were handmade baskets, farmer hats, hand-knotted rope bags that fishermen might use.  Every seafood known to man, ancient adjummas cutting up pig heads, strange vegetables, mountains of kimchee and side dishes.  Also traditional bedding and furniture, cookware, etc.  I felt like I’d found Korea for the first time.

I stopped at one of the street food vendors that had bundaegi and ordered some, along with some beefy-looking dish swimming in pepper sauce.  We couldn’t communicate, and it was awkward again, as always.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me.  (I will go back, Myung-Sook!)  It cost a lot more than I thought it would – 6,000 won.  So she took a plate, put the plate in a plastic bag, and ladled the bundaegi on it and pointed out toothpicks to spear them with.  They were served in a soy-sauce flavored sauce.  I can see how this would be a treat for some people.  It was an interesting experience:  the first bite and you are collapsing and crashing through a lightweight shell, which gives way to some cooked flesh a little like the consistency of cooked shrimp.  And then as you continue to chew, the shell reveals itself to be kind of woody in nature – kind of like if you’ve ever destroyed a toothpick and just kept chewing it until it was down to its cellulose wood fibers.  And it had a kind of smokey flavor.  I would like to try it one day without the sauce it was served in, as the salt from the soy sauce along with the smokey flavor was a bit too strong for me.

The other dish, also served on a plastic bag covered plate (presumably so the adjumma doesn’t have to do any dish washing) was ladled out.  And she also presented me with a bowl of about a dozen mussels in broth.  The beefy-looking dish turned out to be beef liver.  I guess this is the week of organs.  Way too rich for me, organ meat.  I ate about four pieces and couldn’t eat any more.  I also only ate about ten of the bundaegi, as it was also too strong flavored for me.  I ate all the mussels and half of the broth and that was enough to sustain me until I got home.

Coming home, packed on the subway like sardines, I started to cry.  All that culture in the market – it’s totally foreign to me.  All these people and none of them know me.  The people who know me can’t be bothered.  I never have mail in my mailbox or email in my inbox or phone calls on my phone.  This isn’t like traveling alone.  This isn’t like getting homesick at summer camp.  This is living on a different planet.  This is not being a part of anything or anybody.  I have nobody and no country.  The adjummas and adjoshis look so sweet – yet I know these sweet old people drank away their sorrows or beat their wives or abandoned their kids.  Did my mom, when she left me, know what she sentenced me to?  Did my grandma, when she got rid of me, know what her hatred and anger would do?  Did my father care enough to stop this?  Has anyone ever really given a shit about me?  I was so overjoyed to find the market – and the market kills me too.

Myung-Sook, I know now how you felt wandering the streets of Seoul, lost.  There is no place we belong.  There is no history that is ours, no place we call home, no connection to anything.  I would go back to the states today, but there is nothing there either.

This isn’t about being stuck on history.  Coming here was necessary for there to be a future.  That market is the nexus of everything.  If I can walk through that market one day without crying inside, knowing its secrets, feeling a part of it, then maybe one day I can forgive the adjummas and Korea.

On the way back, I stopped at the hated Emart, bought what might be a mackerel, what might be a relative of the yucca, and some kimchee.  But now making that dish seems so pathetic.  Like the lettuce that is wilting in my refrigerator, leftover from a poor attempt at making an American salad.

Time to practice my hangul.

Fuck.  Life is so difficult some times.

…is that’s the only time people teach you Korean, only you’re too busy drinking to take notes.

Let’s see what I can remember from the new teacher dinner and second round last night:

• Yogi-oh – means come here
• mashtah – means good

oh man, I forgot how to ask, “can I have one please.”

I already knew how to say excuse me – shillay hamnida (romanization for this sucks – it looks like silly but they leave out the “h” sound…)

We had mackeral stewed with yucca (cassava – I don’t know what they call it here, but that’s what it was) and kimchee last night.  I think I’m going to make some of this myself.  They added some sugar to it so the kimchee did not taste fermented and chili-like, but not enough sugar to make it sweet either.  It’s analogous to some spaghetti sauce recipes where some people might put in a teaspoon of sugar to cut the tomato acid.

So this was a morale-building event to welcome all the new teachers that we’ve known about all week.  Only the word is the new teachers were all taken aside earlier in the day and told not to attend the second drinking round.  Somehow, administration always finds out who is drinking or smoking, and the implicit threat is that those teachers will not make tenure.  Morale be giveth and taketh away.  Because teacher jobs are so in demand, you can bet none of the new teachers were drinking with us.

Next week about thirty student teachers will be joining the school for one month.  That’s all they get is one month prior to graduating with their teaching degree.  In Kyung had already heard that student teaching lasts a full year in the states, but she was surprised when I told her U.S. teachers must continue to pursue their master’s degree and that even after that, continuing education was required.

Earlier conversations with her were very fruitful about the co-teacher disparity and I might be able to negotiate some sort of grade for my class next semester, and a re-structuring of the situation for the following year.  So it’s good me talking to as many sympathetic English teachers as possible and hopefully they can help me convince the Vice Principal.  That, and the little graphs I have made and thopefully the way I present it.   If we could get some grades and motivation going in class, then I would have no problem staying here another year.  Even though I find this portion of Anyang sterile, having a school structure where I can actually teach would be worth it.

Speaking of – the OTHER station in Anyang turns out to be very human scale, lively, and interesting.  Much like Hongdae but I imagine without quite so much rowdiness at night.  In fact, I have NOTHING PLANNED for this weekend, so I’m going to leave the house now and wander around there.  Maybe I can find a market and buy some yucca and mackeral.

So the other day, the nurse mentioned how the woman on KBS t.v. asked me how I stay so young and beautiful…(wtf?) and how my answer was, “hair dye.”  So she wanted to know if there actually was anything else special I did…(how totally bizarre to me)  The male teacher commented that it was probably because I don’t wear makeup.  Actually, I told him, I’ve been wearing makeup every day, but also I’ve only been wearing makeup the last year or two.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this theory – that wearing makeup ages people.  Migumi, a Japanese girl I worked with years ago also said she wouldn’t wear makeup because she didn’t want to age prematurely.  Interesting…

Then, yesterday, some other male teacher commented how pretty I look without makeup.  “You look more pure,” he said.

“NOT pure.”  I said.  “So not pure…”

I’d never worn makeup before simply because my freaking epicanthic fold on my Mongolian eyes just wouldn’t let me.  Not without having linebacker black smudges under my eyes, at least.  But even when I have tried recently, I’d hardly call the application of it trashy.  (believe me – I grew up in blue eye shadow country)

But this whole notion of purity has me both intrigued and appalled at the same time.

The other evening watching t.v., I was kind of shocked and wasn’t sure what to think when I ran across a very baudy comedy set in historical times, and there was nakedness every five minutes and pretty much everything except genitals showing.  The women were also smoking in public. I asked about this the following day at school.  I was told that every man fantasizes about a smoking woman who is a libertine, but that nobody REALLY wants a girl like that.

So I guess that old virgin/whore dichotomy reigns the whole world over.  But in Korea it seems more about purity and innocent looks than virginity.  At least that is the subtle distinction I am catching.  In Thailand, the girls dressed either very conservatively or they actually did look like hookers.  In Korea, even the conservative girls wear stiletto heels and except for the occasional miniskirts, it’s not so easy to tell who is easy or not.

And so I go, walking down the street, smoking my cigarette, getting the occassional double-take.  And so I go, looking so Korean nobody would ever guess I am foreign.  And there I am, looking pure yet feeling so used and thrown away on so many days.  And I look in the mirror and I suspect that I am unusual looking, even here.  I think I am something like Cyndi Lauper.  Been there.  Done that.  A bit unusual.  But still somehow retaining a small measure of purity.  That I don’t understand.

two unusual girls with downward turning mouths – smiles are over-rated!

This is for Myung-Sook:

I haven’t gotten out and about much.  There’s not much street food where I live, and I had a mini traumatic experience at one place because I was doing something wrong, and they were yelling at me in Korean. I have gotten some yummy fried fishcake on a stick before, and gotten handed some of the warm broth that some of the skewered stuff floats in, but I haven’t tried anything on a plate yet, as I don’t want to get yelled at again.  I need more time to observe the correct protocol for this.

Anyway, I googled bundaegi and yes, it is silkworms, just like in Thailand.

Here is an image from the  Mary Eats blog I found for you:

Hmmm…the other Picassa photo wouldn’t show up – anyway, it was a close-up of silkworms in soup.

That would be me in Korea….

There is a guy who speaks really good English and who was very helpful the day I cried at school.  I am always getting him confused with another man in a suit, the one who wanted me to go to church services on Monday mornings.   Of course, side by side they look TOTALLY different, but they are never side by side and then I just get confused whenever I see one of them.

Part of my lesson with the evening class tonight was about racial sensitivity.  I had the students describe the people in some multi-cultural photographs. They were engaged and interested in the task, and they took a lot of time and put a lot of thought into their answers.  As we reviewed their answers, I taught them how they didn’t need to focus on race at all when describing the people individually, and that each person had something unique and distinguishing about themselves or how they presented themselves.  Of course, their descriptions were exactly as one would have expected – the black man was a gangster, the asian looked smart, and surprisingly two women were mistaken as men, due to their strong features or short afro.

So I had to explain how there was nothing in the least bit scary about the African American man, that there was not even anything indicating that he was a gangster, (and then I went into an explanation of why being scared of someone based simply on the way they look can be insulting) that there was no way in knowing that the Asian was any smarter, and that there were other visual cues about the femininity of the East Indian and African American women.

Then, I had them try and point out the differences between the at first similar-looking people in the photo above.  (interesting article to read if you click on the photo)

I explained how it is a natural survival skill from our earliest evolution to categorize:  that things we know are safe, and categories we don’t know are potentially dangerous because they are not part of our familiar world.  I explained how distance makes us generalize, and that we can’t know specifics until we get closer.  And the problem with race and race relations is that we let our fear keep us from getting close enough to see people as more than just their category.

I STILL HAVEN’T SEEN ENOUGH ASIAN FACES to be able to distinguish them enough.  To me, Asians are still foreigners and my white brain is still working from generalizations and moving too slowly to specifics…My exposure has been so limited my entire life, and this is really the first time I’ve been in close contact.  Only it is overwhelming, and anyone not within my immediate sphere I still have a hard time identifying or describing.

One of the videos we watched today on being Asian in America was about the “vibrant” Korean community in America.  It touched upon the Rodney King L.A. riots, and how that was a galvanizing point in history for Koreans to become more vocal and politically proactive as a community.  But after the describing people exercise, I reminded them of their unwarranted characterization and fear (we’ll explore what that’s based upon in a later lesson on history of racial image and the media) of the African American.  I told them that the backlash against the Korean American community in L.A. was in part their own doing, because their fear was offensive (I’m working hard yet you think I’m an ex-con simply because of my color?) and how the Koreans didn’t take the time to get to know any of the brothers & sisters who spent their money in their stores, and how the African Americans came to view the Korean shop owners as the privileged model minority who exploit those who are denied privilege.

The lovely thing is, the class got it.

Teaching can be great sometimes.

This morning, I arrived at my boy’s class for the day.  The home room teacher was there, and he barked out some instructions to the boys.  And then, then THE MALE CO-TEACHER SHOWED UP  – WITH HIS STICK.

The boys were quiet the rest of the class.  Amazing what a little muscle flexing can do.

The co-teacher didn’t stay the entire lesson, so I didn’t get the opportunity to thank him.  I am sure he thought I spoke too fast and that the lesson did not include the students speaking enough.  I am hyper-sensitive to criticism about my classes, I know.  This particular lesson about the environment is also very dry.  However, I wanted to point out things I have seen in Korea that the students can do to help the environment:

• Bring their own cups and stop using disposable paper cups – they are EVERYWHERE, half of the trash seems to be full of paper cups
• Bring their own chopsticks and keep some in their backpacks for when they eat out
• Stop accepting plastic bags at every store, when their backpacks can hold the items they purchase – again, the trash cans are full of plastic bags
• Stop buying individually packaged single serve items and buy large items that can be divided instead
• Stop turning the heat up so high and wear sweaters and socks.  I was told 28 degrees Celsius was a good temperature to set the thermostat at – that’s 82 degrees Farenheit!  I told them my thermostat was set at 23, and they were shocked.  I told them that Europeans set their thermostats at 20, and they were even more shocked.  I had thought that Koreans would be used to the harsh climate here, but instead their rooms are over-heated, and they wear coats in the hallways and shiver, complaining about the cold.  I told them they could easily save a million won in the winter if they would just put on a sweater and turn down the heat.
• Stop washing clothes in hot water

I hope my expanding definition of English teacher does not get me in trouble – but if there’s any way I can get this small country to be less dependent on imports – imports that fuel wars, denude forests, and pollute the water and food sources, then I will gladly plead guilty.

ADDED:  The co-teacher is scarey.  I also don’t know who he is – they say he is an English teacher, but he looks the same to me as the math teacher who was introduced to me before school as my co-teacher. To be fair to me, I’ve only spoken with this guy once – when the Freshman were assembled the first day of school.