rice with added grains

tons of vegetables

soup with every meal

same sex bonding

lifelong friendships

finding humor amid the grind

tiny yet gigantic acts of rebellion abound

the local fruit

I still don’t have a sense of how Korean culture works.  I’ve read so much about how confuscianism dictates how society works, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.  Maybe this will never make sense to me, as I will never fully buy the arguments for why anyone should accept everything society says we should accept, no matter what continent I live on.

For example, defensiveness:  D. B.’s redirecting my logical arguments as personal affronts to Korea.  Then there was my recruiter, Joyce, who asked me how I liked my teaching assignment. I told her that it was okay, but that next time I would like to be placed in a more vibrant area with more street life, such as Lenn got near the Anyang subway station.  Joyce’s response to this was to blame me for not getting my paperwork in earlier and telling me that Lenn got what she asked for because all her paperwork was turned in at the end of October.  Huh?  Why the blame?  Why the defensiveness?  Did Lenn really ask her for a vibrant area with street life?  I seriously doubt it, as none of us knew anything about any of these locations prior to coming to Korea.  And in Joyce’s case, she asked me my opinion!  And I was talking about what I wanted in the future!  Deflection and defensiveness seem to be the knee-jerk response to anything that does not tow the party line or that invites open inquiry or thoughtful criticism.   There is no logic to this.  I am banging my head against a wall here…

Today I wanted to let the Vice Principal know that I would give him a private lesson to catch him up with the rest of the teachers in my class for teachers, as he missed a lesson.  He didn’t understand what I was trying to say, so after trying to get several people to translate, Y stepped in.  Only she didn’t understand either, and it turns out she told him I would be willing to teach another class to more teachers.  So I explained to her that wasn’t what I meant, and she said she would fix it.  After lunch, we both went to his office and I joked that Y was fired as a translator and let her explain what I really had offered to do.  He said he had been sick and too busy and that he wouldn’t be able to come anymore to classes, which Y believed was just an excuse and that for some reason he had given up.  Later, I realized that since he was no longer attending, there was no reason for the other teachers to fear being in that class.  Unbeknownst to me, she went and had another conversation with him, and then she showed me an instant message he had sent all the teachers saying that because he was no longer in the class, everyone was free to sign up for it.

Wow.  Somehow he knows nobody wants to be in the class because of his presence.  I sure hope he doesn’t think the mistaken offer to teach another English class was meant to underscore how unpopular he is.  I sure hope he doesn’t think my offer to bring him up to speed wasn’t an insult, or a way to tell him he wasn’t good enough.  I have no clue why he would mention his leaving as a reason other teachers should want to come.  I just genuinely wanted to give him an important and helpful lesson!  Now, my wanting to help feels like I have created some misunderstandings.  And I need the Vice Principal’s help if I am going to fix this co-teacher problem…

I have to fill out a form to get my airline tickets reimbursed.  Even the structure of this form supports my claim that my full ticket should be reimbursed.  In the United States, if I were to document such a claim, I know that it would hurt my case if I only requested half of what I thought I was owed.  Here, if I fill out the entire trip, it will create a backlash.  I have filled out the request for the entire trip.  It sits in my desk and I am afraid to turn it in.  Legally I should back up my claim and document it, even if they give me nothing.  Culturally, I know it is suicide for my career.  I know if there is a backlash, that would be unethical.  Yet with the kind of incomprehensible and often illogical processes I have been encountering, I have a feeling ethics can and do get set aside and I will be “managed.”  I must be brave and turn in the form requesting full compensation.  I can throw a rock and hit a new job, and there are other school districts I can work for without D. B.  Just shut up and speak only in class, is what I seem to be hearing.  I will never give up on my convictions and, by the looks of hagwon-a junction, I won’t have to worry about being unemployed here in Korea any time soon.

To be conscientious in a country with limited vision is mind-blowing.

Back when I was leaving campus at lunchtime (before I knew it was against the rules) for a smoke, I would sometimes walk across the street where there was a smaller scale commercial district.  This area is a kind of mini Soho – comprised mostly of interior design and home decorating businesses, with little restaurants and convenience stores, etc., sandwiched in between.  I liked to go there simply because the scale was human and if I only focused on my immediate surroundings, I might be able to forget being dwarfed by rows upon rows of concrete housing monstrosities 18-24 stories high.

I’ve gone there to spend my won a couple of times, as there is a little stationary/gift shop where all the cute Asian school supplies can be had. Yesterday after dinner at the school I went there and purchased a white board so I could practice hanguel ad nauseum and not kill trees.  As I was leaving, I noticed outdoor stalls running along one side the length of one short block, and was pleased to find a sort of mini outdoor market.  It wasn’t much, but it made my heart sing to see something so, um, entrepreneurial and rustic in amongst all this middle-class blandness.  Well, maybe rustic isn’t the word – as all the stalls were sturdily designed specifically for stall use and made out of tarp material.  (and there was a Dunkin Donuts stall too…so yeah, not very rustic)  I went back to teach the class carrying my whiteboard and hoping to hit the market the next day.

That would be today, and there was no market there when I checked after school.  Couldn’t find it.  Think I passed where it had been.  Seeing businesses ahead and thinking I could still keep my bearings in relation to my home destination, I decided to check out Anyang a little more by foot.

The businesses ahead turned out to be businesses and restaurants on the bottom floors of 2-4 storey walk-up apartments, which gave way to more of the same at the base of 6-8 storey buildings, and soon I found myself facing a street wall of these buildings.  I was actually in the middle of about six FULL big city blocks, comprised almost exclusively from the 2nd floor to the top floor of hagwons.

I walked the length of it – the street running down the middle of this commercial education nightmare is called Hagwon-a Way, and where Pyeongchon (?) Street crosses it, it is called Hagwon-a Jct.  To make matters even worse, the businesses all along the ground floor were the likes of McDonald’s, KFC, Baskin Robbins, Belgian Waffles, and various other similar Korean brands of empty calories, sugar bombs, and future heart attacks.  I walked and walked and walked in a daze as I looked up and down the street wall of English schools and math and science schools.  There must have been about – and this might be an understatement – 150 of these schools in this area.  School stacked upon school stacked upon school stacked upon school stacked upon school next to more schools stacked upon schols stacked upon schools stacked upon….next to more schools stacked…

My God.

My chest just tightened.  I could barely breathe.  I just felt so much pain as I watched some of my high school students heading towards some of these places, as I watched the private buses loaded with little children dropping them off, as I watched parents dropping off their tiny ones…as I watched them stopping to load up on crap before heading to more classes.

I looked up and, towering behind this canyon of education cancer, were cliffs of officetels, obscuring and nearly obliterating the outline of the mountains beyond.  And it seemed as if Anyang is an imaginary city/nightmare that education built.  That there really is no Anyang.  There is only this drive and this push to forever expand.  That survival is dependent on expansion.  It is akin to ant colonies and bee swarming.  It is almost mindless.  I feel like I am in amongst the Borgs, part of a monstrous machine that has lost its soul.

Well,  I had to make eight boys write, “I will not talk when others are speaking in English class because it is rude.”  100 times.  Correction:  four of them continued to speak, so they have to write it 150 times.

The day before, I had an entire  class of boys write 100 times and miss the entire lesson.  One boy just wasn’t writing at all, so he got 150, and another boy was writing in kindergarten size letters at a snail’s pace just to bother me, so he too got 150.  I told this class we would continue this exercise at the beginning of the next class until everyone’s assignment was finished, and then I berated them because they are 16 and the last time I had to do this was when I was eight.

English speaking class is so unimportant to them, nothing I or anyone says is going to divert them from the idea that this is free time/social time.  This idea is so etched into their heads that even with the threat and execution of actual work, they can’t not talk to each other.

Contrast this with tonight, it is 9 pm and I am walking past all the classrooms on my way home from my evening class.  The school is nearly full, the doors to these classes are open, there are no teachers in these classes, (some are patrolling the hall) and yet the classrooms are nearly full and it is DEAD SILENT.  I mean, DEAD SILENT.

Again, this would NEVER happen in America.

The evening class was, btw, very promising.  I sold the class (yes, we have to peddle these extra classes to our own students – you know- the ones falling asleep and talking)  by pointing out the class size, pointing out how in America the entire class would be white and only two or three would be Asian, and then telling them that probably none of them would be Korean.  How do you deal with that?

15 students signed up out of 20 slots, some with zero notice from me.  Makes me really happy, as this class is my raison d’etre for being in Korea, and the kids who signed up are very sharp and VOLUNTEERS.  I’m looking forward to the next 13 ninety minutes classes we have together, and I pretty much have the entire curriculum all laid out:  the history of Asians in America, Asians in the media, Racial stereotypes, challenges, etc., etc.

We watched one short video on the kind of assumptions they are going to encounter if they speak to someone in America. Then, we watched two different videos on Asian identity and culture shock.  Four of the kids had already lived abroad and shared a little of what their experience was like.  When I asked them what kind of hardships they thought they might face, they thought being short would be a problem.  One of the kids had lived in Wisconsin for a year, so he had to deal with being the only Asian and the burden of being tagged genius while stumbling with his English, etc., etc.  But then I mentioned kimchee, and that they wouldn’t be able to eat it everyday – in fact, it would be hard to find.  The boy from Wisconsin nodded and told everyone it was a two hour drive to find kimchee, and that he was lucky if he got it once a week.  This was something all the kids could relate to.

Unfortunately, I had too much to say and when pressed the kids didn’t talk much.  But I think they enjoyed everything I had to say, so hopefully next time I can work on my conversation pulling skills.  Tomorrow We’re going to play the name game, since I can handle learning 15 (vs. 600)  and I’m going to pretend to be an ignorant American and ask them some pretty offensive things and see how they respond.  Then, we’ll watch the videos of Asian American history, so they can have a sense of what others assume they represent and enough background information to be able to navigate through those predjudices.

Oh – I have so many great plans for this class – I can’t wait to implement them!

continues…

OK.  So now I know that chim means stew, I am on a mission to find it somewhere.

Last night I went to the nearest equivalent of a Korean greasy spoon where I can eat by myself, (you know – where all the working class folk eat for cheap) and I studied the menu.  The Korean menus at these places are presented much like fast food sushi menus in the states – where they give you the bill with every item listed, and you write the quantity down next to the ones you want.   Annoyingly,  Asian servers give new meaning to the waiter job description, as they actually do wait for you to make your choice.  No pressure.  Unfortunately, I don’t know hangul well, so I am sounding out the last words of the whole menu, looking for chim.

Glory hallelujah, I find some chim under the chiggae (soup) section and order it.  So it comes, and it’s more like soup.  And there are strange things floating in it.  It has a lot of seafood, as well as some veined white meat about an inch wide (God, I hope it’s not one of those tube worm things) with the consistency of liver,  and then to my horror there is something that looks like this:

Yes.  I tried them.  (they were white, though, and cooked)

No.  They weren’t bad.  Neither were they anything special.  I guess you could say they were tender…

But the liver-like thing was pretty gross.

I asked the other teachers in the lunchroom about brains, and they didn’t know of any Korean dishes with brains.  One of the teachers thought it might be intestines.

But really, they actually looked like the photo above.  That, along with whole head-on shrimp, squid strips, and mussels.

I’m sure some gourmet would have loved it, and it might fetch a hefty price somewhere as a fetish dish.  I paid 4,500 won for it, which is the equivalent of $3.00

I think I am going to avoid the word “mixed” from now in, especially in reference to soup or stew…

Until the playoffs between Korea and Japan are finished, that is…

An earlier class asked me if they could watch the game, and incredulous, I said “Of COURSE not!”  Grumpy girls suffered through my lesson, and I had to hand out writing assignments to two groups of girls.  (at least it was a sentence written only 50 times instead of 100 or 150)

Yeah – the old maid teacher is really cracking the whip today…

Anyway, after lunch time I realized, as I watched all the teachers watching the game, and walked down the halls and saw that EVERY CLASSROOM was watching the game, that discipline today was going to be impossible.  Commenting on this I learned that none of the teachers were teaching.  Great.  Just great..I told Young-a this would never happen in America…

I seem to be saying that a lot lately.

So I walk into the classroom and forty expectant faces look at me, and I don’t even let them ask, but just say, “yeah, yeah, yeah.  You OWE ME.”   So for one glorious second, I am everyone’s favorite teacher.  That is, until next week…