I believe it was Thursday, one of the older teachers came up to me with a print-out and said I have been missing from Monday morning church services and that I must attend.  I explained to him that I wasn’t religious and that was why I did not show up.  I explained that nobody told me I was going to a religious school.  And, frustrated, he left.

In-Kyung (yeah, that’s how you spell it) was nearby and she explained how they have been taking attendence and my absence is conspicuous and that I must show up from now on.  It is the president’s wish that all teachers attend this service.

A phone rings somewhere, someone hands me a land line phone, and it is this man again on the other line telling me I MUST attend the church services.  Again, but louder, more irritated, I explain that NOBODY TOLD ME I was going to a PRIVATE school.  NOBODY TOLD ME I was going to a RELIGIOUS school.  It is NOT IN MY CONTRACT that I have to go to somebody’s church BEFORE school starts.  He went on and on explaining how I MUST attend, how all teachers MUST attend.

Look, I said to him, If I were BLACK and MUSLIM – WOULD YOU STILL MAKE ME GO?????

Silence.

He says, “all teachers must attend church service, but for you, for you it is optional.”

Christ almighty.

Later, at lunch, the missionary guy has lunch with me and it once again is THE ENGLISH SHOW at that lunch table, and he is OFFERING OUT MY SERVICES to the others sitting there to take this opportunity of my presence to practice their English.  Then, THEN, he starts talking about how he has been missing me at the morning church service.  And I sit and stew about this for a few minutes and It burst out of me.   You know, that is NOT OK to make me go to that church service.  I AM NOT RELIGIOUS.  etc., etc., etc., the whole thing all over again.  And eyes steely and nostrils flaring, I challenge him with the Muslim scenario again.  I see, he says.  You should talk with the Vice Principal and tell him your views.

I talk about this with Young-a later, and she shows me the attendence list.

See all these names?  She points at the list of truent teachers:  on the first day, there are 18 teachers missing, on the second day, there are 19 teachers missing, and on the third day, there are 20 teachers missing.  She points to all of the missing bodies that are in our floor’s teacher’s office.  A smile crosses my face from ear to ear – it is everyone even the slightest bit interesting – it is also everyone who smokes on the roof.

Don’t worry, she says, they can not make you.  The problem, she says, is the last foreign teacher went every time.  What a brown nose.  (the sermons are all in Korean, for God’s sake – it’s not as if you are going to derive anything spiritual or meaningful from that) For you, it is optional.

So yes, I am a problem child.  And yes, I will get in trouble, but I will not be in trouble by myself.  I look at her and say, well then, screw going to talk to the Vice Princiapl.  It’s my right.  I will protest with my feet.  That’s all I need to say.

For me, it’s four or five people max.  These gatherings with my young classmates have a way of growing beyond cozy and I hate it.  (It was a welcome party hosted by our recruiter – funny, am I the only one who realizes this was really a damage control exercise?)  Granted, I like a few of them and want to get to know them better, but there’s no way with their focus on maximizing every experience.  (It’s really too bad I didn’t have one really tight bonding experience like classmates Lenn and Clara did.  It’s really too bad I got the one roommate in Thailand who was never there.)  Nor do I believe that the next new person is somehow going to open up new worlds for me, so I’m less interested in the next new shiny thing/person. I’m more for quality over quantity, and besides, each time I’ve gone participating depletes my funds for the remainder of the month, and I realize I just can’t afford to go out AT ALL for the next few months.  I should have ordered internet instead.  I spend three hours for every half hour on-line, just trying to find a connection, and my lesson planning is dependent on it.

And I don’t quite understand why I am always the only older person doing these things.  I mean, where is everyone else?  Is everyone my age gardening in their backyards with 1.5 kids, a mortgage and two cars?

Sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown…

And who turned the damned heat up?  I’m sweating everywhere I go.  I think it’s early on-set menopause.

So I got the volunteer to help with the grocery shopping.  But It was like pulling teeth getting her to teach me anything.  When life is obvious and familiar to you, it’s hard to comprehend being an alien or what an alien needs.  That’s why I loved Mi Young so much.  She just had a continuous steady stream of unsolicited helpful advice, anticipating anything and everything that might seem strange for a newcomer to Korea.  She would have been LEADING ME and explaining away every strange vegetable and what they do with it, how to save a buck, where else to go, along with background information on everything.  Yes.  I must find Mi Young and ask to go live with her.   Don’t get me wrong, the volunteer was very nice and she also took having a second adoptee very gracefully (I’d invited a friend to come along so she could help get him a cell phone)  but she was no Mi Young.

My language exchange for today fell through, but no matter, because six others are interested.  How does one choose?  They all sounds the same…there are two that have done this before, taught a foreigner beginning Korean, so I think I will go with one of them.  I just don’t want it to turn into another exploitation like in the nurse’s office.  I want/need to learn some Korean, and  I’m just not going to learn any at my work.

Must get back to the lesson plan.  I don’t know how I’m going to make brilliant lesson plans enough to fill up an entire year.  But I’ve got to try.  And then I will be able to use them again for the next year.

Co-teacher wants to contribute.
Co-teacher wants to team teach.
Co-teacher wants to write lesson plans.
Co-teacher’s English is only mid-level.
Co-teacher feels worthless, and I don’t blame her.
Co-teacher feels her only value is to keep order.

My lessons are jam-packed and media rich, and I’m really making a difference with their phonics. I only need the co-teacher for a little help with order. Because I can not give test scores or grades, the only power I have to keep the kids in line – besides in-class work – is the co-teacher. But I would be bored out of my mind as a co-teacher too.

I would welcome team teaching but it doesn’t make sense with the way in which the schools are structured – we can’t both bring in our expertise in only 50 minutes, and especially not with a class of 40+ which has three levels of students.

Someone told this poor girl that we would be a team.  Even the book of sample crappy lesson plans is entitled, “working together.”  Except for making her translate (which totally negates the whole idea of immersion teaching) and keeping the kids on task, I don’t really understand what role she can play.

I told her would be willing to change my lesson plans to follow the Korean English teacher’s lessons more closely, and she got all excited.  “To be honest, when it comes to the speaking portions of our lessons, the Korean English teachers just skip that part.”

Great.

I wonder if the ministry of education is aware of this.

My other co-teacher is AWOL, so even if we do work out some system of coordinating lessons, then the lesson plan must fill out the missing co-teacher’s place when he doesn’t show.   And btw, he’s a math teacher who was ill last year.  In my conversations with other foreign Native English Teachers, it seems like this co-teacher assignment is similar to disability duty, and it is common for the co-teachers to bail.  On the other extreme, it appears my female co-teacher was honored with this assignment, was told it was important, did it to get in good with the vice principal, and the job is beginning to reveal itself as the job nobody really should want.  So this is what you get when you go for the glory…

This system sucks for all involved – the poor co-teacher, the students, and for us.

Aside from having to establish my boundaries every day as a foreigner who looks Korean but doesn’t deserve to be treated as if I were Korean, and as an a-religious person placed unknowingly in a private institution that is devoutly religious, on top of all that I must deal with the extremes of an overly conscientious teacher and an overly un-conscientious teacher, who I am supposed to have an intimate working relationship with.
My only solutions are both painful – speak with the Vice Principal about this situation (and his English comprehension is only intermediate) find a way to make my co-teacher understand that what she wants is impossible in the current situation, and perhaps call a meeting of all the Korean English teachers to see what we can do to re-structure this fatally flawed system, independent of the school district.

My preferred solution would be to ignore this, were it not for the co-teacher continually mentioning it.  It’s going to be a long year.   And I think I will be moving on next year.

Young-a wears jeans to school, comfortable shoes, and sneaks us up to the roof to smoke.  She was very active in the student protests of the 80’s and she says college was a sad time for her, because of the violence and crack-down.  She is the most open-minded person I’ve yet met here.  Her favorite teacher is the history teacher – he’s this funny little guy about sixty with a paunch and a comb-over, who’s nick-name is Eating Machine.  The fact that she likes him best makes me like her best.  She also attends my classes just because she likes to hear what I am teaching the students about American culture (counter-culture!)  She asked me for a history book about America, so I told her to get Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and the very next day she was the proud owner of the book IN CARTOON..IN HANGUL!  Very cool.

She’s asked me out several times, but each time it has become some group thing, some extravagant thing, where someone, only one, leaves with a huge hole in their pocketbook.  I don’t know if this is because she organized this and cajoled the others into coming or what, but that’s what has happened.  Friday I just wanted to hang out with her, get a cheap side dish and a bottle of soju.   I think I caught her by surprise at the last minute, so she didn’t have time to call the others to join.  “You mean, just me?”  yes. oh god. yes. please just you.  So she called home and told her family she’d be coming home late, left her car at the school, and we walked to my holy grail of soju with a friend.  She went and ordered some fish.  I thought it was a “set” of fish and alcohol.  But actually, it was sashimi for 30,000 won.  Jesus.  I could see she was doing the extravagant thing again and was going to be in glorious financial pain for it.  So I insisted that we go dutch.  (even though even that is glorious financial pain for me)  She wasn’t even sure that was possible – and she was absolutely amazed when the waitor was able to split the bill in half with two different check cards.  It was wonderful – we talked for hours about all manner of American and Korean culture, politics, and growing up experiences.  We downed two bottles of soju and I walked her to her bus stop.  I think I have a friend in Young-a.  I had a hangover the next morning, but it was well worth it.

After traveling to the next subway station where my bank is, so I could set up foreign remittances automatically through my ATM, I stopped and treated myself to a payday dinner!!!  Looking around Boemgye and trying to find someplace affordable that served food for one, my choices seemed to be pizza, bratwurst, or TRADITIONAL KOREAN PORRIDGE.  That sounds horrible, but the pictures looked okay, and the price was right.

Amazingly enough, they ACTUALLY HAD ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONS ON THEIR MENU.  Because I was being cheap I eliminated the porridges with seafood, and I ended up choosing one of the only ones that wasn’t white and didn’t look like rice congee.  Black bean porridge is what I chose.  It was a huge bowl, full of black bean soup – no beans visible, just totally cooked down to the perfect consistency, in a mixture of about 70% bean soup and 30% rice.  It had some soft rice flour dumplings floating in it as decoration – too soft for eating, in my opinion.

Anyway, it tasted like black beans with rice.  Pretty bland.  Pretty boring.  But then I looked at the other tables eating and I noticed they were taking what was in their side dishes and adding it to their soup.   Ah ha!  And what were my side dishes?  Shredded beef marinated in soy sauce, garlic chili sauce, kim chee, and what looked like a cup of cold clear consomme, garlic and vinegar infused with two matchsticks of pickled daikon radish.  So I spooned all of the above (except the kim chee – I just ate that) in light distribution over my soup, and it transformed that blandness into the most tasty and interesting yet comforting bowl of goodness ever.  Something about the tiny amout of the intense side dishes with the huge body of soup added just the right accents to make that soup sparkle when eaten.  Warm, slightly sweaty, and satisfied, like all people should be after they’ve eaten home-made soup, I reached for what I thought was tea but it turned out to be cold sweetened grape juice.  What a perfect finish.

I went home happy.  I got paid, I can ride the subway again.  I can pay my bills in America.  I ate a yummy satisfying dinner.  My classes went well today, and the weekend will be interesting.

I don’t want to eat at subway.  I don’t want to eat mostly American food.  Neither do I want to only eat Korean BBQ.  The Korean resident adoptee does not want/can not spend their life running from what should have been theirs/what once was theirs, to the safe haven of what shouldn’t have been theirs but is.  The Korean resident adoptee instead needs to learn about what should have been theirs/what once was theirs so they can eat and live in a manner that reflects ALL the things they were/are.  It is impossible to only be American.  It is impossible to only be Korean. I am both.  I am fusion.  I deserve to know enough about that other half to be able to not only represent it, but also because I deserve to enjoy it.

There’s too much to learn to waste all my time in Itaewon at the foreign restaurants doing the foreign things I have always done as a foreign person.  I long to eat/see/experience what I know deep in my heart is familiar from when I wasn’t a foreign person.  This porridge reminded me that I long to eat the simple, basic things I know I once ate:  mulkogi with bop (fish with rice), stew, porridge, cabbage soup, and on a really poor day, just rice with peas.  Back when the “new town” where I am living was nothing but vineyards.  Back when I was in that poor mountain town eating simple country food.  Back when Korea was too poor to eat beef every week.  Yes, I am projecting here.  But I know it too, just like I knew what i peu da meant.

I have had this porridge before.

It comforts me.

So Saturday it’s being arranged for me to meet a volunteer.  I’ve asked for some basic grocery shopping skills, such as:  is that price on the fruit PER KILO or PER BAG?  How can I avoid sugar?  Is one of these dairy items cream?  Etc., etc. Also, how to use my damn cell phone…Try to save a caller ID number and end up ringing the number instead – that kind of thing.

Sunday I’m meeting a 28 yr. old language exchange partner/college student for conversation and some tips on how to live cheaper.  He lived in Australia by himself for a year, so he knows what I’m going through.

Maybe I’ll start going to Koroot events on Saturdays.  Everyone was so great there, and I believe in what they are doing and how many visiting and repatriating adoptees they’ve helped.  But it’s also a big deal to make the trip and spend that much time every Saturday.

Ran into a bunch of expats, all English teachers for GePIK, sitting in front of the gs 25 mart in front of my building last night, so I bought a can of beer (it was payday!) and sat with them before it got too cold outside.  They actually LIKE this sterile area because it has more creature comforts than living in one of the older parts of Seoul.  Found out that no, there are no other places to shop than Emart.  But also found out there is a Saturday farmer’s market in the Central Park.  Found out that no, there’s really no night life here, but Boemgye, the next stop over is more happening.  Found out that you can walk to Boemgye, and it’s a direct shot from my apt., same street, about a half hour’s distance.

Of course, they were startled when this really forward Korean chick starts addressing ALL OF THEM in perfect English.  And then they made the switch, and they started telling me where the Subway was, and the Dunkin Donuts, and croissants, etc. Contrast that with today’s lunch, where I was meticulously cleaning every bone from my fish and the Korean teachers were all amazed and asking, “how did you learn to use chopsticks?” I told them there ARE some Asians in North America, and that there ARE Chinese and other Asian restuarants.

There is no middle ground.  With anyone here.  NOBODY understands what it is to be adopted or Asian-American.