A Brand New Life

First, the listings at koreamovietimes.org are not current… which is too bad, because someone took the time to translate them into English for us…anyway, always double-check, but I’m not sure how to do that…

I got to the theater in Gangdong and there were only three of us watching.  :(   The usher boy was really nice to me, and got me from the lobby and found my seat for me, because he knew I couldn’t speak Korean.

Glad I went by myself, though, as I was sniffling from almost the very beginning. (things that wouldn’t make anyone else but maybe me tear up, because I know and love an adoptee who went to St. Paul’s Orphanage and was there at the same time as the main character Jin-Hee, which was based upon the life story of the director, Ounie Lecomte)

It’s a beautiful movie, I loved the period 70’s clothing, and it was shot entirely from the perspective of a child, I guess in the manner of Truffaut.   It’s also a very Korean piece.  A lovely image then rip your beating heart out of your chest and slowly shred it kind of Korean film.  I have learned, with my talks with the Korean documentary director and the artist Jeong Ae, that it is CRITICAL for Korean audiences that there be something beautiful in every sad story.  This is why adoptees have a hard time relaying their struggles, because the amazing beautiful people we are gets lost in the relaying of a difficult story.  So this is why Lacomte’s rendition is important for us, as a model.

The story isn’t really about adoption, though.  It’s about abandonment and loss.  Which is part of adoption, yes.  But it’s not critical of adoption or Korea or political or anything.  It just relays how Jin-Hee faces each new unknown while haunted by and holding onto the memory of her father.  We follow her as she tries to deal with her anger over being so powerless and as she develops relationships with some of the other “orphans.” (I don’t consider abandoned children technically orphans, since they have living parents)  Some have hope for a better life.  Some have resignation.  Some have unbroken spirit and defiance.  All are hurting in their own way.  All must sing a farewell song as the ones who are chosen get sent away to foreign countries.  Especially heart-breaking is the device of Jin-Hee and her best friend Sook-Hee’s interest in caring for a broken bird.  I won’t spoil it, but only say that little people are fully formed humans and experience trauma and heartbreak in all the same way adults do.  Their souls can be crushed.  (it’s not what you imagine) They also think about existence and what that means.

All of the above without benefit of English subtitles, so I’d like to see it again and be privileged to eavesdrop on the children’s conversations one day.

Part of me would like to see a sequel, but then I think no, this is where it must end.  For us, there are three chapters in our lives:  chapter 1 – prior to our separation with our original families, chapter 2 – in transition and prior to our second separation, and chapter 3 – adapting to our new and not always better life.  We adoptees long to have our birth country understand chapter 3, and to rediscover our pre-amnesia chapter 1, but nobody has really portrayed chapter 2 before and what THAT did to us. It’s more powerful standing alone.  I just wish all Korean people could see it.

I looked for my friend Myung Sook, and there were two or three that I imagined could have been her.   Myung Sook’s amazing recall of her life before adoption, her life at St. Paul’s, and her horrific post adoption life will, I hope, one day be in book form.   Unlike most Korean adoptee memoirs, all the chapters are there.

Mr. Lee wants to write a book about my life, but fears too much will be lost because he isn’t confident in his English skills.  Maybe I should let him…

Q&A

Some snippets of Q&A where I let the kids practice their asking skills, from the last day in regular classrooms.

S.  Teacher, do you know my name?

T.  Awwwwwww.  No.  I WISH I did.  I’m sorry. I remember all your faces! (and then I had to explain how I see over 600 of them, but only once a week, and how I wish I saw them all more so I could remember.)

*****

S.  Teacher, are you going to leave?

T.  Yes.  I will be leaving.

S.  Don’t you like it here?

T.  I like the students.  A lot.

S.  We’ll be better!  Please stay!!!

*****

S.  When you read a newspaper, what is the first page you turn to?

T.  Whoa!  You are amazing.  That is an amazing question. (teacher applauds)

I turn to the world news section, but honestly I don’t read the paper much.  Friends tend to send me links to interesting articles.

*****

S.  May I ask about your t.v. documentary?

T.  Of course, thank you for asking.

S.  What do you hope for finding your sister?

T.  I think she deserves to know that her story has more information too, so that’s the main reason.  I also know that the adoption agencies lie to adoptees and their Korean families, so if she is my sister and I can prove it with DNA testing, then I can prove adoption was not done ethically in the past.  I want to improve things for Korea’s future children.

S.  (nods head)  Thank you.

*****

S. What would you become, if you could be a student again?

T.  I would combine anthropology and  documentary film, because I think people and cultures are fascinating and I would like to record them before they disappear.

(students all gasp with amazement)

*****

S. What do you think about our school lunches?

T.  You know, someone in every class asks this!  I think they are not great.  But they could be worse.

S.  What could be worse?

T.  Well, there is an awful lot of what we call “mystery” meat…

(students all murmur ” mystery meat” hoping to remember it)

*****

S.  What do you think of our principal?

T.  To be honest, I’ve only spoken with him twice, so I can’t judge his character.

*****

S.  What games do you play?

T.  (is that a cute question or what – and they’re so serious about it!)

Well, I don’t have much free time, so I can’t spend all the time it takes to play RPG games or most games.  So I only play quick games once in awhile like Tetris

(student nods his head as this seems acceptable)

*****

S.  Why are you chewing gum?

T.  (busted!  the ONE time I do that, and I’m called out on it)

I just ate something I didn’t like and didn’t have time to brush my teeth.

(student nods his head and is satisfied with the answer – phew!  close call!)

*****

S.  Teacher do you love me?

T.  Of course.  I LOVE YOU!

*****

 

A room of one’s own

Photos from last month before the English Zone was completed

Don’t ya just love the message over the door???

To encourage a more studious environment, the window shades have been printed with various Ivy League schools.  Korea is OBSESSED with Ivy League schools.  OBSESSED.

It’s kind of bittersweet for me, since that’s a photo of Yale in the middle – my almost alma-mater.  Oh, you don’t know my Yale story?

The Yale Story

Ten years after I graduated, with two kids and on welfare, I enrolled in college.  Five years later, after working half time, going to school full time and raising two children, working round the clock too many all-nighters to mention, I got accepted to Yale’s Master of Architecture Program.  It was such a huge personal accomplishment.  Despite being estranged from my family for over 17 years, and despite foundations paying for everything financial aid did not, Yale’s admission required my parents to fill out a statement about their finances.

The financial aid form came on a CD which was delivered to my slumlord house.  Only it was dropped on the porch in a derelict portion of the house that was never used, so my generous time frame to fill it out was cut short because I discovered its whereabouts so late.

I called my parents asking them for the information in writing, and my parents said that would take some research on their part.  Meanwhile, the clock was ticking.  I called again asking them for the information, and they made some excuses that they would have to contact their accountant.  My mother cried, “Why don’t you just go to a public school like the other children did?”  (Oh – you mean your real children who you helped pay for their tuition???) and then she added, “You just want to take away our retirement.”  (what the?)  Finally, after much pleading and explaining that nobody at Yale was going to take their money, my parents agreed to send me the information.  Over a week passed and then I received an envelope.  In it, written in pencil, on a piece of scrap paper, was an approximation of what they might make in a year.  I had specifically told them all the DETAILED information Yale required on this financial statement, and what they sent me was totally worthless.  This is from a man who had a graduate degree.  This was from people who had been filling out financial aid applications for their two sons for eight years or more.    The time had run out.  I had to write Yale a letter explaining why I could not attend their school.

Why Yale?  Was I obsessed with an Ivy League education and the networking it would supply me with?  No.  Only later in the workplace did I realize what solid gold it would have been.  I wanted to go to Yale because there was an existentialist philosophy instructor there, and I wanted to write a Master’s thesis combining existentialism, phenomenology, and the Japanese concept of space-time, ma.  I wanted to go to Yale because they had a program where architecture students actually built a house from the ground up.  I wanted to go to Yale because they had housing programs with the outlying area’s most needy residents.  One of my instructors wrote that I was the hope and future of the profession, one of the most creative students she’d ever had.  I ended up, instead, eschewing the narcissism, politics, and competition, and fed my kids with drafting grunt work instead.

Aren’t the opportunities being adopted wonderful?  Sorry, but I’m quite rightfully bitter about this one.  In fact, it’s the one thing I can say I’m bitter about.  That was MY OWN WORK and my own accomplishment, and they destroyed it. The other stuff?  That I can make allowances for, try and find some empathy or sympathy or understanding for their self-centeredness, or how I was used. But not Yale.  Not ever. No person should ever crush someone’s hopes, dreams, and future like that.

The following year I applied at my local public university.  They wouldn’t accept me because they were taking those who went on to the masters program uninterrupted and there was a budget crunch so preference was given to international students with their higher tuitions.

Okay.  So now I get to sit next to an image of Yale every day.  Sigh.

Anyway, I rearranged the chairs and tables like this (my drafting skills are good for something, after all:

(I asked for rectangular tables, btw!)  Anyway, I’ve set up this system of moving the kids around the room.  I’m sure the co-teachers thought I was insane at first, but now that they’ve seen it in action, I think they get it.  Each table has a letter and a number designation taped to it.  Every two tables share the same color.  So I’ve got 14 letter groups, 14 number groups, and 7 color groups.  Every student has a name tag with a color, letter and number assigned to them.

On the first day of class, I let the kids sit wherever they wanted and then I made sure to give each student in one of those naturally forming groups a different color.   So the conversation cliques were instantly outed by the students and  I easily broke them up.  Also, we did a lot of drills where I made them stand up, practice the classic “hello.  how are you?  I’m fine, thank you” dialogue, and then move to the right on cue.

Then, I show them a little video on  how that dialogue is wrong, wrong, wrong, and to never use that dialogue again.  And then I go through all the natural ways Americans greet each other at various degrees of formality, and then I play the “Wassup!” video for some levity.

If there’s time I also present a power point I made showing different types of people and asking the students how they would greet them.  And then I introduce them to the different kind of polite ways to address people:  old people, your boss, a fellow student, an officer, a teacher, the president, etc.  I show them that there are respect levels in America too, and explain how they are falling out of use, but are still important to know for certain formal situations.

Surprisingly, class 1-1 did really well in the new environment.  I guess that’s what 6 weeks of dictation does for you.  Class 1-3 did horrible.  I might have to send them back to the regular classroom for some more medicine if they don’t shape up.  The girls, as always, did amazing.

I must say that the huge touch screen monitor is very very cool.  And it’s also great to no longer have to travel from classroom to classroom.  It might not be so bad if I had a traditional subject, but to teach conversation in spaces so over-crowded the children have trouble moving their chairs enough to stand up is really difficult.  The only problem seems to be acoustics – the sounds  bounce off of everything and the room is painfully loud.

Kind of sad to leave what I’m building here. But I figure there will be more great and awful kids and new and different and equally rewarding challenges at the next place.

Secret Lives

So in our new English Zone, I was reviewing one of the new books purchased by In Kyung for teacher reference.  She did a very good job, btw, but most of the books were, of course, chosen for the Korean English teachers and more applicable to creative ways to teach grammar.  However, there were a few titles she chose which I found useful and which I wrote down and hope to purchase for myself.

One of them was Small Group discussion topics;  for Korean high school students and beginners by Jack Martire.  Martire is a long-time ex-pat who knows Korean culture well and his discussion topics are both very provocative AND distinctly about modern life from the perspective of a young Korean.

For example, one of the topics was on regulation of the internet by way of the sex slave trade.  He cited news articles from the late 90’s where a ring of internet prostitution was broken up by the Seoul police.  Approximately 300 girls were found to be soliciting for sex on-line.  The alarming thing was how organized this solicitation was, and even more shocking was the fact that most of the girls were under-aged, some as young as 14.  The interesting thing was that many of their customers were not men, but boys of their peer group.  The horror of it all was these girls were not even profiting from this solicitation, but were held captive because they were essentially being socially blackmailed into perpetuating what should have been an isolated transgression.

Sooo many tangent topics for discussion can spring from this article.  What conditions would cause so many young girls to be in this predicament?  How is it the boys can afford to pay for this activity?  How was it organized?  By whom?  How was this activity facilitated?  It seems clear that these children, despite being over-scheduled and living pressured academic lives are also woefully unsupervised.  In Korean society today, too many parents work late into the night and have very little interaction or relationship with their teenagers.

When I look at my students, (who, admittedly don’t represent average Korean students as much, because the majority conduct themselves in a more moralistic way due to having Christian parents and being practicing Christians themselves) see their fresh pimply faces, their naivete and almost arrested development in comparison to American students their same age,  and think about this article, it makes me wonder what kind of secret lives they lead.  I see young boys smoking on the way to middle school.  I see a couple of my girls of the gum-chewing, eyes rolling, smart-alec variety, and know deep in my heart that they really can’t handle and aren’t equipped for most of the vices of this world.

I once talked about urban tribes and the way American students wear emblems to mark being in a community and asked a Korean teacher about gangs or tough kids, since they are often portrayed as existing in Korean dramas.  She paused and said yes, possibly Korean students do this too.  I asked how she could tell, since they all wear uniforms.  The hair, mostly.  The way they don’t conform to uniform standards.  I wonder how far their rebellion takes them.  I wonder if the black t-shirt under the white oxford signifies something far more unhealthy than we would care to admit.  I wonder what the true cost of Korea’s economic development is.  Korea is so like Japan with all its sexual repressions yet is so unlike Japan, in that here individualism is not expressed or tolerated of its youth.

And what happens in a repressed society?  Transgressions.  And the result of transgressions?  Untimely babies.  Babies who are sent away as transgressions erased.  Because it is not the mother’s shame, but the family’s shame.  A family who could not provide a good moral compass.  A family who was not doing its job managing their household.

But also interesting in Korea, is that this secret life thing does not stop once childhood is over.  Many many adults here lead secret lives as well.  For example, I could actually sleep with as many Korean men as I wanted, if I were willing to join the many others for whom marriage has no meaning but for which is pivotal to their place in society.  Whether man or woman, these adult transgressors are legion, and its presence is commonly accepted for others and feared for oneself.  And, as it turns out since last year’s celebrated case of an adulteress actress, a jail-able offense for the women.

And, I believe, that these transgressions are the result of everything around Korea changing but Korea resisting REAL change.  While it embraces technology and takes it to a new level, imports everything, and hungers after global commerce, it doesn’t comprehend what the implications are, what it means to their society, and how to incorporate them in a healthy manner.  That some of the things they see as evil are actually beneficial, and some of the things they accept are a trap, enslaving them.  We are talking epic growing pains here.

There is hope, however.  Most of the Koreans I talk to are my age.  They went to college during the student demonstrations for the democratic movement.  They ALL categorically are opposed to this educational system, and some of them are considering saying to hell with their family’s traditional expectations and obligations, as dictated to them.

Mr. Lee tells me about his son.  He wants to direct movies like his mother and sees no point in scoring high in math and science to get into a university that doesn’t focus on  his interests.  So Mr. Lee let his son drop out of high school and study on his own.  So now the boy is studying directors, film history, social studies, etc.  Mr. Lee says the extra classes are killing his pocket book, and that he worries about his son’s future here in Korea, but that he sees the sparkle in his eyes and it fills him with joy to see his son change from someone who hated learning, to someone who has a lust for learning.

I bet Mr. Lee’s son doesn’t have a secret life.  There’s no need now.  May he grow and prosper and show the rest of Korea that in a crazy world without traditional values, personal happiness is even more important to achieve balance and sustainability.

So it’s official

I’m moving out of this bank vault and into a real neighborhood!  Away from Bellevue!  Which was making me INSANE!  Yayy!!!  The real estate agent was a pushover about taking less key money down and more rent per month.  Actually, it turns out that it is the buyer who pays the commission, so he kept working the owner to both take less key money AND keep the monthly rent low.  So I got a very good deal because, it seems, everything in Korea is negotiable.

Seems he stole me as a client and that would sour relations between him and his other real estate friend.  BUT, even though the other guy was nicer, he just didn’t have any good listings.  I told him I’d call him, but then forgot I don’t speak Korean…he probably thinks I’m a jerk now…

Getting my own place, independent of the schools turns out to be more of a commitment than I thought.  I’ll have to get a refrigerator and a washing machine, pots and pans and dishes, a mattress to sleep on, a table to sit at, and some book-shelves and at least a clothes rack if not a wardrobe.  I mean, all those things can be gotten cheap and sold – but it’s still a commitment.  Because of course I want my home to be nice and not look like a drop-off for someone else’s trash.   And then I’ll fall in love with my stuff.  But it’s also kind of exciting, because I love to hunt for the best finds.  But that’s also kind of daunting, because shopping in Seoul is like shopping in Manhattan – that could really wear a person out.

Looking around for things I’ll eventually need I found this:

A Salvation Army in Seoul!

In a couple of months I’ll have to part with all of my school-owned small appliances (don’t watch tv much, don’t use the microwave) and have to purchase some items.  I might just have to wash clothes by hand, since I didn’t see room for a washing machine anywhere, and I’ll have to buy or rent a refrigerator.  But a rice cooker?  SALLY’S!  AND, the proceeds go to rehab centers.  So they have a store and a coffee shop in Mapo.  Sounds like a wonderful way to spend a Saturday.  Yayy!

Also, some other second hand stores:

Yayy!  Who wants to line Emarte’s pockets any more?  Not I!

T-recycle co.

and

Recycle City

Really, I have no idea how one goes about moving here.  I’ve watched the movers move other people out of my officetel, and the movers – instead of using cardboard boxes like in America, use plastic self-closing storage bins.  MUCH sturdier, easier to cart around, and re-usable.  The question is, do they let the person moving hold onto the bins long enough to take their belongs out and organize them?  And what about in my situation, where I’ve got nothing to put my clothing into?  How should I prepare the clothes for moving, if not in boxes?  I don’t want to buy plastic bins that I’m not going to use again…

And really, since I am paying rent for three months that I could have been paying nothing, I really can’t afford many household items until March.  Maybe I’ll just carry one thing each evening, as I will be commuting sometime between December and February, and in this way s-l-o-w-l-y empty out my apartment.  What a funny sight I’d be to the regulars on the subway!  What a pain during the train transfer.

Yayy!  No more gaudy fuscia and gold bedspread!  No more mattress that’s like a box spring resting on plastic cones that I can’t sweep around!  No more audio announcements invading my apartment!  No more strange people knocking at my door!  No more eerie walks down long empty corridors just to get to my bank vault!  I’ll have a bedroom with a door!  No more delivery ads cluttering up my door!  Oh, the list can go on and on…

Also official is I was forced to let my school know I won’t be renewing my contract next year, since my new recruiter was forced to contact them to confirm my employment (sheesh – no way to even test the waters in this place)  So that was kind of a bummer.  The vice principal wrote nice things about me and In Kyung gave me a good recommendation and part of me is sad I’m leaving.  I only hope my new assignment won’t be terribly far away from where I live, as Seoul is a very very very big city.