Ten minutes ago I actually answered the door. (I still don’t know what the different buttons on the video door bell/intercom stand for) Stupid, I know, but I happened to be right next to the door.

It’s a white guy. He starts apologizing profusely in broken Korean. Mr. Mullet is with him and explains that the guy is lost. He’s still drunk and doesn’t know which floor or apartment number he lives at. It’s 10:15 in the morning…I hear the door bells ringing down the hall, one by one. No wonder Koreans hate Americans…so many of them that come here set such poor examples.

Seven Star tried to gather the troops for lunch today. I could tell what he was doing. I told him we didn’t have to wait, and if he wasn’t so hungry he probably would have hung around waiting for the crew to assemble.

We loaded up our trays and sat at a table just as everyone else was arriving. He went and got the rice dessert and proceeded to dish up some for everyone else, distributing them at the empty seats like place markers. Y went to another table, and everyone came over to our table, grabbed the cups of rice dessert, and carried them over to where Y was sitting.

Seven Star proceeded to tell me (for the second time) that time heals all wounds, and that he hoped Y and I would mend our differences. I told him I hoped we didn’t. He told me he thought it was cultural differences. I told him I didn’t have these problems with anyone else Korean. He told me she said I misunderstood her. I told him she was domineering, controlling, that she liked me TOO MUCH, and that I was enjoying my freedom. He told me again that he hoped time would mend our differences. He told me he doesn’t like westerners, and that I am the only westerner he has liked and that it is a problem because Y is his favorite teacher. I asked him if he’d ever had anyone like him too much. I told him she treated me like a pet. I told him I didn’t need that in my life.

In this group society, the clique around Y enjoys her politics and her aggression. She is a legend because she is so libertine and open-minded. They sometimes suffer her insensitivities because she is a unique force. But they would never, ever cross her or do anything to jeopardize being part of her clique.

So my rejection of Y causes this huge conflict to all. As a group society, they believe the most pitiful thing in the world is to eat alone or do anything in isolation. To see me do so is seen as suffering to them, when I am actually reveling in the lack of social pressure. As caring people, they want to sit with me, but as part of a clique of rebels and intellectuals, they can’t afford and don’t want to break rank. They also see my rejection of her as cold and yet another example of western barbarism. I wonder what they would think if I told them the truth about her sexual advances…it’s so very tempting…I wish I could explain the nuances of individual rights and the violation of people’s self determination by having ones wishes disrespected and being pressured into something you don’t want to do.

Is the desire for my own vindication worth it? Maybe. But I just want the next five months to fly by.

Did I luck out in Korea, or what?

ha ha ha!!!!

Today I nearly went ballistic on a girl at an espresso shop. I asked for an Americano with cream and receive the crossed forearm “annio.” I asked for milk. and she got confused. She tried to get me to buy a latte and I tried to explain how lattes are all milk and I just want a little milk. She tried to sell me a short latte instead of a tall latte. I explained how I wanted an Americano with chokum milk. After many charades I finally made her figure out what I meant.

I sat outside fuming, wanting to down my drink and smoke a cigarette, but of course it was an Americano and too hot to do that with, so I texted my new neighbor instead. She said to buy a coffee maker. I know. I have one. Sometimes, a girl just wants to sit at a cafe with a good cup of coffee, have a smoke and watch the world walk by…

This is about the fourth time I have tried to just get some freaking coffee with cream in Korea, and each time usually ends up with me hearing, “not possible.” It is “not possible” to get milk in your coffee at a place that sells LATTES in most places in Korea…

How many times have I heard “not possible?” Is it the irritation of the irrational that gets to me most? Or is it the habit of negating everything by preceding it with “not?” Or is it the defeatist attitude Koreans have – the total lack of creativity on their part with anything departing from the norm?

Today I realized it is not possible to have a poet for a Korean boyfriend. Even though it is possible to have meaningful conversations, but because they are not perfect-in-his-mind there is a communication problem. Because he has to stretch himself a little, then there is a communication problem. Never mind that EVERYTHING else works great. Never mind that there’s little else even remotely nurturing in both our lives. Never mind that magic can happen in this harsh place.

Not being able to ask for a freaking cup at the GS25. Even though I ask for it almost daily – now THAT’s a communication problem. Cup cheom jusayo.
Cup? Yea. Cup. Cupp? Yes. cup. Cupi? Yes. CUP. (charades again) cup. drink. (charades) cup. cup! cup!

OH! CUP!

yes.

(sigh)

cup.

Last week in class I told the students I had no idea WHY they had to learn Korean. But the cold reality is that they do. Once I leave, and YES I AM LEAVING because nobody has to take your disrespect as there are other better jobs. Once I’m gone I’ll be replaced by another teacher and yet another. And you’ll still be tested on English, and your college entrance will still depend on it and the pay at your job will still depend on it, so if you don’t really care about your future please be disrespectful and don’t listen in my class.

I then write immersion on the board and tell them that’s the best way to learn. I tell them that’s the way they learned Korean. I tell them it doesn’t matter that they don’t understand most of it: it’s still the best way to know how a language is used. I yell at them that they are only forced to go through this hell one hour every week, but that I am forced to go through it every single hour of every single day, that I am surrounded by a language I don’t understand and am unable to communicate with it at all. I tell them how lucky they are that the government provides this immersion for them. I tell them that at least they’ve had many years of vocabulary and grammar behind them. I tell them to imagine what it’s like to go live in total immersion with NO vocabulary or grammar. I tell them I live in the hell they only visit. 24/7. Have some sympathy, shut up, and let me do my job.

I tell them how the principal asked me to help make the children leaders and global thinkers and how seriously I took that task. I tell them I put a lot of heart into the videos and messages I choose to present to them, because without the western thought behind the English, the words are nothing more than groups of letters. I tell them the rules of my classroom are just words on the board, but they are based upon being considerate to each other and what we have to do, what respect really means. Sung sang nim might be respect language, but the way you treat your teachers is far from respectful. Words without action are meaningless. I require more than words. Words have only as much meaning as we give them. Words are not the only way we communicate.

Mr. S uses his own personal dissatisfaction with his own expectation of himself as an excuse not to try. Because he is stuck in this Korean mind set of “not possible.” For Koreans, everything is difficult. Everything is pain. At least he can ask for a cup when he goes to drown his sorrows.

No matter. This adoptee is finished with Koreans. They swim in the belly of han, but I will not let it swallow me. They wallow in their own self pity. I will not let them bring me down. I also am not their savior. Screw that. I will not let being surrounded by defeatists bring me down. I am the change I want to see. I am the light at the end of my own tunnel.

Everything is possible you lame asses.

EVERYTHING is possible.

this Onomonopia came up several times tonight, and it took quite a while for me to figure out it was a helicopter sound and that it meant, “spin.” and it was being referenced to describe how you feel when you’ve had too much to drink…

The crazy cicadas have stopped their mating sounds. I had thought I had heard cicadas in movies and that they sound different, but I guess I was mistaken. The Korean name for these is, mami because their onomonopia for the sound they make is, mam, mam, mam, mam…

Not onomonopia, but Koreans don’t get goose bumps: they get chicken skin.

I had a lot more of these, but after a week of classes by day and makkoli by night, my mind is mush and I just need to sleep, so more later…

An article recently appeared in the Boston Globe written about adoptive parents who over-do the cultural heritage thing. I instantly recognized the father in the family photo of the article as Mr. Hopgood, my ceramics teacher in (I can’t remember if it was late Jr. High or early High School) school.

OK. So one girl from Taylor lived her life in abuse and obscurity and four decades later, woke up (or nervous breakdown – whatever you want to call it) writes this blog. And another girl from Taylor becomes cheerleader and reporter and author on adoption, her book titled, Lucky Girl. Two sides of the adoption coin. Same town.

I remember her. She was probably about four or five when I met her. Her dad made me feel like I had some extra talent in the art, and then he would tell me – in total non sequitur – that he had an adopted daughter from China. That’s just great. I didn’t understand how that had any relevance to anything and chose to ignore it.

He kept telling me how he’d have to have me come over to his house some time. I thought this was a special honor, because he was a very popular teacher, and I imagined maybe we would work on some project together or maybe he would teach me some special techniques.

But the day finally came and I went to his cool house and met his beautiful wife and was deposited in his living room alone with Mei Ling. And then he and his beautiful wife disappeared and I was stuck there with a preschooler, a teenager who hated kids. Expected to lessen the actual minority of her existence. Expected to be some role model. Expected to help this child who had everything I didn’t have. Expected to give her something I would never have.

About an endless hour later he returned. I think he realized we hadn’t bonded, and his little social experiment was a failure. He drove me home and that was pretty much the end of my relationship with the coolest teacher in school.

**************

My talks with Chinese adoptees and their parents are both irritating and interesting. They think their case is so different. But really, the model for international adoption is the same. Mei Ling is the beginning of the Chinese adoptees having to reconcile their birth culture with their skin in a new culture and make a different path on their own, and it is all the same as the Korean adoptee experience that preceded them.

Even the one child law has parallels here. There has always been female infanticide. There has always been throwing away children. There has been primogeniture for centuries. In China, the government’s limited resources dictates this. In Korea, personal economic pressures cause the majority to also have only one child. But here, nobody wants to adopt a boy whose blood is not theirs. Boys of other blood, second children, and children born out of wedlock get thrown away. It’s STILL all about blood lines here, and even domestic adoption is often “faked” as a pregnancy in pretense of the child being of the father’s blood. And then there is the horror of the “full” adoption – where the adopted child’s real mother and father are never recorded and the adopting parents names are entered instead. It is 100% erasure of the child’s real identity. Inside sources say something like 90% of Korean domestic adoptees have zero idea they were adopted…

Another thing the same is that international adoption has allowed the Chinese government to turn its back on its own citizens, shirk their duties on social services, and make a buck at the same time.

And adoption agencies have been there from the beginning, offering this relief, becoming the catalyst, making it more possible and more attractive as a “solution” to this problem of women being born in equal numbers in a patriarchal society.

Adoptive parents I talk to ask, well, then, what are we supposed to do? Give up on China?

Yes. Don’t let the patriarchy win. Don’t support their efforts to cleanse their world of females. “Saving” a few lucky girls means telling the patriarchy it’s okay to hate women. And nothing changes the view of women more than economic power. So if you really want to save China’s girls, give the women a dollar and help them turn it into two dollars. Just like Korea’s women are working and becoming more powerful and asserting their rights, Korean parents are learning that empowered women take good care of them when they are old. Just as good, if not better, than their spoiled sons.

The officetel smells like smoke, but this time I don’t mind.

The lingering smell reminds me of how the view from my window looks at dusk, how on the tenth floor in any city in the world, the city lights shine brighter, as blue deepens to black, when you’re with someone you like. how comfortable silence can be when the company is good, how Piazzolla can melt the hardest knots of stress and cause two people who can’t speak to dance.

I never blessed my officetel apartment when I moved in. I never threw perfumed water towards its four corners or puffed a cigar while thanking my ancestors. But I feel like the bad spirits were purged and my home is now a place of renewal.