Month: April 2011

My self-imposed one-year exile in Hantucky is officially ended. 

The incontrovertable sign of this:  I have internet DSL in my new apartment.  Instead of the almost 2-month waiting period I was subjected to in Hantucky, metro Seoul does these things in about 12 hours, from moment of request to installation.  Admittedly, the delays in Hantucky were due to my employer, not due to the internet provider. 

Nevertheless, these differences are meaningful and worth comparing – my employer here is on my side.  That's really the difference.

Nevertheless, I'm really missing my Hongnong kids, at the moment.  I received the following message on my cellphone, last night.  Charming.  Heh.

안녕하세요~

My friend Mr Kim picked me up at the bus terminal at around 4 pm.  His younger daughter, 7th grade, had just finished taking a major hanja examination (there are 1800 characters that Korean middle-schoolers are required to learn), and was sitting looking miserable in the back seat of his car – this was the first time I would meet his family.
We had to pick up his older daughter (12th grade) but we had some time to kill, so we went to the Gwangju wholesale agricultural market (화물 시장 [hwa-mul si-jang] which I thought meant “wholesale market” but really means something like “freight market”) which is in the northeast corner of the city.  We walked around and he sampled various fruit, and we bought some 낑깡 (gging-ggang = grape-sized mandarin oranges).  These are eaten whole, with peels on, at least by Mr Kim, and then spitting out the seeds.  I actually like them a lot, but this was the first time I internalized the name of them.
We picked up his older daughter, who was more sociable.  When I asked her the standard English-in-Korea question “what is your dream?” (which means, roughly, “what do you want to do with your life?”) she said she didn’t know, but then her father said, “She wants to be a lawyer.”  I said, with good timing, “No, that’s your dream,” pointing at him.  This gave me an instant rapport and respect from both girls, who thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in a long time.  Later, I learned she was thinking of writing novels or being a translator – which seemed more in line with how a teenager might think about the future.
We went to dinner for galbi at a place near their apartment in northwest Gwangju, and then later, we left them at their home and I also met his son (1st year college), who seemed stressed out by studying (which is natural I guess, in such an academically-driven family – dad is a pretty successful nuclear operations engineer, after all).  I was somewhat dismayed by the kind of uncomfortable, formal relation that existed between Mr Kim and his wife – but it certainly wasn’t a surprise, based on how I already knew him.  I just don’t understand marriages like that, but I know they’re very common in Korea.  In Korea, rather than get divorced, unhappy marriages just “stick together” as a sort of loveless business partnership, with clearly delineated roles and formalized nagging from both sides.
Then Mr Kim insisted we go out to a bar.  I wasn’t really into this… I rarely am.  But I went along with it, because I tend to let my Korean friends “lead” when I hang out with them.  The bar was one of the so-called “hostess bars,” which have a bad name as prostitution fronts, but played straight they’re just about bars with a high staff-to-customer ratio, where the staff are women who “chat up” the customers as they’re serving them.  This is all Mr Kim seemed interested in, although I was a little bit uncomfortable as he told ribald jokes to the woman serving beer.  But this is an inevitable part of Korean culture, and I was interested to visit this place roughly in “native mode,” to see how the average Korean businessman navigates these kinds of social spaces.
Actually, the highlight of the evening, for me, was when we were finding a place to park.  Mr Kim was driving around, finding a place to park, and couldn’t find one.  He saw a car with some people sitting in it, that was in front of a garage door.  He rolled down his window and asked if they leaving.  They said no, and then he said he needed to get into the garage.  This was a lie.  As soon as they pulled away, he took their illegal spot in front of the garage door.   Mr Kim has shown evidence, before, of this creative parking style, but this is the archetype, now, as far as I’m concerned.
He popped another gging-ggang into his mouth, and smiled slyly.  At the bar, we talked a lot about why I wasn’t renewing at Hongnong, and about his work at the nuclear power plant, which has been a never-ending sequence of training and drills, since the Fukushima events began unfolding (and as is only appropriate, I can imagine).  I think his English has been improving – he’s definitely been studying English more than I have been studying Korean, which left me feeling a little bit discouraged and depressed.
[This is a back-post, written 2011-04-11]

I don’t believe that Koreans are less kind, less rational, or less capable of empathetic thinking than other people, on average.  Nevertheless, I do think that as a foreigner in Korea, it’s very easy to come away with the impression that these things are true.
There are two things that conspire to cause this:  1) the deeply communitarian nature of Korean culture means that everyone, including Koreans, suffer from the consequences of finding unkind, irrational or unempathetic people in their social in-group; 2) the fact that foreigners embedded in this culture have the inability to communicate their own feelings and needs clearly (due to linguistic and cultural barriers), and likewise also lack the ability to clearly understand the feelings and needs of others, means that they bear the brunt of the worst behavior of the always present minority of unkind, irrational and unempathetic people.
I suppose all of that is just a very philosophical way to say that I had a depressing day.  As many of the “volleyball Wednesdays” tend to be, although there were other events earlier in the day that left me depressed, too.
Actually, if I’m objective, I’d say that my volleyball skills, in and of themselves, have improved, at least slightly.  The majority of my serves seem to make it over the net, and once or twice each game I hit the ball in a way that is advantageous to our team.
I hate how competitive they are about it.  I hate how unkind they are to people who mess up or do badly.  There’s a lot of the sort of ribbing, joking, and teasing that I associate with my darkest days of high school PE class.  It’s a culture of competitive, jock-driven unkindness that permeates the feel of the event.
The phrase “우리 편 파이팅!” [u-ri pyeon pa-i-ting = our team, let’s go! (idiomatically)] is heard repeatedly.  At one point, early on, the principal and vice principal were forcing all the most reluctant, bad players to play a match before the hard-core competitors got started.  Naturally, I fall into the category of “bad player,” so I was participating.  They had changed the rules – most of these reluctant, bad players are women, so they’d made a rule that men couldn’t be the ones to send the ball over the net.   But I didn’t know that – I hadn’t caught the explanation in Korean – my Korean is really bad, you know?  Well, once… twice… three times, I hit the ball over the net.  I thought I was doing really good.  And then, each time, our team was losing a point.  Finally, the new art teacher – a hard-core jock if ever there was one, but not as mean spirited as some of the others – took the time to explain to me what was going on (his English isn’t bad).
I said, “I didn’t know.”  He explained my confusion to the everyone else.  And their response, to a person (even the other bad players, even the ones so much worse than me):  this was hilarious.  The poor confused foreigner.  Very funny.  Only the art teacher bothered to apologize.
I shouldn’t let it affect me so much.  But it does.  I keep trying.  I don’t really express my discomfort, much, on the outside.  I carry it around inside.
I think about the fact that this country has a high suicide rate.  I think that maybe it’s not so different for inept Koreans, navigating their own competitive, asshole-driven culture.  I can see why they just feel so ashamed that they decide to say “fuck it,” and check out.
And yet I’m still here.  I’m hoping things will get better when I return to Ilsan.
You know… I’ve stopped studying Korean completely.  I thought that’s why I was staying here.  When will I start again?  I’m like the student at the end of class, watching the clock.  I’m ready to check out.  I have 3 weeks left at Hongnong.  Will teaching at Karma be better?  Will I be able to resume my “projects”?  My art, my writing, my language study…  not feeling very good about any of it.
우리 편 파이팅!