Month: December 2015

Last night at work there was a bit of an emotional conflaguration. It wasn't that pleasant.

When things get intense and unpleasant at work, I always retreat into a kind of "well, I can always leave if really want to." I return to the eternal, tenuous calculus of my stay in Korea, and my never-ending, simple dilemma: should I stay in Korea, or should I return to the US?

Of course, I was struggling with this problem even before I got cancer. When I got cancer, that felt like a kind of fate – it made the decision for me, at least for a substantial period. Many people here showed me great kindness and loyalty, too, and that kept my heart here, even with the many frustrations and difficulties.

Lately, I feel like my frustration with my goals and life in Korea has become intractable. I continue to fail to learn Korean. I feel great despair about the project, and shame, because I am supposed to be a linguist and a language teacher. I continue to be be a poor teacher with respect to the hagwon environment. I am dissatisfied with curriculum, but I lack the talent and capiticity to bring to reality any alternative. After all these years, I doubt I really understand the business environment of an English hagwon very well.

So I have great dissatisfaction with what I decided (during my hospital stay) were the two most important goals in my life: trying to become a better teacher, and learning the Korean language. The reason I nevertheless continue at Karma and in Korea is really because of my sense of loyalty to the people around me, and also because of a kind of laziness: no change is easier than change. Finally, there is an aspect which I tend to emphasize in conversation but which isn't actually as emotionally important as I make it out to be: I continue to stay in Korea because I feel a lot of fear about the healthcare system in my home country – American healthcare is quite chaotic and unreliable, and very expensive, compared to Korea.

So to simplify the above, I can identify five reasons to stay in Korea:

1. learning Korean and my love of Korean culture
2. becoming a better teacher
3. loyalty to my coworkers and to the Karma community, and the kindness shown to me
4. laziness about changing my life
5. fear of not finding good healthcare

Taken together, these are good enough reasons. But items 1 and 2 in the above list are not feeling particularly compelling, lately, and experiences like last night's cause me to question whether my loyalty (item 3) is perhaps misplaced or substantially irrelevant.

And so that leaves items 4 and 5. But in fact, don't you think that laziness and fear are poor reasons to do anything? Including, am I really only staying in Korea, at this point, out of laziness and fear? That seems pretty stupid.

Somewhat relatedly… 

In a moment of weakness and frustration, I forgot my facebook boycott. Perhaps I will start my blog cross-posting here, again – but I haven't decided. I don't like feeling OBLIGATED to keep track of facebook, or misleading people into thinking that I am paying attention to it – which was a major problem with the automated cross-posting from my blog: people thought I was looking at facebook because my blog posts were appearing here, and became upset when I didn't "notice" their comments.

So perhaps I will turn on the automated cross-posting to the facebook again. Let me know (not on facebook but via my preferred contact methods) if you think this is a good idea.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

I have blogged before about the social construction of popular feelings and emotions. I had fun yesterday, for Christmas, but I was acutely aware that "fun" is a social construct, and I could have been miserable, quite easily. This alternate interpretation lurked around the edges.

I was invited for a family fun day by my friend Curt and his family. We went to a sort of mall-slash-theme-park here in Ilsan, a few blocks from my home, called "One Mount." It has a a "water park" and a "snow park." The day being Christmas, it was logical to visit the snow park. Curt and I agreed that "snow park" is a pretty liberal interpretation. It is, mostly, a glorified ice-skating rink. Since the vast majority of Koreans had the day off, they did what Koreans do on holidays. They went shopping and out to a family-fun theme park. The place was so crowded, you sometimes couldn't see the ice.

I tried ice-skating. I've skated before, but I'm pretty rusty, and with grandmothers and small children on diverse sled-like-objects crashing into me constantly, I didn't feel very much like I was actually skating. 

Curt's kids tried skating. His daughter, a teenager now (suddenly), was sullen and teenagery, and quickly took off her skates went to sit somewhere and look at her phone. His son was all legs and arms flying around, but spent a good amount of time trying, gamely. I got sore feet (I think I'd put on the wrong size). We ate Christmas ramen at a food court, and went down a strange sort of waterless water slide, on the roof of the one-buildinged theme park. Overall, I saw a lot of people having fun, but I kept asking myself, why was it fun? Simply because they'd decided that it was. 

Anyway.

I took a picture looking toward my neighborhood from the roof (which is landscaped and full of rides and attractions).

I took a picture inside, looking down on the main skating area.

I took a picture of people having fun on the ice.

I finally felt tired and came back home.

[daily log: walking, for some not-well-defined distance]

With my recent discovery that a large Mormon church is being built in my neighborhood, I became curious about Mormonism in Korea. The more I learned (most of which confirmed my preconceptions), the more surprised I am that this church is even being built.
The Mormons actually are not doing well in Korea, in comparison to other non-mainstream, exogenous religious movements (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses). I found a very detailed, academic analysis of the situation at a Mormon mission-supporting website called Cumorah. As I already suspected, Mormons are not being very successful at converting Koreans, who, perhaps because of their own plethora of home-grown fringe-Christian sects (see Moonies, et al.), are inured to the promises Mormonism. Indeed, Koreans have a long history of domestic, Mormonesque cultural phenomenon (Cheondoism, Won Buddhism).
Furthermore, the previously fairly successful Korean Mormon community (which arose in the wake of proselytizing by US military personnel and by converted returnees from the US, in the 1960s and 70s, and was sufficiently large that a Temple was built in Seoul in the early 80s), is apparently emigrating en-masse to Anglophone countries, where they can find larger and more cohesive Mormon communities, less overt discrimination and social stigmatization, and better economic prospects. Thus, in fact, the Mormon church in Korea is shrinking.
So is this church being built in Ilsan as a kind of stopgap or anticipatory effort, to increase support for a moribund or imagined community? Or is Goyang bucking the regional trend? Certainly it is true that I see Mormons on mission tromping about almost every day, in Ilsan. Is it the area’s American-style suburban cultural ethos, high relative socioeconomic status, and thus somewhat un-Korean in character (what I call the “Ilsan bubble”), that draws them?
I guess I’m just curious. I am not, per se, pro-Mormon or anti-Mormon. I find their theology absurd, but I find the sociology of the group interesting. I just have a weird fascination for the group, for reasons I’ve explained before.
[daily log: walking, 6km]