Category: Banalities & Journaling

Caveat: 1) 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”

I’m definitely sick. I thought I was feeling better, yesterday morning, but I felt like I had a fever all day.  Often, when I know I have a fever, I deliberately don’t take medicine, because my understanding is that a low-grade fever can help the body fight whatever infection it’s fighting – the fever has the function of making the environment hostile to the infection.  I have no idea if this really good practice, but it’s always been my way of coping, though it’s uncomfortable. Partly it’s because I just don’t like taking medicine.  It always feels like an assault on my existential autonomy, although that’s philosophically inconsistent if not downright ridiculous.

Last night, when I got home, I felt really rotten. I began watching some shoot-em-up action flick on the TV, but it was really annoying. I have limited patience for Bruce Willis. I changed to the Buddhist channel. I sometimes will watch this as sort of background noise, because there’s lots of complex Korean to listen to, it’s culturally interesting, and the wacky-yet-banal informercials can be an entertaining contrast.

I’ve come to realize that every evening around 6 PM, the Buddhist channel runs a sort of day-end prayer, which are in the form of 108 affirmations. Lots of Buddhist ritual comes in sets of 108, which is an important number for Buddhists.

Anyway, the title to this blog entry is affirmation number one:

1. 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다.

Google translate, with typical guileless aplomb, asserts that this means “Buddha mind is extreme ear.”  Which might make a good title for a comedy involving a philosophical meditation on the daredevil the body parts of great thinkers.  But I think a good translation might be:  “I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”  The first word, “지극한” is an adjectivalized form of the descriptive verb “지극하다,” which literally means “extreme” but in this context, I think it can mean “the depths of,” i.e. “all,” modifying “마음” “heart.”

I am not becoming a Buddhist. Not in terms of commitment. I can’t – I’m a dialectical materialist, and deeply committed to an anti-spiritual, anti-transcendent worldview. But I have strong sympathies for Buddhist practices, and I have found a lot of pragmatic “peace of mind” in Buddhist-style meditative practice, specifically (such as Zen and Vipassana). And I have been encouraged by the fact that when I say things like “I’m an atheist” to Buddhists, I don’t get the shocked and alarmed reaction of Christians, who immediately begin to worry over the fate of my soul. Buddhists, on the other hand, generally say things like, “that’s OK,” or “It doesn’t really matter.” Because they express no hostility toward my worldview, I feel no hostility toward theirs. Peace begets peace.

The morning is foggy. One thing I like about the weather in Glory County, Korea, is the prevalence of fog. It takes me back to my childhood, and the Pacific fogs of the Northern California coast.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: a-dreamin’ intertextualities

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

Sometimes I have such strange dreams.  I awoke from one, just now.

In the dream, I was reading a children's story.  I suppose, given what I've been doing for a living, that that's not so unexpected.  But in the dream, the children's story was in a weird mixture of Korean and English (real children's stories tend not to look like that), and had been written by my former LBridge colleague, Jinhee.   And it turned out that she'd incorporated me as a character into her story.  The story was about a group of Korean kids who go around solving little mysteries and problems in their community, which was a vast, densely populated suburb much like Ilsan.  It basically was Ilsan, but was never named as such.

One such mystery they solve is the "mystery of the missing soju" – yes, that's funny.  And not that unrealistic, maybe?  Hah.  They find out that at their school's hoesik (staff get-together dinner) the night before, a bunch of soju had disappeared, and they go about solving where it went.  It turned out the vice principal drank it.  All with very cute illustrations, and a nice moral at the ending, about maybe one shouldn't drink so much soju at hoesik events.

So strange, to be reading such a vivid and peculiar yet utterly apropos story, in a dream.  I've often had "textual" dreams of this sort, but few quite like this.

And the next part of the story has the kids running into their "crazy English teacher Jared" while riding a bus to the mall.  In the dream, I feel this mixed feeling of humility and pride at being included in the story by my friend Jinhee.  The kids convince the story character, Jared, that he needs to help them solve a mystery involving a missing puppy.   For some strange reason, to solve this mystery, the kids have to put together and then perform a drama production for a group of high-powered American business executives – hence the need for their crazy English teacher's help. 

So I help them write and perform the drama.  We put together a plot that involves a group of inept superheroes (a little bit a la The Incredibles?) who are being asked to work as office temps in a big company, and the superheroes end up saving the day by finding a missing puppy.

Seriously.  My dream was becoming an intertextual labyrinth of Cervantine proportions.   I'm having a dream in which I'm a character in a story in which that character (who is me) is writing a drama and helping some kids find a missing puppy, and in the drama-in-the-story-in-the-dream, there are some superheroes that are helping to find a missing puppy.  Got it?

The drama goes as planned, and induces the American business executive who apparently stole the puppy to come clean and return it to the crying little girl.  It's a scooby doo ending.  Added twist of irony:  the nefarious business executive in the story is a splitting image of my erstwhile nemesis from Aramark Corporation, CIO Bob McCormick.  I find myself wondering, in the dream:  "How did my friend Jinhee know that that's what evil American business executives looked like?"

But then I notice there's a typo in the story I'm reading:  the word "clearly" is written as "claxli" – this is an "impossible" typo… at the least, it's a highly improbable one.  What I mean by this, is that in the dream, I'm suddenly struck by the fact that "claxli" is not the sort of typo that happens in the "real world."  And somehow this jarring fact causes me to become aware that I'm dreaming.   And in the dream, now aware that I'm dreaming, I look up to see my friend Jinhee trying to present me with a copy of the story book she'd written, and I think to myself, I should tell her about the typo, but then I think, "oh, it's just a dream, so it doesn't really matter that much." 

So I just thank her for the story, and for including me in it, and then we walk into a hoesik where some kids are doing a performance of the drama from the story for their school administration and staff (including the vice principal of the missing soju).  And I think to myself, in the dream, "pues, de veras, la vida es sueño" (a reference to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous Spanish Golden Age drama, "Life Is a Dream"), and then I wake up.

It's six AM on the dot, although I'd turned off my alarm, and it hadn't gone off.  The window is open, the rain has stopped, and there's an almost-coolness in the air, that seems alien and unnatural after so many months of humid, sweltering heat.  It makes me think of Minnesota.

My stomach was feeling very upset yesterday (possibly, in part, stress-induced, from the difficult emotional week I'd endured last week), and it is still feeling unsettled.  I'm feeling a bit under the weather, definitely.  But what interesting dreams I sometimes have, when sick.

Caveat: Thunderstorms at Dawn

Banalities & Journaling

As was probably pretty obvious, I was feeling discouraged, last night.  I still am.  But I'll get over it.

This morning, it was thundering and pouring, rain, which de-motivated me in my plan to go into Gwangju this morning – I have some shopping I want to do, and I wanted to try to meet my friend Seungbae.  But anyway…

There is an immediacy to writing in a blog – you get my feelings of each particular moment.  I don't always try to tone down those feelings, or edit out the bad parts.  So it will swing back and forth, positive to negative to positive again.  Such is life.

I was watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert episodes this morning.  I particularly enjoyed Stewart's segment on the show dated Sept 9, by Wyatt Cenac, in which a Staten Island version of the SCOTUS struck down California's prop 8.  This gives hope for American values of tolerance, despite everything.

And this:  "…the greatest honor this nation can bestow:  free tee-shirts." – Stephen Colbert, in a show saluting war veterans.

Caveat: Zero of the most important things

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Hard, hard week.  I'm pretty frustrated.

The two most important things in my life right now are:  1) improve my teaching;  2) improve my Korean language ability.

I made progress in exactly zero of these two important things, this past week.

With respect to teaching:  it was a challenging week, with chaotic, misbehaving children, messed-up lesson plans, a feeling of dullness and lack of dynamism in my interactions with kids.

With respect to trying to improve my Korean:  it seemed like every time I tried to say anything in Korean, I was hyper-corrected, laughed at, mocked, or ignored.  And the Koreans wonder why we Westerners so often give up on trying to learn the language.  When you're told "you're saying that wrong" ten times in one day, when you're laughed at for trying ,when you're stared at incomprehendingly after having spent over five minutes carefully trying to craft a meaningful sentence in your head before giving it utterance, you begin to lose hope.

Caveat: Growing Up as an Anchor Baby in Hibbing

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology

I found an interesting editorial in the LA Times about the concept of "anchor babies," with a Korean angle. I think it's worth reading. 

Starting last week, my new schedule included the sixth grade (in place of the fourth graders who I was with in the spring), for the "main curriculum" English classes. And then this week, all sixth grade English classes were cancelled, because the sixth graders got to take a class trip to Jeju.

So I'm finding myself with some time to kill, at work. This, combined with the fact that we have finally begun to settle into our newly remodeled English classroom (pictures coming soon, maybe), meaning that there's an actual computer with actual internet access that doesn't have a line of teachers waiting to use it like the ones in the staff room. Hence my websurfing activities.

Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: Somewhere Else, It’s Fall

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Not here.  Hot and muggy, per usual, when it's not actually raining.  But on Minnesota Public Radio, I hear that it's 57 degrees F on the State Fairgrounds in Saint Paul, at 4 in the afternoon.   I love how fall comes so early in Minnesota.  It's possibly the single thing I miss most about "home."

Here in Korea… summer-like weather will persist well into October, although Koreans will obstinately call it fall.  Seasons are defined solely by the calendar, here, and not by actual experiential conditions.  And, in general, I would say weather in Korea is more predictable on a calendar basis than in the midwest of US.

Caveat: It’s really cute

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

What do you suppose that above quote is referring to?  A coworker said "it's really cute."  What was she talking about?  Lo and behold:  she was referring to the way that  I sound when I try to speak Korean.  This is so much more positive and pleasant than the occasional mockings and put-downs that I have to tolerate in my efforts to learn the language.

I won't go so far as to read anything into it except just that it probably does sound quite novel and entertaining to hear a foreigner trying to speak the language – it's something even more rare, in most Koreans' day-to-day experiences, than hearing English or seeing foreigners at all.   In any event, the semantic range of "cute" (귀엽다) is much wider in Korean, and generally speaking less ironic and/or flirtatious in the way it's deployed by adults.

Anyway, a little bit of positive (or at least non-negative) feedback can go a long way, in my soul (or whatever it is that I have that passes for a soul).  I'm feeling pretty happy about my language-learning efforts, for once.

We'll see how things go, over the weekend – I'm committed to spending the whole weekend with Mr Kim, in a little odyssey to Ulsan.  I may not be updating my blog until Monday morning.

Caveat: Phone Phun

Banalities & Journaling
OK, I got a new phone.  My colleague Haewon helped me with translating what the guy in the phone store needed to say to me.  I'm still trying to figure out how to use it.  If you have interacted with me on the phone in the past, please, please call or text me, because I've lost all my numbers from my old phone – it died a terrible and tragic death.  And next week was its 3rd birthday!  Happy birthday, old phone!  Sorry you've left us.

Caveat: Typhoon Kompasu

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

I get a lot of little notes and messages about the typhoon.  "Are you OK?"  I'm fine.  

Typhoon.  Sounds exotic and dangerous.  Really, just a hurricane, but rebranded for Asian audiences.  Both are names for a big, windy rain storms, which are primarily dangerous if you like hanging out or living near large bodies of water. 

Last night, I didn't sleep well, though.  The wind was causing the doors in my building to go "clank clank" as they fought against their latches in the rapidly shifting air pressure.  The building isn't tightly sealed enough to prevent this. 

Lots of wind and heavy rain.  It's annoying, if it happens to be when I need to walk between my apartment and the bus terminal – that's a 20 minute walk, and there really is no alternative – I suppose I could get a taxi, but getting a taxi when it's raining hard is not an effective use of time, since that's the idea many, many other people have too.

So, I get wet.  An umbrella is useless, when it's raining sideways and the water on the sidewalk is ankle-deep.  This happened yesterday, walking home from work.  During the rainy season, I carry plastic bags in my backpack, and use them to seal all the things I'm carrying inside the bag in rainproof containers.

But is the storm dangerous?  Do I feel at risk.  Not really.  It's got the same feel as an intense California winter storm.  Wind.  Rain.  But risk of life and limb?  No.  There may be flooding.  Korea has had bad floods, sometimes – the hazards of being a country made up entirely of mountains and river valleys between them.  But my apartment, and my place of work, are on high ground.

Caveat: The English Teacher K

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Less Banal Than Usual / Life in Korea / Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Yes, another Kafka reference.

I go to work yesterday, only to find out I don’t need to be there. The groundskeeper asks me “오늘 수업 있어요?” (“have class today?”) and I say I don’t – I knew that. But I thought I still had to be there. I’m not quite sure how to phrase that, in Korean. Then he asks me why I’m there. No one else is around. I go to the classroom I’d been using for my summer classes, just as a place to hang out and a computer to sit down at. I text some coworkers, and await their response.

Finally, they text back that, indeed, I didn’t need to be there. I contemplate feeling angry, but decide that “showing up for work when you don’t need to be there is better than NOT showing up for work when you DO need to be there.” Hmm, what to do?

I walk back down through the courtyard. There are some children, hanging out. “Hi kids,” I say. “Why are you here?”

Big googly eyes, showing utter non-English. Yeah… how would you feel, if some guy spoke English to you, after a wonderful, month-long summer vacation? I recognize the little girl from a fourth grade class, from the end of July. So I ask, “학교에 왜 왔어요?” (“to school why came?”)

“그냥,” (“just whatever”) she answers. Big, pleased-looking smile. Kids do this, in Korea. They come to school when it’s not in session, just to hang out. That’s especially interesting, when the school’s been transformed into a giant construction zone – two workmen carrying bags of cement trundle past us.

I poke my head in the teacher’s workroom, one last time. My colleague Mr Lee is there.  Look of utter surprise. In Korean, he begins something to the effect of “why are you here?”

“오늘 일하야 하지 않아요… 잘 몰랐어요.” I know this is bad, awkward Korean, but he tilts his head and grins in understanding – its message makes it across the barrier. (“today work not have to… didn’t know”)

I leave the school. I have a free day. Completely unexpected. Well, not completely. I remember thinking on Friday… I’d thought, what are the chances I show up on Monday, and it turns out I don’t have to be there? But when I’d asked a coworker on Friday, they’d said, “no kids Monday, but yes we have to work.”

I decide to take the bus to Gwangju. Maybe hang out in a Starbucks or something. I do that sometimes. Got to support that Starbucks stock in my 401K, right?

I study Korean for a few hours – mostly vocabulary – something I haven’t done in such a focused manner in quite a while. Then I think, really, I should go find the immigration office. I have this pending bit of bureaucracy that needs finishing: I need to get a “multiple re-entry” stamp to go with my visa, for the event that I decide to travel outside of Korea – so far, I haven’t felt like traveling outside of Korea, and the soonest plan to do so would be next February, but having a free day during the work-week, in Gwangju, is pretty rare, so I might as well try to take care of it, right?

I log onto the internet using free wi-fi, and go to maps on naver.com, to find the immigration office. It’s not where I thought it was – good thing I looked. I walk around downtown Gwangju, then take the single-line subway out to Hwajeong station, and walk through this very much under construction neighborhood to the immigration office. As I arrive, it begins to rain. Why is it that every time I arrive at an immigration office in Korea, it begins to rain? I’m serious, I’ve been here 3 years, and this always seems to happen.

When I get into the immigration office, the place is more internationally chaotic than a Los Angeles branch of the California DMV. There are at least 50 dispirited-looking people in queue (taking little numbers) ahead of me, playing with ballpoint pens and forms. Sitting in chairs and standing around, enjoying the airconditioned office, away from the stunning humidity outside.

I hear vietnamese, tagolog, russian, english, chinese, some-other-language. Ah… nevermind. Maybe I’ll try to figure out how to do this online? Or come back some other day, when half the foreign population of Jeollanamdo hasn’t got business at the immigration office.

I go to E-mart (Wal-mart, since Wal-mart abandoned the Korean market some years back, the local partners re-branded as E-mart, but it’s still basically Korean Wal-mart). The sky is beautiful, as I walk. Clouds scudding.

I find some good Australian cheddar cheese for sale, there, unexpectedly. I buy a new shirt. I go to the bus terminal, nearby, and have a “toseuteu” (“toast,” which really means a grilled egg sandwich). I go back home.

Strange, directionless day, yesterday.

Oh… I just had a strange, strange thought. What if you sat down to read Kafka’s The Castle, but you were given one bit of information before you started: “The Land Surveyor K is a bodhisattva.” Wouldn’t that utterly change the meaning of the book?

Caveat: Arcoiris en Bulgapsan

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Life in Korea

Mi amigo Seungbae recien ha conseguido nuevo empleo en Gwangju.  En consecuencia, voy a poder verle más frecuentemente que cuando estaba en Suwon.  Ayer me llamó, y vino a visitarme en Yeonggwang por unas horas.  Como tiene vehículo, fácilmente fuimos a Bulgapsan, la montaña al sur del pueblo donde se ubica un templo algo famoso, y que no he podido visitar hasta el momento:  hay autobuses locales que corren regularmente, solo he faltado de motivación para poder hacerlo.

Llovía bastante fuerte a ratos, en el parque alrededor del templo, pero fuimos caminando y hablando.  Debía haber traído mi cámera, porque el templo fue muy bello e interesante, incluso un puerto en forma circular, construcción tradicional, muchas figuras  pintadas con los colores tradicionales de Corea.  Debo regresar con mi cámera.

Caminando de regreso al estacionamiento, vimos un gran arcoiris sobre el valle. 

Caveat: The View From Your Window

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / My Photos

Andrew Sullivan has a feature on his blog (at The Atlantic magazine’s website) called “The View From Your Window,” where he invites people to send unstaged photos of views from their windows, and he publishes them in his blog. He’s even compiled these photos and put them into a book.

A few months back, I emailed a photo I had taken from the window in my classroom at Hongnong. I had posted the photo on my blog, on June 17. I didn’t really expect the photo to be published in Sullivan’s blog. But he did. Now I can say that my photography has been published on The Atlantic‘s website.

[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Of course, in the fullness of time, The Atlantic’s link rotted. Mine did too, actually, but I was able to fix mine. Anyway, you can’t see that view from my window on Sullyblog, anymore. Sully long moved on and became right-wingier and irrelevant.]

Caveat: Goodbye, Town

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Teaching & Methodology

Today was the last day of my “summer camp” classes.  I was so pleased with how much my sixth-grade class (which actually included not just sixth graders but at least one fifth grader, one fourth grader, and a third grader, too) seemed to like the project.  We made a town, on the bulletin board, using construction paper, with scissors and crayons and pens.  And using dice, we played a game, running businesses, having disasters, earning money, buying and selling land.  We even had a stock market.
It was a small class.  All the regulars showed up for the last day.  We liquified assets, and I sold them “real world” stickers and candy.  $200 bought a miniature chocolate bar, and $300 got a small sheet of smileyface stickers.  We disassembled the town.
Here is a video I made, this morning, before that end.  The girls’ ability-levels are highly varied, but they all understood the main ideas, and got into the project.

picture

Caveat: Not A Single Charming Feature

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / Teaching & Methodology

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I realized that since the whole apartment fiasco that my school put me through during my first two months, I never took the time to post any pictures of my new apartment. On the inside, it’s quite similar to my apartment in Ilsan, although it’s a bit smaller. At least it’s fairly new and in good condition, and the existence of a working airconditioner is definitely a redeeming feature. But it’s not charming, per se.

On the outside, it looks like a low-end Korean love motel, with the added bonus of being situated in the back parking lot of a gas station, and a 20 minute walk down a vaguely rural highway from the bus station. Here’s an outside view. My apartment is on the sixth floor (actually fifth, since “fourth” is skipped due to bad luck – much the way 13th floors are skipped in American buildings, sometimes), behind the false gable, second window from the left end.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Becoming the Ghosts of Our Ancestors

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / Science & SciFi

I was really sore yesterday, from the hike on Saturday.   So I didn't do much.  I watched some television; I started to try to write a story that was so terrible I immediately wanted to delete it. 

Then last night I had some very strange dreams.  The dream I was having when I woke up this morning was like some strange science-fiction movie, with many details and complex plot-twists.  It was one of those "remote colony on another planet gradually goes insane" plots, but there were features to the plot that made it uniquely mine.

The colony was a Korean colony:  yes, there were Koreans making space colonies.  And I was there, as some kind of token non-Korean.  I often didn't know what was going on.   So far, so much exactly like real life.

But… there were invisible monsters stalking the colony – a la "Forbidden Planet."  Members of the colony kept disappearing.   Soon many of the buildings and areas were dilapidated and vacant.

Then there was some weird time-travel experience.  The few remaining survivors of the invisible monsters, including myself, locked ourselves into an underground room and decided to go into some kind of cold-sleep for 100 years, to await a rescue team.

After 100 years, when we came back out, much to our surprise, there were people living in the colony, including families with children.   The people were living the lives of traditional, pre-modern Koreans, although they still had some technology.  They thought we were the ghosts of ancestors.  They had set up Jang-seung (traditional Korean wooden totem poles, carved with the faces of spirits) around the encampment.

And then the awaited rescue team arrived, finally.  The rescue team included my sister.  She was very unimpressed by the state of things.   "Why have you been wasting time building farms and having children?" she demanded, pointing at all the mysterious people who had taken over the colony.  I didn't know.  I was as puzzled as she was.  I was worried about the invisible monsters, still.

There was one strange building, that had been built, while we were in cold-sleep:  it looked a little bit like a church, but was full of machinery.  I went to look at it, on a hill, with my sister and some Korean soldiers from the rescue team, who were chain-smoking cigarettes.   The building was surrounded by carefully planted redwood trees.  When we got to the building at the top of the hill and looked back down at the colony, all of the people had disappeared.  The colony was deserted.  I wondered if we ALL were ghosts.

That's about when I woke up.  Pretty complicated dream.  A little bit like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Paramo," in space.

Caveat: 음주산행 절대금지

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I hiked up to the top of 월출산 (wol-chul-san = Moon Rise Mountain) with my friend Mr Kim. It took 7 hours – about 3 hours longer than we had anticipated – we went very slowly, like ants (우리는 개미처럼 천천히 가고 있었습니다) . We spent a lot of time pausing and trying to communicate with one another, me teaching English, him teaching Korean.

I became frustrated with “faucalized consonants” (or sometimes called “tense” consonants, and mistakenly understood by many as geminates because they are written as “doubles” of the regular series:  ㅅ[s] / ㅆ [s͈]… ㄱ[k] / ㄲ[k͈] … ㅂ[p] / ㅃ[p͈] … ㅈ[t͡ɕ] /ㅉ[t͡ɕ͈] … ㄷ[t] /ㄸ[t͈]). Not even the linguists seem really to understand these sounds. To my English-trained ear, I am simply incapable of hearing how they’re different, but there are many minimal pairs where understanding the distinction is important. I can’t produce the sound consistently either, although I can sometimes make myself understood by pronouncing a geminate or by using the “ejective” series that I worked so hard to master during my phonology classes as a linguistics major: p’, t’, k’, q’, s’ (these ejectives are common in many African Bantu-family languages, like Xhosa, I think).

Memorably, I was trying to say the word “dream”: 꿈 [k͈um] (standard romanization <kkum>), but Mr Kim was simply incapable of figuring out what I was talking about, because he was only hearing me say 굼[kum], which, standing alone, is a nonsense syllable. I was almost in tears when I realized I simply couldn’t express the sound correctly. Will I ever be able to do it? I wish I could meet a Korean-speaker who was also a trained linguist (or, a trained linguist who was also a Korean-speaker would do, too), who could teach me what to do with my vocal tract to make these sounds reliably. Most Koreans, when faced with the idea that the difference is hard to hear for non-native-speakers, will simply pronounce the faucalized versions louder, because that is part of how they’re perceived psychologically, I think.

Anyway… here are some pictures.

Approaching the mountain in the car from Yeongam Town.

picture

A small temple under construction.  I like the detailed woodwork on the eaves.

picture

A small purple flower.

picture

I’m not sure what “shemanism” is (sounds vaguely West Hollywood), but it’s definitely not allowed.

picture

The Cloud Bridge (구름다리)

picture

A dragonfly.

picture

“Hiking while drunk prohibitted.”

picture

Looking east.

picture

At the summit.

picture

A man surfing the internet on his cellphone at the summit (because we’re in South Korea, of course).

picture

On the way back down:  Six Brothers Rocks.

picture

Me, trying to look very tired (because I was very tired).

picture

A waterfall.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: The commute to work, part III: High Street

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Videos

I don’t really know the name of the street.  It’s one of basically two streets that make up Hongnong town.  There’s a “High Street” and a “Low Street” – I mean these literally, because one street is farther up the hill than the other, and they run parallel to each other, with little alleyways between, for about 10 blocks in length.  The bus terminal is on the southwest end of “High Street” and the elementary school where I work is on about two-thirds along the same street, toward the northeast end.  Beyond the elementary school is the middle school and the fire station.

Here’s the little video I made – all shakey and walky but whatever… it sorta captures the town.  Although that morning I didn’t run into any of my students, like I normally do.  The music is “Fractured” by Zeromancer.  Awesome track.

(Sorry the resolution is so poor – I’ve been having nightmares with uploading large files from home, so I cut the video output filesize way back, to make it tolerable on upload – it still took 25 minutes to put it on youtube.)

Caveat: Where is your house?

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Mr Kim, from last weekend, invited me to go hiking today.   I was thrilled to hear myself attempting to give him directions to my apartment in Korean, yesterday evening, on the phone.   Well, not thrilled.  But it gives me some optimism, when I use the language at all in a successful way, that I may someday "get there" – wherever "there" is: some kind of communicative efficacy, anyway.

"Where is your house?" he asked.  I answered in English, and realized he wasn't understanding.  I tried to explain in Korean, then.  I wasn't even using full sentences.  But he said he understood.  Now, we have a real-life test of that understanding, as I wait for him to show up to pick me up.

Caveat: Building a country from scratch; and later, the green tea plantations of Boseong

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

Yesterday I took a day trip. It followed the pattern of many day trips I’ve taken with Koreans – a little bit random, with an initial plan but a lot of ad hoc changes, too. A bit like many things. Unlike in work situations, however, this kind of thing doesn’t bother me in the least. It’s a good way to do things.

I have a coworker, Haewon, who is Gyopo. “Gyopo” is what Koreans call fellow Koreans who are born or have lived abroad and pertain at least as much to that foreign culture as to Korean culture. Haewon grew up in Houston, Texas, and she is not a full-time teacher – she’s kind of bottom-of-the-totem pole, because she’s young – university age – and I don’t think she holds a Korean teaching certification. She’s kind of just a teaching assistant or part-timer. Anyway, being the only truly bilingual person in the school (and possibly the only truly bilingual person in the entire town of Hongnong), she often gets stuck with “translator duty,” which I think must be very hard on her.

At first, I didn’t feel that comfortable around her – she seemed too serious, and kind of gloomy. But I’ve come to think highly of her. She’s quite intelligent, although she hides it for the most part, and she’s got a sort of understated, wry sense of humor that shows up at odd moments. Friday, she told me she had been invited by one of her adult students (she teaches a night class at the nuclear power plant) to go drive down and look at Boseong, which is where the famous green tea plantations are, at the other end of Jeollanam Province. She conveyed her student’s invitation that I could come along too.

The adult student was Mr Kim, who is a nuclear engineer who works at the power plant as a senior reactor operator. Interesting stuff. He’s my age. He’s trying desperately to improve his English (because his next promotion depends on a certain minimum level of proficiency – it’s tied to recent contract the Korean Nuclear Power company has finagled to build reactors for the United Arab Emirates), hence the fact of his taking the night class, with Haewon, and also his invitation through her to any “foreigners” she might know to spend a Saturday hanging out and touring around. He’s a nice guy, and generous.

We didn’t follow the plan of going straight to Boseong. We ended up going the opposite direction, at first, because he wanted to go see this giant causeway (it’s a bit like the giant polders the Dutch have built to increase the size of their country, in engineering terms). First, though, we stopped at a ancient Buddhist temple called Seonsun, which is one of the oldest in Korea, having been established in 577.

The causeway, which stretches south of Kunsan in a great arc jutting into the Yellow Sea, is called Saemangeum, and basically, as I hinted, the Koreans appear to be taking a cue from the Dutch and are attempting to build more, brand new South Korea, from scratch. One dumps dirt and rocks and cement into the ocean, fills things in and drains water, adds roads, trees, buildings, harbors, and viola, more Korea!

The project is still in early stages, but the plan is humongous, vast – and although it’s not terribly photogenic, especially in the sticky summer fog, I tried to take some pictures. Then we drove to Boseong, after stopping at a fish market in Kunsan and eating some dried, smoked octopus tentacle, and then nearly drowning in a rainstorm while tailing a dumptruck.

Here are some pictures. I really liked the dumptruck bas-relief attached to the monument at Saemangeum – it would maybe make a good logo for my blog.

Here is a flower I saw at the side of the road, while walking to meet Haewon and Mr Kim at 7 in the morning.

picture

Peering into one of the temple buildings, at Seonsunsa.

picture

Me and the dumptruck.

picture

Me and Mr Kim.

picture

The giant, super-humongous tidal flood gates, near the midpoint of the 50 km. long dike that we drove along.

picture

A stream in the woods near the tea fields.

picture

Peering at tea from under cedars, misty day.

picture

Tea fields.

picture

More tea.

picture

Me, candidly, eating naengmyeon.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: A Call to Give Up

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Last night I stopped in the stationery store to buy some more colored paper for my sixth grade town project, and had an actual conversation with the woman in the store, in Korean.   I was buying some stickers and toys too (thinking of using them as prizes at some point).

It was pretty cool:  Where do you work?  At Hongnong elementary.  The kids like these things.  Yes, they do.  Your Korean is pretty good.  No, I only know a little.  How long have you been here?  I lived in Seoul for 2 years and started living here recently.  Etc.

At the end, the woman complimented my Korean again, but I felt ashamed.  "계속 연습 하고 해요," I said (continuing practice [I should] do).  But it felt like a lie.

Why?  Because I have kind of dropped the ball on actively studying Korean.  My first few months here in Yeonggwang, I'd kept really well to my routine of working on Korean at least an hour a day.  But since the start of summer vacation, I haven't studied at all.  My vocabulary list on my cell phone has reached maximum size of 200 words, so I'm not even saving the words I look up anymore.  I'm not reviewing vocabulary.  I'm not carrying around my "grammar bible" lately.

I thought about this.  I think I was much more deeply wounded than I've been willing to admit, by the alcohol-imbued insults and mockery of my Korean-speaking efforts, that were directed at me during our "staff field trip" three weeks ago.   I took it all very personally.  And I took it as a call to give up on learning Korean.  Certainly, it really wrecked my motivation.

Keep this in mind, the next time you want to laugh at someone's English that isn't so perfect.  There are many English-speakers in Korea who have such an atrocious level of attainment that you want to laugh.  They can sound like buffoons.  But don't laugh.  Be positive.  I've been guilty of it, too – I know.

Learning a language is hard.  This is one of the reasons why I think it should be required for foreigners teaching English here to study Korean.  I think it would increase sensitivity to the emotional/motivational issues involved in language acquisition – they're not trivial.

Caveat: Dropping ants from toy helicopters to see if they can survive

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Teaching & Methodology

I saw a Korean popular science game show type progrom where they were dropping ants from toy helicopters and then looking for the ants to see if they survived the fall.  The ants survived, of course.  I think ants are of such low mass relative to surface area that falling through air is like falling through water for something larger… the air resistance means their terminal velocity is quite low or something like that.  They ride the air down like a feather, floating and wafting about.

Today I had a lunch of delicious kong-guk-su (handmade noodles in an iced soy soup, with cucumber) – I went out with Cheor-ho.  

I thought my first grade class went well today -  I'm not sure why I think that, since the kids were running around like crazy monkeys.  Maybe I just felt more peaceful about that fact?  For a while I had them sitting in a circle on the floor with me, while we read a story.  I would stop and ask them simple questions, based on the model of the story:  "Do you want some milk?"  "Yes."  Miming, going around in the circle.  Before that, the kids had gotten hyper throwing paper airplanes we made, too.

I'm trying to get my sixth graders to start buying and selling land from each other in the town we've built.  But they're too respectful of each other's prerogatives… or too shy to aggressively buy and sell, even though they have no problem hurling insults at one another.  It's interesting observing these cultural differences, and to reflect on what implications they may have (if any) for how Korean capitalism actually works.

Caveat: Lately

Banalities & Journaling / My Drawings & Paintings

I’ve been having a lot of computer problems, lately. But I think I should lay off ranting about it here.

pictureI’ve been having a lot of vivid, weird dreams, lately, too. But I hesitate to write about those, sometimes. Nobody wants to read all the time about someone else’s dreams.

I’ve been having a rather vague, inconclusive experience with my teaching efforts, lately. I’m not sure what I could say about it. The first grade feels out-of-control-but-situation-normal. The third grade may be improving with my new, changed direction; and sixth grade remains excellent, although I’m groping for ways to keep it interesting. The “JET” test-prep class is boring. But I expected that. Boring subject can easily lead to boring class.

I haven’t been communicating much with friends or family, lately. Sorry about that. I’ve been in one of my periodic eremitic states.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little blue. (Picture is my own artwork, done in 1992.)

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Practice

Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

I couldn't think of what I wanted to write in this blog.  Sometimes I just don't have anything I feel like sharing.  I went surfing through my more private journal of notes and observations, looking for something to write here.  I found the following unattributed quote, from a while back.  Did I make it up?  Did I hear it somewhere?

What is sleep?  Just practicing being dead.  Everything requires practice.

Caveat: 돈 있죠?

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Life is a Dream / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

It’s said that when you dream in a language, you’ve “learned” it.   So, what does it mean when you dream in a language, wake up and immediately type the phrase into Google Translate, just to make sure you understood correctly?   That’s sort of what happened this morning.
I dreamed I was talking to a child on a bus.  This is rooted in reality, because when I went to Gwangju on Friday, I’d met two of my Hongnong students: two sisters in 6th and 4th grade – the younger is the girl I call “Miss Sardonica” (in my mind) because of her strange, sardonic-looking grin.  But they’re good kids.  I let them play games on my cell phone during the trip, because they looked bored.  It’s a notable, interesting difference between Korea and the US, that it’s utterly common to run into elementary-age children traveling alone on intercity buses here, for example.
Anyway, the dream:  the child in the dream wasn’t one of these two girls, but some random child – well, not completely random, he looked like one of the first-graders:  a certain extremely mischievous, bright-eyed boy named Ji-hun.  And he seemed a little bit lost.  There was a woman giving the child a hard time, but I didn’t understand what she was saying.  Asking him questions to which he evidently couldn’t offer satisfactory answers.  Not his mom – she was like a bus-company employee, the kind that get on the bus to check your ticket sometimes.  But then the child turned to me and asked, “돈 있죠?” (don it-jyo), and then I woke up.  It wasn’t a very complicated dream.  Just a dream fragment, really.  But it felt significant, because it had ended with a seemingly contextless question, spoken in Korean, that I felt I’d understood.  It felt like a triumphant moment.
I had fallen asleep with the air conditioner on, which normally I avoid because it gives me a sore throat (not to mention it seems an unnatural and expensive way to sleep), so my little apartment was chilly.  I looked out the window, and the sun was bright.  Sky was blue.
I looked at my cell phone, to see what time it was, but it was turned off.  Maybe some spam-text-message had inspired me to turn it off, the night before.  Sometimes, I wake up and have no idea what time it is, I will try to guess.  I looked out the window, noted the angle of sun’s shadows down on the gas station in front of my apartment building, noted the shade of blue of the sky, and said to myself, “hmm, 7:00… no, 6:50.”  A little game I play with myself, right?  I turned on my computer, and the clock read 6:53.  I felt impressed with myself, at that moment.
But suddenly I felt very insecure about whether I’d understood the Korean from the end of the dream.  So I opened up google translate and typed in the phrase, “돈 있죠?”
“Got money?” the google-monster muttered back at me, textually.
Yes, I’d understood.   But now it struck me:  what the hell did it mean?  I mean, in the dream-interpretation sense…  Why was this kid asking me if I had money?
I made some instant coffee and had toast for breakfast.  Good morning.

Caveat: Des Moines, SK? Paris, SK; Washington, SK.

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Teaching & Methodology

When I first got to Gwangju, in April, I was inclined to describe it as the "Des Moines" of South Korea.  But having lived in glorious, hillbilliac Yeonggwang for the last 4 months, and returning there to spend the afternoon today, I thought, "jeez, it's like coming to Paris."

I hung out in a cafe (Yeonggwang doesn't really have cafes).  I had a scone.  I bought some real "imported from US" cheese (for about a dollar an ounce), took it home, and now I'm watching NCIS and eating cheese and crackers.  Call it a break from Korea.

After one week of teaching summer classes, here are my thoughts on the curriculum I developed and rolled out for myself.

For first grade:  medium-to-OK;  about what I expected; it could be more organized, but those first graders are hard to manage, especially on my own, so I figure it could be worse;  the best material is when I have them moving around playing (role-playing, vaguely), acting out story-lines from stories we've been reading.

For third grade:  not going well;  they were really into the role-play last month, but I think I got too serious about it, and showing them videos (i.e. Spongebob) to give them ideas actually distracts them and they lose their focus;  I'm going to have to rethink, and change something.

For sixth grade:  I've never had a more successful self-developed curriculum!  They love it;  they come in early and demand that we start immediately, and they refuse to leave the class after the time is up;  mwahahaha – I win ^_^.    They've named our simulation bulletin-board town:  Washington, SK (cf. Washington, DC, I guess, but in South Korea).

Caveat: Kafka the English Teacher in Korea

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / The Wonders of Work

I'm certain they told me that I was teaching a special gifted student English class at the county education office on Thursdays, starting the first week in August.  Of course, that was back at the beginning of July.  I said "OK,"  marked it on my calendar, and nothing more was said about it.  Nothing.  Nobody told me what time, where, what students, what materials were expected.  I figured, well, that's just the Korean communication taboo, kicking in.  

Being the somewhat responsible person that I try to be, I researched the when and where by asking a coworker who had been doing these classes before, and showed up at the education office building in Yeonggwang yesterday at 4:45, expecting to teach some kids at 5 pm.  But they didn't know who I was.  Finally, with my broken Korean, I managed to understand that "oh, that gifted program is on vacation at the moment."  They told me to come back the last week in August.

Maybe I misunderstood the original request to do this – but I really don't think so.  It's just another example of how information most definitely does not work its way down hierarchies, here.

I don't really feel that upset about it.  But it's interesting, to me.  So I thought I'd document the experience. 

As I was walking back to my apartment afterward, I had a sort of insight:  information doesn't move down hierarchies reliably because it's always the responsibility of those farther down to find stuff out – the higher-ups are never wrong, by definition, so, in my case for example, I now owe an apology to my higher-ups for having misunderstood (or for having failed to confirm) the original request.   I remember my first hagwon boss's line:  "but you never asked."  As an employee in Korea, it is always one's responsibility to ask.

Caveat: ♥왜젤왯

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / My Photos

pictureI found an extra car attached to my bulletin-board construction-paper town. It said “♥왜젤왯” – which tranliterates as “wae-jer-waet” – I think it’s an effort on the part of the student to write my name in hangeul, which I sometimes jokingly transliterate as “왜제렛” [wae-je-ret]. If that’s the case, it’s a sweet tribute.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Can you play Sim City using construction paper and scissors?

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos / Teaching & Methodology

Yes.

I’ve started a project to build a “town” with my 6th grade class. There are turns, they buy and sell property, start businesses, etc. A classroom economy.

Here are 3 shots of the first 2 days of the town. See how it’s growing, already? Hmm… I hope this works out – the kids (admittedly a small group) seem really into it – more than I even had expected. But they could lose interest. We will see.

picture

picture

picture

I’m really proud of the traffic circle I made.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Summer School

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / My Photos / Teaching & Methodology

The school is a mess – a construction zone. Most of the teachers and, more happily, the administrators, are missing-in-action (they get longer vacations, because they’re “real” teachers, unlike the foreigner types). But I’m teaching “summer camp” classes. They’re awesome. No coteacher to have to work with or around or behind. I get to make up my own curriculum. And I know the kids already, so I already have some rapport.

I took some “class portraits” today, because I really want to make a serious effort to learn these kids’ names. Korean names are so difficult to learn, but except for the first graders I mostly have them down. So now I have pictures of them to study and to match up to names, as practice.

Here is my number-one super favoritest class – the 3rd graders.

picture

And here are the first graders, behaving better than usual.

picture

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Le Corbusier’s Fantasy, Manifest

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Walking along the Juyeop Park Esplanade yesterday in Ilsan in the humid, still evening, I watched the children playing among modernist statuary, parents playing ball with their kids, kids walking to or from hagwon as if they were college students, grandparents strolling, an old woman selling onions and garlic.  All around, a rectilinear park-like environment, punctuated by a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise apartment towers of dubious individual architectural merit.  This is Ilsan, a city of half a million that didn't exist the first time I came here, in 1991.

Yet unlike so many Modernist planned cities, Ilsan seems to work, at a very fundamental level.  Imagine something with all the charm of Cabrini Green (Chicago's infamous 1960's era Modernist housing projects), but inhabited by a mostly Lake Forest demographic.  The children play happily amid the soulless buildings, the parents are a bit overwrought, but deeply bourgeois.  This is not typical Korea, either, but it feels very much like the future.  The future that visionaries such as Le Corbusier and other Modernist "new city" proponents supposedly got so wrong. 

Ilsan represents to me the proof of the fact that although most contemporary urbanist thinking seems to focus a great deal on the way that we can influence lifestyles through how we plan our urban spaces, when you get right down to it, there are very few elements of the physical urban space that are guaranteed to make a difference, positive or negative.  Density is significant, but Ilsan is probably as automobile-reliant as any American city, if only because of the upper-middle-class status of most of its inhabitants – they need their cars, as aspirational objects, above all else.  Perhaps it makes me a bit of a cultural determinist (read:  marxist), but what makes urban spaces work has more to do with the socioeconomic position of the inhabitants than with how they are put together.

Back to Top