OK. Most everyone reading this blog can now become annoyed with me.
I'm experimenting with embedding a KPop-playing widget on the right-hand column. So… Watch out! You can make it stop by clicking the ipod-looking gadget's pause button, if it's annoying too much.
I will remove it once I have received 3 complaints. My mother likely will be one of them (probably more because it messes up her dial-up access of my blog-page than because she dislikes KPop music, although I suspect that might also apply).
Actually, having had it in place for less than an hour, I may be one of the complainants, for that matter.
In the spirit of my previous "commute" videos, I decided to make one more before leaving Hongnong. Here is my current morning commute, shot this morning at 8 AM. Note that it is so short, I had to "pad" it out with some still pictures at the beginning, in order to fit the 3 minute soundtrack. So be patient with the slow start.
I leave my apartment, I walk to the school gate, I walk across the school yard.
Since next Monday is my last day at Hongnong Elementary, today (Tuesday) is my "first day" of "last classes." I said good bye to some first graders during first and second periods today. I felt sad. I will still see them around the halls for another few days, but the formal "goodbyes" to groups of kids are going to make this a long week. Some kids ran up randomly and gave me hugs as I left the classroom, unexpectedly. Others just tried to steal my plastic alligator.
I'm having all of my students in all of my classes write "yearbook" style messages on pieces of paper. I will scan and post some (all?) of them at some point. Many of them are writing very sweet and kind things. I feel happy because of that.
Yesterday was an utter waste of a full planetary rotation. I have these things I need to get done, given that I’m moving back to Ilsan in about 9 days. I tried to get them done. I failed.
Friday night, I went out with my coworkers – our reconstituted Hongnong Elementary English Department (with the usual caveats, of course, regarding the rather grandiose impression a term like “English Department” might give). We went as a sort of goodbye-to-me dinner, in Gwangju (convenient for the Korean teachers, since they all live there).
First, we went for coffee at this place behind the Jeonnam Univ campus, which was owned by a friend of the art teacher (note that the art teacher is an honorary member of our “English Department” because he hangs out with us, sometimes).
After that, we drove downtown and ate at a pretty posh galbi restaurant there. Here is a candid picture of the three Korean teachers, Ms Lee, Mr Go and Mr Kim.
Finally, we went to a bar-type-place over near the bus terminal, but we stayed too late to catch the last bus to Hongnong (which doesn’t leave that late) and so Moyer (the other foreign teacher) and I ended up in a taxi back to Hongnong. I don’t really have many good things to report about traveling by taxi, in Korea – especially long distances – but this trip was pretty good, as taxi trips go. The fare was prenegotiated and as reasonable as can be expected for a one hour taxi trip, and I ended up spending the whole hour having a conversation in 90% Korean Language with the driver. I think it’s the longest such sustained conversation I’ve ever had, and it left me feeling almost giddy with the level of accomplishment it seemed to represent.
Reflecting on it afterward, I realize it also shows how far I have to go – I often stumbled on things that should be simple at this point, and sometimes the cab driver would go on for whole paragraphs where I only had a vague notion of what he was going on about. But in general, it seemed like a good finale to my year in the Korean countryside.
Well some of you know, there was a point in my last career (in database design and business systems analysis) when I came very close to applying for business school. I took the GMAT in 2005, and scored quite well. I had filled out applications for several high-powered business schools in Europe, and had written some essays, for entrance to International MBA programs. Why was I thinking this? Well, before I realized that I needed a job/career that was more humanly (and humanely) fulfilling, I was working hard to find the more "human" side of my last, computer-related job. And that seemed a logical direction to take it – I was interested in project management, management consulting, that kind of thing.
Sometimes, therefore, I return to surfing management-theory-related texts and blogs online. Not very often – my interest in this stuff has definitely faded. But now, and again, I go looking around. For some reason, a line by Matthew Stewart has struck me as rather insightful – and ties into my interests in epistemology and philosophy and marxism, too. In an article entitled "The Management Myth" (from The Atlantic, June 2006 issue), he writes, "Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class."
I suppose this struck me, too, in my thinking about how Korea as a society "works," who the vested interests are, that kind of thing. Although what passes for management in Korea is radically alien to what happens in the "West," it still ends up working the same way, from a sociological standpoint.
…
Unrelatedly, two developments.
1) With two weeks remaining at Hongnong, I have discovered that my blog's admin website is no longer blocked on my school's network. Lucky me. Hence this post, on a slow Thursday morning of desk-warming.
2) I am not so narcissistic as to assume every person likes me. Or even respects me. I suspect I have aspects of my personality that grates on a lot of people. But I nevertheless feel depressed and dismayed when I get evidence that someone whom I have grown to respect and even like in fact doesn't seem to think very highly of me. I wonder what I'm doing wrong. Well… I'm not going to go into details. But life is full of these revelatory negative social epiphanies, I suppose.
I have a 2nd grade student, Jeong-seok, who wrote an essay. His little essay was posted on the school's web forum, and my co-worker sent me a copy. It's flattering, and my heart is touched. I feel proud to be mentioned in a 2nd grader's essay in such a positive way.
영어수업을 할 때 게임을 했다. 동그라미모양종이에 자기가 하고 싶은 동전 숫자를 적으면 그걸 원어민 선생님인 제럴드선생님에게 드리고 진짜동전처럼 생긴 동전을 한국 선생님께 드리면 스티커를 받는다. 10개를 넘게 받은 친구들도 있었는데 나는 5개를 받았다. 나는 10개 보다 많이 받은 친구가 너~무~부러웠다 나는 스티커를 안내장 넣는 파일에 붙였다. 영어가 재미있게 되고 있으니 눈에 빨리 빨리 들어 오는 것 같기도 하였다. 방과후영어도 정말 재미있게 했다.
I guess that makes a good day.
[Comment added later: Some have requested a translation. My Korean isn't so good as to offer a translation. Google's translate-o-matic makes gobbledy-gook of it, which is about what I would do. I just kind of scan it and get the gist of it, knowing that it's positive. Here's the result of plugging into google (with a few minor but obvious glaring corrections): "When teaching English game. A circle on the paper and he'll put the number of coins you want it wiht a native speaker teacher, Jereot teacher, if it looks like a real coin coin Korea figure, the teacher gives a sticker. I have friends who were over 10 coins received five. I received more than 10, friends envied ~ Foreign ~ the invitation I put stickers attached to the file. English is fun may just be coming in soon, so eyes were fast. School English and was really fun."]
I sometimes get very experimental with cooking. Maybe too experimental for my own good.
When I visited my mom in January, I had discussed with her a dilemma I sometimes have had: I love cooking her recipe of chiles rellenos, but the egg-dense batter in which the chiles are coated is hard to substitute with something that would please my vegan friends.
I’m not vegan, myself, but I have in the past worked hard to come up with ways to make much of my cooking vegan, for three reasons: 1) I feel it makes it very healthy, 2) because I have a some friends who are vegan, and 3) just for the challenge of it.
Well, my mom had a brainstorm: beer batter. And I thought about this, and thought it was a wonderfully good idea. And so I filed it away in my brain. But I also had had a strange idea, at the time, about my life in Korea, and the various substitutions that happen in attempting non-Korean cooking in Korea. Now… it must be said, beer is not hard to to find in Korea. It’s hardly the sort of thing that requires a substitution. That’s not an issue. But I nevertheless had a thought – could I make an even more “native” beer-type batter, in Korea? Specfically, I speculated on whether Korean makgeolli could be substituted for western-style beer.
Makgeolli is beery, in character. It’s often called Korean rice wine, but it’s more like beer (or maybe Mexican pulque) than it is like what I think of as rice wine, such as Japanese sake. It’s cloudy, and it has a slight carbonation to it. This is the property that made me think it might be substituted for beer in beer batter.
Tonight, I went to the grocery store. And I was staring at a refrigerator case, having just grabbed a bag of cheap packaged kimchi. There was a bottle of makgeolli. I remembered my idea, and, feeling inspired, or bored, or something, I bought it.
I came home. I got out some wheat flour, and mixed in some black pepper, nutmeg and salt and a tablespoon of my mexican masa flour for some corny flavoring. And then I dumped in some makgeolli, and stirred it up. Voila. Korean makgeolli batter. Hmm…. it seemed a lot like beer batter, sure enough.
Now, for something to fry. I saw my onions. Hah. Onion rings.
I made onion rings in makgeolli batter. Has this ever been done before? I don’t know.
I won’t say they were perfectly delicious. But this was a first draft. The oil I fried them in should have been a lighter variety of oil – maybe canola oil. And the batter needed more salt. But for a first draft, they were hardly horrible. I felt pleased with my experiment. Here is my plate of home-made makgeolli-batter-fried onion rings.
Note that the squarish item on the part of the plate closest to the camera is a block of colby cheese (imported from America, which I bought at Emart in Gwangju yesterday) that I’d used because I had a tiny bit of batter left over. That was, in fact, pretty tasty, too.
I spent the weekend with my friend Mr Kim. He invited me to spend time with his family – which, in the almost-year that I’ve known him, is a first. Mostly, before, we go hiking, stuff like that.
I’ll share more later. The positive – nothing leaves me feeling more positive about this ongoing Korean experiment than spending time immersed in Korean day-to-day life. The negative – I think I’m a little bit sick. I got home and passed out – asleep at 4 in the afternoon. I haven’t had that happened with me in ages.
Meanwhile, here is a picture seen outside a bar on Saturday night – very loosely translated, it means “Pissing prohibited – big brother is watching”
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]
My laziness continues. I felt no desire to go out on a Friday night – so I've decided on skipping the Friday foreigner gathering in Yeonggwang – it's less appealing now, given it's a 30 minute bus ride away, than it was when I lived there in the town.
So I came home, turned on the "radio" (streaming BBC), and cooked the most amazing ad hoc pasta dinner. Very simple: mushrooms, onions, garlic, stir fried in olive oil, with spices (including red pepper, oregano, basil, rosemary, ground bay leaves and coriander). Add Korean-style tomato juice (which comes across as diluted tomato sauce since it's unsalted) which I let boil down for thickness. Instant tomato mushroom onion pasta sauce. Dinner – all ingredients bought in Hongnong (except the dried oregano and basil).
I was kind of off my game, teaching today.
You can tell I'm not having a good day, when the highlight of the day is finding a crying child in the courtyard, late in the afternoon.
How can this be a highlight? Yu-bin was crying, some other kids were standing around. She told a story, in Korean, that I didn't understand – something about sports and anger. And then she pointed at a boy holding a badminton racket. And cried harder. The boy shrugged defensively. I got the picture.
Some other kids came around. But there were no other adults around. In bad Korean, I ordered the boy to apologize to Yu-bin. I didn't know what for, although I suspected some mild violence with a badminton racket was involved. He bowed and apologized, mumbling. I insisted he do it again.
All the Koreans are in a dead panic today over the fact that it's raining, and presumeably this rain, coming from the southeast, has been Japanified. Fukushimized. Radioactive.
I'm sure the rain is more radioactive than normal. I have no doubt. But people have such strange perceptions of risk in this type of thing. Mostly, Korean culture seems to enjoy jumping on a once- or twice-a-year bandwagon of xeno-hypochondria (i.e. a fear of health risks associated with things from foreign places or things foreign people do).
I would bet everything I own that in terms of background radiation, I am exposed to more and more dangerous radioactivity by the children of the nuclear power plant workers whom I teach on a daily basis – which is to say, their dads bring stuff home, that stuff gets on them, and the kids bring it with them to school. And that's not to say it's a lot.
I'm just saying that I expect that I get exposed to more radiation by virtue of the fact that I work in proximity to a major nuclear reactor here in Korea – and so, panicking about Japan-sourced rain seems out of place.
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!
I've been trying to just keep an attitude of living like a monk, lately. A way of coping with feeling out of control of my home-life, and partly, too, a way of coping with my ongoing lack of "productivity" vis-a-vis my various "life projects."
I felt this monkish feeling very strongly as I huddled, this morning, awake before dawn, eating plain rice for breakfast in my unheated apartment.
People might ask, why is your apartment unheated? Because I'm afraid to ask my school (my employer, my landlord) to repair it. Two reasons: 1) the heating system is hugely expensive to operate, so I probably wouldn't use my heat much each even if it worked (the other foreign teacher, in another unit in this building, had a $600 heating bill last month); 2) my school doesn't really respond very well to requests for help – they tend to question why it is I have a right to complain about such things.
So, for the last month or so, since about a week after moving in to this new place, I've lived without heat. Most of the time, it doesn't bother me that much – I've always prefered to keep my living space cool in winter – but sometimes I have thought of investing in at least a little space heater. But then I remember I only have a few weeks left, here. Hopefully, whatever place I get in Ilsan will be like my previous places in Ilsan – well-maintained and problem-free. Also, of course, the cold time of year is nearly over.
Why am I eating plain rice? That's just a matter of … a lot of times, I like to have a "Korean breakfast" which is rice and kimchi, but it turns out, I have no kimchi, and I was lazy yesterday and didn't go to the store.
I look out at the foggy dawn, it reminds me of high school: living in Arcata, the foggy predawn when I would get up and do my homework and get ready for school – I never did homework except in the mornings.
I listen to Minnestoa Public Radio, streaming online, and forget where in the world I am. There's a "winter storm warning" for the Arrowhead (northern Minnesota). I miss Minnesota mostly for its natural features – it's understated geography, its seasons, its weather.
When I started this teaching job in a public elementary school, I was assured that one of the duties that we 원어민 ["native speaker instructors"] had was to teach a weekly English class to the teachers at our schools – to help them maintain and/or improve their own English language skills. This had always struck me as a great idea, and it was something I'd recommend to enlightened hagwon management as well.
Well, I got to teach my first conversation class for teachers today, with about 3 weeks left on my one-year contract. I guess my school just didn't get around to it, until now.
I'm glad I actually got to do it, though.
Last night, I had trouble sleeping. I'm clearly being troubled by things, lately. Stress around the upcoming job change, I'm sure. Maybe stress around other things, too. I don't know.
I drifted in and out of waking up, this morning, for longer than usual, and kept having these mini-nightmares.
I was being chased by a bear in a snowy wilderness.
I was paralyzed, lying on the floor of my classroom, while my students tried to get me to respond to them.
I saw a flood happening on the floor of my classroom, and I kept clicking on some "stop flood" icon on a computer, to no avail.
I was late for a bus, and tripped and fell into a hole in the street.
Sometimes there's a poignant moment when my students make me overly conscious of my aging. The random comments, "Teacher, white hair" – pointing at my head. Or the comment on there being wrinkles on my forehead, which is somehow a significant observation in Korean culture. The other day, I was spending a few moments at the end of my 4th grade afterschool class playing "duck, duck, goose," and Ye-won stood behind me, tapped my head, and the paused and said, with apparent alarm, loudly, "Teacher! No hair!" Yes, my hairline is receding… yes, it's thinning.
Kids have no tact. Koreans have no tact. So, Korean kids …
Every day, here, is a continuing exercise in humility.
Yesterday, I got permission to leave work at lunch (Monday being a good day since I have no classes after lunch) and run into Gwangju to go to the immigration office and try to at least get the routine visa-extension I need to be able to stay and finish out my current contract. The situation with the visa renewal for my new job is that they've basically told us (me and my new boss) that we were trying to get the renewal too soon.
Going to the Gwangju immigration office has a similar feel to a LA Westside DMV – right down to the demographics – very roughly: Koreans, some caucasians, assorted other Asians, some random Russians and eastern Europeans, a smattering of South Asians and Middle-Easterners. All that's missing is the Latin component, although the Filipinos stand in well for that. And all mired in impenetrable bureaucracy.
For once, something went right. I stayed very friendly, and started out meticulously polite in my fractured Korean. And after about an hour, I got my extension, although they felt compelled to call the Uijeongbu office (which is the parent office to the Ilsan office), which helped them exactly zero.
But… so now I'm good until I start my new contract, at which point I can play it again at the Ilsan immigration office, I guess.
… I saw fields green with the young spring barley.
… I saw a man kneeling beside the tollway next to his SUV, which had a flat tire.
… I saw a banner with a Japanese flag and the words (in English): “Don’t give up, Japan.”
… I saw a motel designed to look like a Russian Orthodox Church.
… I saw a single broad patch of snow on a hillside of brown grass, near Gongju.
… I saw a shed on fire, in a field, with a great billowing cloud of white smoke.
… I heard “Aguas de março” sung by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim, on my mp3 player.
… I saw a cow sleeping in some dirt.
… I saw a reproduction of a watercolor painting of Paris’ St.-Germain Square on the wall over a urinal at a tollway rest area.
… I heard grumpy old people with thick Jeolla accents pronouncing Yeonggwang as Yeom-gang.
… I saw a tall young man with tight jeans and shiny purple combat boots yelling into a cellphone and dropping his iced coffee onto the pavement.
… I heard Talking Heads’ “Found a Job” on my mp3 player.
… I saw brick farm houses with solar panels on their flat roofs.
… I read 50 pages of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.
… I saw many, many pine trees dancing under the sky, their roots sunk in the red-gold earth, looking like ink-drawings.
… I heard The Cure’s cover of David Bowie’s “Young Americans” on my mp3 player.
… I saw tiny villages packed up into narrow valleys, limned with leafless trees, where all the houses had blue tile roofs.
… I saw an angry-looking euro-dude with Miami Vice sunglasses, spitting onto the sidewalk like a Korean.
… I saw a giant statue of a squirrel.
… I ate something vaguely resembling tater-tots, with a spicy sauce.
… I saw a bridge over the tollway that had trees planted on it.
… I saw hundreds of plastic greenhouses, filled with hothouse vegetables growing, looking like large worms swimming in formation through the still wintery fields.
… I heard Juanes’ “Fijate bien” on my mp3 player.
… I saw families having picnics at the graves of their ancestors at random locations on hillsides alongside the tollway, and there were many children hopping happily, too.
… I saw a crow perched on the sign that indicated the Yeonggwang County line. I was almost home.
[this poem is a “back-post” added 2011-04-24, copied from my paper journal. I added the embedded youbube videos because the poem needed a sound-track. A scan of a picture from the paper journal page added 2013-06-14.]
I was on my hands and knees, on a carpeted floor (itself rather alien, given how rare carpeted floors are, here in Korea), picking up little bits of lint. Once I'd gathered a small handful, I'd stuff it into a plastic "Family Mart" (convenience store chain, here) bag. Then I'd get down and get more lint.
I wasn't the only one doing this, in the dream. I had students and friends helping me. There was a lot of lint to be gathered.
That was the whole dream. It was stunningly vivid. And utterly pointless.
I've been going through a difficult time. Feeling like I'm doing inadequately as a teacher. Struggling to tolerate the constant edge-of-utterly-failed-communication, at work. Stressed and on edge about what might or might not work out or fall through with respect to my upcoming job change (it always feels contingent until the visa paperwork is processed, and that's proving complicated and fraught with, yes, more miscommunication).
I have to go to Seoul this weekend, again. I've been feeling burned out on any kind of travel, since my Australia/NZ trip two months ago, and so I'm not looking forward to it at all. I look forward to getting back to living in the city, but I have zero interest at this point in whirlwind weekend trips.
I'm feeling unhealthy and woke up with terrible insomnia this morning after only about 5 hours of sleep. I kept running through what I'm doing wrong at work. I kept speculating on what I would do if, for whatever arbitrary and random bureaucratic reason, my visa problem prevented me from starting my new job in May. I kept thinking about the way that life in Korea is a constant almost unbearable coping with arbitrary and random bureaucratic events.
The reason Korea is spelled with a K and not a C (as in the old spelling, Corea), is because of Kafka. Kafka's protagonists are generally known as "K." Imagine a whole country as a protagonist in a Kafka tale. Sigh.
It was several years ago, now, that my Korean friend Curt told me: “You have no jeong.” Many Koreans have an exceptionalist view of this emotion that is described by the word jeong [정 (情)] – they will explain that it is a uniquely Korean emotion, or that Koreans uniquely tend toward it in contrast to members of other cultures.
The dictionary tells us that jeong means something like: love, affection, attachment, sentiment, strong feeling, concern, matter-of-the-heart.
I found a fascinating academic write up on the word online, which I unfortunately cannot recommend to non-linguists because of its utterly obtuse non-standard romanization of Korean, which renders 정 as [ceng] – I believe this is called the “Yale” romanization, and while as a linguist I understand the motivations behind it, I dislike it intensely because it is very remote from being accessible to non-specialists, leading to inevitable mutilations of pronunciation.
Here is a more typical exceptionalist presentation of the concept from a “study English” website (i.e. it’s an essay talking about jeong as unique to Korean culture, written in English to provide a chance to study aspects of English – this kind of thing is everywhere in Korean English educaction at all levels).
At the time that Curt made his assertion, I was skeptical, on two counts. I discounted the exceptionalist view that there could exist a basic “emotion” that was unique to one culture, and I also rejected the idea that I lacked it. I suppose, in part, my feelings were hurt. And when it comes to notions of language and culture, I tend toward universalism – I assume that basic human emotions, for example, are the same for all humans.
So I attributed his statement regarding my lack of jeong as a simple issue of there being a language barrier – surely a truly bilingual person could identify the proper English equivalent, both in linguistic and cultural terms.
But now, several years later, I have begun to genuinely harbor reservations about my prior rejection. I find the workings of Korean jeong mysterious and impenetrable. It seems to be a hybrid of irrational loyalty and intense platonic love, with a strong seasoning of smarmy sentimentality. And I’ve come to accept that, as a Westerner, I probably “lack” it – in that I have no reductive mental category that encompasses these sorts feelings in simple conjuct.
When Mr Choi throws his arm around me at the staff volleyball game, that’s jeong. And when the staff take up a collection of cash to help my fellow teacher pay his outrageous electricity bill, that’s somehow also jeong. When a teacher admonishes a student to study harder, that might be jeong, too.
I’m hereby retracting my vote for Mr Obama. I was never what you might call an idealistic supporter – I’ve been pretty cynical about US politics for far too long. And actually, I was impressed, at first, by his apparent pragmatism, his calm demeanor, his capacity for compromise.
But when I decided to abandon my pointless third-partyism for Mr Obama in 2008, I was motivated by certain promises more than others. Not just the promise, in general terms, of a more intellectual, even cerebral, president, but also… I fully expected and counted on seeing him work hard to reverse Bush’s attacks on civil liberties and the never-ending jingoism.
Obama’s utter failure to even begin to reverse the civil liberties issues, his constant re-assertion of the Cheneyian imperial presidency, the continuation of Guantanamo despite explicit promises to close it even once arrived in office… these were deeply disappointing. But the interests-driven, ill-considered dive into yet another oil-state war has felt like a “last straw” – I can no longer support this man.
Can I unvote? Not that McCain would have been better – god, no. He’d have been much worse, I have zero doubt. But I’m going to go back into my third-party closet, now. And I remain content to be an expat.
I’ve written before about what a strange place Ilsan is. I’ve compared it to a space-station, because of its modern artificiality. I’ve described it as “Sim City” because of its regular and somewhat boring urban plan. Its upper-middle-class, highly educated and “aspirational” demographics make it rather unique in my experience of Korean places, too.
I went up over the weekend for a very brief visit to drop off my paperwork for my visa renewal with my new boss, for my new hagwon job that will start May 1. I was walking around this strange place that feels like “home.” It’s as different from Hongnong as Iowa is. It’s not even like the rest of Seoul, although I know there are other enclaves around Seoul, other “new cities,” that resemble Ilsan. But Ilsan seems unique because of its scale (more than half a million residents) and the vast regularity of its grid-like layout on basically flat land (in and of itself rather hard to find in Korea). Manhattan-on-the-rice-paddy.
I had a new insight, on Saturday, as regards my own strange “destiny” with respect to Ilsan. When I was young (a child) I would often draw maps of imaginary places. Ilsan, in fact, has some rather striking resemblances to the kinds of “designed” or “engineered” places that I often tried to create, based on my rather utopian-yet-gritty (if that’s possible), naive conception of urbanism – recall that I grew up in a small town and my relationship with cities was intense (I loved them even as a child) but limited (my parents did not love them).
So my destiny, in Ilsan, lies only in that it resembles a kind of “city as I imagined it” as opposed to being a “real” city. Perhaps this is also similar to (but not causally connected to) my strange feeling that Korean is a a “langauge as I imagined it” as opposed to a “regular” language, too. Not to deny the fundamental, external reality of either the Korean language or of the city of Ilsan. Just that they have certain striking predecessors in my imagination, and hence I feel a weird connection to them.
I dreamed last night that I was starting a new job. That's really logical, given that I've traveled to Ilsan to meet with my new boss to work out some paperwork on getting my visa renewed.
But in the dream, the new job was not my "real" new job. It was something like one of my old computer-related jobs: database design, business systems analysis, web-based application support. Nevertheless, the job was in Korea. In Ilsan. My new coworkers were Koreans, and they were showing me around the building where my new job was, and we were bowing to various bigwigs, per appropriate Korean custom.
And then they insisted that I see the mall attached to the building. We were walking around an Ilsan-like mall (like the one here called Western Dom), but my dream coworkers were my new coworkers at Hongnong, Ms Lee and Mr Goh, along with other various Hongnong teachers. Despite that, we were talking about databases and annoying end-users of data-intensive websites, and making sure that code prevents SQL injection, and how to make stored procedures effecient when you couldn't know which search parameters you were going to get ahead of time. Yes, that kind of thing. Although it seemed like they were insisting I should know more about Korean history, too.
But then, in the mall, some woman came up to us and said we should take a class about the mall. "A class? About the mall?" I asked. "Yes, there is so much to learn about this mall," she insisted, excitedly. So we went to the class, where we got pitched a neverending spiel about all the different stores and restaurants to be found in the mall. This was so boring, I woke up.
What… did I fall asleep with the television on? No.
Dreams are strange, and even when they appear to be meaningless, they nevertheless reek of some obscure meaning.
The church next-door to my current apartment (which is just across the school-yard from the school where I work) keeps chickens and ducks. The roosters here are very vocal. There was a reliable rooster or two that I could hear in the predawn hours at my last apartment, in Yeonggwang, but they were farther away. These are quite literaly located on the other side of my east-facing wall, in a little barnyard behind the church.
I've been a little bit puzzled by the idea of a church keeping chickens and ducks. Is this an economic undertaking? Is it a charity undertaking (i.e. housing for displaced parishoners' fowl)? Is it insteaad something related to the Sunday school? Regardless, I don't necessarily object. I heard roosters consistently during my years living "on the hill" in Highland Park, in Northeast Los Angeles. I like the counterpoint the ducks provide, too.
Tonight, I'm going to rush up to Ilsan, to try to sort out some paperwork related to securing a smooth transition to a new visa for my new employer, where I'll be starting May 1st. The end of my time at Hongnong Elementary is looming. It will be a bittersweet departure. Yesterday I felt so much joy and delight in the children's company, and I know I'll miss them.
I've developed a lot of strong, almost parental-feeling attachments to individual kids: hyper Jeong-an who never sits still, serious Ji-min who tries to direct the class, the two madcap Do-hyeons who both always volunteer for anything, sweet Ha-neul who sadly reported she had to leave class early, the princesses Ha-jin and Ye-won who gossipped about their homeroom teacher to me, shy Jae-won who showed off his new cellphone, assertive Hye-jeong who yelled "teacher!" because I was ignoring her, tiny Seo-yeon who didn't want to perform, manic Jae-uk who insisted on performing, earnest Hye-rim who grinned at her high score, judgmental Min-seo who frowned seriously, blue-skies-dreaming Na-hye who said "I'm so happy", ultra-competitive Hui-won who cried because the girls' team lost, helpful Eun-jin who always helps me clean up at the end of class … these are some of the ones that spring to mind from only yesterday's interactions. Mostly, they're current 2nd and 4th graders, with whom I've evolved very close interactions due to the afterschool program.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, here. But whatever.
I really like Radiohead. They recently released a new album. I went to their website last night, and paid for a legal download of the album in mp3 format. I’ve had a lot of appreciation for their business model, as it’s evolved, and I really see myself as mostly a “pirate due to circumstance” when it comes to music – which is to say, it’s troublesome being a resident of South Korea wanting to use US- or Europe-based legal music download sites. Admittedly, I haven’t tried in a few years – so laziness is a factor, too. But – anyway – I decided to buy a legal copy of the Radiohead album.
I did. I paid my 9 bucks. And I got a confirming email. And then the download didn’t work. The link sent me to somewhere in Japan. That didn’t help. I tried something else. It said my email wasn’t recognized. This morning, I monkeyed around a little bit on the website, looking for something resembling customer service.
Then I had a little epiphany. I had paid for my album. I could just download it now, guiltlessly. Within 10 minutes I had located a torrent and downloaded Radiohead’s The King of Limbs. Good album. Guilt-free piracy.
I awoke at 2:55 AM from a strange dream. I was trying to explain to some Korean coworkers that I bought and owned books of poetry. This seemed crucially important, somehow, yet I was unable to clearly communicate the idea. And looking into the dream from the moment of awaking, it seemed mostly an absurd undertaking.
My mother was there in the dream, too, although she said nothing. More oddly, my Minnesota friend Mark was there, and "playing a Korean" – at least, for the dream – and thus not understanding my linguistic efforts anymore than any of the others. The Koreans kept trying to change the subject of conversation to my age, my mysterious marital status, my teaching skills or my utterly inexplicable (to them) disinterest in consuming free food simply because it was free.
I felt a lot of anxiety after waking up. We had yet another hweh-shik last night, and things have been getting tense at my school: yet another, new crisis in the foreign-teacher-housing. This time, anyway, it's more linked to my new fellow-foreign-teacher than to me, but it's nevertheless unpleasant to be around and it's a constant reminder of the ways in which I, too, have felt so mistreated by my school's administration in matters of housing. I guess I could say that, lately, not a day goes by, these days, when the validity of my decision not to renew isn't constantly reaffirmed.
I'm worried that my school could probably easily find a way to throw some kind of obstacle up to my smooth transition to my new hagwon job that I've committed to for May. I don't want that to happen, but I can't help but attempt comment to my coworkers, when they ask, about my perception of the unfairness of things with respect to the housing issues (the details of which I'd rather not go into).
Somehow, these rather frustrating and vaguely fruitless conversations with coworkers, over concepts of fairness and ethical business practices, etc., of which I've been having quite a lot, lately, got translated in my dream into an effort to tell them about my habit of buying books of poetry. Both ultimately may boil down to something absurd.
A rooster is crowing. I don't mind that. Darkness before dawn. Cold apartment.
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by only following the smells my nose finds.”
This is #40 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
… 38. 내 눈으로 본 것만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다. “I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe in my own eyes to be right.” 39. 내 귀로들은 것만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다. “I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by my own ears to be right.” 40. 내 코로 맡은 냄새만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this fortieth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by only following the smells my nose finds.”
… but… but… those homemade tortillas I made yesterday with my illegally imported, well-traveled Mexican corn masa (manufactured in Texas, bought in an imported food shop in Queensland, smuggled into South Korea) smelled so delicious!
I made a cheese quesadilla. The Korean processed sliced cheese wasn’t very good – a kind of petrochemically-tinged decadence – but the corn-tasting tortillas were excellent.
Yesterday, before leaving work, my new main co-teacher, Ms Lee (no relation to my previous main co-teacher, Ms Lee) told me that we would have no class on Tuesday, because the kids were taking some kind of important test. This is common enough. So I was planning on coping with yet another day of “deskwarming” – so soon after getting back into the swing of things with regular classes.
When I got here this morning, she came over and told me that we had classes today after all. I had materials prepared, and so without comment I helped her get ready for class. She asked me, “How did you know the schedule was changed again? It seems like you already knew. I only found out last night by text message at home.”
I explained that I knew that the schedule would change again. She said, “How could you know?”
I answered, “This is Korea, so I just figured.”
She found this embarrassingly funny.
I think classes went fine, this morning. I love the new group of first-graders – who I knew in kindergarten last year. And the new second-graders are my old, beloved, hyper-rambunctious first-graders.
Meanwhile, the school’s administrative office is playing a lot of kafkaesque “imcompetent control and oblique obfuscation” games. I’m trying to ignore that. The kids are awesome.
I’ve been surfing a lot of visual arts and graphic design sites and blogs. One I found recently is called “love all this,” and there I found a link to a person who took 365 photos of star wars stormtrooper figurines (one a day for a year) and posted them to flickr. I began surfing through the pictures, and found myself inexplicably moved to laughter but also even poignancy and pathos.
Like any good visual narrative, it’s easy to “read between the lines” in the characters’ actions and postures, deducing feelings and mental states that obviously aren’t really there (since they’re just plastic toy figurines, after all). I found the whole thing genuinely compelling.
I have been utterly devoid of interesting or meaningful thoughts to blog about. My brain has been in one of its periodic “imagistic” phases, where I’m thinking a lot about visual arts, surfing “art” websites of various kinds, and being anti-textual. So I haven’t blogged, or even thought about blogging. Nothing I felt like saying. Such neglect.
Meanwhile, here is a photograph from my archives, I don’t think I’ve posted it before. Sometime last Spring, I think.
"Optimism and pessimism are buddies sitting together on the same sofa." – John McCrea, lead singer of the band Cake, overheard in an interview on NPR.
Cake is a very eclectic band. They can make songs I really like and others I abhor. But they're always rather cerebral, in a funky, alterna way. I'd never heard the lead singer interviewed before. He's an interesting guy.
