Today is election day in South Korea. The sign at right reads 투표소 [“polling place”].
My bilingual coworker summed up her attitude to these elections.
“I’ve made my decision!” she announced.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m not voting.”
I’m not sure what the turnout will be today – I’m going to guess it will be low. These are national parliamentary elections, but don’t include a vote for the president, which will happen in the fall – the legislative and presidential calendars are out of sync, here. The two main parties recently rebranded themselves, but they are the same as always: a roughly right wing ruling party of nationalists, now called 새누리당 [“New Frontier Party”] and a roughly left wing opposition party of liberals, now called 통합민주당 [“Unified Democrat Party”]. The current president, Lee Myung-bak, isn’t very popular, but his nationalist party remains so – that may have something to do with their recent rebranding. Both parties are currently led by women (picture below), which is striking in Korea’s historically ultra-patriarchal political system.
I predict that the left leaning democrats will gain seats in the legislature – currently they only hold 89 out of 300 – but not an outright majority. There are minor parties and if they get enough, the liberals might be able to block some of the nationalists’ efforts, in coalition. But the president holds huge power – so the really meaningful election will be in the fall.
I’ve commented before that I don’t read books “normally.” I do read a great deal, but I have a short attention span, I skip around. I’m almost always non-linear in my approach. Many people complain about this – not about that I’m doing it, but that it seems to be a common affliction, these days. People like to blame the internet, and blogs, and e-readers, and things like that. I don’t think I have such an excuse – I was reading books via what I termed my “random access method” long before the internet even existed. I read non-fiction non-linearly even when I was in high school, in the early 1980’s. I would pick up an interesting history book, and I would read a page here, and a page there. At the next sitting, I would do the same thing. If I recognized a page, I would read some other page. The book was considered “done” at the point in time when I recognized all the pages I tried. More or less.
With novels, I still at least try to read linearly. But since I rarely use book-marks or other current-page-recording methods (e.g. the turned-down page corner, which I view as wanton and profoundly anti-book, from the standpoint of books-as-physical-objects), I often end up re-reading pages or even chapters of novels as well, or, on the other hand, missing chapters, too, as I flail about trying to find where I’d left off.
I do read a great deal online, lately. I can count on one hand the books which I’ve “finished” – such as it is, by my odd methods – in the last year or so.
So I’ve been feeling extremely “retro” in that I’m about 80% finished with a book that I’ve been pursuing in essentially linear, front-to-back fashion. I can’t even say why I’ve managed it. It’s just working out that way. The book is A Review of Korean History, Vol. 1: Ancient / Goryeo Era. It’s badly translated, and there are parts where the nationalist “Korea-can-do-no-wrong” subtext is annoying, but I think that’s part of why I like it, too – the Konglishy syntax and “view-from-inside” perspective means the book reads like a particularly ambitious essay from one of my sincere-yet-naive middle-schoolers.
Anyway, I’m mentioning it because of a passage that, unexpectedly, made me laugh. I’ll quote: “Cheok Jungyeong abruptly changed sides and banded with other subjects such as Kim Hyang, Yi Gongsu, and Jeong Jisang to arrest Yi Jagyeom and send him off to exile in Yeonggwang in 1127. This proved to be the end of the Inju Yi clan that had been at the center of power for some seven generations.”
I laughed, of course, because of the phrase I put in bold, above. I had a year of exile in Yeonggwang, myself. It seems that even 1000 years ago, Yeonggwang was a backwater, exile kind of place. That seemed funny, to me. I could just imagine poor Yi Jagyeom, former prime minister to the Goryeo king, coping with a dumpy Yeonggwang apartment and being forced to eat Gulbi every day and growing tired of it. I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t like that – but that’s what I visualized. And it makes me think it might make for a funny episode in my never-to-be-completed (erm, always-in-fact-barely-started) novelization of my year in Yeonggwang.
I hate my cellphone. I got it because when my old cellphone died two years ago, I just took the cheapest phone on offer (that could go with my particular contract) at the cellphone store in Yeonggwang. But now that ALL of my students have iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, I'm beginning to feel like a luddite. Some of my students asked me, earlier, when I was going to get a new 3G or 4G phone. I lied, and said I was happy with my "zero G dumbphone." Which made them laugh. But I'm not happy with it. Then, I saw an article at Atlantic Wire about "Dumbphone Pride." It's interesting, as some of the reasons in that article for avoiding the smartphone bandwagon resonate with me. Most notably, I, too, worry about "addiction," and, also, the cost of my current phone's usage plan is quite unbeatable – for 11 bucks a month I get more text and calling capacity than I'm capable of using. Most smartphone plans in Korea are going to run upwards of 50 or 80 bucks or more a month, and I'd probably find myself finding out I was capable of using more data than allowed under those plans, too.
In fact, I have not been much of an "early adopter" of cellphones – I was late to the cellphone bandwagon, having gotten my first in 2004. But in some other technologies, I have been a proud early adopter: I was using word processing in the late 1970's (Apple ][) email in the late 1980's (before the world wide web existed). I taught myself HTML and designed and posted my first webpage in 1995. It was even useful – it was a means of communicating with my students at UPenn, where I was a grad student.
I think if everything goes smoothly with my renewal at Karma (about which I'm feeling anxiety at the moment), I'll end up shopping for and getting a new smartphone. I really want a phone with a dictionary, for one thing. And having the internet in your pocket is clearly useful – I see my students using it all the time, both recreationally but even in educational ways, looking up words, finding pictures or information that pertain to classroom discussions, etc.
I was collateralized once before – in the advertising sense, where my image got included in advertising material. It doesn’t bother me.
I like the picture this time – I’m deploying my alligator.
There’s a write up in an Ilsan area “trade publication” of some kind, about the hagwon biz. There’s a picture of the cover of the magazine, at right. The title is “학부모를 위한 최고의 명문학원 가이드,” which would roughly translate as Guide for Parents to the Best Hagwon [after-school academies] in Ilsan. The magazine is distributed at public school parent meetings.
For some reason that our boss doesn’t understand, Karma English Hagwon is the first write-up in the guide. This is extremely lucky, from an advertising perspective. There’s a two page write up on Karma Academy, with yours-blogging-truly, alligator to hand, on the second page.
Here’s a scan of the two pages. You can see our entire staff (yes, it’s a small hagwon). There were a bunch of children down the hall behind me yelling when we took the picture – because they were all in their classrooms unsupervised. Very exciting moment.
The picture of me with the alligator is slightly ironic – because that is perhaps my single most difficult student there, facing the alligator. You can click the below image if you wish to embiggen it.
Frankly, “Riceball & Tortilla” sounds like the ill-conceived name of a 1970’s TV dramedy with a politically-incorrect ethnic twist, perhaps in the buddy-cop genre (e.g. Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey).
Instead, it’s the name of a fast-food joint in my neighborhood. One of my coworkers brought me something from there – a 주먹밥 (which I’ve blogged before) but coated in something vaguely resembling corn meal instead of seaweed – I guess that’s the “tortilla” part of the name. In Korean, it’s named 주먹밥&또띠아 전문점 [ju-meok-bap & tto-tti-a jeon-mun-jeom = riceball & “tortilla” specialty shop].
Here’s a picture of the container. I ate the actual riceball before taking a picture – sorry.
It’s not bad. I like the kind with seaweed on the outside, better.
Yesterday I went with Curt to go on a small hike up a mountain (well, really just a hill). His daughter came along, who’s just entering 4th grade. The mountain we chose is called 심학산 [simhaksan]. It has a view of North Korea, like many mountains around here – it was hazy and not very distinct but I’m always very aware of it – I guess it’s just my geographical interest kicking in.
After the mountain we went to a brand new giant mall and had dinner and bought his little one-year-old a Pororo-branded toy. It was fun. Here are some pictures. I didn’t get a picture of the boy with the toy. I should have.
This is near the top of the mountain.
Curt and I.
A view southeast, toward Ilsan. Somewhere near the center of that vast cluster of buildings is my apartment and workplace.
Here I am looking dazed with the community known as Geumchon hidden directly behind me. Geumchon is important because it’s where I lived in 1991 when I was in Korea, as a soldier in the US Army.
And here’s the striking view looking North – I’ve added some useful labels to this picture – you can click the picture to enlarge it.
Anywhere in Northern Gyeonggi Province, if you go hiking on the hills and mountains, you will run across military structures – fox-holes, fortified hill-tops, bunkers and concrete tank traps and hidden installations. Here’s a covered “tank-parking-space” amid the trees on the side of the mountain.
Curt’s daughter (and my sometime student at Karma, too), looking focused and tired on her way down the mountain. She was angry because Curt had promised a snack at the top of the mountain and he’d forgotten, and she failed to complain about it. We had a snack when we got back down to the bottom.
Here’s a turtle-based monument seen along the trail.
At the mall.
Lurking in the dusky haze beyond the freeway interchange, there lies the Han River Estuary and the point of North Korea. I wonder what the Northerners think, watching this massive monument to blatant brand-name consumerism through their high-powered binoculars.
Yesterday after work I took the subway in to Itaewon to meet my friend Basil, who’d recently returned from a holiday in Turkey. We went to a Middle Eastern restaurant there, of course. I like hearing Basil speaking Arabic with people in Seoul. It feels very international.
We stopped at the food store there that sells things like coriander powder and split peas and lentils, and I stocked up. We wandered around the neighborhood because Basil was looking for the hotel where he wanted to stay – I guess he’d been there before but forgot where it was. There are a lot of interesting halal grocers and restaurants and things on the side streets to the south east of Itaewon station. I said… “it’s like visiting New York.” Then, as an afterthought, looking at the uninspiring architecture, I said, “Or maybe Newark, New Jersey.”
I came home last night and made some soup and have had a very lazy Sunday today.
Here’s a picture of dusk from the hill in Itaewon, looking toward Yongsan.
What I’m listening to right now.
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, “Down From Dover,” 1972.
Originally written and performed by Dolly Parton. And riddle me this – why does Lee Hazlewood have the same singing voice as Mr Snuffleupagus?
Chaeyon wrote some ideas for a recent debate topic. The first idea is pretty good. The second kind of trails off into nothingness. And then, at the bottom of the paper, in Korean, I found the following:
느허허허허허헣헝ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ주제어려워요
Keeping in mind that “ㅠ” is the local emoticon for tears, you could read this as “neu-heo-heo-heo-heo-heo-heong-heong-<tears>ju-je-eo-ryeo-wo-yo.” I’m pretty sure the first part is just onomatopoeia for crying noise, cf. English “whaaaaaa.” Then you have the <tears> emoticon, and then you have “topic is difficult.”
I appreciate that this is true. Sometimes I push them pretty hard with the topics in the debate class. I like when the kids keep their sense of humor about it.
In other news, my dreaded PM2 cohort taught me a game today, which was fascinating. Apparently, it’s mainly an adult drinking game, but kids have created an alcoholless implementation. Or maybe it was vice-versa, originally. The game is called 눈치게임 [nun-chi-ge-im]. nun-chi seems to mean something like “looks” or “signs” (as used in the expression “he showed a sign of his intention…”). ge-im is konglish – it’s the word “game” in Korean pronunciation and spelling.
The game is hard to explain. It’s a psych-out kind of game. It works great in a group of 10 or so, as I saw demonstrated. One person stands up, saying “one.” Another stands, saying “two.” A third, “three.” And so on. Easy enough. But there’s no rule about who is supposed to go when. And if two people happen to stand up at once, then those two lose points (or take drinks, in the drinking game) and the game starts over. If you’re the last person to stand and speak, you also lose – so there’s incentive not to be last. But there’s incentive to not be simultaneous with anyone else, too. So…
Everyone is watching everyone else very closely. One person leaps up, “one.” Another, “two.” Long wait. Suddenly, two leap up, “three!” They lose. Everyone sits down. The counting starts over.
I love this game. It would make a good ice-breaker party game, obviously. Alcohol or no.
Like everything in Korea, there’s an online version – see picture.
그림의 떡 picture-GEN ddeok [like a] picture of a rice-cake
This means “pie in the sky” – which is to say, something you cannot have but fantasize about.
So that’s proverb for the day. Here’s a picture of ddeok (Korean style rice-cake) – there are thousands of different types and styles – this one looks rather delicious.
The weather felt spring-like, today. Above freezing, breezy – still cold, I guess, but a different feeling about it.
I have been in a sort of state of hibernation, these last months, I guess. Or avoidance. I came home to my apartment this evening, finished off some leftover borshch, watched some music videos on youtube.
I've started reading a book of Korean history. I was reading the introduction, where the author (a Korean historian? – the book is clearly a translation from Korean) explained in one paragraph that because Korea has four distinct seasons, the Korean people are strong. Does a Korean historian actually believe this? How does this pass for historiography? Somehow this concept is an article of faith among the Korean people, which they learn in elementary school and which they all believe, in somewhat the same way that Italians believe in the Holy Trinity. Personally, I find them about equally plausible as matters of fact.
바지락 [ba-ji-rak] is a small clam. Koreans love seafood, and I’ve been getting adventurous with the instant-foods aisle in the supermarket (see e.g. my recent post on nurungji). So I bought some ramen-looking stuff (that also claims to be lo-calorie and not fried – “notfrying” in English on the label) that was called 바지락. Last night, when I opened the package, I was surprised to find some actual vacuum-packed clams! And it cooked up pretty delicious.
Here’s a tear-down (i.e. pictures).
I’m not going to make any assertions or assumptions about healthfulness – I’m sure it’s packed with preservatives and MSG and who knows what else. But it was nevertheless pretty tasty.
I wrote once before about the Korean flavor called “누룽지” [nu-rung-ji = scorched rice] It was a time when I went through a short-time obsession with scorched-rice-flavored candy. Recently, I was wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, and beheld the product shown in the photo at right: “옛날 구수한 누룽지” (yet-nal gu-su-han nu-rung-ji = “old time savory scorched rice”]. It was on the same shelf as the multitudes of instant soups and ramens, so I adduced it was an instant product in the just-add-hot-water variety.
In the time since having scorched-rice candy, a little over a year ago, I have also had the experience of having “real” nurungji. Here’s how it works. Cooked rice is often served in heated stone or ceramic bowls – sufficiently heated that it burns onto the sides and bottom of the containers. This is “scorched rice.” Once you’ve managed to eat all the rice out of the heated bowl, you pour boiling water into the bowl and use a spoon to scrape and stir everything around unsticking the scorched rice from the bottom and sides of the bowl. Rather than throw this away (as might be done in the US), this soupy substance eaten as a delicacy.
I guess the flavor grows on you. It’s kind of porridgy. And I’ve always liked porridges of various sorts. I like that it’s sufficiently esteemed in Korea to have turned into an instant food. I bought some, and had it, and it’s grown on me. Little packets of dried out, pre-cooked, scorched rice. You add hot water, and it’s a delicious snack.
Reading the ingredients, it consists of nothing but rice (product of Korea!) and salt (not over-salted, either). I’ve bought this product several times, now. I eat it just as you might eat a bowl of hot oatmeal. Sometimes I Americanize it into a true breakfast-style porridge, by adding butter or brown sugar (I’m sure this would utterly horrify Koreans). Other times I have it with a side of kimchi and drink oksususuyeomcha (corn-tassle tea), more Korean-style. Welcome to the world of Korean comfort-food.
I have first grade student named Ye-dam who doesn’t like to draw pictures. This is quite unusual. Who ever heard of a first grader who didn’t like to draw pictures?
Today, however, she showed that despite not enjoying drawing pictures, she has a highly functional imagination. We were doing our weekly activity where I have them make a story (based on a fairly structured frame that I give to them) and then draw a picture. Her story was: “What’s in the skeleton? A zombie is in the skeleton. A 투명인간 is in the skeleton.” Her illustration was a cursory stick figure with another stick figure inside it. I examined her story and picture.
“Is this the skeleton?” I said, pointing at the big stick figure. She nodded.
“It’s pretty good,” I said – because I believe in positive feedback, regardless of the quality of stick-figure skeletons. Ye-dam really likes skeletons.
“What’s this, then?” I asked, pointing at the smaller stick figure.
“Zombie,” she said, as if it were obvious.
“So,” I asked, not sure how to continue. Tentatively, I asked, “Where’s the 투명인간 [tu-myeong-in-gan]?” I didn’t know what a 투명인간 is.
“Teacher!” she exclaimed, exasperated. “투.. 명.. 인.. 간..” As if enunciating it carefully would make the meaning more clear to me. There was then a heated conversation between Ye-dam and some other students, the gist of which was that, “silly, teacher, doesn’t know what 투명인간 is.”
“Right,” I said, encouragingly.
Ye-dam sighed a heavy sigh, realizing she was going to have to explain this to me.
She talks to herself, sometimes. She thought outloud, in Korean. “Hmm, how’s this? 투명인간?” She proceeded to draw a very elaborate and detailed figure of a person. And then she erased it.
“보지? [See?]”
I shook my head. I thought she’d changed her mind.
“투명인간!” Pointing at the erased figure.
I shook my head. Confused.
She sighed. She then drew another elaborate and detailed and interesting figure. It took her some time. I was patient. Then she erased it. And pointed.
“볼 수 없어… [can’t see…]” she said.
It dawned on me, suddenly. “Invisible man?”
She and the other kids all shrugged. They gazed at me with cute, blank faces. They didn’t know English, either, right?
I drew a stick figure on the blackboard using dotted lines. And lightly erased it.
Everyone nodded. Ye-dam was very excited. She was hopping up and down.
I said, “You draw very good invisible people.” She grinned shyly.
We admired her drawing together. The stick figures, and the 투명인간.
Cake, “Motorcade of Generosity.” I guess it’s a little bit wild to have this song shuffle around entirely randomly on my mp3 player (from my 6000+ collection of songs that I rotate randomly on and off of the mp3 player). To have the song intoning “I bombed Korea” while walking to work in Korea. Well, you know. Weird.
It’s about the Korean War, obviously. Cake is a pretty cool musical group, too.
Here are the lyrics.
I bombed Korea every night. My engine sang into the salty sky. I didn’t know if I would live or die. I bombed Korea every night.
I bombed Korea every night. I bombed Korea every night. Red flowers bursting down below us. Those people didn’t even know us. We didn’t know if we would live or die. We didn’t know if it was wrong or right. I bombed Korea every night.
And so I sit here at this bar. I’m not a hero. I’m not a movie star. I’ve got my beer. I’ve got my stories to tell, But they won’t tell you what it’s like in hell.
Red flowers bursting down below us. Those people didn’t even know us. We didn’t know if we would live or die. We didn’t know if it was wrong or right. We didn’t know if we would live or die. I bombed Korea every night.
I’ve written before about how frustrated I’ve become trying to find Korean television dramas with English subtitles that I can watch on my computer. It really does help me learn Korean to watch, but I’m just not able to really get enough of what’s going on to watch without subtitles, yet.
I’ve had a couple of false starts, where I find a program and watch a few episodes, but then I can’t get the rest of the episodes with subtitles, so I’ve taken to finding shows and downloading all the episodes before watching them. What I end up finding becomes somewhat random – i.e. I’m not really watching shows because they appeal to me but rather because they’re the ones I can find.
One show I started watching recently because I’d gotten all the episodes is called “마녀유희” [ma-nyeo yu-hui = “Witch Yoo-hui” in official translation]. It’s a romantic comedy series (or really, mini-series in US parlance) from 2007. A too-young female business executive (heir to some rich family presumably) has a bad personality and this ne’er-do-well medical-school dropout (and wannabe French chef) does a pygmalion on her.
That should be enough to get the gist of the story. You can read an atrociously written summary at the wikithing. The whole connection to an actual witch-based fairy tale is tenuous at best (mostly played up in the intro to each episode). I had been hoping for something brilliantly conceived like the Hansel and Gretel meta-tale movie I liked so much a few years back.
But, so… I’ve been watching that. It’s entertaining, anyway.
My students alleged that I resemble pop star 임재범 [im-jae-beom, which he himself prefers to romanize as Yim Jae Beum (which is, in my opinion, a truly misleading and horrible way to romanize it, but, well, with names there’s a lot of freedom on this matter in Korea)].
I don’t really think I do.
In researching it (i.e. typing his name into a Korean search engine and seeing what pops up), I think it must just be the glasses and the haircut, more than anything else. Perhaps the rather exaggerated way he changes his facial expressions as he sings – I do that a little bit during my classroom antics. I certainly don’t sing like him, though.
I live about 10 miles from the North Korean border. Mostly, I can totally ignore this fact. Today, while I was walking to work, I was reminded, as I saw not one but two Korean military helicopters passing overhead, in the cold blue sky. Understandably, the Korean military is probably doing things.
The Onion conveyed the hereditary Stalinist, Kim Jeong-eun’s insecurities.
Meanwhile, yesterday I had fun with first-graders. Three of my phonics kids drew self-portraits on the blackboard, during the break. I thought it was cute. They also drew Christmas trees for me, later.
What I’m listening to right now.
The Youngsters, “Smile (Sasha Remix from Involver).” Euroelectronica, I guess.
Walking home in the dark, it was snowing. First real snow, I would say – the other was a false alarm. This is the real stuff.
Side observation (or trivial pondering of the day): why do Koreans with foreign cars (like BMW’s and Chevys) drive worse than Koreans with local marques?
I awoke this morning and looked out my window, speculatively… facing the day, as it were. There was snow. “엄ㅁㅁㅁㅁㅁ… 첫눈” So I leaned out my window and took a picture of the buses in the middle bus-lanes of 중앙로 (Central Avenue, the street I used to call Broadway because I couldn’t figure out its name, before they put up helpful western-style signs). “First snow.”
When I was a child, I had not one but several traumatic experiences around learning to swim. There was the rather unenlightened “throw them in the deep end and they’ll figure it out” approach that I got around age 7 or 8 at the Humboldt State University pool for some community-based children’s swimming class. And there was an event a few years later, I think, at the pool at College of the Redwoods, where some people in my extended family had taken me, where I ended up cracking my face open and filling the pool with blood and getting stitches later. Finally, feeling the deficit of my swimming ability, I enrolled, on my own initiative, in a private beginning swimming class one summer at the Arcata community pool. After 8 weeks of flailing around, my instructor pronounced me that most unusual of cases: I was, apparently, “unteachable.” Though this last was just a wounding of my ego, it was perhaps the most traumatic of all.
The consequences of these experiences were twofold. The first, obviously, is that I retain some anxiety around swimming, to this day. I did manage, in fact, to pass a “tread water” test while in the Army, and I feel confident that I could perhaps manage to get across a short stretch of water if I had to, in an emergency. But I’ve never enjoyed swimming recreationally, and I’m not a confident swimmer. The second is less obvious: whenever I feel anxiety, that smell of chlorinated pool water makes an appearance, like an olefactory memory but just as vivid as any visual or aural one, if not more so.
This is perhaps interesting – it’s like a sort of special-case synesthesia that comes to me in moments of despair and high anxiety, which, thankfully, don’t hit me that often these days. In high school during exams, I would smell chlorine. In university, while struggling to write papers during all-nighters, I would smell chlorine. Once, when I asked a certain someone on a date, I smelled chlorine.
Today, I had a weird experience. It was what you might call a case of empathetic anxiety-related synesthesia.
We are giving all the students at the hagwon special year-end “level tests,” which is because, effective with the new year, they technically move up a grade level. So the hagwon needs to re-place them in their appropriate ability level. This is especially important for the students moving up from the elementary curriculum to the middle-school curriculum.
The level test, being a level test, is astoundingly difficult. I’d say it’s almost SAT-ish. These are Korean kids who sometimes struggle to emit a coherent English sentence about how they feel, under relaxed conditions. For these… well, it’s basically just gobbledygook to some of them. Specifically, the PN반. PN is the lowest ability middle-school level at Karma. Don’t ask me what PN stands for – something involving “Pioneers,” I think.
When I went in to monitor their test-taking experience, already in progress, I swear several of them were in tears. Others had long given up and were sleeping, face-planted at their desks, with more than an hour still remaining of test time.
I tried to rouse their enthusiasm, and few of the more communicative ones just said, “oh. very, very hard.” Heavy sighs all around.
Several of the students were drawing pictures on the test paper. One was using his pencil as a random number generator (to give him the answers), by spinning it and seeing which point of the compass it indicated (this is a near-universal test-taking strategy in Korea, The Land of the Morning Multiple-Choice Test).
I had this moment of deep, deep empathy. I realized that if I were confronted with a test of the Korean Language at the same rough level as the test these kids were facing (and given that I long ago concluded that I was a PN반-type student of Korean, and not one of the more advanced ones), I would, even at 46 years of age, be in tears, too. And I don’t even have to worry about getting into a good high-school so I can get into a good university so I can get a good job so I can be successful so I can fulfill my obligations to my family and, most importantly, to my ancestors.
Watching my students tugging at their hair, playing with their pencils, making red sleep-marks on their cheeks by sleeping against the corner of the desk, I felt rising up in me the most profound empathy. It wasn’t fair!
And then I smelled that chlorinated water smell. Perhaps for one of the few times in my life, it came to me not because of my own anxiety and pain and despair but because of an awareness of those feelings in those around me.
Maybe… it’s like being the kind of person who cries at the movies. Maybe.
Yuri Irsenovich Kim (the name he was born with) has died.
I assume that this event, the death of the dear leader in the next country over from here, will have some kind of consequence for my life here. Not sure what – I noticed the exchange rate taking a turn for the worse, immediately. There’s economic uncertainty, of course.
But, although the South Korean stock market plunged, South Korean defense stocks jumped 15% on the news, according to Bloomberg. Hmm. Haha.
Tonight, leaving work, I said to my coworker Danny these exact words:
“수고하세요. Don’t work too hard.”
Then suddenly, I realized this was incredibly funny. You see, each, in their respective languages (Korean and English), is a conventionalized way of saying goodbye to coworkers who are staying – but they must reflect some deep cultural differences, because their meaning is exactly opposite, and combining them was an act of pure cognitive dissonance.
“수고하세요” [sugohaseyo] means, roughly, “take pains, put in an effort, work hard.” It’s a typical thing you tell colleagues when you’re leaving them. “Don’t work too hard” is the sort of phatic, leaving-work phrase that I’ve used with late-staying colleagues during most of my working life, in English.
It’s an interesting cultural difference on display.
What I’m listening to right now.
Basement Jaxx, “Where’s your head at.” The video is freaking awesome, too.
“Today is Pepero Day Eve,” answered one of the students, creatively. We had recently discussed the fact that Halloween comes from Hallow’s Eve, meaning the day before All Saint’s Day (November 1).
Actually, today must be some kind of “Pepero Millenium” as one of my students put it. I would like to coin the term Peperocalypse: 11/11 in the year 2011. That’s 11/11/11, right?
Depth of fall. But the weather was hot today. “Indian summer,” that used to be called, in USland. Still called that? I don’t know… I’m feeling out of touch with my own culture.
Easy day of teaching: two classes with the TP2 kids – easy group to get along with. Smart. Interested. Sometimes tired.
I’m just sleeping a lot. Sick. Fever.
What I’m listening to right now.
New track from Jane’s Addiction (recently re-formed), “Irresistible Force.”
I found, in my local supermarket, for the first time ever, grapefruit. From California. Labelled as 자몽 [ja-mong], which I think is a Korean neologism for grapefruit – the dictionary gives the Konglishy 그레이프프루트 [geureipeupeuruteu]. In the dictionary, 자몽 is given as meaning citron, which is a different kind of citrus altogether. But regardless, this is the first time I’ve ever seen grapefruit in the produce aisle anywhere in Korea. I bought some – because I love grapefruit. So much for living on local food, low carbon footprint, right? I made some pasta with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and garlic, and had dinner. And I cut sections of grapefruit and ate them as dessert. Kind of a boring life I have, I know.
I was watching this Korean drama, but the sites I habitually use to download English subtitled versions of the dramas are rapidly disappearing – the copyright police seem to be active. So I was left hanging, unable to watch the rest of the series. I’m annoyed by this – the pay site that had subtitles was so horrible (streaming at very low speeds and quality such that the shows were essentially impossible to watch) I quit my membership. If anyone reading this has advice on where to find subtitled Korean TV materials, please, please help me.
Saturday night my friend Basil was visiting up from Gwangju, where he now works, and we went to that Russian place he introduced me to. I had borsht and svekolny (beet/garlic salad). It was really good. I wonder where one can find beets in Korea? I want to make my own borsht, but borsht without beets is sacrilegious. I bought some brown rye bread from the Russian bakery in the same neighborhood there – the clerk speaking Russian and me speaking Korean, and sort of communicating – and I had some of that, toasted, as breakfast.
Walking from work yesterday, I had my camera. I took some pictures of fall-colored trees. The weather was humid and overcast but summer’s heat is gone. It drizzled a little bit.
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.” – Charles Baudelaire.
The picture below is a redwood tree growing in the Juyeop Park esplanade. It’s a Chinese-origin dawn redwood, that loses its leaves (needles) in the winter. A strange plant, but seeing them (they’re all over Ilsan) always make me think of my childhood in Humboldt.
Work was long today. I had 8 classes, which is the maximum possible under the scheduling system used. There were good, bad, indifferent – as usual. It’s pretty tiring, though, but I felt positive at the end of the day. I took some pictures walking to work – not sure why, just a random impulse. Here’s a view of where I work. It’s the building with the bright yellow sign on the top floor (5th floor), across the street, a little bit left of the centerline of the photo. The sign says 카르마 [kareuma = karma]. Note that I’m standing in front of my previous Ilsan place-of-work.
I recently ran across a Time magazine article about South Korea’s hagwon industry (“Kids, stop studying so hard!”). It even mentions my city of Ilsan by name.
In some ways, it’s a pretty good introduction to the hagwon industry. It makes several points and observations that have been echoing around my skull in other contexts – most notably, it points out that other countries near the top of the achievement list in education, such as Finland, manage to do so without testing their children into submission.
But that connects to another point the article makes – that the hagwon system is, in fact, much older than Korea’s modernization – there were private “cram schools” in a Confucian mold even in medieval Korea, to help the kids of low- and mid-level aristocrats enter the civil service.
But that connects to a point I’ve been thinking about that the article doesn’t mention: in a Foucauldian sense, the hagwon system might be viewed as a sophisticated and highly successful means of social control (this blog post’s title references the philospher’s work that I obliquely have in mind). Perhaps forcing high proportions of the country’s youth into perpetual states of anxiety and sleep deprivation not only achieves those remarkable and famous South Korean suicide rates, but also guarantees a sort of social quietude that is the envy of many other countries. I’m speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek, of course.
Four thousand, three hundred and forty-five years ago, in early October, the gates of Heaven opened over the White-Headed Mountain.
A Heavenly Regent (Hwanung) had asked that his father, the Lord of Heaven (Hwanin), grant him a beautiful peninsula to rule over, because he had seen that the people in that land had become badly behaved and he felt sorry for the place. At the holy White-Headed Mountain (Baekdusan) in the north of the peninsula, near a holy sandalwood tree, the Heavenly Regent established a heavenly city with his three chancellors, named Wind, Rain and Cloud, and 3000 followers.
There were a tiger and a bear living together in a cave on the mountain, and they saw the Heavenly Regent’s city and were desiring to become human, and so they would pray each day at the sandalwood tree. Finally, the Heavenly Regent called the bear and tiger into audience with him, and told them that if they would do as he said, they could become human.
He gave them garlic and weeds (like daisies and mugwort) to eat, and told them to take only these items deep into their cave and wait 100 days, and they could become human. The tiger and bear went into the cave, but the tiger quickly grew tired of only eating garlic and weeds, and gave up his hope to be human and fled the cave. The bear persevered, however, and after 101 days, she awoke to discover she’d become a beautiful woman. She emerged from the cave and returned to the sandalwood tree.
Now that she’d become human, she wished to have a child, but her husband the tiger had abandoned her due to his lack of patience. So, again she would pray at the sandalwood tree, and after a time, the Heavenly Regent took her as a wife and she became pregnant and bore a child, who was named Sandalwood (Dangun), which also means Altar Prince.
The Prince Sandalwood moved to the Flat Land (Pyeongyang) and founded a city he named Morning City (Asadal). The kingdom was named the Morning Calm (Choseon).
More than four thousand years later, on October 3rd each year, the people of Morning Calm, who are the descendants of Prince Sandalwood, and who also call themselves the Great Nation (Han or Khan), memorialize the opening of Heaven by taking a day off from work.
Well… within 2 miles of it. And I was on a hill, so I could see North Korea easily.
Lots of people know that my Korean “hometown” of Ilsan is quite close to North Korea – the northwest suburbs of Seoul have burgeoned over the decades to the point that they basically touch the DMZ in some places. So the North Korean border is about 15 km from my apartment in a line pointing northwest, and it’s reachable on the local bus system.
My friend Peter came to visit because today is a holiday (more on that in a later post, maybe). We took the #200 bus that stops a few blocks from my apartment building toward Gyoha, and after about 40 minutes we got off at 통일공원 (Unification Park), a neighborhood on a point of land that is the spot where the Imjin River joins the Han River and the opposite bank is in North Korea.
There’s a museum and “observatory” there (통일전망대), where you can look through coin operated binoculars and watch the socialists going about their difficult lives in their cozy concrete burghs.
I find these “flexion points” of our global civilization fascinating. It’s an uncrossable border, demarcated by barbed wire fences and fox holes and guard towers and, probably, land mines and hidden weapons caches, too. This is not the sort of border one crosses for an afternoon. But it’s eerie how close it is – a local bus ride from my home is an utterly alien world, two miles distant across a river.
We walked around a lot, because finding the entrance to the observatory/museum area turned out to be a bit challenging. We walked on some trails in the woods, and there were foxholes and concrete and brick barricades snaking through the hillsides as if randomly. I speculated that, for all I knew, I’d dug one of those foxholes myself, 20 years ago, while on some field-exercise or another as part of my infantry support company of mechanics, as part of the US Army stationed in Paju County along the DMZ. I didn’t have a clear recollection of all the various places where we encamped and trained and made foxholes and pretended to battle insidious communists. I wasn’t marking them on a map – I suspected that would have made my commanding officer suspicious.
Here are some pictures.
Here’s the #200 bus, that was very crowded because of the holiday. A woman had vomited in the aisle behind us, and we missed our stop and got off at the next one and walked back, which is partly why we got turned around as far as finding the proper entrance to the place.
We saw golden fields of rice.
We walked down a country lane in search of the observatory.
We saw a wealthy-person’s brand new house constructed in a traditional style.
We saw a statue of a man pontificating.
We saw treeless hills of North Korea.
We looked down the Han River westward towards its mouth. Right bank (north) is North Korea, and the Left Bank (south) is South Korea. Because of how the river snakes, jogging north, then south, then north again, you are seeing layers of South and North. The most distant mountains are Ganghwa Island, which is South Korean, but the mid-ground jut of land from the right (the interestingly denuded hills) is North Korea.
We looked back down the Han River southeast, toward Seoul and Ilsan. I live within the scope of this picture, somewhere (Ilsan is the very urban skyline area to the right in the panorama, disappearing behind the little hill).
We posed with North Korea in the background.
We saw a mock-up of a North Korean class room in the museum (note pictures of Kim Il-seong and Kim Jong-il in upper right above blackboard).
We saw a man sleeping in the grass beside the road.
We received important advice from a trash receptacle.
I had some computer problems over the weekend. Or rather, on Friday… I experienced the notorious blue-screen-of-death on my little Asus EeePC netbook, which runs Windows 7. It’s the first time I had one on this machine – I had, in fact, come to believe that Microsoft had done away with the infamous crash-o-matic indicator with the new operating system, because I’d never seen it before. But lo, there it was.
This made me worried. I managed to recover the little netbook, but I felt a dilemma. I rely on having a computer a lot. More than just for going online – in fact, I spend a lot of time on my netbook off line, and I’m pretty OK with having to cope with lack of internet at home, as I learned the hard way during my struggles with internetlessness in Yeonggwang last year (although obviously I ranted about it quite a bit). I do writing on my computer. Not good writing. Not writing-to-be-happy about, but it’s a compulsive exercise.
Until last year, I’ve always had two computers. Well, not always, but at least in the most recent milennium. The idea being, that if I had a crash, I’d go to the backup. Well, last year, my “main” laptop, an old Sony Vaio that I bought the month before coming to Korea in 2007, suffered an ignoble retirement. It has 3 operating systems installed on it – Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003. I dropped it, and I guess I scrambled the Vista boot sector somehow. I can still boot it up, even now, but using Linux is virtually useless for surfing the Korean internet (although that’s changing rapidly, with the unexpected – to me – success of the iPhone and iPad and the various Android-running clones of those products, because Android is, after all, just Linux). The linux boot has got some other minor issues, too, involving the Korean-language input thingy, which I’ve been too lazy to resolve. The Server 2003 boot still works (and I use it when I’m searching for some old file I’ve misplaced, sometimes), but it never played well with the graphics card in the laptop, with the consequence being that it is only capable of presenting a bare-bones 800×600 half-size window on the already non-huge laptop screen. The upshot of all this, I consider the old “main” laptop to be dead.
So my backup computer, since my hiatus in the US in the fall of 2009, has been this $295 Asus netbook that I bought at Best Buy with a gift certificate. It became my new main computer. It’s very low-grade, but perfectly adequate for my writing and for doing things on the internet, if rather pokey running multiple applications, etc. I had to abandon my computer games habit, but that’s hardly been detrimental, in most respects.
Anyway, getting the blue screen of death, last Friday, set me to thinking… if this netbook fails, I’ll be in a world of hurt. I’ll be able to boot up “old main” if I’m desperate to write something, but it’s hardly convenient, and I can forget comfortably surfing the internet. And besides, I’ve been missing having a computer that can have more than 2 windows open at the same time without slowing to a crawl.
So Saturday morning, I tromped off to Costco and spent 800 bucks. I bought a desktop. Which seems ridiculous, but I’ve considered that one of the main things I do recreationally with my computer, these days, is watch movies or TV serious, and my netbooks 7 inch screen is pretty pathetic, that way. Those 24 inch flat screen monitors looked tempting. So basically I bought a fancy screen with a cheapo Jooyontech (a Korean discount brand) desktop PC attached to it.
I decided to make my life difficult for myself. Not on purpose, exactly: I somehow managed to click just the wrong set of initial choices on the “first boot up” of the Windows 7 Home Premium K (for Korea) operating system, such that the operating system knows I prefer English, but nevertheless refuses to use it with me about 80% of the time. As if that even makes sense. Haha. Let’s just say the remainder of the configuration process involved a lot of recourse to the dictionary. And I’m the proud owner of a semi-bilingual computer.
I decided that, well, wow, I had a desktop with an actual graphics chip set and a big screen, I should put a fun game on it. I have always had an inordinate and unhealthy love for the game called Civilization, in its various incarnations. I went to buy it and try to download it – only to be disallowed from buying by the download store thing (called Steam). I felt annoyed. I hate it when online vendors discriminate against me because of my IP address. They’re telling me they don’t want my money. Well, my reaction to being told by a product vendor that they don’t want my money is to not give them my money. It took me about 20 minutes to torrent and install Civilization 4 (not the latest version, but what do I care? I like the old version just fine) on the new machine. No money required. The internet’s like that, right? Probably, it’s a bit stupid of me to tell everyone this on a blog, but I feel pretty safe from the copyright police, because of the aforementioned discriminated-against IP address. Korean copyright police only care about Korean content.
Well, I played Civilization for part of Sunday, and then, in a long-unfelt rush of self-disgust at wasting such a vast amount of time on a virtual empire, I went on a walk. Such was my weekend. The picture below shows the new computer. It represents a certain degree of investment in my intention to stay in Korea, doesn’t it? I suppose if I end up leaving, I’ll sell it or give it away to a lucky friend.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Changes.”
The video someone made for it in the youtube, above, is clever, too. It’s an appropriate way to ring in the new computer, though Bowie always makes me think of freshman year at Macalaster College in St Paul. Life has changes.
Yesterday was a long day at work. It’s the time of month when we have to post grades and comments about students into the giant, macro-infested spreadsheet that serves as the hagwon student database system. Actually, the spreadsheet’s not bad for an ad hoc job – I’ve sometimes admired its low-budget ingenuity. Anyway, at least I felt competent to do this job: it’s a good feeling of accomplishment when you can write personalized comments about 80 students and remember each of their faces and personalities.
Earlier in the day, I’d come in earlier than usual because I have my current “frontloaded” schedule that is all-elementary. I’m putting a lot of work on my “little ones” – mostly first-graders that have felt kind of challenging lately, walking the fine line between being entertaining for the students and parental expectations that they will come home acting as if they were learning something. Putting together a scheme for phonics flashcards (spelling simple words like cat and cake), I want to implement some kind of regular mini-quiz that’s not too painful for the students but that give me a sense of whether or not they’re making any progress.
I came home and faced the leftovers in my fridge. I like to cook, as I’ve said, but cooking alone always leads to leftovers, and having such a small fridge (it’s essentially what would be called a “dorm room” fridge in the US) means I have to get brutal and triage my leftovers pretty regularly – I end up throwing away things that don’t get eaten far too often, and that induces feelings of guilt, which leads to me cooking less, which leads to me feeling annoyed with my diet.
Um. What was I saying? I found some beans in my fridge and finished them off, after heating them up for an extra-extended period because I was worrying they might have something growing in them. They tasted good. And I woke up this morning.
Over the weekend I had made a tasty curry-coleslaw (see picture), using some end-of-its-natural-life cabbage and the infinite supply of gift-apples-in-a-box that I received as a Chuseok gift from my employer (see other picture – note standard-issue excessive packaging).
That coleslaw is keeping well, so far. But I had to throw out some rice and broccoli and mushrooms into the compost bin downstairs. Isn’t it cool, by the way, that big-city apartments in Ilsan give residents the opportunity to segregate their organic garbage? Not that I have huge amount of faith that anything useful is being done with it… it might be being mixed in with the regular garbage at the landfill, as happens so often in the US, for example. But one might be pleasantly surprised – Koreans seem predisposed, in some ways (e.g. by the density of their society, and its historically recent extreme poverty), to creating a more sustainable version of consumerism.
Who could have imagined I’d spend part of my 46th birthday singing along to a Justin Bieber video with a bunch of Korean sixth-graders? And that that would be, by far, the funnest part?
Ah, but such is life. My coworkers got a cake, which was chocolate, and quite good – although they also ate most of it, too – which was actually good, too, as it would have been unhealthy for me to eat too much of it.
And then there was one of those most excellent of Korean traditions, the envelope of cash – but note that the envelope, in this case, had a hand-made label saying “Happy Birthday JW” in ransom-note style (see picture). I like that kind of attention to detail.
The Thursday “CC” classes that I have are kind of like noraebang (karaoke room) training – which makes sense: all Korean kids need karaoke training, as one’s ability to do well in noraebang are integral to success later in life.
I tried starting with a music video of a song I like, myself:
OneRepublic, “Good Life.”
It’s a pretty good song, and I like it partly because it was popular on the radio during the week I was driving around New Zealand back in February. So hearing it, and trying to sing along, reminds me of beautiful scenery and road tripping – how can that be bad, right?
But the kids said the song was difficult, and in thinking about it, I’d have to agree. The rhythms are tough, and the sentences in it are long. So then, at their request, we did:
Bruno Mars, “Just the way you are.”
This is an easy song, and I actually had the lyrics down pretty well, myself, by the time we finished practicing it. I got into it, even. It grew on me. The kids seemed to like it pretty well, too.
But in the end, I had to submit to their unceasing demands that we do Justin Bieber. “Jeo-seu-tin Bi-beo!” I can’t say I love Justin Bieber, but I’m happy to make the kids happy, and this, somehow, in some mysterious way, makes 6th graders extremely happy. Such is the impact of a Canadian teen idol and global pop sensation, even on Korean culture. We did his song:
Justin Bieber, “Love Me.”
It’s not a bad song, if not terribly original – I like the chorus’s riff on the 1996 Cardigans’ “Lovefool,” for example.
But really, it was just a regular work day, right? Although I managed to get out of there a little early – not that I did anything resembling celebrating. I came home, did a load of laundry, and read a chapter of a book about Buddhism.
I got a lot of Happy Birthdays on facebook. Thanks everyone!
Today is election day in South Korea. The sign at right reads 투표소 [“polling place”].
