Today is Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok). I went on a walk. The city is more shut down than Mexico City on Superbowl Sunday (which, contrary to preconceptions, is the most shut-down I ever saw that city).
Hurry, hurry, everyone. Go to your home town, and propitiate some ancestors.
Maybe you can google them first, and find out what they need – google presented a chuseok-themed googledoodle today.
Ok, bye. Happy Holiday.
Partly, I just really like saying the term Whorfian. It makes me think of Klingons, because of the inestimable Mr Worf from The Next Generation. And Klingons, of course, because of their language, are inextricably tied to first-order high nerdery (see, for example, the opera ‘u’).
But I’m not intending to write about Klingons. Rather, I have been meaning to discuss a rather long comment that my bestfriend Bob left on one of my blog posts from the start of the month. Bob’s comment presented the following anecdote (I’ll just cut-n-paste it here):
Apropos Korean language and culture, I heard a fascinating story yesterday from my Korean colleague here in the Music Department. Did you know that Korean Airlines pilots (and co-pilots, etc.) are only allowed to speak English in the cockpit? According to my colleague, this is because the myriad levels of formal discourse in the Korean language can make communication murky between subordinates and superiors (e.g., co-pilots and pilots). Analysis of black box tapes showed this after a Korean Airlines plane crashed several decades ago. The co-pilot tried to challenge a decision the pilot had made, but because of the circumlocution the co-pilot used, the pilot didn’t get what his colleague was trying to say. And the plane crashed, killing everyone on board. So now Korean pilots bypass the issues of formality and politeness altogether by speaking English. This sounded a bit far-fetched to me, but it came from a reputable source—an ex-pat Korean. Do you know if this is true? If so, it should give your linguistic/cultural interests something to chew on. Or perhaps you already wrote about this in a previous post at some point during the past 4 years?
I have heard this anecdote before. And I believe the fact that KAL pilots are only allowed English in the cockpit is probably true – this is true in many commercial airline companies around the world. But I always assumed the story behind the English-only rule to be a sort of urban myth. So I’m going to explain why I think that.
First of all, there are less baroque and more plausible reasons for a non-English-speaking country’s major airline instituting the English-only rule. Most significantly, since English is required by international aviation rules when communicating with ground control regardless of country (there’s that English is the international language thing, for you, if you ever doubted it), many countries require their carriers to use English in the cockpit for a simple reason – to keep people in practice because during a potential emergency, its use will thus be more reflexive. In countries such as Korea, with such atrocious English-language education (such as I proudly represent!), it serves also simply to provide the crew members with lots of practice.
So, that’s what you might call the constructive rebuttal – the counterveiling evidence. But I’m more interested in the claim made in the anecdote regarding the fact that Korean makes straightforward cockpit communication more difficult. And on that idea, without any concrete support pro or con with respect to the actual anecdote, my gut feeling is to call bullshit.
It’s probably true that sometimes Koreans have trouble communicating with those around them in what we in the west consider a straightforward manner. There are all these deferences and, yes, circumlocutions and oblique references that get in the way. This is cultural, however, not linguistic. There’s an important difference. It’s undeniable that language is the medium of this culture, but it’s one thing to say that culture comes embedded in language and another to say that language shapes culture. This latter view is called the Whorfian hypothesis, after the linguist Benjamin Whorf, who hypothesized it.
The fact is, Koreans are also perfectly capable of communicating straightforwardly with each other in the Korean Language, if they feel like it. If they’re in some kind of social context that allows them to relax the cultural rules, so to speak. A few minutes on a Korean elementary playground will bring my point home quite quickly, I think. Or just give some Koreans some soju and wait half an hour. Koreans have a term for this “low speaking”: 반말 [banmal – literally, “half speech”]. If KAL had wanted to ensure clear communication in the cockpit, they could have just as easily made a rule requiring 반말 as they could have made the rule requiring English.
But this brings me to a tangential point, which is fascinating in its own right. There is a strong belief in Korea that English, as a language, not only doesn’t require deference or politeness, but that it isn’t capable of it. This belief is further reinforced by the tribes of badly-educated, poorly-behaved, and ill-informed foreign English native-speaking teachers that sojourn in the republic. It makes for a bit of a depressing battle, sometimes, with Koreans, when I’m forced to explain, over and over, that phrases like “fuck you” or “shut up” are not always appropriate in English.
“Really?” my surprised interlocutors sometimes react. “But you see it in the movies…” I point out that you can see all kinds of low and banmal Korean Language use in Korean movies, too – but that doesn’t mean you should use it with your teacher or your boss or even your friends. “Oh, wow, I suppose that’s true,” they asnwer, reflectively, new understanding dawning on their faces.
Koreans are perhaps encouraged in their belief that English is a “low-only” language by the lack of complex, grammaticalized forms of humility and deference that my friend mentions above. And to that extent, perhaps there’s something Whorfian going on – they’re letting the shape of their language guide preconceptions about how deference and humility should work in other languages and cultures.
But finally, I reject what we might call the stronger Whorfian hypothesis (with respect to this particular anecdote) not just because of the existence of banmal, but also because there are Koreans who have perfectly good English who are nevertheless utterly incapable of communicating directly or straightfowardly in English, either (cue typical Korean English teacher trying to communicate with his or her English native-speaking coworker). It’s the culture shaping the language, clearly, and not the other way around.
As far as the anecdote above, it’s easy to imagine the guys in the cockpit, forced to speak English, and still failing to communicate – they’ll just end up being circumlocutious with less vocabulary and more limited grammatical resources to convey humility or deference. And, contrariwise, if a Korean co-pilot manages to say to his superior, “shut up, you’re making a fucking mistake, don’t be an asshole,” it’s more likely because he believes English requires him to communicate this way, than because Korean prevents him from doing so (cue Korean playground squabble or typical drunken bar confrontation). The anecdote, circulating in the culture, reinforces that belief, and so, to that extent, perhaps the English-only rule does serve to clarify things in the cockpit.
At the risk of boring everyone with a third blog post in less than 24 hours, I feel compelled to observe that today is the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Korea. On September 1st, 2007, I landed at Incheon and made my way to Ilsan, where I was met by my new employer, Danny, of the eventually-defunct Tomorrow School, to begin my new teaching career.
I have spent all of the last four years in Korea, with the exception of a three-month, unemployed hiatus back in the US in the fall of 2009, and several shorter vacation trips – two to Australia to visit my mother (with side-junkets to Hong Kong and New Zealand), and one to Japan to resolve a visa issue.
I like Korea, But I’m not really a Koreanophile. Although my linguistico-aesthetic infatuation with the Korean language refuses to go away, I’m actually only lukewarm when it comes to Korean culture in more general terms. It has a lot of shortcomings, and I’m not always happy with it. But… I will attach two caveats to that statement: 1) I think the Korean polity is less dysfunctional that the US polity, and that’s a notable achievement (the current state of the US polity is so depressing as to leave me feeling embarrassed to claim US citizenship); 2) I reached a level of alienated “comfort” with life in Korea that is at least equal to the perpetual alienation I have always felt within my own country and culture.
The consequence of these preceding observations is that, as things stand, I have no interest in (and no current plans for) returning to the US – except perhaps for brief visits. For better or for worse, for now, Korea is my home. If, for whatever reason in the future, my life in Korea has to end, I will seek to continue my expat life elsewhere.
I have changed a great deal in the last four years. I have acquired some confidence as a teacher; I have built some good habits; most notably, I have embraced a sort of meditative buddhist zen (선) atheism that works well for me. Although I’m hardly content – often lonely, often aimless in a philosophical or “spiritual” sense (as much as I dislike the concept of spirituality) – in fact I have found a kind of inner peace that my life prior to this most recent phase utterly lacked.
So, there you have it. And so begins a fifth year…
I took the picture below on a long hike in October 2007. It shows some scarecrows in a field of cut rice, across the highway from the former Camp Edwards, in Geumchon, Paju-si (about 7 km northwest of where I live), which incidentally is where I was stationed in 1991, during my time in the US Army as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Thus, you see, my “roots” in Northwest Gyeonggi Province go “way back.”
Today marks a new milestone on my blog: I have received my first bit of "targetted" spam in my blog comments. Up to this point, all the spam received in the comments sections on my blog have been what you might call "widecast" – just throwing out advertising for cheap internet shoes or jewelry or other products, willy-nilly, showing zero awareness of my blog's content, potential audience, etc.
But today I received a spam comment from someone (something) named Jenny, in not-bad Konglish, advertising some kind of cultural event (or coupon club – I can't quite figure it out). I'm not going to do her (he? it?) the favor or reproducing the comment's web address, but I felt some reluctance simply to delete it from the record without observing its passing.
It feels like a milestone, because, instead of being utterly random spam, it's spam-with-a-target – it obviously was placed by someone (or some program) that had a minimal awareness of my blog's "location" and audience. We can call it contextualized spam, as oxymoronic as that sounds.
Here is the text of the spam comment, with the original business name cleverly disguised and with the website address expurgated (because I don't want to reward the spammer).
Come and visit SejongBlahblah on Sunday of the last week of the month. You can find many different artist and singers' performances that are free to anyone! Also, SejongBlahblah is currently having 1+1 ticket event for foreigners. You can purchase one package from ten different packages and get one free ticket with your purchase! If you are interested and want to find out more about this event, you can come out website: https://??? SejongBlahblah is a combination of about 30 culture & art organizations including performance halls, museums and art museums located in the walking distance centering around Sejong-no, where Gwanghwamun Square is located.
This is almost relevant. More so than regular spam, anyway. It got me to reflecting on the possibility that the boundary between spam and not-spam might be somewhat fluid… somewhat fuzzy. Which, of course, makes me think of spam sitting too long in a refrigerator: fuzzy spam. That reminds me of the Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) gift I received from my boss at LBridge a few years ago. A gift set of spam. Chuseok is fast approaching.
I survived Grace’s vacation. My coworker came back from vacation this week, after having been gone for a little over a month. So my 35+ classes per week will end. I put in a few long days this week getting caught up on getting my grades and student performance comments posted to the computer, and as of 9pm this evening, a new tentative schedule is published where I return to a more normal class load.
I feel like I survived the past month with very little stress, comparatively. I kind of approached it “heads-down” and just plowed through, but it helped that there were no major crises, and no serious issues. Things went more or less smoothly.
It’s worth observing that I’ve reached the conclusion that hagwon work, in crisis mode, is equivalent to Hongnong Elementary in normal mode. And Hongnong Elementary in crisis mode, is like… well, it’s like being on the losing side of a major combat simulation. I’m not talking about workload – obviously, there’s no comparison: hagwon work is WORK, Hongnong elementary wasn’t really work. But I’m talking about atmospherics, stressors, incomprehensible dictates from on high, etc.
I felt like I really accomplished something, this week, having completed the increased class load, and getting my July grades posted, and writing out comments on all my students. And then I came home, went on a little jog in the park at 11 pm, and came home and made some tomato and pesto pasta for a late dinner. Yay.
What I’m listening to, right now.
손담비, “미쳤어” [Son Dam Bi – Michyeosseo “crazy”].
The verb michida (conjugated into an informal past tense michyeosseo in this song) is generally translated as “crazy” but I don’t think that’s accurate at all. It means “crazy” so that captures the semantics, but the pragmatics are quite different. “Crazy” in English is quite mild, and can be used positively quite casually: e.g. “Oh, man, that was a crazy fun time.” Etc. But in Korean, you really can’t use the word that way – not in polite company, anyway. It’s not as strong as “fuck,” but I’ve had Koreans react to my use of the word as an American might to an unexpected use of that word. So I almost want to come up with some different kind of translation for the song title. Not sure what to use, though, that would capture the lower social register of the Korean. Maybe something as simple as “Fucked up.”
Here are the lyrics.
yes yes, no no, which way to go,
2008 e to the r i c , let’s go
내가 미쳤어 정말 미쳤어
너무 미워서 떠나버렸어
너무 쉽게 끝난 사랑
다시 돌아오지 않는단걸 알면서도
미쳤어 내가 미쳤어
그땐 미쳐 널 잡지 못했어
나를 떠떠떠떠떠 떠나 버버버버버 버려
그 짧은 추억만을 남겨둔채로 날
후회했어 니가 가버린뒤
난 더 불행해져 네게 버려진뒤
너를 잃고 싶지않아 줄것이 더 많아 나를 떠나지마라
죽도록 사랑했어 너 하나만을
다시는 볼수없단 미친생각에
눈물만 흐르네 술에 취한밤에 오늘은 잠을 이룰수없어
내가 미쳤어 정말 미쳤어
너무 미워서 떠나버렸어
너무 쉽게 끝난 사랑
다시 돌아오지 않는단걸 알면서도
미쳤어 내가 미쳤어
그땐 미쳐 널 잡지 못했어
나를 떠떠떠떠떠 떠나 버버버버버 버려
그 짧은 추억만을 남겨둔채로 날
사랑이 벌써 식어버린건지
이제와 왜 난 후회하는건지
떠나간자리 혼자남은 난 이렇게 내 가슴은 무너지고
죽도록 사랑했어 너 하나만을
다시는 볼수없단 미친생각에
눈물만 흐르네 술에 취한밤에 오늘은 잠을 이룰수없어
내가 미쳤어 정말 미쳤어
너무 미워서 떠나버렸어
너무 쉽게 끝난 사랑 다시 돌아오지 않는단걸 알면서도
미쳤어 내가 미쳤어
그땐 미쳐 널 잡지 못했어
나를 떠떠떠떠떠 떠나 버버버버버 버려
그 짧은 추억만을 남겨둔채로 날
Rap by Eric:
너 의 memories 이런 delete it 매일밤 부르는건 your name 들리니? 몹시 아팠나봐 이젠 시작이란 말조차 난겁나 open up a chapter man i’m afaid of that 전화기를들어 확인해 니 messages, 떠나줬으면 좋겠어, catch me if you can but i’m out of here
내가 미쳤어 정말 미쳤어
너무 미워서 떠나버렸어
너무 쉽게 끝난 사랑 다시 돌아오지 않는단걸 알면서도
미쳤어 내가 미쳤어
그땐 미쳐 널 잡지 못했어
나를 떠떠떠떠떠 떠나 버버버버버 버려
그 짧은 추억만을 남겨둔채로 날
Koreans often make hyperbolic statements extolling the virtues of one or another of Korea’s historical accomplishments, and, like nationalist narratives anywhere, they are often rather implausible, or at the least, fudge the truth.
But one thing that I completely agree with (and speaking as a linguist) is that their writing system, hangeul (or hangul or “Hangle” as my student spelled it in an essay the other day) is utterly remarkable – by far the most logical writing system in general use by any people on planet Earth. Arguably, it was the first time a writing system was made “scientifically” – by a committee of scholars put together by King Sejong the Great in the 15th century, after getting fed up with the difficulty of promoting literacy in a language written using ideographs borrowed from an unrelated language (i.e. Chinese characters – which is, for example, how the Japanese still write their language, today).
If I were tasked with developing a writing system for some newly discovered human language from scratch, I would almost undoubtedly start with hangeul as a base, and then develop whatever new jamo were needed to cover whatever sounds that might exist in that new language but that don’t exist in Korean, and build from there.
Hangeul uniquely captures at least two aspects of human phonation that most writing systems fail at (including, most notably, the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) which is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of scientific writing systems): 1) hangeul is at least partially featural (there are progressive graphic relationships between related sounds); 2) it transparently indicates syllabicity.
I particularly fantasize that this last element of hangeul could be incorporated into the English writing system. Despite the fact that the syllable (or, alternately, the mora, depending on the language – there are some technical differences in the two concepts) is central to the way spoken languages work, no other writing system so transparently shows syllable divisions. So while American schoolchildren struggle with the concept of syllable (and syllabification) well into high school, explaining the idea of “syllable” to a literate Korean first-grader is trivial.
Even the supposed inconsistencies of hangeul, from a phonetic standpoint, end up reflecting morpho-phonological characteristics of the Korean language when viewed from higher up the “generative” chain, so to speak.
So, while there are many points on which I would challenge the Korea-centric narratives put forth in the media here, or in public education, I have no quibbles with the notion that “when Sejong made Hangle” was one of the greatest moments in world cultural history.
Today is Liberation Day in South Korea. It’s the day that Japan surrendered to the Allies, and 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism were brought to a close. What followed was the division of the peninsula by the victorious powers, and a bifurcated, two-sided neocolonial regime (Soviet and American) that, arguably, persists even today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
The North is the world’s only surviving even vaguely Stalinist regime, and the South, despite having shifted to a sort of neolibral democracy (such as it is, and, erm, perhaps not coincidental to the moment in history when the Soviet Union fell), remains the largest “peacetime” host of American troops on foreign soil (i.e. discounting the active war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq).
Despite my cynicism, I continue to believe that South Korea may be the sole genuine success story in America’s highly questionable exercises in “nation building.” I think that this is true, in part, because of the unique geopolitical moment that followed World War II and that the Korean War consolidated – a moment when “democracy” was happily represented around the world by repressive neo-fascist regimes (such as Syngman Rhee and subsequently Park Chung-Hee) – true – but where the lip-service concepts such as freedom were paid would eventually result in an evolution toward more inclusive (if never perfect) political systems.
I think that one reason why the current neoconservative efforts at nation-building (in e.g. Iraq) have been such utter failures is because of the historical myopia that is unable to recognize that “nation building” is, in fact, almost never a democratic enterprise. Democracy can take root in nations, undeniably, but nations are rarely constructed as a result of truly democratic impulses – because true democracies are full of people who are not, in fact, interested in being part of this or that nation.
And don’t try to sell me on some kind of American exceptionalism in this matter – the “American” nation was built by a very narrow demographic of middle-aged and elderly white, male landowners, over and against the objections of all kinds of embedded subjugated peoples (Native Americans, women, Catholic immigrant-laborers, Jewish small-scale merchants, etc.), who were only subsequently, through several centuries of struggle and brutal war (e.g. the Civil War), ideologically homogenized into some degree of inclusion. Never forget: even now, Obama talks white – and that’s how he got elected.
Nationalism is – as movements such as Nazism (not to mention Teapartism) should make obvious – all about the imposition of some totalizing ideological regime across an inevitably heterogeneous population. It’s only as a retroactive construct that such homogeneous nation-peoples (such as Koreans or Mexicans or even Americans) choose to perceive themselves as such.
All of which is my way of saying that I have, in fact, come to believe in a certain strain of South Korean exceptionalism, if only in that its relationship to the United States is utterly unique in the history of neocolonialism. There are lots of caveats attached to that, too.
There’s a perhaps-relevant quote, frequently misattributed to Sinclair Lewis (similar to something said by Halford E. Luccock, but probably invented in its misattributed form by journalist Harrison Salisbury). The recent proto-primarial antics of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry set me to thinking about it: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
To which I will add: Yay, nationalism! Oh, and maybe, as a dash of seasoning, the old Samuel Johnson line: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Speaking of freedom… What I’m listening to right now.
Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kris Kristofferson wrote the song, and this is an early demo version that is currently one of my favorite renditions. There’s a Willie Nelson cover I like, too. I never actually cared for the famous Janis Joplin version that topped the charts in the early 70’s, for example, and I suspect the version that I grew up on was probably one of the Greatful Dead’s covers of it – I couldn’t find anything that sounded exactly right in surfing around youtube, though.
Here is a view of Ilsan’s Jungang-no [Central Avenue], a block from my apartment at the Juyeop subway entrance. I took the photo earlier, shrouded in drizzle – there are a few limp South Korean flags hanging from light poles. I took a long walk today, but didn’t really do a lot. Trying to find inner peace.
I needed to get out of the house yesterday. I took a long walk – along a route I took before… some years ago. I took the subway into the city and got off at Oksu, on the north bank of the rain-swollen Han River. I walked across the bridge into Apgujeong. From there I went to Gangnam, and after stopping at my favorite bookstore, I ended up at GyoDae (University of Education). I walked maybe 7 or 8 km. It was heavily overcast but it wasn’t raining. It was kind of steamy hot. I took a few pictures.
Looking back down the stairs up to the bridge. The subway runs in the median of the bridge, that’s Oksu station on the right.
I love the view along the river, here. For some reason it makes me think of Italy – maybe it’s the arches along the river bank and the way the buildings climb the hillside.
The bridge itself, with its embedded subway tracks and industrial feel, is New Yorkish.
Apgujeong (and all of Gangnam) is a very high-rent area. I would compare it to New York’s Upper East Side, LA’s Westwood/Brentwood.
But there is still the occasional cardboard-carting ajeossi, blocking the forward progress of honking Mercedeses.
The view at dusk looking east along Teheranno, one of Gangnam’s main drags, just west of its intersection with Gangnamdaero.
Here is a rather famous recently-constructed building that even had a write-up in the Economist, if I recall correctly. It’s your basic glass-and-steel box skyscraper, right? But it’s wavy. Wiggly. And there’s a giant sculpture of golden hands, holding up the sky, in front – you could stand under the outstretched hands to shelter from the rain, for example.
By the time I was headed home on the subway, it was starting to rain again. Just a sort of humid drizzle. I got home and made some tricolor rotini pasta with olives and pesto (I found jars of pre-made pesto at the Orange Mart across the street).
I did a lot of reading today.
Working at my current hagwon is definitely “old school” Korea, in some ways. I suppose what I mean is that it’s a small business, where the human relationships are what dominate the employer-employee interactions, as opposed to the pseudo-professional character of the big chain hagwon (such as I experienced at LBridge) or the bureaucratic-but-hopefully-benign neglect that seems to reign in public schools (such as I experienced at Hongong Chodeung – minus the benignity).
This was underscored for me last night. Our hagwon is going to have a short little couple-of-days-vacation (not because it wants to – it’s a new provincial-level regulation that’s being forced on all the hagwon industry, apparently). Curt gave a little speech thanking all the hard work from the teachers and staff (July has been a tough month, the combination of increased class offerings and enrollment due to summer vacation, combined with Grace being on her long vacation meaning we’re short one teacher).
Then he handed out envelopes of cash.
I suppose there might be, um, er, “tax reasons” for handing out envelopes of cash, too – as opposed to simply paying higher salaries. But there’s nothing like two crisp gold-colored bills to make one feel appreciated, eh? The note reads “즐거운 휴가 되세요^^ 감사합니다.” [Have a pleasant holiday^^ Thank you.] Actually, I knew Curt did things like this – I’ve witnessed him doing it before, but had never been on the receiving end of it up until now.
Tangentially, below is a picture from the bathroom window at work. It was raining, and something in the view of all the apartment tower blocks seemed stark yet somehow iconic of life in high-density Ilsan. Remember, although this looks like something an American would call “housing projects,” in Korea this is upper-middle class. Everyone has a car in the underground parking garages. All the kids want to go to Harvard or Oxford or Yonsei or KAIST. One thing that is striking for me, about Ilsan, is that, because it’s one of the “oldest” of the 신도시 [sin-do-si = “New City”], it is lushly populated by large, healthy trees: apartment towers in a forest.
What I’m listening to right now.
오승근, “떠나는 님아.”
I was listening to my mp3s on shuffle, and this song came around. I genuinely like it a lot. It’s 떠나는 님아 by 오승근 [Oh Seung Geun]. “떠나는 님아” [tteonaneun nima] means “O departing beloved…” – my intuition is that this is rather archaic Korean, which is of course quite appropriate for an old folksong. It took me a while to work out what seemed like an appropriate translation for the title. I won’t even attempt the lyrics, below.
This song wasn’t easy to find a video for – the only material available on youtube consists of noraebang (karaoke room) voice-overs. I was about to give up in despair (and/or make my own) when I found the above video on youku.com (a Chinese youtube-type site). [UPDATE: I found a Korean version, which is now what’s embedded.]
One shouldn’t be surprised to find Korean language material on Chinese websites – there are millions (maybe 5 million, conservatively) of Koreans living in China, including an autonomous region in the far Northeast, bordering North Korea and Russia’s Primorskiye, where Korean is the official language. I suspect the reason I had to go to China to find a video is due to copyright issues – the Koreans are pretty lax enforcing the copyrights of other countries, but work at it assiduously when it comes to their own cultural content.
Here are the lyrics.
오승근 – “떠나는 님아”
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
당신이 떠나고나면 미움이 그치겠지만
당신을 보내고나면 사랑도 끝이난다오
님아 못잊을 님아 님아 떠나는 님아
두눈에 가득 이슬이맺혀 떠나는 나의님아
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
님아 못잊을 님아 님아 떠나는 님아
두눈에 가득 이슬이맺혀 떠나는 나의님아
가려거든 울지말아요 울려거든 가지말아요
그리워 못보내는 님 못잊어 못보내는 님
못잊어 못보내는님.
Here’s why I sometimes have a really hard time working with opinionated 14-year-olds who have very limited English:
Student: Teacher!
Me: What?
Student: My school 원어민 [native English-speaking teacher] is handsome but you are not.
Me: I see…
Student: You have small head but big 배 [tummy]
Me: It’s very sad…
Student: Why are you 통통 [fat]?
Me: I don’t know… I used to be fatter, you know. I dieted a lot.
Student: 와아아 [wow].
This student is not, otherwise, habitually insolent or impolite. In fact, I like the student a lot. And I know from previous experience that comments, negative or positive, regarding another person’s appearance, are much more freely thrown about in Korean society than in Western culture: long-time readers might remember the time the restaurant owner (a total stranger) in Busan greeted me with “You’ve got a bit a paunch” [in Korean]?
So what do I make of this? Should I take the time, yet again, to explain that this sort of talk will get a person smacked in the US? – Because I’ve explained it before, I’m sure. Does it even matter?
Regardless, it can take a strong ego to survive this kind of thing, can’t it?
Sigh.
Later, I had a more pleasant (but equally culturally interesting) conversation with my boss.
Boss: You [Westerners] like to argue.
Me: Koreans like to argue, too, I think.
Boss: Koreans like to fight.
Me: Fight… argue. Yes.
Boss: No. Argue is rational. Koreans just like to fight.
Me: Hmm. Yes, I could see that.
Boss: You know I’m right.
Point taken.
Tomorrow, my coworker Grace goes on her month-long special vacation home to Canada. That means my schedule is getting massively augmented. I’ll have 30-something classes, for the next month or so. I’m not even really dreading it, though I feel a little overwhelmed by mastering the content of the classes, I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed by the extra time I’ll be putting in – I’m really in a sort of “wanting to forget my dull, unaccomplished life” mood, lately. So I’ll throw myself into my work. I’ll dedicate myself to hearing the unintended insults of a hundred teenagers.
What I’m listening to right now.
Travis, “Sing.”
Perhaps one reason I often feel so deeply annoyed with foreigners in Korea who rant on and on about all the things wrong with present-day Korea is that it shows such a striking lack of historical perspective. Do they have any idea of where this country came from? Of what it’s been through? I recently came across some amazing photos taken by a U.S. soldier who was stationed here in the 1960’s. Please… please go look at them.
My own historical perspective is perhaps provided by the fact that I was here as a soldier, myself, in 1991. And the change in this country – even from that time – until now is stunning to behold. Imagine taking the Korea shown in those photographs, linked above (and sample at right), and the Korea of today, and finding the half-way point – the average of them… the transition. That’s what I was seeing when I was here in 91. South Korea in 1955, in the aftermath of the war, was one of the poorest countries on earth. Poorer than Haiti, for example. In 1991, Korea was still about the same level as, say, Mexico. I think one reason I “connected” with Korea in 91 was because of all the weird similarities, cultural and socio-economic and political, that I perceived between this country and my beloved, benighted Mexico.
And yet the South Korea of today has rocketed beyond its historical circumstance. It is a material incarnation of market-driven optimism-without-bound. It makes one realize that the struggles of a country like, say Mexico, or even Haiti, are not insuperable – obviously, if Korea can take this road, other peoples and countries can do the same. That determination and culture and willpower all mean something, that there’s more than fate and malice in the world.
And that’s what I have to say to the grumpy, Korea-complaining foreigners that seem to abound here.
Korean terms for family members seem quite overwhelming to those of us trying to learn the language. First of all, there are so many of them. But second of all, Koreans use many of those terms quite freely with people they aren't related to: in particular, because of the social prohbition, under most circumstances, against addressing one's elders by their names, many of the various terms for relatives are used for directly addressing (i.e. talking to, calling out to) older friends and acquaintances. These many "terms of direct address" take the place of the word "you," too, since the various Korean words for "you" seem mostly reserved for advertising copy (e.g. 당신) and talking with children (e.g. 너).
I finally found a blog page that summarizes many of the vocabulary items for relatives and family relations pretty well. I recommend it, but even that summary seems to miss a lot of useful and important information.
For example, during a recent unit on English-language family terms with a fairly low-level 3rd/4th/5th grade class, I realized that they were using the term I had learned meant nephew/niece (조카 [joka]) to mean what we would call "first cousin once removed" (a horrible term – more colloquially we always just said "cousin" in the family reuinion type settings when I was growing up). Which to say, in the term 조카 there is embedded a sort of generational concept.
In researching that word 조카 at an online dictionary, I found some additional complications on it that aren't covered on the above-referenced web page:
처조카 = wife's niece or nephew
조카사위 = niece's husband
조카며느리 = nephew's wife
I'm sure that for almost all of the terms on that webpage, a little research would dig up similar elaborations.
Also, there's a whole other set of terms of direct address that seem to apply to schoolmates and coworkers, only a few of which I can recognize. Many of these are generic job titles, in the vein of 실장님 [siljangnim = "office manager," roughly], which is, for example, the term I should be using for the front-desk-lady at work.
But others aren't really titles at all, but bear on the generational separation between the two individuals: I've recently been becoming aware of 선배 [seonbae] a lot in the Korean drama I'm currently watching – the word means schoolmate or workmate who is "ahead" of one, in seniority terms (it's not clear to me if this is relative seniority or actually years of age – for example, if I'm older but start at a given company later, is someone ahead of me in the seniority chain but younger than me in age a 선배?). It's translated as "senior" but that utterly fails to capture its actual usage.
One thing I've never seen is a truly satisfying list, in one place, of ALL the terms of direct address that Koreans use: mostly when you see someone discussing Korean terms of direct address you get a few examples and then some annoying comment to the effect of: Koreans have hundreds if not thousands of terms of direct address, including names for relatives and titles of coworkers and schoolmates, etc. So my request is: how about a list? I guess it will have to be another little project of mine. Maybe someday.
직장에서 가끔 음식이 제공 될 수 있어요. 어제 맛있는 주먹밥을 받은 때 저는 사진을 찍고로 결정했어요. 그다음에 집에 비를 걸어하면서 사진들도 찍는했어요.
지금 주말동안 “아직도 결혼하고 싶은 여자“라는 드라마를 보고 있어요. 조금 지루 할 것 같아요.
True summer in Korea means rain. These broad fronts of humid, hot, overcast weather with lots of rain swarm up from the south and then just linger over the peninsula. It’s as if the tropics come to visit for a few months each year. For someone who grew up on the Northern California coast, this is backwards in more than one way – rain is supposed to come from the northwest, and in winter, and be cold. But rain is rain is rain. I still like it.
Our current bout of it started two days ago. Yesterday’s and today’s satellite pictures are almost identical.
I went out to do my little jog around the lake. I like doing it at night when I get home, after work – jogging in the dark suits my personality quite well – it’s less hot at night, and I don’t feel like people are watching me. Ilsan’s Lake Park is well lit and has lots of paths and trails.
I took this really cool picture of the amazing, full, bright, shiny moon hanging and reflecting over the Lake, with part of the Ilsan skyline. My little digital camera did pretty well, I think.
So, after about a six month hiatus, I’ve finally resumed my Korean-rom-com-drama-watching habit. The show I selected to take up is not really as likable as most of my previous efforts – in fact, it’s a bit of a struggle not to end up just despising every single character in this show. But I’m sticking with, partly for that exact reason – I think it’s maybe innovative precisely in just how deeply flawed all the characters are.
And yet it manages to match most of the Korean rom-com conventions quite well, despite this. And maybe my perception of flaws is culturally related – which is to say, Koreans may not perceive the characters as all equally as deeply flawed as I do.
The show in question is 내조의 여왕 [nae-jo-ui yeo-wang = Queen of Housewives]. The title already tells you just how atrociously tight to every conceivable bad Korean stereotype this show manages to stay. And as usual, I don’t want to post here an in-depth plot summary, as it’s not really interesting to me to try to do so, and I don’t want to spoil it for those interested in watching it.
It’s quite complicated. There’s a sort of “love hexagon” going on: three married couples, A-B, C-D, and E-F. But E and C love B, D loves A, A might love D too, but is loyal to B. F despises B because B was mean to her in high school, so nobody likes F, but she’s the nerd girl I thought I should feel the most sympathy for, but she’s the villain. E is A’s boss, and C is E’s boss, but C hates his wife D, it was an arranged marriage. Etc.
There’s lots of interesting moments of self-reinvention and intentionally symbolic behavior – i.e. the characters engaging in symbolism in a sort of self-aware way. There’s a resurrection scene like that, in episode 5 or 6, I think. B digs a grave and lies down in it with husband A, and they have a deep conversation. Then they both sit up, and resolve to do their best, moving forward, despite the obstacles.
I understand that A and B are supposed to be the protagonists, but B’s cruelty early in the story line is close to unforgivable, and she seems shallow and painfully self-centered. Her husband A has a heart of gold but is clearly dumb as a rock. He dances along from one out-of-control crisis to the next, never seeing anything coming.
Lastly, my favorite website for downloading these dramas (which shall remain nameless, here), has disappeared from the internet – which is partly why I dropped my drama-watching habit. The website posted free copies of the dramas with English subtitles, but I suppose the copyright police have taken them down. Fortunately, there is now a commercial website in the US that offers subtitled Korean drama, called mvibo.com. So I’ve broken down and started paying for the privilege of having subtitles. I hesitate to recommend it, though – the ironical act of sitting about 5 blocks from the MBC studios headquarters and watching streaming MBC content from some website in America means that the streaming quality is quite poor: the tubes under the Pacific are clogged with dead fish from the radiation in Japan, maybe. I wish I could figure out how to find the subtitled content from a Korean website – but I’ve given up hope on that.
So, you’re still wondering: what’s the ajummocracy? Ajumma [아줌마] is a Korean word used to refer to a particular type of middle aged or older woman, generally in an assertive, forceful sort of aspect. The ajumma represents the matriarchal “power behind the throne” that everyone says exists behind the monolithic facade of Korean patriarchy. Like all cultural stereotypes, it has some grains of truth, of course. I have coined the term “ajummocracy” for the concept of “government by ajummas.” The idea is that Korean women do, in fact, wield considerable political power, even in deeply traditionalist and Confucian (or pseudo-Confucian – this is important but I don’t want to get into it here) contexts. But they do so by manipulating their “men” behind the scenes. Again, I’m not endorsing this – I’m talking about cultural stereotypes. And it’s an interior cultural stereotype. That’s important – ajummas refer to themselves within this context, both deprecatingly and with pride. There is, in fact, an “ajumma pride” movement in Korea. Yes – really.
Back to the drama. This drama is perhaps the best encapsulation, in rom-com format, for that cultural stereotype. Every single female character is manipulative and ambitious. Every single male character is inconstant, mercurial, and temperamental. Each man submits, at some level, to his wife in private, while in public, they play macho games that seem to be either ghost-reflections of the ajumma politics or just male ranting and venting without consequences.
I do not suffer under the delusion that this portrait of Korean society is “real.” But it’s deeply interesting to me, the same way that reading Calderon de la Barca’s or Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age dramas are deeply interesting, as each so transparently display all kinds of fascinating cultural detritus.
I suppose I had to have a bad day, eventually. I felt discouraged. I will say that today, then, was the official ending of my "new job honeymoon" at Karma Academy. My frustration was on two fronts, one general and one specific, which are basically linked. Neither of them is novel in the least – I can almost guarantee I've ranted similarly before, probably on more than one occasion.
First, the general: I'm struggling more and more with a feeling of unclear or vague expectations, vis-a-vis what sort of teaching I should be doing, what I should be working on, what I might be doing right or wrong, etc. Koreans almost never tell you "how you're doing" – until there's some crisis or some problem. I've been feeling guilty, too, because of the inevitable double standard that emerges whenever you have "native speaker" and local Korean teachers working side-by-side – we are inevitably, because of our different proficiencies and distinct market values, held to different levels of expectation. This always makes me feel like I'm exploiting some kind of peculiar affirmative action program, inappropriately.
So the second thing is that today, there was not a major crisis, but a minor complaint from a parent that then got blown out of proportion in my mind. Hagwon parents are so hard to please, of course. One parent complains of not enough homework, and another complains of too much. How can one respond? Often what happens is that you give lots of homework, and there's a kind behind-the-scenes understanding that not all the kids are being held to the same standard, as driven by parental expectations or requirements. The conversation goes: "Oh, that kid … his mom doesn't want him doing so much homework, so don't worry if he doesn't pass the quiz, just let it go." This grates against my egalitarian impulses, on one level, and on another, despite being sympathetic to it, I end up deeply annoyed with how it gets implemented on the day-to-day: no one ever tells ME these things until some parent gets mad because I never got told, before, about the special case that their kid represents. In the longest run, of course, in the hagwon biz, one must never forget who the paying customers are – it's the parents. And for each parent that is pleased that their kid is coming home and saying "hagwon was fun today," there's another that takes that exact same report from her or his kid as a strong indicator that someone at the hagwon isn't doing his or her job. So it boils down to this: happy hagwon students don't necessarily mean happy hagwon customers. As a teacher, you're always walking a tightrope: which kids are supposed to be happy, and which are supposed to be miserable? Don't lose track – it's critical to the success of the business.
I came home feeling increasingly grumpy, and went on my 3km jog, feeling fat and old and slovenly and inept at my career. The humidity is high, the night felt hardly chilly at all. Now I'm eating an ascetic dinner of rice and kimchi, and drinking cold corn-tassel tea. I'm churning mostly fruitless "if I ran the hagwon" fantasies in my head.
A poem by Kim Gwang-seop:
개성 빈천한 묏골에서 하나의 돌맹이로 태어 나서커 다란 바위가 되지 못할지라도 또한 하나의 시내로서 흘러서 넓은 바다에 이르지 못할지라도 그대는 무한에 비상하는 순간을 가지라
My feeble effort at translation, with lots of doubts and confusions and caveats:
Individuality from poor dead bones born and raised as a lone pebble unable to become the great rock also flowing as a lone stream unable to arrive at the wide sea you hold an extraordinary moment to reach infinity
A more professional translation, by someone who goes by the name “Doc Rock” online (but who is apparently a PhD in Korean Lit):
Individuality Though from an impoverished mountain valley, Born as a pebble Never to be a great boulder Or Flowing like a stream Never to be wide as a sea You will have moments to soar limitlessly
Why am I attempting this kind of thing, when I still can’t put together a coherent sentence most of the time? I just feel like doing it, I guess.
I had an insight the other day.
I have compared life in rural Jeollanam Province to Kentucky. Or some other rural and reputedly under-developed part of the US, since, in fact, Kentucky doesn't really meet the archetype, anymore, as well as Mississippi, or, more suprisingly, Nebraska (which I read somewhere now is the part of the US with the highest incidence of rural poverty).
But I took advantage of the Kentucky archetype, which has become a part of the American dialect in that it's possible to use the suffix -tucky to indicate a place wracked by the social problems of rural poverty. Many people refer to parts of Southern California's "Inland Empire" as Fontucky, for example – a portmanteau of the city name of Fontana with that suffix, -tucky. And I once heard my own birth county referred to as Humtucky (combining Humboldt and -tucky) – as well as the quite common phrase Kentucky-by-the-Sea.
So I coined the term Hantucky to refer to Yeonggwang County, combining the prefix "Han-" which simply means "Korean," in Korean, with that -tucky suffix. I was pleased. I like coining terms.
The other day, I was walking along the broad, clean, tree-lined boulevard in Ilsan. I passed an automated bicycle-rental post, where a woman was using her credit card to check out a bike. Two very polite bicycle-mounted policemen rang their bells and rode past. A man with long hair in a pony-tail and a rainbow-colored umbrella walked past, talking into his iPhone. And there was the Russian immigrant woman I overheard speaking Korean with her blue-eyed daughter, that I saw last week. And the two Turkish or Middle Eastern dudes in suits rushing toward the subway. There're organic-only food stores, and posters in front of schools talking about environmental issues. I even saw a Volvo.
Prosperous. Liberal. High-density yet leafy-green and littered with parks. Even slightly multi-ethnic (well, that's a stretch, but all things being relative, in Korea).
So I had a sudden insight. If Yeonggwang County is Hantucky, then Ilsan might just well be Hanneapolis (<- Minneapolis).
Plus, it has a lake, and it's kind of flat.
This is my latest installment in my efforts to document what it's like to go to work. My commute in Ilsan is just a walk to work, but not so short as the walk from my last Hongnong place to work, and not so far as to require a bus trip like my previous Yeonggwang apartment (which required several installments to document).
I call the commute karmic not because of a reference to Buddhism but because that's the name of new place of work: Karma Academy.
[bucheonim osin nal]: literally, “the Day the Buddha came.”
So. Happy Buddha’s Birthday, everyone! Or… “Vesak,” as it’s called in South Asia. Kind of a Buddhist Christmas, conceptually, but celebrated in a more low-key day.
It’s my second holiday in less than a week (after Children’s Day, last Thursday), but not terribly easy to exploit, given that I had to work on the interleaved days.
I felt useful at my new job for maybe the first time, last night – and it wasn’t even for my teaching, which is still reliant on the old schedule and therefore random substitutions. I was helping with a spreadsheet. Shades of my last career.
It’s pouring rain and feeling summery, here. There are pigeons battling in the puddles on the ledge outside my window – I’m not sure if it’s a territorial battle or something related to pigeonish procreation. Or maybe both.
No first day at a new teaching job in Korea is complete without at least one schedule change and/or at least one unplanned-for new class. These types of things don't really bother me, actually. But it's worth noting that all other differences aside, some things are always the same, this being Korea, and all.
Jus' sayin'.
Actually, I'm in stunningly high spirits. We'll see how that pans out in the face of actual students.
My self-imposed one-year exile in Hantucky is officially ended.
The incontrovertable sign of this: I have internet DSL in my new apartment. Instead of the almost 2-month waiting period I was subjected to in Hantucky, metro Seoul does these things in about 12 hours, from moment of request to installation. Admittedly, the delays in Hantucky were due to my employer, not due to the internet provider.
Nevertheless, these differences are meaningful and worth comparing – my employer here is on my side. That's really the difference.
Nevertheless, I'm really missing my Hongnong kids, at the moment. I received the following message on my cellphone, last night. Charming. Heh.
안녕하세요~
Moving back to Ilsan is like moving home, a little bit.
The new apartment isn’t perfect. I knew it would be very small – it’s marginally bigger than my last Ilsan apartment and it’s about the same size as my Yeonggwang apartment, but it’s older and a bit more run-down on the edges than either of those. Smallness, per se, doesn’t bother me at all. I wholly desire and approve a compact lifestyle, for the most part – the only reason I can think of to want a bigger apartment would be in the event that people came to visit me that wanted to stay with me – but in my almost 4 years in Korea, only one person has ever done that.
It’s also nice to have “full kitchen” which this place, like the Yeonggwang apartment, doesn’t have. But I can cope. I will buy some inexpensive furnishings that can help make up for that. Once I get the rest of my stuff here, it will feel like home. As it is, it’s pretty “bare” – I told Curt I would buy my own furniture, so I have to do that. Not going to buy a bed – I’ve gone native on that, and have no issues sleeping on the floor. It’d be nice to have a sofa of some kind, but that’s not super high priority. A small table or desk, and some shelves, I definitely need. I already bought a hanger-thing for my clothes – there’s no closet, which I may miss a bit – the thing I liked best about my previous Ilsan apartment was the relatively generous closet and storage space.
Okay. Enough of all that. No complaints – it’s entirely within the parameters that I was expecting. And of course, it’s in Ilsan. That boils down to the old dictum: location, location, location. Going across the street to the “Orange Mart” is like an entire day-long trip to Gwangju, as far as shopping opportunities. I bought some french whole-grain mustard, spinach and tricolor pasta, and cheddar cheese this morning. Plus the infinite variety of more typical Korean things that are buyable.
The building is about a kilometer northwest along Jungangno from my previous Ilsan apartment – which places me about 2 blocks from the Juyeop subway station and about 1.5 kilometers from my place of work.
Here are some pictures. The first one, I’m looking up at my building from the outside, from in front of the Orange Mart – I’m standing on the southeast corner of the intersection of Jungangno and Gangseonno (and isn’t it amazing, I know the names of all these streets now, which I once-upon-a-time didn’t, for several years, even).
I drew a giant green and gold arrow pointing at its location on the 7th floor – that’s my window that you can see open, there.
Here is from that little window, looking almost straight down and a little toward the street (note the “rooftop garden” on the next building across).
Here is a view from a less precipitous angle, looking toward the Orange Mart and the intersection (roughly east-north-east).
Here is view from the corner by the window, looking toward my kitchen and the entryway – bathroom door is open on the left middle.
Here is a self-portrait of me sitting on my bedding in the corner by the window, pirating an unreliable wifi connection. I’ll get internet of my own soon, I hope – meanwhile, this is uploaded from a wifi in a nearby cafe.
Two of my first-grade students, Min-gyeong and Dan-bi, wrote “I love you 얄러뷰” in a big heart in their good-bye message.
I was trying to figure out “얄러뷰” – but it’s not Korean. I think “yal-leo-byu” is a transliteration of “I love you” – sound it out!
I got portraits of the fourth-graders today. Here they are.
4-1:
4-2:
4-3:
The 4-2 class did some role-plays today, and I took a few pictures.
I am going to miss Ye-won especially (on the left, below). The other day, she said to me: “I will hate the new teacher, already, because you are the best teacher.” That’s way too good for my ego. Plus, her English is pretty good, eh?
Here I am goofing around with some fifth- and sixth-graders during recess today. Note that the girls provided me with a disguise – can you tell it’s me?
Here are some memento photos of the cafeteria during lunch time.
My lunch tray, and my co-teacher Ms Lee across from me.
Here are some boys hamming for the camera.
Finally, here are some kids brushing their teeth at the communal teeth-brushing place:
I am going to miss this school so much. Should I have stayed? Maybe.
I will not miss the feeling of isolation, which was exacerbated by a school administrative office that is xenophobic and stunningly incompetent, and which conducted itself without exception with utter disregard for my status as a fellow human being, despite my substantial dependence upon them for my outside-of-work day-to-day living.
I think that one way to put it is that I will miss the weekday 9am~5pm part of this experience intensely, but I will not miss the weekday 5pm~9am part of it not at all. And that, when you get right down to it, is not a good proportion for a sustainable lifestyle.
I have learned hugely, this past year – about myself, about teaching, about children and about what’s important in the world. I hope I can keep these lessons alive in my heart and carry them back to Ilsan and my next job.
Today is my last teaching day here at Hongnong. The feeling is bittersweet. I hope I’ve made the right choice, in deciding to move on – one always has those moments of second-guessing oneself.
I was originally planning to jump on a bus tonight, but because some of my coworkers wanted to take me out to dinner tonight, I have decided I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning. So the countdown to leave Hongnong is 24 hours. I will be back at least once, to fetch the rest of my stuff – I’m only taking what I can carry on the bus, tomorrow – I’ll have to fetch my boxes of books and kitchen stuff (meanwhile stored with a friend here in Hongnong) with a car (maybe a friend’s, or worst case, rental) over some weekend in the near future.
A view of the alley on which my apartment building (owned by the school) is located. My student Seon-yeong actually lives in the farmhouse on the right – it’s one of the old-style courtyard farmhouses.
No, I mean nothing Buddhist.
I’m packing. I’m listening to Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Current” (dumb name, great programming). Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” comes on. Nice track.
So. Where did I get all this crap? Wait… don’t answer that. I’m packing.
I went to Gwangju for a few hours, today. It was stupid – I needed to get some cash, and my bank has no local branch in Yeonggwang County. So I used it as an excuse to say “goodbye” to the City of Light, and procrastinate on some packing.
Inside the Gwangju subway, they post poetry. At the 송정공원 station, I saw this poem (above, right).
I had brief feeling of linguistic victory, as I managed to parse the first two lines of the poem without having to resort to a dictionary. The poem’s title is “Paper Boat.” I think that’s what it’s about. The narrator launches a paper boat into a stream from a bridge. Etc.
The Gwangju subway is desolate and not very useful. It only has one line. Mostly old people ride it. Here is the context of the poem I saw on the wall – note – there’s no one in the subway on a Sunday morning.
When I was leaving my home (well, my apartment, and only for two more days!) earlier, I walked past the school’s playground, and took a picture of some springy trees.
What I’m listening to right now.
Radiohead, “Lotus Flower.”
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.
My friend Mr Kim picked me up at the bus terminal at around 4 pm. His younger daughter, 7th grade, had just finished taking a major hanja examination (there are 1800 characters that Korean middle-schoolers are required to learn), and was sitting looking miserable in the back seat of his car – this was the first time I would meet his family.
We had to pick up his older daughter (12th grade) but we had some time to kill, so we went to the Gwangju wholesale agricultural market (화물 시장 [hwa-mul si-jang] which I thought meant “wholesale market” but really means something like “freight market”) which is in the northeast corner of the city. We walked around and he sampled various fruit, and we bought some 낑깡 (gging-ggang = grape-sized mandarin oranges). These are eaten whole, with peels on, at least by Mr Kim, and then spitting out the seeds. I actually like them a lot, but this was the first time I internalized the name of them.
We picked up his older daughter, who was more sociable. When I asked her the standard English-in-Korea question “what is your dream?” (which means, roughly, “what do you want to do with your life?”) she said she didn’t know, but then her father said, “She wants to be a lawyer.” I said, with good timing, “No, that’s your dream,” pointing at him. This gave me an instant rapport and respect from both girls, who thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in a long time. Later, I learned she was thinking of writing novels or being a translator – which seemed more in line with how a teenager might think about the future.
We went to dinner for galbi at a place near their apartment in northwest Gwangju, and then later, we left them at their home and I also met his son (1st year college), who seemed stressed out by studying (which is natural I guess, in such an academically-driven family – dad is a pretty successful nuclear operations engineer, after all). I was somewhat dismayed by the kind of uncomfortable, formal relation that existed between Mr Kim and his wife – but it certainly wasn’t a surprise, based on how I already knew him. I just don’t understand marriages like that, but I know they’re very common in Korea. In Korea, rather than get divorced, unhappy marriages just “stick together” as a sort of loveless business partnership, with clearly delineated roles and formalized nagging from both sides.
Then Mr Kim insisted we go out to a bar. I wasn’t really into this… I rarely am. But I went along with it, because I tend to let my Korean friends “lead” when I hang out with them. The bar was one of the so-called “hostess bars,” which have a bad name as prostitution fronts, but played straight they’re just about bars with a high staff-to-customer ratio, where the staff are women who “chat up” the customers as they’re serving them. This is all Mr Kim seemed interested in, although I was a little bit uncomfortable as he told ribald jokes to the woman serving beer. But this is an inevitable part of Korean culture, and I was interested to visit this place roughly in “native mode,” to see how the average Korean businessman navigates these kinds of social spaces.
Actually, the highlight of the evening, for me, was when we were finding a place to park. Mr Kim was driving around, finding a place to park, and couldn’t find one. He saw a car with some people sitting in it, that was in front of a garage door. He rolled down his window and asked if they leaving. They said no, and then he said he needed to get into the garage. This was a lie. As soon as they pulled away, he took their illegal spot in front of the garage door. Mr Kim has shown evidence, before, of this creative parking style, but this is the archetype, now, as far as I’m concerned.
He popped another gging-ggang into his mouth, and smiled slyly. At the bar, we talked a lot about why I wasn’t renewing at Hongnong, and about his work at the nuclear power plant, which has been a never-ending sequence of training and drills, since the Fukushima events began unfolding (and as is only appropriate, I can imagine). I think his English has been improving – he’s definitely been studying English more than I have been studying Korean, which left me feeling a little bit discouraged and depressed.
[This is a back-post, written 2011-04-11]
I don’t believe that Koreans are less kind, less rational, or less capable of empathetic thinking than other people, on average. Nevertheless, I do think that as a foreigner in Korea, it’s very easy to come away with the impression that these things are true.
There are two things that conspire to cause this: 1) the deeply communitarian nature of Korean culture means that everyone, including Koreans, suffer from the consequences of finding unkind, irrational or unempathetic people in their social in-group; 2) the fact that foreigners embedded in this culture have the inability to communicate their own feelings and needs clearly (due to linguistic and cultural barriers), and likewise also lack the ability to clearly understand the feelings and needs of others, means that they bear the brunt of the worst behavior of the always present minority of unkind, irrational and unempathetic people.
I suppose all of that is just a very philosophical way to say that I had a depressing day. As many of the “volleyball Wednesdays” tend to be, although there were other events earlier in the day that left me depressed, too.
Actually, if I’m objective, I’d say that my volleyball skills, in and of themselves, have improved, at least slightly. The majority of my serves seem to make it over the net, and once or twice each game I hit the ball in a way that is advantageous to our team.
I hate how competitive they are about it. I hate how unkind they are to people who mess up or do badly. There’s a lot of the sort of ribbing, joking, and teasing that I associate with my darkest days of high school PE class. It’s a culture of competitive, jock-driven unkindness that permeates the feel of the event.
The phrase “우리 편 파이팅!” [u-ri pyeon pa-i-ting = our team, let’s go! (idiomatically)] is heard repeatedly. At one point, early on, the principal and vice principal were forcing all the most reluctant, bad players to play a match before the hard-core competitors got started. Naturally, I fall into the category of “bad player,” so I was participating. They had changed the rules – most of these reluctant, bad players are women, so they’d made a rule that men couldn’t be the ones to send the ball over the net. But I didn’t know that – I hadn’t caught the explanation in Korean – my Korean is really bad, you know? Well, once… twice… three times, I hit the ball over the net. I thought I was doing really good. And then, each time, our team was losing a point. Finally, the new art teacher – a hard-core jock if ever there was one, but not as mean spirited as some of the others – took the time to explain to me what was going on (his English isn’t bad).
I said, “I didn’t know.” He explained my confusion to the everyone else. And their response, to a person (even the other bad players, even the ones so much worse than me): this was hilarious. The poor confused foreigner. Very funny. Only the art teacher bothered to apologize.
I shouldn’t let it affect me so much. But it does. I keep trying. I don’t really express my discomfort, much, on the outside. I carry it around inside.
I think about the fact that this country has a high suicide rate. I think that maybe it’s not so different for inept Koreans, navigating their own competitive, asshole-driven culture. I can see why they just feel so ashamed that they decide to say “fuck it,” and check out.
And yet I’m still here. I’m hoping things will get better when I return to Ilsan.
You know… I’ve stopped studying Korean completely. I thought that’s why I was staying here. When will I start again? I’m like the student at the end of class, watching the clock. I’m ready to check out. I have 3 weeks left at Hongnong. Will teaching at Karma be better? Will I be able to resume my “projects”? My art, my writing, my language study… not feeling very good about any of it.
우리 편 파이팅!
On the bus, today, …
… 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.]
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 keep trying to figure it out.
