Showing the Early Stages of Assimilation

I have been trying (or at least talking about trying) to write an essay for about a month now and can’t seem to make any headway.  I wrote this great, unusually detailed outline at the Coffee & Waffle a couple weeks ago.  It was the front AND back of a piece of notebook paper!  That’s far more to go off of than I’m used to.  I’ve worked off an outline written on my hand during a particularly wrong subway ride before.  So, I wrote this outline in about an hour after debating on a topic for over a week.  I came home and let the outline sit for a night and then woke up on a Sunday afternoon, ready to be productive, to get back in the groove.  I wrote two pages and haven’t looked at it since.  The outline has recently been used as a placemat for the bowl of Ramen that I eat for lunch every other day.

This isn’t because I feel like some sort of failure or because I think my work is pointless.  It’s because nothing about Korea seems impressive anymore.  The essay was (and maybe still is) about the basketball game I went to.  At the time, I found it so bizarre, so awkward, almost, that I was blown away.  People were pushing and shoving to get free inflatble noise-making sticks.  The woman next to you could purchase some dried squid from a street vendor outside and cause your entire section to smell like the bottom of a fishing boat.  You could watch the Korean players pass to one of their two black teammates on 9 plays out of 10 that it might as well have been a game of 2-on-2.  And, my personal favorite, you could buy almost any fried food on a stick right outside for less than a dollar!

But nothing mentioned above elicits that sort of reaction out of me anymore.  Exclamation marks no longer pop into my head, except on extremely rare occasions.  For example, last week I saw a Korean man with a miniscule star tattoo behind his ear.  He was just standing there by the exit doors, all nonchalant, as if he didn’t look out of place at all.  In truth, he stuck out like a sore thumb.  I blatantly stared at him until he exited the bus.  This was the first tattoo I’d seen on a Korean and, judging by the size and placement and general stigma of tattoos here, I deduced that he is/was involved in organized crime.  On a similar note, my friend met a tattoo artist last weekend.  I proceeded to interrogate her.  “Is it illegal, or what?”  “How many tattoos does she have?”  “Does she have a shop?”  “How big do you think it is?  I bet it’s tiny and nobody really know about it.”  I have since decided to try and meet this girl, or at least find the shop, if for nothing else than to confirm its existence.  The fact that my mind is blown because I’ve heard of one person who may or may not be a tattoo artist shows that some sort of assimilation is beginning to set in.

As far as people pushing and shoving to get inflatable noise-making sticks is concerned, I’m used to the pushing and shoving now.  I take the bus home a lot.  The bus stop is at a pretty busy intersection, so the bus stop is always crowded because 10 buses stop there.  The pushing is almost a given.  I’ve grown so used to it that I’ve started pushing back, as if the bus is suddenly going to slam on the gas without me on it.  This must be what Koreans are thinking, or else there would be no pushing.  The same rule applies for the metro, as well.  In other countries, like Japan or France, those waiting to board the metro at least wait til all the other passengers trying to get off have done so.  Those waiting to board form a sort of “Moses in the Red Sea” pattern and then converge into a human blob to board.  In Korea, those waiting to board have already formed the blob and you are left to fend for yourself, whether your exiting or boarding.  I just thought of a comparison involving the birthing of a human being, but I can’t bring myself to actually type it out.  Use your imagination.

I rarely eat street food anymore because I’m getting a little tired of fried food that is sure to burn my tongue upon first bite.  Street food comes straight from the grill (or pot, or whatever it’s cooked in) and into your mouth.  Koreans must have a superhuman tolerance built into their tongues and rooves of their mouths.  But pretty much everything here is fried or steamed and comes from a pig.  There’s a reason Outback is so expensive here (besides the fact that their meat comes from Australia): Koreans consider cow meat a treat.  I’m used to eating steak every other week and definitely eating some form of cow meat on a weekly basis.  So now I’m reduced to longing for a steak and considering a splurge the same way that they do. 

It’s always the same play on the KBL court because Korea is a land of same-ness.  The apartments are Soviet-style beige high-rises.  Teenage girls all have the same haircut that resembles something out of the American 50′s (even bangs, longer down the sides, about shoulder-length).  The sky, whether it’s cloudy or sunny, always looks a little bit gray.  The people mostly have the same opinions – Japan sucks, short hair is ugly, kimchi is delicious.  I use the word “same” a lot in class because they understand what that means.  They understand loud and clear.  “Paraphenalia and ‘stuff,’ they’re the same,” I’ll say.  Imagine my surprise when I walk past the cell phone stores on my way to work and hear something other than K-Pop – a bastardized version of mid-90′s American pop, overloaded with techno-sounding beats and bands made up of more than five members of the same sex.  The worst part is, it’s growing on me.  Assimilation is beginning to set in and take its hold and I don’t think there’s a cure.

The Evolution of Utensils

I’ve grown increasingly better at using chopsticks.  I can now actually eat an entire meal while using them, whereas before, I would spend ten minutes trying to pick up one piece of beef, fail miserably, then stab it through the middle with the blunt end of one chopstick, like a caveman.  I would often fall deeper into despair knowing that my dinner was so close, yet so far away, thus driving me to stab the meat in front of me.  I’m currently sitting in bed, trying to think of how I should organize all of the things that I’d like to say about chopsticks (of which there is, surprisingly, a great deal), practicing with a wooden pair purchased at the Family Mart down the road from my hotel.  Wooden chopsticks seem easier to use than metal ones, but every restaurant in Korea uses metal.  I think China and Japan mainly use wooden chopsticks of a slightly different length and width.     

The trouble at first was the way I tried to pick up my food.  It wasn’t that I was holding the chopsticks all wrong or using the wrong end or something completely asinine.  I was trying too hard.  After having spent five minutes placing each stick between the appropriate fingers, I was so eager to actually use them that the food between the sticks would inevitably fall out.  I was applying far too much pressure.  This makes perfect sense because, really, chopsticks are nothing more than really long fingers.  When Americans eat finger food, you don’t squeeze it between your thumb and index fingers with as much force as possible.  This would result in the food popping out of your hand or it being squashed in your palm.  At a barbecue place near my school, I was sitting on the end of the table, trying to retrieve my beef from the sauce bowl while making sure everybody else wasn’t watching me too closely.  Of course, they were and, of course, I was taking the wrong approach.  “It’s not about trying to keep the food pressed between them,” my coworker says, “it’s about balance.  You’re better off when you just try to keep everything level and balanced.”  There isn’t a more perfect metaphor for Eastern philosophy than this.  Balance plays an important role in a Korean’s life.  A yen yang is the focal point of the Korean flag.  At least when it comes to chopsticks, balance is the key to achieving your goal.  On a completely back-to-earth level, though, how does applying force to get what you want ever turn out well? 

Obviously, it will take a great deal of time before I’m completely comfortable using chopsticks.  I’d like to be able to pick up a grain of rice or a piece of seaweed or cut a piece in meat with them at some point.  It sounds so simple, yet is so difficult because they’re just two sticks.  I’ve been in Seoul for the past few days attending a company-wide orientation for all new foreign teachers.  This is where I learned that I’m probably ahead of schedule on the chopstick-usage timeline.  At least, compared to the other new Westerners.  I was showing them how I hold them (because there is actually no “proper” way to hold them – it’s whatever works for you) and trying to pick up some noodles and generally look like I know what I’m doing.  Of course, I have no real idea.  Most of us ordered various varieties of the same dish for lunch because I recommended it.  Again, I must’ve looked pretty on top of things.  We spent the majority of lunch debating about chopsticks versus a fork and knife while eating our bibimbap with a spoon.  Bibimbap is sort of like stir fry, except fresher and generally tastes better.  It’s the same basic ingredients found in stir fry (rice, bean sprouts, onions, chilies, meat), except it’s still cooking when they place it in front of you.  It’s the same effect as letting something finish cooking on the stove, but turning the stove off before the food’s ready to serve.  Bibimbap comes in a small black cauldron with all the ingredients separated.  Your job is to mix everything together with a spoon and add the chili paste as desired to make it spicy.  It’s a pretty brilliant and delicious dish.  Also, the rice is on the bottom, so it sticks to the cauldron to get all nice and crispy.                                                                                                                                               

So, the conversation arose because we all got a break from trying to pick up the noodle appetizer with chopsticks.  One girl, frustrated with her lack of success with the noodles, said it makes a lot more sense to use a fork and knife.  So I ask now, as I asked her then, is the Western approach to utensils smart of lazy?  Unlike the previous post, I won’t straddle the fence on this one.  I think eating with a fork and knife is the smartest way to go.  It’s logical and the most efficient method and those, when you think about it, are very American qualities.  Well, sometimes maybe we aren’t the most logical people.  But we certainly like everything to be the most efficient and employ the most useful method or idea that man can possibly think of.  If there was a better tool to eat with, it would be wildly popular in America and sold in Walmart within six months after its invention.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  I’m simply saying that it fits with the American way of life. 

That’s not to say that eating with a fork and knife make Americans lazy.  This comes as a surprise even to me now, as I am often prone to calling Americans lazy.  Americans are prone to calling themselves lazy, even.  This doesn’t mean that Eastern cultures are backwards or less efficient than the West.  And it would be quite easy to say here that eating with chopsticks is something that’s been practiced in the East for thousands of years and still doing so is a way to honor the past.  This, I’m sure, is partly true, but not very interesting.  On a more obvious level, there’s always something to be said about working for your food.  By the time I spend two or three minutes properly positioning the chopsticks between my fingers and dropping the piece of beef a couple times on the way to my mouth, I really, really want to eat it.  The steak you cook always seems to taste better than the one you can order at Applebee’s.  And working for what you want is essential here.  Working 50 hours over six days is a normal Korean work week.  Children, if you include their regular schooling to along with the English classes they take at my school, are usually in school for eight or nine hours a day.  They’re sometimes required to go to English school on a Saturday, as well.  Education here is a very competitive and, therefore, has children learning and studying all the time to try and beat their friends on these mandatory placement tests that, essentially, decide the students’ futures.  How do all these classes really help if all the students are taking them, though?  It seems like it would just level the playing field back out, which puts the smartest students back in the driver’s seat.  But I don’t get paid to question the education system.  I get paid to add a rung to these students endless education ladder that, apparently, leads to working 50 hours and six days a week.  I have no clue how this qualifies as a reward for all the hard work in school.

Thank You for Taking the Time to Speak With Me

Before I ramble on about Korea for a long time, I’d like to say a couple words on a completely unrelated topic: Kanye West’s album.  I find it to be bizarre and incredible and heartfelt and eye-opening all at the same time.  When I first downloaded it from iTunes, I thought it was complete garbage.  The blurb that iTunes wrote about the album said something this being the pinnacle of an artist and all this other God-like language that I didn’t buy into at all.  Now, about a week later, the album has grown on me.  I think you really can see the evolution of Kanye West in this album.  It’s completely different and combines a lot of outside influences (the use of electronic beats dating back to his work with Daft Punk, the voice distortion that he took to after working with Lil Wayne and T-Pain) to invent something that is very new, yet still very Kanye.  I think the death of his mother played a huge role in this album and probably will continue to do so in his future work.  I’m just not sure if he can make another album like this one, because he won’t catch anyone off guard anymore.  He’s going to have to do something completely different AGAIN.

OK, so, strangers have started talking to me.  Unfortunately, it’s mostly older men.  But the first run-in was almost a week ago as a couple of us are walking back to school from a restaurant a block away.  Three teenage girls are heading our way and only wanted to talk to me:

Girls:Hello.

Me: Hello. (Geniune smile)

Girls: Where are you from?

Me: The States.  

Girls: You are very handsome. (Stand there for a second, then head down the steps to the subway station)

Me: (Blank stare.  Stands there for a second because he doesn’t realize what they said.)

Ernesto: Dude, you just stared at them.  They said you were handsome.

Me: Oops.

Hopefully I didn’t discourage them from approaching other Westerners on the street, or at least from practicing their English in real-life situations, like when you tell someone you’ve never met that you find them attractive.  Every other time a stranger’s started a conversation with me, the stranger’s been a forty-year-old man, at the youngest.  I don’t think they really want to talk to me so much as they want to interrupt me.  They always want to start a conversation while I’m writing a letter or writing a draft for this blog or reading a book.  You might think that these guys are just using these cues to confirm their suspicions about me being a native English-speaker, but I think that’s pretty obvious from the color of my skin.  I’m sure that 95%, if not all, of the Westerners in Daegu are English teachers.

It’s always so creepy before they start talking to me, too.  They either stare at me, or whatever English-speaking activity I’m involved in, or both.  This goes on for at least two minutes.  Obviously, I avoid looking at them.  No one likes being stared at, especially in such close proximity.  This only happens on some sort of public transit.  And I have no clue what they’re waiting for during those two minutes of staring.  Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to word their questions properly.  They’re certainly not actually thinking of questions because they all ask the same ones.  It’s like all 40-year-old men carry a “questions to ask foreigners” list in their pocket at all times.  It reads:

1) Where are you from? (Obviously, this is a solid opener.  I could be Canadian or American or English.)

2) You teach English? (No clue why they ask this.)

3) How old are you? (Not too nosy yet, but this information seems sort of irrelevant.  Isn’t “old enough to teach young children English” a satisfactory age?  Either way, sometimes I lie and say I’m 25.)

4) Is Korea good? (Or some variation of “How do you like Korea?”)

5) You single? (Whoa, buddy, slow down.  We just met.  One guy followed this question up with, “So, you’re single and you like Korea?” as if he was trying to imply something about Korean girls.)

6) How much money you make? (I’m not sure if this is an OK question for Koreans to ask each other or for elders to ask younger people because old people rule this country or if they think I’ll answer because I’m just some American idiot.)

7) Where you live? (No clue what they mean by this question.  I say “an apartment” and leave it at that.  There’s never a follow-up, like “near which subway station” or “what apartment complex” or anything.)

8 ) How much that cost? (When I tell them my school pays for it, they say “Oh, you have good job.”)

The problem is, I never know what to ask them.  All the things I’d like to know about Korea, like why they hate tattoos or why that Reversi game has its own TV channel, are well beyond the interviewer’s vocabulary.  So I just keep answering until it’s time for one of us to exit the train or they start peeling their clementine orange.  Old men always have an orange in their hands, turning it in their palm, mashing it on all sides with the thumb, bruising the shit out of it.  Why they like miniature oranges so much is another question I’d like to ask, but it sounds entirely too personal when you say it out loud.

Teacher Always Wins

Korean culture is big on honor and respect and pride, but I had no idea it was instilled in them from the time they’re able to walk and talk.  I’ve completed my first week of teaching and have taught, for the most part, the most respectful and eager children I’ve ever met.  I’ve received presents, candy bars or gummy snacks, from a couple students.  I can’t wait for Christmas.  Apparently parents often buy their kids’ teachers gifts.  And not, like, an apple.  Like, real gifts.  Some female teachers have gotten perfume from parents.  I’m holding out for a Kia or Hyundai or maybe a nice set of silver chopsticks.  But I’m banking on a Hyundai Sante Fe.  Seriously though, I think it’s pretty customary to give fruit baskets as gifts.  Also, in dead seriousness, spam is a traditional Korean gift.  They love spam.                                                         

OK, back to the children.  I don’t think they care much about English, but they care about winning more than anything else on earth.  And they have to, seeing as they have to be the best by the time they get into middle school.  Students have to be the best in middle school to get into the best high school and then into the best college and then into the best job and then they die one day after being retired for, like, five years.  So, I learned from observing classes the other week that all the teacher has to do is award points.  Just little tally marks.  There’s no cheese at the end of this maze, either.  I don’t bring them candy or cookies or prizes.  They just get points and one or two kids have the most at the end of class and, sometimes, that means they get to line up first.  But usually the points just get erased at the end of class and nothing happens.  It’s the oldest trick in the book and, yet, is unbelievably effective.  The point system is taken to heart so much so that students tattle on one another to make him/her lose a point.  Korean is forbidden when the foreign teacher is teaching (students have a foreign and Korean teacher in back-to-back classes).  If Jimmy accidentally slips up and says something under his breath in Korean, at least three other kids will hear it and immediately yell at me to take a point away from Jimmy.  Of course, I don’t care if Jimmy slips up once.  I try to brush it off, tell the kids I didn’t hear it, but they just keep yelling and pointing until I do something.  “Teacher, Jimmy speak Korean! Jimmy no point-uh!”  (They love to put a vowel on the end of words.  I.E. point-uh, English-y, change-y, Matt-uh).   

Of course, when I ask Jimmy if he spoke Korean, he will always tell the truth.  Again, they have some innate sense of honor that they won’t lie to the teacher.  They sometimes even look a little ashamed of themselves.  I guess I would, too, if everybody else in class is spying on me to try and get ahead in life.  But, for some reason, the other kids don’t want to get too far ahead.  If Sally, Jimmy, Sandy and Tony all have four points while Suzie has three, they’ll urge me to call on Suzie so she can catch up.  Everyone will still raise his/her hand, of course, but they’ll do so while whispering “Suzie, Suzie.”  And then, when I DO call on Suzie, everyone else, including the ones who asked me to call on Suzie, will slam his/her arm down in frustration and let out that sigh of frustration that says “really, teacher?  How the hell could you NOT call on me?  You picked SUZIE? What the fuck?”  I really love this sigh because I know they’re all going to raise their hands even higher next time, producing an even bigger letdown for all but that one lucky student I call on.  I never get tired of hearing that.                                                      

I do, however, get tired of the names these kids pick for themselves.  It’s like I’ve walked onto the set of Grease or something.  Most of them pick names they’ve probably heard in movies, and the kids are mostly under the age of 12, so they’re names you’d hear in cartoon movies.  Mini, Sandy, Suzie, Tony, Toby, Kitty.  It’s mostly girls that pick the cartoon names.  I don’t teach an Ashley or Lisa or Meghan or Amanda.  I teach a couple Tim’s and Matthew’s and Andrew’s and Mark’s, so maybe the boys are just more in tune with modern America.  One girl’s name is Honey.  Makes me wonder what kind of American movies she’s been watching.  One boy’s name is Egon, which, as far as I know, isn’t a name in any English-speaking country.  An older boy’s name is Clapton, so I like him a lot.  One moron kid picked Miguel for his English name.                                                                                                                                       

But they are, overall, very bright young children.  It’s hard when you get one that’s not so bright or, as some of us like to say, a normal 10-year-old.  I try to call on him enough so that he’s participating in class, but not enough to embarrass him if he gets the question wrong.  The problem is, these kids know the answer, but it takes more than three seconds for him/her to think of it.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  The other kids, though, they’re vultures.  If I ask Eric a question and he hesitates or looks down at his book, everyone else’s hand shoots up like fireworks on the 4^th of July.  I haven’t figured out a good solution to quell this problem yet.  I often give the student a few more seconds and then go to someone else if he can’t come up with anything.  I’ve only got 40 minutes and have to keep moving.  Each class consists of two pages from the textbook, 2 workbook pages, and a couple pages from the story book or phonics book.  I want everyone to keep up, but you’re only as strong as your weakest link.  The other kids aren’t making the weak link any stronger, though.  I suppose the best solution is to threaten to take away points for kids who want to answer TOO MANY questions, but that’d probably result in the slower kid taking a huge lead in points and then asking me to call on everyone else so that they can catch up.  Either way, though, the material gets covered and I get paid.                                                                                                                                   

Unrelated sidenote: I’m going to Seoul for Christmas.  I’ll be there from Christmas Eve until Sunday the 28th.  I’m pretty excited about that.            

Warning: Objects On Screen May Be Less Relevant Than They Appear

If you are awake past 2 AM in America and have the television on, it is guaranteed that you will find at least one interesting program on, no matter what your tastes.  If you have cable, you will stumble upon old sports games being rebroadcast or Howard Stern’s radio show on television or an infomercial selling something made entirely of plastic that will break after the first use, but will revolutionize the way you cook (insert typical dinner food) for that one time the device worked.  If you do not have cable, you will probably be watching the news. 

What I am about to say is in no way influenced by the fact that I speak no Korean whatsoever:  Watching grass grow in winter is slightly more interesting than watching Korean basic television after midnight.  I have 10 channels during the day.  After midnight or so, the number of channels available for viewing drops to five or six.  Some channels, I suppose, assume that everyone in Korea is either asleep by midnight or working.  It is also quite possible that Korean children could be up past midnight studying English.  Either way, there is nothing even resembling a television program available in the wee hours.  I have spent a couple of nights researching this topic.  Here are my provisional findings in a traditional TV guide format for post-midnight television.

Channel 2:  A group of people are on a stage in an empty studio, only one of whom is singing.  Everyone else is either dancing or just standing there, staring off into space.  I thought for a while that they were filming a group of friends in a room at a Norebang (an establishment that rents out sound-proof rooms for groups to sing kareoke in a private setting), but none of the people on stage looked like they knew each other.  Then I thought that this might be a clip from some American-Bandstand-type show because I was convinced, after 15 minutes of watching this one guy sing, that it must be a clip from 1983.  The singer wore a zebra-striped shirt and possibly a velvet blazer.  One guy behind him, the only guy who never stopped dancing, had a huge mound of hair slicked back like a 40-year-old mobster.  The dancing guy kept stepping back and forth while clapping his hands high in the air.  The singer was awful, intentionall crooning along with some Korean ballad.  The first night I thought this was a fluke, it was so bad, but then the same program came on the next night, but with different people. 

Channel 3: This is an education channel.  Notice I say “education” and notn “educationAL,” like the Discovery Channel.  A coworker said it’s a channel for kids that are home-schooled, so their parents don’t have to pretend to know everything.  That idea would make sense, but I don’t buy it.  It seems much more plausible that parents make their children watch this channel during weekdays, if any tv at all.  Children go to regular school, then English school, then do homework, then study, then watch a television program about English or physics.  There are a lot of English lessons on channel 3, all of which are more complex than the material I teach.

Channel 4:  This is a math channel.  I just read an article in the Korean Herald (an English newspaper here) saying that a new test of 4th and 8th graders found that Asian students stomped all over Western students in science and math scores.  Channel 4 is probably the reason why.  Channel 4 probably employs on two people who work 12-hour shifts, doing nothing but math problems that well beyond my comprehension.  Something interesting to note here: Korean algebra uses X and Y and Z for variables, like we do in the West.  I assumed Eastern languages would use their own characters for variables.  They deserve to, seeing as they’re always better at math than us.

Channel 5:  Does not exist.  This is the first of several post-midnight blackout channels.  I have no idea when they return to regularly-scheduled programming, but there are many hours of a rainbow-striped screen with the incessant ”beeeeep” noise. 

Channel 6:  Their call letters are “EBS.”  I’ve deemed this to stand for “English Broadcasting System,” though the language is nowhere to be found.  But the programming most remembles those that I might find in the states.  Channel 6 airs sitcoms and dramas during primetime hours and informercials at night.  The only difference here is that infomercials have no corny actors.  It’s more of a QVC-type informercial where someone is standing behind a desk or counter trying to sell you something you don’t need and that can be paid for in 10 installments.  The other night, I watched a 15-minute infomerical for glass Tupperware.  I know it was Tupperware because the screen actually said “Tupperware” in English.  But the actual products for sale were made of glass.  There was also a five-minute portion without words.  They aired a sort of video montage to this glass Tupperware stuff, full of clips with a hand pulling gross-looking food of a container and popping it straight into the microwave.  It did nothing for my appetite, but made me want to invest in a microwave.

Channel 7:  Another blackout channel, but without the colors or beeping.  It is simply a blank screen.  Seems more cost-efficient than Channel 5, who still wants to be heard and noticed even without anything to watch.

Channel 8: I’m not sure what to make of this channel.  Sometimes it’s snowy and sometimes there’s techno music playing and sometimes people are trying to sell you stuff.  I suppose it sums up Korean television.

Channel 9: This is my favorite shopping channel because all they sell are winter coats.  They don’t even bother selling other items of clothing.  Only big, furry coats being worn by models who look like they hate their jobs.  What’s most bizarre, though, is the up-tempo “Jingle Bells” tune playing as models strut down the runway.  This could just be because I’ve been teaching my students “Jingle Bells” for the past week in preparation for some sort of Christmas carol relay at school.  They’ve finally managed to correctly pronounce “sleigh.”

Channel 10: It’s the only channel that shows an actual television program on at 3am, so I have no clue what it is.  I once watched a dating show where the sound effects crew went insane when the woman gave the man a kiss on the cheek.  All sorts of crazy images and sounds flooded my senses.

Channel 11: This is where I watched a woman pull tomato-sauce-soaked squid from a Tupperware container, place it in a glass container, put it in the microwave, and then eat it, thanks to some video editing.  Nobody on screen ever spoke a word, so I have no clue what they’re selling.  I’ve narrowed it down to the microwave and the Tupperware-like container.  This is an educated guess based on the sound effects coming from the television when each item was pictured.  But, like most other things, I have no clue.

We Are Not Friends

I apologize for the delay between posts.  I’ve been rather busy and ill over the past couple weeks.  I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.  I spent mine in bed.  At any rate, enjoy.

I believe it was my father who told me this joke many years ago:  A man is relaxing on a Sunday afternoon when he hears a knock on his door.  He opens the door to find a young man wearing blacks pants, white shirt, black tie, and an eager smile staring back at him.  “Good afternoon, sir.  I’m a Jehovah’s Witness and I’d like to talk to you today about your place in the kingdom of heaven,” the young man says.  The homeowner, enjoying his day off and in an especially light-hearted mood, decides to hear the Jehovah’s Witness out.  “Sure,” he replies, “come on in.  Have a seat.”  The Jehovah’s Witness ambles in and hesitantly takes a seat on the couch.  “OK, so what would you like to say?” the man asks.  The Jehovah’s Witness just sort of blankly stares at the man.  “Well sir,” the Jehovah’s Witness says, “I don’t really know.  I’ve never gotten this far before.”

The walk to school is sort of a daunting one.  It takes about 20 minutes and it’s usually in the 30’s, so I hustle while listening to music from the second I lock my apartment door.  I wear a scarf that sometimes covers my nose if I tie it well enough and keep my hands in my pockets at all times.  It is obvious that I do not want to be bothered for the duration of my trek.  But, about once a week, someone does not heed the warning signs.  Sometimes it’s a man, sometimes it’s a woman.  Either way, they always follow me and walk with me step-for-step until I stop and acknowledge their existence.  I am forced to stop, pause my ipod, remove my left headphone and listen to the following opening line:

“Excuse me, but I am a Jehovah’s Witness.  Do you have time to talk to me?”  This was the first time a Jehovah’s Witness approached me in Korea.  I saw him standing at an intersection across the street from my apartment one morning.  He apparently started following me once I’d turned the corner because he caught up to me a block later.  At first, when I noticed this well-dressed man trying to get my attention, I thought I’d dropped something.  Koreans go crazy when a pedestrian drops a personal belonging.  Someone will run to pick it up and immediately sprint to catch up to the item-dropper.  It’s a civic duty that they take quite seriously here.  That, and making sure everyone’s shoes are tied.  Koreans will make sure you know that your shoes are untied, warn you of the potential harm untied shoelaces can inflict upon you and those around you, and then stand there while they watch you tie them.  This goes against all my previous conceptions about Korean pacifism and humility and respect for personal space. 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to have no sense of any of the afforementioned social codes.  So, in a sincere state of concern, I stop to find out what this guy wants.  “Oh,” I respond, “No, I don’t have time right now.  I’m on my way to work.  Sorry.”

“I know,” he says, “That’s OK.  Do you mind if I ask if you have a religion?”  (Wait, wait, what do you mean you KNOW I’m on my way to work?  How long were you standing across the street from my apartment?)  I see him take out a brightly-colored pamphlet.  On a normal day, when I’m not freezing and embarking upon a 20-minute journey, I would want one.  But I’m not in the mood right now.

“Christianity.  I’m Presbyterian.”  I was pretty sure this would get him to put the pamphlet away and back off, but he was a crafty one.

“Oh, good.  Then you’ll be interested in this literature,” he says.  (How does this work exactly?  Does the cue card in his head have two options?  Believer Option: Good, then you MUST only read religious literature, so you can enjoy this on your walk to school.  Non-believer Option: Good, then this ten-page pamphlet will probably save you for the next gazillion years.)  At this point, he’s got me backed into a corner, so I take the pamphlet.  I figure it’s the faster way to get rid of him.  Later on in the day, while passing time at school, I actually DO read it.  The title is some crazy interjection, like “REMARKABLE!” or “GADZOOKS!” or something.  It features “articles” written by people from several continents.  Most of them are moral dilemmas, like “What should Kevin do if he knows his best friend tried drugs at a party?”  That was my favorite article because it actually ended with blackmail – Kevin would tell his best friend’s parents in two days if the friend hadn’t done so by then.  Some friend Kevin turned out to be.

The most annoying part of the encounter was the question he asked as I was already walking away.  “Can we meet to talk about this sometime later?”  I already had my headphones back in, so I pretended to not hear him.  I had no clue how to respond, anyway.

A couple weeks later, I’d almost completed the day’s trek to school.  I was 15 minutes in, at the big intersection where all the important buildings are located – the post office, Daegu Bank, Outback Steakhouse.  This is a busy intersection that probably sees about a thousand pedestrians crossing it during any given hour.  Two women stood at the corner handing out the same pamphlet that I took from the other guy.  There’s nothing worse than getting approached by someone with a pamphlet while waiting for the light to change.  You’re trapped by the fucking red light.  So, I’m standing there in a crowd of people, all of us waiting for the light to change, and one of the women approaches me.  Right off the bat, I tell her I’m not interested.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks.  I tell her I do, and that I’m late for work already.  On this particular day, the excuse was valid.  I overslept by about an hour.  “Well, would you please take a look at this literature on your way?” she continues.

“I’ve already got one.  Thanks.”  The light finally changes and I am free. 

Or so I thought.  A few days after the red-light encounter, I’m on my way to school.  I turn the corner past my apartment building and look in the window-front of the GS25 convenience store across the street from me.  Two women are sitting at a table having coffee.  They look vaguely familiar, but I keep moving and think nothing of it.  It’s cold outside.  Then, once I’ve reached almost the same exact spot as when the first Jehovah’s Witness stopped me a couple weeks earlier, these women stop me next to the Family Mart.

“Do you remember me, from the other day?” one of them asks.  Of course I remember her because, of course, this would happen to me.  I refused to meet with the other guy, so now they follow me around until I agree to have coffee or a séance with them.  How she remembers me, though, after speaking to me for maybe 15 seconds while standing at a busy intersection, is pretty creepy. 

“Yeah, I remember you,” I tell her, “but I can’t talk now.  I’m on my way to work.  Sorry.”  She yells after me, asking when we can meet up to talk about the afterlife or something.  “Maybe sometime later,” I respond.  I get the feeling that I will treat the Jehovah’s Witnesses like we all treat that one friend everyone has, the friend that always calls and wants to hang out and you always tell them, “maybe sometime later.  I’m busy right now.”  Yes, I foresee a quasi-friendship forming between myself and Jehovah’s Spies. 

It’s That Time of Year Again

First, a word of apology.  January was an incredibly tiring month for me.  For the majority of it, I had a couple extra courses in the early afternoon on top of my regular course load that started at 3.  And then there was the lunar new year holiday, in which I went to Tokyo for a few days.  Amazing city.  And then I did a bunch of other stuff, like buy a bike, buy a toilet seat cover that I can’t attach to the toilet, get woken up at 9:30 in the morning to be handed a slip of paper telling me how to properly recycle all my different kinds of waste, and take Korean lessons.

Korea is a pretty superstitious country.  The only superstition that I have to adhere to on a daily basis is not writing a name in red.  This is strictly forbidden.  Koreans subscribe to the “Shining” philosophy – if your name’s in red, you’re probably going to die.  Or someone wants you to die.  But shouldn’t it be obvious that I don’t want any of my students to die?  There are times when I forget and everyone will yell at me before I can even write the first three letters of someone’s name.  Sometimes I’ll write a student’s name in red if I’m mad at them.  They find this incredibly cruel.  So, as a result, I always have a red marker that works, but hardly ever use it because I’m paranoid about writing anything in red now.

I mention this because, oddly enough, nobody seems to care about Friday the 13th.  I don’t care either, but I’m used to people at least bringing it up casually.  I had to explain “superstitions” to a class during an intensive course.  So I named a couple – walking under a ladder, opening an umbrella indoors, breaking a mirror.  After every superstition, they’d ask, “what happens?”  “You have bad luck for seven years.”  And they’d ask, “How?” or “Why?”  I have no idea.  I imagine that Korean superstitions have roots that are thousands of years old, but who woke up one day and decided that people should avoid walking under ladders at all costs?  I just shrugged my shoulders, not having any real answer for them.  It’s like when they asked me what a poem was.  All I could say was “short writing that sometimes rhymes.”  Then I had to explain “rhyme.”  Things go a lot easier when you just shrug your shoulders at complex vocabulary words.

As for Valentine’s Day, it’s a slightly bigger deal.  Not everything in every store is decked out in red, like I’m used to seeing, but there are hints here and there.  E-Mart, the long-lost and slightly awkward cousin of Walmart, has a couple towers of chocolate boxes with girls dressed in tuxedo shirts standing in front of them, holding a box.  The boxes, like the employees surrounding them, look a little classier than what I’m accustomed to.  They’re not  a deep shade of red with oversized cursive handwriting.  They are mostly black and/or white with a small message written in the corner.  I later found out that the some of the boxes aren’t your traditional boxes of chocolates on the inside, either.  Some boxes are deep with two small jars inside, each filled with chocolate cubes the size of sugar cubes – one milk and one dark chocolate.  Earlier this week, I saw an employee dressed in a heart outfit in front of the V-Day display. 

I know what the inside of a box of Korean chocolates looks like because I recieved one as a gift yesterday.  I fail to realize that V-Day was coming up because, like Friday the 13th, it’s not a big deal, if it’s even a deal at all.  A student gives me a box that’s black and white with more depth than length.  “Always with you!” is written in the corner with a red heart around it.  The student had tied a pink ribbon bow across the middle.  ”This is from my mom,” she says at the beginning of class while handing me the box of chocolate.  “Thank you!  Tell her I said thank you.   Did Elly teacher (my Korean counterpart with whom I share the class) get one, too?”  She shakes her head no.  So now it’s a little awkward.  I open the box to discover two small plastic jars, about the size of jam jars.  The milk chocolate cubes are in a white jar with 52% written on it.  The dark chocolate cubes are in a black jar with 76% written on it.  I ask if it’s OK to open it now because I read somewhere that it’s impolite to open gifts in front of the giver.  But they’re 10-year-old kids, so I figure they don’t care.  The chocolates are pretty good.

I didn’t realize anything was odd until later on during class.  The lesson was about different types of sentences – telling, question, and feeling sentences.  “Telling” sentences end in a period.  I explained this type of sentences as something you want to tell someone or something they should know.  Question sentences are obvious; feeling sentences end in an exclamation mark.  Anyway, in hindsight, I probably should’ve explained ”telling” sentences better, but the book sort of boxed me in by classifying them as “telling.”  In the students’ workbook, they had to write three examples of each.  Some students had lined up for me to check their work.  There was a lot of hitting and annoying giggling going on (this is a class of seven girls and no boys).  The student who gave me the chocolate comes up to my desk and looks away as I check hr sentences.  She’s written “Teacher is handsome.” and “I love teacher.” as two of her three example sentences.  I ingore it, except for maybe a slight smile (I don’t remember, as I was pretty taken aback) and tell her she’s done and move on to the next student.  So, my question is, is this creepy or sweet?  I think I lean towards sweet, but I can see how it’s a little bit creepy.  But, when you think about, what V-Day acts aren’t a little bit of both?  It’s a day designed for you to go all-out to show someone just how much you love them (which, when you think about, the amount of true love you have for someone is undefinable).  So, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, try not to be creepy.  Happy Valentine’s Day.