same Korea

I wonder if there are any heros. I mean, there is Kim Yuna. Singing groups (although they’re all pretty formulaic). There’s Ban Ki Moon, but honestly, I know nothing about him. Park Ji Sung, an OK soccer player who sometimes plays for a very good foreign team. None of these are, to me, inspiring.

In fact, little about Korea inspires me. It’s quirky, and interesting, and mysterious, and fun, and there’s tons to learn here. But there is almost nothing that gives me a spark. Nothing wows me. I’m enthralled by nothing. I will myself to find certain things interesting or exciting, because I have no choice: I’ll be here for another 6 months. I have to have some kind of an experience.

But every day I see the same things: repetitive apartment buildings, stores, streets, cars, and people. I rode my bike for 4 hours along a river yesterday and saw nothing but apartment buildings; all the same height, boring design, and in varying shade of off-white. The people I passed on my bike wore biking uniforms; nothing out of the ordinary, exactly what you would expect bikers to wear.

And everyone has a uniform. There are beautiful girls who wear the same kind of heels and miniskirts and clothes; the only difference seems to be how high their heels are or how short their skirts are. The only difference between them is how skinny they are. Same with everything. All a race in one direction.

The competition to get into the best universities is fierce. Kids study as much as they can, at school and then hagwon afterwards if their parents can afford it. They all take the same faceless tests in school. All multiple choice. And then what do they want to do when they grow up? A doctor. Or a lawyer. Their parents don’t tell them “You can be anything you want to be”, they tell them, “This is what you should be, try as hard as you can to get there”. If they don’t meet that goal, there are other options, but only going down the scale, never laterally. All racing towards the same profession, so therefore all racing towards the same schools. There’s other options if they don’t work out, but they’re not as good.

And there’s no way out of the race. If you’re different, you’re out of the circle. Diversity isn’t praised, it’s looked at as rebelliousness. I crave rebelliousness now. Stand up to the man, to the system. How many drunk ajosshis are there every night, in the same suits, drinking the same fucking soju every night. Did they ever have dreams? Did they ever want to be something? Or did they just want to do well?

Sure, this is a conservative country, but isn’t there an underbelly? Other than Itaewon I mean. Where is the haven for the misunderstood, the rejects, the rebels, the ones who are sick of the same race. Where are the outcasts of the oppressive society, where are those in self-imposed exile from a monotonous path towards drunken dissatisfaction as an ajosshi?

And the escapism in cell phones, TVs, technology, Starcraft, PC bangs, roleplaying games. There was a girl who didn’t come to school for a day because she was playing a game where she was taking care of a virtual plant. I didn’t understand exactly because of my co-teacher’s English, but apparently the girl spent about a thousand dollars on the game somehow. This girl had been picked on a lot and my co-teacher had assumed that she was staying home to stay away from the bully. But she was playing a virtual game, in a virtual reality. If you can’t make it in real life, try another game. They don’t just choose another path in life, they decide to start a new life on a computer, and see if they can do better there. Still a linear path. No lateral decisions. Successful or unsuccessful, and there’s always a way to measure it. Society always measures it.

Same haircuts, same skinny jeans, same suits, same likes, same dislikes, no individuality. No graffiti on the boring buildings everywhere. No groups performing on the streets. Just drunk people, sleeping or drinking more.

Not giving a fuck

After listening to the story, and immediately before going to have coffee with his girlfriend, he typed “Morality” into Wikipedia and read. Instead of following his usual routine of debating what to wear for a few minutes before leaving his apartment, he grabbed whatever was closest. He wasn’t thinking to himself “What do I look like”, but rather, “What will the world look like after it sees me”

On the subway, considering the morality differences between Korean and American culture, he decided that they were too divergent to make a truly moral decision in his situation. Instead, he decided, as some of his most admired idols had, to not give a fuck. He realized that not only had the Tucker Max-like characters he had seen, read about, or met in his life subscribed to this philosophy and thrived due to it, but almost every success story had the same spirit about it (although their catchphrase philosophy might be more politely called “Carpe Diem” rather than “Don’t give a fuck”).

He realized that his whole relationship had been based on the premise of “giving a fuck” and that this was precisely what was sucking the life from his bones and shackling him down.

Korea rant

I wake up at 7:35, say “Ah fuck” and get out of bed. I turn on the hot water, and take a piss and brush my teeth as it heats up. Finally I use the hose in my bathroom to clean myself, dry off, and pick out one of the five outfits that I can safely wear to work without getting comments from several teachers. I walk out of the door to the bus stop at 7:55.

At the bus stop there are usually a lot of students, and sometimes a few teachers from my school. I nod and say annyeong haseyo to them and they do the same and then I just stand next to them since communicating is exhausting and pointless for either of us, but still, we feel obligated to at least stand next to each other because we work in the same place. Eventually the bus comes and people stream off of it. Then I squeeze my way on and, unless it’s an unusual day and there’s no one there, I have to stand.

Once we get to school, I walk into my office and nervously smile, bow, and mutter annyeong haseyo to a room full of teachers who I don’t talk to for the rest of the day.

I turn on my shitty too-slow computer and wait for a few minutes as it boots up. Meanwhile, my shins are scraping up against the shelves under my desk. I open my email and download the lessons for the day. This takes more time again. Finally I download it, look it over, and print it. I tiptoe to the printer behind the chairs of the older Korean teachers in our too-small office to retrieve the paper, then take it upstairs to photocopy. In the main office I keep my head down and make a bee-line straight to the copier, dodging other teachers and hopefully avoiding painful small talk with other teachers. This attitude is sometimes chided by the vice-principle, who expects me to greet him every time I walk into the office. I take the copies back downstairs and waste time on the internet to distract me from the fact that I have to teach in 5 minutes.
The class bell rings and I think to myself, “Ah fuck, alright let’s just do this.”

I leave the office and students are running around, bowing to the Korean teachers, waving and stupidly yelling “Hello!” to me, or maybe making some kind of dumb joke about me. I have to put up with it since I feel awkward disciplining them.

Then I get to class. Maybe my co-teacher is with me, but either way, it takes awhile for them all to finally settle down. I’m yelling and banging on the desk, adding more noise to the din. Finally, somehow, even though they’re probably not paying attention to me, the kids at least get quiet. Then I start to teach my lesson to blank stares.

My classes usually consist of a powerpoint that no one pays attention to, a worksheet that never gets filled out and is usually crumpled and thrown on the ground, and maybe a game that takes too long to set up and usually is just a way for kids to yell and scream some more.

Since the kids don’t get a grade in my class, it’s just a period to relax and have fun. And I’m supposed to be understanding, since I’m the foreigner.

After a few classes, and maybe a break where I sit like a zombie in front of my computer trying to forget where I am, it’s lunchtime. I never go with anyone, always alone. And I usually sit alone and no one tries to talk to me anymore, which is actually relieving. Still, I feel awkward, and look down at my food without hardly ever looking up, and eat too fast so I can leave quickly. The lunch room is just as crowded as the office, so it is always awkward to try to squeeze my way out from between chairs. I wonder what will happen if Sunduck gets an obese person as a teacher next year.

The next classes go about the same. Sometimes co-teachers will come to my office on my 10 minute breaks and ask me what the difference between “shadow” and “shade” is, or between “ornament” and “decoration” and I give the best explanation I can without simply saying “Go look in a fucking dictionary. They hardly pay attention to my carefully thought-out, painfully slow, and sufficiently thorough explanation about the completely banal subject they bring to me, because they always somehow bring up some counter-argument that is completely unrelated to what I just said, to which I usually concede just so they go the fuck away and I say “OK bye!” with an ever-increasingly fake smile.

Soon it’s time for my after-school class which I’ve shoddily prepared for. The class is half the size of my normal ones, which is good, but among the students there is a wide range of intelligence and motivation. There’s always a few kids who play on their cell phones, and if I ignore them to teach a lesson, the vice principle will see them through the window of my classroom, come in and take away the cell phone, and then remind me that they can’t have cell phones in class and that I should take them away.

Finally school is over and I either take the bus or walk home.

If I have to prepare a lesson the next day, I might start at 7 or 10, but I usually finish around 11:30, my bedtime. This is because I don’t have a curriculum or any directions to follow. There is no point for me in the classroom, so I’m left to let my own neuroticisms decide what I should be teaching. This leads to a lot of carefully planned lessons, and many lessons that have been planned twice.

Beginner's luck (story idea)

He was a man who firmly believed in the rules of the universe:

Yin and yang.

Good karma follows bad karma

and vice versa.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

He had a wise smile. It was a smile of a man who knows that he can’t know everything, but who also knows he knows enough. Such a smile comes from both luck and hard work, just like everything else worthwhile in the universe (he knew this too). The hard work that had given him that smile was his ceaseless analysis and observation of his surroundings. The luck had came from testing his observations many times; many times more than a normal person would. His luck came after most people would have given up.

Toy cranes were popular in the city he lived. You could pay 50 cents and get three chances to win a stuffed animal by picking it up with a weak crane. Like most people his age, he would go out drinking with his friends at night. In between bars after a few beers, they would play the toy cranes. Usually the cranes were whipping boys for his friends: they put in 50 cents, half-heartedly moved the crane around, and when they didn’t win, they would drunkenly kick the machine and jokingly curse at it for being a ripoff. They’d each have a go at it and then stumble off to the next bar.

He never played them, though. At first he believed, like his friends, that they were a ripoff. But unlike them, he didn’t feel the need to feed it money just to have a justification for kicking it when he lost. Instead he just watched. His friends goaded him to try every once in awhile, but they were as lack-luster at peer pressure as they were at playing the crane.

Then one night, he was again out with his friends. They were getting even more drunk than usual and it was late in the night. On the way to the last bar, the found a crane and each had a go at it in turn. After all of his friends had tossed their money and frustration into the machine, they ambled off to get more drunk. Just one of them was conscious enough to notice that he had stayed behind.
“Hey guys,” he slurred, “look who’s tryin the crane!”

Everyone laughed the laugh that drunk people do when something is surprising. Then he pulled out a sack of quarters and plopped it on the crane with a metallic crash.

“These are all the quarters I saved while watching you morons throw money away on this dumb game,” he announced boldly with a huge grin on his face. He was awash with drunken bravado.

“Not a single one of you has won a single doll since you started playing this damn game, and tonight you’re all going to look like idiots when I win buckets of them on my first night playing.”

Everyone laughed the same laugh again because this statement was also surprising. But they were also drunk enough to be a little scared of someone just as drunk but even bolder than them.

He put two quarters in and played. On his first three tries, the crane merely grazed the edges of dolls, hardly moving them, the same as everyone else’s attempts. They all let out yet another laugh and said, “All right buddy, let’s go. We’ve got beer calling our name.”

“I’m not leaving this crane until every single one of these quarters is gone. I’m gonna catch up with you assholes tonight and spend just as much on this game as you have. Except I’m gonna have thousands of these stupid dolls and none of you morons will.”

They laughed him off yet again and started walking to the bar, leaving him behind. They all thought he might play for a few more minutes, and then catch up with them. But he stayed.

They all got a first beer and drank it. Then a second. Then a third and fourth. Even though they were drunk, they suddenly realized that their friend still hadn’t joined them. They thought maybe he had gotten frustrated and just gone home. But they all knew he was still there. One of them went to go check on him, and found him still there with the bag of quarters, now a little lighter, and without a single doll. Of course, he laughed.

“All right man, come on. Come get drunk. It’s all right. No one wins this damn game.”

He didn’t look up; he was still playing the game. But he cracked a little, half-drunk, half-conscious grin. “I’ll catch up when my quarters are gone. Didn’t you hear me? Get back there and drink another beer,” he said and patted his friend on the bum.

The friend went back to the bar, laughed a little more with the other friends about him, and just drank more beer, waiting around for the inevitable.

Ann's dog story

“I was really sad and got really stressful because the other day my father got really drunk in the morning and told me that our dogs were dead”

Her father works a night job (although I’m not sure what it is exactly and she hasn’t volunteered the information). Her family had moved from a house near the mountains of Seoul to a more urban apartment a few weeks ago, and since they didn’t have any room for them, they sent the dogs to a relative living in the countryside. These days, she gets puppy dog eyes anytime we walked past a pet store and often spontaneously blubbers, “Buy me a dog please!”

“He was really drunk and really angry at my relative. He really loved the dogs. He didn’t tell us before, but then was drunk so told us that they were both dead.

“So how did the dogs die?”

“One was looking for my father. He was lost for a long time. My relative lives near a lake. And he fell in the water.”

“The dog couldn’t swim?”
“Maybe could. But in the water for a long time. No one could find him. And so he died. It was too long of a time.”

She didn’t continue, and since the story was so sad, I didn’t feel right prying. But we both knew the story wasn’t finished. After a few two many knowing head nods and sad looks, I quietly venture:

“And the other one?”

She looked at me, then quickly to the side and back at me, visibly debating with herself what to tell me and how to tell me in English. Finally, she just conceded to the inevitable.

“My relative… ate him.”

My demeanor instantly switched from concerned parent to 14-year-old boy. I was laughing hysterically. Thankfully, the comic timing wasn’t completely lost on her either, and she started laughing with me. After calming down, I had another quite obvious question:

“Why did your relative eat your dog?”

“I don’t know. Just wanted to eat it I think. He sent a leg to my grandparents and his cousins.”