While at home, I picked up a copy of Game of Thrones. The tagline for the book and the TV series it inspired is “winter is coming.” But that doesn’t fit at all in this case.
The first day of my visit home looked like this:
The last day of my visit looked like this:
You don’t need a groundhog to see that winter is on its way out.
There are no groundhogs in Korea. There are, however, numerous Koreans who will gladly tell you that Korea has four distinct seasons.
Spring is on its way, slowly but surely. The frozen peninsula that is South Korea in the winter will start to thaw soon, and my lovely southern city of Busan will be first to warm up.
With the end of winter comes the realization that I’m halfway through my second and final year in South Korea. Here’s to making it count!
A new year, a new round of New Year’s resolutions.
Except I’ve come to the conclusion over the last few years that I almost never stick to a resolution for an entire year. This year, I’m trying a new strategy. This year, I don’t have any specific resolutions. I just have a mantra.
Take Initiative.
This two-word phrase which will no doubt drive me toward Greatness came to me courtesy of Lazy Dog, a sad cartoon puppy on one of the articles of clothing I’ve come to think of collectively as The Konglish in my Closet.
This sweater isn’t much to look at. I bought it at a second-hand store in the Busan neighbourhood of Seomyeon for a measly 5,000 won (less than five dollars). The clerk was particularly excited about this sale because it meant that he could throw in their absolutely wretched matching bright blue sweatpants for free. His eyes lit up when he realized this, and he ran to the back room of the store to retrieve them — obviously, he wasn’t about to put such horrid clothing on display with all the other, normal clothes. He doubled back to the til just as quickly to make sure I wouldn’t leave without taking them off his hands.
The sweatpants had elastic ankles that ended at my shins, and the insides left blue cotton bits all over my other clothes the one time I washed them. Suffice it to say I never warmed to them, nor they to me, and neither of us seemed to mind when we parted ways on the day I moved apartments.
The Lazy Dog sweater, on the other hand, has become an integral part of my Sunday routine.
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When I don’t feel like going outside, when I just want to sit around my apartment streaming American TV shows or reading the Hunger Games books, this is the sweater I wear. As long as I have the sweater on, I don’t leave the apartment. This is an unspoken rule.
But Lazy Dog is dangerous. Lazy Dog can make a weekend hermit out of me, which carries the potential hazard of transforming my tiny apartment into the setting of a week-long, round-the-clock hermitage. Lazy Dog’s self-loathing “why bother” approach to life is both contagious and addictive. Sometimes, I put on Lazy Dog, and I don’t take Lazy Dog off for 24 hours. This is a problem.
Lazy Dog, you poor wretched beast. In the spirit of the new year and all of its potential, and also because I fear becoming you, I hereby proclaim 2012 the Take Initiative Year.
"What are you drinking? Why, it's me, sir! Enjoy me, but take heed: my insides could scald you." (At a Dunkin' Donuts in Busan.)
Thing 2: The Ceiling of My Apartment
It was a bit of a shock the first time I woke up and noticed the giant robot face with a gaping maw directly above my bed. Now that I think of it, I didn't start obsessing about Things In Korea With Faces until I moved into this apartment. Perhaps having the face of my own apartment be the last thing I see before falling asleep at night might be messing with my subconscious a little bit. But I don't know about that. What do you think, Mr. Ceiling Face?
Thing 3: Peanut Buttered Roast Squid
"Eating me is like a punch in the face," he seems to say. Peanut Buttered Roast Squid is an angry guy. His little sidekick, Tofu Boy, is much nicer. (A street food vendor in Nampodong, Busan. )
Thing 4: A Monkey’s Butt
This advertisement for "HANG Plus Anal Hospital" is displayed inside Sinpyeong subway station in Busan. Those poor, poor monkeys.
Incidentally, this is also the cover art for the wildly unpopular new children's book, "Curious George and the Hemorrhoid Treatment."
Thing 5: This Guy
Meanwhile, in Busan…
(You can find other Things in Korea with Faceshere and here.)
I’d just finished teaching my lesson on Christmas, and the students were loudly filing out of the class for lunch. I had to ask my co-teacher to repeat it a few times before I was sure of what he’d said.
“This morning. Kim Jong-il is dead.”
At lunch, it seemed to be all anyone was talking about. They spoke in hushed Korean, but the words “Kim Jong-il” were repeated often. It seemed nobody was sure whether to be relieved or worried about the news. It seemed they’d all decidedly to be both simultaneously.
“I remember when his father, Kim Il-sung, died,” my co-teacher said. “I was a child in school. I thought the world would be… changed.” Her eyes were wide with excitement and shock.
North Korean tradition holds that Kim Jong-il was born in a log cabin in the wilderness of national symbol Mt. Baekdu, and that the event was marked by the ostentatious appearances of both a double rainbow and a new star in the sky.
Reports of his death, however, hold no such epic portents, other than the fact that the news was announced on South Korea President Lee Myung-bak’s 70th birthday. I’m told that the air raid signal that went off during one of my lessons was accidental and not at all related to the historic death of our dictator to the north.
Today is one for the history books, but it remains to be seen how this change in the North Korean regime will impact the future. Very little is known about the Dear Leader’s son, Kim Jong-un; even his age is a mystery. The South Korean military is on alert and all active soldiers on leave are being called back to their bases.
As it is now, South Koreans are reacting in myriad emotions ranging from unbridled joy to fear and anxiety.
But judging from the celebratory K-pop dance moves my students whipped out this afternoon, the nation is certainly breathing a collective sigh of relief — even as it is bracing itself for whatever comes next.
A couple of months ago, popular TV show Glee aired an episode titled “The Asian F.” In it, Chinese American Mike Chang is dismayed about getting an A- on a test. He and his father refer to it as an “Asian F.”
Grading my speaking tests this week, I realized just how apt this term is.
Last week, I conducted speaking tests on my grade 1 and 2 (North American grades 10 and 11) students. I handed in my final grades on Friday. As I’d never ran speaking tests like this before, I kept careful record of my evaluations, and reminded myself that I would probably have to scale the grades to better fit the school’s grading format. And I was okay with that.
Today, I learned that the school doesn’t normally allow any grade submitted to be under 75% for speaking tests.
That is to say, the lowest possible grade a student can receive in one of my classes is a B.
This was far more grade scaling than I’d expected. And it’s not just at my school. After checking with other public school teachers, the base grade varies but it is standard procedure across Korea to not allow failing grades for speaking tests.
In Korea, for a lot of tests, a B really is an F; it’s as low as you can get. This is Korea’s own personal brand of “no child left behind” policy. It is basically impossible to fail English conversation class.
In a culture which so highly regards education, where high school seniors spend 12 or 14 or 16 hours a day studying, the driven students work tirelessly for perfection.
But what about the other students? The ones who make up that base grade of 60 or 70 or 75 percent? The ones who have no reason to bother trying, as they can get a B grade without uttering a single word in English during a speaking test? What motivation do they have?
I know that I am not a real teacher in Korea. I am technically a “co-teacher,” as it says on my job contract, despite the fact that I have taught most of my classes solo this year. This is not my country; this is a country with a separate set of customs and values. I know about cultural differences, cultural clashes, and the ways in which North America and Korea are different, and that’s all okay.
But a failing grade should be a failing grade. If a student shows up to a speaking test and fails to say anything — not even one word — in English, they should receive a failing grade. End of story. As it is, these students will instead receive a mediocre, passing grade. They will feel no motivation to get better. No motivation to try harder, to listen in class, to even stay awake in class. They will coast through school until they graduate, and they will have learned very, very little. Something here is wrong.
So now here I am, scaling my grades up by over 10%. Because I made a compromise with my co-teacher, the kids who did not speak any English during the speaking test will get 60% instead of 75%. Maybe this drop in the base grade will serve as a warning to students that they might want to actually try next time. Or maybe not.
Call me a hard-ass, but if you fail to put in any effort, you should fail the test.
I was sitting in a coffee shop down the street from my school after a particularly long and exhausting day, when the man next to me got up to leave and a gaggle of young women swept over to claim the table. It took a moment for me to register that one of the women was trying to get my attention.
“Excuse me, we are students. We have school assignment to take picture with a foreigner.”
They all stared at me.
“Can we take picture with you?”
Feeling ragged and more than a little awkward in my sudden spotlight, I hemmed and hawed before I realized I really had no choice. I would either be the friendly accommodating foreigner or the antisocial foreigner who has no interest in mixing with enthusiastic, global-thinking Korean university students showing an interest in other cultures.
“Erm, sure,” I responded.
They crowded around me as I worked to push away my table — seemingly to make more room for my new friends, but actually to hide the massive half-eaten brownie I’d been gorging myself on just before.
After more than a few awkward moments of shifting around and camera-adjusting and one of the girls nervously murmuring “hurry up, hurry up,” the self-photo was taken and the girls were gone as quickly and randomly as they’d appeared.
Afterwards, I had time to reflect on what had happened. I’d been annoyed at first, but I held no ill will towards the girls. They’d been polite and straightforward. It was the assignment that baffled me.
What university professor gives a “find-and-photograph-a-foreigner” assignment to their students? Who was it that decided to turn me into a prize in some bizarre multicultural scavenger hunt? I felt like there should be some other component to this assignment — should I check my clothes in case they’d surreptitiously tagged me for future tracking and scientific research purposes? I really hoped the assignment was actually supposed to involve having a conversation with the foreigner, rather than just pulling a paparazzi hit-and-run.
Then I had a vision as clear as day: there stood the professor in his lecture hall, assigning his foreigner scavenger hunt homework.
“Be careful,” he’d say. “And be alert. Foreigners can be found just about anywhere, if you know how to look for them. Try big chain coffee shops and fast food places. Starbucks is a good bet. And don’t be afraid. They’ll be just as wary of you as you are of them.”
And then another vision, this time of the assignment the way the professor envisioned it:
A street full of people at rush hour. A glint of light flashes off somebody’s watch — it’s a foreigner. She dodges out of a Family Mart and quickly scurries into a building. Then another one. He scrambles out of a cab and zigzags past a cell phone store and then around the corner out of sight. He’s there and gone in a flash — you might not have even noticed him if you weren’t on guard.
Finished with my coffee, my book, and my confusion, I pulled on my jacket and stepped out of the coffee shop to scurry my way to the subway station, zigzagging between people along the way.
120. That’s the number of speaking tests I did on Friday. 125 is the number of speaking tests I did today. Once all is said and done, I will have evaluated over 450 speaking tests in a one-week period.
Suffice it to say that conducting over a hundred speaking tests in one day means that they tend to blend together. Every once and a while, though, something will stick out from the constant barrage of phrases like “Let me introduce my,” “I will tell you about,” and “it is very nice.”
Halfway through a Grade 1 class of speaking tests, a student steps out of the classroom and into the hall where I’m conducting the tests.
“Let me introduce my family,” he tells me.
I couldn’t tell you what the next several sentences of his speech were, although I’m sure he must have listed the number of members in his family, their ages and/or jobs, and where they live.
After a few sentences going on in this fashion, he stops abruptly. I look up to see him glancing nervously at the classroom window, where a few of his friends are peering out at us. They are looking on excitedly. A strange, unnerving quiet has settled over the classroom, like the calm before a storm.
Then, egged on by his friends watching, the student turns to me and bursts out, “And then me, I am cutey guy, sexy boy yeah!!” As he shouts this, he strikes what I can only describe as a 1950s-era sex symbol pose: one hand behind his head seductively, the other on his hip. He does a few Elvis pelvic thrusts for good measure, thanks me for listening, and then struts back into the classroom to the thunderous applause of the students inside.
