Holidays

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

It seems like there’s been lots of holidays lately. First Children’s Day, then Parent’s Day, and now Teacher’s Day, which was yesterday. Some of my students gave me some socks. A great gift, and not just in the thoughtful way. Socks in my size aren’t easy to come by here. These fit well, and they’re very comfortable. I have no idea whether they deliberately got my large socks because they noticed the size of my feet, but I appreciate the full gesture very much regardless.

Holidays take a rather different tone here. I hadn’t noticed so much before, because they’ve been relatively spread out. With Children’s Day, the local schools were abuzz with activity like sports festivals, the children came to school with presents they’d collected through the day, and we ran a special program for them. With Parent’s Day, I noticed that Korean television had taken a reverential turn toward elders. My adult students mentioned visiting family over the weekend, and explicitly gave the holiday as the reason why. With Teacher’s Day, not only were I and the other teachers given presents, the students also sang a special song. Which I didn’t understand it, but they still sung it for me personally.

These three holidays occur in about the same span as the President’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Lincoln’s birthday gamut in February in the United States. And I’m honestly a little dumbfounded and how incredibly irrelevant these days seem in comparison. Valentine’s Day is celebrated by some, and held in contempt by others, so it’s almost a celebration of love and affection. But the other two might as well be called Funny Hat Day. Even right now, I’m having trouble parsing how most people in the United States can be so ignorant about the history of our political leaders when we theoretically are supposed to have days off to ponder why they did what they did. The closest I can come up with is a Simpsons episode from twenty years ago where the children have a pageant about the Presidents- and even this is the climax of a plot that starts out because of Valentine’s Day.

Truthfully, most American holidays seem this disconnected when I try to think about them. I haven’t seen any serious supply of trick-or-treaters at Halloween since I was a kid myself. Labor Day has nothing to do with organized labor- most people at barbecues these days probably hold unions in contempt. Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day come close- but the moral of those holidays has somehow been warped into “we must unconditionally support whatever politicians tell soldiers to do”, so I can’t really give much credit there, either. The only commonality most of our holidays seem to have is that they provide a specific theme for a party. As someone who doesn’t especially like parties, usually all I ever noticed was a day off from school or work.

Here is quite a different matter. There are several specific traditions associated with New Year’s Day, to eating specific food, to wearing specific clothes, to playing specific games. Even though Valentine’s Day and White’s Day are still fairly corporate, they don’t seem to be regarded as cynically. Unattached friends of the opposite sex will give presents to each other as a sign of their platonic affections. Not as part of an ironic anti-Valentine’s Day, but in the spirit of the holiday itself. Even the blooming of the Cherry Blossoms, while not a holiday persay, was accompanied by clear structural changes in the way people spent their time. Pretty much everyone was outside, if only to admire the scenery.

I could go on and on about this. But this is one of those subtle cultural distinctions that’s really difficult to notice unless you’re really trying to take everything in. Usually I only find out about holidays after they’ve happened, at which point I go “oh, well that certainly explains such-and-such!” I know that some people in the United States do really engage in the spirit of the holidays. Typically, though, this happens in the privacy of their families and circles of friends. It isn’t something we really talk about that much. Our media culture rarely mentions them except in the context of jokes. I think this is a shame, personally. Most of our holidays have really good ideas behind them, they just aren’t utilized that well. The simple process of a learning experience really can do wonders.

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Recent Living Habits

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

The weather’s getting warmer now, so my smell is getting to be more and more of an issue. I’ve read that smell like mine is typically caused by bacteria, an assertion that seems backed up by a period of time when I bathed using liquid hand soap and was told, by one of the few people I could trust to be honest with me on these issues, that I smelled much better than normal. Unfortunately, the antibacterial bar soap I bought doesn’t seem to be having much of an effect. My boss spoke to me last night about taking further measures to deal with my smell. These include making deliberate use of the rinse cycle on the washing machine coupled with fragrancy enhancers for my clothes, and applying perfume every one to two hours.

This talk has not been great for my mood. Of course, I really do appreciate that she is willing to talk to me about this- my previous bosses would only make reference to my smell when they were discussing something else, and their reaction was usually just disbelief at my claim that I bathed every day, even if I came to work with my hair still wet. The real discouragement for me is realizing that for the six years after high school, probably every negative social reaction I’ve had has at least been partially influenced by my smell. A fact which people were completely unwilling to tell me except in contexts where it functioned identically to a generic insult.

Bleak as this situation may be, I feel a surprising amount of calm these days when I actually try to reflect on my current status. My boss mentioned something else to me. She said that if I worked hard at improving my smell, I could have many friends. In times past I would have considered this a serious, biting insult- in the age of Facebook, we’re often given the message that quantity of friends is a very valid indicator of self-worth. But, this didn’t bother me so much. As apprehensive as I was about this issue in the United States, I’ve lived six months here largely by myself with only token interaction with other native English speakers. And I’m honestly doing pretty OK. Since I’ve stopped assuming that I need to engage in these activities, I’ve found that my day-to-day interactions have a lot more meaning.

I’ve decided, for instance, to keep going to church. The service this week involved a lot more singing of hymns and reciting of prayers. This is good for me, as there’s a projector which cycles along with the music. Obviously, this is for the benefit of elderly people in the congregation, but it’s great listening and speaking practice for me. What’s more, the people at the church are quite kind, and seem genuinely happy to see me. I got the Korean lesson I was promised last week, and the woman who taught me seemed to like teaching the material, though she insisted that speaking, not grammar, was her strongest suit. I’ve been studying some phrases before school this week. She gave me homework, and I want to do a good job when I see her again.

Before I entered the church that day, a man greeted me and said “hola”. At first I was sure that I misheard him, but it soon became clear that the man spoke near-fluent Spanish. He worked in Spain as a missionary / Tae-Kwon-Do instructor for several years and I was able to have an extended chat with him after services. I’m still surprised he bothered trying to speak to me in Spanish at all. He admitted to me that he wouldn’t expect many native English speakers to know Spanish- normally he can only speak with Peruvian day laborers. He just had a feeling I might understand him. Regardless of his motivation, I look forward to speaking to this man again in the future.

It’s funny, really- I always feel slightly uncomfortable talking with Koreans in English. I’m in their country, and we’re speaking the language which I have mastery of. It’s much easier for me to connect with this man, because we’re both speaking second languages. It’s also a great feeling messing around with code-switching. Even in the United States I had little chance to speak Spanish, and many times I mangled Korean words I’ve more recently practiced into otherwise more Spanish sentences. At one point, he pointed me out to another man who’s an actor on a TV Drama. I looked the actor in the eyes and said “Verdad?” twice before realizing he had no idea what that meant and switched to “정말?”

Overall, life goes on. I definitely feel much less defeated now than I did at this point last year. I’m not necessarily succeeding all that much more, but I feel a lot more hopeful. Even as I understand better parts of my past that led to my current cynical outlook, I also realize I have a lot to be thankful for, and that I could have ended up a lot worse. There’s definitely plenty to look forward to tomorrow.

Posted in Life in General | 2 Comments

Book Learning

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

A few days ago I received a package in the mail containing some semi-obscure Americans books. Chief among these were an intermediate Korean textbook and two collections, one of Gary Soto short stories and another of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. I asked for these books in particular because I’d like to use them to meet some learning objectives. The English books at school are incredibly simple, and the ones at the library are not ones I could use to teach intermediate English skills, so this arrival has been reassuring news.

Last night I taught my advanced students with a story from the Gary Soto. At first, I was pensive- his story vocabulary seemed a lot more complicated in English than they were in the Spanish versions I read from the library. Nonetheless, I tried, and to my surprise the class largely understood the story. I demonstrated all of the high-level words which they didn’t understand, but in terms of the narrative they grasped all the essentials. Namely, that this was a story about how the children in a lower-class Chicano family deal with the death of their father.

The Chicano part I haven’t explained. By the end of the next story, though, I’ll have to- one of the characters says the word “nigger”. This is going to be a challenge, but I’m determined not to shy away from it. When I first started this job, I was discomforted as one of the older students (no longer at the school) wore a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. This team is semi-popular here because they have a Korean player- the logo, however, is unsettling to me, for reasons you can probably guess, even if you don’t agree. When I told this to a Korean teacher, she said that this was my responsibility. I’m their only source of information about these issues. And she’s right. The students need to know the uncomfortable embarassments of American culture in order to understand what it’s really like- and I’m the only source they have that’s likely to tell them.

I was also very glad to receive the American Splendor collection. The stories are actually even better than I remember them. In an earlier blog post, I mentioned a Nobel Prize winning author Pekar disliked- his name I.B. Singer. And Pekar had a great phrase for him that I’d forgotten- “wonder rabbis”. Specifically, his criticism was that I.B. Singer’s characters are all outrageously colorful- even the ordinary ones are extra-ordinary. It’s a prescient criticism of American media today as well, where it seems like every character is larger than life. I think that’s part of why I like watching Korean dramas, even without the subtitles. The characters are more relatable, and even when they act outrageously or are put in an outrageous situation, other characters are suitably bewildered. In Korean programming this is the rule- in American programming its the exception, and de rigueur tends to be “people act wacky and interesting and they can’t be stopped!”

Indeed, this is why I think Gary Soto and Harvey Pekar both are important counterpoints. No one in their stories goes on wacky adventures. They have to deal with facts of life like money issues, personal insecurities, and logistics. They discuss the same kind of weird, elaborate anecdotes that people in the United States typically talk about in daily conversation but which don’t really translate well into one-liners. Pekar in particular illuminates very ordinary lives that are nonetheless meaningful and interesting. Unfortunately, the Pekar stories are a bit meta and risque. I don’t have any students I could really use them with right now, though it might be useful in language exchange.

As far as that goes, I’m (maybe) getting an actual lesson in Korean tomorrow. There were no foreigners at the church last week. They were surprised that even I had come. One woman in particular was very glad that I came and we chatted for a bit. She wanted me to come again this week, and I said I would if she would give me a lesson, and she agreed. I didn’t think I would have a textbook when I made that promise, so the timing is quite fortuitous. The material in the textbook is too difficult for me to understand without a native speaker to let me know when I’m making mistakes. The church was fairly unremarkable- about the same tone and technology as most churches in Ames, Iowa, with about three times the attendance rate. The opportunity to learn, instead of just teach, though- that makes me hopeful.

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Being a Native English Teacher

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

For the last week the Korean teachers in the office have been writing report cards. Because these are new teachers they’re learning how to do it by using old templates in Microsoft Word. One such template is an old report card produced from before I started working here six months ago. The contents of this card trouble me. The notes written by the native teacher before me are written in bad English, with the spelling and grammar proficiency I’d expect from one of the middle school students. I don’t know whether the teacher really had English this skills this bad, whether she just didn’t bother proofreading it, or whether someone else wrote it for her. In any case the failure is inexucable- my boss glanced at the template and asked me whether I had written it. Even to her, it was obviously error-ridden, as the Korean program still gives red underlines to misspelled English words.

Most parents would be angry to see a report card written like this- however, in this case, the parents can’t really read the English notes well enough to realize how poorly written they are, and even if they could, they might not be willing to challenge the authority of a native speaker in regards to proper English grammar. Additionally, from what I can tell, the previous native teachers at this school have been fairly well-liked, so it probably wasn’t much of an issue.

In this regard, my predecessor shares a lot with other native English teachers in Gyeongju. The students like them. When I ask them what they like about the native teachers, or what fun things they did, specifics tend to be scarce. I know that the teacher who wrote the report notes was from South Africa, large, and liked to wear crazy hair styles, but I have no idea how she taught her classes. It’s a weird issue for me to consider when most of my students will request, by name, a specific game to play in class that I’ve taught them. They rarely ask to play Hangman anymore, even though that was all they wanted to play when I first got here.

This is the best job I’ve had my whole life. I think, in terms of what I could get away with, it’s also the easiest. All I would have to do is make sure they like me- something they’re already predisposed to do because native English speakers are such a charming novelty for them. That’s not the kind of person I am, though. I like challenging them. We’re supposed to talk slow, for instance, but with some activity quizzes I’ve deliberately been speaking very fast, because I’ve guessed (correctly) that even younger students can keep up with me if I don’t do it for more than a dozen words, and it’s a very practical exercise. Soon, I want to start reading Gary Soto short stories with higher-level students. This will be more difficult than any English material they’ve probably ever seen before, but I think they can do it, so it’s worth trying.

Not all of my ideas work, and it seems like most of my lesson plans are useless because of some quirk with the schedule or students that I failed to anticipate. I get in trouble sometimes with the boss because I don’t stick to the basic plans well enough and screw up lessons. I’m still very grateful to her for encouraging me to do better work, to try harder, and to not accept the excuses I make for why I’m unable to teach a certain lesson or class correctly. It’s really helped my thinking of this as being less a job that I’m doing for basic subsistence and more that the work I’m doing really, seriously matters and she’s invested in making sure I succeed. If I don’t like the way outlined in the teacher’s manual, it’s my responsibility to teach the class some other way. I still have trouble wrapping my head around how she both praises and criticizes me for thinking inventively- really, it’s less about following her instructions so much as it is doing the job correctly.

It’s unfortunate I don’t have much more direction in that regard- there’s videos for me to watch, but I can’t navigate the website and watching other native English teachers talk to little kids is so dull I have trouble staying awake. There an’t any useful notes in the old teaching files, either, and one conversation I had with a teacher in the school across from mine was particularly useless. He only suggested playing Simon Says and Hangman, and said middle school students were harder to work with because of their longer school day. They do tend to be more tired- but you can also have an actual conversation with them. And a couple of days ago I was shocked to learn that one of my high school students had been shown the movie Mr. Popper’s Penguins by her native teacher at school. It might be an all right movie -I haven’t seen it- but if my students could only watch one English-language movie a year I most definitely would not pick that one. The book, maybe, though that would be more work.

In any event, I was proselytized earlier this week by a Church which apparently has other native English teachers as congregants, which is apparently having lunch after second services tomorrow. I’m trying to be optimistic. Hopefully some of my assumptions will be dashed, but I’m not expecting too much. No matter what happens, I’ll still have the support and motivation needed for my job. And that’s really probably the happiest part about me now compared to six months ago. Because that’s enough.

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Friendship and Expat Blogging

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

I tend to be a little hypersensitive regarding my imperfections. Anyone who’s heard me speak about my time at university can probably guess why. I didn’t enjoy my time there, and often thought harshly of myself for my inability to make social connections- not so much for the sake of socializing, but especially these days, you get a job out of college more by making the right friends than via intrinsic skills. Even after college I didn’t even think about friendship in emotional terms. I thought that it might be nice, but when I couldn’t even get a “friend” to help teach me how to ride a bicycle or write me on their own initiative, my expectations got set rather low.

Since coming here the world has felt very different to me. A lot of this has to do with how I’ve been treated by people here, and how I’ve been able to react to it. People are nicer. I’ve been told by several that, all other matters being equal, Koreans tend to treat foreigners (at least, native English speakers like me) better, and I believe that. Even taking this into account, I feel a lot of warmth from people I see regularly on a daily basis, be it at work or at the businesses I stop by on the way to school. I don’t get the same smiles from all of them, but there’s several I’ve been able to talk to in weak English and / or Korean. Some even speak to me. One, a co-worker who left the school last week, I feel I can call a genuine friend.

This isn’t something I like writing about on this blog. I’m a private person about these matters in general. In that sense, I don’t really like discussing what I do or talk about with friends because there’s a certain element of implied privacy involved. Once, while playing Go-Stop with the friend mentioned above, we ended up talking about our family trees. As anyone who’s in my family knows, mine is a little gnarled. She thought this was funny, unsurprisingly. Just general conversation between friends. Then, later on, she asked me if it was all right to tell her aunt (my boss) about what I had said about my family. This, naturally, was fine with me, but this whole anecdote really helps me think about why I don’t like writing about these issues- it’s the ugly specter of generalization. A person could take this information about my family and used it to make all sorts of weird generalizations about Americans. I knew that my friend was not going to do this, because I trust her, but she still asked for a very important reason. Once you let information go, in spite of the best intentions, it can easily be warped into that.

Take the first two paragraphs of this blog post as an example. Someone could easily take this information and think the United States is a miserable place bereft of personal connection, while South Korea is a paradise filled with kindness. Such a statement would be absurd- as I’ve tried to emphasize, my experiences are mine alone and say more about who I am as a person than they do about either country. Nonetheless, the implication still remains. And in this case it’s not one I mind that much. While I’d like to be objective, frankly, I have huge issues with large parts of American culture, and this has a lot to do with why I accepted this job in the first place.

This is the reason why I don’t like writing about my actual interactions with Koreans. Even if I were more socially active, the number of people I meet is sharply limited. It’s entirely concievable, for instance, that the divide I’ve noticed between the friendliness of Koreans and apathy of other expats is due to non-intuitive factors I can only speculate about. The same goes for opinions. Different people in the United States will often give very varied opinions on multiple issues, but none of them are really generally representative of anything except a certain sub-group’s beliefs. I remember when I was asking my co-workers about the elections. At one point my boss mentioned that some old people will follow the lead of younger voters. When I remarked how this was interesting culturally, she got curt with me, saying that only some people are like this and that this was why she was reluctant to talk to me too much about Korean politics.

Her reaction, unfortunately, made perfect sense to me. I used to read other expat blogs during bored moments at work, but gave that up a couple of weeks ago when I just confronted the issues honestly and realized that even the blogs I thought were decent were very quick to make generalizations when they felt they were in the absolute moral right. Even when they don’t mean to do this and add a disclaimer, it still comes off that way. I don’t think a lot of people realize just how unusual our social position is in this country. Imagine, if you will, an intelligent, well-read Spaniard who speaks no English coming to the southwest United States. He only talks to people who can speak Spanish. I think you would agree that no matter how articulate and objective this man is in his own language, there would be huge parts of American culture he would never be able to understand. It doesn’t matter how many American friends he has, if he married an American woman, even if he had American children. He would always be an outsider.

It’s for these reasons why the subject matter on this blog tends to be circumspect. I can honestly perceive my own reactions to the world around me and my every day life. I’m not willing to try and discuss the Korean people I know in the same broad brush- there’s just too much context I could be ignorant of that no one would think to tell me about unless I specifically asked about it. I still run into very subtle cultural differences every day that I simply hadn’t noticed before. This, likewise, is also why I enjoy analyzing Korean television. It’s not just popular locally- it’s a major international export. Indeed, most of the students in the Korean Culture Club I attended at Iowa State were international fans of Korean Drama. A lot of the subtler trends in American culture have been presaged by shifts in the way our entertainment has been produced. I suspect the same may be true of Korea. In any event, they’re probably a better bulwark for considering these issues than the opinions of random acquaintances, though better context in general is the really essential goal- I look forward to the day I can take a good analytical look toward a Korean newspaper.

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Fermentation Family

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

A couple of days ago I finished a Korean drama by the name of 발효 가족. Literally “Fermentation Family”, but it’s also translated as “Kimchi Family”, as fermentation is the process by which kimchi is created, and from a non-Korean perspective “kimchi” makes for an exotic enough title on its own. The show is, unsurprisingly, largely about food. The second and third lead characters are sisters whose familial legacy is a traditional Korean restaurant, 천지인 (Heaven, Earth and Man), located in a forested, mountain area. Many scenes in the series consist of food preparation, and there’s a strong intimacy in these scenes that makes the title’s difficult linguistic translation quite logical. The extended food preparation scenes are detailed to the point that you could probably reproduce the dishes yourself if you have a good enough culinary eye.

However, the camerawork is detailed far beyond simply being able to provide a kimchi preparation documentary. What really got me interested in this show was the cinematography. Nearly every shot is fantastic. The camera greatly captures the natural mountain environment. And even though winter has nothing to do with the plot (it’s just when they happened to film the show), the beauty of snowfall and its affect on surrounding landscapes is profoundly stated and well-integrated into the emotional feeling of the scenes. The work is probably a bit easier for me to appreciate, as I couldn’t focus on the actual dialogue as well a native speaker, but there are multiple scenes where there are no words. Only the camerawork, the ambient music, and the expression of the actors are used for communication, and this alone tells us quite a bit.

I suspect the director and editor have a lot of broad experience in this regard. What made me want to finish the first episode was a fight scene in the first episode where the main character fights a couple dozen other members of his gang all by himself. This scene moves literally at a very fast clip, and yet I fully understood everything that was going on. I even figured out the math and realized when the fight was over, simultaneously disappointed that the scene was so short and amazed that I understood everything that had happened so quickly. I should note, with some irony, that no other scene anything like this happens during the rest of the series. It was the hook that got me interested, and led me want to see more of the cinematography, performances, and obviously, plot.

The main character is a gangster by the name of Ho Tae. He sees a television report about the restaurant and is troubled by how familiar it is- he was orphaned at the age of four and remembers little about what happened to him before then. After a falling out with his gang he becomes involved with the restaurant to try and figure out what his connection is. This mystery forms the basis of the main plot. The rest of the story consists of multiple sub-plots, most of which don’t even have anything to do with the mystery. What they all have in common is solidarity with the story’s main narrative themes- regret, forgiveness, and acceptance.

The story isn’t really defined by extended conflict- the mystery behind Ho-Tae’s past is about as close we get to that, and that’s largely because the truth behind it is much more obscured than any of the other plotlines. Usually when an issue in the plot comes up, it’s more-or-less resolved after a few episodes. In the first episode, for example, one of the sisters is taking care of a baby that was abandoned at the restaurant. We find out exactly where the baby came from and why by the end of the second episode- and the denoument for this ties in directly to the themes I outline above.

All of the show’s dozen-or-more plotlines resolve in pretty much the same way along narrative themes, although the exact execution varies quite a bit. This might sound boring, and it is- if you define excitement as only being about conflict. What made this show interesting for me is that the plot manages to take resolution – usually the part of the story we care the least about – and makes it the part the viewer really wants to see. Not only did I find this very entertaining, when I thought about it, this was also perfectly logical. In real life, when we have serious problems like those faced by people on the show, we usually try to solve or at least come to terms with them quickly, because living in a state of uncertainty is very emotionally painful. The plot’s constant embrace of catharsis is a very sharp, hopeful relief against the tribulations that come from just living life.

Much of this is reenforced by the music. As mentioned earlier, there are plenty of scenes where there isn’t even any dialogue at all, so effective music is essential to the scenes working well. This isn’t just for the more emotional, introspective scenes, but also the upbeat tunes played during the cooking montages, and the rising action pieces for when the show hits a plot-critical moment. At all points the music does a great job. The closest the show comes to an annoying song is the love theme, although partially this is just because the extended “사랑해” (I love you) that makes up the chorus sounds over-the-top even to me. Once I get past this, though, and think of the song in terms of related movements in the love story, it ends up coming off quite sweetly.

Indeed, in less capable hands, I would have been rolling my eyes at this song. The love story here, though, doesn’t follow the typical romance tropes of passion, wackiness, and drama, though the first episode makes it seem as if this is what will happen. The build-up is very subtle. The intimacy of the characters is communicated primarily through hugs, hand-holding, and general precious moments that establish the strength and trust of their bond, even in emotionally difficult times. There are only two kisses throughout the series- however, one of these is without a doubt the greatest kiss I have ever seen on television. The emotional build-up really sells it- the elements behind the kiss are already in the story, we’re practically just waiting for it to happen. The camerawork and music just make it better. And even after the kiss is over, we get to see what the characters do for the next few minutes after the greatest kiss of their lives- it’s such good comedic fodder I’m surprised writers don’t use it more often.

I can strongly recommend Fermentation Family based on its interesting use of narrative elements coupled with the clear technical skills that were used in completing the production. Even as just general information on parts of Korean culture, it works rather well. Most Korean restaurants are not so elaborate as Heaven, Earth, and Man, but they’re about as rustic. Most importantly, though, there’s a strong sense of family and the importance of sticking together to get through the difficult times and make our own happier ones. It’s a very sweet message that’s all the stronger because it works in spite of the drama in the main plot. Indeed, the ending is uplifting not so much because of events in the climax, but rather because the ability of the characters to endure these difficulties makes it clear that they can take anything else that comes their way- though for the foreseeable future they won’t have to. I don’t know well actual Koreans do adhering to these ideals. I still greatly appreciate that this kind of thinking is being perpetrated as an ideal at all.

Posted in National Media | 1 Comment

The Other Side of the Mountain

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

Directly to the east of my house is Mt. Geumgangsan (소금강산). I had assumed this mountain impassable, limiting my ability to explore to the east. But last week I found several trails on the mountain I hasd previously missed, in addition to a sign indicating that the mountain could be entered and exited at multiple points on all sides. By coincidence, at about the same time I learned of a performance of traditional Korean pansori (판소리) music at Bomun Lake Resort- which is what I would run into if I passed through the mountain due east. So for about that long, I’ve been determined to tackle this feat today.

After passing through the woody cliff I’m familiar with, I had found another one across the road that looked like it was used for military training- there were human-shaped targets everywhere, and getting to the top was a brutal process. I found multiple hikers in the mountains- all of them a fair bit older than me, which certainly helps put my limitations in perspective. There were bees, flowers, and mounds aplenty on this new mountain, yet I was so tired and so blinded by sunlight that I fell through the path nearly in a dreamlike haze. And I only had to go farther when I came out on the south side of the mountain, not the east as I had originally planned. If I ever try this route again, I’m making a note of erring north- once the path turned toward the south it simply wouldn’t head back east anymore. Walking alongside the road, with two endless parallel lines of blooming cherry blossoms before me, I wasn’t able to recover my grip.

That may sound bad, and it certainly felt strange at the time. By and large, though, this disorientation was really affirming. Over the past several years I’ve been growing more and more disconnected with material objects and feelings- it’s hard for me to see them as anything more than products I’ve been conditioned to want. Up on the mountain, out on the road with nothing more than a compass to guide me and my eyes to sight the lake, the sheer reality of the world around me is overwhelming. I actually felt desensitized to the beauty of nature for a large part of today- this numb lack of appreciation conversely helped me really look at just what I was seeing. The most subtle movements of the strong wind felt reflected around me, especially as the cherry blossoms gracefully slowed to the ground in an oblique rain.

As far as the actual resort I now find its name to be horribly misleading. It is a resort in the literal sense of the word that you can relax there. To me, it looked more like a giant public park centered around a lake for which there happened to be many enterprising businesses nearby. I walked through a large portion of it in my efforts to find the performance I had come for, and it was difficult to ignore the huge throngs of people, particularly families engaged in a happy daily outing- the children charming and unobtrusive even though some of them had rented tiny little cars which they were driving everywhere. There were also romantic couples enjoying a moment of quiet reverie, as well as large, random groups of people doing whatever it was they were doing. There was a great deal of overlap between all of these groups.

After having lunch, the time finally came to watch pansori. The performance took place in a large outside ampitheater. Rather appropriately, given everything else that had happened that day, the pansori proved to be a very introspective event. Pansori performers wear traditional Korean clothing, and perform with drums and their voices. Naturally, I couldn’t understand most of it, except in very broad strokes. But I could absolutely feel the rhythm of the music and the reverberations from the audience- all of whom were very much into it. A little girl kept wandering up right to the front of the stage, mesmerized by the sight before her while the show went on. Later on, an old man danced to the music, even getting a shout-out from the emcee. Even with those that seemed bored, it felt appropriately so. Next to me, one older girl was sleeping on her father’s knee. The music is exactly right for sleeping- it brought to my mind a very strong peaceful spirit. I might have shut my eyes, but the windy weather also caused the outfits of the performers to billow in the breeze, a fact of which I felt hyper aware.

You can probably watch pansori on the Internet- I’ve been told KBS plays it every Sunday. I can’t imagine it’s the same as the live performance, though. Being with that crowd and appreciating the performers right in front of me in the fresh spring weather- there’s too many aspects that just can’t be quantified on a screen. The closest I think I’ve come to this is with the pow-wows I attended as a child. I realize now that I didn’t have the capability of appreciating them back then. When I next go to the United States, I need to try and see one again, from this new perspective. These kinds of walks, and these kinds of performances, are not events where I really learn much of anything tangible. The feelings I have from them, though, are important to an extent far beyond that. When I can see the little details in how people react to the world around them, even the language barrier doesn’t seem so immense anymore.

I did othert activities today- I went to an outdoor hot spring at one of the hotels (not a natural one- I need to get better at describing words), charted the Gyeongju World Culture Expo and Millenium Park. I visited a carnival set up by the side of the road, complete with a karaoke stage, games, a magic show set, eclectic food, dark-skinned vendors from other countries with good Korean skills, a nearby stream with a bridge made of rocks, and people shooting off firecrackers from long firecracker blow darts. These events are a queer brand of nostalgia- the most recent of them were only a couple of hours ago, but I feel like I’m looking at something from my distant past. Funny fact to consider- the most expensive purchase I made today was the taxi ride back home. It was too dark for me to even try walking back. That economical reason is an entirely sensible one for me to only ever to walk to Bomun Resort. And yet at the same time, its tangibility makes it seem the most irrelevant.

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Local Politics

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

Even though I’m an alien here, the spectre of elections has been pretty difficult to avoid. My classes have often been interrupted by trucks driving through the streets below blaring loud slogans and theme music for candidates. Today’s elections are provincial and local, and we got the day off from work for it (though we still came for a couple hours in the morning to practice the major promotion ceremony). The main positions being contested are seats in the local city council and national assembly. Judging from the distribution of scatterred business cards and candidates, these races appear to be considered equally as important.

City council positions being treated as important is something I’m not used to. What’s been even weirder is just how upbeat everything is. The business cards I see throughout town only talk about what the candidates themselves have accomplished in their lives and what they want to do. The supporters, adorned in matching t-shirts with the appropriate color and number, are respectful, friendly, and have been very visible. The songs played as well are quite upbeat, and only seem to play up the strengths of the candidates involved- complete with their actually being referenced by name.

The teachers at my school have found this to be an annoying interruption. Indeed, they are all rather cynical about politics, and are voting largely out of civic duty. Their cynicism is quite different from what I’m used to in the United States, though. While most Americans will tell you they’re disgusted with the political system, in the end most of us hold our nose and vote for the “least bad” candidate. Alternatively, we vote to “send a message” to some specific group we don’t like. Either way, whoever “wins” an American election will always claim that the victory is a complete vindication of whatever principles they have regardless of whether they were actually mentioned on the campaign trail.

Here, no one I spoke to had any candidates they really liked, though they all planned on voting. They were somewhat surprised at the fact that I wanted to talk about these issues at all. First, of course, I’m a foreigner, so my curiousity on subjects like this is always a little strange. But also that these kinds of opinions are considered more personal. They asked me whether this kind of talking was common in America. I realized it wasn’t- we don’t typically ask people for their political opinions. It is quite common to simply tell other people what these opinions are, though. My boss remarked that, since everyone has different political opinions, this sounds rather rude. I explained that in the United States people usually have friends with the same political beliefs, so it’s not as much of an issue.

In spite of this, they seemed deliberative. After coming home and before voting today, my boss and her family deliberated for several minutes over the campaign literature they had received in the mail. Earlier this week, I showed my co-workers a bunch of business cards I’d collected and asked if they could tell me anything. The information they gave was largely the same as what I’ve written above. My boss did mention that she thought one candidate might be decent. However, she found out he was involved in an incident involving some protest where people died, and he never apologized. In her mind, this made him untrustworthy. I explained that in the United States, politicians never apologize for anything. It’s considered a personal weakness. She responded dubiously, wondering how anyone could possibly trust political leaders who can never admit to making mistakes.

Now, granted, the number of Koreans I know here is limited, so my ability to make broad assumptions is limited. But, unrelated to the elections, there’s been a major news story lately. On April 1st a woman was brutally raped and murdered in Suwon. That’s not notable on its own, but she was able to make a seven minute long phone call to the police during the attack. Though she provided them good information as to her location and the noise in the call clearly indicated she was in danger, miscommunication and inaction were such that she was only located after she had been killed. The outcry against these events has been tremendous. Civic groups have been vicious toward the police establishment and their failure to respond, many blaming the woman’s death on the state itself for its failure to respond. The national police chief, Cho Hyun-oh, faced immense pressure to resign- and he has, or more accurately, will. Because of the elections it’s not logisitically practical for him to step down right this minute. However, he has given an absolute apology, and acceded to all the demands of the victim’s family- that they be involved in the investigation, that a full list of names of those who acted inappropriately be provided, and that said employees will face subsequent dismissal.

I found out about this while watching a television program on Monday- three times Korean words flashed at the bottom of the screen announcing the police chief’s resignation. And at least one of my co-workers was told about this case from someone besides me- she started reading an article about the killing shortly after receiving a text from a friend. This story has been a huge deal. The United States has had its share of incompetent police, but I have never heard of anyone being admonished like this. The first case that comes to my mind is Warren V. District of Columbia- a case where the police acted far more incompetently than in this one, and for which the ultimate outcome was a judicial declaration that police aren’t actually under any legal duty to effectively do their jobs.

I hope this illustrates an important, albeit tangential point. I suspect Korean people are skeptical of government officials because they hold them to higher standards than we do. I’m sympathetic to those who have been annoyed by the campaign trucks the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate the goofy cheesiness of it all. It helps that this is campaign has only been temporary- outrage and heavy social pressure seem to be considered a better harbinger of change than just expecting the new politicans to magically fix everything. And that’s really the way politics should be. They should need my help more than I need their’s. A healthy amount of shame helps keep this stuff honest.

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A Very Long Day

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

Last Saturday I went to the Gyeongju Arts Center to watch a show called 어디만큼 왔니. The title roughly translates as “Where did you go by”. Posters for this show have been posted around Gyeongju for the last couple of months. As this was the only show I’d seen advertised not obviously intended for children, I was very intent on seeing it. The show is a biographical musical about the famous Korean folk rock singer, 양희은 (Yang Hee-Eun), though her sister, actress 양희경 (Yang Hee-Gyung), also plays a significant role. These two are relatively famous, so I figured it would be good to learn more about them. Additionally, plays, particularly musicals of this form tend to have simple plots, so I figured I wouldn’t have too much trouble understanding what was going on.

I had planned to watch the 3:00 show, however, upon arriving I found out that the 3:00 show had been cancelled. In retrospect, this did explain why only some of the posters around town mentioned a three ‘o clock show- namely, the ones that would be most difficult to take down. So I was left with the prospect of waiting four hours for the show to start. The Gyeongju Arts Center is about a half hour walk from my home, so going back wasn’t really an option. So, I decided to explore more of the five story building. Most of it was very spacious, expansive, and empty. Some features certainly would have been interesting had they been open- there’s an observatory at the top, but the doors were understandably locked.

One exhibit was open, though I did have to turn on the lights myself. In a small circular corridor, there was an exhibition of props and costumes from the television show, The Great Queen Seondeok. Oddly, even though most of the images and items displayed were clearly from the television show, the information displayed was largely about the known facts of her reign, and the accomplishments made by the Silla empire in antiquity. The China and Hwarang arcs from the television show were only mentioned very briefly- which is quite understandable, as these were the parts of Deokman’s life that were made up for the sake of dramatic license. Specific mention is made of several quasi-divine events which don’t show up in the television show. There are three central myths. First, that she once received a painting of flowers coupled with seeds as a gift from China. She remarked that the flowers looked beautiful, but that those grown from the seed would have no scent. They didn’t. When asked once about frogs amassing and croaking in the palace grounds, she ordered the Chief Palace Guard Alchun to take a force of 2000 men to the West, to attack a group of marauders from the Koryo Kingdom. They were there. And there was also the story of how she predicted the day of her own death, and asked for a specific burial space.

There’s other stories- apparently she’s also referenced, very positively in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. They don’t call the story by that title here- which I suppose is understandable. “Romance” is a bit of a strange word. I’ve learned to note that this is probably what someone is referring to whenever they say something about Three Kingdoms and Chinese history. Aside from these curiousities, there were also videos demonstrating where many of the scenes from the show were filmed. Apparently most of the city sets were filmed at the Silla Millenium Palace, which is elsewhere in Gyeongju. If nothing else, there was a list of good sites to visit. It’s a small enough gallery, but very well done. Great for fans of the show, and lots of other general interest as well, I think.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to entertain me for four hours, so when I left the hall I sat and looked out the window for awhile. The view from the fourth floor is fantastic. Facing the river, I could make out the shimmering waves, expansive mountains, and the city outline of Seokjang-dong, including an interesting looking pagoda. I was already half an hour far away from my house, and this is a part of town that I can never visit, so I figured I’d go over there and see what I could find.

Even though I made a note of what direction the pagoda was in and had my compass with me, I couldn’t figure out where it was. I gave up trying to find it on foot in the city and worked my way up a mountain trail, hoping to eventually find a high enough vantage point that I could see it again. This didn’t work out very well, either- there were trees everywhere on the mountain that I looked so I couldn’t find a clear view of the overall area. The weirdness of this occurred to me at the time- I’d never thought I would be irritated at having found a mountain with too many trees. Still, while I couldn’t find the pagoda, the expansive hiking area and beautiful scenery were well worth the experience. It certainly seemed like better hiking grounds than what I’m used to in the northeastern part of town- but part of this may just be that it’s now spring. For all I know all the mountains have pretty flowers now. But the ones to the northeast don’t have trails overlooking the river, and I spent a long while just sitting at a crag near the river, dipping my feet in the water, and watching the waves.

These mountains are well-travelled. I met several hikers (all of them Korean) while walking about, and even a complete tour group. At one point near the river is an ancient Petrograph that was only discovered about twenty years ago. Unfortunately, while the sign states that there are human faces, floral arrangements, and shield patterns in the rock, I honestly couldn’t see anything. Right as I was about to leave, though, a full tour group of a couple dozen people arrived. Who they were exactly I’m not sure- many of them had nametags, but the only words I could recognize were “Daegu” and “library”. I stayed to listen to the tour guide speak, though I couldn’t really understand him very well. I took careful note of his delivery- a lot of what he spoke wasn’t even about the petrograph. He also told a story about the river itself, and his low-key, vaguely humorous delivery worked quite well. There wasn’t very much out there in terms of physical objects. The aesthetic beauty was quite something else, though, and I could easily see why this would be on a tour.

Eventually, I finally stopped hiking and ending up coming out near Dongguk University. It’s nice that I know where it is now, though it would take a very momentous event for me to want to walk all the way out there again. The place was largely deserted, as I’ve come to expect on weekends at universities. They had a great field, and students were using it to play sports. So, that much I can clearly write in its favor. I had dinner at the last restaurant I found before I had to cross the river to get back to the Arts Center, where I could now at last buy a ticket and watch the show.

“Where did you go by” was a fairly high-key production. My ticket cost about $50 for the lowest-level seats. In spite of my assumptions, I found I couldn’t really follow the events of the story at all. I knew who the characters were, and what they were generally doing, but the way the scenes related to each other wasn’t clear at all. I couldn’t entirely tell what the conflict was, or even if there was a conflict at all.

Normally this kind of disjointedness would irritate me. I realized about halfway through the show, though, that this wasn’t really supposed to make sense in its own right. The show was not for me. As I felt the audience’s reaction and measured it’s responses to each piece, I saw that this show was nostalgia in its purest form. They knew Yang Hee-Eun and Yang Hee-Gyung. Yang Hee-Eun and Yang Hee-Gyung knew their audience. The show was about reminding people, in part, about their own lives, and how they had changed from listening to music throughout the whole time. The framing device was important to establish this tone. However, that was all it was supposed to do. When the actual story of the show ended, Yang Hee-Eun came out and pretty much said “we’re going to have a concert now, because why not”, at which point the whole emsemble did several more musical numbers.

This general feeling also became more obvious to me by paying attention to the set design. Only two props were operated with any level of complexity. One was a giant staircase used for stage exits, an impression of a room and, at times, stairs. The other was a computerized backdrop, which at various points showed a night sky, shooting stars, rural city drops, urban city drops, bright colors, changing colors, snowfall, and plenty of other aspects I’m sure I’m forgetting. In all cases, the intent was clearly to emphasize the tone of the song, whether it be upbeat, melancholy, or serene. It’s another apsect of Korean entertainment that sounds, when I describe it abstractly, as being cheap and gimmicky, but works quite effectively when actually seen in person. The drawings themselves, while almost certainly projected by a computer, looked hand-drawn, and mildy elegant in spite of their simplicity. They were the kinds of pictures I might have seen had I closed my eyes while listening, and they really helped immerse me in the overall stage experience.

For the price I paid to attend the performance, I was expecting more spectacle. I was very happy to instead find a performance that was very sublime and understated. There was a quiet confidence in this performance that was incredibly reassuring. I less got the feeling that the actors were trying to entertain me than that they were doing what just came naturally to them. This was, once again, a very different feeling than what I’ve gotten from my experiences with American stage performances and musicals, and it again makes me very interested to see more in the future. So far the Gyeongju Arts Center hasn’t let me down.

After I left the show I ended up getting lost, returning home about nine hours after I left. It was a long, tiring day. It was also an immensely satisfying one that’s given me a lot to think about. I could live in Gyeongju for years and I don’t think I’d have a full appreciation of the tone of local life and culture here. I think I’m all right with that. Learning about new abstractions has become a major new interest for me.

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Current School Issues

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Schwartz Teacher

Recently two new teachers have been hired and are undergoing training at school. This training has been making me feel uneasy, mainly because I’ve gotten very self-conscious about my own limitations as a teacher and the fact that I did not undergo training, even though I am most certainly less qualified to teach a class than either of the new hires. Additionally two classes will be undergoing major promotion in the next couple of weeks. When a class undergoes major promotion, all of its students are expected to put on an impressive English show for their parents to demonstrate what they have learned. The incomprehensible play I mentioned a few months ago was part of a major promotion program.

Even after working here for five months I really don’t have a very good perspective on whether or not students are actually learning or how good a job I’m even doing. While many foreign teachers love to tout statistics that Korean students and parents are more satisfied with lessons from native speakers, I consider such notions to be of dubious value. I can’t give any instructions more advanced then “pronounce this word a certain way” or “use words in a certain order”. While I do have perfect skills as a native speaker, my job is a lot easier in part because it’s been specifically tailored to avoid my having to do anything especially difficult. Additionally, the inability of most students or teachers to communicate with me in a meaningful way makes me closer to a novelty than a real instructor.

Maybe I’m being hard on myself, but I prefer this kind of thinking to just assuming that everything is perfectly fine. Yesterday I had a very strange argument with my boss. Because of my insecurities I want to try to help with major promotion preparation by tutoring students in memorization practice before class. She suggested I do a different book than what she had told me earlier that the students had already been working on. That sentence may seem fairly comprehensible, but it took about fifteen minutes for her to get that point across, largely becuase I wasn’t sure whether she understood what I had told her, as instead of saying “do the same thing you said, only slightly different” she paraphrased it to the point I thought she was giving me completely different instructions. We’ve had troubles like this before- she insists that she never had difficulties communicating like this with other native teachers. I keep wondering whether the other native teachers simply avoided asking for clarifications when they weren’t sure about what was said.

I’ve been cleaning my desk, since there will be less office space with four teachers than there is now with three. I’ve found a bunch of old notes from previous native teachers and it’s weird how discombobulating they are. All I seem to find are random collections of phone teaching questions, spoken dialogues, and drawings of God and Jesus in mitosis- not really much I can integrate with my own lesson plans. This adds another layer of uncertainty on my end about what exactly this job should entail. I can’t even say for sure that these notes were written by a native English speaker at all. They only seem like it because phone teaching is explicitly the native teacher’s ob.

My latest thinking on trying to improve on my teaching is that I need lesson plans in order to keep me focused and going in the right direction, and that I need to be able to change them to the right extent when class isn’t going well. That, and I need to be more strict with discipline and getting visibly mad when the children misbehave. It’s been difficult reconciling this with the other main philosophy of how the teaching has to be fun, and also that it has to have the right amount of rote memorization. This only gets all the more complicated because the mood of the students in class directly affects their cooperation to a large extent. Yesterday a normally dour class of middle school girls came to class very excited and energized. I’ve had to reconcile to the fact that even if the ultimate direction of any given class seems to be moving at random, I still have more control than I give myself credit for. I’m very grateful that there are new teachers now because it probably means we’ll do teacher’s meetings again with demo classes- it’s practice I think I definitely need.

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