Month: May 2013

The elevator door opens. The inside of the institute is bright and clean, impressive. Two hallways lead off towards classrooms on either side of the front-desk. The first person I see is seated behind that front-desk, a receptionist-secretary (or “Desk Teacher”, as they were called). In the seven or eight months she and I worked together, she was to say a total of two words to me: “Hi” was one. The other was “Bye”.  She was shy, and she didn’t know much English, but she was pleasant. From what I saw, she had that kind of “hardline” shyness that if observed in a child in the USA would alarm people but in Korea is generally not considered problematic.

It is around 11 PM. The timing worked out well: The language-institute’s schedule was for teachers to be there from 3 PM to 11 PM. Classes were held between 4:30 PM and 10:30 PM. This meant my arrival was after the students had left, but while the teachers were still there. I was a bit self-conscious about showing up with suitcases in hand in front of soon-to-be coworkers, but at least it wasn’t in front of dozens of soon-to-be students.

Soon, a Korean woman of about 40, with short hair and an amiably-forceful personality, materializes and greets us. This is Mrs. Y, the boss. She is smiling broadly. I did not, at that moment, know who she was: I didn’t know much of anything about anything then. In March of 2009, while in the USA, I’d talked to her husband on the phone. He ran, and as of this writing still runs, the other campus of this language-institute. This was no corporate-owned franchise, but a mom-and-pop operation (quite literally: They have a daughter, whom I taught). Anyway, the husband had interviewed me. He was a smooth interviewer. The contract I subsequently signed bore his name, I think. My visa didn’t say his name, but rather Mrs. Y’s, although I couldn’t read the Korean yet, so I was ignorant of that fact.

Yes, Mrs. Y would be my boss for the next twelve months, and a very engaged boss she was. Some bosses are resented because — it seems to their subordinates — they coast off the work of others, and don’t seem to really do anything. This is certainly my feeling about the top-tier of managers at my current job (as of spring 2013), but was not the case at all with Mrs. Y: She definitely worked more than the rest of us. Besides being (as co-owner) in charge of the money and the administrative and marketing sides of running the business, she was a full-time teacher. It was like she did two full-time jobs. The problem was, she expected everyone to be as committed as she was.

She took on a full-load of classes because she loved teaching,  I think, more than it being about only saving money.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the South-Korea into which Mrs. Y was born resembled the North Korea of today more than it resembled the South Korea of today! That fact explains a lot about her personality, and the personality of her generation, I think.

By the time Mrs. Y entered high school, South Korea’s fertility rate had dropped to 1.5 babies/woman, and military rule was relaxing, though a general was still president.

Mrs. Y told me that, as a girl in the early 1980s, she developed a strong interest in American pop music. She said music was what drove her to major in English at university. Although she did also express to me ambivalent feelings about the USA itself (a typical South-Korean attitude), I don’t doubt that she felt attracted to American pop music, about which she seemed very well-informed.

Most early-2010s Korean middle school students, with whom I have interacted at my jobs, have seemed under the impression that K-Pop singers are among the most famous in the world. I have never had the heart to tell them that K-Pop has been (generally) totally unknown in the USA, until the novelty song by Psy last year.

Mrs. Y majored in English in university in the early 1990s.

Perhaps if K-Pop had existed in the 1980s, she never would never have studied English at all. It’s possible.

By the mid-1990s, it seems she was teaching in English language-institutes. She met her husband (a former KATUSA with an MBA from a U.S. university) around 1996. They got married and their daughter was born in 1997, I think. I taught the daughter when she was in 6th and 7th grades. By year 2000 (at latest), the family was in Ilsan. They both earned good money in the then-booming language-institute business, and in the mid-2000s they opened their own place. In mid-2008, Mrs. Y opened her own campus in southern Ilsan. It was this place that would be my home for the next year, six days a week.

Her English was excellent, I would say totally fluent, except for an occasional “how could she have known” mistake, like saying “MVP” instead of “MVP” (emphasis on ‘P’). I am very impressed that someone could develop such a mastery without ever having gone abroad.

Mrs. Y was being very positive and energetic that night, and trying her best to be pleasant. She ushered me into her office and offered me some of the milkiest and sweetest coffee I’d ever tasted. She spent a couple of minutes talking and showing me my schedule. The schedule was full to the brim with classes.

Her veneer of enthusiasm showed small cracks while in her office for those few minutes. I was reminded of that old adage about bears being more afraid of you than you are of them. Maybe it was because she saw in me someone utterly clueless about the ways of Korea, and was having second-thoughts about hiring me. More likely, she was embarrassed that I had the most classes of any teacher, and that I would be working on every Saturday (as we all were). I told myself I’d be okay with it. In fact, though Saturday (half-day) work in particular sounds bad, and does limit time for leisure and trips, I really liked it. Saturday work was definitely the most relaxed and “fun” day of all.

Our brief orientation was over. She said we needed to go down and join the others at a nearby restaurant, where they had already begun eating. We put my suitcases in the trunk of her car and got in. . . .

Back on the evening of April 29th, 2009, though, I was too busy being amazed by things to care about all that.

So many things amazed me. One thing especially stands out clearly in my mind’s eye: The cars in the parking lot all seemed to have retractable side-view mirrors — that is, the mirrors folded-in automatically when the car turned off. Amazing, I thought. I concluded that it must be because space is at such a premium in Korea (being that South-Korea is the size of Indiana and something like 75% mountainous, as I later learned). I remarked to Melinda that the cars in the USA didn’t have automatically-retracting side mirrors. She seemed puzzled.

I really thought Korea would be filled with those narrow trucks (like the one I found at right) and the like. I thought most cars would resemble the Hyundai Pony. In hindsight, this seems truly naive, to the point of stupidity: Didn’t I know South-Korea was now among the richest countries on Earth? In defense of my 2009-self: Okay, South-Korea is rich, but Germany is even richer, and Germans’ cars are generally on the small side, as I remember clearly.

We were racing along, and stopped for gas at one point. The attendant asked, gesturing at me, “Who’s that?” (or so Melinda translated). I was surprised to see gas station attendants at all, a rare sight in today’s USA.

The car navigation system spoke to Melinda steadily, giving directions. Our destination: Ilsan, my home for the next year. Writing from the vantage point of 2013, it’s a place I have fond memories of, though actually living through it was often tough for me.

Ilsan is one of South-Korea’s “New Cities”, which went from rice-fields in 1990 to a more-or-less integral part of the Seoul megalopolis by 2010, when I lived there. It’s northwest of Seoul. Much, or most, of it is closer to the DMZ than to central-Seoul.

Below is a google-map of Ilsan. If you are reading this and have an interest in orienting yourself, to follow along with this meandering narrative, zooming in and out would help. The airport is far off to the southwest. The red-marker is anchored on a park area in central Ilsan, not far from where I lived. Zooming in, this park connects Jeongbal Hill (forested, to the east) with Ilsan’s Lake Park (to the west). Now, in Korean and Chinese, “Il-San” means “one mountain” or “one hill”. I tried for a long time, in vain, to figure out if Jeongbal Hill was that “one”. No one ever seemed to know. My friend Jared, who knows many things like this, had another idea about it referring to a different specific hill, but I’ve forgotten which.

My mind, drawing on previous linguistic experience, was making wild and certainly-wrong linguistic connections on the fly: “Im-nee-dah” sounds a bit like the Estonian word for politely expressing thanks, “aitah”. Perhaps they are connected, I speculated. / [Speaking of Estonian: I have various “go-to” attention-getting / unexpected-change-of-pace mini-activities I use on bored or unmotivated ESL classes: One is to write the numbers one-to-ten on the board in all the languages I know them in (English, Spanish, German, Estonian, Russian, Korean, Chinese-Korean). For the Spanish, German, Estonian, and Russian numbers, I ask students to guess which languages those are. They can typically get Spanish and German quickly, and sometimes can get Russian, but no one ever gets Estonian.]

The car ride continued, as I pondered whether an Estonian-Korean linguistic connection were possible at all.

We were stopped at an intersection, waiting to turn. Before us was a large facade full of neon. I asked Melinda what all those signs meant. I was so confused: What could they all possibly be for?!  She glanced at them and said that many are the names of hagwon — private educational institutes, mainly for K-12 students.

This dizzying array of neon lights (even more onerous-to-a-Westerner’s-sensibilities than the one I found online at left), meant we’d just about arrived. I didn’t know it yet, though: For all I knew, we’d have to drive through another half hour of this. I had no concept of scale within the Seoul megalopolis.I have more of one now, but it’s hard to truly wrap one’s mind around a 25-million-person urbanized region. / No, we had nearly arrived. No more driving. I’d later learn the informal English-name of the road onto which we were turning: It is commonly called “Hagwon Road”. It parallels the Gyeongui Rail Line.

My eyes had been darting everywhere since I’d gotten in the car. Deja Vu: I remember doing the same in January of 2007, when I arrived in Berlin, the first time I left the USA. In both cases, I was so excited that I tried to catch a glance at everything outside the window. I rued each blink. Seeing all this was a joy of life like few others.

As such, I was almost disappointed when we actually arrived, because it meant I’d no longer be able to be a passive observer, taking-in this new universe into which I was about to stumble. I was about to meet lots of new people, soon-to-be coworkers, and hopefully would impress them. I could not have foreseen that, before the night was over, one of these new people would tell me that I should be “deported”!

After some confusion on where to park, Melinda, the recruiter’s assistant, turned off the car, opened the trunk, and I took my suitcases out. We wheeled them over to the door of the building in which the language-institute was housed. We got in the elevator. She pushed the button. Up we went. . . .

As I was making my way through the baggage-area — which was still in the secure area, so no “normal people” allowed — a Korean man approached me and asked if I was in the military. In preparation for this…endeavor, I’d recently gotten a haircut and so my hair was on the short side, so his question was fair. He wanted to guide me the appropriate way. His face took on a look of puzzlement or surprise when I responded with a ‘No’. Or maybe it was just plain old indifference.

I walked out of the baggage-area, and thus out of the secure-area of the airport, and into the “Arrivals” area. A woman was waiting, holding a humble little sign bearing my name. Her name, she told me, was Melinda. I thought this was pretty interesting, being that I have a cousin with the same name. I have no idea how old she was, though I assume she was 25-30. I remain bad at guessing Koreans’ ages. She said she’d been in Washington state, I think it was, some time ago, perhaps studying. She was now the assistant to this recruiter who had gotten me the job. I’d thought that recruiter was a one-man operation, but it seems he had an assistant after all, and she got stuck doing the “pick the new guy up at 10 PM” chump work.

She was tired and a bit annoyed. I think she was good at hiding her annoyance by Western standards but not particularly good at hiding it by East-Asian standards (as I look back on it now). It was the late evening, after 10 PM.

My plane was late. No wonder she was annoyed.

The plane had been delayed in Japan due to the worldwide H1N1 “Swine Flu” virus scare, then in full swing.

We then had to fill-out cards about our health status, and obviously they’d be ferrying-away, for isolation, anyone who answered that he or she had flu symptoms, a big disincentive to answer “Yes” to the “I have been coughing recently” prompt. The Japanese authorities instructed us all to wear masks like those at left. They provided the masks, but few of us wore them. I remember murmurs of “Do we have to wear these?”  An Indian woman from New Jersey, sitting next to me, was among the first to take her mask off. She was married with adult children, and was visiting Tokyo as a tourist, alone, she told me. Anyway, that Swine-Flu inspection slowed everything down.

[Next: Part II and Part III and Part IV and Part V]