Author: Peter

The dramatic Battle of Chipyong-ni (지평리) [Feb. 13-15, 1951] was the “Gettysburg of the Korean War”, they say, in that it was the first time, when under Chinese attack, that the Americans didn’t retreat. (The linked-to book discusses the entire “Wonju Campaign” of February 1951, of which the siege of Chipyongni was the most significant part.)

In the long (500 pages), detailed military history of the U.S. Civil War I read a few years ago, I believe it was called How the North Won, I was surprised at how little attention was given to Gettysburg. Only a few paragraphs. The authors actually had a small appendix explaining why they neglected Gettysburg. It was actually of little final importance in the defeat of the Confederacy in military terms (the purpose of the book). They explained how unlikely it was that Lee was “about to win the war” with a victory there, and about how it was not a turning point.

This goes against what we’ve been told in movies. Gettysburg was the turning point, we are told. The strategic situation in the East was exactly the same in Fall 1863 (after Gettysburg) as it had been in Spring 1863 (before Gettysburg). Nothing changed. It was, by definition, not a turning point, because nothing changed. I remember thinking, “Okay, but Gettysburg must have increased Union Army morale”. It was the first time the Army of the Potomac (the eastern Union army) actually decisively won a major battle. It was the first time the Army of the Potomac did not retreat after a battle. That must count for something.

Likewise, Chipyong-ni was the first bright spot after so many weeks of retreats in Korea, “the longest retreat in U.S. military history”. It was the first time the Americans did not retreat when attacked by the Chinese. The incredible casualty ratio made the formerly-invincible-seeming Chinese seem like amateurs: 5,000 Chinese killed and wounded, versus 400 U.S. and French casualties.

See the long essay from the U.S. Center for Military History entitled “Restoring the Balance: 25 January to 8 July 1951” for a full history of the campaign.

In the two weeks before the February 13th-15th battle, the UN had taken a limited offensive, as below. The dark line was the frontline as of January 25th, and the dotted line was the front as of February 11th. Note that Chipyong-ni was the point of furthest advance in the area.

Chipyong-ni stayed in U.S. hands for the rest of the war.

Far off to the east of Chipyong-ni, Seoul itself was still in Chinese hands at the time of the battle (Feb. 1951), and would be till mid-March. It was nearly recaptured yet again by the Chinese in April/May 1951. “Chinese hands”. That’s the other interesting thing about Chipyong-ni. It was a major battle of the Korean War, but very few Koreans were actually involved. According to the elderly museum-keeper at Chipyong-ni, only 150 Koreans were part of the U.S. force at Chipyong-ni and they were KATUSAs (English-speaking Koreans to facilitate communication).

I first became aware of Chipyong-ni in the recent Korean War history The Longest Winter (2007). I grew to dislike that book as I was reading it, because it was more a political screed than an actual history. The author spent more time on 1940s/1950s U.S. politics than anything. He chose specific personalities to vilify for his own political purposes (it seemed to me), including General MacArthur himself, whom he paints as a buffoon. He even vilified the leader of the relief column at Chipyongni, Colonel Crombez, for wasting his soldiers’ lives. He put lots of men with rifles on top of the tanks. When soldiers fell off tanks, Colonel Crombez ordered the convoy on. Many of the men who fell off ended up dead or POWs. (Crombez prioritized breaking the siege, which was the right decision, General Ridgeway later said.)

Chipyongni 2013
I visited the site of the Battle of Chipyongni in September 2013. In 2012, after reading The Longest Winter, I identified the location of the battle by figuring out its current name. What we wrote in English in the 1950s as “Chipyong” is now written as “Jipyeong” [Gee-pyuhng] (지평리 in Korean). Its suffix, ri or ni, means “village” in Korean. It has since been promoted to “myeon”, a slightly larger settlement than a ri/ni. The current name is thus Jipyeong-myeon (지평면).

I will write about the visit later. For now I can say it was one of the most significant excursions of my time in Korea. I feel blessed that it worked out the way it did. The word “Chipyongni” does not even appear in the tourist guidebook I have. It was something I independently discovered.

It’s as good a time as any to reveal that I plan to hike across South Korea, from south-central to northeast.

It will take seven to eight weeks. I begin on September 16th. I doubt there will be many, if any, updates in those weeks. The trail is called, in Korean, “Baekdu-Daegan”. It’s sort of a Korean “Appalachian Trail”.

Here is a wall map on which I plotted out the approximate course.

I will post more on this later, I hope. I hardly find time these days. This is an ambitious plan, but with proper planning and sufficient courage, it can be done.

Tomorrow, I visit Chipyongni, a February 1951 battlefield. It’s due east of Seoul, but near halfway across the country. It’ll take up to three hours to get there by train. It’s rural: I’ll camp overnight. It’ll be a kind of “practice run” for the hike.

Nine days till my last day at this job.

Problem: My visa is running out before I plan to leave. Thus, this morning I paid I (successful) visit to the Incheon Immigration [Visa Control] Office. I asked to extend my visa and it was done. My Alien Registration Card got a new “expiration date” printed on it, 28 days later than the original. Phew; Another thing done, I thought.

The Incheon Immigration Office is inexplicably located very far away from anything. I managed to get there by train and then bus. I got off at the station inexplicably named “East-Incheon Train Station” (it is in the west of Incheon). I’d been here before with my friend CH. It is not far from Freedom Park, which features the giant MacArthur statue.

Very few of us got off at this station. One whom I noticed was a man, East-Asian in appearance but foreign-seeming to me. He seemed drawn from the ex-Soviet world, though this may be wrong. I base this on his walk [tough guy], his clothes [suit, not well-fitting; not in Korean fashion], his haircut [close-cut, nearly shaved-head], his shabby briefcase, and his build [big]. I didn’t even see his face. He got in a taxi outside the train station. I went to try to find a bus. Twenty minutes later, I saw him at the foreigner office, talking to a Visa Control agent. I was right. He was a foreigner. The agent spoke to him in Korean, and he nodded along. All I know for sure is that he was not Chinese. There are two wings at the Immigration Office, one for Chinese, one for others. He was in the “non-Chinese” section.

The process for me was easy. The woman wanted me to write down what I planned to do after I finished working to give me a “tourist” extension. She gave me a blank A4 paper. At first, I wrote a single sentence, but she wanted more. I listed some places. She asked me to sign it. I wondered why this would matter, and realized it’s possible that she did it out of personal interest. This is like the police in Kazakhstan in 2011. Living up to the ex-Soviet police stereotype, they demanded I produce ID or passport on the street for no apparent reason. I never had serious problems. The times they did this to me, or at least one of the times, I got the feeling the guy was just curious where I was from, but felt too awkward or lacking language-confidence to ask it in a jovial way, so he just used his position to impel me to show him my passport,which would give him the information he wanted.

Anyway, the agent did not comment on the list of destinations I wrote out. She disappeared and reaappared with the Alien Card within two minutes or so. The card had a new expiry date printed on the back. “That’s all. Bye!”, she said.

I emerged to find a bus going back to East-Incheon Train Station. The neighborhood was totally empty. I got on a #24 bus. It was unexpectedly packed with people, and suitcases. No seats were empty. It must’ve come from the airport, I figured. I heard a few Chinese voices. One of the signs on the bus was written in Chinese and Korean. I was confused about this, but I guess Incheon really does have a lot of Chinese. I rode the back to the train station and rode back to Songnae Station, the closest to my home/workplace. I ate a small lunch at Lotteria, a Korean knockoff of McDonald’s. It was only 11:00 AM. As I ate, I read the newspaper about Syria (somebody proposing a “No-Fly Zone“) and the shocking recent indictments against pro-North-Korean National Assembly members (for plotting “Underground Revolution”), and finally got another bus home. It was well before noon. I’d left home at about 9:15.

I’d call the morning genuinely pleasant.

Partly, it was pleasant because it all really felt like “travelling”. The core of “old” Incheon feels somewhat like  Southeast-Asia to me (or what I imagine SE-Asia to be, having never been there): poorer, dirtier, less efficient, not-well-organized, lazier; but relaxed, unpretentious, authentic.

On September 10th of 2013, my Korean friend Hoon will enter the South Korean army for his mandatory service. He is now 26, some years older than the average conscript. He worked as an assistant at the language-institute here for a number of months in 2012. He was the head assistant, and was consistently kind to me/us, one of the few who were.

Twenty-one months is the term of service for all able-bodied, full-blooded, male South Korean citizens. Foreign citizen ethnic-Koreans (“Gyopos”), and mixed-race citizens, are exempt.

I met him for a final meal recently, and he seemed in good spirits.

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”   —Orwell

The U.S. Must Act Against Assad by Eugene Robinson

The editorial by this man Robinson (“Punish the homicidal maniac!” ) is just the same as one reproduced this week by the Korea Herald, written by none other than Tony Blair. The latter seems to call for an Iraq-style invasion/occupation of Syria. The editorial was titled “It is time to take action in the Middle East“. 

This really is, face it, “warmongering”, strictly. 

Both men assure the reader that toppling Syria’s government would be an act of self-defense. In so doing, they nestle themselves snugly into Orwell’s mold of the hypothetical pushers of “every war”, of course.

Blair’s final sentences:

This all makes me a bit dizzy. Blair seems to be talking about Radical Muslims, but isn’t the Syrian government sort of an Arab Fascist government? I mean, if “fascist” were not a pure pejorative (Orwell wrote an essay on the uselessness of the word “fascist” by the 1940s in English since English already has the word “bad”, I think is what he wrote). Syria’s government is not Radical-Islamic, and is actually trying to kill Radical Muslims on a daily basis, in this war.

I gave a student the “English name” of Royce on Wednesday.

The boy’s real name is Kim J.H. He was born in September 2000. This is his very first week at the institute, according to the the online system. He is in seventh grade and lives in the Sang-Dong neighborhood of Bucheon. His attitude is optimistically-boyish, as it has neither been pressured-downward by adolescence yet nor, frankly (as he is new), has it yet been soured by this institute’s weekly grind (lots of homework and endless and pointless memorization of English words, both under threat of “detention” if not completed, and with no significant breaks in the year).

Kim J.H. said he had no English name. A friend from school his was also in the class, sitting next to him in fact, and declared, “He needs an English name!”  A wave of excitement washed over several students in the room.

Why English Names?
In fact, I’ve always felt a “vicarious guilt” (I’ve never done it myself but others here have) about the idea of imposing English names. My feeling is, who is an English-speaking foreigner to just cruise into a place and bestow an “English name” on somebody? They already have names, after all.

Incidentally, at my Ilsan job English names were never used. At this Bucheon job, English names are used for about 90% of students, with the rest insisting on retaining their Korean names. These are usually the angriest and most sullen students. This, at least, fits with the Koreans’ idea that English names are “fun”. There is (in my experience) a strong correlation: Those having the least fun learning English are most likely to reject English names. I don’t think use or non-use of English names has anything to do with causation of that unhappiness, though.

An Ad-Hoc Naming Plan
The issue was in the air. English name! English name! Okay, I thought, I can use this as an opportunity to try to make the students laugh by doing something unexpected. (My best strategy in that particular undertaking is to amuse myself. It usually succeeds in amusing them, too.) I asked a random student to “choose any number between 1 and 26”. She was confused but took it in good humor. She chose 18. I counted it out: “R” is the 18th letter. I said to Kim J.H., “Okay, your English name will start with ‘R’. Let’s see…” and I started listing, on the board, all the names beginning with “R” I could think of. Ronald, Roger, Rex, Roland, Ricky, Roy, Robert, Ralph, Randy…..

My idea at this point was to put the names on the board and leave it to the Darwinian nature of the open classroom. Some names would be ridiculed by the class while others would be thought “cool” and one of the “cool” ones would win (a kind of mini, on-the-fly social experiment). Some discussion of that kind did follow. This was very much an ad-hoc plan, as it must have been since I didn’t know this “English name” issue would come up at all.

The boy, Kim J.H., hitherto English-name-less, was hesitating.

Anything But “Kevin”!
Around this time, J.H.’s friend Jack suggested “Kevin”. Argh. Not Kevin! A search of the online database yields 66 “Kevins” enrolled as middle school students at the institute since 2007. It is a very popular name. By comparison, there’ve been only 53 “Johns” and 41 “Jameses”.

My old British coworker, E.R., believed that certain English names augur trouble (in terms of behavior problems from the student), and “Kevin” was the first one she cited. I tend to agree. I wonder why problem-students end up choosing and/or being given “Kevin” so much in Korea.

I rejected “Kevin” outright. I’d have felt like I failed if he ended up merely another “Kevin”, one of dozens. He’s already saddled with “Kim”. Give the boy a unique identity!

Choosing “Royce“
We spent three or four minutes discussing this English-name issue. It was the first day, so my goal was to make the class more fun-oriented. Still thinking about the “Kevin is too common” concern, I circled and gently suggested the name “Royce” on the board, another of the “R’s”. I guessed it may have never been used in the history of this institute, of all its thousands of students since 2007. (It turns out this was right. There have been four “Roys”, but no “Royces”.)

Kim J.H. remained indecisive. Probably too shy, I thought. My vague guilt feelings persisted about “forcing an ‘English name’ on an East-Asian”, so I gave him the attendance sheet and told him to write whichever name he chose next to his Korean name. He took a minute. To my surprise, he wrote “Royce”, the name I’d circled on the board. I realize now he’d wanted the decision made for him by an authority figure, in the typical East-Asian fashion, and I’d done it.

And thus was “Royce” christened. I was so proud of this naming that I went onto the staff website that very night and input this as the student’s “영어이름” (English name).

My First “English Name”
This may be the very first time I have given an “English name” to a student. Others have discussed “changing” theirs with me, but never before had I had a student who claimed to have never received an English name yet in life.

I think this is a happy side effect of my being moved down to the lowest-level classes for my last three weeks, my last partial semester here. Only in a low-level class would a student show up in that condition, i.e. without already possessing an “English name”. (The class was actually “MI”, about mid-range in skill level.)

Postscript: How Common is the Name “Royce”?
You can check the popularity of baby names by year of birth in the USA here. It turns out “Royce” was one of the top-500 boy-names from the 1910s through the 1960s, and then became less popular. It even fell off the top-1,000 list by the early 2000s. Curiously, it recovered to rank #493 in 2012.

Popularity Rank of “Royce” as a Boy’s Name in the USA, By Year
2012 : 493rd [i.e., 492 other boy-names were more commonly given to babies born in 2012]
2011 : 529th
2010 : 743rd
2009 : 941st

493rd is the highest ranking that “Royce” has had since 1963. I wonder why the sudden popularity jump.

This is the last week of the semester for elementary students, and I decided to do a fun activity. It ended up being very successful with a class that has been difficult this semester, to my pleasant surprise.

Here is part of the activity:

I stole the two strips you see from here and here.

As you might guess, the activity was first reading and discussing the comics, then asking them (in pairs) to think of possible new dialogue for the pictures. I pretended these two strips were connected. On another page, they were supposed to continue with nine more boxes, all totally empty. They were to draw, write the dialogue, and caption each box. Groups that were most advanced I had finally write the comic as a narrative (“One day, a boss had a meeting with a worker…”). At the end were half-hearted, giggly presentations and candy prizes. Most groups had fun.

My apologies to Scott Adams for using his Dilbert comic without permission, but on the positive side for him, this activity exposed two dozen students to Dilbert. None of them had ever seen it. One or two said it looked like the “Wimpy Kid” series they use in class.

[Warning: Negativity Below]
The success of this activity, which I came up with in only fifteen minutes, and the success of an MI class at the end of the day in which all the kids were enthusiastic, contrasted sharply with my rising anger toward Management, whose hostility increases by the day. I mentioned in post-140 the issue of back pay for about 50 essays I did months ago. I was accused of “lying” about doing them. Argh….Really. Well, I took the time this afternoon to carefully take screenshot evidence proving beyond any sensible person’s doubt that I did, in fact, complete those essays and submitted them into the system. The parents paid this institute, but the pay never got to me. I presented really knockout evidence. I gave Stringbean the paper with the evidence. An hour later, the paper appears back on my desk marked up with ways she still “thinks” I am “lying”. If one untangles the logic of the implied continuing-accusation that I am “lying” despite evidence from the online system (which I screenshotted and explained exactly how she can check directly, herself), then the implication from Manager Stringbean is that I have hacked into that website and manipulated evidence, a theory so wildly implausible as to be laughable…..if it weren’t happening to me.

See post-138 for an artist’s rendition of Manager Stringbean’s appearance.

More bad news keeps coming from work. The dark clouds are gathering. The latest, they refuse to pay me for several dozen essays I did months ago. Pathetic.

Speaking of dark clouds, tonight I browsed the comments to a Washington Post article on the (seemingly) impending war against Syria. John Kerry 2013 sounds a lot like Donald Rumsfeld 2003: “There must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious […] This international norm cannot be violated without consequences,” said Rumsfeld, err, Kerry.

This led to what somebody, or some algorithm, selected as the top reader comment:

The reader comments were amazing. They were overwhelmingly against the war, a bit to my surprise. There were almost no non-ad-hominem-based pro-war comments (see the end of this post for the one I found). I will post some representative comments below:

The above makes most sense to me, to be honest.

Of all the dozens of substantive comments I saw, only one was pro-war, although others were (partisanly) “anti-anti-war”, attacking “Tea Party” members and attacking Republicans, the relevance of which I cannot determine.

This is the single “pro-war comment” which was not based in ad-hominem:

U.S. intervention in Syria may be imminent. That makes me sad.

Behold the magic wand of atrocity propaganda:

August 25th:

August 26th:

In 1990, a Kuwaiti woman testified before Congress that she “had seen” Iraqi troops kill babies in Kuwaiti hospitals. Her allegation was later proven to be totally false. She just lied; plain-old made it up. The truth only came out after the Rubicon was crossed and the war was waged. They say this single liar’s performance before Congress, then-believed, so outraged Americans that it helped push the USA to go to war against Iraq. She said:

It turned out this “eyewitness” was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA. She had been coached to tell this lie. What a disgrace, although she should’ve gotten an award for theatrics, anyway.

In 2003, I was in high school, and one teacher had us watch live as Colin Powell told lies about Iraq’s fantasy-WMDs. I disbelieved in what he was saying at the time and I was conscious of being a clear minority in that. I discussed this a lot with my friend Paras in early 2003. He said he was against the war, but he believed there may have been WMD. I was insistent there were no WMD. I don’t know why I was so sure. What the heck did I know? But I was right.

One of the most flagrant and shamefaced examples of phony atrocity propaganda that I know of was in WWI. German soldiers were said to have been “bayoneting Belgian babies” by the thousands. Nothing like that ever happened, but it was used to whip-up war frenzy. See this poster:

On Syria again, if we look closely at this, the story (as presented) is very suspicious, as summarized neatly here:

I was surprised to learn that the world’s longest insect lives in neither Africa nor the Amazon, but in Malaysia (Borneo). It is called “Chan’s Megastick“. With its legs fully stretched out, it can reach two feet in length. Picture below:

A two-foot-long insect is really reminiscent of a “zergling” of the Starcraft computer game. That game is a common point of reference for all males born after 1980 or so in South Korea. Really, it is. They all know it, in and out.

I wonder why Starcraft became so popular in South Korea. There may be some social significance that I can’t see.

I played the game in the late 1990s and early 2000s a bit. I often tell boys here that when my friends and I played on the Battle.net server back then, we informally resolved to avoid playing against Koreans because they beat us so easily and so quickly that it was just depressing and no fun. (We also half saw them as “cheaters” for some complicated reasons, but I don’t mention that to the kids.)

Five months is not a short time. Post-1 was five months ago.

In honor of the occasion of this blog’s five-month anniversary (or, “fifth monthiversary”), I will retire what has hitherto been its (clumsily-made) banner.

Instead, I clumsily made a new banner:

Ah. These have been a hard five months, in some ways, due to my work situation. The inclusion of the Dilbert comic is an “homage” to that. The train track pushes on, and disappears off into a brighter future.

I first posted the Dilbert comic in post-19. I took the picture of the railroad tracks during my hike from Lynchburg to Roanoke in Fall 2010, when I visited my friend Jonathan S. The symbolism in this banner was unintentional, but works for me.

Something happened at 10:05 PM on Thursday that marks what must be the lowest point of my working life during the past two years. Then, as if life were a movie drama, just seven hours later on Friday early morning, something amazing began to happen, totally unconnected to the previous night’s disgrace except that both relate to my job. The Friday thing probably ranks as one of the highest points of my three working years in Korea.

I don’t really know if I should write about either one. If I wrote about the former, I’d not be able to avoid negativity and bitterness. It would turn into an “anti-Av****” diatribe. And who likes diatribes? If I wrote about the former, it may look like shameless boasting or self-promotion.
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The implications of the “low point” thing frighten and depress me (I’m led to believe that management [such that it is] may be about to thrust the proverbial knife in my back, as my foot is out the door).
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I drank an unhealthy amount of coffee during my two nights of two to three hours’ sleep (see post-131 and post-132). So many essays submitted late. I did them all. This weekend, I completed thirteen final “straggler” essays which students submitted on Friday, the last day. I won’t be correcting another single essay the rest of 2013.

I think the Civil Defense drill yesterday was nationwide. It happened in Ilsan, too, I’m told.

Here is a picture  the intersection in front of my workplace which was closed-off for the drill:

This is about the view I had of the drill.

To conceptualize the scene as I saw it, you’d have to first image the steady wail of a siren. I have no recollection ever hearing one in the USA. The closest thing was the “fire drill” in school. This was a society-wide fire drill, I suppose.

So, right, the siren. Imagine, further, that all traffic, including foot traffic, is stopped cold. No exceptions. Picture two policemen blowing whistles at anyone who flinches, and four to six retired-age volunteers in a bright uniform that resembles a jersey. The volunteers are holding flags that say “Civil Defense” in Korean.

Fifteen minutes float away thusly. Everyone is frozen in place. A captivating nothingness.

Well, actually, it was not all nothingness. There were was the whistling whenever someone broke ranks and tried to cross. And, the highlight of the nothingness: A few minutes in, a little convoy rolled through: an army jeep, a fire truck, an ambulance, and two or three other such vehicles. They drove fast and on the left (the wrong way in Korea). As all normal traffic was stopped, the path forward — on the left or right as needed — was clear. That must be the purpose of the drill, to practice allowing military and other vehicles to travel at high speeds unimpeded.

The word “민방위” was on flags all over this week, on flags on lamposts. That words means “Civil Defense”.

I realized why yesterday. At 2:00 PM, the sirens blared. The old volunteers of the Civil Defense Corps appeared. All traffic was stopped. No one was allowed even to cross the street. Serenity was imposed.

I’ve seen several of these by now. Even this time, I was spellbound, although not as shocked as I was the first time. I was in a classroom correcting essays at the time. I opened the window. I stared. I stared some more. There it was, one of the busiest intersections in Bucheon’s  Jung-Dong neighborhood, still. Twelve traffic lanes. Many buses, both local and to Seoul and to Incheon. Subway station. Two department stores. Restaurants, coffee shops. And always lots of people, either milling around or racing somewhere.

The only thing happening at this intersection from 2:00-2:15 PM yesterday, though, was a bunch of nothing, punctuated by an occasional angry whistle-blow beration (from a policeman) at somebody bold enough to try to cross the street. Crossing the street was forbidden. Stillness was mandatory, except for the siren.

My coworker, C.R., has to cross this busy street to get to work. He sometimes arrives slightly after 2:00 PM. I wondered, as I stared at the scene of Civil Defense serenity below, if he was stuck on the wrong side. My view was blocked by a tree. I peeked in, and he was in the teachers’ room (a place I dread being in these days). Lucky him. He’s already been threatened for being “late” once. (These are people who generally can’t even produce a class schedule on time until the very day a semester starts. Generally we don’t know what we’ll be teaching till “the day of”).

Update: A follow-up post is here: Civil Defense Drill, Part II

Actually, I happened to see the Bupyeong headquarters(?) of the Civil Defense Corps yesterday, hours before the unexpected (by me) drill. The training center is very close to the small Bupyeong History Museum, my morning destination (a small and sleepy place with free admission).

The sign above says “민방위교육청”, or “Civil Defense Educational Office”. I presume this means it’s a training center.

I enjoyed looking at the old maps, in the museum, of the area between Incheon and Seoul (i.e., Bupyeong and current Bucheon). In a very detailed U.S. Army map published in 1959, only a few dozen small structures are drawn in what is now Bucheon. The rest was all empty. Farmland. Population today: near 900,000.

My “final grand push” succeeded. All 75 essays in my stack of last night are now corrected, commented, posted online, photocopied and given to the students. I slept two hours.

Naturally, I was glad to have that out of the way. This calls for a “Phew!“, right? I knew I’d still have to knock out a few more stragglers, but only a few.

Imagine my astonishment when I checked the website again today. Many new essay submissions! The fresh to-do-pile now stands tall at….eighty.

I was once in fifth grade. We read a fantasy story, parts of which have stuck with me ever since. At one point, the characters are given “subtraction stew” to eat. The more you eat, the hungrier you get. This reminds me a lot of that.

I always tell students that the purpose/goal of any essay, on any topic, is to add value to the world. Few care enough to bother with all that. Even fewer get what it means, I think. I don’t think I even get what it means, but I am sure it’s the right advice for Korean students (i.e., essays ought not be fill-in-the-blank exercises. I have fought a long-running losing battle against that idea.)

Likewise, my goal here has always been to make posts of value to the world. Things I’d like to read myself. Maybe I’ve failed, or maybe not; I hope I’ve succeeded at times, regardless of how many people ever read these words. (This may be the opposite of the narcissistic Facebook/Twitter model of what-I’m-doing right-now banality).

Anyway. I don’t have time for value/content today. As I mentioned in post-131 , this is the end of the semester. I have to finish 75 essays by 4:00 PM tomorrow. “No ifs, ands, or buts”, as we say. It’s the last time I will see the students this semester, and some of them it’s the last time I will ever see them. There is no possibility of delay.

I write this at 11:30 PM (Korea time). I have another plan from 9:30 AM to 1 PM tomorrow, so it’s “down to the wire”. The stack of essays sits there taunting me.

Every day, now, exceeds 90 Fahrenheit (32 C) during the day, easily so if counting by the “heat index”.

At the language-institute (hagwon) at which I’ve worked the past two years, each classroom is a sealed-off box with a junky old window or two that barely opens; some rooms have no window. The classrooms are, resultantly, stuffy and oppressive by U.S. standards. There are ACs in each room, but they are single units hanging on the wall, not a central ventilation/air system.

Maybe that’s why these temperatures, not so different from those in my hometown in the USA about now, seem harder to bear in Korea. I remember, with some fondness, the luxury of a central ventilation/AC system within a building. That seems to create a much more pleasant atmosphere than what is normal in South Korea (but maybe that is just “the grass was greener in the past” thinking).

I also have, this week, a Damoclean burden more distressing than the heat. No matter the temperature of the room, thinking about it makes my head get hot.

I need to write up comments for every student (184 as of this writing) and finish up the semester’s essays (100+ to go). The semester for the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders ends this week. For 5th and 6th graders, it ends next week. In most of August, I had a 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM schedule (due to students’ vacation from school), but now it’s back to 2-10 PM.

The hours of comment-writing will hurt. I try to approach them seriously, though, and write meaningful and true comments. The purpose of the comments is for the Korean homeroom teacher to report on students’ progress with the mothers over the phone. Since these will be my last, I’ve tried to do an especially thorough job. And partly they are for my successor: All comments from all teachers at all times are input on the website onto a kind of “student page”, a kind of digital “permanent-record” that all (and only) teachers can see, including those who come later.

Somebody found a Kentucky county’s 1912 eighth grade final exam [Reported on Yahoo-News].

I was surprised to see grammar question #4:

I assume this means “What properties do verbs have“. That is how we would write the phrase today. I wonder, is there some rational reason why “Do you have” triumphed over “Have you” (as well as “Do not be” over “Be not”)?

Consider the German “Was haben Sie zu Essen?” In English, its word-for-word translation is “What have you to eat?” which sounds wrong, today, but once was right. That kind of “Germanic” phrasing was common for most of English’s history, I think. I remember seeing it in Shakespeare [circa 1600], and Gulliver’s Travels [1700s] and Moby Dick [1850] as well. Even Lincoln, in 1862, wrote to General McClellan, “Have you any more perfect knowledge of this?”

Experts say that the extra “Do” comes from Celtic:

If that’s the case, why did such major verbs as “to be” and “to have” retain the Germanic structure so long?

By the way, one reason the 1611 King James Bible seems so poetic may be that it doesn’t follow, at all, the way we use this “do-helper” today:

Translation:
“You all ate the loaves and were filled. / Do not labor for the meat which perishes…”

I appreciated the following essay. It’s by an Australian who has been in Korea for almost three years, the same as I:

On Fear, Travel, and Coming to Korea
By “The Waegukin”

I find a lot to sympathize with in the essay.

A few months ago, I tried to write about my first night’s experiences (post 46 and 47 and 48 and 49 and 50 and 51 and 52) but I never finished. I never even got to the “punchline”. Maybe later. The reason I was able to write so much about that night was that I, too, was definitely scared about coming to Korea and scared when I first arrived. In those circumstances, memories stick, of course.

1945
August 6th: An American atomic bomb destroys Hiroshima.
August 9th: An American atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki.
August 15th, 12:00 Noon: The Emperor of Japan announces Japanese surrender via radio.
August 15th, 12:01 PM: The Japanese Empire is dissolved; all overseas possessions are released. The war is over.

And so it goes that Koreans celebrate August 15th as Independence Day (광복절). (Or, some do. I had to work a full day. Mandatory. Overtime pay, at least. So they say.)

Students were depressed/sullen about being compelled to “study” on a national holiday. Speaking of students: North Korea teaches its youth that August 15th was when Japan surrendered to Kim Il-Sung’s triumphant rebel army. A sheer fantasy. South Korean education has, from what I gather, a trace of that kind of thing, too. Students have expressed to me their idea that Japan was partly compelled to surrender because of pressure from Korean rebels.

Koreans put more emotion into another “independence day”, March 1st. A nationalistic anti-Japanese uprising occurred in 1919 on that day. It failed, but it was a native-Korean effort all around. (In fact, Japan largely controlled Korea as a puppet from the 1890s or even 1880s, and fully-annexed Korea in 1910. That means that in 1945, only the very oldest of Koreans could remember a truly independent Korea. Syngman Rhee [born 1875] may have been one.)

March 1st is untouchable. I’ve never heard of anyone working on it. It’s also the beginning of the Korean school year.

At 2:00 PM (or sixty-eight years and two hours after independence), I met a friend, J.A., for a lunch of kong-guk-su (콩국수, a summer food) at “Kimbap Heaven”. He works at another hagwon (language institute). His is in the Sang-Dong neighborhood of Bucheon. J.A. had this national holiday off, unlike me.

It was a lively meeting. I talked very quickly, knowing I had to be teaching again by 3:00. / J.A. is in better spirits than I’ve ever seen him, I think. He was excited to learn a very-big “Starbucks” is opening right below my workplace.