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Not so fast. It turned out that “what to call her” and “what her name is” are entirely different questions in Korea. At the end of this night, which I hope to get to by Part XII, I made the mistake of calling her “Mrs. C”. She got confused at this. She said, “No, I am Mrs. Y; my husband is Mr. C!”

It may be because of this confusion that, on my second or third day, she handed me a piece of paper with two pieces of information on it: Her phone number was one. The other was a word totally unknown to me, written in pen in neat handwriting. The word was Wonjangnim [원장님]. She said, “You should call me that”. And that was that.

Address the Boss by Her Title
Wonjangnim was the title of her position. I came to learn that it means something like “Honored Director [of the Hagwon]” or perhaps “Honored Headmaster”.

This was the term the Korean staff used to address her, in all cases. I halfheartedly appreciated that I wasn’t “being singled out for special treatment” and told to call her something else than what others call her. It took me a long time to realize how unusual it really is for a boss to request that a foreign English teacher use that title to address him/her. In a way, I should have felt honored for being treated like an equal. I was mostly just confused at the time, though.

At the same time, it was very… awkward for me to address this woman, or any person at all, using a title and only a title. I don’t know if I’d ever hitherto in my life addressed anyone by a pure title with no name attached at all. It was “Professor Smith”, not just “Professor”; “Pastor Jones”, not just “Pastor”, and so on. Addressing someone with a pure title would be very out of place in the USA in which I grew up; I even feared sounding patronizing. It was even more awkward, I guess, that the honorific is added in the Korean, though I didn’t know any such thing in April of 2009.

My feelings of awkwardness and discomfort using this title weighed down on me. It took me a while before I actually used this title to directly address her.

Titles in Korean Work Life and Social Life
[Many benefits come from writing these memories four years later. One is that I can say the following, which I could not have done had this been written in May 2009, because I didn’t know much about Korea yet:]

Why was this woman asking me to call her by this strange-sounding title? Was it personal arrogance on her part? A Canadian who’d been in Korea for some time, whom I told after I met him at the foreigners’ office, seemed to think so. He scoffed that I’d actually been told to use the honorific “nim”.

In fact, titles are obligatory among Koreans working together, even when they are on very friendly terms. Addressing another teacher, one says “Kim Teacher” (Kim Sunsengnim), or just plain-old “Teacher” (Sunsengnim), not just “Kim”, or — God forbid — a given name.

More surprisingly, titles are very common even in purely-social situations. A male addressing an older male friend, for example, will call the older one hyung (형), meaning older-brother. This seems so antiquated — like something you’d hear from the Amish, or something. One would think addressing everyone by title, including friends, would a declining practice in the modern world. Not so: Even the youngest of Koreans alive today follow this “addressing by title” custom, religiously. In a classroom in which grades are mixed, a 5th grade girl will call a 6th grade girl un-ni, a word meaning older sister. Friends do it, too. It’s quite remarkable.
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This is exactly the kind of thing about which I was in total ignorance on that night in April of 2009. Korean food was another. I’d never even tasted kimchi!  Soon I would. And my tastebuds have not been the same since. . . .

[Next: Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X]
[Previous: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part VI, and Part VI]

Around the Table Again
Back on April 29th of 2009. A small, not-well-lit, noisy restaurant, after 11 PM. Conviviality is thick in the air, though less so at our table. Ours is a bit tense, you see, because it’s hwe-shik (as described in Part V). I sit at a corner of a wooden, rectangular table around which sit seven others. Six are Koreans. One of them is “B”, an affable American man in his mid-30s. I sit to his right.

B is my predecessor. His contract is up. He is going home. I’m taking his job.

Looking to my left, I see B, but beyond him I can see the regular Korean teachers. There are four of them (Kang, Yoon, Im, Lee). All are half-curious to see the new guy (me). I tried to describe the ambiance of their side of the table back in Part IV. Also (possibly) present, at that far end of the table and furthest away from me, may have been at least one of the so-called “Desk Teachers” (a curious title that was used for the two front-desk staffwomen. A “desk-teacher” was a receptionist/secretary/miscellaneous-job-doer, not a teacher at all). My memory is foggy on whether any desk-teachers were there, but at most hwe-shik the later-shift desk-teacher was generally also present.

Across from B sits Mr. C, the Korean husband of Mrs. Y, my new boss. Mrs. Y herself (whom I described in Part III) sits down directly across from me as I take my place next to B. That rounds out this review of the cast of characters.

Mrs. Y, the boss, is still all smiles, as she was to be all night. She promptly orders more alcohol, as was her wont to do. It was probably beer, although soju materialized soon, too. She didn’t ask if I wanted any. “Alright, this is the way it’s going to be” was more characteristic of her approach. My impression is that this is expected of the boss in Korea.

Some of my talking was with Mrs. Y and Mr. C, the bosses. We talked about lots of things, including the hagwon (language institute). They set me straight that it was an English hagwon, not a general-purpose hagwon which included English (as I’d read some are). That is how ignorant I was — I didn’t even know the nature of the job I was walking into. Mr. C was interested in the decline (and “bailout”) of the U.S. automotive industry, which was big in the news at the time — The nation that had pioneered car manufacture now had a bankrupt auto industry. One of us made the comment that the ones who pioneer things are often not those who do it best.

Naturally, some of my conversation was with B. I learned we had two things in common: He had a Danish surname (as is my own) and he was from Iowa (as is my father). Other than those two facts, he was quite different from me.

Physical Description of My Predecessor
Physically, B was 6’0″ or so, same as me, but a bit on the plump side, perhaps about average for a 21st-century American. I later learned he had gained weight due to a weakness for fried-chicken, a South-Korean obsession.

Later, too, the top student at this hagwon, then a 9th-grader who had scored an amazing 104 points on the TOEFL iBT test, told me various things about B, not all of them good. One of the stranger comments he made was that B “looked like Homer Simpson”. I had not seen it. The student commented that B’s “huge eyes” caused the resemblance, which, again, made no sense to me. Did B have “huge eyes”? I hadn’t noticed. The “big eyes”/”double-eyelid” beauty ideal in East-Asia is accurate, but comparing someone with big eyes to Homer Simpson does not seem complimentary!

The Affable American‘s Amazing Reading Ability
With the conversation flowing, food and drink came and went. New dishes were needed to replace those eaten.

That’s when it happened: The boss asked B what they should order next. He obliged. He went line by line through the simple menu, commenting on what he thought was good, recommending things to the boss. There was not a single English word in sight on that menu. He recommended pa-jeon (파전), which we ate.

I was stunned. There B was navigating through this seemingly-indecipherable alien script. And so seamlessly! How could a White man read an East-Asian alphabet? Put crudely, that’s something like how I felt. Maybe “impressed” is the best word. In time, I  developed the magical ability to read it, too. It’s not as impressive as it seems.

I soon learned that the alien script that B was able to read was called Hangul (officially, hangeul [한글]), and it is a high-point of pride among Koreans, who developed it seventy years before Luther hammered his 95 Theses onto that door.  [Note: “Hangul” definitely refers to the Korean script, or “alphabet”, which in sentence form looks something like this: “피터선생님 멍청이 아니에요”. There seems to be a persistent mistake among those affiliated with the U.S. Military regarding this word. They seem to call the Korean language itself  “Hangul”, which is definitely wrong. When I visited my uncle in 2011 at Camp Casey (he was there for work), more than once I was asked by his associates, “Can you speak Hangul?”, which logically makes no sense. It seems to me that’s like asking, “Can you speak hieroglyphics?” / My cousin’s husband, Air Force, stationed at a base in Korea in 2012, whom I visited in February of 2012, also repeated this erroneous use of the word “Hangul”.]

Good at Playing the Game
That B could read Korean (i.e., Hangul) more-or-less well was a testament, perhaps, to his status as a veteran of ESL in Korea. He had several contracts under his belt by the spring of 2009. Another was ending that very week.

He was smooth, on the charming side but without a hint of smarminess. He knew how to play the game well. He knew how to make himself look good to the Koreans without working too hard. I’ve always felt I am the opposite: I work (“too”) hard but don’t put much effort into making myself look good to superiors. My attitude is that it is immoral to do the latter, whereas it is “moral” (somehow) to produce quality work without overt desire to personally benefit. I am suspicious of (what I perceive to be) “form over substance” types. B was, looking back on it, somewhat of a “form over substance” person, frankly. (Sometimes I think Korea itself runs on a “form over substance” basis.)

B was well-liked by students and the Korean teachers. However, the kids who liked him tended to the lazier ones. In other words, he wouldn’t push them much. The kids who liked me most tended to be of a different stripe altogether.

Much later, I happen to have come across B’s resume at work. I think he completed four contracts through April 2009, with several-month gaps in between each. B was one of those who would do a year or so and return to the USA for a few months, visit friends and family, perhaps travel, and live off his savings, then return to Korea to do another contract. This is mostly my conjecture, but what else would he have been doing in those months?

My Predecessor’s Predecessor
Much later, too, I learned that B had only been at this ‘campus’ of the hagwon for a few months, after transferring from the other ‘campus’. The other campus (in the Hugok neighborhood of northern Ilsan) was bigger, and was managed by Mr. C — which is why Mr. C was here at this dinner. Why had B. been transferred so late in his contract? It turns out the previous foreign-teacher had done some damage. The mothers were upset. B was called-in, in the same way as a steady veteran pitcher is brought in when the bases are loaded in the ninth inning.

The guy he replaced: A younger American, G., lazy and sarcastic. I never met him (as he left in late 2008 or early 2009), but I did learn this much: G. dedicated his preparation time in the teachers’ room exclusively (so I’m told) to giggling at political-comedy videos on the Internet, probably John Stewart. Hardly any planning was done; all of G’s attention was given to John Stewart. His classes were incoherent at times; his tests were lazily made. This guy was there about six months, from when this campus opened. The boss, Mrs. Y, did not like him. She liked B a lot more.

Although G. had not been gone long by the time I arrived, no one ever really referenced him a positive way or said they missed him. Many missed B. It was hard, for me, to step in after a popular teacher (B) left.

A Check In the Mail
In the two days I knew him, B gave very little guidance on actual teaching, but helped me in lots of other ways: He gave me his electronic bus/subway card, onto which I could load money in the machines. He drew a map of places I’d need to find my way around, he showed me how to get the bus to the hagwon. He also left me three boxes full of coins. Their cash value was something like $200. In a year or more, he’d never paid in exact change. He’d always overpay and take change home. He said he ran out of time and asked if I could go to the bank and send him a check to a U.S. address in Illinois. Okay. A few weeks later, I counted the money and sent him the check. It was quietly cashed. I never heard from B again. I heard my boss speculate that he was back in Korea, as of 2010.
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This is all getting ahead of myself, though. Back on April 29th, I was drawn to B, because he was the only other native-English speaker in sight. I’m glad they sat me next to him. But, then, where else would they have put me?

I was also intrigued to be sitting across from Mrs. Y. The thing is, I didn’t at that time know what to call her. I didn’t know her name. Knowing her name wouldn’t have solved that problem anyway, as it turns out. . . .

[Next: Part VII, Part VIII, and Part IX]
[Previous: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V]

Some more information, as I understand it:

Who Is Invited
Those not invited to hwe-shik are not considered actual coworkers. Part-time workers or lowly-assistants are often not invited. Those who are invited to hwe-shik and refuse to go are doing something strange, offensive, and faux-pas, perhaps comparable to not saluting a superior in the military at the proper time. (In my current job, we foreign teachers, in theory the equals of the Korean teachers, have not been invited to a single after-work hwe-shik in my 20 months of employment, which really distresses me.)

Hwe-shik are the initiative of the boss. They are led by the charisma of the boss, and endured (with varying levels of actual enjoyment) by those co-workers who are invited. In the case of my job in Ilsan, this usually included the “desk-teachers” and even the assistant (조교), the lowliest job of all. My closest Korean friend, C.B.W., was the sole assistant for a few months in 2009, and we first got to talking at a hwe-shik in August or September of 2009. Without hwe-shik, we never would’ve been friends.

The Purpose of Hwe-Shik
Students were frequently discussed at hwe-shik, it’s true, but “work” was never the purpose. Although the best short English translation possible may be “work-dinner”, that translation is seriously weak. “Work”, as such, was not the point. Usually these hwe-shik  were just held “for the heck of it” without any pretext like a holiday or someone’s last day (though those were also sometimes used to justify them). The purpose was more chit-chat and to enjoy a big meal paid for by the boss. More deeply, there was something else going on, though:

The Effect of Hwe-Shik (Juhng Building)
When push comes to shove, hwe-shik was/is a chance for building the emotion Koreans call Juhng (정), which I learned to be a special kind of bond formed with those with whom one has undergone mutual hardships, like the bond of soldiers who’ve served together. As I understand it, Juhng doesn’t necessarily mean friendship or even necessarily admiration, but a kind of recognition of, and appreciation of, shared-experience itself, “we are [were] all in this together”. It’s especially true for emotionally-important experiences, like (again) combat, or working together at a such-and-such company in difficult conditions. The harder the situation, the stronger the Juhng.

Benefits of Hwe-Shik
There are good things and bad things I can say about my one year in Ilsan. Looking back now, fours years after that first hwe-shik I began describing in Part IV, and three years after I finished my contract and left Ilsan, I can say that these attempts to build rapport, to sow the seeds of Juhng, were terrific for me. I felt included (in a way), and valued, proud. I got a lot of Juhng “points” with those coworkers for always being there, plus I was able to try all manner of new foods, I picked up some Korean language on those nights, I learned more about my coworkers, and observed Koreans functioning purely within their own culture. And, not least, it was a lot of free food!

Anyway, the hwe-shik at my job in Ilsan were all the initiative of the boss, Mrs. Y. I owe her a debt of gratitude, as I imply above. That’s not to say I enjoyed  them: Typically, the others spoke only in Korean, and I was left alone eating what I could find in front of me and trying not to look too uncomfortable. In this context, focusing too much on “enjoyment” is silly, though. The gladness I feel for having had those experiences is not connected with ‘enjoyment’.

A Terrible Attitude
I pity any foreigner who comes here, works with Koreans, and never does hwe-shik. They are missing something. Worse than missing out, though, is willingly missing out. Few things have annoyed me more, within the context of working in Korea, than when some of the other foreigners who are employed in the family of hagwon at which I presently work have said how glad they are that we haven’t had work-dinners. They don’t “want to”. The people I am thinking of have never worked anywhere else in Korea, so have never actually experienced hwe-shik at all. This attitude is terrible. Worse, it is foolish. Why are they in Korea? It’s like going to Hawaii for a year but never making it to the beach, then shrugging it off with a “I’m glad I never went to the beach — Who needs the sunburn?” ….Argh.

Synopsis of My Hwe-Shik in 2009-2010
We had hwe-shik  approximately once a month in my year in Ilsan. Maybe twice Western food was involved (including the Christmas one), but otherwise it was barbecued meat, typically the fatty pork sam-gyup-sal. Alcohol was always involved. There were several instances of the boss buying lunch or a late dinner for all or some of us, which we ate in the language-institute itself — including one instance of some unidentified ultra-spicy Chinese food that affected my tongue and mouth so strongly that it brought tears to my eyes. I spent five minutes in the institute’s bathroom running water over my tongue after finishing.

I’m not sure whether to consider such meals consumed at work true hwe-shik or not. Some (of my arbitrary) criteria are met, but a true hwe-shik, to me, need be outside the premises of work. 

Only once was one organized not by the boss but by another senior teacher, a woman who made up for in force-of-will and loudness-of-voice what she lacked in stature (being not much over 5’0″), and whose name sounded very similar to North Korea’s now-dead second president.

In November of 2009, we also had what could be called a 24-hour-long hwe-shik, in which all the teachers (and the shy desk-teacher I mentioned in Part III) went to a pension on Ganghwa Island after work on one Saturday. Again, paid for in full by the boss. Barbecue pork and beef was had, a lot of talking was done, and then sleep. People left by noon Sunday. As, again, with most hwe-shik, there was no actual reason for going to Ganghwa Island overnight. I recall some flimsy lip-service being given to the idea that it would be a “training”, but lip service is all it was.

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Back in the 11 o’clock hour of April 29th, 2009 (Korea time), in that cozy-but-noisy restaurant in Ilsan, the “reason” for the hwe-shik underway was clear, though: a farewell and a welcome. The ‘welcome’ was directed at me, of course. The ‘farewell’ was for B, the American man in his 30s whom I was replacing. I was now sitting next to him, and soon became amazed at one particular ability he had. . . .

[Next: Part VI, Part VII, and Part VIII]
[Previous: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV]

The restaurant was humming with activity as we walked in. The owner or manager of the restaurant seemed acquainted with my new boss (Mrs. Y). It’s likely she’d been coming here for many years.

“What kind of restaurant would be so alive at 11 PM?”  — I don’t remember if I asked myself that question as I was walking into the restaurant with that night. I may well have. Many establishments, drinking-oriented, have their prime hours around this time, of course, but this one seemed on the food-oriented side.

It was much later that I realized why this food-oriented place was so alive at 11 PM. It’s because we were on Ilsan’s “Hagwon Road”. This was one of the many restaurants on that road that catered to hagwon teachers and staff. In those days, most hagwons had quitting times of 10 PM or 11 PM.

Ages of the Other Teachers
Of the eight to ten people eating together that night, I was certainly the youngest. I make a note of this because age matters a lot more in Korea than it does in the West, as I later came to realize. I spent a lot of time in 2009 wishing I were a few years older, to relate better to my coworkers.

The four regular Korean teachers — all women at that point — were born (I believe) between 1979 and 1983, with Kang being the youngest. Yoon, who was born in (I think) 1980, was very concerned that she was soon becoming (according to her) an “adjumma”, a middle-aged woman. She was only turning 29 that year, though. The outgoing “foreign teacher” was born in the mid-1970s, and so was older than the Korean teachers. I was seated next to him.

The bosses, Mr. C (born in the ’60s) and his wife Mrs. Y (born 1970), were — naturally — the oldest. (Though husband and wife, they did not share a family name, which confused me. I didn’t know, that night, that women in East-Asia retain what we call the “maiden name” their entire lives. Much later that night, I called my boss by the wrong name, assuming she bore her husband’s name. It was not my first display of cultural ignorance, and not my last.)

Fulfilling a Social Responsibility by Acting Excited
I already noted the giggling, but I strain my mind to remember anything more specific about the mood. Four years on, it feels like a faded dream a few minutes after waking up. In retrospect, I think the Korean teachers’ mood was one of nervous-excitement. I don’t think I’m projecting onto them my own feeling, though that was, also, my feeling.

Anyway, it’s fair to say that, insofar as the Korean teachers were trying to fulfill their roles as good subordinates (which is to say, good Koreans), they were at least trying to play the part of “nervous-excitement”. I mean, it is a Korean social responsibility to seem enthusiastic in the milieu of the “work-dinner”, or hwe-shik (회식) as it’s called. Only later did I learn the word hwe-shik, and only later still did I realize its importance. But there I was, maybe two hours off the plane, in the midst of one, my first one. . . .

[Next: Part V, Part VI, and Part VII]
[Previous: Part I, Part II, and Part III] 

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]

This is the 44th post. I aimed for 10 posts per week, or 1.43 per day. I have just about kept that pace.

Ten posts per week is an achievable goal, and I’m glad I set it. Still, I may consider significantly slowing that pace in the future, or maybe even increasing it. There will be a period in the fall of this year (2013) when I will probably not post at all for a few weeks, being away from a computer for an extended period as I will be. I will make a post about this plan later.

An easier question is “when”:
I arrived, for the first time, almost exactly four years ago, in late April of 2009.

I lacked even basic knowledge about the place in April of 2009. I lacked experience teaching. I lacked experience with East-Asians, besides a few acquaintances here-and-there. And I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

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Four years on, the memories of my first night in Korea are vivid. They are more vivid than many of the things I did just this past weekend! In the coming posts, I will write down my memories of that first night.

                The British [in the Korean War] were absolutely devoted to the ritual observance of tea-time.
                They dropped everything at 4 P.M. to consume tea and cookies, even during combat. British
                artillery ceased firing for tea-time and then picked up the tempo afterward.

He made those comments shortly after mentioning the battle at Gloster Hill, in which an entire British battalion (800 men) was encircled for three days and compelled to surrender in April of 1951. This led me to wonder if the Gloucester Battalion also found a way to stop everything for tea, at the appointed times, on those three days of encirclement. Gen. Paik implies that they would have.

Maybe the story would have three acts, each act depicting tea-time on one of above-mentioned each days.

            Act I: Day-1 Tea-Time — High Spirits — Maybe they can repulse the attack?
             Act II: Day-2 Tea-Time — Defeat Looming — No escape
             Act III: POW Tea-Time [As I understand it, the Englishmen all surrendered before noon on the 25th.
             Maybe the third act we have them on the march north, bound for POW camps. Maybe the Chinese
             commander would have allowed them drink tea on that first afternoon as POWs, as a show of good-will].

I am struck by the positive and optimistic Weltanschauung on display. There is a purity, a distinct non-cynicism. (Is there a word for non-cynicism?). / Their descendants today are more cynical and pessimistic. / There are many kids in the audience: If the kids of today were teleported back and attended this event, they’d roll their eyes and think “that high-pitched yelling is so gay“, no doubt.

April 25th was the day the Battle of Gloster Hill ended in 1951.

There were 700-800 men in the Gloucester [Gloster] Battaltion on April 22nd. By noon April 25th, all but 40-60 (pictured below) were dead or en-route to NK/Chinese POW camps.

The city in which I live and work is Bucheon. “Bucheon is the Best in Korea“  is what I’d always guessed that slogan meant, which is wrong. (I recognized three of the five words. My Korean skill is not good enough to understand it fully). This kind of bragging is not uncharacteristic for Korea. The city itself uses these kinds of self-promoting slogans. Anyway, this translation is definitely wrong.

Thursday, I had a class of one, a very low-level 9th grade girl. Seeing the banner again, I decided to solve the mystery once and for all. I asked her. Aided by the limited efforts of this 9th grader, my first real translation effort was this: “Beyond Korea’s Best Competition is Bucheon“. This sounds awkward, so I knew I hadn’t gotten it yet.

My second effort was “Beyond Bucheon, Korea’s Best Level of Competition”. There should be an implied [We have] inserted, as in “Beyond Bucheon, [Our Language-Institute has] Korea’s Best Level of Compeition”. This seems like needless boasting, I thought, although I was satisfied with the translation. Again, this kind of ‘boasting’ is not uncommon here. (This language-institute has had a reputation for ‘poaching’ elite students from elsewhere, and offering them highly-discounted tuition, so the claim is true: Many top students are certainly here).

I was still unsatisfied with the translation, though. What was I missing?

Finally, a Korean friend told me: The last word carries a “let’s”. The best translation (rearranging word-order) may be:

This was true in my own experience:
I was in the Boy Scouts in the 1990s. I witnessed my own troop’s decline as an institution. The troop actually folded, for lack of members, in the mid or late 2000s. The reasons were various. The biggest reason, or so was my conclusion at the time, can be seen in the thousand-words spoken by the paintbrush of Norman Rockwell, over there —->

The typical kid born into the 2000s-USA will not identify with that image. It is an “America” that Whites associate with the 1950s. That was (and I guess still is) its appeal.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
I tried to find numbers. The best I can come up with:

2.7 million : 2011’s tally for number of boys in the Boy Scouts. [Official, pdf]
3.5 million : The 1990s tally, when I was involved. [Apparently official / excluding “Learning for Life” members]

I dream of summer.

The USA, has [I think] a legal mandate to give ‘substitute’ days off (e.g., Monday July 5th off, in lieu of Sunday July 4th). As of 2013, South-Korea has nothing like this. This is one of the many small blemishes on work-life in South Korea. Yes, it may be one of the richest nations in the world, but so often it doesn’t…act like it.

Now, though, the government is proposing adopting U.S.-style ‘substitute holidays’:

One caught my eye:

I thought the caption gave recipient’s name as Mu-Sang Hahn [한무상], but it turns out that word means “charity”.

I don’t mean to ‘compare’ the American rebels of 1775 with a pair of Chechen terrorists of 2013. A more-valid synchronicity to note would be this:

• October 2002: The sniper terror attacks around Washington, DC (discussed above) occur.

• October 2002: The Chechen Tsarnaev family arrives in the USA. The family came in on a tourist visa, claimed to need political asylum, and were allowed to stay indefinitely. The future-terrorist brothers were 9 and 16.

Finally, I find it interesting that the younger one’s Twitter account shows he was a bit of a “whigger”. It’s likely he would have protested if you’d called him “White” to begin with, though (a prerequisite for being a “whigger”).

No, spring has still not really arrived in force. I don’t understand it. The typical day here has been in the 0-10 Celsius range (30s-40s Fahrenheit) through April so far. [It should be in the 10-20 Celsius range by now].

• The nightly-low in Bucheon has stayed below 10 Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) all but twice so far this year.
• The daily-high has stayed below 15 Celsius (60 Fahrenheit) all but six times so far this year.

A Korean folk tale has it that Winter is jealous of humans’ love of Spring, so it angrily throws one last burst of cold weather at us humans before Spring takes over. I heard this on the only non-military English radio station here.

Koreans even have a special term for sudden spring cold-snaps (꽃샘추위). This one is prolonged, though.