{"id":56,"date":"2013-05-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/05\/08\/post-49-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-4-meeting-new-coworkers\/"},"modified":"2013-05-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T00:00:00","slug":"post-49-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-4-meeting-new-coworkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/05\/08\/post-49-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-4-meeting-new-coworkers\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-49: One Night in April of 2009 (Pt. 4): Meeting New Coworkers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nNOTE:<\/strong> These are my memories of the night I arrived in Korea in 2009.
The memories are vivid, even as I sit here in the spring of 2013, four years later.<\/em>\n<\/div>\n
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\nThis is a follow-up to:
Part I: “A Pig Virus Delays My Arrival”<\/strong><\/a><\/font>
and
<\/span>Part II: “Into the Wild Neon Yonder”<\/a><\/strong><\/font>
and<\/span>
Part III: “Meeting the Boss”<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/font>\n<\/div>\n
[Simple synopsis of Part I<\/a>: In the airport, I find the woman waiting to pick me up]
[Simple synopsis of Part II<\/a>: From the airport to my new workplace; observations along the way]
[Simple synopsis of Part III<\/a>: I meet my new boss (whose personal history I relate); we depart for the restaurant]<\/font><\/div>\n
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\nPart IV<\/u>: Meeting the<\/font><\/font> New Coworkers<\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

The restaurant was humming with activity as we walked in. The owner or manager of the restaurant seemed acquainted with\u00a0my new boss (Mrs. Y).\u00a0It’s likely she’d been coming here for many years.<\/p>\n

<\/span>“What kind of restaurant would be so alive at 11 PM?”<\/em>\u00a0 — I don’t remember if I asked myself that question\u00a0as I was walking into the restaurant\u00a0with 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.<\/p>\n

<\/span>It was much later that I realized why\u00a0this food-oriented place was so alive at 11 PM. It’s because we were on Ilsan’s\u00a0“Hagwon Road”. This was one of the many\u00a0restaurants on that road that catered to hagwon teachers and staff. In\u00a0those days, most hagwons had quitting times of 10 PM or 11 PM.<\/div>\n

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\nSome Giggling<\/font><\/strong>
<\/span>A\u00a0table full of people awaited, seated around a rectangular table of Western style (i.e., no sitting on the floor\u00a0here,\u00a0though\u00a0sitting-on-the-floor places\u00a0were not hard to find, if desired). All eyes were on us, or perhaps on me specifically,\u00a0as we approached.\u00a0I was\u00a0introduced.
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<\/span>I remember a lot of giggling in\u00a0those first minutes,\u00a0which I interpreted\u00a0to be at my expense (and may partly have been), but which I realize now was them trying to be polite, giggling being a common way Korean women are polite.
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<\/span>One of the souces of the giggling was a comment by one of the Korean teachers —\u00a0maybe Kang, maybe Yoon —\u00a0that I (supposedly) looked similar to one of the English-speaking cartoon-characters used in the textbooks. Was it supposed to be a compliment? The others found this quite funny. I never got a chance to see<\/em> this cartoon-character. <\/p>\n

<\/span>Ages of the Other Teachers<\/font><\/strong>
Of the eight to ten people eating together that night, I was certainly the youngest. I make a note of this because age\u00a0matters 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.
<\/span>
<\/span>The four regular Korean teachers — all women at that point — were\u00a0born (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\u00a0becoming (according to her) an “adjumma”, <\/em>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.
<\/span>
<\/span>The bosses,\u00a0Mr. C (born\u00a0in the ’60s)\u00a0and his wife Mrs. Y (born 1970), were — naturally — the oldest. (Though husband and wife, they did not<\/em> share a family name, which confused me. I didn’t know, that night, that women in East-Asia retain what\u00a0we 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.)<\/p>\n

Fulfilling a Social Responsibility by Acting Excited<\/font><\/strong>
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.\u00a0In\u00a0retrospect,\u00a0I think the Korean teachers’ mood\u00a0was one of nervous-excitement<\/strong>. I don’t think I’m projecting onto them my own feeling, though that was<\/em>, also, my feeling.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s fair to say that, insofar as the Korean teachers\u00a0were trying to fulfill their roles as good subordinates (which is to say, good Koreans<\/em>),\u00a0they were at least\u00a0trying to play the part<\/em> of “nervous-excitement”. I mean, it\u00a0is a Korean\u00a0social responsibility to seem enthusiastic in the milieu of the\u00a0“work-dinner”, or hwe-shik<\/em> (\ud68c\uc2dd) as it’s called. Only later did I learn the word hwe-shik<\/em>, and only\u00a0later still did I realize its\u00a0importance. But there I was, maybe two hours off the plane,\u00a0in the midst of one, my first<\/em> one. . . .<\/div>\n

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\n[This is the End of Part IV]<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span>[Next: Part V, Part VI, and Part VII]<\/strong>
<\/font>[Previous: <\/font>Part I<\/font><\/u><\/a>, Part II<\/font><\/u><\/a>, and Part III<\/a>]\u00a0<\/font><\/strong>\n<\/div>\n

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NOTE: These are my memories of the night I arrived in Korea in 2009. The memories are vivid, even as I sit here in the spring of 2013, four years later. This is a follow-up to:Part I: “A Pig Virus Delays My Arrival”andPart II: “Into the Wild Neon Yonder”andPart III: “Meeting the Boss” [Simple synopsis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}