Brawling With Old People

Ah, the boy—the boy! Today I took him out for a long walk along the river, and he acknowledged my commitment to the unending struggle to be a good parent by passing out within seconds of going outside. He missed a gaggle of ducks, an old man speedwalking backwards, plenty of old people playing around in the old people playground, and several old people who did not know the difference between right and left. There are signs all over the place, seriously everywhere, telling people to stay on the right, in Korean, English, and Chinese, but everyone still walks on the left.

Not to worry! I have developed a foolproof way of dealing with this. As opposed to getting the hell out of the way, which as a younger person I am supposed to do, according to Confucius (“When Old Man Come In, Young Man Get Fuck Out!”—Analects xii.22), I maintain my honor by just staring at my feet and pressing on at full speed.

In response to this, the old person lined up against me will always play chicken, from the very moment I am spotted on the horizon, until they can see the sun gleaming on every golden bristle sprouting forth from my black beard. Then they will break. They always break. Every time. I get them every fucking time because they’re no match for my secret weapon: the baby.

People are less inclined to screw you over when you’re holding a baby, even though everyone (except for the reptoids disguised as humans) was once a baby, and yes, even a zygote. Nevertheless, at some point you reach the age at which it is permissible for others to fuck you over; for the moment the only people who are allowed to fuck Harry over are his own parents.

This method of looking down and moving forward does not work nearly as well without the very necessary baby. People always move eventually, whether they’re running or walking, but I’ve gotten close enough to catch the kimchi-soju-barbecued-pork reek pulsating wildly from the teeth and the tongues of my adversaries before, at last, Confucius relents in the face of the Western Cult of Youth, wherein everything that is young is good (Confucianism being the opposite).

Armies on the march should employ baby tactics to win wars: seriously, if you’ve got a baby strapped to your chest, no one is going to shoot at you. Even in Busan, that hive of scum and villainy, people will actually be somewhat considerate if you happen to be carrying a baby, so that navigating the city resembles a walk in the park rather than that ridiculous fight scene from The Matrix: Reloaded.

Korean Breakfast

The idea of eating spicy briny kimchi, pickled mushrooms, nets of cold wet yellow sprouts, damp spinach, sticky white rice, hot sauce, pickled kimchi radishes, still-boiling still-bubbling blood-red kimchi stew, cold cooked onions and potato slices, either mixed up or spread about on little plastic saucers, complete with steel shot glasses for the water you have to gulp down to make up for all the salt, probably does not sound too appealing to the Western breakfast palate, used as it is to sweet grains slushed about in milk, with muffins and fruit and endless rivers of coffee pouring, roaring down whirlpool-like gullets, along with gallons of orange juice and absolutely whatever else you can get your meathooks on.

But then yesterday, after months of muesli mixed with bananas and coffee, I was ready to take the plunge. The realization was gastrointestinal more than intellectual.

Actually it had always been horrifying to me to think that Korean breakfast was more or less the same as Korean lunch and dinner. I would often ask my young students what they had for breakfast, and they would often tell me that they hadn’t eaten anything at all, or that they had drained a bowl of kimchi soup mixed with rice. A few stragglers would report on successful conquests of cereal, and for this I would cheer them on, breakfast imperialist that I am—I’ve been eating cereal since I could eat solid food, and some of my earliest memories involve making enormous bowls of cereal for myself before spilling the clattering contents all over the floor. Various visiting relatives would tell me that they could trace my path through the house by following the Hansel-And-Gretel trail of syrup-soaked cheerios I’d left in my wake. But for these little Koreans there would be no such pleasure. Just kimchi soup and rice. Tortillas and beans, señor.

My wife, A., has drawn the opposite conclusion. Because she is a Korean who has had to spend most of her life hauling herself out of bed very early in the morning for endless shifts of work or school, she is also not really a breakfast person; the Western breakfast is predicated on the hour or two in the morning Westerners sometimes have to just hang around and eat—Koreans never seem to possess this luxury, sleep being more important than food. But because she’s lived with me for a year A. has adopted the breakfast of my father: banana with coffee, declaring on several occasions that it is one of the more brilliant things she’s ever discovered. But yesterday she’d had enough. “Boonshik,” she said, around eleven. “It’s like cheap college food.”

At once a platter of pickled mushrooms rose into my stomach’s imagination, even though I had just eaten breakfast an hour before.

Shi-fucking-takee.

After a walk down a tar alley past mountains of garbage and cigarettes, which A. photographed because she herself is becoming less Korean while I myself am becoming less American—typically my impression was that foreigners hate the decorative garbage here while Koreans think it’s not so bad—and after I told her that if she didn’t like Korea she could leave—we came to a little cement-and-linoleum hole in the wall, with two friendly flowersuit-clad ajummas baring curry-toothed grins at us as we walked in, flipping skillets of vegetables over bonfires that were leaping up out of a pair of old black ovens. We ordered. A. and I talked. We decided to read a Korean newspaper; even though I still need her help it’s still not nearly as impossibly difficult as it was six months ago to work through a few sentences; an hour’s intensive labor has been reduced to fifteen pleasant minutes of learning about the hard iron door and the drawn curtains that separate Kim Jong Nam from all the reporters swarming after him in Macao.

Even though I do not speak any language fluently enough to read without assistance, it is still definitely very different to catch a few lines of Homer in Greek, or Ovid in Latin, or Borges in Spanish, or ancient Chinese poets thrown at me in a conversation I remember from my first language student, who told me about waking up one winter morning to find the trees outside his window bursting with white cherry blossoms in the form of blankets of sudden quiet snow. He told me it happened thousands of years ago, and modern Chinese people don’t need translators to help them see it.

(if anyone knows this poem, please let me know, because I haven’t actually read it and I would really like to)

Homer is a minstrel strumming a lyre, Ovid has a very jaunty seventeenth-century sort of jumping rhyme scheme (which he uses, repeatedly, to describe rape, murder, bestiality), gold takes on a far more nostalgic gleam when it becomes oro—to me, anyway—and Kim Jong Nam’s door is really fucking black and really fucking hard. No one’s getting through that thing if he doesn’t want them to. That’s what I gain from reading Korean with a Korean’s assistance.

Some acquaintances walked in, their staring child with them. Bows. Hellos. How ya doin’. I saw your picture! Then the eight dollar platter of food arrives—everything I described in the first paragraph, and more. We attack. Eating Korean food requires strategic thinking because there is so much to choose from; it’s as if you took everything out of your fridge and all your cabinets, sliced it up, cooked it or pickled it, and then threw it down on the table in front of you.

We eat, talk, order more. The ajummas yell at us to make do with what we have, babbling about wasting food and money. But they are all smiles as we walk out—assuaging our stomachs for at least two or three more hours.

Humanizing Buddhist Monks

—- University must be one of the few academic institutions on Earth where you can see significant portions of the student body wearing either miniskirts or the thick gray robes of Korean Buddhist monks, but now that everyone’s on vacation the campus is dead and all but a few stragglers have scurried away into their alcoves throughout the rest of the half-peninsula. I was working in the library today for two very short, very precious hours on the best part of my book, perhaps, indeed, the only good part at all, which deals with describing the riches-to-rags-to-middle-class journey of my wife’s family, when a nearby monk got a call on her cellphone. At once the silent study room exploded with the chants of Korean Buddhism, as well as that telltale sign of ancient far eastern spirituality—the moktak, or wooden fish. After an instant the bald monk, with five o’clock shadow shadowing the whole of her corrugated scalp, silenced her incredibly loud electronic device.

This was a remarkable moment for several reasons, the most notable being the fact that there is indeed at least one Korean who does not use KPOP to damage the ears of anyone who happens to be nearby whenever he or she receives a phone call. This Korean chose to abuse everyone with a different musical tradition, instead.

Some readers might be surprised to know that there are monks with cellphones, and if there were more tourists around they would probably be snapping photos of the monks doing normal-people stuff—like driving cars, taking pictures with digital cameras, eating meat, what have you—rather than sitting around and chanting or meditating, which is all that monks are supposed to do.

During the last week at the university I met two monks who did not fit the bill, the monk bill, the preconceived notion westerners have about Buddhist monks—that they are serene, deeply spiritual people, joyfully penniless and incapable of harm or hypocrisy. The first was a former investment banker, apparently very successful, who told me he still had enough money sloshing around to take a break from the relentless and (frankly unbearably cold and snowless) South Korean winter to visit a friend in Hawaii. Another monk, written about in a previous post, wrote an academic paper in English about how normal people should act more like monks in order to conserve natural resources and help fight climate change, and then promptly set off for some kind of meeting in California on the next day. Combine all of this with the sudden realization that the Dalai Lama is not the most perfectly moral man ever—brought to me courtesy of Christopher Hitchens—and we have something resembling the humanization of a religion which would appear to be fairly tame in comparison to the bloodthirsty Muslims, the deranged Christians, and the greedy Jews who populate America, though I suspect it only looks that way because non-Richard Gere American Buddhists seem to be so rare.

Next up: The Jains!

A Random Useful Korean Phrase

약을 먹어라! Yag-ul moe-go-la! Eat your medicine! Take your medicine! To be said only in an action film while stuffing a pistol inside your archnemesis’s bleeding mouth, or in the company of a sick child who is being a pain in the ass. Wield against everyday folks with caution.

Yak, from the Chinese word for medicine (藥, yào), ul, the Korean article (or particle) used for objects, mok, the Korean verb stem which means eat, o-la, a very impolite conjugation in the present tense—mogola is by far the most common word Koreans say, meaning “eat it!”, as well as mok-go, “eating”, both of which you will undoubtedly hear several times within five minutes of walking outside the door.

A Prominent South Korean Writer Expresses Her Sadness For The Death of Kim Jong Il

So Kim Jong Il was a weird guy—and how nice is it to refer to him in the past tense?—but hidden among his more famous quirks is the fact that there are prominent South Koreans who support him and have expressed genuine sadness at his death. One of them is a famous writer named Gong Ji Young, who in response to a photograph of South Korean protestors celebrating the death of the Heinously Dear Leader tweeted the following—”Shame on you!” (“정말 부끄럽구요 쫌!”). Various politicians aligned with the Democratic Party have also apparently expressed their condolences.

(news is over, opinion follows; the preceding paragraph would have been impossible to write without A.’s help)

Now I am a communist, partly because communism is cool again, but also partly because Christopher Hitchens called himself an especially conservative Trotskyist, a title I would like to adopt for myself even though most of my knowledge about Leon Trotsky comes from Animal Farm. Nevertheless, armed with an amateur’s knowledge of the issues I essentially hope that our capitalist economy will become more democratic, peacefully, over time. This opinion places me far to the left of most people. But in South Korea I am a conservative.

It is a hallowed South Korean tradition to despise whoever is in power, and as the current president, Lee Myung Bak, has been around for several years, you will be hard pressed to find a single person expressing support for his policies, which mostly benefit a small group of incredibly rich old Christian men. But people hate him for a lot of good reasons. The economy, his strongest asset, is doing okay but that’s really because everyone here is working like slaves (everyone, that is, except for me) and because the country appears to sell a lot more than it buys—particularly in the case of ships, cars, electronics, cellphones.

The man does not care about the environment, the underprivileged, or freedom of speech, sacrificing everything and everyone in the name of money, and he is also—as the North Koreans call him, and everyone else in this country—a puppet of the United States, having just signed what would seem to be a fairly unpopular Free Trade Agreement with America (which some Koreans believe to be more of a threat to their security than the North (Japan also is considered to be more dangerous)). For these reasons I should probably not support him. But I do.

For all his faults, the man doesn’t give anything to North Korea. Not a dime. Not a grain of rice. And because every dime and grain of rice would go toward maintaining the elite and the military in that country, I support the idea of starving it of resources and allowing it to collapse on its own, because the North Korean army is too powerful to be destroyed without killing huge numbers of innocent people, and the North Korean people themselves appear to be too weak or too unwilling to take down the regime on their own. This may seem callous, but I think the people who are starving to death in the North right now will continue starving regardless of whether or not anyone sends them aid. Some people might say that aid should be sent along with people to monitor its distribution, but in Asia that would mean losing face, because the poverty in North Korea would be exposed for all to see, and nothing could be more shameful, because horrible things are okay as long as nobody else knows about them. The Northrons (or Norks) will allow countless people to starve before allowing themselves to be humiliated like that.

A more liberal politician is probably going to be elected to the presidency at the end of next year as the result of the current backlash against President Lee, which means that the status quo will remain the same except for North Korea. The South will, quite promptly, resume sending everything short of nuclear weapons to the North in the name of solidarity with everyone’s racial brethren (seriously), and these actions will probably prolong the North’s eventual collapse by months, years, or even decades. America’s policymakers will probably support this move as well because people seem to think that the leaders of North Korea actually want to give up their weapons, their mansions, and their power, in exchange for nooses and cold prison cells. This would not be logical anywhere outside of North Korea; I don’t know why it is logical inside North Korea.

The Garbage In New York

To us, because we were traveling, even the trash was beautiful. It was early in the morning on the day we were to return to Korea, and under the orange streetlight outside the taxi window there was a Manhattan curb choked with garbage. It was an Aleph for me, representing everything and nothing, all cities and no cities and just the city of New York, and because I had missed this place (my birthplace!) so much that image took on the most profound significance, and I still remember it as though it is here, now, before my eyes, a year later—all while complaining about the garbage in Korea.

A. talked about this yesterday (after we read and discussed On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer together, in an attempt to undo the damage of her Korean education) and said that as a Korean it was like walking into a movie, to go to New York City and wander around for a couple of days. Sometimes the experience of travel is so intense you photograph everything you see with your eyes, and all the food you eat is exquisite, and you feel like you’re coming to life for the first time in ages.

To live in New York sounds extraordinary to me, but I’m sure it would become normal enough after a few months. Likewise I’m guessing other people think it must be so bizarre to live in Korea, but life here acquires the same grinding slog you would find almost anywhere else—although after two and a half years I still have not gotten used to being pointed or stared at by children and old people. Nonetheless, normalcy snatches the days away. Habits of living accelerate the passage of time; any escape from these patterns, a glance at a pile of leaves glowing in the sunshine, a bird diving into the river and rippling beneath the water, the mountains turning blue beneath a pink sunset, a boy in his white taekwondo suit leaping out of a beeping, roaring minivan—these breaks from the grind wake me up to the astounding perfection of the mind of god, and I start thinking like Liebniz, and not Voltaire. This really is the best of all possible worlds.

Should I stop there? No, now I must reduce things to the absurd.

Why was New York like a movie to A.? Obviously because she had seen the city starring in a lot of movies. To a lot of people here I think New York is America, and I’ve known a few Koreans to express surprise and bewilderment when I tell them that almost every inch of America is wide open country. On the other side of things, from my perspective, I think there is one prime image of Asia (or East Asia) in the American consciousness, or at least in my consciousness: Asians clogging up subways. Mobs of them in the hundreds and the thousands going up escalators, piling onto subways, pouring down hallways in floods…and to travel away from home and step inside that image of modern exoticism is not at all as pleasant as voyaging out to New York City from Korea. On Saturday I was in such a sour mood I actually shoved an ajumma against a stairway wall after she herself shoved me out of her way; I believe it was the first time in my life I have violently acted out against a perfect stranger, and some part of that violence definitely comes from my preconception of Asia: the subway is bad, and ugly, and must be gotten over with. It’s not just the objective shittiness of the subway itself, but the negative image I consumed before I came here already convinced me of the horror of the place. And as a boy I loved trains. My first job preference was to be a conductor.

These two tropes, of New York and the East Asian Subway, are played in different keys. Regardless of the actual beauty of New York—and there are plenty of people who can’t stand the place—Koreans are programmed to believe that it’s a great city, and most will tell you that they really want to go. The image of Asia is more negative, and fits in with one stereotype about Asians, that they are mindlessly hard workers, trudging in and out of existence with little more individuality than a hive of ants (and perhaps the only alternative to this dreariness is leaping over bamboo rooftops). But there is nothing objectively good or bad about the reality from which this image draws its strength, and if the subways were depicted in a more positive light—imagine some sort of ridiculous subway musical, a good comedy, a patriotic song imported from North Korea, what have you—I think it’s possible I might have been programmed or influenced into believing that it is actually a pleasant thing to take the train. I mean, the train gives you a few minutes to listen to music or read a book; I finished two books by Balzac, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, and To The Finland Station, reading them almost entirely on the subway, and it can be thrilling to listen to a good song while darting through the crowds. It sucks when people are yapping or shoving, but they’re not always doing that, so sometimes it’s really not that bad.

The clip I posted from Baraka is an exposure of background. There are a few ideas behind the film (most obviously that Western civilization is mindless and destructive), and one of them is a sort of switchup: take the background to all the news clips and movies and TV shows we’ve ever seen, and make it the foreground. Focus on the background instead, and bring the innocent bystanders out of the woodwork—the three schoolgirls at 3:29—and make them confront us, head on, staring at us like we stare at them, from behind the safety of the television screen, for an uncomfortably long period of time, a lengthy break to the rushing about we’ve been getting used to for the last few minutes. This is what I’m talking about. These are the ideas that have programmed me, brought out into the light. Cities likewise become absolutely horrifying here, with the huge endless buildings like living moai statues, rushing about, devouring the landscape, and all the traffic between them is reduced to a factory’s production line—the sound effects suggest a roaring incinerator. Everything is reversed. The subway becomes a work of art, something to focus on, and the city, the centerpiece, the star, of so many great films, is exposed as a concentration camp.

The Cold War In Miniature

At least one of us is prepared.

I was in quite a good mood early this afternoon as I went on a sprightly walk down the sunny street to get some lunch, stepping around SUVs jammed right up against the glass entrances of flower shops, cafes, and convenience stores. One karaoke place displays a giant, grainy image of young naked Nordic children playing in a band, with their little uncircumcised penises clearly visible. I remember a young woman tucking herself out of sight behind a rectangular pillar of cement. The world was finally looking up.

In Korea you must always laugh and cringe as you say this, but I went to gimbap chongook, or gimbap heaven, a chain restaurant that serves quick, cheap, passable Korean food to individual customers—the last part is the most important because in this communal society most restaurants will refuse to serve you unless you go with a friend. And as I was diving into my bibimbap, or rice mixed with vegetables and kimchi, and lapping it up, and groaning in joyous paroxysms, all while trying to understand the conversation of some loud middle-aged Korean men—the only words I could make out were first!, second!, third!—and while watching a single jaundiced (yellow-eyed) waitress rush about to serve quite a catch of maybe fifteen patrons, with another single woman working in the kitchen to feed them, the news came on, and for once we weren’t looking at the same videos of factory-bred cattle, hideous modern government buildings, and middle-aged suited technocrats.

I had gotten up to pay at that point. The old waitress took a minute or two to get to me, and as I waited, and as she rushed about, the television began playing something that had been produced in North Korea. Reporters and anchors from that country always sound completely ridiculous to us: the whining, wailing, deep-throated elderly voice of this ajumma is what I heard, sitting before a backdrop of pine trees and Mount Baekdu, the Olympus of Korea, where Dangun (the Adam of all Koreans) as well as Kim Jong Il, were born. There were a few words beneath, switching back and forth, but I could make one of them out: 사망, samang, death—okay, who has died? No, it couldn’t be, impossible…

The text switched back, and there it was, written in Hangul: 김정일. Kim Jong Il. Dead. Everyone had gone quiet by then. The moment millions of people had been waiting for and talking about had finally arrived. Any change in North Korea was impossible while that man lived; his death may mean nothing, but at least now there is some chance, some opportunity, for reform.

“Oh my god,” I said, fairly loudly, in the relative silence. A war could start any minute! The man had died mere moments ago!

I checked my phone, ready to call A., but she had texted me first. KIM JONG IL IS DEAD. Then, a moment later: I KILLED HIM. I rushed home through the chill of the sunny street that was completely normal before but now drenched in significance. I won’t forget the car that pulled out, the two college students I saw walking toward me…

After returning, dancing, eating, jumping, and singing a certain song from The Wizard of Oz, came the facebook posting. This was the silly joy that I would remember with some bitterness after I found myself penned up in a freezing concentration camp. Gyeongju is relatively safe, but we’re planning to go to Seoul on Thursday for our baby’s first modeling shoot, and I told A. that I won’t be going without this on my head—and proceeded to don a steel pot. I remembered jokes about the obscenely loud farting of my father-in-law. He would fart, the house would shake, and his mother would say the war is starting.

Speculation of any kind is almost pointless (although this piece is a lot of fun) because we appear to know more about the far side of the moon than North Korea, but we should hope for the best (a unified Korea) and prepare for the worst (war with China). It seems that the Dear Heavenly Amazingly Fuckingly Great Leader actually died several days ago, and that whoever is in charge now—some believe it to be this anonymous man (it is almost certainly not the very young but anointed successor)—decided to keep the story under wraps while presumably getting things ready for the big announcement. Because North Korea is a dictatorship, they were probably purging people left and right.

The strangest thing about South Korea, mentioned in this great article, one of the greatest I have ever read about the two Koreas, is that people here don’t seem to care that much about the North. Americans probably care a lot more. Life here goes on as if nothing has happened. To be sure, people are talking, and thinking, but they’re not raiding grocery stores, and they’re not stocking up on weapons, because something fucks up in North Korea at least once a year, and I think that after five decades of yearly fuckups you really just have to throw your hands up and relax. Seoul could be leveled any minute. Toxic gas could start raining down from the sky here, above sacred Gyeongju, any second. But it’s been like that forever, and I can’t think of any country that has knowingly committed suicide in history—the people up North may be crazy, but they’re not suicide bombers, and they know that they will be destroyed moments after they order the destruction of the South. M.A.D kept the US and the USSR at bay for decades, and the same is true here, because Korea is the Cold War in miniature.

And I was getting excited about recent reports that the North was on its last legs, something that people have been saying for twenty, thirty years. India will go on, is the line repeated in a slim volume by the despised V.S. Naipaul, and I think the same goes for North Korea.

Speculation is useless. We can’t be sure of anything. But I can be sure that there will be plenty of speculation, and plenty of alternately lame and amusing jokes, at the faculty meeting tomorrow afternoon.

Assuming, of course, that there is a tomorrow afternoon.

Translators And Calculators

Several other professors and I have had to endure the bizarre phenomenon of random college students coming up to us with their final papers and asking, with the purest innocence, for us to check their grammar. This is a bit of a controversial request to make because there is some risk of the professor writing the paper for the student, and my superiors advocate an approach that is more along the lines of circling problems, rather than fixing them, and answering specific questions, rather than looking at the entire paper. But because writing English is impossibly difficult for many native speakers, and because I can untangle most linguistic knots in a matter of minutes, I usually veer off the deep end with the students who have clearly written their own papers (or at least gotten their friends to do the work for them).

Occasionally as I delve into these masterpieces I find myself freezing up before Gordian aporias: students have a habit of saving the most difficult thoughts for translators. Here is an example culled from the top headline on Naver (Nay-ee-boh), the heart of the Koreaverse, translated with the help of Google, which probably provides the best approximation:

After 15 months old son, a Cradle sumjige beoryeodun spoiled 8 months 30 of the law she was judged.

I run into sentences like this after a paragraph of fairly decently plain prose, and cannot go any further. A rut like this is insurmountable without the author’s help; the tank’s treads are jammed with one too many monkey wrenches. So I ask for an explanation, I get one in everyday speech, I cross out the Googlese, and I replace it with the student’s own words.

But then there are those innocently pure students who began this post, and they are the ones who hand me entire papers that have obviously been run through computers. They hand them off to me with a great deal of politeness, they smile, they fold their hands like the finest businesspeople you could ever ask for, ready to settle in and pick apart their hard work. But one sentence is enough to send them packing. The tank’s treads are not jammed, because the entire tank has been transformed into a plague of ribbitting frogs, leaping about, swelling their throats, impossible to catch. I look up from the biblical disaster before me and ask, with equal innocence—did you write this?, fully ready to believe whatever answer they give me, and then, every single time, the student looks at me with the sweetest smile, and says, in the sweetest tone—No!

No one has tried to lie. None of them even get angry at me. All seem to believe that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing; though apparently if they hand in two such papers, they will fail whatever class they are taking. The smarter ones will cut and paste from English websites, and in one case a ten millisecond google search established that a student had copied her text from gyeongjublog.com, which must be the most popular English resource for this city. Back in America, my uncle was once faced with an entire class that had handed in the same paper, copied from the same website—so my half-remembered story goes.

But in spite of how internet translators are not so good at deciphering complex ideas in odd foreign languages, it is still pretty miraculous that they even exist, or function, at all, and several years ago their presence would have been almost unimaginable. If you confine yourself to single words or simple phrases, you can probably get your point across without any knowledge of the language you’re trying to use. With time the technology will only improve, and it is conceivable that in the future machines will be able to render a Keats poem in relatively decent Korean, equaling or surpassing human translators. It’s already happened with chess as well as Jeopardy.

At that point my wife and I will be out of a job, because aside from being an odd kind of hobby there will no longer be any reason to learn a foreign language. Calculators, too, have rendered the need to mentally perform everyday mathematical calculations obsolete, and language is just a different kind of math. Perhaps computers will also compose poetry and literature as well, at which point we’ll have to wonder if there’s any reason for human beings to exist at all, when machines do everything better. As many science fiction films have told us, the machines will probably be asking the same question.

Chun-So-Ga

There are no bad students, just students who received one too many doses of caesium-137 at birth. Chunsoga was one of these. His name has a far nicer meaning than sound; the mispronounced toneless Chinese characters governing the assemblage of his two personal Korean syllables, 천석, were probably 天石, Tiānshí, “Heavenstone”, and I only remember this ugly name at all—in a nation deprived of a euphonious nomenclature, a place seemingly victimized by J.R.R Tolkien—because this name was constantly being shouted at him, by me, by the otherwise unbearably nice Ms. Nam, and by whoever else happened to be sitting around him.

He would often while away his classtime by attempting to stab innocent bystanders with the enormous pairs of rusty meatcleavers, otherwise known as scissors, which Korean schoolchildren ostensibly use for cutting up papers, although their supple young sweaty limbs often offer far more tempting targets. He could neither read nor write English, and also had plenty of trouble with Korean, which was really an amazing feat of misfortune, as I can’t think of any children his age (the fifth grade) who were unable to write their own names. Even in America this would be cause for some concern, but although Chunsoga probably had a learning disability (the disability of being born into a poor family), and although he had fallen hopelessly behind his fellows, he was just passed along through a system which has little tolerance for those who cannot keep up.

Because he does not fit into his peg, the boy’s fate has already been decided, as a Delta-Minus Heavy Lifter, a miserable laborer of some sort, with little beyond the mindlessness of television to solace his rare hours of rest.

To my great chagrin, toward the end of my tenure at my illustrious elementary school, I was appointed to work with Chunsoga to better his English. Now I was not qualified to teach anything to begin with, having spent approximately zero seconds studying the art of education (beyond a few radical texts related to the no grades/no tests philosophy of Hampshire College, hardly applicable in test-crazy Korea), and I was even more unqualified to teach students with special needs. But teach him I did.

Twice a week for forty minutes I would sit down and do battle with the insurmountable laziness of Chunsoga, who resisted my tables of Korean and English letters and games and encouragement and despair with constant requests to go to the bathroom and get a drink. At best he would give me the bare minimum, and tonelessly repeat what I had said to him, not understanding, not remembering, not caring. I could only get him involved by encouraging him to compete with other unfortunate students, who occasionally joined us, but because they were not quite so unfortunate as Chunsoga, they quickly surpassed him, he no longer had any chance of victory, and so lost all interest. Every time we met it was as if we were meeting for the first time. It took weeks to get him to memorize the alphabet, which I believe he was still unable to recite by the time I finally escaped.

One of my evil co-teachers openly blamed me for his failure. But seriously, guys. I don’t know what else I could have done. Chunsoga was an unfortunate, misguided, nearly brainless child, but he wasn’t bad. If you got him away from the other kids he ceased all attempts to lash out; and in his defense the other children tormented him mercilessly, so of course I saw myself in him, having spent much of elementary school at the mercy of—how else to put it?—fucking shitheads. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted him to break through, somehow. If he could have gained the slightest confidence about his own intelligence, he might have been able to turn everything around. But the boy had no friends and probably no role models. I am fairly certain his parents worked around the clock. He wore the same filthy clothes every single day, for weeks on end, and they were always covered in all kinds of stains. After school ended I sometimes saw him walking around outside a nearby grocery store, his face smeared with ice cream. He would always say hello to me with a great deal of happiness and excitement. If I had been able to communicate with him in Korean, I might have inspired him…and as I think about things now I believe I should have gone to the nice co-teacher, Ms. Nam, and asked her to translate some sort of moving speech. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Every last card was stacked against him.

He is still there now, slightly taller, enduring school as his school endures him, spending most of his life trying to get everything over with, a habit I doubt he will break until his difficult and unfair life is likewise gotten over with.

A Korean Says English Is Better

Right now my wife is watching the Korean equivalent of American Idol, called Nanun Gasuda, or I’m A Singer. It has a few variations on the American version, most notably the startling fact that everyone on the show is Korean. At times it seems as if the Korean Wave is just American pop culture with an Asian face; one wonders how successful it would be if Asians actually had a place in American culture that went beyond darting over bamboo rooftops. Besides singing their hearts out, the singers also must occasionally endure bizarre gauntlet-like encounters in small rooms with various representatives of the country’s fast-talking comedians; the singers are also notable for not going totally overboard with plastic surgery, unlike almost every other celebrity in this country.

Although the show is entirely in Korean, A. just told me today that there are certain situations where she now feels uncomfortable speaking her first language—situations where no foreigners of any kind are involved. The statement astounds me. Although I’m officially an intermediate-level Korean student (and likely will remain so for several years), I can’t imagine preferring Korean, with its (alternately) slavishly deferential or imperiously high-browed verb conjugations, over nice democratic Shakespearean Queen’s English. That said, I still think it’s fun to speak, and doing so in front of other people rarely fails to impress them.

Now she’s shaking her butt and singing and checking on the baby, who has finally figured out how to sleep. What are these situations she spoke of? One involves posting videos on her blog, most of which concern different baby-related products, of interest to Korean mothers, who despite their Middle East-like status in this country still exert a considerable influence on most of its affairs.

A. doesn’t want to speak Korean in these videos because she has a strong, folksy accent, and doesn’t sound as sophisticated as someone from Seoul—a Gyopo I knew told me that various Southern accents in America are a rough equivalent to the various Southern accents of Korea, and that, like in America, most people on television sound like they all come from the same place (Seoul for them, various cities for us). Her English is so good that she loses most of her accent when she switches over from Korean. In fact she once told me how she was once speaking English in some class after she got back to Korea from Australia, and everyone was really impressed with her, and then totally surprised when she changed tongues back to her twangy Korean drawl. You’d just as soon expect George W. Bush to start reciting the poetry of Chairman Mao—in Chinese.

There’s another situation as well. Both of us are tutoring a rather wonderful young student who, thanks to the incredible wealth of her parents, has studied English in the Philippines for six months and attained near fluency in an impossibly difficult foreign language before middle school. A. tutors this student entirely in English and never speaks to her in Korean; after several weeks of this she realized that she was uncomfortable doing so, and when I asked her why she said it did have something to do with the inherently hierarchical nature of Korean.

A. respects this girl, likes her, enjoys teaching her, and was intimidated by her achievements before she started tutoring her. It’s strange to switch from the relative mutual respect of English—which is hierarchical as well, but much more obsessed with accurately describing the timing of events—to Korean, where the difference in ages would force A. to assume the linguistic position of wise regal wizard of truth. Her student would likewise find herself reduced from a friend to an ignoramus. A. would talk down, and her student would talk up.

Both parties seem to prefer the difficulties of a second language to the (seemingly greater) difficulties of the first. I’ve never heard of this happening before between two people who could very easily slip back into the seeming comfort of the mother tongue they share.

Still, regardless of language, hierarchy is something that seems inevitable to human culture, or at least modern culture. You’ll never hear someone with a strong Southern accent delivering a news report on TV in America, and it will be years at least before American movies featuring Asians who are human beings rather than caricatures become the norm rather than the exception. Similarly, how long will Korea have to wait before its Captain Kirk / Uhura kiss on Nanun Gasuda?