Talkin'

Had my speaking test today -- 15 minutes of talking before two of my classmates and the teacher on one topic from a list we were given. I originally figured on talking about work and life, but a chance comment by the only other westerner who consistently comes to class made me rethink my choice. If I did the work/life topic, it'd be easier, but I probably wouldn't use any new vocabulary. So instead, I picked the "population problems" topic. Easy breezy, man! NOT.

We practiced a little bit yesterday in class, and I stumbled through a couple assertions about the link between the status of women in a society and how that's related to declining birth rate -- thankfully, the teacher stopped the torture to give another classmate a chance to practice.

Embarrassed, with a touch of nerdiness, I sent my socially conscious Korean friend a message, asking her to help me out with this topic, and we ended up having dinner together and then talking about population problems. Fascinating stuff! Up until about the 1980s, the birth rate in Korea was on the up slant, but within the last 20 years or so, the birth rate has declined to about 1.2 children per couple. In a couple of decades, if this trend holds, the South Korean population will start to decline.

Women on maternity leave from work currently receive 300,000 won (US$255) per month for each of the three months they are allowed to have. Some policymakers have suggested raising this amount to 400,000 won ($341) per month, plus a flat rate sum of 200,000 won (US$170) for each child when it is born.

"Bullshit." So says my friend, who is due to give birth next month. "There's no woman out there who would say 'Okay, let's have another baby!' just because she's going to get another 100,000 won," she said animatedly. "It is so expensive to have just one child. Another 100,000 won is nothing. Nothing!"

It turns out that while on the whole, there is certainly a relationship between the status of women and birth rate, in Korea, the prevailing issue is money. It's tremendously expensive to raise a child in Korea, primarily because of education costs, and within that, primarily because of private education fees. I've mentioned here before that the UN cited Korea last year for violating children's rights -- primarily because of the oft-maligned (and rightly so) education system that beats the spiritual stuffing out of high school kids who study day and night for the all-important college entrance exam.

But it's not in high school that the process starts. Kids as young as 4 and 5 are enrolled by their parents in hagwons, private educational institutions that teach everything from language and music to physical education (I kid you not). This system is what creates the huge demand for English teachers in Korea. All those college grads who answer the ads calling for any college graduate to come and teach in Korea end up teaching elementary, junior high, and high school kids who come in after their school day and will probably go to another hagwon to learn something else after the English class. If you want to risk it, you can make even bigger money as a tutor to the really rich kids, who get private tutors to come to their houses to help them with any and all subjects under the sun.

Paying for all these hagwons (and some kids go to as many as 8 or 9 in addition to school) is probably the single most expensive part of raising a child -- an expense that is virtually unknown in the States. I did take private music lessons and such as a kid, but never more than one at a time, and my extracurricular activities all took place at school, where they were included in the tuition. In addition, the cost of going to college or graduate school, while not as high as the States, falls entirely on the parents. American community college students would say, "yeah, tell me about it," as they struggle to pay their own tuition, but for the thousands of students who attend state schools and private universities, Uncle Sam doles out a generous dollop of funds per student. Not so in Korea.

You might just say well, then, don't send your kid to these hagwires or whachamacallits. Then you can keep your money and have another kid. But there's where the thinking takes a different road in Korea. In the U.S., most people make a distinction between success and happiness. You can be a wealthy doctor, but if you really wanted to be a postmodern painter, you may not be happy. But in Korea, happiness=success and success=happiness. And the road to success is a very narrow one, with predetermined steps set in stone. What parent doesn't want their kid to be happy? So rather than have two or three kids that they can't fully and completely take care of ("take care of" in this context meaning "send to all the hagwons they can afford; excuse the kid from any work, household or otherwise; and work their fingers to the bone"), the Korean couple will stop at one.

Hence, the declining birth rate.

I blabbed on and on about this during my test today, and at the end, my classmate asked if I would rather educate my future child in Korea or the States. Man, there ain't no doubt about it. Rotten public schools and all.

Korean News

A couple days ago an actress apologized to a group of old women here in Korea, getting down on her knees in the dirt outside the house they share and tearfully choking out the words, "I'm so sorry, I did something truly wrong." The television crews caught it all on tape, naturally.

Her offense? She posed nude (a recent trend among Korean actresses) for some photos. That in itself is slightly controversial but pretty widely accepted, but the real issue was that the photos depict her as a Korean comfort woman.

The comfort women, about 80 to 90 percent of whom were Korean, were forced to serve as sexual slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army in the period before and during WWII. (Women from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other Japanese-occupied territories of the time rounded out the sex slave population.) The Japanese government first denied the existence of such women and then recanted and apologized in the early 1990s. Some Japanese conservative nationalists still assert that there was no evidence of coercion. The question of reparations and an official governmental apology are still ongoing topics of discussion.

Some of the old women sitting outside the group home for former comfort women watched the young actress sob before them, and reprimanded her for capitalizing on their suffering. The actress had originally asserted, along with her producers, that the photo series was supposed to illuminate the bravery of the comfort women.

Horribly tasteless, I must say, but it did bring fresh publicity to an issue where the principals are dying off. In 1991, Kim Hak Sun became the first Korean woman to give public testimony about her life as a comfort woman when she and two other Korean women filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government. In 1995, she told an anthropologist that she thought the Japanese tactics would be to stall the legal proceedings until all the litigants were dead. She died four months before the Shimonoseki Branch of the Yamaguchi Prefectural Court in Japan ruled in favor of the three women.

Why hk is happy today

~ Because she got a free planner from Burger King when she bought her fries and realized that the empty hole in her life these days was really the space waiting for a monthly planner. Nihilistic and despondent feelings, begone! There's a new, cheap, Burger King-motifed planner in town.

~ Because her favorite online writer, Sarah Bunting, is back after a couple weeks of no new content. (Check out tomatonation.com, people. You won't regret it.)

~ Because most of her feverish, fatalistic, stomach pain-inspired guesses on the midterm turned out to be right, proving that 1. Kwan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, really does exist, and 2. that she really does want to hk to stay in her class and experience feeling like an idiot this term. Now, I know y'all's gonna think that it's just hk again, faking like it was hard when she actually was pretty sure all the answers were right, and I assure you that that isn't the case. I really guessed at a lot of answers. And that they turned out to mostly be the right ones is really a surprise. And I'm meeting with the teacher tomorrow to go over the test, because I won't learn anything from being lucky, will I?

~ Because I'm laying off the third-person references, and we should all be happy about that.

~ Because I'm back at the Foundation, and it's like slipping into an old sweatshirt. (Although new sweatshirts are really fuzzy and soft and actually much nicer than old sweatshirts, aren't they?) Yeah, for all my wanting to try teaching English, the KF came up with an extra 200,000 won per month, so in the end, I'm working a little over half the amount of time I used to, but being paid 4/5 of my old salary. Can't really beat that.

~ Because I'm wearing my new knee-high boots, and while I still can't decide if they make me look like a farmer's wife, they're very comfortable, and between having wearable black leather boots that might make me look like I'm going to muck out the stables versus unwearable trendy dominatrix-type black leather boots that I'll wear exactly two times after which I'll chuck them in anger into the "I hate you but you cost too much to throw away" corner of the shoe closet -- well, I'll go with the stable-mucking shoes, Alex. Anyway, I always liked horses. Not in that way, though.

The midterm sucked. It was definitely the worst test of my Sogang Korean Language Institute career. I'm not looking forward to the results.

I shared part of my train ride to work yesterday with Father Joseph, one of the triumverate of African priests who are well known through our little language school community, both for being from Africa and for being so gentle and mild. Peter and Joseph, from Kenya, and Tamlat, from Ethiopia.

Joseph and I had two classes together, but I didn't know until yesterday that before he became a priest, he used to be a park ranger in one of the nature reserves in Kenya that they take tourists to for safari trips. My old college roommate and Forever and Always Bond Girl, Masha, went on safari last year with her husband. There's no chance, then, that they crossed paths with Joseph, but I amused myself by thinking that if they'd gone a couple years ago, they might have.

I wouldn't mind going on safari myself someday, but say, but some freak of time and space, I did go, and Joseph was a park ranger, and I met him there. We could have a similar conversation as the one we had on the train yesterday, but there would obviously be a distance there that wasn't present yesterday. The problem with being a tourist is that you never really get to know the people who live there. I don't feel like I've gotten to know Joseph, but we've shared the same experience of being in a bewilderingly different society, and struggling to learn a bewilderingly difficult language, and we talk as friendly equals and classmates. I never felt that in any of the three weeks I spent in Southeast Asia, and really, how could I? That's just a part of traveling. But it's frustrating. Unsatisfying.

Aaaaand... sick again

Been out of commission since Tuesday noon, nursing an irritated stomach. Went to the doctor today, only to be convinced once again that no one knows much when it comes to the human body and its quirks.

Yesterday, as I am wont to do, imagined that I was suffering from dengue fever or malaria or Hep B. But I really don't think so.

Tomorrow I have my midterm, for which I've only been memorizing vocabulary (at a rate of about 25-40 new words a lesson, you would too), at the expense of grammar. Every day I go through a predictable cycle of:
- confusion (as I am confronted with a new word in class that I haven't seen in my prep for that day);
- frustration (as the Chinese and Japanese students look at the word and say, "Ohhh, that word!" and nod their heads in comprehension);
- despair (as I look through my dictionary only to find four different meanings for the word, each of which gives the given sentence a different spin);
- anger (as I blame the teacher for introducing words in class that we haven't had a chance to prepare for);
- depression (as I think, "I'll never, ever be as good as the other students");
- disgust (as I tell myself I'm an irritating, whiny prat); and
- determination (as I mentally shake myself and tell myself to step up to the challenge, dammit).

I've got a bit of a fatalistic attitude about the test and this term in general.

Enjoyment and Employment. (And a touch of inspiration.)

Employment: Got a call from my mother, of all people, today, and couldn't place her voice. "Nina? Wendy? Who is this?" "What, you don't recognize my voice anymore?"

Well, considering you've never called me while I've been in Korea (she doesn't have an international calling plan, so sometimes I call her, but that's really slacked off in the past six months too... come to think of it, I don't think I've actually talked to my mother since I saw in San Francisco in September -- oops), I don't think I was unduly unfilial.

"Mom?" (Incredulous. And annoyed. Gut reaction. Sorry, mom.)

"Yes! Where are you?"

"Well, I'm in class."

"What?"

"IN CLASS."

"Oh. Can you talk now?"

"Yeah, in about 5 minutes I can."

"Well, I just called to tell you to call my friend because she might have a job for you."

Her friend from college is now the dean of human ecology at Yonsei, the number two school in Korea and also the alma mater of both my parents, as well as the site of their meeting. "I just got off the phone with her, and she might be able to get you a job teaching English at Yonsei. So call her, okay?"

That was about 9:45 am. At about 11 am, I checked my phone and saw that someone from the Foundation had called. Upon calling him back, he said the sweet words: "Okay. Three times a week. Same conditions as before. You'll start Monday?"

With this information, I started recalculating and rearranging. I had made an appointment to see the director of the English language institution in Shinchon, where my school is, on Monday. I called him back and made it for 3:30 pm this afternoon, after the Catholic service I had planned to see with my Chinese nun friend.

A bit of inspiration: Father Peter and Father Joseph both hail from Kenya. Father Peter was in the Congo for a couple years, but had to leave when the genocide there began to sweep through his area. Unlike the machete-wielding killers (forgive me, I don't remember if they are the Hutus or the Tutsis), who are shorter and more robust, Father Peter is tall and slender, a characteristic shared by most members of his tribe, the Masai. Unfortunately, it was also a characteristic of those being slaughtered. So he was evacuated with the other Kenyan priests.

Father Peter has been in three of my five classes at the Korean language school, and like everyone else, I adore him. If all priests were like him, I think I'd have to become Catholic. Gentle in speech and manner, slightly stoop-shouldered, owner of a charmingly gap-toothed smile, and as pure as they come, he and Father Joseph -- who has possibly the most blindingly wide and bright smile this side of the planet -- led mass in Korean. They were attended by three other priests from the language school, at least one of whom is Filipino. Where the other two are from, I don't know, but there was something really moving about these five Catholic priests from around the world, gathered in a chapel in a Jesuit college in Seoul, Korea, giving mass in the Korean they had so earnestly learned over the past year. In their white cassocks (surplices?) and emerald green drapery, they cut fine, solemn figures at the altar.

Most of the audience consisted of nuns and a couple teachers from the school, but me and two Japanese students in my class had come to see Fathers Peter and Joseph conduct mass, and we were unanimous in our opinion: they rocked.

After mass, we filtered out and headed to the refreshments provided by the language school (it was really a language school event, after all), and Father Peter grasped my forearm and said, with a wide smile, "I'm so happy that you came to this!"

More employment: I couldn't stay for the refreshments, though, because I had arranged to meet the guy at the language institute at 3:30. So I bid my farewells, and headed off to the easiest interviews of interviews, probably because I'd already been deemed suitable at the Gangnam office I went to last week. Basically, if I want to work a couple hours a day in March, I'm in like ... like Tin. Yeah.

After that, I walked over to Yonsei, and got picked up by my mother's friend, who drove me around the campus a bit and showed me the buildings. We then did a little chatting in her office, and she said she thought that teachers at the language school at Yonsei probably needed more qualifications than just being a native speaker, but that she'd ask. Then we talked about her son and her daughter and the job situation in Korea and being busy, and speaking of being busy, she usually ran about all day and, in fact, had another appointment in an hour. A little more chit-chat, and gosh, she'd normally take me to dinner, but she had that appointment at 6:30. I finally got the hint, and excused myself.

Enjoyment: By that time, it was 5:40, and I belatedly realized that I'd promised Maiko to pick up her homework assignment for today, since she's in Busan now, saying goodbye to a friend who's going to study abroad in Australia. I speed-walked back to my language school, picked up her stuff, and then paused. It was 6 pm, and I didn't feel like going home yet. I put my stuff down and took out my phone and thought, "Well, Etsuko probably has plans, but what the hell. I'll see if she wants to have dinner."

It turned out that she was having chicken barbecue stirfry with Mayu, and they told me to come on over. Unfortunately, I didn't know where it was, so Mayu ran out of the restaurant and we spend several confused minutes trying to find each other. But ultimately we succeeded, and I went back to share their meal. Support the chicken farmers, I say! (Korea is all abuzz with the recent news that some chicken restaurant owner killed himself because business has fallen off so sharply due to the avian flu scare. They're saying that people are dying before the chickens are.)

We then went off to an ice cream parlor and talked for a while about people leaving, and how much that sucks. Etsuko's boyfriend is Mongolian, and will be heading back there in April. It's unlikely that they'll see each other again, though Etsuko might visit. That's the hard part about befriending other expats or foreign students: at some point, they leave. Though both Etsuko and Mayu say that they would consider living in Korea for several years, if not their lives, they're the exception. By the beginning of next term, most of the people I shared classes with for the past year and a half will disperse to their various homelands.

Etsuko was lucky (and talented) enough to snag a good position in a Seoul-based office of the Japanese company she used to work for in Osaka, so we talked also about work conditions, leading to my amazed discovery of the fact that in Japan, women are allowed one day a month for their menses. By law! Etsuko never took one, being both unplagued by PMS and embarrassed about her male colleagues possibly knowing when she was menstruating. But by law, women office workers are allowed one "seng-li hu-il" ("menstruation holiday") per month.

After the ice cream (a yummy concoction of low-fat frozen yogurt, Froot Loops, canned peaches and pineapple bits, fresh kiwi slices, Cocoa Puffs, and a couple tapioca balls, strangely enough), I was beat, and told them I was going home, but agreed that checking out an "o-rak shil" (game room) was worth doing, as I'd never been to one before. So we went to one that Mayu knew, and what came shimmering out of the cacophony and heat? Nothing less than House of the Dead. III.

Now, you may not know about my sordid affair with HotD (TM by Minnesota M's ex), which started in an arcade late one night in Chicago, where I was holed up for a couple of days in 1998 in preparation for a trial. The trial never went through (our man, Stan, pleaded guilty at the last minute), and to celebrate the settlement, we went out for steak and then to an awful, cheesy amusement park-like building that happened to have a pool table and video games. I noticed a little game called HotD and informed the rest of the DOJ team with amusement that the "agents" in the video used blue plastic handguns emblazoned with the slogan: "Gun of Justice". The DOJ team was of course immediately intrigued. Or at least, one of the junior attorneys was, and that was enough for me, he being my crush of the ye-- okay, of a couple years. We played, and I was hooked.

HotD is your basic shoot 'em up video game, taking place in various venues through the different versions. The original and my sentimental favorite is located in the haunted Curien mansion, and it was a lot harder to kill the undead that popped up everywhere. Tonight's foray back in the world of HotD showed that they've made the regular undead much easier to kill -- just a shower of bullets sufficed to kill the killer slugs, whereas in HotD I and II, you had to actually aim. In addition, in the first two versions, human hostages weren't ARMED, for CRYING OUT LOUD, and therefore could not, with your bullet barrage providing cover, GET UP and START SHOOTING AT THEIR UNDEAD ASSAILANTS FOR YOU. I mean, really. If they had freakin' guns in the first place, why didn't they freakin' use them to escape? Snort.

Okay. Calmer now.

The fact that you only kill the undead and other monsters was the appealing point of HotD, because around the same time I first became entranced by it, I decided that I'd only play video games that didn't involve shooting humans, because I found it objectionable to kill people, even in simulated format. (Oh, I know it doesn't make sense, but it kind of does, and it goes along with my desire, a couple years ago, to try shooting a handgun, but that's another story for another time.)

Anyway. I locked eyes with the box, told Etsuko and Mayu that I loved HotD I and II but had never seen HotD III, and just like that, we were shooting the familiar undead. With pump action shotguns. The original two HotDs feature the aforementioned light blue plastic guns. I dunno, but after the first exitement over the pump action reloading feature, I kinda wanted my old gun back.

We didn't win, but we did get pretty close to the end, and only used about $5. Next time, I'll take it to the finish.

After HotD, we went into one of the karaoke booths, and each sang a song for 40 cents. Mine was a request from Mayu: Glenn Medeiros - Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You.

You know it. You love it. Go on, sing it.

Last night stayed up til 2 or so, watching old episodes of Sex and the City, which OCN, the English language cable channel, sometimes shows. Started reading Poland, a James Michener novel that I took from Wendy a year and a half ago. Michener is Da Man!

This afternoon I met with my video teacher, who very kindly offered to meet with me once a week to practice Korean (me) and English (her). Not sure how much it's going to help my Korean. She talked a mite too much for me to practice speaking as much as I need. It's rather a disadvantage in learning a new language when you're not naturally much of a talker.

Still waiting to hear from the KF about working three days a week. Must say, periods of waiting and indecision suck. I am, however, enjoying the afternoon hours of studying in a quiet classroom, either alone or with schoolmates. I'll be sorry to give that up.

Job search update

The Foundation called today -- they want me to come back, and as the friend whom I encouraged to apply for that position just wrote and said he'd gotten a choice job in his homeland of New Zealand, there'd be no ethical problems about taking my job back.

Even so, I'm holding out for working only three times a week. Because frankly, the work is mind-numbingly boring. And frankly, because I can.

If they agree to that schedule, I don't think I can resist -- it's twice as much money as the English-teaching gigs, and I'll have the opportunity to teach at my dad's program. I'm signed up to teach an American history class and a conversational English class starting in late March. Goodness. Anxiety. But it'll be a good experience. I think.

Am strangely irritable and grouchy these days. Why? Should probably start taekwondo again soon. I've been putting it off because I feel poor. When I have an income again, I'll go... That's another strike against working for Pagoda, actually -- I can't do taekwondo if I'm teaching from 5:30 to 9:30 every weeknight.

Off to bed. Hopefully will be a bit brighter tomorrow. Maybe if I wear my new boots. Mmmm. New shoes.

Repotted but in need of fertilizer

I worked hard this weekend at Korean, filled with new resolve to learn as much as I can in the time I have left here, but in class today, I felt like a wilted lettuce leaf all over again. I was okay as long as we stuck to the material in the text that I'd previewed, but the teacher gave us a handout that was just incomprehensible because it incorporated vocabulary that wasn't in the book.

This may be whiny, but I'm really unused to putting in the effort and still feeling like a dunce during class. Undoubtedly, I'm learning a lot -- being forced to put in more effort will have that effect -- but it sucks to feel like the stupidest person in the class.

It was gratifying, though, to sit with my dad and his two friends at dinner tonight and be able to recognize vocabulary that I'd just learned that day. I think I understood some 80 percent or so of the conversation, which I tried to follow more than usual, mindful of my new resolution. Quite fruitful, actually, since I learned that my brother was born after my parents' wedding. I mean, they were legally married and all before he was born, but they delayed having the ceremony for some time.

The reason requires a little explaining: my dad was serving his mandatory 2.5 years in the army then, and was poor, as all soldiers doing their service are. In Korea, your office will give you a tidy sum of money when you get married, and your coworkers all come and give you more money. So it's definitely worth it to wait until you get into a nice job at a nice office before getting hitched. So they waited for my dad to finish his army service, and while they waited, my brother was born. So now, in all the pictures I've seen of my parents in their traditional wedding outfits, I now imagine my brother, one year old, off to the side, being held by one of my grandmothers.

The things you learn when your dad's friends are sitting around drinking a bottle of 17-year-old Ballantine's. Heh.

Wilty but Repotted

This is the first week that I've attended class every day, and I was so discouraged by the huge difference between my language skills and my classmates' that I asked my teachers today to move me down to the slower section of level 6. I'm in section B; section A has far more westerners, which slows down the pace considerably. Although we cover the same content and have the same book, having other people in the class who also have to look up 20 to 40 words per lesson would help me feel less of dunce.

I've always felt that my Japanese and Chinese classmates were far ahead of me in terms of recognizing and remembering Korean words (people who know Chinese or use Chinese characters in their native tongue are naturally better positioned to understand Chinese-based words), but in level 5, as long as I looked up the vocab list before each class, I could follow the class discussion pretty well.

This term, I feel lost a lot, as if I'm listening to a radio that keeps fading in and out -- I get the gist of everything, but not enough to participate with any depth. The problem is the addition of two new students whose language abilities are really more suited for level 7 than level 6. One woman, who hails from Taiwan, has been married to a Korean man for more than 5 years, and whose pronunciation and grasp of structure and vocabulary is close to native. Another man is a Japanese professor who has said that the textbook is easy for him.

In comparison, I'm previewing the lessons, looking up the definitions for as much as 6 words per sentence, reviewing each lesson, and struggling with grammatical structure. To make it worse, the presence of two excellent speakers makes me feel tongue-tied during class -- the same feeling I get in front of native Korean speakers. A couple times this week I felt like I really wanted to cry in class because classmates were using vocabulary that I didn't know or I just didn't get the meaning of the text enough to say anything remotely analytical about it.

I tried to keep in mind that I missed a lot of days due to travel or sickness. I reminded myself that I couldn't expect to know as much as the Taiwanese woman, or hope to learn new words as fast as my Asian classmates. I told myself that I was pretty good for a westerner. With that in mind, I tried to treat the class as a challenge, and attempted to persuade myself that it was good for me to be in a position where something I wanted to be good at didn't come easily to me.

Yesterday, during video class (which is actually at the right level of difficulty; it's my speaking class that's killing me), we watched a documentary about the first Asian person (a Korean woman) to become a simultaneous interpreter of English and French. In college, she studied French obssessively, befriending her French professor and family, following her professor even to the hair salon, going to French movies instead of on dates, and reading French novels and newspapers -- in short, becoming completely devoted to learning French.

In 1979, she entered the premier simultaneous translation school in Paris, and found that being the best French language student in Korea meant nothing in France. On her first test, she got a total of 2 points out of 20. But she rose to the challenge, submitting a translation of a French newspaper column everyday until the comments changed from "Mal" to "Moyen" to "Bien!" When she was hospitalized in her second year, she woke up and peppered the nurse with questions about what each step of the examination process was called in French -- and then looked them all up in English too. In 1981, she graduated with 8 other students -- out of an entering class of 109.

For homework, we had to write a paragraph about a time when we'd felt frustrated in learning Korean, and with a full heart, I wrote about my insecurities and discouragement over the last few days. But as I wrote, I couldn't help but look at the documentary's subject and see how far I was from her example. With the move to this apartment, I've fallen into the habit of watching at least an hour of English language television every day (and usually it's more than an hour). It's true that while I was traveling, I didn't have an opportunity to practice Korean, and it's true that I really did need to think in English when I was making The Decision. But overall? I don't listen to Korean radio, I don't read Korean newspapers, I don't even watch Korean TV. I haven't been meeting my Korean friends -- with whom I mostly speak English anyway -- and I still use mostly English with my dad.

In short, I haven't been devoted to learning Korean. And that's okay -- in my meeting today with my speaking teacher, she asked and I told her that my goals in coming to Korea were many, and that learning Korean was just one of them. But hell, I'm never going to be able to replicate the opportunities here for learning Korean in the States, and I haven't taken advantage of them at all. I may as well be taking an immersion class in the U.S. for all the Korean I use outside of class.

My speaking teacher told me after school today that I would not be able to transfer down to section A, because it was too full. I felt crushed, but sometime after meeting with her, I felt the slight stirrings of determination beginning to rise. After all, am I a man or a mouse? (Well, neither, but you get my drift.) I don't want to be the person who's not going to rise to the challenge. Or be held back by my fear of looking stupid. I thought I'd come a long way in that regard, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

So, no more nights up til 3 am (like yesterday) watching B-movies on TV. Time to put the Harry Potter books away and pull out the Korean/English book of Agatha Christie short stories that I bought six months ago. Time to try reading the paper again. Time to stop indulging.

[Wrote this on 4 hours of sleep, so have, I know, rambled and used 50 words where 10 would do. Not the best entry. Ick. Annoying. I can do so much better. Discipline's what's needed here. And after all, "a day in the Corps is like a day on the farm -- every meal a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, every formation a parade. I love the Corps!" And I love Aliens. Wow. You really can find anything on the Internet. Okay. Sleep now.]

Wanted!

One of those days where you feel desired, admired, and friendfull (as opposed to friendless). I'm talking about the job search, of course, plus having a very enjoyable dinner with my friend Yuri (who-is-not-Russian-but-Korean).

I went to my interview at Hagwon No. 1 as planned, and it went smoothly; a man with the slight Scottish burr asked me a couple questions about how I'd handle certain classroom situations and then straight into the pay (about $16 an hour on the weekends, about $12 on the weekdays) and apologized for only having Saturday hours open for jobs right now.

Flushed with success, I thought, what the hell, I'll call the guy at Kaplan and see what he says. I'd made contact with this guy through an acquaintance in December, so I reminded him of it and when he said, "Oh yes! Right... well, I don't have your resume on hand right now --" I casually interrupted, "Well, as it turns out, I'm in the Gangnam area now and could drop off a copy at your office if you like." So we arranged to meet and within 10 minutes, I had my pick of Saturday hours teaching conversational English to adults at Hagwon No. 1, or a 4-hour-per-day gig starting in March teaching the SAT. Or both!

As I was in her 'hood, I dropped in on Yuri, who is in charge of educational content at Hagwon No. 2, to see if she might want to have dinner, and while I was there, mentioned that I'd been to Hagwon No. 1 and Kaplan, to which she suggested I drop off a resume at the 10th floor of her company. So I marched up and said to the receptionist (in Korean): "Er, I'm an English teacher? And, um, do you by any chance need English teachers?" After which a passing management type stopped and took a resume from me. Predictably, once he saw "Harvard Law School" on it, he said, "Why don't you come see Grace, who's in charge of the preliminary paperwork for employment?" Turns out that they need someone to do one-on-one tutorial-type work and occasional group conversation classes in their Youido office, which is closer to my Korean language school in Shinchon.

So between 3 pm and 6:30 pm today, I essentially got three job offers, and learned again that timing, a polished appearance, and that one-two punch of Yale and Harvard makes the employment road very, very smooth. I'm deeply appreciative of it.

However. With private tutoring (which is illegal), one can make twice what the hagwons are offering. Work less, earn more... hm.

And then there's the KF, which I feel like I'm leading on, as I basically said on Friday that I'd like to work there again, and basically received an offer to do just that. Except that I told my friend Lewis to apply for that position, and he's done so, and I'd feel like a big ol' tool if I took the job back. I said as much to the HR guy there, and he returned, "That's life." I responded, "Yes, but it's up to us to change that, and to act honorably. It starts from us."

Ah, choices, choices. Crushed by the weight of options (as usual), I think I'll go to bed and think about this tomorrow. Lovely to feel wanted, though.

Job search update

Perhaps I've gotten a response from the Kaplan people -- I wouldn't know, since I can't log into my yahoo account for some reason; I keep getting the message that the page isn't available. Since I can usually log in just fine at school, I suspect it's a local server problem. Grr.

In the meanwhile, I scraped up the courage to call one of the biggest language institutions in town, where my classmate Yoko happens to teach Japanese. Got a very nice guy on the phone who said he finished assignments for February this weekend , but that his counterpart in the Gangnam area needed a parttimer, so call him. So I did, and now I've got an interview for tomorrow for an English language instructor. The winter suit I got made in Hoi An (thanks, Wendy!) is going to see some action! Whoo hoo!

I stuck around school this afternoon, as I did yesterday, to watch the video I'd missed last week when I was lolling around at home, sick, instead of attending class. Called Dong Gam (translated by whomever in the film industry does that kind of thing as "Ditto"), it was about a female college student in 1979 who, via a HAM radio, contacts a male student at her college -- who is living in 2000. Dum dum DUM!!! (Or rather, dumb dumb DUMB. Not the premise itself, which was done fairly well in the States with Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid in Frequency in 2000, but the heavy-handed -- musta weighed a ton, that hand -- melodrama and annoying characters.)

The 1979 girl is in love with this guy, see, and then the 2000 guy says "Hey, my parents were in your class! Wonder if you know 'em?", and the guy's parents turn out to be the girl's best friend and the guy she's crushing on, and I'm usually pretty bad at guessing endings to movies, but this one was so predictable that I guessed everything about 15 minutes in, astonishing Yoko and causing her to say, "You're no fun to watch with."

On TV tonight there was some "tribute to troops" type of show, the last part of which featured a young man's extremely sentimental letter to his mother, who stood in a traditional Korean outfit on stage while the letter was read out loud by the host. After the letter-reading, the host asked the mother to call out her son's name, whereupon a tall young man hopped up on the stage and enfolded his mother in a hug while they both cried.

After that, a popular female singer wearing a light blue blazer, a slightly-above-the-knee blue skirt, and black and white pumps sang, while hundreds of young male soldiers sat quietly in the auditorium. The first couple rows of soldiers waved pink and light blue balloons back and forth in time with the song.

Not exactly JLo in fatigue-patterned Daisy Dukes.
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Am currently alternating between stressing about finding a new parttime job and thinking, "Hmm, maybe I should just not work for the rest of my time in Korea..." Sent a feeler out to the Kaplan office here -- maybe they need an LSAT instructor. Ulch. I actually enjoyed teaching the one LSAT class I did for Kaplan in DC a couple years ago; the subject matter left something to be desired, but I ended each class feeling energized.

I do need to decide what I want to do with the remaining months here; the current term of school ends at the end of March, and then what? Take the last level of language school? Work a fulltime job? Work parttime and loll around for the rest of the day? Spend a couple months in China? Travel around Korea? Travel around Asia? Hm.