When it comes down to basic communication, my students manage to get around their lack of English surprisingly well. Their halting speech is peppered with idiosyncrasies and unique turns of phrase that make me forgive them their terrible grammar and vocabulary because they struggle so poetically to express themselves.
Living here myself with only the most basic knowledge of Korean, I’ve found that when you lack language, you scramble for other tools to express yourself. Communication becomes innovative and simplified, a game of words, ideas and diagrams.
In the classroom, I’ve had lessons that have degenerated into Pictionary and charades as we try to share ideas and experiences that no-one has the language for. Dictionaries make it even more obtuse. But the students have surprising success rates by themselves, even with such crap vocab. One guy calls a skirt “triangle pants.” Another describes his best friend as his “very intimate friend” which made me howl until he got offended and I had to explain, which made him even more offended.
A waterfall: “Water – down.” Barbecue: “fire machine.” An explorer: “Ship go, Korea and New Zealand and USA.” A city: “Many human live.”
From a boy in love with his new MP3 player:
Mpthree is preservation many sing. I listen study mpthree. mp3 listen is not sleepy. mpthree thank.
My long-suffering twelve year old student tells, with a wistful face, why she wishes she were younger:
Mother and father, my sister “You cute!” Mother and father, me “You not cute! Study!”
And a boy on seasons:
I like summer, because it is go swimming and ice-cream eating. I don’t like winter because winter is cold and angry. Winter’s floor is slidey. Winter discovers me snow, and I like snow, and I like winter.
I really couldn’t have said it better myself.
In what is destined to be regarded as a Very Bad Idea, I’ve agreed to go to jazz dance classes with my Korean workmates. The classes are five times a week from 9pm until 11pm. Five times a week. For two hours.
Why must Korean people approach every educational or sporting activity with such unyielding and unsustainable commitment? Last year I took up taekwondo, which required a minimum commitment of ten hours a week. The lessons were reluctantly reduced to eight hours a week when we lazy, fat, piggy Westerners baulked at the idea of losing our early Friday night drinks. My students attend academies, schools, camps and training programs from after school until late evening, again in the weekends, and if they can afford it, their summer holidays at an educational camp.
The pressure is huge for young students. I have a girl in my class who’s at school from 9am until 3:45, then attends extension English class until 5:30. She then goes home for an hour to eat dinner, and packs her bag again to come to my English class. At 8:30pm, she goes to a study room and studies until 11pm, after which, presumably, she goes home and sleeps the deep sleep of the intensely over-educated. She’s 14.
Another boy finishes school, has kendo (Japanese martial art) until 5pm, comes to my English class, goes to math and science academy, then Chinese class, and gets home around 11pm. He doesn’t seem to have a dinner break and is always high on snack food.
Their lives aren’t unusual, nor particularly noteworthy in a culture where education is the most important thing in a child’s life. It’s not unusual, but in my mind is certainly not natural, right or sustainable. These students study about fifteen hours out of 24, and will continue to do so in increasingly ridiculous hours and patterns at least until they get into university, where the pressure will only increase.
Even my younger, primary age students have packed schedules. After school they go to taekwondo, ballet, art class, Scouts, and then finally English at 6:30. By the time I get them they are absolute monsters, over-hyped, slack-jawed and red-faced, high on candy and stuffing fistfuls of chips into their mouths. It’s that, or dropping their heads on their desks and falling asleep, before waking up and whining that they’re tired or hungry.
These kids are eight, nine, ten years old. There’s not much grass or playgrounds for them to expend their energy on, even though we’re in a relatively quiet and surburban (for Korea) part of the city. It’s no wonder they slam doors on each other, hide under the desks, cry, scream, swing on their chairs and stuff crayons in their ears. Often I feel like doing the same.
My adult student Civil Engineer tells me that Korean students who go to New Zealand to study often can’t be convinced to come home again. There, they’re top of their classes, studying far more than their slacker New Zealand peers, and the family and social pressure to succeed at all costs is diffused by distance.
For all the emphasis Koreans place on ‘well-being’ and eating healthy foods; for all the red ginseng, green tea, tofu, exercising, skincare, cupping, stress-reducing massage and multi-grain rice they eat; for all Korea’s much-lauded statistics on heart disease (conveniently ignoring their high rate of stomach and lung cancers) they’re destroying their kids with over-expectations, packed schedules and heavy workloads.
How is it healthy for my ex-student So-min, now attending a poncy all-English international high school near Seoul, to spend her school days studying until 3am, then waking at 7am and starting again? The emails I receive from her are fraught with distress and there’s nothing I can tell her to do, except to get a good night’s sleep and eat properly. But how can she when her fellow students are following the same punishing schedule and she ends up berating herself for not spending enough time studying? So-min is thirteen.
I was running the other day and passed herds of Korean teenagers. In some ways they’re just like every other group of teenagers I’ve come across. They travel in packs, they take up the whole footpath, they’re plugged into cellphones and MP3s, they eat nothing but junk food, they’re noisy, immature and giggly, they wear terrible school uniforms that make them look uglier and more awkward than even they dare to imagine.
Except, for one major aspect. Korean teens are not intimidating. They’re not even mildly irritating. I ran past them without feeling a single barb or leer.
I would like to think I’m not usually intimidated by people less than half a decade younger than me. But on a short break home in New Zealand, when I walked past a group of high school kids, I was profoundly put off by their appearance and attitude. They were sneering, noisy and dirty. They’d throw stuff at passing cars, sit ten to a Mazda in the McDonald’s carpark, hoot and deride rivals in throbbing cars cruising past, swear, spit, smoke, wear clothes that a roadside hooker would deem slutty. The girls had bleached hair with dark roots, wore black g-strings pulled over their muffin tops and white pants with dragging, filthy hems. The boys pulled their caps low to hide wretched, angry baby faces.
They wanted me to buy them cheap vodka. I refused, and walked away from a hurl of abuse, half of a well-aimed double cheeseburger bouncing off my skull. Obviously, I’m uncool.
But I haven’t yet seen Korean teenagers reach the same level of general unpleasantness. Although they hang out in the same numbers in the same public places, I don’t get bad vibes from them. They study. They hold hands, boys too, sometimes. Their hair is tidy. Uniforms are always navy blue, dark green and white. They carry umbrellas. They don’t hang out in cars. They wear glasses. They are decorous. All in all, they’re a tame lot. There’s no rebellious streak, no goths, no bogans, no punks, no skinheads, surfies, skaties, druggies, gangs or any other subculture that people invent to give themselves an identity.
The only graffiti I’ve seen is the usual “김유미 4 이기석” carved into desks and the backs of bathroom doors. Near my house there is a lone scrawl of hanguel in blue spray paint. “Resist!” it exhorts. But even this is pathetic, a desperate, impulsive half-thought; there’s no clue as to what we’re supposed to be resisting or rebelling against. The other local example of graffiti is the painting of the Stars and Stripes elsewhere in town. It’s been updated with “BUSH PIG DOG DIE” lettered in thick black capitals. Fair enough.
So Korea has a lack of restive, assertive teens. I have several theories as to why this is so: social strictures, family pressure, the lingering effects of Confucianism, an education system that staunches rebellion and creative thinking, the driving need to conform and be like everyone else. Or maybe I just haven’t been to the local McDonald’s enough on Saturday night. Either way, Korea’s lack of rebellious teenagers means I’m safe when walking the streets at night, free from entreaties to buy cheap booze and cheeseburger missiles.
I was standing at the pedestrian crossing, wondering idly why in Korea the little red man is not little at all but instead strangely squat and muscular, a sturdy weightlifter with a few extra pixels to his biceps. When I’m here, he says, the road is mine and you’re not going anywhere, buddy. Stand down. Then the little green man takes over. He’s a lithe and active fellow striding out confidently as though he’s not about to get run over by a fried chicken boy on a clapped-out scooter, who gets paid by the delivery and doesn’t give a toss about whose toes he slices off as he swings around corners, one knee scraping the ground, his delicate hands warm and snug inside giant mitts. The red man is menacing, the green man friendly. That’s the way it is with traffic lights.
I was standing at the pedestrian crossing pondering this when a green and yellow school minivan (GnB English Academy, 766 0682) pulled up at the red light and some kid sitting in the back seat, the den of troublemakers the world over, yelled at me out the window. Nothing new. Foreigners get yelled at oh, maybe twelve times a day. Usually it’s a gasping “What’syournamenicetomeetyou!” from schoolgirls who then fall over laughing. You come to expect it as part and parcel of being a tiny minority in a country where the entire population of 40 million is descended from Dan-gun, venerable half-man/half-bear ancestor. Indeed, earlier in the week, “You panty yellow!” had come from the same van and the same corner, which I had to grudgingly admit was a little funny. But quite wrong since, coming from New Zealand, I don’t wear panty; I wear knickers.
“Waegookin!” the kid yelled, and like a fool, I looked. A tiny fist was thrusting out the window.
“Waegookin! Fuck you!” I squinted. I was being flipped off by an eight-year-old.
The van swung around the corner and peeled off as the kids inside erupted in jeers and laughter, half their bodies hanging out the windows. Even the driver was chuckling. There’s not much more disconcerting than being laughed at by a group of kids, and kids with wheels at that.
I stood fuming on the sidewalk. The light changed and the green man flashed, playfully beckoning me to join him. Fried chicken boys swooped past me, their helmetless heads bent low over their handlebars. I imagined kicking their bikes so they tipped out from underneath them and sent bodies sprawling into traffic, and felt much better.
