However, my legs do not impress my Korean students.

I was standing on a chair in class, hanging up a poster, wearing those 3/4 jeans that are probably out of fashion now, if indeed they ever were in fashion. My group of nine year olds were working steadily on some bullshit assignment I’d given them to keep them quiet. One kid glanced at me and said in a tone I’ve come to know quite well, “mool tari.” And he snickered.

The others laughed. Usually I manage to ignore this; I’m used to “big nose,” “fat belly,” “red face,” “hairy arms” or “filthy stinking foreigner.” Today, something about the quality of the laughter made me angry, and also curious. I’d never heard mool tari before. A new insult! I swung on the kid.

“What did you say?” I loomed over him and shook the sellotape in his face.

He looked stricken.

“Anneyo,” he said quickly, fluttering his hand weakly.

“It wasn’t nothing. What did you say?”

“Mool tari, mool tari!” chanted the other kids, pointing and laughing.

I went to Becky, the Korean teacher who likes me because I chose her first English name.

“Mool tari?”

“Ah.” she said. “Uhhh – big leg?” Great. Nothing new. I went back to the classroom and pretended it was funny.

Five minutes later Becky knocked and rushed in.

“Naohmee? Mool tari – big no. Uh – pat?”

“Pat?”

“Phhhhat.”

“Fat?!“

“Pat, yes!”

Even better! I grabbed the kid’s head in what was supposed to be a playful way.

“Mool olgul! Your face is big! Ha ha!” and sneered as he had done. He smiled uncertainly as Becky and the other kids laughed at him. Revenge.

It was mean. Koreans are sensitive about their wide faces. I felt cruel but triumphant; I am completely fed up with the daily snarky comments about my appearance. Big nose. Hairy arms. Dark circles. A pimple. A not cute or beautiful mole. Red face. Fat.

“May I have coloured pencil?” said Becky.

“Sure, sure.”

Becky left, and I resumed class, thinking once again that I was not cut out to be a teacher if I couldn’t be trusted to be the adult when they act like children.

As the kid ran out at 4:50, I swatted him on the side of the head and asked him if he said those things about his Korean teachers in front of them. He looked at me blankly. Go, go, go. I said. Get out. And added silently, fathead.

Becky came back with my coloured pencils, a dictionary, and a huge grin.

“Naomi! Mool tari – fat, no. Radish!” She outlined a rectangle in the air with her index fingers. The Korean radish is ugly, large, thick, white, heavy and shapeless, like a dumpy oval brick.

I have radish legs. I should have hit him harder.

Diet your point card.

Bravo your life!
Samsung life insurance

Have a good time!
Good time chance
KTF phone company

Digital Exciting
Anycall phone company

Think Star
KB Bank

Humanism Through Digital
SBS broadcasting

Milk Itself
Seoul Milk

Think Benefit
Samsung credit cards

KT&G and You (Korea Tomorrow and Global)
KT&G tobacco company

These are large, in some cases multinational companies. Imagine what the English is like down on street level.

The police and Army spent the next two months engaged in a massive hunt for the infiltrators, involving helicopters, dogs and tens of thousands of soldiers combing the rugged Gangwon-do mountains in a furious search for the twenty-six stranded North Koreans who were racing the sixty-five kilometers to the DMZ, and home.

On the afternoon of the discovery, submarine navigator Lee Kwang-soo was caught at a remote farmhouse. He’d become separated from the group and, believing that he’d be unknown in such a rural location, dropped in to ask for a meal. The farmer called 113, South Korea’s Report-a-Spy hotline, and Lee was captured alive and held for interrogation. Lee had had a close shave; that evening, ROK soldiers and police discovered the bodies of eleven North Koreans, mostly submarine crew members, lying in a hilltop clearing. Fallen in a row, they had been shot by the AK-47 assault rifles that are standard issue in North Korea. As the submarine team consisted of twenty-one crew members and a reconnaissance team of five, ROK officials surmised that the highly-trained spies murdered the crew to increase their own chances of survival.

By November, there were three left. Eleven more North Koreans had died in clashes with ROK soldiers as they tried to make their way home to the Fatherland. The three were still at large. On their long march north they’d killed several civilians, including strangling an off-duty ROK soldier who was gathering bush clover alone. In Inje, 49 days after the submarine was discovered, the ROK Army finally caught up with two of the spies after a report from a civilian who’d spotted them crossing a highway. The spies had traveled 100 kilometers from Gangneung; twenty kilometers from the DMZ they were killed in a clash that left three South Koreans dead and 14 wounded. The North Koreans wore ROK soldier’s uniforms, carried ROK Army guns and had a diary outlining their escape. “Killed one enemy Sept. 21. Moved south,” it said. “Punished three residents at 2.20 p.m. Oct. 8 on a hill.”

The last infiltrator, Li Chul Jin, was never found and is thought to have successfully escaped through the DMZ to North Korea, the only one of the 26 to make it home.

The captured submarine navigator, Lee Kwang-soo, initially refused to give information out of fear for his family in North Korea. Somewhat unsurprisingly, four bottles of soju provided by the interrogation team helped him to loosen up and he became chattier. He revealed that the mission’s objective had been to collect intelligence on South Korean naval and air bases near Gangneung, and was on its way home when their vessel lost engine power and became stranded, forcing the spies and crew to swim to shore. Apparently, the small team of spies had penetrated South Korea’s defenses with little difficulty. More ominously, Lee also revealed that there had been two successful reconnaissance missions to the South in the past.

The repercussions of the submarine incident were immense and fraught with emotion, setting back North/South peace talks considerably at a time when President Roh Tae-woo’s “Sunshine Policy” towards the North seemed to be making relations more amenable. Initially, North Korea’s government denied that the sub was on a spy mission; they said it had drifted into South Korean waters by mistake, suffering engine failure while on an innocent training exercise. The South Korean government, apoplectic with rage, insisted the submarine was a provocative act of war designed to raise tensions on the Korean peninsula. North Korea’s reasons also didn’t explain why the infiltrators had well-rehearsed South Korean accents, ROK Army uniforms, weapons, and forged identification papers. Cans of Pepsi and South Korean food wrappers were apparently also found aboard the sub. Most tellingly, a written vow to Kim Jong-il, swore that they would accomplish their ‘mission’ even at the expense of their lives. Additionally, Lee declared in a later press conference:

“We were not on a training but a reconnaissance mission. The mission was to be prepared for a big war, considering the fact that [the] chief of the Maritime Unit of the Reconnaissance Bureau, a full colonel, was with us in the submarine.”

On 29 December, a North Korean official issued an official apology, expressing “deep regret” for the submarine incident. Though this was an expression of regret rather than an apology or admission of guilt, the statement went some way towards lightening tensions between North and South.

The ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff, no doubt pondering how an alert taxi driver had spotted what the combined forces of South Korea’s radar, sonar, coastguard and watchmen had failed to notice, later conducted an investigation on how the North Koreans were able to infiltrate the coastline so easily. A report investigated the failures of the Army and Navy in detecting the submarine infiltration and the slow military response time. Subsequently, twenty ROK officers and soldiers were punished for “negligence of duty” and a lieutenant general and major general lost their positions. The taxi driver, however, received a hefty reward for his keen eyes and quick thinking.

On 30 December at Panmunjom, the South Korean Government returned the cremated remains of the infiltrators to North Korea. The incident had been wound up, but a lasting scar of distrust remained. In Gangneung, the abandoned submarine sits on dry land, something of an anti-Communist propaganda vehicle. It serves as a reminder to tourists and young Korean school children that their mysterious, untrustworthy neighbor to the north might even now be watching.

Tonight at 11pm, she’s standing in my lounge wringing her hands and talking in even tones with the landlord. He’s looking unpleasant and unconsciously jerking his toes in time to the thumping bass coming from below. His toes spasm each time the singer tries to hit an especially tricky high note. And misses.

Sally pleads. The landlord, a bored, lonely, middle-aged man, crosses his arms and shakes his head. Sally turns to me, a smile stretched on her round face as it so often is when she has to deal with my bullshit complaints about hot water, failing internet, broken phones, bills in Korean I can’t decipher.

“Well, you must move out. You can be ready 11am tomorrow? Before class?”

If I pack and clean all night, I can be, and the noraebang’s stabbing bass will help me stay awake. I snarl nastily at the landlord and he throws up his hands, says “Aieego!” and leaves. He lives above me, and can’t hear the music and torturous singing from bored, lonely, middle-aged men who have gone to the noraebang every night for the past four months, from sundown to sunup. When they put down their mikes at 3am and blessed peace descends, I count myself lucky: four luxurious hours of sleep until the bulldozers and concrete drillers start up on the construction site next door.

That night I turn my speakers up as loud as they’ll go, tip them towards the ceiling, crank the bass and play music I hope he hates. I pack my clothes and clean the floor, mired until sunup in an awful cacophany. Once, someone bangs on my door screeching but I refuse to open it, clenching my teeth and wrapping plates instead. I’ve sunk so low, and it feels so good.

The customs officer waves my pack through with a languid “nothing to declare” and we emerge into the soupy 26 degree heat to calls of “taxi, boss!”
“What did the Lonely Planet say a taxi should cost?” I hiss to Darren and fumble with large notes, trying to look experienced, suave, nonchalant: all that we’re not.
“I don’t know – no, no taxi,” he rumbles, waving away a lean, grinning man hauling our packs into his cab.
“Cheap taxi boss!”
“Good price!”
“Kuta fifty thousand rupee!”
“Bugger this,” I say, and walk off toward the carpark. We approach a small, balding taxi driver in a short-sleeved white shirt, crouching on the kerb smoking a cigarette.
“Cheap!” he says and leaps up as we lug our bags towards him. He reaches to shake our hands. “My name is Amet. Thirty thousand rupee.”
Darren nods approvingly. “That’s cheap.”
Amet grabs our bags, promising to take us to a good backpackers’. “Very good, very cheap!” Of course it is.

Amet speeds us the thirteen kilometres into Kuta with wide sweeps of his steering wheel. I grip the door handle and lurch across the seat at every turn. After Korea, driving on the left feels suicidal, though I grew up with it at home. As we swing through the streets I can’t believe the differences between the country I’ve just left and the one in which I’ve suddenly arrived. Bali’s roads, far from being the gray, ugly concrete shit heap of a wintering Korea, are hung with soft coloured lights and lush green vegetation. They seem cosily cluttered, a jungle of glimpse and murmur. The heat spreads all around, seeping into my winter-dry skin. Soon I am relaxed, heavy-lidded and smiling as readily as the Balinese people until Amet swings across two lanes and almost takes out a motorbike.

We have no travel plans here, both of us just wanting to sit on the beach for as long as it takes to forget screaming students and the breath of morning kimchi on the subway. We ask Amet for suggestions about getting out of Kuta.
“I will drive you north to Lovina Beach,” he offers, pulling up at a set of wooden buildings half-hidden by trees and turning around to smile at us. We exchange glances.
“What’s in Lovina?”
“Traditional Bali, dolphins, good for relax, very cheap,” Amet says, patting the steering wheel. He knows the buzzwords.
“Dolphins?” I say.
“Cheap?” says Darren.
Surprisingly, it just so happens that he can take us there tomorrow, for very good price.

We go to sleep watching the geckos creep across the ceiling, thrilled to be in a place where the outside blends so seamlessly with the inside, where the fan does nothing but shift warmth around, barely stirring the heat. But who wants the chilly artifice of aircon when there are gauzy curtains, verandahs, leaves brushing the screens and windows that open onto languid air? Couldn’t afford it, anyway.

In the morning, the sun has warmed the terracotta tiles outside, and there are little oysters of gecko droppings on the floor. I quickly wash under a rusty drizzle in the turquoise tub, eying the corners of the huge, decrepit bathroom for spiders. Drying with a rough, threadbare towel, I squelch across the room, push my blindingly white feet into jandals and head outside to explore.

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.

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.

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 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.