My boss Sally is a small, round woman with a permanently hunted expression.
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.
“This passport photo, it is not good.”
It isn’t good. I had glandular fever that day, and my eyes were glassy, my hair a wild dark nest.
“No, it’s crap,” I agree.
“Naomi,” he says, squinting at my passport. “It’s Japanese name, yes?”
“I think it’s Hebrew,” I say.
“Japanese,” he says decisively, handing it back to me. “Ah! You’re from New Zealand! Kia ora!”
His white teeth flash and I can’t help grinning back. Welcome to Bali.
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.
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.
