Anecdotes from Korea

written by Deborah Oakley

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Here, in no particular order, are some experiences I had while in Korea.

 

Free of Parasites

This is a page out of an English textbook a friend received from her high school. They told her she could use it to teach from. Seriously. I haven’t embellished in the slightest. I copied it word-for-word. The title of the book is Kwangsoo’s Thoughts in English.

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Once I failed to bring my stool sample to the school. The teacher with a menacing look on his face asked me to produce one quickly by all means. Since I was the type of person who goes to stool only in the morning, I was afraid nothing could happen until the next morning. So I was quite at a loss. All my close friends had brought their stool samples so I asked those who didn’t and just produced ones to share them with me, but it was in vain. I, very eager to find an unflushed toilet, opened every last bathroom door from the 5th floor. As I reached the 3rd floor, I found one, still warm, staring at me. With extreme care I scooped it with a match and put it in my plastic bag. A week later, thanks to the sample whose origin was unknown, I was obliged to swallow 6 strange pills in the presence of all the classmates.

Consequently I am free of parasites.

Attack of the Techno Toity

To properly appreciate this, you have to try and put yourself in my place. This happened the first night I went to lead a new Bible Study.  (I’d only been in Korea about a month.) It was just 3 Korean women and me in one of the women’s apartments. I’d barely met 2 of the women at church one time before, and the 3rd woman was a new someone I’d never met.

We’d been talking for a while, and I had to go to the bathroom. They showed me where it was and, after I was finished, I attempted to flush. Problem was, this was one of those fancy Asian models that had lots of buttons along the side. They were all labeled, but in Korean, of course. I studied it a bit, trying to figure out which one did the flushing. Well, there was only one button that had a picture that looked like water, so I pushed it. WRONG! This little tube came out from directly under the back of the seat and proceeded to shoot water out! Thankfully I was standing to the side, or I would have gotten it right in the face. Instead, it shot water all up the wall in front of the toilet. Can you imagine how I felt, douching this strange woman’s bathroom wall? I mean, honestly, when you’re trying to decipher toilet buttons, who’d ever guess one of the options would be, “Toilet pees back at you?” I finally got it shut off, and then had to figure out what to do about the water that was running down the wall and pooling on the floor. I grabbed a towel and wiped it up. Now what to do? I could have just hung the towel back on the rack and simply not mentioned it, except that I still hadn’t managed to flush, and I WAS NOT going to push any more buttons.

Well, I had no choice but to go out and confess. They all got a big laugh about it, and then one of the women came back to the bathroom to show me how it worked. Simple. She pulled down the toilet seat and used the flushing handle, which was just like any toilet flusher I’ve ever seen! With all those other buttons, it simply never occurred to me to move the lid and look for a handle.

 

A Day in the Life

Things aren’t always what they seem.  And sometimes they are.  And, if you live in another country, there are times when you have no idea what’s going on …

Earlier in the morning, my co-teacher had 3 students at her desk.  She was sitting.  They were standing.  She was talking.  They were listening.  All parties had small smiles on their faces.  Another teacher was close by, listening and occasionally adding his own comments.  He had that same smile.  The kind of smile that, to a westerner, says, “I’m a little bit amused by all of this.”  It had me really curious.  Koreans are quite friendly, but I don’t usually see that many of them smiling at the same time.  And then it hit me.  The boys were in trouble, and the teachers were scolding them.  THIS was why everyone was smiling.  (I checked with her later, and that was indeed the case.)  Why do they smile in such a situation?  I have no idea.  I wouldn’t have caught on, had it not been for a kid smiling at me when I scolded him a few days prior for tearing up a computer.  His constant smile just kept making me madder.  The Korean teacher later told me, “He was really sorry.”

“Then why was he smiling?”

“That’s what we do.”

I went to my class.  Two boys got into some sort of argument during class.  I had no idea what they were arguing about.  I kept telling them to stop, and they each kept trying to get the last word in.  Finally, I told them both to stop talking and do 100 squats.  They began the squats and kept at each other.  So, I upped it to 150.  One of the kids finally got the message and shut up.  They did a number of squats, and I told them they could sit down if they would be quiet.  One kid told me, “Okay,” down he sat, and he kept his mouth shut.  The other said, “No.”  And he kept on doing squats.  I don’t know what he was thinking.  I guess he proved … something.  Whatever.

That class left.  Another came in.  Suddenly, boys started scrambling away from one of the kids.  “Teacher! He do BOOM!”

Never waste a good teaching moment.  “The English word is fart.  F-A-R-T.”

 

Surprise Gift

I got home from school, and I needed to go to a store that was several blocks away.  I was whipped, my feet hurt (no car, so I had to walk), and I DID NOT want to go.  But, there was something I really needed for the next day, so I forced myself to make the trip.

I got to a crosswalk and had to wait for the light to change.  (The lights were quite long.)  There were 2 little boys there — probably between 7 and 8 — who were also waiting for the light.  As usual, they were fascinated when I walked up.  The kids there were always fascinated with we foreigners.  One of them watched me, and thought, and finally managed to ask, “Where you going?”  I told him, and then watched as he tried to think of something else to say.  I could tell, though, that he just couldn’t come up with any more English words.  So, I just started talking.  It seemed like the thing to do.  I spoke slowly, talking about how nice the weather was.  I don’t think he understood me but, as I talked, he edged closer and closer to me, until he was leaning against me with his head resting on my arm.  And that’s how we waited for the light — him quietly leaning against me as he listened to me talk.  Eventually the light changed, and he scampered off with his friend to wherever it was they were going.

The trip started out as a burden.  It ended up being a gift.

 

Too Picky

An American friend who also taught in Korea told me this story:

I was on a trip with the teachers from my school, and I was talking to one of the new, male teachers.  Of course, he asked me the inevitable question:  “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

I gave him my pat answer, “I haven’t found the right guy yet.”  He asked what I wanted in a boyfriend, so I told him, “There are only 3 things I need in a man to make me happy.  He must be Christian, he must be intelligent, and he must be kind.”

The teacher VERY seriously replied, “I know why you’re still single.  You’re too picky.”

 

Notes from Students

My students wanted to communicate with me, but doing so in a foreign language is hard.  They often left me notes they’d labored over.

 

 

Gift Gift Gift!

It’s not uncommon in Korea for parents to send gifts, via their kids, to you to thank you for teaching their kids.

It was 2009; I was in my first year of teaching in Korea.  I only taught the lower classmen, but there were some seniors at my school that often came to my class to chat with me during lunch.  They started because they wanted to practice English.  They continued because we became friends.

One day, one of the girls asked me, “Teacher, is it common in America for people to give underwear as a gift?”  In Korea, underwear and socks are quite common gifts.  I was new there, and that fact was still wildly uncomfortable to me, so I couldn’t help but answer with a strong, “NO!”  I explained to her that we considered underwear pretty private, and that we don’t generally give it as a gift to someone other than our spouse or our kids.  “Oh, okay,” she responded, and that was the end of the conversation.  I thought.

About a month later she came to me, extremely nervous.  “Teacher, I have a problem.” She finally managed to explain that her mother wanted to give me a gift and had gotten some bras for me.  Apparently, this is what prompted the previous month’s question.  After my response, she was embarrassed to give them to me, but she also didn’t want to hurt her mom by telling her it was an inappropriate gift.  So, every day for a month, her mom had been asking her, “When are you going to give the teacher my gift?”  You should have seen her face!  “EVERY day!  Gift!  Gift!  Gift!  What do I do?”

I reminded her that we WERE in Korea, which meant I needed to play by Korean rules.  I’d be honored to accept her mom’s gift.  I got them soon after:  2 fancy, lacy bras.

 

School Newspaper

 

 

Boys!

This story isn’t a Korean thing.  It’s a boy thing.

Hoon-gyu was in 1st grade in high school (equivalent of American sophomore).  He had a great personality and a good heart.  And I swear the kid was hyperactive.  He was a WILD thang.

He was in my classroom one morning, waiting for class to start.  He had his socks off, and was alternately smelling his fingers (which had held the socks) and the socks themselves, making a big deal about the whole thing.  I asked him what he was doing.  He laughed and told me, “Socks smell!  Ddong (Korean for ‘poop’)!”  I asked him why they smelled.  He said they’d gotten wet going to school (it rained that morning), and it had been a long time since he’d washed them.  The bell rang, the kids went to their seats, and class began.  But, as always, Hoon-gyu’s attention began to lag.

He started trying to get other kids to smell the socks, too.  At first, they refused him.  But, as class continued, he wore a couple of them down.  And that was all she wrote.  Left and right, boys were smelling his socks and then talking excitedly about how bad they smelled.   I’d been thoroughly and completely upstaged.

My patience was already wearing thin.  And THEN, I accidentally got downwind of the socks. And you know what?  Hoon-gyu was right. They DID smell like ddong!

 

Pigeons

“Anatidaephobia:  The fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.”

It was Teachers’ English Class.  One hour a week was set aside for teachers to work on their English with me.  During this class, we were talking about western humor.  I showed this comic and intended to talk about why it’s funny.  I didn’t quite get that far.

After I’d explained phobias and what the comic meant, one of the teachers told me, “Oh!  Now I understand!  This makes sense.  I feel this way at the park when the pigeons look at me.”

“What?”

At first I though she was joking.  Nope.  She was serious, “Have you seen pigeons?  They’re so big!  And there are so many of them!  I don’t like it when they look at me.  They scare me!” In my Korean world, they peeled grapes, put tomatoes in fruit salad, and Gary Larson did documentaries.

 

Naked?

In Cheonan, I attended an English-speaking church on Korea Nazarene University campus.  It began as a Bible study for the native English speakers that taught at the university.  Not long before I got there, they had become an official Church of the Nazarene church.  About half the membership was comprised of English speakers; the other half was Korean.

In 2009, the first babies were due to be born in that church (four of them), so we decided to have a baby shower for all of the soon-to-be new families.  Soo-in, one of my students, attended church with me, and she wanted to know what a “baby shower” was all about.

I explained that we called it a shower because we showered the mother with presents for the new baby.  Soo-in got very quiet and had a perplexed look on her face.  Finally, she asked, “Naked?”

 

Radish Jar Man!

I stopped at the market to get a Coke.  There was a man standing at the counter.  When he saw me, he gave me a huge smile and said, “Radish jar man!”  At least, that’s what it sounded like he said.

I was bewildered.  “What?”

With an even bigger smile he responded, “Thank you very much!”

I laughed and went back to the cooler to get my soda.  When I came back to the counter, he was still there, still smiling.  At least this round made more sense:  “Where you from?”

“Meegook.”  (That’s America in Korean.)

“L.A.?”

“Washington D.C.”

“Ah!  Washington!  Thank you very much!”  He went on his way.

Most likely translation:  He wanted to practice his English.  I probably heard all he had.

 

Alternate Reality

My phone rang.  It was my teaching partner, calling to tell me she had to cancel the English class we were supposed to teach at church that evening.  There was a schedule conflict that she’d just become aware of.  The cancellation was a nice surprise for me.  It wasn’t that I was particularly tired.  I wasn’t.  And it wasn’t that I wasn’t prepared for class.  I was.  “No problem,” I told her.  “I’m lazy, so I’m perfectly happy to have less work to do today.”  I wasn’t joking.  I was being truthful.

“Oh, I’m so glad you think that way!”  she exclaimed, in obvious relief.  I blinked in surprise.  I knew she was aware that I was being sincere about my laziness, and I could also hear the sincerity in her reply.

“You just thanked me for being lazy.”

“I’m glad you’re not upset that I cancelled class an hour before it was supposed to begin,” she laughed.

In a different reality, being lazy was a bad thing; one for which others became disapproving and upset.  In that same reality, last-minute schedule changes were also considered bad and to be avoided if at all possible.

Not so in this reality.   A simple shifting of expectations changed everything.  I’d like to hang out there more often.

 

You Know Me!

They had Oktoberfest at the US Army Base.  My brother was playing (he was in the Army Band).  One of my students went with us to enjoy the festivities.  He did a little of the Chicken Dance and the Polka, tried some German food (they did a pretty good job with it), and took lots of pictures.  Plenty of people were drinking beer and getting happy, but no one got sloppy drunk while we were there, so it was a lot of fun.  It was a typical, boisterous Oktoberfest — people dancing and laughing and singing along with the band and such.  At one point my kid looked around in wonder and said, “When Koreans have a festival, everything is so — gentle.  But when Americans have a festival, they really CELEBRATE!”

I replied, “Yeah, one of the things I’ve missed about home is there’s no BASS in this culture.  It’s all the light, high, fluffy notes.”

He thought for a moment and said, “Yes!  I know exactly what you mean!“

I don’t know if he agreed with my opinion or not, and agreement was irrelevant.  What mattered was that he understood what I thought and felt.  That was an especially meaningful moment for me — when someone I cared for in Korea finally understood a thing that was deep inside me and was totally different from their culture.  Surface stuff is often understood, but those moments of deep knowing, when you’re talking about things that have no parallels between two cultures, are rare and hard to come by.  It got me thinking about, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  (1 Corinthians 13:12)  Living as an American in Korea gave that verse a whole new depth of meaning for me.

 

Atmosphere Maker

Class was just beginning.  This was one of my 2nd grade classes (junior in high school), and they were particularly good-natured and fun to be with.  They didn’t even let the fact that it was 1st period on Monday morning get to them.  There was one kid in particular who was always laughing, talkative, and fun-natured.  The rest of the class fed off his sunny personality. LOVED that kid!

As usual, I was looking at cumulative team scores and giving out candy to the team with the highest score.  Sunny was on the winning team, and he said, “Teacher!  Today give me 2 candy!”

“Why?”  I asked.  “You have to give me a good reason in English.”

He pointed to the Korean teacher and asked me, “Assist?”  Of course I agreed.  He asked her something in Korean, and she told him, “atmosphere.”  He turned back to me with a bigger-than-usual grin.

“I am atmosphere maker!”  He certainly was.  He got more than two pieces of candy for that.

 

Styling

 

Did You Have Lunch?

I spent 2 years teaching at a girls’ high school in Cheonan.  We foreigners were assigned a co-teacher:  a Korean teacher who spoke English and was there to be our liaison with the Korean system.  They helped us out, answered questions, helped us navigate cultural mazes.  They were our lifeline.

Every morning for 2 years, my co-teacher would greet me and then ask, “Did you have breakfast?”  Koreans are quite health-conscious, especially when it comes to food.  They’re also big on giving each other advice.  I’m not a breakfast eater.  I’ve heard it plenty of times in my life:  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”  I just can’t handle eating in the mornings, and that’s that.  And so, I resigned myself to the daily nagging.  Sometimes I’d make excuses.  Sometimes I’d act like I hadn’t heard.  I know I always had a resigned look on my face.  I’d often see a quizzical one on hers.

After 2 years at Cheonan, I felt God say it was time to go elsewhere, and I got a job at a boys’ high school in Gwangju.  During my first week there, my new co-teacher asked, “Did you greet the vice principal today?  You should say something polite.  Ask him if he had lunch.”

WAIT!!!  That’s a GREETING?!?  That changed EVERYTHING!

My previous co-teacher and I had spoken for 2 years on that subject and never once communicated.  And neither of us knew it.

 

Silent Love

 

They Pad

 

We are Unbelievable!

 

Johnson

I was at the boys’ school, it was a new semester, and the kids were picking their team names.  This time around, class after class, teams kept choosing the name “Johnson.”  I wondered about the name.  Was it a sports figure (I know nothing about sports), some celebrity I hadn’t heard of, or the slang term for a part of the male anatomy?  I didn’t want to ask because, if they didn’t know about that term, I didn’t want to be the one to put it in their heads.

Later in a class, we were doing a survey about learning styles.  One of the questions was, “Do you hold something when you study?”  One kid piped up with “Johnson!”  His teammates all started laughing.  Okay.  I got my answer.

I used my sergeant’s voice.  “Hey!  What’s the class rule about respect?”

Complete shock on their faces.  “Teacher!!!  You know Johnson?!?”

Did they not realize they were using ENGLISH slang?

 

We Want You

Most of the foreign teachers in Korea were in their 20s:  kids that had just finished college and wanted to see a bit of the world before they settled down in life.  I was in my 40s, so I was an anomaly.

[Said to me during my skype interview for my job teaching at a boys’ high school]

“This is boys’ school.  We don’t want young beautiful teacher.  Maybe there will be sex scandal.  We want you!”

 

No Makeup?

Korean teacher:  “Do you wear makeup?”

Me:  “Only eye liner and mascara.”

Her:  “No base?  But your face looks so white!”

Me:  “I AM white.”

Her:  “Oh.”

 

Engrish

A favorite pastime of foreign English teachers was to find funny examples of “Engrish” in our surroundings.

Ah, Korea!  You’ll own a piece of my heart forever!