Creepy Children, Korea and Futureness

We were in the DVD Bang, had selected Memories of Murder. In the dark, settled. The movie begins. But then-- the creepy in-room phone screeches out an electronic version of Fur Elise, scaring us a little. “No English subtitles, sorry.” The man behind the desk gives us complimentary Vitamin C drinks. Back in the room after some internet research, now prepared for The Uninvited. We were hell-bent on watching a Korean Horror. The oft-repeated scary little-dead-girl-duo at the fore, giving way to a convoluted storyline, haphazard scary moments and consistent watch-checking by me. After what seemed like 5 hours spent in a black box, we emerged back onto the Hongdae scene, Sunday late evening. But you wouldn’t know it. Hordes of people out, are you sure it’s not really Saturday night, Alex? A: I don’t know, let’s go dancing.

Then we see it. The creepiest dangling baby – it (yes, “it” – too early to distinguish between she and he) was attached to its mother’s back – one of those baby backpacks Korean women use to cart around their little ones. It looked like it was practicing for tryouts for Baby Cirque de Soleil and it looked creepy as hell. Baby spines shouldn’t bend that way. (add to this yesterday’s equally creepy child experience of little unblinking girls bleating at us in Paris Baguette—seriously, what is going on?)

Also, random moments/Korean observations (“Koreanisms”) from the last couple months/entire time I’ve been here:

 Teacher lunch. After a river of Korean wine (Makgeolli- milky and drunk out of bowls) – my former Head Teacher asks me to join his table. I must down a shot of hard liquor before entering into conversation. I thought only males were asked to do this. Maybe I’m special. They are impressed that I didn’t choke (as am I). Inebriated, Mr. Park confers with another Head Teacher and they ask me in drunken, extremely broken English if I will join their 3rd grade teacher trip (I teach 1st grade: the high school freshmen). They say they are going to Laos and would love for me to join. While I am honored and would absolutely love to go to Laos, somehow being accompanied by a dozen ajoshis (older Korean men) just…yeah, it wouldn’t work out. I wonder how I can exit the scene unnoticed and without offending anyone. Fortunately, an even more inebriated Head Teacher descends upon us, yelling, holding up an unopened Makgeolli bottle and everyone starts cheering. I slip out through the back.

 While teaching my lesson on travel, I found out that Korean students are taught that there are 6 continents, not 7. They combine North and South America into one super continent: America.

 My shoe size puts me just outside the range of availability at most Korean shoe stores. I wear a size 9 and a 1/2 in the U.S. – here that translates into size 255, a.k.a. “SORRY”, “250 ONLY” or “NO”. Size 250 is usually the largest available.

 Our cinco de Mayo is Korea’s Children’s Day. No school! Also, no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, but = Parents Day.

 After roughly 2 years of having an insufficient portable music device, I bought a Korean mp4 player. Cowon S-9 mp4 with an AMOLED screen and it is *awesome*.

 America’s Funniest Home Videos and Steven Seagal are constant fixtures on my Korean TV. If these are the most consistent representations of America, it’s no wonder my co-teacher tried to cut my tofu for me the first week I was here.

 I asked a co-teacher why most Koreans don’t like cats (I’ve yet to actually know 1 Korean who owns a cat as a pet). She said it is because Koreans believe cats can take revenge on you while you are sleeping.
More to come.

My (more or less) established plan for my post-Korea future: Contract ends early September—I hope to travel around America and Canada from Sept-Dec, visiting friends and family, then will return to NYC come January when I (hope to) start graduate school for social work.. This could all be dashed if I decide to instead:

1. get ‘real’ teaching certification, move to Saudi Arabia or the UAE, live like a nun and save $30-50,000. AND I could legitimately buy a burkini.

2. become a Russian governess and follow my filthy rich Moscow family around the world, all the while teaching some spoiled Russian kid how to engage in proper American discussions, like talking about Gossip Girl.

3. buy tickets for the Trans-Siberian railway and just never get off the train

4. go back to Vietnam and hobo around the country, spending less than a $1 a day

5. couch surf around the world and pretend it’s for some higher purpose other than delaying real life
All these avenues would ultimately enable me to continue this abstracted, unreal reality I’ve felt alternately blessed/doomed to occupy these past 8 months. Four more to go. Less than, really. Will I make it?

Whatever happens, knowing I will be returning to a world that inhabits the people I’ve missed so dearly since being over here—that alone will make these last few months seem less interminable. That and kimchi mandu. And Pizza School.

Vietnam, finally.

--

Da Lat, Vietnam.


Unidentified female, mid-20s, presumably American, was found late last night in the surrounding mountain roads just outside of Da Lat. It appears she was riding a white motorbike when she drove off the road on one of the many hairpin turns.

Local investigators report that there was no identification found on the body, but that the storage unit on the bike, most likely containing her belongings, came off during the fall. Police are scavenging the area for the unit and any possible leads as to the woman’s identity.

--

It was in those few moments before going over that she remembered the blind masseuse’s face. It was the face of a generation left to its own devices and torn apart from Agent Orange; a face she’d seen earlier that week at the War Remnants Museum and in this case, the face of a blind woman selling her wares for all she could: her hands and at 50,000d an hour, roughly $3 american.

“IT IS 2:22PM”


The young woman remembered laying down on the table hesitantly, not sure if she should disrobe. The blind masseuse clamored over, felt the young woman’s clothing and slapped her rear sharply and quickly. The young woman learned within an instant that there would be no awkward fumblings around English and Vietnamese, only fumblings through that sometimes forgotten universal language: body.

This wasn’t a planned visit- she’d gone off course in her search for a Saigon movie theatre that played English-speaking films and while flipping through her Lonely Planet realized that the closest possibility to her was the Ho Chi Minh City Blind Association. The prices seemed exploitative, but then so did everything in Saigon- even when adjusting for foreigner charges.

“IT IS 2:27PM”

They made her lock up her things in a safe and handed over the key on an elastic bracelet. The staff, all of them blind, save one woman with partial sight, noticed the pause and pointed to a pack of smaller than small Vietnamese children running down the halls. They put the bracelet on her wrist for her.

The young woman, having promised herself that she wouldn’t stare, she wouldn’t, couldn’t help but gaze into the masseuse’s eyes: a milky blue, forever staring off into unknown spaces. She then gaped at the masseuse’s real eyes: her hands. Small and strong, severely scarred.


“IT IS 2:32PM”

Small and strong, severely scarred. Just like the female vendors on Nha Trang beach, selling their necklaces and bracelets and fried Vietnamese treats to the pasty, mostly plump foreigners lining the shore, knowing not to come back to the young woman after her third and fourth refusals. Somewhat like the child vendors: small and strong, same necklaces, same bracelets, same fried treats, with the biggest, emptiest eyes the she had ever seen. Only kind of like the young Vietnamese women all over Vietnam, being escorted by old and ugly white men: small.

“IT IS 2:37PM”

She felt the masseuse tightly pinch at the bend in her arm, the place where they put needles in at the hospital and nearly fell off the table trying to swat the masseuse’s hands away. Her legs awkwardly hit the lineoleum, breaking her fall.


Not unlike how she half-fell off her seat on the bus from Nha Trang to Da Lat about every 3 minutes, at every turn thinking This would be The Last Turn. Hurtling down unfinished roads at silly speeds, the bus wheels rustling up streams of dust containing god-knows-what that would pass through the ‘closed’ windows and into her eyes, nose and mouth.


“IT IS 2:42PM”

The young woman felt as though she were stealing something, continuing to stare into the blind masseuse’s eyes like that, feeling every bit the sordid Western voyeur. Stealing the masseuse’s cataract-covered eyes, twisted (still strong) hands; her livelihood: paying her roughly 1/20th of what she would in Seoul or New York. If that.

Time to turn over. She felt relieved. No more opportunities to stare into the milky blue.


The masseuse worked on her neck, hard. Knuckles grinding. Elbows digging. Searing pain, but the young woman suffered through it, afraid that if she moved her neck would snap. And then she entered into a space so calm and fluid she wondered if her neck really had.


A flood of snapshots. Sharp and sun-drenched, unrelenting.

DEAD DOGS on Mui Ne beach. Stiff, legs in air. Flies swarming. Footprints of heavy foreigners making figure-eights around the bodies.


SILENT SALAMANDERS, not cockroaches, climbing on every hotel wall. Fast, soundless, greener than green.

FAST-FOOTED Saigon children, dark brown, white teeth, stained skin. Holding out baseball caps, following her, taunting her. Moving onto the next foreign crowd.

SILKY SHAKES, orange, red, yellow. Pure, clean, cold. Refreshing dragonfruit, passionfruit, mango, banana. Endless variety. Less than a dollar.


CRUMBLING CONCRETE sidewalks, steaming, searing. Sucking the life out of her at peak sunny hours. Chasing her into the rare air-conditioned café.


SOAKED SHIRTS of the xe om drivers. Holding onto their backs, instant familiarity of old Vietnamese men and one woman. Feeling them sweating out whole days on these bikes, foreigner fare = lucky day. They all helped her with her helmet.


“IT IS 3:21PM.”


The blind masseuse takes off her talking watch. The young woman slips her last $20 into her hands. The masseuse feels the money and yells at her. The young woman leads the partially-sighted woman over to her, says nothing, puts the bill in her hands and lurches down the ridiculous red staircase the blind people must suffer down on each exit.


--


And then…

The OVERWHELMING OVERWHELMINGNESS of the Da Lat Highlands. The lush denseness and largeness of the scenery, feeling taken over, kidnapped by the beauty, at once: wishing she was sharing this moment with someone dear and wanting it to be a virgin land and she, the first and last visitor, having no one else contaminate the spectacle of this seemingly empty magical earth. Riding alone on twisting mountain roads for miles, trying to lean into the turns like how her father once told her many years ago.


She loses control of the bike on a sharp left turn. She quickly speeds to the edge of the cliff. Time slows down. She sees her family, her friends, memorable lovers and the blind masseuse’s face. It is sunny outside.


No one sees her go over.
--

My Brain Is Dying

Ok, I know it’s been awhile and I have some very important things to write about, namely my experience in Vietnam and that whole ‘what I’m doing after Korea’ business…but I just couldn’t stand not talking about this for one minute longer.  Please don’t judge me, I actually think this is more important at the moment:

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Some of you may have been wondering what Bob Ross has been up to lately.  Remember him?  He was the white guy with the huge afro who had that color palette surgically attached to his left hand on that old people’s channel you always skipped past on your way to Nickelodeon or ABC as a child growing up in the early 90s, wondering for a hazy half-second if people thought it was still acceptable to look like that.  I mean, a white guy with an afro?  A button-down shirt tucked into jeans? What??

Anyhow.  He actually died back in ’95 of lymphoma (thank you, Wikipedia, for depressing me with More Things I Didn’t Need to Know But Anxiously Looked Up Anyway).  But…these sneaky Koreans have somehow brought him back to life.

He’s now living inside my Korean TV, selling Qook & Show smartphones—and consequently killing my soul at every 30-second turn.  Here, watch for yourself. 

Also.

There’s this website that’s been consuuuming my life ever since I found out about it (thank you Day!) and if by some stroke of horrible luck, you don’t know about it— here you go.

Ted.org

I didn’t think I could connect post-mortem Korean-speaking Bob Ross to Barry Schwartz, but the wonders of the modern age have showed me up again. 

While watching this brilliant, inspiring, enlightening talk by Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, I could not (and still can’t) get the theme song of that one sketch on MADtv out of my head.  Lowered Expectations. 

And no- the connection is not that this is something else I used to watch growing up in the 90s.   The connection is that I am currently living inside a Baudrillard novel (if he were to ever have written one) which caused me to watch the commercial in the first place.  Before I explain that,  here’s a short synopsis of that novel:

Young American woman living inside Asian technological epicenter, slowly but consistently losing her mind as she realizes with each new day that this is not real life.  Not really.  It is a representation of life.  An awe-inspiring concoction of explosive consumption consumption consumption of all-things-tech, all-things-image and all-things-emptiness.  Add a dash of Confucianism and a large helping of alcohol and you’ve got…KOREA: Shiny Simulacra and Sparkly Simulations, a novel by Jean Baudrillard.

It is because I live inside this Baudrillard novel that I choose to be mostly absent—mostly (trying to) sleep, exhausted by Nothingness…feeling compelled to let others fill up my mind, hence being consumed by TED…but it was after watching that Schwartz talk, that I became even more hyper-aware of the world around me, the illusion of happiness and choice and…etc.  And so—it was in the aftermath of all this (probably fake) hyper-awareness that I felt a strange pull toward my Korean TV, only to see a post-mortem-Korean-speaking Bob Ross  and…well, I just thought you all should know about it.

One more thing..  I just went to church and God (Oprah) just told me that Copenhagen is the happiest place on earth.  I want to go there. Maybe then I can get that theme song out of my head.

Vietnam: Dying in the Rough...

all the usual disclaimers of my computer's limitations and bla bla bla...

This is what I captured on my 10-day excursion in south Vietnam, late Feburary 2010 (Saigon, Nha Trang, Da Lat, Mui Ne). Though I could never hope for pure elucidation of my thoughts and experiences onto film, this video captures a few moments of my time there.
*********
CCR "Run Through the Jungle"

Harry Nilsson "Everybody's Talkin'"
Her Majesty's Sound "Odd Phantasms in Unique Moments"

Jimi Hendrix "Hey Joe"
Boards of Canada "Left Side Drive"

Up In the Air...

In less than four days now, I will be in Hong Kong for an overnight, before I arrive in Saigon for 9 days of (hopeful) bliss, reflection and discovery. It looks like I’ll be sticking to the southern end of the country, since the northern end is a bit cold and rainy right now (as my foreigner friends indicated upon their return from Vietnam a couple weeks ago.)

A friend of mine asked me what the purpose of my trip was. Is it to experience the food? For adventure? For the history? Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it. I’m just kind of…going. Though, I’ve been thinking about it some more and I do think that my trip there will be instrumental, after all. I realized that when I return at the end of February, I will exactly be at my 6 month mark here. Which means…I’ll be leaving in 6 months. And…contrary to what I thought were cemented plans for what I’ll be doing by then…I’m still undecided. I’ve been giving some pretty serious thought to some pretty serious alternatives and hope that Vietnam will give me the insight needed to follow through with preparing for…well, not going back to NYC right away. That’s all I can say for now.

Oh also—there was a 5 second earthquake in the Gyeonggi Province (where I live) a couple days ago. It’s pretty telling that at the time I automatically assumed it was North Korea finally calling its own bluff(s) and then two seconds later, concluded it was just another annoying vegetable truck barreling down my street—well, a barrage of them anyhow (it was pretty damn loud). Nope, it was just an earthquake. Apparently there was also an earthquake in the Chicagoland area? Strange stuff…

Anyway. Maybe I’ll come back looking like Moses when he came down from the mountain, full of knowledge and awareness and an awesome Moses tan. Or I could come back full of red blisters and malaria, having accomplished nothing more than slowly dying in my Saigon hotel room (see: Apocalypse Now)…

I’ll let you know when I get back. Wish me luck!

Isn’t that odd? Part I: Korea At School

In lieu of doing a post called: Boredom, Part II, I figured I’d try to write about something interesting— like, say, observations of Korean weirdness. I know I have mentioned a few things in the past (students staying at school until 10pm, seas of red electric crucifixes, the ridiculous presence of phonebooths in ‘the most wired place on earth’ and how Koreans actually use them, etc.). But, I’ve come up with a few new ones, namely: those things that I’ve grown so used to seeing everyday that I don’t notice them as completely and singularly, Korean, anymore. While beginning to jot these things down, I noticed that there’s a lot of them, so they will be condensed into sections, starting with Part I: At School, since this is, technically, where I spend most of my time.

Also, writing about such things allows for a list, which really saves me time on having to connect things in an eloquent way and…well, saves time on thinking. So, here goes!

l Everyone at my school (myself included), has been wearing a winter coat all day long since the cold weather started because Korean schools don’t currently find heating hallways as cost-effective . This has allowed for two subsequent observations: 1). Korean women collect winter coats. Some of my co-workers have a different coat for every other day of the week and others have a new coat for every day. They’re usually very cute, manicured-looking coats that don’t offer a lot of warmth. And 2)., the wearing of my coat has officially upped my status of looking ‘slightly homeless’ to ‘full-on homeless’ while at school, since 1). I can’t be bothered to work on looking presentable that early in the morning and 2). the added hobo coat just pushes me over into the full-on homeless category. My students still manage to take me seriously, some of the time, so if they’re fine with it…I’m not changing it. Also—it’s really comfy and warm!

l You can’t wear real shoes inside the school. It’s been suggested (mandated) that I only wear slippers while inside. But, being the renegade that I am, I’ve continued to wear my real shoes everyday- mainly because I don’t see the point of wearing slippers if I have to walk outside, on dirty pavement to get to the side of the school where the language lab is. Truly- teachers will walk around in fluffy animal slippers that have disgusting gray munj on the soles and still find the gall to stare at my very normal-looking brown boots as if I am committing some horrible foreigner crime.

l About once a week, someone will bring in treats to share with the other teachers in the teachers lounge. Most often, it is either a huge box of clementines or an assortment of rice cakes. It is considered rude to not partake, even if one isn’t hungry or doesn’t especially like eating the provided treat (granted, most of my friends don’t seem to mind them and admittedly they do look delectable, but I find Korean rice cakes to be excessively bland in taste, --imagine what raw biscuit dough must taste like).

(my friend Alex and I sizing up the rice cake spread in Insadong)

l There is no coffee-maker in the teachers lounge, rather a multitude of Maxim packets—instant coffee that consists of about 70% sugar and 30% coffee-like substance, for which it is normal to put into 2-sip Dixie cups and shoot like tequila.

l The other week, my co-teacher hooked up her furry slippers via USB to her laptop to warm them up. Provided, she wasn’t lying on the floor, but it still looked every bit ridiculous.

l Occasionally, random (sometimes vagabond) salesmen are allowed into the school to sell their wares. The first salesmen I encountered was selling socks and stared at me for about a minute, deciding whether or not to pursue the ask. He didn’t.

l Things that I observe my Korean students doing at school:
Between classes: They will inevitably be doing one of five things: furiously jumping rope in the hall (for exercise), practicing K-pop dance moves in front of the large mirrors on the stairwells, brushing their teeth in the bathrooms, eating dok boki (out of small Styrofoam cups) or ice cream cones – either from the vendor down the street or from the school’s snack shop or screaming (and I mean *screaming*) and running down the halls in large herds.
During class: intently examining their faces in their standard-issue little (though some are large) plastic mirrors about every five minutes, using what I can only describe as ‘face rolling tweezers’ as they say to “get small face”, i.e. to reduce the size of their jaws. I tried to find an image of these things on google by typing ‘korean small face tool’, but feared failure when the first image to come up was a map detailing forest fires in North Korea and the second, a picture of what I guess to be a British band called The Small Faces. Further down the page however, appeared a quite intriguing picture of a Korean woman sitting in a plastic bowl and naturally, decided to do some investigation. It took me to a website called Digital Chosunilbo (English news about Korea) where they thoroughly detail the array of low-cost Korean aesthetic tools, among them what I had initially searched for, officially called a ‘face massage roller’.

“What are you doing just sitting there doing nothing? If you moved your hands even once, you could make your face look smaller. “ (Available at GSWatsons for W11,500)

By the way, what I thought to be a Korean woman sitting in a large plastic bowl is actually a Korean woman sitting on a ‘pelvic correcting basin’:

“This is not a basin that holds water. It closes the pelvis after it has expanded during pregnancy while lifting a droopy behind and straightening a crooked pelvis. The device offers much more stability than a sofa or a chair and welcomes rears of up to 100 cm in diameter. While reading or watching TV, any user can get the three daily sittings of 15 minutes out of the way. D&shop W29,800.”

That’s all I can gather up for right now, though I’m sure more Korean weirdness at school is bound to pop up in the remaining months…so be sure to stay tuned!

On Boredom

You may recall that last week I wrote (complained) about how it’s really the lack of things in this country that’s tampering with my mental balance. I’m still appreciative of everything Korea’s given me and blablabla… -- but, as it turns out, unsurprisingly, I was mistaken. There is absolutely a presence at work here. It’s the overwhelming presence of the lack of things. Or, what you may know as… boredom.

I read a NYT book review the other day: ‘Our Boredom, Ourselves’, by Jennifer Schuessler and came away exultant. Exultant. “Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century…” Alright, that wasn’t the line I wanted to point out, but isn’t it funny?

Ok, for real now: (Schuessler musing about Patricia Meyer Sparks’s Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind) : “[Spacks] describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”

(My Korean translation) Boredom: a luxury and a peril. Yes. A luxury that I have been granted this undeserved reserve of seemingly unlimited free time to muse about whatever the hell I want and still find extra time to grumble about said undeserved reserve. Still, underneath it all I do find it pretty luxurious that I can wallow around in my own cerebral muck and not have to constantly worry about making rent.

A peril. Amidst the indulgent wallowing, it will somehow seep into my consciousness that important things are happening in the world and that I am just passing my days, looking at the world through a foggy prism of watered-down interest and persistent reminders of that ‘daunting personal responsibility’: happiness. But, more on that later...

If it’s true what Schuessler suggests: “Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul”, then my cup (brain and soul) overfloweth with goodness (boredom). Along with my daily 10am yogurt delivery, my Korean life also boasts the prompt and ever-reliable on-the-hour delivery of freshly baked boredom. What will come from this bittersweet gift, I’ve yet to see. Whatever it is, I hope it’s meaningful (and not, in and of itself, boring).

As a sidenote: my work and home computers seem to have entered into a suicide pact by slow starvation (but really, they're just plain dying). And-- as a result have been messing up big-time, leaving me beyond frustrated with all of the work I’ve lost and how much time I spend watching pages load at the rate of a dying turtle. So I’ve written this (now much shorter) post about 4 times over now. So I apologize if it’s not that coherent, but I’m seriously sick of rewriting and editing—so you are warned—the next few posts might be entirely convoluted. So read at your own risk (of boredom, most likely)!