The Unathlete
Written by Ben Harris Out of all the events spanning the two-day sports festival at my school, the scrimmages between the teachers and the students were the most anticipated. People shuffled around listlessly when two classes faced off, but the atmosphere surrounding the teacher-student matches befitted a professional game. I’d been invited to play in the volleyball game. My co-teacher asked me well in advance, a few times, and I agreed whenever the question came up. When the net was up and the other players were in their positions, a teacher grabbed my hand to lead me to my spot. I became chicken. I pulled away and backed off. It must have seemed sudden, and it was, but although I hadn’t anticipated my own reaction, I wasn’t surprised by it. They found a substitute, another teacher who wasn’t happy to play, but at least he did. I watched the game left out and a little ashamed. Feeling that I needed to do penance for my cowardice the day before, I agreed when a different teacher asked me to play basketball. Because all Korean high school boys seem to love either soccer, basketball or both, the basketball game was going to be hot. Basketball was the filet mignon to volleyball’s cheese sticks, and nobody was about to miss it. I knew this was the case, and still said I would play; this is how reckless I am. Students rushed in to sit on the stage and in the balcony to watch the teachers warm up. I didn’t warm up. I barely even knew how to play. Just watching them from the sidelines made me sweat. To celebrate Sports Day, students’ parents brought a buffet of fried chicken, rice cakes and pig’s feet for the teachers to eat in the back room of the gym, and I would have been much better off spending the day there. The truth is that I am as interested in sports as I am in car mechanics or doctor’s office waiting rooms, which is to say: not at all. When another ETA told me that her first impression of me was that I was a sporty guy, I had to laugh. As a child, I was awkward, sniffling and asthmatic. I had nosebleeds and did breathing treatments. My parents never had any hope for me as an athlete. “We knew it wasn’t for you early on,” my mother once told me. “I mean, my God, you couldn’t even throw a football.” It wasn’t mean-spirited. It was fact. My mom always encouraged my interest in music, and didn’t even want me to play sports because I might get hurt. My dad is so loyal a Detroit Lions fan that he kept faith even when they broke records one season by losing every single game. Yet if he was disappointed that his oldest son was more interested in the piano than in being a quarterback, he never showed it. I finally picked up running after high school, at first as a sometimes-habit, because I felt like I needed to do something. All my friends swam, wrestled, played football or baseball, and all I did was go to school and go home. I asked myself if I wanted to go through life on a rolling chair. I wheezed all the way through my first run with my best friend, who I’d held back so much that he ran another several miles after finishing our route. I hated it at first, but eventually grew to like it. I like the way I feel after a long run, and how during it I can think clearly. What I don’t care about is proper technique unless it’s something that keeps me from hurting myself, and I don’t care about speed. I’m trying to train for a half-marathon, and I don’t care about my finishing time. Finishing at all is the whole point. Running does not make me an athlete. Everything I know about true athleticism suggests that it is graceful, competitive, and technically artistic. As a true unathlete, I am far away from all those things. Although sports are everywhere in the United States, they are still easy for me to forget. In a conversation, if someone asks me if I like a certain team or saw a certain game, all I have to do is say no and we change topics. There’s a sports section in every newspaper I read, although to me that article titled “Pistons Score Big Win Over Cavaliers” might as well be called “Better Seed Storage Methods for the Best Yield from Your Summer Garden.” Many people like sports and many people like gardens. In America nobody seems to care that I care about neither. In Korea, my indifference to organized sports is often met with genuine bafflement. I used to think it was disappointment, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been told more than a few times that I’m very small, too small, and that I should be lifting weights. People sometimes tell me this with great concern, as if my arms were so small that they were in danger of withering away. I can never resist stealing a look. Really? Are they that puny? Some people seem to think so. They ask me to flex so they can feel my muscles. There’s not much to feel, though. I rarely have to lift anything heavier than a cell phone. The spring of my freshman year of college, my friends sometimes wasted time on the basketball courts behind our residence hall and every once in a while let me play, too, though they laughed at the way I dribbled. Later, an opportunity for a casual one-off tournament between two or three halls came up, and I must have gotten the wrong idea from their inclusiveness, because I asked the same best friend who took me on my first jog if he wanted me to play. Sheepishly, he told me he’d already dreamt up a
To My Loving Grandmother
To My Loving Grandmother 사랑하는 우리 할머니께 [1] Written by Andrea Kang I’m frustrated that I can never send you this letter because it will be in English and you wouldn’t understand a word of it. As my friend always said, English is a colonial language and I too have been colonized—stripped from my mother’s language, your language. But I hope that this letter reaches you in spirit. I saw you many times when I was young but I didn’t know much about you. You were only a distant memory, a faint scent of flowers and myeolchi bokkeum [2], bright red-stained lips, and small notebooks filled with Japanese kanji and paper cranes—perhaps remnants of a “globalized” past, harbingers of both nostalgia and trauma. I remember you used to use words like denki, shashin, and jishin [3]—words that I thought were distorted Korean from your Daegu accent but in reality were Japanese words that you would have only learned from your school days. As I studied more about Korea and its history, I began to understand that war taught you to be bilingual. In a way, it taught me to be bilingual as well. But for me, it has been a different kind of war, where assimilation was not as direct as it was in your era. I remember styrofoam mats and magic carpets. A wall full of colorful drawings and alphabet posters with pictures of worms and apples, trumpets and roses. The smell of gingerbread and disinfectant wipes overwhelmed any visitor who walked in through those burgundy metal doors. My white teacher with round, golden glasses and graying brown hair hit me because I could not understand the odd words that she was speaking—the first time I was punished without really understanding the reason why. This was just the first of many moments that would try to teach me to forget the complexity of my heritage and identity, and to force myself into the dominant culture. My mom and I were greeted by the sounds of ringing phones and the clicking sounds of the money counter sifting through dollar bills. It was a typical day of running simple errands. “Canu I depositu thisu?” my mother said with perfect grammar. The bank teller looked to me in confusion, asking me to translate the English coming out of my mother’s mouth. I apologize. Why did I apologize for a mistake that the bank teller made? Have you ever apologized for something that was not your fault? I am sure you have. You grew up in a time when knowing and speaking in Korean meant physical death. For me, and for my mom, looking like we didn’t know English was a mark on our foreheads that said FOREIGN. NOT AMERICAN. We were all branded. How did you survive your branded past? I wanted to know. You were like a book of war tactics that I wanted to open, because to understand your past was to understand my own, to understand how I could equip myself for the future. When I came back to South Korea to study abroad in college, all those years after the first time I visited as a child, I wanted to get to know you better. But weeks turned into months, and months turned into a whole semester of interrupted times together, and I began to realize that it was more than just a language barrier that kept us apart. Our family told me you were too sick to talk to anyone. They told me your depression had gotten worse so it was best that I didn’t bother you. Perhaps they didn’t want to burden you with another person to take care of in your home. That would make sense since the last time I saw you, a week before Chuseok [4] this year, you looked like you were carrying a jigae [5] full of bricks instead of wood. On your better days, you would always talk about memories that even I had forgotten. But that day, your hair seemed a little grayer and the wrinkles on your face were not from smiles but from furrowed brows. Your movements were slower, and it seemed like you couldn’t remember what you did a minute before, let alone those memories from twenty years ago. Maybe you were too busy fighting the demons that kept your doors shut. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was somehow being kept from getting to know you. Perhaps they were too afraid of what would come out of our conversations. Too afraid that those conversations would give you the power you once had—the power to present your beautiful, imperfect self to a world that tried so hard to cover the blemishes, the not so pleasant things. Maybe they were afraid that our conversations would make me realize that they were human, vulnerable and imperfect like you, like me, like everyone else. But in the end, I understood your small gestures. The way you peeled the goguma [6] for me with your shaking hands, pained by arthritis. The way you picked up a small morsel of kimchi with your chopsticks and put it on top of my rice for me to eat. The way you dusted off my coat and asked me if it was warm enough for the South Korean winters, because it’s not just cold up North. The way you hugged me when I knew that hugging was not a practice you’re accustomed to. In the end, they couldn’t silence the language of compassion that our bodies spoke. And I think that it was this form of communication that helped me understand you a little better. Your vocal silence did not mean that you were silent. Because you were speaking in other ways. And these other ways showed more compassion for those who had wronged you than anything else. I understood that compassion was in itself your power, and that you had never really lost any of it at all. These were the war tactics
The Wrong Kind of American
Written by Judith Foo and Zerin (Zarin) Tasnim This piece features alternating vignettes from two ETAs sharing their respective cultural experiences while in Korea. We sat in the back end of the coffee shop, my small suitcase jammed next to a fake ficus, and the contents of an even smaller bag threatening to spill out. My stomach growled audibly and I felt sweat seeping through my stiff blazer. After four hours on the bus, I was tired, hot and ready for a cold shower. My head buzzed back to that very morning, when I woke up groggy and dreading the day. A haphazard placement ceremony, tearful goodbyes, boarding a bus to Busan —after a summer of anticipation, this very moment was underwhelming. As I tried not to give into my exhaustion, a small, plump woman approached the table. Caught off guard, I stood up and quickly bowed, gasping “안녕하세요” [1] under my breath. The woman nodded and stared at me even after she took a seat. I smiled and shifted around nervously. Finally she spoke, slowly and deliberately. “What did you study in college?” “I studied political science and history.” I answered automatically, wringing my hands underneath the table. “When did you graduate?” “This past June” “Do you have any teaching experience?” “Not any formal experience but I did learn a lot during my orientation,” I said not considering that she already probably knew all these things about me. “How long have you been learning English?” she asked studying my face. I noticed she hadn’t once smiled at me. “Excuse me?” “How long have you been learning English?” She repeated slowly. I gaped at her, unsure of how to answer. Surely she was aware that I am an American… “I’ve been speaking English ever since I can remember.” I finally answered. She looked at me as if she didn’t believe me and exchanged a look with my coteacher sitting next to me. “Where are your parents from again?” She asked. “…Bangladesh.” I replied unsure of what that had to do with me being a teacher. “Bangladesh,” she repeated. I nodded as my stomach began to fill with a sense of unease. The hum of warm summer night conversations swirled around the tension that filled our space. “Well, let’s go find you a place to sleep,” she sighed, as if disappointed. “Your apartment isn’t ready yet, so you’ll have to stay at a motel for a week or so.” She grabbed my wrist and led me out of the coffee shop. II. The sun is already setting over the Busan International Film Festival by the time we clamber off the bus in search of a 7 PM screening. The ten of us are huddling together around our crumpled festival map when a man, middle aged and garbed head to toe in bright red BIFF-stamped apparel, approaches us from behind. Hardly any speaking is required; all it takes are a few gestures towards his official badge and his enormous, professional camera to get the point across. He’s with official festival staff, and he wants to film us. “Just…hello!” He instructs, waving both hands enthusiastically in demonstration. “Say hi! Hello to BIFF!” Why not? We crowd laughing together, arm in arm and hands on shoulders. He squints into the lens, then frowns, squinting over it. “Korean?” He asks. I realize he’s staring at me, where I’m standing in the front row. The frown is for me. “Korean? No, she’s American,” my friend responds dismissively, flipping her blonde hair over her shoulder and clinging still more tightly to my arm. We settle back into formation, but the signal doesn’t come. Instead, the man steps out from behind his camera, steps up to us. We all straighten up, unsure of what’s happening. The man grabs my arm and walks me forcibly out of the frame, deposits me a few feet away on the sidewalk. Then he hops back behind the camera, beaming as if nothing of consequence has happened. “Just hello!” he shouts into my friends’ enraged faces. “Just hi!” III. I straightened up to answer the student who had just bounded into my classroom. “Teacher, teacher! My brother, did you see?” “Erm…yes. What’s his name again?” I asked trying to recall the faces of the 16 new third graders I met just 7 minutes ago. “Park Woobin” [2] she said, searching my face for any sign of recognition. I thought hard, trying to remember if any face was similar to this student but came up blank. “What was he wearing?” I asked “He wearing orange jacket.” I could tell she sensed that I didn’t have the vaguest clue. Not wanting to disappoint her, I pretended to have a moment of recognition and prepared myself for a tiny white lie. “Ah yes! I remember your brother!” My student broke out into a smile. “He is very cute!” I exclaimed. Technically, all the third graders were tiny and adorable. My student looked surprised and tried to convey her thoughts “Ah..yes. Cute… 하지만 섹갈 이상해요 [3]…not good color.” I blinked trying to process what she said. Color? Was he sick? My student sensed my confusion and pointed to her skin. “His color bad” she elaborated. Ah. I knew who her brother was now. Park Woobin, a little boy with cute dimples and a giant orange jacket, was similar in almost every aspect to his older sister but he had one difference. “Dahyun,” [4] I said with a slight smile, “Your brother and I have the same skin color.” My student blinked, realizing what I meant. “But teacher,” my student began, trying to find the right words once again. “선생님은, 이뻐잖아.” [5] IV. The first time I hear the crinkle of a coat behind me, I pay no heed. The café in downtown Seoul is bustling with strangers, each wearing a bright winter jacket puffier and noisier than the next. But a few moments later, I hear it again, right by my ear, so I turn. There’s a middle-aged Korean man,