Han
By Sarah Muscutt, ETA ’16-’17 Han I want to write a poem about Seoul. I’ve waited with bated breath, lungs immobile, the chill of awe thaws, and tiny hair soldiers stand attention a jolting involuntary thrill and the train emerges, sliding from dark tunnel. We’re always crossing the Han too fast to take it in. Eyes swallow the river, then rivet to lines where sky meets steel, and steel stages approximately 10 million stories. I want to write a poem about Seoul, at night geometry, columns and constellations, Taillights crowded, edging along. 불금 revelry, orange and pink possibility, seeps from street arteries into a thirsty horizon. Twilight hushes the city dressed in evening. I want to write a poem about Seoul to explain how the chain of subway cars, a chimerical iridescent caterpillar, glide along the track. A city-spirit silent disappears into building forest, and slithering yellow headlight snake draws my gaze along the river bank. I see it all across the Han, Mythical. I want to write a poem about Seoul. Lighted boxes, freckled with illuminated windows to other worlds. Cruising lifted expressways past life stacked thirty stories high– an abstraction of lines, shapes, shadows, points, stars, satellites, and so many colors– I always miss my exit, too entranced. I want to write a poem about Seoul, sewer reek, and unruly trash piles clashing aromas– exhaust, human bodies, cigarette, and sizzling street food. I crane my neck, a moment paused, damp armpits and achy feet at a crosswalk-crush, to take in a traffic maw, angry gash of light and motion gaping between city cracks, and the silver spoon moon above pinned to gauzy haze clouds, impassive. I want to write a poem about Seoul. Logos everywhere blinking, blazing sheet cakes advertising assault from every angle in the night-city, rendered romance, just a twinkle reflected upon the Han, Consume life! Cranked maximum the messages shimmer before my dizzy pupils, dilated to catch every last drop before I’m gone and feel the loss like a stone in my stomach, sinking down, down to the bottom of the Han. I want to write a poem about Seoul, but it’s way too personal, and anonymous. Atoms of humanity packed tight, particles thick as peanut butter, repulsive. The girl breathing my air, hip wedged against me, pressed so close I could kiss her on the subway. Stares, eyes carefully blank, past my face. I want to write a poem about Seoul, absurd reality. The street vomit stains and homeless grandmas searching hunchbacked under unfathomable burdens of Han and precariously stacked cardboard, accumulated in just one day of a throwaway modernity. Salty swell, wave and undertow, Heavy drops of water fall from unprepared eyelashes. Rapture and revulsion. I want to write a poem about Seoul. Rocky, Bukhansan at sentinel post. The Seoul of a country, immaculate twinkle and hum, so far off. A red, white, blue, and black banner waving welcomes spent legs to summit of ice and stone, whereupon you cannot hear the city-beat, over the hush, hush, hush of the wind. Sarah Muscutt is currently a teacher’s assistant at Missoula Valley Montessori School in Missoula, Montana. From 2016-2017 she was an elementary school ETA at Gwangcheon Elementary School in Hongseong, Chungcheongnam-do. Sarah will soon begin a Master’s of Education at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.
Kenny
By Zach Winters, ETA ’17-’18 “Kenny,” Sonnet II How ‘funny’ that I come here now that you Are gone—or is it ‘fun’? I can’t be sure, But every time I think about the few Short years we had I end up wanting more— How ‘fitting’ that I come where you’d have found Your half—or were you ‘one’? I couldn’t tell— I’d never thought of you as ‘한’, but now I wish I’d known to ask you how you felt— I’ll never see green eyes begin to fade And never force green ‘무궁화’ to be An echo of the home you might’ve made, A familiar place you never got to see— But as I walk this ‘home’ you never knew, You’re in my heart, and so you walk here too— Zach Winters is a 2017-2018 ETA at Jeju Jungang Girls’ High School in Jeju city, Jeju-do.
A Little Learning
The first time I noticed the hagwon in the town of Dochang was in September, shortly after I’d moved and started teaching at the local high school. It was on the second floor of a nondescript two-story with a miyongsil and a secondhand shop, both a bit down at the edges, on the street level. I’d have missed it altogether if I hadn’t been looking up. Plump drops of rain had just begun to fall; one struck me on the forehead, and I glanced at the turbid sky above, then saw the hagwon. It was indistinguishable from all the other hagwons in town: garish lettering on slightly dirty windows that betrayed no hint of what went on inside. At the time, I didn’t even have an umbrella; I rushed into a café to wait out the rain, and thought nothing more of the hagwon on the second story. Those first few weeks at a new school in a new town are always disorienting at best, and I’d been finding the adjustment harder than I had expected. After a year teaching high school in Sejong City, I’d wanted to see a different side of Korea—someplace quieter, closer to country, with fewer expats around and fewer distractions. And it would certainly be better for my Korean. I’d come to Korea with the goal of becoming, if not fluent, at least proficient, spurred by dreams of becoming a literary translator; a year of teaching English, to my frustration, had left me barely any closer to this goal than I was when I began. Hours of evening study evaporated into almost nothing. I’d almost left at the end of the year, but decided to give it another try. Maybe a different place, with more pressure to use my Korean regularly, would help, I thought. But I worried I’d made the wrong decision. Living alone, which (after the tumult of the previous year) I had dreamt would come as a relief, had turned out to be a trial; I spent far too much of my time refreshing the same half-dozen news websites minute by minute, trawling the same endless heap of outraged reactions. And I hadn’t realized just how wonderful my old school had been until I arrived at this one, where the hierarchy was far more formal and my colleagues disinterested in my work to the point of apathy. I tried speaking with them in Korean, but they seemed exasperated by my infelicity with the language. Even the students seemed dazed and distant in comparison. A month and a half in, I still hadn’t been able to draw anything more than mere pleasantries from any of them—nothing more than a very teenage “Yeah, just doing stuff later,” or “I don’t know.” (“What kind of food do you like?” “Normal food./Meat./Good food.”) An old nervous habit, biting my tongue, had started to resurface when I spoke. It certainly wasn’t for want of proficiency in the language: I had enough Korean to hold a conversation, and their English, if anything, was better on average than my Sejong students’. In fact, some of the students’ English was of preternatural quality—idiomatic, accurate, with an accent that seemed to belong somewhere near Columbus, Ohio. These students—there could only have been a dozen in a school of some four hundred—weren’t exactly a clique, but they did spend a lot of time around each other, and they did stand out. I noticed my first, a girl named Hyein, when, during a lesson on sokdam and sayings (the textbook’s choice, not mine), I asked a second-year class one afternoon if they knew any sayings in English. A few students volunteered some simple phrases—“Win some, lose some,” “Two birds with one stone”—but then Hyein, a student who, in the first two weeks, had barely spoken, suddenly stood up, and as if for posterity, enunciated: I stood, wordless and blinking, for a second longer than anyone found comfortable. “Where did you learn that?” I finally stammered. “A book,” she shrugged. “Do you know who said that?” A split-second’s pause, as if only to let the current zap through the microscopic gates on a motherboard. “Alexander Pope,” she answered. “A poet. An Augustan. Of the eighteenth century.” As if it were simply common knowledge, and not something that nine out of ten American college graduates probably couldn’t tell you. Why was a Korean sixteen-year-old reading—indeed, memorizing—Alexander Pope? What else did she know? I had to go back to the lesson—the other students were staring—but with every passing second, the question smoldered more uncontrollably in the back of my mind. I turned to approach her at the end of class, but she had disappeared in the normal throng before I could say her name. The students filed out, and I stood wondering, watching the door, for a full half-minute before I realized that there was a student standing to my side, just out of my peripheral vision. A boy named Sehun, short for his age, his collar askew so that the thin band of his fake tie showed around the edge. “They’re all like that,” he told me, before I could even ask if he needed something. “The Neungnyeok students. They are all like robots. Genius English robots.” “Neungnyeok? What is Neungnyeok?” I asked him. “It’s the academy in the town,” he replied. “They are famous. And very good.” “Do you go there?” He giggled. “No, teacher. It’s so expensive. But the students always get perfect hagwon score. So they can ask a lot.” “What do they do that’s so special?” He looked askance at me. I rephrased the question: “Why is that hagwon so good?” “No one knows. I think they work a lot. Those students always look tired.” “Who else—” “I have to go now. Bye, teacher!” Over the next several weeks, I noticed the Neungnyeok students more and more in my classes, and around the school. They didn’t always speak up in class—indeed, they often held themselves aloof, with a mien of