Please Forgive Me
By Teddy Ajluni, a first year ETA in Gwangyang, Jeollanam-do When I first arrived, it was too early to think about leaving. Everything was so new and exciting. You were all so welcoming to me. I was almost surprised at how few problems there were, especially for elementary schoolers like you. Sure, you could get a little chatty here and there, but you still showed a passion for learning—much more than I did at your age—and it gave me the passion to keep teaching. There were few times when I felt bored with my work, and those moments were so few thanks to your energy. I can only hope you felt the same during class, though I know that’s impossible. Having sat in your seat once, I know there were times when you must have been bored. Either way, you were patient with me, just as I was with you. It was all too exciting, too good to be true. Now I’m looking at the prospect right in the face: I have to leave. It’s a little strange thinking about it. I still have some time before I must go, but I know how quickly that will pass. I remember the days when such a span of time would feel like half of my life. I guess it really was half of my life back then. While I’ve known you for almost 10 percent of your life, you’ve only been there for a tiny fraction of mine. The odd part about it is, I know deep inside that it will feel like the other way around. Yes, you’ve only been there for a fraction of my life, but this episode will live with me forever. Meanwhile, while I’ve been there for so much of yours, I will slowly fade away. It might hurt for you at first, but I know what is likely to happen after that. It happened to me too. The portion of your life that I was with you will shrink smaller and smaller until it is almost nothing. I will become nothing but a memory—fuzzy and intangible—slowly morphing here and there in the recesses of your mind until you only recall half of my face or the sound of my name. You might even forget me altogether, and I would not blame you at all. Whether or not you forget me, I have to thank you for something. It’s not the behavior or the positive attitude I mentioned before, though I appreciate all those things. In fact, you might not even remember it, but it was when you answered a question of mine and returned something I didn’t even know I needed. You see, thinking about leaving made me ask why I came here in the first place. What was I seeking? What did I hope to find? There are answers to those questions, but now I know they’re not the right questions to ask. The real question to ask was this: what was I running from? Someone told me once that everyone’s running from something. I wasn’t sure what to think about it at first, but now I know that they’re right. I was running, and I still am. But you answered that question for me. And it wasn’t until you showed me what I was running towards that I found out what I was running from. I still remember the day you helped me discover why I was running. I had to go grocery shopping and I didn’t want to spend too long getting to the bus stop after work. Then a couple of you spotted me. “Do you play PoGo?” Pokémon Go. You said it in Korean, but some of you know as well as I do that the language of the Pokémon Trainer is universal. Despite my lack of language skills, I knew what you meant. I took out my phone and laughed. Of course I played. That game came out when I was in high school. And now, as all my friends seemed to outgrow it, they left me behind, stuck in my augmented reality. As time went on though, even I began to play it less. But it was still there on my phone, right where I left it. So I told you yes, I do play it. I opened the app and showed you. You were all amazed, even though some of you were a higher level than I was and knew much more about the game. It was funny to watch. Of course, I had a lot of the old Pokémon. Maybe that’s why you were so amazed. But you had a lot of the new ones, ones that I’m sad to admit I didn’t even know existed. “Raid,” one of you said, pointing at the virtual map. I looked. There it was. A five-star Raid Boss. Dialga. I hadn’t gotten it yet. Neither had any of you. “Come with us?” one of you asked me. Hearing such a question with such sincerity almost made me laugh. Or did it almost make me cry? I don’t know, but I smiled either way. No one had asked me to play for so long. Without even knowing it, I realized that it was the offer that I’d been waiting to hear for so many years. And now, it was being extended. “Yes!” Almost as if my subconscious were answering for me, I didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go!” You echoed me in excitement. So, we ran together. We ran towards Dialga. And that’s when I knew what I was running towards. Dialga, #483 in the National Pokédex. It’s a Steel/Dragon-type Legendary from Sinnoh. You can catch one, but only one, at Spear Pillar in Pokémon Diamond and Platinum. If you want to get it in Pearl, then you have to trade. In Pokémon Go, it doesn’t work like that. You can catch a lot, as long as you beat them in a Raid Battle first. But most of you already know
The Foreigner’s Phrasebook for Eating Alone
[Featured photo by La Toya Crittenden] by Paige Morris 1. 초딩 입맛 (A Little Kid’s Tastes) Life as a foreigner in Korea often relies on a fixed script of questions and answers. Where are you from? America. What are you doing here? I’m an English teacher. Over time, the questions grow weightier, more loaded. Are you married? Do you like Korean men? How do you do your hair? Slowly, I’ve acquired the vocabulary needed to respond. After two grant years and even more years of language study, I know how to politely say no, how to demur, how to describe the interweaving of strands, both real and synthetic, that form my braids and twists. But when I first came to this country, I was overwhelmed by the amount of language I didn’t have, all the things I didn’t yet know how to do. Certain lines of dialogue demanded to be learned with urgency. There were interactions I had to become fluent in, fast. One of the earliest lessons I had to figure out was eating in Korea on my own. This wasn’t a skill I was even sure I’d had in English. Back home in the US, I hardly ever ate by myself. In college, eating was a decidedly social occasion, with eateries and dining companions within walking distance from my dorm or apartment. My friends and I hosted huge potluck dinners at least once a month and shared at least one meal a day. I had gotten used to always having someone around whenever hunger set in when graduation scattered us all over the globe, and I found myself in a new place where I knew no one. When I ate dinner with my host family that first year, I felt like I was scratching at something familiar, starting to uncover a sense of closeness that came with eating a meal together. But it was also strange to be treated like another child in this family. I wouldn’t know what that night’s meal would be until I was called down to eat. I would ask questions about dinner, curious to learn all the words for the food laid out before me, but it seemed this frustrated my host mother, who had to set her chopsticks down to look up the words in Naver dictionary. I heartily ate what I was served, but when I set aside the little slivers of egg from my kimbap, my host father chided my choding ipmat and called me a pyeonsikga—a picky eater with the stubborn mouth of an elementary-aged kid. I started to question my every move during meals. If I ate only one serving, would my host mother think I disliked the food? If I went for another bowl of jjigae, would my host father think I was being greedy? Should I wait for my two host sisters to stop quarreling over who was the prettiest member of Twice and finish their rice before I got another pat for myself? Should I have eaten the hodu snacks—even though I’m allergic—so no one would think I was too particular? The anxiety around eating grew so intense, I decided I might be better off having dinner on my own. 2. 한 명이요. (Table for One) More than almost any other cultural differences, my efforts to eat alone proved incomprehensible to the people around me. When I mentioned at breakfast one morning that I’d be getting dinner on my own after work and volunteering, my host parents panicked. “With your American friends?” they asked. “With other teachers?” When I told them the other volunteers lived on opposite ends of the city and I was planning to go alone, they were scandalized. “You’ll eat alone?” my host mother echoed, incredulous. “We can save some dinner for you to heat up when you come back. You shouldn’t do that—eating alone?” She turned to her husband, murmuring, “Where would she even eat? By herself, at that?” It turned out this concern wasn’t for a lack of options, but for the perceived strangeness of the situation itself: a foreigner, or anyone, eating somewhere unaccompanied. The first few weeks of my experiment were predictably difficult. Even at restaurants in bigger cities, it seemed lone foreigners were unlikely customers. I would step inside a kimbap shop, a kalguksu place, a mandu-jip, and be greeted with a look of surprise. Sometimes the surprise melted into excitement, the thrill of spotting an opportunity to try out some English or to ask questions of the Black person who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. Other times, the surprise shifted into panic. What was anyone supposed to do with me? Why was I here, instead of off somewhere eating hamburgers or steak? In any case, the script was initiated as soon as I entered. The waitstaff would ask: 몇 분이세요? How many people? I’d hold up a single finger. The grammar to indicate the size of your party is a pure Korean number, plus the counter for people—myeong. 한 명이요. One person. Just me. Here is where the script might fracture. Sometimes, there was no issue. I’d be ushered to a table. Often, I’d have a good view of a wall-mounted TV showing a drama from the early 00s that I had never seen. Most times, despite some initial trepidation, I managed to order without a hitch, which would put all of us—the waitstaff and the foreigner—at ease. There were times, though, when I’d be met with a firm shake of the head. This was usually at places with grills and pricier cuts of meat: pork and beef. The owner of the restaurant would hold up two fingers and shake them to say there was no room for someone looking to dine alone. The first time it happened, I glanced around the restaurant and saw several open seats, which made me wonder why it was that business from one customer was made out to be so much worse than no business at all. I realized
A 45-Minute Exercise in Stalling
By Katherine Moncure, ETA ’16-’17 Today is my second day of tutoring with North Korean defectors, and I have absolutely nothing planned. Yes, I know that’s pretty bad. During the week, I teach at an all-girls high school and last week I tutored older students, but today I’m switched to a room with five boys somewhere between ages seven and nine. I’m already sweating. These little boys can barely hold themselves in a chair. I take a deep breath. They ignore me completely, speaking in Korean and wrestling each other as my friend Emma and I try to get their attention. “Okay! Yay! Okay! Hello!” We both have absurd smiles glued to our faces as one of them glances at us, then keeps speaking Korean. Emma and I pat on the desk and their chairs, and a couple more students break their conversations to look toward us. A young Korean woman walks in to help, and she calls them each by name and gets them to be quiet for about 30 seconds. “My name is Katherine! Katherine!” They stare blankly and then gradually slip away. “My name!” I try to shout over them. “My name is Kae-suh-reen! Kae-suh-reen!” “Chicken!” they all laugh. “Chicken chicken!” “Kae-suh-reen!” I reply. But honestly, “chicken” is English so it’s close enough. * Whenever I have a crazy lesson, I always think back to my first time in a formal classroom. It was senior year of college, when I volunteered to teach second graders immersion-style Spanish using a lot of hand motions, repetition and context. Our official training wasn’t until after the first week, so the organizers pulled together a short meeting to make sure we weren’t totally clueless before starting. Still, I felt like I was going in cold. I arrived at school that day to find out that the teacher I was supposed to assist (and the one who had a lesson plan) was in a meeting that day and there was a substitute instead. The substitute teacher was a small, middle-aged woman who sat in the corner of the classroom. “Do you know Spanish?” I asked her. She laughed. “No. Good luck.” Before I had time to react, little kids streamed into the classroom and I could feel my heart rate increase. There were 23 of them, so I figured I could kill 23 minutes on names? * The little boys struggle to move to the carpet, and I quickly realize they cannot stand still in a circle and act like miniature adults, as I assumed they would. I think we can get them to learn Simon Says, and Emma and I start yelling the names of body parts. “Head! Head! Nose! Nooooose!” I shout about my nose as if I’ve just discovered it on my body, right there below my eyes. Sticking it up in the air, I jab it with my pointer finger, momentarily going cross-eyed to look at it. Two boys are still in their chairs—one has completely given up and has his face down on the table, refusing to speak to anyone. Another boy is half on the chair and half on the floor, his feet slowly sliding across the tile. Two kids on the carpet start wrestling again, and one of them pretends to have a gun. I pause from trying to play Simon Says. Oh no, toxic masculinity already setting in. When I look at the boys as a group, they remind me of the musical scene from Charlie Brown Christmas, where all the Peanuts flop around in a weird sort of dance. Except right now, these little boys are pulling at each other’s shirts, and this is not a musical. This is the real life version. I glance at Emma, who seems to be just as lost as I am, and when I turn back to the boys, one of them is on the floor crying. * After finishing “me llamo,” I looked at the 23 little kids on the floor in front of me. I had nothing left, and I had contributed a total of 23 minutes of service to public education. They looked back at me. I looked at the clock. It hadn’t moved much. Someone once told me that a good transition for young kids is standing up or sitting down. “Levántate!” I yelled and motioned with my hands to stand up. Feeling like a magician, I commanded the sea to rise. Once the whole class was up, I paused and said, “Y… siéntate!” They all sat down again. “Levántate!” And up again. “Siéntate!” And down again. “Levántate!… Siéntate!” We kept going like this for a while until some of them started to look confused. Thankfully, I remembered that we did “Simón dice” in our short training meeting. “Quieren jugar Simón dice?” I asked them. “Simón dice! Simón dice!” they chanted. This was an obvious winner. I let them take turns being Simón, but after about 10 minutes they got bored. We stopped, and one girl burst into tears. Apparently, she didn’t get to be Simón. Her scrunched up, tear-streaked face stared me down from across the circle. Uhhhhh, oh god, oh god. I could feel myself getting sweatier now, the magic gone, to the point where I was sure the kids could smell my nervous body odor. Kids can smell fear, right? “Ahh, pobrecita! Estás bien?” She continued to stare at me. “Estás bien?” I repeated, and I did a thumbs up and thumbs down hand motion. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE SAYING!” she shouted across the circle. I shouldn’t speak English, right? That’s not allowed? “Quieres un abrazo?” I held my arms open, gesturing a hug. Reluctantly accepting, she stopped crying. I later found out that hugging students, or touching of any kind, is generally accepted as a Big Time Bad Idea in the United States. Who knew? * Emma checks her watch. 15 minutes to go. The crying boy gets ushered outside by the Korean woman who’s been