Korea and Taiwan: Classroom Moments
Memorable Classroom Moments from Korea and Taiwan In both Korea and Taiwan, the Fulbright ETA grant year has come to a close. Some ETAs have said their goodbyes, while others are staying on with Fulbright for a second or even third year. Regardless, the end of a grant year always invites reflection. Here, Korea and Taiwan ETAs share their most memorable moments from the classroom and stories they know they’ll still be telling in five years. — All of my students chose their own English names the first week of class. Among the names were Kentucky, Fried, Chicken (yes, they all sat next to each other), Blue and Orange (they were dating), Pikachu, Larva, Adele, Sam Smith, and Beyonce. One of my 2nd grade high school students chose the name Obama. Flash forward to the next semester. I no longer taught Obama because he was a 3rd grade high school student. I saw him one day and asked him to remind me of his Korean name because I felt weird yelling Obama across school all the time. He said, “Kim.” I repeated, “Kim.” “Ba.” I repeated, “Ba.” “Ma.” – Monica Mehta, ETA 2015-2016 Naju, Jeollanam-do, South Korea My second-graders came to class one day and said, “Good afternoon” to me in Vietnamese. I am Vietnamese-American; I came to Taiwan to teach English and American culture, and ended up learning from my students the true meaning of intercultural understanding. – Chloe, ETA 2015-2016 Taitung City, Taitung County, Taiwan [I’ll always remember] seeing the excitement in the students’ faces when we learned about the fifty states and seeing them try to find the states on a US map. After that lesson, every time they came into my classroom, they would run up to the US map and try to find another state before we started our lesson of the day. It was great to see them genuinely interested in learning about how each state is different and unique. – Kristin Krzic, ETA 2015-2016 Iksan, Jeollabuk-do, South Korea Given the flexibility of my school, the administration often let me create my own activities. While on Jinmen, I collaborated with a number of musicians and eventually started a band with three other friends. Our music was, shall we say, against the Jinmenese traditional grain. We played punk music. On Mother’s Day, we held a performance for students and their families at Shumei (my school). I was deathly afraid that the music would be too abrasive for the young learners, but once we started playing a song we wrote about Mother’s Day, the crowd began clapping on time and some of the students were nodding their heads. At the end we gave out our band’s stickers. Even today, I see our stickers on my students’ water bottles, bags, and other items. Cultural exchange through music, passion, and unspoken tones had a profound impact on our process of understanding each other. The beauty of the Fulbright program is that it allows ostensibly irreconcilable differences to be mitigated through creative engagement and artistic dialogue. – Oliver Thomas, ETA 2015-2016 Shamei, Jinmen County, Taiwan It is not a specific story, but what I will still be saying about teaching in five years is that your students, no matter age or where in the world, will always make your experience. They will challenge and frustrate you beyond belief, but they will also make you smile when they finally understand the material and laugh on the days you need most. – Alessa Strelecki, ETA 2015-2016 Sejong City, South Korea One ordinary Monday morning, I was preparing to teach a second grade dance-themed English class. Right before doing the morning greeting, I realized that each of my 30 giggling second graders had a balloon stuffed under the shirt of their school uniforms. When I questioned one little boy, he responded “I’m having a baby,” and proudly rubbed his little balloon belly. I didn’t ask any more questions. Once it was time to dance, I turned on the music and encouraged the students to stand up and move around. Suddenly 30 little blue balloons were flying in the air. In complete chaos, the students desperately tried to find their precious babies and stuff them back under their shirts. In that moment, I stopped taking myself so seriously and started to just go with the flow. – Sheridan Baker, ETA 2015-2016 Taichung, Taiwan The first time I heard the song “Cheer Up” by TWICE, I thought during the chorus they were singing “Shut up, baby” instead of “Cheer up, baby.” During a pronunciation lesson I used this as a little example of “why 발음 (bareum, meaning “pronunciation”) really matters” …And the students thought it was hilarious. Now I hear them shout-singing in the halls all the time, “SHUT UP BABYYYYYY.” – Mo Kinsinger, ETA 2015-2017 Mokpo, Jeollanam-do, South Korea During one of my first classes, a male student loudly declared that he “touches man parts!” and eagerly waited for my reaction. In a stroke of calm genius, I turned and wrote three letters on the board: TMI. “Do you know what this means?” I won that round. – Monica Heilman, ETA 2014-2016 Busan, South Korea I was talking with one of my fourth grade girls, and all of a sudden she said “Wait” and she slapped me on the forehead. I was taken aback, and even more shocked when she drew her hand back to show me that it was covered in blood. “蚊子” (mosquito) she said, and then we both started laughing. – Matthew Noah Baker, ETA 2015-2016 Taichung, Taiwan The one story I’ll be sharing five years from now is just being there to listen to students. One day, one of my 6th grade boys who speaks great English and is well-mannered stayed behind class and told me he needed to talk to me about something. He said “I cannot show this to my mom or sister. But this is
How I Learned to Be Confident in Korea
I learned how to be confident in Korea, holding my head high, high heels announcing my presence, steps echoing in a still-quiet subway station. I learned how to be confident in Korea starting with lip tint – for the moisturizer, then lipstick – it was a gift, now BB cushions, oil cleanser, concealer, and double lash mascara. I learned how to be confident in Korea hearing unearned affirmations praise for physical traits previously disregarded an anthem now follows in my wake: Small face Small face Small face Your face is SO small! I learned when confidence fails me in Korea, when despite heat and oil, my hair stretches her frizz high and wide rebelling at the worst time, on a morning missing mascara. When the office is quiet, save for a hello or two, critical eyes pass over my hair, face, body and say nothing. Yet in crucial moments, a warrior emerges sword lifted high against stereotypes, gender roles and fat-shaming rhetoric – relics of my code of honor. False confidence shed and armor donned, I catch battles at every turn, from bus to lunchroom, in sight-seeing and church-going but I in my righteous fight am far outnumbered. The warrior retreats. So I slip back into my new confidence, and on a day when I’m dressed up nice, I slide open the office door and announce my presence, counting down the seconds until the first compliment confirming that I am indeed Beautiful. Monica Heilman is a 2014-2016 ETA at Yeongdo Girls’ High School in Busan. She previously taught at Gimhae Jeil High School in Gimhae, Gyeongsangnam-do.
No Longer Silent: The Adopted Diaspora’s Return to Korea
No Longer Silent: The Adopted Diaspora’s Return to Korea By Catherine Ceniza Choy South Korea plays a central role in the history of international and transracial adoption. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the phenomenon has spanned six decades and involved over 200,000 Korean children adopted by families in Western nations. Given its long duration, Korean adoptees comprise multiple generations. They are older as well as younger adults. They have founded organizations in the diaspora to provide resources specifically for adoptees. And they have paved the way for what has become a more common experience of returning to Korea to tour the motherland, to attempt to reunite with birth families, and to live on a long-term basis. In a January 2015 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea,” writer Maggie Jones highlights Laura Klunder’s visit to Seoul in the summer of 2010 when she was 26 years old. Klunder joined more than 500 other Korean adoptees from around the world for an annual event known as the Gathering. At this event, Klunder heard fellow adoptee Kim Stoker give a lecture about “belonging” in South Korea. Jones writes: Raised in Colorado and Virginia, Stoker has lived in South Korea for 15 years and has the maternal presence of someone who has held the hands of many 20-something adoptees during their first months in Seoul. Living there is the most meaningful thing she has done in her life, she says. “We didn’t have a choice about what happened to us,” she told me, referring to adoptees being taken from their country. “So to come back, to live on your own terms. . . .” she said. “I do really feel like these are my kin.” By the end of Stoker’s talk, Klunder felt, as she put it, “invited to come back.” And before leaving South Korea that week, she decided that she would return to live there. In the twenty-first century, the impact of several hundred returning Korean adoptees on their homeland is profound. Klunder’s individual journey is part of a collective experience inspired and forged by other Korean adult adoptees who have returned to Korea seeking belonging in their country of origin. Korean adoptee leadership and participation in organizations such as G.O.A.’L (Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link) and spaces like the guesthouse KoRoot enable and facilitate this experience. What happens when the adopted Korean diaspora returns to the homeland beyond a temporary visit? How does this phenomenon change the sending nation? Among the hundreds of adoptees who have returned are writers and visual artists. What might artistic production by and about Korean international adoptees who have returned to live in Korea say about the history and contemporary state of international adoption? These are some of the preliminary questions that undergird what I hope will be a chapter of a new book project tentatively titled “No Longer Silent: Asian International Adoption and Cultural Production.” “No Longer Silent” is inspired by the presence of Korean adoptees in my Asian American Studies classes in the United States and Korea, and the research I conducted for my book Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America that was published by NYU Press in 2013. In Global Families, I argue that we must pay attention to the voices and experiences of Asian adoptees in order to understand the complexity of international adoption. Yet, unlike social workers and adoptive parents, adoptees’ voices and perspectives are noticeably absent in most archives about international adoption. As several generations of Korean adoptees in Western nations have come of age, cultural expression comprises one productive site for the documentation and dissemination of their experiences. Since the 1990s, the emergence of a sizable body of artistic work by and about Asian adoptees has challenged the representation of Asian international adoption as a “quiet migration.” Global Families’ final chapter, “To Make Their Own Stories Historical,” features close readings of the documentary films, First Person Plural and In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee, written and directed by filmmaker and Korean adoptee Deann Borshay Liem. I chose to focus on Deann Borshay Liem’s films in the book for a very specific reason. My archival methodology primarily mined the records of the non-governmental organization, the International Social Service-United States of America (ISS-USA) Branch, a pioneering social service organization that facilitated international adoptions, but advocated for a different approach to the handling of these adoptions in contrast to the more well-known work of Oregon farmer and adoption advocate Harry Holt. Because the ISS-USA arranged Borshay Liem’s adoption, and because her films analyze the prominent role that organizational records played in her life history as a Korean adoptee in the United States, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee offer a direct and provocative link between ISS-USA organizational records and one of its adoptees speaking back as an adult. Such links are difficult to find as adoption case records typically do not provide longer, continuous accounts of the adoption after placement. However, Deann Borshay Liem’s films are only a few examples of adoptee cultural production. While they document a history of Korean international adoption, they do not represent the diversity and dynamics of adoptee experience. My hope is that “No Longer Silent” will illuminate a larger, multivocal conversation about adoption through close readings of artistic work by and about adoptees, and oral interviews with other filmmakers, visual artists, performance artists, and writers. An illuminating example of such artistic expression is Jane Jeong Trenka’s 2009 memoir Fugitive Visions. Fugitive Visions defies simple categorization. It is at once a personal memoir upon her sixth return visit to Korea; a poetic ethnography of the collective experiences of returning adoptees who chose to live in Korea on a long-term basis; and a call for recognition of the racism and physical and psychological violence experienced by Korean adoptees in Korea as well as abroad. In Fugitive Visions, Jeong Trenka bears witness to returning Korean adoptees’ unique homesickness, one that