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February 27, 2006 >> Basketball
Last weekend I checked out a basketball game with Cindy and her kid in nearby Anyang. The KT & G Flying Kites were playing the KTF Magic Wings, and the team names alone were enough to convince me that Korean basketball was a mindfuck to warrant attention. And the price was definitely right: courtside seats for 10 bucks!
Now there's one key thing you need to know about the KBL (Korean Basketball League... did that acronym really need explanation?). Each and every corporate-sponsored entity has a restriction of two foreigners per team. This makes sense I guess, as a lack thereof would certainly result in 100% imported Africans and basketball would become some weird gladatorial thing. On a side note, I really dig these cultural mandates for protection of an independent Korean lifestyle, from sports to movies to auto economics... Canada could definitely take similar steps to ward off diluting American fingers. But I digress.
Despite the insurance of Korean participation in a Korean basketball league, each game plays out rather hilariously like two matchups running in parallel, interweaved and yet seperate. The black guys score a vast majority of the points and, since they are hugely overpowering, have to guard each other exclusively. This results in a feverish game of foreigner 2 on 2, while the extra Koreans flit around the perimeter of the action, hustling their asses off to run formations and such. I felt a bit sorry for them, since it basically seemed like it was their job to feed the ball around until they could dish it to one of their gigantic teammates waiting in the key.
The crowd waited with baited breath for two treasured rarities: the black guys dunking the ball or, less frequently, one of the Korean players actually scoring a point. The three-point line was a lot closer than it is in North American basketball, and the nets even seemed to be a bit lower. Even with these child's play advantages, I didn't notice any Korean sharpshooter heroes: all they did was pass pass pass to the imports. I hope they've had better days.
We had accidentally seated ourself in the small but vocal cheering section for the Busan KTF team, and a crew of teenaged girls behind me were just nuts. "DICK SUN! DICK SUUUUN!" one would scream hysterically, every few seconds, for a great lazy lout evidently named Dickson. It felt like my ears were being pierced by great big knitting needles so I tried to taunt her every time Dickson screwed up, which was often.
I noticed the foreign players were pretty laid back about the whole game. Oftentimes all four of them would hang back while the Koreans led a rush down the other end, trying to give their teammates a fighting chance to score. They were consumate showmen. One Flying Kites import, Dante Jones, or "Dontae Jone", according to a fan-made banner, was especially great. He kept me in stitches by complaining loudly about foul calls to the ref (who couldn't understand a thing he was saying), and then going to the opposing bench to complain some more to the KTF team (who also had no idea). "Fuck that shit, that's some bullshit man. You hear what I'm saying? Yeah, you know. You know, baby. You know it." Then he would slap hands with them all and go back to the game. I guess you need to have a sense of humour if you're going to be playing ball in exile.
The game had all the usual sporting features gleaned from the NBA: mascots, cheerleaders, fan contests and a halftime show. The Flying Kites mascot was this big dancing bird, which confused me until I realized that sometimes a Kite is a bird and not a kite. As mascots go, he was pretty quality, at least compared to the Magic Wings mascot who was fat and blue and spent most of his time sitting in a folding chair and holding his big anime-style head. He looked retardedly hung over and I really wanted the Kite mascot to fight him, but sadly they seemed to be friends and the Kite even went and got him some water or maybe some soju.
The halftime show was a bunch of elderly folk filling the floor for a stately dance. I thought it wildly inappropriate, sorta like line dancing at the Superbowl, but the Korean crowd seemed to dig the performance and I'm pretty sure there was line dancing at the Superbowl recently, so what do I know? Anyways, there was a shortage of men because some women had to dance with other women dressed like men. It was a little creepy, but they danced and then they stopped dancing and that was that.
In the end, the game ended happily for the locals with Team Dante Jones scoring a bajillion points versus Team Dickson, who only managed to score half a bajillion. Screeching Girl Behind Me left quietly, which was a shame because I wanted to pop a balloon in her ear in retaliatory celebration. I was satisfied with the overall experience because now I've confirmed that basketball is not always basketball as we know it. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, are universally hot.
Posted by Chris at 12:28 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 25, 2006 >> The Funky President Comes to Town
James Brown beamed. He looked like a pickled version of himself, promenading around the stage with a big bobble head. "I love Shanghai!" he revealed, with the air of throwing a benevolent bone to the sizeable crowd arrayed before him. Silence.
Now every performer since the dawn of townships knows that you need to mention your location at least once per show: make the concert feel special, make the crowd cheer in regionalist frenzy. Suck some audience cock for a free roar. Even the shittiest places in the world will get a nod: "Cambridge is... er... Cambridge has... a very nice Coffee Time! The best fucking Coffee Time in Southeastern Ontario!"
James has played this dog-eared card enough times to know what the deal is. Unfortunately for James, telling a bunch of Koreans and ex-pats in Seoul that he loves China just won't do the job. See, Koreans have been fighting to stay independent from China for hundreds of years, so basically they were all like "fuck you, James Brown you negro. Does this look like Shanghai?" The foreigners mostly roared with laughter and catcalled, taking the whole thing as a sign of James' forthcoming decline into senility (the man is almost 80!). And the band played on.
We arrived at the show about forty minutes late, rushing off the Jamsil subway and down past Olympic Stadium, which is still neatly lit up in a fond mausoleum of great days long past. We had only gotten our tickets a few days before, on a whim. They for were the shittiest seats at 55 bucks a pop, but still... I was sure there would be an opening act - I mean, this was James Brown, right? - but nope: James was going full tilt when we got into the venue, all dressed up in a pink suit. The crowd was mostly foreigners, which I could understand. When James Brown was at his peak years ago, Korea was still trying to dig itself out of the ashes of a Japanese occupation and probably didn't have any time for Soul and/or Funk. I could see that lots of Westerners had brought their Korean girlfriends, ostensibly to show them what they'd missed in the glorious heyday of music.
And the music was excellent, for the most part. James had a full-piece band with him, some talented musicians on the horns with some funk in their hearts. He had backup singers with whom he flirted and smiled at disarmingly, and a hot pair of dancers who ran offstage between songs for outfit changes that got skimpier and skimpier as the night slipped by. The Man Himself was subject to a lot of annoying lip service from his ensemble - "Do you want to see James do his thing? *roar* Do you want to see James do his thing?? *roar* Do you want to see. James. Do. His. Thing?? *slightly disgruntled roar*. We know the man is a legend, okay? Let's get to the stuff that made him a legend already.
And, despite his age and misguided sense of current geographical location, James stood up well. He danced, as James Brown is wont to do, and the people loved his shuffle, his running man. He sang and played his keyboard, clearly enjoying every second. He let the spotlight wander away from him for featured solos from his band, cooling his ancient heels. He picked his moments with the careful methodism of a man who knows he doesn't have a whole lot of moments left to pick, and I could appreciate the fact that this particular James Brown simply didn't have the physical ability to dance all night like he once did. But he still had the love, and the memories.
"GET ON UP!" became his spectators' rallying cry, and the timeless refrain from James' biggest hit grew into a climatic conclusion. Korean rave-kids danced wildly in the stands, liquid, fists pumping. A stadium clapped in unison. Energy built and built and built and nobody was sitting and it could go higher, it could... it could... and then it was finished.
It's finished, we were told. At 10:00 PM. There would be no encores, which nobody could believe until the dreaded house-lights came up. The house-lights can be a blessing or a curse at a show depending on good times or bad, circumstance subjective. But one thing is sure about house-lights: they carry the infallable last word in endings, the assurance that no matter how hard you beg for more music, more songs, nobody is listening anymore. So you might as well just go home.
And so we did. Sam was bitter: "Well, he's eighty fucking years old, isn't he? He probably just wants to go back to his hotel room and have a hot chocolate. That's his afterparty now: a hot chocolate. Fuck him." So perhaps we learned something from James and his old bag of tricks that night: no matter how beloved a legend you might be, and regardless of how decrepit, you should always play an encore or Australians will slander you mercilessly.
And Shanghai is not Seoul, okay? Seoul has Soul. Shanghai has slave labour.
Posted by Chris at 08:33 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 23, 2006 >> This Moment in Sports
Korea has some entertaining notions of sport for the Western critic. At first there's the initial blowback of "Whoa, so chicks will hold up freaky little placards of your giant head pasted on a cat's body and scream and weep for you on TV if you're a Starcraft player??" Then you gradually come to accept the fact that geeky boys with emo glasses and emo hair can be princely Cyber-Athletes in the public eye, and the bewildered mind can be freed to roam more enticing pastures.
For example, ass-kicking is very popular. There's K1, a hyped-up kickboxing circuit around Asia. Korea has a local hero at play here, a seven-foot something Andre who is slow as molasses but fearlessly rains down hammering blows on men half his size. Yes, you heard me right: a seven foot tall Korean. His name is some kind of Korean name that I can't remember, but all you ever have to do is say "MONSTER GIANT VERY VERY BIG BOY K1 PUNCHING!" and most Koreans will pick up what you're putting down. They love their very big boy.
Other ass-kicking exhibitions include Pride, in which men will kickbox and grapple enthusiastically, rolling around on top of each other in pursuit of some kind of homoerotic dominance. G5 is more of the same, although G5 fighters are strictly amateur and the whole shenannigan looks like it takes place in a casino backroom. The fights are usually poorly matched and some twenty-second degree black-belt will be fighting a flabby businessman who took some Pilates classes and wants to impress his wife. Extra entertainment is had when the camera flashes to the wife's look of abject disgust as her pitiful spouse is judo-chopped right in the fucking face. Sometimes a white guy will fight and he, too, will be mercilessly chopped and humiliated in some kind of racial super-battle-spectaculaire.
If you don't care for arm bars or low kicks, the Koreans have also taken it upon themselves to freakishly mate volleyball and soccer into a game which is played quite intently between university teams. It's basically (surprise!) volleyball, except instead of that bump set spike donkey-kong, they head and kick the ball like (surprise!) soccer. Basically if volleyball and soccer got wasted on soju one night and had an illegitimate sports lust-child, it would be this game exactly, no mailman surprises.
There are also the ye olde conventional sports in the mix: baseball, basketball and soccer, which is popular everywhere and never forget that or soccer will bomb your house. There's even an inter-Asian hockey league and Anyang, a nearby city, just made it into the playoffs so hopefully I'll get to go heckle a Japanese goalie sometime next month. He will never forget Korea is number one Asian destination for uncouth weigook devil-fans long time!
The great thing about the Korean adaptation of the Great National Sports League (see: NFL, NHL, NBA, that baseball one), is the delightful visage of The Corporation proudly propping up the circus tent for all to see. Beyond the simplistic plastering of stadiums and jerseys with tasteful advertising, the megacorps have inserted their parasitic brand into the very essence of its host. All of Korea's big business players own a slice of sport: they own the goddamn team names.
Lotte Lions, KTF Magic Wings, LG Telecom Twins. The Hyundai Unicorns are playing the Kia Tigers in the Auto Classic tonight, and one of these team names is very gay. What city are these teams from? Who the fuck knows, because all they're ever referred to is by their corporate sponsor! This is very dirty but also very ingenious, because if the Unicorns ever win the Pennant (or Silver Kimchi Victory Bowl, or whatever) then nobody is going to want to parade around cheering "Unicorns are awesome!" They are going to make big banners that say "Hyundai is number one, bitches," and then Hyundai is going to sell lots of cars because they are number one. Unless Kia is number one, in which case they will probably sell more cars. The whole debacle is quite a feat of advertising, anyway. It's a step over the line.
So next year, look for the breakout Clemensonline Donkeysliders to make waves in Pacific Rim equestrian sporting events, and possibly Counterstrike if our ping times are good.
Posted by Chris at 11:59 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 19, 2006 >> Graduation Day
Welcome all to Graduatation Day
A day that seemed so far away
But now we're here
And now we fear
That we must go.
Thus began one of the ten trillion speeches delivered at the kindergartner graduation ceremony: a speech penned by yours truly, requitely stamped with a tinge of my underhanded pessimism and delivered by students who didn't know what the fuck it meant. They only knew that unholy wrath would fall upon their heads if they messed up, so they memorized and spewed at the appropriate time and the parents clapped and our showboat left the dock.
Jessica is a chronic scowler in photographs. She very much looks like she wants to assassinate Sue's ear, in the leftmost picture there, but sadly she never got the chance. There will be no more Jessica stories; the tomboy fights her gender battles elsewhere now. She's vanished, off to another hagwon, and that pisses me off because the weird kids are always the best.
I was also pseudo-mad when I saw that the kids got those rad square tasselly hats - mortarboards, I believe the lingo goes - because at our commencement last summer, a graduation from university, there were no cubic hats! There were no tassles! Looking back, I see now that we fell far short of the Perfect Memory mark: mortarboards are, I think, extremely necessary to score that elusive 100% Stereotypical Graduation Percentile. I think we should outsource our graduations to the Koreans in the future, because they know how to do these things right. Or ridiculously over the top, at least.
Ridiculousness case in point: midway through the ceremony all the staff performed a carefully choreographed dance, a dance that we had practiced for weeks in varying stages of tension. We basically had to look cool in a Rat-Packish way, despite the fact that we were doing spin tricks with plastic hats. Amusingly enough, the spectacle was set to 'Hit the Road, Jack', which is contextually paramount to telling these alumni children to get the hell out, we're done with thee. Luckily, the parents were suitably distracted by snapping fingers and elaborate footwork and Director Lifts in Tandem... plus none of them understand English. The prancing went well, but I'll never quite shake my bafflement at managerial perception that thinks an amazing day for the hagwon is a day when the teachers successfully dance like trained monkeys in bowler hats.
In the end, it was all appearance as usual, but an appearance that pulled more than the usual incredulous revulsion on my part. I felt something between sad and happy, my heart somewhere in the middle of that great grey divide between the lighthouse points of emotion that English can adequately convey.
There was everything you might expect. There were performances and songs, pomp and circumstance, flashback films and flowers. There were honkin' big head shots of all the graduating kids smiling down from above, thirteen unknowing little deities. There were pictures and pictures and video and pictures, and I felt a strange twinge when I gave each child their customized award - BEST HELPER! BEST ORAL ABILITY! - because they were so grave, so solemn and perfect in the saddest way possible.
It was something I don't think I can ever forget.
Posted by Chris at 10:26 AM >> Commentations (6) | Permalink
February 16, 2006 >> Mike coined the term 'mak-o-lait', not me
This guy in particular was super rad... he sported a rotten bandaged thumb which he waved about with enthusiasm and often rubbed sensually up and down Dave's unreceptive arm. When Mr. Pig tried to give him the boot, he thought we were being told to leave and argued vehemently and drunkenly on our behalf. We watched him firmly grasp a scalding hot water pipe no less than three times as he wheeled around the bar, jerking his hand back with a shout each time. But he didn't learn a thing, because within minutes he'd be reaching for that pipe again despite our cries of warning. The whole encounter was a hideous and hilarious exercise in natural selection, and the weakest link had his thumb bandaged for a reason. I wished I had some candy or moldy bread or something to give him, but we only had tin kettles full of milky booze and it was quite clear that he would find some way to set himself on fire if we liquored him up any further.
So he left, and then we left too, and then a saucerful of space-giraffes made me their leader.
Posted by Chris at 10:16 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
February 15, 2006 >> Wist
Wow weblog, you and me aren't really friends any more. Once this teaching madness ends, we'll move out to the suburbs and the kids can play in the yard and we'll plant junipers and laugh just like the good old days.
Lunar New Year Road Trip gallery.
Posted by Chris at 10:37 AM >> Commentations (0) | Permalink
February 08, 2006 >> Numba One Stunna
I'm watching the best documentary IN THE WHOLE WORLD and it's called Stop Snitchin, Stop Lyin and it's all about esteemed wesssssiide spitter The Game saying "Tony Yayo's a FAGGOT man, that nigga is whack," and The Game is perpetually fried and he hates 50 Cent! And now The Game is soliciting hatred for G-Unit on the streetz, getting his homies to say "G-G-G-G U-NOT!" and they are also saying that Tony Yayo is a fag. The best part is how The Game talks about how 50 Cent is one-dimensional and then he spends the better part of an hour calling the G-Unit gay in various states of stonedness, and he doesn't know what the "big word" montage means, and the whole niggaish DVD is so infantile that I can't believe I downloaded this shit for free.
Another thing: I'll never understand how Bono, a drunken Irishman, does more for African aid than the entire African-American hip hop community combined. Giant platinum chains aren't going to feed the kids!
Posted by Chris at 07:44 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 05, 2006 >> The Makolay and the Museum
I had a rather cultural weekend, which is good because I've been getting a little tired of hanging out with little kids by day and getting smashed at night. I mean, I still like those things but sometimes a boy wants more, y'know?
Saturday I tooled down to the Suwon Fortress with Belinda and Sam in Dook's rumble-van. Our interaction with the fortress itself was minimal, limited to driving around the outer walls and saying things like "Where the hell is this place?" We were on a very special mission, you see, a mission to find the Ultimate Eatery. And so we did, passing by a giant bronze emperor sitting serenely on the cusp of Suwon, benevolently watching over his hotbed town of neon and industry. He had the fortress locked down: we had more immediate goals in mind.
The eatery itself, as it turned out, was a ragtag half-basement operated by an immensely fat man in combat fatigue pants. A tiny, masterfully hidden, screen door granted us entry and we crouched through to find an abode housing three small tables. And it was awesome! The walls were decorated with guns and parasols and used grenades and masks and American Confederate propaganda and a giant wooden penis. The screen door featured a story about how it had been constructed by seven men, at 100 000 won apiece, with extra charges for soju snacks and fish along the way. Thusly, the door declared, the grand total cost for damaging it would be about 750 dollars. So we didn't smash the door.
Our big-bellied host fried us up some delicious kimchi pancakes and we drank milk-white liquor, called mak-o-lay, out of prison-style metal bowls. Mak-o-lay, as I have crudely phoneticized, is a rice-booze similar to bekseju but had the curious property of making its imbiber feel more stoned than drunk. This makes it vastly superior to bekseju in my eyes, especially because bekseju is gross and sucks the bag. There we were: me, Belinda, Sam and Dook, giggling to ourselves like schoolgirls, liqui-fried out of our skulls. It was surreal to the max.
Then the Fat Man's posse dropped by, all smashed on soju, and we proceeded to have a good 'ol time with liberal interpretation services from Dook. All of them were former yangachi, or gangsters: aging men with fading jailhouse-style tattoos on their forearms and diamond rings on their fingers. They were bang-up guys, too, and two of them kept insisting on cramming pieces of raw fish into my mouth. Because I was pseudo-stoned, I could say mashi-issyo (it's delicious!) and honestly mean it. The posse ribbed the Fat Man endlessly ("Hey fat pig, do you have any fish today?"), which he took with stoic good grace, and whenever he went back to the kitchen to perform food services the most spry of the yangachi would leap to his feet and slyly refill our mak-o-lay bowls. "Sur-viss-uh" he would say, with a wink.
"Service" in Korea basically means "give me some free shit" and, as a general rule, you should say "service" whenever conducting even the most menial transaction in hopes of landing some extra prize. Well, we landed plenty of free mak-o-lay and while we drank, a few down-and-out adashi came down into the eatery and the Fat Man hooked them up with some free soju and a handful of weirdo seaweed grub and a few ribald insults about penis size. We finally left our laughing, wasted ex-gangster friends behind and took a brief look at the fortress walls before heading home, fully intending to return for mak-o-lay redonkulousness at a later date.
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On Sunday I was planning to sit around and shake off a hangover garnered from several Korean army fellows who crashed our poker game and forced me to shoot soju with them the night before, but Chad and Jen thankfully offered a more culturally stimulating pathway: the National Museum of Contemporary Art. We subbed it over to Seoul Grand Park and made our way past Seoul Land, which looked like a pretty crappy excuse for an amusement park. It was like Santa's Village, maybe, or what would happen if you took all the rollercoasters and fun rides out of Canada's Wonderland and then beat every arriving guest with a bamboo switch. So we judged and strolled and judged and before we knew it, the museum rose before us majestically and a giant fucking robot was guarding the entranceway.
This robot statue was especially freaky because its huge mechanical jaw would creak open at intervals and the thing would start singing, some kind of queer siren song which, if one listened long enough, would surely convince you to assassinate the president or maybe buy seventeen souvenir shirts at the museum shop. So we rushed by warily and, after briefly stopping to help some statuesque Koreans push at a big mirror ball, entered the accultured halls of the National Museum of Contemporary Art.
Contemporary, for the most part, means a hodgepodge of retarded modernism drivel and postmodern WHY DID WE DO THAT?? The first sight we beheld was a massive circular bank of television screens, spiraling up and up and up forever. Each display featured a psychedelic seizure of global images and flashes of colour. The overall effect was quite impressive, and I wondered whether I could perhaps tune this armageddon of television to something useful like, say, the Leafs game. Sadly, art is never useful and we wandered onwards.
There were some interesting one-colour reliefs depicting Korean military nationalism and many traditional scroll-scapes of sages on mountaintops, contemplating some shit. Every time I tried to take a picture, a well-dressed museuwoman would rush over and say something in Korean, most likely asking for a spoonful of porridge or demanding my opinion on interstellar warfare. It got annoying, so I eventually ceased and desisted my futile efforts to photograph the galleries.
It was probably just as well, anyway. Most of the art was pretty kife nonsense: a clutter of tangled chicken-wire entitled "TIME", for example, or a big posterboard of black squares entitled "TIME". Apparently time is a popular subject for meaningless abstract representation, along with "THE ORIGINS OF EVERYTHING". I am thinking of creating a postmodern "TIME" of my very own by throwing several rolls of Bounty toilet paper down a staircase into a sizeable pile of broken glass, filming it, and displaying my masterwork backwards on an old Colecovision monitor that's been smeared in maple syrup and smashed up with an authentic paganist ankh. HOLY SHIT THAT'S ART!
There were some fairly thought-provoking pieces, however. One of my favourites was a hi-definition vertical screen alone in a black room, playing a silent slow-motion loop of a crowd of people jostling for position in the camera spotlight. The darkness of the room and the quality of the display demanded attention, and I found it fascinating to watch the interactions and body language of each person in the 'film': making up backstories for their apparent joy or sadness or indifference, watching the way they brushed past each other and held hands and looked back at the camera as if to ask who we were. It was a surprisingly engaging piece, for a technologically-driven exhibit.
Lots of Korean contemporary art seemingly revolves around the (mis)appropriation of technology. One bizarre display featured a split log with several rocks bouying up a small television set, upon which flickered a static image of a rock. Seated on the ground in front of the television, seemingly watching the motionless display was - you guessed it - a rock. A rock watching a TV show about a rock on a TV that was held up by rocks. The show looked pretty boring to me, but I guess if you were a rock then it would probably be like MTV, right?
One of my favourite non-tech exhibits was this business-pig and his fishy wife. Of course, the pig has a fountain pen in his breast pocket and one can't help but think of Orwell's Animal Farm and its accompanying anti-capitalist ideology, but yo, what's with the trout woman? Is this some kind of reverse mermaid dealie, a sly commentary on the true scent of a woman? If it is, at least one Korean artist is a dirty, hilarious bastard. Also notice that the pig is imperiously turning its head away, out of reach of the kissy affections of his aquatic lover. Perhaps this is a critique of the Korean work ethic and the subsequent damper it inflicts on intimate relationships? Man, who knows, it's an alabaster semi-fish kissing an alabaster pig in a suit. This thing is so fucked it could really go anywhere.
We only got about a third of the way through the galleries before we were kindly and firmly booted from the premises by Closing Time and a maddening tune played over the museum loudspeakers. The welcome robot was silent during our exit, his subliminality sung out. I wasn't concerned. What we had seen was definitely enough sustinence to last a while - further culturing should be quite unnecessary for the next few weeks. Eritis sicut dii. Philistine I am.
Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
>> Interjection and Invasion
I've discovered that I can only write for myself as a diversion from something more pressing. That something, on this eve, is the formulation of many sycophantic comments for the parents of outgoing kindergartners, so they can beam with joy at how far their babies have come. Or at least they would beam, except most of them can't read English so I feel like I'm wasting my time. I guess they can beam at all the unnecessarily long words I've been using. Bigger is better, right?
I'm sad to see them leave though (the kindys, not the parents). I suppose I'll even be sad to see some of the parents go, such as Sue's mom who I've had frequent weekly battles with through the Role Book. She never responds to my formulaic banter, so for a while I started writing absolute trash for my own personal amusement. Stuff like: "Sue is a Valkyrie of the true Nordic soul, a pioneer down the long dry path of Role Play achievement and a sassy character to boot!" So then we get in a drawn-out mock-fight over how I don't make any sense and who's sassier, me or Sue, and Sue's mom writes me a tongue-in-cheek poem about how Eastern wisdom kicks the shit out of Western wisdom. A few weeks later I have a super busy week and scribble out my comments with my monkey handwriting, and she writes back asking me if I had to go to the bathroom or something and insinuates that her kid writes better than I do. This is all in Korean, by the way, translated by a snickering Cindy or Elisa. So I respond to Sue's mom's grave accusations with gigantic penciled letters and infantile sentences about DID YOU HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND? and our scrap continues with winking happy faces and the occasional jab or two. I enjoy it very much and now it's going away.
And I still have to write these awful parent conference comments. Like I said, I'll be sad to see these children go - the graduating kids are pretty much my kids. My entire homeroom is rushing on to bigger and better things in the looming world of elementary school. I suppose it's nice to have a job where things are changing so constantly - keeps you out of the formidable clutches of Routine - but still.
I feel that I should inform the external world about the atrocity known in the blackest circles as dong shim. This, my friends, is a rather Korean phenomenon whereby a small child will take their index fingers, put them together, and ram them up a teacher's ass as hard as they can. Yes, you read correctly. The kids have a name for forced anal intrusion, and it is a name which can strike fear into the hearts of even the most seasoned ESL teachers. I, myself, have been fairly lucky in evading this fate: the children at Herald are mostly discouraged from such practices and I can only remember a couple times when I was violated. I'm told that it means the kid likes you, but I really don't know if I can believe in a culture where fingers go in the ass as a sign of respect and admiration and love. Except maybe Amsterdam, I dunno.
So yeah, the dong shim hasn't been much of a factor for me but Chad has quite a few humorous sob-stories. The best I've heard so far was a brutal victimization of Matt who, until that fateful day, had largely escaped the probing of students' happy fingers. It was an orchestrated effort, a gang-rape, and as one boy feigned intellectual ignorance and Matt leaned over to help him, two more lads pinioned his hands to the desk and a fourth gleefully ran up behind, pointed fingers a-jabbin'. Once! Twice! Three times an invasion! The dong shim had struck again, and Matt spent the rest of the day crying in the bathroom and the rest of the week wearing an extra-chunky diaper for protection. Incoming ignorants to Korea, beware the dong shim!
Posted by Chris at 09:33 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
February 04, 2006 >> New Year Number 2: Korean Kung-Fuery
It's a bit surreal, ringing in the New Year and then doing it a second time roughly one month later but the vacational rewards are paramount. Another bonus was some mad cultural expose in the form of little kids in silk pajamas bowing their noses to the floor.
Traditional Korean clothing is called hanbok. For women, an acceptable hanbok look for the 2006 Winter Collection is a long, billowing silky skirt which isn't too flattering and generally makes its inhabitant look quite plump. The hanbok is adorned with ribbons and intricate baubles, presumably to draw attention away from the fatness of the dress. The younger girls get to wear rad little hats too. On the testosterone side, a hanbok suit consists of a satin shirt, a vest and an over-jacket, most featuring some kind of ornate pattern in gold or silver. The pants are like kung-fu pants and wearing them seems to make kids want to high-kick each other in the face. Young boys also wear hats with this ensemble, but they look like pirate hats. Pirates are so totally in right now.
So I've seen these get-ups before, for Chusok, but this time around I was waylaid and forced into a suit myself which was cruelly purloined from Molly's dad. I guess most adults have several hanbok outfits: "Hmmm... what am I doing for 2006? The red salamanders or the dancing blue monkeys smoking opium pipes?" Apparently what Molly's dad wasn't feeling this holiday season was PINK, because a full set of pink pajamas laid in wait for me and I was hustled into my silk pig-suit before the terror had time to set in.
I kicked around a bit and complained, even though I got a blue vest to put over top, but there wasn't much time to whine because the kids quickly came pouring in and there were ribbons to be tied and tassles to admire and little hats to steal. For girls, the predominent colours seemed to be red and white while boys wore the regalities of gold and deep cyan (and pink). Every child had a little waist pouch in which to keep their booty.
In Korea, major holidays are cherried by children receiving cash swag from their grandparents and family, which the little gnomes promptly stash away in their secret bags. From what I know, the homestead routine goes like this: Kids bow their faces to the floor in a show of respect, elders chuckle and dispense the goods. Younger bows to older, inferior to superior. It's a telling ritual, a rare visible inbreak into the hierarchical pyramid scheme that dominates Korean society just beyond Western eyes.
Following the New Year, I compiled class data regarding just how much currency was collected. It was sorta like "What did you get for Christmas?" where the poor kids sit sadly in their hand-knitted Christmas socks and the rich kids try to one-up each other with just how materially their parents love them. Oh the gloating: "Teacher, teacher, I get many moneys!" No, you dumb donkey... you got lots of money. Past tense! Last weekend! Not many! Lots!
I think having multiple words for excess really confuses them. It confuses me too, now that I really think about it. Why did we bloat English so gluttonously? Probably because our forefathers weren't blessed with the wonderous sensations of silky pink pants like the Koreans had, and the Olde English were wearing itchy burlap codpieces and thought, "Man this fucking sucks, let's make up some new words for suckage. Horrific! Terrible! Intolerable!" And it was so, and so forth and so on until there was a word for every kind of discomfort known to man, but nobody knew how to stop inventing new words and now here we are, overflowing. Ubiquitous.
But anyway, sorry I'm insane, and the point was that the kiddie cash intakes were typically between 50 and 150 thousand won, with SuperSmartSally coming out on top with a cool 250 grand. That seems like a lot until you realize that you drop 3 zeroes in conversion and it's only 250 dollars and also it's not really hers to spend on violent manga comic books or Korean boy band CDs or whatever she wants; the money is usually squirreled away by the parents for further education or a nice dinner (for them) in Seoul. So yeah, even the poor kids on Christmas have a sweeter deal than this, but nobody knows it and the gloating continues accordingly.
Now let's return to way back when I was wearing those pink pants and learning to bow in a traditional Korean manner: right hand over left, palms planted on the floor, gracefully face down. I was not graceful and I bashed my knee and my kids tried to pull my hair, but goddamn if I didn't make an effort. And then the grand hierarchy came into play and all the children bowed to us teachers and we solemnly presented them with a crisp, new, unfolded 1000 won bill which is the custom. Except mine were folded because I had kept them in my pocket.
Finally the teachers lined up to bow to our director who presided, grinning hawklike, over the fealty and thankfully it was over fast. We were compensated with an envelope containing naked pictures of Kim Jong-Il, which is not, in fact literal but a brand-new English metaphor and slang for "money" - we got money in the envelope of course - and I just made up my own diction because that's what English is all about: fucking around and making serious foreigners pay to glimpse at the rules.
Posted by Chris at 06:53 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 01, 2006 >> Snow Sled is Yes!
As I've mentioned before, one thing I really dig about my hagwon are the 'field trips'. For the January edition of portable learning, we trekked all the kids out to a local hill, or Mega Sledding Emporium, which sounds much cooler, and demanded that they hurl themselves down a treacherous icy slope over and over again. The educational merits of such a life-endangering task are suspect, but I suspect the kids learned a lesson or two about not falling out of inner-tubes and the dire consequences of throwing snowballs at teachers.
The kindergartners were fun. I camped at the top of the incline and shoved other kids out of the way so our precious babies didn't have to wait in line. Herald first, bitches! Some of the smaller ones were scared so we rode with them. I don't know about the other teachers, but I'm pretty sure I made the whole experience more terrifying by screaming things in their ear the whole way down, things like "AAAH! NOOOO! WE'RE FALLING OUT! WE'RE GOING TO DIE, ESTHER! ARE YOU READY TO DIE??" Most of them were all like "Hells no" and wouldn't ride with me again, but I think a select few enjoyed our whimsical brushes with mortality.
Something I've always found hilarious about children is the way they look all dressed up in snow gear. You know what I mean: the bundled-up marshmallow kid who can't put his arms down by his side because he's wearing eight layers of jackets and has to waddle around, arms akimbo, like a penguin? Well imagine a whole squadron of such inadvertant buffoons trying to struggle up a hill; clumsily grasping the straps of their inner-tubes, falling down and losing their mittens, trying to kick each other in the back of the knees because they're pissed off. I was losing it - everywhere I turned there were children slipping and sliding and tumbling and crying and looking ludicrously fat. I took pity every once in a while and dragged a handful up the ramp while they sat imperiously in their sleds and looked around at other kids as if to say, "Check out pimp ride is mine! I school have Western slaves... do you got Western slave? Think no, biatch!"
We've been working more on ebonics than grammar lately.
The locale itself was pretty ghetto: a half-assed circus tent and a bunch of staff members in red jackets sitting around a hobo campfire. Some of the older children got lost in a sea of dirty food huts and had to be dragged away from their noodles; some of them saw the circus show and were tight-lipped about the probable atrocities witnessed within. There was an inflatable bouncing castle. It was generally agreed, by the foreigners, that the Mega Sledding Emporium was pretty kife and didn't deserve the name Mega Sledding Emporium, which works out well because I just made that name up and it sorta sucks anyway upon reflection and the sledding place's actual name was really a jumble of Korean symbols which meant something like "Yo here is some sledding for poor folk!"
The other major activity for the kids, beyond the glorious incandescence of snow sledding, was sitting on an old wooden board and scooting around on the ice by jamming two sticks topped with rusty nails into the frost and lurching forwards. I'm totally serious. Look!
So this was an utterly retarded bit of tomfoolery, but we had fun with it by pushing the kids around super-fast and ramming them into each other like bumper cars. I was a little surprised that nobody took a nail in the eye, but they have really poor motor skills. They'll get better at impaling when they're older. Anyway, they managed to injure themselves quite nicely by falling down so many times, and it was a battered and bruised cadre of children that were sent back to their mothers. The key point was that they were still smiling at the end of the day, and learned a valuable bonus lesson along the way about the temporary nature of pain. So I guess the field trip was worthwhile.
The older kids were fun too. They, being better versed in the cruel ways of life, were able to inflict and withstand many snowborne assaults over the course of the day. I was hit in the face by innumerable snowballs and kicked many inner-tubes down the hill in retaliation. It was all in good fun though, and teacher and student alike banded together to form a juggernaut wall of downwards motion which swept aside the frantic whistle-blowing of the hill attendant. Being older, the afternoon children were also heavier, and that precious attribute lent itself well to devastating collisions and DNA-like strands of mobile assault squadrons clinging to each others' tubes as we all screamed down the incline.
We got in trouble numerous times, but played the stupid Westerner card over and over again, even after our students worriedly informed us, "They say stop holding on... five time now! They say five time! Is danger!" Is danger, indeed! The stupid Westerner card is like a platinum VISA of unrestrictable fun, an immunity to rule and regulation and cultural more alike. In the end, every affronted Korean just shakes their head and wonders how idiots like us got into the country, while we gleefully get our way and continue acting like idiots.
It's a pretty nice setup, if you happen to be an idiot.
Posted by Chris at 08:46 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink