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Sam just told me, in her mildly sardonic way, to "blog it up, mate," and so I'm doing just that. Blogging it up. Mate.

I figured I'd hit Halloween before it gets stale (damn these time-context sensitive holiday postings!) so let's get started before I blink twice and the Christmas decorations are up.

One thing you should know about my school is that the director is incredibly obsessed with big-I Image. We regularly put on shows for the kids' parents, not because they actually teach the kids English but because Mrs. Kim likes to imagine that she is the ringleader of some kind of spectacular trained monkey circus. If image is everything and thirst is nothing, Herald Kids School is Sprite. Cider. They call it Cider here. It's quite tasty.

Anyways, the school bows to the will of the parents because they fork out the cash. Mrs. Kim thinks the parents want flashy dog n' pony shows from their kids because she's so image-centric. The teachers are thusly required to command the kids to sing and dance for holiday events. The kids will inevitably suck at singing and/or dancing and/or bashing a tambourine against their leg. The parents glare at us and wonder why they're paying so much money to watch their children shuffle around like fucking idiots. The teachers wonder the same thing. Mrs. Kim smiles broadly and says that it went well, when it obviously did not. Stir and repeat.

Halloween was stirred as such, and trick or treating apparently provided the ultimate Eagle-Eye Parental Supervision holiday opportunity. And so the children arrived Halloween morning, each dressed in a stereotypical Halloween costume:

-pirate
-Dracula
-pumpkin
-Disney princess
-ghost
-some kind of weird Clockwork Orange thing, her mom must've been drunk

I was a Mexican.

Anyways, we played some games and it was all good. I got to put blindfolds on kids, spin them around in circles and aim them towards the open window. The ones with friends watching usually managed to turn the right way and successfully pin the head on the skeleton with a little help. The ones who came alone... well... yeah. It's a long way down. And they had big bags of candy. That I wanted.

Fortunately, the parents were in good spirits and many an elderly grandmother or would-be trendy mom took a festive picture of me and their kid - or their kid's corpse. And then came the trick or treating.

We had prearranged some local stores to give candy to the kids (candy which we gave them beforehand). Most businesses that we asked to help out refused, saying that we would kill their business and defile their uncle's tomb and turn their merchandise communist. But an elite group of ten places agreed, and so we marched the children, military-style, down the streets of Sanbon with their doting mothers in tow. At every store, the kids screamed their rote-memorized songs at the proprietors who came out to quizzically drop candy into each bag. At every store, the mothers took ten pictures each of their child barking for their sugar high. Aahhh... it felt like I was home again.

Oh, except for the old drunk man who screamed at Mike's group about how they were destroying Korean culture by celebrating American holidays. He's right, of course, but who would be crazy enough to actually say it? Not me, that's for damn sure!

Finally came the dreaded song & dance in the street in front of a circle of elderly, disdainful Koreans. It was bad. It was very bad. Some kids whined at their parents during the songs. They stood, stock-still, while the poor bastards who were trying to remember the choreography plowed into them. Cymbals clashed in horrific discord. Tambourines formed an orchestra of the damned. The performance was very much like watching a train wreck where the passengers of the ill-fated train were a thousand baby squirrels and oh god the blood is everywhere and there'll be no nuts for your birthday this year little Nutty because you're fucking dead on the tracks.

Weeks of practice. Weeks of watching the kids' eyes go quietly feral when we cried, with false cheer, "Singing time!" Weeks of horror and terror and everything that Halloween stood for before Christian approval turned it into a PG movie. All for naught.

Anyways, our group quietly walked back to the school and we all tried to forget about the travesty we had just witnessed and then Duk shot Erin in the eye with a Lord of the Rings suction arrow because I was supposed to catch it but my massive Mexican sombrero severely limited my motor skills.

The most important thing was that the trick or treat massacre was over. And then the kindergartners' parents left, mildly placated by Mrs. Kim's promises of a better dance next time. The afternoon kids came in, parentless and thusly of no great import, and I got them addicted to gambling by making them pay me one Halloween dollar to throw balls through a Jack O' Lantern's eyes. Long story there, too long to be worth telling, but I did notice that Korean girls throw better than Korean boys. Huzzah to the Six-Dollar Girl!

I was a Mexican.

Posted by Chris at 08:33 AM >> Commentations (12)