The Week of July 30
Monday was back to school and sluggish. We sat around rubbing our heads and eyes and lobbing empty coffee cups into the door or wall, by which we meant trashcan. Our Korean had taken a hit during the vacation, but our teachers had already prepared review lessons to whip us back into shape.
But that made two times for me that day, as I’d “gotten up” at 6 to go to the gym. (I joined just before vacation, so I until Monday I hadn’t yet put my morning-workout-to-avoid-wasting-precious-afternoon-time plan for a valuable gym experience into place.) I had been a horrible student in Spanish class through high school because I’d always hesitated to speak, and it wasn’t until I took SPAN 130 in my freshman fall that I got over that apprehension and began feeling comfortable in the language. Fortunately, I’ve been learning Korean in a similar atmosphere, so while my speaking is still terrible, apprehension hasn’t really been a problem. But just in case, there’s also the experience of chatting without any clothes on every morning to really allay self-consciousness.
In the afternoon, we had our last pronunciation class with 김지은B, as it’s 김지은A that teaches us speaking. We’d learned great things throughout the MW afternoon course, including 자음동화 (Consonant Assimilations) and 모음조화 (Vowel Harmony), but when my question about quickly reviewing double consonant pronunciation led to another one about vowel sounds, we ended up reviewing basic letter sounds to all of our disappointment, and I felt responsible.
On Tuesday Sung Ho returned and we all went out for 돈가스 (pork katsu) at our favorite place across the street, 왕돈가스, to catch up with each other. After grammar class, I met up with Yoon Ji in Hongdae, where she attends Hongik. She spent a year in high school as an exchange student in Minnesota, where she learned to bake some of the most delicious things I’ve ever tried, including the chocolate biscotti she brought with her that day. It was only the second time we’d met, so she told me a bit more about her friends, most notably Turtle, the cute back-pack-toting, glasses-wearing character from Gangnam who is always up for eating and exploring Seoul, and Trash, the perpetually-guest gourmand who hates studying even more than the Turtle and always shows up to join them for food, usually when it means cutting a class to do so. Person, as Yoon Ji is known in her circle for how she is to be treated because of her “untouchable” status when it comes to pranks as a result of her 군대-serving boyfriend, bestowed these names upon them. Most young people acquire an embarrassing nickname at one time or another, and my friend Hye Ji is currently thinking up one for me. She showed me around pretty Hongik and we went to her club’s room (at Hongik and Sogang, clubs have their own space inside the student center) where she taught me GOSTOP, a card game her friends play after drinking. I talked with her boyfriend, who is on the school’s pistol team, over the phone for a while.
Later, I met Hyeon Ju, and she showed me some of the proverbs she’d written down. One of them was something to the effect of the humble person can only expect a humble life and we talked for a bit about American humble’s two meanings, a linguistic “insight” I only partially believe in. The beginning of our dialogue went something like:
“Do you know what this one means?”
“No.”
“Humble means both the good quality of being modest and polite about yourself and also the bad quality of being average, meager, modest, or unimportant.”
“Oh. In Korea it’s only a good thing. 겸손. Being poor or meager is 그롯이 작다.”
and continued on into my guesses about the American nation and my generalizations about American culture and values that I managed to cobble together with my citizen’s public education, and hers about Korea. Reading over David Silva’s reconstructed conversation, his point about cultural differences and language is clear:
Hasuksaeng: How do you say 재수생 (jaesusaeng) in English?
Author: Do you mean “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 (hagw0n ‘academic institute’) so he can take the exam the next year”?
Hasuksaeng: Yes! How do you say that in English?
Author: Uhm . . . Well, you have to say “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 so he can take the exam the next year.”
Hasuksaeng: Yes—what’s the English word for that?
Author: There isn’t one.
Hasuksaeng: Really? So how do you talk about 재수생 in English?
Author: You don’t. There’s no such thing as a 재수생 in America.
Hasuksaeng: So what happens when a student fails the college entrance examination?
Author: Nothing, because there’s no way to “fail” the exam. You might earn a low score, but there’s no specific passing grade.
Hasuksaeng: How strange.
[From Silva, David J. “Western Attitudes Toward the Korean Language: An Overview of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Mission Literature.” Korean Studies. 26.2 (2003). Access it here.]
But for us in a Sinchon Starbucks, I’m not sure how much I believed that I was introducing something important or even exclusive. Searching for the lost proverb online, business America in its pushy off-the-rack suit and toting some CEO’s biography was telling me to bold, and know myself and act on my abilities, while religious America, in its Sunday oxfords and khakis and holding a monogrammed Bible, told me about God’s altar. This is not to get all sappy and drone on about post-nations and globalization with eyes so bright there’s nothing behind them, but after so many meeting different kinds of people this summer, or seeing the wry ballet of 지하철 1호선, it’s hard to give language this much credit when people are just walking around reconciling themselves with what they’ve been told they are.
On Wednesday I went to visit Hye Jin in Suwon. I had to write a newspaper article for my writing class, and I’d chosen to fake an interview with Steven Felix about cycling, which I worked on on the ride over. Hye Jin and I walked around the lake that her institute overlooks, which is in the center of a pretty Suwon park. As at Lotte World’s Seokchonhosu, we were passed right and left by ajummas outfitted in full mountaineering gear, including matching black nylon sweatpants, bandanas, boots, and workout gloves. We climbed up onto a traditional pavilion and stretched out our legs to watch the sun set. Afterward, we wandered a through a rice field and made it over to a samgyeopsal restaurant for dinner. It was scrumptious. Wrapped in lettuce leaf, seasoned with sesame oil and rock salt and ssamjang, eaten with the kimchi sizzling in the fat collecting at the bottom of the inclined grill, it was a new and gorgeous flavor.
Thursday afternoon I ran over to a panel on education around the world put together by Athena for her teacher training module at Ko Dae. I learned a lot from my eloquent Algerian, Guatemalan, German, Malaysian, and Korean peers during the discussion, including the fact that the weekend in Algeria means Thursday and Friday. I had no idea she was doing this, so I unwittingly blew Athena’s surprise by mentioning Jeong Woo by name a few times; she had tucked her son in among the panel as “Jay from Canada.” I liked the questions I was asked, didn’t like it when the room was so ready to agree with one of the panel members that migration itself was at the core of social and economic problems dismantling the parent-teacher relationship in his country. When I posed back the same question to the packed room with only one male teacher in it about why they thought “there are so many more women than men in primary education,” they answered me with: “What [the Algerian panelist said]. Only women are patient enough to put up with the kids.” But at other times, the teachers debated with one another, such as when one teacher asked if parents in our countries had lost trust in their educational systems only to be interrupted by another “clarifying” that trust hadn’t been lost, just “supplemented.”
Over lunch, I talked some more with my peers and learned that political parties run overseas operations as NGOs in Korea, and that my Algerian and Guatemalan peers were studying in Korea as part of economic negotiations between their countries and Korea. Neither spoke much Korean, and both had spent their time in Korea improving their English through their graduate studies at Ko Dae, a fact impressing on me just how strange the English situation here has become.
I saw Ratatouille in Yongsan with Presca and her cousins, which made me feel warm and great.
On Friday, the Deans Farley visited us at Sogang. My class predictably went wild over this 멋있는 pair, and my teacher had Masato do his presentation over again. He’d just finished the brilliant, memorized sum of his travels, study interests, experience in Korea, and world view told through a touching series of vignettes about tomatoes, and we were all eager to show him off.
We went out for boribap, and back for our meeting with Sogang about our travel assignment for next week. Again, Sogang, which got us all into the trip in the first place, prepared a small orientation for us about how we should prepare to ask intelligent questions, keep an 일기, and get the most out of the trip culturally and linguistically. 마음에 들다.
We met our guests for Milky Road and headed over to Daehagno to see 지하철 1호선 (Subway Line 1), a musical about Seoul life that’s been playing since 1994 and, like Nanta, changing to fit the times. I loved it — its Woodcutter and the Angel allusions, its dialects, its hip-hop subway salesmen, its IMF crisis — because it hurt so much. Most of all, I loved the Ladies of Gangnam number:
On Saturday, despite Kaila’s call to confirm I was awake, I woke up late and had time enough only to 세수하다. Feeling dumb and worried that my dark jeans would not suffice to meet the dress code at the DMZ, I piled into the cab with the others and headed over to the Hilton, where the Dean and Victoria and a whole tour bus were waiting to leave. Veronica handed me a heavenly almond croissant while the tour guide confirmed that we had our passports.
I didn’t.
Feeling ever worse, I called Presca to make sure that at least she’d be able to make it. But in a mix-up, she was waiting at the wrong hotel and had gotten in a cab to make it across Seoul in time. I held off the tour guide to wait out the three more minutes for Presca to arrive only for her to arrive at the wrong Grand Hilton. I sadly waved off the bus and waited for Presca. We had brunch and headed to Sinchon to see a movie.
A few weeks ago, I mistakenly wrote that we waited out a 폭풍우. I meant to say that we waited out a 소나기 (sudden rain shower). Walking around E Dae with Presca, even my earlier admission of the error to her didn’t help me as the sky opened up its tanks on us, soaking us both through. We slid into the Migliore a few blocks down, wrung out our clothing in the entrance, and made our way up to the Megabox. I dried my hair in the hand dryer and we killed our waiting time looking in vain for a towel.
We saw 화려한 휴가 ( Splendid Holiday/ May 18 ) about the Gwangju Uprising. Professor Hwang taught us quite a lot about Gwangju and I was eager to see the film. Weeping along with everyone else in the theater, I was staggered to remember how much the people around me remembered. Presca was right when she pointed out that the worst part of the movie wasn’t when everyone died; it was when everyone was celebrating in front of the guns that would cut them down.
We went wetly to meet everyone for lunch in Insadong. The Farleys took us to Sanchon, the Buddhist temple cuisine that Kaila discovered, where we ate terrifically.
Dean Farley sniffing the nasty rain smell that Prescaand later Kaila would gang up on me about.
These photos are from Mark’s camera and by Kaila’s hand.
Afterwards, we watched noodle-making and parted ways. The rest of us made our way back through the alleys to the Old Tea Shop, where as soon as we’d sat down to order, Dean Farley walked in and chided us for wanting a free tea so badly as to intercept them.
Noodle making.
En route.
Sipping on delicious sikhye, ginseng, pear, jujube, and cinnamon teas, we contemplated actually intercepting them later on.
Thanks for showing us such a great time, JE Deans Farley!
중심은 중심 