
Seoul, Korea : April 1996 - January 1997
So, Korea. From the all-night drinking binges, the whores, the tattooed and goateed drug-addled backpackers, the color and the noise and the pollution of Bangkok, to the grayness, the dark suits, the cool weather, the quiet orderly bustling of Seoul.
I had two weeks to wander around Seoul before my job started, and the weather was pretty nice, so wander I did. From one end to the other, from the temples to the Blue House parliament to the university quarters to the cinema districts, from the large shopping areas to the woody mountain areas at the end of the subway lines.
My first surprise was that Korean people paid any attention to me at all. Thai people never really had. Foreigners are certainly no rarity in Bangkok. But the Koreans – they tried not to stare at you on subways. They crossed the street to avoid walking past you. They avoided sitting next to you on the bus.
Or they provided you with constant attention.
On about the third day I was in Seoul, walking through the xxxxx Palace, a couple of 8-year-old girls came up to me and smiled and said, “Hello! Hello! Photo! Photo!” They posed with me and asked their shyly smiling mother to take a picture of us.
Over the course of the afternoon, approximately ten children had their picture taken with me. The first couple of times I thought it was pretty cool, but by the fourth or fifth, I began to feel like some kind of mutant freak. The Elephant Man got a lot of attention too.
I think the second incident was a red-faced, drunken Korean man who approached me on the street and explained in broken English that he was a teacher and he would like to buy me a beer and practice his English. He also wanted to buy me something that he didn’t know the name for. He took out his notebook and sketched an octopus. He indicated it smilingly. I apologized and said I was in a rush, and hurried away.
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about that offer at the time, but I later found out that grilled squid is a popular beer snack. Whew.
Then there was the surest way to step into the limelight – going to the English language bookstores. You would inevitably and immediately be accosted by grinning groups of Koreans of all ages. There was an old guy who hung around asking foreigners to explain things about stuff he’d read in TIME magazine. There were inevitably groups of school kids who’d gotten an assignment from their Korean teacher of English to find foreigners and speak to them and record it. Cornered, you would have to dutifully answer questions like, “Where are you from?” and “What do you think of Korea” into Samsung mini-recorders.
One wasn’t really safe on the subways or the street, either. On several occasions kids came up to me and wanted help with their homework. One girl had a lengthy photocopied text with about fifty words high-lighted that she wanted me to explain to her.
Finally I started my job. Not much in the way of facilities – tiny rooms with white boards and cramped tables it was generally impossible to move around in once everybody had sat down. No cassette players. No teachers’ books. No resources. At that time, I wasn’t even really aware there was such a thing as resources though, so I didn’t mind too much. The owner was such an asshole that managers came and went nearly every month. Classes were 50 minutes, and you were generally just expected to stand there and talk to the class for that amount of time. Trying to teach them grammar was a sure way to get them complaining.
Another way, I found out soon, was to not want to go out and sing Karaoke with them. “Karaoke” – Japanese for “incredibly embarrassing waste of time.”
Now of course the big Karaoke bars were far too expensive and luxurious for the budgets of most of my students, who were university students and entry-level salarymen. I endured several trips to cafes or bars with my students, where we quickly ran out of polite questions for each other and everyone sat smiling uncomfortably. Then they would go to small “karaoke-bangs” which were places where you could rent a little cubicle with a karaoke machine in it. Seeing them pour their poor little hearts into sappy ballads with soul-aching earnestness was too much. I managed it once but could never make myself do it again.
My popularity started high but went down quickly among my students.
Then there was the question of shagging Korean girls.
Now virginity is highly prized in Korean culture. That means that quite a lot of Korean girls are desperate to fuck guys from other countries. If only to make their parents angry.
My first was a die-hard English Groupie. She studied English the way some people follow football. Apparently she was also hoping to learn English by seminal injection. She’d worked her way through a considerable number of American army guys, and picked up quite a lot of rap slang and obscenities. English teachers were her second choice, I think, but if there was no other option, she didn’t mind them. She wore a tremendous amount of makeup and talked in a kind of high-pitched Betty Boop babytalk, and smoked so much she couldn’t walk up the 15 steps to my second-floor room in the cheap hotel without being out of breath.
My second was a cute little art student. She couldn’t speak much English, and didn’t improve much under my tuition. She had dyed red hair and she started playing with my right nipple while we were watching the film MISSION IMPOSSIBLE together one afternoon. I returned the favor, and after the film we went at it up in my room. Afterwards she avoided me and refused to speak to me beyond polite greetings. I later found out she was the assistant director’s cousin, which caused something of a scandal among the Korean staff, who had seen her waiting for me outside the school a few times. Of course everyone was too shy to mention anything about it to me.
That experience soured me on shagging the students somewhat. I was a lot more interested in the sleazy British blondes working as hostesses and models that hung around the Hollywood nightclub, anyway, and the Russian chicks you’d see occasionally. Numerous students had their crushes, and I got several pathetic love letters and gifts. I evaded them unsubtly.
My popularity continued to slide. There’s only one thing Koreans hate more than a foreign devil who comes over and fucks their women – and that’s a foreign devil who comes over and thinks he’s too god to fuck the women.
The dark side of fame began to evidence itself to me one afternoon ice-skating with the English Groupie. A man began hissing at us and making throat-cutting gestures. That was the first time somebody was hostile towards me, but not the last. I never experienced the gang beatings that occasionally befell people in the dark sidestreets of the Itaewon nightclub area, and I never got a cat nailed to my front door, like one of my colleagues. But I got plenty of old man hissing things like “Son of a bitch!” at me on the street, and the occasional drunk university student on a bus lecturing me, usually in Korean, about American foreign policy.
The film “INDEPENDENCE DAY” was released that year, and it seems like many students went to see it solely so they could complain to me about how it portrayed Americans as the only heroes in the world.
“Well, I mean, it was an American movie, did you think the Chinese were going to come in at the end and kill all the aliens?”
The students all smiled and laughed. Which meant they were angry. ‘But America has a responsibility!”
“What responsibility? Why?”
“Because they are the most powerful country!”
“You mean, because it’s the most powerful country, it has a responsibility not to make movies about how America is the most powerful country?”
Down and down went my popularity. . .
One of my colleagues, a wan alcoholic ex-army guy about my age, took me out on a double date with his girlfriend and one of her friends. The friend seemed nice enough, and I had thought the evening had gone okay, but later my colleague told me that I’d infuriated his girlfriend by only dancing to Western music and not to any of the Korean pop ballads they’d played at the disco we’d gone to. “He doesn’t like Koreans!” she fumed.
So slowly I became more and more isolated as I moved through my last months there. I went to the Hollywood nightclub by myself on Friday and Saturdays and went to movies by myself on weekday afternoons. I watched sitcoms in the evening. The money piled up steadily in my bank account, and when I had the $10,000 that was the maximum I was allowed to change into dollars and take out of the country, I got ready to go. Ten months passed all too quietly.
A few nights before I left, I was eating in Burger King in Itaewon. A couple of smiling young Korean men came up to me and introduced themselves and asked if I could help them practice their English.
“I’m eating!” I snarled. They shyly excused themselves and scurried away.
International communication is my life.