Comings and goings...

Good evening loyal readers, internet wanderers, and insomniacs. I apologize for not updating the blog more regularly. My trip to Japan took me away from the blogosphere for a week or so, and I've just been too damn lazy to update it the rest of the time.
Today was the start of the fall semester at my school. I have to admit that I got a little spoiled by the students I had during the summer camps. (Korean schools have about a five week summer break, but this is really in name only. Most of the students either come back to their school for camps in various subjects, or study even more rigorously at the private academies their parents send them to after school.) The summer camp students actually have an interest in English, and the classes are a manageable size (12-15 students). My regular classes, on the other hand, have 40 students apiece, half of whom view it as an opportunity to catch up on their sleep (which is not entirely irrational on their part, since the material we cover in my classes is only tangentially related to what they're examined on).
Another problem is that many of these students are painfully shy about using whatever English they know. The Korean education system is built around the rote memorization of facts. Making mistakes is a sign that you didn't study hard enough. Language learning, however, is predicated on using new words, phrases, and grammar constructions that you're not entirely comfortable with. This invariably results in mistakes.
As such, most of my students are deathly afraid of using the language that they spend so much time studying. A darkly amusing aspect of my job is watching students literally cower in fear at the prospect of answering a relatively innocuous question such as "How was your weekend?" Today, I though I would try to bribe my students into talking. Each student who read their answers to the list of questions about summer vacation that I gave them would get a caramel. Ah, but the prospect of candy was not enough to get more than four kids out of forty to raise their hand. Hell, I don't think most of these kids would speak English if I was handing out 10,000 won notes* to everyone who participated.
(10,000 won is roughly equal to $11.)
Don't assume that I don't enjoy teaching these kids, however. I do. Any success I have in getting them to understand English is doubly satisfying given the burdens that we're working with. They are usually very kind and sweet to me outside of class, even though having a strange man come in and start babbling at them in a foreign language must be kind of weird. (Imagine being a middle school student, and having someone come speak at you in Korean for 45 minutes each week.)
Frankly, Koreans are one hell of a lot more appreciative of education than Americans. My students here are never anything but cheerful to me, even though my efforts to extract English from them are pretty much torture a lot of the time. Contrast this with the attitude of many of my students at Davis, moping through life because no one could possibly understand the cruelty of having to live in California and attend one of the 100 or so best universities in the world on their parents' dime.
Most Americans tend to have an inflated sense of entitlement. In fact, one of my professors at Davis said that about me one time. Now, I'm not going to defend this guy too much (he has an ego that is extremely inflated in relation to what he has actually accomplished in the field), but in this case what he said had some truth to it. I've often been one of those people who I was so disdainful of in the last paragraph. Let's face it, it's pretty easy to complain about how others don't understand your feelings, but it's a whole lot harder to try and understand someone else's problems. Most of us have been trained from an early age to believe that we're "unique" and "special." Now, there's certainly a lot that is admirable about having a strong sense of self, but can't this pretty easily turn into pigheadedness? Isn't it possible to become so absorbed in standing up for "what you deserve" that you trample on the feelings of everyone else? I'm certainly not going to stand up for every aspect of this culture (or hell, even most aspects of it). It does, however, seem to do a little better job than ours of imparting that ever important lesson- that life is not always fair.

Korean... "Exceptionalism"

Korea combines American in your face nationalism and Canadian insecurity.
--ESLCafe Poster.

I recently had the "I hate Korea week" that most new teachers experience within their first few months. I think I felt this way because of the exceptionally illogical way in which Korean public schools end their semester. The students take their finals.... and then have another two weeks of classes. With the "fist in the back" of exams removed, instructing the students become rather challenging for the native speaker and his Korean co-teachers alike. I ended up teaching my classes the old Beatles song "Yesterday." The lesson didn't actually go to badly. Nevertheless, lazy bum that I am, keeping the kids at school for two weeks after they had effectively called it in for the semester rubbed me the wrong way, and left my mind a fertile playground for vaguely anti-Korean thoughts.
My attention then turned to Dave's ESL Cafe, the internet portal which allows minor daily annoyances to blow up into full-fledged ethnocentric rants. I didn't indulge in such a rant, mind you, but I did read many such posts on the message board. Specifically, I became more aware of a rather ugly episode in 2002 when a U.S. Army tank ran over and killed two little girls north of Seoul. In spite of U.S. efforts to make amends for the tragedy, most accounts (and not just from the folks on ESL Cafe) describe what followed as a full-fledged orgy of anti-Americanism. Here's a sample:

http://www.angelfire.com/journal2/uglykorea/gallery1.html

Now, I am certainly not the first person in the world to defend U.S. foreign policy at every turn. Still, one must conclude that the alliance with the U.S. has been hugely beneficial to South Korea. Just as the Koreans should rightfully take pride in their accomplishment of building one of the largest economies in the world from practically nothing, so should Americans take pride in the fact that the U.S. "security umbrella" helped make the miracle possible. It's no accident that in their frantic attempts to put lipstick on the pig that is the Iraq boondoggle, GOP officeholders often invoke South Korea as an example of a country that flourished because of America's dogged insistence on seeing a foreign commitment through.
Seeing things this way is very hard for Koreans, though. Having a foreign nation's troops on your soil IS emasculating, no matter how well intentioned those troops may be. America thus becomes the scapegoat for Koreans' inadequacy over centuries of war and occupation, sometimes in equal measure to Japan (the occupier itself).
This is all exacerbated by the fact that Koreans have an almost racist obsession with blood purity. Koreans are not alone in this respect- the Japanese are every bit as xenophobic as they are, and I'd venture that quite a few people of European and African extraction (even in the American "melting pot") would prefer not to see their children interbreed with members of other races. It's more problematic here though, because Korea is divided. People want to identify with their cultural "brothers" to the North, rather than the "foreign occupier", but to do so requires them to ignore the artillery batteries pointed at Seoul. The result of all this is the mother of all cases of cognitive dissonance. If I'm a Korean schoolchild, I'm taught that the Korean "race" is special and that preserving it is of the utmost importance. Yet, at the same time, I'm also aware that other Koreans are in a position to destroy everything that my forefathers have worked so hard to build, and worse, the intervention of a foreign power is what prevents this from happening.
What makes this all the more sad is that Koreans can be extremely kind and generous. My co-workers, in spite of the language barrier that exists between us, are always bringing me food and other small gifts. My students, even the little snot-nosed ones, have brightened countless days. It's hard to believe that some of their countrymen can harbor attitudes towards my country that are so hurtful and mean. My own cognitive dissonance, I suppose.

Korean Sports

You probably know that I spend way too much time watching and thinking about sports. Moving to South Korea has not changed this at all. In fact, going to sporting events here is so much cheaper here than it is at home, I almost get to satisfy my yen every week. For instance, Incheon has a team in the Korean baseball league. The quality of the play is roughly equal to that in AA or AAA in the U.S. The kicker is that the "cheap seats" (the equivalent of lawn seating at a Rivercats game, except that you actually get a seat) are roughly $2. $2 bucks!! Beer and hot dogs set you back about a dollar apiece (and you can bring your own into the ballpark). Not surprisingly, Korean baseball is one of the more popular pastimes for expats.
On top of this, the local team (the SK Wyverns*) is leading the league. This is rather exciting, since SK is the newest entry in the Korean league, and is the only franchise that has never won the Korean Series.
Baseball here is also "different" in many ways from the U.S. There are fewer home runs, and there is more of an emphasis on moving baserunners and manufacturing runs. Nearly all relief pitchers have, for some reason, been trained to throw sidearmed. The most important difference, however, is that there are dancing girls to entertain the home fans. (Koreans hire dancing girls for just about everything, from sports to the opening of a new store.) Actually, Korean baseball games are a bit like minor league games in the States, in that there are all kinds of contests and promotions to bring in fans. However, Korean baseball fans are very passionate. Whereas polite applause when the home team does something right constitutes "cheering" in the U.S., fans here cheer more like fans at European soccer matches. They sing songs, chant players names, and so on. Since Korea's such a small country, the visiting team will usually bring a contingent of its own fans. When they start chanting at each other, the stadium can get rather loud, even if there are only a few thousand people at the game.
Another fun experience was taking in the South Korea/Netherlands international soccer friendly. This was instructional for two reasons: A) The Dutch national team is really good. B) Koreans are passionate about their national team. The Seoul World Cup stadium (which is about the size of the Oakland Coliseum or Candlestick Park) was pretty much crammed for the game, even though Korea has not been playing well (all of the top players are hurt), the match was meaningless (a "friendly" for you soccer-philes), and the home team really didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of winning. Part of the attraction was the Dutch, of course, but most of the people were there to watch the Koreans, even though they are a shadow of what they were a few years ago. I couldn't imagine what the World Cup was like here in 2002. I should ask my co-teachers about that sometime. But I digress....

*Korean baseball teams are not generally known by the city they play in, but rather the company they're owned by (like Japanese baseball teams). The owner of Incheon's team, the SK Corporation, is the perfect example of a "chaebol" or Korean conglomerate. They have interests ranging from oil refining, to shipping, to telecommunications. The wonky way in which these corporate monoliths (and the Korean economy in general) developed is worth a separate post sometime. But not tonight.

The scariest place in the world...

I ran into a thread concerning the continued presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula at ESLCafe (an online gathering place for English language teachers) yesterday. The thread turned into a discussion of the possibility of a North Korean strike against Seoul. You have probably heard it discussed on the news that North Korea has literally thousands of heavy artillery guns poised on the northern side of the DMZ, trained on Seoul, 35 miles to the south. This might seem a little abstract to the folks back home. The truth is, though, the North Korean guns could level much of metropolitan Seoul (home to over 20 million souls, including yours truly) in the time it will take for me to write this post. Imagine New York or San Francisco coming under a sustained assault of 500,000 artillery shells per hour. Also keep in mind that NK has the missile capability to strike targets Japan, and as far away as Guam. They have also tested missiles capable of hitting the west coast of the U.S. Finally, top this off with chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities. The North, when you think about it, has actually created a credible military deterrent (at a stunning cost to its people, of course).
Of course, the North could not "win" a war against the U.S. and South Korea. They would not be able to forcibly reunify the peninsula, and the regime would almost certainly be toppled in a protracted conflict. But, being able to "win" is beside the point when you can effectively turn much of the east Asian economic miracle into smoking rubble in two days.
This situation would seem to lend itself to a mutually assured destruction type of deterrance from all sides (for any of you IR geeks reading this). This, of course, is pretty much what has transpired over the past 50 years on the peninsula. Unfortunately, the North Koreans are known for selling their military wares to the highest bidder. This is one scenario (albeit somewhat farfetched) under which a terrorist group could obtain nuclear weapons. This has made the more hawkish sectors of the U.S. foreign policy favor a pre-emptive strike against the North Koreans, even though such an attack would unleash the scenario described above.
This, in turn, puts the U.S./South Korean alliance in an extremely untenable position. The Americans desperately want to contain North Korea's nuclear capability. Doing so with a military strike, however, could easily cost a million or so South Korean lives (not to mention erasing the economic progress that has been made over the past 35 years). In other words, the South Koreans might be asked to sacrifice Seoul in order to protect New York and Washington.
Not good times, as my friend Rolfe might say.
So, what to do? Really, the only option is some kind of diplomatic initiative to get the North to surrender is nuclear capability. The North Koreans always cheat on these agreements, though. Likely, you'll be in another standoff with them in another ten years. The best case scenario is that we buy enough time for Kim Jong-il to kick the bucket and hope that North Korea dies with him. At that point, the U.S., South Koreans, Chinese, and maybe the Russians would pour in and try to seize all of Pyongyang's military goodies and prevent a crippling refugee flow. Then, the long road to reunification would begin, with the U.S. and China competing for influence on the peninsula.

Aloha means Hello...

All,
I have decided to add my thoughts to the blogosphere. At first, putting my thoughts out for the entire world to see seemed a bit self-important. Then, I thought, why should that stop me? After all, getting to live in a foreign country provides me with an endless amount of jokes and anecdotes that can be told in an utterly self-serving manner.

What can I say about Korea after two months? Well, I think that no matter what you say about Korea, the opposite can also be true. I'll give you an example. My friend Mark is an American of Korean extraction. Like nearly all Koreans and gyopos (people of Korean descent who live outside the peninsula), his family has some fairly shocking tales about the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. I think "ethnic cleansing" is a good way of characterizing the way Japan treated Korea during the occupation. The Japanese did not actually try to exterminate the Koreans like the Germans did with the Jews, but they basically tried to erase any vestige of Korean language, culture, and national identity. Many who resisted were killed. Others were kidnapped into sexual slavery. More were taken to Japan and used as slave labor. To this day, Koreans in Japan face discrimination.
Not surprisingly, the very act of living in Korea dims one's view of Japan, as anti-Japanese sentiments are fairly routine around here. Koreans don't like the Japanese, you might say. Oh, but it is not that simple. Mark and I were thinking about taking a trip when we get our vacation here in a couple of months. Where to go? Tokyo, of course! This is not an uncommon line of thinking in Korea, either. Seoul-Tokyo is one of the busiest air corridors on the planet. When Tokyo's Haneda Airport re-opened to international flights a few years ago, the first city served was Seoul. NHK (one of the Japanese national broadcasters) is available on many cable systems in Korea. Korean players appear in the Japanese baseball leagues. The Japanese are vigorous consumers of various forms of Korean pop culture, and vice-versa.
It's not so surprising that Korea and Japan have been able to build a successful working relationship in the post-war years. After all, many former enemies in Europe and Asia have developed alliances over the past few decades. What is surprising is that something that is seen by many foreigners as a key component of the national identity (Korean disdain for Japan) is oftentimes the very opposite. As a former social scientist, living in a foreign country is really helpful in terms of exploring how concepts like "culture" and "national identity" can be useful and limited at the same time. I will return to this idea later. Now, I need to go to bed.