Gripes (IV): Through the Past, Darkly
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Gripes
As my first "substantial" vacation in seven years slithers to a screeching halt and a new semester beckons (not entirely welcomingly, I have to admit), something has come back to haunt me, and unfortunately this was to be expected . . .
As the UK economy began to crumble in the 1970s, we entered into an era in which it was more evident than before that – every few years – you had to have some kind of change of career. This was not actually a great change in reality; it was just that it became more obvious to see (or alternatively, harder to deny) rather than being something of an elephant in the living room, one of those things that had always happened for a lot of people but they never really admitted it. The era in which (for example) a man could join a large organisation like British Rail (or British anything, for that matter) and reasonably expect to stay there from the first day until retirement and a nice comfortable pension were gone, never to return, and we were slowly being thrust into a new age where everything was being "outsourced" to places where labour was cheaper and the kinds of industries that used to employ large numbers of people were declining at an alarming rate; the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and their successors.
We were being conned into thinking that "competition" was good when we should really have been looking at standards and thinking about how to maintain employment for a couple of generations more. We should also have been adapting to the fact that raw materials were no longer going to be as cheap as they had been previously when we were able to pretty much just steal them, as the countries which produced them became democratised and self-reliant and needed the capital. And the established capital began to chase its own tail as never before, abandoning those who had helped it in the past to an increasingly bleak future where work and income was hard to come by even as things became more expensive.
But I will say one thing about that era: it convinced me more than ever before that a person should be as independent as possible. As I often say to people, as an individual, I do not like to be a small cog in a large machine; in my experience, the kinds of jobs I have tended to do (as one who finds himself accidentally and repeatedly shunted sideways into chemical analysis) were actually pivotal, in that often there was no-one else with the patience and application to do them, and besides, usually no-one else had had the necessary experience or had acquired the perspective to do those things. Applications where disparate areas of knowledge had to be somehow melded together into some kind of coherence, where things were never written down but kept in the head as lore; and so whenever the bearer of the lore moved on to pastures new, the lore went with them, never to return.
So instead of doing what I was actually trained for – things like biomedical or genetic research, or something microbiological or ecological, say – I was required to do things where really, I felt something of a fish out of water. A fraud. Why? Because I was not specifically trained for what I was doing, and often had to struggle to get my head around it. In those days, these things were to do with analysis or alloys or cleaning methods; nowadays it is more likely to be how to be effective in keeping the attention of eight-year-olds. Plus ca change, mon ami.
And every time I changed jobs – this little fish was out of the frying pan and into the fire, or rather finding himself in another, uncomfortable frying pan – the whole thing repeated itself. I had to break my head understanding what was necessary, time after time, because of all the lost lore that someone had to rediscover. Yet people criticise me for this. What, exactly, is wrong with not just being appointed the "expert", but actually working hard to acquire the knowledge to walk the talk? One gets the impression that there are an awful lot of people out there who just want a well-paid job and the more they can hide any inadequacies they may have and get well paid for it, the happier they are.
Anyway . . . fast forward to 2009, and the summer vacation from the school job (such as it is), in fact my first truly reasonable vacation, period, since leaving England in September 2002, found me back at "the centre of the universe" (as our dear Hendrik* calls it), Lee Soonyoung's "International Pub" (IP) in Changwon. Discussing various matters with fellow Englishmen. And them trying to persuade me that "going back into industry" was Really A Good Fing – and Yours Truly not being really convinced, for the reasons stated above. And this a couple of weeks after a previous foray thereto, when big Tim from NZ actually brought both of his little girls out to the pub, of all places, together for the first time, so he could look after them and watch the Rugby International on Australia Channel at the same time. Rebecca, the younger of the two, at the time of writing, is only a couple of years old, but she seemed very happy to have a plump, middle-aged Englishman to play with, and actually sat next to me on a bar stool kissing my left hand. Err, do you think she liked me? 😆
And I started to wonder – as I am sure so many others have – whether the lifestyle I have led was the right one; whether I should have had kids of my own too. Too much time and money wasted sitting in smoky bars – admittedly often with interesting engineering types to talk with – when I should have been thinking, perhaps, about losing weight, smartening up, earning more qualifications and contributing to a pension plan as well as a new health insurance policy and, well, savings and investments.
This place has been a stream of consciousness in which I have allowed myself to become somewhat distracted, and yet . . . and yet, as I sit here writing this, the realisation comes upon me that it has not all been bad . . . the people I've met, the lives I have touched, the knowledge and experience which has come my way, I would never have had if I had not arrived here in South Korea essentially by accident rather than design, been asked to stay and developed things from there. Bizarre and amusing – yet priceless – moments such as when I had four little girls in my afternoon class, all happy and smiling in a row, all having dropped some milk teeth at the same time . . . times when you really wish you had had a camera with you.
So I should not have much reason to complain.
But . . .
I actually feel quite uncomfortable here. This is simply because I am a foreigner. In a place like Miryang, where people like myself are less prevalent, I actually feel quite exposed, whereas in Changwon you could walk down the street unnoticed.
Then there is the apartment where I live. It's absolutely fine for a single person, but . . . it's not quite comfortable enough for my liking. One thing often remarked upon by foreigners here is that the owners of the accommodation seem not to understand that perhaps their definition of "comfortable" is rather different from that of their tenants; personally, as I have grown older, my joints (and various other parts of my body) have noticed the hardness of everything, like when everything is made of wood or plastic or metal, and often with no cushioning, it can be very difficult to relax; likewise, I have found it hard to sleep because East Asian bedsprings seem to be a lot tougher than in England, where in fact I used to have two very comfortable British-style futon beds; and when those were new, you would simply lie down on them and be out like a light.
Likewise with cooking and eating – normally the foreigner is given a simple gas range, which is actually fine in itself, but the kind of cooking you can do this way is limited and rather likely to pile on the pounds, when what I would really prefer would be an oven. So I seldom do any cooking at home now; it's not my personal style. Granted, the school has an arrangement whereby I pay a monthly fee and eat with the students, so I'm not exactly going to starve, but not all Korean food is to my personal taste . . . and so it goes on.
Another complaint the foreigners seem to have is that no-one seems to "get" the idea that perhaps the place where you live is not just somewhere to sleep – as well as doing things like reading books and listening to music or watching TV, for many people the "place to live" is also often at least partially a "place to work", in the sense that there are tasks relevant to your income which also often require you to take work home with you, and to which you might even adapt – as I certainly have – to the extent that the equipment you have is demonstrably superior to what your employer has provided, and so you prefer to get certain tasks completed to a greater or lesser extent at home, because you have provided yourself with a better (and more comfortable) environment in which to do some things which need to be done. If we were talking about the students and their motivation for studying, we would be talking about keeping their affective filter low and I personally think that what is true for the students is also true for the teacher – the easier the job can be made to be by the use of something like appropriate technology, the better the motivation becomes.
Alas, but here is where it all comes "unstuck". Where I do find myself agreeing with older foreigner friends here is with regard to the reasons why you might want to leave a job. All of the other jobs I had back in England and Wales all had some kind of "irritation factor" built in so that after a while, the accumulated "irritations" became unbearable and forced me out. It is saddening to discover, after all this time, that it is really no different here in Korea. The job is actually fine but perhaps the Koreans here are just as gauche in dealing with this particular foreigner as this foreigner is in dealing with them; the teaching method requires more application and dedication than any of the involved parties are really willing or able to put into it; and they really never discuss very much with me that could be classed as important or relevant in anything like a timely manner. So my patience is limited; and besides, at the ripe age of almost 47, I have started to realise that perhaps my days are numbered. I hardly need to add that this is all deeply unsettling . . . and rather demotivating.
My reservations with regard to teaching English in Korea pretty much stem from the same sources of dissatisfaction that I have experienced everywhere else – namely, that the difficulty I encounter in trying to bring all of my knowledge and experience to the job frustrates me tremendously, and as with everything else that I have done elsewhere, there is only so much of this that I can take before the grass looks greener elsewhere and my feet become loose again. But this time, it is really so much more difficult – the job situation (actually the whole situation, never mind just the job) back in the UK is dire for someone on the wrong side of forty, and besides, I have been here for so long now that it's almost like I've put down roots, at least insofar as this might be possible for a rather solitary, bachelor type male to do.
So here I am on a Sunday evening, the sun is setting on Miryang and the magic words: "strawberry yoghurt" are at the back of my mind. The new semester is almost upon me and tomorrow, the last day of this all-too-brief vacation (and probably tonight) will be spent at least partially in printing out materials and planning how the coming weeks should be laid out. And with this big new printer, laying all of that out in a comprehensive fashion should be so much easier than before. But I also have some personal decisions to make which will probably not be too easy.
Welcome to the future, Andrew.
* See http://books.trafford.com/08-0568.
Tags: elementary, English, expat, hagwon, Korea, public, school, South Korea, teaching
