Seeing With Alien Eyes: Ten Years Teaching in Korea
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Taking it easy on a weekend of miracles, July 7th, 2012 – having received a pay cheque with an unexpected overtime emolument, I made my way down to Haeundae, and again, this place seems miraculously dry and sunny after some two days of torrential summer drench. Soaked in sunshine with a temperate sea breeze cooling down the town from a warm Saturday afternoon, I find myself sitting here in a not-too-crowded Wolfhound and suddenly recall – with a start, perhaps – that it is literally nine years since I arrived here on a cheap one-way flight from Taipei, after a disastrous ten months trying unsuccessfully to engineer my career transition from analytical chemist to English teacher.
July 14th – next Saturday, in fact – was the date stamped on my very first ARC, and in that time I have taught English, mainly to children, in different places around the south of the peninsula, hit Fukuoka (alas only once . . . so far) and belatedly hit Seoul (September 2009, which was actually six months late for the start of my first public school job in Miryang) after perhaps too many occasions mooning about certain parts of Busan . . . the sea breeze is keeping Haeundae cool this evening and the soundscape of the bar, uncrowded and spacious, is punctuated by the noises of weekend banter and the constant clink-clink of cutlery on dinnerware.
One of the dubious benefits of being a single foreigner in a land like this, where development over the last few decades has perhaps been more rapid than changes in attitude, is detachment: the alien sees everything with different eyes, but also, as a result of this encounter, looks back upon the familiar with a changed perspective. Unlike Japan, where a couple of run-ins with Commodore Perry and his Merry 'Merkin Men in Yokohama Bay led to forced entry and familiarisation with foreigners long ago, or China, where colonising powers such as Britain used devious means such as plentiful, cheap opium to enforce quiescence, Korea has come to the international scene comparatively late in the day, due largely to a desire in former times to remain aloof from transnational relationships, but one upside of this has been that they do not have the kind of technological overburden inflicted upon them by previous generations that we tend to see in the West, where earlier technologies have become entrenched alongside other parts of the infrastructure. Much of the Korean counterpart to this Western infrastructure is therefore very new; and commentators elsewhere, accustomed to the prevailing situations in their own countries, often fail to realise that it is hard to be held back technologically when a historical overburden is virtually nonexistent; one would draw a similar parallel with the telecomms situation in China, for example.
We'll come to what the other "upside" might be shortly, but for now, to continue our example, the Internet here has almost no "old" components: nothing here is "old" or "slow" – everything is new and fast, and getting faster all the time. Contrast this with the situation in the "West", where an unhelpful combination of geology, development and myopia has often resulted in unforeseen SNAFUs, such as . . . a while back, I was reading online that the speed of telecomms in one part of London was forever held up by the fact that, wayyy back in Victorian times, when Alexander Graham Bell's new invention was spiffing and exciting, and any problems remained in the unseen future, a thick copper cable was laid down for trunk calls, and buried so deep underground, encased in thick concrete, that later rectification of the situation was rendered almost impossible by succeeding developments which grew up above it. Getting around this would require so much destruction (and so much concomitant restoration) in the area that replacement was forever being stymied by the projected cost.
In contrast, not only is much of what you see in parts of South Korea very new, but many of the buildings here, by virtue of their method of construction (rebar in steel moulds, slap in the concrete, overlay with polished stone ashlars), seem to be designed with purely short lives and imminent rebuilding in mind. The outcome is that the urban landscape here is a constant ferment of reconstruction and recycling, the extent of which is often hidden and only strikes one's realisation when, in dialogue with the older inhabitants, beer-tongued talk wanders into their recollections of how things are now are not as they used to be in "the good old days", and how so much of what is now submerged beneath the tarmac and concrete used to be green fields and forest, or estuarine mud, maybe, drained in the name of a nebulous Greater Good.
The East Asian mind welcomes the new prosperity which has ridden the waves of economic development, but frets at the loss of the wilderness its ancestors knew; and the stranger here, in his solitude, wonders at times whether, in their deep hearts, the average Korean males, in particular, still yearn to be a field bumpkin with a top-knot, even today, amid their newfound affluence and the trappings it brings . . . but perhaps the greatest sadness, for the outsider, is the apprehension that the current generation of Koreans has little or no interest in its own history. This was brought home to me in the course of several advanced-level classes to which I was assigned last month (June 2012). During our discussions, I was acquainted with the fact that high school students are very disinterested in such things, because history is seen as being of little use in qualifying for a "professional" career, and this, I thought, formed an interesting contrast with the West, where those who seek high positions have traditionally tended to favour the study of the humanities.
The question arises as to whether the Koreans will become historically illiterate in their pursuit of future affluence, perhaps to awaken suddenly at a time yet to come as the horror sets in that there were important lessons being taught that they should have been learning, but which were cast aside because their study seemed to offer no tangible benefit. Perhaps it is too difficult for me, as a "Westerner", to behold such a spectacle without cynicism. We know already that history is essentially a fabrication of convenience; even in a conventional history lesson, wayyy back in my schooldays in Leicester, in my tender years (LOL), the message was clear: because of the constant conflicts fomented between peoples, history was always "written by the victor", meaning that "inconvenient" (from the point of view of an absolutely truthful and objective account of past historical reality) details were expunged wholesale, or were simply ignored, so that "the truth" (or its closest possible approximation) would later have to be "reconstructed" from patchy details because documentary (or other physical) evidence had been gratuitously marginalised or actually destroyed.
The tragedy here (in the real and original sense of the word, not its bastardised modern meaning, courtesy of cheap journalism) is that what we are seeing is a convenient rendering of an entire populace into a state of historical ignorance, by their own hand and of their own free will. In the West, the realisation that history has been (and continues to be) manipulated by "interested parties" is at least emergent, but in the East, the context and comprehension of historically important events is in decline as a result of the individual's desire for personal advancement, sidelined due to the perception that an understanding and an analysis of past events is of no relevance in an age of cable TV, Internet and cell phones. But surely, nothing could be further from the truth: because in an age of pointless and distracting ephemera, the only way to secure ourselves psychologically is through an understanding of who we are, and how we came to find ourselves in the places where we abide. In other words, in an age of pointless distractions, the only certainty is our sense of history. We need to understand where we came from to understand where we are going, and this, therefore, represents a prime target for those who would control us.
The history which binds all of us into one became a tool of the elites when they realised that citizens who were kept busy in their daily affairs would be less inclined to question a manufactured reality when they had to put it to one side in order to cope with their own circadian crises; that keeping most people in a state of constant distraction would eventually divorce them from their own past, and therefore make them tragically manipulable; and the question of whether historical conflicts were useful simply because of the convenient destruction of artefacts is one which is never asked. This state of denial is therefore complicit with the destruction of past historical information, because it represents a psychological barrier which prevents access even to the relatively recent past.
This is the parlous state in which modern citizens find themselves: distracted by their high-speed media and information saturation, and here in Korea, especially, by their constant and irritating (for the onlooker) interaction with their cell phones. I see a prime example of dumbing-down as I walk the daytime streets of Seomyeon and spend much of my perambulation trying to avoid being walked into by (mostly) young people whose whole attention is focussed on keying in another inane and pointless message. They cannot walk in a straight line, they cannot avoid walking into other objects (or other people) they encounter, and are so utterly amazed when they are almost killed by a passing car, which is invariably being driven by . . . someone else talking into their cell phone!!!
It is a constant source of wonder and amazement to me that more people do not die each day on the mean and dirty streets of Seomyeon . . .
What lesson can we draw from all of this? Essentially, it all boils down to one simple point – that any people cut off from their own history do not know where they have come from, and this makes their future so much easier to control by those who concern themselves with such things; and as in the West, there is no shortage of such people. They therefore keep the population distracted and busy to aid their nefarious works. But the greatest sorrow for the onlooker is that it is self-inflicted – in their desire to be prepared for a more prosperous future, young Koreans are sacrificing their sense of the past.
On a lighter note . . . earlier, I mentioned that there was another "upside" to the state of being Korean, and here I want to say that another point which strikes the casual foreign observer is that Koreans are, perhaps, blessed in that they do not have any real "stereotype" in a Westerner's eyes, unlike the citizens of other nations such as China and Japan, and – more latterly – Vietnam (I meet a lot of 'Merkin ex-forces guys out here), with whom "the West" has had "encounters" in the past . . . I have long thought that the reputation of a country (i.e. memories of its past actions and international, er, activities) is important when, for example, its companies want to sell their products abroad: if the country's past activities were less than savoury, then the quality of both products and services might be the only factors which would make people want to buy them. However, having been the past object of conflict by other countries, Korea seems to be in the unique position of not having any obvious "stereotype" when first seen by foreigners; it's interesting to note that in the old Jung-Chul Level 1 textbooks at my original hagwon in Changwon, the first question from the foreigner encountered by the Korean was: "Are you Chinese?"
Korea is also in the interesting historical position of being seen as a nation against whom others waged aggression, rather than vice versa. So, the production and sale of high-quality, high-technology goods such as cars and portable electronics by Korean companies is generally not hindered by any antipathy internationally, and is only impacted negatively when a quality issue is manifest; otherwise, notional opposition to the purchase of Korean goods and services tends not to arise, unlike, for example, the sale of Japanese cars in the USA. Not being subject to a "national stereotype" in the West is a great advantage for Korea.
And so I finish this blog, almost a week later, back in Haeundae at the Wolfhound the following Friday night, with an incredible summer fog rolling down the main drag (which turned out to be the precursor to a real summer downpour), celebrating (if that is the right word) the onset of my tenth year in Korea, a curious and bittersweet sensation. The sun has gone down, and in the crepuscular light, Haeundae brightens for another seaside night, again with the bar suffused with a pleasant breeze, and again surprisingly vacant mid-evening. The crash at the junction by the sea front later was amusing, too . . . 🙂
And I do not complain about the things I cannot change, but merely observe them as they happen; like so many before me, I merely lament the passing of what was, and face the coming future with as much grace as I can muster . . . and think about a salmon salad, down the way there at Sharky's. 😀
