Life under the shadow
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
4
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheonan,
Korea Rep.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The rice fields outside change. I had taken them for a constant in Korea, but in this I am mistaken. I come home one day and find the rich deep greens have been shorn down into a yellow that casts stumpy shadows in the evening light. Great plastic-wrapped bales of hay sit like heavy jumbucks in the field. A weasel sprints across the road. A snake writhes across the school steps. I had thought there was no room for animals in Korea. Again; mistaken.
I think, in delighting to write of the weirdness of Korea I have managed to give the impression that I am unhappy here, or that I feel isolated, that life is a struggle. On the contrary, though, my life is easy, easier than it has been in a long time probably. And any struggle I have is only because being at ease gives me a sense of dis-ease. I quite like living rough and wondering about what comes next. I like culture shock. But I don't have to worry about any of these things here.
The simple facts of life here, for those who have been wondering...
I teach in three schools - Seongnam, Sinsa and Susin. Seongnam is my main school, the smallest by far and a great place to work. It has managed to find both principal and vice-principal with a sense of humour, the staff are young and friendly and the school is well-resourced. My job there is very very easy.
I teach at the other schools one day each week. The classes are bigger and both students and staff there are still a little intimidated and skittish in my presence. But the work here is never hard. These schools lie on the Road, whereas Seongnam is off among the farms. I also live on the Road, and it is the only road that connects us to the rest of Korea. Kids who go to school on the Road are more urbane, less shy, more prone to cause trouble in class. They also speak better English because they can attend the private institute on the Road. Teaching them once a week feels fairly pointless, but I go along with it happily, and even after the most unsuccessful and wasted of lessons I walk away smiling because life is very very good.
In the long mornings before classes begin I try to entertain myself and not to fall asleep. At first this time was full of lesson-planning, but that no longer feels necessary and I spend more and more time trying to entertain myself. The staff roster at every school is very bloated; I still don't know what the vice principals do and I have never seen the nurse at one school do more than make coffee and surf the internet. I'm not sure why a school needs a dietician, given that the food every day is a variation on kimchi, rice, soup. This is the tip of bloated bureaucratic iceberg in which we are all hiding during our free hours.
Though the rest of the school may not need a dietician, I could put one to good use. As I become more insistent about my vegetarianism I attract more and more looks and laughs from other teachers. There is no common vocabulary in which to explain why I'm extracting the loose chunks of fish from my soup, so I don't try it. Its just chalked up to my foreign rock star weirdness.
Once school lunch is over and I have dumped my ample leftovers the lunchtime ping pong begins. This is a new development but it is fast becoming a routine. I've been coached in use of the Korean grip, because my old chinese grip wasn't going to work even though they use it in china and china always wins (all this I heard from one teacher. I'm still not certain of the logic of it).
And by the time ping pong is over food is usually being served once again in the staff room. To talk Korean customs and culture is basically to talk food. In between there is a bit of bowing, to work up an appetite. But basically food seems to be the focus of life in Korea. Koreans are always hungry it seems. I think this is because food doesn't register as food unless it is spicy. My Korean friends and teachers can gorge themselves on any sweet or strong food, but if it isn't spicy they will still go a-hunting for kimchi as soon as the plate is emptied. By the same logic after the grandest, spiciest of meals they will think nothing of polishing off a serve or two of ice cream, since it isn't spicy and so seems to take up no stomach space.
While the Korean stomach may be wired so as to only recognise spicy food as food, mine is not. I find myself oscillating wildly between fullness and hunger. It doesn't take long to go from one to the other. With so much rice and so little fat on the menu, Korean food tends to disappear very fast (that's assuming it doesn't reappear even faster. Never before have I so frequently heard the sounds of up-throwing in the men's room).
This brings me to the bane of my existence in Korea, the greatest trial I have yet had to face, and one I face regularly. I am referring to gogoma, or sweet potato, a Korean staple since the distant, forgotten pre-chilli age. In the past I would always have declared my love for this ugliest of roots, whether it be served as kumara fries in NZ or candied yams in the US, I knew it only in its delicious manifestation.
But in Korea gogoma is served plain, that is, uncandied, unfried, unmayonnaised and uncheesed. It is boiled, peeled, and stuffed into one's gob. It is chewed on for a long long time, being soft and sticky and usually enormous. It is the blandest thing in the world.
I had though that all the gogomas appearing in the staff room were some kind of brief, seasonal thing, to do with the chuseok holiday. Then I was told that today I would be digging for gogoma with the students, and that there was a whole field planted with them adjacent to the school. Out in the crisp light students were hacking away at roots and runners with their rusty trowels, kindergarten students dragging forth gogoma as large as their arms and legs. It was a rich harvest this year, hundreds upon hundreds of the things pulled up and kept safely at the school. Some looking very much like half-inflated basketballs, big enough for the children to wear as hats.
So now and for the foreseeable future I live in fear of gogoma. Fear is a powerful learning tool; it didn't take me long to learn this Korean word, for me to realise when it was about to be offered to me. I continue to smilingly grudgingly except these platefuls of blandness, dreading them but not wanting to create more confusion as to my diet by rejecting more food (especially when this food would be so good after a few minutes of deep frying), but even the smell now makes my mouth claggy and my tongue heavy.
This is the stuff of my day to day life in Korea. In the evenings as often as not I head downtown to eat with some of the younger, friendlier teachers. Out from under the shadow of gogoma, away from the staleness of the school cafeterias I am discovering the delights of Korean cooking. There are many highlights, all of them impossibly spicy. I find myself hiccupping still fairly often, but always enjoying the experience.
And on the other evenings I keep to myself in the penthouse. Gradually it is falling down, being reclaimed by the mud and the rice fields. Fresh invasions of insects are never far away, and the mould is always rising. Still, for the time being it is home, although I hope to remedy this very soon.
The weekdays skip by quickly, I am amazed at how much and how little my students are picking up, but I am enjoying the process immensely. Friday comes round so frequently, and then the pace of my life quickens as I hatch yet another escape plan and take off. I won't even try to talk about these here though. They are a different experience altogether from this sleepy little weekday country life I lead. They are the reality check I need to keep myself from dreaming and dozing my way through this year. But there is an entire world beyond the Road, a very different world and one I am uncovering one snapshot at a time.
