Tomato Season
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
15
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheonan,
Korea Rep.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
The kids all came to school wearing their monthly or bi-monthly haircuts. June had begun. My co-teacher warned me that the rainy season would start soon and the next day the rain came thundering across the rice fields.
When I arrived in Korea it was grape season, and I couldn't eat grapes as fast as they were gifted to me. The presents piled up and then rotted and were flung to the hungry rice fields out the window. Winter was orange or mandarin or clementine season, and by February they had become thoroughly tedious, as well as increasing small, hard and bitter. There was a brief pineapple season but none of those was actually grown in Korea. Then came tomato season, and cherry tomatoes appeared in great pyramids in the supermarkets, and in huge bags around the schools.
With the coming of the rainy reason the cycle was just about complete. The wet swathes that hung around the hills every morning were the same swathes I had seen when I first arrived in Cheonan. The rain when it came moved in silently, drenching everything, and disappeared fast but never for long. It was all so familiar.
The rice crop grew high, and one day it was too high for the herons to stride over. They became sharp-billed periscopes in the rising fields. Then one day the fields were full of tiny white butterflies, flitting over the jagged green, dancing across the damp roads.
The corn grew from knee to head height in a few short weeks, nodding its shaggy heads in the pre-storm breeze. Huge trunks of white corn appeared beside the tomato bags in the staff room. While the other teachers ate dog at our end of term picnic, I gnawed on cob after cob after cob.
In July the Buddha-bellied spiders returned and spun their perfect webs about the bus stations and farms. They snared hundreds of flies, bundling them up in gauzy cocoons. The summer orgy of the flies went on undaunted though. They filled the school, plundered the bags of tomatoes, shagged on my computer screen.
Word got out that I wouldn't be renewing my contract, and the principal invited me into his office. He gave me words of advice, encouragement, and praise, but he didn't change my mind. My jumbled explanation for why I was leaving involved homesickness and two bereft, empty-nested parents. It didn't include the truth; that I was sick of teaching, that a five day working week was more than I could handle, that I had exhausted myself in my attempts to make school as fun as possible. When he saw that I was resolute he signed my release, gave me an A+ review, took me out for lunch, and then cancelled my afternoon classes while we toured the shrines and birthplaces of the local martyrs.
I counted the days and weeks to the end of term, hungry for a vacation, for a chance to enjoy this country before I left it behind. The weeks disappeared in a blur; I have no idea how I managed to fill them so quickly or thoroughly.
The weekends remained their usual frantic business. We ventured off to a sleepy little island where nothing opened except during the 'beach season', which isn't until August. We visited a huge spa and water park, most of which was closed until the official vacation began. A mud festival on the coast attracted every foreigner in Korea to my province, and for those two brief weekends, while everyone was coated in blue-grey mud people - even locals - were permitted to relax, to smile, to dance about and talk to strangers. The weekends were filled with excursions and small explorations, but the weekends remained too small and most of the country remained unexplored.
The countdown accelerated into July, and then stalled as extra weeks of teaching were added to my summer. I scowled and growled and yearned for joblessness.
The last official week of term came around and the schools went swimming. A flotilla of flotation devices were deployed, and I was watched teachers and students alike struggle to stay afloat in hip-deep water. Life guards stalked about, ordering children out of the deep end of the pool, which was chest high (on them, not me). For a seafood loving country that once upon a time boasted an invincible navy, it was all rather ludicrous. I decided to take a dip myself, shocked and scared a few people by swimming underwater, and then sunk as student after student latched on to me. Though most of them grew tired of drowning games, one did not; a big fatty from 5th grade who had named himself Elephant King and who cried when he didn't win games. I dragged him and myself round and round the pool, swallowing water and understanding why some of the teachers were avoiding the water. By the evening I had fallen sick - it may or may not have been unrelated - and I was vowing never to swim with the elephant king.
I coughed and spluttered through my last week of classes. I lost my voice every time I opened my mouth. It was a very strange, very hoarse goodbye I bid to most of my students. The sadness of farewelling them was balanced by the elation of farewelling the cafeteria food forever. No doubt with time these goodbyes become very easy for the English teachers doing the rounds of Asia, but these were my first batch of malleable young minds, and despite their miscreant moments it was sad to be leaving them all behind so soon.
July came to its end and the tomatoes began to turn yellow and orange. Their skins became loose and their places of prominence in the supermarkets were given to peaches and melons. I reached the one month left mark and celebrated it by going to visit the DMZ, and staring across to North Korea. It was one of the things I had come to Korea to do, and it had taken me almost a year to do it. When that short tour was over I wandered what else I could do to experience and explore the partition, but there is nothing else. Whether I had taken the tour in the first month or the eleventh hardly matters, because no one here really talks about divided Korea, or the insidious north, or the impoverished north. Another tick in another box in the country full of surprises.
And then the summer vacations began, and I began my program of summer camps, and the days slid away... 31... 30... 29... 28... 27...
