bad metaphor

Yesterday, I made plans to hang out with Eli and friends in the evening, which entailed some of my two favorite things: fried chicken and laughing at people in silly hats. I was really looking forward to stuffing my gaping maw with crunchy, greasy, molten-hot KFC (that’s Korean fried chicken, not the Colonel’s blend) – when my co-teacher rolled in at about 4:10 and said, “oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you. I mean, I almost forgot to tell you. There’s a Teachers’ Dinner at 4:30! Can you join?”

“Of course,” I said, as there’s really no other possible answer in the Korean workplace culture! While inwardly thinking, great! What are we having, rotted fish guts? It turned out that though my fried chicken plans were shuttered, my arteries would not be spared – we were off to a samgyupsal place, to feast on fatty, fat fatty fat fat grilled pork.

As with a lot of Korean traditional foods, when you go out to eat it at a restaurant, don’t assume that you’ll be relieved of cooking duties just because you’re not at home. The matron comes out with a big plate of raw slabs of pork belly, a hill of rock salt, slices cloves of garlic, tongs and scissors to cut the meat into edible strips. You grill the meat, and when it’s done, wrap it up in perilla and lettuce leaves, dip it into sauce, and down the gullet it goes.

The word “samgyupsal” roughly translates to “three layers of fat pork” (or “pig beef” as many of my students and the other teachers call it, lol). The restaurant where we ate specialized in ohgyupsal, which is even fattier than that and has FIVE layers.
It was diabolically delicious, the best samgyupsal I’ve ever tried during my stay here in the ROK, and any thoughts I had about saving room for dinner later with my friends flew out the window.

Free and delicious food: what could an English teacher possibly complain about? Why do most English teachers react with instinctive dread and revulsion upon hearing the ominous words “Teachers’ Dinner”?

For starters, the issue of having hardly any advance notice for these things is slightly problematic for our schedules. It seems that everyone knows well in advance about the Teachers’ Dinners, everyone except the person that can’t speak Korean. After about seven months of working in a Korean public school, I’ve gotten a pretty thick skin when it comes to abrupt “schedule changee,” having a class suddenly appear when I didn’t expect one, or classes canceled without me realizing until nobody has shown up about five minutes into the period. So though I was slightly bummed about having to bail on my friends, they’re also public school teachers and they understood.

No, the main reason why I and many other foreign teachers loathe going to Teachers’ Dinners is that it entails a long amount of time sitting in a crowd of people who can’t (or don’t want to) talk to you. So once you’re finished eating, you just…sit there. And keep sitting there, and twiddling your thumbs, and playing with your cell phone (which you failed to recharge because you didn’t know there was going to be a Teachers’ Dinner, d’oh).

Even deciding where you are going to sit is a bit of an ordeal. The other teachers will fight over who has to sit next to you – none of them want to do it! – so at times it’s slightly amusing, even if a little offensive, to watch the other teachers scurrying away from the dreaded “English zone.”

Luckily, I get along pretty well with my main co-teacher, Mrs. One. I wish I got along better with my other co-teacher, Miss Three. We hardly interact at all in class – though she does her part, disciplining kids who get a little too rowdy during games and things like that – and outside of class, our interaction is next to nothing. I’m always the one who says “hi” in the hallways, or sometimes “annyeong haseyo” in case my theory that she’s not comfortable using her English is valid. Miss Three sat down at a table by the wall, so I figured I would just take a place next to her. She didn’t say anything, of course, and even if she did I probably wouldn’t have understood (my Korean is decent for only having been here 7 months, but abysmal compared to a Korean toddler with head injuries). Still, I definitely could sense that she was annoyed at having to sit next to me, and dreading the chore of potentially having to translate things.

For the first hour or so, Mrs. One took over that dreaded duty. Miss Three and another woman at my table were commiserating over being single. They’re at the age when the pressure to get married and start popping out babies is at its highest, so they asked Mrs. One for advice on how to find a mate. Bless her, she gave them advice and translated what she said in English for my benefit! It was mostly along the lines of “when you find a man, see how his father behaves and you’ll know if he’s a good husband,” and that sort of thing. Solid advice in any culture, really.

Then some speeches transpired, and it turned out that my principal (King Teacher!) will be retiring in a few months (!). Again, this was news to nobody except for me. Then the King Teacher whisked Mrs. One over to his table to pressure her into drinking this absolutely foul alcohol concoction, which tastes like fermented Dayquil. The two young women at my table continued chatting amongst themselves in Korean, and for lack of anything to do, I kept eating more and more samgyupsal.

“Do you have any plans for the holiday?” I turned to Miss Three and asked, when the conversation had stopped for awhile.

“Yes,” she said, and went right back to eating.

Shut down! At least I had my confirmation – girl, for whatever reason, HATES my guts. Fine by me; at least I put forth the effort. I guess I can understand her perspective somewhat. As a young female teacher, and a substitute at that, she is at the very bottom of the chain of command. She’s teaching a subject she isn’t that comfortable with. She’s got homeroom duty, too, so she’s fairly busy. And she has to come to my classes (though she hasn’t been doing that as of late), stand there and be bored out of her mind. She does try to help out every now and then, and I wish I did chat with her more outside of class so I could coordinate a bigger role for her so it isn’t such a dull experience for her. But I’m not even sure she’ll come to class – and if she does, sometimes she comes in rather late – so I certainly don’t want to hook the lesson plans on an unreliable factor!

So here I was, bored and stuffing my belly which was fast building up five layers of its own fat, when the vice principal (Deputy King Teacher) looked over the room at me. Now, DKT was tanked. A potentially lethal combination of the Dayquil stuff and soju, I imagine. He tottered over to my table, and plopped himself on the cushion vacated by Mrs. One, much to the discomfort of the young woman sitting next to him. His English is pretty basic, but unlike Miss Three, he really really really wanted to talk to me. He called out for Mrs. One’s assistance, and it was then that we discovered Mrs. One had absconded from the premises. She totally bailed. “Zuh? How will I get home?” I asked, and Miss Three said we’d be getting a ride from the other young woman teacher. Oh goody. She probably hates me too!

As it turns out, Deputy King Teacher had been to Vietnam three times, and is like obsessed with it or whatever. Through lots of hand-wringing, head-scratching, pantomimery and exchanging the few words he knows in English with my limited Korean, he proceeded to lecture me about my country of heritage. (The poor lady next to him also got a corresponding lecture, in Korean). At one point, he looked me dead in the eye and declared, “I love Ho Chi Minh.”

“Sorry?” I said, not thinking I understood him right. For some reason I assumed that Korean men of a certain age would be really anti-communism, given their own history, but of course I didn’t factor in for individual variance. “I love Ho Chi Minh. He is a good man,” quoth Deputy King Teacher. “He start from nothing!”

While I myself am a big ole lefty, and certainly don’t share the virulently anti-communist ideals of my parents – their war experiences loom large in my family history, so I couldn’t quite bring myself to just nod and agree with the declaration of love for a man who brutally tortured, “reeducated,” and killed people for the sake of ideals. Sure, HCM was no Pol Pot, but still. “My parents – mother and father – are from the South,” I explained. “My father fought and had to escape to America. He is still, uh, angry about the war.”

Deputy King Teacher nodded sagely (and drunkenly), and said that this war was similar to what Korea had gone through. For some reason he decided to quiz me about Ho Chi Minh trivia – “do you know – Ho Chi Minh no marry?” Then, since I apparently failed the quiz, he insisted: “you must learn more about your country!” and continued praising HCM. Strangely enough, he reminded me strongly of my dad in that moment, even though their beliefs are diametrical opposites. If there’s one thing Asian dads around the globe know how to do, it’s to steamroll any other opinions in a conversation.

Eventually he staggered off to get more soju, probably, and the special ed teacher came by the table to chat with me. It seems to be a rule that the less English a teacher speaks, the harder they try to talk to me, which is kind of sweet and funny. Hey, at least I was no longer being bored to death. He asked me if I liked working at the school, and I replied with yes, the students are great, I love them!”

“What about teachers?” he asked, with a big grin on his face.

“Yes, all is good,” I replied, with a big thumbs up. Though if I could be perfectly honest, if given the choice, I’d much rather pay out of pocket and take my students out to lunch, than go to another free Teachers’ Dinner. Nothing against the teachers, but last night’s experience really drove home the point that I relate infinitely better to kids half my age.

I got a ride back to school with Miss Three and the other young teacher. Judging from the exasperated sighs and the animated complaining in the car, they were relieved to be done with the dinner, too. I gestured to be let off at an intersection, and the girl pulled over to the side of the road and let me out.

Naturally, it was – of course! – the wrong intersection.

I looked over at the car, which was still there, stopped at a red light. Should I run back and explain my mistake? Hell no, too awkward! I pulled out my (dead) phone and did the whole “pretending to talk on the phone while walking off towards the sunset like I meant to go this way” thing. Did I mention that red lights in Korea take twice as long as they do back home? Yeah.