bad metaphor

Even when my kids are at their most obnoxious, texting on their phones, doing homework for math class, sleeping with no effort to hide it – I try and maintain some patience with them. Why? I recognize that they’re overworked in their other classes, and they’re not held accountable for the material in my class except for speaking tests.

Here’s a day in the life of a typical high school student, condensed:

A friend of mine who taught in Japan said that his students once went on an exchange trip with Korean students, to see what life on the other side of the East Sea is like. He said his students came back a little traumatized, saying things like, “man, those kids in Korea work so hard!” He didn’t think the Japanese students had it particularly easy on a day-to-day basis, either, so he was fairly impressed.

A recent American high-school graduate and budding filmmaker is raising funds to produce a documentary about attending high school in Korea. The film concept appears to have initially been about the stress induced by a yearly mega-exam called “Suneung.” That’s a fascinating subject in and of itself, but from the video, it seems that the subject has evolved somewhat to incorporate non-academic sources of major stressors, such as appearance.

Now, I’m willing to bet there’s not a single high school in the world wherein the majority of students have a healthy body self-image – that’s just how high school works. The pressure seems particularly intense in Korean schools, though, especially on top of all the academic stuff the students have to deal with.

Just two, simple wrinkles - or lack thereof - can cause so much trouble.

In many Asian countries, having a “double eyelid” (as seen in the bottom photo) is considered beautiful, whereas having a normal (well, for Asians) epicanthic fold is regarded as unattractive and old-fashioned. Being of Vietnamese-American descent, I was totally familiar with this fad before coming to Korea. My own mother has tried to persuade me to spend any available free time rubbing the tops of my eyelids to form a crease, because she tried it one summer when she was young and it supposedly worked. Currently I have this awkward situation where one eyelid has a crease and the other one doesn’t, for some reason (maybe I need to rub that eye more). Unlike the students in the video, and my own students, I never think about this unless I come across a news item about it, or my students ask me if I’ve had the surgery.

The more I learn about the lives of my students, and students here in general, the more I feel really bad for them. They’re being pushed to be perfect, and while that is probably generally positive for society as a whole – look at the incredible strides Korea has made in the last twenty years or so! – it’s not so great for individuals. Each year, South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, if not THE highest suicide rate. It makes me a little sick to think that my students will continue to be pressure-cookered for the rest of their school years, and probably the rest of their lives too.