Now I’m on the other side, totally reluctant to go back to Korea. It’s not that I won’t be happy to see my students and friends in the ROK. It’s been unseasonably warm and pleasant here; meanwhile, Korea is buried under snow and ice. I’ll have to leave behind my adorable two and a half year old niece, who just keeps getting cuter and smarter and more amazing as time hurtles forward. (Linguistically, she’s leaps and bounds beyond even my brightest students in English, and at this rate she’ll surpass me by the age of five). She’s been attached to me ever since I arrived, following me around and shouting “hi Auntie karenology!” every time I walk in, and sometimes (during a rare moment involving her sitting still), she’ll just stare at me with the hugest smile on her face. I’ll be leaving my sister and brother-in-law, my parents (both lonely under different circumstances), and my friends, who dropped everything to come see lil’ ole me. I’ll be leaving a country where things more or less make sense to me. I’ll regress mentally, going from a place where I am able to have witty conversations with adults, back to a land where I am on the lower functioning end of the mental totem pole. I’ll go from being surrounded by family in a cozy home, back to life alone in a tiny apartment between a dump and two love motels.

It’s always hard, going home.

The first thing I noticed upon arriving was how much friendlier Americans tend to be towards complete strangers: saying “hi!” just because you happen to be passing in the hallways, smiling for no particular reason, engaging in random chitchat. It’s nice but it’s a little bewildering if you’re not used to having random people wedge themselves into your lives. I was grocery shopping back in Lawrence, looking at potatoes, when a little old lady sidled up next to me. She told me all about her potato diet, how she’d lost a ton of weight, and how she went to this seminar about the potato diet but didn’t shell out $65 for the book, she’d just stuffed all that information from Dr. So and So into that little potato in her head…and so forth. I kept nodding and smiling and thinking that if I were back in Korea, this little old lady would be shoving me out of the way with her cart to get to the discount potato bag. Koreans tend to be a lot more clannish and unwilling to engage strangers. It’s not that Koreans aren’t nice people – I’ve certainly been the recipient of unprovoked kindness, and definitely some over-sharing also. They’re just not quite as open, on average, as Americans.

Other than that, minor differences abound: yeah, in the States, you don’t have to bow to people older than you, or do that thing where you touch your hand to your arm when you’re giving something to someone (which makes it kind of awkward when you’re trying to juggle holding your groceries and paying for them at the same time). Particularly in Kansas, the environs is different: the skyline is vast and unobstructed by buildings. There are plenty of churches, but none with red neon steeples. Oh, and there are actually trash cans readily available, so people don’t generally toss their garbage on the street…

Exciting stuff, eh? That’s the problem I have been running into when trying to describe my life in Korea. My experience thus far has been interesting to me, but I can’t seem to boil it down into compelling sound bite format. Here’s how my reunion exchanges have transpired:

“So, how’s Korea?”

“It’s all right.”

I think the frustrating thing for teachers coming back home is that they want to talk about their Korea experience, sometimes desperately, but it’s hard to know where to start. It’s also difficult to find an audience that will really care to listen, because “I had to use toilet paper as napkins, and take my shoes off when going indoors” is just not as sexy of an anecdote as “I had to rebuild the roof of my mud hut every week during rainy season.” That is not to say that I think my experience, or that of any other expat in a fancy developed country, is somehow less valid than that of someone slumming it in some hovel in the third world. I just think it’s somehow harder to convey the sum effect of the differences between societies, when the similarities are so similar.

To wit: living in Korea is just like living America, except totally different in every way.

Oh joy a rice cake thanks.

Usually I’ve learned to accept gifts with grace by saying thank you: “Kamsa hamnida“, and immediately stashing the gift in my drawer, either to be consumed later if it’s a tangerine, or offered to students (or the food trash receptacle) if it’s a rice cake.

I was offered the strangest gift of all today: a dog. A Yorkshire terrier, to be exact.

Let me back up – a few months ago, I had written an essay for the school yearbook. My co-teacher wanted me to write something summarizing my first year in Korea, so I wrote briefly about my experiences, bonding with the students, yadda yadda. I think I had written something about feeling lonely and isolated when I first arrived, as almost every foreigner feels. Anyway, apparently that line really stuck with one of the other teachers, who came up to me and mentioned that she “felt concern for [my] lonely,” and though I insist that I am doing okay now, she still mentions it every other time we chat. She’s a really sweet lady.

Anyway, we were chatting briefly after lunch today, and she talked about her dogs. She has seven of them, and one recently had puppies. “Wow,” I said, “what are you going to do with all those puppies?” She said she’s going to keep them (no, not for stew, har dee har har), because she has a big property in a pretty rural area. Anyway, I wonder if she maybe mistook my interest in what she was going to do with those puppies, for an interest in said puppies, for then she suddenly offered me a dog. “I feel that you are lonely, so I want to help you!”

“Oh, thaaaanks,” said I, a little flabbergasted. Uh…I like dogs and all, but I kind of don’t really want a dog. Not just yet, anyway. (Think how the hedgehog would feel). I was moved by her gesture, but the responsible animal owner aspect of me is just always shocked whenever someone offers another person a pet as a gift – what if the recipient can’t properly take care of the pet? What if the recipient doesn’t want the pet (as in my case)? Though she meant it very sincerely, and it was really quite sweet. She’d take the dog back when I go back to the States, so there wouldn’t be the issue of me dumping it off at the pound (or bosintang restaurant) I’m actually friends with another foreign teacher who would LOVE to have a substitute dog while she’s here, but I’m not sure if the woman will be offended if I pass off her very heartfelt gift to a stranger.

What’s interesting is that she didn’t offer me one of the puppies; she offered me her Yorkshire terrier, who’s about 7 years old, and from the way she talks, he might be her favorite dog. She also mentioned that I might have to re-potty-train this dog, since he’s become accustomed to running around this huge property and might have forgotten how not to poo on the floor and stuff. I, never having owned a dog – only felines, who generally know where to put their business – haven’t the foggiest idea of how to train one. Sometimes even taking care of the hedgehog is overwhelming to my exhausted self; the thought of cleaning the poop off her exercise wheel is a little less exciting than studying Korean grammar or a DIY root canal, you know?

I told her that I’d never owned a dog, and that I was really more of a cat person, but I’m not sure she really understood, because she said “expect a dog when you return from your vacation!” and left the room. Hoo boy. This isn’t exactly the sort of gift I can just stash in the drawer and toss in the bin later. Again, this setup would be perfect for the friend I know who wants a dog while she’s in Korea, but I’m not sure how to propose this without offending.

There are two types of dogs in this country: those wearing clothes, and those in stew. This would be a very patriotic example of the former.

Oh, man. I think I'm gonna have to offer a "Craft" themed camp next go around!

Thankfully, I’m feeling like I’m slowly but surely getting better at this job – just in time for budget cuts, natch – and last week was probably my professional peak, in terms of being a super-awesome-cool English teacher. I did a detective / murder mystery themed camp, of which there is a gigantic thread over at waygook.org, and of that megathread of posted materials, I used maybe…1%. I have unfortunately developed this sick aversion to using other people’s materials these days, even though it would save me so much time and sleep (what an idiot I am).

The one time I did end up using someone else’s stuff, though, it ended up being way too difficult and the students, who had loved every second of camp up to that point, started complaining bitterly. It was shocking, the change in attitude, and I sincerely felt bad about totally harshing the kids’ mellow* by introducing this extremely difficult, not-fun activity that was vastly different in tone to everything else we had done. It was my fault: I had been utterly wiped after prepping a week’s worth of materials, that involved: 1) creating a semi-realistic looking crime scene, complete with tape, hair extensions and blood; 2) requesting voice recordings from my friends back home as actors for a murder mystery “investigation”; and 3) taping envelopes with secret codes all over the damn school, pissing off the lurking security adjosshi who patrols the building after hours. So on Friday, I just went with a cryptogram activity posted by another teacher. I had incorrectly guessed that the students would be game for some crazy Da Vinci Code cracking nonsense; well, maybe they would have been, if it hadn’t been super hard and badly formatted. I actually sincerely regret that because it was the one sour note of a completely and utterly awesome camp. The kids were way into it, I was into it, and we were all a little sad when it ended. With my co-teacher’s help, I went through the feedback left by the students (in Korean, so they could give more detail), and a frequent comment was that “this camp was not a waste of time.” Though perhaps a bit clinical and cold-sounding in translation, this is probably the nicest and most validating complement I can get from burned out Korean middle schoolers. These kids guard their free time with the tenacity of dragons.

This week, I’m midway through a Superhero themed camp with my 8th graders. I chose the theme last summer, during the conclusion of my Greek mythology camp. One of my loyal camp attendees shouted out, “Marvel and DC!” and so the theme was decided. It’s going a little less swimmingly, as the students have been out of school longer and so the 8th graders seem to have forgotten a lot of English in the interim. Plus, I’m just not that jazzed about superheroes. Murder is definitely more up my alley (I guess that’s why my students love me, ha). I’ve been doing my best to bring up my own enthusiasm level, by showing up the first day in my Halloween wig and some Wonder Woman style bracelets fashioned out of foil tape. Still, I have to admit that I’m not feeling it as much this week. Hopefully the students don’t pick up on this.

Once this week is finished, then…I pack my bags and hop on an airplane, bound for…home. Home. Where is that again? Even though I talk regularly to my friends and family through the magical ether (net), it still seems like a distant memory. That was another life, a life in which I wasn’t staying up at odd hours pasting hair extensions to a papier mache ball dripping with fake blood, for the sole purpose of provoking a reaction from 13 year olds. Who was that person, who lived in Lawrence and used to go out to bars, and do things, and have actual conversations with other adults? What was she like? I guess I’ll find out in four days.

*for the record: these kids were not that kind of mellow. In case any education officials are reading this blog. Everything’s legit up in my English Zone!

Eli sometimes says he’ll grow up and be Adult (responsibility-wise, not porno-wise) after the end of the world. I think that entails settling down, buying a house, and working a job with a dress code, or something. He also says maybe he’ll do this after he turns thirty-two. Both of which are slated to occur this year. (I’m thinking maybe he’ll need to find a new deadline…)

Here are my resolutions, in order of urgency:

1. FIND MY PASSPORT, OMG, WTF. I’ve torn my apartment apart looking for the blasted thing. I think it’s in with a big stack of papers at school. My co-teacher asked me a couple times to bring my passport back to school so the secretary ladies could…I dunno, make another copy of it. I don’t know why they couldn’t just use an old copy, since it’s not like it changed in the last year, and now I’m ultra grumpy because it’s totally THEIR fault I’m a disgusting mess and can’t find it. I’m hoping some kid didn’t just see it lying around and walk off with it as a souvenir.

2. On a related note, clean my work space – both at home and at school. Right now, on my table, I am typing next to: a double pack of batteries, a cake decorating kit, origami paper half-way fashioned into a 3d snowflake, an empty tin of cookies, a flyer for my students’ NYE rock concert (awesome!), a sock, credit cards, a knitting project, my winter camp roll list, and feminine hygiene products (not used. I’m bad but not Courtney-Love-levels of terrible). I can’t even fathom how I’ve managed to rack up so much clutter over the course of 15 months in another country. I might just have to set it all ablaze when I leave. (Maybe North Koreans will take care of that for me!)

3. Blog more often than once a century. I say this every year. Ha!

I definitely want to write more letters, but I feel bad forcing people to decipher my handwriting. Maybe I should include a kind of cryptogram key to help the receiver out.

5. Work on music. Part of the clutter I’ve managed to accumulate while here includes musical instruments (yes, more than one. I know, it’s sick). The guitar I strum with occasional frequency, but the keyboard…yeah, that thing. It’s been standing up on one end, gathering dust. Every now and then, I feel bad for it and rotate it so that it’s standing up on the other end. I think I’ll purchase a stand for it, and that will magically make me start playing it more, because buying more things is always the solution.

6. Learn more Korean, so that I can at least have one transaction in public that doesn’t descend into a terribly lengthy game of Charades or Pictionary. If I feel that I am leaving the impression of mere mild mental retardation, that will be a major success.

I’m sure there are more resolutions I can create and not follow, but six is a good number. Happy New Year, everybody! If you’re near a Koreatown, try and eat a big bowl of ddeokguk (rice cake soup) to herald the new year:

Simple and delicious! Recipe at maangchi.com.

Today, after 7th period, all the students convened in the gym for a concert. “Oh, the students are performing again?” I asked my co-teacher, thinking it was a little repeat of the smashingly entertaining school festival we’d had in September. “No, it will be parents.” Zuh? I guess the parents of some of the 7th and 8th graders started a band, and decided to entertain the kids, in a mandatory way. One of the 9th graders whined to my co-teacher that she didn’t want to go, and my co-teacher responded, “You must.” (Of course, she bailed – convenient business away from school, I suppose).

I strolled in a few minutes after 3:00, as it is a Korean teacher’s prerogative to arrive fashionably late to everything (especially class). A few of the 9th graders strolled in with me. Henry, who is probably my favorite student ever, is this kid whose favorite trick used to be playing guitar with his teeth. Then he did it too often, I guess, and when I asked him if he was going to do that for the school festival, he rolled his eyes and went, “Teacha! Very very hurt! Pain!” (I guess he’d been asked one too many times.)

I sat at the back, with the few other teachers who hadn’t made other excuses to duck out, and the homeroom teachers, who were tasked with getting the restless students to stop hitting each other for a few minutes. The parents walked on to the stage and picked up their guitars. Yes, they were a rock band. I expected something like a choir or a classical concert, or something – actually, I really had no preconception of what a concert by parents staged in a middle school would really look like. There is just no similar analogue to that happening in the States. I just…can’t even picture it, as a hypothetical. Even the one girl I saw who kept slapping her friend with a folder every five seconds – even she was a much better audience for the parents than any middle schooler would be back home.

Anyway, the parents picked up their guitars and immediately launched into a song, an old-ish Korean rock song that I have heard so many times since arriving here. Henry, who sat behind me, groaned really loudly. “Every band always THIS song!” he said, and made a motion as if to strangle himself. He would alternately rock out with his buddy behind me, and then complain loudly about how boring the parent performance was. He was awesomely catty and bitchy, and I was nearly in tears from laughing at this kid. At one point, he leaned over and whispered, “wait a minute – soon, friends coming, and we burn this place down! YEAH!”

These are the only parents who should be allowed guitars. (Yes, I may actually be sadder about their divorce than I was when my own parents split up. )

The parents’ concert was really fascinating and bewildering, from my perspective. One of the students’ mothers sang a poignant, hyper-emo ballad, in English, and though she sang well enough, it felt a little awkward: yo lady, what are you doing baring your soul to these monsters? I guess it’s different when you birthed one of said monsters, but still, the other ones don’t have familial obligations to sit politely through your show. At one point there was a brief intermission with a magic show, and Henry just could not stop freaking out about how bizarre it was. “Magic show??! In concert?! Why? Very very mistake!” and between the weirdness of it all, and Henry being hilarious, I just about died laughing in that gym, and it really turned around a day which had been kinda shitty. I am definitely going to miss these 9th graders when they graduate and go off to high school, especially Henry.

Henry, by the way, invited me to a concert that he and his buddies are putting on, at the end of the month. He’s going to play guitar (not with his teeth), and he promised me two American pop songs, “so you can understand and enjoy!” and kept insisting that it would be a billion times better than this totally lame parents’ concert (aww, poor Moms and Pops! They honestly weren’t bad at all – it’s just that you surrender any semblance of “cool” when you birth a child). Henry talks a big game, and I’m totally looking forward to it. In all sincerity, really, I can’t think of a cooler place to be on New Year’s Eve.

I found out from a student – Tom, in fact. I didn’t have much time to react to this pretty impressive news, on account of all the other students clamoring for my attention. I asked my students what they thought was going to happen, and their answer is the same as everyone else’s: “I don’t know.”

According to the Times article, Kim Jong Il apparently died two days previously, and the announcement was not released until today. That does confirm the suspicion that I and many others have about Kim Jung Eun, the dynasty’s successor – this kid is so not ready for prime time. My hope and my worry is that the regime will absolutely crumble and disappear as a result of this newly created power vacuum. Ultimately, it’s good for the people of North Korea to come out under the thumb of this brutal and horrible dictatorship, and join the rest of the world.

I have my doubts as to whether or not South Korea is economically ready to absorb the impact of a sudden influx of refugees – perhaps the most destitute people in the world, no less. I also fear the last, desperate actions of a dying regime. Perhaps it’s not the best time to be living quite so close to the 38th parallel.

May you live in interesting times indeed!

The other part is that I just don’t know how to do it. I never watched my mom putting on makeup when I was growing up, because I was busy writing stories and plotting new and horrible deaths for my least favorite toys. I was what you would call a “total loser” in middle school and didn’t have many friends to ask for advice. I did wear eyeliner once; I think it was Halloween, and I was probably trying to be Courtney Love or something. I remember Lauren and Emily, the popular bitches in my French class, telling me, “oh, your makeup looks so good.” I was caught off guard, and actually felt – flattered! Then I went to the bathroom and saw that my eyeliner was all smudged; half of it had somehow smeared over one eyelid. They’d punked me again. (I’ll reiterate my earlier wish, that they are happy with their fourteen kids in their double-wide trailers now). General fear of looking a total fool has kept me from even experimenting with eyeliner, to the point where I don’t even understand the physics of it. You’re supposed to draw around your eyeball with a pencil? How do you do that without it hurting?

When I want to look like this:

I end up looking like this:

Can't sleep...clown'll eat me...

Because I don’t want to induce nightmares for the people who I encounter in every day life, I just go natural. This hadn’t bothered me a whit until I came to Korea. Appearance is of utmost importance here. Nobody dashes out to the grocery store in their PJs and flip-flops – well, except maybe the occasional foreign teacher who just got here. She’ll be properly shamed, soon enough. Plastic surgery is rampant; almost everybody gets the double eyelid procedure at some point. It’s pretty weird NOT to wear makeup here. My co-teacher panicked and made me put on some of her lipstick on Photo Day (which she had not, by the way, bothered to warn me about in advance). She did this in front of some of my students, and they were clamoring for me to put on eyeliner and eyeshadow as well. But there wasn’t any, so when the photo is published, my lips will probably be a bright red gash in a bland oval. Nice!

So anyway, today I felt like taking baby steps into the world of makeup. First milestone: BB cream. For those of you outside Korea (well, all of you who read this blog), here’s an explanation of BB cream by the wonderful folks at Eat Your Kimchi. Basically, it’s like a miracle serum that fixes everything wrong with your face. Even things you didn’t know were wrong with your face. I was a bit hesitant about buying makeup here, as I am several shades darker than the darkest shade ever showcased in advertisements (translucent gray), but I decided to go have a look around the many makeup stores in my area.

(Fun fact: the word for “restroom” in Korea literally translates to “makeup room.” This probably accounts for why there are mirrors everywhere in a Korean public restroom, including one positioned on the stall door, hanging at eye level. So you can check yourself for blemishes while you eliminate. I guess that is efficient multitasking).

I went into the first of the eleventy bajillion makeup stores in the area, and of course it took the sales reps awhile to find the shade of BB cream that is closest to my own, which is kind of nutmeg. (My skin still remembers the lovely beaches in Vietnam). When I checked out, they gave me free samples, as these stores always do – a benefit of shopping in Korea. You get free random shit whenever you buy anything! I got some powder and a few face masks, which are these creepy masks that make you look like Jason from Friday the 13th, but transform your skin into smooth silk. I put one on, and after a few minutes my eyes were kind of stinging, which is maybe a giveaway that hey, something ain’t right! abort! abandon ship!, but I was busy cooking while looking like an axe murderer, so I paid it no mind.

I eventually pulled it off, and washed off whatever noxious cancer chemicals were roiling around my skin cells, and looked at myself in the mirror. Alarmed, I double-checked the label on the packet, and sure enough, I had ripped right through the word in big, bold capitals: “WHITENING.” I am NOT going to take a picture of myself in this state, but trust me when I say that I can pass for an extra in the next Twilight movie*, if it stays like this: white face, contrasted with much darker neck and rest of skin. Not a good look. Thankfully, I have a turtleneck that I’m going to be wearing to school tomorrow.

I know I'm American and all, but this is a look for the birds, not for people.

Now, I’ve talked at length about the enormous amounts of scholastic pressure applied to these kids. What I haven’t really talked about is what a load of Wendy Whiners these kids are. They’ll complain about everything! At least once or twice during every class I teach, I’ll hear a student moan, “jaemi opda!” which means “boring.” How frigging rude is that? I can’t imagine actively heckling a teacher mid-class like a comedian on open mic night. Not even Mr. Woody (yes, that was his real name. And yes, he had the misfortune of teaching middle schoolers with that name).

Purple rubber bands: highly useful for flinging at your classmates.

Then I had an entire 9th grade class who were stone-faced and sleepy all throughout my lesson plan on “Luck,” so since that lesson bombed with them, and we’re running out of time before finals anyways, I decided to skip it for my next 9th grade class. One of the few 9th graders who still pays attention complained about that — “but teacher! Lesson very funny!” Aww. (I do like complaints that are flattering to my teacher’s ego).

I have spoiled my students so much as far as rewards go, that they complain when they get candy. Yes, they bitch and moan about magical candy procured from thin air, a.k.a. the foreign teacher’s wallet. That’s how spoiled rotten they are. “TEACHA! I want BIG chocolate!” Listen, kids, in my country nobody gets candy in school these days. Why? Because they’ll get sued into oblivion! So go count your lucky little ABC chocolates, and please don’t choke on them.

My pets are actually the worst about this. They’ll complain about things I do, in class. “Teacher why are we doing this?” “I don’t like this activity!” ARGH THEN WHY DON’T YOU TEACH THE CLASS. Later on, I’ll find out from them that they actually ended up enjoying the activity, or just wanted to complain for the sake of complaining. I love my students but these days, my head is a bit sore from banging it against my desk.

Of course, when Tom was telling me about this bracelet thing, he was also complaining about how lame it was. I pointed out that he ought to switch his bracelet to his other hand. He complained about that too. Naturally.