Our little booklist

Embarrassingly, we've still seen very little of this city and its surrounds.  Our excuse: Kyobo Books has a great foreign language section with all the classics discounted by 50 percent!  (Ok, that and the fact that we'll be paying down some student debts for a while yet.)  In the first months, we were looking for anything cheap to pass the time, and have since filled a small shelf with books that one or both of us have read.  It's been a nice change to read fiction and although it will be good to have kept up our reading level, I expect that it will still be difficult to return to school and its tedious non-fiction next September ... or later.

For a while in August I thought that I might pursue an MA in postcolonial English lit, so I burned through Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Toni Morrison's Beloved.  The further I get from John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, the weaker my interest in religious symbols in literature becomes.  Yes, dad, your prediction was right again: Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, remains unfinished.  I also finished my second book by Zadie Smith - this one the Booker Prize winner of 2005 - a satire called On Beauty.  Hilarious, although I've loaned out the book to other teachers and those who read her first novel, White Teeth, about Indian immigrants to England, preferred it to her later works.  I'm currently reading a collection of short stories Smith edited for 826 New York City (a group supporting young writers) but have not been further than five minutes south of The School. 

Jon, as you know, is a voracious reader who I can't possibly keep up with.  He's finished Australian Peter Kocan's semi-autobiographical Fresh Fields, John Hersey's Hiroshima, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (and has both Ulysses and Dubliners on the backburner), Goethe's Flight to Italy, and Huxley's Brave New World (again).  Now, thanks to grandparents John and Betty Frost, he's onto David Halberstam's popular history The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

Our California theme persists: both Jon and I have read John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; Jon has read more Steinbeck than myself, and polished off East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath within the first two months of our arrival.  I have yet to read a full book on Korea (unless our travel guide counts?).

So, I guess this is what university has given back so far: a degree to come over here and teach, and the ability to read at a good clip.  What are we foregoing?  Apart from July's mud festival (during which an even mix of Koreans and foreigners slather themselves in 'wellness' mud), I don't think we're missing too much that we can't see during our later months.  Museum exhibits don't seem to change too frequently here.  We've got a list of festivals happening each month that our work schedule precludes us from visiting anyways.  We don't have much time for a trip out of the country now that classes have been pushed back into October and we've lost two days of manager-created 'vacation'. And I don't expect the mountains to go missing.  

All this reading has kept us from another common foreigner pitfall: drinking, be it in Korea or while traveling to smaller islands or countries on long weekends for a pint on a beach or on a mountain top.  Heck, a blogger working for The Walrus even got paid for writing about the drinking culture among foreigners in South Korea.  (In fact, he's getting paid to write a blog about Korea not dissimilar to our own, albeit a little more political, while teaching kids on Jeju Island, Korea's subtropical paradise.  The NYT also did a story on corporate binge drinking among Koreans.  So, maybe the best way to experience Korean culture is to shoot back a few bottles of soju and bear my soul to our coworkers in order to 'bond' and improve morale at work?

Or I could read a classic and remember it the next day.

Hm.  Tough call.

Biculturalism

For those who are interested, here's a neat link about the synonimity of culture and language, and how it changes personality:

A split in linguistic personalities, by Colleen Ross (a CBC Radio producer in T.O.). In her article, she argues that a person's personality is dominated by the language that they speak. Those who learn more than one language also develop more than one personality, which can develop into an internal identity struggle (for the linguistically gifted, of course. Ross herself is trilingual).

Now, it may not be the best article out there, but Ross's personal examples are probably helpful to one linguistic theory or another.  If you've got a few extra minutes, it might be worth your time to browse readers' comments.

Enjoy!

Welcome to Gangnam/Kangnam!

Arla here --

To bring everybody up to speed, I thought that I would post a brief summary of what it's been like here so far. I hope that you don't mind the quick Q & A format ... this message was originally written for Lex (Jon's sister), who asked: Are you enjoying the teaching / new culture?

My lengthy reply was as follows:

"I think that the teaching gig has been going really well for us so far! Better than expected, at least. It's ridiculous that it's my job to teach my native language to a group of people, really ... Most of them have been learning English since high school at the latest. Their grammar is good and their vocabulary extensive. I only wish I could speak French as well as my students speak English. I guess the hardest part is keeping people's attention on the topic, and understanding Konglish (a strange mix of Korean expressions using English words, like 'skinship'). Oh, and reading Korean, which I really can't do for the life of me. I'm absolutely illiterate over here. Jon and I both have cell phones with this handy little Korean to English dictionary function that has proven handy for normal things, like understanding how to work our washing machine. Lifesaver!

To give you an idea of what we do ... the most complicated things I have to teach are English expressions because, I find, that they don't often have a root in common sense. Why, for example, do you see ghosts, but feel spirits? What is the paranormal? Why don't we have 80 different words for the 80 different types of buses that exist in Seoul and area? Why does a bus have a route, but a subway has a line? And these examples are just from one class, 50 minutes long. Put on the spot, I often try to come up with an educated guess ... like that a ghost may have a spirit but a spirit never had a visible body ... that the terms 'inter-city' and 'intra-city' buses include dozens of bus sub-types, etcetera.

Of course, if you were concerned about getting the answers exactly correct, you might feel bombarded with questions that are very difficult to answer correctly (especially with the little prep time that we've got each day for seven hours of class). Maybe that makes me a lazy teacher, even a horrible one. But I'm guessing that my students need a functional answer, not an impeccably correct one, or that they're often just curious when they're digging for more information. So I'll try not to stress about it too much during my first month here.

The new culture is loads of fun! It's like almost anything goes as long as the institutions of marriage, education, work and shame are respected. Women wear anything as long as it's paired with high heels. Yellow is a feminine colour. Not pink. The food is spicy and often paired with soju, a vodka-type drink with 20% liquor often taken as a shot, or with beer. Businessmen vomiting on the streets is not unheard of, although never glamorous. Homosexuality still elicits giggles from my students, but both men and women hold hands while walking down the streets as an acceptable sign of friendship. I expect that seeing two middle-aged businessmen holding hands while they look for a restaurant or talk business will continue to throw me for a loop for a while yet. But being in the centre of an entertainment district has other perks, like shopping and easy access to all modes of transportation. Sales, for example, are 'Happy Sale', and the buses come almost as frequently as the subway.

It's been great so far, if a lot to take in at once."

So, that's my teaching/cultural experience in a nutshell.