Language Drainage

It’s a common thing for people (and by ‘people’, I mean expat English teachers; many would justifiably disagree with my choice of collective noun, there, I admit) who’ve served a long sentence in the grammar mines of Korea to complain that they feel as if their ability to express themselves in English has drained slowly away. They’re in a bar somewhere and suddenly find themselves totally unable to describe clearly how much they hate whatever bug it was that crawled up their ass that day. And it’s not the booze that’s split mind and mouth, damn it! No, it’s the daily grind of feeling compelled to speak in monosyllables, to shoehorn their thoughts into non-complex sentences. It’s grown into habit. It’s become instinct for them to avoid using the present perfect or the passive, or even, depending on the age and language ability of most of their students, to begin to avoid using auxiliary verbs altogether when speaking to the Koreans with whom they spend so much of their time. It’s begun to feel like communication is more effective for them and everyone else if the difference between “Where you go yesterday?”, “Where you go now?” and “Where you go tomorrow?” gets restricted to that single, terminal time word.

Of course, that’s dumb, but trained language teachers tend to be like honourable politicians amongst the unwashed hordes of the hogwan†istas. Which is to say, pretty damn thin on the ground, and automatically under suspicion merely because of their rarity.
† cut-throat, private language institutes.
Anyway, they get used to that deliberate act of pulling their arms back into the communication train before it enters the tunnel. They start to feel tongue-tied when digging any deeper than the equivalent of ‘See Jin-Ok run! Run Jin-Ok! Run!‘ They shelve their Great Canamerican Novel and start to limit their self-expression to ‘HAHAHHA yuo suck!’ on message boards or ‘HAHAHAA pwned joo newb!’ in Counterstrike or Q4. Or even ‘That’s a transparent strawman argument, and I know that this is an ad hominem attack, but yuo you suck!’ and ‘On preview: HAHAHHAAA 5-dolla newb!’ on Metafilter.
Me, I’ve noticed two things that have emerged from paying attention to what I say and speaking as clearly and correctly as I can, almost all the time.
The first is that my writing is getting, if anything, more parenthetical and rococco. That’s probably not a good thing, but much as I love writers who are spare and sinewy and rippling with Harlequin-romance-cover muscle, wanky pyrotechnics and goofy juxtapositions have always played a too-large role in the stuff I’ve written. It’d take too damn much effort to change that now. You know, unless somebody paid me to do it.
I write the way I talk when I’m drunk, I think, even though I never write while drunk. I admit I am always trying, what with the Strunk & White tattoos I had done in invisible ink on my forehead back in high school, to eliminate unnecessary words. The problem there being that I have so much difficulty deciding which ones are unnecessary (and I’m pretty sure, unlike many of those teachers I mention above, that it’s not the auxiliary verbs) that I just don’t bother editing myself at all.
Also, I’m lazy.
The second thing that’s emerged is that when I speak, naturally and extemporaneously, I never use idiom or slang. I rarely use contractions, and my Canadian accent (I think) has all but disappeared. I am the (literal) model of clear, expressive use of standard English. My students are elated that they understand me easily, and inevitably depressed when they can’t understand a damn thing that American engineer who’s visiting this week is saying. I’ve always spoken quickly, and though I still do, now I merely give you a mild case of windburn rather than lift your scalp right off when I’m excited about something. These are good things, I think.
I’m trying like hell (well, maybe just like heck, to be honest) to find a shiny, happy medium between these two poles. Me talk pretty already, but me hope me write pretty someday, too.

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch

So I’m having one of those days. Must be the onset of the Hot and Wet season. Man I hate that.
A Few Random Things I Miss About Australia (or Canada, I guess), Because I Chose To Come Back To Korea For More Punishment

• beer other than fizzy, metallic lager
• cheese and deli meats of any description
• driving
• magazines
• books made of paper
• libraries
• bookstores
• bars and pubs
• good bread
• turkey
• international food – Thai, Turkish, Mexican, you name it, other than Korean and nasty yankee junkfood badly imitated or franchised
• having an oven
• promotions and professional recognition
• clean air and water
• TV and movies (that I don’t have to download illicitly)
• off-the-rack clothing and shoes that fit
• random jocular interactions with people at shops
• being invisible
• cocktails
• friends
• beaches
• ‘taking the piss’ and ‘going out on the piss’
• Nicorette Inhalers
• drug stores
• nice apartments
• community other than virtual
• Edit: jesus christ on a popsicle stick, I forgot limes. I miss limes like you would not freakin’ believe.

AusThings I Don’t Miss So Much

• exorbitant health insurance
• telemarketers
• rent and utility bills and ratbastard real estate agencies
• pauperizing income tax rates
• metred broadband
• Australian banks
• the utter lack of internet shopping

Could be worse. I could be a dog in outer space. [/obscure injoke]

Away Team

We spent the last couple of days AWOL from the Corporate Disneyland where we live, and ventured out into the Real Korea for the first time in a while. Jesus tapdancing popsicle-stick Christ, it’s scary out there! Everything’s dilapidated, dirty or broken, and that’s just the stuff they bother to slap a new coat of paint on every decade or two.
On the upside, I’d forgotten about all the attractive young females — not many of those around here in Chaebol City, Arizona. She Who Must Be Obeyed did notice my noticing, but by the time I regained consciousness, the wounds had already been stitched up, so it’s all good.
A couple of chapters from the Modernization for Stupid People™ handbook that exemplify for me — this weekend at least — the Timeless Wisdom of The Korean People:
1) Build condos in one of the most beautiful places in the country, nestled deep in fragrant woods that in October begin to assume such a magnificent symphony of colour as to take the breath away, beside a lake, in the mountains. Then proceed to allow those condos to become filthy, dim animal caves, poorly lined with stained, grafitti’d wallpaper, reeking and unkempt. Ensure that nothing works, and that the cigarette burns in the cheap plastic bog-standard yellow floor-covering are unconcealed by any furniture, other than the lumpy bed in one corner. Make certain that the rooms, while being as depressingly drab and horrible and dirty as possible, cost more than US$100 per night, because you know the f–kin’ proles got nowhere else to go. Laugh and laugh until you piss yourself, as the lucre rolls in.
2) Build tawdry eyesore asphalt chancres on the most attractive bits of coastline, buttress them with kiloton sprinklings of concrete tetrapods, and festoon the pleasure palaces gaily with buzzing, flickering neon and bellowing signage. Make sure there is plenty of opportunity for the whores to earn their trade, and make sure that tinny speakers howl out 24/7 the cookie-cutter ’80s K-pop that gets the housewives a-rockin’ while they’re getting drunk and trying to forget what their husbands are doing. Because this is the coast, and the view is spectacular, build a raw fish restaurant underground, and make of the walls vast aquarium tanks, into whose murky depths you can peer, hoping to spy the algaed, parasite-riddled beast that will become your lunch.
A moveable feast, Korea, a moveable feast.

Taking One For The Home Team

So, I was at the bar on Friday night. This is a sentence that, in my dotage, is far less likely to pass my lips and fingertips than it once was, back when I was positively dripping with vim and vigour and fluids of a more bachelorly nature. But nonetheless, there I was, gazing somewhat blearily at myself in the mirror through the bottles, propping up the fake-mahogany with my buddy J. There was an impressively long line of empty bottles neatly lined up in front of us. I think the Korean guys like the empties left in front of them as a display of their alco-power, but that conspicuous consumption display tends to backfire when me and my equally thirsty drinking buddy, the livers who walk like men, come onto the scene. Shrug.
The gaggle of young women behind the bar are paid as much to be decorative as to actually sling piss, and station themselves right in front of you, whether you want them there or not. Orders. I tend to ignore them, after an initial smile to show I’m not entirely ogrish. It’s pretty clear, at least when it comes to old bastards like us, that getting pole position in front of the foreigners is pulling the short straw. The ladies do tend to make a valiant attempt to be hostessy with their few phrases of English, but the time is long, long past when I much enjoyed talking pidgin with bargirls, no matter how attractive they might be. Not to say that I wasn’t young and foolish, once. Thousands of young men around the world would be pouring over my seminal textbook, ‘Bargirl Bricolage and Soju Semiotics: The Ineluctable Modality of The Boozehound’ if I’d ever written the damn thing.
So we were tanking up, smoking, talking sh-t, enjoying the once-a-month concession to our younger selves our wives allow us. At the outer edge of my OB Lager-induced tunnelvision, I noticed a group of 4 guys sit down beside us at the bar, but J and I were deep in discussion about how cool it would be to be first on the ground when the Kimchi Wall comes down, as writers or otherwise, and I didn’t notice much other than that the guy beside me was Korean. He didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed, as one does, that he didn’t speak English, and ignored him after giving a terse nod.
Not long after, though, J announced that it was time to break the seal — I, as usual, had been peeing like a racehorse since the first friendly whissht! of escaping beer vapour — and wandered off to the toilets. Turning to me, the Korean guy said ‘How’s it goin’?’
In those few syllables, I knew not only that he spoke English, but that he fluent, and that he’d lived overseas for a time, or was maybe even a returnee. My English Radar is strong. Well, that and the fact that the three other guys sitting with him were all foreigners, and pretty clearly not the English teacher type.
So we started in to talking — and having a conversation in idiomatic, natural English with someone new is such a rarity for me that I was almost giddy with the strangeness of it (nutty expat syndrome ahoy!) — and I learned that he was the language liaison for the other three, who were Americans, a couple of soldiers and a contractor, and here at the deep water port in Sunshine City to expedite the transhipment of tons of US military equipment from Korea to Kuwait.
That may have been classified information, but we were all pretty drunk.
I was right, both about his English and his history. He’d lived in America and gone to both high school and university there. I asked him how he’d liked it, and he told me this : he went to high school in Illinois, university in Los Angeles, and he hated America. Those were the words he used. I suspect saying so wouldn’t have gone over too well with the guys he was with, but they were busy clumsily and loudly hitting on the waitresses, who, in the Way of The Korean Bargirl, tittered fetchingly while failing to hide the look of abject panic in their eyes.
I asked him why he would say such a thing, and he told me that while he was going to university, he worked to make extra money, in a relative’s liquor store. And that he’d been shot during the regular hold-ups. Twice.
This boggled my mind.
When he was in hospital, he said, he’d decided that he was leaving America as soon as he finished school, and not coming back. Not surprisingly. Now, I’ve been around the world a few times in the last 15 years. Been in war zones, been in all the worst places in dangerous cities all over the map. Even LA, one mad weekend on my way down to Mexico, when I heard gun shots in my friends’ Hollywood neighbourhood as we stumbled around, indestructible Canuck style, at 4 am. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone before who’s been shot. And this guy, this mild-mannered Korean whose parents sent him over to America to get out of having to do his military service, he’d taken a couple of bullets for the home team.
And now he was back home, getting paid to translate the crude pickup lines of his military colleagues to the girls behind the bar.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, a twisty-cruel just-so story, I imagine. I leave it to you to tease it out, if you’re so inclined.

New Day Dawning

The general election here in Korea has come and gone, and the results are being characterized as a democratic victory for the left, the first one since, well, ever. As is usually the case when people resort to such sledgehammer thud-dullard simpletongue™ words as ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, though, that’s a simplification that does as much to obscure as it does to illuminate. The Uri (‘Our’) Party has won a clear majority, and as the presumptive representative of the young, the disenfranchized and the reform-minded, it may represent the first significant shift in the political landscape in Korea since the initial stumbling steps towards real democracy 16 years ago. It gives me some hope for the future.
The final numbers of parliamentary seats, of 299 total, are :

• Uri Party:152
• GNP (Grand National Party) :121
• MDP (Millenium Democratic Party):9
• DLP (Democratic Labor Party):10
• Others:7

The Uri Party, formed in November 2003 by a band of breakaway MDP legislators after months of the kind of factional infighting that has paralyzed Korean politics since there was such a thing, is the party Noh Moo Hyun said he would join, and for which he publically expressed his support a couple of months back. This infraction of election laws — public servants and elected officials are (somewhat inexplicably) barred from expressing support for a political party — led, along with charges of corruption from the mind-bogglingly corrupt GNP, who held a majority in the assembly, to his impeachment last month. A ruling on that impeachment by the Constitutional court is still pending, but the disgust felt by the vast majority of the population at the hypocrisy of the impeachment, made clear in pre-election polls, has been hammered home by yesterday’s election results. Few outside the oligarchy took kindly to the Lord of the Flies stink of the impeachment, and most who are not locked in to that corporate-sponsored network of bribery and kickbacks — sometimes hyperbolically referred to as the Korean Disease — had any interest in seeing it rewarded.
But the story is deeper, I think, than mere political bullsh-ttery. It’s a story of young against old, of modernity against tradition, of the emergence of a wired netizenry and an unwired elite, and most of all, of a culture rooted in a neo-Confucian world-view that is simply not acceptable to a majority of the population that understands that the strict vertical hierarchy of such a world-view serves only the old, the male, and the wealthy, while rightly cherishing the elements of the ideology (made the state ideology more than 500 years ago, during the Choseon Dynasty) that support the fading communitarian underpinnings of the Korean spirit. Korea is widely held to be the most orthodox Confucian nation in the world, and for good reason.
In an essay on Confucianism and Korean communitarianism, Professor Park Hyo-chong writes :

What Professor Park does not mention, perhaps because it militates against his thesis (or merely because it’s tangential to it) is that this definition of self in terms of relationships with others has a dark side as well. In today’s urbanized Korea, if there is no readily identifiable relationship between one person and another, that other is summarily ignored, or merely disregarded as a sort of speed bump in the road of daily life. Not to say that Koreans won’t struggle mightily to establish some sort of relationship, no matter how tenuous, if they wish to interact with you (the seemingly overpersonal questions about age, marital status, religion and so on that so annoy newly arrived foreigners are examples of this in action) — they do, and will. But if there is no reason to do so, the default mode of interaction with strangers often seems to be brusqueness to the point of derision. Rude by the standards of an overly-sensitive Canadian like myself, but not so much impolite as simply a way of managing one’s way through life while buried in a complex, dense web of relationships, relationships through which one defines oneself.
This dependance on a web of relationships and the tendency to simply ignore those with whom there is no first-order relationship through blood or money or alma mater creates an ever-thicker wall between the haves and the have-nots. This is one of the things that has helped empty the countryside of young people, as they seek both fortune and contacts in Seoul, and has made a good part of an entire generation of young adults simply give up if they did not gain acceptance to one of the ‘good schools’. It actually is about who you know here, in a very real and destiny-defining sense.
But this is far from the worst of what Confucian values have wrought, despite the communitarian benefits they have sown.
For those not entirely hip to the Confucian two-step, I wrote a little bullet-point summary of some of the underlying human taxonomy it requires in an old piece on linguistic relativism.
Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships (although of course there is much, much more to the system of thought) :
1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend
All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last.
The implication is clear, I should think, and for anyone with any knowledge or experience of the differences between the old and new guard in Korea, it should be easy to divine the pattern : man over woman, old over young, teacher over student, ruler over subject.
It is this structuring of duty and fealty, of dominance and willing submission, that underpins a great deal of day-to-day life in Korea, and, I believe, has been one of the guiding forces in the evolution of Korean politics, just as it has been in all things here. It’s a force that is fading, or more accurately, being transformed, but it still has deep and mostly unquestioned influence in the relationships between Korean people in both the personal and the public spheres.
The one constant in Korea, as the cliché goes, is change, though. One of the alarm bells that anyone who was paying attention might cite was a UNICEF poll back in 2001, that showed that among Asian 17 nations surveyed, Korean young people had the lowest levels of respect for their elders.

When the mostly old, mostly male politicians and teachers are unfailingly corrupt and obviously unworthy of respect or fealty, and when the very foundation ethos of the cultural history that they cling to demands that that respect be paid, things start to fracture.
Beatings of students by teachers, like this one captured on a camera phone recently, are not the exception, and only go part of the way to an explanation of the disgust and anger most young people and many of their elders feel with the state of things. Although it’s little discussed in English, for example, it is standard procedure for public school teachers to accept bribes and gifts from parents in order to ‘do a better job’, or pay special attention to their children. Arbitrary exercise of power, corruption, and disregard for rule of law are everywhere.
And young people today, thanks to penetration of broadband internet into upwrds of 80% of households in Korea, know that that’s not the way it needs to be. They’re angry that the moneyed elite, all of whom, with very few exceptions, graduated from one of the Top 5 universities in Seoul, have developed an insular network that locks out anyone from the wrong class, or the wrong province. They’re angry at the university entrance examination system, which theoretically offers a level playing field, but like the continuation of the old yang-ban government service exams that created a small de facto nobility and a vast population of peasants and outright slaves during the Choseon Dynasty that it is, they realize that the game is rigged against them. They know that if they don’t jump through the hoops presented to them by an archaic and entirely anachronistic education system, in which they can only excel by putting in 18 hours days throughout their entire public school careers, greased by the liberal application of their parents’ money, they have little to no opportunity to rise to the top. They know that anything can be bought, and everything is, and they’re sick of it.
Then, last year, when a man who had not attended university, who came from a peasant background, who spoke plainly, whose background was as a human rights lawyer (and to rise to that level, he had to repeatedly retake his qualifying examinations), when this most unlikely of people to actually be put forward as a candidate for president of Korea, when this totally unexpected watermelon seed suddenly squirted out of the scrum — well the young and the disenfranchized elders voted for him in droves. For better or worse, he represented the truly revolutionary idea that you might not need to be part of the oligarchy to succeed.
And when, after being blocked and bullied at every opportunity by the bought-and-paid-for money men who held the majority of the seats in the assembly, after wobbling from crisis to crisis, he was impeached in what was clearly a power grab, ostensibly for the kind of corruption of which it was abundantly clear so many the impeachers were equally guilty, the outrage went ballistic.
All countries are well-stocked with corrupt politicians, of course. Korea may be cursed with an overabundance of them, but ordinary people, especially the young, are clearly not willing to bow down for them much longer, as the watch the scions of the tiny overclass ride blithely past so much abject poverty, safe behind the tinted glass of their Chairman sedans.
It is entirely possible the Uri Party will end up being as mired in corruption as the others, and equally possible that the chaebols like LG, Samsung, Daewoo and Hyundai that own the country and its politicians outright will buy up the new power brokers in short order as well. It is likely that the bickering and internecine backstabbing that has been the hallmark of Korean politics since they were occupied by the Japanese (and further back than that, of course) will cancel any forward momentum. The young, who, while idealistic, are also fatter, lazier, more selfish and less driven than their parents and grandparents, may continue to think of the evil bastards up in Pyongyang with a misguided, romanticized fondness right up until bombs start to fall.
Will it mean that the education system will be reformed? Probably not. Will it limit the power of the oligarchic chaebols and their rentboys in the assembly? Doubtful. Will it bring about greater rule of law, and more respect for individual rights? I’m not going to hold my breath. Will it break the strangehold on money, power and the future of the latter-day Gangnam yangban? Hell, no.
On the other hand, this deliberate break from a rule by corrupt corporate whores, this disgust with a perpetuation of the status quo that weakens Korea and its people in every measure but the monetary, this understanding of the power of democracy a decade and a half after the country became democratic in name if not nature — perhaps this means a new day is dawning. It’s the first real step in the right direction of this magnitude that I’ve seen in 8 years here, and it will, I hope, mean that the transformation of this society, massive and rapid as it has been, has only begun.
Now let’s just hope as more pegs are knocked out from under the rotten superstructure that there are people with the energy and ideas to build on the traditions, the drive, and the indomitable spirit that has brought Korea to where it is today.
And that Kim Jong Il doesn’t get any bright ideas.

Walkabout

Went for a wee walkabout with an automotively-blessed buddy on the weekend, and took a few pictures. Here are my favorites from a pretty average bunch. Line on the left, one cross each.