Via Korea Has Died of Dysentery

I’ve been at fives and sixes on the Bristol Stool Chart for the last five days.  Down to one meal a day.  Five hours of sleep a night.  Work schedule unchanged.  Any water I consume is immediately turned against me.  It either crawls back up my esophagus, bloats my stomach, or rushes straight to the floodgate of my anus.  My body isn’t absorbing any of it.  Serious signs of dehydration.  Weakness.  Dizziness.  Fatigue.  My boss asks if she can get me something to eat to give me strength.  I tell her no as I have no appetite.  She gives me a slice of toasted bread with nothing on it.  No jam.  No butter.  Just. Toasted. Bread.  I eat it anyway and it mixes with all the water sloshing around in my stomach, making me intensely bloated.  I curse the heavens.

I’m going in and out of the bathroom about three times a day at work.  This is normal, but in the past I went in frequently because it was a refuge from the rest of the academy.  Cleaner, too.  I’d lock myself in the stall and just put my head against the wall.  That’s when I wasn’t even sick.  Now I’m squirting a fallow, macerated stew during each visit.  One of my coworkers (all of whom are female) comes in and bangs on the stall door.  I make no reply.  This is the men’s restroom.  She’s too lazy to walk to the other side of the academy to use the women’s restroom.  She’s also too ashamed to streak the porcelain with her solid twos and threes in the women’s room because the other coworkers would hold her in low esteem.  So she pinches loaves in the men’s room.  But it’s my domain now.  The next hour I return and the toilet is clogged with a massive turd the size of a sweet potato.  I look at it with a curious mixture of envy and disgust.  I couldn’t clog a coffee straw if I tried.

Yesterday I had to teach a few classes from a chair.  Couldn’t stand.  Vertigo and sweaty fever chills.  They say you should seek medical attention if these conditions last more than two days, but I want to see how long I can last before I go to the hospital and realize that my boss in fact never paid for my health insurance.  At that point I’ll have to pay in full and out of pocket.  I learned that lesson during a visit to the dentist a while back.  My boss prefers to do everything under the table.  She sends in “The Ajumma,” a private nurse who will come to your apartment and ask you questions impatiently in a rugged Jeolla-do accent before giving you shots in the ass.  My boss never ceases to tell me that “The Ajumma” is ex-pen-shee-vuh, so I should take it as a luxury.

During each visit, “The Ajumma” makes me a really nifty IV out of a coat hanger, but during the most recent visit she missed my vein, causing my hand to swell like a balloon.  Then my boss showed up with a syringe full of something and injected it into the glass bottle leading directly to my veins.  My boss is not a licensed nurse.  I was too weak to even say in a fading wail, “Noooooooo!”  Immediately after that, the line stopped dripping, so “The Ajumma” had to come back and fix whatever my boss had fucked up.  My boss made up for it by giving me a massive pot of a certain homemade food that my body was too weak to digest at the time.  I was shivering in bed for two days after eating that stuff.  That’s my last memory of “The Ajumma,” so this time when my boss asked me if I wanted her to visit, I said no.

The pharmacy is very hit and miss.  The first medicine did absolutely nothing.  The second would only plug me up for a few hours until I became painfully bloated.  And it only worked between the hours of 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.  I don’t know why.  Nothing but the runs the other twenty hours.  I went in for something different today and the man gave me the first one again.  I refused it and asked for something new.  Waiting for that to take effect now.

You’re Next, Pooch

Hagwon Teachers at a Glance: The Margins

Just as the housing bubble pushed millions of incompetents into doomed-to-fail mortgages, the university bubble is pumping out millions of incompetents into doomed-to-fail job searches.  The TEFL industry is one particularly convenient drain for the innumerable soapsuds of the great Ivory Soap Tower Bubble.  In it you have guys like “Tim.”  “Tim” is a terrifically hirsute Midwesterner who represents the extreme right tail of Gwangju’s TEFL suds bell curve.  He’s got a vaulted cognitive ceiling that surprises the hell out of me, but also an impaired ability to process nonverbal cues.  When speaking to “Tim,” I know I can turn off the bullshit-secreting social spigot and rely on concise language.  “Tim” communicates only in facts.  Everything I say is run through his fact-checker and if something doesn’t compute, “Tim’s” eyes flash DOES NOT COMPUTE in bold red letters and his tongue is immediately set to the task of disabusing me.  He’s the ultimate fact refuge and he’s never wrong.  He’s also not very employable in any job requiring interpersonal skills save bottom-of-the-barrel TEFL jobs.  He’s too fact over feeling.  All objectivity and no grace.

The story goes that he was a hard science major who couldn’t find work after graduation.  I’m sure he had a very limited social circle to call upon and his parents probably put little to no emphasis on the networking that is so important during college.  Due to the sheer number of Asian students mining for 4.0s in American universities, straight As are nothing without further connections, string pulling and choice internships—just the new bottom line.  Unable to schmooze, “Tim” had failed the game of upward mobility before he started.  I know because I’m schmoozing-impaired myself.  That’s why we both teach at hagwons now.  Dean’s List Schmean’s List.  Our college degree stock is flat.

“Tim’s” opposite is this British guy here in town whose name I don’t know, but whose face says everything that needs to be said about the extreme left tail of the TEFL bell curve.  He’s the guy whose glass tumbler whizzed by my head during a bar fight almost two years ago.  Handsome but dumb as a box of cox and 10 years too old for this teaching gig, every crease in his face oozes a patina of hooligan lifeblood.  Part of me thinks it wouldn’t be a waste to follow him through life as a fly on the wall, watching as he willfully plows headfirst down the path of most resistance in every possible situation.  I ran into him again a few months ago and threw him a simple question, but all I got back were some runny Brummie diphthongs that no one but his closest mates back home could have made out.  They came through lips pressed around a dangling cigarette whilst his bloodshot eyes and calloused hands teamed up against his shirt pocket in search of a light.  This was Brawling British Guy at 6 p.m. on a Saturday evening doing what he does best: enjoying a cigarette outside an expat bar before going in for round two.

A hagwon tee-cheol like Brawling British Guy doesn’t have a backstory that any human could relate to.  No childhood.  No gestation period.  No nothing.  Just an instance when a few hundred million sperm were shed onto some maculated prom dress and left to die somewhere in the vast labyrinth of modern indoor plumbing.  All eventually flopped dead in a limpid genetic stew scattered among the sewers of Birmingham save one.  By chance this super-seed found the River Trent and was dumped into the North Sea, escaping into the belly of a colossal squid where it stayed for two decades until a man emerged on a rocky coast somewhere near the Shetland Islands clothed in nothing but tattoos and squid sucker marks.  Rumor has it the squid was half submerged somewhere nearby, mysteriously asphyxiated by one of its own tentacles.  That’s encyclopedia editor “Tim’s” polar opposite here in the hagwon trenches: a guy who injects 151 directly into his right temple while shooting up his knee-clanking bellend with heroine.  I’d like nothing more than to get these two opposite margins of Gwangju’s hagwon distribution together and just talk.  I’d set an I.P.A. in front of Brawling British Guy and an encyclopedia in front of “Tim” and watch each lap up his meal.  These are my people.

Words to live by

Teachers’ Day: Hagwon Edition

How exactly does Teachers’ Day work out for folks renting themselves to after-school language mills?  It would be both inaccurate and boring to try and speak for haggie teachers in general, but my own experience is easy to adumbrate.  For starters, of course, I didn’t get the day off, as hags aren’t real teachers.  Teachers’ Day is there only to remind us that there are real teachers in the world, like psycho pud-tugging Korean guy.  He gets the day off, while the only weekdays we get off are days when the entire nation is shut down.  Our plight is a never-ending rain dance to the beat of a malevolent free-market force that feeds on money and human misery day after day, contract after contract.

My day began with an eye infection.  My eye was sealed shut by dried puss, so I had to force it open with my fingers.  Spring had cursed me with allergies and a migraine headache that day on top of the phlegmy ajeossi cough, inflammed throat and nasal congestion of a cold passed on to me by my students like a torch at the Special Olympics.  My boss knew I had been sick like this for a few days and asked whether there was anything she could do short of letting me have the day off.  “Then, no” was my answer.  She loves Teachers’ Day because it’s the day her latest ajeossi boyfriend sends a massive bouquet of flowers to the academy, which she places conspicuously in front of the entrance.  She is showered in the greatest approbation despite teaching the fewest classes at the academy—even fewer than the one part-time teacher we’ve got.  But who has the gall to notice such things?  Haters?  Yes, only haters.

Teachers’ Day wasn’t a total wash for me.  I was sent home early—that is, I didn’t have to stay an extra hour and tutor one of my boss’ kids without pay after finishing all my other classes—because I had lost my voice.  Actually, my voice had already disappeared the previous day after I finished my shift, but that’s no reason for a foreign-language teacher to stay home the following day.  Voices schmoices.  If a teacher loses his voice in the classroom, does it make a sound?  No!  So teach, fucker.  Gesticulate if you must.  Or pantomime using the theater skills that got you your worthless B.A. and a plane ticket to Korea.  Whatever it takes.  If worse comes to worst, just exist foreignly in front of the children.  You can do that, right?  If not, then even that 병신 Stephen Hawking could do your job better than you, you bum.

To finish up the day, I slumped in my chair at home, thoroughly medicated, and vacantly listened to the blood rush through my temples.  Waiting for the computer to warm up, I noticed that the pulse from my wrists, both of which were pressed into the edge of the desk, was so strong that the water in a nearby plastic bottle was pulsing, too.  I’m still not sure whether that was real or just a mild hallucinatory tribute to the film Jurassic Park, a childhood favorite of mine.  No matter.  In my inbox was an e-mail from two students I used to teach at my first academy.  They were particularly fun and wickedly intelligent when I was there, and now, for Teachers’ Day, they had remembered me and wanted to wish me well and invite me to come visit them.  How sweet.  Oh, wait a minute.  It’s actually just the new boss of that academy using them as a front because he wants me to come work for him next year.  Figures.

Keep it Classy

A certain fundraising event involving musical performances mainly by professional classical musicians from Jeollanam-do was held last weekend here in Gwangju.  The performers were almost exclusively made up of music professors from local universities like Chonnam, Chosun, Mokpo and Suncheon.  Lots of M.A.s, D.M.A.s, A.B.D.s and Ph.Ds earned in America and in Europe, with many well-traveled Korean composers and soloists, a few members from the Gwangju Philharmonic, 3 sopranos, 2 baritones and even an oddball jazz fusion ensemble.  Lots of different languages sung, lots of tributes to recondite composers of yore.  It was an homage both to traditional European music and to the cosmopolitan progenitors of it.  That being the case, it should have attracted a classier segment of Gwangju’s 1.5 million denizens, right?

I first noticed numerous tiger moms with their restless-legged cubs in tow.  Bad sign.  These mothers were likely attempting to force-feed culture and English to their apathetic, game-opiated progeny.  The mistaken belief here is that children are as malleable as wet clay and come with no genetic baggage predisposing them to numerous idle enjoyments and only the occasional tiger mom-approved habit.  I counted two sleeping preteens in the first 10 minutes.  Other kids’ faces were blotted out by the touchscreen sun.  A few teenage boys in the highest seats had laser pointers and were amusing each other with a burlesque of head shots using the backs of macrocephalic Korean heads as targets.  This is what happens when you put recidivous game junkies in the junk tank against their will.  I say Free Willy!

Large swaths of the audience were made up of broods of single college girls in short dresses who got up and left abruptly whenever their musician of choice finished his set.  They came off looking like groupies or play-thing proteges of said musicians.  This was the majority of the audience at the Lim Dong-Hyek recital I attended last year, by the way.  (Hypergamy in Korea differs a bit from America’s in that the women here aren’t yet subject to a shifting cultural milieu in which thuggish men are deemed higher-quality mates than successful beta men, so Lim et al. can still get lots of access to prepossessing Korean mons.)  But I’ve gotta say that the ladies in attendance on this particular night were even guiltier of indoor touchscreen tanning than the aforementioned teens.  All were texting via KakaoTalk and sharing their infantile banalities with their ‘big sisters’ while sopranos and baritones rattled their diaphragms to a never-before heard composition especially created for this event by the expert pianist.

These gals, like many of my students, suffer from a Korean disorder known as “박inson’s,” which distorts their perception of time and results in the stereotypic movements of lowering the head, turning up the palm of the hand and gazing at the time, dozens of times an hour.  As I’ve learned from observing my poor students, they don’t really have any need for knowing the time, they just want to be comforted by the fact that time still exists and is proceeding as usual.  Those without phones ask you in a panic, you tell them and then they settle back down the way a person with dementia settles down after being reminded that the most basic mechanics of life have continued unabated.  Such routine nonsense is comforting for those afflicted but annoying for those who aren’t.

Insurance Fraud, Naju