Here Comes Fancy

Remember the photo essay we did on Autumn? With all the lovely colours and shapes? We decided it was unfair to give all our attention to just one season and so Lara went out with her camera and took a bunch of snow shots. As it turns out, they were pretty good and we decided to publish them. The bonus being that we wouldn't have to actually WRITE anything this close to the new year.

The snow that never drifts.

No one can see their reflection in running water.

The show shoveller is suing me for a million dollars.

I smoked with a guy last December...

What children know.

A road so serious that it can't enjoy the sun.

Some say the world will end in fire. Some in ice.

I'm very partial to an abundant hedgerow.

Escaping nature's snowy den on roads I've seen and places been.

I'm hiding, I'm hiding, and no one knows where.

Korea: Land of Things Inside Other Things

Somehow, Christmas has come for another year and in all the fuss, bother and alcoholic excitement we decided to join forces and write an article about something very important to both of us. Something that may shock all of you, something that threatens the very boundaries of our existence: food and the various ways that Koreans sabotage some of their most delicious ideas.
The Korean attitude towards food can be defined as a “more is more” philosophy. More food, more flavours in more bowls. What we present here are some of our encounters with the restlessly inventive Korean culinary culture.

Pizza Cone

On our second weekend we went with our neighbours to Seoul Zoo and after hours of staring at animals, hunger drove us to the food stalls. Gleaming like a gem sandwiched between churros and corn dogs was a picture plucked from our own half-formed desires. Pizza cone. The base a soft, doughy conical cup for the steaming, glistening pizza filling stuffed inside like ice cream.
Similar to a Pizza Pocket and priced at about 2000 Won, the melted cheese and tomato sauce were most welcome in the autumn cold. Everything was fine. But then halfway down the taste changed, becoming weirdly, sickly sweet. We stopped chomping and started nibbling, growing slowly aware that, yes, nestled in the bottom inch like a slug in a drain was a stiff dollop of fluorescent grape paste. It was so wrong, so disappointing, so unnecessary and unwarranted that we threw the remainder in the zoo bins and resolved to never trust a country whose cuisine attempts to combine dinner and dessert into one. But we would be fooled again.


Marron Bread

Here is a archetypal scene of the foreigner in Korea. The foreigner is hungry, and goes into a business that he seems to recognise – in this case, a bakery. He buys himself a sandwich and emboldened by the relative cheapness, he also buys a delicious looking bakery treat. The sandwich is good but the bread is a little sweet and he has to take the pickles out. He then takes a bite of the top of the crusty, nutty treat and goes “oh wow! This is great!” And then... the horror. The Horror.
What is 'marron'? According to wikipedia, marron is a name given to two closely-related species of crayfish in Western Australia. But as we found out, it may also refer to the French word for chestnuts as in “marron glace”. But the pieces of chestnut baked into these tiny, beautifully rich loafs of sweetbread are more akin to blanched sweet potato. Were they in it for the texture? The horribly mushy texture? Yet again, we found ourselves asking – WHY GOD WHY?

The Red Bean Phenomenon

Red bean is possibly one of the most forceful additions to food in the entire Korean peninsula. Made of boiled, mashed and then (sometimes) sweetened Azuki beans, the resulting paste is present at the centre of a huge number of pastries, cakes and sweets. Which in itself isn't really a problem as the taste is quite nice (though very strange to a western palate where 'bean' does not associate well with the 'sweet' category).
The issue lies in its sneakiness. You buy a dumpling, full of what you assume is shallot and meat flavoured goodness. But no. RED BEAN!
Is that a waffle with honey inside? Of course it's not you damn fool! RED BEAN!
What of the rice cakes that look like they've been rolled in flakes of dark chocolate and coconut? Put it this way: it's not chocolate. RED BEAN!
And don't even think about buying a savoury cheese roll. The savoury part ends very abruptly. RED BEAN!
Our last experience with red bean was at a train station on Sunday where we bought a pack of twelve walnut-shaped Walnut Cakes. Admiring the nutty grooves on its sides, East popped one in his mouth and then screeched loudly enough to alert old women on the street, 'IT'S RED BEAN!' (In its defence, there was a walnut swimming in the determined body of the paste.)
There's no way to ever be sure. If there was a way to put red bean inside another red bean, the Koreans would be eating the shit out of that shit. Or to put it another way, they'd be eating the red bean out of that red bean.


Which brings us to:

Meta Octopus

Lara was the lucky one to experience the might of the meta octopus. After work one day she went to dinner with a co-worker and ordered grilled octopus. Ten minutes later a plate with a single, cephalopoid mollusc was delivered to the table and Lara sat there wondering how on earth a pair of chopsticks would aid in the eating of an un-sliced octopus. The chef spirited himself from the kitchen to her side and sank a knife into the head, opening it with one long drag. Spilling from its insides came a swarm of tiny babies no bigger than a thumbnail and Lara found herself eating not one large octopus but one large octopus and eighteen tiny ones. And after eating the contents there was brilliantly convenient, edible packaging. It was, in a word, unbelievable. Such things haven't been seen since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and even then there was no delicious soju cocktail to wash it all down.

Pizza Cutlet

As you can see, not all our experiences with inventive Korean cuisine can be classified as bad. In fact, some could qualify as 'Epic Wins' but we here at the Great Affairs acknowledge that this term is constantly under debate.
But I think no-one but a vegan can really question the incredibleness of Pizza Cutlet, a pizza restaurant whose speciality is PIZZA TOPPING ON A CUTLET. You would think that this would be a logical extension of the Schnitzel Parmigiana but somewhere between conquering the Gauls and losing all the World Wars, Italy dropped the ball. But Korea picked up that bitch and RAN with it.
The one you see pictured below also had potato wedges and chunks of bacon on it.


Chocolate Nachos

The general idea Korea has about the food of other cultures is “Hey, that's great – but now we can Koreaify it”. Sometimes these decisions are fantastic (see above). And then, other times...
While we weren't the ones to order this lovely little mess, we did taste the leftovers just to verify it had actually happened. Nachos complete with cheese, tomato, onion, jalapenos, guacamole, salsa and chocolate sauce.
We thought we were imagining things. Was it an accident? Had someone put the barbecue sauce bottle next to the all to similar chocolate? Did the cook just stroke out for a minute there? Probably not. Probably this was a concerted effort of food abuse.

Despite the occasional horrors we have encountered since our relocation to Korea, one powerful impression has remained: Koreans are extremely inventive when it comes to eating. One flavour is never enough and more often than not, opposing foods are combined in a (hopeful) attempt to create something delicious. What baffles us is that when the result proves less than ideal, they continue selling it. The Korean food market is based on a series of lies and desperate delusions. It keeps you on your toes, that's for sure.
For your reading pleasure, here is a short list of some of the stranger combinations we've eaten and regretted.

Some Memorable Munchy Mentions

Squid and peanut flavoured wafers.

Dunkin Doughnuts “Bubble Tea” - black tea afloat with tapioca chunks.

Sugared garlic bread.

Acorn flavoured jelly. We were unaware that acorn even had a flavour. Explains why those squirrels go mad for them.

Real bunches of grapes that taste like fake lip balm.



Lara and East will eat your faces. And love it.

Something Media This Way Comes

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish” - W. H. Auden.

On March 26 of this year a South Korean Navy ship carrying one hundred and four personnel sank off the west coast of the country, killing forty six seamen. A national investigation concluded that the incident was caused by a torpedo fired from a North Korean midget submarine. On November 23, North Korean artillery shelled an Incheon island with dozens of rounds, damaging houses and military infrastructure and killing four people. These two attacks framed my arrival in South Korea and for the first time in my life I found myself living in a country on the verge of war. At least, this was what the rest of the world was saying. It seemed the further from South Korea I looked, the more sensational, violent and imminent the situation became. Australia's ABC news was terrifying my parents with reports that Seoul was close to being evacuated; The New York Times insisted that the South was convinced another attack was close at hand; and the London Times touted claims that North Korea believed the US was dragging the entire peninsula to the very edge. Here, however, in the midst of what should have been the most tense social environment, people were going to work using the same transport routes, eating dinner in crowded restaurants in the city and barely sharing two words about “the war”. Furthermore, the news came through with a far calmer, balanced view of the situation. This appeared as a complicated reversal of what I expected and I wondered why countries so far removed were causing such hysteria when the one that should have been the most effected was keeping a level media head.




The first I heard of further hostilities between the two Koreas was two days after the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. This information came from my mother via Facebook in a long paragraph where she described a report from the ABC news. Her exact words were as follows:

“News tonight pretty grim. Nth and Sth Korea on the brink of war. Very worried about you both as scary talk of Nth Korea having the capability to reduce Seoul to a fireball!! Please find out what is your best course of action if things escalate.”

These comments prompted me toward momentary panic and I immediately looked up online news reports in sources I recognised, starting with the Sydney Morning Herald. The first thing that caught my eye was a story entitled 'North Korea Gravely Concerns Gillard' and while it differed from other inflammatory news articles by concentrating on Australia's attitude toward the hostilities rather than the acts themselves, the heading struck me as ridiculously suggestive. Was it an attempt to create a bond between leader and people? Perhaps by seeing the concern of a personable figure of government, everyday Australians would start involving themselves in an issue that has been present for decades. What it did was make me realise that a story doesn't have to be directly incitive to disturb the water. An issue that has relatively little social effect on the country where it occurred was being made a social concern over six thousand kilometres away. And to top it off, when I asked Mum what she knew of the attack two weeks later she told me that each day any news on Korea was pushed further and further back to make room for the next big thing on page one. Finally there was just one thin column near the sports section, like an almost forgotten memory. One thin column for an entire country's pain.

Now, almost a month later, The Herald is taking a different angle: 'N Korea's Nuclear Capacity Worries Russia'. My immediate thought was, why now? Why after so many years of conflict and aggression from North Korea was Russia voicing its concern? Surely anything that finally worries Russia should be something I need to keep an eye on, particularly something with the capability to level my city. The text warned of North Korea's capacity to enrich uranium to use in the construction of nuclear weapons but this is information the world has had for years. There have been nuclear tests conducted from North Korea since 2006 and each time it happens we panic, check the state of our bunkers and call for immediate action against the North's leader. What I can't understand is why we don't recognise the threat at any other time. Why is it only spoken of when the North pokes it head clear and calls for attention? Are we that starved for drama that we let it build up to breaking point so we have more to frighten us?


I can only assume that the style of Seoul's media coverage of the North and South situation is due to Korean attitudes toward crisis. My editing position at Open Radio North Korea means that I have contact with an enormous number of reports dedicated to the relationship between the two countries and in each one I am alerted to their factual, un-biased and balanced portrayal. While working I read headlines like 'S. Korean Nuclear Envoy Rules Out Dialogue' and 'NK Leader Kim Jung-il Reveals Intention to Allow IAEA Nuke Inspection' and found the stories within refreshingly informative, dealing with the nuts and bolts of North Korea's internal workings and its connections to surrounding countries. Through these I learnt about its policies on international censorship, criminal justice and the trade embargo, to name a few. Others were focused on the political turbulence within the North's regime with direct reference to Kim Jung-il's lingering illness and his son's, Kim Jung-eun, ascension to power. I was fascinated, so why weren't other countries' media sources informing people about the way North Koreans live with the rest of the world? Where was the other side of the coin in the North's actions? My co-workers believe that the majority of aggressive gestures are the result of Jung-il “flexing his muscles” in preparation for his take-over. I shared a dialogue with the editor of the radio station about South Korean perspectives that was as illuminating as it was touching:

Me: Are you scared that North Korea will attack Seoul?
Hyun-seo: No. Things like this happen a lot but nothing comes of it.
Me: Do you think it could happen one day?
Hyun-seo: Maybe with the new leader.
Me: Would China help the North if they wanted to start a war?
Hyun-seo: They are allied with the North but no, they would not help them.
Me: What do you wish would happen to North Korea?
Hyun-seo: We want to take down the border. It's very sad for us because we want Korea to be one country. Their people are the same as us but they live very badly. It's a sad thing.

His words made me think more deeply about the two countries and how once upon a time there was no border or armed walls cutting them in half. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have Australia split down the middle and know that people just like me were tortured and suffering and dying and I couldn't do a thing about it except for wait. And of course I got a little angry. If we are a global community, why are these news stories sensationalising an all out war when they could be concentrating on the inner trauma of the Korean people en masse? Who actually cares enough to forego top-selling drama pieces and concentrate on the little known details that make this such a difficult position?


Now me, I'm not one to buy into unsubstantiated hype. Peer pressure had little effect on me and threats generally fell on deaf ears and so by surrounding myself with largely unconcerned Koreans, I felt that the threat of the North was something I needn't pay too much attention to. It was a learning experience; living in a country classified as teetering on the edge of war but seeing the everyday workings of its people. This isn't a war zone, this is a degree of tension that is ever present and constantly at flux. I personally doubt it will snap any time soon and I base my opinion on those around me. And of course as I wrote these last few words a scheduled air raid siren, one I had no idea was planned, started going off. I swallowed my words and readied myself to rush to the basement of the building only to receive a call from East telling me it was a drill and not to mind the low flying fighter planes. I end this article red-faced but hopeful.


Lara was incredibly frightened by the air raid sirens. Seriously.

Words Blogged in Anger: Some thoughts on accountability

Notes on the ESL teaching experience

“I came here with good intentions. Something changes over time. Your belief that you are making a difference in the students’ lives turns into a lost cause. Your belief that they (students/teachers/admin) give a rat’s ass – disappears. Your belief that they are actually capable teachers – vanishes. You will remain, alone, to spend your year in purgatory. Teaching in South Korea is the midway point of nowhere.” (-some random guy, a blog)

I don't mind being nowhere. Nowhere has no past, no mistakes, no consequences. In Nowhere you're always going somewhere – after all, you're not just going Nowhere, you're leaving Nowhere.

But I don't thinking teaching in Korea is the midway point of nowhere. It feels more like a city that has grown around a transit hub, one of those nothing towns that seems to wither indefinitely like a gutshot heroine in an action movie. Teaching English in Korea is like Newcastle or what I imagine Atlanta would be like.

Newcastle, Australia. Best known for the failboat.

Don't get me wrong. Teaching English in Korea isn't bad but it's not great – the money's good and the work can be rewarding. Some of us have it better than others for sure, and some have it worst than most but this seems to be the way things work everywhere. But foreign teachers in Korea are for the most part an overeducated, stymied bunch of malcontents too savage, starry-eyed or broken down to hold jobs in their own countries. We are travellers, tourists, middle class washouts surfing our language and privilege as far as the dollar will allow.

People make simulacrum lives here. They settle into the job, their homes, their routines but jerks like me always refer back to their origin as if their efforts here amount to nothing. Newbies always ask, “when are you going back?” or “what do you want to do?” because our own lives are in such a state of flux that the places we occupy become transitory because of our mere presence in them.

What bugs me about people complaining in blogs about the job is their presumption to embody their problems and fears as “Korea” and not their own shiftlessness or immaturity. The more you look around for the ex-pat blogging community the more pretentious self-idolatry (yay look at me I'm somewhere new!) and prosaic foot stamping you find. Which seem to me different sides of the same coin – a sustained self-obsession without any sense of propriety or introspection.

I know the ice above the blistering cold irony is rather thin here, but you'll have to trust me. I'm a doctor of journalism for god's sake.

The Angry are the Young

At university I knew an overweight, prickly nerd whose intelligence and acerbic wit really amused me at first. I tried my best to befriend him but the more I tried the less he wanted to be around me. Then one day at the bar (as these things go) I was infuriated with a tutorial group full of high school layabouts who were trying to weasel our teacher into letting us go half an hour early because they hadn't finished that week's readings.

I threw my arms around, ranged up and down the bar looking for the blackest insults to hurl, screaming in frustration at these myopic, cud-chewing imbeciles. And this guy, this big, abrasive geek, finally warmed to me because I demonstrated what he identified more closely with – petulance.

He was also a fifteen foot, emotionally retarded Bigfoot. Good guy.

There is a purity to our rage that can be charming. When you are angry you don't give a damn about anyone else and are so purely without disguise, so utterly without cool that you can glimpse a person's true self. Well, not their true self – their eight year old self. When someone's mad you see how they were as a child. You see the sulkers and the dummy-spitters, the criers and the pant wetters paralysed with fear. But that's anger – a return to the eight year old state.

Living in the slush

Here in Korea, winter has graced us with her first snows. It's still a novelty for me, so I note all the little details – how the clouds turn pink and the air noticeably numbs; how the flakes spiral and hang in the air like goose down.

So it was in an introspective mood that Lara and I went out with some friends for pork spine soup at a little place in the market up the hill. It was snowing quite heavily and big slushy piles clogged the gutter and the swirling flakes stuck to my umbrella like mud. I was talking to one of our friends about anger, blogs and the foreign teacher experience. Specifically, about the blog that inspired this piece: pages of puerile ranting that I had been mulling over for the better part of the week.

“I just think you should be held accountable for what you write online. Well, some of it.” We weaved in and out of the neon-drenched crowd. “This guy's just venting but a lot of what he says is outright racist. It's morally irresponsible.”

My friend went to reply but had to dodge a parker-clad middle schooler with a mobile phone in one hand and a fish stick in the other.

“Racism's easier. I think about what I say sometimes and I'm like, Am I being racist? But you get so angry and have to blame someone. Racism is a defence. Anger is a way of dealing with your frustration. The problem is, it's too easy. It has negative outcomes.”

Writing from Anger

Some of the best works of fiction and satire have been born of anger. But there's smart and dumb anger. There's having a problem with your job and then there's having a problem with a foreign culture – but the most irresponsible act is to transform the fruits of anger into bitter hatred.

The reason that hatred and anger are depicted throughout our culture as dark, negative emotions is because they separate us from each other. It's a morality play we have seen a million times and we are just too damn lazy to get the point – the reason those goofy good guys win is because they're doing it together. Love (and the subsets of nobility, friendship and kittens) bring people together. Hatred (racism, xenophobia and puppies) drive people apart. I'm not even saying the good guys win in reality, I'm just pointing the moral you've been consuming for all these years.

Kurt Vonnegut said about mankind: “We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damned cheap.” I'd like to, with modesty and with an acute sense of the irony involved, to point out that hatred is just too damn easy. That writing in a public forum without self-observation or due accountability is NOT venting. It's misrepresentation and slander. Reader beware, sure. But you are responsible for exercising the power of your freedom of speech.

Come on people. It's not that hard. You know this stuff already. From Star Wars.

Daniel East is not a substitute for real human interaction.

What to Watch When You're Not Watching British Television

WARNING: this post contains sentiment. What with experiencing my first thanksgiving just last week, and Christmas rearing its head round the corner, perhaps it's called for?

Someone once told me that being around my family was like watching a British comedy. This someone, of course, was East. I took his words as an unmitigated compliment because I love British comedy and just by having this said to me I realised how much my family of three embodies the madness that is a British script; we talk over each other, are suddenly and violently flabbergasted and use words like 'rubbish' or 'bloody Nora' as though they are legitimate curses. Our bickering is a way of expressing our love and because I've spent so much time in such a specialised environment, this has become the way I interact with people I meet who, after time, make me love them. It's never the same, though, as with my parents and the only contact I have with them is over Skype where the slight delay puts a stop to our usually smooth banter. Living overseas has taken my biological family and in moments of homesickness, culture shock and language difficulties, it's hard knowing that those I'm closest to, bar East, are thousands of miles away. We all need a support system and as a westerner in Korea, where millions of voices may as well be silent for how well I understand them, a lifeline is very welcome. So I found friends to fill the gap my parents had left.


When East and I first arrived here we had no idea what to expect of other English speakers. Would there be many in our area? Would there be another at East's school? What countries would they come from? Would we be friends just because we spoke the same language? As it happened there were three Americans who lived on the exact same floor as us in our apartment building and they greeted us like old friends; took us to dinner to show us what and how to eat, introduced us to soju and its many sugary mixes, leant power boards and adapters and gave us never-ending advice on places to go in the city. It was wonderful, having so much help so close to our door, but after a while we realised that we weren't doing things for ourselves. We didn't know where to buy train tickets, how to ask basic questions or what food was what. We'd been handicapped by friendship and it took striking out on our own to rediscover these skills. It felt much like breaking away from parents for the first time: out in the world, only a vague clue on how to get by and full of questions you decide not to ask for fear of looking like you can't deal with so much responsibility. Not only were we missing out on first hand experiences, we were limiting ourselves to a very small friend base. The kindness of our neighbours meant we had stopped searching for others with whom to share our lives. Luckily, proximity had another card in its sleeve. East met two very amusing men at his orientation, one of which lives just up the road from us. We have dinner with him once a fortnight and talk about the differences of travelling through Europe as opposed to South America. A gathering of Gwangmyeong teachers gave us an opportunity to meet people in our area and from that evening I befriended a girl who once lived in the same British county as I had and another who warned me away from Trinity College in Dublin because she had gone there and found it pompous. East got friendly with a guy who designs computer games in Seoul and they spent an hour talking about codecs and story lines. We had found another nest in which to fluff ourselves. A nest away from our nest. And we still had our neighbours, though one had been replaced with a new intake, and you can be sure we still loved them. Their Thanksgiving feast was proof entire of that fact. If Robert Lindsay had been there we could have filmed an episode of My Family.


What about organised activities, I hear you ask? Surely if you were looking for like-minded people you could go to some kind interest-inspired gathering. Not so easy over here. There are plenty of social events tailor made to westerners but finding out about them proved tricky, particularly when we hadn't made many friends to hear things from. So when we heard about a performance of Julius Ceasar at a station near our house, we went to have a look. The performance was short and sweet but the thing that really got our attention was the sentence written on the back of the flyer: 'If you would like to join Actors Without Bard'ers, please email us.' Bingo! Our chance at spending time with a group of people all interested in reading and acting. So email them we did and two weeks later we walked into a room of people who would quickly become some of our best friends. People who had read books I studied at university and knew who Magnetic Fields were and loved that I sat in the back of the room writing poetry on scraps of paper. Before meeting them I thought that living here had narrowed my choices to such an extent that I wouldn't be able to find anyone in whom I could see something of my own joys. Someone I could banter and argue with. I thought friendship had become a matter of take what you can get but it turns out everything I had at home I could build here. Minus my parents, I found a family that loved me and loved my interests. Moreover, everyone had a place in our chemistry; someone to organise professional meetings to keep us on the straight and narrow, another to work us up into going out and staying out far later than sensible, someone else who brought down the guilt for our previous night's revelries, another who brought cake or sweets to rehearsals to soothe our pain and one more who, silent, looks so perfect at the back of the room that you want to aspire to their calm, benign presence. Think the crew of Phoenix Nights without the wheelchair. And they read Shakespeare like bloody demons.


They say the family of the 21st century is made up of friends and not relatives. You know who else said that? Simon Pegg in the final episode of Spaced. And who is they? People who don't know any better. Surely we've evolved to the point where family is a very loosely defined term? We have families of mothers and fathers, those of adopted children and step-parents, orphaned children finding a place to be together, couples moving out for the first time and the many victims of tragedy who group for love and comfort. Of course the 21^st century has family not entirely involving relatives but if you're lucky enough to have them, and even luckier to like them, these biological families take a very special position in the world. Mine is my own personal British comedy but while I've been away I've created another show: part American sitcom, slightly Canadian absurdism, frank and honest South African wit and perplexing, enthusiastic Korean hilarity. And they are, in a very real way, my new family.



If Lara were to be reincarnated, she would definitely return as the second coming of Zoe Wanamaker.

What the Job Is – Part 2

What Students Know, What Teachers Don't

ESL teaching is half guesswork. For the native speaker in a foreign land, it can be difficult to predict what the students already know. This problem is particularly acerbated in Korea, as so many words enter the Korean language through adapted homophones. One of my first lessons was a class I copied from an ESL website – a 'make your own pizza' sheet. It included a word search, a vocabulary scramble and a 'design your own pizza' square where students drew their dream pizzas. A good lesson, I thought, that should fill the time admirably.
It took the students about twenty minutes. You see, when you order a pizza in Korean you are essentially speaking English – most of the ingredients are transliterated (cheese is 치즈 [chi-ju], pepperoni is 페퍼로니 [peh-pe-ro-ni]) and the menu uses transliterated English terms to characterise the pizzas (barbeque, supreme) even though there are Korean equivalents available. Couple this with the students' prior experience with time-wasting English games (mostly likely taught from an early age by other native speakers) and it meant I had a lot of bored kids on my hands.
The flip side of this equation can prove more difficult. Another early class I ran was called 'avoiding nice' (another downloaded worksheet) in which the students had to use adjectives other than 'nice' to describe a list of arbitrary nouns. It was a complete, cringe-inducing failure. After eliciting a blackboard worth of adjectives the children knew, students would rush through the sheet putting the same three or four adjectives in the spaces provided as I screamed at them to stop. Students would finish the sheet in a minute, lie slumped on their desks and complain: “Teacher! Bored.” Internally, I pondered how much of my foot I could fit into their throat without their face exploding.
The problem was systemic. From my point of view, the lesson plan was about exercising an already known vocabulary in the correct grammatical way. From the students point of view, it was about filling the gaps with a certain sort of word. We were playing a game with language, except we both had different rule sets.

Dreaming of the Multiple Lamppost

Wittengenstein defined language as a game with a near infinite number of moves restricted and defined by the finite number of given rules. The rules of the game give the board (context), markers (speech) and players (speakers) meaning despite the endless permutations of the game. His definition was designed to give meaning to any specific utterance (conversation) by eschewing it as a subjective, constructive process. Everytime you talk you talk with someone for some tangible reason – in other words, you play a sort of game. Academic debate? Verbal chess. Keeping secrets from a friend? Spoken Jenga. Flirting with a stranger? Go Fish. Some games are predictable, some are not, but each is played using a different set of similar rules.






Your crib or mine?








But there is another truth that underlies this. A truth that has made me appreciate what my job as an ESL teacher in Korea is. It came to me on the outside landing of a friend's apartment in Noksapyeong. I was bending the ear of a new friend of mine, Hyunsin, who had foolishly allowed me to pick her brains whilst I was desperately looking for the bottom of a pitcher of Cass Red (for those back home – 1.6 litres of 6.9% alcohol beer.) I had been thinking about this article for a while and wanted to ask her opinion of language acquisition and more specifically, probe her for an understanding of bilingualism. Hyunsin's parents were both Korean but she was born and spent the first thirteen years of her life in Germany. As a result, she can speak Korean, English and German fluently and also has smatterings of French, Swahili and Chinese.
As someone who reads a lot in translation, I was intrigued by the bilingual mind. I machine gunned her with what were, in hindsight, very dumb questions until she finally said something my lumbering mind could hang onto. It was a chill winter Saturday, and pointing down the twisted alley to a streetlamp choked with IP cables I asked her if she saw that post with the wires hanging from it in English, German or Korean. Was there a quality to the light that was best expressed in German? A way of evoking its rubber spiderwebs in the sensitive definitions of the Korean colour spectrum? But she said simply:
“I think of it in Korean because I'm in Korea. If I was in Germany I think I'd be thinking in German.” And that's when it came to me. Discussion between two speakers is a game – but language itself is a road. And a road has only one function – to connect otherwise isolated spaces.








Not pictured here: subtlety.









Highways, Back roads, Fire trails.

Today in class I taught the names of the planets alongside a video with their relative size. As part of the lesson I included a 'sentence scramble' – an activity designed to help the students reproduce correct sentences by giving them the building blocks of the sentence required. Thus far most students have been completely unable to complete the task. Why? Because the road isn't completed.
English as it is taught in Korea is a completely abstract knowledge. Students with low intelligence or poor motivation will boggle the minds of their foreign teachers by being unable to recognise basic English words that are plastered over shop fronts and signs everywhere. When one student didn't know what the Korean for 'noodle' was, I literally felt one half of my brain blister like heated paint. The English word 'noodle' is EVERYWHERE. At a rough guess, I'd say up to 185% of all noodle places in Korea have the word stencilled somewhere within.
English as it is taught here isn't used to communicate with other speakers of the language. Rather, English is used as an indicator of class or sophistication – the same way one might hang decapitated antlers in the parlour or a dried, twisted wreath of laurels over a door.
The equipment to build the road is supplied but it goes nowhere. There is simply no reason for Korean students to make a sentence because one: it is not required for their final exams (all of which are done in multiple choice) and two: because there is nothing you could wish to impart in the language that doesn't consist of verbs and nouns. If I ask my class, “How do you spell 'dictionary'?” No one answers. But if I say, “Dictionary. Spelling?” They will dutifully answer. The games of English that Korean students play are limited to algebraic substitution (gap fills and multiple choice) and banal word recognition puzzles (word searches and letter jumbles).


What the Job Is (part 2)

I was discussing bilingualism with a friend on mine who has recently moved to Mexico with his Chilean girlfriend. He commented that the most difficult problem is “the trap of translation” - that of converting the target language (in ESL terms, the L2) into the native tongue (the L1) and then back again. Imagine a triangle with 'English' at the bottom corner, 'Korean' at the bottom right and 'translation' at the top point – it is a ludicrous method and can only be overcome with practice and patience. As my friend went on to write in his email:
“Knowing the English word for 'auto' in Mexico is not necessary or relevant - all that matters is the word that Mexicans use. And, again, knowledge of the English word is not actually necessary to understand the concept.”
The word itself and not the idea of the word. But here is where this whole festering mess come to rest – 'the word that Mexicans use'. My friend is still learning enough Spanish to immediately communicate his needs to other Mexicans, but because he is living with someone he can converse with in Spanish, and because there are so many other people who can engage him in Spanish, he will be able to communicate with Mexicans much easier than my students can communicate with me. The English of my students is played in the classroom and for tests. The Spanish my friend learns is the game of the lost tourist.










Learn the plural form of 'Rape' in fifteen new languages!










In my last article, I talked about how isolating this job is, and how the avowed claims of 'language fluency' were actually a lie – but I never realised how completely this job was isolating myself from my target skill. Put in a situation where they can only communicate in English, the students are bullied and baffled by a strange looking guy whose arms swing wildly and eyes flash like hornet's wings. On the most basic of levels our job is to be AN ENGLISH SPEAKER. We are not educators in the truest sense of the word – we are cultural immunisations.
This is not the fault of the Korean education system – they are doing their best to institutionalise a foreign language in their native country. But the concept of language that they are dealing with is irrevocably flawed. While it is possible to teach abstract skill sets without specific goals in sight, the elements of a language are informed by countless interactions which both parties' need to willingly enter into. Imagine teaching soccer by reading the rule book to a classroom – the students could not play soccer, they could only emulate the rules. Similarly, the majority of my Korean students cannot speak English though they have massive vocabularies and an impressive knowledge of grammar.
I have begun to feel that my classes should have no explicit grammatical goals, nor do they follow a trajectory of knowledge. My classes are becoming more like my own tastes – strange things riddled with non-sequiters and wonderous, useless marvels. My best recent lessons have been about dinosaurs, the solar system and how to draw anime. Internally I hope that these useless lessons begin to destabilise the image of English as a drab, dead thing. It would be no use to teach poetry to the kids – they couldn't understand it. But to learn the names of the planets as they spin in a silent void? To raise my voice as they watch a video that relatively scales the earth to the sun and the sun to the biggest stars we can see? That's fun. And what's more, it's a game they might learn to like.




Daniel East is a curse word in 12 languages.

The Autumn Years

For this week's post we decided to do a photo essay dedicated entirely to the most beautiful season of the year. While I, Lara, did the effects on all of these photos, East is responsible for some of the lovely leafy shots. Most have been taken in Seoul, though some span back to our trips to islands and tea fields. What do they all have in common? Autumn!

So much depends upon red leaves.

I stood on the bridge at midnight,
Over the river wild and wide.

I want a holiday with a scene,
Of green, green and green.

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

The autumnal leaves will colour my face in yellow.

As I disappear.



All alone, except for stone.

Once there was a tree and she loved a little boy.

We are two stubborn people.
Which side do you choose?

All day I hear the noises of water,
Making Moan.

How to be a Foreigner

“To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time” - Cornelia Otis Skinner.

There are over 250 000 foreigners currently living in Seoul and of these, I have met no more than a hundred. These meetings have generally happened by chance, involved either alcohol or the intention of drinking and taken place at English-speaking friendly locations: westerner bars, mutual friends' birthdays and plays. What these factors have led to is a dangerous belief that these environments are where I belong and where I can find my people. At the first shared word with an American, Canadian, South African, British, New Zealander or fellow Australian I think to myself, here I have found a friend based on the one tiny similarity that we share in language. What of the millions of other factors that go into building a friendship? Why do we insist on greeting one another based on just one fraction of who we are?


Halloween Had Its Moments

Unusual as it may seem, this year's Halloween celebrations gave me a perfect reflection of the expected behaviour between a group of westerners. Our costumes, designed in spirit for deception and surprise, offered another set of greetings that we foreigners have long perfected. It may be a safety reaction that we turn to in times of uncertainty; being unsure of what we are approaching we attempt to simplify it with recognisable overtures. Halloween was an environment rife with examples and I was one of the worst - upon seeing a friend my first words weren't, 'so how was your week' or 'what did you get up to at school' or even, if applicable, 'are you feeling better?' It was one of two comments: 'what have you come as' and 'I love your costume'. By dressing up we created yet another impersonal platform from which to communicate. It didn't matter that the conversations we had after these initial moments were much more involved. They all began with the same desire to determine and catalogue. After waking up the next day, costume either rubbed off or missing, I realised why the night before had seemed so familiar, despite me having never truly celebrated Halloween before. My behaviour was identical to how I greet every new westerner I come across, and how they respond to me. There is always one question and one answer: 'where are you from', followed with either 'I've been/lived there' or 'that sounds nice'. Every single time, this is how I attempt to create a relationship with these people and the reason lies within our shared label as foreigner. If I met someone in my home country I would probably ask what they did for a living or which area they called home but as all foreigners I meet generally live in Seoul and are teachers, this avenue has also been taken from me. We have pre-knowledge before we even meet a new person and while this should drive us to be more creative in our creating a friendship, we take the easy road and use a foreigner greeting template. And what do we ask after we've secured the home country of the person: 'where are you going after this?' Have we really just skipped over the entire present tense of a person's life? What of their experiences in Korea, their jaunts to nearby lands, their miseries and triumphs and new found loves? There seems to be a pattern amongst foreigners where we assume our experiences in this country are all in all similar and so we leap to subjects removed from the immediacy of now. We react to what we recognise not in ourselves but in the greater scheme of foreigner politics.


A Big Wide World

Personally, I think Koreans have the right idea. When speaking to someone, be it a taxi driver, waitress or subway traveller, they are much more interested in what I think of Korea as opposed to where I've come from. True, most assume that I'm American and when I tell them Australia they often mistake it for Austria but all this really does is make my origin unimportant. Their interest in me comes from how I relate to the country I currently live in, not how I got there. They want to know which parts of Korea I've seen, what food I eat, where I go to drink or dance and every time I answer them I realise that I've rarely been asked these questions by another foreigner. This baffles me. These details are a fantastic jumping point for any conversation because they are full of relate-ability. 'You like kalbit'ang? So do I. There's a great place in Suwon that you should check out.' Think of the opportunities missed ignoring these details. This is a problem I haven't experienced with the locals; my friend wanted to know which exactly was my favourite type of kimchi, if only to look smug when I told her I loved them all. This of course is good old Korean-style pride, a powerful force; one man asked if I loved Korea or Australia more and my answer received quite a talking to until I said 'of course, it's very beautiful here'. Despite this, their attitude is such a refreshing way of communicating that I find myself seeking out Koreans for conversation. The problem, ironically enough, lies in the language barrier. It seems that finding the best of both worlds is a near impossibility. Those I can speak to are interested in a life I no longer live and I haven't the ability to talk to those who want to share in my present. I just don't have the words.


Despite my opinions on foreigner relations, I have met a lot of truly excellent westerners since arriving in Korea with whom I've experienced culture and custom. While writing this I thought about the people I've come to know, through proximity or by chance, and I understand why we share our lives the way we do. What more do we have in common with a new person if not what we immediately recognise? This was the reason I waved to other white people while travelling through Nepal, and why hearing an Australian accent in the bowels of a Yorkshire club would set me looking for its owner. When in a country that speaks my language, I am drawn to a familiar accent and when in a non-English speaking country I search for words I know. We foreigners play it safe with each other and ask the easy questions because we need to cling to something we ourselves feel: communication ultimately leading to conversation which, if undertaken by two friendly people, has every chance of developing into friendship, however begotten.



Lara promises to ask the next foreigner she meets if they have ever watched a biopic of Hunter S. Thompson and not loved it.

The thin line between Entertainment and War: Notes on Korean cinema and the pop-art abyss

The following statement is considered entirely logical by today's standards:

“I believe in a Christian god because I believe it and that's my right.”

The following is also considered perfectly sane:

“I absolutely love this movie because I believe it and that's my right.”

However the next sentence is considered to be an outrageous, xenophobic claim:

“I think Korean cinema is puerile because I believe it and that's my right.”

Most rational people (who gave a damn) would point out to the holder of the last opinion that perhaps they had not taken in all the facts, that they were being a little too willing to judge an entire culture's artistic output in a certain light.

Whereas someone who questions the second opinion, someone who asks for justifications for a particular point of view on a film could be seen as arrogant and pig-headed. After all, a movie is just a movie and it really doesn't matter why you like it, or who likes it.

Someone who disputes the first claim is generally considered a jerk. Someone who outright demands a Christian provide proofs for their assertions of blind faith, to rationalise a belief in such an unlikely and irrational deity is a sort of pigheaded atheist bore.

I'm not making a point for atheism here, I'm trying to outline the sensitive rhetoric of opinion that so cripples authentic aesthetic discussion in these baffling years of moral relativism. What I'm outlining is a battlefield where I will sight the beast, shoulder my carbine rifle and put three slugs (the semi-automatic three count CRAK-CRAK-CRAK) in the guts of the high art/low art debate. Not enough to stop this insensate beast, but surely enough to warrant some kind of honorific.

Personally, I've always wanted to be a grand poobah of something. It just SOUNDS right.

Scrutiny for Lady Vengeance

This was originally a review of Park Chanwook's film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance but as I researched my topic it grew into something much more complex. To best summarise my dilemma, I quote Nathan Lee's review of the film from the New York Times:

His puppet people and phony plots are an excuse for rhetorical showboating, neither a source of human value nor the medium of legitimate ethical inquiry.

That's why the story of "Lady Vengeance" is such a convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories. That's why Geum-ja's ordeal elicits no sympathy. That's why the ending is trite, not transgressive.

Now, I completely agree with the criticism of Chanwook's film given above – problem is, I also really liked the film in question.

Now before I go off on my rhetorical dialectic I would like to give a quick review of the film in question: Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is not a complex film. One might be fooled by the segmented plot (which unlikely Hollywood product occurs in three distinct sections with three distinct thematic events, reminiscent of a novel or TV serial) and the moral complexity of the actions undertaken by the protagonist (elevating the characters within to an archetypal status) but I would like to point out another movie with segmented plot and morally complex characters whose status is not misunderstood as Lady Vengeance's. Ginger Snaps 2.

Not to belabour the point, but the climax of Ginger Snaps 2 is a morally complex and ultimately transparent parable that asks whether it is madness, reason or beast-like instinct that drives humanity to the extremes of violence. Except with werewolves.

AND NO ONE WOULD AWARD IT SHIT.

Jack Nicholson pictured here at the 2008 Academy Awards

Foreign pulp is the new arthouse

In all the reviews I read, both for and against Chanwook's film, there was never a tacit claim on the film's pulp status. Which makes me want to slap my head in disbelief. I mean, it's right there in the title, one of the most beloved tropes of the pulp/cult classic canon – the revenging she-devil. Yet every review either clucked their tongues in disapproval or proclaimed how 'riveting' and 'visceral' the film was. Somewhere between the post-production and the American release something happened to completely retard the normal cinema viewing process – and it happens in the bottom eighth of the screen at constant intervals. The subtitles.

There's an interesting moment in the director's commentary of El Mariachi where Rodrigeuz talks about the reception of his movie at a film festival. He noticed that the patrons in the cinema were busily nodding their heads throughout the movie, and he often overheard them talking about the 'moral complexity' of his b-grade exploitation flick. I don't mean to overstep my mark here but this is exactly what is going on in the case of Lady Vengeance. This movie is a beautifully shot pulp/cult joyride and doesn't pretend to be anything else. Just because it's part of a 'trilogy' doesn't mean it must be a work of profound artistic merit – it just means the director didn't develop artistically from his last two movies (George Romero I'm talking to you.) (Not that you're listening, but still.)

Every law is local

There is something unique about this film that displays a character I would tentatively outline as a recurring element of Korean drama – that is, the ability to underpin what are often overly melodramatic narratives with moments of surreal and absurdist comic devices. The sharp cuts in Lady Vengeance are some of the most perfect examples of cut-away comedy I can possibly recall. There is one beautiful moment when a group of killers wait in a line outside a room of their intended victim. They begin to discuss exchanging murder weapons and the techniques they will use to execute their revenge, all with a improbable awkwardness that wracked my body with laughter. This otherwise bleak and improbable story is elevated by moments of stillness and comedy to a level above the shlock of Hollywood.

NOT PICTURED: Remorse.

It's a lovely thing to watch a Korean film occur. The narrative logic employed is so foreign to the logic of Hollywood that is a confusing delight to unwatch the story unfold. It is a storytelling aesthetic best compared to the devices of anime and manga, wherein very serious, intellectually probing melodramas are told via the medium of improbable, cartoonish elements (such as giant robots, gun toting samurai or naïve immortals). It is the pairing of the tragic and the comic, of the mature and the immature that gives these stories (and in my opinion, Lady Vengeance) their appeal and their character. A somewhat confronting blend of high and low art.

Which brings me full circle. The dialectic of high and low art is such a Eurocentric, self-defeating argument one wonders why we persist to perpetuate the myth. The terms can only make sense if one looks at the literature of one culture. If one inserts outsider voices into the mix the whole sham falls apart.

If one considers the position of, say, a Korean film into this high/low art dichotomy one immediately begins to identify an unfair cultural bias that discredits the production of new voices within the canon. The reviewer is tempted to forget that this film MIGHT NOT BE MADE FOR THEM and the literary tropes and devices within the work might carry different significance from another cultural perspective. Perhaps it is accepted shorthand in the Korean tradition to display character depth not through dialogue and internal conflict, but by having the bastard DO something and let the audience second guess their true motives. Doesn't matter. Point is, there's no good film or bad film – nor are there good portrayals or bad portrayals, only stylistically different ones.

And it is this last point I want to make the most stridently. We all back away from artistic debate because we think that no one is allowed to be wrong in the wars concerning intention. Which. Is. Bullshit. There's still failure, there's still misconception, there's still a reason to pass judgement on art. Cos art ain't art unless some bugger's trying to kick its damn legs out. Art's just entertainment that bears up under scrutiny – same as morality is an action that can sustain a critical enquiry.

Our Lady of Vengeance

The first impulse I had after watching Lady Vengeance was to write an article that discussed the previously mentioned absurdist elements as indicative of Korean cinema – but I soon realised this would be incredibly ignorant as my experience of the culture was limited to a dozen or so movies. I thought it would be disrespectful to use a limited perspective to inform a broader view of something as important and as difficult to define as Korean cinema culture. Which seems a little ironic considering the sweeping generalisations I have made above.

Darcy Paquet, reviewing Lady Vengeance on koreanfilm.org, had this to say:

Lady Vengeance might feel rather subdued, even lackadaisical, for some viewers with a built-in expectation bred by Park's previous works. Its narrative might strike other viewers as meandering and unfocused. Yet others might take issue with the subplot involving Geum-ja's daughter … Despite these potential flaws, however, in Lady Vengeance we are again presented with a unique vision of hybrid cinema, the kind of which we are not likely to see anywhere in the world, not to mention Korea.

If I had to recommend a film by Chunwook I would put the excellent Thirst above this film, but wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing it. As for the statement above, while I disagree with the glowing review Paquet gives it I have to agree with his assertion that this is “a unique vision of hybrid cinema” and well worth a look.

Furthermore, I would invite you as an audience to exercise some critical acumen regarding your own reception of the movie. We all know the best way to watch a movie is without preconceptions, but perhaps you will find it rewarding to interrogate the cultural tensions that may inform your opinion before you get a chance to see the movie.

So pull up a comfy chair and sit down to Lady Vengeance: it's like a bowl of cut watermelon and blood orange; sweet and refreshing, but not all that filling.

East.

Daniel East: not a pipe.