A Sunday Korean: "Breaking the Lules"

So I decided what I am yesterday. I am a Sunday Korean. You all know the phrase "Sunday Christian," right? Someone who goes to church and takes religion seriously one day of the week, but sins like CRAZY for the other six days (especially Saturday night, I bet)? Well that has become, unfortunately, my attitude about learning Korean.

I have a new language exchange partner who takes our work together VERY seriously, which is great. He simultaneously wants to PERFECT his English while helping me to accomplish my goals with Korean (which, by the way, are quite modest). So we spend two hours every Sunday engaged in fairly intensive language study, the likes of which I haven't known since Mr. Chandler's B-period AP French 4 class.

The problem is that for the other six days of the week, part of my job is to actively police my classroom, reprimanding any student who speaks Korean, or "Konglish," or really even speaks with a heavy Korean accent. For example:

Student: Teach-uh? Can I please-uh go to bathroom?
Teacher Chris: *with mock incomprehension* Teach-UH? What is teach-UH?
Student: TeachER, please-uh!
Teacher Chris: Please-UH?? What is please-UHH??

So I spend 6 hours every day, and three hours on Saturdays, enforcing a strict-English only policy. It makes me feel like an evil colonial governor, but that's what I get for reading all those books in post-colonial literature for Lit Crit class.

Meanwhile, I would really like to cultivate my skill at speaking the language my children would like to desperately to use during class time. I'm sure I could learn quite a bit if I didn't have to be such a Nazi about enforcing English only. Every now and then I've let a word or two in Korean slip out, and this actually completely disrupts the classroom atmosphere. Students immediately stand up and point to me, with glee on their faces. "TEACH-UH YOU SPEAKED KOREAN! TEACH-UH YOU BROKE THE LULES!" It's a sight to see.

Mentioning Christianity brings something else to mind. The churches here in Korea all have their steeples decorated with bright red/pink neon crosses. That's right; you can identify a place of holy refuge from quite far away, even in the darkest of sinful nights, by the neon pink cross, shining like a very flamboyant beacon from heaven above.

Please Don't Hit Us

And speaking of domestic abuse! Today in one of my elementary school classes, my students had to get into groups and brainstorm things that they liked and did not like about their parents. Then they had to think of what kind of parents they wanted to be, and finally, they had to write a song about parenting.

A group of five elementary school girls produced this gem. It's called, "Please Don't Hit Us."

PLEASE DON'T HIT US

Listen to my opinion
Listen to my opinion
We hope that you don't hit us.
(Because we can get hurt
Because we can get hurt)

And we can get many stress
We always try hard for
Be a good daughter to you.

Heartbreaking, isn't it? In a funny, ESL-kind-of-way. The boys, on the other hand, did not focus on the same emotionally intense issues as the girls. Instead, they wrote about a much more straightforward concept, one that is near and dear to the hearts of children from developed countries all over the world. And in the true spirit of rock and roll, it's called, "Give Me."

GIVE ME

Give me money
Give me money
Give me money

And we want.

Give me free
Give me free
Give me free

Now we have.

Everything
Everything
Everything

And we have
All the thing.


UPDATE:

So I gave the same exercise to a different class today and got surprisingly similar results. A group of boys wrote from the standpoint of a consumer in an acquisitional materialist culture, while the girls' song reflected their desire to escape from the critical judgements of their elders. Amazingly, the boys even chose the exact same title for their song.

WHEN I GROW UP

When I grow up,
I want to be a nice parent.
I don't say so many scolding,
Because...

The scolding makes them
A sense of inferiority,
The scolding makes
Children have a bad mind.


GIVE ME

Give them
Give them
Give them
A free time.

Give them
Give them
Give them
Many money.

Don't give them
Don't give them
Don't give them
A study time.

Don't give them
Don't give them
Don't give them
Many books.

PIFF and a long commentary on domestic abuse...

So this week is the Pusan International Film Festival, which is, in the words of everyone's favorite Anchorman, "kind of a big deal." The city is flooded with even more twenty-something American "waegu" than are normally here, although the really cool thing is that I know more about Korea than all of them put together!

I saw the only movie I could get a ticket to today, a Canadian film called "Twice a Woman," about a woman who attempts to reinvent herself and recover from the trauma of an abusive husband. It was actually not bad, although I'm sure I'm far from the target demographic and there's a reason why it's the only one that didn't sell out completely.

The one thing that I wished this movie gave me (and I've noticed this from other movies about abusive men) is more of an insight into the mind of the abuser. In popular culture, the narrative of an abusive relationship seems to invariably center itself on the victim, her helplessness, her recovery, her growing confidence, etc. But that's really only half the story, isn't it? I mean, does a guy just wake up one morning and declare, "Today, I'm going to send my wife to the hospital!" I mean, what's going on inside his head? I'm genuinely curious, because there must be some sort of internal progression from "I'm a guy" to "I'm a guy who abuses his wife/girlfriend." What factors turn a person into an abuser? Can ANYONE be transformed into one, given the right circumstances? (Probably more people than you'd think, anyway.) Who, or what, CREATES an abuser? And, if I may ask a more dangerous question: What narratives do abusers craft to justify their behavior?
And to become still more dangerous: Do these narratives have any legitimacy?

Also, I read a study that actually claimed that women are actually MORE LIKELY to abuse their domestic partners than men are. Obviously, less men are going to report it when their wife beats them up, because of the shame involved. Also, consider how little social support there is for abused men? For men, few people will even admit it's a problem. When I was at Sarah Lawrence, a couple of women came from an organization to talk to the RA Staff (including me) about services for abused women, and how to deal with situations where we suspected abuse, etc. When I questioned their insistence on using the female pronoun for the abused and the male pronoun for the abuser, they dismissed my objections on the basis that the "overwhelming majority of abusers were men." EVEN IF this is true, wouldn't insitence on those gender-based pronouns only serve to reinforce the social frameworks that prevent abused men from seeking help? Just sayin'...

Speaking of ABUSE, someone stole my bicycle. It wasn't a super-expensive bike, but come on. It was locked up right outside of my academy and when I got out of work at 10pm, it was gone. And it was raining. Hard. So I had a long and angry walk home to my apartment, where I promptly mixed myself a drink and fantasized about what I wanted to do to the person who so flagrantly violated my property right.