Another Week

Another week has gone by, but only Saturday night, walking home from a coworker's house after a night of eating an improbable burrito dinner, of drinking soju and nearly freezing on his rooftop while his grill sputtered ash, and of then sitting on the heated linoleum floor of his living room—which, living in a studio, is also his kitchen, which is also his dining room--did I realize in the literal word-for-word sort of way that you tend to realize things while taking a longer than desired walk home alone in the middle of the night, that I am in Asia. To know that I am in Asia, to say it out loud despite what the Korean cabdrivers waiting or not waiting at the red lighted intersections think (what they already think of me will not be impacted by whether I am or am not talking to myself), is a very different feeling than to realize even that I am in Korea, or that I am teaching abroad, or that I was in a love motel but that I am now in an apartment, in Tongyeong, which I first heard of two months ago and where I now live. Asia just sounds so much grander, and thank you, but not only in the geographical sense of the word.

So here I am. Another week in.

The monday before last was to be my first day of teaching but, after a quick trip half-way to the hospital and back, a medical examination promptly cancelled and rescheduled after Leon, my school-appointed life-manager, asked me if I had remembered to bring my passport and I responded that no one had told me to bring my passport and so no, I had not remembered, but that it was sitting in my motel room not four blocks away and that we could just swing by and grab it, but no matter, he said, not understanding a word that I was saying, we'll do it tomorrow, I was informed that, contrary to what I had been previously told, rather than teaching Jeff's classes with Jeff tagging along constructively or otherwise, I would be spending the day hopping from one foreign teacher's side to the next. Evidently Pamela, the director of teachers at E.C.C., felt that I would benefit from observing a more diverse range of teaching styles. Or maybe “diverse” isn't the right word. “Effective,” maybe.

And in that there is no denying that she was correct. From Steve to Eli to Britney to Greg to Elizabeth (called “Zibby” everywhere but on the official school documents and just now; I still haven't figured that one out), the worst class I observed that Monday was disciplinarily comparable with the best of Jeff's. Which is to say, of those which I was soon to have the miserable fortune of inheriting.

Every teacher seemed to have his or her own way maintaining order, though all seemed to follow the same basic framework. Good behavior—answering a question correctly, reading a passage from the book without any mistakes (or with more realistic generosity, without abandoning the task mid-sentence to crawl under the table and bite a fellow classmate on the ankle)--is acknowledged before the class in one way or another, though in most cases with a “+1” hastily scribbled with a dry-erase marker on the white board right next to the student's name. Bad behavior, likewise—speaking in Korean, speaking at all in some cases, refusing to do work, abandoning a task mid-sentence to crawl under the table and bite a fellow classmate on the ankle—is also acknowledged, usually with a “-1.” Or perhaps, in the case of Britney, this is all done with stars and frowny-faces.

What these points and stars all translate into is also a matter of the teachers individual discretion: Steve, on the one hand, maintains a strict and predictable sticker-to-point ratio on the positive end (E.C.C. has established an artificial though thriving sticker market in which students can trade in a certain amount of stickers, stuck neatly into a book designated for exactly this purpose, in exchange for certain educationally-positive prizes, namely books; most baffling of all is how successfully the school has managed to convince the students to, as it were, buy into this system; the stickers no longer seem to function as a sole means to the end of educationally-positive reading material, in the same way that our own national currency no longer represents a given stock of gold; the children seem to have long since taken the fiat value of the stickers for granted at this point and the teachers thus have carrot, one of very few, with which to reward good behavior), while maintaining an equally rigid punishment regimen on the negative side (-2 gets a student sent to the corner where his or her arms will be held aloft in all too familiar, slightly embarrassing and after long enough quite painful posture used in Korean public schools, while -5 gets a student sent outside, and -10 earns that student a visit to the universally feared director of the school; Britney on the other hand, awards fruit and candy on the up-side and delivers punishment with typically Korean displays of humiliation before the class). But regardless of its various incarnations, this system seems to be universally applied across the school.
That is, except for Jeff's classes. From the admittedly limited amount of time I was given to observe Jeff teaching style, coupled with the litany of unfavorable remarks leveled against him and in hushed tones to me both preceding and following his departure by every one of my colleagues, some subtle (“I don't want to say anything about him behind his back,” said Sunny, a Korean teacher from Busan, before looking at her desk and then repeating four more times, “I just don't want to speak poorly of him behind his back”), some not so subtle, (“That guy is a piece of shit,” says Eli), my understanding is that over the course of his tenure at E.C.C., Jeff-Teacher's personal approach to class order has been to not have an approach to class order. That isn't to suggest that for a class to move smoothly from one chapter of the designated English textbook to the next, it is incumbent upon the teacher to establish an elaborate market mechanism with its sticker-strip currency and its fixed prices designated as such with a teacher-specific codex of symbols. That is also not to say that Jeff was never strict. But what does seem to be the case as far as I can tell is that Jeff was consistently inconsistent and, according to my colleagues, that inconsistency was borne of a deep apathy apparent to both his colleagues and his students.

And so in walking back to the love-motel that Monday night, knowing that I would be teaching Jeff's classes the next day, I felt energized by the fact, evidenced by my experience that day, that it is the resilience of the teacher at E.C.C. and not the moral fiber of the student body that so often determines how smoothly or catastrophically a class runs. And I felt a terrible kind of despair for the same reason. I knew that after a year of negative (or an absolute lack of) reinforcement, I would be fighting an uphill battle in each of my classes until everyone of my new students was fully and unambiguously aware of who it was that was in charge. And I remembered how stern Eli had been; a Texan standing at over six-feet with a suitably hard face, he was unquestionably one of the strictest teacher I had observed and for the mechanical order with which his children raised their hands, stared numbly at the open faces of their books, turned the pages when he said to turn them, and lining up quietly at the sound of the bell, I envied his power. Or maybe it wasn't the power that wanted, but the ease with which he seemed to move from class to class. There was no constant struggle between him and his pupils and so he strolled the halls of E.C.C. like royalty. I, on the other hand, could only begin to imagine the excruciating humiliation if I were proven unable to sufficiently intimidate a group of young children into not screaming at one another in Korean for forty minutes a day. And in that failure, I began to anticipate the next 364 days; 364 days of wack-a-mole, telling one child to knock it off in as stern a voice as I can muster only to find three more on the other side of the room starting their own equally incomprehensible conversation, laughing away, not listening or laughing at me or not listening and laughing at me. I needed to succeed at this.

“They will try to push you,” Eli had said to me. “They will push you and when you give, they will know to push harder the next time. So you never give.” And so I was ready to come in the next day, guns-blazing, the anti-Jeff, as sturdy as a wall.
The next day was Tuesday and within 2 minutes I had made a six-year old girl cry. The time-line went something as follows:

00:00:
I enter the classroom and greet the class in a friendly, but I hope respectable manner. I have decided to wear a tie today, hoping to display a level of competence and confidence which I do not possess. The six-year olds do not seem fooled. They do seem confused as to who I am exactly and where it is that Jeff-Teacher went. And for their ignorance, I'm not sure I can really blame Jeff, despite the temptation. I was in the room on two different occasions during which Jeff told them that he was going home (a flattened hand arching out in front of his body was used to demonstrate the concept of “going home”) and that I (Ben-Teacher) would be the new teacher. But apparently the news didn't quite stick.

00:45:
Having decided to enact a similar point-based system in which positive points may be redeemed for sticker strips, and negative points earn the infractor progressively more severe punishments (I only have three at my disposal really), I decide to go around the room and have each child tell me his or her name so that I can write it on the white board, and for extra fun and to convince myself that this is a legitimate part of my “lesson plan” (I do not have a lesson plan, but there are a few scribbles on a piece of paper in front of me which I am now having trouble reading), to tell the class about their favorite dessert.

00:55:
I am now trying to explain to the class the concept of “dessert.”

01:00:
Why is this Korean child named Rick? Eli told me that upon arriving at E.C.C., that child's teacher will be asked to choose an English name on the student's behalf. But this does not seem sufficient to explain why it is that there is a chubby 10 year old in one of Zibby's classes named Larry, which aside from the obvious comical incongruity of a chubby Korean 10 year old named Larry, seems additionally absurd, if not cruel, given that poor Larry will certainly have trouble pronouncing 3 of the 5 letters in his name.

01:20:
I have written “Ava” on the board instead of “Eva.” There are howls of protest across the classroom. Eva herself, along with her close friend and ally, Jasmin, seem particularly offended, and then amused, and then offended by my oversight.

01:30:
“Your name is 'Eva' then?”
“EEE-BA! EEE-BA!”
Rick is so stimulated by the sudden outburst of noise and energy in the room that he jumps up and runs to the board, perhaps to better point out my mistake. But he has not asked to stand up. And all children are to remain seated. I was warned about this. They are pushing me. This is how it begins.

01:45:
Rick is back in his seat sulking. Eva and Jasmin are laughing, I imagine at me. The two girls in the back are chatting in Korean. I attempt to resume my preliminary exercise of misspelling the children's names and asking them questions which they do no understand.

02:00:
A cellphone rings. Cellphones are absolutely not allowed. I approach Eva. Or Ava. Or Eba, which is what it might as well be, since Korean's can't pronounce “v”s.
“Give me the phone.”
“No.”
“Give me the phone, Ava.”
“Eee-Ba!”
“Give me the phone.”
“No.”

She turns around and slides the cellphone in the front pocket of her backpack. This, I know, is a confrontation of sorts. I have asked for the phone and she has boldly decided to refuse my request. Britney has referred to these little events, instances in which the will of the teacher collides violently with that of the student, as “showdowns.” And I remember what Britney told me about showdowns: “you cannot lose.” And I remember Eli and what he told me and how wonderfully un-childlike his children were. And so I tell Eva to stand up, to walk to the corner of the room, and to stand there facing the wall with her arms raised.

And she immediately starts bawling.

Fortunately for me, the rest of the class proceeded very quietly. Quietly, except for Eva's incessant sobbing which did not stop for at least 10 minutes. For a moment, I wondered if my punishment hadn't really been counterproductive since as long as she remained crying, she was not doing her work, nor was Jasmin, her accomplice, too busy patting Eva on the back and shooting me dagger-eyes. (Imagine my relief the next day when I discovered that Jasmin and Eva rarely do their work anyway!).
But the next class went smoother. What I quickly discovered, and am continuing to discover, is that different classes absolutely call for different approaches. And in that respect, I am much more comfortable teaching classes full of boys. Boys tend to respond quite enthusiastically to the point system, even the most study-averse ones roused by the scent of competition. And on the opposite end of the pedagogical spectrum, they also seem to react somewhat more predictably and, in my opinion, favorably to getting shouted at—this ironically or not being my only available method of behavioral enforcement that does not make me feel subsequently like a child abuser.

Perhaps there are certain gender constructs specific to Korea that I am not aware of that might explain this discrepancy between the reaction I have so far received from boys and girls respectively, but my suspicion is that the girls are by and large just the smarter group. The boys will be awed by my pointing finger and disciplinary shout—they will be cowed, assuming that the volume and relative depth of my voice stand for some legitimate source of authority I have over them. But the girls seem more likely to see through that. Even the six year olds. Even after making her cry on the first day, I still haven't managed to get Eva and Jasmine to take me seriously. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect she was faking it all along.
But despite these initial hic-cups, I've been surprised by the manageability of the majority of my classes. So many of those that Jeff had warned me about, the classes that had been so disorderly when I was observing them myself the week before—fourth period immediately labeling me Pinnochio-nose en masse and the seventh period being described by Jeff in his helpful write-up to me that “[a]ll of the boy misbehave all of the time”--seemed markedly tamer this week, the fourth, in fact, being one of the most enjoyable. With the exception of the first class, which has indeed taken a turn for the worse since my transition to power, and the sixth, which is every bit as bad as Jeff made it out to be (and now that you mention it, I'm really beginning to worry about the fifth), everything has been going better than expected.

Eli warned me though: the first week they spend summing you up. And then they start to push. By the end of the first week, I was already exhausted.

Eli mentioned that too. During one of our five-minute breaks between classes, we bumped into one another in the bathroom. Maybe I looked as tired and dejected as I felt after four more classes of struggling to make sense of the various class-specific books or the class-specific paces at which teachers are expected to teach through those books or the alternating class-specific book schedule or the fact that none of this is written down in one place anywhere. Or maybe so much was conveyed as I frantically dabbed at my nose with an increasingly blood-stained ball of flakey toilet paper (the cold months are exceptionally dry here and the constant piping of hot air into all of the classrooms all of the time has done much to desertify the interior of my nose and, in the process, horrify the children and undermine my respectability, or at least a pretense to it, as I lean over a student's workbook, checking her grammar, blood slowly trickling from my right nostril), but he told me that after his first week, he was ready to quit. “Give it another week or two,” he said, washing his hands and saying nothing about my face. “Once you get into the routine of things, you stop sweating the small stuff. You stop having to even think about what you're doing.” And then he invited me to his house for a get-together on Saturday.

But in the meantime, I was still in the love-motel, waiting for Jeff to finally move out, for the cleaning service to come in after him and rid the place of what Greg and Eli both swore must be a revolving deposit of empty pizza boxes, decaying food scraps, and unchecked mold and grime (for the record, I have found neither a pizza box nor a morsel of rotten food since arriving; I do not think I will ever sufficiently understand exactly why it was that everyone of my colleagues, including, as I found out at lunch today, my director Pamela, seem to so dislike Jeff, but the unanimousness of their opinion does say something I suppose), and for Leon, my life-manager, to move me out of my room with its aesthetically neutral condom dispenser and its midnight bumping and grinding in the rooms surrounding me and its back-alley sleaziness and its central and incessant heating that forces its tenants (me) to keep a window wide open to the 40 degree nights or, even worse, run the air conditioner simultaneously just to keep from suffocating while they sleep, and into my new apartment of which I certainly held unhelpfully high expectations.

On Tuesday morning I met Leon my life-manager once again at the school and, this time with passport in hand, we made our way to a hospital down by the harbor. We spoke very little for the obvious reason that neither one of us spoke the language of the other (or in Leon's case, not particularly well anyway), but I still felt uncomfortable sitting with him in the van, and then in the waiting room of the hospital, and then in a waiting room in the downstairs of the same hospital, and then in the radiology center, and then in an a separate and altogether too cramped room with cups of other people's urine balanced on shelves all around us, in almost complete silence.

As for the hospital, my initial observation of Korean-healthcare is that it seems to stand on par with the best that the Canadian and U.S. systems have to offer in its ability to administer embarrassing tests, to make you the patient feel like an irritating distraction, and to outfit all of the interiors of their buildings with vaguely dispiriting color schemes of tope, cream, and medicinal white. Inexplicably, though I suppose as a side note, Leon also received every one of the blinking, beeping, scanning, x-raying, blood letting, and urine sampling tests that I myself received.
The next morning was Wednesday and, as expected, the knock came at my hotel room door at 11. I opened the door, however, not to find Leon, but two other men, neither of whom I had ever seen before and both of whom spoke even less English than my life manager. They had arrived, it was eventually made clear to me, in order to transport my bags first to E.C.C. and then, after depositing them there along with me 2 hours before my workday was due to begin, put them back in a van and take them to my new apartment, where I would be taken separately after work. The rationale behind this arrangement was never explained to me, but I trust that it made sense to someone.

The shorter of the two men, his wavy hair gelled back against his head, immediately sat down on my bed and began playing my guitar. Plucking away and nodding at me exuberantly, soon enough he was singing. I was still packing the last of my things and dressing myself (they were actually a few minutes early). The second man, taller, with his hair cut short against the sides of his head but left long in the front and his thick circular glasses, appeared to have too little lip for his teeth or too much teeth for his lip, because either way, his face seemed to be persistently pulled back into a taught-skinned and slightly painful looking grin. As his friend began to sing, his smile pulled down against his lips tighter, with more teeth and evident pain to show for it.

Occasionally, a person will experience a situation that is so profoundly and undeniably strange that, rather than leaving you with a vague impression of strangeness as feelings of any kind tend to leave you with vague inarticulated impressions of something or other, it brings you out of yourself, leaving you as a sudden and temporary narrator to your own otherwise incomprehensible experience. And as I tried to frantically tie my tie, one Korean man, a total stranger, sitting on my surely at many times sullied love motel bed, playing my guitar, singing a ballad in Korean, his compatriot with the strange haircut cut grinning ghoulishly despite himself in exasperated awkwardness making an effort to grab my bag which was not fully packed yet which is something I was unable to successfully explain to him, I couldn't help but feel myself brought temporarily out of my situation, if only to think for that one second: “What am I doing here?”

After work that day, I got on the smaller of the two buses with the children from the late periods (7:30-9:00). In the driver's seat was the taller of my morning visitors. As we wound through the labyrinthine network of streets that connect every part of Tongyeong to every other part, as I tried my best to ignore the children on the bus, many of whom I had just had in my class, whom I had just told in a firm tone of voice to do their work now, at 8:30 at night, to whom I had just given negative points for their loudness or insolence and to whom I had delivered the corresponding punishment, and now, sitting with them on the bus with my backpack in my lap, feeling not so far very removed from their respective stations and feeling lousy for putting them through yet another fairly pointless educational regimen so much more excessive than any of those that I had so loathed when I was their age, the driver would occasionally catch my glance in the rearview mirror and tighten his lips, flashing me his upper teeth, and sometimes laughing for no other reason than the fact that he would have no idea what to say to me even if he could speak English.

After dropping off all of the children, we came to the end of the line: Inpyeong-dong. The neighborhood, I have since learned, is about as far away from my school and the rest of downtown that one can be without having to cross a bridge or leave Tongyeong altogether. Which of course doesn't say a lot. Tongyeong is a pretty small place.

The driver laughed and continued to smile as he led me past the small market at the corner and into the windowed stairwell of my apartment building. Past a clinic on the first floor, and a locked door on the second, we came to the third with a poster taped to the outer corridor door, written inexplicably in English: “All utility bills for the following rooms should be billed to E.C.C. Tongyeong at...” On this floor of mine live four other teachers from E.C.C., all of them Korean women. With the exception of that first night when two of them, Laney and Cathy, showed me how to operate my stove, I haven't had much chance to interact with any of them. As a rule, so it seems, the foreign teachers at E.C.C., like the foreign teachers at all the hagwons around Tongyeong, don't interact very much with their Korean counterparts. But then again, the four women in my building were living out here with Jeff, a notorious charmer no doubt, so this year things may be different.

The driver ushered me into my apartment and, after showing me what the various switches do, or in the case of the heating system, pushing buttons and making gestures and getting progressively more frustrated at his inability to communicate to me the relatively intricate features of the heating and water system of my apartment and smiling broader and broader all the time, he left me alone to my disappointment.

Two walls and a door over most of the studio flats of my colleagues, the place still struck me as horribly cramped. The kitchen was the bleakest. With no light but from a naked bulb protruding horizontally from one wall and the entire room built beneath the back a stairwell, my refrigerator comes jutting out into the center of kitchen, the floorspace already roughly the size of coffee table, blocking two cabinets and therefore two of the few storage areas of any kind in the entire apartment.
I saw little improvement as I took the short step into my bathroom, though at least, I noted, its proportions were rectangular. And yet the shower wasn't so much a shower but a faucet built into the far wall, only tangentially related to (though mysteriously separated from by a moldy curtain) a drain located at the center of the room, its unpolished steel and the enormous pores upon its grate evoking chemical-intensive industrial processes. At the opposite end of the room, though to speak of the room in terms of opposite sides maybe implies a size of misleading proportions, you find the toilet. Functional toilets being what they are, it may seem difficult to find fault with one. And this was certainly a functional toilet. It was the walls around it that presented the problem. Without giving away too many details of my time spent in bathroom, I couldn't help but worry that the 12 inches of space afforded by the wall facing the toilet might be grossly insufficient for my knees, let alone the enjoyable reading of anything at all.

And then there was the issue of the sink in the bathroom, the issue being that there is no sink in the bathroom. Which is to say that if, for example, I want to wash my face at night, which I generally do, my choices will be limited to the shower faucet in the corner of the bathroom—and in choosing that option, I would certainly need to remove my socks and roll up my pant legs since the slow-to-warm water from the faucet will certainly splash all over the place—or the kitchen sink which, aside from offering no counter space on which to rest a bar of soap or a toothbrush, also drops the water from an exceptional height down onto the steel of the sink, and so I would honestly feel a little uncomfortable and certainly inconsiderate using that at night given how loud the water, to say nothing of my spitting and splashing, can be.

My room seemed fine enough in that first impression. I had a bed (it's frame, I was soon to discover, mysteriously structured around a single bisecting support rod and therefore, I imagine anyway, providing a sleeping experience akin to that afforded by a rooftop sprawled atop lengthwise), an armoire, a desk, and a short cabinet. And yet, discolored through the lens of my general disappointment, by my insufficient caloric intake that day, by another exhausting 8 hours at a job that I was only after two days starting to get sick of, teaching a class of humanity I was indeed already sick of, and by my inability to disassociate what the apartment was that night—still dirty despite the ostensible presence of a cleaning service, lacking most of the basic household items necessary for healthy, hygienic, and employable living like soap and toilet paper and garbage bags and any food at all and at the very least hangers so that after a week and a half I can finally stop living out these two suitcases, and it was already 9:30 at night, so really what was I supposed to do at that point?, and the dozens of mosquito corpses plastered upon the walls and ceiling of the bedroom, a testament to both the unbearable sleepless summer nights that lay ahead and the previous tenant's abysmal standards of personal hygiene and aesthetic conscientiousness—from what the apartment might eventually become after a little shopping and scrubbing, I hated the bedroom too. Or maybe “hate” isn't really the right word as that implies a kind of energized purposefulness to one's emotions. I, on the other hand, felt like a three-day old balloon.

And so after setting up my computer to check whether or not my apartment had an active wireless internet connection (my apartment did not have an active wireless internet connection) and changing out of my teacher's tie and into a t-shirt, I left my apartment behind, grabbed a cab with surprising ease, and headed straight back downtown to meet, among other people (that is, almost everyone I know here), Mike and Christine, Sunday's auctioneers, celebrating their last big night in Tongyeong before heading back to the U.S.A. at the end of the week. I could only imagine their elation.

The bar, a bar I had been to once before on my first bowling night, was named with all the attention to creative commercial flare of a Soviet canned good: Western Bar. The two bartenders presumably dressed as the embodiments Rock and Roll and Punk Rock respectively, pointed me to a bit unnecessarily towards the back, towards the boisterous group of twelve or so English speakers who were, with the exception of a couple at the front, the only customers.

Greg, who along with Britney, I have now come to consider as a kind of foster-parent or older sibling here in Korea (those two being the first teachers that I met, who have so far seemed the most willing to go out of their respective ways to illuminate or advise or include me, and upon whom I have consistently fallen back upon for relatively less pained conversation during those moments at nearly every social gathering so far when I cannot find a way to intrude upon other conversations and into previously formed relationships; plus, Greg has a very bushy beard, which no doubt enhances the view that I have of him as a wizened mentor of some kind) was the first to acknowledge my presence.

“How's the apartment?” He says this with a knowing smile, obviously.

And just like they do in movies, though with half the theatrical energy, I wave him off as if in a daze and pointed to the bar. “I need a drink.” Which, it being a Wednesday and not really possessing the appetite for it regardless, I probably do not. But now there was a commitment involved.

Returning to the table, my wheat-intolerant's mixed drink resting conspicuously amongst the towering pitchers of beer, I wedged myself between two competing conversations. Mike and Christine arrived shortly thereafter to many cheers and some applause. Beside them was a Korean who I immediately and mistakenly assumed to be a teacher. The idea that either Mike and Christine, over the course of their 18 month contract in Tongyeong, might be able to befriend a real-life Korean civilian had simply not occurred to me.

Enough people began smoking to make things uncomfortable before we finally moved on to another bar called—and I will say nothing to point out the obvious here—No Smoking. As a brief reading of the name might suggest (note the functional, even perhaps ironic and therefore somewhat sophisticated use of the English language), this is considered to be the most hip bar in all of Tongyeong. At least, this is what the Americans around me said, as did Won (or is it Wan?), the sole Korean and non-teacher amongst us, who happens to work there.

After an hour or so at No Smoking, during which Britney and I were pulled aside by Won in order to be introduced to the bar's owner, a pretty middle aged woman with a cast (apparently the manager of the nori bang next door [a Korean interpretation and substantial improvement on karaoke, but more on that later] physically struck her in the elbow so hard as to break the bone, but I was never able to hear the rest of that story) and four severely inebriated male patrons. Won showed us the drawings hanging up around the bar and painted along its walls and atop its tables, explaining that the cast-wearing owner was the artist, a fact which the owner almost went so far as to deny in her bashfulness, and the four patrons commented (a number of times) on Britney's good looks. And then we left for nori bang (deciding to go to the place across the street so as to boycott the establishment of the alleged arm-breaker).

I will not bore you with the details of the nori bang experience. I will not recount the many songs that were sung and in which order, or how hoarse and unlistenable our voices became before too long, or how Won kept stealing the line-up management device in order to secretly erase everyone else's song selections and to replace them with power ballads which she would then sing before us alone, or the exact nature of the pictures displayed in the background of the lyric-prompter screen except to say that they seemed to have been drawn from a combination of various tourism video catalogs and nature footage compilations intended for those with sleeping disorders. All of that, I'm sure you can imagine. The significant point is that two hours later we emerged and I had no idea where to go.

I did not know at that time, the name of my neighborhood. And I did not know the name of the street on which my unfortunate apartment could be found. The only bit of information I had to tell the cabdriver was the name of a bar, a few blocks from my apartment, called “Dallas.” “Dallas,” it turns out, is a much easier name to memorize than “Inpyeong-dong,” the name of my neighborhood.

Most frustrating of all is that in physical terms, I knew exactly where it was that I wanted to go. Tongyeong is not very big and my sense of direction is fairly good and so if I had known the Korean words for “left,” “right,” and “straight,” there would have been no cause for concern. But of course I did not know those words. I still don't.

I tried explaining this all to Won.

“We'll just share a cab,” she told me. “You live close enough to me.”
“You know where I live then?”
“I think so.”

So without a real alternative, I decided to tag along. I tagged along as she conferred with another American teacher named Adam, and I tagged along when they decided, it being 4:00 in the morning on a Wednesday, that the most appropriate action would be to grab a quick bite to eat at the equivalent of an all night diner before settling in for what remained of the morning.

The quick bite that Adam and Won had in mind sounded to me like “cheesy dunkers,” even after numerous requested repetitions and clearer enunciations, and which I only later found on the internet are actually called cheesu donkas, though either term, I think, evokes clearly enough the midnight snack's degree of traditionally authenticity and coronary soundness. Adopted from a Japanese dish which was itself an adoption, or rather caricature, of Western cuisine, cheesu donkas are fried and breaded pork cutlets filled with cheese and served with barbeque sauce. Apparently, every culture has its own poutine. And at—by this time it must have been—a quarter after 4, having forgotten in my disappointed assessment of my living arrangements and, by extension, my estimated standard of life for the next 357 or so days, to eat dinner or anything at all really, I found it absolutely delicious, even if it doesn't go particularly well with kimchi.

In the end, it turned out that Won really did seem to know where it was that I lived, because after the cabbie let her out, and after a brief conversation between the two which I of course did not understand in the slightest nor did I even really listen to it, the driver took me straight to my doorstep.

The next day was Thursday and in the spirit of tradition, we all went bowling after work. Mike and Christine showed up, this being the eve of their departure, looking all the worse than the rest of us from the frantic packing, the discarding of unwanted or unpackable house accessories, the tying up loose ends at work, to say nothing of the nori bang experience the night before. But still, rallied by their sudden and up until that point uncertain appearance, after the three mediocre games preceding their arrival, everyone went on to bowl in the mid-hundreds, the Korean patrons frowning disapprovingly at our cheers.

It was only the next night, Friday, having finally located and purchased, among other things, some wire hangers, a frying pan, and some basic household cleaning products, that I started to feel at ease, even comfortable in my new place. The cabinets in the kitchen remain blocked by the fridge (a recent effort to push one out of the way to make room for the other resulted in the sink nearly falling off of the wall), there remains of course the single sink with which to wash everything that might need washing, and the space between the toilet and its opposite wall is still as concerning and inhibitive to me as ever, but with some rearrangement of furniture, the removal of (most of) the desiccated mosquito corpses from the apartment's walls and ceilings, and a few quick and crucial augmentations of my personal views on what is and what is not a tolerable method of washing one's face at nice, my outlook has changed dramatically. What was once a cramped, dirty, and horrendously designed apartment which I was being forced to inhabit has now become my cramped, slightly less dirty, and horrendously designed apartment, that single possessive adjective transforming those descriptors of my discontent into “personality.”

Plus, now I have the internet.

The next day was clear and cold and through the barred windows of my interior porch/patio/outer-room, beautiful. I spent the day catching up on sleep, hanging up or folding the rest of my clothing, getting myself out the suitcase and in all other ways, into my apartment. At four, I finally departed without enough warm weather clothing for Eli's house, somewhere near the harbor he had told me and walkable if I was in the mood for walking. And so, having had no time up until that point to really walk around my neighborhood, to trace and discover on foot its overlap with the surrounding areas, I set out at a leisurely stroll, down the main road that cuts in front of my apartment, past the elderly women selling vegetables, most of them recognizable to me, on the sidewalk (though what arrangement was struck to allow them to do so directly in front of that particular grocery store I do not know), passed the bus-stop from which I depart on my way to work, past the University and past the place where the University meets the water and stops leaving only the road. And then along that road, along the waterfront, towards and then under Tongyeong Grand Bridge, its trussed arc lit up with erie green lights at night, walking along the strait that divides one half of the city on the mainland from the other half on the island, all the while gazing out across the water, busy with fishing boats and larger commercial vessels, the ship building cranes on the far side towering over everything but Mt. Mireuksan which, with its tiny gondola cars strung up along its far side, I can finally see clearly on this day without haze or rain or the business of E.C.C. or something else entirely too keep from seeing anything.
And before turning in away from the water, I catch one last glimpse in the far distance of where the water way of the strait opens and spills out into the Sea of Japan, splashing against more islands, all of them in view a part of Tongyeong. And then I am crossing through a live fish market and then another.

At the center of it all, moored permanently among the speedboats and pleasure crafts tied around the main harbor, sits Tongyeong's turtle boat. A design from the early 17th century, and evidently a fairly successful one given Japan's eventual repulsion from Korea's southern tip, the turtle boat, like its namesake, is a boat with a shell. Ridged with spikes, and supporting a dragon-headed battering-ram at the front, the turtle boat is like an ironclad two hundred and sixty years early and, if the stage boat can be trusted, with more emphasis on a pretty paint job. It was here that I was to find a payphone with which to call Eli, which I did, but not before strolling a bit further beyond, examining the fruits and vegetables and candies and cookies and household goods and K-Pop music tapes and dried fish all for sale, all for cheap, all laid out on carpets on the sidewalk. I bought a dixie cup of crystalized coffee, the taste mercifully obliterated by sugar, for 500 won (50 cents), and as I clutched and sipped at it in the 40 degree weather, the sinking sun warming only the outermost layers of my skins, I think that was the first moment that I was truly happy with my choice to come here.

Eli found me at the payphone eventually, took me back to his apartment (which though smaller, it being a studio, I could not help but notice was, with its roof access and its central location and its large window, objectively nicer than my own). I was followed closely by Britney and Greg. Soon after, Steve emerged from his apartment one flight below, and though Steve and Eli are as far as they let on, heterosexual, having come here together, spent the last 11 months living in the same apartment, and hanging out, I was later told by Britney, almost though not quite at the exclusion of everyone else in the available social network, I couldn't help but feel like the fifth wheel at a double date.

The dinner prepared by Eli was Mexican. That is to say that we ate grilled shrimp and vegetable burritos. On real tortillas. With homemade salsa. And cheese. I still don't quite understand how Eli managed to find these varied ingredients, in my experience, the supermarkets here offer their products according to a binary system of consumer preference: unusual and often incomprehensible Korean food or all-too-familiar American staples. There is one or the other. Anything that might be categorized between those two poles are usually impossible to find or otherwise prohibitively expensive.

Everyone left from that night in awe, and perhaps slightly tipsy, the combination of burritos and soju about as surreal a culinary overlap as one can imagine (or subsequently digest).

But my stomach was given little time to reorient itself. The following night, after a confused sequence of social proceedings in which one teacher, Coleen, attempted to organize a “Meat-Eaters Only” dinner on Facebook, a half-serious and not truly exclusionary but perhaps you guilty types could take a hint this once kind of event, in part, I think, inspired by a conversation I had had with her the previous Wednesday at No Smoking, in which we marveled, without judgement of course, at the sheer number of vegetarians within the ESL teacher's social circle and, moreover, how this fact, coupled with that other great anomaly characterizing the extended group—that is, that so many of the group's members are, so to speak, “coupled-up,” and therefore often bound by the dietary restrictions or ethical considerations of their significant others—left few opportunities, if any at all, to get together in a large group and eat what was formally cute but is currently delicious, that is, dead animal. But because I did not have a reliable internet connection at the time, nor a working cellphone, on top of a host of other logistical and communicative mix-ups, in the end, we all—“we all” not, after all that, including Coleen for reasons Adam, her boyfriend and cheesu donkas connoisseur, seemed hesitant to explain and so one can only assume but quite a few half-hearted vegetarians who were willing to eat fish and, sadly for her, one vegan, who had to eat around what might be called with an understatement, the main course—settled on “Eel Village.” They have one dish. Guess what it is.

Among other things, it is delicious. In what has by now become a familiar routine for me to observe, the meal began with a canister of burning coals, and not a gas burner in this case, being placed inside the deep divot at the center of the table. Over this divot a black iron circular hotplace was fitted. As the iron began to warm, the eel, killed and cut up so recently that, unless my eyes and those my fellow teachers were deceiving us, slight muscle spasms, particularly in the tail segment, were not infrequent, was then brought out on an enormous plate and in excessive proportions. After throwing the eel meat on the grill, we were served with a not quite so exciting but tasty enough salad with sesame dressing, sweet potato pancakes, kimchi (with all the veterans of Eel Village repeatedly reminding the rest of the table that this was in fact the best kimchi in Tongyeong—and it was good), and a various assortment of other pickled vegetables. When the eel segments began to curl up away from the skin (but not spastically, as in the minutes previous, which had indicated both the contraction of muscles and that the eel was most certainly not ready to be eaten), they were pulled from the grill, dropped onto lettuce leaves, topped with sliced ginger, (what I insisted was but everyone else refused to acknowledge was) Thai basil, and chili or hot soybean sauce. And then, similar to but then again nothing at all like the burritos from the night before, the contents are wrapped in hand and eaten.

The obligatory soju was consumed as well. The middle aged Korean men sitting at the table behind us found this infinitely hilarious and would ask us repeatedly what we thought of the drink. “It's good,” we would say, which is, strictly speaking, not true. And they would cheer. Before long, dirty jokes were being exchanged and I was pleasantly relieved to find that, though I am one of the youngest members of the group (the ages range from 22 to 30), I don't feel overly concerned that I will have to adopt any kind of pretense at maturity. Not with this crowd.
This week has been relatively subdued so far and I am happy for that. Finally relieved of the obligation to write up daily lesson plans for each one of my classes (this being the single and tacit recognition on the part of E.C.C. that as someone with absolutely no experience teaching children, I might require some sort of training, but also a process that used to lengthen my effective workday—that is, the amount of time I spend at E.C.C. during which I am actually working and not say, taking a real dinner break, by at least an hour and a half)), and more generally, just getting into the proverbial swing of things, the days have been going by quicker. Likewise, I am certainly not nearly so awkward around my colleagues as I was last week and they in turn seem comfortable enough with me. Soon enough my apartment will feel like it is fully ready for human habitation, but I am not quite there. But across the board, progress is being made.