Noun, Verb, Kimchi: Part 3

Written by Clayton Foster

I say the boy needs more homework.  Pile it on.  I want him to be Korean by the time he’s done.
- Homer Simpson

It’s a question with which every traveller struggles: How willing am I to let go of my own cultural values and embrace the values of my host culture?  And even if I wanted to, could I?  And even if I had the ability and the motivation, should I?

I think most people are reasonable enough not to expound the wonders of hamburgers in India or make cracks about the King in Thailand.  Those are easy.  But there are other culture clashes that are more complex, too subtle and nuanced to summarise in the handy appendix of a Lonely Planet Culture Guide. 

“Teacher, I’m tired,” is a greeting as common as “Hello” here in Korea.  Early on, I asked a 10-year-old student why he was always tired.  Like most teachers, and adults in general, I was ready to interpret his drooping eyelids as laziness deliberately created to sabotage my own lofty goals (i.e. get through the day’s lessons as smoothly as my optimistically sparse lesson plan suggested).  I was a good few finger-waggings into my lecture on the wonders of the eight-hour sleep pattern, good breakfasts, and other things that would be nice if I actually practised them myself, when he said, “But my mother wakes me at 3am to study.” 

My reply: “Oh.”  And then: “Yeah, so... adjectives...”

Imagine you’re a Korean child.  Apart from a passing interest in online gaming and an almost crack-addict-like obsession with kimchi, your life is structured around one dominant feature: study. 

From the age of five, your life has a single goal with a laser-like focus: to compete for a place at a good university.  Immediately following regular school Monday to Friday, you are likely to have at least one, but often two or three, private academies to attend.  Everyday.  These academies are called hagwon, like the one I work at.  At these hagwon, a Korean student will get additional study in English, Math, Science, Social Studies or extra specific and sometimes baffling skills, like Chess.  As well as this, you’re likely to have an organised team sport to play, and one (sometimes two) musical instruments to learn.  It won’t be unusual for you to leave the house at 8am and return at 10pm.  As for your weekend, every second Saturday you spend an extra day at your regular school, there might be more hagwons, and much of what’s left of the rest of your weekend is dedicated to homework.

And I do hope you like homework.  From your regular school, as well as from each of the hagwon, you will receive required homework in heavy doses.  From my hagwon, for example, you’ll be given multiple-page lists of words to remember, three short stories to read several times over, as well as online writing assessments and online tests – all to be done by the time we see you again in two days.  Recently, my hagwon decided to take away the five-minute breaks that children enjoyed between classes and replace them with vocabulary tests.  This was a result of requests from the mothers, who felt their children weren’t working hard enough.

This is where I start to struggle.

In particular, my own dilemma centres on a value common amongst most New Zealanders: that, to a large extent, childhood consists of equal amounts of education and carefree adventure.  We are one of the lucky first world countries left where kids can still ride their BMX’s down to the beach to poke crabs with sticks and throw jellyfish at each other.  We realise it’s time to go home only when it gets too dark to see where we put our jandals, and off we pedal to be met with a Milo and a Tim-Tam from a fairly unconcerned mum. 

Yes, I’m treading on thin ice here, and I’m more than a little uncomfortable in doing so.  It’s easy to walk into an alien culture and start tut-tutting and meddling.  In fact, it’s what we of Anglo descent do best.  That’s why I’m careful to say that it’s not a case of right versus wrong; it’s a case of my cultural values versus another.  In fact, I wish I  had known to work harder at school.  Even so, my own internal culture spends a good amount of time in Korea rocking backwards and forward chanting: All work and no play makes Seoung-Won a dull boy.

It’s a problem that gets more complex the longer you look at it, like the line-up of a Korean boyband. If you’re wondering whether being born into a high-stress culture is enough to normalise those levels of stress, the answer I’d give is: a bit, sort of, but not enough.  Watching a 9-year-old girl break down in gasping hysterics because she got the definition of “reminiscent” wrong on a daily test is heartbreaking.  She tells me she’s terrified of what her mother will say.  One boy tells me that he gets money for every question he gets right and is punished for every question he gets wrong. 

Today I counselled a 13-year-old whose mother was “sad and angry” because she only achieved 93% on a major school exam.  I told her that I would have killed at high school, actually killed, for 93%.

It’s enough to make a beach-raised child of the South Pacific like me to want to scream: it doesn’t matter.  But as tempting as it is to bound into class like a kiwi Robin Williams shouting inspirational phrases in Latin at the children, the fact remains: the kids have to do this, they have to live with this pressure, because it’s the world they live in, and it’s the only way it can work. 

Why?  Because South Korea is less than half the size of New Zealand, but with over ten times the population.  That’s a lot of people and not a lot of space.  Not to mention that you’re flanked on either side by the powerhouses of China and Japan jostling for jobs and cultural influence.  You’re going to have to be in tip top condition to handle this, kids, and I’m not talking about Hokey Pokey.

Korean culture is a plethora of delights, from the incredible generosity down to the day-to-day politeness.  They have the right idea about many things, so who am I to say that they’re wrong when it comes to studying?  Maybe pushing all their chips onto children’s education is a gambit that will pay off.  The way I see it, in 15 years Korea’s either going to be an international powerhouse or a country with a lot of deep-set issues.

As for my own personal conundrum, I obviously can’t change anything and I don’t think it would be my right to even if I could.  The best I can do is the next time a student says, “Teacher, I’m tired”, give him an honest reply: Well, shit kid, I would be too.