Big ups to my KASY fam!

Most of you probably know, I was living in New Haven for 6 years total... 4 as an undergrad at Yale and then 2 years on-campus working as staff for the same student congregation (UCW) that I attended during my undergrad years. During those 6 years, because of mad friendships and also my awesome UCW friends, I got super linked into the Yale Korean community especially the KASY (Korean-American Students at Yale) crowd... I'm talking about showing up to KASY events and knowing 80% of the people there, running into people randomly on W 34th in NYC, shopping in Soho, etc. etc.

One of the dope events that KASY puts on every year for the community is "Adopted Friends," they invite any local families that have adopted Korean children to come and have their kids (ALL their kids, not just the adopted children) come and learn about their home culture. Food, clothes, taekwondo, all that kind of thing. I remember MAD families used to come through - I even saw my advisor (i knew him all 4 years, philosophy professor, director of undergraduate studies, etc.) and his wife and two kids there one or two years in a row!

Well Asian media, especially Korean media, loves Yale! So this year my homegirl SARAH PARK was KASY social chair and so she put together Adopted Friends... and it was a huge success!! So big that they covered it in KOREA DAILY, based in Long Island... way to go Sparky!!


I see you! Miriam, Paul, EK, Eliot, Mindy, Esther, James, etc.! Hahahaha.

going down the only road i've ever known

the last time I woke up, I was in Ilsan, South Korea, at a co-worker's apartment;
the time before that, I was in the south of Beijing, at Paco's apartment.

As this morning dawns, I arise at my parents' house in Delaware; and, tonight, I'll be laying my head to rest at my new apartment in New Haven.

After 77 days in South Korea - 55 days of work - and 7 days' vacation in China, it's time to go back to school.

what will this year be called?

Dénouement

For the past work week, I've had a steady tension building, a bubbling froth in the pit of my stomach that sends my mind into a joyfully-wound knot. I'm a kid on Christmas Eve.

There's a saying among certain circles of society, memorialized in The Wire as such: "There are only two days you serve in prison: the day you go in, and the day you get out."

My bags are packed: one lies in a co-worker's apartment, awaiting my return to Seoul eight days hence, and another, half-empty, lies open next to my door. My passport, wallet, and ticket information sit, stacked neatly, on my desk. I've long since stripped my bed of its accoutrements, tucked away in the former piece of luggage, and I lie on the comforter provided, alongside the mattress, by my company.

Reflexive soul-searching will seize its own kairos; for now, I'm just chilling out.

I can't remember the last time I felt this roiling anticipation: probably last summer, preparing to leave for China. Of course, this time, there's an additional tool thrown into the machinery: the palpable, albeit slim, chance of China's vigilance in public health abruptly shutting down my hopes of a leisurely week.

And before that? The strongest association which I can provide is from my youth: the hour before arriving at a beloved summer camp, driving our way out of Delaware, stopping in Philadelphia for lunch, approaching on the winding Pennsylvania foothills. Me barbaric with a pent-up boil of preparation, banging on the ceiling of our old Volvo sedan, ecstatic. So.

In approximately 8.5 hours, I fly out to Beijing; God willing, I'll make it through customs with no hold-up and emerge on the other side of my 7 days off before returning to the States. I've heard that China has started blocking blogspot; if so, communication may be infrequent. So, for now

I lay me down to sleep

Visions of Seoul II

Signs that the end is near:

During my work hours, I have begun to refer to myself - and request that my students follow suit - by an ever-lengthening series of esoteric pseudonyms, of increasing complexity.

At first, it started by requesting that my students refer to me as "J-dogg"; after which, it was followed by "the J-dizzle". Today, I called myself "Big Teacher J".

Extrapolating, by Friday, I will have assumed an entirely new alter ego.


Additionally, I have begun referring to myself in the third person. I.e. "You know the J-dogg don't play like that." "Yall now flying with the big J-dizzle, a/k/a Big Teacher J."


Edit (7:28 PM): I thought of another one this afternoon.

They can also call me "The J Train".

Edit (Friday, August 21): Plan succeeded admirably. Students have taken to calling me J-dogg. One student even wrote it in his essay.

he's a well respected man about town

How we get down in the K; every weekend, all weekend.


Gabe & Czarina came out to Ilsan for a late afternoon of walking around
and touring Lake Park.


Alex and I met up in Gangnam late one Saturday afternoon for dinner,
coffee, and a discussion lasting long into the night.


Unwilling to be and uninterested in eating alone, I invited Gabe, Michelle,
and Sungwon along for Korean Chinese food (as opposed to Chinese
Chinese food); and they, natives of Ilsan, wound up seeing the Lake Park
fountain show for the first time (my nth, for arbitrarily high integer n).


After the last day of their summer SAT courses, we
took sticker photos.

I am mad ulzzang in this joint


And today, with Jean and Pauline, after church, on our way to lunch at a
local chicken place, before heading out to gyeongbokgung for some
sightseeing and a museum visit.

In hindsight comparison, I realize that the spot at which we took today's
photograph is identical the the spot at which Alex and I, weeks before,
took ours.

2 more weeks of summer work. In 13 days, I'll be asleep in 北京...

Let the countdown to journeys commence

SAT essays...

From students' essays (reprinted without citation, in order to prevent the possibility of obtaining blame for reasons of being reprinted without permission):

"[Talking about the dangers of pollution]... people will get a skin cancer called cutaneous cancer. Six out of ten scientists said that after 3000 years later, there are no white man or women because of cutaneous cancer."

"Defeated in the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln announced the Declaration of Independence and opened a path to freedom."

pretty much the situation as i hear it

"''There's a strange kind of infatuation [in South Korea] with North Korea,'' Professor Cha said. ''[South Koreans] see it as, at worst, a decrepit regime, or a crazy uncle in the attic; either way, not very threatening. Many people would argue there is great naïveté in that view.''"

-Man's Bridge To North Korea Is Seen as Link To Espionage, NY Times. Originally published November 5, 2003, available online.

ha!

me: BEST IDEA FOR A MOPVIE

Emily: ...

me: Korean man time-travels, fights dinosaurs

name:

Jurassic Park

Emily: haha wow i laughed out loud

Emily: i think i should stop talking to you

because my humor is becoming

inaccessible

Korean journeys

List for self: Places/neighborhoods to which I've been in South Korea.

Ilsan:
-Daehwa
-Juyeop
-Jeongbalsan
-Madu

Seoul:
-Sinimun
-Samseong/COEX Mall
-Hongik University (Hongdae)
-Sinchon
-Myeongdong
-Gangnam
-Chungmuro
-Yeoksam
-Gwacheon
-Insadong (Jongno)
-Suwon

2 windfalls

(1) Winding my way towards home today after I finished grading a pile of homework (for my summer, SAT essays, as with pancakes, come in stacks), I discovered that, while the beloved fried snack outpost next door to our academy has since moved to greener pastures (no matter: I still find my super corn dog at any one of the innumerable, and now government sanctioned, stands in the area), one of the other nearby shop fronts I frequented last summer still stands sessile and open for business.

A tiny footprint on one of the jam-packed rows roughly two blocks down from my workplace, it seems, as far as I can tell, to essentially run as a one-woman operation: in the back, a fairly-sized kitchen containing freezers filled with precooked and modular ingredients; in the front, a tiny room large enough for the cook-cum-cashier to stand and take an order, fronted by a glass window with the halves perpetually slid aside and a glass display case showing off rows of fundamental-if-ornate Korean basics: a matrix of permutations on curry, tonkatsu, and the like.

This display case is, I've come to realize, inseparable from my affections for the place: without it, I'm faced with the awkward and halting process of expressing my culinary desires through mimed gestures and sheer fortune. But at this stand, of all places, my meagre stash of Korean is expended and found adequate:

Me: 안녕하세요 [Anyong haseyo; "hello"].
Shopkeeper: 안녕하세요.
Me: (pointing at display case) 하나 [Hana; "one"].
Shopkeeper: [something in Korean] (goes back into kitchen; returns in 2-3 minutes)
Me: 고맙습니다 [komapsumnida; "thank you"]. (bow; exit stage right)

Cost, too serves as a major selling point: all dishes go for under 3000 KRW (~$2.50USD), and several for under $2USD. Coming with meat, rice, kimchi, and drenched in sauces, I'm sure I'm consuming the Korean equivalent of an American $5.99 "Chinese" lunch buffet. But complaints are slow to come, if at all. As I sit in a nearby park shortly afterwards, squeezing out soy sauce and mayonnaise onto my pork, strips of scrambled egg, rice, and kimchi, I watch salarymen pace along the walkways while elementary school children flit about, playing on what I assume to be their lunch break; or perhaps in transit from school to 학원 (academy).

(2) My supervisor/work buddy Jae called me today in the midafternoon. Having ducked out early due to my afternoon student reportedly having been a no-show, my first thought, naturally, was of alarm: was I supposed to be at work? But no, apparently my bosses just wanted to move some items from a recently-departed teacher's apartment (Fritz, for those of you keeping score at home) into mine.

And thus, a few minutes later, my doorbell rang (buzzed, rather), and Jae turned up with a TV, accompanied by stand, and laundry rack. Of course - for those of you who know me - you know that my mind quickly raced through some steps of swift deductive reasoning, and arrived at the conclusion that Fritz's apartment might contain other abandoned items well worth my salvaging efforts.

So, throwing on a pair of shoes, I tagged along up to the 6th floor, behind Jae and Mr. Yang, ransacking the room (what, I take it, the crime shows refer to as tossing a room) for anything and everything remaining of value. After four trips back and forth to my 5th floor room, I proudly surveyed my new possessions, feeling far more materially wealthy than had I ever before been in Korea:

2 bags of (unspecified) frozen meat;
1 bag of frozen french fries;
1/4 bag of frozen tortellini;
9 frozen hash browns;
a scattered handful of frozen chicken nuggets;
several pieces of assorted hard candy;
3 chocolate bars, and 2 Kit-Kats;
2 large boxes of corn flakes;
a bag of onion rings;
a bag of tortilla chips;
a matching container of salsa;
several packets of gravy and sauce mixes;
a large tub of brown sugar;
a tin of chocolate milk mix;
a box of Nerds;
2 tins of Danish-style cookies;
2 bottles of water;
a complete set of eating utensils (highly desirable, as I'd forgotten to bring any with me);
2 pans (for the first time ever in Korea, I may cook);
a bowl;
a plate;
two pots, including lids;
a copy of Bleach Vol. 1, in English;
2 5-pound weights;
a glass mug;
and a (what I assume is fake) Louis Vuitton shoulder bag.

(Fritz if there is anything on that list that you need, get at me.)

bene dicta, magister

It's 8:34 AM, and the streets of Ilsan are covered in a fine mist, rendering the pavement slick and slightly cool. Passing cars and buses scatter the puddles, tossing minute particles of water two or three feet into the air.

I'm out for a morning jog. Sequestered for the night earlier than I had planned, thanks to the compound effects of jetlag (despite my casually swaggering boasts of having grown accustomed to international travel, I am still impacted by the long reach of geography) and an afternoon spent out with friends, I woke at 5 AM. Completing some long-overdue tasks and emails, I decided to head out for a run, to clear my head and stretch some sorely-neglected muscles.

As I run, my mind drifts; 36 hours ago, when I was a knotted bundle of anxious tics: would my luggage clear through San Francisco onto my Seoul flight? Would the laminar plywood of my forcibly-checked skateboard (intended to be carry-on baggage) crack under the shifting mounds of luggage deep in the hold? Would my computer, with its finicky wireless connection, work in Korea? (Yes; No; Yes.)

My mind worries back and forth; 2 months ahead, with a host of invented complaints and light neuroses: will I grow prematurely bored of a repetitious summer, as I did my second summer in 北京? Will my students respond, grow, respect in the same way that they did (or did not) last year? How ought I - how must I - speak to them in such a way as to grasp at their attentions, or earn their mustered approval? What does it mean, to speak well?

The Benediction is the closing prayer of the Christian worship service, the opportunity for the presiding clergy to invoke the grace, mercy, love, and care of God for the congregants. Its roots: bene + dictio, which serve as a verbal phrase: adverb + verb: to speak well.

Context. One of the fundamentals which I've already begun drilling into my students, with which they will be well - and perhaps frustratingly - familiar by summer's end (or so I hope). What is the context of a speech made well?

My thoughts flow: a story. Bono, gregarious and irrepressible frontman and lead singer of U2, got his name from a music shop in his Irish hometown. He and his gang of youthful, gregarious, irrepressible friends used to hang around in the streets, staging absurdist plays and existentialist physical comedies. On one of the streets lay a music store, Bonovox; and so his mates began playfully referring to him as Sir Bonovox. The young Paul David Hewson disliked the moniker, at first, until he discovered the latinate roots of the word: Bono + vox, adjective + noun: good voice.


Actions speak louder than words. - American Proverb.


It occurs to me, that the phrase, "speaking well", possesses in itself two meanings: transitive and intransitive. To speak well, intransitively, means simply to speak skillfully or convincingly. "He speaks well", as synonymous with "he's a good speaker."

To speak well, transitive: in this case, however, speaking well of another. "He speaks well of her," as synonymous with "he praises her" or "he admires her."

My life is, of course, ostensibly one endowed with a career of speaking well of another: the most beloved condensation of the Christian creeds, to me, is the old chestnut, "To know Christ and make Him known". To proclaim Him; to speak well of His love for me. And it occurs to me, that, in this case at least, the transitive and intransitive uses of the verbal phrase dovetail: to speak well to those with whom I am surrounded for the summer, the most purposeful preparation is, quite simply, to speak well of the one with whom I have grown - am growing - more and more acquainted.

in nomine patri, et filii, et spiritus sancti

conclusion (End of Summer, finale)

8/29/2008

[Part 6, concluding my summer travelogue. Having recounted my
my post-employment trip to Beijing, subsequent return flight to
Seoul, I conclude the account of my last 24 hours in East Asia and
the return trip to the US.]

Friday8.29.2008:


My summer home.


Looking down the road towards Seoul.


My local shopping plaza/supermarket.


Seoul fashion: AF1's for the men, LV for the women.


Seoul storefronts: ads, ads, ads.


I passed this park every day on the way to work in the morning.


Convenience store behind the park behind work.


Toy vending machines.

My former SAT class was having a pizza party to commemorate
the (more or less) successful end of another summer; I dropped by
to congratulate them get free pizza.










They stuck with it all summer... veterans.






Mrs. Lee.


Joints was crazy, crust all rolled up and filled with
mashed potatoes.





Class ended around noon; I headed back to Mike's
apartment to gather my belongings for the 6:30 PM
flight back to the States.

On the way back, I encountered schoolchildren.




Inside the convenience store.


Watching ants.





On the 13-hour flight back to the States, I was seated
next to these young men. We watched Iron Man.







fin.

a vision of Seoul (End of Summer V)

8/28/2008

[Part 5, the penultimate entry in the ongoing photo
travelogue of my vacation post-work in East Asia,
including my weeklong trip to Beijing, final day in
Seoul, and return trip to the States.]

Thursday8.28.2008:

Rising early, 代新 called me a company car, escorting
me to Beijing International (北京国际机场), to catch
my flight back to Incheon.




Her office building (site of my 1-week, unexpectedly
extended vacation in China last year).


顺义区人才市场 = "Shunyi District Human Resources Market".


The view out front.


The hotel I stayed in for an extra week last year. Memories abound.


有人说我很像她.


Flight staff.


Our flight.

1h45m in the air later, no waiting for checked luggage (2 carry-ons
allowed for international flights, I been stay winning), and it's back
to Ko Rea for one last day.


Waiting for the bus back to Ilsan (一山). You can barely see it, but
there is a taxi cab hidden behind the large, squat metal box; for a
good ten minutes, a (rather large) man and his (rather petite)
female company engaged in an (increasingly vocal) squabble with
a (rather numerous, and increasingly so) group of cabdrivers. Over
what, I shall never know.



Back in the hood, I stopped off at the Ilsan Vista,
the SLI foreign teachers' apartment building, to
leave my things with Mike, the co-worker I was
crashing with for the night. I then headed out to
the academy (학원/学院) for one final visit.


Jae at his desk.

Real talk, dude was a prince among men. Always
helpful, patient, and he let me straight bogart his
computer desk (and, subsequently, internets) for
many an afternoon. He is also a husband and a
father, and that is Real Talk.


My erstwhile spot in the office.


TA's chilling/grading.


One of my elementary students. I love this dude, he
practices um kumdo? Some kind of tae kwon do or
variant thereof. He is also pretty smart.


Another student. This dude loves food, it gave me great
joy whenever he would be snacking before class. Just
to see such pure pleasure is a privilege.


Mikey AKA Dominican Mike.


That afternoon, Jae and I rolled over to the bank, a
locale in which I had, all summer, been entirely
dependent upon him. He helped me close out my
account (garnering me my ~$98 of remaining
wages!). I kicked it in the office for a little while
longer, then Mike and I went to a little place he
knew for some lunch.


Old grannies (ajumah) often sell vegetables or clothes roadside.


I thought the look on this girl's face was dope.


Mike ordering. Dude is swift with the day-to-day Ko Rean.

After lunch, Mike and I wound our way home,
walking through the many adjoining parks littering
the Ilsan landscape.






No one crosses the street before the crossing sign blares green.
The street here was actually empty of cars for half a minute before
the light turned, while these dudes all just chilled it on the sidewalk.

Mike and I spotted his crib for a minute longer, then
headed back to SLI for evening classes.


Still grinding.


I spent mad many hours in this classroom, over all. Every day this
summer... I think this may be one of the top two or three places I
was at this summer, excusing my own apartment (and that, largely
for sleeping).


Claire/Seo-yun, one of the girls I tutored regularly.
We spent many a long hour talking about, um,
topics in English.




Elementary students, all from Korean middle/high schools.


Doori. Son is a literal baller. Princeton 08, varsity
football team (championship ring swagger), and SLI-
Ilsan's most recent acquisition.




One of my elementary kids. Duke had a bit of an
attitude going on...


...but with a swager like this, I was a little more forgiving. Looking
at those joints even now, I still get a lil aggy.


...grand closing

[Next up! The last day; SAT students; on the plane]