Archive for the 'Ramblings' Category

2008-4-20, Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China

A Few Pictures

The troops all look about 16 years-old. They’ve been marching up and down Yushu’s main street 24/7 for more than a month. Full riot gear, their bodies in are in rigid formation and their adolescent faces show no fear. Just boredom. Until, that is, they see my white face obliviously breaking Chinese law and taking pictures of them. Then they just look confused, curious as any country boys at seeing a foreigner. But they are guardians of the Harmonious Society and its right to set up shop on the Tibetan plateau, 12,000 feet above Beijing, and so on they march.

::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1324.jpg”,”Young soldiers.”)::
The Tibetans eating breakfast nearby did not share the expression of boredom. As I obliviously snapped a few pictures, the look on their faces was much more that of “who the hell does this white asshole think he is coming here and provoking the Chinese?” I was too busy to notice, but Wayne made sure to let me know what kind of looks I got. And how he thought about being associated with me at that moment.

Wayne is a 53 year-old mountain climbing Lakota from Brooklyn. If it weren’t for Wayne, I probably wouldn’t have come here. But given that I did come here, if it also weren’t for Wayne I probably wouldn’t be alive.

The Detour

Really, I didn’t plan to go to Tibet until I was basically there. After Hohhot I continued West, until I decided in the middle of a train ride to save a trip to Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) for sometime that I could keep going further into proper Central Asia. I abruptly changed course, South towards Xining.

Reading how sparsely populated and mountainous the province of Qinghai was, I expected Xining to be far more of a dusty outpost town ringed by brown-red mountains. But Xining, the last major stop on the new rail line to Lhasa, has been subject to the Central government’s relentless pouring out of investment and infrastructure into China’s western frontier – and the pouring in of a Han majority that falows. The city of Xining is less than 4% Tibetan, despite the surrounding, poor, countryside remaining overwhelmingly so. The village birthplace of our current bespectacled Dalai Lama is less than two hours away.

::fuzzpic-right(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1275.jpg”,”An avenue in Xining.”)::
Xining, at more than 7000 feet above sea level, is a fairly bustling provincial city of two million with several shiny new shopping malls and an appropriate scattering of sprouting high-rise apartment blocks. It is 20% Hui (who only count as a minority ethnicity because they wear skull caps and veils, believe there is no god but Allah and Mohamed is his messenger, and really because the communist party says so). The other 1,500,000 odd-people are all majority Han Chinese.

I hoped to head through Southern Qinghai and into Western Sichuan and to Chengdu – avoiding entering the north-east corner of the currently forbidden Tibetan Autonomous Province by 20-odd miles. When I started making inquiries in Xining about the route ahead I was told that officially these and all other Tibetan regions in the surrounding provinces are entirely off-limits to foreigners.

The day before I left for Yushu, soon after meeting Wayne and being emboldened to join him at an attempt to go, Chinese media reported the discovery of a large stash of weapons in a Western Sichuan monastery. These decades-old grenades and machine guns, it was reported, were hidden behind the holiest sutras of the temple’s central altar. It was speculated, among Westerners with whom I spoke in Xining, that security forces have known for years that the weapons were there, that they where just waiting for a politically advantageous time to “find” them.

Talking this over, I learned that the Tibetan population in what used to be the Kingdoms of Kham and Amdo – the exact aforementioned regions through which I hoped to pass – were still fighting the Chinese until the the seventies, twenty years after the boys in Lhasa surrendered. They stopped only when Nixon walked The Wall, said it was Great, and told the CIA to stop giving the them guns and money. Now, despite the lack of media coverage and my own ignorance, the same areas have seen far more violence and armed conflict than Lhasa, and continue to do so.

“Whole towns can burn in Sichuan, but if someone sets off a firecracker in Lhasa, that’s what fills all the western papers,” said Jamin, a travel agent from Seattle who’s lived in Qinghai more than six years. While Western media, as much as I’ve been able to keep up on it, righteously scorn the harsh military response in Lhasa, there are only a few mentions here and there of what appears to be continued, intense fighting in Western Sichuan, and likely elsewhere.

The Uniform

The policeman told me there was live fire in Ganzi. But that was only after he called his boss. At the very first it seemed like they were going to let us through this, the first police checkpoint after leaving Yushu, about 30 km into Western Sichuan.
::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1530.jpg”,”At the Sichuan border, posing with our drivers.”):: The sign at the pass between Qinghai and Sichuan said 4700 meters above sea level, 15,420 feet. Strung beside and across the steel Chinese road sign were hundreds of colorful prayer flags. The road dropped away to each side into brown mountains that looked from such a height just rolling hills. There are a few trees down in Yushu, clearly planted and carefully coaxed into growing so high above timberline. At this pass there is only lifeless brown grass and the yaks who love it, extending to practical infinity.

::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1547.jpg”,”Smiling nomads.”)::After a large valley, and a pause to meet the photogenic inhabitants of a string of large, white nomad tents, the road climbed up again and led to a small Tibetan village of about 20 reddish mud houses. One wood hut stood beside the road, flying the flag of the People’s Republic. A pole in front of it could have blocked the road, but was left raised. The taxi driver Wayne and I had hired drove slowly through the road block, only to stop a few meters later as a young policeman in a black-blue uniform noticed the car and, waving out of the hut’s front window, beckoned us to stop. The cabbie reversed, parked, and we all got out; Wayne, I, the driver, and another taxi driver who had come along for the ride.

We only had 30 km left until Sershu, or Shiqu by its Chinese name. (All towns here have two names.) At first the police said merely that they were going to register us. We entered the small wood cabin in which were two police officers and about 10 soldiers. The soldiers all looked like they were 16 years-old. In the back room some of the green-uniformed kids were cutting up peppers, potatoes, and yak meat. We were beckoned to sit and another young soldier was sent to fetch us tea. On the TV was a program about Thailand’s rain forests, in Spanish. Nobody was paying attention to it.

The older police officer asked, “do you have tea in America?”

“Yes, we import a lot of tea from China.”

“Do you often drink tea?”

Wayne nudges me, “what’s he asking?”

“He’s wondering if we drink tea in America”

“Oh? In fact, I do drink a lot of tea.”

To the police officer, “my friend says he drinks a lot of tea, but I usually drink a lot of coffee.”

“Ah, I’ve heard Americans like to drink coffee.”

The younger police officer interrupted, holding a portable phone in his hand, “sorry, I have to make a phone call, OK?”

What am I going to say, no, that’s not OK? He steps into the back room with the vegetable cutting soldiers. It wasn’t OK, the wonderful impression that they were going to let us through means nothing when we start asking our commanders. One of the adolescent soldiers, pointing at the TV, “do you understand that?”

“Yes. It’s in Spanish. Why do you have a program in Spanish on?”

“Background noise.”

The younger police officer came back with a grave look on his face. “There’s fighting in Ganzi. Shooting.” He sat down, and I realized he was younger than me. The older cop looked up from copying information out of our passports – to add us, for all I know, to the likely-spy registry. The younger one looked me in the eye. “Please understand, I cannot let you go on. It is very dangerous. If I let you go and you get hurt, it will be my fault. Please understand: this is my job.”

The police and our taxi drivers talked calmly for a moment in Sichuanese dialect, then switched back to Mandarin. “Even your drivers also cannot go. It is not only that you are foreigners. It is too dangerous for Chinese as well.”

I translated for Wayne and he echoed the understanding. Everybody was very reasonable, agreeable. This is for our safety. I don’t want this young, responsible policeman to get in trouble as much as I don’t much want to get shot myself.

His face lit up, “you could go through Aba!” The cab drivers look up, immediately nod agreement. “Come on, let’s look at the map.” He led us into the cabin’s third, side, room. One wall had a large portrait of Deng Xiao Ping and a motivational poster about responsible police behavior. The back wall had a 5 foot Chinese flag hung not quite taut. The closest wall had a map, and the two police officers, the two cab drivers, and several onlooking young soldiers began discussing alternate routes, saying Tibetan village names in Mandarin, evaluating them in Sichuanese, and pointing wildly around the map.

“Make sure to get everything they’re saying!” ordered Wayne, excited at a second chance.

I thanked the authorities for the tea. The younger cop shook my hand. “If I’m wearing this uniform,” he puffed up his chest, looked me in the eye, then exhaled in an exquisitely empathetic gesture, “then I have to keep you safe.”

As we drove back over 4700 meters and returned towards Yushu, Wayne demanded to know what I had learned about the alternate route. But my eyes had been focused somewhere beyond the map, the Sichuanese had flowed out my other ear, and I only remembered “Aba.”

Disinformation

Our two taxi drivers wanted to go back home to Chengdu themselves. One of them had his mother’s birthday coming up. They were pushing hard for us to come with them, and offered us an amazing fare at a quarter of what it would usually cost to hire a taxi all that way. About $180 for three days’ driving – for the two of us, and plenty of time to enjoy the sights with them. They completely believed our young police officer friend’s advice to try going through Aba, and took time to explain the route to us back at the taxi company’s office. They eventually offered the same price as before, even at the alternate route’s added 500 miles.

But after all that, I could not believe that cop had any idea. I truly believe he really believed what he said, but in fact nobody knows anything, even the cops. This is why people in Xining said I could not go to Yushu, and why nobody in Yushu knew I couldn’t enter Western Sichuan. It is no accident. Despite our officer friend’s conviction, his total trust in whomever he spoke with on the phone, for all I know there is no fighting in Ganzi.

“Maybe there is no more fighting in Ganzi. They just don’t want foreigners to see the cities locked-down, the mass arrests,” said one foreign volunteer living in Yushu, later that evening. In fact one of the taxi drivers told me on the drive back that he wondered if the cops didn’t just say that he and the other driver also could not pass just to make us feel better, that maybe if we were not with them they could have continued. While we were there the police let a civilian looking jeep go through after only a few unheard questions.

Even the news on Aba, which had slipped through in person, conversely contradicted. “I know someone who escaped from Aba recently and came to Yushu. He said they were really fighting hard there. He and his friends had to hide in the mountains for days,” I heard even later that night from a Tibetan I won’t name.

Internal Problems

As much as we like to think everything revolves around us, and love the opportunity to criticize the morally inferior, I do not think China’s disinformation policy in Tibet is primarily about keeping secrets from the outside world. The thing most Westerners cannot understand is just how religiously the Chinese believe that Tibet is Part Of China. So it is none of our damned business. The Chinese similarly cannot understand that we’ll make it our damned business anyway. By keeping the West in the dark, by feeding the few foreign correspondents allowed in feeble propaganda, China allows Western opinion to assume the worst. Western opinion self-righteously loves every minute of it, and ad revenue soars.

As much as the press thinks it’s all about them, I think China’s real goal is to keep the disperse Tibetan population in the dark about their brethren’s situations. By turning off the phone network, keeping out the foreign press, and controlling the local press they can prevent other regions from getting ideas and keep the resistance unorganized.

China’s disinformation policy only makes sense on the local level because internationally they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Keeping the story simple and fostering indignity sells, the media love it and China feeds it to them. US papers call demonstrations what the Chinese call riots. But it’s not just the Chinese who are biased. The most shocking story I’ve heard, coming only second hand by word of mouth, is a of tourist’s video and pictures of Tibetans in Lhasa beating a Han girl of about 14 years to death. The video and pictures were bought up by several Western media companies for tens of thousands of dollars, and never published. Was she so as evil as her most evil of governments?

Of course, no matter how violent the Tibetans have been these past few months, Chinese rule has been systematically violent for a half-century. Things need desperately to change, the Tibetan people are indeed losing their land, their culture, and their language, as they have already all but lost their freedom. But to dumb the situation down, to cast the players into narrow, dramatic roles is counterproductive, and does nothing more than sell news, make people feel good about their ideologies, and create endless email chain-petitions that do no more than prove you have a better sense of moral indignity than your friends.

“If you are chasing a sick, hurt dog he will run from you. But if you chase that dog into the end of an alleyway, he knows he will die and he will jump up and try to bite you anyway. He has no other choice.” The tone of this Tibetan friend’s voice implied this was not a justification of violence but a resigned explanation.

Yushu’s Pride And Shame

I also learned from the same friend how it was that I managed to get so far as Yushu. Why the area has been calm and how I passed unhindered through four military check points. “Kham is traditionally a warrior kingdom, and Yushu used to have some of the fiercest resistance to the Chinese. So, when the demonstrations broke out thousands of troops were here before people could do anything. In fact, many people in Yushu feel shame that nobody fought here. People in other areas have been saying that we are cowards.”

The tension sits in Yushu’s thin, dusty air and everyone looks like they feel they’re being watched. Not counting the young soldiers, the population of Yushu Prefecture is 97% Tibetan, compared to less than 50% in Lhasa. What few Han and Hui there are all live in Yushu city; shopkeepers, restaurateurs, taxi drivers. I estimate the city at 100,000, spread out across this valley at almost 13,000 feet about sea level. The city, as any valley around here, is ringed by rolling mountains, only the very tops of which – at likely over 17,000 feet – had snow.

::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1382.jpg”,”Yushu.”)::The city is very brown, many of the residential streets are unpaved and the construction sites – much smaller and slower than those in China – have big piles of fine, loose dirt. When the wind blows, and it can blow very hard up here, a column of dust lifts up from the city and disappears over the mountains. In the city center looms royally a large statue of Nyetri Tsanpo, the legendary first Tibetan King. He looks fierce on a rearing horse, and it ironically seems he could kick the ass of any Mao statue in most Chinese city squares.
::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1450.jpg”,”Nyetri Tsanpo”)::The cost of getting construction materials and the small local economy major limiting factors, the architecture in the central city is mainly plain and Chinese. But, the buildings are painted very colorfully and all the signs are bilingual.

Tibetans themselves are very colorful, one of the reasons why I suspect they are so much more loved than other less well-dressed tragically oppressed peoples. The way they dress reminds very much of Native Americans, topaz and silver jewelry, long braids, leather and cloth with complex, abstract patterns. This is so much in contrast with the April scenery. Aside from snow topping distant mountains, everything is brown, cold, and at first sight lifeless. The mountains do not look too steep or too big, but relativity taken into account everything is in fact huge, steep, and higher than you’ve ever been outside an airplane.
::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1553.jpg”,”Mountains outside Yushu at dawn.”)::

The only person I heard call Yushu “Jyekundo” was an American in Xining. Of course, most of the Tibetans I spoke to I spoke to in Chinese, if not English. Most young people in Yushu speak Chinese as well as or better than they speak Tibetan. When I asked a well educated young man how to write “Adam” phonetically in Tibetan script, he had to ask a friend, who then couldn’t get it quite right without asking a third. In the public schools, taught entirely in Mandarin, for their second language students have to choose between Tibetan and English. Most choose English. Of course outside the city and down the deserted mountain roads many people cannot, or will not, speak Chinese.

::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1329.jpg”,”Trying out phrases, failing.”)::
My first day in Yushu I tore the two pages of Tibetan phrases out of the back of my Lonely Planet China and shoved them in my pocket. Walking around after breakfast, I tried out a few phrases. At first I assumed it was the combination of my bad accent and Lonely Planet’s arbitrary transliterations that were getting me so many confused stares. So after the third or fourth failed phrase I switched to Chinese and asked how to say what I’d been trying to say. With the exception of ‘Hello’, Tashi Delek, the responses were wildly different from the phrasebook and I clued in that this must be a different dialect.

Turns out there are three major dialects of Tibetan, what my friends in Yushu called Kham, Amdo, and the written standard Lhasa dialect. In my ear they sound like properly different languages. Some well-educated people in Yushu speak fluent Kham, Lhasa, Mandarin, and English. I met one Tibetan who could only speak Amdo, while the other Tibetans present could speak the above four. I wondered at their friendship until this same guy, several beers later, was suddenly fluent in Chinese. While sober he had refused to speak Chinese even if it meant not speaking at all.

The Giant, the Monk, and our Angel

Wayne’s and my stone-faced jeep-driving Angel also at first refused to speak Mandarin.

He had an old green jeep with broken door locks. He had rounded sunglasses over his serious, sharp, and handsome Tibetan face. He had blue jeans and an entirely unmemorable shirt. He had gas cans in the back seat. He had perfect timing.

I’m sure our Angel knew just from the way we flagged him down that we were not in a good way. Easily twenty miles out of town, down an ever more deserted road leading off into the silent mountains, Wayne and I had just jumped out of a taxivan and run across the street when out of nowhere swooped down our Angel.

::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1331.jpg”,”Dashboard monk doll and air fresheners.”)::
The taxivan driver had been so friendly. Smiling and laughing, he wanted us to be sure to notice the air freshener. Air freshener that he may indeed have stolen along with the van.
After buying gas and picking up two more ‘passengers’ at the edge of town, he stopped and bought us all chewing gum. By the time Wayne refused my naive trust and demanded I tell the driver to stop, the driver had already become too quiet, too anxiously angrily nervous. From the beginning Wayne picked up the bad vibes, but I’d been naive. I forgot that this was not China. No matter what the maps say and how religiously the Chinese people believe it, this ever more deserted mountain road was not China.

I’ve gotten complacent. In Mexico or Brazil I would never let myself get even close to such a situation. In China I’ve never worried about more than pick-pockets, and certainly not bold robbery. Chinese robbers – even suspected robbers – are simply shot. The Chinese shoot Tibetans with even less reason. This is why, were these guys indeed planning to rob us, in retrospect it becomes clear that they would have been quite wise to kill us and leave us to the sacred vultures of the traditional Tibetan sky-burial.

After stopping to buy gas, the two ‘passengers’ came up one at a time. The first was a giant. He was 6’5″ easy and his hands looked like grownup hands used to look when you were a kid. He wore black pants and a Tibetan jacket like a fuzzy Kimono bunched up at the waist; dark cloth and an intricate pattern embossed in shiny purple thread. He first came up to the driver’s window, joked with him for a minute. Next came the second man. Smaller and older, he was dressed as a monk, but he is now in my memory far too rough mannered, far too scruffy, to be a man of Buddha. A few more words with the driver and they both climbed in the back seat.
::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1335.jpg”,”The Giant and the Monk look at North Korean money.”)::

Wayne’s forearm tattoo was showing, and the Giant, like a child, simply started touching it. Used to attention at his tattoos, Wayne uncomfortably tried to laugh it off. As we drove out of town, Wayne already said he had a bad feeling. I told him this is normal. We passed the turn for the temple to which we had hired the driver but kept going. Seeing the look on my face, the driver said that he was going to drop them off 3km down the road and turn around to go back to the temple. 3km is two miles is only a few minutes and, translating for Wayne, we reluctantly agreed. If couldn’t have read the sign, I would never have known we were going the wrong way.

It was already more than 3km when we stopped, but only the Giant got out. He ran over to a farm house, exchanged a few words – and who knows what else – with an unhappy looking woman, and got back in the taxivan. The driver started again. Irritated, I asked the driver where he was dropping them off. He pointed down the road, his face snappy and nervous, “down there.” We passed “down there”. I told him we passed “down there” where the hell are we going and he pointed “down there” again. I told Wayne. In a tone of voice that I could never doubt Wayne just said, “tell him to stop the car.”

“Stop the car.”

I don’t know how my voice sounded, but for an instant the driver slowed and Wayne, in that same voice, “Get out!”

We ran across the road and into our Angel’s jeep.

Shaking as everything unraveled in my mind and fit sinisterly back together. “Thank you thank you thank you… are… are you going to Yushu?”

He nodded at “Yushu” and waved away any other Mandarin I tried to speak.

The taxivan came roaring back, honking its horn wildly. The Giant and the Monk were nowhere to be seen. I gesticulated wildly to keep going, to ignore the honking, pointing at the taxivan and miming him slitting my throat. Our Angel pulled over anyway. The taxivan driver got out and ran up, fuming. I locked the door. He opened it anyway, the lock was broken. He wanted the money we’d agreed on to take us to the temple. I told him he didn’t take us there and he could fuck off. He started reaching for me, so I said fine and gave him ten yuan. Not satisfied he threw it back at me “Forty!” Our Angel stared ahead, trying to stay out of it. I resumed my pathetic gesticulations for him to drive away. He turned around and said, in perfect Mandarin, “just give him the damned money.”

I shoved twenty yuan into the taxivan driver’s hands. He let go of the jeep’s door for a second, and our Angel drove away. I thanked our Angel profusely in Chinese and explained what we had concluded was about to have happened. Our Angel, expression yet unchanged, simply said “I know. They aren’t locals. They are bad men.”

The White Scarfed Lining

We brushed off death, determined to get on with it, and hired a licensed taxi. The driver was Han and I felt racistly safe. He took us everywhere for a good price, and we bought him dinner. He led us to a spectacular new restaurant, the owner of which wanted to introduce us to an Anglophone friend. This friend then introduced us to the small (six people) expat community of volunteers and invited us to her friend’s traditional wedding the next morning.

::fuzzpic-left(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1472.jpg”,”Big, fancy crowd.”)::
In my imagination a traditional Tibetan wedding should be out on the high plateau surrounded by jagged snowy peaks from which the bride and groom should arrive galloping on handsome strong horses while monks chant and et cetera. Of course that’s impractical and the plateau is brown, cold, and windy in April. So it was in a large hall of a nice hotel. There was a projection screen over the stage so everyone could have a good view.

::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1469.jpg”,”The spread.”)::
The hall had at least 400 people, eight plus people to a gold table-clothed table. In all there were only two obvious Han Chinese present. Most people were well but not overdressed. I was wearing dirty jeans and a dirtier t-shirt for lack of anything else. There was a plate of cigarettes on every table, Chinese baijiu liquor, beer, yak butter tea to drink. As the ceremony proceeded pounds of food were piled everywhere, a mixture of Chinese and Tibetan cuisine; Yak, vegetables, sweet rice, fish. After the ceremony at least half was left uneaten, the feast too large.

Tibetan weddings are very quick: Some, I assume respected, older man gets on stage and says something in Tibetan. Everyone claps. Some singers perform a few traditional songs. Another sings some Tibetan pop songs with synthesizers and a style a little India, a little China, and another entirely his own.

::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1488.jpg”,”Ribbon draping.”)::The bride and groom come out. Somebody says something else, everyone claps. After that, every guest in attendance forms a line and one by one places a thin white scarf on the groom and another on the bride. I pulled the two bunched up scarves that I had been instructed to buy out of my pocket and did the same. Bride and groom, upon becoming fully draped in a cloud of thin white cloth are apparently now married and everyone leaves to go get drunk, uneaten food lying everywhere.

After the wedding we hired another licensed taxi and a second driver came along for the ride. We met a serious young police officer who didn’t really know where there was or was not fighting but believed his boss and turned us around for our safety.::fuzzpic-right(“Yushu/thumbnails/IMG_1315.jpg”,”Horrible sleeper bus stops for pee break.”):: Please understand, it’s his job. And so for me it’s back on the horrible, horrible dirty smoke-filled sleeper bus. It’s 16 hours back to Xining and along the way bus is sliding backwards and sideways around overturned trucks in a blizzard at 3 in the morning and 14,000 feet above sea level. Riding away in our Angel’s jeep, Wayne had shrugged and said that he knew it wasn’t his time to go anyway. And so do I as the road disappears into snowy Himalayan nothingness, the bus drivers laugh it all off, and I fall back asleep.

2008-4-10, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

2008-4-10, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

The Nervous School Teacher

::fuzzpic-left(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_0983.jpg”,”Hohhot’s train station.”)::
The suited young man was visibly shaking in his nervous approach. He was clean shaven and wore the ovular wiry framed spectacles of the educated Chinese. I’d already finished my fried pancake breakfast (think chewy with garlic and hot sauce, not fluffy and Aunt Jemimah), and was sipping my instant coffee in this dirty-as-expected train station canteen. [as I write this,ten minutes out of Hohhot on the sleeper train to Yinchuan, an old lady just emptied her daughter‘s catheter into the trash can and pushed the trash can right back my way] After numerous firtive glances, Mike Lee, as he styled himself, worked up the confidence to come over and ask me the usual tired questions the answers to which, if it were not for pity on all the English learners out there, I would be tempted to have printed out onto a multilingual fact-sheet. Mike Lee’s English was worse than usual and his nervousness made me really uncomfortable, and this was by far the most intersting thing about the second least intersting person to approach me in Hohhot. When he, explaining he was also visiting Hohhot for the first time, asked if he could see some sites with me, I declined as politely as I could and ran away. A more graceful exit than the one I would perform a few hours later, surprsingly drunk and feeling very out of place in an illegal but not much hidden card room in a converted first floor apartment near Hohhot’s main mosque.

The lost Ghanian

Not a minute and 50 meters away from Mike Lee,

“Hello, do you speak English?”

No Chinese person has ever asked me if I speak English in English – it is assumed that the languge is inherited with my skin color. A very pasty color these days, wholly in contrast to the dark brown of the young African man approaching me.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Can you maybe help me? I arrived here yesterday after a 40-hour train journey from Guangzhou. I was expecting to get in contact with a friend of a friend who can offer me an English teaching job. Unfortunately, I continuously call and call, and it continues to say his phone is not working。”

“I’m sorry, I just got off the train, I’ve only been in town twenty minutes. I guess if you call the number I could listen to what it says?”

“You understand Chinese?”

“Sometimes,” I smile. He dials up the number, hands me his phone.

“Duibuqi, ni fada de dianhwa yi wufei…”

“It says his account is out of money.”

Contemplative pause.

“I don’t have anything but this phone number. Do you know anywhere I could find a teaching job here?”

It seemed at first very strange that he should imagine that I, some random gringo who got off a train and ate breakfast would have any such idea. But it occured to me not just that in his present position it could only hurt no to try, but that, in fact, I did have an idea. On the sleeper train from Beijing I met a student of the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University. A nice girl named Haiting who cannot for the life of her pronounce her future profession: a veterenarian. She said a friend of hers might have some time and be interested in showing me around town to practice his English, so I took her phone number.

I called Haiting and asked if this friend of hers could meet us, thinking it easiest to explain in person my lost Ghanian friend’s predicament. As we waited for her to contact this friend and, we wandered around the area of the train station.So far, Hohhot looked like any other medium-sized Chinese city, if perhaps more spread out. Dusty in a more natural, yellower sort of dustiness. I was looking for a China mobile store at which I could add money to my phone. The first three mobile stores all told me to go to down the block and turn left. Until I completed the circuit and met with success. As we walked in this big circle, I learned that he had orignally come to China with a business partner who was then deported – something to do with a Chinese girl gone sour. So this guy was now lookig for a teaching job – but why in Inner Mongolia he could hardly explain as well as I could.

Haiting called back and apologized that her friend was busy, so I explained the situation over the phone. She knew of a private English school and agreed to track down and text the contact information. Soon enough we got in contact with the school, who said they’d call him back. I left him waiting by the station, and will forever wonder what became of him.

The curious Shanghaiese

::fuzzpic-left(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1022.jpg”,”Multilingual inscriptions.”)::
He beat even Mike Lee as the least interesting person to approach me. But I liked him better, as he didn’t try to speak more than a few words of English at me. Instead he followed me around the Dazhao Lamasary asking every detail about application procedures to American graduate programs, costs of living, and ranges of salaries for different levels of education in San Francisco. These are not the oldtiredquestions and I enjoyed hearing his perspective on my estimated answers as I admired the Tibetan art and the trilingual inscriptions in Mogolian, Chinese,and Sanskrit. This lamasery dates from the Silk Road days, when Tibetan Buddhism flourished in what was then the Barbarian capital of all of Mongolia, centuries away from becoming a civilized part of the Middle Kingdom.
::fuzzpic-right(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1027.jpg”,”Freaky deity dude.”)::

The Mongolian MInotLF

I ran off not because Tana was hitting me up for money, and not really because she was lying to me, but because she was lying to me insultingly poorly. Tana is a 37 year-old Mongolian single (or perhaps not?) mother who works for Hohhot’s water utility and likes to spend her Friday afternoon drinking Baijiu with her coworkers and soon enough with young American boys from the next table over. She also, it must be said, had the face of a 27 year-old and a singing voice far more suited to the steppe than a public utility office.
::fuzzpic-left(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1060.jpg”,”Oat noodles.”)::
Refreshingly, Tana and her two coworkers did not want to practice their English. As a group, all they wanted was to share in the, ahem, refreshing delight that is Baijiu with their new friend. Tana, however, it later became clear, also wanted thirty yuan to finance a bit of gambling. And for me to take her to America. And, it increasingly seemed, was going to want something else from me soon enough which, it must also be said, was also involved in the decision to run away. Question my masculinity if you must, but I was unwittinly force-fed Baijiu after finishing my lunch of Mongolian oat-noodles. After polishig off the rest of the current and the the next bottle, I could not refuse their invitation to come play Mahjong. I don’t know how to play Mahjong. The illegal but not much hidden Mahjong-room stuffed into a first floor apartment was terribly crowded. I was promptly kicked out for not knowing how to play and taking up space in which someone ele cold be losing their money. Tana followed me out and led me further into the somewhat delapidated apartment complex of grey dust-stained seven story blocks, cracked roads, and school kids in P.E. suits running around, screaming. Outside the next gambling operation Tana stopped and batted her eyelashes.

“If I lose money in poker, can you give me some more? Like, maybe 30 yuan?” while all the wile tryng to hold my hand, etc. I told her no, and she said let’s go anyway.

While the name of the game, pouke is a sinicizatin of Poker, the game they were playing in this second crowded smoke-filled apartment was not poker as I know it, but rather something very much resembling that gold-old drnking game “asshole”. From what I could quickly gather of the rules of the game, and the expressions of the other players’ faces, my good friend Tana was doing quite well, in fact. Until suddenly she looked at me, big Monglolian pleading eyes, and said “oh no! I’ve just lost! I need, um, thirty yuan. Okay? So you need to give me thirty yuan.”

“I don’t think you just lost.”

“Oh no! Really, I just lost. I owe the others thirty yuan, if you don’t pay I’m in trouble.” She smiled, and grabbed my hand, squeezed it suggestively.

::fuzzpic-right(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1068.jpg”,”Main mosque.”)::
I refused again, and she shook her head, stood up, and stepped into the next room. A minute later I was acrosss the river and eating beef dumplings beside Hohot’s main mosque, wondering at the grey areas between putting out and prostitution.

The irl who an’t say Gs
I wandered over to the Inner Mongolia Museum, only to find it very closed and myself with nothing to do for five hours until my ten o’clock train onwards. Wandering back in the direction of where I thought I’d seen a coffee shop, a diminutive girl dressed in the plain style of the Chinese college student appeared out of nowhere.
::fuzzpic-left(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1088.jpg”,”Memorial for something, next to the closed museum.”)::

“Hello!”

Her tone was that of an old friend bumping into another on her way home. This startled and confused me until I was distracted by those oldtiredquestions. I think if I print that fact-sheet I’ll have to laminate it.

But, Suzy, as she styled herself, was not akwardly shy, spoke both good English and patient Mandarin and was, unlike most random people who cross the street to come speak English at me, pleasant to talk to as we continued down the street and past the where- what- and how-…-are-yous yawn. Suzy didn’t know where the coffee shop was – the average Chinese college student cannot afford the relative luxury prices of real coffee. This I understand. I found it anyway, and possibly more to my own surprise than to Suzy’s I asked her to join me for a cup.

As we sat and compared studying each other’s language, it became clear that she has a fairly limited but severe speech impediment. My limited training in phonetics allowed me to pretty easily understand the symptoms, but my total lack of training in speech pathology left me at a loss to explain it. Since I was still drunk, I perhaps did not consider that I might have just been blowing her a bubble only for it to be burst by the reality of the fact that not only are speech therapists in China few and far between, but like hell she has the money to pay for that. And if you don’t get at something like that until adulthood it can take years of hard work to retrain your mouth.
::fuzzpic-right(“Beyond/thumbnails/IMG_1094.jpg”,”.”)::

I’m not sure if giving her false hope makes me a bad person.

Suzy bought me some sweet, dried goat cheese that I didn’t like until the third time I tried it and walked me to the train station, another night on the train for me.

Even in Jeongseon, an English Experience Center


For a month this winter, I was working at the brand-new, ₩400,000,000 (~US$400,000) Jeongseon English Experience Center (JEEC).

The concept of vacation, to many Koreans, ends up often just meaning a time when you can force your children to study something that’s just not their regular classes. Many kids barely get a day of vacation until University. One popular ‘vacation’ activity is English camp, and since many school districts have foreign teachers who are getting paid salaries whether school is in session or not, the labor for said camps is often very available.

Most people, when assigned to teach a winter “camp”, are given a classroom and told to prepare a week or so’s worth of three hours a day lessons and activities. A few of us here in Jeongseon County, however, had the privilege of teaching our camp in our very own brand-new English village. There’s a number of said English villages here in Korea, on very different scales, but all with a similar set-up. Most, if not all, are actually designed and built by the same company. Each is essentially a building (or several buildings for the larger ones) with a series of themed booths constructed to resemble places one might go as a traveler in North America. JEEC has eight booths:


Flight Airport,



the East Bank,



the North Post Office,



the Empire Hotel,



the French Fresh Food Restaurant,



the E-cent Shopping Center,

cute-name-lacking library,


and the Main Street / Virtual Reality Station.

The “Virtual Reality Station” is an excellent example of what’s not quite right about JEEC (and, indeed, many other things in Korea). It’s called the “Virtual Reality Station” because there is a giant, rear-projection screen and a little stage area with seats around it. Intended to be projected onto this screen is a virtual city with extra areas not included in the actual center, such as an office building and a subway station. One can use a wireless Playstation style controller to walk around the virtual North American city (in first person perspective but unfortunately with no gun), theoretically going up to the digital white folk milling about and talking to them. To talk to them, however, requires real people to pretend to be their voices. Needless to say, this is stupid and we haven’t used it once. What we did use everyday, however, was the computer on which that program was intended to run. On it we showed PowerPoints with dialogs, vocabulary, and photographs in order to prepare the students for role playing in the various booths. Now that’s all well and good, and in fact the rear-projection screen allowed us to use dry-erase markers directly on the display, so it made for a nice setup. Annoyingly, the crappy software for the wireless game controller wasn’t smart enough to control PowerPoint, and despite the heaps and heaps of money and attention spent on building the place, once we were actually running it our requests for a wireless mouse and keyboard went unheeded for weeks. (We’re still waiting.) The computer in question, you see, is in a little room behind the screen. Without wireless control, to show a PowerPoint presentation means having one teacher sitting in the room using his expertise and teacher training for the difficult task of pressing the space bar whenever we called “next!” from the other room. (This job we affectionately called “backstage monkey.”) To make things even better, when I was messing with the projector one morning, trying to get it aligned perfectly (I didn’t care for the PowerPoints but when it came to hooking up my laptop and watching the Daily Show on the big screen, I didn’t want it at a funny angle!!), I noticed that with just a male-to-male PS/2 cable one could connect the schmancy projector to the computer and use its remote control as a mouse! So, did they keep the box the projector came in? Of course not. Did the grounds keeper actually have any idea what I was talking about when I asked him? No.

Many other things followed a very similar pattern: there are real cash registers. Nobody could figure out how to set them up (we didn’t even have instructions in Korean). But, not having any special paper for them, that hardly mattered. We have (probably very expensive) plastic food in the restaurant, but only a few dishes that don’t particularly correspond to the pretend menu anyway. I will spare you the rest of the list and explain my take on the general phenomenon. The Korean public school system spends heaps of time and money on easy, showy solutions to teaching the kids English, but then proceeds to lack the institutional organization and will to fully implement them. The whole program of hiring foreign English teachers is, itself, just another, broader example of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, at least most of my peers here take their jobs seriously, and we try to make the best of it. At JEEC, some of the ways we did this were by using the “Virtual Reality Center” as a high-tech classroom, by printing pictures of food and laminating them, and, gasp, writing bills by hand (which anyway gave us the ability to try and overcharge the students for their “meals” and see if they were paying attention).

While most of our activities at JEEC could be done with a little creativity and imagination – and a lot less money – in a normal classroom, I think that it was a great experience for the students. Many of you, being from California and the like, might think it strange to build a specialized “English village.” We don’t need to build “Spanish villages” in California. But, remember how different things are for kids from small towns in a small, homogeneous country. At the very least, JEEC gives the kids a chance to have a low-risk exposure to something different. For example, while most middle-class American children have already flown in an airplane at a tender age, with the exception of Jeju island, no one in Korea needs to get on an airplane to visit gramma. If any of these students visit any foreign country they will doubtless be using English at the airport and I’m quite confident many of them will draw on their experiences at JEEC.

The local media certainly love JEEC.



We’ve had TV news crews three times already. Here is a clip of one news show’s coverage*:



This is from the week before I was there, the news coverage in which I starred I couldn’t find online. While searching for it though, I came across an article (Google wanna-translation) in the national news section of chosun.com, the title of which translates as “Even in Jeongseon They’re Opening an English Village.” Jeongseon County, you see, is in the serious boonies, and this title is very amusing.

As a final anecdote, our fake money and the fake passports we give the students all say “JELC” on them rather than “JEEC.” The original name of the center was the “Jeongseon English Learning Center,” until, apparently, it surfaced that “JELC” sounds like an archaic Korean word for fellatio that no one had ever heard of. Of course they still had to change the name of the place after they’d already printed all the materials.

*I’ll give 50 bucks to the first person (who doesn’t already know!) who can find the other appearance of the host in the news clip on my websites.

Another MP3 Player

New pictures. Check back in a week or so and some might even be explained.

This week is the Korean autumn harvest festival of Chuseok. Because of eccentricities of the lunar calendar that I have no desire to understand, Tuesday is a holiday, as are Thursday and Friday. Should one get out of work on Monday and Wednesday, that’s a solid 9 days off, and a good chance to go somewhere cool. So let’s rewind to two weeks ago when I politely inquired if I would have class on this, what has become a true Monday among Mondays. My coteacher said, let me ask the supervisor. Asks supervisor. Answer is yes, but no class on Wednesday. I figure I can’t complain – that’s still a 6 day holiday.

Ffwd: today. I show up for school, deposit bag, iPod, usw., at desk. Material for 2nd grade in hand, I head towards the classroom. I knew my coteacher had a meeting in the morning, so I would be flying solo today. I glance at the big class schedule on the wall and… wait! something looks terribly different. Where’s the 영 (yeong [English])? There’s no 영 (yeong). I trade some of my broken Korean for some of the Math teacher’s broken English. Turns out the schedule “is changey.” I have no class. So I pack up my stuff – feeling very bemused that I had to spend 5 hours on busses yesterday to get back to Gohan just to not work today rather than feeling happy to suddenly not have class. I oh-well and pack up my stuff. Having had it drilled into my head to profusely and politely greet my coworkers at every possible chance, I head out with a bow and an 안녕히 계십시오 (anyeonghi gyeshibshiyo) – only to have the science teacher start desperately explaining something to me in Korean. I got the gist that I had to stay until after lunch, what I did not get was why! They’ve never made me stay around when I didn’t have class before! Reportedly many other EPIK teachers are struggling with being stuck at the office until 5pm whether they have class or not. A huge plus of teaching at so many different schools and not having any one main-school is that I have unto this very day never been forced to hang around an office upon finishing my classes. I’m pretty sure I also have to thank my predecessor for this, as a few others I’ve talked to who teach at many schools have said even they are stuck in the office sometimes. My predecessor, one Sam Parker (“미스터 파커”), was teaching both in Gohan and the next town a few clicks over, Sabuk. Now he’s teaching only in Sabuk and I’ve taken over his Gohan operations. I don’t even want to think about how many schools he was teaching in, except to be happy that it meant he couldn’t possibly be forced to sit in an office for no reason, and now such is not expected of me.

Until this morning. I should have just slipped out, I’m SURE they would never have even considered my absence. Being stuck here right now is, however, not what bothers me. I’m at least two weeks behind on blogging, so I can use this time. What bothers me is that my coteacher said I had class today! If it was clear I would not have class today, whether or not they wanted me here, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be somewhere awesome cuz a 9 day vacation is worth going somewhere awesome. A weekend and a subsequent 6 day vacation is nice, but inot truly somewhere-awesome worthy.

I have two complaints about this job. The one I thought I could deal with but which has really bitten me on the ass today is lack of communication. It appears to be quite the Korean style to have all these suit and tie meetings and plan everything in minute detail, and then not tell anyone about it until the absolute last minute. Since I’m usually just hanging around Gohan and don’t have much else to do, being told at the last minute that this class is moved or canceled or I have to go to this meeting at this place or whatever isn’t a big deal. Bifurcating a potential 9 day vacation just so I can sit at a desk and bitch on the internet is a big deal. And just now, as I’ve been sitting here writing this, my coteacher called and started making noises towards the supervisor wanting me here on Wednesday! Having been very explicitly told I had Wednesday off, I quickly said I had reservations and lots of travel plans, thank you very much. This was not entirely true, but if they can lie to me, or, to be fair, change their story at the last minute, I feel no trouble lying about that. Aaaaaaaah! In the end, I do realize that of all the potential trials and tribulations I exposed myself to by taking on a new job in a new country this is pretty low down the list, still it’s annoying, and what better place to bitch about it?!

The other complaint I have about this job is of a very different sort. It’s one that is really a mixed blessing: that I teach so many different levels. Something like 12, depending on how you count. This is apparently enviable to some teachers with the experience, organization, and resources to prepare all the necessary lessons and material. I do see why; it most definitely never gets boring! As a matter of fact, by far my favorite classes are at the two extremes: the kindergarteners and the advanced high-school girls’ (extra-curricular) conversation class. But goddamn does it exhaust me! I barely manage to summon all the energy I have left after teaching to go to the gym, so please understand why I haven’t been writing the wonderful novels you expect each week. And now my supervisor has offered me the chance to teach an adult conversation class for 30,000 won (US$31) /hour, 4 hours a week in the evenings. I said I’m interested because that’s damned good money, I think I could enjoy a class like that, and I can work the schedule out myself (including, I will mandate, time off during winter so I can snowboard!). But with the trouble keeping up I’m having now without that class, I hope I can handle it! It feels like I should be able to adapt with more experience, practice, good organization and time management. Of course those last two things have certainly never been my forte, as many of you probably know. But I can learn. I do that sometimes. I can learn things.

Like Korean. It seems that all of a sudden, about two weeks ago, I actually started progressing with my Korean! I have hardly done any actual and regular sitting down and studying Korean, despite many intentions to have started doing that a long time ago. See above. On top of that, I’m teaching English all day long. This means not only am I not speaking Korean, but in all but the younger elementary classes, I have been actively trying to not speak Korean. This is something I’m finding more and more to be somewhat unwise, not just for my sake, but also for the students’ sake. Only real experience at the individual level can show me what the right amount of translation is in class, but I’m finding out that in most of my classes it’s not none. Aside from “out”ing my Korean abilities with some of my classes, there are some other factors I suspect in what I’ve perceived to be the recent upturn in my Korean progress. It’s strange, and I know I’ve certainly had agency in this, but it seems like kind of all of a sudden lots of different people just stopped either trying English with me or, more commonly, not talking to me, and started actually speaking Korean to me. I don’t understand much, but it’s been great! The final factor is my electronic dictionary.

At first I was thinking about waiting for a trip to Seoul to get one cheap, but my paper dictionary was absolutely driving me insane! The Korean-English section of it is ordered alphabetically by transliteration, and the transliteration they use might be regular, but it certainly isn’t always logical to me, nor representative of how the words actually sound or are written in Hangul. I decided I need to get an electronic one right away so I could start using it, right away. So, I headed to the local “metropolis,” Taebaek, since there’s no where to buy one here. I was directed to one shop that might sell one. Closed. Finally found another, a “Digital LG” store. I always assumed these stores sold only LG products, and mostly home appliances, since that’s what’s obvious from the outside. Turns out they have a small selection of personal electronics, not all of which are made by LG. Having seen what things are like in Seoul, I was simply astonished. They were selling old model MP3 players and digicams at what would be high prices Another MP3 player.back home. They had three electronic dictionaries. I bought the cheapest one. $220.00! That was about $70.00 more than they seemed to be, on average, in Seoul. But I was tired of waiting and in the mood to just buy one of the damned things so I just bought the damned thing. It’s actually pretty cool! And I saw it for $200.00 in a major store in Sokcho this Saturday, so maybe I didn’t get ripped off too bad! According to the box, it has 24 functionalities! Among these are the following dictionaries: Korean, English (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary – good enough for me! I even used it already), Hanja ( means Korean written with Chinese characters), Korean-English, English-Korean, Japanese-Korean, Korean-Japanese, Chinese-Korean, Korean-Chinese. For all these languages, as well as German, Spanish, French and Italian, it also has an extensive Korean-to-that-language phrasebook. You can even add words to the dictionaries yourself, and save words as flashcards. It has a memo pad, a date book, an address book, a class schedule, a solar calendar, a lunar calendar, world time, and a few games, including a decent tetris. All of these extras, of course, are clearly added-on and they don’t really expect you to use any of them except the dictionary since they’re all truly horribly designed. To add a space, when writing, one must press the shift key first, just to name a particularly lovely design element. They use spaces in Korean too, so that’s not just crappy for writing English. You can set it into funky English, and it even changes most of the menus! Out of the little speaker on it, it will pronounce Japanese, English, and Chinese vocabulary for you. You’re already supposed to know how the Korean sounds. It come with a 128MB SD card. It will play MP3’s off that SD card on it’s little speaker, and even has a headphone jack, together with headphones with a remote control on the chord. The MP3 player interface is pretty crap. My favorite part is that it can’t access anything else on the SD card while playing MP3’s. The other thing to which I refer is text files. Far into exploring the dictionary’s menus, I discovered that it has an “ebook reader,” which is really just a text file editor, but thanks to the page up and page down buttons, makes it into an effective ebook machine. That was a really cool surprise, since I starting to miss having a palm pilot on which to read ebooks. I wouldn’t really call it a proper ebook reader, since if you switch back to dictionary mode, it doesn’t remember where you were in the text file. The only option to avoid pressing page down a million times is to split your ebook up into a bunch of smaller files. Annoying, but doable. I have plans to write a program to do that for me, by chapter.

Now that I’ve written more about my dictionary than anyone but my brother and my dad could ever want to read, there was another gadget on my shopping list two weeks ago in Taebeak to geek it up about. I needed to buy a cellphone. My coteacher was supposed to help me buy a cellphone. But, after waiting two weeks to get my alien registration card, I didn’t want to keep waiting for my busy coteacher to have enough time to go to another town and help me buy one. Besides, I hate being dependent on other people, and going and doing it on my own was a challenge I just had to take. I figure I probably ended up paying about $50 over what I could have for my phone. Buying a phone as a foreigner, at least here in the boonies, is a real bitch. A guy in one store just told me he wouldn’t sell me one and asked me to leave. I found a store where they would sell me one – one of five. Out of the 40-some cell phone models, so far as I could understand, only for five of them did the offer pre-paid minutes. As a foreigner, she would only let me pre-pay minutes, rather than buy a monthly plan. I’ve since learned that with a $200 I can probably correct this situation if forceful, or if I have the help of someone forceful and who can speak Korean, which would be lovely since the prepaid minutes are a truly extortionate deal! At least incoming calls are free.The 5 phones they would let me buy were all the same price, so I picked the best looking one with the most internal memory. I was actually kinda iffy on the phone at first, an LG-KP4700, but it’s actually really grown on me.Another MP3 player. It’s a sleek slider phone, rather than a flip-phone, which I really like a lot better, although it’s shape is a little funky. It seems like it should actually make a nice MP3 player, the speaker sounds fantastic for it’s size. If I find a decent-sized TransFlash card I could see myself using it for music, if only I can find a different set of headphones (the ones that came with it can ONLY be used if you wear the phone necklace-style – popular with the Korean kids, but not with me – and it does not have a standard headphone jack) and a workable Windows XP running PC with which to load it up with tunes. Asid from that, it does everything a modern phone should, although just how well I’m still finding out. It even has an IR data port. For syncing with other LG phones? I dunno. I even figured out how to set most of it into English! Frighteningly this brings my current count of present and potential MP3 players, here in my Korean home, to 7 ([broken] computers included).

Gadget proliferation is a dangerous thing.

And I have an income and I’m going to Seoul tomorrow. It’s a small town here. I said I had plans to leave for Seoul tomorrow so they didn’t ask me to be here Wednesday, so I’d damn well better leave tomorrow, or it will be known. I already have plans to buy at least one piece of electronics: a new laptop hard drive. Lady fortune blessed me this weekend when Mike, the Australian EPIK teacher in Taebaek, revealed he was a mac technician for many years, and offered to fix my Powerbook for me!!!!

What with writing this, the TV on (they let me leave school after lunch), and finding a hostel to reserve in Seoul, I’m about 2 hours later now for going swimming then I’d hoped. But you all cared SO MUCH about my new gadgets so time was not wasted!

Terribijon Terripy

Rainy Saturday all holed up in my little residence here at Gohan Elementary School. With the TV on. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but ever since they hooked up my cable I keep finding my thumb drifting toward that remote. The provision of cable and a TV on which to watch it is stipulated in my contract. This surprised me at first – I would certainly have preferred they provide internet, which I’m still waiting to get hooked up on my own 100 won coin – but I now realize that, at least in my case, cable TV has actually been very soothing. TV kills the silence of living alone, something that is quite new to me. Sure I’ve spent plenty of time by my lonesome, having traveled to many a far-flung spot all my by self. Here now I’m finding out how different moving alone is from staying alone. The part that kills me is not loneliness. The only time I’ve felt lonely, in fact, was my first night here and most of the following day. It was a very intense loneliness brought on by the abrupt transition from the high-drive socializing of a bunch of fast friend peers all lumped together with 10 free evenings at EPIK orientation to a silent night in an empty house in a strange little mountain town. Fortunately, having uprooted myself to strange places before, I was able to identify the reasons for how I felt and knew it would go away. What didn’t go away was the silence. The silence really kills me, it piles up on top of itself, traps and suffocates my brain. Background noise is like a pacemaker for my thoughts, occupying the part of my brain that bounces off the walls if not restrained. TV does occupy more of my brain than I would often like, but at least for now the sound of human voices, even ones I can’t hardly understand, is truly wonderful, if a little bit terribly guiltily so.
Cable TV here has a number of highlights I would like to share with you. Moving up through the numerous channels, you first pass a whole lot of local news channels. While I can sort of guess the news topics from visual cues and the few and far between words I understand, the newsworthiness is often entirely lost to me. They seem to interview a disproportionate number of old ladies who look very disapproving of whatever it is they are talking about, to show a large number of panning shots of quotidian life, particularly of ubiquitous apartment buildings and farm houses, and to sprinkle in a surprising amount of undercover-cam footage with blurred-out faces of people pretty much sitting around chatting very unexcitedly and, I must say, entirely unsisnisterly about something that I can only take on faith to be appropriately nefarious.
Next, there’s lots of talkshowish programs, with plenty of cute font, brightly colored captions bouncing around the screen, highlighting the more amusing statements they’re saying. After that there are pretty much 24/7 at least a few soap operas set in ancient times East Asia, some Korean, some Chinese with subtitles. Among these, the only thing making any of the programs unique to my untrained eye is the wide range of production quality; some of the Chinese ones I’m pretty sure borrowed their costumes from a high school drama class.
Further into the channels come educational programs of teachers lecturing about a wide variety of topics. These are very exciting. Every couple of minutes they even go so far as to change from the predominant shot of chalkboard and hand with piece of chalk writing on chalkboard to show the teacher’s face for at least a few seconds. I have one of these programs on right now. We are learning high school algebra. The teacher has clean fingernails and holds that chalk very well. Unfortunately he uses roman letters for variables, which I find a little disappointing.
After that there are a number of sports channels, showing local and international sporting events.
Following that there are some channels that show a lot of American movies, couple-year-old primetime network series, and a few wonderfully horrible old-school shows (such as the A-team; I don’t know how people took themselves seriously back then!), presenting a surprisingly satisfying selection of programming in English.
Finally come the best channels of all. Second best is the 24/7 Go channel, channel 73. My personal favorites, though, are channels 77 and 78, the live video game channels. Here one can’t help but become engrossed in the epic battle between slightly rotund, sweaty Korean teen-aged boys trying to destroy each other’s avatars or demondroid armies or whatever through the medium of networked personal computers, complete with corporate sponsorship and attractive commentators.
Aside from the above programming, I find the advertisements rather fascinating as well. About half of all advertisements, pitching most any product, are all the same: a cute, mid-to-late-twenties Korean girl against a clean, stylish background, speaking in a sing-songy half-whisper, with some fancy-font words floating by and almost always a very quick little jingle at the very end. Seriously, those are all the same, whether it’s green tea, home lones, or toilets. Also, there are a few great ads on of just the sort made fun of in Lost In Translation, particularly good is one showing Pierce Brosnan in a suit. It just zooms around him for a while, and at the very end, he says, simply and slowly, “The Suit.”
Gladly I don’t need to wear “The Suit” myself at work. I do, however, have to wear a collared shirt and non-jeans. I actually haven’t been explicitly told not to wear jeans, but I plan to wait until I’ve thoroughly ingratiated myself before asking. I have been explicitly told not to wear flip-flops, yet at the same time it is required at the elementary schools to take your shoes off at the door and change into slippers. I bought my own pair of slippers to take with me after spending all Wednesday with half my foot hanging off of the biggest extra pair they had. I’m glad no students noticed this, as I’m sure they would not have let me hear the end of it. This I am sure of because of all the other things they don’t let me hear the end of. Of foremost interest are the presence of hair on my face, the relative lack of it on my head, and the size and shape of my nose. Whether despite or because of such exotic features, the majority of my younger female students have been assuring me that I am “very handsome,” even a few male students and teachers have echoed that. In fact, last Saturday, when I was meeting people at some schools before starting work, several teachers happily said to me “good imajee [image]!” My co-teacher in charge of helping me out, Mr. Heo, explained that they were pleased that they got the most tall, anglo-saxon looking of the new teachers coming to the county. Clearly my English is thus the most authentic, right? Anyway, the girls’ middle school is probably the best place to teach; perhaps it’s just the novelty, but they were glued to my every word. And while for now I just let the rockstarstatus amuse me, I very quickly grew tired of the one girl who decided to stalk me through the hallways all day long. At one point she saw me talking to some other girls at the other end of the hallway, I suppose found this unacceptable, and literally sprinted over and tried her best to edge the other girls away. I think I need to practice the Korean for “Thank you, I’m very flattered. Please do be so kind as to relay your positive impressions of me to any sisters or cousins you might have who are about ten years older than you are.”
At the boys’ schools, don’t get this kind of attention, which can certainly be a relief. Still, the boys seem to like me too, and I have had absolutely no discipline problems at all, something other teachers are already complaining about on our EPIK 2006 email list. I am keeping in mind that the lack of misbehavior might, like the girls’ attentions, fade as quickly as my novelty. They do still use the “love stick” in schools here!
I teach at two elementary schools, the boys’ middle school, the boys’ high school, the girls’ middle school, the girls’ high school, and once it’s completed, at the “Jeongseon English Experience Center,” a brand-new facility for role-playing English practice, about 30km away. That is 7 schools, depending on how you count – since the boys’ high school and middle school are connected, as are the girls’ schools. In total I have 24.5 class hours. My contract limits me to 18 class-hours, so this means (should mean – I’ll be looking very carefully at my paycheck!) 6.5 hours’ overtime each week. They call these “special classes,” and never asked me if I wanted to do them. According to my contract they should have. I suppose I could complain, but at W20,000/hr (about US$21/hr) overtime, the added income is enough for me to try and put up with it. What I’m worried about is how much work it will prove to be, outside of class, to prepare material for 10 different grades, as well as the English Experience Center. But, as with everything, time will tell.
For now, I’m more worried about being able to teach effectively and cheerfully, with a loud enough voice, come Monday. Since about Thursday, I’ve had a sore throat, very unpleasant nasal congestion, and fatigue. Seriously I’m pretty sure it’s SARS, but I’m telling myself it’s a bad cold, brought on by the stress of getting adjusted during my first week. I was thinking of leaving town this weekend, possibly even going to Seoul to buy some things I want, particularly an electronic Korean-English dictionary and some Korean grammar books, but instead I’m just resting, writing this freaking novel (hey, you’re still reading it, aren’t you?), and watching TV.

Epilogue: On the way to the internet cafe, USB flashdrive with this post in my pocket, I was harangued by some middle school girls. They were very concerned that I am unshaven, and truly shocked that I should be wearing flip-flops with no socks! They must have been very concerned for my naked feet because they proceeded to follow me down the street and giggle rabidly. Don’t worry ladies, my toes can handle it!

Home Sweet Gohan

English Program in Korea, or EPIK, has essentially two roles, so far as I can tell. The first is to be a recruiting company. They advertise around the world, giving an impression of a standardized, nationally run program. They then process applicants and pay airfare to Korea. Upon arrival, EPIK takes on its second role, which is the brief training of the new teachers. It is at this mandatory, ten day orientation that it becomes very clear that EPIK is not at all a nationally run program. To be fair, when signing the contract it is made quite explicit that said contract is between the teacher (in my case, me) and the Office of Education to which said teacher is going (in my case, Gangwon-do). But the true extent of the decentralization of the program is made quite clear when you’re at orientation for a whole week before you can meet with your provincial coordinator and actually have a chance at finding out more about where you’re going than just which province it’s in. Only later to discover that all this coordinator knew was which county you’re going to and that he was blatantly wrong about which town in that county. The experience I speak of is of course my own, and the culmination of it happened Friday as I was riding in the car of my co-teacher, who had come to meet me at the Gangwon-do Education Center, and was driving me to my new home. He was telling me details of a town with a name that was most decidedly not the Jeongseon I was expecting. I remember like it was yesterday (or, at least like it was 5 days ago) that the Gangwon-do coordinator told me I was going to, specifically, Jeongseon town, not just a broad assignment to Jeognseon county. But loandbehold there I was, riding along with some town named Gohan looming large enough in the conversation that I had no choice but to reckon that thereto I must be going. And hereto I have come, to find out that while Gohan loomed large in that conversation, it does everything else pretty small indeed.
But before I tell you what little more I can about where I am, I want to say a few more things about how I got here. I’ll spare you too many details about the flight over and such, except to mention the part where the weight of my shoes, which I had strapped to the outside of my backpack, pulled open the zipper and caused everything to fall out, including, most unfortunately, my external hard drive and my laptop. The external hard drive appears to be broken, as does the hard drive inside my laptop (although the rest of the latop is OK). I made a back up of the internal drive onto the external drive that very morning, but, when all my data was in one proverbial basket and that basket very unproverbially came open, I now find myself thoroughly fuct. I have low hopes of finding anyone who can fix a Mac around here. Somehow, having uprooted myself to the other side of the world, losing all that data feels like just another thing I’ve had to give up to come here, and so does not bum me out as much as I think it would have back home. What does bum me out is not having a fully functional computer of my own.
Technological tragedies aside, I arrived at Incheon International an hour early, found the EPIK counter. They bought all the already arrived teachers dinner and then we loaded our stuff onto a truck and ourselves onto a bus – or a “limojin” as they seem to be called around here – the last of four buses to collect teachers from the airport over the previous two days. A very nice three hour nap later and I arrived at about 12:30 pm at the Korea National University of Education.FYI:KNUE&EPIK(OMG). , outside of the city of Cheongju. We all registered, got a guidebook, a map of the Cheongju area, a map of our province, a textbooky thing to go with the many lectures to come, and our very own stainless steel EPIK mug. I lugged my gear to my dorm room on the third floor, waking up my roommate, Patrick from Newcastle, took a shower, passed out.
The following ten days were a mixed bag indeed. We were tightly scheduled between classes and three cafeteria meals, which evenings thankfully freeish. Freeish because we were required to sign out and back in should we be leaving campus, with a curfew of 11:00 pm. Luckily the curfew was not strictly enforced! Most of our lectures turned out, in my opinion, to be fairly well-intentioned but useless. Our lecturers were some EPIK staff, some local Korean teachers, and some veteran EPIK teachers. I liked the lectures that were very on-topic and that gave a lot of good, practical advice and ideas to use in the classroom. Unfortunately, many of the rest of the lectures became dominated by the same people asking the same questions over and over and over again.Another exciting lecture. All of these questions were legitimate things to be worried about, like visa issues, tax issues, housing, transportation, etc., but it was obvious to me very early in the program which of these questions I could get an answer to at that point and which I could not. The former I quickly resolved, and the latter I just gave up on, knowing I’d find out when I got wherever I was going.
Because of so much wasted time I think the EPIK office is wasting a lot of money on having so long of an orientation, all the material given to us, the food, the housing and the field trips must cost them a lot of money. On the practical side, I’d love to have all the good lectures over five days, and have them give to money saved to each teacher as a nice bonus. On the personal side, orientation went by damned fast. It hasn’t been long since I graduated and I sure haven’t forgotten how to turn my brain off during bad lectures. Outside of the lectures, I actually had a good time. It’s easy to make fast friends with people who have a similar background and who are all similarly in a strange country embarking on a very similar sort of adventure. A day and a half in Seoul and plenty of nights out and I’d say orientation was well made the best of. I was getting very anxious to move on to the next step, but now that I have so much to do to get my life here in order, on top of the responsibilities of a real job, I’m missing this past care-free week and a half.
Now here I am, feeling rather alone, in this tiny town of Gohan, Jeongseon county, Gangwon province, Republic of Korea. Just that I’m in this town at all was one surprise, but there’ve been others. For one, due to a current housing shortage, they’ve put in me in an official residence at one of the elementary schools I will be working at. My commute on Fridays will be unbeatable! I tried my best to expect the very minimum housing promised in the contract, and so I was extremely happy to see my new place. I’ve got two rooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom. Brand new appliances: TV (big).Bedroom. , microwave, a minifridge and a full-sized refrigerator (?!).Kitchen.
Kitchen. , and a washing machine (the buttons on which I spent about 15 minutes deciphering and labeling in English with sticky notes this morning).Washing machine (and improvised clothes line). .
An enormous new dresser,
Dresser (and improvised clothes line #2). and a brand-new queen sized bed (I guess they expect me to find a girlfriend).Big for a bachelor. No cookware as yet, and while no was cookware ever promised, it sounds like they’re going to be buying me some soon.
My good fortune in housing is due to another good fortune; the local housing shortage is due to the large number of construction workers who are building a ski resort right outside of town. The local economy used to be entirely coal-mining, I have been told. Around ten to twenty years ago all the mines closed, and everyone left. My co-teacher explained that this is why they have a two elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools with very small numbers of students and in such a small town. A while back, in an attempt to revive the local economy, the government gave a special exemption and allowed for the construction of the only casino in Korea in which Korean nationals are allowed to gamble. This casino is called Kangwon Land and it’s only a few miles up in the mountains from Gohan. I have yet to check it out, but from what I’ve read it’s quite big, and they have branched out to include a large resort and a golf course. Kangwon Land is currently branching further to include a ski resort, slated to open this December. From the the girls’ high school and middle school, which I visited yesterday and which is higher up on a hill, it’s possible to see some of the ski runs and ski lifts.Brand new ski slopes, as seen from Gohan Girls' Middle/High School). Needless to say, what with the turn-off up to the resort literally across the street from the elementary school that is my new home, I think this should be a pretty good winter! .Turn-off for Kangwon Land. But, this isn’t even the end of the good surprises. Local teachers are allowed to use some of the facilities at the Kangwon Land staff housing complex, just a few minutes walk from my home. I’ve been granted access to the gym and the swimming pool, and plan to check them out soon. I have, however, not been granted access to their internet room, apparently the previous English teacher, one Mr. Parker, abused that privilege and has set a poor precedent for all gringos.
While the director at the Kangwon Land employee housing might not trust me, everyone else has been really nice to me so far. Just on my way to this internet cafe I stopped for some noodles. I got to talking to a guy working there, in his small English and my teensyweensy Korean. He was wearing a Burton snowboards shirt, so I asked if he snowbaorded. Turns out he’s a snowboard instructor and now I have a snowboarding buddy. I think he said he could get me a discount on a season pass to the new resort. On top of that, after lunch, they refused to let me pay! Next, I was a little confused trying to find this internet cafe again – I had a card with some minutes left I wanted to use up. I asked someone, and they forced me into their car and drove me here. Finally, just now the guy next to me noticed I was almost out of time as he was finishing up playing some Starcraft, and he gave me his card with 28 minutes left on it. I’m getting worried that there’s some awful conspiracy to be nice to me!

some background

There come’s a time in every Skor-skor’s life, as it was once said, to, well, find something to do with himself. That time in this Adam Skor-skor’s life was brought on by my somewhat questionable choice to graduate from college. With no immediate desire for further schooling, no desire at all to have the kind of job that I could get in the US with just a bachelor’s degree, and the good sense to not squander my paltry capital on being a bum, the best option was one that, I must admit, does come quite naturally to me: running off to a far-away land.
But not just any far-away land. My criteria, while not too demanding, narrowed my choices down to two countries. Specifically, I wanted to capitalize off of my good fortune to have been raised a native English speaker (thanks mom! thanks dad!), and I wanted to make enough money for it to be worth my while. Now, with just a bachelor’s degree, and with no (or, in my case, very little) special training in education, it is possible to get a job pretty much anywhere in the non-Englishosphere with the exception of Western Europe. Unfortunately, in the name of making enough money to count when converted back into real money, only two countries remain viable options: Japan and South Korea. “So why not Japan?,” as I have been asked by plenty of people. To be honest, the primary reason I first considered Korea instead of Japan was because of several travelers I’ve met who explained to me how one can save up significantly more money in Korea. While the absolute pay is less than in Japan, the cost of living in Korea is fairly low, and the cost of living in Japan is quite high, making for a greater amount of savable income in Korea.
I first thought of teaching, as most westerners do, at a private language academy. As I did research towards that goal, I learned that at these private academies the pay can be quite good, but the hours can be very demanding and there are often many great uncertainties. Stories of terrible working and housing conditions, and very frequent accounts of not getting paid on time made me increasingly cautious about it. Many people find great jobs and I still think that with a lot of care and some good luck I could have too had I not found out about English Program in Korea (EPIK), through which the Korean Ministry of Education places native English teachers in public schools across Korea. On the downside, the pay is somewhat less good than I could, as a UCLA graduate, have found in the private schools. On the upside, the job is very secure, I’m sure to always get paid on time, and things like housing should be much less sketchy. Additionaly, according to my rough calculations comparing the kind of hours I’ve heard people work at private schools with the hours guaranteed to us through EPIK, my pay per hour should actually be somewhat more.
And so, here I am at the Korea National University of Education, an hour or two south of Seoul, attending our mandatory 10 day orientation period. Here I am to be getting acquainted with Korean culture and attending some useful lectures to help prepare me for the classroom. We’re housed in a dorm, fed like clockwork, and have to carefully fill out excursion forms if we want to leave campus – it’s the insurance policy, they say..'Pork music.' So far some of the lectures have been good and some rediculously useless, which I suppose is par for the course. This afternoon, after a field trip and a special folk music concert (which, despite the MC’s description of it as “pork music”, was actually awesome) we had a very poor introduction to phonetics from one of the directors who, with his imprefect accent, insisted that we follow the goals of The Seventh National Curriculum and make sure all our students achieve the pronunciation perfection he lacks. All in all there’s a general air of everything being superficially hyper-organized, but fundamentally ad-hoc at the same time. I’ve been told that I should get used it, that it’s just sort of the Korean M.O.
I get shipped off to my province, Gangwon-do, a week from today. I still, however, have yet to find out what town! Neither has anyone else going to Gangwon, so for now no choice but to go with the flow. In the meantime, after a morning lecture tomorrow,.Representin' UCLA class of 2006. I’m escaping this campus to run around Seoul with some other EPIK teachers, two of which happen to be follow members of the UCLA class of 2006. There’s also a UCLA ’05 grad here too. None of which had I previously met in LA, of course. I have decided that this is not really coincidental and indeed just a product of the high exposure to all things Korean that is UCLA. For now, I’ve an hour and ten minutes to hopefully get some time on a stationary bike in the dorm’s gym (gotta work off all the kalbi!), shower, and head off to noraebang! (Do NOT call it karaoke, you’ll get your ass beat ’round here, they don’t like the Japanese for some reason…)