What is Korea really like?
When we finally decided that Korea was where we were going to go, we tried, like anyone making such a huge cross cultural leap, to find out what Korea is really like. Not facts about the country's population, history, or religious convictions, not the propaganda shoveled out by the Korean Tourism office, but real, inside, information about what it is like to actually live there.
The result was nothing less than disappointing: a few second or third hand horror stories about bad living conditions, overly persistent Korean men, and an impossible communication barrier. Nothing concrete; it seemed that everyone knew someone who had gone to Korea (or at least Asia) to teach, but no one really knew what it was like to live there.
As we begin this page intended to relate our own personal experiences in this, the land of opportunity for recent Arts and Social Science graduates, to all who are interested in knowing what to expect if you take a job in Korea at a private language institute outside of Seoul, we have been here for almost seven months, living and working in Sokcho, a small Korean city on the North-East coast, about an hour's drive from North Korea.
The First Steps
We talked about coming here for most of our last year at the University of Western Ontario and, as April approached on the horizon, we decided to start taking some serious steps towards a good job, with good pay, in a radically different cultural setting.
The problem was, however, where to start. We didn't know anyone who could tell us directly what steps we needed to take to realize our dream of teaching in Asia. Everyone was certainly willing to help, but not being the people to approach friends of friends or acquaintances of friends (i.e. not having any experience with ‘networking’) we decided to send away for an over-priced guide book to finding teaching jobs in Asia.
The purchasing of this book, set us on our long and expensive road to South Korea. You see, in this book, which had jobs listed for Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand and Malaysia, the only places that sounded worthwhile from both a culturally and financially enriching point of view were Japan, Korea, and (in some cases) Thailand.
What did we do next? We sent many (costly) faxes to prospective institutes in Japan, Korea, and Thailand -- after all, according to this book, getting a job should have been a snap. Did we get any responses? Yes, one, and it was of the we'll-keep-you-in-mind variety. Needless to say, we felt disappointed and more than a little ripped off; but the question remained: how do we get to Asia?
After talking to many people, we finally decided on Korea as the country on which to focus our efforts: it was (apparently) the place where you could make the most money with the least qualifications. So, we started looking in the classifieds, having been told that there always seemed to be something about teachers needed in Korea in the jobs section. We sent out letters to various placement agencies and finally got a response from a California based company. They guaranteed us jobs in Korea complete with paid tickets to and from Korea, and a good contract with a nice big one month bonus upon its completion (which we found out later is required by law in Korea). Their fee was quite exorbitant (approximately $1200 US paid in two installments from our first two paychecks in Korea) but by this point, we were desperate. We said OK and tried to comfort ourselves with the fact that our agency would handle any contract disputes between us and our employers, finding us new jobs in Korea if our employers broke their word.
All we had to do now was sit back and wait.
Suddenly, we got a call from our agency! An institute in Sokcho wanted us to start October 1st! This was the beginning of September and we had completed our summer courses required for our fall convocation, but we did not yet have the actual diploma in our hands; for that, we would have to wait until the end of October. No problem, said our agency, just get an official letter from the university stating that we had completed our degree requirements and would be graduating in October and that would be fine.
Over the next week, we rushed around getting all of the appropriate documentation for our impending departure. This was it! We were finally going to Asia!
Do you think it was that easy? Of course it wasn't.
A week after the initial call, our agency called us again and told us that they had bad news: the Korean government had just passed a new law requiring the actual diploma before issuing a work visa; the letters from our university were no longer sufficient. We would have to let this opportunity go and hope we could get something for November 1st.
At first we were disheartened, but then we decided to make the most of the month and a half we had before our soonest possible departure by making a 10 day hike up the Bruce Trail to the family cottage on the Bruce Peninsula. We started planning our hike immediately; it would be a beautiful time of year for a hike in the forests of Southern Ontario.
So, this was it, Thursday September 12, our hike was planned, for the following Tuesday. We were relaxing in the backyard with some friends when suddenly there was another phone call from our agency!
The Institute in Sokcho wanted us so badly, they didn't care whether we had our diploma's/work visas or not. Now, we were to leave on September 22, posing as tourists when we arrived in Korea, claiming that all of our extra luggage was for ‘a friend’ in Seoul.
Needless to say, we had our qualms concerning this new and apparently illegal plan; but our agency assured us that this was in fact common practice and that we would be sent to Japan (all expenses paid) to obtain our work visas once our diplomas arrived from Canada, and of course we were, as I said before, desperate. Over the next week, we faxed back and forth to Korea and California furiously, packed our things, and ran around like nuts trying to get everything in order for our now not-so-distant departure.
In a week, we were off to experience something completely different.
The Arrival
This was it. We had been on the go for over 24 hours, and we were now in Seoul. The ‘president’ of the Korean branch (which we later found out to be the main branch) of our agency was there to meet us at the airport. It was a really nice feeling to arrive in Korea, totally clueless about what to do next and have someone walk over and say, "You must be John and Heidi."
He helped us get everything ready for our connecting flight to Sokcho and then he bought us breakfast; funnily enough, it was a ‘Western’ breakfast.
Over breakfast, he talked to us about a great many things; a good deal of which were practically incomprehensible due to our lack of experience with Konglish, the bizarre mash of Korean syntax, accent, and intonation with English words spoken my many of the ‘English speaking’ Koreans we have met here.
One of the things he told us was that we were to have a large studio apartment in Sokcho. Having heard horror stories about deplorable living conditions: crummy, rundown apartments, or even a room at your director's house (We even heard about one guy who had to share a room with his director's baby), we were, needless to say, ecstatic at the prospect of having a ‘large’ studio apartment.
As we were sitting on the small, 100 passenger plane which shuttled us the last forty minutes of our seemingly never-ending journey, sipping Korean green tea, watching the beautiful, mountainous countryside roll by beneath us, and imagining what lay before us, we were neither prepared for the stunning beauty nor the overwhelming confusion which awaited us in Sokcho.
We flew into Sokcho on a beautiful late September morning, the sun was dancing on the East sea, and our excitement was at its peak!
Sokcho airport is incredibly small; in fact, due to a combination of frequently foggy weather and a runway that is almost too short for the passenger planes which land there, there is apparently a forty percent cancellation rate on both takeoffs and landings.
We weren't expecting Sokcho airport to be anything spectacular, but we certainly weren't ready for the ghost-town like emptiness which blew through the place not ten minutes after we had walked off the tarmac and through the doors into an airport the size of a ten store strip mall.
That's right, after ten minutes of standing around aimlessly, the only people left in the building besides us, were a few scattered airport personnel. What is wrong with this picture?
No employers, that's what's wrong. We waited around for a few minutes thinking that they were probably late. After about five minutes, we started to get a little nervous so we went outside to see if they were in the parking lot for some reason. No luck. Still, we decided to wait for a half an hour before getting too excited.
Forty minutes later, there was still no sign of our employers. We were stuck on the outside of a tiny city in Korea with no idea where to go and no ride to take us there. Armed with the phone number given to us by our agency, we attempted to call our institute to let them know we had arrived.
The first problem was, of course, making change. We went over to the woman at the snack bar who told us a great number of things we had no hope of understanding as we tried to give here a thousand Won bill (worth about $1.30-$1.50 CDN) while miming putting change into a phone and pointing at the three empty phone booths at the other end of the airport. Eventually we realized that she was pointing us over to the flight check-in counter -- a strange place to ask for change, we thought; but over we went.
We showed our money to the man behind the check-in counter and pointed at the phones saying, "Change?" Immediately, he opened a drawer and gave us change for our bill. Great, we thought, so far so good.
Heidi went over to the phones while I sat with our stuff: two enormous backpacks and two bike boxes containing not only our bikes, but all of the extra stuff we thought we might need before the two suitcases my parents were sending as cargo later on arrived.
After a few minutes, she came back and in a rather frustrated tone informed me that the woman on the other end of the line at the number she was dialing, didn't seem to speak a word of English, nor could this woman put Heidi through to someone who did -- strange for a language institute to have no one on staff who could speak English, we thought naively.
Heidi told me that the woman seemed to be talking to someone else the whole time in Korean while Heidi repeated, "Heidi Veeser and John Moore. We are here. Heidi and John. John and Heidi. Here. Sokcho. Airport. Heidi Veeser. John Moore. Airport." Finally the woman started to say some numbers in English which Heidi had neither the time nor the tools necessary to write down.
Assuming these numbers to be a phone number rather than some cryptic form of code, armed with a pen and a pad of paper, I went down to the phones to try my luck.
I put my money in the slot, dialed the number our agency had given us and waited. A female Korean voice answered the phone and I said, "Hello?" Silence. "Hello?" I repeated. Suddenly the woman started spouting off in Korean as though she were having a conversation with someone else who was in the room with her. I waited for a moment and then said, "John Moore and Heidi Veeser. We are here. At the airport. Is someone coming to get us?" More incomprehensible babble from the other end. I repeated myself again. This time the woman suddenly started to ramble off numbers in English. I wrote them down.
By this time, after more than 24 hours on the go, and between the two of us, having spent about a half an hour calling the institute and trying to make our presence known, I was just about at the end of my rope. I signaled to Heidi that I was going to try the number, took a deep breath and dialed. Another female Korean voice answered the phone and I said, "Hello?"
"Hello," said the woman.
"At last!" I thought with a great surge of relief. "This is John Moore," I said slowly, "Heidi Veeser and I are here in Sokcho. We are at the airport."
"Mmmm…uhh… yes…ahh," said the woman, "here in Sokcho?"
"Yes," I said, "at the airport."
"Oh…uhh…here now?"
"Yes," I replied, "is someone coming to pick us up?"
"Mmmm…uhh…OK…forty minutes," she told me; then suddenly, "My name is Miss Ju. I am Korean English teacher at institute. I am looking forward to meeting you."
"Uh…OK, thanks," I said taken more than a little off guard, "me too."
"OK, good-bye."
"Good-bye." I hung up the phone and walked back to Heidi. While we sat and waited, we speculated about our ‘large’ studio apartment, knowing full well that ‘large’ by Korean standards is small to us Westerners; but still, we thought, maybe it will have a balcony, or maybe even a bathtub.
The time ticked by slowly as we waited for our ride. We were dead tired, but we were still excited and as we waited, we talked optimistically about using our new tent in the steep green mountains that form a natural boundary line between the cities of the North East coast and the heart of Korea. We would get lost in a vocal reverie of how exciting this year was going to be; but coming out of it, we would notice that only three more minutes had passed. Ahh, sleep deprivation.
By the time the director of our institute rushed through the automatic sliding doors into this Lilliputian airport, we were more than ready to go ‘home’ and sleep.
First Contact
An axious-looking, middle-aged, overweight, slightly-balding, Korean male in an expensive suit rushed into the empty airport, walked over to me and said, "Uhh...John, Heidi?"
"Yes," I said as he shook my hand and told me that his name was Mr. Kim. Aside from a brief glance, he didn't even acknowledge Heidi's presence. He asked me about our luggage and when he saw our bike boxes, he said, "Wait," and walked back outside.
He came back inside with a luggage trolley for our bikes and we took them outside into the blazing sunshine of that beautiful late-September morning. We followed our director over to the parking lot where he told us to put our bikes into some truck and told us that we would get them, "later." This was, of course, a little more than slightly disconcerting: our bicycles are our cars and we just didn't feel right throwing them into the back of some truck with absolutely no idea of when we would see them again. Still, there was no alternative considering the size of our director's car.
As we drove back into Sokcho, I sat tensely in the front seat wondering if I should make conversation; and, more importantly, if I did try to make conversation would it be understood. Suddenly, Mr. Kim said, "You are a rock man. She is berry beautipul."
My brain raced to decode this obvious attempt at communication: "Rock man"...the movie Rocky? "berry"...berry??? "beautipul"...beautiful!
Ah-ha! It hit me: You are a lucky man. She is very beautiful.
I strove to think of an appropriate response to this inappropriate (to my Western mind) remark, "Uh...Thank-you," I said.
What we didn't know then and we know now is that women are generally treated second-class citizens here -- little more than objects. Hence the remark; hence the reason why our director chose to address only me and shake only my hand when we first met.
Dead-tired as we were, we expected that we were being transported to our 'large' studio appartment for some much-needed rest. Nope. We went to the institute, stood in the lobby for a minute, then proceeded directly to the basement of our building to the restaurant area. This is good, we thought, we are hungry after all, and now we get to try some real Korean food. Nope. We went to a burger joint.
Eventually, an English speaking Korean (who turned out to be our associate director) showed up. Much to our relief, he spoke English like an American (he had lived there for 12 years) and we figured that we were going to be in for some smooth sailing this year in Korea: we were going to be dealing mostly with a man who spoke and understood English and (presumably) North American mentality perfectly. Well...uh, more on that later.
After lunch, our associate director took us out to a hotel/condo near the base of a stunning rock formation on the outer edge of Mt. Sorak called Ulsan Rock, so named beacause it was once claimed to be so tall that, on a clear day, one could see all the way to the city of Ulsan in the southern part of Korea from the top of this 950+ meter rock.
Why a hotel? Well, you see, they had made a mistake and did not expect us untill the next day. Still we weren't complaining. We got a beautiful studio appartment style room with a balcony facing Sokcho city and the East sea below. More importantly, it had a really comfortable bed!
Our Apartment
The next morning begain for us at about 2:30 am. The jet-lag was harsh! Being up so early did allow us to enjoy the sunrise from our balcony and dream some more about just how exciting this year was going to be.
What an amazing hotel room, we thought. If this is where they put us up for the night, and we are supposed to have a 'large' studio appartment...yahoo!!
Our associate director picked us up around noon and drove us over to our institute where we met a couple of Korean English teachers, including the infamous Miss. Ju, and saw that our bikes had been safely delievered the afternoon before. We ate a Korean-style lunch at a restaurant in the basement (finally), and then drove over to our appartment building.
On the way to our new home, our associate director, kept telling us that it was really small, but it was the best they could do. No problem, we thought, we were ready for a small Korean-style appartment; we knew that the whole 'large' studio appartment was really just a joke.
We drove up in front of a 20 story building (one of only a few here in Sokcho) with a large, nice-looking entrance and thought, hey...this looks good. As we rode up to our room on the 17th floor, we were again warned about how small it was; and as he unlocked the door he repeated that this was the best he could do, and we all walked in.
Our apartment is one room on the 17th floor of an officetel (office bldg./hotel) and it makes the our old apartment in London (Ontartio, Canada) look like a mansion. It is about 12' by 19' in the main living area which contains a double bed by the window, a large wardrobe at the foot of the bed, a small dresser/TV stand directly beside the bed, an oblong dining table and two chairs, a small desk w/mirror (we think it is really a make-up table), two (slightly) comfy vinyl chairs and the kitchen area consisting of a sink, two burner electric stove, and a bar fridge.
When you first come in the door, there is a very small "front hall" (ha!) and a very low sink and mirror just to the right (this is where we hand wash most of our clothes). To the right of our sink is the bathroom (ha! ha!): it is actually a room, not much bigger than the toilet it contains, with a shower head on the wall and a drain in the floor. The place is lit entirely by fluorescent tubes which are pretty much the only source of light in most apartments here in Korea. They seemed to think it was strange when we asked for a normal incandescent light and, when our associate director gave us the only one of the promised two that we ever received, we were more than a little disappointed with its size and power.
Generally we use only one of the two fluoresent lights on (the one over our bed) which is tempered by a blue sarong that Heidi got in Greece, the small (tiny) lamp we were given, and the light over the "stove" which is also incandescent. This is pretty good at keeping it somewhat cozy in our apartment most of the time. I don't know what it would be like without the bluish light provided through the filter of Heidi's sarong for a year: I hate fluorescent lighting in schools, malls, and office buildings, let alone an apartment!
Teaching
Well, now comes the actual job description. Actually, there is no real job description. In fact, the whole private English Language Institute craze in Korea is a craze for one major reason: money. Everybody and their uncle wants to set up an English Language Institute; if you run it right, you can make a mint.
So, the whole concept of these English Language Institutes is flawed from the beginning because they are set up to provide a good business opportunity for the owner, not a good learning opportunity for the students, not a good teaching environment for the teacher.
This emphasis on money making causes the students to be important to the institute inasmuch as they can provide a good profit (i.e. in large groups -- which generally only occur at the beginner level; and most beginners cannot even hack the entire three month beginner course and quit when they realize that learning to speak a language is in fact a long and arduous process, not something that can be achieved after a few weeks of 50 minute classes four times a week. The individual student who has the tenacity and dedication to make it to high intermediate or advanced levels is worthless) thus the educational integrity of the institute is constantly compromised when the few long term students are forced to quit when there is no class offered for them because it is no longer lucrative enough. Further, this constant emphasis on money causes the teacher to be valued only if (s)he schmoozes with the students and puts on a show in class worthy of a SCTV skit in order to keep the numbers as high as possible.
That’s for the adults. For the children, it is a different story. You are, of course, expected to be extremely exciting, but schmoozing is not necessary. There is another dilemma facing the teacher at this level. (Remember, the name of the game here is money.) These small private institutes (especially outside of Seoul) tend not to have too many students to begin with, so, in order to (once again) keep the numbers high, the institute is often forced into putting children of various levels into the same class. In one class, I have had children who could have a small conversation with me and others who barely even knew the alphabet!
Now we come to the most frustrating part of teaching at a private English Language Institute in Korea: unannounced schedule changes. You see, the whole employer/employee relationship we are used to in the West where you expect your employer to give you a fair amount of advanced warning when there will be a change in your work schedule -- where you expect your employer to treat you with the same amount of respect and courtesy you show him/her -- is totally non existent here in Korea. In Korea, the employer/employee relationship is traditionally more of a parent/child relationship than a relationship between equals: you are told only what you need to know when you need to know it. So sometimes, you may be sitting at home enjoying your lunch when you get a phone call from your director who says, "I’m sorry. You have a new class now. Please come downstairs. I am waiting outside." For some reason, they seem to think that you are always on call. This type of behavior has caused many foreign English teachers to just up and leave (sometimes sneaking away in the middle of the night) deciding that it is just not worth it.
You could try to chalk these (and other) problems up to cultural barriers, but you would also think that if they are going to be hiring Westerners to work for them, they should at least try to learn how to deal with us just as much as we have to try to learn how to deal with them. There must be a happy medium that both sides can live with so that the Korean employers don’t feel like they are losing face by treating their employees as equals and the Western English teachers don’t feel like slaves. Unfortunately, at many private institutes across this country, this is not the case and they go through English teachers like a hay-fever sufferer goes through Kleenex in the summertime.
More to come...someday...