Back to Korea!!

My first day of teaching in a Boys Middle School was quite the challenge....A classroom with forty boys all chatting and gossiping is not my idea of a constructive teaching setting.Yet the boys are adorable. They are all mad into singing and dancing so whenever they were exceedingly bored, I got them to organise a few Korean pop songs and dance routines. Engish communication games were a life saver. I called them 'old women' most of the time as they were such gossipers. I learned how to say "Be Quiet" and 'hurry up' fairly rapidly. Of course, they got great pleasure out of hearing me use korean. They would be in stitches and yell "very good"!! My pronunciation was and and still is a joke.

Korea is the land of contradictions. You hear one thing and you experience another. Couples wait until they get married .....yet the percentage of babies born to teenagers is rising all the time. The newspapers are always full of North Korean spy alerts and possibilites of War with their northern cousins yet the ordinary people laugh at you when you suggest leaving the place doublequick. Korean Society is based on the beliefs of a Chinese sage. Confucianism is steeped in Korean Society. Confuscius being the great Chauvinist that he was would be delighted with the way the korean male stereotype has evolved. Wifebeating, we hear is a national past time yet from my chats with male teachers, it seems that they are for the most part henpecked hubbies. Women,though on the whole have a raw deal.They are tied to a traditional system of subservience to their families and husbands. It maddened me to see my women teacher friends constantly doing things for their husbands while they sat plonked on their butts. Women are second class citizens. Boys are favoured over girls and that is the same all over Asia. Abortion is big! Japanese men are now encountering problems trying to find wives. Poor Filipino women seem to be filling that gap along with other South East Asians.

What will I yearn for? Soju and Kimchi? Soju, the korean poitin but legal and very cheap. It's deadly stuff and a night on the town drinking this leads to chats with Jesus and a major hangover. What you have every weekend is a nation of drunks on the phone to Buddha. Kimchi? leaves of cabbage are mixed with red peppers, garlic and ginger and then left for the winter to ferment in Kimchi containers. Breakfast, lunch and dinner play host to this concoction. Foreigners find it very difficult to eat kimchi as the smell is one thing and the taste is quite another. It is an acquired taste and after a year, I can now just about manage a few scraps of it. Most Koreans die from stomach cancer directly related to over consumption of hot spicy Kimchi.That's understandable when I think about what it does to my own stomach!!!

Kimchi is hardy food for a hardy race of survivors. They have fought for their land from aggressive neighbours for centuries and have overcome so many obstacles to get where they are today. Koreans fascinate me. People liken them to the Irish and they have been called the 'Irish of Asia'. They love to drink, sing and have the craic so I suppose we have something in common.When I tell Koreans that I'm from Ireland, their face lights up and they say "Korea...Japan....Ireland....England. They have a deep hatred for the Japanese and I suppose they are justified. The Japanese occupied their country for over forty years from 1905 to 1945 and the treatment the Koreans received at the hands of the Japanese would horrify the toughest criminal. I popped over to Japan in May and headed down to Nagasaki for a few days. I ended up in the Atomic Bomb Museum and one story continues to haunt me. Koreans were taking over there during the war to work in the factories and when the bomb exploded, they were working outside. While people were being picked up and taken to hospitals after the holocaust, the Koreans were left there on the ground, crows picking out their eyes and pulling the skin off of their faces. What a terrifying image. They ask me if I hate the English and if so, how can I be friends with James, a Yorkshire pal? I tell them that the ordinary english people are just like us and when we're abroad, we tend to feel great affinity with them......but there are always two sides to the coin and I won't go into that here!!!!

There is so much to say about Korea but it really has to end now. I'm one thousand miles away from there and Beijing calls. I'll get back to you soon after I've experienced the delights of this sprawling city.

Hope all is well in Connemara. Take care, Ita

15 Aug. '97

"And so I leave Korea..."
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