monkey tests and chopstick wars

Symbolic convergence theory has got nothing on my Korean sojourn. There are dozens of inside jokes that my students, my fellow expatriates and I have cultivated over the course of this year, none of which would be in any way comprehensible to an outsider or a non-Newbie.

Consider, for a moment, the term "monkey test."

Our semesters at my hagwon are three-month blocks. At the end of every month we have what are imaginatively called "monthly tests": standardized progress tests to check comprehension and retention. On a whim, to brighten the prospect up for some of my younger students who didn't like taking these exams, I referred to them (pseudo-mistakenly) as "monkey tests." They cracked up. I did it all my classes, even the older ones. The older kids seem to have less patience for it, but the younger ones love it. Even now, months later, it never fails to get a grin out of them. It's really quite heartwarming to see their little faces break into grins and hear their voices sound in a chorus of "monkey test!" when I walk into the room on test day.

"Chopstick wars" is a slightly more nebulous term. We don't call it that; we don't have a set name for it, so I made up this phrase just for reference. Down the street from Reading Town is our favorite sogogi restaurant. To be clear, so is the Korean word for "cow" and gogi is the word for "meat." Sogogi is just beef, fried on an open grill at your table, dipped in salted sesame oil or ssamjang, put onto a leaf of mustard or lettuce, covered with marinated onions, greens, fried kimchi, mushrooms or garlic, and then wrapped up and eaten. The meat is brought to you, raw, on enormous platters, which you personally transfer to the grill and cook up. Inevitably, when there are four of us, there's an uneven number of meat slices, so one of us has to polish off the last one. The tradition is set in stone: Elaine grasps the bit of meat and holds it roughly a foot above the surface of the grill. Adam, Jeff and I poise ourselves for action (Adam and I use chopsticks; Jeff sometimes uses the cooking tongs). Elaine counts off and drops the delectable slice of juicy beef onto the grill, whereupon we three rapacious meat lovers dive for it. Whoever snatches it away eats the spoils. So far the score stands thus: Adam - 2, Andrew - 1, Jeff - 1 (with one assist). It's a refreshing little tradition we've started up that will likely last long after we leave here.

Korean children are clever. Once they get the general rules of the language down, they're quick to spot opportunities for comedy. By that I mean puns.

Some months back I was standing in class, argumentatively trying to get the class to realize some salient fact or other, and when one of them finally got it right (intentionally) I hissed out a long "Yessssssssssssss." At some point after that the occasion arose to answer one child with the word "yesterday." I don't remember what the question was; maybe I was assigning homework and he asked what the date was and it was yesterday. Chris, a burly elementary schooler who has a body like a tank and the brain of a puppy, took the obvious phonetic similarity between the words "yes" and "yesterday" and ran with it. From there until the class ended whenever I said "yes" he'd finish with "...terday."

"Johnny is going to..." I'd say.

"School!" Carl, the brightest but noisiest kid in the class, a cute little kid with a flat top and a perpetual grin, would yell.

"Yessssss," I'd hiss.

"...terday," Chris would finish. Everybody would giggle, myself included. Soon Chris has the entire rest of the class doing it. From now on whenever I hear somebody hiss out a "yes" like that I'll automatically think "...terday." Thanks, Chris. That's a phonemic snippet I'll remember until the end of my days.

Then there's the lengthy list of monikers that Adam, Elaine and I have developed for certain "special" students. All the kids are unique (if that statement makes any sense at all) but some of them are uniquely unique, if you take my meaning. They stand out, either due to their mental prowess, their cooperative attitudes or (quite often) their debilitatingly annoying or obstructive behavior. To name a few:

• Stony-Faced Laura: She's now left Reading Town, but while she was here she might as well have been an ornament on the wall. In class, she used to sit in the rear row, in the very last seat, way back in the corner. She never spoke, not even a single word, and if she ever did, her voice was inaudible. Her face was like a stone statue's: devoid of life, eyes downcast, mouth fixed in an immovable line. She looked absolutely miserable. It was perhaps unkind of us to bestow a waggish nickname like "Stony-Faced" upon her, but given the profusion of other Lauras, we had no choice. That was her distinguishing feature.
• Reliable Sandy: She's a little gem, and also quite cute. Her mother always dresses her in skirts and knee-socks and buckled shoes. She's awfully soft-spoken (I can barely hear her above some of the wackos in her class) but her answers are always dead on-target. She always does her homework, and that's rare: even some of the diligent older kids "forget" theirs once in a while. What's more, though, she has integrity. She forgot her book once and I forgot to take the necessary ten vouchers from her. As I turned away, I felt a tug on my arm. I looked down and there she was, her big brown eyes staring quizzically up at me, holding two five-voucher bills in her hand. What an honest little girl. Right then and there I bestowed her moniker upon her.
• Sinister Jim: James is a good guy, and he's knowledgeable for never having done his homework, like, once. But still, he gets in the way of the class sometimes. He, like 80% of the other Korean boys, is always making extremely off-color jokes. You ask the class why Strega Nona punished Big Anthony, and Jim will say "Because he needed to die." You ask why King Lion summoned the Iguana before him, and Jim will say "Because he was going to kill the iguana." You ask why Goldilocks went to the Three Bears' cottage, and Jim'll say "To kill the three bears." Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die. That's all it is. I nicknamed him "Sinister" because he's always making death-related funnies.
• Little John: Tiny little boy, but with as much energy as a pocketful of firecrackers. I knew he was going to be unique right off the bat. Picture this three-foot tall munchkin with a gap-toothed smile on his kisser, his shock of black, wavy hair sitting tousled on top of his head, making blub-blub-blub noises with his lips all during class. That's when he deigns to actually sit in his chair: usually he's up and running around, climbing over desks, peeking over people's shoulders and whatnot. I can't get angry at him for this (I was the same way at his age). He's a cute kid, light as a feather and as happy-go-lucky as you could want. He's easily the smallest kid in the entire hagwon, hence his nickname.
• Amy of the Opera: A somewhat spoiled girl...with a voice like a screech owl. Amy (bespectacled and stringy with a fringe of brown hair reaching to her shoulders) is not accustomed to being quiet, and as such will offer her opinion on whatever subject is at hand, curricular or no, stridently as a bullhorn. Of all the kids in that class whom I've told to be quiet, I've told her at least three times more. Unsurprisingly, she's also one of the worst at raising her hand. Like the rest of the "spoiled" crowd, she'll just shriek your name until you give her your attention.

Some of these shared meanings that have been created aren't even jokes, but are no less memorable. I think I've mentioned before what my job description is. I spend my afternoons being a jungle gym and my evenings combating mood swings. The little kids who come in first at two o'clock just love to climb on me. I think I started it. I invited John (Little John) to hold onto my arm, then hoisted him into the air. The other kids were wowed, and soon enough I resembled an ape-monster in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, warriors clinging to every limb, a colossus covered with tiny scraps of humanity. Bella and Angel learned to latch themselves around my ankles and sit on my feet, like two little legwarmers with earrings and ponytails, as I waddled down the hall.

Then I began giving them "assisted jumps": I'd hold the kids' hands, count to three, they'd jump into the air and I'd lift them really high. These caught on like wildfire: particularly with one little girl, Leslie. She's just about the cutest little girl I've ever seen, and working where I work that's saying something. She's got almond-shaped eyes (always half-closed, like she's planning something, or about to give you the mother of all dirty looks); a little round nose; and a squeaky voice. Whenever I give an assisted jump we always count off thus: "One, two, THREE!" So now when Leslie pokes her adorable head in the door, she holds up three fingers and says "Teacher, one-two-three!" (Only with her Korean accent, it sounds like "One-two-thlee!") Anyone else would be mystified as to what she means. Now I know that I must get up and go into the hall and give her a jump (or six) or else she really will give the aforementioned mother-of-all-dirty-looks. She's good at them, too.

On a final note, I'd like to leave you with the Newbies' Official Induction Ceremony. You must be burned with Elaine's cigarette, slip on the ice and fall flat on your face. Jeff started off this time-honored tradition on the roof of my apartment building one ill-fated cocktail party a while back. We'd all joined hands (this is when we were too drunk to care about how nerdy we were being). Elaine neglected to notice she was holding a lit cigarette. The next thing we noticed was hot ash on our hands. Jeff sort of sprang back to dust himself off, encountered a patch of black ice on the dark rooftop and collapsed instantaneously into the push-up position. Some good-natured laughter and bruises later we decided to incorporate the proceedings into our initiation protocol. Some good came of it after all. When I leave here, I'm going to have some killer stories to tell...which nobody will understand.