Another caveat: you don't actually have go to out and perform the service on this day (unless, of course, the opportunity presents itself). But you should take time to at least schedule some volunteer work.
A soup kitchen in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
I selected Itaewon Global Village Center. They have several different volunteer activities that they do. You can pass out food to the elderly or infirm, or do the same for the poor little waifs at an orphanage, among other things. I'm curious about helping the poor while I'm here, as poverty is a taboo subject in Korea (thanks to Confucianism). The homeless and destitute are generally swept under the rug. But for the amputees panhandling in the subway station or the wild-haired bums scrounging through garbage, a foreigner might believe that there aren't any poor people in this country. And I've been wanting to volunteer at a Korean orphanage ever since I saw this.
So! I sent IGVC an application form today. I'll let you know when I get a reply from them. This is the moment when taking on a challenge like this really starts to pay off. I've always been lax with volunteering. I didn't do it enough, and I'm fairly certain it knocked me out of the running for several jobs. It left a black stain on my conscience, too. I haven't volunteered since the last balloon launch with NKP. (I'm actually in that video, by the way, at 14:10; the guy with aviator shades and the fedora, obviously.)
Be that as it may, it's high time I did something to help the South Koreans. This country's been good to me. I need to pay them back.
Did you know that Ulysses S. Grant went to Japan once? I didn't.
But let me back up here.
This was my final day in Tokyo. Now that the girls were gone, I was back to sleeping in a capsule hotel...and since Miss H had taken my huge rolling suitcase back to Korea with her, I was traveling more lightly. That meant I could stuff all my crap into the provided lockers and have a restful night's sleep. It did me a world of good, and I arose on the morning of August 3 refreshed and ready for an expedition to Roppongi.
(I do recommend the First Inn Kyobashi to anyone wanting to stay in a capsule hotel; just don't go in the height of summer like I did. The floors can get a bit warm, and while there are both wall-mounted and portable A/C units, they might not reach you or work particularly well. So either bring a fan you can plug in or go in autumn sometime when the weather's milder, and the steamy bathroom on the first floor will feel more equable.)
So far in Tokyo, I had hit most of the central neighborhoods: Asakusa, Ueno, Akibahara, Shibuya. I skipped Odaiba, Ikebukuro, and Shinjuku because they were all rather remote and out of the way. I had wanted to see some things in Shinjuku, but I nixed them because of the time involved. I had overestimated how long it would take to see the stuff on my grand to-do list and ultimately I had to make some cuts. So I elected to skip the Japanese Sword Museum and some other parks and museums on my itinerary. Instead, I chose to focus on famous landmarks, picturesque temples, and any other points of interest.
Today was the day I hit my last neighborhood: Roppongi. It's on the southwest side of town. It has, or had, a seedy reputation. This is where U.S. servicemen would go to blow off steam during the postwar occupation, if you know what I mean. Nowadays they're trying to clean the place up: shopping centers such as Roppongi Hills and glitzy apartment complexes are attracting upscale movers, and the sultrier bits are getting swept under the rug.
But I didn't give a darn about that. Roppongi had two things I was interested in: Tokyo Tower and Zōjō-ji.
The main hall (see below) with Tokyo Tower in the background.
Zōjō-ji, the first temple I saw in Japan, was much like any Buddhist temple I had seen in Korea...except larger. The main temple hall was downright enormous. Later I found out why: the temple's main claim to fame is that it was the personal temple of the Tokugawa family. In case you're not up on your Japanese history, the Tokugawa shogunate was the last one to rule over Japan before the Meiji Restoration (the period between 1868 and 1912 that saw imperial rule restored to the emperor and a major social and technological overhaul of Japanese society). They were powerful people, the Tokugawas. The shogun, a fellow named Ieyasu, had a lot of clout. Zōjō-ji had originally been built in the Chiyoda area of town (where the Imperial Palace stands) but Ieyasu had it moved, first to Hibiya (home of the Godzilla statue) and then to its current location. It was Ieyasu who had the ginormous hall in the following picture built so he and his family could have a suitably grand place to worship.
See the ladies there in yukata at the top of the stairs?
You wanna know how big a deal Tokugawa Ieyasu was? I'll tell you. Blogger's spell-checker actually recognizes his name. That's how much weight he swings.
Anyway, like most stuff in Tokyo, Zōjō-ji was badly damaged during World War II (we may have accidentally sort of dropped a few fire bombs on it, whoopsie) but was lovingly restored.
Zōjō-ji has some other notable features, but I'll get to them in a minute. First I have a funny story for you.
Now, I'd done extensive research on how to pray at a Buddhist temple in Japan. And when I say "extensive research" I mean that I paid close attention whenever a character in an anime I was watching did it. There seemed to be certain steps to it. First, toss a coin into a collection box with a slatted cover; this is your "offering" to the gods (and the temple's tithe). Second, ring the bell. This is so the heavens can hear you, sort of like ringing a cosmic doorbell or something. Then you pray, hands folded, eyes closed. After that, if you so desire, you can clap your hands a couple times: again to make sure the gods heard you.
The incense and burner are in front, the slatted offering box behind. Inside the temple there wasn't much going on; just a couple of monks pottering about and a great gigantic Amida Buddha with all the trappings behind them. I didn't take a picture because there was a sign saying not to when there was a ceremony going on.
At Zōjō-ji, there was one more step: there was no bell to ring, so visitors plucked some incense flakes from a bowl and sprinkled them on hot coals, sending oily plumes of aromatic smoke upward into the hazy air. Guess the gods will smell the prayers coming.
So
I done it. I flipped a 100-yen coin (one U.S. dollar; I was serious)
into the box, sprinkled the incense, prayed for Miss H's future
happiness with me, clapped my hands, and left.
Now, that was all well and good. But I came into Zōjō-ji from the side entrance. If I'd come through the front gate, I'd have remembered to purify my hands at the basin there before entering the temple grounds and praying. So what the gods got was a dirty, smelly, grimy prayer only slightly gussied up by the incense. Rats. I did it wrong. Well, hopefully there'd be time to rectify that mistake.
Here are some other shots from around the temple grounds:
These little guys are called Jizō, and they protect children. The offerings of flowers and pinwheels you see here are, in the case of Zōjō-ji, offerings to unborn children, whether miscarried, aborted or stillborn, to help usher them to the afterlife. Small stones placed near the Jizō help to ease the trials and tribulations of the journey.
I just adore the work of their landscaper...
Close-up of a Jizō.
This is one of Zōjō-ji's other claims to fame: the cemetery of six of the 15 Tokugawa shoguns.
I have no idea who this feller is, but he sure earned himself a nice plot.
I was on my way out toward the main gate when I spotted this sign.
So I stepped back and got this shot. Dang. Big tree. And planted by old Unconditional Surrender Grant himself. I had no idea Ulysses S. Grant went to Japan, did you?
The main gate, called Sangedatsu, I believe.
And that was that! I bought myself a snack of onigiri (rice balls) at a nearby convenience store and sat in the park to eat them as the pigeons flocked all around me. Then I got up, walked down the narrow lane running along the temple's north side, and back to...
I used to have this thing about young adult literature, or YA for short. I thought it was...well, for kids. "Young adults" means kids, right?
As I outgrew book series like Goosebumps and Animorphs and moved on to the heavy hitters like Notes from Underground and Moby-Dick (getting tired of hearing about that one yet?), I instinctively sensed that I was "too old" to venture back down the trail and revisit old classics—or discover new ones.
One of the few exceptions to this rule was the Harry Potter series. I got in on the ground floor, as it were: Sorcerer's Stone came out in the U.S.A. in 1998. It took a year for word to spread to my family that this book was the living shizz. My mother originally picked up for my brother to read, but he wasn't interested. I happened to notice it on the coffee table one day in early 1999, when I was 12 years old, just a year older than Harry. I read it and was enthralled. For about three years afterward, Harry and I were practically the same age: Chamber of Secrets came out in June of 1999 (I was still twelve); Prisoner of Azkaban in September 1999, just before my 13th birthday; and Goblet of Fire appeared in July of 2000, two months before my 14th birthday. After that the age gap began to widen, but for a few short years Harry and I shared some kind of age-related bond. And it was magical, let me tell you. I was totally unashamed to be seen reading Deathly Hallows in 2007 at the age of 20.
But even if I had been, I would have soon been cured, for everywhere I looked I saw people twice my age reading it. The big wake-up call came during a visit to the doctor's office, where a large, curly-haired, middle-aged woman in a shapeless blue dress was sitting in the waiting room, riveted by the same orange volume I myself had just finished reading. Another telegram came in when my mother bought me Stephen King's book On Writing. In its pages I discovered that even my favorite contemporary horror writer loved reading the "Potter" series, and had included some shout-outs to it in his own works.
Despite this, somewhere between my twenty-first birthday and my twenty-sixth, I became leery of young adult literature again. Kid stuff, I couldn't help thinking. Yeah, I'm sure it's got literary merit. I'll bet the plot and pacing are second to none. The writing likely kicks ass.
But something always held me back. I'd see the "YA" label on a book on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble, and I'd click away or put it back on the shelf. This prejudice even extended to fellow human beings: I'd be reading someone's blog and liking it, but then I'd check their biography and see that they were a writer of YA. I'd promptly get turned off and leave. Cripes, you'd think I was insecure about my manhood or something.
Well, I'm here to tell you today about two books that changed my outlook: Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve and Airborn by Kenneth Oppel.
You might remember 'em from my last book-related post. Mortal Engines is the first book of the Predator Cities series (known inexplicably as the Hungry City Chronicles in America). Basically, the world's become a wasteland following some kind of nuclear holocaust, and in the wake of this disaster some enterprising fellow put the city of London on gigantic tank treads and gave it humongous steel jaws and decreed that cities should roam all over the planet's surface eating and assimilating each other for spare parts and fuel. Thus the system of Municipal Darwinism was born. Every city and town and village became a mobile eating-machine and started chasing each other around like Pac-Man.
Tom Natsworthy, a 15-year-old apprentice historian and Londoner, is on punishment duty in the Gut—London's hellish underbelly where her prizes are pulled apart and fed to the boilers. Unexpectedly, though, Tom has gotten to meet his hero, Thaddeus Valentine, a renowned master historian. As the scruffy survivors of London's latest catch are processed, one of them draws a knife and makes an attempt on Valentine's life. Tom prevents the ragged captive from stabbing his hero, and in the ensuing struggle both he and the would-be assassin fall out of London's bowels and into the Out-Country, the ravaged remains of Earth's surface. Tom learns that Valentine's attacker is Hester Shaw, a teenage girl with a horribly scarred face, who blames Valentine for her disfigurement and for murdering her mother. During their ensuing adventures, Tom must adjust to a great many things: the savage lifestyle of the Out-Country, Hester's brutal and standoffish nature, the Anti-Traction League (a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of London and every moving city like it), and the unsettling evidence that Thaddeus Valentine may not be such a hero after all.
Awesome, right?
Airborn follows Matt Cruse, also fifteen and a cabin boy on the grand passenger airship Aurora. During the course of the novel, the Aurora is caught in a storm, boarded by pirates, stranded on an uncharted island, and very nearly destroyed. All this is rather traumatic for poor Matt, who loves the airship more than anything in the world, for his father served (and died) aboard her. Complicating Matt's comfy existence aboard his floating home is Kate de Vries, a wealthy heiress and amateur zoologist who is out to prove that her balloonist grandfather was not crazy when he claimed to have discovered an unknown species of flying creature on his final voyage. She and a reluctant Matt have a series of whirlwind adventures on land and in the air, surviving storms, ducking pirates and meeting the ferocious cloud cats—the "beautiful creatures" that Kate's grandfather spoke of with his dying breath.
Even more awesome, right?
I don't even care that these are both technically YA works. The writing's good. The characters are vivid. And the imaginations of these two authors are off the flippin' chain. (Reeve, in particular, makes a bunch of obscure pop culture and literary references, most of which I get. It's like I'm receiving a direct geek-to-geek call!) Labels like "young adult" don't matter to me, not now. These are the first works I've really gotten lost in since Harry Potter. It's nice to have rediscovered that feeling. Getting lost in a book is the best thing in the world. You feel like you've taken a running leap off a diving board and submerged yourself wholeheartedly into a vast unexplored ocean, a galaxy of new worlds and new horizons.
The next book in the Mortal Engines quartet is Predator's Gold.
Next up in the Airborn series is Skybreaker.
Gad, don't those titles give you the chills?
Excuse me, I have some new worlds to explore. Turn off the lights when you leave.
There was a moment just now—a moment when I glanced out of my apartment window, into the wet night, and saw hundreds of likewise-lit windows swimming eerily at me through the rain and mist. It was though the air outside was really murky seawater, and this city sat at the bottom of the ocean, and miniature submarines scurried back and forth between airlocks, and at any moment a shark or a whale might swim by my window. In that moment, I stepped back and wondered "Am I really doing this?"
I don't know which has surprised me more: the fact that I'm back in Korea or the fact that I've slipped into the routine so smoothly and easily.
It was a rocky start, as you well know. There were delays. Hang-ups. Mess-ups. Hiccups. But they evened themselves out. No matter what this job has thrown at me, I've rallied and risen. In fact, I've gotten so comfortable lately that I'd dare to say it's a routine. It's not just the weekdays, either. Even my weekends have acquired a regimen. On Saturdays I usually go into Seoul, or shop or something. I venture forth from my cave, my manhole, and obtain the requisite supplies for the upcoming week. Revel in the freedom a weekend affords. Strike out independently. Explore a new corner of the city. Do something fun, you know.
Sundays are a bit more laid-back. Generally, around noon, I wander 300 yards down Gilju Road to a little park hidden among some stubby evergreens. There, my fellow expatriates and I test each other's skills on the basketball court. I'm grateful to report that I've gone from "Grade-A Suckage" to "Certifiable Acolyte" in the span of three weeks. I'm not making baskets reliably yet, and I can get hold of rebounds but not sink them; still, I'm steadily improving. There's four or five of us who usually come: Peter, Jon, Andy, Martin, and most recently Stephanie. We warm up for half an hour shooting hoops or playing horse. Then we shoot for teams. This last Sunday we had enough people for three-on-three. Team captains picked their players (I will brag a bit here and say that I was one of those captains, by virtue of making the first basket). Then the game began in earnest. Half-court. Take-backs (if the ball hit the rim). Play to eleven. It was a fierce contest. We ducked, dove, dodged, hollered, sweated and slid, passing and dribbling and shooting. Goals were scored, desperate, jubilant, soul-affirming jump shots and layups. Everybody got a piece of the action. The humid air glowed with hot-blooded exultation, burning spirit and competitive fire—and a goodly dose of old-fashioned camaraderie.
Following basketball, the rest of my Sunday usually consists of reading, writing, laundry, cleaning, and other domestic pursuits, both leisurely and productive. Oh, and of course, a big dinner. I look forward to my Sunday dinners. I usually pull all the stops out and have multiple courses. And by that, I mean that I actually have side dishes with whatever entrée I've prepared. A couple of weeks ago it was bulgogi with fried garlic, kimchi and marinated spring onions; the next week it was mushroom soup; and last Sunday, it was supposed to have been chicken fettucine alfredo, but it wound up being just chicken fried in oil with garlic, kimchi and spring onions (noticing a theme here?).
On Friday night I'm hosting a cooking class of sorts. The octopus I routinely buy at E-Mart has sparked several wild hypotheses among my coworkers. People have asked me what exactly I do with the octopus to prepare it. Dissatisfied with my own answer ("Take it home, boil it and eat it whole") I decided to paint myself in a more civilized light and prepare some proper octopi. And while I was at it, I thought I'd invite some of my coworkers to my apartment so they could watch, and sample the results. The recipe I've picked is called nakji bokkeum: stir-fried octopus with vegetables. It's a common dish, available in any halfway decent restaurant. There's even a TV-dinner version. The dish is spicy (a liberal amount of gochujang—pepper paste—goes into it) but full of vegetable and seafood flavors. With some artful preparation, I hope my coworkers and I will cook quickly, eat slowly, and have a lovely sip of something afterward. I'll let you know how it goes.
Apart from that, what more is there to tell? That I'm slowly carving my way through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness? That I'm opening a second bank account on Thursday to wire money home more inexpensively? That Martin, Andy, Jon, Peter, Stephanie and I gathered at the pub late Sunday night to watch Manchester United trump Queen's Park on the telly? That Miss H is still anxiously awaiting her paperwork, and I am still anxiously awaiting her?
All those things would be true. Years from now I shall write a little book about Korea. Its joys, its sorrows, its gifts, its privations. Only my comrades-in-arms shall understand it.
That's something of an understatement. I'm sure there've been whitewater rafters who've had a less rocky than I have.
First of all, I got hit with a double-whammy when I arrived. My predecessor left her position one month before the semester ended, so I was dumped into the middle of her courses with only her notes to go on. Then, a scant month later, the new semester began: and with it, shorter (and more numerous) class periods and an entirely new set of textbooks. These materials took a while to learn (in fact, we're still receiving training on them, six weeks after my arrival). Add in two weeks' worth of jet lag, an apartment that was filthy when I moved in, a month-long wait for my first paycheck, technical difficulties with my Internet and bank account, and the absolute hell of being without my other half, and you'll begin to understand what I've been going through.
Honestly, it seems as if some new catastrophe rips across the landscape every week. First my passbook didn't work (a sort of checkbook which is inserted bodily into the ATM machine to withdraw cash; automatically balances itself!). Then my check card, when it came, was also inoperable. Both these crises necessitated trips to the bank to explain my problems in pidgin English, and fill out more forms. My Internet was installed successfully. But then I left the router unplugged overnight to prevent the other tenants from siphoning the unsecured network. The router reset itself. I had to call the service provider, KT (which fortunately has an English help line) and sort that mess out. I also got a cell phone this time around. I procured one in decent shape from a coworker, but I had to drag one of my Korean colleagues along to the shop so he could translate for me. I felt rather embarrassed, but at least there were no miscommunications or screw-ups.
Things at work have been hectic as well. I've forgotten how easy it is to accidentally breach cross-cultural etiquette in Korea. My original schedule for this new semester gave me eight classes on Thursdays. This is a full load, which management would rather avoid. So I spoke to my supervisor about it. I was informed that the class had been changed, and amended my schedule properly. However, because I failed to double-check the new master schedule I had been given, I didn't realize that another of my classes had been changed as well (from Thursday to Tuesday). As a result, I wound up missing it. The students just sat around for 45 minutes. This created quite a stir. I was ranked out publicly in the staff room. The remedial class was slated for Thursday, which meant that, for one day only, I really did have to teach eight classes in a day (exhausting). Compounding the matter, the Korean supervisor chose to call me on the carpet at the very moment when I was collecting my things for my next class, which would begin in less than 90 seconds. I could hardly give him my full attention while I was scrambling around gathering pens, markers, an eraser and textbooks. He interpreted my behavior as flippancy and disrespect, and reported me. I was not disciplined, but the incident has remained a black stain on my time here nonetheless.
Things were not this complicated the last time around.
Last time I just moved into my apartment, bought some food, went to work, learned how to teach, got a router installed, and spent one glorious year whooping it up in K-Land.
I'd like to say something inspirational and hopeful here, but I can't think of a blessed thing. It's a glorious, cool, breezy, sunny spring day (with scattered clouds), and a wonderful moist smell in the air from the day-long drizzle we had yesterday. I need to tidy up this apartment before the KT repairman arrives. He's installing a new router (one with an actual password on it). Then I think I'll take a nice stroll over to the other side of Jungang Park and try to find this street market everyone's been talking about. And flirt with Miss H online a little bit. I'll let you know how it all works out.
Breakfast on the morning of June 17 was a somewhat muted affair. It occurred rather late in the morning, and only after large amounts of water had been drunk and hot showers had been taken.
Jeff and I, despite our fuzzy heads, still weren't finished with Dublin. There were some things we figured we had to see before we left, and had no excuse not to, since our flight out didn't leave until the afternoon.
That pretty much left the National Museum. It actually wasn't too far away from us, over on Kildare Street. We didn't know it going in, but the Museum actually has four branches, all in different places. We were walking into the archaeology branch.
...which happened to be right next to the houses of Irish Parliament. There was a big ol' protest going on outside its gates as we approached. Camera crews were busy filming it, policemen were busy guarding it and spectators were busy gawking at it. A bunch of elderly folks were walking up and down the sidewalk, hoisting signs that said PRESERVE THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE and SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IS A SIN.
Some things apparently don't change too much between continents.
We entered the museum through a metal gate and walked up the steps into the domed lobby. Outside there were a bunch of school kids (crisply uniformed) all hanging about, either waiting to start a tour or just having finished.
Nothing makes your day like hearing a little Irish girl singing a Taylor Swift song, let me tell you.
So, we walked in. Admission was free. The museum was rather small (at least this particular branch). Nonetheless we saw some cool stuff. There was a whole Viking longboat found somewhere over near Galway or something that had been almost perfectly preserved. Or maybe it wasn't even Viking, maybe it was just a big effing wooden canoe that the early Irishmen had built. I don't remember, I was hung over.
They had a nice little section on ancient Egypt on the upstairs floor with a bunch of articles, artifacts, artistry, artisanship, and all those other words that start with "arti." (I wish I could give you more details, but as has previously been mentioned, I was hung over. And it's Wednesday afternoon as I'm writing this and I just woke up from a three-hour nap and there's a thunder cloud hanging over my house that's making a whole lotta noise and I'm trying to finish this entry before it starts crackling and pouring and frying my motherboard.) The pinnacle of the museum's collection was its exhibit on "bog bodies." These were the mummified, mutilated remains of Irish kings, slaughtered by their political foes and dumped into bogs. The peaty composition of the Irish bogs meant that the decomposition process was slowed or even halted, resulting in some of the best-preserved bodies you'll find anywhere in the world. Indeed, some of these guys (except for the fact that their skins looked exactly like leather, and they were, as has previously been mentioned, mutilated) looked almost...well, alive. It was creepy, dude. I highly recommend the exhibit if you happen to be in Dublin. It's not going anywhere. It's by far the most exciting thing ever to have come out of an Irish bog (except when they pulled Old Patty Flynn stone-drunk out of the Ardee bog last year; that was a hoot). So we left the museum about eleven and headed back to the hostel. We made a brief stop in Waterstone's (a bookstore chain found all over the Isles) to check the price of a copy of Ulysses...
...saw this thing maneuvering around streetcars...
...zipped back to that souvenir shop on O'Connell Street so I could finally get my Ireland T-shirt...
(Feel privileged, this is the most recent photo of me. Like, ever. I just took it five minutes ago.)
Then we our hostel a fond farewell, had one last tributary pint of Guinness in Doyle's (as Argentina slaughtered South Korea up on the TV), and headed for the airport.
And so we departed Dublin the same way we'd come in: tired and hung over.
We were sitting behind some little Geordie kids on the way back. I tell you what, I like hearing English, Scottish and Irish accents in general, but hearing them from kids...well, that's an extra kick. Makes the little tykes seem extra cute, you know. It was two little boys and a girl, and they were all talking about what makes airplanes stay up. They were pointing out the window and watching the Boeing's flaps go up and down. It kind of took the hangover away for a while.
Ryanair, being one of those cheapo airlines, doesn't give out free drinks and snacks. You have to buy them. And they cost a lot of euro. If you're a smoker, though, and you don't think you can go the 45 minutes between Dublin and Newcastle without a puff, they sell smokeless cigarettes. Yes, on an airplane. They were sellin' cigs. Wow. Neat.
We got back to Newcastle, hopped at cab back to Tynemouth, and were home and dry in Adam's mum's house before the sun set.
But as you already know, that ain't sayin' much up there in the northern latitudes.
Next up: I try to host an American barbecue for my gracious hosts...with British charcoal and a British grill. Witness the disaster next time on British barbecue blues. Don't miss it.
So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair on the back porch, a gin gimlet in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a play?
It was 1992. I was six, and in first grade. I had been tapped to perform in Oakview Elementary's Thanksgiving play. And get this: for some mysterious reason, I was picked to play an Indian.
This wasn't the most politically correct play, either. In the early 90s, political correctness hadn't evolved beyond an amorphous invertebrate thrashing its way around a primordial soup of bull-squeeze. Be it otherwise, the ACLU would've been on this play like white on rice. I don't remember much of it, unfortunately. I don't think I had any lines. My memory of the affair is almost completely gone. Most of what I know I gleaned from the videotape.
Yes, Mom rented a camcorder and taped the whole affair. Of course. I can't hardly stand to watch it, even now. It mostly consists of me, my costars and I, wearing brightly colored headbands with feathers stuck in them, dancing around in a circle in front of 300 people, kicking our legs up, flailing our hands around, and singing in little-kid voices. "Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya!"
You honestly can't blame me for mentally suppressing this, can you?
I didn't win an Academy Award for my performance. Before and after the big dance number, my costars and I just sat around looking complacent, grinning like woodchucks and waving to our mothers. I highly doubt that Squanto would've recognized us. Even the Pilgrims would've laughed themselves sick. If there were any history teachers in the audience, I didn't see 'em. They probably excused themselves before the intermission.
That's the only play I've ever been in. I have since become afflicted with chronic stage-fright, which still hasn't wholly deserted me. Class presentations scared me stiff; standing in front of more than three people was torture; I died a thousand deaths before every piano recital. The only thing that didn't scare me was reading aloud. That's because I knew I did it a million times better than anybody else in class. It's called "inflection," people. You may have heard of it.
Since I've tagged this post with a "humor" label, I shall leave you with a joke. I went over to my buddy John's house one afternoon a while ago. His father was busy doing some landscaping. John objected to this. Why? John's father had removed a bush from the side of the driveway. John claimed that this bush provided him with a landmark vital to the act of reversing his car out of the driveway. John's father was nonplussed.
"You know," he said, "they have these things called mirrors."
"Yeah," I agreed, "you might wanna look into 'em."
Next up: a long-overdue book review. Stay tuned.
Four people crowd around a small table in a one-room apartment on a tilted, crooked street. The street is in the second-largest town on the second-largest island off the southern coast of South Korea. Two of these people are English, one is Canadian, the other American. The lights are low. The drink has been flowing for several hours, courtesy of yours truly, your friendly neighborhood expatriate bartender-in-training. There's a bed, a few poles with clothes hung on them, a dresser, a derelict TV, a refrigerator, a tiny kitchenette, and a bathroom around the corner. By now, the linoleum floor is gritty with tortilla chip crumbs and dropped peanuts. The air is filled with the smell of alcohol, salty snacks, laundry detergent, Korean pepper paste, citrus, and maraschino cherries. The laptop is on. Several YouTube videos on the screen, one playing Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly"; Groove Armada and Oasis wait in the wings. Jokes are being cracked, stories told, laughs exchanged, fun had. Four plastic highball glasses (filled with rum daisies, tequila moonrises or Chelsea Hotels) are making the rounds between table and lips. Occasionally, one of the four people leaves to use the lavatory; sometimes the entire company adjourns to the rooftop to stargaze, or to look out over the uneven, haphazard, Mary-Poppins skyline of the city. All of us are in a drunken stupor, a happy haze. We've had a hard day of teaching hyperactive Korean children the finer points of the English language. Perhaps we graded 30 journals at a stretch, having to add in all the articles (or subtract all the excess) ourselves. Maybe little Tommy was acting up again and gave us a headache. Maybe it was hot as hell in the classroom because the head secretary's too goddamn cheap to turn on the A/C. Maybe we just had a bad day. But it's all gone now.
So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a gin and tonic in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I broke my arm?
It was 1998. I was eleven years old, and a reluctant Boy Scout. My troop and I were camped just off the road running past Norris Dam, on the Clinch River in eastern Tennessee.
It was just an inch away from car camping, really. The vehicles were parked a few hundred yards from the tents. This would prove to be fortunate.
My memories of being a Boy Scout are not fond ones. I wasn't in the best of troops. I was a pretty wimpy kid, and the other guys were far from supportive or brotherly. I'd been on several outings with them already, and none were the kind I'd remember wistfully. But during this trip, I thought things were really going to turn around. The weather was beautiful (unlike Big Hump, which was negative temperatures coupled with 30 mile-an-hour winds; it was snowing sideways). Dad and my brother Harlan were along, meaning yours truly, Mommy's boy, wouldn't be left all alone (unlike Savage Gulf, where I was crying and moping and smelly all week because I'd forgotten to pack soap).
Camp Jim was a marvelous place, too. It was a big, wide clearing in the woods, floored with dry brown soil, packed hard. It sloped gently upward to meet the wooded flank of a ridge. The trees surrounding and dotting the clearing seemed impossibly tall to me back then. The sunlight trickled down through the canopy and dappled the forest floor with those dancing bits of sunlight which I found (and still do find) so dazzlingly wonderful. All in all, it was a picturesque spot.
But most importantly, it seemed the other guys in the troop were beginning to warm up to me.
Near the center of the clearing was a particularly gigantic tree. I'm afraid I can't remember its exact dimensions. And I was so short back then that it must've been a lot smaller than it seemed. In my memory, it was gigantic, the next thing to the California redwoods. It was a towering oak, gray-barked and rough, no branches less than 30 above the ground, the trunk so wide that six of us would've had to link arms to encircle it.
An enormous tree in the camp would've been awesome enough for us. But no, this one just happened to have thick brown vines hanging from it.
And what's more, one of them was swingable.
I was wandering around camp one golden afternoon not long after we'd arrived, a bit bored and a bit tired. (Two owls had chosen the wee hours of the morning to start having a conversation, and one of them happened to be perched in the tree right above our tent. And these owls didn't hoot, either. They screamed. Nobody in the camp got much sleep that night.)
I look over and I see the guys swinging on this vine.
And I think, cool.
Here's the setup: the massive tree is just at the foot of the slope of the ridge. In front of it, the ground slopes gently down for a few yards, then suddenly drops fast—a steep embankment, the wall of a shallow gully running through the camp from north to south. This makes the vine-swing that much more thrilling. The guys, grabbing the vine and pushing off the trunk of the tree, swing out over the gentle slope, and then over the embankment. At the farthest outward point in their swing, they are about 15 feet above the ground or so.
I make up my mind to try that swing or die in the attempt. The guys make room in the line for me, something I wasn't expecting. Surprised and gratified, I take my place and wait eagerly for my turn. I watch my predecessors take theirs, trying to pick up tips. Push off from the tree as hard as you can. Grasp the vine and climb up the side of the trunk a little to give yourself some extra height and oomph. Push to the side, making your swing wider, longer, more circular and less ovoid.
I'm not the only one watching the proceedings. One of the older boys—I think his name was Lee or something—is also perusing, standing on the gentle slope below the tree. The guys are swinging directly over his head. Lee's extremely tall—mustbe nearing six feet. He's also quite thin and gangly, like most boys his age.
My turn comes. My heart in my mouth, I grab hold of the vine, bend my knees as far as they'll go, and push with all my might.
It's wonderful. I go swinging out, clutching the rough bark of the vine for all I'm worth, the sudden breeze blowing back my hair, the sunlight sparkling through the leaves high above, the ground dropping suddenly away until it seems I'm as high as a bird, I can see the whole camp and practically everybody in it, I can even see through the trees and over the hill to the road and the Clinch River beyond—and then suddenly I'm swinging back, and I pivot and kick out my legs to stop myself smashing into the other side of the tree. Breathless, I hand the vine to the next lucky bugger, and get in line again.
No way one swing is enough.
It seems to take ages, but eventually I'm back at the front of the line again. I grasp the vine (I'm probably grinning like a punch-drunk monkey), climb even higher up the trunk, and push off even harder. I start my outward swing—
And suddenly it feels like someone clamped a ball-and-chain around my ankles.
I can barely hold on. My grip is slipping, the rough bark of the vine skinning my hands. I glance down.
Lee, the older boy, is hanging onto my shoes. He's swinging along with me. I look up.
We're over the embankment.
My head empties. My only thought now is to hold on. The ride is forgotten, except inasmuch as I really, really want to get off now.
I try to hold on. If I lose it now, we're falling a long way.
But I can't do it. Lee is just too heavy. Just as we reach the peak of the swing and begin to head back, I lose my grip.
Those few split-seconds that I fall 15 feet and land on the slope of the embankment are a terrifying, toxic blur.
WHAM.
Lee rolls away, unhurt. I land on my hands and knees on the steepest part of the embankment, facing uphill.
I know I'm hurt. But I've never broken a bone before, and I don't know the signs. My arm doesn't hurt yet, but there's that numb sort of feeling which precedes pain. It's in both of my arms and both my knees. How I managed to avoid planting my face in the dirt, I'll never know. Maybe it was the slope that saved me, who knows. But it does a number on my right wrist. Even after I've been picked up, dusted off and set to rights, it keeps throbbing.
And in a few minutes, it starts to hurt.
It starts to hurt like hell.
Even sitting perfectly still, it hurts as though it's going to fall off. And if I try to move it, or even touch it, however slightly, fresh waves of raw agony shoot through my whole arm.
Dad doesn't believe I've done anything serious to myself. He observes me on the floor of our tent, cradling my arm to my chest, whimpering, tears in my eyes, and says "Oh, come on. You're all right."
Later, I felt rather sorry for him. Mom really tore him a new one for not believing I was hurt.
In Dad's defense, I didn't fall that far, nor land that hard. It was inconceivable that I should've broken something. Pop probably just thought I was scraped up a little, and was trying to get me to toughen up. I'm glad he tried, at least.
Dad and the troop leaders try various things on my arm: wrapping it in bandages; ice packs; warm water; immobilization. Nothing works. Eventually, the call is made. I'll have to be taken to the hospital. Dad calls up Mom and she comes A.S.A.P, driving our huge Ford B-Wagon van. That thing was amazingly capacious. With two seats up front and two benches in back, plus a vast amount of cargo space, it was the Post family's workhorse for nearly ten years. It chauffeured a family of four (and two dogs) on numerous picnics, transported entire soccer teams, supplied car campers with a week's rations, and was the best thing for a relaxing after-lunch nap while driving home from the restaurant.
My memory blanks out here. I don't remember the ride from camp to the hospital at all. Such is my curse. I have an awful memory, and it's photographic to boot. This means that conversations, sounds, sights, and sensations are often utterly lost, and all I'm left with are images. I'm fortunate to remember as much of this incident as I have. I don't remember what explanation Lee gave for leaping up and grabbing my feet. I don't remember how the other guys reacted to our fall. I don't remember much of anything apart from what I've told you here, unfortunately. My apologies.
The X-rays come back and the tall, dark-haired doctor puts it up for us to see. I have a spidery crack halfway through my radius. Nothing that needs to be set or splinted, fortunately, but enough to technically qualify as a "break." It also qualifies for a cast.
Now that I've had some anesthetics put into my system and can actually move my arm without wanting to scream, I'm rather pleased. That's the way I recall feeling, anyway. I got to go home early from the Boy Scout trip and had a broken bone into the bargain. I didn't want to break a bone, mind you, but I felt it was something I needed to do at some point in my life. And have a cast. Then I could hold my eleven-year-old head up and proclaim, "I am a man of the world. I have broken a bone, and worn a cast. In your face, Herman."
I don't know who Herman is. He just stands for all those bullies at recess who called me a girl or a wuss or a homo.
For some unexplained reason, I picked the color orange for my cast. I don't know why. It didn't have anything to do with football. The colors of the University of Tennessee (with whom Peyton Manning was playing at the time) were orange and white, and all of Knoxville lit up with those colors every game day. But I was too young (or too wussy) to like football yet. I just liked the color orange.
So they put it on. It went from my wrist up to my elbow, extending between my thumb and index finger. This made it impossible to hold a fork or a pencil, but I grinned and bore it for six long weeks. And I got all my classmates at middle school to sign it. I felt good and proud and accomplished for the first time in my life.
I look back on the whole affair now with mingled amusement and shame. I'm ashamed that I couldn't have been stronger and held on to the vine as long as it took to return to the tree safely, even if I skinned my hands raw. That would've been the brave, selfless, manly thing to have done. Maybe that's what Lee was trying to teach me, I don't know. I'm just glad he didn't get hurt.
I'm ashamed that I spent the rest of the afternoon moaning and groaning and writhing in the tent. That wasn't very manly, either.
I'm amused at how the whole thing must've looked, though. Tiny Little Me, swinging on a vine. Tall Skinny Guy grabs my shoes. Suddenly TLM is swinging from the vine, and TSG is swinging from me. That must've been a sight. Then suddenly TLM lets go and the whole shebang plunges to earth.
TLM spends the rest of the afternoon crying and whining on the floor of the tent.
There was a lesson to be learned here, but it's temporarily escaped the author's mind.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the first of the fireside chats that I mentioned earlier. Well, not really the first. I've already told a few stories on this blog. There's the one about how I fell into a pond in fall in Ohio when I was a kid; another concerning a certain all-night party in Korea that nearly resulted in a lost watch; and a third—oh yeah, did you know that I once saved a rabbit's life? Ever wonder what living in a Buddhist temple is like? Check 'em out. There's much more to come.P.S. I've decided to postpone that award-ceremony thingy until tomorrow, and combine it with the news report I've been compiling. I've got some rather juicy tidbits for you. We have a new dog, for starters. The garbage truck got stuck in the sand up the road a couple days ago, too. HALLELUJAH, I passed the big scary test on shots yesterday! This morning I had my first flight lesson in a month and a half; I went "under the hood" for the second time. Dad has tapped me to play bartender for the dinner party he's hosting tonight. And did I mention how nice the weather's been down here lately?
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.
