It is my fifth month in Korea, and so far each day has brought unique and exciting experiences. I have found the Korean people to be the most gracious and outgoing hosts; by far more outgoing and generous than the average self-centered Westerner. I trust the average Korean, enjoy my time spent with them, and I have found that even the reluctant Original Koreans, ("I am original Korean!" translating to �purely Korean�) appreciate a friendly smile and a low bow, (enough to get a free meal during those first two months of poverty).
After five months of daily battles with anxiety, paranoia, and job insecurity, life is finally fading into a comfortable and productive emotional stability. Veterans to teaching in Korea assure me; this illusion is easily shattered, and regardless of how long I stay, I am guaranteed a constant flux of emotions. For now, this very minute, most tense experiences seem old hat, and I can take them on with a calm and controlled confidence, and even possibly, a slight apathy.
For example when I am confronted, once again, with my Hagwon director softly telling me with her kind smile, "I am sorry, I will pay you tomorrow. I promise," I will understand that what she is really saying, is "I am sorry, I don�t know when in the hell I am going to have the paper to pay you, and I refuse to pay you with the cash sitting within this little steel box under my desk."
Experience has taught me that on the prescheduled payday, one does not wait until classes are finished that night, because the director will have retired early on that particular eve. One must instead, begin to pester one�s director as she unlocks the doors that morning, through the period when she buys you lunch, before the bad news. One must pursue her until the time she is grabbing her purse, about to shuffle on out the door.
I have also learned, that after the third week and the fourth promise of a paycheck, after two used up excuses for how she will obtain your cash, when your director returns her upstairs classrooms for her deposit money and explains that she cannot pay you until the upstairs is completely empty, but then tells the movers to move everything except those three huge tables in the corner, and then refuses allow you and your friends to move them for free, this is when you realize that someone thinks you�re a sucker, and that is when you make some threats. And then you get paid. Now, hopefully, I can do this calmly and with a gentle smile, and without trembling, sweating, and clutching at the chair I am sitting within. Rarely do I hear a positive word about the hagwon experience; thus hagwon directors are probably one of the most interesting experiences for newcomers to Korea. I recommend the hagwon experience. It is crucial. Hagwon directors represent a slightly twisted side of the Korean people, and a slightly paradoxical side of capitalistic competition. The first thing translated to me from my director, by a Korean teacher was this; "Our program is Jung Chul. Do not tell anyone this secret. Do not speak with other foreigners, as they may be spies for other institutes." The translator somehow translated my director�s ten minutes of scowling, hissing and throat clearing into two simple sentences, and as she explained she pointed out the window to the institute�s large neon sign reading "LEARN JUNG CHUL SUPER ENGLISH."
Over the next few months, I experienced a director that relished any opportunity to pull me into her office to explain, in the most basic English, that she absolutely hates men, and that my teaching really sucks. This was about enough to make me cry. I excused it as miscommunication, then I saw Korean English teachers leaving her office, faces flushed with tears, only to hear them tell me, "she says I am a bad teacher."
So far as I can tell, fate has placed my director and her teachers in their proper places. (But then again tomorrow is payday!) Now I can sit in the local beer mart, and listen to the same varying horror stories from other teachers. Only now, instead of competing for my own chance to vent, I can sit back, ripe from five months of artistic suffering, and chuckle.