Haylookitsa Charupa

It occurred to me while writing this that gordita is a word for “little fatty”. I am going to name one of my students Gordita.

Gordita Chalupa Aye Aye Aye
Gordita Freeman
Gordita Gecko
Gordita Enmaipanss

Teaching Korean children English is exactly like trying to get a puppy to shit on the floor. Well not exactly per say. It’s more akin to trying to convince a puppy to shit on a certain part of the floor. You keep trying to tell the little thing something and it just sits there and it just looks at you and then it pees. Looking back, I think it is more appropriate to say that Teaching Korean children English as a second language is exactly like trying to teach a Korean puppy English as a second language. They are indomitably cute and their first language is Korean.

That’s not to say that these kids are are dumb. In fact, I mean the opposite: for their age, they are smarter than I was at that point. On life’s curve, these kids will be proper adults by the time they hit my age. This is something only a few of my generation can brag about. Korean children are basically America’s most precocious children but tinier and more addicted to sugar and video games.

They keep asking me my age and weight. This is disconcerting.

Like any idiot who thinks they can shape a child’s future, I worry about the world these kids will grow up in. Korea has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. In Korea, per 100,000 people dudes kill themselves. And per 100,000 people 19 dudettes kill themselves. Seoul alone has upwards of 10 million people. So on average since this information was started to be collected in the 1960’s, over 200 people kill themselves in Korea in my city alone per year. This is the entire city of Roberts, MT dead in one year because they sucked at their jobs or school or whatnot.

There is tremendous pressure put on these kids each day. From 0830 -1500 they go to school and then after that some go to private ‘Hakwons’ (private schools) where they get to learn English from people more white (and thus more qualified) than me. Some kids go to sports clubs or other assorted activities where other more bigger people yell at them for doing things that are not the things that the more bigger people are being paid to yell at the kids to do. This is a Korean childhood. After this, they go to middle school where they are told that if they don’t do well they are going to have a shit life or go to a less shitty highschool so they can join the military later on and get yelled at by people who are afraid that other GED holders are going to stream down from the north and rape and pillage the land all the way to Jeju island. After this, they get jobs which they work at the same time they go to graduate school until they get married, pump out some kids and have their own little things to yell at. Well, as stated above, they can also kill themselves. But that’s more or less option C.

None of this really seems that alien to me.

Of course this ethos is not all bad. Seoul itself is a testament to this. This town is a mega-town where every nook and alley contains a restaurant, a domicile, or a place to put a nook or alley. It lights up every night like the Blade Runner set, this city is a science fiction story. People here can start their heaters from their cell phones. They have locks that they can unlock from their cell phones. The buildings regularly turn into giant walking robots that keep Japan at bay… literally… sorry. One time I saw a Korean man jump forward into the street and zoom off on a light cycle. Last night, a giant primordial being made from light attacked city center so the city turned itself inside out and some guy named Bin Won fought it with a spear made from pure respect for ones elders. Also, everyone here is amazingly dressed.

My next post is going to be about globalization because this place is basically you average American city but bigger, more stylish, more suicidy, more ambitious, and filled with Asian/pacific islanders.