When I was tentatively asked to move from working part-time to full-time at Busan International Foreign School back in February – a job I finally began last week – I understood that as part of this my son could be educated at the school during the duration of my contract, which my wife and I had decided would be a good idea since we had become concerned at his interactions with other children when he met them. Because of this, we didn't search for a place in a Korean nursery for him, but a couple of days after I signed the contract we found out he was 10 days too young to qualify for a place. The moral of the story perhaps, is to always check the small print yourself.
Our son was born in the Year of the Tiger, which is a Chinese zodiac thing people here still find important, and apparently it was a "White Tiger" year. So while the "White Tigers" might sound like a resistance group set up by foreigners* in the Haeundae district of Busan**, the term actually refers to the multitude of 'white tiger babies' born during that Chinese year, or 'lunar year' as the Koreans prefer to call it for some reason.
Tigers are important in Korea as they are seen as a symbol of strength (whereas being white is important in cosmetic adverts and hagwon teacher recruitment), so it is believed that white tiger babies will become wealthy and powerful as they are born with an extraordinary amount of potential, not like all those mediocre babies from lesser years you have to subconsciously write-off from birth. The upshot of this is that everybody who could had babies that year, and now two years later there are too many babies and not enough nursery places.
So by the time we realised we had to find a nursery place after all, the nearest place we could apparently find - after single-handedly boosting Korea Telecom's profits by 10% - was in somewhere called Pyongyang, and it seems there are no direct buses. My wife then resigned herself to another year of hanging around with our son in 'kids cafés', which are a form of disguised nursery which distracts you with food or drink you have to buy, while your child disappears and gets into trouble.
Then a miracle happened. My wife found a nursery which had 30 free places, which admittedly is slightly suspicious given the white tiger glut. It was beneath some kind of church. It was probably run by some kind of Christians. I was still working part-time so I decided to go the first day to make sure it wasn't actually a cult; I grew up a Catholic so I have a lot of experience in spotting them.
The nursery people were pleasant enough while not being suspiciously nice, there were some prayers on the wall and they said Grace before eating, but there were no models of crucified men hanging from the walls or fairy stories about a bad man with horns who knew what you were doing and probably made government policy. I concluded they were probably mostly harmless.
If the group did have a cult-like quality, it transpired to be in their attitude to the English language. After he'd been at the nursery for a couple of weeks, my wife was asked to "speak more Korean" to our son at home because the staff felt he was lagging behind other children.
From what I've read on the subject of bringing up children in a bilingual household, research suggests that it's entirely normal for children to initially lag behind in terms of language development because they have two vocabularies and sets of grammar rules to learn rather than one. It's logical enough.
I think everyone recognises that this situation is far from ideal, but it is the reality of your circumstances unless you want to take the radical step of only teaching your multicultural child one language and one culture. I have known of people who have done this – both in Korea and in England and I wouldn't advocate it in either country, but I would particularly question the approach here given that in the current cultural environment you are not really going to be accepted as a Korean if you have 'mixed blood' (or indeed, if you don't have any Korean blood and become a Korean citizen).
As I see it, the road ahead is potentially littered with this kind of attitude though, because in truth, the road behind us already has been. In the matter of the nurture or nature question, I have to say my attitude has been shaped by nurture. Bringing up a child in a multicultural family in Korea doesn't on the face of it have to be a constant battle, but somehow it regularly turns into one as people associate undesirable traits with 'bad blood' and try to force you and your child into being as completely Korean as possible, without seeing the irony in the fact that if you were they still wouldn't accept you for it. And this is the fundamental paradox of living here.
* I understand – not that I would know – that the local resistance actually goes by the name 'Busan Alien Residents Front' or BARF, and it is vaguely affiliated the the Seoul-based 'Resident Alien Liberation Front' or RALF – Korea's oldest foreign-based resistance movement which dates back to 1994.
** I use the "Haeundae district of Busan" here for simplicity – many here are increasingly of the belief that Busan is, in fact, a district of Haeundae.
A year ago someone told me that they’d read that it requires about 4,000 hours of studying to reach competency in the Korean language. I’d been struggling with finding the motivation to study in an increasingly busy life, and I seized upon this figure as a psychological tool which would give me a sense of there being an end point to my efforts to learn. To that end, I began posting a progress meter at the end of my posts to show my progress towards this fixed goal, fully knowing that any potential failure would be there for the world to see.
And I failed. With the year over, I’m just over 3% of the way towards that 4,000-hour target, which means that theoretically it will take me over 30 years to achieve competency in Korean at my current pace of studying.
Auribus teneo lupum
So what has gone wrong? I can give many reasons but when it comes down to it I believe that in this world you are either in control of your life, or your life is in control of you. Studying a language requires a commitment, mental focus, motivation and enough free time every day to make it happen, and these things are increasingly eluding me.
In retrospect what I believe I should have done when I quit trading for a living in August is taken a year off, and made studying Korean my primary goal with no compromises. Frankly, I’m getting too old to keep studying piecemeal here and there year after year, it doesn’t really work and it’s the road to becoming one of those foreigners who’s lived here ten years and who doesn’t speak the language and never will, but are living here with the delusion that they are still trying. It’s obvious though at this point that it’s the latter fate that awaits me. Perhaps I'm already there.
But with my wife not working after the birth of our first baby, taking a year off would have led to a substantial drain on our savings, even if we had stayed living at my mother-in-law’s place. Our living arrangements were becoming untenable for me though, so we bought our own place last year – in itself a project that took two months of our free time – and the upshot is that our costs have risen by 50% and now we have a mortgage bearing down on us. Despite all this I still could have afforded to take a year out to study, but watching my savings disappear is psychologically something it turns out I can’t easily accept.
So instead of studying Korean, I quickly found a part-time position working as a software engineer – my pre-trading career – and which officially takes 15 hours out of my week but is actually 22 hours with travelling. I was also offered more work at Busan e-FM and took that, I agreed to form a joint-venture business with a large Korean Internet company that approached me but ultimately didn’t manage to get their project off the ground, and I immersed myself in several side-projects which like a lot of things we ultimately do for our job prospects, were time-consuming and lacked any immediate return-on-investment.
My wife did an eight-week TESOL course around this time, which very much left me holding the baby – both figuratively and in reality – and combined with my 'dash-for-cash' efforts to put a liveable income together, this was how I didn’t study in September and October, following the two months I lost due to apartment hunting in July and August.
I began to realise that I used to complain about the long hours working as a trader was demanding, but while I certainly had to sit watching the screens, I did get a lot of other things done at the same time, which amongst other things included studying as well as writing my blog.
The final irony of my choices turned out to be that the financial chaos in August was a bad time to make life-changing decisions; by the year's end I'd still made 64.13% in my trading account, and while that didn't compare all that favourably with previous years, sticking with trading was still a better financial option than everything else I plunged myself into. But in my life I traded the uncertainty of trading for the certainty and greater respectability of salaried employment, and perhaps there's something to be said for stability.
The Maginot Line
Another wider question which has been on my mind in recent months is whether the greater goal should to be to learn Korean at all. In the last year I’ve met a lot of foreigners who have been in Korea for a long time. And one of them - who like the others is completely fluent right down to the body language - quietly told me that if he could live his time over again, he wasn’t sure he’d bother making the effort to learn the language. It’s a shocking revelation for an old Korea-hand, but one I increasingly understand as I reach the personal conclusion that more often than not Korea is a country that does not really reward you for your efforts as a foreigner. Of course, there are people who go native and find some contentment in their lives here - whether in reality or through wilful ignorance – but my own experiences are leaning me towards the idea that it might not be typical.
To wit, consider the case of an English-language radio station I’m aware of – I won’t say which one - that employs foreigners, or Koreans who speak English well enough to be hosts, and is officially run for the benefit of the foreign community in Korea (even though I’m sure the vast majority of the audience are Koreans learning English). There is no prospect of progression into production or management for fluent Korean speakers because that’s their Maginot Line through which the invaders must not cross. What’s more, those defensive fortifications do not just protect against physical incursions, but also the cultural – because one strongly gets the impression that foreign ideas are not really welcome in even this small corner of supposedly multicultural Korea.
Much like the Maginot Line though, I know these defences will eventually be swept away, but like a lot of things in Korea it’s a process which will take a lot of time, maybe even generations. But it’s 2012, and even in an organisation that is meant to be a beacon of multiculturalism I’m still left with the feeling that it's reflective of a multiculturalism that more often than not gravitates towards telling foreigners about your superior culture and trying to help them assimilate into Korea’s monoculture to become almost-Koreans. In fact I’ve long since lost track of the number of Koreans I’ve met who’ve told me they’d like to go abroad – not really to learn from other cultures but to tell everyone about bibimbap, Dokdo, Korea’s four seasons or some other repressed Korean secret they think the world should know and is going to be in awe of once it collectively realises, which it won't.
Now people of limited intellect who like to summarise entire articles in single words will say this is a rant, but I’m afraid it’s far more nuanced than that because personally I have mixed feelings about multiculturalism, and I think the Koreans are entitled to be Korean if they want to be. If part of being Korean means not really accepting foreigners for who they are and largely keeping us in our place so be it, but what it means is that learning Korean does not carry with it the rewards I might be hoping for, which is the prospect of a seat at the table one day, and maybe even a proper job.
Motivation
I say this attitude doesn’t put me off, but deep down, it doesn’t motivate me either, and after working all day in an office or spending my time babysitting I need more positive rewards than I’m finding to learn the language.
Time is running out. Life is running out. I hope this year will be different while knowing in my heart that it won’t be. But without the hope for change, what is left?
"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi Indian term for "life out of balance".
Chronologically, we signed to buy the apartment and then I lost quite a bit of money in the market, so I now had a major financial commitment and barely the funds to meet it. I remember my wife working through the apartment paperwork as I watched the London FTSE market futures drop a huge amount - 8.4% at one point - on my mobile phone. I was recklessly long overnight in the market on the ‘Centum apartment play’, and there promised to be an enormous progress crushing fall at the open, which there was.
So it was definitely time to find another job in Korea, and for the first time I had to truly confront one of the fundamental problems with living here - namely that while I’d always been able to use my software and web development skills in England to put food on the table, and there I was capable of doing a myriad of other things, in Korea apparently there is really only option open to me, which is teaching. This was a pity because the one conclusion I had from doing a TESOL course many years ago is that I never really wanted to teach English again, even though I got good grades. Worse, many of the jobs involved teaching children. This is not my thing, and if I thought having a child might kindle some enthusiasm for it on my part, it only made me realise that I need a break from that, not more of it.
Life is suddenly looking a lot tougher.
And then, after I decided I had to find a job, I discovered something I’d always been vaguely aware of in Korea, but the scope of which had never quite registered in my mind. I started searching in earnest for jobs on Koreabridge, and I began reading the phrase ‘North American passport holder’ rather more than I expected. I hadn’t realised that being a Canadian and speaking Canadian English was a class above being British and speaking English English, but I guess now I know.
I suppose it’s all aboot [sic] the accent, because while the job ad I saw which asked for an “american (but, if you have a very neutral accent, another nationality is possible.)” perhaps represented an individual preference rather than a corporate policy, it may well encapsulate the underlying prejudices Koreans have about anything which isn’t American English, or perhaps as I’m learning, Canadian English as the second choice.
Korea seems to get very little bang for its buck when it comes to the subject of English teaching, and perhaps part of the reason is the kind of profiling that prioritises people based on nationality and race rather than on actual English and teaching ability.
Another good one I saw recently - though sadly I can't find the link now - involved a group of male corporate executives who were looking for “an English tutor – female only”. Dear Sirs, I think what you are actually looking for, is a geisha.
Now this probably a very important subject in Korea – especially for Busan e-FM listeners – today’s subject is Korean and the English language.
The Korean English language school
I met my wife in England, where she did some postgraduate studies at the local college and university in my home town. Both were quite popular with overseas students, and perhaps that’s what led to the story of the Korean English language school.
In my job as Student Union President, I spent a lot of time liaising with the university’s management. One day they called me up and asked “Do you know anything about the plan to open an English language school for Koreans here?” Well I didn’t, but the story was this: apparently some Korean businessmen intended buy a building near the university and turn it into a school that would just teach English to people who would come over from Korea. Then the businessmen actually came to the city, met local council leaders, and finished up having their pictures taken, shaking the mayor’s hand, which then appeared in the local newspaper.
And that was the last I heard of it, until six months later, when suddenly the first Korean students arrived. There first question was naturally, where is the school? Exactly. Where, indeed, was it? I knew the building the Korean businessmen said they were intending to buy, and I’d looked at it every time I walked by – and there’d been no visible signs of any activity at all. I had contacts in the local council as well as with the university, and they hadn’t heard anything about it since the businessmen had gone home either. Didn’t the plans work out suddenly, or was it a con from the beginning? I don’t know, but it didn’t look good.
The students had spent all their money in some cases. Some returned to Korea, and some transferred to the local city college. But I specifically remember the story of one girl, who had no money and felt too ashamed to go back home. What I took from this was how important English must be in Korea, and what a big business it seemed. But it didn’t always seem a fair business.
Fusion-combination under fusion-combination environment
And then I came to Korea and saw it for myself. I was shocked by the number of hagwons. Yes, you know there are going to be a lot, but I wasn’t expecting there to be ten within a hundred meters of my apartment. I guess there are thousands in Busan alone. It’s mindblowing. But I can’t help feeling that despite all this it doesn’t really work.
At first – I admit – it was funny to see all the badly written English signs, and all the badly used English, such as the “Korea Literature Translation Institude” and the restaurant advertising “Spaghetti with swimming crap”. But soon it made me a little sad because of all the money you can see being poured into it, and it can have consequences.
For example, one wedding album we looked at started off “You will always have a special place in my hear”. Then, under a picture of the bride you’d have the words “with palpitation just like the fist time”, and it finished with what appeared to be a disastrous cut-and-paste failure from Ben E. King’s classic song ‘Stand By Me’, where the main line “Just as long as you stand by me” became “hust as ling as you stand by me”. Well, that’s not a wedding album I can send back to England really, because it creates a bad impression of Korea, and it kind of makes the whole wedding seem like a bit of a joke.
It’s not just companies that end up with odd English. The Ministry of Health and Welfare sent out a multi-language leaflet on the importance of having children vaccinated “in order to ensure our children grow up to be healthy human resources of the future.” Then again, this is Korea, maybe we are all just ‘human resources’ to the chaebol in the end. But my favourite is the Korean Internet & Security Agency. Recently I visited their English page trying to find out why a website I’d tried to visit was blocked. It explains “We need to prepare a counter-measure system against infringements related to fusion-combination under fusion-combination environment.” The page goes on to talk about the need to create “digital warmth” for minimising the ‘dysfunction’ of the Internet. What is ‘digital warmth’? [The whole page is worth reading because it essentially encapsulates so many of the failures that English translations have here - and translations into Korean from English can raise very serious issues too].
The english waves come in [sic]
I became more sympathetic as I struggled with the Korean language, but it’s still surprising though when you see these really big brands using bad English – why don’t they pay for proper translations?
Then I started to hear a few stories from foreigners doing the translations. They were rewording advertising material from a first draft in English done by a Korean, but after they’d corrected it, the company would often go back to the first one, because they said it sounded better.
[I can’t believe they let me mention this on air]. Take the Busan e-FM slogan for example. “The english waves come in” - it’s on the signs and advertising. This is a small issue, but it makes a big difference: there’s an apostrophe missing between the ‘E’ and ‘S’ of ‘waves’. So instead of “The English Wave Has Come In”, instead it really states that the waves come in around the coast of England. 그래서, 영국의 파도가 옴니다, 그리고 나감니다. There’s no capital for the word ‘English’ either.
Working in a Korean business environment is hard [story pending]
So seeing all this makes me think that working in a Korean business environment could be very hard for a foreigner. My impression is that whatever foreigners might say, Korean businesses just plough on regardless. They don’t care.
Whose language is it anyway?
But then I had a revelation, at least about the English language. Maybe these Korean companies don’t even want good English... because they’re not pitching their messages at English speakers, they’re pitching it at people who ‘speak’ English in Korea. And who’s to say they can’t? Perhaps Korean English is a new language like American English [an earlier bastardisation of the original language – although modern British English is in itself arguably a bastardisation of ‘olde [sic] English’]. If people are happy with this new version of English - ‘Korean English’ - then maybe it’s OK.
And really, the way some ‘native’ English teachers write on websites here – what language is that? I call it “native English teacher English”. Maybe that’s a new version of the language – with bad grammar, awful spelling, and a general inability to communicate. My God, I wouldn’t want some of them anywhere near my child teaching English.
To quote the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.” What he meant by that of course is that you can have two groups, essentially using the same language, but still not communicating well. So maybe this is the problem with English written in Korea – or Korean English, and we can’t necessarily expect it to ever change. And looking at it from a Korean language point of view, perhaps when I reach Korean fluency I’ll still have problems communicating, so the Koreans and I will still be divided by a common language too.
And that might be the world we live in today anyway – everyone’s talking but many people are not understanding what’s being said.
There’s a bit of a background story to this. I was originally scheduled to talk about Festivals in Busan, but then the North Koreans attacked Yeonpyeong Island the day before the show, and suddenly I had to find something more depressing to talk about. So I chose learning Korean.
Introduction
For my fifth week on Busan e-FM’s “Inside Out Busan” show, I thought I'd talk about something that perhaps is my biggest problem in Korea – and that’s the Korean language.
2007
I didn’t begin learning Korean properly until 2007, even though my wife and I started dating in 1999. Sometimes I think because I met her in England, and we spent our first few years together there, I didn’t really have the incentive to learn Korean that I might have had if I’d met her in Korea, because I didn’t have to speak Korean with her.
More than that, I think if I’d met her here, I would have started socialising with her friends, and eventually met her parents, and this would have provided a very powerful motivation to learn the language in order to create a good impression. Instead, by the time I got to Korea our wedding was only a few weeks away, and in so many ways it was a done deal whether I spoke Korean or not; everyone was stuck with me.
Slow progress
Of course I have made progress in the last three years since I started learning Korean, but it feels like that progress has been painfully slow. And honestly, I can’t help thinking that everyone else is thinking the same thing – that I should be a lot better by now.
If I could turn the clock back, and know in 2007 what I know now, I’d have quit my job and studied full time. But back then, I wasn’t expecting to stay in Korea for very long, and as a financial trader I became quite immersed in the Credit Crisis, and so my job took up a lot of time. And actually the older I got, the harder it got. Also I see now that I made mistakes in my approach to learning Korean.
How not to learn Korean
I learned a lot of vocabulary. I thought then I could make myself understood. When I studied Japanese part-time I learned about 1,200 words in a year, and it really just felt it was all coming together when I stopped. But that didn’t really work with Korean – even now my Korean vocabulary is only about 800 words. I really needed to get out and speak Korean more, but actually because I work for myself it’s easy for me to spend a lot of time at home. So in fact on many days, it’s like I don’t even live in Korea. Sometimes I think it’s harder to study Korean in the Internet age than when I studied Japanese before the Internet really became popular.
The Internet is destroying the ability to concentrate and learn
Back then – in 1996 – I used to read the experiences of people who’d been in Japan for ten or twenty years, and they were often totally isolated, so they had to learn the language. Now I can live in Korea, but spend all my time during the week on the English Internet and then watch American TV on Hulu at the weekend, in addition to the TV channels showing English programmes.
We think the Internet is this great thing because it brings people together and makes us less isolated, but sometimes I think it’s a curse when learning Korean – for precisely that reason. The Internet makes it easier to keep living your old life now, even if you move countries.
Creating a more immersive environment
I should try and create a more immersive environment for studying, but I’m afraid I’m really too busy with my job to be properly motivated. I tried to do little things like use a Korean version of Windows, but most of the time I get my wife to read the error messages and ignore everything else. My smartphone is Korean language only, so I just don’t use it fully – it doesn’t really help me learn. I should probably switch off all the technology and stop watching things on Hulu.
Doesn’t living with a Korean family help?
Living with a Korean family doesn’t help much. They speak in a local dialect, and because my Korean is poor it really throws me off. For example, instead of 왜 my mother-in-law says 와, she asks me if I’d like 사가 and I think... what is that? And even if I can remember that 사가 is 사과 [apple], there are so many other words and pronunciations that confuse me. It’s actually really discouraging because the more I try and communicate with her, the more problems we seem to have, over really basic things. And then there’s the ‘I-told-you-this-once’ problem.
The ‘I-told-you-this-once’ problem
I’m surrounded by Korean family or friends, and someone says something – in Korean – which later they assume I know, because I was there when they said it. But being there is not a guarantee of understanding. And when you ask about it later they say “I told you this once”. Anyway, the main problem is that I feel like some kind of 5 year-old child who doesn’t understand what the adults are talking about.
Making mistakes and levels of politeness
The other problem with living with a family is remembering the levels of politeness. They confuse me, I make mistakes, and I end up discouraged. People don’t mind if I make a mistake, but in English there’s basically one way to say hello and one way to say goodbye. Here, it depends on whether you’re speaking to a superior, an equal, or a junior – so there are at least six ways to say hello and goodbye – maybe more – and several ways to say everything else. It seems I’m often too polite and ‘respectful’ to my juniors, so apparently I lose face and then people maybe don’t treat me with as much respect – so I’m told. I really hate all this hierarchical stuff.
The perils of learning Korean with your spouse
I don’t really practice Korean with my wife. I think a lot of people who aren’t married think that if they marry someone who speaks a language they are learning, it will really help them with that language – but actually I think the typical experience is that it really doesn’t. Good teachers are good diplomats – and diplomacy is usually the first casualty of marriage.
Where do I go from here?
I’ve looked into attending Korean classes – or doing something more formal – but it never really fit in with my job. Sometimes I get letters from the local immigration office for programmes, but they’re only written in Korean, which means I just get the executive summary from my wife, because she’s very busy as well.
I think the government is trying to help immigrants, but I think generally we fall into three distinct groups – migrant workers, imported Asian wives, and Westerners. Once I was sent an invite for an online forum, but after I did a lot of translation work to register for it, I found it was almost all Asian women who’d married Korean men and were learning how to cook Korean food. So I gave up on that.
I’m going to keep working on my Korean. I have to. Last year I was at the Immigration Office to extend my visa, and they said it was better to have language skills if I wanted to extend if for longer. So you know, it made me feel like the Korean government were getting a little bit impatient with me. And I’d like to work my way onto an F-5 visa – permanent residence – but I think there’s going to be a language requirement for that. I don’t blame them though – I have very strong views about ‘multiculturalism’, so I think if I can’t learn Korean soon then I should leave Korea.
One of the problems I've identified with myself psychologically as far as my language studies are concerned, is that learning Korean feels like an open-ended commitment that will last the rest of my life. I'm very objective-oriented as a person. I used to write software for a living, and then became a financial trader - both these activities produce definable end points, whether it be in terms of a completed function in a program, or a trade which is closed for a profit or a loss. There's no definable end-point in learning a language. Yes, you can say it's attaining fluency, but what is that exactly, and how far off into the future is it?
As a trader, I live my life by numbers. So when Tim, the host of Inside Out Busan, told me on the show that he'd read that it requires 4,000 hours of studying Korean to reach competency, I began to think about the number and how much progress I was making towards that goal.
So inevitably before long I'd created a new worksheet in the spreadsheet I use to record the results of my vocabulary tests, and into this worksheet I entered 240,000 – that's the number of minutes in 4,000 hours. I studied for an hour, and entered 60 into the box next to it - leading to the spreadsheet reporting that I'd accomplished '0.03%' of my target. It wasn't much, but it felt like I was a little closer to my goal. It's oddly satisfying, and will remain so for as long as it takes me to realise that my rate of progress means I'm going to reach 100% in 2021. Yes, I worked that out.
I don't believe it's as simple as just putting the hours in though, because in my life I've found that the real benefits which accrue from studying language come from studying it in a reasonably concentrated period. When I was studying Japanese, in my first year I ended up in a class with a couple of people who'd been doing it for eight years, and it wasn't long before I felt that I'd surpassed their level. But they had jobs, and I was only working part-time back then. It gave me an incredible advantage.
My life in Korea has never been like that. Some of it has been my choice – but like those people back in the Japanese class – I have a job too – and just because I work for myself it doesn't make it any easier to quit – like them, I still have to pay the bills at the end of the month.
I feel that this year is a make-or-break year for my Korean studies though. Time is moving on and my abilities are clearly not. So I've decided to set myself that 4,000 hour target. I don't even care if the academic research backs this up or not - it feels about right. It's also merely indicative - it's a mistake to chase hourly targets because the most important thing is to put in good quality study time.
I started my hours off at zero - partly because I haven't recorded how much time I've put in before now, but mostly because at this point in time I feel it was largely worthless. My 4,000 hour target is not going to be achieved in one year; 4,000 hours approximates to two years working the hours of a full-time job with no holidays. Even as a trader, I only work about 2,750 hours per year, and those are long hours I'll never want or be able to do with the language.
So during the course of this year I'm going to publicly shame myself by placing a Korean-language competency progress meter after each post, you can share in the unfolding horror. Right now, I've done 480 minutes in the last week, reaching 0.2% of my target, meaning that the bar on the progress meter below is undetectable. Some may view setting such a difficult target as counter-productive, but for me, with my kind of background and character, it really does feel like setting any kind of target - even a large and possibly unattainable one - is putting some sort of limit what otherwise feels like an endless infinity of language study.
Five days ago my wife gave birth to our first child, a boy. Over the last couple of years, we'd talked about whether it was better to have a baby in England or Korea. I've always been impressed with the Korean health system - yes, it costs money, but it is fast and efficient in comparison to the slow lumbering bureaucracy of the British National Health Service. Korea seemed to be the clear winner. Now I'm no longer sure. I want to document my experience here as a possibly cautionary tale for other people who find themselves in the same position. Had I known a few months ago what I know now, things may have worked out differently.
I'm splitting what I have to say into the before and after - a tale of two halves if you will, and then there may be quite a lot of post-match analysis, so if you don't want to know the result, look away now.
She's Having a Baby
My wife's water broke at 9.35pm on Saturday evening. The hospital said she had time for a shower before checking in. That's important because Koreans firmly believe that women can not take a shower or bath for a week or more after giving birth otherwise it will damage their health for life - after giving birth Korean people's bones are 'brittle'.
An hour later we arrived at the hospital. It's not a huge state-run complex of buildings as you would expect to find in the UK, but rather eleven stories of a very small office block situated on a major road. Like most Korean hospitals, it's specialised - in this case, as a maternity hospital. When we reached the delivery floor, we stepped out of the elevator into a small empty waiting area. I soon discovered that the entire floor was being staffed by one nurse, although since there was only another patient there, who was busy screaming in agony, perhaps that was the appropriate staffing level. The nurse split her time between checking us in and disappearing into the first delivery room to admonish the woman for her behaviour. Really.
Korean Mother was with us, and she went down on the forms as the next-of-kin. My inability to communicate at the level of Korean necessary to deal with a medical emergency made it necessary, but that was to prove only the first of a series of unhappy experiences during the next few hours.
The Red Gloves
The unseen woman gave birth and the baby cried for around a minute before silence descended on the otherwise unoccupied delivery floor. Retrospectively, I see now I should have seen that as a clue, but my head was full of other thoughts. We were in the next door delivery room by now with my wife lying on the bed. The nurse entered with heavily bloodied surgical gloves and much to my shock began adjusting my wife's bed and bedding. Korean hospitals have always seemed to have good hygiene standards so this wasn't what I expected at all. It turned out my wife was already 30% dilated so we were told the baby was likely to come by the morning.
I suppose the room wasn't quite what I expected either. It was very cramped - only wide enough for one person to stand on either side of the bed - and it didn't fit my possibly wrong image of the clinically clean environment I'd expected. It was really just a room, with some rather dingy circa-1970s wallpaper.
I'd chosen to be present in the room during my wife's birth. I don't think this is really negotiable for British people and it would be very unusual if you didn't want to be. I got the impression that Korean men are not so enthusiastic about the idea, and I was told the husband of our neighbour stayed outside for the big moment. But again, the reality was different from my expectations. Korean Mother and I were regularly told to leave by the nurse and the pedometer that I wore eventually told me I'd walked over a kilometre in the corridor outside, partly out of frustration and partly just to keep myself awake. Korean Mother took to crouching by the entrance to the curtain-off delivery room chanting Buddhist mantras over and over.
The Wreck of the Mary Celeste
It was while I was pacing up and down the narrow and claustrophobic corridor of the Mary Celeste Maternity Hospital that I finally started looking at the crib positioned near to the door of my wife's delivery room. A green blanket sat in it and it was stained with blood and other bodily fluids. Another equally stained blanket lay underneath it. I suppose the hospital would argue that they were perfectly clean despite their appearances, but I was so surprised I took a photo of it. Unfortunately, I'd left my DSLR in the maternity room and was only carrying my compact digital camera, which I discovered had developed a fault preventing me from altering its settings, so the noisy picture didn't do the reality of it justice. Anyway, I was rather surprised, and not in a good way.
My wife was determined not to be a screamer so only moaned occasionally, but even after two epidurals she was in considerable pain by 3.30am, which is when apparently to her great surprise the nurse discovered that my wife was 80% dilated, suddenly moving the expected time of arrival up a number of hours. The nurse had now been the only person we'd seen since arriving five hours earlier, but she began making phone calls to a doctor, giving me some comfort that we really weren't the only people in the entire building. But lingering questions remained in my mind - if there was an emergency, how equipped was a small hospital like this to cope with it? How long would it take a crash team to get here? Did they even have one? No, say what you like about British hospitals, at least you probably have every conceivable specialist to hand if there's a problem. I began to think a larger Korean hospital might have been a better plan.
Push Pull
Within half an hour the nurse was giving instructions to push but there was still no sign of the doctor despite a series of phone calls. In my mind I'd editorialised them as increasingly urgent pleas of 'where are you?', but perhaps it wasn't.
Twenty minutes later the nurse, whose attendance throughout the night had been sporadic despite the theoretical one-to-one ratio of nursing care, disappeared, leaving Korean Mother to work with her daughter on the pushing. When the nurse returned, with the doctor, a second nurse, and a large vacuum pump in tow, we were bundled out of the room. I discovered later that the baby had been judged to be stuck, but my language isolation prevented me from understanding what was happening and Korean Mother didn't appear to know either. Her Buddhist chanting became louder which I didn't take as a particularly positive sign. It was a critical time in the delivery, and we were kept outside for twenty minutes, but they hadn't properly closed the curtain to the room, so occasionally I managed to see beyond the medical staff to the horrors that lay beyond. My wife had clearly lost quite a lot of blood. It's hard to know at the time what can be considered normal, so I wasn't especially worried, but later she had to have a transfusion.
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
We were finally called in three minutes before the birth, and for the first time we had to wear gowns - but no masks. Because of the cramped conditions - caused in no small part by the large vacuum pump that was already attached to my wife, I could only stand at the top of the bed, so when the baby came it's the only angle I could see it from. The umbilical cord was clamped and I was given what felt like the world's bluntest scissors to cut it with. Yes, Korean men apparently might sit out the actual delivery, but its normal for them to cut the umbilical cord.
We'd had all these grand plans about taking lots of photos and even filming the moment of birth, but in the reality of the situation it seemed heartless to take pictures like a tourist when my wife needed my full attention. When the birth happened at 4.57am it was so quick that I was taken aback. I didn't understand how rapid the vacuum pump could be, although having seen my baby sucked out of its home head first like that I think I understand why so many people in the modern world have nightmares about being abducted from their beds by aliens. I was quickly conscripted into cutting the cord and then the baby was passed to its mother while I struggled - and failed - with the now certainly faulty camera I had to hand to take a shot. I couldn't reach my DSLR in time. Thirty seconds later the baby was bundled outside by the nurses and I once again tried and failed to take a photo in the corridor despite the protestations of the staff. Blink and you'll miss it. Our baby was hurried away.
In the end, while giving birth is a terribly hard thing to go through, it ended up being comparatively straightforward. The baby was fine and after a couple of days, my wife was much better too. But a mistake was made during that thirty second period and it was going to linger with me and cause a great deal of unhappiness and frustration.
We never set out to own animals in Korea, but they seem to find us. First we rescued hamsters from a snake. Then we rescued a dog from some people who didn't really know how to care for him, followed by another dog from some traffic - although we managed to find that one's owner. And now, it's fish.
Personal relationships are quite important in Korea, and the social network is often how business will be done. This meant that when I bought into a health insurance plan here, it was only proper that I gave Korean Mother's insurance friend a hearing before running off to sign a deal with some faceless, but potentially more competitive, corporation. We eventually signed the deal with her anyway because we were busy, and didn't have time to wade through the complexities of all the various deals in the wider market.
The line between friendship and business gets blurred like this, meetings can be social with the underlying suspicion of being opportunistic, lunch can be bought, and the vague sense of obligation to return the favour grows bigger with every bill. Then sometimes, your insurance agent gives you an aquarium full of tropical fish with the words "I hope you will bring me some more clients".
To my mind Korean Mother didn't want to have the fish, but didn't want to face the rudeness of rejecting the gift, so they quickly landed in our office. I had mixed feelings about this turn of events - on the one hand I thought it might bring a little island of calmness to our increasingly stress-filled trading floor, but on the other hand it meant I suddenly had to learn all about keeping fish in addition to my DSLR learning curve, Korean studies, trading, baby related work and another sudden political campaign I'd become involved in back in the UK. But herein lies another lesson about language barriers. Korean Mother wanted the fish, but thought I liked them, so decided to give them to us. Had I known that, I would have readily set her straight and said "keep the fish". As it was, this fact only emerged two weeks later, after two of our thirteen fish depressingly died and another one was separated into a box before giving birth to seventeen babies.
So I read all I could about the fish in the limited time I had, and came to the conclusion that they needed some plants - or at least, the smaller ones in our tank did. I researched about plants, and then we went to a fish store, but we came away empty-handed - the woman in the shop just raised more questions than she answered. I could write a long story about everything that happened afterwards but suffice to say that my conclusion was that there are two schools of opinions on fish-related matters - the Internet consensus, comprising of various large hobby and commercial sites, discussion boards and Wikipedia, and the second school of opinion - Korean shop owners - which often appears to disagree with it. What I learned from the Internet was that the pH level of the water was quite important, and what I was told by the shop owners was "oh, you don't want to worry about that sort of thing". And I ended up with some plants - a random fish store selection - not the ones I thought were compatible with our fish. That was another one of those "oh don't worry about it" scenarios.
Another "oh don't worry about it" moments came when Korean Mother was given some more fish, including five babies, by her Insurance Friend, and she insisted on keeping them in a large jar. Now admittedly, the jar was so large that it probably held as much water as our aquarium, but there was no filter, heater or anything else you might think necessary. By this time I'd read about the basic needs of a healthy tropical aquarium, and was growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that I couldn't pursued her through my translator wife that this was not a good idea.
Korean Mother did, at least, change the water regularly, but she'd do all of it and clean the jar, which necessitated transferring all the fish to a much smaller container. Finally, for reasons I just don't understand and the language barrier prevents me from discovering, the large jar would be left to dry for gradually longer periods until one day she showed no inclination to move the fish back at all. "This", I told my wife, "is going to turn into a disaster". I suggested she buy an aquarium - it would be much less work - then I offered to buy her an aquarium with the proper equipment, and when that failed, I insisted on it, but to no avail.
So it had reached the stage where the only way anything was going to get done was by me going down to the fish store on my own, and somehow muddling through buying what Korean Mother needed, despite her considerable resistance. Korean Mother is a Buddhist, and holds all life as sacred, so I really couldn't understand it.
The next day we went out together leaving the fish in the small jar with my final words on the subject being "she's not leaving those fish in that jar is she?" Sure enough, when we returned in the evening, about ten dead fish were floating at the top. The remarkable thing was, that five one centimetre-long baby fish in the jar and an immature guppy had survived, although the latter took two days before it was able to submerge below the water surface again.
Korean Mother's plan to separate the dead fish from the survivors apparently involved pouring the water into the sink on the dubious principle that the latter would stay in the jar. This may or may not have worked but apparently it doesn't work if you pour really fast. She gets flustered sometimes. Following my horrified look, numeric hand gestures and some frantic translation work by my wife, Korean Mother somehow found the two missing baby fish in the unspeakable hole that is used in sinks in this country to collect festering masses of Korean food, and improbably they were returned safely to the water.
Korean Mother decided to buy a proper aquarium. She hadn't wanted to pay the money to buy one before, but once in the store I was not entirely surprised when the 50-inch LCD mentality took over and she chose a tank that was over three times the price of what we have. There's a lot which has frustrated me in connection with the fish - but file this under something positive which would never have happened in my country - the store owner offered to give us a lift back to our apartment with it so he could set it up and have a look at our fish to help us identify a couple of them we'd failed to.
What I took from all this is not about fish but about language. Aside from the fact I ended up with an aquarium I'd have been quite happy not to have, somehow, the fact that I can't effectively communicate in Korean makes it feel to me that I'm really not getting my point across sometimes. Perhaps it means I'm easier to ignore. I guess I play that game too. Touché.
And as for the story of those fish stores versus the Internet though, I have reached the conclusion that I'm going to side with the Internet; Korean Mother was at one of those shops recently to stock her aquarium, and when I looked more closely at their tanks, I saw they were full of dead fish, and they'd clearly been dead for some time. What's more, it wasn't long before some of the fish be bought started suffering from fin rot, and once again the treatment advice differed significantly from the Internet consensus. Something has to be done because it's not something I want to see; watching them slowly waste away while being constantly pecked at by the other fish can be uncomfortably reminiscent of life as a foreigner in Korea.
When I spend time with our Korean friends, we share experiences, but not often thoughts or conversation; they can't speak much English and I can't speak much Korean. When they laugh, I don't get the joke, when they suddenly decide to do something, I usually don't vote, only follow. The language barrier separates us and it's easy to fall into an isolation of my own thoughts and my own world. It's a frustrating reminder that the time I've spent studying has not yielded adequate results, and while I try to follow what those around me are saying, it requires a sustained level of concentration which my mind seems ill-equipped for after all the hundreds of ups and downs of fifty-five hour trading week. It was with some trepidation then, that I opted to extend the experience from a few hours to an entire weekend spent at the summer house of one of our group, two hours north of Busan in Hapcheon County ('합천군'), West of Daegu.
Recently Korea has suffered from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and once we left the highway one of the realities of this became evident as our stuffed minivan was quickly subjected to decontaminating spray at a checkpoint. It wasn't the last; shortly before we reached the isolated valley in the mountains that was our destination, we had to repeat the experience. It may only be a matter of time before movement is prevented entirely as it had to be in the UK in 2001.
When we drove down the final mountain the valley that emerged before us comprised of six or seven small dwellings clustered amongst the fields. It was the type of place which was so small and dispersed you had to wonder whether it could even be called a village. I'd expected our weekend home to be a rather ramshackle building in keeping with the vast majority of Korean rural architecture and my experiences in Namhae, but the rather smart metal gates we pulled up at suggested otherwise, and these were opened to reveal an entirely modern single-story house beyond, which in turn opened up to reveal a modest but functional three room dwelling comprising of a bedroom, kitchen/living area, and a bathroom.
Our friend, the owner, has a full-time job in Busan. I'd been told he grew vegetables here, but the variety of crops visible, along with the size of the plot of land - which even included a pond - made it evident that this was no mere side operation but a serious commitment. It seemed he was leading a double life as a farmer at the weekends.
Namhae hadn't prepared me for this. The nearest road was a thin strip visible in the far distance, and even then it wasn't well traversed. In-between the bird song it wasn't just quiet, there was an actual absence of noise. I couldn't remember the last time I'd experienced anything like it. It was breathtaking - and perhaps because Meniere's Disease has left me with mild Hyperacusis, enormously relieving. People always seem surprised when they read of traders who give up their lives in the city to become farmers - moving from the frenetic pace of the city to the perceived tranquillity of a job which seems right at the other end of the career spectrum as far as one's environment is concerned. While I'd always sympathised with the sentiment, at that moment I understand it perfectly.
After a barbecue, to which every fly in Hapcheon County had been invited, the plan was for the group to go 'night fishing'. It had been warm in the sun but as we'd eaten and dusk had fallen, the temperature had become surprisingly cold, promising to turn the experience not so much into a battle against the fish, as a battle against the elements. But once again language and cultural barriers highlighted the difference between my English understanding of the act of going out 'fishing' and the Korean definition. We drove out to a river near an isolated love hotel, getting sprayed for foot-and-mouth disease again on our way in and out, where nets were prepared on a low concrete bridge in very little light. Once prepared, the nets were tied to the bridge supports. And that was it - no rods, no braving the near freezing conditions, no waiting around in vain for hours - just drop your nets in and leave. Two hours later the nets were collected - two fish had been caught.
We were all up the next morning at 7am because we'd come here with a purpose of sorts - to help dig foundations for a new outbuilding and harvest some of the vegetables. An early mist hung in the valley but it wasn't long before a surprisingly strong sun burnt it off. I also got burnt - I'd spent an hour clearing stones from the fields to be used around the pond, and while I put on sun-cream when I went in for breakfast, the damage had already been done.
At 9am my image of the idyllic rural scene was somewhat shattered by the sound of a disembodied voice echoing around the valley. I realised later there were speakers on some of the telegraph poles, and the authorities weren't afraid to use them. A foot-and-mouth warning was read out. It repeated every couple of hours, and at one point a car broadcasting a similar message even made its way down the valley. Now that I've worked out in the fields while loudspeakers broadcast government warnings I feel I've had a little taste of the North Korean experience. On the whole, it seems strange that such a potential invasion of privacy would be put up with, no matter what the 'public good' arguments are, but given that our apartment back in Busan has a similar loudspeaker which 'important' messages are broadcast through - with no way of turning it off - perhaps people here are conditioned to be used to disembodied voices of authority speaking to them in their private moments.
I suppose it's not as though they are used to urge people to work harder in the fields - not that it would perhaps be needed - who needs Big Brother when you have your dead ancestors watching over you in the fields from their graves in the hills?
We completed collecting stones from the land and the 'Oriental Fire-Bellied Toads' ('Bombina orientalis') now had a more interesting environment to live in. The toads, as their name suggests, have rather spectacular orange undersides to warn of their toxicity, but they weren't easy subjects to photograph.
The foundations began to take shape, but digging was hard work as the ground was full of stones and rocks. The building was being referred to as a summer house, which appeared to make it a summer house for the summer house. There seemed to be a Russian doll thing going on here. From the haphazard nature of our work, I harboured a suspicion that in Korea, if you wake up one morning and decide to build a new building on your land you just go ahead and do it - there's little if anything in the way of planning permission to resolve. Or at least, there didn't seem to be anything other than an ad-hoc plan.
Later I helped harvest some vegetables before lunch, and in the afternoon sawed some wood - my wife wanted to make a traditional wooden object which is meant to usher in good harvests - it's basically a wooden base with a small vertical branch connected to horizontal, vertical and then horizontal branch, all progressively smaller. The alleged effect is that of a bird perched on a branch.
We'd been on a tight schedule all weekend, in fact there was an actual schedule printed out in some detail, and our time was almost at an end. We left our brief rural life and returned to the city, where the 'Meowi'/'머위' vegetables (or Meogu/머구 as they are called in the Busan dialect) were a big hit with Korean Mother. Apparently they are really hard to find or buy in Busan because not many people eat it here, even though many people like Korean Mother are ultimately immigrants from more rural places. I'm told it tasted especially delicious. When I closed my eyes, I could still see dozens of black dots flying around. I can only imagine this place is mosquito hell in summer.
During the trip I seriously began to wonder how I was perceived by my Korean friends. My wife, who normally acts as my translator, was elsewhere most of the time, and unlike at social gatherings I found myself in situations where I needed to coordinate with others or follow instructions, but it was hard to do. I felt that if I were a Korean, I'd probably be regarded as having a rather low IQ, but then this is the reality of my Korean existence so perhaps for the purposes of defining my Korean life, I am thus mentally challenged. At one point I was asked if I knew how to use a spade. I don't know how it is that the deeper I get into Korean life the more isolated I feel, and can only hope this is an inverse Bell-Curve of which I will one day find myself on the opposite, ascending side. I never expected my experiences to get worse as time went on, and that's the surprise and disappointment.
I tried to work very hard to compensate, but I was sorry that between this and the tight schedule I never had the chance to leave the compound and walk around the area. Life in rural Korea is radically different to life in the cities, and I thought there must be much to discover. I also really needed that elusive perfect moment of tranquillity that was hinted at, and the faintest promise of some enlightenment it might carry with it, but instead it seemed we exported our city lives into the countryside, changed one form of work for another, and kept the same urban pace that is so much a part of our existence.
My wife and I are members of a newly formed social group in Busan. There are a lot of groups like this in Korea variously meeting up for cultural activities, going out and engaging in charitable activities. The new group plans to do all three.
In a culture where there are reckoned to be two million Internet addicts, inevitably there is an online forum for members, and I felt obliged to participate. Because the forum is run by Daum, one of the Korean Internet oligopolists, it isn't possible to just register by creating a user name and password as you might expect to with an equivalent Western web site. Instead, it's necessary to submit a full national ID number, or in the case of foreigners, the ID number from their 'Alien Registration Card', along with a full official name as per one's identity documents.
In other words if I'm to fully participate in Korean society, which these days is in no small part conducted online, I must forego my anonymity and potentially associate my name with every aspect of that life, with all the loss of privacy and potential for governmental profiling that this entails. Is the Korean Government spying on its citizens, and casting a worryingly wide net in doing so? Quite possibly.
After I entered my identity number and full name, I then needed to authenticate my online identity with the Government's 'identity bureau', either by mobile phone, by verified banking digital signature, or by entering my credit card details. My mobile phone is in my wife's name for simplicity, ruling out that option, my banking key turned out not to work with the Government's badly designed software even though it works with my bank, and I wasn't thrilled about handing my credit card details over because I don't really trust them with it. But, I had to go with the latter option. It really didn't seem worth it but I took the view that sooner or later I was going to have to let the Government's computers open a file on me so that the software can, in principle, start building up the evidence that I'm anything they later accuse me of.
The other problem with joining is that now I feel obliged to participate in online conversations - but even though the main method of communication tends towards Twitter-like brevity, even then trying to construct the Korean takes me a long time. Still, it all helps with the language study, and in the end it's probably an inevitable part of the process of integrating further into Korean society.
Three years ago we went to Pusan National University to see Jeon Jeduk (전제덕), a famous Korean harmonica player who was making an all-too-rare foray down to Korea's second city. He was back in town yesterday - for one day only - holding a concert with a woman regarded as one of this country's most famous jazz singers, who has been described as Korea's Ella Fitzgerald - perhaps in reference to her ability with scat singing. She's simply known as 'Malo' (말로). This time it was no mere university campus the concert would be held at, but rather Busan's Citizen's Hall in Beomildong.
I'd seen a clip of the two artistes performing together in a piece on our video-on-demand service, and while I knew what to expect with Jeon Jeduk, I was impressed with what I saw of Malo. But, I do like Jazz, and while I'm not sure about the Ella Fitzgerald reference, she certainly seemed to compare favourably with the likes of Diana Krall. Here's a video from Korean TV - featuring Malo and Jeduk performing Devil May Care with Malo's scat singing, followed by a less frenetic piece:
If you're not like me and you don't like rain then the weather was atrocious. By yesterday evening the downpour had turned into a deluge and while Jeon Jeduk thanked the audience for turning up in such conditions, even though his blindness meant that he couldn't have seen just how bedraggled we might have all looked.
To call it a joint concert between Jeduk and Malo would not really be correct, because the emphasis was more on the former than the latter. This imbalance was not what my wife felt had been advertised - I noticed that on the poster for the event at the venue it mentioned Jeduk with Malo in much smaller writing as a 'guest', but I gather that was the only place that this was actually stated. The flyer for example tends to imply a much more equal rating. Well, that's Korean advertising for you. A more difficult issue is what you define as jazz. The concert was advertised as a jazz concert and while my wife was happy enough that most of the content fell within definition I wasn't so sure. I may be old fashioned.
At least when Malo eventually took to the stage she was everything promised. A couple of songs were in English, which I had some mixed feelings about. I've heard the classics sung by native English speakers of most nationalities, but there's something about hearing them sung with a non-native accent which always feels ever-so-slightly off to me - I'd be remiss in relating the experience if I wasn't honest about it. I can easily lose myself in a truly mesmerising song but finding that moment of perfection can be harder when I'm hearing the pronunciation. I expect the longer I'm here the more I'll get used to it.
We ranged through Jazz music to Soul and Korean pop classics of the 1970s and 80s which were not jarring at all even if I'd have preferred to stay firmly fixed within the jazz genre. I wasn't really able to take any photos and videos until the encores when it became acceptable to do so.
The rarity of the trip to Busan had prompted one of the guitarists into something special - Jeon Jeduk had persuaded him to propose to his girlfriend - who was in the audience - on stage in the middle of the concert. However, this is not quite what you might think - they have arranged to get married in two weeks anyway, but such is the way things are done in Korea that he technically hasn't proposed yet. Well, it seems to me that it's a done deal now and far too late for her to say 'no' - Koreans don't have the same tradition of backing out of weddings as we do in the West (the loss of family face would be extraordinary) - but it was probably the most awkward proposal I've ever seen, with neither of them saying anything in the end and Jeon Jeduk gently chastising them for it afterwards.
The unscheduled diversion took the concert beyond its slated 90-minute running time and with the encore we were pushing 10pm when things finally came to a close, having started at 8pm. At 50,000 won per ticket (£29/$44) I'm not sure it was that cheap by Korean standards. To my mind it was worth it despite the minor disappointments, but then sometimes in Busan it feels like you have to take what you can get. Apparently, we're a long way from Seoul.
It snowed this week in our part of Busan. It was the first time snow had settled on the ground since I've lived here. South Korea hasn't had an easy winter, but this city's location and our location within it - in the south-west by the sea - mean that it usually rains, if anything. The snow still falls on top of the nearby mountains though, which I have an excellent view of from my office window. Annoyingly, it often doesn't stop it from being bitingly cold, but it's nothing compared to Seoul. Our dog was captivated by what he saw out of the window, and outside our building a group of children, whose school was apparently closed by the weather, bravely tried to scrape together enough of the white stuff to build a snowman. I imagine this was their first and last chance of the season, and it was clearly hard work.
I had to go to the maternity hospital with my wife the day of the snowfall, because she had an ultrasound scan scheduled. There was no more than two centimetres of snow beneath our feet, but somehow the main road had become treacherous. When a taxi driver saw us, he apparently knowingly applied the brakes about ten feet away in order to slide to a stop beside us. It was clear that most of the road was ice - there had been no attempt to grit it.
As we skidded our way terrifyingly towards the hospital, it was clear that few drivers were prepared to compromise their driving style to accommodate the dangerous conditions, so regularly changing lane and cutting up people who couldn't necessarily brake effectively was commonplace. The saving grace was that the roads were so jammed with traffic, so nobody was able to go very fast, meaning the hundreds of accidents which doubtless occurred should have been minor.
Our doctor had not made it to the hospital - he was stuck in traffic - but we were able to see another, who at the end of a long conversation I barely understood asked if I had been bored. I'd tried to look attentive while fighting the constant tendency I have in Korea to zone out, but my lack of comprehension had somehow been detected or correctly assumed. It's unfortunate that my Korean ability has not progressed sufficiently, because this is a time when I want to understand every word and subtle nuance of the ongoing diagnoses, but instead all I can do is read the body language for any sudden negative revelation. It's incredibly frustrating.
The hospital gave us a DVD after the ultrasound. We hadn't had one after previous scans but this was a big one which incorporated a '4D' imaging technique which is supposed to be more comprehensive. The DVD contains a software application - Windows only of course - from which it's possible to view the ten minute ultrasound video, still photos and a general yoga video for pregnant women alongside some hospital advertising. We'll take the DVD back with us as the pregnancy progresses and they will continue adding to it until the baby is born. It's all part of the package but it's still a very nice touch. A friend of ours who's also pregnant has chosen a much bigger general hospital - as opposed to a specialised maternity hospital - where they don't do this, which seems a pity. Having the video has enabled us to share it with family back home to make the pregnancy more real to them than it would otherwise be, given the geographical difference.
Everything is fine and we continue along the road of the Korean pregnancy experience.
I received a letter from the Ministry of Justice at the weekend. It was about the Korean Immigration and Integration Program, which neither I, nor apparently Google, had heard of before. I grew up in a city where it was a given that any communication from local government or schools would arrive in four different languages, but this attempt to reach out towards certain immigrant minorities in a spirit of friendship was interpreted by a fringe element as an invitation to burn English books they disagreed with between City Hall and the Police Headquarters. Later, a good number of them decided that protest was inefficient, and the brilliantly elegant solution to creating an integrated society was to kill everyone who disagreed with them. Just so you know where the Ministry of Justice are coming from, their letter is written only in Korean, and it points you to a website - more on this later with a warning - which is also only available in Korean, save for an English menu entitled "INFORMAION" and a section curiously called "MORGUE". One might have thought the website at least could have had a brief explanation in English, Vietnamese and the language of any other major immigrant group that tends to end up on F-type visas - especially as the Ansan Migrant Community Service Centre managed it - but then perhaps that would lead us to the point where we're burning Korean books outside the Ministry of Justice a few years down the road.
The Free Dictionary defines integration as "The bringing of people of different racial or ethnic groups into unrestricted and equal association, as in society or an organization". So there may be an important lesson here - integration in Korea in 2010 does not necessarily mean arriving at some level of equal association through multicultural mutual understanding, or being in any way really being accommodating, it means complying with the Korean way of doing things from the outset. Maybe that's fair enough, and maybe it isn't, depending on what you believe integration to mean. Given my experiences back home, I didn't want the Korean Government to make the same mistakes we did in our liberal naiveté and post-colonial guilt either, but on the other hand, I felt as though they could have given a little - but then, maybe that's how that long spiral downwards begins.
So what does the Ministry of Justice want? It wishes to invite me to undertake two conversion courses, one in Korean language and one in Korean culture, which will help towards naturalisation. I'm not interested in becoming naturalised - there's little natural about me in the first place - but with further investigation the situation becomes a little vaguer. While it is only an invitation, it carries an incentive - or possibly an implied threat - that successful completion will contribute points and therefore "help" towards visa renewal - potentially even general F2 ones where it says that 'skilled workers applying get 10 points'. You don't need to have studied logic as part of your degree course to see that the implicated flip-side of this positive condition is that not doing the courses may be "unhelpful" towards future visa renewals. Which leaves one wondering what all this really means, and where it's all leading. The letter makes a point of stating that the courses are open to 'any foreigners' and goes on to list many examples including 'overseas students' although curiously, English teachers aren't mentioned. One has to presume at this point that 'any foreigners' will only include those fortunate enough to have someone with the time to translate the letter for them, investigate the website and inevitably, phone up the office concerned when they realise how inadequate the former two are.
Language is one thing. I've been studying between one and two hours a day since returning to Korea with little success, and yet I certainly see the need to achieve fluency - lest I end up like those people back in my home city who don't speak English living in their ethnically-divided cantons. So if Korea is to extend the gloved-hand of friendship and help me down that road with the carrot before me and possibly the stick behind, so be it. Culture though, is another matter, because it can be very subjective. Before giving up and unexpectedly leaving the Disunited Kingdom, my wife undertook and passed a sometimes difficult and mandatory Government-run Life in the UKexam, which is similarly presented as contributing towards visa applications. It largely - though not completely - boiled down to a predictably politically correct and uncontroversial exercise in dry facts and statistics about life in Britain, which I promise you most British people would fail. If you happen to be British and think you wouldn't - try this - I've no idea when an adult should join the New Deal programme, what percentage of children live with both parents, or precisely how many Jewish people live in the country. The test has to be studied for and there's quite a high failure rate. Political correctness in the UK largely demands a certain line in bland questioning, but what of a Korean cultural test? I can foresee problems here, because I have a certain Copernican view of Korea which I'm not sure my hosts share. Furthermore, while I have some interest in Korean history, politics, economics and culture, and possibly some 'interesting' views, I have no interest in the lives of Korean celebrities or the kind of television programmes which audiences make "ooooo" noises to every five seconds. To be fair, I share the same disinterests in British and American culture too.
As well as containing a section called "MORGUE", Avast said the Korean Immigration and Integration Program website contained a Javascript trojan the moment I allowed it with NoScript, so my attempts to navigate through the pages were somewhat thwarted by the anti-virus program's prevention of functionality to protect me. I try be very careful when it comes to matters of computer security so there was only so far I was going to go under Windows. The website is http://www.kiip.kr but under the circumstances I'm not going to directly link it here - it may well be a false positive but enter at your own discretion.
I tried it under Ubuntu instead which is probably safer, but the menu wouldn't load at all so I gave up. If one of the questions on the cultural test is "Should Koreans be allowed to design websites?", I'm going to get that answer wrong. It's sad because Korea's refusal to adopt international and more security-friendly standards in web-design surely results in lost export business, and the day Digital Pearl Harborfinally occurs is most likely the day this country is cyber-bombed back into the 1980s. The people here will wish they'd never even heard of ActiveX the day their mobile phones stop working.
I got as far as learning that there are - I think - four language levels taking 100 hours each, and a fifth level for culture which takes 50 hours, but there appeared to be no information on whether this consists of one hour a week or 40, nor where the courses might be held - it can take me well over an hour to reach certain parts of Busan, so it has a bearing if I'm supposed to be commuting for over two hours a day for the sake of an hour's class. My wife, who had to work through all this on my behalf, concluded that "surprisingly, it doesn't have the most necessary information". I wasn't so surprised, if there's one thing bureaucrats everywhere have in common, it's their unfailing inability to think anything through properly or arrive at a functional and public-friendly result.
My wife phoned on Monday morning to be told that the courses were held for two hours three times a week, at a government office near PNU - which is just about as far away from me in Busan as it's possible to get - and at a private university in Seomyeon - which is a more reasonable 30 minutes journey. She also took the opportunity to complain about the fact that the letter and the website were written in Korean - to which the man taking the call laughed - but in bureaucratic embarrassment or belligerence it's impossible to say. There are a number of factors I have to weigh up before deciding whether to do this or not.
