Firsts

On March 3rd I had my first class of new students (aside from the first years I taught over break). We did the whole getting-to-know-you questions thing, and when I opened it up, I got all the standards: Do you like Korea? Do you like kimchi? They did surprise me with some sort of elaborate questions, like: Did you lose weight or gain weight after you came to Korea?

And then pretty quickly it moved on to the more political questions: Do you know about Tokdo? What do you think about Bush? What do you think about Ohno? I actually know very little about Ohno, so I asked my students to explain it to me, and while one did pretty well (Ohno was a speedskater who "overreacted" and got an undeserved penalty on the Korean player, costing South Korea the gold medal), the one who actually asked me the question didn't seem to know, or couldn't explain. And then came the question, "What do you think about Japan?" on the heels of the Ohno question and the Tokdo question, and they knew that I'd visited Japan over winter break. I hemmed and hawed at how to answer such a broad yet sensitive question. Then the class bell rang, and they all laughed at my relief. "Bye!" I said brightly and stepped quickly out, the hearty laughter continuing behind me.

After this I got curious about this whole Ohno incident. I was familiar with the event because it'd been discussed during Fulbright orientation, and we'd been shown footage of the South Korean soccer player scoring a goal during a World Cup match and celebrating by doing speedskating motions as he ran, before he was joyfully tackled by his teammates. I decided to do some research so I could respond more confidently if I was ever asked about it again.

Turns out the speedskating event occured in at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and Ohno was not on the Japanese Olympic team, as I'd assumed, but on the American speedskating team. South Korea would have been awarded the gold medal except that their skater was penalized for apparently getting in Ohno's way--though many claim that Ohno exaggerated the disruption. The upset over this was still fresh at the 2002 World Cup, which was hosted by Korea and Japan. Ohno was actually invited to a World Cup-related speed-skating event in Chuncheon, South Korea, but he, and consequently the rest of the American team, didn't attend in response to death threats he'd received. The memorable footage I saw of the speedskating mimicry occured at a World Cup match between South Korea and the U.S.A, in response to the one goal scored by South Korea, a goal which brought the match to a draw (1-1). It is a bit surprising to me that the loss of Olympic medal was enough to muster so much hatred towards Ohno, but of course South Korea and the U.S. have a complex history. What is almost more surprising is the terrible timing of yet another event---in June 2002, the same month as the World Cup match between South Korea and the U.S., two Korean girls in Seoul were run over and killed by a U.S. military vehicle. The two G.I.s were tried in an American military court, instead of a Korean one, and many Koreans believe they received unnecessarily light punishments. This was when a couple anti-U.S. pop-songs started circulating on the airwaves.

As an ETA now, I feel like I've experienced very little backlash if any from these events that are actually pretty recent, and obviously still fresh in the minds of even the children I teach. Though there has been a sort of recent backlash against foreign English teachers, one that echoes the movement against the U.S. military in Korea. The government started cracking down more heavily on foreign English teachers without visas, teachers who have been violating the conditions of their visas, and even teachers who didn't have college degrees. Ostensibly this started because of extremely offensive remarks written by a foreign English teacher on an online bulletin board about his exploits with Korean women a few months ago. In some clubs in Seoul now, foreign men are charged higher covers, or banned completely--like their GI counterparts. On the boat to Japan I met a Canadian man who had decided to pick up and leave his job in Korea after working for several months to a year without a visa, when his own students started getting suspicious and complained about him. It's a situation that makes me thankful, once again, that I work through Fulbright, and even that I'm female, though I know these two things don't make me immune to animosity.

So far, though, my biggest problem has been strange Korean men who want to practice their English by discussing the U.S. military. Remember that creepy guy who I thought I had gotten rid of in October? He came back the other day. My co-teacher told him off good and thoroughly this time though. I'm pretty positive he won't be coming back.