The Naming of Things

One of the finer pleasures of your early days in Asia is the naming of things. When you first arrive in your foreigner ghetto, you are a child: you don't know your address, or the names of objects, or what to call manmade structures. Perhaps you know "here" and "there," but that will get you neither here nor there. And so you and your band of expats start naming things, at first for the practical reason that if you are to meet another expat somewhere, you must choose a discrete location in time and space at which to meet them, and then for the purpose of distinguishing important places from the sameness that surrounds them, a sameness that would astound even americanus suburbicus, and finally with the same giddy imperialism as kids naming lightning-splintered trees or NASA geeks naming rocks on Mars.

You can master the Korean alphabet in three months without even trying, and despite our best efforts, some of us did. We could read street signs, but the problem in Korea was that there were none: the Koreans stubbornly refuse to name their streets. So the expats of Chilgok District 3 devised an atlas of their own, a geography that was well-known even to the fringe members of the group. There was Cakehouse Road and Footbridge Boulevard, Garbage Heap Turnpike and Exploding Transformer Square. We often built bonfires along Cremated Cat Creek, so named, suffice to say, because the foreigners of Chilgok 3 once cremated a dead cat upon its fertile shores. We felt no need to rename the Gugu Tunnel, though nearby Mt. Unamji was known only as "Jumanji," and it was pretentious to call it otherwise. There was Rub 'n Tug Lane, a reference to the services rendered by its afterhours massage parlors. I lived on the corner of the Pig Intestine Intersection. You often took your best girl for a late night stroll along Sea Penis Promenade, named for its seafood restaurants and their specialty, an uncannily phallic bottom-dwelling organism that propels itself by ejaculating torrents of milky saltwater from its uncircumcised head, served raw. (Breaking News: Though for years I was unable to empirically prove the Sea Penis's existence, Wikipedia now tells me it is the urechis unicinctus, a species of marine spoon worm. That which we call a Sea Penis by any other name is just as hideous.)

There were other places which we did not rename, but endowed with a kind of mythical status that baffled any and all Koreans in our company. There was the GS 25 convenience store, where we sat outside in plastic chairs around a plastic table and insulted each other until four AM, and The Coffee Bean downtown, where we congregated the following afternoon to apologize, to read the New York Times, and to sneak off to the bathroom one by one to enjoy the sudden and violent regularity afforded by a hangover and too much coffee.

We rechristened the beers, mostly out of spite. Hite was Shite. Cass, obviously, became Ass. O.B., like the Gugu Tunnel, needed no alteration, was just fine the way God made it, though you were allowed to call it B.O. if that was your wont. And lest you think we were amused by ourselves, we always spoke these names with straight faces.

At Old School, Daegu's one and only hip-hop bar, Mark introduced the bartenders to the Irish Car Bomb, which later resurfaced on the menu as an Ai-ri-shi Ka Bom-buh and went for nine bucks a pop.

Children's Day became Youth in Asia Day. Daegu was known, affectionately (I think), as The 'Gu. Chilgok was The 'Gok. I was Kisu, Mark was Marker, and Arthur was R-Dor 3000. Hyunmin was Richard and Sangmin was John.

And now, in China, I am Pan Da. I have so far neglected to mention this fact, perhaps the key plot element of my Chinese existence. I did not choose the name, though I certainly would have if I had been creative enough to think of it myself.

Our official Chinese names were posted on the wall of the hotel conference room on our third or fourth day in-country. I'm not sure who picked them for us, whether it was a Chinese bureaucrat down at the immigration office, one of our Mandarin teachers, or a Peace Corps employee with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.

I remember glancing at the other names as I looked for myself on the list. Song Min-Tao, Gao Hai-Ning, Bai Li-Jie, Lin Rei: these were names that I could not pronounce or make fun of. Then I found mine: Pan Da. Pan ... Da. Panda. I stood there for an unusually long time. I ran my index finger across the page to make sure that the name was indeed mine. Keith Petit - Pan Da. I searched the other 74 names for a Kou A-La, a Wen Hung-Lo, a Long Dong, to no avail. I shrugged. It was a happy coincidence that the most ridiculous volunteer should have the most ridiculous name. From that day on, I was Panda. Many of my fellow Peace Corpses still do not know my Christian name.

Pan Da looks something like this: 潘达. The first symbol, Pan, is a surname. The second symbol, Da, means "dignity" or "to achieve." But to my students, Pan Da means "panda." And so, after asking them to call me Keith, Mr. Petit, or Pan Da, they insist upon calling me Mr. Panda.

It's good to be a panda in China. When my name comes up at the drinking table, I will smugly say, Dui-aaaa - wo shi guo bao: Yep - I'm a national treasure. It's hard to gauge whether my audience is amused, revolted, or amused despite their revulsion.

China has named me, but the naming of China is not yet complete. I have named and renamed some of my students. Monkey, I explain, is probably not such a good name for a human. How about Edwin? I am slowly mapping out Nanchong, planting flags and lifting my leg on street signs, but it remains largely uncharted. And Chengdu was far too vast for naming, aside from the bar where I met and came to know some of my favorite people, where we were once attacked by a hive of ill-tempered wasps, a bar we dubbed The Bee Bar and much later, The Bee Bar and Grille, after we discovered that they served peanuts upon request.

It's just history repeating itself.

Radiohead's Hail to the Thief opens with a burst of static. Nigel Godrich says, "We're rolling." Thom Yorke remarks, "That's a nice way to start." A drum machine fires up, spits out four stuffy beats. Then Jonny Greenwood sweeps in with a wave of sinister arpeggios and the album begins in full. They are the tentative sounds of a band that has dissected itself to shreds and is nursing its wounds, sitting down to work with tempered expectations and tea. I imagine they drink tea.

It is upon similarly ginger footing that I make my return to TEFL, Teaching English as a Football League. To borrow a David Foster Wallaceism, Korea was a supposedly fun thing I should never have done again. But here I am, doing it again. How do you prepare yourself? By running wind sprints through train station corridors? By binge drinking Listerine? By slapping a strip of duct tape over your mouth and attempting to get your driver's license renewed at the DMV? There is no cross-training for TEFL, no preparation for the absurdity. It is a decathlon of narrowly missed trains, substance misuse, shady bureaucrats, gross miscommunication ... Coming off my five month sabbatical with Dora the Explorer bubble bath in the upstairs tub of my sub-suburban compound, I feel I am up to the task this time around, though no one is ever up to tasks such as these.

This time, it is Poland. I flirted with Peru, made eyes at Estonia, strung along Kyrgyzstan for four months before I caved in to the cat calls of Katolicka Polska. I will be teaching at an English academy called Global Village, in a middling town by the name of Kielce, infamous as the site of the Kielce pogrom, the 1946 slaughter of 37 Jews by a frothing mob of deranged Polish policemen, servicemen, and steelworkers. It is also sister cities with Flint, Michigan. We shall hope Kielce is not the ugly stepsister.

Kielce hovers an hour north of Krakow - where my British leching partners yet remain, lurking in the alleyways between cathedrals, umbrellas at the ready - and two hours south of Warszawa, a city whose name, like Omaha's, evokes a grey sludge in my mind. I find myself in a geographically familiar position, residing in an overlooked mountain town nestled between two metropolises, but I don't expect that Kielce will be as much of an eye- or lung-sore as Daegu. The train station is a flying saucer, enabling quick and easy transport to places like the Kuiper Belt and Flint, Michigan.

It is a five month gig. I will be teaching high schoolers. The contract calls for nineteen teaching hours per week, somewhat less than the forty-or-so I'd gotten used to. I can't imagine how Polish teenagers could possibly surpass the pampered seven-year-old sons of Korean bankers, but I am not placing any bets. According to my director, the thus-far charming Urszula, "we had to thank the teacher you'll be replacing after only 2 months as it appeared he had a drinking problem." How much do you have to drink to get fired in Poland? How many 9.2% Polish porters for breakfast? How much buffalo piss vodka at lunch? How is it possible to get fired without dying?

I am polishing up on my Polish. This language has seven cases. Six of them are beyond me. I suspect everything will be beyond me for a while. But I'm feeling good about Poland. In the event of a Huckabee, Romney, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Giuliani, Paul, or Thompson victory come November, I will have no qualms about my candlelit loft above the barn, in my cabbage-shaped, cabbage-scented Cathotopia across the sea.

Igo ani jana.

It's like The Shawshank Redemption. All the English teachers here are chiseling their days into the walls, pacing like caged pumas up and down the streets, chain smoking, tunneling through the floor with rock hammers by moonlight. I, myself, have a d-day countdown running on my cell phone: 271 days until I fly away. I am not homesick and life is not even that unbearable here, but it would be silly for me to deny it: Korea is a stepping stone.

I did not come to Korea because I am a kimchi connoisseur, because I enjoy being stared and pointed at, because I have a penchant for hostile languages or because I thought second-hand radiation might do me some good. I am here unabashedly for the money. But I want the money so I can travel, so that I can become poor again, so that I can work, so that I can travel, so that I can become poor once again, so that I can keep growing and dying and growing, so that I can keep moving without ever having to stay still, all that idealistic bullshit. That bullshit is my plan and it will not become reality. Something will get in the way: I will get pregnant, my kidneys will spontaneously burst, my nose will fall off, my ears will melt down the sides of my head, I will get the guinea worm. But the universe is a large place; I would at least like to get to know the planet I'm stuck on.


Starting with the Oprah restaurant two blocks from my apartment.


Daegu is divided into specialized districts with a trillion specialized shops selling the exact same junk for the exact same price. So on Sunday night, when the Bostonian and I wandered downtown for all-you-can-eat at a foreigner bar, we first had to pass through a pet shop district, a used tuba district, a Protestant Church district, a wig district, and a district of boarded-up windows, scattered plastic bags full of ball bearings, and discordant faraway piano tinkles - en route to the foreigner bar district, where foreigners go to sniff each other's asses, and drink.

The buffet was packed and buzzing with the hysteria of a hundred human beings united in a quest to eat themselves to death for fifteen bucks a head. After finishing our fourth course, the Bostonian and I decided to sample some of the insect cuisine, one bug apiece, with lemons for chasers just in case. It was a brownish bug, maybe some sort of larva, football-shaped, a chewy morsel with a dash of crustacean pizzazz. I had just about choked the thing down when a blue-shirted Korean man at the table next to me collapsed and went into a seizure.

I've always imagined my moment of truth to be a dramatic or at least somewhat distracting affair, drawing some concerned glances and maybe a paramedic or two. But this poor bastard just lay on the floor writhing around for five minutes while his friends sat with their beers stalled en route to their mouths. The guy must have stopped breathing, so the hero of the bunch felt obligated to kneel down and give a few halfhearted chest compressions. Meanwhile, a drunk expat across the room stood up and performed an impeccable reenactment of the "Da Bears" SNL skit, pounding on his chest, hacking and pantomiming the projectile dislodgement of a Philly cheese steak, a hot dog, or something.

The bug was still on my tongue so I swallowed it and reached for a lemon. A man in an orange jumpsuit parted the gathering crowd with a stretcher. A tense but mostly impatient silence weighed heavy on the buffet as people waited for it to become socially acceptable to go back for more cocktail wienies. At the bar, a Korean was bellowing without using his honorific forms because the weissbier was kaput.

Finally, the seizing man ceased seizing and rose to his feet. I fought that primal American spectator's instinct to give him a standing O, realizing morbidly that he could collapse again at any second and die. He staggered around a bit, let out a few probably incoherent words (doubly incoherent because I don't know Korean), looked around, scratched his head, and bowed ashamedly to the onlooking crowd, deciding by default that he was terribly drunk. His two friends grabbed him by the arms and grumbled as they dragged him out of the bar. Your worst enemy is your own nervous system (Orwell, 43).

The Bostonian had not finished his bug.

"Eat up." I pointed a chopstick.

"Fuck you," he said.

Feeful come and feeful go.

First thing this morning, one of my eight year-olds pegged me in the eye with a tennis ball. Furious and half-blind, I let out a beleaguered ogre groan and groped for the would-be assassin, eventually snagging him by the collar. I ripped his ball away and tossed it in the garbage. Rule number one: never martyr a fuzzy spheroid. For the next forty-five minutes, the kids went on a rampage, scribbled all over me in black marker, roundhouse kicked the walls, tore everything to shreds. In spite of my recent advances in pretension and musical literacy, I still do not deal well with bullying.

I had so mori soup for dinner. "So mori" means "cow head." As much as I wanted to be revolted by the stuff, it was indescribably bland. Well, I could describe it to you, but I would only end up using some worthless description like "indescribably brand." You know?

I just finished reading 1984 for what might have been the 1,984th time. It's the only book I can re-read with any sort of non-contrived enthusiasm. It's written like a shark. There isn't a sentence in the book that isn't pure muscle. I still jump when they get caught.

Tomorrow I'm going on a road trip to Gyeongju with the Korean brothers and the Bostonian neo-hippie. I'm excited because we won't be in Daegu, or on top of a mountain overlooking Daegu, or in a historic Shilla Dynasty suburb in the process of being swallowed alive by Daegu.

It's 4:45 in the morning and I'm holed up in the fourth floor stairwell of an emptied-out office building, slurping from a cup of authentic ramen noodles. It's time for bed.

Dirty Daegu

Hagwon.

I am in Korea. I'm too tired to write an authentic blog post, but I will gladly regurgitate the mass e-mail I sent out to everyone.

Daegu is a soul-crushing monstrosity swarming with small men in grey suits. The city has a pervasive stench that smells like a combination of garbage, fire, body odor, and kimchi. (Kimchi, for the record, smells like a combination of garbage, fire, and body odor.) From what I can tell, 98% of Daegu's inhabitants live in the horrifying 36-story filing cabinets that line the brownish river that drools through the middle of town. I would describe these apartment megaplexes in detail, but they don't really have any details to describe. You must believe me when I say they are horrifying.

I'm still like a skittish kitten around here - as opposed to a Scottish kitten, which anyone with good sense would name Seamus McManx - and I am constantly shocked and a little nauseated when I turn to find myself staring at a wall in my own apartment that I have never seen in my life. Everywhere here is unfamiliar. I woke up this morning and had no idea where I was. That much isn't unusual, but in any case, I'm not used to being woken up by a turnip vendor screaming into my window through a megaphone.

Everyone stares at me as I walk down the street. I do not expect this to cease when my 'fro grows back. Or when I grow out my beard. Or when I start walking around with my fly down and my gargantuan caucasian penis dangling out. But I'm not too bothered by it. The staring, I mean. They aren't doing it to be rude. The Koreans stare at me the way you might stare if you saw a flaming kangaroo hopping down the street with Buzz Aldrin sitting in its pouch playing "Mister Bojangles" on the mandolin. In short, I have caused more moped fatalities than I am worth.

Little kids point at me and yell "Chogi! Chogi!" (Over there! Over there!) in horrified voices. I wave at them and they run away screaming. Now I know how Bigfoot must have felt. No. Nobody knows how Bigfoot felt.

Hardly anyone here speaks English, but everyone wears Engrish. Let's face it: regardless of what our language is actually saying, it looks damned good when it's printed on a t-shirt in comic sans font. A few of my favorites:

(as worn by a dumpy 40-something year-old man) "MAKE A NEW KIND OF LOVE"
(picture of Snoopy smelling a heart) "UMM, TASTE OF LOVE"
(as worn by a teenaged fellow, in sparkly letters) "WORLD WITHOUT STRANGERS"
... and (as worn by a ten year-old Korean girl) "PUREFUCKING CANADIAN"

I finished my second day of classes today. Some of the students are bashful, quiet, absolute angels. Others are punk pubescents who are more interested in the woodgrain of their desks than the English language. I've got to learn to not give a shit, to take it all in stride, to not get hurt by indifference, hostility, or cruelty. That is the only way to survive school, the hagwon.

Tonight, I came home after a long day of classes and I drank a few rotten Cass beers. Then, I held a solitary dance party to The Beatles. When I got tired, I just sat around thinking about how fucking wonderful they are. That was today. Tomorrow might be better or worse or the same. I hope it's better.