The Lazy Mexican

Today, as I was leaving school for siesta, I heard the word "Kimchi" screamed in my direction. It was one of my teenage students, smoking a butt on a park bench. I just started teaching two days ago; no doubt this nickname will spread. I asked him what he was up to. He and his friend were just smoking some dope before class, he explained. I nodded. I've never understood why my students are this cozy with me, but they always are. They spill their guts to me, tell me about their sex romps and drug regimens. It is my greatest asset as a teacher and it is my Achilles heel. In a profession where bonding with one's students on anything but the most platonic subject-verb-object level is strongly discouraged, I somehow wind up playing guidance counselor and wizened sage for people only slightly younger than I am. It's frightening and reassuring.

In Spanish class, my teacher turned around and searched the coffee shop for a la object. She couldn't find any. Everything in the room was male. (She finally found (and later devoured) a tarta.) While the rest of the class moved on to ser and estar, I couldn't get my mind off it: a room full of el objects, of masculine nouns. One could work with this. One could arrange one's rooms in a German gender-based feng shui. You could bring your MENSA friends over and have them guess the motif. "Wrong, Blaise. Everything in this room is neuter in Slovakian, not in Serbocroat." Would there be a palpable difference in aura? In a room of der objects, would a game of poker break out? In a room of die objects, would everyone start ovulating at once? My curiosity knows no bounds.

The lazy Mexican is a myth. True: for two hours in mid-afternoon – the standard hours of Nordic productivity – the Mexicans loosen their ties and lay around in the shade drinking and smoking and sleeping. But that just means that they get up earlier in the morning and work later at night. Mañana exists, but it only applies to social engagements: my friends show up an hour later than they say they will. Hell, I do that in America. But work-wise, mañana doesn't apply to me, or the taco vendors, or the bankers, or the clerks at the supermarket. It might be different with Mexicans in the States. I'm not sure. But after someone has made a mad dash across hundreds of miles of desert at the risk of death by gunshot, starvation, thirst, or combinations thereof; after they have lived in a sublet closet and spent months scrapping around for work before finally earning the privilege of disemboweling pig carcasses for twelve hours a day at minimum wage; after they have sent the last of their paycheck back home so their children, parents, and grandparents can scrape by in rural Michoacán; after all that, how anyone can call the Mexicans lazy – I must admit, it is beyond me. But then, so are many things.

Walking home.

I feed the beasts some word puzzles and while they tear each other apart, my mind melts into the white paint on the wall. It is six something and I have taught nine classes today. Two of them weren't anywhere on my schedule, but I taught them anyway, because I am a slave for children.

Walking home. I'm two blocks from my dumpy little flat where a clogged toilet and a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal await me. It's like the afterlife. But first, I stop for a bowl of take-out kimchi stew. When I get inside the restaurant, the owner guy approaches and embraces me. What? Oh, right. This man befriended me whilst he was staggering drunk one night several weeks ago; I think it was a Tuesday. He insists that I stay and eat at his restaurant, so I do. I'm sitting by myself and in Korea, this means you are insane. The table of high school girls next to me bubbles over with giggles.

The owner guy asks me if I want a cup of coffee and I say yes. I wait outside in the cold, breathing clouds. He comes out and hands me a little pee cup of sugary milkwater and then practices his English on me for half an hour. He seems to know 30,000 vocabulary words, but not how to pronounce or use them. He embraces me again, says he is very jubilation, and asks me to come by his restaurant every day for good pood. I say sure.

A block away from home, I stop by the bakery for a cornbread thing. I'm browsing the cornbread thing shelf when the door opens behind me and one of my middle school students walks in.

"Teacher. Buy me pood. Puh-lease-uh," he says.

Ordinarily, I would drop a quip and disappear into the night, but my will is so decimated at this point that I cave in and buy him a pig-face cheese danish. He says thanks.

"One day," he says, "I buy you pood."

I'm in the convenience store across the street from my apartment. My canned coffee rings up for three bucks which strikes me as vaguely ludicrous, but I'm too spaced to argue. As I pull my wallet from my back pocket, it vomits all my cards out on the floor. While I'm bent over trying to claw the cards up off the tile with my untrimmed fingernails, five Korean geezers cut in front of me in line. When I finally get out of there with the coffee, I'm stopped at the door by a woman holding a gurgling fetus/baby thing that's about six hours fresh from the womb.

"Excuse me," she says, "please talk to Jae-Min."

Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: [ogles, spits up on self]
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello, Jae-Min!
Jae-Min: Wagghhhhh.
Mom: Say hello, Jae-Min!
Me: Hello!
Jae-Min: Blughhhhh.

Mom thanks me, bows, and walks away.

I shut the door and lock it behind me. I'm home. On the dining room table is a 50-pack box of Quaker Oatmeal. In the bathroom is a clogged toilet.

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.

So glad to be a slab.

It's my third month in Korea.

The BBC hordes have been nipping at my heels this year. I was in Krakow for The Pope, I was in Berlin for the World Cup, and now I'm in Korea for the apocalypse. Call me Forrest Gump. And yet I've scarcely written a word about any of it. I'm not sure why, exactly. When I'm not at work getting ddong chimmed by Korean 4th graders, I'm brooding on how I will recount my travels to my cybernetic great-grandchildren of the future, whether I will narrate each episode in past or present tense, which digressions I will make, the length of said digressions, whether to omit sordid details for posterity ... but my misadventures, like this afternoon's kimchi, need time (probably several years) to be digested.

I will say - in highly general and mostly vague terms - that my travels have been rendered surreal by the sheer ubiquity of western shit. I feel very much like ... what's his name? ... Tartuffe? Voltaire? ... ah! - Candide! ... what with all the zany coincidences, the recurring themes, the lopping-off-of-ass-cheeks and all. Certain corporate logos have a way of running to your aid when you are at your most defeated, when a Berliner has jacked your luggage and an unprecedented late-May blizzard descends upon you; when your posh British roommates have locked you out of the flat and spending the night on a Krakowian park bench becomes a real (although not splendidly enticing) possibility; when you've just missed your connecting flight home and pause briefly to consider whether you (as a man) could sell yourself for a profit. But when all seems utterly and unrefundably lost, cutting through the frenzied squall of binge-shopping Asians, you spy those doughy electric letters - "DUNKIN DONUTS" - and rising above the consonant cacophony of a Polish Catholic anti-gay march, those glistening, golden buns - "BURGER KING" - and at the train station at the end of the earth, where there is nothing but a slab of rusty concrete and the tombstone-colored sky, where the wolves stand to come before the train ever does, just over your shoulder is a Starbucks, selling grande frappucino latés for half the gross domestic product of wherever it is you've ended up.

I climbed my first non-metaphorical mountain not too long ago. Here is a picture.



Nothing is impossible, just prohibitively time-consuming.

-Keith

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.