The winter holiday for Korean students at public schools lasts between Christmas time and the beginning of February. Because Korean parents are intent on forcing their offspring to use every waking hour to study, Hagwons take on extra students during this period. For the last couple of months I have been teaching two separate high school classes. I taught one class every day at 1.30pm and the other class every other day at 6.30pm. When these classes were introduced to me by our manager he promised that the first couple of lessons would be ‘free talking’ –“Just introduce yourself to them, get to know them, share your dreams....” but he guaranteed that he would find a suitable text book for me to use very soon. Unsurprisingly this never happened and therefore it was up to me to come up with a new and interesting topic every day that would grab the attention of a bunch of 19-21 year old Korean students. What made this even more difficult was that one student happened to take both of the classes that I taught so I couldn’t even regurgitate the material we had used in the first class to use it for the second. Therefore, in total, I had to think of about fifty different themes which was tough work for my brain. As expected some things worked very well; love, national holidays, stress and some went terribly; the generation gap, diet and exercise, military service.
The two classes that I taught were distinctly different. The first started off being a group of about twelve students, but as with all classes at our Hagwon, they disintegrated and by the last week I was left with only two. This particular collection of youths could not have been duller. In the first couple of weeks I put their lack of participation down to under confidence and shyness. But when week five started walking my way and they had got to know their fellow classmates pretty well, I realised that it was just because their poor brains had been fried with an overload of study and other people’s myopic opinions. These kids didn’t have anything original to say and couldn’t back up any of their opinions even when I jumped up and down reciting, “give me a reason!! I need a reason!” Their written English ability was good but the most I ever heard come out of their sullen little mouths was ‘Yes’ ‘No’ and ‘Just because’ (the latter was their given reason for everything.) Most of them wanted to be business men or women and were studying that at university which obviously clarifies that they had an extreme lack of imagination and had lost their souls during adolescence. When I asked what sort of business they wanted to run I was told that it did not matter as long as they became rich.
I remember doing an interesting exercise with them a few weeks ago. We had been talking about (or I had been talking about) people’s priorities in life and people’s wants and desires from life. I gave them a list of priorities and asked them to number them from 1-12 (one being the most important) and to give reasons for doing so.
The list included:
A happy long-term relationship
Raising good children
A high level of academic education
World knowledge and wisdom (travel, reading, voluntary work etc)
Friends you can count on
Money
Being famous
Being powerful
Having a fulfilling career
Owning valuable things
Being aesthetically beautiful
I'm not naive, I absolutely expect university students to give responses that focus on themselves in the present rather than things like family. What I didn’t expect was that 90% of the students would give exactly the same response and it would take them less than two minutes to decide (I was hoping it would take up at least ¼ of my lesson). It’s almost as though they are told what their priorities in life must be from a very young age so that by the time they reach 19 or 20 they don’t even have to consider anything, rather like a very easy maths sum. I was also disappointed, though not surprised, that education was very low on their lists (even though they study so much) and world knowledge even lower. Fame, money and beauty was at the top, though I suspect this would be the same if I asked many teenagers anywhere in the world. What confused me was that although ‘money’ was listed in the top three, owning valuable things was about number seven. I asked them why they wanted lots of money if they were not interested in owning nice things and they said that they wanted a swanky car and a big house for show and that was all- they didn’t seem to be interested in the contents. And everyone wanted that big house to be in America. It was like talking to a load of dummies or pre-programmed robots or humans whose brains had been replaced with a potato and a tape recorder that reeled off the same rubbish as all the other potato-brained humans in the room.
Just when I was beginning to think that this generation of Koreans were desperately lacking in spirit, soul, depth, originality and innovation- I met Phoebe (who always signed her name the same way she said it- PB) and Stella. Obviously these were their given English names for the purpose of the class only. These girls attended my evening class and were the life and soul of the party. When I first met them they terrified me- Phoebe was a tall, very skinny girl of 21 who never parted with her five inch heels and short black mini skirt. She wore thick, charcoal black eye make-up and had radiant bronze skin. Her hair was dyed auburn which she always wore in a pony tail that was slicked back against her head. She looked like she had just stepped off the set of a Korean pop music video. Stella was her best friend, much shorter than Phoebe but probably even skinnier. I’m sure I could have fitted my moderately small hands around her waist- she was the width of a can of beans. Like Phoebe, she had thick make-up smothered on to her face but she chose the traditional white face make up that most Koreans opt for. Stella had short cropped hair but sometimes she came to class with a long red wig. They were loud, chatty, outgoing, confident and very funny. Their command of English wasn’t great but they tried at every possibly opportunity. They had a wicked sense of humour and my classes sailed by with the help of their eager participation and general zest for life. The thing that impressed me the most about them was their lack of seriousness and their ability to enjoy being a twenty-something-year-old and not succumb to the pressures that so many teenagers in Korea have to put up with. They didn’t know what their future held, they didn’t really care- they were living for the moment and they were having an awful lot of fun. It was very refreshing to see. But, they were still smart kids and they put the work in where it was needed. We talked about all sorts of things together- from serial killers to cosmetic surgery, relationship troubles to travel. They wanted to know everything about me and likewise I was very keen to find out more about them. They had strong opinions about everything- often differing to most of their class mates and they were always able to give reasons for their views. There was nothing reserved about them and they weren’t afraid to be laughed at which was often the case, though they would laugh along too.
In the corner of that class always sat the same girl- her Anglicized name was Suji and this was a name she had chosen herself, I assume it was based on her Korean name. She was a world away from Phoebe and Stella and I wish I had been able to find out a bit more about her. She was quiet and her body language reminded me of a hermit crab, she would cower away under her oversized woolly hat and big winter coat. She didn’t talk a lot, but she was different to the others and the very few things that she did say suggested that she had a lot of distaste for Korea. During one of my classes we talked about feminism and equality between men and women. I declared I was a liberal feminist and that I believed that equal opportunity and fairness between the sexes was fundamental to a forward thinking society. I asked the class what they thought and most said that they thought that equal rights between men and women in Korea was very prevalent (I disagree entirely but did not voice this.) Suji piped up and stated that she thought that women had a hard time in Korea and were not treated as equals to men, she said she was a feminist too and that Korea was a horrible place for strong minded women. She spoke with real bitterness and looking at her, it was almost as though she was trying to disassociate herself from Korea entirely. Her hair was dyed light brown in a way that looked natural and she had bleached her eyelashes and eyebrows the same colour as if to rid herself of the Korean look. She is the first Korean person I have met to declare a hatred for the awful pop music that we are forced to listen to as residents here and she said that she was a fan of Radiohead. This was pretty shocking as most local people don’t even know who The Beatles are. I felt quite sad for her as she seemed to hold a lot of weight on her shoulders and clearly didn’t fit in with the majority of people her age. It was as though she was waiting for the opportunity to flee this country and as soon as she got one, she would vanish from here and never look back.
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