Frankie's Misadventures

This morning as I listen to the steady pitter-patter of Korean rainfall, I sit with my cat and computer in my lap. Sadly, there is not room for both--but I haven't the heart to put him down, drowsy and comfortable as he is. Frankie crawled up there just minutes after I sat down, his usual habit. He had been huddling uncomfortably with the electronic cords in the small space between my dresser and my armchair, presumably to get away from the light and cold my apartment then afforded, and must have found it too unpleasant a place for a nap. Over the last six months, he has proved to be a constant companion, if sometimes a little moody or restless. He's also quite resilient, having survived two moves, a trip to the States for which he was left behind, and a few excursions to the Great Outdoors.

"Jennifer Lowery tried to take Frankie for a walk this morning," I posted on Facebook in the middle of May, referring to the first time I tried to take him outside. "Fifteen minutes and a few dozen scratches later, we uneventfully arrived back at my apartment because he couldn't handle all the noise and sights of people, moving cars, buildings, and storefronts. Apparently, the concrete jungle is no place for a cat, either." At the suggestion of one of his previous owners, I had decided that taking Frankie for a walk would ease his restlessness. A friend in Chungju walked her cat just like you would walk a dog, so thought I, too, would give the idea a try. I bought him a leash and collar set as a way of apology for keeping him cooped up inside for so many months. I knew that just letting him outside would be disastrous, since I didn't know if he'd ever come back home. "For the record," I commented to my friends that day, "he was on a leash."

The day I chose to experiment was a Saturday morning, a time I thought would be peaceful. I had stumbled upon a beautiful sports park about a ten-minute walk from the apartment and was certain that Frankie would enjoy frolicking there. Unfortunately, it was a place we never quite made it to. I confessed on Facebook to not "ever put[ting] him down because I wanted him to calm down a bit first, a thing that sadly never happened. We didn't even get halfway to our park of choice before the decision to take him back home [was made]. If he spooked with just [the] one or two cars [that he saw], I knew he wouldn't have been able to handle crossing the busy street that lay between us and the park." In hindsight, it's a good thing we didn't get very far because, guaranteed, there would have been many more people at the park where those on the street had come from. If anything is certain about Korea, it's a place where you'll never be alone, especially in the Great Outdoors.

After that fitful episode, I didn't take him out again for several weeks. One night around 9p.m., however, dressed in a short-sleeve sweater and sandals, I had the urge to try again. "Want to go ou'side?" I cooed to Frankie as I lifted his leash off its hook and clasped his collar around him. "I wan' go ou'side--you wan' go ou'side?" I scooped him up and off we ventured. I should have gotten the hint when he tensed up as I opened the apartment door, one with an electronic locking mechanism that whirs curiously as you unlock it. Timidly, I tiptoed down the stairs with him, Frankie still a contracted ball of muscle in my arms.

This time, he lasted just until the front door, another electronic piece with unfamiliar noises ebbing from it. He was already uncomfortable with the strange noises pulsating through the closed doors and walls of other apartments. He had already watched the hall light just outside my door turn off as we descended the first flight of stairs, witnessing what was no doubt a mystery to him. The corridor, which served as the front foyer of the building, had been dark until we reached the bottom step, which triggered an unseen light sensor and set off more of Frankie's suspicions. Perched uneasily on my shoulder as the automatic door opened politely for us to step through to the outside, the motion triggered more fears in him and Frankie dug into my flesh, scrambled down my back, and ran as fast as he could to get away from it.

He couldn't escape, as he was still tethered to my arm with the leash. I scrambled to reach him and pull him back into my arms. Each time I tried, he struggled to free himself and hissed at me loudly, baring his sharp cat fangs. He pulled so hard, I thought I would choke him. I was finally able to grab him and carry him back to the apartment. We reached it breathless and panting, our hearts pounding and our bodies exhausted, safely home. My left shoulder throbbed as I examined what Frankie's sharp claw had left behind. I vowed to myself that, scared of the outdoors as he was, I wouldn't try again.

Sometime after that, Frankie started a curious habit: Late in the evening he would sit alternately at the door or near his leash and meow loud enough for it to become annoying. At first I ignored it, not quite understanding the nature of his pleas. Slowly I began to figure it out. "You really don't want to go outside," I cautioned him one night. "You think you do, but you really don't." As a way to prove it to him, on two occasions I hooked up with the leash, set him down on the floor (having learned my lesson!), and slowly cracked open the door. He instantly tensed up and each time, he pulled hard on the leash and backed up past my sliding glass entryway door, about two feet. He still meowed at the door, though--so one night I donned a long sleeve sweater and strong-armed him outside. He squirmed in my arms for the five minutes we were outside, but at least he didn't claw me this time.

The most recent blunder to add to Frankie's growing collection came last Tuesday, the 13th. "I tried taking him for a walk tonight," I wrote to Brandon that night, "which almost ended in disaster." The rest of the email recounts the feel of the attempt:

I held him tightly as we walked out the apartment door (that has a new-fangled electronic lock that makes all kinds of noise), down the stairs, and through yet another noisy electronic door. He made it about two blocks: We crossed two lightly-trafficked streets (one which had all its traffic go by at once just so Frankie could get an authentic feel for city-life) and headed towards a park-like patch of grass. "Look," I cooed at him, "there's some green." We turned the corner towards the patch and suddenly he started squirming nervously to be let down. To our left were mysterious-looking Korean men chit-chatting on a nearby bench. I suspect he saw them and his fears instantly arose. I tried putting him down (holding onto his leash), but that only served to aggravate him more. He was so upset that he ran so fast I almost couldn't catch him--and he was tethered to the end of the leash! When I finally reached him, he hissed violently at me. For a moment, I thought I would lose him and feared that I would somehow let go of the leash and he'd be gone. Just about the time I was able to grab him, it started sprinkling. As I clutched him even tighter and walked home, I noticed more and more people on the street. We finally made it safely back and he calmed down, but each time I try to take him out, it's a bit of a misadventure.

Brandon agreed that the excursion was definitely a misstep. Given our many uncomfortable outings, South Korea doesn't seem a good place for a cat; at least, not South Korean suburbia. "I wonder if Frankie would do better in a wilderness area with less people?" Brandon pondered. I replied that the cat might do much better in a place like West Texas--or even San Antonio, provided he had enough frolicking space. In my email back to Brandon, I affirmed that whenever I leave Korea for good, Frankie would be coming with me.

For a while now, I've been considering keeping him. After all we've been through, the least I could do is not to leave him in a place so hostile to felines. I've even considered taking him on other international assignments I may take in the future. He may yet prove to be quite a savvy traveler, if a highly sedated one.

Dream Come True

Meet Pippy Longstocking, my childhood heroine. She was the Strongest Girl in the World, a redhead with freckles who rode a horse instead of a bike to school. She lived alone in a large house by the beach because her father was off to sea and each night, she would gaze out at the ocean to wait for him. She always knew he'd come back for her, one day.

In sixth grade I must have checked out her book and read and reread it four times. I even watched a movie of her when it came on T.V. I was a lot like her, I felt: Though I wasn't strong, I was a redhead with freckles who liked to wear pigtails (albeit ones that never stood up on end). How much more similar could you get? Because I loved her so, I dressed up like her once in eighth grade for an alternative to Halloween party at my school called Fun-O-Mania. I didn't realize then that her hair didn't naturally stay in the updo fashion she so lovably coined--I thought all you needed was a little "muscle" to make the braids super-tight. Unlike Pippy's, my hair stayed limp the whole night and I was at a loss to figure out why.

Early this week at my school in Korea, I discovered that our activity for the month would be Crazy Hat Day--and, sad to say, I was fresh out of crazy hats. "But if you don't have a hat," one of the co-teachers affirmed, "you can wear crazy hair." Crazy hair? I thought. Now that I could pull off. But not without a little change in persona for the day. The 'do would be meaningless if I came as myself. But Pippy could be bold enough to wear it gracefully and with pride. This time, I would do it right.

"Do you know where I could find wire?" I asked James Tuesday as we were riding back home from work.

"I have some in my home," he said. He then proceeded to describe what one might use to plug in various electronics. "It's this thick or something like that," he said as he fingered the mesh pocket of the seat in front of me, a string the thickness of a small rope.

"I don't need a cord; I need wire. And I need something thinner than that." As I hadn't told anyone about my costume decision, I didn't want to ruin the surprise by letting him in on why I needed it.

The plan was to walk to Home Plus near Byeongjeom Station that night, an "everything store" much like Super-Target or HEB Plus, to shop for my outfit. I imagined finding a coil of copper at the store to match my hair and was only slightly disappointed when I discovered all I could find was stainless-steel grey. Like a blonde (gasp!), I almost wanted to say aloud, "Well, you have any other colors? Like, y' know, brown?"

I had forgotten the very nature of wire and what copper varieties are generally used for. When I came to my senses after my momentary relapse, I wasn't interested in becoming an even better conductor of electricity: Stainless steel it

was.

In addition to wire, I was in need of some long stockings more colorful than the usual kind-- and was not in the mood to buy some for cheap at the station, only to discover once home that they wouldn't go past my calf. While browsing Home Plus' selection, I found three kinds that might suffice: a demure pair of off-white knee-lengths; bright orange hose; and a pair of black no-toe tights with pink and white horizontal pinstripes. I surmised that Pippy would in turn wear all of them, and perhaps on one occasion wear them all at once. As neither my budget nor my dresser had room for extras, however, I needed to decide on one. For a good while I had my mind set on the off-white pair because I knew I'd wear them again. But Pippy isn't demure, so I nixed those. I then thought of the orange pair, since I knew Pippy's style to be that loud. In the end, I chose the pinstripes because they most mimicked her red-and-white-striped knee-highs from the good ol' days.

During snack on Crazy Hat Day, I told my students, "Teacher Jennifer isn't here today; she went on vacation. She sent me in her place. I'm Teacher Pippy Longstocking." It was doubtful that they knew who she was, but I was still eager to play the part. I had wondered who would get the joke as I carried out my transformation earlier that morning. I knew my American co-teacher, Jack, would and he was the first one I asked upon arrival. Tongue-in-cheek, he replied that I looked like "Popeye the Sailor Man." When I guffawed at his comment, he dutifully corrected himself. What came as a huge surprise was that anyone else would recognize me.

A redhead among such a black-haired populace already sticks out, but one with horizontal locks is hard to miss. As I entered school, people instantly noticed my change in hairstyle; however, they also caught my shift in identity as well. No less than four Korean teachers called me "Pippy" that morning even before I had a chance to introduce myself. Three of them asked for my picture, which nowadays is akin to asking for an autograph. They quickly confessed that they had seen the television series when it had aired so many decades ago. It appears that The Strongest Girl in the World made her shining silver screen debut in the Land of the Morning Calm, too. I realized that day how much of a cultural leveler Longstocking had really become.

The stockings I chose proved to be the magic touch that brought the outfit to life. I have begun a tentative friendship with our hagwon's cook, Teacher Jane. Though she knows as much English as I know Korean (which is a handful of unrelated words), we seem to carry a mutual respect for one another. Because of this connection, however limited or fragile, I thought she would appreciate seeing my handiwork up close. From others' reactions, it was likely she would understand even through the language barrier.

"Teacher Jane," I told her as she stood at the sink, her back to me. "Today we had Crazy Hair Day." Her eyes lit up and her lips broke into a broad grin when she spied my twisted tresses. She sputtered off something grand which I interpreted to mean joyous recognition. "Pippy," she said excitedly, calling my hair cute. Motioning down her legs with her hands, she told me in Korean (at least, as far as I surmise) that to complete the image all I needed was long stockings. I motioned back, this time in English, that indeed I had them, indicating my horizontal pinstripes. She grinned broadly again and clasped her hands. "Pippy," she finished.

I had no idea I would be so well

known as a personified children's character. As I ventured to dinner that night in a small town a short subway ride south, still in costume, I was recognized by no less than three Korean strangers. The group of us that went were passing a string of small shops en route to our restaurant of choice while a proprietress of one of the shops stood on its threshold. Someone commented offhandedly behind me, "Hey, did you hear her? She just called you Pippy." In fact I hadn't heard. But given the response from earlier, it wasn't that surprising. I relayed to the party what I had discovered that day about Pippy's now-world-renowned fame. "They can't pronounce the Longstocking," I said to my friends, "but they recognize Pippy."

Later that night, we strayed from the path back to the train station long enough to peruse the foreign food market for some American comforts. As I stood inside the tiny store, the owner gestured to my outfit and sputtered something that I thought was Korean. "She's trying to say Longstocking," another of the group chimed. I pointed to my stockings and she grinned. "Pippy," the woman said. "Yebbun, beautiful." I had never heard Pippy described as that before--it felt kind of nice to bask for a moment in the glory of someone else's fame.

Half of the group split off from the other while I payed for my things, as they were in a hurry to get back. Only my friends Tim and Jessica stayed with me as we trudged back to the station through windy, dark alleyways: They were the only ones to witness what happened next. As I noticed a car behind us, I moved out of the main portion of the street so it could pass. The vehicle, a taxi, slowed as it pulled up next to me. The driver's window was already down and he stuck his head out and tilted it towards me. "Pippy?" he smiled.

My foreign friends liked the get-up as much as the Koreans. A young woman I share the bus with, Tina, told me that morning to make sure I bent the braids upward before I walked in to class to show my students; she was sure I'd be a hit. Having accidentally run into more foreigners as I walked home, I sat down and shared why I was so adorned. One of them, a guy named Corey whom I ran into at Home Plus the night before, was proud to see that I had "pulled it off." I told them "as long as you don't mind Pippy Longstocking, I'll go with you." At the restaurant, I sat across from Tim, the organizer of the foray into Songtan. With sincerity in his voice, he confessed, "It's a good look for you." I couldn't disagree.

Today, my director echoed Tim's sentiments. She stopped me for a moment as I was leaving school this evening and wished me a good weekend. The she declared that she was "very impressed with [my] hairstyle" on Wednesday. Given all the positive reactions that I received throughout my stint as Pippy Longstocking, it's a 'do that I will certainly have to do again.

the staff of Apple Tree Dongtan:

(from left) James, Pippy (me), Anita, Michelle, Vicky, and Grace

not pictured: Jack

Jin Yong Chun

As I was grabbing for a handle on the mostly crowded subway car to Oido tonight, en route back home to Byeongjeom from the Samgakji station in Seoul, I noticed a thin, slightly taller Asian man in a somewhat-wrinkled heavy Oxford shirt standing next to me. His face was more round than most Koreans I've met and his ears stuck out like a little boy's. His cropped dark hair was beginning to grey at the edges and his eyes creased at the corners like crow's feet each time he moved his mouth. I noticed his lips trotting laboriously up and down as he tried to formulate a word. Each time it refused to come out, he offered me a shy smile and I smiled back. He stood almost a meter from me at first, but inched ever more toward me as the train started to move.

He watched me situate my bag and pull out The Opposite of Fate, by Amy Tan. Shamelessly, he peered over my shoulder as I held the book in my hand. Aware of his interest, I turned it unopened toward him as a silent offer of kindness and wondered if he could read the cover. As I opened it to the bookmarked page, I tried to casually hold it out far enough for him to catch a glimpse of its English contents. We stood this way for several minutes, me peeking at him from time to time as interest to communicate glimmered in his eyes. I tried getting back to my book and ignoring his desire for conversation. He finally broke the awkward stalemate with a faltering voice. "Hi. Where--where you from?"

"Where am I from? I am from America," I said slowly, careful to enunciate every syllable. "From Texas."

"I am from Chinese," he offered in return. So that explained the rounded face. "Ar-artist," he faltered again, painting in the air with his hands. "Computer. Building design."

"You like artists?" I asked, unsure of his meaning. I thought he garbled the name of a famous Asian artist of whom I was unfamiliar.

He nodded his head toward the book in my hand. I thought that meant he was trying to read it. "Can you read?" I asked, holding it further out.

He nodded his head regally. "Jin, Jin Yong-chun," he said and tried to air-scribe his name in hangul. The white noise of the screeching subway car and its occupants covered up his words. The only thing I recognized from his pantomime was the "n" shape at the end. "Kim?" I suggested, at a loss for the rest of his name. I volunteered mine. "Jen-i-fer," I articulated.

"Chinese name," he said. I was sure I'd never remember it right. Only later when he handed me a small black-and-white slip of paper that served as a business card did I catch his whole name. The name itself was curious: It was printed in hangul, with its romanized counterpart only appearing as part of his email address. The hangul read "Kim," but the email address confirmed his self-introduced family name as "Jin." If the name was Chinese, I wondered why he transliterated it K-i-m instead.

"How long have you been in Korea?" I asked as he stared blankly at me, unresponsive. I quickly realized there was no way to hand-gesture my way to the meaning of the phrase.

He then started volunteering more information about his life. "English, Chinese, Japan," he counted on his fingers.

"Do you know Korean?" I asked. Again, no response.

"One," he started. "One and half year."

"You have been in Korea one and a half years? I have been here for eight months," I offered, purposely accenting the ths on the end.

"Thirty," he thought for a moment. "Thirty-eight." Twelve years older. A surprising age, given his childlike mannerisms up to this point.

"I am twenty-six," I volleyed back.

"You," he said, pondering me for a moment as if he hadn't understood my last comment. "You forty." He subtly reconsidered. "You thirty-five," he asserted. It was as if he wanted me as his peer. Okay, I thought. I can be thirty-five if you want.

As we bantered back and forth, I remembered Amy Tan's statements about her Chinese immigrant mother's unpolished English skills. Tan noted that, while growing up, others treated her mother differently because of her poor English. In turn, Tan herself began to limit her own thoughts toward her mother. "I believed that her English," she wrote in The Opposite of Fate, "reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect" (274). I tried not to impose those same imperfections on Jin Yong Chun. It wasn't that he couldn't think, I reasoned; he just couldn't think well in English.

Even with this word to the wise in mind, I began to notice a certain air of, shall we say, immaturity about this man as our time together progressed. Throughout our exchange, he had been unnaturally trusting, innocent, and shyly timid, but genuinely interested in communication with me. Just like a child. At first I chalked it up to an idea that my friend Emily had shared the night before: that Korean men (and perhaps this applies to other Asian nationality groups) are coddled and taken care of by their parents for so long that even at 26, 27, and 28 they still lack a sense of adult maturity or independence. Because of this, young men in this country don't usually "grow up" until well into their thirties. As I continued to ponder this thought, it occurred to me that surely by thirty-eight, the age that my new companion confessed to being, a man would have grown out of any such mama's boy complex. Surely.

While we continued to stand and chit-chat, a seat opened in front of us and, in impeccable English, he offered it to me: "Sit down please." Moments later, the seat next to me became free and he took it as well. Now properly seated, we continued our chat.

It was here that he handed me his "card" and here that he clarified his profession. I discovered that he works with computers in Osan designing interiors for buildings (though I'm not sure what kind of buildings). He considers himself an artist, the same one that he had mentioned earlier, though I'm not sure if his profession is what makes him an artist. Here, too, he asked for a means of communicating with me. "I don't give out my number," I apologized. I told him the same was true of my email address. When I wrote my first name down for him on one of his cards, I refused to give him my last as a precautionary measure.

Again attention turned toward my book. I pointed to the woman on the front and we read her name together: "A-my Tan." He tasted her surname in his mouth for a moment, then reformed it. "She's Chinese," I offered and his face lit up. I then flipped through the book to show him different pictures of Tan's life.

"Here she is my age," I told him, pointing to a professional portrait.

He pointed to the mustached and bearded man with shaggy, receding hair, her husband, seated next to her. "Old," he said.

"No," I countered. "They are the same age."

I took him to other photos, pointing out her mother in them. "Mother," he tasted. I then asked about his family and he told me he had a father, mother, and one brother in the mountains of China. I revealed that I had two brothers and his countenance rose instantly--he was so surprised that he was incredulous. "Two brothers," he smiled with awe and envy.

Again, he remembered his three languages. "English, Chinese, Japan," he counted on his hands again.

"Can you read Chinese?" I interrupted him and he nodded.

"Only English and Japan I speak." So he doesn't read English. "I want to have English book," continued, "so that I can read it." I toyed with the idea of giving him the book in my hand, what he had been eying the whole train ride. Though he could connect to the Chinese references inside it, evidence from our earlier conversation led to the judgement that he wouldn't have been able to understand the book's complex language. It might have done nothing but frustrate him.

"This is my stop," I tried to say. "I have to go."

He looked back at the Korean marquee and nodded. "Mine too. I take bus to home. Twenty... twenty-four I think." So he would be catching a bus at Geumjeong and not transferring subway lines, I reasoned. It would give me some alone time on the train ride to my place and a chance to get back to my book. We exited Line 4 together and stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps leading out of the station. I waved at him to say goodbye.

He shook his head and indicating he was transferring, too. "But aren't you taking the bus?" I asked.

"Osan," he said. "I take bus at Osan."

Oh great, I thought. Now there surely wouldn't be respite. My only hope was that the approaching subway for Line 1 would be destined for Byeongjeom or Seodongtan. As he was going several stops farther down than that, he would be forced to wait for the next available train. I secretly groaned inside when the PA system announced the destination was Cheonan, the last stop on Line 1 and a perfect fit for any persons going to both Byeongjeom and Osan. In concert, the two of us stepped onto the train.

Just after transferring to Line 1, Jin Yong Chun took initiative and consulted the subway map mounted above the car's exit door, counting the stops we each had to go. "Five," he said as he reached where I was standing, indicating my number. I thought that was odd because I knew that there were seven stops from the transfer at Geumjeong to my arrival at Byeongjeom. And then I remembered: I had told him I lived "in Suwon" as a precaution and he took it as fact. I debated whether I should now reveal my true location.

I remembered my father's advice about dealing with the mentally handicapped: "We should be nice to them." I wanted to do that for Yong Chun. I looked at his face, trying to memorize every detail. I imagined it was something Jesus would have done. I wanted to remember it--a face that Jesus loves and longs to comfort and make new.

"You my best friend," he said suddenly as we stood looking at each other in the subway car.

I smiled at him kindly. "Yes" was all I could say. Then I began to feel concerned. What does it say about someone if his best friend is a stranger that he meets on a subway? "Do you have friends?" I asked gently.

He counted three digits on his hands, then put one finger down. "Ja-Japan," he said with a timid smile.

"They live in Japan?" I asked. "Do you have any Chinese friends?"

He smiled broadly at this. "Chinese," he nodded, this time with three fingers up. I wanted to ask if he had any Korean friends. "You my best friend," he said again. It reminded me too much of the moment my mentally-handicapped mother leaned into my face with her forehead touching mine and her forearms resting on my shoulders. Peering intently over her glasses and into my eyes, she whispered the same. "You're my best friend."

By this time, my stop--Suwon station, at least--was quickly approaching. Yong Chun had been asking about food for some time now on the trip and he deftly asked again. "Eat?" he asked. "Drink? If have time, I pay." I was cautious. Besides needing to guard my own heart, I knew how exhausted I was from my time in Seoul. I had been away from Frankie (the cat) all weekend as well and needed to get back to him. I told Yong Chun as much as the train pulled into the stop.

His face fell as he prepared to say goodbye. He mumbled something unintelligible and then in Korean managed a feeble, "Anyangikaseyo." I felt I couldn't play with his childlike emotions and stay on the train when he had made such an effort at closure. I quickly got off the train so that he wouldn't think I had lied about my destination. He waved at me as I walked toward the platform's exit and I waved back. His loneliness struck me as I watched the train pull away. I pondered whether I should have stayed and taken him up on his offer.

Though Scripture doesn't expressly state "thou shalt talk to thy neighbor on the subway line," it does state that I have an obligation to "live at peace with all men," "do good to all," and "be all things to all [people]." I felt I fulfilled that tonight. Outsiders will know us by our love, the Scripture says. What else but love would venture to step me out of my comfort zone so that I show the kind of interest in a man's life that Jesus shows? I can't shake the feeling that what I did with Yong Chun tonight was really done to Jesus. I know that the LORD looks down with a heart of compassion on him and I have the privilege to do the same. "Assuredly I say to you," Jesus says in Matthew 25, "inasmuch as you did it to one of the the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me."

Toy Story 3 Comes to Korea

Last Monday morning (Sunday night, San Antonio time), I called my brother Jason to wish him his first happy Father's Day. Among other things, he mentioned that his three-year-old daughter Cami had gone almost a month without wetting the bed. "Anyway," he said, "we were real proud of her so we took her to see Toy Story 3 with Dad and Mom. She said it was scary. It has some scary parts for anyone under five."

The whole movie series holds a special place in my heart. When I was 12 years old, my brothers, my dad, and I went to see the original Toy Story in theaters. We liked it so much that as soon as it came out on VHS (in the time before DVDs, Blue Ray, and Youtube), we bought it and watched it incessantly for the next six years. It became part of our family's micro-culture: Dad and I reveled in quoting different scenes from the movie to each other, line-by-line.

If anyone came up with a solution, my dad would shout, "Out.. the... win-dow--Buzz, you're a genius!" Another of our favorites surfaced whenever somebody around us had a good idea. "I like your thinkin,' Woody," one of us would say with a twinkle in our eye. Quoting the movie was a way of expressing deep thought for my dad and me. It brought a sense of togetherness and like-mindedness. It was almost a form of non-verbal communication between us. All he had to do was say a few lines and I knew just what he meant. It communicated emotion that we could find no other way to show.

As we used their words to communicate, the characters themselves became symbolic of our own lives. I thought of this symbolism as Jason continued his description of Toy Story 3. "I'm not gonna ruin the movie for you," he said, "but there's a scene in there where the toys are--they're in a junk yard and they're heading straight for an incinerator. There's no escape. They all look at each other and hold hands and it's like, 'Well, at least we're all in this together.' That was powerful for me, given Grandpa's situation."

The week I was back in the States, my grandpa was admitted to the hospital and had to miss the wedding. The first time I called home after returning to Korea, Dad told me news about him. "I'm glad you called," Dad had said somberly. "I have something important to tell you." He said Grandpa had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, but Dad was quick to point out that we don't know exactly what that entails. Grandpa was released from the hospital after two weeks, but without a hopeful prognosis. He and my grandma are seeking treatment and remain hopeful throughout this new season, but his condition remains the same. My family and I are currently facing what the toys in the movie did: what looks like a certainty without a means of escape.

When my dad first told me about Grandpa, I was reminded of a truth found in Scripture that has given me peace. "Whether we live or we die, we are the LORD's," it says. I know who my grandfather belongs to--and I know who my family belongs to: They belong to the LORD. My grandfather is a servant of Christ, not a servant of mine. The LORD alone is the One who controls the outcome of these new events. The LORD will uphold my grandfather and fight for him. And if it comes to it, the LORD will bring him home. Jesus alone is the One will see him through this.

"[Toy Story 3] was a great movie to wrap up this set of characters," Jason said. I couldn't help but think of the end of our own story as he said it. It almost feels as if the LORD is closing a season for our family with this illness, "wrapping up the characters," so to speak. But just like the beloved gang on the screen, we still have each other. At least we're all in this together.

My GA 1 Class

Last Friday, I taught my GA1 class how to set up an account with Blogger. Starting today, they will have three entries a week of varying topics to fill their blogs with, one being whatever topic they choose themselves. I hope that this encourages them to write more in English. These are four of the students who are most proficient in English at my language school and I know they are up for the challenge. Thanks to the ease of today's technology, it will now almost be effortless to keep track of my students' writing.

I was supposed to have been handing out journal topics to my students each time we met, which was three days a week. Frankly, however, I was out of ideas for them. This was the class that was always pushed to the back-burner during preparation times at work (which are often inadequate allotments) because it was the last class of the day. If I had no time to really think through the day's classwork, I had even less time to think of a writint prompt. With an uneasy groan, I would glance at the lesson plan and remember that I had once again forgotten a journal topic. Though I was sick of always running into class without one, I didn't know how to fix it.
In vain, I viewed the class as what lay between me and the time to go home. Inevitably, the kids saw it the same way.

The idea for this ongoing assignment suddenly materialized as I was finalizing one of my own blog entries late last week. As I sat at the computer editing, I thought about how fun my GA1 students, all 'tweens, might think this was. What if I simply turned their journal assignments into blog entries? I bounced the idea off Jack, my American co-worker, and he thought it might be good for the kids. I began to get more and more enthusiastic about the prospect of teaching my students something new, all while helping them to practice their English. As excitement and anticipation began to build, I decisively commented to myself that "it's happening" and I introduced the concept to my students that day.

I feel this decision will infuse life and energy back into what was once a stale class. I have felt so much like a paper-pusher as of late, just having students fill out worksheets so that they can complete a workbook without having learned the knowledge contained within it. What's the fun or engagement in that? GA1's Writer's Workbook, still part of the plethera of workbooks from the old curriculum, had "Write and Plan a Journal" on the agenda for last Friday's class. My plan to get my students blogging solidified when I discovered that. The Apostle Paul tells us to honor "the spirit of the law and not the letter." Who's to say that showing students how to journal online isn't still "writing and planning a journal," even though all the worksheet pages for the day might not have been used?

So far, the response has been positive. "So I am fun and happy," one of my students commented in her first blog entry of the project. "We can write English journal!!!" She put all of those exclamation points at the end--I didn't edit them in there. "I like my class," she went on. "I write my blogger everyday~I love my class and blogger."

The blessing in this for me personally is that I feel I can finally start using the writing knowledge I have to teach my kids here in Korea the conventions of writing in English. I almost feel like a full-grown editor as I comment on my students' work: Yes, your topic was good but the way you say this in English is--. I suppose the first order of business for them is to say it right and then work on larger concerns like structure and, oh, a thesis. It's quite the opposite of what I would be doing as a writing editor to native speakers. One step at a time, though, one step at a time.

Surpise! You Now Work at Apple Tree!

More than three weeks ago now, one of my Korean co-teachers casually mentioned that "from next month" we would only have one workbook and one main book from which to teach. As the system then stood, each level of English proficiency at ILS had several things one might call workbooks, each book on different topics ranging from grammar to cross-curricular science and social studies. Each level had one central textbook, nicknamed the "main book," around which the others were organized. I enjoyed the curriculum as it was, because I noted the solid pedogogical practices embedded within the system; however, I could see the desire to simplify stdents' study needs. I thought that the aim of this new push was to hone in on one of the skill sets from one of the children's workbooks--grammar, for instance--and just use it. What my co-teacher failed to also mention was that we would, most assuredly, be getting brand new books. This was my first wiff of the change that was soon to come.

By the time word had gotten to me about the new book situation, I had already heard of the new schedule change. Starting in June, the school calendar would go from a four-week lesson plan to one six weeks long. This had fairly weighty consequences in itself: The monthly test--the only grade I ever give my students and the Koreans' method of assessing accumulated knowledge--would be pushed back by two weeks. Report cards, too, would aso be pushed back; parents would now have to wait until the beginning of the 7th week in a row to check their students' progress. The decision didn't affect me too greatly, as I was never the one to put my lesson plans together. But I was unsure what the need was for so many changes all at once--and en medius res, in the middle of everything, to boot!

Three Fridays ago, the 28th of May, I discovered the impotus behind these recent developements. A part-time Korean teacher informed me off-hand that day that our director was thinking about changing the name of the school. "I think she's going to change [it] because the ILS curriculum is too old," he said, nodding his head regally.

Jack, my American co-teacher, was sitting next to me at that moment and heard the teacher's announcement. Instantly, his countenance "fell to the floor," as I wrote in a recent e-mail. He didn't buy the reason for a split second. "The only reason they would change the name," he said, his face still downcast, "is if they owe a certain teacher seven million won. If they change their name, when people call up looking for ILS, they can say that ILS doesn't exist, that this is a different company. It's a way of cancelling their debts. I can tell you the money is one hundred percent the reason. The curriculum is not too old--none of it's topical. It's not current event stuff."

So. The truth was out. It remained only hearsay, however, until the following Monday. I could tell something was up as the halls of ILS fell eerily silent that morning the thirty minutes before the students' arrival, when normally teachers' chatter would fill the emptiness. Jack remarked on it as he came in that day. "What? Did somebody die?" he asked, tongue-in-cheek. As did everyone else, he sensed the collassal change brewing in our director's office. We all stood on the edge of something new, something tht felt like standing all too close to the edge of a precipice. It reminded of my life a year ago when I was expected to move from my home within three days of being told that the possibility might exist. Somehow over one weekend the situation went from "She's thinking of changing the name" to "It's already been changed and you'll have a meeting at lunchtime to explain everything."

As it was described to me as "a meeting with the native speakers," I fully expected to have Jack and James, my two other foreign co-workers, present with me in the meeting with my hagwon director that afternoon. But as the lunch hour slowly eroded and I had not yet been summoned to see Michelle, I started to doubt. "Jennifer, you haven't gone yet?" I was asked. "Go!"

"But the door is shut," I managed. "Someone must be in there."

Heads nodded in understanding. "Ah, Jack Teacher," they murmurred.

"She will meet with you one-by-one," Lena explained slowly, "because the schedules don't match."

I thought for a moment before I was called into the meeting. Was it really true that our meetings were different due to scheduling problems? Didn't we all have the same lunch break? I began to think that seperating the foreigners prevented us from both leaning on each others' expertise in the meeting and being able to hear answers to one's questions that must surely affect us all. Whas this separation strategic?

Michelle called me in at present, catching me in my reverie. She dutifully tried to explain the reason for all the recent changes. "ILS [Headquarters] won't let us use any other book," she began, indicating the pile of Open Court Reading resources resting on the couch beside her. "You know the kindergarten needs EFL Phonics and Give Me Five. But ILS wants this book. We've been fighting the headquarters for six months. Our [franchise] contract ends on the fifth of June, so we gonna... change the name."

"This book," she continued, holding up a shiny new hardcover student edition, "we can have for three months. This book--" she said as she held up one of the thin paperbacks from Open Court--"we have to change every month."

Her argument for the need to change the school name centered entirely on curriculum, it seemed. "But what will the name be?" I interrupted.

"Apple Tree. There's a famous... uh, hagwon... in Seoul area that's called Apple Tree--very good school."

"But can you take the name?"

"That hagwon didn't file the paper with the government." Ah. A loophole.

"Many, many hagwons do this," she went on. "After they finish the contract... they just... change the name." This was meant, I suppose, to make me feel better about the situation. But how can I feel good about infringing on another school's name just so we can piggy-back on their success?

In truth, I feel that the decision to change our name will backfire. I don't feel that they're being honest about matters and their efforts to make it legitimate feel only like free-spinning wheels. If the concern is really a quality education for students, the new curriculum choice misses the mark. Lack of educational quality is not simply a book's fault, but the fault of poor methodology. Simply changing a book without changing the mindset to teach it fixes nothing and instead perpetuates a problem. Changing a quality curriculum to something lower only exasperates it. "If, as a teacher, I present the same lessons in the same manner than I used to in the past," a handout from my days at BA reads, "[and] I seek no feedback from my students... then I have absolutely no way to become better as a teacher." I could adapt the quote for my hagwon: If as a hagwon, I change the curriculum and seek no feedback from my foreign teachers, then I have absolutely no way to become better as a school.

The problem wasn't the curriculum, I feel. Though I had my issues with it, I knew it was solid, based as it was on American education theory and convention. In the Teacher's Edditions, I could see where the whole program fit together. It was full of challenging texts for my students, especially for my EX1 class, whose little seven-year-old minds are ready to soak up more knowledge. This new set of books is touted by my director to be exactly what our hagwon needs--and yet, it's levels below my students, all of them. One of the reasons for the new curriculum's inadequacy is that we've ordered first grade books for students in third and fourth grade. But it's even too low for my ESL first-graders. The first story for them from the new book took three minutes, when it was planned to take forty. In the simplest language possible, the story was three pages of "Let's play Tug-of -War with an elephant." What more can you do with that than "Do you understand? Yes."?! It was completely disengaging for my students. My school has exchanged a solid reading program, which if wholly implemented would help students grow in their knowledge of English, for baby's milk.

My director clings to the new books vehemently, the reason being that, according to her, they will last longer. The books themselves are a series of different units from one elementary grade level. Meant as part of a longer anthology, each unit is sectioned out and published as a different book. Some of the units are combined with the next one into a slightly larger book of two units. An American first-grader, for example, might read five of these books in a year, if his teacher paced the class acoording to the curriculum's design. Director Michelle, however, suggests that a book with only one unit should last for three months and a book with two should last for six. That's at least double what they were meant for! She thinks that a book one-inch thick should be enough for a three-month timespan, yet she forgets to ask about content. How much is actually in said book and how much of what's in it can stretch twelve weeks? In our previous curriculum, a flimsy ten-inch-by-ten-inch paperback less than half an inch thick covered one unit of stories for my students and it lasted four weeks. How can one unit, even exhaustive, last for three times that? It's all in the size of the book! I feel like my director can't see the big picture of how these units work together. She forgets that they are just one part of a complete whole. She advocates for snippets of a program rather than the entire thing.

It seems that the decision to change books was hastily made. Even during the first week of using them, I started to see the reprecussions of such an ill-thought-out-decision. In one of my classes, my co-teacher burst in at the beginning of class to stop me from distributing the new book because the Korean teachers had run into a problem: One of the students had previously completed the new book and two years ago, surpassed its level. I couldn't teach from it, I was told, until this unforseen problem was fixed. What do we do with a class of new books we suddenly cannot use?

"I think the Korean teachers are all confused as well," James assured me as we walked to our apartments that evening. "We should just try to work together with them."

I winced as I took in his words.

"I don't want to complain," he continued. "I take Jack Teacher as my model. He's been here longer than us and if he can work that long together with them, it's okay."

I appreciated his honesty and knew that in that moment he was a better man than I. No matter my own reaction to this new work environment, I do have an obligation--not just from my contract, but through Christ--to work together with my co-teachers without complaint. We are all in the middle of this confusion together and complaining about it will only make matters worse.

"It will get better," my co-teacher Vicky told me last week before I left. It was a side of her that until that day, I had never seen before. And I know she's right. I have found one positive in the midst of the chaos so far: Because of the mishap about which book to use, I might get a chance to be in the conversation to decide what book is studied in my class.

In the end, I suppose the name works: In our foyer, we do have a formidable artificial tree under which I must duck whenever I go for a restroom break. But nothing else in the entire school speaks of apples. There is one other thing that might connect us to trees and apples, now that I think about it. In the students' library are several copies of a Scholastic book called The Apple Pie Tree. In it, children gleefully suggest that there's nothing better than an apple pie you've grown yourself. Perhaps the solution to our nameless hagwon is to call ourselves "Apple Pie Tree School" instead. It might save copyright headaches, at any rate.

Culture. Shock.

The week of my arrival to Korea, Brandon and Andy took me to E-Mart after work as a way to introduce me to my new way of life. "Do you know anything about culture shock?" Andy asked as we gently rode the ramp-style escalator.

"I'm working from a theory," I proudly replied. I then described an idea I learned from my days in XTI: The first few weeks in a culture were the most relationally fruitful in terms of bonding to a new people. It was like being born: you're never more alert than in your first weeks of life. I wanted to be out among them as much as I could.

"Well that's not culture shock," he abruptly countered, deflating my rationale and betraying my ignorance. "Culture shock happens when you've been here for a couple of months. You start to notice all the little things that aren't supposed to be that way. It's this frustrating feeling that starts to get to you."

From that night on, Andy's idea has been the knowledge that I've worked from in dealing with the lifestyle by which I now find myself surrounded. I've experienced what he described several times since then: having to drink out of a paper envelope at the water cooler rather than out of a cup; being bumped into without appology at the airport, on the subway, and on the bus; and having to deal with having a bathroom inside my shower instead of a shower inside my bathroom. I quite agree with Andy's assessment, but I want to add to it. For me, culture shock didn't develop after merely two months. Small irritants like the ones above may have then surfaced, but the concept as a whole didn't fully materialize in my mind until much later. I confessed a couple of weeks ago on Facebook that "after seven months," it had "finally, irrevocably set in."

I feel the shock in many ways, most notably at work. The day I wrote my Facebook assessment, I had just confronted an English writing textbook--published in Korea and from which I am supposed to teach--that described the purpose of possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her, etc.), quaintly labeled "special words," as "relating something to someone." The book couldn't tell my eight-year-olds that these "special words" show ownership?! It didn't even use "possessive," "adjective," or "pronoun" in its description of them. I feel our writing book of choice is too simplistic to be of use to my students' English education. In a roundabout way, I suppose the book is right. But my current frustration with its methodology lies in the knowledge that there are more accurate ways to describe English grammar concepts, even to children--ones based less on hearsay and more on conventions of language and peer review.

Sometimes, however, the shock is positive and opens up opportunities to learn from the culture around me instead of just to shake my head at it. Over this summer, for example, I've been able to see Korean children's games at their finest, played among my kinder students during such activities like "Pajama Day" and our field trip to picnic in the park. American games squeeze themselves in there, too. These games are always "Koreanized," though, with an element or two no Westerner would have thought of. For Pajama Day, we played "Pin the Tail on the Elephant," as we were fresh out of donkeys without tails. Instead of leaving him to feel his way around, teachers clapped for the blindfolded student to "lead" him to the target. On our field trip to the park, we played "Musical Groups," a game similar in nature to Musical Chairs except that participating contestants don't sit down.

Today, Wednesday, May 26, we had a game for our monthly birthday party mirrored on a concept I've seen in the US. The object was to fold a sheet of newspaper smaller and smaller while still being able to fit each member of the team on top of it. I assumed that the game would play out like Musical Chairs: The contestant who found no more room to stand on the newspaper would be "out." As the situation progressed, I found there to be no such concept present. Instead, the rule was created to use whatever means--climbing on another's back, having a teacher squeeze you in--to keep every member on the square, no matter how small it got. If somehow that wasn't possible, the team as a whole was out. I lost faith in the idea by the middle of the game and wished so much to have it over. But as I began to think about it, the approach to such an activity seemed to reflect a cultural perception from the Korean worldview--the idea that it's taboo to do anything alone.

Simon Winchester, in his book Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, first introduced me to the concept of not doing things alone. He encountered it time and again in 1985 as he ventured to cross the peninsula on foot by himself. People literally thought he was insane and unhealthy. As I thought about the newspaper game and Winchester's comments, I discovered this was a game of cooperation rather than exclusion. Where the focus in America is highly centered on the individual, here the communal group is spotlighted and prized. We played another game that day which illustrated this same thought: Students lined up four at a time to tun to the end of the foyer and try, without using their hands, to eat crackers dangling from a string. In America, I mused, schoolchildren would have turned that into a relay race in a heartbeat! I thought it rather fitting and natural that, even in play, such a concept could be so exalted as to alter the rules of a game--and create whole new ones--just to preserve it.