Korea 017 – Weasel and Dust
WEASEL AND DUST
I began work at KAL (Korean American Language) on Wednesday and quit on Saturday after three nightmarish nights. The manager was a Mr. Kim. During the interview, he did all the talking and made it clear that my most important duties were, one, to wear a tie, two, to be punctual, and three, to bow to the President of the school when I passed him in the hall. Other than that, he had nothing to say and appeared to have no idea what went on in the classrooms.
Mr. Kim had a short, river rat looking guy I called the Weasel waiting on him hand and foot. The Weasel was all bony and angular. During the interview, he stood pressed up against the wall like a poster. Mr. Kim waved him off to get us some coffee and the Weasel scurried off hugging the wall closely. He never walked across a room but followed the walls until he reached the door. He even managed to fold himself around the door frame. If he needed to cross a hall he pushed off the wall and lunged for the other side terrified of being out in the open.
From the first second of the interview, I knew it was a mistake to work there, but I drifted along and found myself employed. I watched the horrors unfold like a man struck immobile by the barrel of a gun, a deer paralyzed by the growing headlights of an onrushing truck, or a mouse hypnotized by the cobra’s stare.
Mr. Kim took me up to the work room to meet the other teachers and left me there. Most of them were American. The teacher with seniority greeted me and gave me a bit of advice. The other teachers stood around snorting and saying “fuck” a lot.
“Okay, you’re going to go out to bars with your students. If not with them you’ll go with other teachers, and you’ll end up in Itaewon if you haven’t been there already. And I’m telling you, you’re going to get into a fight. I can fucking guarantee it! Nothing you can do. These bastards are always looking for trouble. Now the thing is they stick together. So you’ve got to hurt the guy as badly as you can, as quick as you can and then run. If you don’t, every Korean for three blocks will jump on you and knock you senseless. Then when the cops come they’ll arrest you. I’m serious. So do whatever you have to. Use a brick or a bottle but bash him over the head and get the hell out of there.”
The other teachers chimed in with their own versions of basically the same thing and exchanged war stories. I suspected they were all ex-US military. One of them extended the attack to include the Chinese. He searched for the worst thing he could say. “One fucking percent of them can’t rub together a fuck of enough of pennies to buy a goddamn Coke!” After standing next to these guys, I felt so dirty and contaminated I wanted to take a bath.
A bell rang and the hallways filled with hundreds of students. The hallways were only a few feet across and there was instant gridlock on the stairwell. They gave me the wrong textbook for the first class, and it went very badly. There were 12 people in the class, and they put us in a language lab, so everyone looked at each other across headphones and Plexiglas. A bar partied on the other side of the wall shaking all the headphones on their hooks with a bassy beat.
For the most part, the class was normal if uninspired but I had one psycho and he set the tone. He was a little overweight and hid tiny eyes behind thick glasses. His ambition was to be the first person to travel into a black hole and live. He refused to do pair work with any woman in the class and glared at them whenever they spoke.
My next class was supposed to be in room 312, another language lab. But when I arrived, there were a dozen people with headphones on – wrong class.
I went down to the office looking for help and found the Weasel stuck up against the wall behind the door. He was the only one in the office, and I asked him where I was supposed to be. He looked furtive and scurried out and ran downstairs to find out. He returned and told me room 201. I went to the second floor and failed to find room 201. I went back to the Weasel and told him Room 201 didn’t exist. He scurried off once again to talk to Mr. Kim. Back he came and guided me into the old teacher’s lounge on the fourth floor. There a dozen people awaited me with angry expressions on their faces. I was twenty minutes late.
The room was a dismal affair. Against each wall ranged a set of couches – the soft and squishy kind that trapped you and sucked you back and down no matter how hard you tried to lean forward. The students had to shout to be heard across the 4 huge tables filling the center of the room. There wasn’t any room for me to circulate around the room. These people grilled me hard about the stuffiness of the room, my tardiness, the absence of a lesson plan and the fire hazard implied by the narrow and overcrowded hallways, and I had no answers. I promised that the Weasel and I would get everything straightened out.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
The next day I had a little chat with Mr. Kim while the Weasel danced attendance. But there was nothing he could do. There was no other room available.
The third night was the clincher. It took twenty minutes to find out that there was no text for the class in the teacher’s lounge. I was expected to create a curriculum based on interesting conversation topics. It just so happened I had some books with me that contained some appropriate material, and I enquired after using a photocopier. The photocopier was in a locked room. The Weasel had the key to the room and a secretary kept the paper in a locked closet. I had to fill out a form specifying the pages I wanted copied and how many copies I needed. It would take a week. I raised such a fuss that at least I did get some copies that night but they were poorly done.
I decided to at least try and move the tables to make more room and I made it a class project. What a comedy. Garbage from the last decade poured out and a dust cloud rose to the ceiling. The second table had nowhere to go except over the door frame. People entering and exiting had to go through the square made by the table legs – risking a serious knock to the head. The next step was to move the couches closer together. They came apart in individual seats and were the very devil to move. They hadn’t been vacuumed in years and touching them covered your hands in dust. I was so embarrassed when each chair moved revealed a mountain of moldy garbage – the years of junk food disposed there by teachers. Dust rose and the women began to sneeze uncontrollably. I handed out my hard won photocopies to the class and launched a discussion. It died. It rolled over, begged for mercy and then committed suicide. I don’t remember the rest of that night. I must have turned my mind off. Somehow I made it to the end of the class and the next day I informed Mr. Kim and the Weasel that I wouldn’t be returning the following week.