THE FOREIGNER PARTY

One of the highlights of English teaching life in Seoul is the foreigner party. There are many types and all are worth attending. Some are hosted by long-term ex-pats with real jobs with real companies, real houses, real incomes and real lives. For the English teacher, it is a treat to go to these. The spacious rooms, actual furniture, fully functioning bathrooms, and best of all, stereo systems, are a pleasant change from an English teacher’s 10′ by 10′ yogwan room shared with Yorg the vegetarian anarchist from Toronto. It is unlikely that an English teacher will get a direct invitation to one of these. We usually hear about it third or fourth hand. We don’t worry about it and go anyway. English teachers fit very nicely into the gaps and niches between the various social and economic classes, and nobody knows where we belong. The solution that has been conveniently worked out by us is that we belong everywhere. We are the cockroaches of Seoul social life. We rarely sleep, we live in tiny cracks between walls, we eat and drink practically anything and show up everywhere, invited or not.

Some foreigner parties are hosted by embassy people. These are also a great treat. The houses are usually immense and have a front kind of rock garden, and if you are very lucky, even a bit of grass lawn here and there. People are well dressed and racially mixed! You usually find the children of the various embassy personnel congregated in one room, lying on the floor on huge pillows acting strange. I enjoyed sitting in on their conversations and hearing what it was like to live a real life in Seoul, one with access to cars, tennis courts and of course imported food. Which brings me to the best part of attending Embassy parties: they often have cheese!

Seoul is tough on cheese lovers. Koreans simply haven’t discovered it yet. At the local stores you can often find processed cheese slices

Then there is the English teacher’s party. It is here that your real education will begin. It is here at the English teacher’s foreigners party that the inevitable clashes between cultures get a bit ugly.

This type of party usually begins with an idea conceived at three in the morning on hooker hill and takes on life with a map. You need a map to find anything in Korea. They don’t have addresses in the conventional sense. An address is simply a reference to nearby large buildings or structures. However, in the rat’s maze of alleyways in which most English teachers live, there are no large structures, so for anyone to find a party they have to have a very detailed map. If your map isn’t detailed enough, you spend the entire evening trooping down the hill to meet people and physically guiding them to the party. The map also sets the tone, announces any themes and reminds everyone where the closest mom’n’pop for picking up beer is located. The map can be conveniently created in an English class. You simply give your class a writing assignment that will keep them occupied for half an hour and draw your map while they work. If that isn’t possible, you can also announce that today’s English lesson will be “Map Making and the English Language” and you get your class to draw it for you. It is best to reserve this task for the class you dislike the most since the “Giving Directions in English” lesson (‘take the second left, go down three blocks, it will be the fourth house on the right….’) is the second most hated and feared lesson after only the much dreaded “Telling Time in English” lesson. Either lesson will elicit groans and whines loud enough and long enough to disrupt all other classes within a hundred-yard radius. Simply ignore the whining. It is a standard reaction by Korean English students to anything their teacher ever says or does. Fed up with a particularly whiny class, I once conducted a test. Interspersed within the usual whine and groan producing comments like, “Good morning” (moan, groan, whine), “please open your books to chapter four” (moan, groan, whine), I said things like “Today I’m going to give each of you a thousand dollars” and “our special guest speaker tomorrow will be Kevin Kostner”. All such remarks were also greeted with loud moaning and heart rending whines. About then, I gave up trying to please any of my students.

Once the map is completed, the party hosts make a couple of copies on the school photocopier. Two are sufficient as these maps are a lot like viruses. They know how to make copies of themselves and those copies make copies and through the network of English teachers (some of whom work at four different schools in a day) the map will soon be distributed all over the city. The biggest problem with this system is that often one of these maps will land up in the hands of some American GI slumped in a drunken stupor in a corner of the King Club. There is a lot of debate amongst English teachers whether GI’s actually know how to read, but it seems clear that they can read maps and can recognize the word “beer”. So chances are some will show up at the party. That isn’t always bad, as they are useful for throwing out the Korean MP’s when they show up, opening beer bottles with their teeth and for general entertainment in a bear baiting kind of way.

A few hints on dealing with GI’s. It is best to use words with only four letters or less. If you have to use a longer word, try and pronounce it so it sounds like it has only four letters. It’s also helpful to understand how a GI thinks. He doesn’t. At least not in the way the process is generally understood. When confronted with any sort of outside stimulus, the GI’s brain presents him with a few basic choices: Should I thump it, drink it or make sexist, racist remarks and bellow like an idiot? Usually the “thump it” impulse wins out, so it is best to be careful and keep a respectful distance at all times. Almost any remark made to a GI lands in his brain with a wet thud and lays there until he stumbles across it, giving you the chance to watch his reactions and run away if necessary. You’ll see his brow furrow and his muscles tense as he tries to process what was said to him, “Was that an insult? Should I thump him?” Almost anything that enters his field of vision will trigger the same response, “Should I thump him?” If he decides to thump you, you’ll see it in his eyes long before his own brain is aware of the decision, again giving you time to get away. If your way is blocked, simply hold out your beer or drink to him. There is only room in the GI’s brain for one thought at a time, so when he sees the beer you are offering him, the highly developed drinking instinct will kick in and he will immediately think about drinking it and the impulse to thump you will be lost. All in all, GI’s are best avoided. However, if you must speak with one it is helpful (and hugely entertaining) to speak ironically and sarcastically the entire time. They’re incapable of recognizing either irony or sarcasm allowing you to lie convincingly and safely ridicule him at the same time.

 

 

 

Tags: GI, King Club, Korea, Korea - First Days Teaching English, Korean English