Out of Poverty: Living and Teaching in Asia

Out of Poverty

LIVING AND TEACHING IN ASIA

Judy Smith

Contents

Dedication

Pico Iyer

Disclaimer

Introduction

Places and times we have lived, worked and travelled

SOUTH KOREA: Where it all began

POLAND: Dodged the Bullet

THAILAND: Here Today and Gone tomorrow

Oh Man, OMAN

CHINA: From the Belly of the Beast

Home Again

Copyright

Dedication

Dedicated to our children, Jessie and Erin, to their children and to their children’s children, and to all the expatriates who must struggle to make a living in a foreign land.

Pico Iyer

If every journey makes us wiser about the world, it also returns us to a sort of childhood. In alien parts, we speak more simply, in our own or some other language, move more freely, unencumbered by the histories that we carry around at home, and look more excitedly, with eyes of wonder.

-Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Disclaimer

This account is written from my point of view and, wherever possible, attempts to preserve the privacy of my husband, Roger Cristofoli, and of our intimate relationship. Although I could not have done what I did without him, this is my story. He would no doubt tell a different one, and yet, given our closeness, there are times when there is no other choice but to use the all-inclusive we to describe events and even, sometimes, feelings.

We have been married for over twenty-six years and together for over thirty. Often in the morning we find that we have chosen to wear the same colour scheme.

Introduction

You enter a new country cautiously, on Zen-like cat’s paws. Each moment is an existential now, your eyes wide open. Watching. Is this why you do it, time and time again?

Almost every primal need is discovered for the first time. Money. Food. Mobility. Sleep. Time. Speaking. And yet, it’s what you bring with you that counts. How much is this in dollars? What can you eat? How can you get from the airport to your bed? What time is it at home? What do all these signs mean? What are people telling you? What are their bodies saying? How can you say: I want? I am. I need.

If only you could sleep, and wake up to try again.

Places and times we have lived, worked and travelled

October, 1999 – July, 2002 : Daegu, South Korea

October, 2002 : Poland

December, 2002 – December, 2003 : Gwangju, South Korea

April, 2004 – September, 2004 : Thonburi, Thailand

October, 2004 – July, 2006 : Salalah and Ibra, Oman

November, 2005 : Jordan

July, 2008 – April, 2009 : Incheon, South Korea

September, 2009 – July, 2012 : Nanning, China

SOUTH KOREA: Where it all began

We spent a total of four years in Korea: two years in Daegu (1999-2002), one year in Gwangju (2002-2003) and one year in Incheon (2006-2007.)

October, 1999. As my husband, Roger Cristofoli, and I entered the Castlegar Airport to leave for our flight to Korea, the Community Choir surprised us with a lovely performance of Arirang, Korea’s national folk song.

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo...

Over the Arirang Hills you must go

How I wish you were not going so far away

It is such a long road and I want you to stay

I burst into tears: the surprise and kindness of our neighbours, the pain of leaving home, and the mountain of stress accumulated over the past few months all caught up with me, who was trying so hard to keep it all together, at least until we were safely on the plane.

I was in shock. Our airplane tickets had arrived by UPS that morning, with just two hours to spare. This was in the days before e-tickets and automatic check-in and Skype interviews and checking for black-listed language schools on the Internet. The process of getting jobs teaching overseas was far more complicated than it would be ten years later, but it was no less risky. The difference was, in 1999 we had reached a point where there was no other choice.

Things had taken a dive for us in 1999. I was fifty-four and Roger was fifty-one and we were not able to find employment anywhere in Canada. I was burned out from nursing and had also burned too many bridges in the process. I enjoyed the freedom to write, but writing barely paid enough to buy a pencil. A few years before that, Roger had gone to university to get his teaching degree because there was a shortage of teachers, but by the time he graduated the market was glutted and all he could get was on-call positions that led nowhere. He went back to carpentry, laying wood and laminate floors, but the market in that area petered out when the anticipated jobs created by building a new dam did not materialize. The final outcome was that we were broke and going down fast. By October, we foresaw, we would not be able to make our mortgage payments. We visited the bank, forgetting that their walls are made of marble. The bank was happy to take possession of and sell our house, swallow all the mortgage payments we had already made and charge us a penalty on top of that.

I felt a deep pain in my chest when I realized we would have to leave home: a sharp, penetrating pain that sucked most of the life force from me. We had such dreams for our house, creating an adobe in the desert of Castlegar where we would grow much of our own food and enjoy financial security when we entered retirement. We spent years nurturing the soil, planting, and creating a work of art in our large corner lot: luxurious vegetable gardens; peach, apple and cherry trees; clumps of exotic grasses; a rose bed and grape arbour that Roger built from driftwood we had gathered along the river. The house itself was a labour of love: painting, redecorating, and building new furniture. We hosted many parties, and created countless dinners in our house. We were leaving all our friends, the community we had nurtured, everything.

How could we leave what we had given birth to? How could we leave ourselves?

We’re leaving home, bye-bye…

Making Lemonade

Roger often accuses me of making lemonade whenever I’m handed lemons. In the twenty six years we’ve been married, however, I have come to realize that he has the same aptitude; it is one of many qualities that we share and that helps us to survive.

Surely, I thought, given our combined education and experience, we could find a way out from the quagmire of poverty. We joked about designing a cardboard box to live in, but being forced to apply for social assistance was the final straw for me: welfare was not an option to my stubborn prairie roots. I subscribed to Vancouver newspapers and poured over want ads. After seeing the same one appear in The Vancouver Sun for a week, I finally broached the topic with he who I thought would never leave his home in the mountains.

Have you noticed this ad for teaching in Korea?

I was just about to ask you about that, he said.

Two months after responding to the ad, with new passports in hand, we had a huge garage sale, sold two vehicles, put our house on the market, rented it out to pay the mortgage and reduced our lives to two large suitcases, two carry-ons, one laptop and one purse.

Most of what we had chosen to take with us was inappropriate.

Teacher Clothes

I shopped for second-hand teacher clothes at home but all of the suits were branded Made in Korea so I thought it would be cheaper and more convenient to buy them when I got there. What I didn’t know was that all sizes larger than size two were exported from Korea to the full-figured women in America. The only clothes I could get in Korea were tailor-made. Roger, who has always been slim, had no problems finding clothes off the rack. Korean men are surprisingly tall in comparison to other Asians.

The only thing we knew about Daegu was that it was a city in Korea in which we would be living. We did not check out the climate in Daegu or conditions in private language schools (Hogwans) before packing. The first winter was brutal. Daegu’s winters are cold and damp; the classrooms were not heated. I had grown up in Saskatchewan where winter temperatures hovered around minus forty Celsius and had lived and worked in the Far North of Canada, but had not experienced such bitter cold as I did in Korea. Our suitcases were stuffed with anything but the clothes we needed to survive.

Medicine

We thought Korea, as shown on M.A.S.H., was a third-world country. If we weren’t careful we would perish from any one of weird and dreadful diseases. Therefore, one suitcase was crammed with enough vitamins to last a year, an elaborate system for filtering water, and emergency tablets to treat food poisoning. I brought my stethoscope and a personalized first aid kit designed to cover all emergencies, including lacerations that required sutures.

What we discovered was that vitamins were plentiful and much cheaper than in Canada. We never used the water filter because tap water wasn’t safe for anything except washing. Although diarrhea would plague us until we returned home and went on mega doses of antibiotics, we were careful about the food and never got poisoned by it. The first aid and medical supplies were not necessary, as Korea offers some of the best and most accessible medical care in the world.

Books

There was a weight limit to checked luggage, so we loaded all our books into a carry-on suitcase. Being responsible teachers, we purchased and packed advanced grammar texts and instructional manuals. Novels were chosen on the basis of thickness of volume, small fonts, and thin pages.

We were to discover that the students had no English skills, so teaching students the rudiments of English greetings did not require a grammar text or instruction manual. Furthermore, the texts were written and provided by the employer, who was an accomplished musician. Fifteen years later, I can still sing the ditty:

Are you a student? Yes, I am

Are you a teacher? No I am not

I had sung it over and over, to one class after another, and then I started over again. It was enough to drive a person bonkers. It soon became apparent to both of us that we had not been hired to teach English. Our job was to make parents happy so they would continue to pay tuition fees.

As for novels, there were several bookstores that specialized in English books. (One was called, What the Book? for which I still have a book mark.) Teachers who had come before us left a fairly extensive library behind and there was an active book exchange among current teachers. We were not the only people to teach English in Korea, and would not be the last.

Gifts

I had read that it was important to bring gifts from Canada for our employer and students. Therefore, while waiting for our visas in Vancouver we went shopping for knick-knacks: pins, pencils and pendants bearing the Canadian flag, maple syrup candies, and smoked salmon in fancy boxes.

We saved the pins to give to select students and gave most of the more expensive gifts to our employer’s wife. She glanced at the pile of goodies we had spent precious cash on, made a disgusted face and filed them under junk. It was one of many hard-earned lessons I learned about going to work in a foreign country: this is not about me.

Money

It was important not to lose certain things: money, passports, tickets, certificates, and contracts. Therefore, we purchased a money belt for me to wear under the waistband of my fully-gathered skirt. The problem with that system was, how could I get things out when I needed them? Oh, look, everyone! Come see! I have hidden all these important things in this money belt under my skirt!

After we got through security at the Castlegar airport (not a big deal, since this was prior to 9/11) we shifted our passports, tickets and some cash to my purse. At the advice of a well-meaning seasoned traveller we had exchanged cash to American dollars which, as it turned out, was totally unnecessary: Korean banks will take money from anywhere, for a price.

Years later we were able to access our bank account in Canada through any ATM in the world---a service that would come in handy when we found ourselves strapped for cash in Hong Kong and the Bank of China suddenly shut down---but in 1999 we thought we needed traveller’s cheques as a way of securing cash to carry. The concern about security was unwarranted, since Koreans are honest to a fault. We could cash traveller’s cheques but at only select banks, and when we first arrived we were terrified of going anywhere without an escort.

The certificates, including original transcripts, birth certificates and degrees, were just as safe and less cumbersome to carry in a briefcase. Other than having contact names and numbers available, there was no point in carrying the contracts with us, since they were worth no more than the paper they were written on.

Credentials Required for Teaching English in Korea

How does one gain trust with a Korean boss? References letters, resumes and even degree certificates can be easily forged, so first, he judges you from your photograph you had sent. Do you look honest? Trustworthy? Do you look your age? Do you have any visible deformities? Soon after your arrival, he takes you out and gets you falling-down drunk. Can you handle your alcohol? Do you still make sense? Who are you with your guard down?

To add to my discomfort in trusting in blind faith was the method of payment for services. We got paid in cash, in sealed envelopes. The cash was not counted or signed for. We simply took it to the bank and handed it to the manager. The largest bill in Korea is a ten thousand won note; we each got paid one and a half million per month (approximately seventeen hundred dollars) that first year. At the end of our contract we were paid an extra month’s salary. The cash covered the area of a double bed and looked like we had just won the lottery.

In the beginning was Song Soh

Our first assignment was in Song Soh, a working class, industrial district thick with smog and rife with students whose parents could ill afford to pay for English lessons. The children knew the sacrifices their parents had made for them and were anxious to not waste their parent’s hard-earned cash. I was blissfully unaware of how lucky I was to be handed such great students that first year, and equally naïve about Korea.

The administrator for the school, Mr. Soh, had called us shortly before our departure to firm up final preparations. Mr. Soh asked if we had any experience living in an Asian country.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in China Town.

Mr. Soh laughed. I think you will find many things in Korea that will astonish you.

What astonished me most of all was to discover that although Korea was not the third world country that I had anticipated, I still had considerable difficulty learning how to live in that culture.

That first year overseas was the most memorable of all our time working overseas. Especially in Korea, it is said that teachers who have lived there for one year think they know everything about Korea, and I was no exception. At the end of four years in Korea I discovered that what I knew was just the tip of the iceberg.

A New Place to call Home

When we first arrived in Daegu, our apartment wasn’t ready for us, so we were housed in our employer’s penthouse suite in the middle of the city. A mother dog and her litter of pups resided on the roof, providing security to the apartment. I was happy to see that the mother dog was securely chained to the concrete wall, as her sharp fangs were clearly meant to seriously harm any intruders.

Our employer’s niece shared the space with us, and her task was to cook breakfast for us. We were prepared to accept anything about our new country, but facing a pot of rice for breakfast every day was asking a bit too much. Most importantly, however, we learned how important it was for us to begin each morning with a cup of coffee. Green tea simply does not work. We asked Mr. Soh to take us to a store and, thinking we wanted a major shopping excursion, he took us to a large supermarket in the suburbs.

Whenever I see newly-immigrated Koreans to Canada wander around a supermarket looking for food they can eat, I remember our first shopping excursion in Daegu. There was a whole aisle devoted to hot pepper paste, another containing soya sauce and its off-shoots, and another loaded up with different kinds of noodles. There was no spaghetti or pasta sauce. We could not find any bread, milk, cereal or butter. There were no spices that were familiar to us. We saw very little food that was recognizable, and came away from that massive supermarket with a dozen eggs, some oranges, and a jar of instant coffee. Mr. Soh looked at our meagre purchases and, disgusted, said we could have gotten the same items in a local market. What he meant was, you are incredibly stupid and have wasted my time, just like all the other stupid foreign teachers I have had to contend with.

After our aborted venture to the supermarket Mr. Soh took us out for lunch. I think he was ticked off because we had wasted his time, and chose a plate of noodles by way of punishment. I had eaten noodles with chopsticks in Chinese restaurants, and although it was a difficult task it was not beyond my chopstick skills. In Korea, however, the chopsticks are made of metal, not wood, and are tapered sharply at the eating end. Chinese people pick up their bowls and scoop the noodles into their nearby mouths, but in Korea one must not touch one’s bowl. I noticed that Mr. Soh was able to grab a load of noodles with his chopsticks, whip them up and shovel them into his large and gaping mouth.

It looked disgusting to me. Would I ever be able to open my mouth that wide? Showing my eating companions all the undigested food in my mouth? In public?

I was too hungry to wait for that day, if it ever came, and asked for a fork. Mr. Soh grinned, as if he had won something.

A few days later we moved into our new apartment above an electrical shop owned by our landlords. We had two bedrooms and a kitchen/dining room/living room combined. The windows looked out to the grimy walls of the building an arm’s length next to us. There was a two-burner stove to cook on, rudimentary cooking utensils, a pint-sized fridge, and an air conditioner so packed in grease I thought it must not have been cleaned since its installation. The bathroom contained a shower with no curtains and a washing machine crammed into the corner.

Our kitchen in Song Soh.

"Welcome home,’ I said to Roger.

Well, it’s better than a cardboard box.

We had a place to live and would soon have an income: I knew that, but for that moment I could not rise above the pain of homesickness and memories of the beautiful home we had to leave behind.

It might have eased my pain to know that although leaving home was not exactly our choice, it turned out to be the best decision we had made. Going to Korea was the first step in many treks past the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The journeys carried us through the next twelve years, the best part of our lives.

On that first contract, however, and on our first day of teaching, our first manager was pushing us to leave for work. I repaired my makeup, pasted on a smile and went out to meet my new world.

The Infamous Kim In Hwan

We were very fortunate to have a good employer for our first teaching job. Kim In Hwan was the same age and birth sign as myself. He was married and had two sons. Both he and his wife, Lee Tae Sun, had been educated in the United States and spoke English fluently. Kim In Hwan was well-known in Daegu, having hosted a television show for teaching kids English for a number of years before starting Daegu’s first language school, LIKE. He now owned seven LIKE schools in Daegu, employed over one hundred teachers, and owned prime buildings and acreage in Daegu, the countryside and Jeju Island. He was the fifth wealthiest person in Daegu, a city of three million and the third largest city in Korea.

In spite of his wealth, for all appearances you would have thought he was a lowly farmer.

He always wore a tailored suit, white shirt and tie, but they never seemed to be freshly pressed, and he was unable to keep food from landing on his shirt. If he had an important meeting to attend he simply compensated for his sloppiness by carrying a clean shirt with him.

He loved kids, he loved teaching, he loved music, and he was a very shrewd businessman. Students he had taught as children were now adults who brought their children to his schools. He wrote, produced and taped all his own music and published his own books. While many language schools were floundering, there was never a shortage of students at LIKE.

To save money, he used teachers to tape sound tracks, paying them a decent salary but not as much as it would have cost him to hire professionals. I was given the task of re-writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for Korean middle school students, for which he paid me handsomely. Plagiarism was not a crime in Korea; on the contrary, it was expected. Why reinvent a perfectly round wheel?

Kim In Hwan, the teddy bear of the operation, was able to maintain the image partly because his wife, Lee Tae Sun, was the grizzly bear. She handled the finances, disciplined or fired teachers, and made sure that her husband was awarded the space and time he needed for creativity. It seemed to me that her steely eyes were continually on the look-out for those who would dare ridicule or criticize her husband.

It would be so much easier for us if we could see people in black and white. It would be easier for me to depict Lee Tae Sun as a hard-nosed disciplinarian, but that does not suit the awesome image of her instructing me how to do the cha-cha on the white sands of Jeju Island.

Names

A Korean name consists of a family name followed by a given name. There are only about two hundred and fifty Korean family names currently in use, and the three most common (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for nearly half of the population.

There is no sound for R or L in Hangeul so I could not understand why those letters are used in written English. For example, Lee is pronounced Ee and Park is pronounced Pahk.

Married men and women keep their full personal names, and children inherit the father’s family name.

We were expected to use Korean names for the students. It was a steep learning curve and I made many mistakes on route.

Initially the students giggled at the sound of my name. Apparently Judy sounds like the Korean word for asshole.

Getting from A to B

When we first arrived in Korea, I was terrified of getting lost. In 1999 there were no street names in Daegu. That changed during the World Cup in 2001, when a horde of tourists descended on the city, but when we arrived places were identified only by their proximity to a famous landmark. Everybody needed to have a cell phone, as half of the people were lost and the other half were trying to find them. For us, not knowing any landmarks, once we left the comfort zone we were totally lost. In a city of three million people, none of whom we could talk to, what would happen to us?

Years later we made sure to have a native person write down (in the