Busan Journal, Day 28

So -- that's it, I guess!

When I meet someone, and especially when I meet several people at a time, I often have trouble remembering names. Faces usually fix themselves easily in my brain, but names slide around, disappear.  It's sad, but true.

Consequently, learning several classes worth of new student names each semester is a challenge. 

Over the years, I have learned how to make the process easier, but it is always a struggle.  Picture rosters have helped a great deal.

This semester the task has been particularly difficult as the students in my classes are all Korean and the roster is printed in hangul. No pictures. It's not that Korean names are especially difficult in and of themselves; it's that there are so many names that sound similar to dull American ears.

Those dull ears would be mine.

Still, over the weeks I learned to attach the correct name to a student most of the time. As always happens, one or two student names remain elusive.

Now the semester is over, and I have turned in grades. I tried hard to be sure that each name received the grade it was supposed to receive.

I have realized in the two weeks since our last classes that I really need to get better, not so much at learning names as at saying goodbye.

Odd as it may seem, when it comes to saying goodbye at the end of a semester, I find myself feeling awkward and shy, as I often felt growing up.  It is always that way for me.

It is a most unfortunate character trait, particularly regrettable in this present instance when my short tenure combined with our mutual struggles to get to know each other make the goodbye a significant moment. Things worked out well for my graduate class because my students took us to lunch after the final session, as is the tradition here at PNU.

There is no such tradition for the undergraduate classes.  Consequently, in my usual way, I let the moment slip by without the attention it deserved.  We had spent the last class in a review session for the final, and as different groups of students finished at different times, I dismissed them by groups.


At the end, a small group remained, eager to chat.  I dug out my camera and took their picture.  I had actually intended to take a picture of the entire class, but that intention had been forgotten somehow as I visited study groups.

Thank you to these five for making our "goodbye" significant.  To the other two-thirds of the undergraduate (Immigrant Literature) class, my apologies.  It was a great experience.  I had fun and I learned a lot.  I will miss you all.

And some day soon, because of my experience with you, I would like to return and teach more classes at PNU.

For now, however, I have packing to do and more posts to write about Busan, so I will just leave you with a heartfelt kamsamnida!


Later, dudes!

Busan Journal, Day 27

The Neighborhood


The morning after we arrived at Ungbikwan, our dorm condominium, we took a walk around the campus to orient ourselves.  Important as it was to walk the campus, the walk itself was disorienting.  We did a lot of circular wandering.

It did not help that it was graduation day, so a great many of the people on campus were visitors who had little more idea of where things were located than we did.  Even without the language barrier asking for help would have been a problem.

All we knew about campus, our new neighborhood, as we walked was that our dorm sits at the top of the hill. So, when it was time to go "home" we were confident we could get there by heading uphill.  Easy enough to remember, although the climb remains, well, a climb.

Looking for places, the Humanities Building, for example, was difficult in part because many buildings have a similar look and because signs are in Korean. English names do appear below many hangul letters, but they are often small, frequently puzzling, and occasionally hard to find.

On the way back up to our dorm that first day, I noticed a traditional tile roof partially hidden in the trees a hundred feet off the road.  Both the location of the roof and several other details led me to think it might be a Buddhist temple or shrine.  I remarked that we would need to walk down the path to see what was there in the next day or so.

Last week I decided to the time had come so I walked down the little path.  Sure enough, beside the building with the traditional roof was a ten foot stone Buddha and, behind it, a garden.

So my initial suspicions were confirmed, but what surprised me was the eating area above the shrine.  It is similar to the outdoor eating areas one finds all over these hills. All this time I had thought there must be a trail head onto the mountain, but all this time people were just coming to eat.

I did not go all the way down into the eating area, because that usually draws out the proprietors, the women who run these eating houses, to greet you -- even if you are only passing through.  More than that, however, I wanted to get closer to the shrine since there was no access from the path I was on.

Further down the road from my dorm are steep stairs that lead into a residential neighborhood.  Many students go up and down these stairs, but I had never done so. I went down thinking it would give me access to the shrine.

At the bottom of the stairs, just 150 feet from the sidewalk at the edge of campus that I know so well now is a different world -- small houses, tall apartments, well-tended gardens, and narrow streets.

Getting to the shrine was not as straightforward as I had anticipated, but eventually I got there.  It is not as public a place as I thought it might be.  The buildings were all closed up and there were no signs that visitors were encouraged. The pilgrims I had seen were not pilgrims after all, just hungry souls looking for a meal, a conversation, and a bit of relaxation.

Turns out not to be a big find, but at least it is no longer like so many other places I always intended to visit but never did.

Busan Journal, Day 26

The Rewards of Teaching

One of the rewarding elements of teaching in Korea is hearing from students who have connected with our reading or discussions in significant ways. That is, I suppose, always the rewarding part of teaching -- to see the light of understanding in student faces and to hear excitement in their voices.

My Korean students have rewarded me many times in this way.

After class a week ago one of my graduate students, whom I will call Mi-Won, mentioned to me what she had found so compelling about No-No Boy, the novel by John Okada that we had just finished discussing.  Interestingly, it was not the central character that she related to but his mother, whose role in the novel embodies a particular set of attitudes and characteristics.  She is an immigrant who, like much of the Japanese immigrant community, hopes to recreate the old country in the new. In this story she believes she can remain Japanese and raise her sons as Japanese.  Her dream is to return to Japan, with her family, as rich people who can live the life of the wealthy -- once the family has made its fortune in America.

Having lived for a number of years in both England and the United States as her own children were growing up, Mi-Won found the mother's plight both understandable and sympathetic in a way the rest of us had not. Mi-Won identified; she found a level of empathy that opened the story to her in a compelling way.

While the portrait in the novel treated the mother with dignity and sympathy, it also portrayed her as stubborn, aggressive, and enigmatic. The Japan she idealized and desired for her boys had been destroyed.

Mi-Won told of her own struggles to raise her children with a  Korean identity, even as they were being shaped by the English and then American cultures.  Her efforts led to misunderstandings and arguments with her son -- she arguing in Korean, he responding in English, using British and American vulgarities.  Mi-Won resonates with the mother's frustrations and sense of powerlessness as she loses her own children to their new culture.

Mi-Won's moments of illumination are what literature is all about.  And in the best of circumstances, those moments are what teaching is about too.