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.
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