Writings

Background Story

I studied for one quarter at Yonsei University, but decided to change schools when I realized Yonsei’s program was the most expensive. Seoul National University, the number one school in Korea, also had a Korean language school, and because it is a state school the tuition was half that of Yonsei’s. Since I was already thinking about the possibility of graduate school in Korea, and SNU was a good choice in that regard, I decided to switch over to their language school.

At the beginning of 1997, one of my friends from church approached me with an idea. He wanted to start an English language school in Mongolia, and he needed English teachers. It sounded like an interesting opportunity, but he wanted me to go for a year, and I wasn’t quite prepared to leave Hyunjin for a whole year. He suggested that Hyunjin and I get married and go together. I thought it over and asked Hyunjin how she felt about it. We had originally planned to wait a little before getting married, but Hyunjin agreed to the proposal and (more importantly) her parents agreed as well. And so, on 5 March 1997, exactly one year after the day we met, we were married. My family flew over for the wedding, and we flew back with them to spend about a month in the States.

We were back in Korea by the beginning of April, and in mid-April (on my birthday, in fact) we got on a plane for Ulaanbaatar (also spelled Ulan Bator). We ended up spending only six months there, but it was quite an experience. The city still had an old Soviet feel to it—not that I had ever been in a Soviet city before, but it looked exactly how I had always imagined an old Soviet city would look. I would like to say I had a great time there, but it was rough. Our apartment didn’t have hot water, so we had to boil water on the range whenever we wanted to wash. What passes for summer only lasts for a few weeks, and the rest of the time it’s pretty cold. And for the first three months I was there, I spent twelve hours a day at the school, teaching classes, creating teaching materials, and just trying to do my part in getting the school off the ground.

The country itself wasn’t doing too well when we were there. Mongolia had decided that they wanted to be a democracy. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it meant an end to Soviet subsidies, and it quickly became apparent that Mongolia did not have any sort of economic infrastructure. The result was rampant alcoholism among the men, with the women shouldering much of the burden—it was, in effect, a sort of unintentional women’s liberation movement. There were also a large number of street kids who had left their homes and taken to living out on the street, begging and harassing passers-by.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad, and the experience had a significant impact on my life. I did get to experience a new culture, and the Mongolian countryside is really something that has to be experienced. I rode a horse for the first time in my life, which was fun, although it wasn’t quite what I had imagined galloping across the Mongolian steppes would be like (it is a figure of speech that Mongolian children are born on horseback—apparently the male children are also born with cast iron athletic supporters). Outside the city there are no real suburbs, and once beyond the city limits you quickly find yourself in wide open grasslands and low hills. My wife and I often took walks along the river, and we would sometimes build fires and cook German sausages over the fire. It’s funny how you remember little things like that. But as insignificant as the good memories may seem, I don’t think I would trade those six months for anything. There was much more that it is difficult to put into words, and I know I matured significantly during those six months.

When we returned to Korea we found that the economic crisis of 1997 (ironically dubbed “the IMF period”) was in full swing. This didn’t affect us personally, though, and we went on with our lives as normal. I went back to study Korean at SNU, and I finished level five (out of six) in May 1998. I decided to skip the last level and use the summer to prepare for graduate school. I took one year of classes as a research student, just to get familiarized with the system and get used to taking classes in Korean. In the fall of 1999 I officially entered the MA program in Korean Classical Literature, specializing in oral literature.

The coursework took me two years, and I took another year to write my thesis (during which I spent a few months in the States on a research/vacation trip--more the latter than the former, actually, if the truth be told). I finally finished my thesis at the end of last summer, and after another semester off I’m now ready to enter the Ph.D. program at the beginning of March.

Along the way I reached the point where I decided that I didn’t want to teach English any more. It was a good way to pay the bills, no doubt, but I grew dissatisfied with it for a couple reasons. Teaching English privately requires a lot of travel, and that wears on you after a while. More than that, though, it was a general disillusionment with the profession of teaching English in Korea that led me to make that decision. All you really need to teach English in Korea is for English to be your native language—in other words, no training or real skill is required. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of talented and skilled English teachers in Korea, but there are also plenty who have no right teaching English. One guy I knew used to play English language recordings for his class and just sit there and read a book while they listened.

There is a strange dichotomy at work in the Korean perception of English teachers here (and I’m referring to the “entry-level” teachers, who make up the majority). On the one hand, they are respected simply because they are teachers, as teachers are highly respected in Korea. On the other hand, they are despised in general, because most Koreans know that no skill is required for the job. I was just tired of the thin veneer of false respect—tired of being lumped in with all the other English teachers. I wanted to do something that not just anyone could do.

As my Korean improved, I began to think about translating, which was something that I had wanted to do ever since I first took an interest in Korean literature. My start in translating, though, was not glamorous, but at least it was gratifying—I began to receive requests for translation from classmates and professors because I was the only one they knew who could do it. After doing a number of school projects, I started getting requests for other jobs, and over the past few years I have done translation work for the Korea Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, UNESCO Korea, and other institutions. These days I am trying to focus more on literary and academic translation, an I hope to get my doctoral work done in a reasonable amount of time as well.

And that is where I find myself today. I obviously left out quite a bit, especially at the end there, but the purpose of this story was to answer the oft-asked question of how I came to Korea and to show how a single moment led me to where I am today. Having accomplished that, I will end this story. The real story, of course, goes on, and that is what I hope to record in my journal.