OutsideInKorea » Featured

Jobsee.kr — the new hotness

Chris — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:22:12 +0000

I haven’t written any articles for OutsideInKorea in a good long while. Rather than offer the usual excuses, let me point you to my new project, one that has taken up much of my time in recent months, and something I’m pretty excited about: jobsee.kr.

What’s it all about?

The Korean English-language ‘blogosphere’ (I know, don’t hit me) has exploded in recent years, and there are people out there writing their hearts out, which is wonderful, and as it should be. I’ve been in Korea and writing online about it since the late 1990’s, and at my own domains (including this one) for almost 10 years, and because of the nature of the beast, most of the weblogs have come and gone over that long stretch of days. There are a few sites that have been around for the long haul and are still thriving — Robert Koehler’s site being the canonical example — and of course on the non-weblog end of things there is Dave Sperling’s venerable Eslcafe.com, which I’m pretty sure was there, and looking much the same, when I first came to Korea back in 1996.

There are a number of job-board sites catering to the foreigner-in-Korea market that have sprung up over the years, as well. Some have gained traction, some have not, but none have shifted Dave’s site from its position at the top of the job-listing heap. One thing that seems to be almost universally true is that the job listing sites tend to be useability nightmares, or sport design aesthetics from the 1990’s, or both. Nothing much has changed, for a long long time. The emphasis has shifted firmly to recruiting companies that use their own sites to promote their job openings, but cross-post to the more popular job listing sites.

There are a plethora of bog-standard PHPBB bulletin boards out there, as well, there are groups on the social networking platforms like Facebook, and there is a floating community of sorts in the comment threads on many of the larger K-blogs. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s happening out there on the weblogs these days, because every time I’ve dipped a toe into the blogstream in the last few years, it’s come back blistered and discoloured from the level of vitriol and shoutiness and resentment percolating there.

So I had a think. I’m no designer, but I knows what I likes, and I like building sites (my network of personal sites, community sites and sites built for other people is unfeasibly large and still growing), and having spent years a) in Korea, b) in software and web design and c) in the ESL industry, I figured, hell, maybe I could do something that would fill what seemed to be to be a gaping niche.

That niche would be: a site for job-seekers, for those interested in coming to Korea, a site includes a more modern take on web-based community than the same old bulletin-board model, a site that is interactive, pleasant to look at and use, and that includes useful information and tools for the Korean expat community. And that’s kind of fun, into the bargain.

Here’s what I came up with.

I’m getting close to launch now, still second-guessing my design decisions, hammering bugs out of the woodwork, thinking about how to try and ramp it up into a vibrant and active community, and trying to plan administrative ways to make it something that’s not just another wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Little joke there, but you know what I mean. There are a lot of expats in Korea these days who are not into the whole negativity vibe that seems to grip the community, lots of long-termers and short-termers alike, and a whole generation of younger types who expect their online tools to be a little less, well, like using digital stone knives and bearskins.

So, for launch, which is coming relatively soon unless I decide on yet another tear-down-and-redesign, the site will include:

Jobs listings

Jobs listings are the core of the utility of the site, I think, and for at least a month or two after launch, I plan to make them absolutely free to employers. Little touches like Google maps showing you where the job is located, granular built-in search tools, filters and views to help jobseekers find exactly what they’re looking for, and a back-end Dashboard for employers to manage the job listings they’ve posted in the past are all part of the mix. I think it’s pretty sweet.

Resume posting

Jobseekers can post their resumes for employers to browse, tag them and categorize them so they’re easily found, and sit back and (hopefully) let the job offers roll in. Posting your resume to the site will always be free.

Live FAQ

I get a lot of questions about working and living in Korea on the various community sites I frequent (Metafilter, in particular) and via email. People want to know how things work: they need useful info before deciding to leave home, and after they arrive in Korea. That need was one of the reasons I started OutsideinKorea, but I eventually decided that the blog format wasn’t really the best way to help people out. The Jobseekr FAQ subsite is, I think. FAQs are organized by topic, and every topic has a textbox at the bottom where visitors can ask questions they might have, and I and my crack team of SuperExpats will do their best to answer. As soon as we have an answer, it’ll appear on the site, along with the question.

Community

Community is another centerpiece of the site. It’s a new take on web community, focused on individuals and ways for them to get together into groups around interests or locations, plan events out in the real world, and stay as private or as public as they wish to be. Forums are, of course, baked-in, and tied to groups, public, private or hidden from community view. It’s really a great piece of software, and I hope that people will enjoy using it. Think of it as a kind of Facebook for our community — you can even use your Facebook login to create an account there with Facebook Connect!

Another major part of the whole is that anyone who registers an account in the community — as well as being able to dive right in and start interacting with people and joining or creating groups and starting or participating in forum threads — can create, in a few clicks, their very own hosted Wordpress weblog, at http://jobsee.kr/community/whatevertheywant

Weblogs are a dime a dozen these days, of course, but with tight integration to the community, and the ability to create group weblogs tied to the Groups that users can create within the community — well, if it takes off, I’m excited to see what people do with the tools I’m providing.

Thus endeth the promotional post. I hope anyone who happens by OutsideinKorea or is still subscribed to the RSS feed will go and check out the new site. Like I said, it’s going to be launching soon in all its glory, but the community subsite is ready to rock, and I’d love to see people join up and start kicking the tires.

Welcome to the next generation. I hope it kicks some butt.

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A Free Korean Language Course

Chris — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:39:37 +0000

Just as there are a lot of terrible ESL books out there, there are also a lot of egregiously bad textbooks designed for foreign learners of Korean. In fact, I’ve rarely seen such badly organized and poorly thought out language texts as some of the ones I’ve tried to use to improve my Korean. It’s an insight perhaps, into the quality of language education in primary and secondary schools, if the Korean-made textbooks used to teach English and other languages are as poorly put together. Help is at hand if you’re a self-directed student of Korean, though.

The American Foreign Service Institute used to publish a series of courses targetting a wide variety of languages, for the use of diplomats and other government employees posted to overseas positions. The Korean one — Mastering Korean, available in two levels — is the best that I’ve ever seen, the most comprehensive and logically-structured introduction to the grammar and structures of the language

It’s not pretty in terms of design — it has no illustrations whatsoever and is typset in Courier — and it’s not intended as a classroom text, but for self-study, particularly if you have a modicum of knowledge about linguistics and grammar in English, it’s very good indeed.

The other good news is that it’s in the public domain. So I’m pleased to be able to offer the course for download here, from this site, free of charge. All I ask is that if you link to it, you link to this page, rather than directly to the files in question. Each chapter is in pdf form, and the audio component has been converted to mp3 files.

There is one gotcha, though. The author uses his own romanization, one different from either the old McCune-Reischauer romanization or the revised one adopted by the Korean government since 2000, and there is minimal use of the actual Korean alphabet in the examples and exercises. The romanization used is a sensible one, particularly if one knows the sounds of Korean already, and some of the quirks of pronunciation. If you take care to note, for example, the regular transformation of syllable-ending consonant sounds (for example a consonant-spanning ㅆ is romanized as ’ss’, even though it may be pronounced as a t-like unreleased stop followed by the sibilant), you’ll be OK. I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the alphabet and its sounds first (it’s a matter of a few hours to a few days), then learn the system used in the text, comparing and keeping mindful of the quirks as you go.

So, without further ado: here’s a belated Christmas present, Level One of Mastering Korean. Share and enjoy (and if you know of any other good textbooks for learning Korean, please feel free to let everyone know about them below, in the comments).

Update: You can find the Level Two course here!

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A Short Korean Food Primer

Chris — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:32:42 +0000

Are you new to Korea (or planning to come) and want to know how to order food at one of the local eateries, or just know what it is? Do you live somewhere else and want to impress that beautiful waitress (or waiter, I guess) at your local Korean restaurant?

Well, despair no more, friends, because I’m going to give you the beginnings of a Rosetta Stone for ordering Korean food with style and aplomb and hopefully not too much embarrassed-for-you giggling.

It might help a little to peruse Learning to Read Korean Part 1 and Part 2 (Parts 3 and 4 are upcoming) before you jump in, but I’ll try and provide some phonetic cues in this article which will make it unnecessary to actually be able read Korean (that said, it’s really easy, so I encourage you to give it a go!)

Throughout this article, I’ll use the Korean, then the revised romanization, then a phonetic approximation for those who are not familiar with the sounds of Korean (regrettably, a prerequisite for proper pronunciation of the revised romanization scheme), then the translation.

An example: 밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)

Dining Customs

In Korea, you order your main dish, which is frequently some kind of soup or stew, often served individually in a heated stone or clay bowl to each diner, or in a larger pot or pan in the center of the table over a gas fire, which is shared amongst everyone at the table. Also shared are the constellation of 반찬 (banchan, ‘bahnchahn’, side dishes) — the more there are, the more sumptous the meal is perceived to be. It is perfectly fine to ask for more of a given side-dish if it’s all eaten (and is provided without charge), and it is unnecessary to eat all of the each of the side dishes (and in fact might give a bit of an impression of gluttony).

Everyone also gets a small individual lidded stainless (or sometimes ceramic) bowl of short-grain, glutinous rice, which you are generally expected to finish. Long-grain, ‘fluffy’ rice is almost unheard of — if that’s what you get in an overseas Korean restaurant, it’s just not the Real Thing. The rice bowl is customary kept to the diner’s left, and the soup or stew to the right. Stainless steel chopsticks and long-handled shallow steel spoons are customary, although Korean folks (overseas or in touristed areas of Korea) may try and be ‘helpful’ and give you a fork. Be gracious, thank them, and put it aside in favour of the chopsticks. Many restaurants (but by no means all) have areas with floor seating and table-and-chair seating; the former is, of course, the traditional style.

Food is very regional, and every little village and town has its own specialties, for which, according to the locals of that hamlet, it is justifiably famous. Regions also tend to have their own takes on standard dishes like 김치 (kimchi) or 김밥 (kimbap) or 비빔밥 (bibimbap).

Some etiquette no-nos if eating with Koreans (or just trying to be polite a la mode Koreane): don’t

blow your nose at the table
pick up your utensils and start eating before the eldest person at the table does so
stick your chopsticks upright in your rice and leave them (edit: this is done with the rice offering during annual graveside ceremonies to honour ancestors, and so is inappropriate to do at a convivial dinner)
pour your own liquor — watch what others are doing (the matter of drinking etiquette deserves its own essay, which I’ll tackle sometime later

Answers.com mentions a few other things as constituting bad table manners

Bad manners include [...] chewing with an open mouth, talking with food in one’s mouth, [...] stabbing foods with chopsticks, mixing rice and soup, and picking up food with one’s hands…

As far as I’ve seen in 10 years here, those are pretty much nonsense, at least in any but the most absolutely formal of situations.

The Language Of Food

Here are some vocabulary elements that show up in the names of various foods, and will help you to guess what category, at least, the dish might fit into.

밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)
장 – jang, ‘jahng’, paste
자장 – jajang, ‘jahjang’, black bean paste
된 – doen, ‘dwehn’, fermented soy beans
고추 – gochu, ‘gohchoo’, hot pepper
김 – gim, ‘k/gim’, dried laver seaweed (the initial sound is partway between ‘k’ and ‘g’, usually romanized in the past as ‘k’) (note also, that it’s not the same 김 and the one in 김치 (kimchi).
떡 – deok, ‘dduhk’, chewy rice cake (the inital ‘d’ is highly aspirated)
두부 = dubu, ‘dooboo’, tofu
고기 – gogi, ‘gogee’, meat
닭 – ‘dak’, ‘dahk’, chicken
돼지 – ‘doeji’, ‘dwehjee’, pork
감자 – ‘kamcha’, ‘kahmcha’, potato
회 – hoe, ‘hweh’, raw fish or other raw seafood
찌개 – jjigae, ‘jeegay’, soup or stew
탕 – tang, ‘tahng’, soup or stew
국 – guk, ‘gook’, soup or stew
면 – myeon, ‘myuhn’, noodles
주 – ju, ‘joo’, alcoholic beverage (소주, 맥주, 동동주, etc)
차 – cha, ‘chah’, tea
물 – mul, ‘mool’, water
불 – bul, ‘bool’, fire

비빔 – bibim, ‘beebeem’, mixed
냉 – neng, ‘nehng’, cool or cold

Those syllables (there are many many more, of course) are enough to get you well down the path of figuring out the most common Korean menu items! Let’s start putting them together and see what we get. (

된+장 = fermented soy bean + paste: one of the most common bases for soups and stews.
고추+장 = hot pepper + paste: the other most common flavouring, after 마늘 maneul, ‘mahneuhl’, garlic)

See how easy it is?

How about the everyday light meal or snack, 김밥?

Well, 김+밥 = seaweed rice, which is what it is. Rice with goodies, wrapped in a seaweed roll. Sushi roll ahoy!

How about that old dinner standby, 불고기?

불 + 고기 = fire meat. Sounds painful, but it’s the grilled marinated beef that is iconic of Korean BBQ. Variations are 닭 불고기 (chicken + fire + meat) and 돼지 불고기 (pork + fire + meat).

Now, let’s put together some even longer dish names, why don’t we?

된장찌개 = 된+장+찌개 = soybean + paste + stew.
김치찌개 = 김치+찌개 = kimchi + stew.
두부 찌개 = 두부+ 찌개 = tofu stew. Woohoo!

What about that other everyday Korean food that everybody knows and loves, 비빔밥?

비빔+밥= mixed + rice, which is exactly what it is (except you do the mixing, which adds to the Power of the Delicious, if you do it right). And, of course, it’s what you mix in with the rice and the 고추장 that makes it sing. A sunnyside-up fried egg on top is mandatory, in my humble.

Let’s try that again with another noun. How about

비빔면 = 비빔+면 = mixed noodles, the noodle equivalent of 비빔밥.

A standard Koreanized Chinese food is 자장면. What’s that?

자장 + 면 = black bean paste + noodles.

One of my all-time favorite Korean foods is 냉면. What does that mean?

It’s easy: 냉+면 = cold + noodles.

We can get even fancier, because there are two kinds of 냉면.

물 냉면 = water + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles in a cool broth)
비빔 냉면 = mixed + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles with veggies and seasoned pepper sauce, that you mix in the bowl in much the same way you mix 비빔밥, of course!)

Fantastic stuff in the summer time.

And, last but not least, we can now read the label on that old favorite from university days, ramyeon (ramen in Anglified Japanese).

ramyeon = 라면 = 라 + 면 = ra + noodles. I dunno what ‘ra’ means, but it’s darn tasty.

Cool, huh?

Now, I won’t pretend that this list is exhaustive, and there are synonyms and other words for some of these things, as well as many, many more ingredients and combinations Just a few tastes from the groaning buffet table. But after studying these building blocks, you should be able to navigate your way through that Korean-language menu on the wall with a little bit more authority.

Good luck!

(If you have any additions or corrections, feel free to leave a comment, below.)

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A New House and A Walk In The Woods

Chris — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 06:46:50 +0000

I learned an important lesson about living in Korea today, and I learned it at the point of a gun, which may just make it stick for a while, for a change.

Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (’rule of law’ not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.

Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk and fridge, located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.

† I liked it better pre-2001 when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners (’san’ being the Chinese character for ‘mountain’) so I could refer to the city as ‘Poo Mountain’ and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now.

The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I tended at that point in my life to enjoy the tipple too much to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and aimless sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.

The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.

The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithely exclusionary attitude that has traditionally informed much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with the hairy barbarians. To be fair, it has been in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, I admit). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call the most-favoured tenant demographic, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan ‘love hotels’ on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.

I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale sex and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than they deserve, though, I’m sure.

So when my contract at the university ended with a whimper rather than a bang last month, it was a fairly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).

The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our (well, my) chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.

So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.

Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.

Until we found the area we decided to plant our flag for a few months. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears when we started looking around there. It was the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’d seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like brobdingnagian barnacles nor consisting of streaked domino concrete slabs looming over echoing concrete courtyards, brutalist Pyongyang retro-soviet style. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and wasn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.

Seoul is a city (like most other urban environments in Korea) that hates its residents.

I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.

Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire life in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.

So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.

We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.

It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto – but it’s pretty nice.

One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we had been the first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with accreted filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That had been pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge had been enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.

The new area, Songnae, had a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved one day, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, the week before, to attempt to find my way up the closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, that far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.

The weather had been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer — unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I had been in a while, and it was good.

I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.

After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.

My meagre command of Korean being what it was, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f**k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.

They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the hell outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”

I got the hell out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.

And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.

[originally published September 2003, revised and updated June 2006]

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On 기분

Chris — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 04:49:17 +0000

Kibun (기분 — variously romanized, roughly pronounced ‘gee-boon’) has been translated into English as ‘mood’ or ’state of mind’ or ‘feeling’, but these are pale concepts compared to the Korean one. In Korea, Kibun is regarded as much more important a matter than most westerners would regard mere mood. In another of those seeming contradictions of Korea, Koreans have a tendency to dwell, involute, on their more delicate feelings, despite their rough-and-ready, earthy exteriors. The degree to which they can focus on their emotional states can seem almost effete to a westerner, particularly one who, like me, grew up in a rough, tough northern town. Kibun is of overarching importance in social relations, is constantly discussed, and attempts are always made to ensure kibun is preserved.

It might be described as the part of you that goes beyond your physical presence, that not only permeates your being but surrounds you, invisibly, like a cloud. But it can be damaged, by unhappiness or disrespect, by losing face, by thoughtlessness or humiliation, by anything that’s disruptive to the harmony you feel with other people. Damage to your kibun is damage to your essence, and can have negative effects both mentally and physically.

It is this consciousness of an inner life, one that is molded by the degree of harmony one achieves in one’s relationships with other people to whom one feels any degree of responsibility, that gives Koreans their almost preternatural ability to sense peoples’ mood, and their character, and modify their own behaviour to lubricate the social gears. That’s the nice part. The infuriating flip side of that, though, for many foreigners, is the tendency to dance elegantly away from any potential confrontation. An angry waeguk-in, until they understand what’s happening, is likely to become angrier when the Korean with whom they have a bone to pick says ‘Maybe’ when they mean ‘No’, or ‘tomorrow’ when they mean ‘never’, in order to try and re-establish harmonious dealings. The accompanying, ever-present potential too, is that when someone is pushed too far, and they lose face, in which case ’social harmony’ can take a flying leap, and the only way to regain face and salvage personal kibun is to blow up and stomp and yell. This happens a lot, too.

In this consciousness of the relationships between people and its effect on your own wellbeing, rather than the ‘correctness’, ‘objective truth’, or self-interest of an individual or his arguments, there is a minefield of potential misunderstanding. Most foreigners to Korea trip through it over and over again, myself included, before they realize that putting the kibun of the people around you first, even in a situation of confrontation, will bring results.

(As an aside, this is what the Americans do not seem to understand, or care to, when they deal with North Korea. The patterns of seemingly-irrational behaviour on the part of the DPRK negotiators isn’t (always) irrational at all, from their own perspective.)

The importance of kibun for Korean people should never be underestimated. It’s not merely convention, it’s baked-in. Koreans can make crucial, important decisions based on kibun. Business decisions, choice of a mate, career and employment choices, all may be taken on the basis of what feels right, or what will result in the most socially harmonious outcome for all concerned. Koreans will discuss kibun, but rarely attempt to analyze it in this way. To do so would perhaps damage their kibun.

This is not to say that decisions, important or otherwise, are made strictly on a non-rational, intuitive basis. Things like love and marriage, about which westerners can be decidedly irrational, are approached with a combination of cold, rational analysis and intuitive leaps here, for example. It is another of the contradictions that make up so much of what it means to be Korean.

In future, look for more on this from me. Kibun is only one of the six controlling concepts of the Korean psyche : chemyeon, neunchi, kibun, bunuiki, jeong and han, and the interplay between these guiding forces is what makes Koreans so unique, and, at times, so difficult for the non-Korean to understand.

[originally published January 2002, revised and updated 2006]

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Teaching In Korea — The Skinny

Chris — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:11:09 +0000

There’ve been a few questions on Ask Metafilter that I’ve answered with some variation ‘why not teach in Korea?’, and I realized that there was no place of which I was aware that served as a comprehensive introduction to the Honourable Slave Trade. So, this, originally written for my private site, and lightly revised for OutsideIn.

Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival (”Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?” “When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?”) that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum — there’s gotta be a market for a book like that.

So here’s a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :

The Skinny

It’s pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they’ll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won’t, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a ‘hakwon’ is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what’s expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.

Some do end up actually teaching, and teaching older children, or university students (who, in Korea, have for the most part an emotional age of about 13, from the western perspective, except that the boys are required to interrupt their schooling to do military service for more than two years, which bumps them up to the level of, say, extremely sullen abused 16 year olds, perhaps, on their return), or even adults. Whatever the age, these students are for the most part veterans of the hakwon churn, and if they’ve studied English for any length of time, have seen a rotating cast of wide-eyed foreigners go through the Korea Newbie Cycle :

Wide-eyed wonder
Blissful confusion, pleasant buzzy disorientation
The three-month barrier : missing home, missing food, missing easy conversation
Unblissful confusion, culture shock, isolation
Resentment of Korea as personified by one’s boss, xenophobia, alcohol abuse, ranting
…

The next stages depend on the person.

Not a few freak out entirely, experience a psychotic break, and go wobbly. This is sometimes a permanent condition. Many of those who flip their noodles leave Korea, either suddenly or at the end of their contract, broken and dull-eyed or raving and newly-racist. Of that group, many nonetheless return, finding themselves unable to function properly back home. A self-perpetuating cycle of odd activity (which finds little to no censure in Korea, as most Koreans expect foreign devils to behave in inexplicable and aberrant ways anyway, and most expats tend to have a degree of quirkiness already, and are unwilling to criticize others in their small groups as there are so few around) begins, the end result of which is Freaky Waeguk-in (”way-goog-in” – Korean for “foreigner”) Syndrome. This is epidemic.

Some, after going a bit loopy temporarily, settle down, get a grip, and fall into one of two general patterns. They go native, learn the language, marry a Korean, and in a range of different ways further their isolation (or not, and try to maintain a balance) from their countrymen and mothertongue siblings, or they shrug, accept, and learn to enjoy the chaos, ferment, stares and prejudices and insults, and take it all with a sense of humour. Some of these stay for a while, some go elsewhere, or back home, after a year, or two, or three. If they’ve been cautious, they’ve been able to pay off their student loans, if they had them, and more. It is commonplace, although illegal (if caught, you will be at least fined and at most fined and deported), to teach private lessons at rates ranging from $30 an hour on up. I do not personally do this, but most people I know do, and you can double your income quite easily this way. I’ve known some people who have left Korea after 5 years with enough cash to buy a house back home. How they dealt with issues of taxation on their return was their business.

But that may not be what most people are reading this for, especially if they’ve arrived on the wings of Google. You probably want to know what the deal is with working in Korea, in one handy, pre-packaged essay. The dirt, the skinny, the Good Oil. You’re probably in your 20’s, and you probably have student loans to pay off. You might be looking a first adventure overseas, or you may be an old hand at the backpacker trail, and need some ready cash.

OK, here’s the story, in a very very small nutshell.

You will be offered the following, with some variations.

Anywhere from a bottom end of 2,000,000 won per month to a high end of 2,500,000 or more (this being winter 2008), usually for a contact-time workload of 25-35 hours per week. If you have any teaching qualifications, you should be able to negotiate your way towards the upper end of that salary range, but there is no guarantee. Some people make more than this without qualifications, and some less, I am aware. University positions, for which the required qualifications are sometimes MA degrees, but more frequently BA/BSc degrees with 3 or more years experience (in Korea), usually pay at the low end of the scale, but often have very generous holidays (12-16 weeks per year) and low contact hours (12 – 18 hours) per week. There are growing numbers of exceptions to this rule of thumb as Korean universities become ‘hakwonized’ and cash-flow oriented. Many university teachers are asked to ‘teach’ children these days, and are working as hard for their salaries as hakwon teachers.

Although some teachers will fly into a foaming frenzy of resentment if it is suggested, it is nonetheless true (again as a generalization) that there is a hierarchy of job desireability in Korea, which may be different for different individuals, depending on factors like how much they like children, how important free time is to them, how much money they want to make, or how professional a teacher they consider themselves. It does exist, in general terms, nonetheless. Remember, success and relationships in Korea are all about hierarchy, and assessing hierarchy requires assignment of status. You may not like it, but it is the reality of the situation.

At the bottom of the scrum are the kiddie hakwons, and the elementary/middle-schooler hakwons. These make up the vast bulk of teaching opportunities in Korea, and as a newbie, chances are this will be the kind of job you are offered. There are good schools and bad, and good bosses and (very, very) bad. Whether you get a good one or a bad one is often a matter of sheer, dumb luck. If you get a personal recommendation about a school, that makes all the difference, although it is not unknown for people to talk up a school in order to find their own replacement, nor is it unknown for people to keep the names of good schools to themselves and their circle of friends incountry. The best jobs are frequently not advertised, as in many industries.

Next up are the more reputable chain schools (which often have individual branches that are hellholes, so being part of a chain is no guarantee of quality), where you may teach kids, university students, and/or adults. Adult classes almost invariably mean an early start (before they go to work) or a late finish (after they finish work) or, in the most horripilating of cases, both. Split shifts — where you work from, say, 6:30 am to 9 am and then again from 6 pm to 9 pm — are less common than they once were, but still almost the rule in adult hakwons. This kind of schedule may well drive you insane, even if you are allowed to go home and sleep during the day, if you do it for any length of time. Some of these hakwon jobs are good, and some lucky new srrivals find great bosses or great salaries, or truly love teaching kids, and stay at the hakwons for many years. Some.

For many, the next step up the food chain is getting a university position. The workload is easy, the students are, if not motivated, at least generally quite pleasant, and although the money isn’t great, such a position leaves plenty of time for travel, writing, study, drinking, or whatever. At my last university position I worked four hour days four days a week, with four months paid holiday (plus national holidays etc), and made in the lower mid-range of the salaries quoted above.

Top of the heap for many is corporate jobs, teaching, editing, proofreading, developing curricula, and so on. These positions are few and far between, and unless you’ve been incountry for a number of years and have a great deal of experience with teaching Koreans and knowledge of Korean cultural norms, you might not even get an interview. There are exceptions, but they are few. Your alma mater means almost as much in this situation, as it does for Koreans, as anything else.

You will pay tax, healthcare and pension from this. For Americans and Canadians, it is law that your employer must deduct 4.5% of your salary for pension, and kick in an additional 4.5%. This money will be refunded (but you must apply) on departure from Korea. After a year, it will be somewhat more than a month’s salary. Antipodeans may not be able to reclaim their pension — the law may be changing there. Some universities use a private pension plan, so your contribution may vary.

Income tax will be deducted, at a rate that should not exceed 5%. Healthcare should be provided through the employer, and deductions will be on the order of 50,000 won per month, perhaps less. You will receive a paper healthcare booklet with a plastic sheath that you must take to clinics and hospitals to receive coverage.

You will often be promised training when you are offered a hakwon job, but there is a 90-100% chance you will not receive any. This is a cruel joke, but every time someone new to Korea complains about it, I am compelled to laugh nastily, mostly because I’m a complete bastard. Buy a book or two before you come, is my best advice, if you’ve never taught.

You will be offered accommodation, and you will in almost all situations be required to pay utilities for your apartment. Gas, water and electricity can be very expensive here. If you consume them to the same degree you’re used to in North America or Australia (or…) you will probably be paying between 100,000 and 200,000 won per month. Your accommodation may be single or shared, and this is something you should verify up-front. Many schools, understanding the preference of many for single housing, are offering it these days. Asking for pictures of your housing may be a good idea – it will in many cases be incredibly tiny, old and dingy. This is by no means always the case – it is increasingly common for good schools and universities to offer quite attractive, modern housing – but it is something to look out for. Nothing will depress you faster than a dim, mildewy closet to go back home to after an exhausting day of teaching.

Most schools offer airfare, either upfront or on a reimbursement basis. None will pay your return airfare if you break your contract, and if you notify them that you are quitting early, rather than just disappearing (as many do, which makes the level of trust for the rest of us grind down another notch), the school may well try to deduct the inbound airfare from your salary. Some school have begun withholding a portion of the first few months’ pay as a kind of insurance policy, usually because they’ve had teachers to a Midnight Run before. This is technically illegal, but if you sign a contract that mentions it, you really can’t complain too much. Read your contract carefully before you sign it, is the lesson here.

Most schools offer a contract completion bonus, usually equivalent to one month’s salary. This is sometimes finessed by claiming that the bonus was built in to the salary, and paid in installments. This is a scam, but a common one, and needs to be verified up front.

Bosses

Korean hakwon owners are almost universally reviled, and with good reason. The vast majority are entirely unconcerned with education per se, and obsessed with making (and scrimping to save) money. That’s why they got into the business, in almost all cases, and it is a lucrative one, if they play their cards right. There are horror-stories galore available around the net, and many of them are true, so I won’t bother getting lurid here, but a warning : caution is advisable. Treat your boss with deference and respect, and never disagree with him (chances approach 100% that it will be a ‘him’) in public. Don’t trust him until you’re sure you can, but not in a negative way, until you’re given reason. Just be sensibly cautious. Buy a book like ‘Ugly Americans, Ugly Koreans’ to learn about some norms of behaviour and how accidental offense happens in both directions, before you come. It is better to err on the side of overcaution and over-solicitiousness than to give offense, because once you do it, you may well be cast into the ‘waeguk-in who will never understand Korea’ bin, never to be recycled. Koreans love to label others, as do most folks, but their labels can be very sticky indeed.

That said, your Korean boss may just be a total psycho. It really isn’t that uncommon.

Do not assume that your director is cheating you by default, but have a clear understanding of what your mutual responsibilities are, and be vigilant (in a polite and professional way) to ensure that if you are upholding yours, he is similarly upholding his. Never accuse him of anything to the contrary in public, unless you have gotten to the bridge-burning stage. Try and remain calm in the face of apoplectic bluster, rather than giving back as good as you get. Korean men are brought up to believe that temper tantrums are an effective and acceptable means of dealing with confrontation and frustration, particularly with those who they perceive to be beneath them in the social, Confucian strata.

Confucian ideas are an important substrate to dealing with people here, particularly older males. Understand (even if you don’t agree), and try to leverage the fact that your only hook into the hierarchy (especially if you are young, female, and foreign, or any combination of the three) is that you are a teacher, and teachers are to be given respect. At least when they behave in a manner deserving of respect, where people can see ‘em.

Paperwork

You will be asked for originals of your qualifications and other paperwork, if you get to the contract signing stage. This paperwork is sometimes lost. Korean immigration recently lost my original university diploma. Yeah, I know. It happens, but these things can be replaced, although it generally does cost. Once immigration approves you and you have signed a contract, one of two things will happen — you will either be sent a document which authorizes the local Korean consulate to issue you an E-2 Teacher visa, good for one year, or you will be told to fly to Korea (no visa is required for most nationalities to enter as a tourist) and, once here, be sent to Japan to get the visa. The school should pay for both trips, although many schools try to refuse, often successfully. Be aware that if you teach after arrival in Korea and before you have that E-2 in your passport, you are breaking the law, and can be fined or deported.

To start a job at a new employer, you must receive your E-2 outside of Korea. Signing a new contract with the same employer only requires a trip to the local immigration office.

Recruiters

The Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Jobs list, which is probably the single best resource for finding a job for people both outside Korea and already incountry, has been swamped in the last year or so with recruiter ads. “We have best jobs! All wonderful happy time fun! Beautiful city most good living in Korea!” and so on. The community is divided on recruiters – some have had positive experiences, and experienced no problems in finding jobs through them. My first job in Korea was through a recruiter, although I did not realize it at the time, and in many ways the job was a good one. But there are many who will tell you to never, ever use a recruiter, just because of the sheer number of unscrupulous, unprofessional agencies out there. I tend to agree, but if you take care, you may get lucky.

I recommend dealing with a school directly. The fewer intermediaries there are between you and the person you’re actually going to be working for, the better. Recruiters receive a payout for every warm body they deliver to a school, and sometimes a cut of the salary paid, which inclines them to push candidates toward positions regardless of the quality of that position, which is not a situation that should inspire trust. Using a recruiter may make your job search easier, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Contracts and their importance (or lack thereof)

Contracts are a mixed bag in Korea. Some are stuffed with pages and pages of badly-written minutiae, all inserted, in most cases, because some previous employee behaved badly or performed poorly or drank too much or something of the kind, and the school is trying to close loopholes that might allow such things. Some contracts will have clauses that are outright illegal in Canada or America (or…), and these can be argued against but will rarely be changed. They are for the most part left unenforced, anyway, but when it is in the school’s interest, your director will not hesitate to point out the letter of the contract, and demand compliance. In no uncertain terms.

The other side of this is that with most Korean employers, the relationship between the parties to a contract is more important than the agreement on paper. This happens not only at the level we’re talking about, but manifests itself in the frustration that many western business people experience when negotiating with their Korean counterparts – Koreans frequently want to revisit language and conditions of an agreement long after, from the perspective of the westerner, all pertinent discussion has been finished, and the agreement has been ‘put to bed’.

This puts the employee into a difficult situation : when making a complaint about conditions of employment that appear to breach the agreement signed, many Korean directors will explain that ‘that’s not way do in Korea,’ and attempt to get out of their responsibilities, which the teacher assumes, rightly, are legally binding. On the other hand, when a teacher does or requests something that is outside the contract language, the director may turn around and say that ’sorry, not in contract’ as a reason to refuse the request or censure the activity. It can be maddening.

The EFL-law website is a good resource of last resort in this situation, but it must be said that in 9 cases out of 10 pushing a dispute to the point where legal or human rights recourse is necessary will mean that the foreigner loses. Not that you can’t win, but that you probably won’t. You should be aware that the system is strongly weighted in favour of your boss, and chances of prevailing are not good.

Which means that you should do everything possible to avoid getting to the point where conflict is inevitable. Flexibility, sensitivity to the concept of ‘face’, reasonable and professional behaviour in the workplace, and care to develop a positive relationship with your employer, on their terms, will help this. It’s a cultural minefield, but if you learn the rules of the game upfront, almost all conflict can be avoided before it occurs.

Your job

The failings of the Korean education system are manifold, but with regard to language teaching, they are quite specific. In the past, and to a large degree in the present as well, many people studied English with people who couldn’t speak it. They studied in the ‘traditional’ Korean style, which is firmly in the model of ‘teacher as source of knowledge and wisdom’, lecturing. They studied grammar, translated passages with dictionaries, were taught incorrect pronunciation and in many cases incorrect idioms and grammatical constructs (older Koreans without fail use ‘as possible as’ when they mean ‘as much as possible’ as a result of the former being nominated as the correct formation and taught as such in the all-important university entrance exams for years, for example), by Korean teachers of English.

As a result, most students, at most levels, need practice speaking, and listening to a lesser degree. Getting Koreans to speak in class, though, is frequently an exercise in frustration, as the learning style they have had beaten into them over years or decades is in complete opposition to the idea of speaking up in class. Asking questions of one’s teacher is considered, traditionally, as a challenge and a sign of disrespect.

New teachers believe their students to be taciturn and sullen — in fact, in most cases, they’re just showing respect in the only way they’ve been taught to do so in the educational context, by attentive silence.

So strategies must be devised to overcome the pedagogical catch-22. Each teacher approaches it different ways, and those ways vary with different student ages, but providing structure and clear examples to model expectations so that the student’s chances of failure are minimized is a good start, and is a wise strategy at all levels of language teaching. It’s all the more important in the Korean context.

People

Although many teachers in Korea — most, perhaps — make an avocation of complaining bitterly about the country and the people, and some leave with anger and a sense of relief at having ‘escaped’, a lot of those same people miss the Korean people and their nation, and inevitably return. Some others just settle in, bitching all the while, broken expat records, and they can be annoying to have a beer with, and are best avoided. Others choose their targets a bit better.

It seems to be the lot of foreigners living here to have a love-hate relationship with Korea, and with Korean people, who can be so xenophobic and yet so hospitable and kind, so abrasive and impolite yet so conscious and careful of the niceties and minutiae of feeling and mood, so puritanical but so boozy and sexy and free, so group-focussed yet so individualistic, so backwards but so modern. The contradictions never cease to fascinate, and for a foreigner who makes even a cursory attempt to understand the old, odd, and ornate monoculture he or she is leaping into, and to read and understand a modicum of the nation’s history, and to make an attempt to learn a little of the language, the rewards are great.

I won’t lie — it’s hard as hell to live in Korea, perhaps harder than anywhere else in the world with a similarly high standard of living, for the westerner. But it’s equally hard, once you’ve gotten under the surface a bit, to leave it behind. And if you’re young, and looking at a Nametag Nation job back home, the money, once you’ve added in all the benefits, is undeniably great.

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