Memories of Korea

On March 28^th, it will have been 10 years since I returned to Canada from South Korea, where I was teaching English. Wow.

People often ask me if I enjoyed my experience there, and my short answer is that I’m happy that I went. I had a lot of stuff going on in my life at the time, which Korea no doubt helped to precipitate, and I was really, really young experience-wise. I worked for people who were likely stealing from me or otherwise not acting in my best interests, and I had a relationship with someone who was an amazing friend but a really awful boyfriend, but it all came together to be a terrific learning experience, and I made some lifelong friends as well, so … overall, I am truly glad that I did this.

I have a lot of cool stories from that time of my life, but I have less and less occasion to tell them now. So I’ve decided to reach back in those dusty shelves of memory and bring a few out to share. Here’s the first:

But before I get started, a little bit of background: When I lived there, Korea was going through accelerated social change, but society was still very conservative and patriarchal in some ways, with lots of taboos (e.g., it was considered shocking and brazen behaviour for women to smoke in public, it was common and relatively accepted for husbands to have mistresses, etc.). I expect that many things are dramatically different today.

I used to teach civil servants in the city hall where I lived. The public health nurse was a spirited woman in her 50s who probably had her work cut out for her, but she had a lot of energy and was a lot of fun. One day, we were working on vocabulary, specifically the rooms of a house and the furniture therein. We were working through the furniture room-by-room, with me giving my students a chance to call out vocabulary that they already knew. Everything was going well and without anything noteworthy (other than the gratifying excitement of students developing confidence in their own skills) until the bedroom. That’s when the public health nurse yelled out “Condom!” as her contribution to the list of bedroom furniture.

Well, you should have seen the reactions in that room. The nurse was such a likeable, irrepressible person (no doubt seizing every opportunity to get her message across) and yet for her to actually yell out this word in mixed company??? The room convulsed in laughter. There were some 50-something men in business suits sitting next to her who actually turned away from her because they couldn’t look at her, even as they laughed because they were so embarrassed.

And the nurse sat there among the furor, enjoying her moment and knowing that she’d made her colleagues think a little bit more about safe sex. :)