by Chris Tharp
Reservations aside, I decided to give the sauna a go. While my hangover had lessened by the time I ground out that last hour of class, it still possessed me like a malevolent spirit, and the only way to banish it from my body would be through heat and sweat. So after work I walked straight over to the building, entered through the door, and approached the front desk, which was staffed by two pretty young women. I paid six thousand won (US$6.00) for both the sauna and jjim-jil bang, and was handed a numbered key attached a semi-elastic band, as well as a shirt and pair of shorts. I thanked them and walked toward the elevator, only to be stopped by one of the women’s voice shouting after me: “Shoes! Shoes!” She pointed to my shoes and then gestured to the rows of small lockers in front of the elevators.
Ashamed to play the part of the uncouth Westerner, I bashfully waved back and removed my shoes, opening the locker with the key I had been given.
The elevator brought me up to the fourth floor, where the men’s sauna and locker room were located. I entered the locker room and searched for my number. There were hundreds of large wooden lockers in the warm, brightly-lit space. This locker room had none of the dank smell of man-sweat, like a place back home. It was clean and welcoming. Men congregated near a television set showing the evening’s baseball game. Some were nude, while others wore the shorts and shirts provided for them to wear in the jjim-jil bang. Their eyes were fixed on the game, while a few munched on hard-baked eggs that sat out in a wooden bowl on the seating platform. An attendant was seated behind a desk and greeted me as I walked in. A commercial refrigerator sold soft drinks and cans of coffee. A door led into what looked like a tiny barber shop. I quickly located my locker, stripped down, took a deep breath, and headed toward the entrance of the main sauna.
In the West, when we say “sauna,” we usually mean “steam room.” A Korean sauna contains steam rooms, soaking pools, as well as showers and personal cleaning stations. This is what I first made out as I sauntered into the main area. Steam hung in the air, and the place echoed with the sound of jetting water and men’s distorted voices. It was not a particularly quiet place. A few eyes darted my way as I came in, but for the most part I was ignored. I soaped up and rinsed off under one of the countless shower nozzles, and then went to check out the actual baths. There were three hot baths to choose from: I slipped into the largest one and let the hot water envelop me.
Immediately I felt the talons of my hangover loosen their grasp; my body relaxed as I loudly exhaled. As I opened my eyes, I saw a young boy sitting across from me, next to his father. The boy’s eyes were transfixed, as if he could not believe the vision of a real live foreigner relaxing in front of him. I closed my eyes once again. When I reopened them, I saw that his stare had not abated. He was just a curious kid, but I was beginning to feel like a zoo animal and couldn’t help but be annoyed. As I looked away from the boy, I saw an older man–perhaps in his mid-50s–enter the pool and look my way. He smiled. I politely returned the smile. He waved. I nodded. He then waded across the bath and approached me.
Oh no, please.
He sat next to me and began to talk: “Hello!”
“Uhm… hello.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m… uh… I’m from the USA.”
“Oh, America? Yes, yes, I know. I’ve visited America several times…”
The man spoke English well and no doubt wished to practice. I had already experienced this several times, so I wasn’t surprised. What caused me to recoil was the fact that he grabbed my arm and touched me as he spoke.
A naked man touching me while I, too, am naked. No.
Call it homophobia, but the idea of a nude guy touching me ANYWHERE while I also lack clothes just scrapes against the grain.
Is this some old pervert hitting on me in what seems to be an otherwise respectable public bath? Or is he just being friendly?
As I scrambled for some sort of cultural bearing, I saw at once that my meters were out of whack. They needed some serious recalibration. Even so, I extricated myself from the pool as quickly and politely as possible, and jumped into the cold bath, which cooled me off and immediately cleared my head. My skin contracted and my thoughts sharpened. The sensation of going from faint-headed hot to bracingly cold is one of my favorites in life. I couldn’t imagine the sauna without a cold pool. It’s the best part, really. I knelt in the waist-deep water and looked out onto the scene playing out in front of me. Korean men–all black-haired and yellowish-brown-skinned–walked and bathed and washed in the white-tiled room. Their uniformity made me self-conscious. I was big, pink, and different. Many of them were seated on small stools in front of cleaning stations, where they went at themselves with vigor. I saw a father lay his son over his knee while he scrubbed the dead skin off the kid’s back with a rough red exfoliating cloth.
This sort of father-son grooming is very common in the saunas of Korea, and no doubt helps to strengthen an already-deep bond. Such a thing is much rarer back home. My father was a very warm and emotionally-generous man, but aside from when I was an infant, he never washed my naked body and surely never wanted to. This contact I took in was not just limited toward relatives, either. I saw two teenage boys–friends, it seemed–showering next to one another. At one point, one boy scrubbed the other’s back. I’ve seen such a thing on many occasions since, an exchange that would be unthinkable in the West.
This was my first lesson in the fact that Korean men are much more physically intimate with each other than many of us foreigners. They often touch when talking (even in the sauna, as I found out), and after drinking, many older men will even walk hand in hand. There’s nothing sexual about it: they just happen to be a lot less hung-up about physical contact than, say, we Americans are. I view this as a generally a good thing, a reflection of a certain warmth and camaraderie that we lack in our personal-space-valuing culture back home.
Some things in the sauna didn’t strike such a sentimental chord with me, however. One older Korean man (known as an ajosshi) viewed the sauna as not just a place to soak and sweat, but also as a gym of sorts. He took the opportunity to do his daily stretches, au naturale. He lunged and bounced and placed his naked body at all sorts of strange and demanding angles–at one point even doing several toe-touches, which, when viewed from behind, was acid to the eyes. Also, a few other ajosshis evidently viewed the sauna as an appropriate place to clear their throats and sinuses of a week’s worth of stored-up snot and phlegm, blowing and hawking up loogies that seemed to come from the deepest recesses of their bodies. These mucous evacuations were shot and spat straight onto the floor, the same floor that the rest of us were walking on, barefoot. The fact that the floor was regularly rinsed with water did nothing to dispel my gnawing annoyance at such wickedly nasty behavior.
I emerged from the sauna soothed and spotless and changed into the jjim-jil bangpajamas given to me by the woman at the front desk. The actual jjim-jilbang was up on the fifth floor, so I walked up the stairs and explored the space. The Koreans refer to a jjim-jil bang as a “relaxing room,” and it is just that, though it’s actually made up of several rooms, rather than just the one. As I entered the main room, I saw many people sitting or lying on blankets on the floor, watching a comedy program on a large-screen TV. The TV show consisted of a team of men running around and screaming at each other, accompanied by endless instant replays of them falling down or getting hit in the balls with foam baseball bats. While it was silly and obviously entertaining for a lot of people in the room, it was noisy as hell and anything but relaxing.
Next to this common room was a snack bar, selling drinks and cup ramyen (ramen noodles). A bored-looking ajumma stood behind the counter, her eyes fixed to the smaller TV blaring above the bar. I noticed many young couples milling around the jjim-jil bang: boys in blue, girls in pink. I made my way past a room where people were just sleeping, and then opened the door to a small, dark room. The floor was made of little grey stones, which soaked up the heat radiating outwa
rd from the heat source. I wrapped the towel around my head and lay down on the hot stones, forming a sort of gravel angel with my arms and legs as I settled in. In no time I was sweating, soaking my shirt and towel, expelling the remnants of my crazy abduction drinking session the night before. After about twenty minutes I had all I could take, and stepped into the cooler environs of the main room, where I bought a cold drink from the woman.
I was now relaxed and felt purged, as if a host of toxins had been flushed from my body. I walked around and tried out the several other rooms which made up the complex, sweating some more and letting go of tension that had been stored up from years of stress. It was nice, and nothing like I had ever experienced before–literally clean and wholesome fun.
I could get used to this place.
That night I had my best sleep in months.
CHAPTER 4: TERRIBLE CHILDREN
When I first decided to come to Korea–when I answered the ad, secured a visa and decided to make the plunge–I figured I had it made. Teaching in Asia? Nothing to it. It couldn’t be like teaching in America, with all of those rude, disrespectful kids. I’d be going to an ancient Confucian society that valued education, a place where teachers were truly esteemed.
I remember envisioning tidy classrooms full of obedient, disciplined, and well-behaved students, who sat at immaculate desks arranged in straight, precise rows. I imagined them bowing in unison when I entered the room, and sitting erect, soaking up every English word that fell onto them from on high. I would be respected and deferred to. My lofty position would be untouchable, my decisions beyond reproach. I would be an honored teacher.
My first hint that things may be otherwise came during my phone interview. Scott, the head teacher at the hagwon(and later close friend), was asking me some basic questions about my background and why I wanted to work abroad. When he was finished, he asked if I had any questions.
“Yes,” I said. “How about the students? Are they disciplined? Are they well-behaved?”
There was a slight pause as Scott–being a very polite Canadian–struggled to choose his words. In the end, he let out a brief sigh and just said, “Not really.”
* * * *
It can be said that I'm a permissive teacher. I let my children get away with a lot in class. I figured out early on that this was the best way to operate at a Korean hagwon. If you start cracking down hard and being a fascist, it’s just going to cause you a bigger headache. It will only serve to generate complaints from the mothers, which is kryptonite to any English teacher. And as I mentioned earlier, these kids in question go to regular school all day and then have to come to the hagwon for a couple more hours: school after school. It must fill their little hearts with joy. I suppose you could say that I sympathize with their plight, that I have no interest in being Mr. Hardass, that I want them to learn English, but that I want it to be fun. As long as they're practicing English, I let them get away with a lot. They can yell, they can hit me, they can call me names… whatever. It just has to be done in ENGLISH.
Case in point: My favorite class at the Bayridge Language School was in the afternoon and consisted of only three kids–two boys and one girl. Like all my students, they had English nicknames: Peter, Louis, and Marie. They were my most advanced class. The kids were firecrackers, as smart as it gets. However, these kids, like all kids, could at times be truly regrettable, awful little organisms. Every day, I started the class with an informal English conversation. This is known as free talking, a kind of warm-up before we opened the book. I would ask them very some basic questions and they, in turn, would answer. Early on I noticed that these kids had a morbid streak, that they entertained dark fantasies of death, carnage, and destruction. Maybe this was a subconscious manifestation of living in a country that has always faced the specter of total war. Maybe they watched too many violent movies or played too many gory computer games. While I can’t be really sure about the root cause, what I do know is that it didn't take long before I became the central figure in these fantasies. Before long it evolved into a daily ritual. Every day, one by one, the kids would go up to the white board, and tell me, with the aid of an improvised diagram made with markers, how they would kill me.
Let me recount a few of the scenarios from a typical day:
Little Peter always went first. On this day said that he would pack me into a box filled with dynamite and drop me out of a plane into Iraq.
Little Louis was simpler in his plan, which basically involved kicking me off the top of a very tall mountain and me landing on dynamite. However, after the fatal explosion, as my spirit ascended into the heavens, I was set upon by a gang of angels wielding sharp swords, thereby assuring the complete destruction of my soul. I was killed twice–both on Earth and in the afterlife.
Little Marie's were (she had two) the most elaborate, as usual, since she was always the leading candidate for the Most Evil Child in Class award. I didn't quite understand the first one, though it incorporated her shooting some sort of projectile at me that ended in dismemberment. The second fantasy resembled Peter's in that I was dropped out of a plane, only instead of Iraq I landed in "Aprika" [sic], where I was boiled in a pot by a bone-through-his-nose native. She employed the old-style African native on more than a few occasions. I don't know where she got it, but Korea's still behind the curve when it comes to progressive views of black folks and Africa. Comedy skits employing blackface and Afro wigs are still quite common on their TV variety shows, and some of the depictions of black people I’ve seen in children’s textbooks look like they came straight out of the minstrel show.
Marie was the star of the Let’s Kill Chris game, since she really invented it. Her scenarios usually ended in cannibalism, where I'd be served in soup, over rice, or as "Chris-gogi" (gogi is Korean for meat).
Peter's were the most explosive and often employed advanced technology. They usually involved dynamite or bombs. One time, a flying robotic dragon dropped me into a dynamite-filled volcano.
Louis liked to employ animals. I have been eaten by both tigers and lions, as well as bitten by hundreds of deadly snakes. Once I was bitten by snakes after being cut into pieces by scores of knives. Another time he drew what looked like a clawed animal paw and, without a hint of emotion, stated:
“You are crushed by bear hand.”
The Nicknames
“Grasopor.”
Some of the kids began calling me Grasshopper. This is just a variation of Christopher, my full first name. They are syllabically similar, so I guess the leap wasn't so hard to make.
Officially, I was known as Chris Teacher. Some of the more respectful students even addressed me as Mr. Chris. This led to another nickname:
“Miss-teol Christin.”
Miss-teol is a play on the word mister. The clever little fucker who invented this one succeeded in both calling me a girl (Miss) and ridiculing my arm hair (teol, which is Korean for body hair.) Korean children are obsessed with my arm hair, which is light to moderate at best. They constantly stare at it, pull at it, stroke it, and uncontrollably laugh at it.
Christin, of course, is a play on Chris, and turns me into a girl TWICE. This was an endless well of glee for the little hellspawn.
"Cow."
The children in one class began calling me Cow. This was only after I forbade the use of the word pig. Pig is a very mean word to use in English, though the children fling it around like a fifty-cent Frisbee, both in English and Korean (the Korean word is dwaeji). They even used it to describe a teacher named Brian, who was six three and nothing but bone and sinew. One time a nefarious little fucker told him that he was "100% fat.” I pity the truly fat in this country. The abuse must be an endless torrent.
"Super Dung Man.”
The same group of children mentioned above used to call me Super Dung Man, but only on Fridays. This emanated from a white board drawing one of them did of me in which I was composed entirely of feces, complete with ravenous flies circling my poo-ey form. Korean children
–boys and girls alike–are obsessed with poo, and often kill the time by doodling endless piles of it, always in neat coils.
"Supercrazy Baboteacher."
I invented this one on my own. Babo basically means dummy or fool in Korean. The kids used it all the time. I think babo is a hilarious word. It just sounds like what it is: dumb.
"Super Gorilla."
Most of the kids already knew me as “Gorilla Teacher,” because, from time to time I would act like a gorilla. “Super Gorilla” grew out of this. I used to sometimes play a card game with the kids called Crazy Eights. This game consists of a deck of cards split into categories. One of the categories is animals, and one of the cards is a gorilla, featuring a huge silverback ape. One student began referring to the card as "Super Gorilla.” The idea of a Super Gorilla intrigued me, a gorilla even more savage and stupid than a regular gorilla. This eventually led to me channeling the Super Gorilla, which was just a more extreme version of my regular gorilla. From time to time I would burst into a class room shrieking and grunting, pounding my chest and attacking the furniture. It was cathartic: the kids would totally freak out. It was like giving all of them a giant whap of pure sugar in the jugular. You know how you can rev up a puppy, how you can just bombard it with frenetic energy until it starts running aimlessly, back and forth through the room, biting at the air and growling at the carpet? Well, you can do the same thing with children. They're basically just like puppies, only a lot meaner.
Killing My Dragonfly
About nine months into my first year, I helped some of the kids put up a spring mural in their classroom. We made construction paper flowers and grass. One of the kids made a sun and clouds. Another made a bee.