This is a photo Mr. Paik took of Mrs. Chung, my tea teacher. It's published in a book of his photos he gave to me and which he autographed without my asking. I thought that was odd, like it was presumptious or something, but then how would I know how famous this guy is? Anyway, this picture is from 1993, but Mrs. Chung still looks exactly the same. She has a warm, friendly face.
My head is hurting. Got out the tax stuff a little while ago, but I could only handle looking at it for an hour or so before it got to me. I hate doing taxes from a foreign country. It’s so much harder than my singly filed returns back in the good ole USA. We got an accountant right - an employer-appointed person? Some firm that does all kind of expatriate tax returns and knows all the ins and outs, which we certainly don’t know. What I DO know is that our employer is like horrible at providing us with detailed information about what they pay for us besides the wages, tips, salaries thing. Anyway, the accountant sends out a stack of papers stapled together with one of those huge steel wires bent into thirds. The "booklet" has every question about any kind of income and expense possible and I have to wade through all of it, discerning which questions apply to us, of which 99% don’t. We never see an actual 1040. But still, sometimes I get stuck because the language is like some kind of weird tax-ese and I don’t even know if we received or spent such things; There are no explanations, just demands and blank spaces to fill with numbers. I stop short at actually getting out the dictionary; I figure if I don’t know what it is, it doesn’t apply to me. All I can say is that the tax forms the gov’t provides, along with the instructions for filling them out, are a lot easier to understand. Believe it or not.
Oh well, we have till June 15th.
You know that six degrees of separation thing? Well, yesterday I was just 2 degrees away from Kim Jongil, the wacko dictator (with the Kramer haircut) of North Korea. While I was at my tea lesson, washing down Korean snacks with malch’a a friend of Mrs. Chung’s, Mr. Paik, came by to pick up some stuff. He’s some famous guy in Korea I’ve never heard of, but apparently he’s got an Australian passport which allowed him to visit the North and meet the psycho-killer. Of course, I jumped all over that, asking what Kim Jongil was like, but Mr. Paik only said that Kim Jongil liked the gift he presented to him. Hmph. Oh well. Mr. Paik has also met the Pope, who prayed for him when he was sick with cancer of the intestines and even though the doctors thought for sure the cancer would kill Mr. Paik, he is indeed alive and well today, albeit with a sack permanently attached to his side. So, he was interesting and I told Mrs. Chung she knew the most interesting people. She liked that.
Yesterday was also the first day of a new session of classes at Ewha. This time, the series will focus on women and work in Korea, which is mildly interesting. I would’ve liked it more if the series focused on sexuality. So, I’m going, but it means that Thursdays are a public transportation nightmare for me, as I will spend 20 minutes getting to Mrs. Chung’s, then one hour from there to Ewha, and another hour (at least) back home. Too much. And yesterday it was totally just unbelievably bad: I spent three hours and twenty minutes commuting. I didn’t even have extra batteries with me so I conserved by listening to the radio as much as possible, which was playing decent stuff for once. Lucky me. But unlucky that I had to come home in rush hour and the first bus 12 to stop where I was waiting was already packed full to standing capacity so I had to wait for the second, which was close behind and relatively empty. But, when we reached the city center there was some kind of freako civil unrest and there were riot police running all around in their grey uniforms with the Darth Vadar helmets that had face guards like the ones on football helmets and red symbols painted on top effectively making these conscripted boys look menacing. They had their shields too, parked in front of them as they stood at attention, or held stiffly in front as they trotted down the street. Our bus would have none of it and did a quick yooee trying to find an alternative route, which proved futile as everyone else was doing the same and, well, those demonstrators were mobile too, blocking off one street then leaving it to disrupt the next. We circled stop and inch, somewhat aggressively (honking all the way), for like an hour before the bus driver finally just decided he’d had enough, breaking into a section of street that was barricaded off and honking vociferously at the policeman standing in the center. This little foray provided a great view of a demonstrating mob who had surrounded a bus and several cars and were yelling, waving signs around. They had white bands tied around their heads, just like the Karate Kid. The police officer, seeing the oncoming bus en rage, directed us left and we were free. Way to go maverick bus driver!Class was interesting even if the topic matter wasn’t so much. There were two men present, and I was like, whoa, because there’s never been any men in my classes at Ewha. There were men in the women’s studies classes at UW, and the result was not always a friendly environment which sometimes ended in most men dropping out. Basically, I think the classes should be definitely open and inviting, but they aren’t. A weird thing happens when men are present in a women’s studies class - a mood change. I see that the women participants become more belligerent with the men; they are less patient and more aggressive in their responses. The professor too (in the Ewha class) was totally aware of their presence and acknowledged it in a way that made me think she is not accustomed to teaching this subject matter to men. I wonder. And then there’s the men, who come to class missing so many of the vital "givens" and then questioning, making themselves look like idiots, and revealing how much they really aren’t aware.*** It is hard to be patient with them; it’s hard to create an open atmosphere when they obviously need to do some extra work and when teaching them the basics takes up so much of our precious learning time. It is not our job to nurture them in our classroom, you know? It’s like: Go read a book. Or at least acknowledge your ignorance on this subject and keep your trap shut and just listen; you might learn something.
Anyway, I don’t like the hostility this male presence elicits in women. I really hope for feminism to include men and I figure at the very least women cannot expect men to ever embrace feminism if they are excluded. We have to be better than what we’ve been dealt by the established authority. But still, there’s that male presence. And just listening to the space a deep male voice can occupy in a room of softer-toned female ones just sort of jars me. Even on our terms we can be talked over.
Well, here’s the best of the ignorance offered up in class yesterday (by a White American guy):
Why do [Korean women] go through all the trouble of getting an education if they know it won’t get them a good job?
Duh.
*** This class right now is the third in a series. Really, these guys and a few of the women should be in the first one. It gets annoying when basic questions that one would learn in the first or second class take up a lot of class time that could be used to discuss new and more in-depth topics. Return
past
index