"I don't speak the language...

...Latin yes; this Eastern babble, no."- Bhuta, Help! (the Beatles movie), 1965

In four and a half years here, I've acquired shockingly little Korean; I can say "I have a book" or "I have a pencil" or "I have a bag", or, in a dazzling display of virtuosity, "I don't have a duck".

There was the time in Daegu when I told my little-kid class, in English, "I like to drink kopee", which means "I like to drink bloody nose", rather than "I like to drink keopee", coffee. They thought that was pretty funny. Brats.

Of course, I can read hangeul, the Korean alphabet, which my friend Bob, who has been here just as long, can't. (Ha ha, Bob, I rule.) But that's of extremely limited use when I don't know what most of the words mean. I know computeo and keop and keopee and left fieldeo and centeo fieldeo and right fieldeo...

Hangeul was the world's first methodically designed alphabet, as commissioned by King Sejong (the guy below). Give me a minute or two and I can make all the noises in the word balloon, but the only words I recognize are "Sejong" and "people".

I've tried, kind of, to learn more; I had a brief beginner course back in Daegu and I have bought so many books, generally used and marked down, that I can't recall them all offhand; I have Korean Made Easy (can't be done) and Survival Korean and Korean for Dummies (they weren't kidding... it doesn't bother with the Korean alphabet) and phrasebooks from Lonely Planet and Berlitz and Jimmy's A-1 Korean Emporium and Muffler Shop.

Before I ever came over here, I got Rosetta Stone, which is useless because we don't learn languages the same way as adults that we did as children. And I don't really think one of the first words they needed to teach me was "elephant". Maybe I should have learned it better, though, as in the line for Safari World at the Everland theme park I tried to amuse some little kid by saying "Koyangi" and making elephant noises and waving my arm like a trunk... later on I remembered that koyangi means "cat". (Koggiri is "elephant").

 This is us.

And I tried "iSpeak Korean", an audio program of useful phrases that loads onto an iPod... but that interspersed "That's too expensive" and "My hovercraft is full of eels" with my Pink and Clapton and Eagles songs. That can really harsh your mellow, dude.

I tried to register for a free class last spring, but when I went to sign up right after school, I found that the course had been filled up by 8:05 a.m.

I had just about given up--after all, I get by pretty well without a solid knowledge of Korean. But not being able to speak to people really adds to my isolation. I live such an American life, limited to a few TV channels that play the same few movies over and over, or going to the mom-n-pop store and only being able to say "Hello", "How much is it?", "Thank you", and "Goodbye". I'd like to say, "It's really cold" or   "How is your cat?" (Although around here the answer might be, "Needs more salt.")

Ladles and jellyspoons: the hardest languages for native English speakers.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, my school arranged for a teacher to come after school once a week. (They did that last year, but she never got past hangeul, the alphabet.) I decided to try one last time.

The teacher this time was very nice, but she had no idea of how to teach anything. She would ask what random phrases we wanted to know, teach us how to say them, and move on... no order, no logic, no system. So I was ready to give up again, maybe once and for all...

...when we got a notice that she had other commitments and we were getting a new teacher.

Ms. Jeon is very good. Last week our class consisted of Kris, our art teacher's husband,...

Kris is an artist who's making waves here; you can buy his stuff (like this) on coffee mugs.

...Qin Jie, our Chinese Chinese teacher; and me. I was 'way ahead of them, since they're new in country and I'd had a class. Ms. Jeon's English is limited, and I knew the very basic stuff we started with, so I went as a go-between. I hope I was more helpful than insufferable; at my age, I'm very open about my strengths and weaknesses, and I know I can be infuriatingly smug. But it went really well.

Last evening, only Qin and I could make it, and we learned a lot more. To my dismay, though, Qin had to help me understand some of it... Ms. Jeon's English knowledge may be finite, but her Chinese is excellent, so she rattled off a lot of grammatical info to Qin, who translated for me. (spoken Chinese--nasal and singsong, to my ear--and Korean are really distinct in sound, but Ms. Jeon spoke so fast I couldn't always tell which one she was using.

Many Korean words are homophones of Chinese words, Ms. Jeon's explanations to her are more extensive than Qin's to me, and Qin is after all a language teacher, so she's progressing a lot faster than I am. If she can teach Korean kids Chinese in English (with her Chinese accent and their Korean accents), she can help teach Korean to an American by translating Chinese to English. Got it?

I get very frustrated when I struggle to learn stuff in front of other people. (That's another of my many flaws that I'm aware of.) But the class went well and Qin and I get along very nicely. We live next door to each other, so we talk over what we've learned on the walks home. Maybe, as soon as I get 30 years younger, she'll go out with me.

Next week, we should have our full complement of students: Qin, Kris, Amber (the art teacher), Casey (the other English teacher), Harry (the Korean-Australian gym teacher), and me. Amber, Kris, and Casey have basically no Korean at all, so it will be interesting to see how Ms. Jeon keeps us all involved.

Already, in just two weeks, I've learned to tell a taxi driver, "Itaewon Yeok ga juseyo" (Please take me to Itaewon Station), rather than "Itaewon Yeok juseyo" (Please give me Itaewon Station.)

At this rate, I will be fluent in hanguk-eo in the year 2525.

Dust in the mind

(...all we are is dust in the mind...)

Spring sprung, for real and we hope for good, promptly on April 1. The high temps each day have been near 60 (in the mid-60s today) and it's been generally sunny. It would seem to be, at last, the lovely spring I've been longing for.

But it's Yellow Dust season! Once again, the air is thick with sand and grit blowing from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. This happens every spring. Some days the newspapers have suggested that people stay indoors, and keep their windows closed, as much as possible.

I'm not particularly susceptible to bad air; I haven't gotten sick or tired from it, but it weighs me down emotionally. It's just dismal to have yellow air and invisible mountains that I know are only a half-mile away. My hair feels gritty and my eyelids heavy.

Aside from that, we're back at school. I don't feel cheated by the length of our now-done spring break. I didn't do a lot of what I'd planned; Bob and I didn't want to get up at 6 to get to the USO to go on their DMZ bus trip, and I decided that I didn't want to take five hours out of every Wednesday to go all the way to the City Hall area and take the Culture Center's Korean-language classes (although our school's dean, Ryan, tells me there are also free classes a lot closer...)

I hared (help lay the trail) for my hash group on Saturday. It did not go well. As Forrest Gump said, "That's all I have to say about that."

Probably the best thing that happened on break was making good friends with Vanessa, as I mentioned in my last post.

(That and my new cell phone; I am, after all a Guy, and to a Guy the thought that People are more important than Toys is Crazy Talk.)

I mentioned to Vanessa that I'll miss Lauren when she leaves in June, especially on Sunday mornings when we are wont to go for coffee; Vanessa said simply, "I drink coffee." Of course, people aren't fungible; you can't just plug one in for another. But I have gotten to really like Vanessa, and as much as I will miss Lauren, a new coffee friend isn't a bad thing to have.

This is she.

One of the biggest benefits to living abroad is coming to realize that your home country really isn't the center of the universe. Particularly in the U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! we get used to believing that we're it, as if other people's (and peoples') perspectives don't really count. ("If English is good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for you!")

As I've said, it's been really good to have friends who are Kiwis, Aussies, Scots, South Africans, Ugandans, Koreans... but in particular I've never known a Chinese person before. We (or I) have had an image of the Chinese as a gajillion-strong mass of interchangeable people; I'm a little ashamed of that now.

I wouldn't have thought that Vanessa and I would have anything to talk about; she's literally half my age, loves shopping for clothes and shoes and adores Sex in the City and Michael Jackson. But we do just fine. She taught herself Korean and English and is casting about for another language to learn on her own; she's thinking German or Spanish, but I told her she's getting lazy, taking up a language whose alphabet she already knows. I suggested Russian, Greek, or Arabic.

So, life, as it tends to, goes on. Our long-planned-for accreditation visit is next week and it will be a big load off when that's done. I'm looking forward to settling back into my normal everyday life in Seoul.

When the dust settles.

...have, don't have, love

I sat down to catalogue (yes, dammit, Spellcheck, that's how it's spelled) the Korean words I know; there are more than I had thought. Here's what I came up with:

Hello, goodbye (that you say when you're leaving), goodbye (that you say when the other person is leaving), hi/bye (it's the same word), thank you, excuse me, dog, cat, elephant, apple, *banana, *papaya, *tomato, potato, bag, *cup, *computer, *cake, man, woman, boy, girl, child, good, honeydew (which is in Korean, phonetically, "muskmelon"), rice, bread, rice with vegetables, vegetable, California roll, *pizza, glasses, *contacts, medicine, pharmacy, teacher, school, middle school, who, one through nineteen in the Korean numbers (used for counting), zero through five, and one thousand, in Chinese-derived numbers (used for bus numbers, money, and such), *bus, person, United States, *France, Korea, Japan, *Canada, *Russia, book, cell phone, *chocolate, where, what, car, father, mother, dad, mom, please give me, this, that, over here (said to a waiter), *hotel, *motel, water, milk, *orange, *juice, tea, *lemon, *ice cream, beer, soju, bar, pencil, *pen, room, karaoke, *ski, *skate, *tennis, *camera, *cocoa, *coffee, mister, sir/ma’am, mountain, temple, *sauna, *health club, *golf, baseball, baseball park, *ball, *strike, *out, *home run, hit, *catcher, *first baseman, *second baseman, *third baseman, *left fielder, *center fielder, *right fielder, *strikeout, is, isn't, have, don't have, love.

(The ones with asterisks are derived from English and are basically phonetically the English words.)

Perhaps you can tell from this list where my interests lie (mostly baseball and food), though I only seem to know nouns, which makes it a little difficult to put together even a simple sentence such as "The left fielder is eating a papaya."

Also, I can read Korean letters and make the sounds, though that doesn't mean I know what any of it means.

And if anybody asked me about syntax, I'd probably say, "You mean like the surcharge on cigarettes?"

I have about the same size vocabulary that Koko the gorilla had, but one more cat.

The sun never sets

I've been thinking for a couple of weeks about writing about the English language (funny how treading water in a sea of Korean will do that) and the movement-that-will-not-die to make it the official language of the United States. I have to admit I have extremely mixed feelings; I'm no jingoist, but I do think that it's a wondrous language, and that if everyone in America learned it, it would be a wonderful unifying force-- but who wants to align himself with some of the racist yahoos who are pushing it?

It's a tough piece to write, and as I'm lazy, I think I'll post this instead; it's a model essay I wrote for LIKE responding to an online talk about the world's "English mania". One of the things I do at school is writing essays, complete with glossary and notes on why my essays are the Pope's knickers, for the upper-level kids to critique, take notes on, and translate into Korean.

(According to the speech, TWO BILLION PEOPLE are currently trying to learn English.) (And the speaker's name really is Jay Walker. No comment.)
---
PROMPT: Why is English “the world’s second language”, as lecturer Jay Walker says?

For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, the world is moving toward a common language. English is fast becoming the second choice of billions of people around the globe, on every inhabited continent. English is the language of business, of education, and of popular culture. Jay Walker tells us, “English represents hope for a better future, a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems.” But, of all the world’s languages, why is English the chosen one?

For 400 years, the United Kingdom’s empire spread around the world, from India and Australia to North America. “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was the saying; a quarter of the world’s population, covering a quarter of its landmass, was subject to the British crown. The sunset of the British Empire was overlapped by the rise of American superpower, and the military and economic might of both has led to the dominance of English. Above all, the 21^st century business world runs on English, and speaking the language is nearly a prerequisite for success in international business, in the sciences, and in education.

Indirectly, English has also been boosted by its ubiquity in popular culture around the world. It is the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Chaucer, of Mickey Mouse and the Pussycat Dolls. Any language that produces both “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun” and “Don’tcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” is endlessly adaptable. Few Korean pop songs, for example, fail to have a “nobody, nobody” or a “baby, baby” thrown in. Clearly, English is also the language of emotion and entertainment.

Finally, English has grown and prospered because it takes the best of every other language as its own: skunk and raccoon from the Algonquin Indians, safari and jamboree from Swahili, kimchi and taekwondo from Korea: all these have enriched English and increased its appeal. French was once the language of diplomacy, but the French Academy jealously guarded it against incursions from “inferior” tongues, and French faded as English threw open its doors to all comers and grew stronger. One website claims that last week English gained its millionth word; there is no doubt that it has the largest vocabulary of any language on Earth.

The short answer to “Why English?” is Jay Walker’s: it’s the language of opportunity. But we must look deeper, to how English became that in the first place. As the language of empire and entertainment, and the language that has welcomed every culture with open arms, it has earned its place in the sun, the sun that never sets on the English language.

"Yes, we have no bananas"

...is a phrase that would make perfect sense to a Korean. "Neh, panana upseoyo", at least, would: "Don't you have any bananas?" "Yes, we don't." One of the first things a foreign teacher learns is not to ask a negative question; you will always get "Yes, I don't" as the answer. That struck me as screwy, but I finally realized that it makes as much sense as "No, I don't".

Another thing that takes some getting used to is the numbers. Not only do they have Chinese numbers for buses, room numbers, phone numbers, and so on (il, i, sam, sa, o...) and Korean ones for counting (hana, dul, seht, neht, daseot...), but large numbers go in multiples of ten thousand: two hundred thousand, for example, is "i-ship-man", twenty ten-thousands, or, if you really want to break it down, two-times-ten ten-thousands. This struck me as screwier than Carrot Top on speed, but I finally realized that it's just as logical as going by thousands. Except... except... they still put the commas every three digits, in the Western style.

Oh, and the months have no names. There's just one-month, two-month... my birthday is ten-month, two-times-ten six-day.

On the way home tonight, I cut through the huge neighborhood park behind E-Mart. It has a quarter-mile circular dirt path that's very popular for exercisers when the weather cools a bit. As I moseyed counter-clockwise around the path, there were literally a hundred or more Koreans striding manfully (and womanfully and childfully) around the path, singly, in pairs, and in groups, every one of them apparently intent on walking for fitness, and every single one, of course, going in the opposite direction from mine.

I bet the Korean word probably means counter-counter-clockwise.

"Your brain is too tense."

..."Too tense?"

"Yeah, too-tense the size of a normal brain." (As Moe said to Curly.)

It has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this post except the word "tense", but it's 1:40 a.m., I've been home for 20 minutes, I just drank a screwdriver, light on the OJ, and right now I don't care a whole bunch. (About much of anything, actually.)

(By the way, what do you call vodka with milk of magnesia? A Phillips screwdriver.)

At work, I've been moved largely into working with kids on their essays and SAT-style grammar problems, shooting videos about grammar, and proofreading and revising the school's 1000-question grammar workbook.

The proofing of kids' papers can drive me nuts after the first dozen or so; today's highlight was "she became a periodic human vegetable". But it never occurred to me until this evening just exactly how difficult English must be for these kids. Here it is:

The Korean language has no articles (a, an, the), no plurals, no differences between subject and object forms, and no verb tenses! All of these items are implied by context in Korean. Very roughly translated, a Korean might say "I sandwich two thing she make" for "I made her two sandwiches." So it's great fun to teach the kids the difference between noncount nouns (music, jewelry) and count nouns (song, necklace), articles (a dog vs. the dog), subjects and objects (I vs. me), and tenses (I went vs. I have gone). And you can just defenestrate "I will have gone." As David Steinberg said in a different context, "It's like explaining alternate-side-of-the-street parking to a cranberry."

I got off work at 1 a.m. tonight, by the way, fifteen minutes after the last kids left. I'm not jealous, though; I started at 7:30 p.m., they at 8:30 a.m.

Everybody here still crazy.

A Roh by any other name...

If a Korean's name is actually pronounced "Ee eon hey", ("eon" is one slyllable) it may be written in English as:

Lee eon hey; Lee, eon hey; Lee eon-hey; Lee, eon-hey; Lee eonhey; Lee, Eonhey; Eon hey Lee; Eon-hey Lee; Eonhey Lee; Rhee eon hey; Rhee, eon hey; Rhee eon-hey; Rhee, eon hey; Rhee eonhey; Rhee, eonhey; Eon hey Rhee; Eon-hey Rhee; Eonhey Rhee; Yi eon hey; Yi, eon hey; Yi eon-hey; Yi, eon-hey; Yi eonhey; Yi, eonhey; Eon hey Yi; Eon-hey Yi; Eonhey Yi.

...and that's ignoring differences in capitalization. Also, in North Korea it's usually spelled "Ri".

Now consider that 45 percent of the population is named Lee, Kim, or Park (actually pronounced "Ee", "Gheem", and "Baek".)

...and there's very little chance for a Westerner to distinguish male from female names
...and some kids use English names and some don't
...and virtually everyone has a one-syllable family name and a two-syllable personal name
...and they use a completely different alphabet
...and some kids write their names in English and others in hangul.

The old canard that they all look alike is bunk. But they do all sound alike. I don't even feel a little ashamed that I can't remember the names of the vast majority of my students, but it makes building relationships harder.

At least I'm secure in my identity: Kohnmehn Seuteebeun Jeon.

And I only am escaped to tell thee.

(Photos: Daegu's greatest writers' group, with too much coffee, and Korea's greatest trivia team, with too much beer. What do these two "greatest" groups have in common? Modesty forbids...)

...okay, the title of this post is a teense melodramatic (it's from Job, and Moby Dick), but it's been one whale (ha!) of a four-day stretch and I'm exhaustipated.

Thursday, I had off as I've agreed to work Sundays. It was cold and drizzly all day and all I did was work out and, in the evening, go see He's Just Not That Into You with Joanna from the Samduk LIKE. Well, actually, there was a huge kerfluffle about where she was (not where we were supposed to meet), so having bought two tickets, I left her a note, got to the theater late, and did my best to sprawl across two seats. She found me, though, a half-hour into the movie. Not a good movie. I don't mind chick flicks and I especially don't mind looking at Scarlett, Jennifer, and Jennifer, but there were too many characters to care about any of them in a dramatic sense and it wasn't nearly funny enough to be a comedy.

Friday, E.J. Koo, the head of the language program at the YMCA, helped me buy a cell phone. There are literally well over a hundred little phone stores in a few blocks downtown, all with the same products and services, and they apparently fire anyone they suspect of speaking any English. E.J. overwhelmed me with her generosity; she doesn't really know me at all and she gave an hour of her time and donated a cell phone charger. Then I ate lunch at Hami Mami's, my number-one hangout (American brunch! French toast! Hash browns! The only place in Korea you can get food without hot-pepper paste and garlic!) Hami is the one, by the way, who set me up with my cats; she's really nice. Then I went to school.

After a long day's work, I caught a cab downtown for a midnight trivia game at a dark cavern of an expat bar. I got hooked up with a bunch of strangers, mostly friends of my new friend Justin, some of whom had come down from Seoul for the weekend, who also didn't have teams. Going into battle under the team name "Han Solo Rocks", we kicked ass. There were three rounds; I helped carry us through the first round, history and politics. (Sample question: Mentioned in the movie Die Hard With a Vengeance, who was our twenty-first president?) I was practically useless in Round Two, rock and roll (not a single Carpenters question!) The third round was movie quotes: name the movie, year, and Oscar winners (for any category in any movie) who appeared in the movie. I helped a little, but my teammates did the heavy lifting, and we won easily. Each team put up 20,000 Won and HSR took home all the cash. My share basically paid for my cabs and beers. God, I miss trivia. I miss Hogwarts.

(During the day, George, the Guy Friday at school, had told me the government allowed teachers a cut-rate cancer screening. This is good, as the bar resembled a fire at the R.J. Reynolds factory. I got home, scratchy-voiced and red-eyed, at 2:45 a.m...)

...and found email that the teaching job in Seoul for next year, the one I really wanted and would have had already but for a timing mixup... is basically mine. This may be the only thing in this post of lasting value, so don't bother reading anything above or below it, okay? Uh...

On Saturday, having had five hours' sleep, I attended the first class of the second-level Korean course. Felt totally lost. Went to work most of the day, then caught a cab downtown to see Watchmen with a few friends and friends' friends. If you don't know Watchmen, it was an incredibly brilliant, multilayered, dark comic book series in the eighties and long considered unfilmable. (Time called the comic compilation one of the 100 best novels-- not comics-- of the century.) The movie was astoundingly done but so brutal and nihilistic that I can't say I enjoyed it. If anybody likes royal blue male appendages, though, that's your movie. I'm not kidding. I have always kept this blog family-friendly, so I won't make any jokes about "blue jobs".

On Sunday, having had five hours' sleep again, I taught a new three-hour class on critical thinking and essay writing, then walked downtown to the writers' group meeting at Hami Mami's. It's really nice to have new, like-minded friends. For five months, I didn't know anybody I didn't work with. Daegu is a different, better place now for me. Then I got home, took the arduous trek to and around Costco (as the boys and I agreed that we needed a thirty-pound jug of cat litter, stat), and came home and fell asleep in front of the tv.

And now it's 1 a.m. Monday and I'm awake. Good night!

Frustipation

Tiki can lick any guy in the house. (This picture is, of course, almost completely irrelevant to this post, but note the clipped left ears, more visible on Tiki; vets do that to cats upon neutering, as a symbol that the cats should not be killed or molested.)

This post is rated F. (Frust-rated, that is.)

There's one more Korean language class to go and I have to decide whether to invest another 100,000 Won for 12 weeks at the next level. The thing is, I don't feel I'm making a lot of progress. Part of it is that I don't practice every day, but also, the instructor, while very nice, manages to both go too fast and not cover enough. Her English isn't great, either. The class, which has 20 students, has had only about a dozen show up each of the last few weeks, so I suspect I'm not the only one who's a bit disenchanted.

The other thing is that taking the series of classes from entry to advanced takes a year and costs over 500,000 Won in all. The other other things are that it gets me up too early and takes three hours out of every Saturday, which is a working day at our school. I have the book and CD from the course, another book and CD I bought months ago, the (useless) Rosetta Stone program, and an online flash-card program called Before You Know It. Whether I sign up for the next class or not, I won't give up on Korean.

But, oh my gars and starters, guys, it's hard. For example: for some purposes, you use Korean numbers, for others Chinese. Also, when you mention a quantity of anything, you use not only the name of the item but also a special counting word that means, more or less, "thing", so to count pencils, f'r'instance, you say, "Pencil three kae", but there are different "thing" words for different items, so for books you say, "Book one kwan", cats, "Cat two mari", and so on. There are different counting markers for small paper items, bottles, cups and glasses, numbers, money, people, animals, books, large things and small things.

I said it before, I'm sayin' it again: everybody here crazy.

Either way I decide about the class, I will regret it. I don't like to be a quitter and I won't learn the language too well on my own. I also wouldn't see my new friends Cliff and Joelle as often. On the other hand, it's a lot of money and it's two hours of frustration with, so far, little payoff. So, in the words of Paul and Artie, "Any way you look at this, you lose." Everyone I in the class whom I talk to is either leaning toward or leaning against continuing, but nobody's sure what to do.

Saturday also brough a trio of metaphors for my situation Saturday. First, I caught a different number bus to the class, as it was headed in the right direction and the sign said it went to Banwoldang, the junction where the YMCA and the class are, but it headed to the far far south of town, where the driver turned around to me, the only passenger, and said to get out. I had to take an expensive cab ride back to Banwoldang and missed the first 15 minutes of class. Avid readers of SJCintheROK (that is to say, I) may recognize this as a reprise of something that happened in my first week or two here.

On Saturday night, I was going to a bar near Kyungpook University to see a band and talk with Joelle and Cliff, and Joelle and I missed connections and I ended up standing at the wrong subway stop for 40 minutes. We finally made connections, though, and we sat so close to the band that I couldn't get out of my seat till breaks between songs. On the first song, I kept thinking the guitar player's back was blocking my view of the singer; turns out he was the singer. Something deep there about forests and trees...

But we did have a good time in a tiny funky bar with 95% American clientele, and I figured out a way in the wee wee hours (couldn't help it, I'd been drinking beer) of the morning to tell the cab driver how to get me home, so there's that.

Meanwhile, the principal up on the outskirts of Seoul sent me email today to say that they will have an opening in the fall and he's definitely interested in my services, so there's that.

And Tiki, who was so scared, likes to stand on his back legs, pull my hand to him with both paws and nuzzle, so there's that.

So it goes.

미국 사람 이예요.

미국 사람 이예요 (Meeguk saram eeyayyo) means "I am an American." (Or, literally, "United States person I am," which gives you some idea of the language barrier.)

I find myself getting Americaner and Americaner. I've made my apartment a little island built up on English language books and an iPod packed with Western pop songs and NPR podcasts, and a few tchotchkes from home, and above all, the Web. Facebook and CNN and tv shows and movies and email and Skype keep me anchored to my friends and my country. I eat American food at home and most of the time when I eat out. (At least that way I know there aren't any animals in my food.) Even the cats have forgotten their Korean vocabulary by now.

It's just possible that the change in presidents has contributed a smidge to my revived patriotism, as well.

I guess it was inevitable; I like many Korean people, but the culture is, in many ways, totally alien, and I can no more immerse myself in Korean life than Kirk would go native if he were living on the Klingon planet. So I cling on (Get it? Har!) to what I know.

In some ways, I feel more 미국 사람 than I ever did back home. But I'm still glad to be here.

Yodaaiee kamja

It strikes me (a little late in the game) that one of the scariest things I'm letting myself in for is that I will be functionally illiterate for a long time. I'm bad at a lot of stuff, but I've always considered myself gifted with... what's the term I want? Oh, words.

I'm not too worried about oral communication; I'll just smile and shrug and play Cletus the slack-jawed yokel and maybe people will think I'm adorable. I already know about a dozen Korean words and can create such useful sentences as "Annyeounghaseyo, piyongyi" (Hello, cat) and "Yodaaiee kamja" (Girl potato). I admit that not knowing any verbs could be a drawback...

But it's the reading, stupid. I don't want to follow a sign I think is to the post office and end up in the women's room. It's been fifty years since I've been worried about my reading ability, and I'm not looking forward to it. 말을 하기!