uring the last semester of college, I sent away for a copy of The Asia Employment Guide,
a book that, for a mere fifty bucks, gave you the inside scoop on teaching conversational English in Asia. For native-tongued Americans, the book preached, getting these jobs in Korea was easy. You didn't have to know Korean, the
pay was good ($15-25 an hour), and you could put away a cool ten grand if you didn't binge on shopping or frequent the shamelessly overpriced McDonald's.So I mailed out resumés and waited. Out of twenty foreign language
institutes, about half of them answered -- almost all favorably -- but none of them gave me a hard offer. According to the book, it was next to impossible to land a job unless you hauled your fat American ass over there. So before
leaving, just to make sure, I called up an institute and talked to the supervisor. "Come on over," Mr. Kim said. "We need you. Please hurry!"
My uncle greeted me at Kimpo Airport. We hadn't seen each other in
twelve years, but he recognized me right away. He told me I hadn't changed a bit. I didn't know how to take it, so I just took it. I felt dizzy, and the air pollution was New York squared. I almost hurled.
My uncle and his family
lived in Seoul, but "institute row" was located at the other end of the city, over an hour away by bus. Eventually, I figured, I'd search for an apartment closer to work.
The next day, I went with my uncle to the
institute to meet with Mr. Kim. After rapping with him for a couple of minutes, it became obvious that I was talking to a human jellyfish. He wasn't the one really in charge, he apologized, wringing his small hands. The
owner of the institute, Mr. Han, was the one who hired people, but he was busy. So to kill time, Mr. Kim cooed, was it okay if I could perhaps...sit in on a two-hour conversation class, and maybe observe a teacher in action...if it
wasn't too much bother?
So I went to a class and listened. The instructor was a cute Korean girl around my age who stumbled over easy grammar and spoke with an accent. After she dismissed the class, we made small talk, and I
found out Helen was from Maryland and had lived in the States for thirteen years. Out of curiosity, I asked her about the money. (It had seemed good on paper, but you never really could tell.)
"Not good," she said, shaking her head.
"Not good? I thought you got paid $16.25 an hour."
"The Americans do."
It took about a second for that to sink in. The Americans. She meant the
Caucasian Americans.
At this institute, white teachers were paid hourly wages while Korean teachers earned 40 per cent of the class tuition. Which meant that if there weren't enough students in your class (and according to
her, the classes were never full), you were screwed. "You'll make enough money to live on," Helen said, "but that's about it." She was working two other jobs.
In the U.S., prejudice had never laid its hands on
me. Of course, I'd been called a chink a million times. Slant-eyes. Rice paddie. You name it, I've heard it. But see, that never bothered me. They're just words, and I knew that I was better than those neo-Nazi youths. I always
knew that I would, in the end, prevail. I was never turned away from a job during high school or in college, and I was always paid equally.
When five-thirty came, Mr. Kim begged me to come back at eight. The owner was
unfortunately still "busy." I almost said "Screw you," but I didn't. Instead I went with my uncle and chewed some naeng myun
at a nearby restaurant. I told him about what I had found out, but it didn't shock him. That's just the way things work here, he said. I just slurped my noodles and kept to myself.
Eight o'clock came and neon flooded the
streets. I stared at the blinking signs, but they told me nothing. At the interview, Mr. Han blew smoke in my face as I coughed up a passage from their textbook. He handed me the job after listening to me for five minutes.
While
Mr. Kim was congratulating me, I asked about the money. It was exactly as what the girl had said.
"But I'm doing more work," I told him. "I'll be teaching in both Korean and in English, and I'll even be teaching a
bit of grammar. And I can speak just as well, if not better, than your white teachers."
"I'm sorry," he said, "but we are losing so much money with those American classes." He told me that the
"white" classes, which had hardly ten students in any of them, always ran in the red. But they had to keep them because the natives liked to see blue-eyed teachers; the more whites an institute utilized, the more
"hip" they were considered. I bumped into one of those teachers before I left the institute, a blonde-haired Kentucky woman who made Suzanne Somers look like Stephen Hawking.
The next day, I told the institute to blow
off. Then I called two other places, just to make sure this wasn't an isolated phenomenon. One guy introduced himself as the "man in charge of hiring only the white instructors." Stating the obvious, he said there was no
work for me. He said it broke his heart to see these kinds of things happen.
After hanging up on the guy, I stared at the phone in bewilderment. Less than a week before, I'd been on the plane to Seoul musing over my good fortune:
I was going back home, going to share my knowledge with my own people, going to live with them.
What was that cliché about how quickly dreams turn into nightmares?
I dialed Korean Air to ask about the next flight back to New York.
©1995, Sung J. Woo. This document may not be reproduced in any form without express written consent.
