Filed under: being foreign, food, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), moral outrage
This is related, I swear. No, really.
The staff room at our school operates much like a high school cafeteria. The open hostility simmering just beneath the surface is gone, but the rude jokes, juvenile behaviour, and raucous laughter remain. We spend our day with children: we let loose a little in the staff room. Anuses get mentioned almost every break, my co-workers keep a daily tally of the number of times I say ‘vagina’, and I’ve lost track of the number of times somebody’s been told to fuck off through a mouthful of food.
This is all fine.
There is one gentleman I work with who objects to this. He is not a prude: he does not object to all of the rude jokes. No, he objects only to mine. And it is not only the jokes: I need only mention something that has to do exclusively with women and out come his barbs. I was telling one of the women today about Vaginal Tightening Cream, some disgusting little product I’ve just found on the intarwebs, and was busy proclaiming my disdain when he loudly bulldozed through our conversation. “Very nice, -’b,” he shouted. “Very nice.”
“I wasn’t really talking to you,” I said, turning away from my friend.
“Yeah, but I can HEAR you,” he snarled.
The woman I was talking to turned to me and said, “I don’t think he likes it when you talk like that,” she said.
I’m SORRY?
“He’s a grown up,” I said. “If he’s old enough to see a vagina, he’s old enough to talk about one.”
Look: I am not shy. I will talk about periods – they are, after all, a huge part of 50% of the population’s life, and when we are in pain because of them, it is effing. real. I will give candid sexual health advice, or ask for it, at the staff table. I will talk about my vagina and my breasts as much as, or more than, you talk about your penis. I can objectify with the best of them, and my dirty jokes will make you blush.
Why, when we are talking about subject matter that has to do with women, must we hush it up, pretend it doesn’t exist, go off somewhere private and out of the public sphere to do it? Why are men willing to put their penis in a vagina (and boast about it!) but not to admit their existence later? And why, why, WHY, does it reflect badly on my character when I am NOT shy about sex, sexual health, women’s rights, or my ability to compete with the boys’ club?
Here’s how this relates to the article above. 83% of the women in Egypt have been harassed. 2.4% of them reported it. Why? Because we are ashamed! We are made to feel ashamedin the public sphere of our bodies and their functions, of our sexual behaviour, of our comfort with ourselves. We are supposed to hide all that away until there are no men around to hear it. We are to be appropriate. And for as long as this is true, as long as my vagina and my breasts and my sex don’t exist as soon as I walk into a public space, then my safety, my health, my concerns, and my exclusively female voice will also not exist in those same public spaces.
And that is Not. Ok.
This weekend I was in Daechon – a town on the coast that I’ve never been in before. I was there for the mud festival – a two week party on the beach.
We were walking down the street, covered in mud, carrying beers, when we saw a bar with a Korean man standing outside. “NO FOREIGNERS” said the sign on the door.
“Really. REALLY?” my (drunk) friend asked.
He glared us, nodded.
I have no words.
No wait. Yes I do. Here they are: FUCK. KOREA.
Filed under: being foreign, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), moral outrage
I just got the scare of my fucking life.
This morning, I saw the sun rise for the third consecutive morning. It’s like I’m nocturnal! But with a day job.
I was not at a bar all night yesterday. It was a work night. Seriously, I would have been home by 3am. I AM RESPONSIBLE. No, I was in the emergency room all night with my friend. Middle of the night scares are never fun: try them in a foreign fucking country.
I left her there at 9am, sure she wasn’t going to die, happily drugged out, no longer awaiting any scary tests, and with someone new on the way to take over for me (I left, but I’m not the callous bitch I felt like, ok?). I slept for 4 hours, slept through my alarm, and took a cab to work.
Moral Cursader and Hero To The Masses that I am, I then led a (slightly sleepy) protest to make sure that said friend’s classes were covered. I work at a school with no supply teachers or back-up plan for when a teacher is sick. That means: I have taught with a bleeding urinary tract infection and with food poisoning. The girl who spent the night in the emergency room, had a meningitis scare, still didn’t know what was wrong, and had a choice between debilitating pain or being seriously drugged out and high was told “not to worry” as she could miss an hour of her prep time.
No fucking way. Annnnndddd – Moral Crusader wins again! Which really means, I have a semi-reasonable boss who realized her mistake when I told her, In No Uncertain Terms, that there was no fucking way in hell that said friend was ok to work. It helped that I had, without consulting either the teachers who were to teach, the friend who was on her way to work, or the boss, drawn up a possible schedule for coverage. (I swear I’m not a control freak under normal circumstances)
Then I drank six pepsis and I don’t remember much of what happened in class, except that I’m pretty sure I was upright for most of it.
Which is all a LOT of backstory for why I am so fucking tired and susceptible to scares tonight.
Because of the six pepsis, I was finding it hard to play the Passing-The-Fuck-Out game, which is one of my favourite games. I finally did: an hour and a half ago. Sweet, sweet release. Then, half an hour ago, Stupid Motherfucking MSN Messenger (SMMM) ran an ad for “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. Yep – I left my computer on, my MSN running, and the volume turned up. The video clip of the explosions started at approximately 3AM IN THE FUCKING MORNING.
“HOLY SHIT!” I thought, sitting bolt upright, “KIM JONG IL IS HERE.”
We were sitting on the subway when an older Korean gentleman sat down next to us, sandwiching my friend between him and myself. He stared for a minute, leaning over her, as if amazed to see me, as if I was some mythical animal he was sure didn’t exist.
“I’m a bloody unicorn,” I thought bitterly as I stared back, making it clear I knew what he was doing. He finally spoke.
“Russian?” he said, tentatively, hopefully. “Russia?” he said again, a little more forcefully, still leaning over and gazing at my blonde hair, eyes flicking down occasionally to my cleavage.
“No!” I said, angrily. I got out my teacher voice. “Anniyo!” I said again, then turned away from him. He backtracked a little, though the sad cow look did not leave his face. “Where are you from?” he asked.
I refused to answer, but my friend, after looking at me quizzically, turned to him and gamely started to chat to him in her new Korean. She was stumbling through, giggling, and he was responding but still staring at me. I elbowed her a few times, hissed her name, but she didn’t understand why I was being so rude to this man and continued to talk to him.
Finally, the subway stopped and I pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go,” I said, shooting a dirty look at the man, who continued to gaze sloppily at me. “Hurry.” As we waited for the doors to open, I stared right back at the man, eyebrows raised. The challenge didn’t work: he thought I was gazing into his eyes, and continued to stare.
The doors opened and I pushed through before they’d opened all the way, tripping as I did so. “Fuckl!” I swore loudly, frustrated.
“What the hell?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why were you so rude to him?”
“..Seriously?” I said.
“He just wanted to know where you were from….”
I looked at her unbelievingly, realizing nobody had told her and she thought I’d been unspeakably, unnecessarily rude.
“Sweetie,” I said. “In Korea, ‘Russian’ means ‘prostitute’. He was openly asking me if I was a whore. He wanted to know if I was open for business.”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh shit,” she said.
“Goddamn,” I said, looking around. “This is the wrong fucking stop.”
Hey, remember that kid who carried homophobia across the Pacific Ocean and straight into my classroom?
Remember how I patiently explained allll about homophobia, and rationally and politely asked him to refrain from that kind of behaviour in my classroom? How I respectfully asked his opinion before handing down the decree? How I made him understand why it was bad instead of simply banning it?
He was recently moved up a level, into a different teacher’s class. The teacher came to me one days and said, “Hey, you know what Jack’s taken to calling me?”
“What?” I said. “Bad teacher? Fat? Let me guess. He think you’re pregnant too!”
“No,” he said. “He’s been calling me ‘Homo’.”
So, instead of making a kid understand something, I just annoyed the kid to the point where the fun in making fun of gays didn’t outweigh the tedium of listening to me talk about gays.
WIN.
Filed under: cultural differences, idiocy (other people's), moral outrage, students
One of my students just came back from two months in Canada. The first two things he came out with upon his return?
“This sucks!” and “You’re gay!”
siiiigggghhhh.
“Jackson, I’d really like it if you didn’t call people gay in my classroom.”
“Why?” (really? we’re going to have this lesson? really?)
“Do you know what it means?”
“Yeah. Guys who are boyfriends.” (from the front of the classroom: “ew!”)
“What do you think about that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“Me neither. That’s why I don’t think you should use it to insult people.”
“What?”
“Well, lots of my friends are gay. There’s nothing wrong with it. So it’s mean to use it when you mean ’stupid’, and I don’t want you to anymore.”
“k.”
The thing is, he doesn’t really know what it means. Yes yes, he can get out his dictionary and he knows that gay means two men who are boyfriends. But he doesn’t have the cultural background that makes that an insult. He’s just parrotting what he heard on a playground in Welland.
I don’t know what’s worse: people who say these things with intention, or the fact that it’s become so much a part of our language that it transfers so easily, even without the intention. It transfered into a culture where they don’t even really acknowledge the existence of gays, where the gay community is invisible. Chances are, this kid probably hasn’t ever had any contact with a gay man, and he doesn’t give a shit about either his use of the word or my distaste when he does. And yet, there it is: hatred transfered.
I went to the DMZ in October. That was trippy. It’s so easy to forget that the war isn’t actually over until you’re there and North Korean soldiers have sniper rifles trained on you. Our tour guide, Sergeant Han, was definitely worth the price of admission. Perhaps will spend more time on military bases. There was one place where we stood at an observation point and were surrounded on three sides by North Korea, and, more importantly, a minefield.
That’s something that’s totally outside my experience. So far outside, in fact, that it was completely unreal to me. You can tell me as many times as you like that there are people with guns pointed at me, it’s not going to register. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t understand. Well I did and I didn’t.
You can see the border quite clearly because it’s where the trees end – N. Korea has cut all of theirs down. There are tourist trips that foreigners can take – South Koreans are not allowed – and I’m sort of curious to go on one, but at the same time I’d feel sort of…well, disgusting. For a few reasons. For one, I’d see only the part of North Korea that they’d want me to see, and it wouldn’t be real. And it’s hard to go into a starving country and eat well as a tourist. Not to mention that I’d be turning people’s suffering into a tourist attraction, which is sort of reprehensible, and my money would be going to fund Kim Jong-Il. And I can only go to Pyongyang if I go through China. If I thought I’d see something real and could come back and write about it, I’d do it in a second, but I think all I’d do is go hiking on the sacred mountain that South Koreans are no longer allowed to go to and spend the night in the kind of luxury North Koreans don’t know exists.
South Koreans are also vastly uneducated about North Korea. At least, my students are. According to South Koreans consitution, everybody in North Korea is a citizen of South Korea, and yet South Korea does dick all, to the point where in votes about North Korea in the UN, South Korea actually abstains from voting. The children here are convinced that the people in North Korea are happy, which is probably how they deal with their guilt, or something like it, (though, to be fair, I’ve heard the same argument from Canadians. “No no, they LIKE being hungry and scared! they don’t know anything else!”), and have no idea about the hunger and fear and control.
Kim Jong-Il is a source of joking in my class. I’ve even heard teachers using it towards their kids as a form of discipline: “In this class, I’m Kim Jong-Il and you’re the North Koreans.” To me, that’s as bad as saying “Pretend I’m Adolph Hitler and do whatever I say.”
Even I’m careful about talking about in class. It comes up as a topic of disucussion quite frequently, “would you like Korea to unite?” “what do you think about mandatory military service?”, as I strain for topics to make these kids talk in class. But I’m always aware of the fact that, just as in Eastern Europe you may find yourselves speaking to survivors of or family members of survivors of the Holocaust, in the classrooms here, I may find myself speaking to students whose grandparents are in North Korea. And to me, it’s just as bad.
