What Freedom Means Here

I have lived in Korea for four months and I feel like I have so much to learn.  I got past the honeymoon, all is new phase pretty quick- this is probably the biggest learning period.  After that, it's more interesting, and perhaps more difficult.  This blog, particularly this post, is a mix of things I find important for an American audience, things I learned in college, misconceptions I had, and misinformation I hope to correct.   

I am not attempting to be comprehensive or to speak for Koreans.  None of this is a substitute for a Korean person's perspective.   I only want to offer insight to people like me who may have interest but have trouble finding non-wikipedia information.  

Basically, as always, I will discuss American Imperialism and social justice- which have extremely complicated, brutal, and if nothing else, globally unique history in Korea.  I gladly welcome any criticism or input from Koreans, fellow expats, or anyone.

Geography is low on the list of American interests.  Unfortunately for the world, American corporations and military might have immense impact in literally every country.  We have a positive influence in a few places, but overall, our hegemony is not welcome.  Of course you have to separate the people from the empire, which people around the world have no trouble doing.  When Rick Steves went to Iran he said the same thing, they say Death to America because we overthrew their elected leader and try to destroy their country, not because they hate individual Americans.

This is just down the road from my home in Dongsong.  Another 5 km down and you're at the DMZ.

Needless to say the majority of American soldiers represent our country respectfully, needless to say our military helped fight an oppressor in Korea, the Northern communists.  But when Koreans are polled on who the biggest threat to their peace is the majority say the USA, not North Korea.

To be clear I am not anti-military, I am anti-foreign domination.  I am anti-imperialist.

Every nation has the right to self-autonomy, this is not basic proper policy but a statement on human rights.  From the West Bank and Gaza, to Ukraine, to the indigenous Australian peoples, powerful countries abuse their position- going from helper to oppressor whenever there is money to be made, "interests" to secure.   

And we as Americans talk a big game about democracy but simply can't back it up in the real world.  

We occupy the world, our soldiers are in over 100 countries.  One reason has been to insure the fragile peace the US plays a role in.  But the main reason is to ensure the ongoing perpetuation of imperialist capitalism: exploiting value and resources from the periphery to the core in a way that furthers US interests.  This takes many shapes and forms, and the winner and loser is not always totally clear.

The American military presence in Korea is somewhat (sometimes, very) unwelcome by Koreans because of ongoing sexual assault of Korean women by US soldiers, brazen attitudes by US policy makers, and the prime-real-estate-grabbing US bases on Korean soil.  The best example of this I saw in Itaewon, Seoul.  

This part of Seoul is the main foreigner district, with a lot of cultural history.  Also with a massive hideous US base smack in the middle.  It is cinder block and barbed wire with placards every few yards reading DO NOT ENTER PROPERTY OF US GOVERNMENT.  In the middle of a culturally rich area, museums, art galleries, shops, is this base, and it is huge, covering block after block, I lost count.  

Odd juxtaposition.  But it is life for Koreans.  If America had a Korean or Chinese military base like this on our land... well I can't even speculate "if."  We would never let that would never happen, to us.  

Here it is on the map- that large dark gray area is all US military base.  That small green park is the National Museum of Korea, which is a glorious, free museum full of amazing history and artifacts that I want to visit again for an entire day.  For now, look at our impact:

I think Americans need to know this is not just a base but a presence of our soldiers.  There has been a recent spike in the number of sexual assaults of Korean women and US soldier misconduct, in which Americans typically receive full impunity from Korean law.  I know this might be risky to show, but this is not falsity.  It's not libelous, it is the reality.

Obviously, Korea is very developed economically so the story of capitalism and imperialism is different here.  But in fact, Korea is entirely unique in that manner.  After the Korean War and partition into two countries, the US had a vested interest in helping to rebuild the place, not just because of our military involvement, but because we had an opportunity to make an example of the achievements of capitalism, right smack against the near threat of communism.

The Korean struggle for independence and economic development are totally a product of the culture of Korea, which places high value on education.  There was also a unified goal for economic self-sufficiency that would be wrong to attribute totally to American influence.  Nonetheless, America sent millions in aid to the South, and helped establish the KCIA (sound familiar?) to crack down on organized labor.  I really want to avoid giving credit of economic success in Korea to Americans, that is not my point and not the historical truth.  What I want my readers to know is that America helped prop up right wing dictators and spread anti-unionism in Korea, in addition to constant pressuring and back-door dealings with the elite that excluded the Korean poor and working class.

I am not hopeless about the situation, and I am not afraid of North Korea.  But I want to use my frustration to spread more awareness, hopefully to be part of an ongoing change for the better.  I also see an astonishing silence of critical discourse on the military by American expat bloggers in Korea.  American young people, almost all of them ESL teachers, sounds like a small select group in Korea, but google it- there are thousands of us here blogging about literally every aspect of being American in Korea, every aspect except this imperialism one.  This is a serious concern.  I also want to point my readers towards some Korean tumblr bloggers who have a history of anti-imperialist writing, from a Korean perspective: 

beemill.tumblr.com

lostintrafficlights.tumblr.com

thisisnotkorea.tumblr.com

k0234.tumblr.com

ecue.tumblr.com

koreaunderground.tumblr.com

Many of my family members and loved ones are veterans and active service.  I do hear discussions from these loved ones on reigning in our empire, ending the frivolous war budget that pays people to parachute full time to promote the army.  Those discussions give me hope, particularly because change has to come from within institutions.  Outside pressure can only go so far.

One perfect example of change being pushed from the outside was the massive civil unrest and organized protesting by Koreans in 2008 against the forced importation of American beef, a meat Koreans are really into.  The whole unhealthy cows thing was a big problem, but an even bigger problem, really the core issue was the (correct) Korean perception that the US unfairly bullies its way into Korean politics and economics.  In the end, US economic interests won, the market has been flooded with cheap, sickly American cow meat.  At the very least stores are required to display where their meat comes from, but no surprise, people prefer the cheaper US meat.  


Protests are absolutely a part of Korean culture.  There is a warped idea, that I even had myself, that because Korean culture is eastern, confucian, it does not experience or allow for the questioning of authority.  The reality is that (Neo)confucian ethics encourage innovation, and Korean people have always resisted oppression.  Protests are very common here, like after the president Pak Gyeun Hye (whose father was a capitalist dictator) won in questionable circumstances, after the Sewol Ferry accident, in response to union busting.  

The history of Korea, being 5,000 years old and very far away from Western culture, is victim to many misconceptions.  Part of these stem from the very recent, lingering Cold War division that splits one people into two countries.  As I have said before, the division of Korea is not black and white.  "Democracy versus Communism" is an outmoded trope and it falls short in describing the abuse of human rights by both countries and the USA.  Korean people strive for unification, despite the obvious barricades to that fleeting goal.  Still, there is a shared sense of nationality that transcends the North-South division.  Here is another map, this one is from my classroom.  

What else can I say?  A lot, but I will never totally explain or even understand myself.  The best I can do is offer an alternative to the major narrative about Korea, which either doesn't exist in the main or is totally defined by the supposed threat of the North.

Did you know? Maybe you did.

Did you know Korea did not divide itself into North and South?  This was done by the US and Soviet sponsor states, a totally top-down foreign imposition.  

Did you know Korea was occupied and colonized by Japan?  By colonization I mean dehumanizing-exploitative-strip-you-of-your-culture exploitation, by imperialist Japan for 35 years (1910-1945)

Did you know Korea had metal movable type printing a few hundred years before Gutenberg?  

Did you know Korea went from being an international aid recipient to an international aid donor?

These are only a start.  There is a lot I still don't know.  There is a lot I am coming to love about the country that I never could have expected.  I have encountered so many heartwarming people, and had such a warm welcome in smaller acts of kindness.  I am trying to keep in touch and be lost in a new place, at once.  I am scatterbrained but I am trying.

Teaching A Language

Hi again reader.  I'm assuming you got here accidentally or incidentally.  I sent links from tumblr and twitter- warm welcome to those of you who found me thataways.  I have yet to share my blog with my family or friends because DMZJazz is not turning out to be what I promised to those beloved people.  Mostly it's polemical and stream of conscious travelogue instead of photos and recaps.  I'll get there soon. 

But until I get hatemail I will direct my thoughtbeam at the general audience.  I hope I'm being frank and encouraging and honest. 

The origins of the adjective "frank" meaning direct; unreserved, come from the Franks, the primordial French people.  My mayonnaise ancestry is part French, so I will keep the candid component and hopefully reject the snooty part.  Anyway, my blog still feels like a flickering bulb in the sea of cosmic net darkness, which is quite literally what I am, but the last thing I want to do is write condescendingly.  It's not insight if it's not shared, it's not wisdom if it's condescending.

In the last two to three years I have written a few hundred pages of probably pointless, incredibly cathartic, multi-narrative poems, stories, expositions, lyrics, and a novel that I'm still bangin out.  I'm not worried about being succinct or sounding like an expert.  Communication is my objective. 

Talking is love, free thought, freed thought.  Geography, etymology, language, rapping, conversation, paradox, literature: my passions.

I'm also a fan of radical thinking, both in the popular conception meaning dangerous or unorthodox, and in the critical, return-restore-to-origin sense that Angela Davis uses- the historical root- the radish.  Delish. 

Teaching English as a Foreign Language is pretty hard.  Not impossible, just tough.  The act of teaching itself- instructing, is not hard, in fact I love it.  But what I 'm discovering is this love of mine is an ideal, theoretical hope that I am able to communicate important things in an accessible way.  Obviously this tends to differ from the reality, the sweaty process of teaching.

When I say teaching ESL is hard what I mean is the entire experience is a hard, fleeting, semi-successful, impenetrable idea for everyone involved.  While teaching ESL is hard, without question, the students of English face a much more daunting task. 

Learning English as a foreign language is far more difficult than just teaching it.  No question. 

Learning English is especially tough when you're learning from a teacher like me.  Kidding... sort of.  I must avoid self-deprecating humor in public in Korea because it's a very odd, foreign, very not-funny thing here to ridicule or undermine your own authority.  I know that from experience now. 

What I'm getting at is my lack of credentials in my own foreign language background.  I took 6 courses of Swahili in college, 3 years of High School French, and am not even close to beginner level in either.  Yeah, I get a few phrases.

Conversely, I have attempted to learn Spanish from poetry (Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo) and from Mexican movies on my own time and I am probably most able to communicate in that language.  It helped working with ESL Latin@ children for several months back home.  If you're reading, kids and ESLAsC people, I miss you all.

My qualifications are actually rooted in standard form.  Old Jazz standards like pedagogy, TEFL certification, conference attendance, etc- the system.  That's scary to think about.  But I felt before teaching and still hope that I have some ability to transcend the rigid form of the classroom and really motivate... or something.  That's delusional.  The classroom and the baggage of a school system is a barrier to learning. 

You also can't have an English "conversation" class with 20-40 people.  Theoretically, this is impossible, conversations have six or seven people, maximum.  But there is some room to work, and a lot of leeway in terms of my lesson plans.  So I am at the beginning of getting to know the students more so as to better engage.  It's tough, like I said, but I love it.



Probably my first day here at school I abandoned the hope that I would deeply root English in their minds.  My job is not to make them learn, my job is to help learning, to inspire, which is precisely what my language teachers did to me.  My French teacher and my KiSwahili instructors are absolutely incredible, inspiring, wonderful, heroic (no joke) humans.  Hero.  That's my reasonable goal.

I am uncertain that I am inspiring any learning whatsoever.  My only basic goal is to create a comfortable environment where English is accessible.  If anyone has any pointers on how to get the environment in a groove, like giving it your own sass n pizazz, I'm all ears.  A giant ear.

I have dreams- day dreams and sueños that I am speaking fluently and confidently in Korean or Spanish or Swahili.  I wonder if my students dream like me.  I know some of them do.  I try to sympathize with their struggle to learn English by saying "I am just like you in Korea."  "I only speak a very very little, so we're all students."

What a load of crap.  Me learning Korean and them learning English are two completely different things.  It's a bogus analogy, unfortunately.  Here's why:

Firstly, when I said that in my first few classes it just didn't fly.  On the surface it sounds like it would work- create bonds and whatnot, but for the most part, my students didn't understand or weren't buying it if they did understand.  Most, maybe 80-90% of them are beginners in speaking, despite their great vocabulary and fantastic reading/writing ability.  Strange, I know, but the testing and achievement metric in Korea is written.  Speaking comes afterward.  And for my part, I speak WAY TOO FAST.  They just don't hear me, they feel me, but they can't yet hear me out.  You can't just teach them English; they have to learn English by using it.

Secondly, as a Westerner in Korea, the onus to communicate actually falls on Koreans to speak English, not the other way around.  Foreigners feel a very small pressure to speak Korean compared to the Koreans.  This is because of language imperialism.  The increasing importance of English, the lingua franca of capitalism and globalization.  You might say English is the site of globalization.  So this English imperialism does awful things, useful things too (that's where I come in, more on that later), but mostly it makes people feel inadequate, out of touch.  Every Korean feels pressure to learn English.  Marinate on that, and maybe even extend it a little further, a whole lot further.  The world's less economically advantaged people all feel more pressure to learn some global trade language.

Also, lastly, consider the fact that hundreds of thousands of white guys like me have come to this country before and only a pathetically, abysmally tiny percent of them could say a single word in Korean.  Therefore, Koreans expect and are forced to expect that white folks, foreign folks, mostly white though, don't know Korean because they don't have to.  The burden of communication goes to the Korean, who, if the person is older than about 30, faced compulsory English education in school. 

There is no comparison in terms of when, where, why, and how the languages are spoken.  I am studying Korean but I am not very similar to a Koren student of English.



I feel an intense spectrum of experience and emotion as a teacher.  I had to revise this post many times because it varies greatly from venting to jot-this-down-it-made-you-smile.  Stay away from venting.  Stay away from anger because anger is self-duplicating, transmittable, sustainable.  Listen to Rage Against the Machine if you have to.  One golden moment I shared with a very kind teacher at my school was when we were driving back to town and she played some Rage, we bonded over our teen angst.

I am bonding with my other teachers as well, by blog and in person.  Ask any teacher of any subject at any level, teaching is not easy, but it means something.  My blog is an exploration on the idea of privilege, access, rights, freedom, knowledge, power.  I believe deeply that Education should be universal, free and benefit everyone.  That's a pipe dream but it does exist in some places in the world, specifically Indigenous communities where education is a loving process passed down over generations.  Survivance, a term used in Native writing, namely the work of Gerald Vizenor, a truly marvelous writer.

Education is a benefit and not a cost in places with traditional lifeways.  It's twisted that we in the West concieve of education as a cost.  No it's not.  Education is a benefit to everyone.  The future, we should not even call it "education" or school, we should call it our future.



I am encountering friction and personal-political-ethical dissonance about teaching ESL.  The crushing social impact of globalization is not a beautiful process.  Languages are dying, entire thought systems die with them.  There is a lethargic attempt to redress the needs of the periphery, to that end Teaching ESL is a bandage.  I have constant consternation about my own role in perpetuating the dominance of English abroad, and therefore enabling imperialism. 

That's the political implication.  However, and this is not what I tell myself to sleep better, it's the reality: English is the key to  the information of the world.  This has economic implications, clearly, but the impact of English reaches beyond that.  Of all the science and technical publications, the stuff that shapes policy, frames understanding, and gate-keeps everything, 80% is in English (other studies have it around 90).   I want to unlock these tools and empower my students.  We can start to communicate more in spite of a shrinking mode of contact.  The more people who speak English as a second language, the more English will  be informed by different ways of thinking.  Yes, this implies retaining a mother tongue, that is the challenge facing the world. 

As for my class, I hope to achieve a comfortable, happy, safe place.  I mean that.  You remember feelings better than ideas, so I start there.  Students can move from comfort to intrigue, from curiosity to understanding, from understanding to confidence. 

The current state of the world requires much to counteract; many areas of concern need immediate addressing (the environment, poverty, war, food security).  I'm not teaching them to save the world, but I am teaching a foreign language, so the idea of global citizenship is already embedded in my presence.  I don't tread lightly here.  Everything I do has an impact, which is the case for everyone anywhere, but I need to use this to my advantage and to the student's advantage by creating lessons on topics that actually matter.  So far I have covered global geography, feminist impact of words like policeman, climate change, the rise of elephant poaching for ivory trade, and stating opinions.

I am skeptical but hopeful, that's the pessimist in me.  But we've only just begun.