27,000 words (A Wedding Campaign)

I’m trying very hard to find a way to put current feeling into words. I just called Tim, and did a fairly dismal job of trying to express it, so I suppose I’ll give it another try. A lot of this mood I think was inspired by the movie I just watched, A Wedding Campaign. It was by far the best movie I’ve seen in Korea.

Wait, quick list:
1. Welcome to Dongmakgol*
2. 200 Pounds Beauty
3. The King and the Clown
4. JSA
5. Please Teach Me English
6. Someone Special*
7. No Blood, No Tears*
8. Righteous Ties*
9. Bungee Jumping of Their Own
10. Wishing Stairs
11. A Wedding Campaign*
12. The Wig
13. The Host

Wow, that’s not bad for having been here not quite two months yet. The movies marked with an asterisk I chose because they include my Korean heartthrob, Jeong Jae-Yeong. I suppose that my Korean movie watching will follow the same trends as my American movie watching—horror movies, historical epics, dramas that seem particularly good, very few romantic comedies, and any movies with actors I like in them. I’m actually really sad—I discovered today that I’m almost out of JJY’s movies—there’s only one more in which he has a large part, and I suspect I’ll be watching that sometime this weekend. Anyway, here’s my review of A Wedding Campaign, because then I should be able to better explain my current state of mind:

Kate, I insist that you watch this as soon as possible. So don’t read this: I give A Wedding Campaign 6 Bs (out of 5!), because it was just absolutely excellent. In true Korean fashion, it’s meant to be a romantic comedy, and it delivers on that front, but it’s also remarkably dramatic, with high stakes. (Think Someone Special—the romantic comedy with a brain tumor.) JJY plays Man-taek, a 38 year old Korean farmer who is still unmarried and living with his mother and grandfather. He is attractive (at least in my opinion), but socially awkward, which explains why he hasn’t married. In an amusing and illuminating scene from his youth, he is caught looking through the window at a woman bathing by her daughter, who is also the girl he likes, and as he explains, he hasn’t been able to look at a woman since. His mother nags and ridicules him about his unmarried state constantly, so he and a similarly romantically-challenged friend decide to go to Uzbekistan. There is, for some reason, a small population of ethnic Koreans in Uzbekistan, so there is a company that specializes in helping Korean men meet ethnic Korean Uzbek brides. So, he and his friend set off on their “wedding campaign.” The problem? They’re internationally inept. Man-taek is too awkward to hit it off, and his friend is a jerk who gets a girl and then decides she isn’t pretty enough and dumps her, breaking her heart. Man-taek’s translator, who accompanies him on his dates, is a lovely character named Kim Lara, who says she is also a Koryo (Korean Uzbek), and Man-taek begins falling for her. But Kim Lara is in fact a North Korean citizen who has defected, and is currently living in Uzbekistan while waiting for her tyrannical boss to give her the fake passport she needs to go to South Korea. She falls in love with Man-taek too, but much drama ensues, even as he is still theoretically trying to woo one of the Koryo brides.

I’m going to ruin the best scene of the movie for you now, so if you don’t want to read it, don’t. In the end, the matchmaking business is shut down, because so many of the Uzbek brides go to Korea only to discover their lives aren’t quite as their prospective husbands described. So Man-taek and his friend have only 48 hours to remain in Uzbekistan before their visas are cancelled. Man-taek runs all over the city trying to find Kim Lara, who is in hiding. Uzbek Independence Day is near, so the police are much stricter about checking passports, and if Kim Lara were discovered with a NK passport, she would be sent back. So finally he finds her, and confesses his love to her, and asks if he can come back for her. (There’s a lot of awkwardness, because he doesn’t know until the end that she is North Korean.) She says, “I’ll take it as a compliment,” and walks away. He chases her, but then he is stopped by police. They ask for his passport, but he doesn’t understand, and he is still trying to follow her, so the police get agitated. She comes back to help, and says she is his translator, so they ask for her passport too. Things get heated. The police take her bag, and pull out her NK passport, which is when he finds out, and suddenly a lot of things make sense to him. So they’re radioing to find out if she’s legal, she’s about to be caught and really upset, so he… punches the policeman and yells at her to run. She does, but she stops to look back, watching as the two policeman pummel him, and he keeps screaming “Run!” So he goes to jail but is bailed out, she escapes, and he has to leave the country. You’ll be pleased to know that they get together in the end.

The movie is just so… cute! I typically loathe cute movies, but it’s cute and wonderful in a way totally different than most romantic comedies. JJY is a great actor, and I couldn’t help but fall in love with his character, despite his painful social awkwardness. There were some universal truths about love in it, but nothing too heavy-handed. I’m not sure what it was, really, that made it so good. Perhaps that these two people were so obviously perfect for each other, but faced with a very real and problematic barrier. In so many of these stupid love stories, the thing that keeps the two main characters apart is something really stupid—the gimmick of License to Wed, for example. Maybe I’m just a sucker for North-South relations movies, but I really felt for these characters in a way I never could for all the Ashton Kutchers and Britany Murphys in the world. And JJY reminds me so much of Norman Reedus. Mm.

So I was in a very strange mood after the movie. Meghan and I parted ways, and I walked home in a slight drizzle, but I got to the outside door of my apartment and just couldn’t go in. I was talking to Tim, and I was hit with a sudden and paralyzing sense of… something. It just suddenly hit me how surreal this experience is. Nothing else I’ve done has ever affected me this way. I got tinges of this feeling sometimes in Ireland, but it wasn’t the same. I stood outside in the parking lot looking up at my bedroom window and went, ‘what am I doing here?’ Not because I’m unhappy at all—school is going really well this week, I’m happy at home, and I’ve become really good friends with Meghan and am seeing lots of movies. My life is pretty simple, relatively, and satisfying. But it’s not at all what I ever expected. I’ve pretty much always known what I wanted—college, grad school, teaching, and everything I did was pretty much a steppingstone towards those things. Even being in Ireland—I was still technically in college, and I’d had a fondness for Ireland since the first time I went, and had wanted to live there and possibly go to school there, so it made sense. The homeless shelter wasn’t exactly part of the plan, but it was how things worked out, and though I sometimes questioned it, it made sense.

Korea doesn’t make any sense. Korea was never part of the plan. But… it’s what I’m doing, and I’m happy. It’s hard being so far from family and home, but someday soon I’ll have internet for my laptop, and Skype, and then you’ll all only be a phone call away, which isn’t really so different from when I was living in Orlando. I wish I could see you, but I’ve come to really appreciate email in a way I never did before. And… I’m happy in Korea. At least, right now. Maybe the surreal feeling just came from that—I’m someplace I never expected to be, having an experience I couldn’t have dreamed of having, but it feels right.

It’s just weird. For these first few weeks, and most of Orientation, time seems to pass so slowly, so that it’s hard for me to imagine actually being here for a year. I know that this will be like every other time—six months from now I will suddenly go ‘where did the time go?’ But that’s impossible for me to imagine now.

I think maybe I just never thought I could pull this off. I mean, picking up and moving to Ireland was a big deal. But Kate was there, so it could never have possibly been this scary. I had a super-close friend who had already been through it all to guide me, to show me around, and to support me. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done Simon if not for that. And when I first found out I got the Fulbright, after the initial euphoria of having finally won a prestigious scholarship wore off, I was terrified. I wanted so badly to turn it down. I never could have, really, because I would have regretted it too much. But particularly in those weeks leading up, I wanted so badly not to go. No one even knows how much, because I never ever gave voice to it. I put on a brave face, but I was terrified. I didn’t know anything about Korea, didn’t know any Korean, and didn’t really want to come here. But now, it’s great. I’ve pleasantly surprised myself with my adaptability. It’s not to say I don’t have hard times, and down times, but I’ve remained far more positive than I ever though possible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships lately, too. Sometimes, when I’m watching a good love story, or when I spend time with kids, I realize and accept that I really do want a family. This is important to me. Having someone with whom to share my life is important. But I don’t want a relationship at the moment. I feel like there have always been two sides to me: part of me is capable of being really really co-dependent. This came out in my last relationship. For me, it can be very easy to commit to someone and to come to rely on them and depend on them to validate me. But there’s another part of me that is fiercely independent, and that part is currently at the forefront. There are just so many things I want to do, or think I might want to do, in the next ten years (well, eight) that would be easier and arguably better and less stressful without a serious relationship. When I’m in a relationship, I always think I need it, but when I’m not, most of the time I realize that what I need most is good friends who have time for me and movies—my two greatest loves. But when I watch a good love story, I get anxious. What if I, like Man-taek, find myself 30 (or 38) and alone? What if I wake up and suddenly all my good friends are married and busy with their kids, and I’m past my prime? It’s such a ludicrous thing to think at 21, I know, but sometimes I worry about it. Going to Ireland and coming to Korea were selfish career-based decisions, and those are the kinds of decisions I need to make for the next few years, because I need to make sure that I end up in a career that makes me happy. As my Korean principal said, “We spend… so much time… at school. It is necessary that… it be… joyful.” It has always been important to me that I have a job where I feel that I’m doing some good in the world, and that fulfills me. It is important to me that I be happy with my life independent of my lovelife. But I’m worried about being too ruthlessly career-minded.

Clearly, I had problems in my last relationship. It had reached an unsalvageable point, at least in its current state. But I clung to it still for a long time. Because it was so nice being sure. It was so nice being able to say, “Well, that’s settled. Here’s the person I’ll spend the rest of my life with, who will support me through everything, and with whom I’ll eventually have a family.” As if checking it off a to-do list. Quick, a James Joyce joke:

1. Grocery shopping
2. Laundry
3. Forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race

So yeah. It was nice to think that I no longer needed to worry, even a little, about my future companionship. Starting over from scratch is scary. But I’m going to take advantage of this time in Korea as time when I try to avoid thinking about relationships or my distance from thirty. I will throw myself wholeheartedly into a few goals: losing weight, becoming a good teacher (and discovering if I really like teaching), and learning Korean. And figuring out what career will make me happiest in the future.

But if JJY shows up at my doorstep in Naju, I won’t say no.

Anyway, I feel a little less shellshocked about things now. Today was a really good day. I finally expressed my real feelings about the textbook to my co-teacher at DMS, and she was really supportive, so we agreed that on Thursdays I would teach from the book, and on Fridays I could come up with my own activity that practiced whatever grammar point they were working on. So today was the first day of that, and both the 2nd and 3rd grade lessons went really well! In 2nd grade we were practicing if/then constructions. “If I am hungry, then I need to eat.” “If I am tired, then I will go to sleep.” I made a Powerpoint with some examples and awarded tickets for reading them. I had created 15 if/then sentences, then printed them onto sheets and cut them in half, so I gave each group and envelope with 30 slips of paper in it, and they had to make 15 coherent sentences. Each team did it successfully, which suggests that they understand if/then pretty well, and that their vocabulary may not be as limited as I thought. Or at least there’s one smart kid at each table. Good enough. Then I used magnets to put 12 sheets of paper on the board face-down. Each had half of a sentence on it, and we played a memory game. (Each team took turns flipping over two sheets, and if they made a correct sentence, it was a match.) The kids seemed to have fun, and it was a lot of good speaking practice, I think.

The 3rd grade lesson was, in my opinion, even more fun, but it didn’t go quite as smoothly. The 3rd graders were practicing the “If I were… then I would” construction. Like, “If I were at home in America right now, I would be eating Taco Bell.” It differs from second grade because it is an imagined conditional, rather than a simple cause-effect sentence. So I printed the lyrics to “If I Were a Rich Man,” a fun song from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, and inserted blanks in place of simple words. We listened to the song first, and tried to fill in the blanks, which the kids had a hard time with it. Then, I had found a video on YouTube of a clip from the movie with subtitles, so we watched it again, and the kids filled in the lyrics. Then I tried to convince them to sing along. I generally just make a fool of myself for their sakes, and today was no different. I sang without music and danced, and generally had a good time for my own benefit. A few of the girls actually sang with me, so that was cool.

If I were a rich man,
dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum
All day long I’d biddy biddy bum,
if I were a wealthy man.
I wouldn’t have to work hard
dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum
If I were a biddy biddy rich
deedle-deedle-didle-idle man.

I’d build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen
right in the middle of the town.
With one long staircase just going up,
And one even longer coming down...

Anyway, Teyve is a poor farmer, so he sings this song describing what he imagines he WOULD do if he WERE rich. It’s a cool song, and I’m basically awesome for connecting it to this lesson. After we practiced the song we did an activity from the teaching manual “If I were stranded on a desert island.” I did a pretty ridiculous drawing on the board of an island, and the colored blue around it, and then drew a plane crashing onto it. And we talked about what four things we would need and why. “I would need (noun) because I would be (adjective)." I had them come up with four things in groups, and I think it was pretty difficult for them, but we had some good ones. My favorite: “I would need airplane because I would be go home.” Duh.

My co-teacher complimented me on my ability to pantomime, my creativity, and my enthusiasm, which I was really happy to hear. I’m always worried about whether or not the co-teachers think I’m doing a good job, and with the ones at NMS I always say “Was that okay?” And they say, “Yes, okay.” Which doesn’t really tell me anything. Miss Kim also walked with me to the bank today during a free period to show me how to use the ATM (which buttons to push and stuff). Korean ATMs are crazy, because everyone has a bankbook that you can insert into the machine and it will print your balance right into it. She was surprised when I told her we didn’t have those in America. Am I right? Have you ever seen it?

So yeah, she was really sweet and effusive in her praise. I really enjoy talking to her, because she asks fun questions about words and idioms and stuff, and we talk about movies. And best of all, I think the kids are starting to warm up to me. Most of them just show up in the teachers’ office and say “Miss Camp… so beautiful… Candy?” because I give them candy for speaking English in class. But a few of the better students come and actually try to talk to me. One boy gave me a hug. Which makes me happy. The kids are shy about speaking English, especially in front of me, a native speaker, and I know the only way they’ll improve at conversation is if they feel comfortable and a little confident. I can sympathize with them. I know a lot more Korean than I actually use, but I’m too shy to use it in most situations. But with Miss Kim, or with my host siblings, or the middle schoolers, I’m not too embarrassed, and that’s when I get to practice.

Okay, it’s midnight, and tomorrow I have an exciting day of lesson planning and studying Korean in front of me, so I should get to sleep. Go see A Wedding Campaign (Netflix!)

Take care.

ETA: I just copy and paste compiled my last 10 entries into one Word document, because that’s how I’m going to be keeping it now, and it’s 45 pages and almost 27,000 words.