Sun-Yeong's Hometown and Typhoon

I’m blogging a lot less frequently now, which could be for a number of reasons. The past couple weeks have been rough in a number of ways. I’ve felt pretty bad, I got my period on Tuesday, and my stomach’s just been dodgy. And the cat thing really threw a wrench in my mood situation at first.

But the good news is that it’s Saturday afternoon and I have a six-day vacation spread out in front of me, thanks to 추석, the Korean thanksgiving. Which should give me a lot of time to get back on track, and to relax, and to get things done. I’m a little worried that my host siblings will start to piss me off (my host brother already has), so I need to stay busy. I’ve fallen off the wagon with jogging, eating well, and studying Korean, which I’m sure helps to account for my dampened mood.

My computer must be feeling the strain too. For some reason, my desktop no longer exists. None of my icons appear. They still show up in my desktop folder, so it’s not as if they’ve completely disappeared or been deleted. But even why I try to add a new shortcut to my desktop, nothing appears. It’s perplexing, and makes me worried that my computer’s not going to survive through the whole year, which would be way sad.

But this week since Tuesday has been… pretty good. My lessons went pretty well at Noan on Wednesday. I didn’t start crying, although second grade was still a pain in my ass, especially my favorite class. Third grade went surprisingly well, and I think they’re finally starting to warm up to me a little too. It’s actually only two kids in the second grade class that I want to strangle—they just talk nonstop while I’m talking, and Wednesday I went over and gave them dirty looks no less than six times. They’d stop talking for a second, say “sorry,” and then go back to talking. It’s maddening. And I don’t know how to say “Shut up or I’ll send you out,” so there wasn’t really much I could do. Next time I really will call their bluff and do some dictation, which I suspect will lead the class to police them for me. Plus, my favorite student JK is in that class. Luckily, we were studying “Can you…,” so I said “Can I hit this student?” And JK was the only one who understood what I said, and he laughed and said “Yes.” I said, “No, sadly, I can’t. But I want to.” So he laughed again and translated for his friend.

Thursday and Friday at Dongkang were really great too. I’ll say one more time how much I love my co-teacher—she makes my life during class a breeze. So the kids at Dongkang have always been nice, but I’m starting to form a few relationships with some of them, especially one boy who made it a point to sit next to me at lunch both days, even though he speaks no English at all. I’ve been studying names hardcore, and I sit outside during recess time and watch the boys play soccer while I’m studying. The girls come out and sit with me, and help me practice my Korean. It’s a good system, and I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to them on Friday. I’ll be very sad to see the third graders go in December, especially. Thankfully, my two favorite students overall are second grade, so that will help to ease the pain a little. And remember the girl who gave me the card the first day? She writes me a letter everyday and leaves it in an origami box on my desk. She’s too shy to talk during class, but I write back to her, so we communicate that way. It’s way cute.

And I really like the teachers at Dongkang! They’re all really nice, and make valiant efforts to communicate with me, despite the fact that they know very very little English. I brought some fruit and cake as a Chuseok gift, which they seemed to appreciate. There’s a particular thing they say, like our “Happy Thanksgiving,” that’s something like “Spend Chuseok well,” but I didn’t know that phrase, and they didn’t know how to translate it, so instead they said “Merry Chuseok” to me, which cracked me up.

So yeah, school’s very excellent. I’ve decided that all I really need is one good thing to happen every day. If I manage to have one really good thing happen, the entire day will be a success. So far, I haven’t been disappointed. As for my homestay life—I’ve warmed up to the wittle kittycat a lot. The litter training did, in fact, work, which was the most important step toward me not hating her. It still means I’m going to have to intensely clean my floor once a week, something I wouldn’t have had to do without her, but I guess that’s alright. I don’t enjoy scooping litter, but at least at the moment it’s all very small. So she’s slept with me the past few nights, which is kind of annoying because she feels the need to sleep literally under me, and to burrow into me at annoying times, which leads to me chucking her off the bed, and inadvertently rolling over on her a lot, but it is nice to have a little cuddle buddy (until I get my Korean boyfriend). It’s nice that she’s still so small that her claws don’t actually hurt yet. Once she starts hurting me, the honeymoon phase will be over. The biggest breakthrough is that host mom has warmed up to her too, so now I can open the door and let her wander around downstairs when I’m home, which is nice, because then she’s not on top of me all the time. She’s starting to annoy my host brother, which is what he gets. He’s really mean to her though, so it makes me worry, which is another sign that I’ve started to like her. He’s just such a little shit. Maybe if I could communicate with him, I wouldn’t feel that way, but at the moment he’s just a little brat. Fact.

And now, some movie reviews. On Wednesday night I went out with Meghan, and we saw a surprisingly good horror movie. Unfortunately, the Korean title was really long, and the English title was either non-existent or a name, so I don’t even really know what to call it. I think Tim translated it as something like “Sun-Yeong’s Hometown,” so that will suffice until I can find out exactly what it is. It started off pretty bad—I didn’t know that it was set sometime in one of the Korean dynasty periods, so it was a period piece, complete with traditional clothing and historical sets. And the first scene was really confusing and un-interesting. And to top it all off, the subtitles were laughably bad. The first one, I think, was “I have ever killed someone.” Ever? Never? In a horror movie, this is important. So the bar was set pretty low. But at some point very early on, it started to make sense, and became good, and in the end I was really satisfied. I’m going to go ahead and tell you the whole plot, because you’ll never see it. I give it 4 out of 5 Bs. This is the story of two twin sisters (not again). The older one, Sun-Yeong, was a big jerk and hated the younger one, Hyo-Jin, and the mom only loved the older one. But Hyo-Jin had a promised boyfriend, at age 8, and Sun-Yeong, was especially jealous about that. Then, in some mysterious circumstances, both fall into the water and are drowning, and Mom can only save one, so she saves Sun-Yeong, her favorite. (She recognizes her by her bracelet.) But Sun-Yeong is then in a coma for the next, like, ten years. When she wakes up, she has amnesia and can’t remember much about herself, or what happened, although she recognizes her mom, I think. Anyway, people mysteriously start to die as soon as she wakes up—several of her friends from back in the day, who she’d told to chase her sister toward the river. So they think that it’s either Sun-Yeong killing them or the ghost of Hyo-Jin, both of which are bad. They blame Sun-Yeong anyway. And for whatever reason, the families have decided to go ahead and marry Sun-Yeong to Hyo-Jin’s boyfriend, although the boyfriend hates Sun-Yeong because she was a big jerk to his girlfriend back in the day, and was suspiciously involved in her death. Awkward. Anyway, everyone in the town starts to turn against her, including her Mom, and there’s some really scary scenes where the ghost kills the two friends. Then in the final scene, we find out that the girl isn’t even Sun-Yeong—it’s actually Hyo-Jin. Sun-Yeong had let her sister wear her bracelet, so Mom intended to save Sun-Yeong, but actually saved Hyo-Jin instead, so now it’s Sun-Yeong’s ghost who is murdering people. Awesome. It wasn’t a totally irritating twist, as usual. Anyway, Hyo-Jin survives, and gets together with her old boyfriend, and the end is sort of a happy one.

Last night (Friday), Tim came to visit me in Naju and we went to DVD bang. I’d written a list of at least ten Korean movies that had come out in the last three years and which I thought we might both like, but the DVD bang owner took a look at it and proclaimed that he only had two of them. The one I’d really wanted to see, which came out last year, he said “This is… not Korean. Foreign movie.” (No, it’s not.) Another one he said “Very old… six years.” (No, it’s not.) Perplexingly, he doesn’t actually have a list of which movies he has, let alone a searchable database, so he just looks through a big DVD case, and I feel like sometimes he looks harder than other times. It’s annoying that most of the movies there are American movies, but understandable, I suppose, because Korean people watch Korean movies on TV. That’s what Tim said anyway. So our choices were April Snow, which I remembered was an intense melodrama, and Typhoon, which looked like an action film, and I couldn’t remember why I’d thought Tim might like it. Then I remembered, the description had said that it dealt with North-South relations, which Tim and typically both tend to enjoy.

And, it did, sort of. I give Typhoon 4 stars, although Tim declared that it would probably be the worst movie he saw in Korea. And it was pretty… something. I wouldn’t say bad. It was an action film, and the biggest problem was that it had a relatively simple plot, which it complicated really unnecessarily with a lot of other information which I felt was pretty unimportant. The simple plot is that there’s this bad guy, named Sin, who’s the leader of some Asian pirates (who knew?) Sin looks like a cross between Jack Sparrow and Will Turner, only Asian, and is hot. In the beginning, he and his pirate crew get onto an American military ship and murder everyone. Then they steal nuclear waste. Sin’s family were North Koreans who, when he was ten, tried to defect to South Korea, but after being assured they would be successful, they were denied asylum, and sent back to North Korea, where his parents and older brothers were murdered. He and his older sister managed to run away and escape, and endure lots of hardships, but were eventually separated. So, he had a bitter hatred for all South Koreans all his life, and now he intends to put the nuclear waste in weather balloons and send them up into a super-powerful typhoon which will cause it all to be dispersed over Korea. Convoluted, I know. First, though, he murders the particular South Korean diplomat who denied his family asylum. And he’s been looking for his sister for all of these years, and the Russians finally find her. Anyway, after the American ship pirate thing, the South Korean government tries to find Sin, and they choose a particular officer from the Navy for the job. And he somehow finds out about Sin’s sister, and gets to her before Sin does, and then uses her as bait to get him to come to them. Oh yeah, Sin’s sister is dying of cancer, by the way. Anyway, there’s a tearful reunion scene between them, which is interrupted by gunshots, because for some reason the South Korean government suddenly just wants to murder Sin. And the sister gets shot protecting him, and the two of them escape. So they get on the boat, and proceed to sail into the typhoon, so that he can engage in his nefarious plan.

And the South Korean Jack Ryan character follows them with his team, but it’s apparently a suicide mission because they only have helicopters which can’t carry enough fuel to get back. (What?) And they’re halfway there when the Americans inform the South Korean government that they’re sending a submarine to blow up Sin’s ship, which will also kill the South Korean guys, so the South Korean government tells them to come back, but the good guy refuses, for a reason that’s completely unclear to me. And he writes his mom a really sad letter that’s like, “I probably won’t come back alive. They’re sending me to point a gun at a guy who I’d have liked to befriend in a different situation.” Or something. It’s so confusing and convoluted. Anyway, Sin dies in a knife fight with the good guy, only a few balloons get out, and even those didn’t have the detonators on, and the American submarine blows up the ship, but the good guy somehow is miraculously rescued and comes home.

There were roughly 3000 problems with this movie. Now, I’ve never read a Tom Clancy novel, or seen a movie adaptation, but I imagine this is what they’re like. The actor who plays the main character, the good South Korean, is terrible. His face is really angular, and he remains completely expressionless throughout the entire movie. He doesn’t even smile once, which makes him just seem like a military blockhead, despite the fact that the script tries to make him deep and thoughtful. And there’s a ridiculous information/exposition overload in the beginning, with a huge number of characters introduced, so that you’re confused (to the point of giving up, if you’re Tim), for the first hour. The flashback scenes, and the refugee plot, were actually really good, but they come halfway through and are too short to have their intended emotional effect. And Sin, despite being hot and having had a bad life, isn’t really that sympathetic a character. And the whole typhoon, weather balloon, terrorist thing is just ridiculous.

Notwithstanding, I enjoyed it, because Sin was hot, and I like action movies. I like all movies, I guess, besides American romantic comedies. And now, the rest of my to-do list. Merry Chuseok!