::A Geek in Korea::

I remember the first time I sat down to study a foreign language in the high school library with some classmates. The first thing we did was grab the English to Spanish dictionary and look up curse words that we couldn’t conjugate or use in sentences. We didn’t know how to use the basics of grammar, had an exceedingly small vocabulary, but we thought we could curse in another language.

The whole "We are cursing in school right now without getting in trouble" aspect was one part of the allure. So was the whole exclusivity of being able to curse in another language when no one else could. Since no one could understand us, it became a sort of secret code of rebellion against our hated Spanish teacher. Literal translations of curses stink anyway, since you don’t know the feeling behind the words and can’t properly intone them anyway. We could have been shouting gibberish or making up words like Dr. Seuss for as much meaning as any phrase we might have memorized had in all likelihood.

Still, we never dared to curse in Spanish in class, or to actually use curses where we had the opportunity to be understood. There is a joy in cursing, in the taboo of the act. For teenagers, the anticipation or fear of punishment, and the exhilaration of getting away with the unthinkable is a powerful thing.

I’m not surprised when my students use their electronic dictionaries to learn new swear words. They spend a considerable amount of money on them, and they use them constantly. Of course people use them for the same things I used to do. The problem is, when they do that in class, it’s highly annoying and disruptive. I had a class that went crazy today because of an electronic dictionary.

One extremely foul mouthed student always brings his electronic dictionary to class. I don’t know if he curses like a sailor at home, but he swears more than movie gangsters in class. He has a really bad habit of cursing, and having new ways of learning new curse words isn’t helping. He’s started corrupting the entire class. He doesn’t hold anyone in respect and will curse at them for anything.

When he isn’t cursing, he’s using his electronic dictionary to curse for him. He’ll use the phonetic dictionary speech to say loud curse words in class. When I tell him to stop, he’ll act innocent as if his dictionary is simply possessed and speaks long sentences calling other students terrible things on it’s own. I’ve tried to take his dictionary away from him, but it’s an expensive toy, and it does help him with his homework. He shouldn’t be using it in class, but since he does nothing but curse at other students anyway, I’d rather have him playing Tetris int he back of class than making me angry.

Today, he started looking up words for the lesson, then started to play with his dictionary again. He called a girl in class a terrible name. She got out her dictionary and responded. The other student used his phone with English dictionary to curse at both of the other students. The students assume that I don’t know anything and I don’t understand that they are saying bad words, but I know everything they say, and they aren’t all that good at being subtle. Since they don’t know why English curses carry the weight they do, when they curse in English they just laugh instead of getting angry. I’m the only one getting a headache because of it. I just wait until after class and tell my head teacher that the class was swearing, again. I can’t punish students that never do homework and behave this badly because I need to have a reward to remove in the first place.

As I type, a solution to the situation seems to have presented itself as long as my head teacher will agree to it. I’ll just take their beloved possessions and put them in my desk until the next class. Use your dictionary to curse? Fine, bring your mother to school and get it back. When she watches your behavior in class, I’m sure she’ll understand why you can’t be trusted to have such materials anymore. Will it work? I doubt it. My only other choice is to wait them out and hope they quit or get reevaluated at the beginning of another semester and removed from my class. That’s not much of a hope either.

When walking home from the film, getting caught up on some of the story elements I missed, or something my wife hadn’t gotten a chance to explain before the movie had moved on, we heard some people yelling at each other. The usual Korean response of "Head down, I didn’t see anything" kicked in, and we kept going past the couple. None of our business, right? We were just witnessing a quarrel behind a wall near an apartment complex. We kept walking, but then we heard what they were saying, and took more of an interest.

The man happened to yell, "I saw you kiss him. I saw you. You did it. Didn’t you?" just as we passed.

The woman simply said that she had, but we didn’t hear anything else.

Of course, I happen to look up in shock as we hear all of this, and see him bring his hands down on the woman. Two quick chops or slaps to her face or shoulders. The woman didn’t run away. She didn’t cry for help. I don’t think the man hit her very hard either, but that doesn’t matter.  This is in a  public area, and I just saw a guy smash a woman who was pinned against a wall in the face. Despite the fact that the two people are somewhat hidden behind a wall, there was no mistake about what I had seen. I thought to myself,  "She might not be able to leave, and this guy is hitting her. We don’t know who they are, but If we continued walking, we wouldn’t know what would happen to that woman. I can’t let this happen."

I grab my wife’s hand to stop her from walking on as we cross to the other side of the entrance to the apartment complex, hidden from their view. We can make out what is going with their body language on as they walk in front of and behind a wall the size of a door. We can’t hear what they are talking about, but it’s clearly a nasty intense fight. I look at my wife and tell her, "No, we aren’t ignoring this. We are calling the police."

My wife protested. The Korean response to such situations is, "Lover’s quarrel. Ignore it. Don’t get involved. It’s a messy situation. Adding police will make it worse. It’s in public, it won’t go too far out of fear of shame. Someone else will handle this. Move on." My wife’s family have had problems in the past where stepping in has caused as much of a problem as what was happening in the first place, thus explaining her reluctance. Also, no one wants the police involved in anything, because they aren’t the friendly public servants they are made out to be at times.

I’m an ignorant, hopeful, foreigner, with a desire to change the society I live in by living by using a different set of moral principles than the ones common here. I speak out when I see violence, racism, and other problems that people ignore in this culture. This might make me an irritant, but I was raised this way and I will not change. Forgive me for my rudeness, but I can not abide your rules tonight. I took out my phone and I dialed the number myself. If I had the ability I would have explained what was going on myself. Sadly, I needed to involve my wife in this despite her objections because I wouldn’t have been any good to the woman if the police didn’t understand what was going on when we called.

I told my wife to explain the situation to the police officers. We gave the location and what we saw. My wife said the officer that answered sounded annoyed, and he wanted to make sure we had witnessed everything from the street, and not an apartment nearby. I don’t know why this mattered. We were watching the couple fight as the police were rudely dismissing us as crank callers. My wife told them we had been walking, heard them fighting, saw the woman get hit, and then had been peeking around the corner to keep tabs on the situation. They agreed to send a cop down to the location to check it out. They hung up without telling us anything. No directions whatsoever.

Would we be needed? Would they even really come? Who knows? To paraphrase and culturally contaminate Public Enemy, 1-1-2 is a joke.

With this, my wife said, "Enough. The police are involved. We’ve gone beyond the call of duty now. We can walk away without feeling bad about this."

Again, I couldn’t walk away. I had to see that something was going to happen. I honestly didn’t expect the police to arrive. I wasn’t going to leave this woman, whatever she had done, in potential danger from this man. We weren’t in any danger of being seen. The man so focused that he couldn’t detect some people across the apartment complex entrance peering at him. People were walking past at this point and not doing anything about the situation. If we didn’t do it, no one would have. The woman hit the man a few times in the stomach. They talked some more.

At one point, the woman walked away, almost got into a taxi, then walked back to the man. At this point, it was pretty clear that whatever was going on, the woman wasn’t being intimidated or forced into staying. It was an ugly fight we were witnessing, and perhaps the final straw in a long drawn out unhealthy relationship, but the man didn’t physically keep her on the wall she had been arguing. Since we couldn’t see what was going on the entire time, every time she disappeared behind the wall, we didn’t know what was happening. He could be hitting her, or they could be making up. We saw she could walk away, and had a chance to get into a taxi before turning back.. You can’t call the police about an unhealthy relationship, as bad as they are.

By the time the police arrived, around 10 minutes later, we got a call. The police were flashing they lights nearby, and said that the couple in question were sitting where we said they had been. The police were watching. Their hands locked around each other, friendly as can be, hugging each other. No problems of any kind. No, really? With the police in a car parked nearby they were no longer fighting or hitting each other? Who knows how that had happened. The police officer said he would watch them for a while, and if things turned sour, we’d be needed as witnesses. He didn’t seem to think anything was going to happen as long as he was there at least.

We then were hung up on, again. I asked my wife to call the police officer and ask for his name, badge number, and the number of his supervisor. I was in a divinely inspired sort of justice seeking mode tonight. My wife said that going over a police officer’s head was asking for trouble, so I stopped. I could see where such a complaint might lead, and there was no reason to bring that on her, as well as myself. There might be a rude cop at the scene, but we had done all we could do.

Seems that my heroic act turned out to be little more than an over reaction. I made a stand on a principal that I couldn’t live with ignoring. The part of me that read comic books as a kid and believes in justice and things worth fighting for is somewhere deep inside of me. I’m not brave foolish enough to fight my battles with fists. I’ve heard other foreigners have done so in my situation, and have lost, getting tossed out of the country, or fined in the process. I know that when it comes down to it, I’m a foreigner in a country that has a different set of rules about how it operates. Sometimes the difference in these rules is minor. Sometimes it isn’t.

I’ve surrendered a lot of my cultural identity to live in this country for as long as I have, but I am proud I haven’t lost some things that make me "me."

My wife and I had an altogether shitty day today. We went to go see the early evening showing of Pan’s Labyrinth and missed the sale of tickets for the movie by five minutes. They couldn’t sell us tickets after the movie had started for ten minutes because we would miss the advertisements and safety regulations…or something. Whatever the reason, we had two hours to wait around for the next viewing. We walked around and killed some time before the next show. No big deal, except the whole "wasted lots of our time" thing was a real annoyance.

Next viewing, we were purchasing snacks for the film. We disliked the "Squid, Popcorn, Soft Drink" set we got last time because the peanut butter roasted squid was stale and nasty. I’m the only one that likes the taste of the squid anyway, so if I wasn’t going to eat it, it was best to move on to something else. We decided to get a "Churro, Popcorn, Soft Drink" set instead. I don’t know how this snack store is told to operate, because they make excellent popcorn, have cold drinks, but then hand me a cold stale Churro. If I’m going to eat a long stick fried donut covered in sugar, the thing needs to be warm. I complained and got a less disgusting Churro for my troubles, but everyone looked at me like I was a maniac for deserving a refund after I had tasted the food. How else could I have known how bad it was going to be?

Anyway, we finally sit down for the movie and I come to the realization that, "Hey, all the credits are in Spanish. That’s an interesting stylistic—shit. This movie is entirely in Spanish. With Korean subtitles." While this made the movie more difficult, it was much easier than my last subtitle debacle in French. Since I’ve forgotten the majority of my high school Spanish education, the audio was nearly useless. Unless they were talking about something easily, like greeting each other or talking about books or mornings, I really didn’t know what they were saying.  I tried reading the Korean subtitles, but I had the same problem. As long as the speakers were using simply declarative sentences, I was pretty good. As soon as they delved into more complicated motives for actions, or were talking about things they weren’t doing, I needed my wife to help in the translation. Still, the movie wasn’t that complicated that I couldn’t follow it.

It’s like a fairy tale in construction, so having such rich visuals helped keep my interest. It’s a fantastic film, and even thought I watched in a language I don’t understand anymore with help from subtitles in a language I barely understand enough in, and had my wife translating scenes in my ear, I felt I got a lot of the story and didn’t walk away as confused as I have watching English language movies in the past. I’d recommend the film, but I’d see it in a language you are more comfortable with if possible.