Kitty Kitty Limbo

I am required to attend the weekly teachers’ meetings on Monday afternoons. The meeting starts when a woman stands up and speaks briefly, and then everyone stands up, looks at the Korean flag at the front of the room, smacks their hands on their hearts, and sits back down. After that, people proceed to speak in turns. I mostly just watch their mouths make sounds, wondering where precisely in the room between their mouths and my ears the meaning of those sounds dissolves. Sometimes I write down what it sounds like they’re saying. At a recent meeting, the Vice Principal stepped to the front of the room with a prepared rant. When he was not gesticulating, his hands gripped the sides of the podium. His speech was long and emphatic. “Kitty kitty limbo!” he shouted at one point, irate. “Cheeba wise hair?!” He leaned forward, knuckles white, forehead glistening, and cast his appalled eyes around the room. No one answered. The teachers all looked at the stapled pieces of paper in their hands. Long seconds passed. “Bang shuttle tampon,” the Vice Principal said quietly, in a tone that sounded to me exactly like “that’s what I thought.”
Afterwards, the Principal, a much gentler and softer-spoken man, swept his arm back and forth repeatedly, speaking of a princess who could yodel. He threw an imaginary something over his shoulder and cheerfully asked us not to chew the yellow book.

But what about the war? Here’s the latest (buried deep in the site) from CNN.com: “South Korea's defense ministry will show wreckage of a sunken ship to a group of Twitter users in an effort to dispel doubts among young skeptics about its investigation blaming North Korea for attacking the vessel….” Twitter. Huh. The article continued, “Twenty users of the microblogging site will have a chance to review the evidence Friday after applying through the defense ministry's Twitter page.…” Last week North Korea threatened “all-out-war” if provoked. I wonder if tweets are considered provocation. Koreans have to maneuver, it seems, as if they’re living in the eye of a hurricane. Any significant movement one way or another would have them out of the eerie calm and into certain destruction. And eerie it is, when the rhetoric from the north consists of phrases like “There is no need to show any mercy or patience for such confrontation maniacs, sycophants and traitors and wicked warmongers as the Lee Myung Bak group [whose] call for "resolute measure" is as foolish and ridiculous a suicidal act as jumping into fire with faggots on its back." Provocation, hurled insults, name-calling, and then silence. Maybe I didn’t misunderstand the Vice Principal’s words. Maybe this IS “kitty kitty limbo.”

Strawberries For Sale and Exploding Brains

Thursday the soldiers and their tent were gone, as were the sandbags piled on the pedestrian walkway to the school (on the north side only, of course), though traces of spilled sand left the walkway looking more like a beach boardwalk. Also gone, at least from the home pages of CNN and BBC, were any articles about the ongoing name-calling and fist-shaking here on the peninsula. I often feel that I’m living on the set of someone else’s reality show, or am an unwitting actress in a foreign film with no subtitles. The constant fog of this life is both visual and audible. For whatever reason, the sky is perpetually hazy here, as if we’re in a dome someone clapped over a smoker-friendly AA meeting. Recently, on a very rare clear day when the sky was a cerulean backdrop to the leaves and azaleas instead of a yellowish-grey one, I found myself squinting, as if my eyeballs would shatter with the intensity of color. It’s the same with what I can hear. As rare as clear days are moments when I understand what people are saying around me. I went to a Mexican restaurant in Seoul several weeks ago and sat next to a table of Americans. Just as I squinted at the colors, I winced at the sounds, which were so intrusive to my ears, used to the white noise of incomprehensible Korean. How distracting to understand overheard conversations! I wonder if, when I go home and can see for miles and understand what everyone says, my brain will explode.
As I type, right now, there is a male voice shouting urgently on a loudspeaker from a moving vehicle, and already he’s out of hearing range. I’ve seen little blue pickup trucks cruise slowly through town with loudspeakers blaring, and what they’re shouting about is obviously the strawberries, or melons, or apples, they’re selling from the back of the truck. I’ll be blissfully ignorant on the day that those words become warnings and alarms about pending attack rather than descriptions of juiciness and sweetness. I wonder how I’ll know if we go to war. (“WE”??? What’s this “we” stuff, kemo sabe??)
But things seem to be settling down between the Koreas. Lee Myung-bak (the South Korean president) has what seems to be an unpopular aggressive attitude toward North Korea. The more I read and from the little I hear, South Koreans seem to view North Korea not as a hated foe, but as a wayward sibling, who maybe joined a motorcycle gang and robs gas stations and decapitates kittens. South Koreans, instead of hating that wayward sibling, seem to want him to come home and mend his ways and be forgiven. Maybe it’s about cultural solidarity, here in probably the most homogeneous culture in the world. Or maybe they just don’t want to irritate the wayward sibling, seeing that his motorcycle gang has over a million members, and they’re all armed and dangerous and led by the poster child for Weird and Whacked. But what do I know.
In other news, students were writing a sentence about what their best friends can and can’t do. My co-teacher for the class (there are four Korean co-teachers I work with) called me over to a desk, laughing. She said “I don’t remember the word! If we eat many things, we can (she made a gesture as if expelling something from her butt) put the gases into the air?” “Fart?!” I said. Yep. Apparently this student’s best friend can’t study but she can fart. I’m doing important work over here, people.