My Eyes Are Now Open

I know now that I am in a foreign country.

As I write this, I am attending another in a continuing series of incredibly pointless monthly staff meetings. Conducted entirely in Korean, without any translation for my benefit whatsoever, I am required to attend, yet get less than nothing for my presence. Meetings of any kind tend to sap my energy; a 30-minute meeting in a foreign language is a vampire, sucking out my life's blood, leaving me pale and gasping.

All of this, however, has very little to do with what I should be writing about.

Fact is, I'm trying desperately to avoid putting it all down on paper. Maybe by the time I'm done you'll understand.

It's easy to deluse yourself into thinking that Korea isn't so foreign a place after all. Evil, Western influence is everywhere you look. There's a McDonald's! There's a Pizza Hut! Oh my, Levi's!

It's easy. It's dangerous.

One of my students is a boy of about 7 years old. He's kind of small for his age. During one of my first lessons, I noticed that he drools a bit. He seems to be completely ignorant of his condition, occasionally letting drops of saliva spatter his textbook. He's not bright, but he's not stupid, either. He sometimes misses the simplest of questions, only to ably hold up his side of a difficult English conversation minutes later. Occasionally he spaces out. His eyes lose their focus.

He touches himself, his groin, quite a lot; there is a multitude of red welts and scars visible on his arms and legs.

There are a number of sticks around my school, approximately two feet in length, about 1" x 1" in size. They are wrapped tightly in duct tape, or shiny packing tape. Some of them have mottos of discipline written along the length. Some, just the teacher's name.

The first time I saw a student hit with one of these, it literally took my breath away. He was wacked incredibly hard across the back of the legs by my boss three times. He had been late for class.

That was months ago.

I have gotten used to the sight of it by now, and I hate myself for having gotten used to the sight of it.

As a teacher in California, I am legally required by law to report any instance of suspected child abuse. As a teacher in Korea, I feel like the world's biggest hypocrite.

I know now that I am in a foreign country.

A week ago I was watching TV in my room. It was around midnight, give or take. I can't remember what I was watching.

What I do remember are the first sounds from the upstairs apartment.

Glass breaking.

Heavy running ateps, back and forth across my ceiling.

I turned the TV sound down and heard two voices. The man's voice was loud, angry accusatory, drunken. The woman's voice was hysterical, crying, pleading.

More glass breaking, yelling, crying.

Slapping. Hitting. Crying.

I sat there, watching the mute television, listening to the horrible violence from upstairs.

My first instinct had been to reach for the phone, to call the police.

My hand had stopped halfway there, then dropped to my lap.

I spoke virtually no Korean. Would the operator speak English?

How could I describe what was happening?

How could I give directions to where I lived?

Do I even dial 911?

And here's the thought that froze my blood: is beating up your wife even illegal here?

This is a country, mind you, where women are still to blame if they are raped; a place where women are blamed and even ostracized if the child they give birth to is a girl, instead of a more desirable boy.

And before you start feeling too holier-than-thou, it wasn't that long ago that no police officer in America would dream of jumping in the middle of a "domestic dispute."

Would the cops here even want to get involved?

So I just sat there, watching TV, listening to my drunken upstairs neighbor beat the hell out of his wife, feeling like the most useless piece of crap in the world.

I know now that I am in a foreign country.

I hate it.