Cyber Bully Abroad or Boring in Korea An essay excerpt from Tough Talk out of School, an Education Memoir S. Keyron McDermott   © Copyright 2024 by S. Keyron McDermott

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Kyungnam University is a collection of landscaped buildings scattered up a nearly vertical hillside on the south coast of Korea above the port of Masan. Above and behind the university a few lowly dwellings squat along a steep street, and then yield to terrace gardens and rice paddies. During the1994-5 academic year most of Kyungnam’s foreign, which is to say non-Korean English staff (a dozen of us) Aussies, Brits, Canuks and Yanks, is housed on the top floors of a brand new residence hall at the first crest of the hill. English HQ and our classrooms are in older buildings closer to the bottom—doesn’t take long to figure out why Koreans are thin!

Other than at lunch and department faculty meetings, I seldom see my colleagues, as like me, most are engrossed in projects: A twenty-something named Mark Ferraro his thesis on Blake; Ron Gray, a book with an obscure title Syllogisms of Some Such, which keeps him in the library all hours; and Sally Carlson a zaftig, Italian-looking, middle-age woman with a very American bent, management. When not in class, ole Sal is down in the office organizing. We have no idea what. Overweight, maybe obese Louis Hunt is assigned the two-bedroom apartment on the very top floor of the residence because it is assumed he needs more space. There’s an elevator in the building, but climbing down and back up from class and schlepping groceries—more exercise than he’s ever had in his life, undoubtedly—is his project.

The scuttlebutt is American profs used to be quartered in private homes; however, an American teacher got wedged in the door of one of the Korean houses, so the university had to build a new residence hall. Mind you, I don’t know if this is true. Our apartments are compact with a bit of counter space on the kitchen wall, fridges but no ovens (baking is not a Korean thing), a bedroom alcove and a desk next to the window with a view of the university and the bay (south, down the hill) or the hillside terraces (north, up), depending on your side of the building.

In the unit next to me is Robert Brown, Ph.D. Fluent in Korean, Bob has taught at universities in Seoul, publishes in linguistics journals, and spends the lion’s share of his spare time in the gym kick-boxing. In fact, there seems to be only one person with no project, avocation or interest: a tall, fleshy Texan named Don Boring in the room next to Bob with such unfathomable contempt for Koreans that I cannot imagine why he came back here after his first semester, spring the previous year. Though he lives on my floor along with Gray and Brown, I only see Don, who is actually quite good looking, in the dining room where English speakers congregate at tables reserved for faculty, and where he can invariably be heard making loud, pejorative comments about Korean customs, students and/or food.

Everybody ignores him, their eyes glass over when he begins, but one day I get my gut full and say, “Korean cuisine is far healthier than most of what you would find in a Texas or indeed any American university dining room.”

“Cuisine! There’s a good one!” he hoots derisively.

He’s not adept with chopsticks, but then Myunghee, my Korean friend, who has drafted me as the English element of a translation consortium for a Korean novel, tells me that a few spastic Koreans who have never even seen a fork aren’t either. It’s harder to counter comments about students because when we teachers give assignments, Korean students do them ensemble; American teachers largely regard this as cheating and them as dishonest. It seems more a matter of culture: Koreans are more responsive to their group obligations than back-stabbing, every-man-for-him/self Americans. This why I like the language lab, defunct when I discover it, but Myunghee helps me find a tech to get functioning. The lab forces them to work independently and allows me assess them that way. I offer share my materials—pattern drills and verbal exercises that facilitate using it—but nobody takes me up on it.

Passé, sixties tech, I presume.

Don calls me “Shirl, the Sickophant” because I am part of a consortium with three Korean women including Kang Choonwon, an American with a Ph.D. from George Washington U. and the only “foreign” staff member not obligated to teach evening classes at the language institute operated by the university. Koreans pay more to attend and send their kids to such schools. Except for Brown, the rest of the “foreign language” faculty has only MA’s, ostensibly why we are obligated.

Don despises Choonwon. I presume because he sympathizes with Brown, who also has Ph.D. and is required to teach at the institute (non-college classes for the public), but Bob rather seems to enjoy it. The guys teach businessmen and other adults. Maureen, Sal, Ginger and I get the little kids, who are an adorable change of pace and with whom we can sing songs, play games, and integrate holiday activities to lesson plans. When Ginger and Mo go down to the market to buy Halloween to carve with them, they return complaining the pumpkins are all short, squat, and unsuitable for carving.

This makes Don’s day: “Like everything else Korean—puny, pint-sized, stunted, half-baked, and second rate!” he observes magna voce.

I wait for somebody else to counter this, but there’s dead silence, and I finally say: “And you can’t tell a pie pumpkin from a big, showy, worthless shell of a thing you can only carve a garish grin in and set on your front porch from food.”

“Wow! Now Shirl, the Sick is an expert in pumpkin genetics.”

“No,” I say, getting up from the table, walking off, “just a dumb Iowa farmer, but at least I can discriminate that far, which is more than you can say for yourself, sir.”

Sal follows and catches up with me on the hill and says, “Ignore him! You’re not going to change his mind.”

“No kidding, Sal! All I am trying to affect is what the Koreans think of us – all sitting there feckless with our thumbs in our bums.”

It also rags me that he—I assume it is him, ah, who else?—is posting comments and cartoons insulting Koreans in the elevator, which is used by everybody, including Choonwon, Myunghee, and Kayho, my co-translators, when they come up to work on the book. Thursday nights “the boys” on the floor drink beer, watch Beavis & Butthead, and on Friday nights occasionally Brown and I go to a bar. There, I pick his brain to try to find out who is posting the nasty cartoons, but he maintains he doesn’t know though he, like me, assumes it’s Boring. He figures that I, not the Koreans, am the target because I give him lip and am not in love with him.

“Oh yeah, he really cares about the attentions of a woman on the downside of fifty.”

“You don’t look even forty, Honey! And most men take their adulation wherever they can get it! Trust me on that one!”

Fortunately, the rest of the staff gets on harmoniously. A reliable topic of conversation all fall is Thanksgiving dinner, which Sally and I, the only staff members who had ever cooked one, secretly regard as pure fantasy because we agree even if you had a turkey, (nobody has ever seen one in the market) you’d have to cut it up and soup it or fry it because nobody has an oven! Ovens don’t figure in Korean cuisine.

“I bet there isn’t an oven in all of Masan!”

Serious inquiry proves there isn’t one in the campus kitchen, where we expect to find one. Though, this intelligence does not slake the on-going group fantasy of a huge American-style turkey dinner with trimmings.

Meanwhile the grant for Kim’s Daughters, our working title for the Park Kyung-nee novel we are translating, comes through. Boring mockingly maintains he wouldn’t do it for the entire $15,000, no less a four-way split!

“Especially some tacky piece of Korean chick lit.”

Once a week the consortium meets with piles of dictionaries and thesauruses to fine-tooth what I have rewritten from their first round “Konglish.” The process is called consortium translation and they refer to me as a “translator,” embarrassing because I barely have enough Korean buy vegetables in the market, order in a restaurant or give the taxi driver the address to get for our sessions at their apartments!

However, when I sit down at Kayho’s kitchen table the last Thursday of October, I look into the glass window of an Amana electric range and holler ecstatically, “Kayho, you have an oven!”

“Yes, once I tasted a chocolate chip cookie I tell my husband, we cannot go back to Korea without an American oven! He agreed.”

This news, delivered portentously at lunch the following day, propels Thanksgiving prep out of realm of the theoretical into the practical. The guys form a turkey “hunting party,” and assure us that late Thursday (We have classes; Thanksgiving, naturally, is not a holiday there.) they will arrive with the turkey giving us till Saturday to thaw it.

“We need cans of pumpkin; we have to have pumpkin pie.”

“Why buy canned? We know the market is full of it!”

“I thought it came in cans.”

“How do you suppose it gets in cans? Farmers have to grow it first!”

Ginger is abashed at this news. Farm communities like Cascade, Iowa, where I live on the “homeplace,” are full of brown-cow-chocolate-milk-city-folk jokes, but you think they are fabricated exaggerations till run onto the real thing. I draft her to the pie committee so she sees how a market pumpkin becomes a pie, and in chatting discover that she is from a home, where if the servants didn’t make Thanksgiving dinner, they ate it in a restaurant. For most of my majority, I would have traded my country bumpkin upbringing with anybody with city money, privilege and access. There in Masan, South Korean, recalling the warmth and love of the house at the bottom of old water tower hill, Mom, my sisters, aunts and I making a dinner, for the first Thanksgiving of my life I am deeply thankful for white-trash upbringing.

Right on schedule the turkey “slayers” arrive with a 24-lb. Butterball and trimmings from the Jinhae naval base grocery, and we set it to thaw in my sink. All day Friday every surface—even the bed—of my apartment is covered with bread drying for dressing. It reeks of yeast.

Going to the heart of the market, where vendors sell potions and powders of exotic animal parts—Oriental Viagra—Brown with his fleet Korean, manages to score enough sage for dressing. After dinner, the staff drinks Ph.D. qualities of wine while cutting onions, shredding bread, shucking oysters, and peeling chestnuts to make four pans of dressing insuring leftovers.

At 10 a.m. the following morning Choonwon and I transport the thawed, stuffed, foil-tented turkey to Changwon where it bakes all afternoon in Kayho’s oven while we quibble over synonyms and ransack the Thesaurus. Meanwhile, back at the residence hall, the guys are transporting our tables and chairs to Louie’s place, and Sal is supervising the table setting with bed sheets and water glasses and jars full of fall Korean flowers, raiding for candles and supervising the peeling for candied yams and mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and assembling the ingredients of our gravy recipe.

It was a truly memorable Thanksgiving dinner, the more savored for how close it came to not materializing and the cooperative effort to pull it off. I was sad that Don went to Seoul, but I could not feel guilty. Brown insisted he had friends there and flew up once a month anyway.

With my $5,000 windfall (the consortium agreed that as the style-standardizer I have to rework the translations of all three and should be paid more), I accede to my Berlin sister’s pleadings and fly to Germany for Christmas. The English-speaking staff is required to return to Masan, a month before university classes resume to teach J-session classes to Korean high school teachers of English. Apparently, this had been a standard contract provision for years, but since nobody had ever organized the J-session, English teachers had ended up with the same two-month winter break as Korean profs. Now we know what Sally has been managing! Begeistered by Berlin (enthralled), a city is never more exquisite than in the candle-lit short days before Christmas and my adorable nieces and nephews, I imagine myself more distraught than anyone at returning early to Masan.

Nonetheless, Boring casts himself and Brown as major martyrs to this new wrinkle. His palpable indignation is, however, inexplicably directed at me and the Koreans rather than Sally, now a heroine in the front office. Naturally, the university administration is delirious with the teacher class, which generates bushel baskets of cash from the Korean Office of Education, without a won of additional expenditure on salaries or facilities. So vitriolic is Boring that I can’t help wondering how a teacher could interact productively with students (of any age) that he regards as natively immoral and imbecilic. Ironically, Brown is nowhere as bitter or negative as Boring and leaves me his video player at the semester when he departs along with Gray, whose contract is also up. The three are replaced by a guy and a pair of lesbians, who schlump to class in tennies, which nets the “foreign” staff frequent hectorings on how to appear professional. Our Korean colleagues are reliably impeccable in suits, dresses, jewelry, and leather shoes; the women, always in heels.

Shortly after the new semester begins, the post office delivers an intriguing-looking box to the English Department with a Seoul return address for me. The only person I know in that city is a German research psychologist named Gudrun with whom I had had a memorable conversation on the plane back from Berlin about her theory of the benefits and liabilities of national identity. She had insisted, “Guys like Don with contempt for Korea are surprisingly common.” (Common? I don’t believe it.) She professed to have met several who articulated the same derogatory attitudes, Brits and Americans primarily, though not exclusively. She theorized they were availing themselves of “imperial and/or patriarchal prerogatives to underwrite their own shaky personal identities.” Women, in most societies, one class of underdog or other, developed more cooperative strategies to buttress theirs. I.e: Germans and Italians lugging around their recent Nazi and Fascist pasts, also less likely.

“Ironically,” she went on, “many these self-aggrandizers are married to Oriental women who could be relied upon to follow around in their footsteps, if not literally, psychologically.”

I would have mounted a more vigorous defense, if I hadn’t already noticed such couples in the street, wondered why the more (preferable, equal, at least to my mind) Western ethic did not prevail in those relationships. As time went on, however, I came to resent both equally: the guy for choosing a compliant woman he could bully; the woman for being that way. In the end, they are both doing their bit to undermine women like me.

Gudrun and I had not exchanged addresses, but I open the carton thinking either one of us could have sent something in care of our respective universities. Inside, are several Korean take-out containers with notes on them that ape the distinctive English usage of a beginner Korean native-speaker: “We know you very like our two beautiful national food, so we send you it. We Korean know you eat it with gusto.” (I am particularly fond of kimchee.) Before I get the wrapper off, I can smell the excrement and have no doubt who sent it.

For the rest of that spring at Kyungnam, summer and fall when I return home I receive inundations of mail, mostly bills, sometimes the magazines themselves, addressed to insulting variations of my name, i.e. Moron McDermutt, Odalisque McDermoot. I receive responses to what has to be a titillating, tawdry, salacious letter soliciting sexual favors from guys in prison.

It feels like being stalked, but gets serious when reject letters begin arriving from real universities, to which I had “applied” claiming to be a “Roads Scholar,” and a “Googleheimer Fella,” claiming credentials I don’t have and misspelling the simplest words.

I can do nothing, as I don’t even know where he is. I email Brown, but he doesn’t either. Who would I call or complain to? Interpol?

That was 1996, so you have to hand it to Boring: he was a real trailblazer and may have the honor of being the first cyber bully. Then I was the only victim I knew.

It’s the following Thanksgiving; the translation and my contract are finished before the harassment tapers off and I concede Gudrun’s points, though I had resisted them vigorously in our plane conversation. Since then, bullying has become a national issue, as Gudrun contended. Haunted by our plane conversation, I begin wonder if this is not who and what we are, each and every American one of us. Would I even have been teaching English in Korea if I hadn’t been availing myself of the many, varied international prerogatives of being an American? When I ask my co-translators, they smile sheepishly and Myunghee asks, “How many more American and British books are translated to Korean than reverse? Is it as we assume, just because they are better?”

However, the real depth and breadth of the Texan’s sense of entitlement escapes me until well past thinking about it and finish the memoir chapter of my Kyungnam year. That day, feeling vindicated having gotten the whole thing on paper, I type his name into Google and am rendered speechless with consternation: the browser lands me on the Asia Foundation’s website where read this CV under a photo of the fleshy countenance, I by now, know so very well.