Disturbing Thing I Just Learned about Korea and Something Universal

Here is a somewhat disturbing thing I learned about Korea last week:

In Korea, women are not allowed to work past the age of forty. Basically, this means that if you do not get married before you turn forty, your life will be extremely difficult and/or impossible. It's against the law to actually fire them just for being forty, but companies can do whatever they can to make women quit, including, according to my TP, things like moving their desks into the hallway so they cannot get work done, taking supplies away, giving impossible deadlines and then reprimanding them for not getting things completed on time, etc.

What the hell?

I knew that things would be different for women here, but in addition to all that, women make less than half what men make at the same jobs, and it is far more difficult for men to get fired. This makes me fear for my older female friends who are unmarried. Ten years to find a husband seems like plenty of time, but who knows? And what happens if they never meet anyone, or want to choose not to get married? Or what if, and I know this is really rare in Korea because of the culture, but what if someone is a lesbian in a committed relationship? Who takes care of these women when they turn forty? What options can they have?  I’ve done some research and found out that Korea is actually one of the worst countries in the world for the professional treatment of women.

As many issues as I can have with the United States, sometimes, in some ways, I am really thankful to be American.

Now, the universal thing.

Christmas concerts are nothing more than devices with which to torture teachers. Hello lots of extra work? Yes, she can take you right over there. That's right, the white one. Oh, tiny, high-voiced tone deaf children? Yes, again, over there with the white one. Oh and by the way white one, can you choreograph a dance routine while your ears are bleeding? Because otherwise you're rather useless aren't you?

Still, even I have to admit that as loath as I am to do the extra work, the kids’ musical numbers are coming together quite well.  We have to do two numbers each, and my kids selected “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” and “Jingle Bell Rock.”  As difficult as it was to refrain from teaching them the Mean Girls choreography, “Jingle Bell Rock” is still the cuter number.  At the end they all crowd together in a “one horse sleigh” and then Ryan, the class troublemaker, gets on all fours and whips off his Santa hat to reveal reindeer antlers.  It’s pretty cute, and they absolutely love doing it.

So Christmas concerts are, yes, universally destructive to teachers’ sanity.  However they are also universally adorable.

Bitter Winter Cold and Guns Guns Guns

Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to this week’s episode of “Holy Fuck It Is Freezing!”

On tonight’s episode: Siberian Fucking Winds.

I know I don’t ordinarily swear this much, but trust me: it’s warranted.  I’ve been wearing my winter coat and at least one scarf (yes, at least) every day for a few weeks now, and it snowed last weekend.  One day it was so cold that I had on three scarves- one on my throat, one on my face, and one on my head.  And I was still cold.  Thank god for those inexpensive New York scarves I bought a ton of, or I would be in even more pain.

The problem is that Korea gets winds that come down from Siberia and over the edge of China, so the air in extremely dry and biting to the point that any millimeter of exposed skin is immediately engulfed in painful pins and needles.  It just plain hurts.  Supposedly this is one of the worst winters in many, many years, but that’s no excuse.  Get your shit together, Korean winter.

What doesn’t help is that the office is currently unheated, so that the only time I’m not wearing my coat and scarves during the day is when I am physically in the classroom teaching, or when I am in my own home where I can crank the floor heat, bills be damned.  Most of the school day my hands are numb from having to be exposed in order to type effectively.  We told the administration that the office was too cold so they gave us one heat lamp, which barely heats one small section of the room.  We told them that and they gave us one more heat lamp.  And then took the first one away the next day.  So that was nice.

Something that I’ve discovered that is nice about Korean winter (or at least, that Koreans do well in winter) is the aforementioned floor heat.  The heaters are under the flooring so that the first thing to get warm is the thing you’re putting your cold feet and toes on (brilliant) upon which you can also quite easily sit (well done).  Plus, since heat rises, having the heating unit in the floor makes the most sense because it also heats the air throughout the room as the heat rises from the floor up to the ceiling.  This is the best method of heating I’ve ever heard of.  Get your shit together, America.

Speaking of ways in which America needs to get its shit together, gun control in Korea is a non-issue because they have no guns.  Like, nobody has guns.  Most adults that I know in Korea are afraid of knife violence, because you can’t control knives (how would we eat meat, in one large piece or ripped apart by hand?  Ineffectual!).  So when the kids here pretend their hands are guns or build guns out of Legos or blocks, no one says anything because they are just playing, and in a way that American kids can’t play.  Korean children aren’t desensitizing themselves to guns because there are no guns toward which to become desensitized.  A gun is a toy when you’re a child, and then a concept when you are an adult.  It changes the dynamic in an interesting way.

Korean TV even blurs out guns in movies and TV, and knives in extreme cases, plus cigarettes, blood, nudity, and sex.  I watched an episode of TruBlood the other day and it was about five minutes long.  And you couldn’t see half the things on the screen.

Somehow it wasn’t the same.