Article 9

NOTE: This is my last column for the IPFW communicator. I actually wrote it last week but forgot to post it. This is for the newspaper that will be on the stands all summer (as opposed to just the normal weekly paper). It's an okay column, but I wish one of my better written pieces was the one that would be on stands for three months. So it goes.

Ryan

I leaned over and closed the swinging glass door with my finger. It was the fourth time that I had cut off our private room from the blaring Korean music in the rest of the bar.

“You’re really pissing me off, Ryan Teacher,” Smith said with a big smile on his face, the same smile he uses when he tells me that I need to do something around school. He’s quite the champion or mock-sternness (but is easy to ignore).

I’m Ryan Teacher in Korea, because that’s how you’d say it in Korean. Your first name (which here is your family name) and “sawn-sang-nim,” which kind of means teacher, but only in the most broad sense. Callilng Mr. Kim “Kim Sawn-sang-nim” apparently translates right into me being called Ryan Teacher.

Smith is my boss (but, again, only in the most broad sense), and he put together this event. “I wanted to do something new,” he said. “Go out and have some fun together outside of school. Unless you have a good excuse, you have to be there.” Compulsory fun isn’t unusual in Korea.

I’m not normally a heavy drinker, and I hate it when the music in a bar makes conversation impossible. Loud music is fine—blaring is something else entirely. Smith, however, certainly enjoys the booze and the bands. I wasn’t the only one that wasn’t enjoying it. The other teachers kept urging me to shut the door, but the moment I’d close it, Smith would just open it again. He was drunk enough that he didn’t know it was me the first few times—he just thought it closed on its own.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. After months of turning Smith down (I get more than enough of him at school), I finally accepted an invitation for a night out earlier in the week. We met up with his friend Park at a traditional Korean bar. These I love. You sit on the floor, get waited on hand and foot, and can enjoy a quiet conversation, often in the open air. This particular bar allowed us to sit on a platform on the roof with a nice view of the night city.

But the place was too beautiful for Smith to enjoy for long. After being there only a half hour, he talked everyone into going to a night club. The place was dirty, loud, and packed with overweight Koreans, none of whom were younger than 40. Smith positioned us right in front of the speakers. This, of course, made it impossible to chat, but when I couldn’t hear anymore either, I decided it was time to go home.

I shouldn’t have gone then, and I wouldn’t have if I had known that there was a required outing later in the week.

After I had been fighting over the door for an hour or two, the rest of the teachers, many of whom were now nicely tipsy, decided it was time to hit a singing room. Karaoke here isn’t like karaoke back home. There are karaoke bars, but mostly there are what translates into English as “singing rooms.” These are small rooms with huge TV monitors for the lyrics (and images that generally have nothing to do with the song) and a big table in the center. You look through a huge book to select your song then belt it out in the quiet company of your close friends. I have to be drunk to sing—really drunk—and I wasn’t that night.

The owner of the school, Mrs. Gu, leaned into me after a few minutes. “I want to hear your song,” she said. I shook my head no, and told her in Korean that I don’t like to sing. She told me in Korean that she does like to sing, and repeated her request.

Everyone except me got up and sang. While the Korean teachers sang love songs (three in a row title Sa-lang-ham-ne-da, “I love you.”), pictures of sheep, people on jet-skis, and naked baby boys dancing passed over the screen. When Mrs. Gu sang, everyone cheered. When Smith sang, everyone endured it.

Instead of singing, I just paged through the book. The English section was large and surprising: Rage Against the Machine, Slipknot, and Marilyn Manson were mixed in with Britney Spears and the Beatles.

After two hours of paging through the book and turning down persistent requests to sing, we finally left. As we walked out the doors into the late night neon of Korea, Mrs. Gu stopped me again. “Next time, I’ll hear your song,” she said sternly. I smiled and headed home.