The Hub of Sparkle!

So you’ve been hearing about the Association for Teachers of English in Korea lately; they’re grabbing column space in papers, post-space on blogs, and even airtime on radios and podcasts, and slugging it out at Dave’s ESL Cafe, to fill up their free time.

You’ve also heard, I’m sure, of their Equal Checks For All campaign, which is asking E2 Visa holders be subject to no more and no less than the same checks other teachers dealing with children in Korea undergo.

Well, on Monday, I got a message from Tony, their communications officer, saying that he’d be in Seoul on Tuesday night, in order to do an interview on Wednesday morning, and did I have any free time to hang out?  Turns out in the midst of battling on Dave’s ESL Cafe, he’d noticed that The Hub Of Sparkle was being very nice to ATEK, and wanted to say hey.

I headed into town as soon as my classes finished, not really sure what to expect, but interested to meet a guy who’s really standing up for something.  Turned out the president of ATEK, a guy named Tom, was going to be there, too.  I poked my head into Three Alley Pub in Itaewon, and I had no idea what these cats looked like, so I hoped the picture on Roboseyo’s front page would be enough to help them spot me.

Turned out it was, and between about ten twenty, when I arrived in Itaewon after work, and about one-thirty, when we parted ways and Tony caught some rest before the radio interview, I got to know a pair of really cool guys.

See, these guys aren’t some weird, musty law-school nerds, they aren’t some spiteful, “Let’s get’em!” pricks out to fight the system the only way left to them, they aren’t ideology-driven Hail The Workers kind of pinkos, or just another pair of cynical veterans out to work an angle and get a piece of the exploitation that’s already going on anyway.  I didn’t know whether to expect some kind of a pitch, or an hours-long litany of the abuses they’d suffered under crooked school directors, or a mini-recruiting session:

they weren’t like these guys.

Or like this guy.

JOIN ME!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nah.  These are regular guys, the kinds of long-time English teachers that I like being around, because Korea’s home to them, and they’re working hard to see, and create good in their home.  Tony’s a funny guy, gregarious, always ready to tell a story or laugh at a joke, and always making sure there’s a beer in your hand, and that you’re glad to be drinking it with him.  Tom’s a little quieter, but well-grounded, and nice: good energy, as my friend would say.  Remarkably, Tom lived in the same building where I used to live, probably at the same time, for a while; we may have made drunken ramen together at the nearest ministop, without ever being the wiser, some Friday night.  We wandered around Itaewon swapping stories about awesome and weird stuff that had happened to us, nearly made each other spew beer with laughter a few times, and genereally stuffed as many good times and laughs into a few hours as we could.

We had some good beer, ate the wonderful kebabs available at the “My Brother” place in the alley behind the Quiznos building, and took wrong turns saying, “I thought YOU were leading” pretty much every time we changed locations.

I thought you were leading.

As we talked, sure, they ranted a bit about the way certain press agencies misrepresented them, and they talked for a while about all the stuff they’re trying to do in order to make this ATEK thing really happen: they’re in farther than you know, folks, and meeting people with real decision-making power.  On the other hand, they’re also really putting themselves on the line by deciding to stand up for Korea’s English Teachers, and whether you agree with them or not, they deserve respect for that.  See, you don’t do the things they’re doing, if you don’t really care about what’s going on, and if you don’t really believe you can make a difference.  Tony’s been putting in sixty hour weeks, unpaid, taking care of business during this recent media push, and he has a job to go back to soon, but he’s passionate, I mean passionate, about this, and he knows what he’s getting into, they both know they have a hell of an uphill climb, but see, Tony told me this story…

I didn’t get his permission to repeat this, so I’m going to omit some details, and of course, I’m not getting the words exactly right, but in effect, while we were waiting for our kebabs, he said, “You know how far into this I am?”

“How far?” I asked him.

He told me a dollar number that made me shake my head a bit: suddenly finding myself out that amount of money would ruin my half-year, and maybe my whole year.

“Oh yeah?”

“Sure,” he said, “and I’m not expecting to see any of it back…but you know, a guy I knew was telling me once about how he blew eight hundred dollars on a night of drinking, and I thought, ‘if he can drop 800 and have nothing to show for it but a hangover, and I’m losing XXX(more than that) dollars trying to make conditions better for every English teacher in Korea, hell, I don’t care about the money at all, you know?”

And that’s what he wants to do.  And he really doesn’t care about the money: see, he and his ATEK people have put together this book for English Teachers: the Seoul Global Center will help him distribute it, and they’ve basically written the book they wish they had during their first year in Korea, along with a bunch of stuff that’ll be really interesting for long-time expats, too, hopefully.  And it’s not even that they’re trying to make money off this book: in order to make sure that everybody will have access to this useful information, they’ll make the .pdf file available online for flippin’ free.  Because they want Korea to be easier for foreign teachers to navigate.  Tony sent me the table of contents…he might have pronounced it continents because it was after his fourth Kilikenny, or I might have heard it that way because it was after my fourth Alley Kat, but while he won’t let me post it here, I’ll tell you that there’s everything from “how to operate those darn bank machines that don’t have English instructions” to “A history of English Education in Korea” and “what the Korean legal system will and won’t do for you”.  I can’t wait to see the full book.

I was glad to meet these cats, and to hear firsthand their serious wish for life to get better for English teachers here.  I hope it works out for them, and that they can affect some real change.  In my mind, there are two kinds of expats in Korea: those who live here, and those who are visiting.  Visitors don’t invest, they have one foot out the door, and they never even bother trying to leave the country in better condition than they found it.  If there’s something they see that they dislike, well, it’s only a year or two, right?  A visitor can focus on the good stuff and put up with the bad for a year or two.  You need to really care about a place, really be invested in it, to actually try and create the change you want to see, instead of just bitching about it, and that’s what these guys are doing, because somebody had to.

At this point, Tom’s worried that I’m going to tell a few of the embarrassing stories that Tony pulled out, at his expense… but I won’t.  That kind of stuff doesn’t go on blogs, folks.  You’ll just have to buy Tony and Tom some drinks yourselves sometime.  They’ll make sure you have a good time, but you’ll have to move fast to find a slice of their time, because you’ll be competing with me, and I’m hella quick.

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