teaching in busan, korea

Older people in Busan, Korea, talk about hiding in the mountains at night when the Communists shelled the city and coming back during the day to do their jobs and live their lives. Busan is in the very south of the Korean peninsula and the armies from the North had almost taken the entire country. That was 55 years ago.

Now Busan is the bustling, building, second-largest city in the country and one of the busiest ports in the world. There’s a film festival and a dozen universities and lots of babies everywhere and the people are very keen to learn English – or at least pass some exam that says they are learning English.

Today is my first day teaching English in Korea. Apparently there are 15,000 registered teachers here and about the same number doing it illegally. My classes start at 1 in the afternoon and go until 10 in the evening everyday – with regular breaks and time to eat (thank god!) Koreans see English as an essential part of being in the world – although, many of them have never left the peninsula and seem nervous about doing so.

The strange thing about being in Korea is you realize it is still a ‘developing’ country. So many things are still so rough; often, for instance, areas have the smell of sewage from the overtaxed systems. And foreigners are still stared at with surprise (and sometimes apparent mistrust or even disgust) and that’s true even in Seoul. With China growing on one side and Japan still there on the other, not to mention the presence of almost 40,000 US troops that many Koreans see as occupiers, the outside world can be seen as a malevolent force that has no understanding of or genuine interest in things Korean.

But, as we all know from the flood of increasingly sophisticated technology, Korea is a new type of developing country – let’s call it ‘advanced developing’. It may have problems with sewage and social support systems but everyone uses a cellphone and I mean everyone! I was on the subway and a very old man started talking with me and Gemma. His English was quite good and he said he had learned it in school! (Amazing in itself.) I asked his age (which is kosher in Korea) and he said he was over 80. When I wondered aloud if he had a cellphone, he looked at me like I was crazy - of course he had one! With a cellphone you can shop and take the subway and watch TV and take pictures and even make phone calls.

Small countries like Korea and Finland and others are making their way in the world by being smart. Short on resources and people, they have been working harder and planning better than other smaller countries like Canada and Poland. (I don’t think this makes the world ‘flat’, by the way; Tom Friedman’s ‘analysis’ is just charming cheerleading.) Vivek Chibber is a left-wing economist with no particular affection for the Korean government, but he singled them out as the best economic planners within recent memory. They focused economic policy on developing a few giant industrial enterprises capable of competing in the world – Samsung, LG, Hyundai – and gave them free rein. So did governments in India and Brazil and Turkey, according to Chibber. Despite the mess that the International Monetary Fund foisted on all four countries, the Koreans succeeded. Chibber says the causes are not perfectly clear but it looks like one significant factor is that the Korean developers actually kept the money in the country while the other countries saw a lot of cash head to bank accounts in Europe and the US.

Why? No one knows for sure but one difference between Korea and the others is the Korean experience with Japan and with the war at the beginning of the 1950s. It seems to me being annexed by Japan for almost 50 years has left Koreans with a very determined streak; they don’t want that to happen again! So they are fighters and nationalists (Chibber refers to the “exceptionally united capitalist class.”) Perhaps that was especially obvious during the war – although I have to say that I know very little about the Korean War other than the strange fact that my half brother, Peter Bingham, commanded the Canadian troops of the Royal Canadian Regiment. Peter was 40 years older than me, so I didn’t learn much from him; to me he was a cartoon figure of a British officer with a handlebar-moustache and a couple of Weimaraner dogs and a walking stick.

Now I find myself in Korea, commanding no one (thank god again). But I am a believer in the power of English and I want to do my best to help a few Koreans learn. When I draw the globe on the whiteboard for my class and then mark out Korea’s tiny physical space, the students look terrified – but only for a moment. They seem to be as determined as their parents and grandparents to fight for their place and also their place in the world.

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