Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Another weekend, another round of random adventures in Seoul, with random musings, random meet-ups, and random places....senses overflows with brand-new knowledge, no matter how trivial, and the body overflows with more and more alcohol under random conditions leading to random consequences. For just another foreigner living in the massive metropolis, no experience is really off-limits and no activity really deserves to be set aside as off-limits for any reason. But increasingly, as a foreigner living in a foreign country, not just here in Korea but Japan and pretty soon in the future, England, I am increasingly an inner split between two different kinds of foreignness , battling inside of me for supremacy in every situation I get into. As an Asian-American, the side of me that exemplifies the “Asian” natures of humbleness and respect for authority clashes with the “Western” natures of individuality and spontaneity at every opportunity I get. Without a doubt, these are the clashes

"How do I get my kids into Ivy League schools?" Working in the hagwon business , it is THE fundamental question teachers and consultants must be held answerable to their clients. The inquiring looks of the students and their parents are surely never to be satisfied by any explanation, no matter how long, sophisticated, detailed they are...but the question still had to be answered. Amid the non-ending competition for clients among different hagwons, the standard answers about extracurricular activities, SAT scores, and essays, at some point many many years ago, have became nowhere near sufficient.... In a market where anyone who lived and went to school in the States can claim (and often do so shamelessly) him or herself to be an "expert in American education system," the shadowy arts of "unconventional persuasion" becomes not only handy but also completely necessary and required for the very economic survival of the so-called "experts" in the

I have said to many people many times in the past, and I will say it again, "every spot in Korea, if not specifically designated as another function, can be and is a dating spot." Strolling through malls, parks, and random streets, the sights of couples with locked hands and loving conversations are something that cannot be avoided by any means. As if to declare to the entire world that they are in love and with complete disregard for the (supposedly) Confucian tradition of toning things a bit down in public spaces, the young couples have made the streets of the metropolis dissipate invisible pink hearts at any corner and at any time of the day. Pardon the completely overused and cliched "soul=Seoul" pun, but for the past days, I have been trying to track down exactly where all these energy for romance are generated...and gets dissipated. In a society known for social conservatism based a strong sense of different social groupings , it is always a wonder how peop

Walking through the little lobby of my service apartment here in a neighborhood frequented by high-end foreign visitors, I would commonly find the newest brochures for English-language tours of Korea. The familiar Seoul city tours, the Korean drama tours, the historical Korean culture tours...but even in this day and age, the most prominent and most used tour packages are still the "Korea divided" tours headed up to the northern border. DMZ tour is a crowd favorite and commonly acknowledged must-do in Korea, and wait it minute, can it be? NLL tours?! NLL, for those who are unfamiliar, is short for the "Northern Limit Line," a highly disputed "maritime border" between the two Koreas extending west from the land border that we call DMZ. And the biggest military news of the last few months, namely the alleged bombing of a Southern frigate by a Northern torpedo, and the deadly bombardment of the nearby Southern island by Northern artillery, both occurred n

Class, prep for class, sleep, class, prep for class, sleep...the normal cycle of being an "educator" in an "intensive" summer SAT program seemed to finally come back to me. Even though it has been more than a year and a half since I taught similar programs, it seems that I am having much easier time getting used to the life of an English teacher this time compared to the last few times. Perhaps it is really because that my discipline and worldview changed much since I went through my full-time job in Japan ... Perhaps, just perhaps...but what is interesting is that I can confidently say that I worked harder and had a much broader view of the world back when I was a Yale student ( even though I am in many ways quite dissatisfied with it ) and will certainly do when I start another tough year at LSE . My Japan experience should not play that big of a factor. So, I took a few minutes out of my prep time to rethink about exactly what is making my few days of teachin

People always question me why don't I just work in Korea full-time when I seem to love the country so much even though I do not even speak the language properly. No knowing the language, they argue, only works in my favor here because I can truly pretend to be completely oblivious to the "social rules" here and play the "foreign card" literally 100% of the time . No need to be like in Japan, where I still try to do as the Japanese salary-men do (occasionally) to score some brownie points and "increase friendships ." But my answer has always been the line about how the every "social rule" that exist in Japanese workplace definitely exists in Korea, and they are enforced more strictly here than over in Japan. After having a night-long conversation with a Korean friend that works in a government financial agency, such "harsh" opinion of mine just got reinforced, much more strongly...the stories of a bottom-rung Korean white collar w