Friday Five: From the Mouths of Babes

Gina asked:

I don’t have children myself, but I love to hear the knee-slappers that my godson, his siblings, and my nieces come out with. Or, for that matter, the “logic” espoused by the adults around them when speaking to them.

To wit, what are the most amusing things you’ve ever heard in a household with children?

Well, to be honest I haven’t gone into a household of children in ages, but I have two sources to draw upon: my childhood, and life in Korea. As a teacher, I used to deal with kids every day, but I also sometimes ran into kids who were not my students but talked to me anyway. Kids have much less fear of strangers here, partly because they are actually a lot safer in public, but also partly because there? a kind of illusion of total safety that causes parents to let kids wander about as they please, without the admonition never to talk to strangers. Anyway…

(1) Poooooor halitosis baby!!! My sister and I teasing our baby sister, who happened to have peanut butter breath at about age 4. I think my sister and I, aged 6 and 7 respectively, must have learned the word from a TV commercial.
(2) “Weigukindeuli dalnara aeseo wasseoyo?” (Foreigners come from the moon?) A kid I met at the swimming pool changeroom who, once he started grilling me with the standard foreigner-questions, actually seemed to believe me when I told him I come from “the moon country,” where we eat cheese and sing all day.
(3) “Teacher: JUJU!” said a little boy, pointing at the huge false breasts in my “Dabang girl” Halloween costume and then trying (and failing) to grab at one. Juju in Korean means something somewhere in between “Titties!” and “Boobies!”
(4) “Well, Annie,” my mother told my baby sister, “Your hair used to be blond, but then you put your head in the over and your brains melted and came out your ears, all over your hair, and turned it brown. Isn’t that terrible? So stay away from the oven.” A wily didacticist, Mom is.
(5) “Teacher’s girlfriend’s name is… So Ju Jan?” asked one twelve-year-old girl. It was a very clever and deliberate pun, because all Korean names have three syllables, and So is a not-uncommon last name. But soju jan means “sweet-potato vodka shot glass”, and the students all knew that I liked bok bun ja ju, a kind of Korean raspberry wine, so the jump to soju was a short one.

Runner up goes to this conversation, the best moment of which was then a girl said to me in Korean, “I don’t speak Americanese!” Or this one, where a boy complains about food in a country that has no name. And for a more sobering, but still sometimes hilarious, change of pace, here are some letters my young students wrote to George Bush in English when the war in Iraq broke out earlier this year.

Other F5 participants are: Melissa, Adam, Merideth, Will, Chris, Gina, Dave, Colleen, Craig, Gord, Adrienne, and Nanette, Marvin, and Rob.

Cong-Ja and The Confucian Society That Does Not Read Confucius

So it’s funny…

The other night I was bitching to my friend Myoung Jae about how in Iksan, I was the only person I knew who’d actually sat down and read Confucius (or, as he’s known in Korea, Cong-Ja). Now, I’m not just talking about foreigners, I mean Koreans too.

Korea’s supposed to be a Confucian society, after all. So you might think that a fair number of people are at least passingly familiar with The Analects or The Great Learning (I think this is the same book, by the way, but I am not sure). I asked Korean friends continually, and nobody had. Not even Confucius, let alone his major commentators, like Mencius (Meng-Ja). I could see nobody having read Lao Tzu (No-Ja) as Taoism isn’t big here… but Confucianism has so much lip-service paid to it I couldn’t believe nobody actually knew Confucius.

Well, yesterday I had lunch with two Confucian scholars… well, Chinese classics majors, anyway. They had studied The Tae Hak (The Great Learning) together last semester and found it very difficult but had struggled through. When we were talking, I think I figured out why almost nobody actually reads Confucius here… because, they said, it’s thought you can only really understand it in the original Chinese and so they must study it in hanja characters (Chinese) rather than in translation into Korean.

I don’t know if there is a good Korean translation, though of course there should be one. Then again, I suppose many Westerners have read neither the Bible nor Homer in the original languages, but… there are translations and if you went looking for someone who had at least read a translation at a University, you’d probably find someone. After all, I met people in Iksan who’d read Baudelaire and Pound and Philip K. Dick both in English and in Korean translation, no less.

It makes me think that Korea’s not really a Confucian society any longer, as much as a simply hierarchical society with an antiquated privilege left to older rich men and (subordinately) the women connected to them, with the standard downward flow of domination you find in plenty of other cultures that never experienced Chinese philosophy in any way, shape, or form. (…such as traditional European society, for example.)

Anyway, it was a pleasant lunch with these young scholars of Chinese lit, one of whom is my student. I learned a few things, including the fact that at my University, the dormitories have a great diner. The counter lady even gave me an extra pajeon when she saw I was a (white) professor. I am still uneasy about such special treatment but it was delicious, and we had a good chat.

오늘은 행복하고 마음이 들다…

10월에 너무 아펐어요. 감기가 너무 너무 나빴고 고드를 죽이었어서 못 썼어요. 미안해요! 하지만 요즘 다 괜찬아요.
오늘은 우유를 없어지만 커피를 맛 있었어요.
오재밤에 학생이 나한테 핸드폰으로 SMS 매스지들이 보냈어. 슬픈 이야기 있었어요… 하지만 학생이 나중에 행복핼거예요. 나는 잘 졸 수 있어서 나도 행복 하고 생각 했어요. 뭐 생각 했어요? 사람들이 다 생월을 볼수없어서 사람들이 다른 사람을 많이 피료해요. 내 잘 못 보는것 다른 사람이 볼 수 있고 다른 사람의 잘 못 보는것 나는 때때로 볼수있어요.
오늘은 영화를 보�毛楮�… 같이 보고싶어요?
오늘은 완전히 정직 생월을 다시 시작했어요. 원야하면 정직하게 말 하면, 고요하게 살거예요.
오늘은 내 공상 과학 소설 (SF novel) 쓰기 열심히 하�毛楮�.
내일 뭐 해? 잘 모르 �瑁嗤�… 열심히 핼거야…
지금은 선잠 피료 해요… 아이고, 늙고있어요…