What was it like to move to South Korea from the U.S. in 2003?

Have your expectations about a place ever gotten you into trouble? American expat Evan, also known as my husband, was kind enough to be our first guest on the podcast show back in 2017. He shared a group email that he wrote to his family and friends back home with us as well as what he thinks about his culture shock now, 20 years later. 

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Transcript

Steph:

Welcome to the Expat. Rewind. My name is Stephanie, and I will.

Be your host in this experience. What we're doing in this podcast is reaching back into the first year of an expat or geopat's existence into something they put online, whether it was via a blog, Facebook, Instagram, any sort of social media feed, or an email that they sent to a group of people that they knew. And we're going to reach back into that post where they told the world about their experience as an expedited Geopat. And then the expedited geopat will reflect on what they think of what they wrote, what they've learned since then, and anything else that comes up as they're reading that online experience that they posted all those years ago.

I'm really excited to present our first guest reader, Evan, who lived in Korea in 2003, and actually for a few years after that. Although I've never been to Korea, evan's stories about Korea have always interested me. So I'm really excited that he opted into participating in Expat Rewind. Evan's going to read from one of the newer mediums that we're welcoming intot the podcast, and that is a mass email. So let's listen to what Evan thought of Korea when he first moved there.

Evan: 

My name is Evan Simpson, and I've been living and working abroad since 2003. July 25, 2003, actually. Since then, I've taught in South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and the United States. And through it all, I've tried to learn as I've gone, but sometimes it hasn't gone very well. But that's life. 

Anyway, so today, what I'd like to do is I'd like to read to you an email that I sent about 30 people on March 2, 2015, at 09:34 a.m. Got to love time dates. Anyway, what happened was this was a year and a half into my Korean experience. I ended up living in Korea for three years, and I got a job at a public school, which will remain nameless, but I worked as one of the first 100 of people in a program that was called Geppik. That was basically the Jet program for Korea, but specifically just for Yongido Province, which is the province that surrounds Seoul, which means it is by far the most popular province in South Korea.

What this email is is it was an email to about 30 people. I used to write them every couple of months to everyone back home. And this was on the first day of school in South Korea. And the funny thing about that is that the first day of school in South Korea is in March, March 2. And I'm going to go ahead and start reading this and explain. But needless to say, it was a hectic day. I've reread this. I still decide I want to share it with everybody, but I've changed a lot since then, and I'll be sure to talk about that as I go. As I said, this goes out to about 30 people. And it starts like this. Hello, y'all. Today, March 2, is the first day of the new school year, and chaos rains supreme at name of elementary school. Three factors have destroyed any chance of today going off without a hitch the weather, the fact that it is the first day of school, and the undeniable fact that Koreans, to put it as simply as I possibly can do not ever plan ahead. Now, let me go ahead and break out and explain this. Korea is a confucian country, and the way it works is that you do what someone older or more senior than you tells you what to do. I'm speaking in broad stereotypes and generalizations, but it's for the most part, accurate. And the way this worked was. Everyone had to do what someone older them told them to do, they never really bothered to plan ahead. Because why make plans if someone's just going to come by and change them all? So, needless to say, things were very at the last minute, and I've since lived in lots of other countries and everywhere. 

As I get older, I realize lots of places are just in time, scheduling and done at the last minute. But I was kind of idealistic at the time. So back to the email. Part one the weather. It snowed about two to three inches, 50 to 75 mm last night. While this may not sound like much to my fellow North Americans, any snow means danger when you mix Koreans with it. Koreans just can't drive on snow because they forget how to drive on it every year after it melts. So people were driving slower. Dumber than usual, to say the least. Now, needless to say, I'm older now, and I realize that's everyone everywhere, no one remembers how to drive in the snow after it's melted. And then it comes back. I'm originally from Idaho, and I've been back to Idaho in the winter. I've been in Iowa in the winter. And sure enough, after the first snowfall or the first snowfall in a while, people drive like shit. So, needless to say, my bad. I now realize just how stupid that.Was that I wrote that.

Anyway, back to this. But this is important. This, meaning the snow, affects the school big time. The school doesn't have a big yellow bus that drives around and picks the kids up. The children either walk because they don't live far away, maybe 1 km tops, which is 0.6 of a mile, or their parents drive them. Since it was snowing and Koreans fear the cold like the plague, most of the parents decide to drive their children to school. Okay. The school is serviced by only one road, and the school is situated on the side of the road at the top of a hill. So everyone has to stop at the same spot to drop their kids off. Since the school is at the top of a little incline because it's on a hill. The people were driving super slow, and the hill iced over after about 20 minutes of continuous driving, meaning no one could drive up it after 08:00. This caused the biggest bottleneck I have ever seen. 

Why did I mention that there are 1418 students that go to this school? I only teach 869 of them. I'm writing this at 09:30 A.m., and some teachers still aren't here. We had to be here at 830. So like I said, I was teaching at a public school. It was an elementary school, which means there were grades first through six, and there were over 1400 students who attended school there. There was roughly 40 students per class. Needless to say, there were a ton of students. And since parents didn't want them to walk in the cold, they drove them. And since it was the first day of school, more parents drove them than normal, which, as I just said, led to absolute chaos. Especially the fact that since many teachers couldn't even arrive on time. 

And then back to the email. It's the first day of school. It was only going to get so good anyways. And the next thing I wrote here is the big heading koreans can't plan ahead to save their lives. Now, I know that's a bit harsh, but at the time, I really did think it. Now I realize that most people can't plan ahead. Anyway, this is what I wrote. The school sent out letters to all the parents telling them what classroom their child would be in. The letter said the room number, for example, four. Two means fourth grade classroom number two. Okay, normally the first grader is on the first floor, second graders on the second floor, and you get the idea, well, they couldn't do that because there are an unequal number of classes. There are eight first grade classes, seven second grade classes, seven third grade, yada, yada, yada. So for whatever reason, the second graders are on the first floor, the first graders and third graders are on the second, third and fourth are on the fourth, and so on. So the parents students see that the slip says two four, and immediately go to the second floor. But that class is actually on the first floor. 

Now, I want you to imagine 1400 elementary school kids wandering the halls looking for their classroom. And you can imagine the carnage this causes. They keep asking random teachers for directions, but the teachers are in a huge hurry because they're late for work because of the snow, and they don't have anything prepared for today because they knew they would have plenty of time to get things ready before school. But that didn't happen because of a gargantuan traffic jam in front of the school on the only road that leads to the massive school. And now they're really pissed off, late and annoyed at these kids that aren't even their students asking them all these stupid questions. So a little side note here, and I didn't put this in the email, but I should have. Now I know why I didn't put this in the email. Because I sent the email. And then what I ended up doing was I went downstairs to the ground floor of the school and I started giving directions. 

The problem was I was the only non Korean in the school. So there's 1400 and some OD students plus all the staff. So there's over 1500 people. And there's one person who is not Korean, me. So needless to say, when anyone walked into the school, they looked shocked to see a gigantic foreigner asking them, where are you going? They didn't think they should answer me, so a lot of them ran off. But some other kids that actually knew me from the previous year, they came up to me and they actually asked me, they said Simpson sang name, which means Simpson teacher, where is and they would ask me where is their classroom? So I'd actually give directions to them. 

But it was a nightmare to see this many kids running around. Back to the email. Now it's 10:00 and I'm still the only one sitting in this office. As an English teacher, I shared an office with two other English teachers, but as I say in the email, I was the only one there, even though it was an hour and a half after when we needed to be there, because I was able to walk about two or 3 work, whereas my coworkers had to drive back to the email. Now it's 10:00 and I'm still the only one sitting in this office. One of my coworkers is trying to put the English schedule together and the other one is stuck in traffic.

Okay, so I was wrong. One of them was at work, the other one was on her way to work. So like I said, back to the email.

One of my coworkers is trying to put the English schedule together and the other one is stuck in traffic. She lives 2 hours away, but she can't move any closer because her father doesn't want her to move out of the house. She's 28 years old. Yep, that actually happened. It was very common at the time that if you weren't married, you lived at home. I'm not sure what it's still like in Korea, but traditional society back to the email. I don't know when my classes will be, but I have a feeling they will start on Monday. Sorry. That's right. It was Wednesday. Because back to the email. Why didn't my head teacher put the schedule together before today? Because we got six new teachers on Monday and Tuesday was a holiday, so she couldn't have done it. Then why didn't we hire the teachers before Monday? Because Koreans don't plan ahead. We also got a new vice principal monday because the old one got promoted to principal at another school on Saturday. We had interviews for my new coworker last Friday for a position that started today. Rough. Literally four days later. I won't bore you with any more details, but it was truly painful. I had to judge their English level and whether or not I could handle working with them. It really is amazing that they asked for and used my input. They hired the one that I wanted on Monday, so it's all positive. Why didn't they send a map of the school with the child's letter? Because they didn't know where the rooms were going to be until Monday. They had two months to work on this, but they didn't actually do anything about it until two days before the school year started. Why? Don't ask. I used to think it was just the institutes that were screwed up. By that I mean the bushy bond hogwans. Now I know that it is just part of the culture and there's nothing you can do about it besides smile, take the paycheck, and exercise like a madman when you're ready to blow off steam. Thanks for reading my rant. It's now 1030 and my new coworker just showed up. Write me back when you have time. Much respect, Evan. And then my signature at the time was, game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education. That's from Invisible Monsters by Chuck Polonik. I love that book. So that was an email that I sent over a decade ago now when I was working in the republic of Korea as an assistant English teacher at a public school. And the funny thing about it now is that looking back on it now, I can understand why at the time I thought for sure that my situation was definitely geographically based by people not planning ahead. Now I realize that's just life, that's just places that's large organizations, lot of moving parts, and especially the way it works in South Korea is public school teachers are government employees. So if they need someone to move across the country, they find a way to move them across the country. So that could mean that someone moves on Sunday and starts teaching on Monday and their family joins them a month later. And that's just how it works with huge organizations that sometimes the right hand doesn't know that the left hand exists, let alone what it's doing. But needless to say, the older I get and the more distance I get, the more I realize that you just got to learn to roll with things and just giggle about it, because in the end, it doesn't really matter.

Steph:

Welcome back, Evan.

Evan: 

It's great to be back.

Steph:

Quick note for the listeners. We recorded the first part of this episode about a year or so ago, and Evan was my first guinea pig for expat, rewind and disclaimer. He is also my husband. I don't think I've ever really shared that bit in the episode or podcast. And yeah, we realized after the second episode that this one was the only one that didn't have an interview. So we are circling back to do the interview portion of this experience. So thank you, Evan, for micing up and coming back.

Evan:

You are so welcome.

Steph:

Yay. So, Evan, now that you've listened to your own recording again, what are your thoughts on what you just heard?

Evan:

I'm still amazed that when I think back to how I was a year and a half into Korea, just how frustrated I was because I had just this idealized version of the world and how things would work and how things would run, and I literally have no idea where that came from. I really don't, because I thought for sure that things were going to be this smooth, well oiled machine, and the world just doesn't work that way.

Steph:

Did it work that way before you went to Korea?

Evan: 

Like I said, I have no idea where this comes from.

Steph:

TV. Let's blame TV and movies.

Evan:

I guess I don't get it. But I thought for sure that you graduate from college and you get a job that requires you to have a degree, so therefore things are going to be better, things are going to be more organized, and that's just not the case.

Steph: 

It's not the case. I like in your reflections throughout the reading how you kept saying that you realize now the world is like this.

Evan: 

Oh, yeah.

Steph:

It's not one country, it's not one culture, it's the world. I think that's really hard to realize, especially the first country, the first year. I think that's really hard to realize is it's not them, it's us.

Evan:

It's just people in general.

Steph:

Yeah. In the year or so since we recorded this, do you still feel like you're experiencing this kind of unorganized mess in your current day?

Evan: 

Of course. Yeah, because it's like in my current job, I travel around and I give workshops and teacher training seminars, and it's just the nature of the beast with anytime you're doing anything that requires organization with people on a massive scale is that it's going to be done at the last minute. Because you're dependent on so many people organizing things, and people's schedules coalescing that it's almost impossible for it to be well planned out. And if you go the other extreme, where you plan everything out years or months in advance, then it's so rigid that anytime anything comes up, people say, no, sorry, can't be helped.

Steph:

Shogunai 

.

Evan: 

Yeah, sorry. Can't be helped. We can't do anything.

Steph:

I remember hearing that word when we were in Japan the first time and just laughing, going, I didn't realize I needed a word for that. But that fits into so many situations. Yeah, it can't be helped. Which basically is a really nice way of saying, no, we're not changing that. You said you used to send these emails out every couple of months. When did you stop sending them out?

Evan:

I probably stopped sending them out. I'm not entirely sure, but this could actually be the last one that I did.

Steph:

Oh, wow.

Evan:

Yeah, because I got to a certain point where I realized the only emails I was sending out were just these group emails to a whole bunch of people complaining about my life and different aspects of the culture. And I realized that I was just being toxic and there was just no point to this. And the funny thing about that is I spoke with many people and they described having the exact same experience that when they first started their first year or their first couple of years, they were sending out like, dispatches, like, reports from abroad, back to people in the homeland. And then after a little while, they just stopped doing it because they realized, why am I doing this?

Steph: 

It's really funny you said that this is such a meta moment right now, because part of the reason why Expat rewind hasn't had new episodes for forever is it did morph into bookish Expats, which is still looking back at a book, the people that helped them get used to the culture that they moved into. But it was also hard because I'd met many people that wrote these things and I did it too, but I was silly or smart enough to put it online as a blog. I'm not really sure, but I met a lot of people that wrote these kinds of dispatches, but they didn't want to share them even like 1015 years later. So it was hard to get people to come on and show that part of their Expat experience. Even though I think it's really useful to show everybody goes through this. They didn't want to be the guinea pigs to do that.

Evan:

Yeah, well, also you don't want to. I mean, the best analogy I can say is it's kind of like looking back on yourself from middle school or junior high. Everyone went through junior high. But even if you were one of the cool kids, which I wasn't, but even if you were one of the cool kids, I've talked to people about it and they're like, oh, my God. They don't want to relive that. They want to think about it. They don't want to reflect on how they were during that time.

Steph:

But some of the movies that have been the most fun and TV shows that have been the most fun are ones when people go back and dig into the crazy stuff that used to happen to them as the misfit kid or teenager. I think I guess I was trying to recreate that next platform, but it was just so hard to get people to come on. I even offered anonymous stuff I'm like, I won't post your socials I won't do anything. We won't even say who you are. But yeah, no, too hard. Too hard. Having said that, listeners, if any of you are brave enough to come and do this, I'm more than happy to resurrect, expat, rewind, bring it back for another season. When you stopped writing the emails to people, was there any other way that you were, like, mass telling people what was happening with you? No, I just stopped you stopped communicating completely?

Evan:

Yeah, well, I didn't stop communicating completely. I stopped writing mass emails to huge groups of people, and I just continued writing individual emails to people, talking about things in our personal relationship. But I stopped doing these gigantic dispatches, and I didn't start a blog because I remember a few people told me I needed to start writing a blog about this, and I said I didn't want to do that because I didn't want it to be public. Yeah, I know. That's funny. Now, this is well past the expiration date, but I didn't want to be one of those people that was live blogging their experience, because I wanted to have the freedom to just write about whatever I wanted to, and I didn't want someone to stumble across it.

Steph:

Yeah, that was smart.

Evan:

Thanks.

Steph:

Kind of wish I had gone that route. I have no regrets about what I said, but I probably should have gone anonymous and changed the city I was in. But live and learn.

Evan:

Because that's actually funny, because at the school that I worked at there in Korea, the person who ended up replacing me ended up having a very public blog and just trashing the school on the Internet. And she wasn't very smart about it because the head teacher just this was pre. Well, no, it wasn't pre Google. It was right as Google was taking off, but he looked online and he found her blog and printed it off and said, why are you talking about us this way in public that everyone can see?

Steph:

Oh, my God.

Evan:

And then she went, oh, I'm sorry about that. So then she switched her blog to private.

Steph:

Wow.

Evan:

Yeah.

Steph:

Okay. Well, I didn't do that. I didn't bitch about work. I described work. That was the one smart choice I made. And I did anonymize people's names, but I generally tried to share my experience, not other people's experience. But yeah, that's not smart. Yeah, but the Internet. Yeah, it was too much, too quick. I think the power to publish quickly is something we talk about on virtual expats podcast. The virtual expats show what I have to plug whenever I can. Feels like there's something in the mass email experience that made you kind of generalize and go down a darker path. Am I making shit up, or does that seem possible?

Evan:

No, I always talk about because I read this once about how there's two types of people, the people that do platonic ideas of broad categories and the Aristilian idea of tiny little boxes. And I understand that even by bringing that up, it shows that I kind of do things in broad categories because I just mentioned two. But I'm one of those people that I see things in broad strokes. And so, no, writing the mass email didn't make me go down this dark rabbit hole. I was in that dark rabbit hole where I saw things in just sweeping generalizations. Yeah, because my first job in South Korea, I thought I had this horrific job. I was working at this language school, and I couldn't imagine anything being any worse. And then I met a bunch of other people who were teaching in language schools.

And when I say I couldn't imagine anything worse, I mean, as far as like, the language school situation could be worse, there's infinitely worse situations on earth. I get that. But I thought that the language school job that I had was the worst possible job, language school teaching job you could have. Until I met a whole bunch of other language school teachers, and we were all having, like, Thanksgiving at a friend's house. And I noticed that everyone was telling the exact same story, just with different details. And so I was like, oh, it's just like this. And so I was in this incredibly broad brush, stereotype kind of mode where I was like, language schools and education here works like this. And so, yeah, no, it had nothing to do with the medium. I literally thought like that.

Steph:

Yeah, the first time I was in Taiwan, the first time I was around a bunch of TEFL teachers and they were bitching. I was like, yeah, me too, me too, me too. And they were talking about and one person said, oh, do you ever get paid on time? And I went, oh, suddenly I like, my job? What do you mean? You have all of this, and your pay is being messed with, and your benefits are being messed with, and they haven't paid for your airfare. Like, all the things that I thought were a given because I got very spoiled with my North American and Taiwanese married couple bosses where they did what they said and that was not the norm, apparently. I was like, oh, no.

Evan:

I couldn't believe it when one of my friends at one point, I was complaining a little bit too long, and he asked me, do you get paid on time? And I said, yeah. And he goes, well, you have nothing to complain about then. And I was like, no. As gently as I humanly can, the only reason why I show up for work is because you pay me. If you don't pay me, I don't show up. So if you're going to pay me late, I'll come in late, or I won't come in at all because you're not paying me. I never understood because I actually had that with one of my first boss, she was like, all you care about is money. And I looked at her, and I went, no.

Steph:

What?

Evan: 

You pay me because I work here.

Steph:

Why are you all here if you're not?

Evan:

If you can't afford to pay me, that's fine. I'll go find someone who can.

Steph:

Yeah. There was a big chain up in Taiwan that up in there was a big chain school up in Taipei that notoriously, didn't pay people, hired tons of people, went through teachers like crazy. Everybody knew on and offline that they did this, and yet they still were able to hire a lot of teachers. And when you met the teachers and they said the name of the school, you'd be like but you didn't want to be the person to warn them, because they just got there, and they were really excited. But you're like, I feel like I should tell you, but if you met them, like, a few months in, they'd be like, yeah, well, they said it would be Nick next week, or they're having a little problem with their finances, and blah, blah, giant school making tons of money, and it just notoriously for years and years. It was weird.

Evan:

My first job, they didn't pay me on time three months in a row. And the last time, I took the receipt from the ATM, and I showed it to them, and I said, Why didn't you pay me? And they said we forgot. And I was like, as gently as I can. What would you do if I forgot to show up for work?

Steph:

Yeah.

Evan:

Because I kept telling them, I'm like, you want to tell me that you're having financial problems? You don't want to tell me? You're so stupid, you just forgot to pay me.

Steph:

I know, right?

Evan:

And then I said, do you need me to remind you? And they said, yeah. And so I said, okay. And so I would remind them the day before, I was supposed to get paid every day, each month until I end up leaving there. And I got paid late once at the public school because my new supervisor, who had to submit my pay, was new, and she didn't realize she had to do it because I understand she had all sorts of new things she had to do. And so I got paid late once there, and I just kind of laughed it off because I got paid late one day. And she was like, I am so sorry. I'm like it's.okay. She goes, It won't happen again. I go, I know. It's all good. And it was just such a difference. And I was just like, yeah, no big deal. And everything was fine.

Steph:

Yeah. I remember in Vietnam when the woman that did finance went on maternity leave, and they didn't assign anybody to do her task, and we were all waiting for our paychecks, and we're like, what's happening? What's happening?

Evan: 

All 100 teachers.

Are like, oh, my God.

Steph:

I'm like, you guys had at least okay, maybe she didn't tell you the first two months, but she probably did. So you had at least, what, five, six months to plan this moment.

Steph: 

Yeah. As an avid planner, these moments hurt my head a little bit when they happen. What would you say to first year expats, especially the English teachers out there, how to deal with these kind of moments of just what's happening? Instead of bitching to people online or in person at the bar, what could they do instead that might do might be better for them?

Evan:

Detach.

Steph:

How?

Evan:

Just literally just detach. Just take a step back, breathe, and take a big picture view of the situation and understand that it's not personal, they're not doing it to you, that this is just what is happening right now, and you need to figure out what you can do to make the best of this situation.

Steph:

Do you think that there's anything cathartic in writing stuff like this?

Evan:

I kept a journal for the first, I think almost the first year I was in Korea, and I just stopped because I would reread it. And I realized that all I was doing was just spewing pure negativity. And I think that's because my expectations were off. And so if I would have viewed my journal as being something where I just put down these feelings so I can just put them down and then not have to think about them anymore, I would have been in much better shape. But I was looking at my journal for wanting to see progression in how I was evolving while I was there. And I noticed that I was complaining about the same stuff every single day, so I just slammed it shut one day and I was like, no more. I'm not going to write anymore.

Steph: 

So writing it actually just kept you down in the negativity of it?

Evan:

I don't think so. Someone very wise to me one time said that stress is what happens when reality doesn't meet your expectations.

Steph:

I bet they read that online.

Evan: 

Was that from Shakespeare again? Nothing comes from nothing. But the whole thing is that I was expecting this situation to be different than it was. And since my expectations weren't being met, it was driving me nuts. Like, for example, I remember you asking me once, how come I never said that Seoul was crowded? What happened was we were in Hong Kong, and you were like, It's really crowded here. And I go, yeah. And then you looked up and you saw that Seoul was actually more crowded than Hong Kong, more densely populated. You're like, Why didn't you tell me that? And I was like, It's Asia. I expected it to be densely populated. Because growing up in Idaho, that's what you learn. Now, of course, I now know if you go to, like, Lao, you're going to have a very different experience. But point being is when reality doesn't meet your expectations, you do feel a lot of stress, and it really bothers you. It never bothered me in Korea that it was crowded, because I always expected it to be. Same thing. I was so upset that they weren't paying me on time because my base assumption is they're going to pay me on time to circle all the way back and answer your question, what can I tell? First year people try to have better expectations or none?

Steph:

Try to have none. Is that possible?

Evan:

It's impossible to have none. But just I was expecting this well oiled machine, and I thought that blah, blah, blah. And I didn't know anything really about Korean culture before I went. Yeah, I didn't know hardly anything about confucian societies before I went. And so, needless to say, when I showed up, oh, boy, there was a lot going on in my head as far as that was concerned, and it caused a lot of stress.

Steph:

Yeah, no, that's true. And, yeah, I did read that quote online, and I really wish I had saved it. It's probably somewhere in my Twitter stream somewhere. But yes, dress ticket. Because I saw Taiwan on a map, and I looked it up and saw that the weather it was an island. It was a humid island nation. It was super hot tropical, and I automatically put all of my tropical vacation places, characteristics on it and then got there and saw that it was a very traditional the town I was in was a very traditional, very family oriented, very we dress as if we don't live in a tropical environment kind of place. And just like, every expectation I had was just constantly crushed. Yeah. I was like, you don't act like you live on an island. What's happening right now? Yeah, expectations are tough. Yeah. Because you can't not have them. So just kind of like the meditation thing. You have the ideas, and you let them float on by. I guess the expectations should be like that, too. Have them, but don't cling to them. Wise advice, Mr. Evan. I don't know why I'm trying not to say your name.

Evan:

No idea.

Steph:

I don't know. Wise advice, Mr. Simpson.

Evan:

Why, thank you so much.

Steph:

Well, thank you so much for coming back on Expat Rewind.

Evan:

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Steph:

Okay, so, yeah, listeners, again, if anybody is daring enough to come back and to read something they wrote the first year living abroad, do let me know. I'm more than happy to resurrect this show for a season. All right. Yay. And we're out.