The Birth of Korean Cool Read Online Free PDF

debt”—that was the party line.
     The same line was used to explain why we weren’t allowed to turn on the classroom lights: during daytime hours, we relied entirely on natural sunlight. The teachers never explained what
     this debt was all about, but we knew it was an embarrassment on the level of a national bedwetting.
    The no-foreign-school-supplies rule was enforced by way of surprise inspections, heralded by the teacher suddenly yelling midlecture: “Everyone, put your hands on the top of your
head!” This would send all the students into full-on freakout mode, trying in vain to hide their Japanese mechanical pencils in the gaps between the floorboards, like a drug dealer flushing
his stash down the toilet.
    In eighth grade, my teacher picked up a plastic Tupperware-type container from a student’s bag, looked at the bottom, and shrieked, “Made in Thailand? Thailand?! If you’re
going to buy non-Korean goods, why would you pick a beggarly country like Thailand?” She then hit the offending student on the head with the contraband plastic container.
    Even worse than getting hit was being responsible for someone else getting hit. On one occasion, I scored an 88 percent on a Chinese language exam—far exceeding anyone’s
expectations. Since I didn’t speak Korean at the time and was regarded as the class idiot, the teacher announced, “Every student who scored lower than Hong Youn-kee [my Korean name] is
going to get hit.” I was not very popular after that.
    Why so much brutality for such young children? For starters, Korean culture views childhood as an extremely high-stakes period. If you screw up your early years, you are finished, finished,
finished. There’s an old Korean saying that I heard often: “A habit begun at age three lasts until age eighty.”
    By the time you realize you might be in possession of bad habits, you are most likely past age three. Too late! You are already possibly doomed and have to work in constant emergency mode to
outpace your demons. This early-instilled childhood panic was one reason why we were so obedient—and why it never really occurred to any of us to hit the teacher back.
    People who have never experienced corporal punishment outside the home don’t understand that it does not leave the same psychic scars as getting hit by your parents. Punishment from
teachers was not personal, and if everyone is subjected to the same rules, you can tolerate quite a lot.
    But some teachers were out of control. The most brutish teacher I ever had was my seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Chung—or Chung Sun-seng (“teacher”), to use the honorific.
He was a very short, thin man of about thirty, with dark skin, poufy hair, eyes that darted quickly from side to side when he got angry, and a facial twitch. He had no neck and his trousers came up
too high on his torso; these combined features made him look even smaller. Basically, he looked like a bad guy from a Roald Dahl children’s book. And he should have been
institutionalized.
    At some point, a classmate’s mother had called Chung Sun-seng to tell him to lay off a bit on the beatings where her own son was concerned. The next day, Chung Sun-seng called the boy and
me to the hallway outside the classroom. The teacher boxed the boy’s ears, saying, “Why’d you go crying ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ like a baby?” The boy fell to the ground;
then the teacher kicked the boy repeatedly in the stomach and in the head until the boy bled from his mouth and lost a tooth.
    Yes, I watched and did nothing. I don’t remember what it was I was meant to have done, but I do remember that I was in trouble as well. All I could do was patiently wait my turn—but
my turn never came. At the time, I thought it was because the teacher had run out of steam. Years later, I found out my mother had paid my teacher off, with an envelope full of cash, to leave me
alone. I believe the teacher had called me out to witness this beating as a