Korean people…no like…talking to children…

No, I didn’t leave anything out. That’s a complete sentence as it was spoken to me.


I’ve been a bit grumpy recently, and I’m not sure why. Everything’s going pretty good in my life. I guess maybe it was just one of those “funks” you get into now and then. I pretty much got over it today. I slept in, got a haircut and was well on my way to feeling good again.

Work was okay today, and I’m looking forward to finishing out this week. Once it’s done, we’re back on “exam preparation schedule,” which means I don’t have nearly as many classes to teach, and no conversation classes at all.

Sweet!

So – of course – somebody’s got to come along and try and screw things up for me.

As I was leaving work tonight, I stopped outside to talk to one of the guys I work with. I’d set my helmet on my bike and we were chatting about work and other stuff. While we were talking, a few of our students came up to us, wanting to know how they’d done on the test they’d taken tonight. That’s cool, and I don’t mind giving good news to students. (Or even giving bad news to students I don’t care for.) One of the kids had aced it, and I was glad to tell him so.

As all this was transpiring, some dude (Korean guy, early to mid-thirties, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off) walks over from the outdoor tables that belong to the restaurant on the first floor of our building. He immediately starts jabbering away in Korean, and my friend and I just looked at him like he was nuts. He then switched to broken English and came out with, “Korean people…no like…talking to children…”

HUH?!?

At first I thought, “well, if Korean people don’t like talking to children, then why’d you come over here where there’s a batch of kids who are talking?” But it seems his point was more along the lines of “Korean people don’t like foreigners talking to Korean children.”

Double-HUH?!?

I told the dude I was a teacher, and that these were my students. I thought that would be helpful in pointing out to him the simple fact that…

I GET PAID FOR TALKING TO KOREAN CHILDREN!!!!!!

I don’t know if the motorcycle was leading him to believe that I was some evil, child molesting foreigner, or if maybe that was some prejudice of his tangential to his nosiness. (He’d said something in Korean about motorcycles that my students couldn’t quite translate for me.)

Whatever his deal was, the guy was a total prick. Even after being told that I was a teacher and these kids were my students, he kept on mumbling in a mixture of Korean and English. I tried getting my kids to translate, but they were faced with that cultural “must be respectful to adults, even when they’re total idiots” thing, so they couldn’t really do too much. I don’t blame them for that. After a couple minutes of this moron’s BS, my friend said “see you tomorrow” and walked off.

He had the right idea.

I put my helmet on and got on my bike. As I was doing so, I got goodbyes from my students, which I happily returned. The dude, gave me a half-assed “I’m sorry,” but I just waved him away and rode off.

What the fuck was he sorry for?

Could he have realized what a dick he was being? I doubt it. Maybe he thought he’d judged the situation wrong? Well, duh, he had. But I doubt that’s what he was apologizing for. No, he was just trotting out the same, weak “I’m sorry” that I get from my students when I’ve caught them doing something wrong. They see it as a “get out of trouble free card,” which is isn’t. The words don’t mean anything if there’s nothing to back them up. All this dude had behind his words was ignorance and racism.I hope he gets hit by a fucking bus.

Full of children.

Maybe then his life will serve some purpose by way of his death being a warning to others. Otherwise, he’s liable to breed and pass his stupidity on to another generation – and that’s something this country doesn’t need.