Dinner with Professors Yoon & Kim

Dinner with Professors Yoon & Kim

At the Faculty Cafeteria [1], 2006, Kyungnam University, Masan, South Korea.

 
Tonight, two professors came over and asked if they could sit with me. Very nice gentlemen who wanted nothing else than to meet me and practice their English. One who did most of the talking was a good-looking, regal, hawknosed, white-haired man named Prof. Yoon, Dean of the Law Department. He’d spent a year at the U. of Texas in Austin. His sidekick was Prof. Kim, (well, who isn’t Prof. Kim? [2]) from the Dept. of Marketing. He’s a little round-faced, bespectacled Mr. Peepers type. His given name, believe it or not, is Young-man.

Typical 3500 won lunch at the gyoji gwon sikdang.  Dinners, which cost 

maybe 4500, were even better; they always included a fish or meat dish and a dessert. Ubiquitous kimchi at upper left.

“How do you pronounce that?” I asked Prof. Kim.

“Young man,” he said.

“How do you spell it, I mean in English?”

He pulled out his business card and handed it to me, and spelled it out: “Y-o-u-n-g, dash, M-a-n.  Just like that.”

"Thank you.  Kam-sa-ham-ni-da."  I said.    

"Oh, you speak Korean!" he said, smiling.

"No, no, sorry," I said.  Mistake.  I looked again at the card.  “Well, how old are you, if I may ask?”

“Heh! Heh heh heh!  Well, maybe younger dan you.  Younger man," he grinned.

"Heh heh," I said.

Chinese Landscaping on the Kyungnam University campus, as seen from my office window.  Wolyeong-dong business district in the background.

Fortunately, I don’t have to carry a conversation here.  Taking the initiative, the two profs came over just because they wanted to meet and talk to me.  They might actually have felt sorry for me, sitting there all alone. I was happy to have the company but was not distracted from the meal. They were surprised at my dexterity with the metal chopsticks, jeok-karak. I attacked my food with gusto and soon there was nothing left but a little tepid broth in my soup bowl. They were thinking: “Old foreign man chopsticks well handles, but like pig eats.”

They gave me their business cards; the only way I can remember their names is to write them here. In return I hand-printed my name and e-mail address on a piece of yellow legal paper. (I didn’t have my business cards with me.) They were thinking: “Old foreigner like child writes. Bad handwriting as for, irresolute character indicated. Chopsticks better (he) uses.”

I am well aware that excessive concern about what the natives may be thinking about me is a symptom of culture shock. I even admitted it to my dinner companions.

“So, Professor Mellon, what is your fust impression of Korea?” asked Prof. Yoon.

It was an easy question to evade. I smiled and thought about it. As if I knew! I have “first impressions” every day and have learned not to trust them. And, if I’d been honest, I would have corrected his misuse of the title "Professor." I am not a professor. [3]

“Well, you know about culture shock, right?” I finally said.

“Ah, culture shock…yes, yes, of course.” He smiled and recollected. “As I say, I spent one year in Austin, Texas.”

“How long did it take you…to uh...adjust to it?” I asked.

“Umm, well, maybe more dan one munce.”

“Right. In my previous trips, to Indonesia and Japan, it took me about that long too. At least.”

Prof. Kim chimed in, “Ah, but Korea is very different.”

“Quite right,” I said, thinking. “It may take even longer here.”

“Heh heh,” agreed Prof. Yoon.

What did they expect me to say? That I’m immune to culture shock in such a beautiful country as Korea? Then they’d know I was a liar as well as a pig and a bad printer. Masan is a beautiful area, I conceded. And I love the food, as they could see. I was tempted to make a comment about the good-looking women but thought it might not be proper at this early stage of our acquaintance. Maybe later.

NOTES:

1. Gyoji Gwon Sikdang (교직원 식당): Faculty cafeteria. Just a five-minute walk from my on-campus apartment. I’d have lunch and dinner there several times a week. The food was cheap, nutritious and very tasty. You’d go through the line and pick up small plates of soup, veg, rice, noodles, fruit, etc. The kitchen was “manned” by ladies wearing white coats and hats; they always smiled and giggled when they saw me coming and pushed plates toward me that had a little extra in them. (I was so huge, scary and hungry-looking.)

Dinners cost a little more than lunch, maybe 4500 Won ($5.00?), and included a fish or meat dish.

In front of the serving line there was a big tub of kimchi; you could get as much as you wanted with your meal. Usually, it was the standard baechu (Napa cabbage) kimchi, but sometimes it was khakdugi (cubed daikon) kimchi. The white-coated ladies tittered when they saw me come back for more.

Daikon (khakdugi) kimchi.

The meeting described above was probably my first with the professors. During the year I was there, not all of our conversations were so superficial.  Prof. Yoon would often have dinner at the cafeteria and sometimes we’d sit together and chat about the news, etc. I felt flattered that he sometimes asked my opinions, but probably he was only taking advantage of the chance to practice English.

I asked him why he ate so often at the gyoji gwon sikdang.

“The food is cheap and good here.  Better dan I get at my home,” he said somewhat ruefully. Like so many Korean women, his wife was too busy with other things to spoil her old man with a home-cooked meal every night.

I worked with eight or ten other foreign teachers from English-speaking countries. Except for one, none of them liked eating at the gyoji gwon sikdang. “Yuck! It’s so institutional!” was a typical remark. They preferred going into town and spending three times as much at restaurants or cooking their own meals at home.

In fact, the faculty cafeteria was closed on weekends, so I’d have to shift for myself. There were a couple of western-style supermarkets nearby where I could buy stuff to cook in my tiny apartment on a little two-burner gas range. And there were plenty of cheap food stalls and restaurants in the neighborhood.

2. Kim (김 in Hanguel or 金 in Hanja ) is by far the most common surname in Korea, both North and South, accounting for 21.5% of all surnames, followed by Lee (or I, or Yi or Rhee) at 14.7% and Park (or Pak or Bak) at 8.3%. My boss, in fact, was a Prof. Kim, but bade me call her by her given name, Ki-ae.  Very nice woman. We enjoyed a cordial and collegial relationship, and I don’t think I go too far in saying that she favored me a bit, though she was careful not to seem partial. The reason for this, I think, was that I was taller than anyone else and I didn’t complain, at least not as much as the other foreign teachers did, which was constantly.  Consequently, I acquired a reputation for being easy-going. Knowing that I was away from my family, she took good care of me--mothered me--though I was a few years older. Every month she treated a few of us foreign teachers and office staff to lunch at a Viking buffet at one of the big hotels in Masan. She had to spend money from “the fund,” she explained. Otherwise, it would just “go away,” to be wasted on non-gustatory educational enterprises.  (See also:  "Baby Octopus Lunch,"  https://tomatopointe.blogspot.com/2020/09/baby-octopus-lunch.html.)

As Chair of the English Division, one of her responsibilities was to keep us happy, or at least to prevent us from becoming too unhappy. And she was treating herself, too. Ki-ae was not a big woman, and I was always amazed at the big, bristling mounds of king crab legs that she piled on her plate at the buffet. That was her favorite. The crab seemed too much work for me, however. I’d usually start at the fresh sushi table and then work my way through the Chinese dishes. And, as always, there was plenty of kimchi to keep the alimentary canal operating smoothly.

Sushi line at a typical Viking buffet.

Ideally, after one of these Viking feasts, I’d have no afternoon class to teach. I’d have to return to my little apartment and take a nap. No additional meals were needed on that day.

3.  My dinner companions were probably aware that I was not a “professor” in the sense the title is used in either Korea or the States. They knew I was just a yearly-contract EFL instructor, but wanted to be either polite or flattering or both. If a colleague or student wanted to address me formally in Korean, they would probably use the word seonsaeng-nim: (선생님) “Honored teacher.” My cursory research this morning shows that word is cognate to Japanese sensei, written in Chinese characters (hanja in Korea, kanji in Japan) as 先生. Of course, the word is pronounced differently in all three languages and has different shades of meaning. In any case, I asked both colleagues and students to address me by my first name, Ben (actually a shortened form of my middle name,) but if they insisted on more formality, I suggested “Mr. Mellon” as an acceptable alternative. No matter what I thought or said, some people insisted on calling me “Professor Mellon,” in which case I could only shrug my shoulders and mumble, “I’m not actually a professor.  Call me Ben if you like; it's easier.”

Working up an appetite at the Chrysanthemun Festival, Dotseom Island, Masan, Nov. 2006.