Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely

By Alex Clermont

Imagine leaving behind everybody and everything familiar to live in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and don’t know a soul.

Imagine you wrote a book about your time there...

Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely is a collection of snapshots that cover the two years of an English teacher living in South Korea. Written with a flair for humor, emotion, character and depth, these introspective narratives are not a travel guide. They are creatively written windows into the life of someone discovering new things about himself, the world, and the people who he shares it with—all while stuffing his mouth with kimchi.

Eatting Kimchi and Nodding Politely has a 4 out of 5 star rating on Amazon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Clermont
• Release date: May 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476301723

Alex Clermont

Alex Clermont is a creative writer, and full-time copywriter, born and raised in New York City where he received his BA in English creative writing from Hunter College. Alex has been a contributing writer to Beyond Race Magazine, Turntable Magazine and several other publications covering and interviewing independent artists and musicians. Alex's fiction has appeared in the anthologies The Bodega Monthly and Every Second Sunday—a collection by authors from around the world. He has been also appeared in the online literary journal Foliate Oak as well several other print and online publications. He’s the author of the independently published, Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely. He is has also self-published a short story titled, "Missing Rib,” which features a 4.5 star rating on Amazon.

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ALSO BY ALEX CLERMONT

Missing Rib

You, Me And The Rest Of Us: #NewYorkStories

No Hiding Place

EATING KIMCHI AND NODDING POLITELY:

Stories About Love, Life, Death, and Discovery From an American in South Korea

Copyright (c) 2012 by Alex Clermont

ISBN: 978-0-9973850-0-7

The author can be contacted at AlexClermontWrites.com

Cover Photographer: Raoul Sirhan Dyssell

Cover Designers: Jason Ormand, Geraldine Jabouin

THANK YOU

Thanks to everyone who read these stories when I first wrote them. Thanks to everyone who liked them. Thanks to everyone who made me think that putting them together in this book was a big deal.

Thank you to Raoul Sirhan Dyssell for friendship, boundless energy, and his free photography and videography work. Jason Ormand and Geraldine Jabouin for their help creating a cover image, their ideas, insights, and their free design work. Deborah Anderson for the warm-hearted encouragement, strong reading eyes, and her free editing work. Whitney D. Barr and Stacey Clermont for their enthusiasm, support and the things they did that were free anyway, but worth a whole lot.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Thank You

Introduction

There is Hope

Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely

Bad Teacher

Smiles, and Dating I

Smiles, and Dating II

Banchan I

Venus

My Brother’s Eulogy

Banchan II

Dirty Kids

My Home Until I’m Home (The Zoo)

Mothers and Daughters

Banchan III

Me and Min Ho

Male Bonding

Banchan IV

There is Love (Park Min Soo)

About The Author

Also by Alex Clermont

A Note From The Author

INTRODUCTION

Explaining what you're about to read is a little difficult. Essentially, these are a bunch of stories about whatever I thought would make for good reading (though mainly about my time as an English teacher in South Korea). I believe the official term for this is a collection of narratives.

This is a collection of narratives.

It doesn't have enough words to be what I think of as a book. It's also too long to be a short story, although it's made up of short pieces—some of them only a hundred words long.

The content was, and is, also hard to explain. Especially to friends who want to know why I opted to spend my Saturday nights with my MacBook, getting eyestrain, rather than roaming the streets late at night with them. The subjects vary from story to story, as does the tone. Some are quick reads, and others I wrote to be digested for a bit longer. If pressed, I would say that what most of these stories have in common is that they first appeared on my blog (now a site, AlexClermontWrites.com).

I went to South Korea in 2009 after being called, and then interviewed, for a job I didn't know existed. Like many of the people in the developed world, I decided to blog about my life. Unlike other blogs I visited, however, I wanted to give more than just diary-like entries of what I saw, who I saw it with, and when I stopped seeing it. Having been a writer for a few years, I wanted to post creative non-fiction based on the real things that were happening to me in my new, unusual, home.

This is a collection of those real things.

The writings collected here are set in Korea, but this is not a travel book. You won't learn about exciting tourist destinations of a country you probably never thought about going to anyway. I tried instead to write about emotions and situations that are universal. Things like death, love, sex, friendship, and food are not confined to one country—though I encountered all of them during my two years in South Korea.

Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely is a lot of things, and I hope you enjoy them all.

This is my thank you for reading my words. Thank you.

Alex Clermont

THERE IS HOPE

For most of my life, I’ve held a generally pessimistic view. My childhood pictures show sad stares colored with regret on the face of a chubby little boy. There was never a specific reason, and though I avoid the idea of blaming it on my nature (whatever that means), happiness was always hard for me to find. The things I desired just didn’t desire to be around me, and as a result, I grew up expecting very little out of a life that I counted every day of.

Moving to South Korea was an extension of this observed rule. I wanted to be in the publishing industry just as mergers were allowing companies to fire their staff, and print media in general began walking the path worn out years before by the Tasmanian tiger, the Bermuda Ern, and the eight-track tape. During my internship at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, an assistant editor named Eric had a talk with me after I leaned our conversation to the idea of me filling in any open positions.

He asked, You know the other intern? Jerry?

I wasn’t sure if the person I pictured in my mind was indeed Jerry, but I said, Yeah.

He’s looking too. He’s about thirty years old, he’s got an MFA in creative writing, and he used to work at another publishing company. Right now, though, he’s not working. Someone, possibly Jerry, passed by. Eric continued, It’s just really hard out there. Ya know?

Eric raised his eyebrows, which led the rest of his face into contortions of sympathy. I smiled back faintly and said, Yeah. I know.

I didn’t have an MFA. I didn’t have any friends in the publishing industry. As a consequence of those facts and many others that I take fault for, I landed a job as a layout editor and web-master for a local newspaper in Queens. It wasn’t fulfilling in any way, but they regularly paid me in money—as opposed to feelings of satisfaction, which might have been nice but would’ve done nothing to fill my stomach.

I worked with my then-girlfriend, until she got in a car crash, which later ended with her getting laid off from her position in sales and leaving me as the only one able to pay for anything and everything.

At some point, while looking for a better-paying job, I was contacted by a recruiting agency about a position with