Probably True Stories: Korea As It May Or May Not Be

By James Sarver

In 2012 James Sarver went to Korea to teach English. His only previous experience: student teaching, twenty years earlier. He'd lasted six weeks. Twenty years later, suffering from a lifelong midlife crisis, he decided to give teaching another try. But somewhere else this time. Korea. South Korea. This is the story of how he learned that you can give it all up and start over. And make the same mistakes all over again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678111717

Book preview

PROBABLY

TRUE

STORIES

korea as it may or may not be

James E. Sarver

PROBABLY TRUE STORIES

Copyright © 2022 by James E. Sarver

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-6781-1171-7

for

hyun-woo, do-hyung, min-seok,

ga-hyeon, and all the others

whose names I never did

pronounce correctly

a note on the title

The title of this book comes from a conversation I had with a Korean student whom we’ll call Min-hee — since that’s her name — about the historical dramas she liked to watch on TV. When asked whether these dramas were based on fact, legend, or, like American soap operas, the lives of those we love to judge for being so screwed up when our own lives could provide plotlines no soap opera would come within a million miles of, Min-hee replied that the Korean dramas she watched were somewhere between fact and legend, history and mythology; the exact phrase she used was, probably true stories.

The moment I heard this, I said, Min-hee, I’m going to steal that and use it as the title of my book.

Her immediate response was, I want ten percent.

I looked at her. "If it’s royalties you’re thinking of, you’re barking up the wrong tree. In my entire life I’ve made about $28 from my writing. And that’s if you throw in the in-kind value of the free issues of No Quarter Given, the pirate fanzine, I was sent for having my hilariously humorous stories published therein."

Cut the flim-flam, Min-hee snapped. Ten percent or it’s a no-go.

Since ten percent of nothing is nothing, I hesitated only a moment before replying, Okay. Ten percent. But only on domestic sales.

She smirked. Like your humor translates. The last thing you should be worrying about is foreign editions.

My humor translates, I said sheepishly. "You laugh at my jokes."

I’m Asian, she answered. We’re taught to respect our elders.

She held out her hand. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been outwitted, but then I’ve spent most of my life trying to shake that feeling. I took her hand and she said, Deal.

So here’s her title — not stolen, but bought and paid for, with ten percent of…whatever…and now here it is, adorning the cover of this collection of anecdotes, tales, and vignettes of the Republic of, which is to say South, Korea.

There may be those among you, of Korean descent or otherwise, who find the title Probably True Stories to be somewhat offensive, for a book of anecdotes, tales, and vignettes of Korea. I can only refer you to the subtitle.

If you don’t like it, you are welcome to, like Min-hee when she tries to collect those royalties, sue me.

a note on the subtitle

Nobody’s memory is perfect. Even now, there are those of you reading this who think that first sentence began with No one’s memory instead of Nobody’s memory, and will swear up and down that you’re remembering it correctly, until a friend opens the book and shows you the actual text, at which point you’ll shake your head and mutter, "No one’s memory sounds better."

My memory is less perfect than most. No, that isn’t true. My memory is actually quite good. It’s one of my few redeeming qualities. Assuming, that is, that having someone tell you, No, you were in Hawaii in September 1998, not October, is considered by you to be an attractive quality in a person. Still, nobody’s — or no one’s — memory is perfect. I can recall with crystal clarity the day I started Kindergarten, the day my family moved to Woodlake, California, the day I got my first real job (I was 27), the night I was arres — the point is, I have an excellent memory.

But not perfect.

This book, then, makes no claim to immutable truth. It is, in fact, extraordinarily mutable. I’m not even certain some of it happened, to be honest with you. I’m pretty sure it did — but I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law. Okay, yes, I would swear to it in a court of law (Min-hee, take note) but I would know, in my heart, that it’s entirely possible I got one or two of the details wrong.

Or one or two of the main points.

Or any of it, really.

So please, don’t take these stories as gospel. They’re as true as I remember them, I can promise you that much. But how true is that? No more or less true than anyone — or anybody — else’s recollections of any given event.

When it comes down to it, what is truth, anyway? Am I the more handsome, clever, competent, caring, generally wonderful person presented in these pages, or the significantly less-so person of real life?

We may never know.

a note on the previous note

If you were planning on visiting, or relocating to, a country such as, say, South Korea, you might choose to solicit the advice — one might even refer to it as the expertise — of a person who has already done the work of visiting or living in that country for you. A fellow traveler, a comrade expatriate.

I am such. But I am also terrifically shy and self-conscious and don’t do much socializing. Plus, I don’t give a crap. I mean, I do give a crap, but as a general rule, I steer clear of people whenever and wherever possible — unless I find them attractive, in which case I pretend I’m in a bumper car and aim right at them. I like people, I just don’t like being around people. I’m horrible at small talk. I avoid parties as if me and parties once dated and it ended badly. I have Social Anxiety Disorder the way some people have freckles. Sure, I could get rid of it, but it’d be costly, and time-consuming, and I’d have to be around people.

Nothing in this book, therefore, is meant to serve, in any way, as advice. Nobody should be modeling his or her life after mine, not unless his or her life’s goal is to be in the middle stages of adolescence at forty-three. You are better off, with regard to life choices, following in the footsteps of a celebrity in rehab.

As for expertise, I congratulate myself each morning when I remember how to open my eyes. I am in no way an expert on anything, including knowing which things I’m not an expert on. It’s very possible I am an expert on something, but am unaware of the fact.

This book, then, is no more than a record of my experiences in Korea. (No one in South Korea calls it South Korea.) My unique experiences, which could never be replicated, even by me were I to travel back in time and do it all over again. This is not a guidebook and not an Eat Pray Love-type call to romantic adventure. It’s not Pico Iyer and it’s not Paul Theroux. It’s a silly little book whose sole purpose is to bring a smile to your face.

And to mine, because you paid for it.¹

a just plain note

With the exception of Ten Things About Korea And Koreans You Might Not Know, this book is written in the past tense. That’s because it all happened in the past, and much of it was very tense. This does cause a bit of an issue, though, when discussing things that are still true – for instance, if I write Daegu was south of Seoul, does that mean Daegu has since packed up its bags and headed north? No, it just means I’m too lazy to go back and check all the sentences in this book to replace, where appropriate, was with is and did with do.

So didn’t be surprised.

INTRODUCTION (Or, Life Has Led To This)

I was supposed to go to China.

I hadn’t been outside the country, other than to Canada, since I was ten years old. Prior to that, I’d been a regular Secretary of State — my parents had been missionaries in Ghana, West Africa, and we’d gone through Europe on the trips there and back: London, Amsterdam, Switzerland. And while in Ghana we’d driven east to Togo and north into Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). So I’d seen a bit of the landy part of the world, in my youth, but a combination of lack of funds and…a severe and continuing lack of funds…had prevented me from traveling farther than Hawaii during the entirety of adulthood.

I desperately wanted to travel. I saw myself as Livingstone, or Stanley, or Burton, exploring the world and braving its dangers and coming back nothing but skin-and-bones to write instant bestsellers about that time I found a lost civilization in the heart of the Amazon, but the proof was in the rucksack I lost when I went over that waterfall, and now I can’t find my way back because the natives insisted on blindfolding me for the last ten miles of the journey. I pictured myself as Indiana Jones, world traveler and roustabout, getting into bar fights in Caracas and wooing femme fatales in Timbuktu. Never mind that I don’t drink and am gay — the bar fights could be over whose shoes were more fabulous, and the femme fatales could be, how you say, postoperative.

But the truth was, I was no more David Livingstone than I was Golda Meir.² If I’d really wanted to travel, I’d have found a way, wouldn’t I? People do it all the time. They backpack through Asia on two cents a day, or hitchhike a ride on the space shuttle and parachute onto Mount Everest and ski down the South Col.

Don’t they?

Me, I was content to spend most of my life in the Bay Area — San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley — a variety of cities, a variety of jobs, a variety of boyfriends, but life proceeding down a path that could hardly be termed adventurous. The most venturesome thing I’d done since graduating college was to drive across the country (or from California to Toledo, which is close enough) in less than forty-eight hours. (Yes, for the sake of a guy. Why do you ask?) In retrospect it was crazy and dangerous and stupid, but then whose past hasn’t been crazy and dangerous and stupid?

Well, for example, mine. That cross-country sprint was as venturesome as ever I got. Since then it had been cruising speed ahead, never moving too fast or too far afield, never exceeding the speed limit of my own personal safety zone, content to read biographies of Livingstone, Stanley, and Burton, and watch the Travel Channel whenever the itch to wander grew too great.

In early 2012, however, events conspired — along with several unindicted co-conspirators — to cause me to be a) unemployed and b) in a mood to change, radically change, everything about my life. I was entering middle age and I hadn’t done one thing on my Bucket List, not even, Make up a Bucket List. I was sick of making excuses for myself. I didn’t have much money — or any money — but I could afford to hitchhike through Asia if it all it took was two cents a day.

For a couple of weeks I could, anyway.

I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see Japan, and India, and Germany, and the Caribbean, and Argentina, and I wanted to go back to Africa and see Ghana through an adult’s eyes. I’d have to borrow someone else’s, since I barely qualify as an adult, but this was a bridge that could be crossed when come to. I was determined to see the world.

Now if only I could get somebody else to pay for it.

*   *   *

Unless you’re eighteen, gorgeous, and of easy virtue, it’s all but impossible to find a benefactor who will take upon himself the cost of your plane ticket to, for example, Brunei, and furthermore underwrite your food, lodging, incidentals, and crippling heroin habit. While I am of easy virtue, I am neither eighteen nor gorgeous — okay, I’m not eighteen, at any rate — therefore my options were limited to a) enlisting in the military or b) running away and joining the circus. An international circus. Like Cirque du Soleil. Or…like Cirque du Soleil.

Option a) I ruled out immediately, since I was forty-two years old and even in these trying times when the Army’s so desperate for soldiers they’ll make you a colonel just for walking into the recruiting office, they do still have an age limit. For the Army, it’s thirty-five. For the other branches, it’s even younger. I could pass for forty-one, forty in the right lighting, but thirty-five? That would be pushing it. Besides, they’d only have to look at my I.D. to say, "I knew he looked forty-one. Forty in the right lighting."

That left option b). But the problem with option b) was, I can’t stand Cirque du Soleil. No offense, but it’s stupid, and awful. No offense. Also, I have no gymnastic abilities to speak of, nor can I tie a decent knot, which is what I imagine must be the primary qualification for the job of Guys Who Put Up The Tents. I’m also allergic to music that sounds like it was composed for a laser light show, and I’m even more allergic to witnessing the personal journeys of clowns.

I was down to option c). What was option c)? I didn’t know yet. I’d heard of folks who’d found jobs overseas, but most of these were people who’d lived overseas to begin with, a course of action which, if available to me, would have meant I didn’t need the job. I had a couple of friends who had taught English in Japan and China and had good experiences doing so, but I couldn’t see myself teaching English because I couldn’t see myself teaching anything. Not after what happened in 1991.

What happened in 1991? The first Gulf War. The Rodney King beating. The collapse of the Soviet Union. But what I’m referring to was the biggest disaster of that year, my student teaching at Mt. Whitney High School in Visalia, California.

*   *   *

It was atrocious. The kids walked all over me. I’d been planning to be a teacher since around the eleventh grade — despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was write — because both my parents were teachers and because they insisted that writing may not pay the bills, which meant I needed a backup plan. Since I had a certain aptitude for math and I foolishly thought, What are the chances that a group of high school kids might be poorly-behaved?, teaching high school math became that backup plan.

The chances that a group of high school kids might be poorly-behaved, it turned out, were one hundred percent. I was only twenty years old at the time, and some of the students in the class were seventeen, eighteen years old; I had no more clue how to regulate their behavior than I did how to regulate the airline industry. They took every advantage of me except the physical, and by three weeks into my student teaching tenure I was an emotional, spiritual, and pedagogic mess. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I resigned with my tail between my legs, an expression I’ve never understood, because where else would a tail be?

A more ignominious beginning to my after-college life was hard to imagine, though it led to an even more ignominious period of living at home until I was twety-five and holding down a succession of embarrassingly low-paying, or short-lived, or both, employment — for example helping out a guy from our church install satellite dishes. Not the tiny Dish TV jobbies in which you could comfortably toss a salad, but the gigantic wire mesh jobbies with which SETI attempts to contact extraterrestrial life and folks in Woodlake, California, attempted to watch Mad About You three hours earlier on the East Coast feed.

The scars, that is to say, from my student teaching experience ran deep, and wide, and long. I couldn’t drive by a school, any school, for months afterward. I couldn’t watch reruns of Dead Poets Society on television. I couldn’t hear the Pledge of Allegiance recited without needing to place a wooden spoon between my teeth. I couldn’t bear to think of those three weeks during which I’d discovered that not only was I not cut out to be a teacher, I might not even be cut out to be a human being. My failure was that comprehensively complete, by my accounting. And in the accounting of anyone who’d watched me teach.

Therefore I ruled out option c), teaching English in a foreign country. I was down to option d).

There was no option d).

I was in the middle of researching that very select group of gay gentlemen who prefer their sugar babies with a touch of gray when I received a series of friendly reminders from my creditors that, while I may have forgotten about them, they most certainly had not forgotten about me.

I resolved to revisit option c).

*   *   *

Most countries in the world have fairly stringent requirements regarding whom they allow into their country to teach their citizens English. They ask for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification, or a U.S. teaching credential, or, in the case of Iran, that you not be Jewish. The only countries I could find that required nothing more than a college degree — which was all I brought to the table — were both in Asia: China and Korea.

Investigating, I discovered that Korea offered the better deal, but also demanded a great deal more paperwork. Schools in Korea would pay airfare to and from the country, which meant your only upfront costs were whatever was involved in that endless paperwork: fees for the applications and visa, and FedEx charges to send everything to the school in Korea. But this was not an insignificant amount — not to a person with no money to begin with — and every step of the bureaucratic process took time, also not an insignificant factor to a person who’s struggling to pay for housing, food, and various adult websites.

Schools in China did not pay nearly as well — about half as well, in fact — and they did not pay for your inbound ticket. They did pay a bonus at the completion of the one-year contract, a bonus meant to serve as your, as it were, ticket home. Deal-wise, there was no comparison: Korea was offering more or less a free ride and China was offering a deal made in China.

However, what China did not request that Korea did request were two copies of my college transcripts. I hadn’t seen my college transcripts in ages (an age here being defined as ten and a half years, ages meaning two of them), but I knew that they were, to say the least, unimpressive. The higher I’d gone in mathematics, the less I’d enjoyed it and the less I’d understood it and the more I hadn’t given a hoot. My grades outside my major were stellar — almost all A’s. But my grades within my major were pathetic — mostly C’s, some D’s. How I graduated remains a mystery.

If Korean officials — or the Korean school contemplating taking me on — ever got hold of those transcripts, I couldn’t imagine their saying, He got a D in Number Functions? Quick, make him an offer before some other fast-developing nation snaps him up!

Korea was out.

I was far from certain that I could scrounge up the funds for the initial ticket to China, but after speaking to a recruiter who assured me that, assuming all went well — and I am just stupid enough to assume, always, that all will go well — I could be in China in six weeks, I made up my mind to go to China.

But this did not happen. The fact that this did not happen is the surest proof I have yet found that there is — or might be — a loving, caring God who watches over us with a guiding hand.

Or it’s all coincidence and happenstance. Who can say?

*   *   *

The school the recruiter found for me was a university in Chengdu, a city of fourteen million in southwest China, north of Hong Kong. An interview was arranged with the university’s English Department Adviser. I have always gone into job interviews with the attitude that I’m interviewing them just as much as they’re interviewing me, because, hey, I’m a terrific employee, and they’d be lucky to have me. But in this instance, if my one experience twenty years earlier was anything to go by, I would make a terrible teacher, and they’d be unlucky to have me.

When I connected with the English Department Adviser via Skype, however, the conversation didn’t last five minutes. He spoke very little English — I wondered just whom it was he was advising — and only asked me one question: You were born in United States?

Yes, I said.

Okay, he said. He asked if I had any questions for him.

I had a million questions for him, chief among them, Am I on Candid Camera?, but given the limitations of his English — and the much more severe limitations of my Chinese — I felt it best to hold these questions in abeyance and ask them of the recruiter instead.

Still, imbecile that I am, and anxious not to appear uninterested in the position, I felt it necessary to ask at least one question, and the question I chose to ask, with my usual impeccable good judgment, was, Is it true that China limits Internet access?

There was a silence on the other end of the…computer. He said, No one has ever asked this question before.

I said, digging the hole deeper like a cartoon gopher, "Really? That’s all we hear about here in America, how the government censors Google,