Martoons

Cast of characters

Mrs Kim

Mrs Park

Mr Go

*

Mrs Kim       

The mesmerized Mrs Kim only half-noticed the door open.

As Mrs Park and Fred ecstatically whirled around the tiny office dipping in and out of every nook and cranny between furniture, Kim’s last few months were whirling through her mind…

Her intense interest in foreigners (she wondered if there was a way she could eat one) had started as a friendly competition with Park shortly after Mr Go cut the opening ribbon on his business a year ago.

Following its ‘grand open’, Central Englishy Institute hired its very first waygook to great fanfare.

However, this inaugural foreigner and one that followed turned out to be duds:

That first guy was a barely-reformed alcoholic who’d heard that Koreans were highly religious and he presumed they didn’t drink.

So his thinking was he’d come to Korea to dry out.

It was a grave miscalculation.

He was a believer in three square meals a day, but for him ‘square’ was the special square soju shot glass Go had given him as a gift.

He kept that little glass full pretty much every moment he was at home.

He joked that he must have been a Korean farmer in a previous life because he enjoyed a couple of soju shots at breakfast, a bottle with lunch, and a case with dinner.

* So much for drying out… *

By his third week in Chinju, Go had to drive him from his staff apartment to work and ‘pour’ him into his class.

At the one month mark, Go handed him his salary envelope.

“Hmmm.” Number One Waygook inspected it. “Seems extra thick.”

“It is,” Go replied. “It contains a little bonus for all your hard work.”

It was a plane ticket out of the country.

To make sure the waygook actually boarded the flight, Go drove him to the international airport and ‘poured’ him into Check In.

The second waygook didn’t last long either – he’d majored in communist politics in university and had erroneously imagined he’d be teaching in North Korea.

Expecting character-building Fourth World conditions, he was sorely disappointed as his flight descended into Seoul and all he could see were skyscrapers, mega traffic jams and smog.

Furthermore, he was an obese junk food addict and had come to Korea hoping to be deprived of his health-destroying sugary and salty temptations.

He quickly found out that Korea had more varieties of snacks and junk food than back home, with eye-catching new ones popping up regularly.

He munched and slurped his way to his first salary and then realizing his weight was exploding, saved his health by pulling a ‘midnight run’.

He hopped a late-night bus from Chinju to the international airport and then the first flight out at dawn.

This was a common escape route for culture-shocked waygooks.

Despite those first two waygooks’ short and truncated tenures, the housewives –

particularly Mrs Kim – found them exceptionally intriguing. How different they were!

* How were they so different? *

Yes they dressed like slobs but looked good doing it –

the five o’clock shadows; their bland, purely-for-comfort clothing of T-shirts and jeans; their stinky armpits (deodorant was unavailable in Korea).

Even their smoking was suave: they inhaled in a relaxed, quiet and natural fashion, not the neurotic, loud pursed-lip sucking action of most Korean men.

Waygook exhaling was prolongued and stylish; and the activity took on the air of an end-in-itself.

They respected the cigarette almost as a living being, and smoked right down to the tip of the filter.

Korean men frantically lit up and stole a few puffs whenever time permitted, then discarded most of the cigarette.

When it came to dining, Kim and Park were impressed how the waygooks were extremely adept with knife and fork –

whereas Koreans often wielded Western cutlery like barbarians, or fumbled and dropped it altogether.

Best of all, the waygooks treated the housewives as equals, not servants the way Korean men did.

Nevertheless, despite the good keyboon generated by the first two waygooks, the wives (and Mr Go) were frustrated and baffled when they disappeared suddenly.

The Koreans had taken it personally and wondered which of their actions had made the waygooks skedaddle?

When the second one (the heavy-set communist dude) failed to show for work the morning after pay day, Go called the wives in for an investigative interview.

He was aware that they had done extensive and regular after-class socializing with the waygooks.

Such schmoozing was Korean style and Go encouraged it.

He wondered if the wives had heard any off-hand or deliberate comments from the waygooks suggesting that they weren’t happy and might be about to leave.

Apparently not.

If the waygooks had been disgruntled, they hadn’t been whining about it. So Go had to look deeper to find out what had gone wrong.

He’d stepped up to the plate and swung at the first two pitches – and gotten two quick strikes. He didn’t want strike three.

Something had obviously gone wrong with his foreigners and he wanted to solve the riddle.

So he held off hiring a third waygook for a while and had many discussions with the two housewives.

*

Tomorrow: Mrs Kim and Mrs Park learned how they could befriend the waygooks.