Feeding My Passion

Late last June, I signed a 1-year contract to teach English at a small private academy (known as a “hagwon”) in Dong-tan, Gyeong-gi province, South Korea. I’ve had a wonderful time teaching and living here since I arrived on June 28th. I’ve always wanted to travel in Asia, and living here has been great, full of interesting and wonderful people, places, things, and not least of all, food. The most pragmatic reason for working here was to make some money and pay off some debts, like my school loan. Considering how badly the US economy is doing, I thought it would be a good idea to go somewhere, even halfway around the world, where jobs were a little, make that a lot, easier to find. I’ve been working here for almost 7 months now, out of a planned 2 years, and everything has been going pretty well.

Enter the monkey wrench. For the past 4 months or so, the woman who owns the hagwon has told my foreign co-teacher and me that the school was having financial difficulties. The number of students hasn’t really increased, which was critical for the school’s continued survival. As I was heading out the door after work on Tuesday the 18th, Kelly, the Korean manager, said she wanted to speak with me. She told me that since the school was having difficulty, they could no longer afford two foreign teachers, and they they decided to let me go.

To say the least, I was in shock. It’s one thing when I was living in the US and got laid off or fired, and it’s another animal all together since I was over 6,000 miles away from the US. Since they prematurely canceled my contract, I lost any chance for the severance pay, which was equal to a month’s pay, and I lost my plane ticket home. Just to get home and lick my wounds, I was going to take quite a licking. Not good.

I headed back to my apartment in Byeong-jeom, dazed, confused, frightened, and starting to get angry about how unfair the situation was. I emailed my recruiter, Issa, a great guy who did a great job getting me here and helping me understand how the process works. While I knew there were a lot of jobs for foreign teachers in Korean, I was deeply unsettled and had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Didn’t know if I was even supposed to show up for work the next day. After texting Kelly and finding out I had a month, I felt a little better, but not much. Didn’t sleep much that night.

It’s a complicated situation, but I seem to be moving in the right direction again. And I’m coming home and spending a few weeks with Kamila in Los Angeles before I come back here and do another 1-year contract, this time at a place that appears to be a lot more stable and well funded. It is certainly has a lot more students, always a good sign.

Now I just have to pack and clean up the apartment before February 1st so I can get on a plane as soon as possible, hopefully that day or the next at the latest.

It’s been interesting.

Food journalism as a career? Maybe, maybe. What’s particularly interesting for me is that my father spent most of his professional life as a agricultural journalist, which is certainly food journalism. Strangely enough, while agriculture is the foundation of food journalism, it’s now considered only one part of a much larger whole.

There are chemical companies which are creating “food” and flavor; there are other chemical companies genetically engineering crops, which medium- and long-term seem not be worth the short-term benefit they confer; we have a populace, at least in the US, and maybe increasingly so everywhere else in the first world, that is becoming more and more distant from the origins of their food, both physically and mentally; a political system that seems to be completely in the pocket of the companies that make the aforementioned “food” and genetically-enhanced crops to the detriment of our health; and environmental issues which threaten our food supply. I see those as just the main challenges facing food, and there are many more lesser ones.

On the flip side, there’s also a movement to remedy all of those things:  a group of people who are dedicated to the creation and preservation of small, honest, un-enhanced farming and ranching; they exist because there is also a group of consumers, led by chefs and other highly food-interested people who insist on more honest food and who believe that “bigger”, “faster”, and “longer-lasting” aren’t the most important synonyms we can apply to our food and animal crops; lots of non-professionals who cook and blog who are strong advocates for a greater connection to our food and for preserving food culture; and environmentalists who aren’t just worried about how many of us will get skin cancer or the implications of rising sea levels, but also about how the depreciation of our environment threatens our food supply. Since the only things we need to do to stay alive are eat and breathe, it’s an excellent idea for scientists to focus their research efforts and advocacy toward perpetuating the health of our food supply.

So a food writer’s knowledge, e.g. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, encompass a huge landscape of extreme depth and breadth. It might be an interesting job.

It’s pretty cold here in S. Korea. Fortunately it hasn’t been too windy. I remember a few days in and around Chicago that were not only cold, but windy (No, it’s not called the Windy City because of the weather, but it might as well be the origin of its nickname.), and any exposed skin felt like it was being ripped off. I’m not talking about a little cold and a slight breeze, I’m talking about 5° F (-15° C) and strong gusts, about 30 mph (48 kph). It amazed me that people would choose to settle in a place where you’d experience that every year. And yes, my Canadian friends would laugh at me, they certainly have the right considering what they have to deal with.

And now I’m dealing with Chicago-type cold and wind. Insane. My only advice to someone who’s going out in it is to cover as much skin as possible. And get back inside as quickly as possible.

I feel strangely normal.