by Titus Green
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” (Marcel Proust)
Recently a surplus of time guided me to where it was certain to be squandered: the click-bait market that is YouTube. I tried to resist its infinite menu of distraction but instantly caved in and surrendered my attention. Unconsciously, the tip of my forefinger tapped on the entrance to this remote temple of sacrificed time, and an odd impulse prompted me to type ‘South Korea and Seoul 1997’ into the search bar. The website spat out grainy Reuters clips of riots with agitated young men hurling Molotov cocktails. Heavily armored riot police looking anachronistic in their lobster helmets and riot shields charged them, adding absurdity to the violence as they raised batons like advancing 17th century dragoons with pikes. Mountains of fire at the intersections contributed to the apocalyptic scene. Unable to reign in my 21st century internet attention deficit, my watching becomes promiscuous. I click on another short video paired with my search. This time it’s a vacuous autumn 1997 BBC report on strained labor relations between workers and management at a Hyundai factory in Ulsan. A somber union leader is interviewed at home breakfasting on kimchi and then the report cuts to a seated phalanx of bandana wearing workers chanting slogans and shaking fists in solidarity. Others hold placards with messages in red Hangul.
The search result disappoints me. Granted, this activity was going on during my employment at a hagwon in Kangnam from December 1996 to circa November 1997, but I needed scenes that complimented my cherished selection of flashbacks from what was a very eventful eleven months of my life. I wanted segments of gauche foreigners floundering in front of classroom whiteboards and their immaculately groomed, sharply dressed students watching the edutainment spectacle with neutral faces. The salarymen poised and inscrutable in their tailored wool corporate armor with Filofaxes unsheathed and pagers on the table. The demure young women laughing into their hands. I wanted to see noraebang (karaoke) scenes of foreign male teachers intoxicated and gripping microphones which protest with ear-splitting feedback at their butchered attempts to woo Miss Kim students with Michael Bolton ballads. I wanted montages of Itaewon discos when the neighborhood carried edge, perhaps minus the brash, crew-cut neanderthals from the Yongsan military base muscling into the nightlife. I expected thumbnail video recommendations stacked up on the right that would, like a digital genie, alchemize this content into the essence of what it was like to teach English in South Korea during the extraordinary hagwon boom phase of opportunism, excess and turbulence in the ‘90s. I yearned to hear the Spice Girls and Maria Carey’s saccharine lyrics warbling from the PA systems of the Seoul Pub, and then juxtapose them with the jarring chorus of Ju Ju Club’s contagious hit16/20 blaring out of radios and the Korean Broadcasting Service’s ubiquitous TV bubble gum pop concerts where the music was drowned out by the racket of screaming teen fans. I wanted the imagery of Seoul’s late 20th century nocturnal temptations that tempted and corrupted. Where were the dual barber shop poles spinning suggestively in the urban twilight? Those esoteric symbols conveying a naughty code that western tourists in Korea wouldn’t have a clue about. The poles that generated ribald innuendos and knowing side-glances from the company men in your last evening classes who always wanted to know more. Where was footage of Miari, the notorious duplicate of Amsterdam’s red-light area, and the sordid incline leading to the Twilight Zone of debauchery that was Hooker Hill?
I scroll some more, dredging YouTube’s dump of discarded happenings for videos that align with my 1997 Seoul vignettes. There’s Michael Jackson’s concert and visit, such a big deal that the King of Pop, in his Seoul Marriot Hotel suite, is holding court with President Kim. There is also blurry concert footage of obscure foreign grunge bands performing, coincidental cultural action I knew nothing about while I was looking at clumsy lesson plans scrawled onto Post-it-notes in my hagwon classroom. The selectivity of my recall becomes obvious: alongside my contractual confinement and ersatz teaching a parallel world of more significant affairs in South Korea circa ‘97 progressed indifferent to the insular hagwon routine that I lived. The real world was oblivious to my daily struggles, my complete absence of English language teaching know-how and the fatiguing attrition of six-lesson days that started at 7 am and ended at nine pm This disquieting epiphany shifts my attention from the past to the present.
I am now browsing a vast catalogue of videos from Generation Z hagwon adventurers making their way along the rutted and potholed 2025 Korean ESL El Dorado highway. These kids weren’t even born when Korea hosted the World Cup. Generation Tik Tok sharing its musings on the ‘hagwon yongo kangsa’ experience with virtual plastic surgery, headshot filters and AI thought assistance. They are the descendants of Dave’s ESL Café Korean Thread champions and the grandchildren of the hard-copy zine malcontent teaching expats opining in zero subscriber pamphlets which didn’t circulate beyond Itaewon’s boundaries and lived briefly before expiring from the cancers of indifference (‘other’ foreign expats working in Korea in 1997 interested in reading about the misadventures of E2 visa holders were countable on one hand) and the time poverty of the teacher editors and producers.
There are too many warning videos taking up the baton of complaint from the nineties and early noughties tellers of hagwon horror. It’s a surplus of negativity from the broadband pipeline I am loath to accept at face value given the passage of time and my jejune humanistic belief in ‘progress’ and notion that, with time and technology things eventually get better, even hagwon working conditions. Why I quit my hagwon job/The Negative Sides of Teaching in Korea/Hagwon Horror Story…Leaving my Second Hagwon/Do NOT Teach in Korea. The generic titles read like tabloid headlines of a story that has been static for thirty years. One of the uploaders, a surly-looking young man with a face galvanized by grievance, has an attention-hunting thumbnail image which shows him next to South Korea’s flag the Taeguki with two diagonal lines crossed through it – incendiary, provocative stuff. Lured by the bait, I click and the ESL malcontent appears hunched over the ubiquitous XLR microphone of choice for serious YouTubers intending to go pro with their GoPros and make a fortune. The uploader, a combustive, F-bomb dropping New Yorker gives a meandering and by now generic account of exploitation, foul-play and suffering as a newcomer to the by now jaded world of foreign English teaching machine in the realm of Korean English language academies. He wasn’t paid on time, wasn’t told about changes in his timetable and had half of the promised airfare withheld. Also, his apartment was in a noisy area, and the school proprietor wasn’t forthcoming about his ‘twoejikgum’ or severance pay. I console him in the comments but also state that things were even wilder and more hazardous for the unprepared but adventurous foreign English teacher surfing the peak of the ‘English Fever’ tsunami crashing through the country before the IMF meteor struck its economy at the end of ’97.
Believe it or not, the hagwon proprietors pulled more outrageous stunts back in the ‘90s – the industry was less regulated, foreigners had no help from the labour ministry and a much narrower range of visas to live in Korea with. It was also perversely more exciting and for people with a mercenary mentality, incredibly lucrative. The demand for English lessons from Koreans outside of the hagwon was enormous, with strangers soliciting you constantly on the street. I knew people who had five-figure side hustles on the qt, just turning up at private homes and company offices to be a ‘free talking’ conversational opportunity not available remotely or digitally in the internet’s nascent dial-up era. The ‘beepee cowboys’ who scheduled their private lessons or ‘privates’ with their pagers and rode the city’s metro as though it was a Silk Road and they traders carrying their overpriced syntax for sale. Seoul had become a genuine El Dorado for the English native speaker. A market for expensive and banal conversations costing 50,000 per hour.
My monologue soon gets responses. Some are curious, others dismissive. They made how much money teaching privately? Some of the snarkier, off-hand comments seem to have come from people who’ve never been to Korea and base their opinions on remote contact only with the contemporary culture. Episodes of Squid Games, soap dramas or K-Pop concerts from the current Hallyu generation ingested between Instagram uploads. However, the uploader is intrigued:
Was it really like that? Tell me more.
And so, following this prompt I turn a key on the rusty padlock on the sliding door on my warehouse of life experience. It is a musty space with shadowy recesses where archives of memory are decaying with depressing alacrity.
I’d first been to Seoul in the summer of 1996, taking in the buzz of the metropolis in the balmy heat. My first impression was of a city of youth, noise, enterprise and energy. Stall-holders proliferated on the sidewalks, selling clothes and watches and the cars and buses sped by with blaring horns and belching exhausts. Population density’s meaning became clear in the packed throngs in Namdaemun Market and at night the city turned into a dazzling neon adult playground of a million signs I couldn’t yet read that offered something. I felt lonely and locked out of a party, except when groups of inebriated men staggered out of the bright light joints and helloed me from across the street and then moved on, too drunk for English grammar. There were so few westerners around we competed for head-turns and stares. Startled by the shoving on the subway stations, and fed up of gawping middle-aged men staring at me (this anthropological absurdity moving through their streets) I took refuge in coffee shops and then ventured back out watching the speeding cars and pedestrians zipping about. I was approached by strangers who broke the ice with arcane openers (‘How do you do?’) and conveyed the same message with varying levels of clarity: they wanted to speak English like native speakers within three months. Bballi bballi. Koreans wanted things quickly.
I came across English language teacher expats with contrasting experiences. One was a recent American graduate in t-shirt and shorts trudging despondently through Itaewon.
“What’s wrong?” I asked sipping a sweet, creamy 30 won cup of jappangki vending machine coffee that I’d chosen in favour of Pocari Sweat, which didn’t sound appealing despite the sweltering heat.
“They’ve taken my passport. They’ve taken my money, my ticket. Everything,” he replied, looking at me with a wounded face.
“Who? Who’s taken everything?” I asked, surprised to hear about robbery in a country that had up to that moment impressed me with its lawfulness.
“The owners of my school. I had to live with them, teach their little brat son English and then be whored out to multiple elementary schools down in Changwon.”
I sympathized and suggested he approach the U.S. Embassy without delay, which is where he was in fact headed, carrying his invisible rucksack of misery for a hard-luck show-and-tell. Sipping beer in an Itaewon bar later, I conversed with a cynical, stocky Australian about teaching English in the country. I told him that I was amazed by the concentration of hagwons around Chongno and Kangnam.
“There seem to be hundreds, and when I walked through Chongno last night the managers of the school were calling me over to ask if I wanted a job.”
“Forget about the hagwons. They’re slave shops. I’m here on a tourist visa teaching privately. Do you know how much money I’m making?”
He boasted fluently for an hour, breaking down his monthly earnings and how he got the money out of the country. As I left for the airport for my flight back to England, I decided that teaching in this country was going to be a chapter of my life experience.
***
I was hired by the Global English Institute by fax machine in December 1996. After signing a very basic contract sparse of detail, I received papers to take to the Korean Embassy in London. Two weeks later, my passport arrived stamped with the E2 visa for ESL instructors, along with a British Airways one-way ticket.
The flight foreshadowed the jarring, chaotic rhythm of the next ten months. Delayed flight, rude staff and lost bags. I arrived in Seoul eight hours behind schedule leaving my future employers holding my name sign forlornly at arrivals. The nineties. The mobile phone free era when you lived in a different time-space continuum where guesswork replaced video calls if a person no-showed at appointed times. I reached a payphone, dialed Global English’s number and after some flustered IELTS band 3 level fluency responses and repetition requests on the other end of the line I got Mr. Kim, the school’s Academic Director, and I assured him I was en-route.
When I arrived at the school, stressed, exhausted and thrown out of joint by the wretched journey, I was met in the reception by Mr. Kim. He was a short, ruddy-cheeked, nonchalant man in his fifties. ‘Annyong Hashimnikka!” I said, greeting him formally using a memorized phrase from a Berlitz Learn Korean course.
“You are incredible! You speak Korean like a genius,” he said, flattering me with disproportionate praise for my rudimentary Korean.
I introduced myself to his sharply dressed subordinates, and it was an awkward interaction packed with ethnographic unease. Their smiles disguised an acute discomfort amplified by their limited English. I also said hello to the office ladies, who also struggled to express themselves and compensated with cringes.
“I am sorry for poor English,” one said. It was a sentence that would soon become ubiquitous, and I wondered how I would communicate with my Korean co-workers in the coming days.
Next, I met my fellow English native speaker teachers tasked with delivering high-value language learning experiences. They’d joined a few days before me and two of them came through the door. Kurt was 26, and a fellow generation Xer from Calgary who’d majored in Political Science and who, I learned later, had even more substantial student loan repayment debts than I did. The second teacher was Richard, whom it transpired was a former US soldier stationed in Korea now in a different army, a foreign legion of deserters escaping unemployability in the west with their liberal arts degrees.
“How was your flight?” Kurt asked earnestly. We shook hands.
“Terrible,” I laughed grimly and gave a condensed version of my journey from London.
“That was a flight to forget, eh?” said my new co-teacher with the distinctive Canadian question tag. “Well, things can only get better from here eh?” His optimism was welcome and momentarily injected me with hope for the job ahead. I liked Kurt, even if his constant eh made him sound, to British ears, like a bumpkin. When I smiled at Richard, non-verbally inviting him to comment on my anecdote and build some new-colleague rapport, I was surprised when he ignored this cue and just said, with a disconcerting bluntness, that ‘these are the breaks’.
“You’ve got to get with the program. Adapt to setbacks and adverse circumstances.”. Bitching about bad luck won’t help.”
I smiled incredulously at his response, this rather tactless and uncalled for micro lecture. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding: standards in humour crossing the Atlantic divide that just hadn’t aligned. My account of the dog’s toilet journey from London had been delivered in a deadpan way, with some dry, ironic asides. I intended to briefly entertain with it but certainly not elicit sympathy. Alternatively, I realized he could simply be obtuse, humorless and condescending. Unable to leave his military world of glib pep talks. Kurt, sensing the tension caused by Richard’s weird remark and my non-plussed reaction, stepped in with some encouragement.
“Mr. Kim’s bilingual. He’ll get your bags sorted and sent here when they’re found.”
“Right,” I said, glancing away from Richard so as not to show my irritation at his jerk dialogue. I took in the scowl etched into his face, his sandy hair and the tense energy in his features. I hadn’t known the guy for a minute yet the undisguised disapproval of me that emanated from his gaze was disconcerting. How on earth was this character going to put students at ease? Was he going to put them through an assault course? And tell them to push ten when they erred with grammar?
This was a new branch of Global English Institute that I was joining. Two floors of a commercial building close to Seollung subway station that had been renovated rapidly in the bballi bballi ethos into classrooms and a reception area and back offices on the first floor. Workmen darted here and there fitting doors and carrying furniture into the rooms. The toxic pong of glue hung in the air. There was a row of tables opposite the reception desk, on which were stacked boxes of new toasters. The dapper, taciturn office managers were conversing with Mr. Kim in the back office while the office girls were busy stacking a display shelf just inside the main entrance with English language textbooks. Side by Side by Molinski and Bliss took up most of the space, with the levels stacked vertically. The bright, cartoonish covers caught my eye along with AFKN English, which evidently had a connection to the first classroom in the school located on the left which had a prominent AFKN English Course sign on the door. There was a giant television inside the room. Mr. Kim approached us, shuffling languidly in his tweed jacket with his greying hair slicked over into a glossy Brylcreem comb-over.
“It’s all very impressive Mr. Kim,” I remarked, gesturing to the work in progress. He smiled and nodded.
“Do we know when the school is opening officially yet?” said Kurt, asking the key question since no communication with the school by phone, fax or snail mail on my part prior to arrival had yet yielded any answers on this important detail.
Our academic director, allegedly in post to assist and mentor us foreign English teachers, sucked air into the space between his teeth and cheek for a moment and tilted his head. He then frowned, as if what Kurt had asked was a theoretical physics question worthy of such a prelude to response.
“We cannot know what is not known,” he chuckled.
“But will we know soon?” I pressed. “We will need some advance notice to plan our lessons—and do we know which classes we’ll be teaching yet?”
Kurt’s face showed a willingness to know this, while all Richard did was sustain a supercilious half-smirk that I ignored.
“Will Mr. Moon make that decision?” asked Kurt. Mr. Moon was apparently the son of the school’s founder. A lofty figure that would be stopping by soon. It was during this brief lacuna before Mr. Kim’s next answer that my limited understanding of the communication norms of the culture advanced an increment. Behind his ambiguous smile, Kim couldn’t conceal what seemed a bizarre exasperation at this barrage of questions from staff, albeit foreign, who were junior to him in the Korean hierarchy schematic.
“The other teachers, look—they’re here,” said Kim deflecting Kurt’s question into the ground and pointing at our colleagues arriving through the main door. Both of them were ladies. Belinda was a confident, outgoing New Yorker in her thirties and Shelly was a younger Korean-American woman barely out of college clearly returning to the country of her heritage to start chipping away at her student loans. She seemed aware and streetwise. Kim left us to get to know each other and disappeared into a meeting or errand. We sat at one of the long tables stacked high with electric toasters.
I asked them when they’d arrived and where they were staying, temporarily, until their more permanent accommodation was arranged.
“Oh, they’ve booked us into a yogwan just up the street,” said Shelley. “Yeah, and they’re going to show us our apartment tomorrow—what about you guys?” The follow-up question was Belinda’s. The way she looked at me, spoke and sat conveyed unconsciously her superior life experience and street smarts. She was an attractive woman, and I wondered if she was married.
“Do we have any idea about that Kurt? The contract said we would get housing right?” I had been disconcerted by the vagueness of content in the housing clause of the contract.
“I arrived last week, and I’ve been staying with a Korean buddy,” he replied, adding: “But I think we’re supposed to be sharing an apartment, when they’ve got it all arranged.” I’d definitely lucked out with Kurt and not Richard as a roommate, but that when clause took up all my attention because the Global English hagwon story so far seemed written in Mr. Kim’s riddles. Definite answers and timelines did not seem to be in his lexicon.
“Well, I hope we know soon. It’s kind of reassuring to know where the roof over your head’s going to be. You know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and all that.”
“Right,” concurred Kurt.
“TIK. This is Korea. It isn’t Toronto and it sure isn’t London,” sneered Richard unhelpfully.
“Well, where are you living then?” I enquired.
“Got my own place from my previous job. Overlooks Yongsan and it’s 9 pyong,” he said, emphasizing the Korean unit of measurement just to make sure we knew the palatial splendour he lived in.
I excused myself, needing to get out of Richard’s zone and explore the premises. I went upstairs and noticed that each classroom was named after a member of the great and good from English speaking civilization. Room 10 was Walt Disney. I hoped our courses weren’t Mickey Mouse because they sure weren’t going to be cheap. Next to this there was Alfred Hitchcock, juxtaposed by Michael Jordan, who was the patron saint of classroom 12. Completing this bizarre sequence of celebrity was Bruce Willis down on the door of room 13. Hitchcock seemed apt given that everything about the job was thus far a mystery, and Mr. Kim was the wizened, enigmatic old crone withholding the script that had to be teased out of him with cunning and patience.
I went back down to the reception. My colleagues were huddled pigeon-like around around Kim who was throwing us crumbs of information. It was nearly seven in the evening and jet lag had me close to a state of collapse. I could have curled up in the corner of one of the classrooms, put my coat over my head and gone into hibernation.
“Let’s have dinner together,” said Kim with cheer. “We will take you to the hotel afterwards,” he added, addressing only me since Kurt was still lodging with his Korean friend. And so, with the Korean staff, we proceeded to a restaurant close to the school and had a large grill of bulgogi, samgyopsal and a plethora of chilled soju and side-dishes. The atmosphere was genial, and the booze was reducing the reserve of Kim’s male subordinates Mr. Choe and Mr. Song, who wanted to know the intimate details of our lives. Mr. Kim interpreted their questions competently. Was Belinda married? Why didn’t she have children yet? At her age? Initially flustered by these unfiltered and forthright enquiries that weren’t likely to come from her usual interlocutors in the coffee shops of Manhattan, she replied that she was a career woman and added, archly, that one didn’t usually ask such questions to ladies in America. My relationship status was checked next, and then Kurt. His reply in the negative, when translated, triggered a short burst of coquettish giggling from the office girls whose eyes were becoming progressively glassier.
As the dinner progressed, Shelly took over the interpreting. Richard had a girlfriend but wasn’t willing to elaborate. I noted how frequently he checked his pager and the shifty, evasive side glances of a born grifter. I also noted the complex etiquette in Korean group drinking, such as how Mr. Choe gripped the Jinro soju bottle with two hands when pouring for Kim and how he turned his head to the side and covered the glass with his hand when consuming his own soju. It was fascinating.
Belinda had worked in art marketing at a gallery in Greenwich Village, but the trade in paintings had taken a downtown and before long it was a struggle to make the rent. Serendipity intervened, placing a Teach English in South Korea classified ad from the Village Voice in front of her as she sipped a latte and contemplated moving back in with her parents. Shelly had majored in Journalism but could not even secure an internship for a minor paper in Los Angeles. “You could write an expose on the hagwon industry,” I said innocently, slurring my speech as the soju and jetlag worked like anesthetic. She gave me a wry grin. Richard revealed himself reluctantly, giving us only morsels of fact about his background and maintaining his man of mystery front.
Before we left the restaurant, Mr. Kim told us there would be a teacher’s meeting the following morning. Mr. Choe led me to the hotel. Its entrance was covered with long black rubber slats, the function of I tried to guess because Choe could not explain them in English. We entered the reception, where the businesslike ajumma processed my arrival. Mr. Choe escorted me to the room, and we passed a colossal condom vending machine in the hallway. This, combined with the privacy slats and the soft pink lighting of my room when I entered indicated the clientele of the establishment only too clearly. I slumped onto the bed, ready to enter a one-week coma of sleep. I thanked Mr. Choe and said goodnight but was aghast when Choe put his arm around my shoulder and started stroking my arm with a tenderness that made me flinch. I told him I needed to sleep, instantly, and declared this with irritation. He stared at me with wounded, puppy-dog eyes moistened by the soju excesses and I feared some extreme reaction, some drama when all I wanted to do was exit consciousness. “I AM SO-REE,” he said, dismantling the syllables. “This SKINSHIP man and man.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but said it was O.K. and goodnight. Soon my head touched a soft laundered pillow, and the crazy decision to teach in Korea, my lost baggage and the chaos of the school could be confronted in the morning.
When I entered the school reception the next day, I was relieved to see my suitcase outside Kim’s office. When the Academic Director shuffled around the corner, I thanked him for reuniting me with my luggage. Mr. Choe and Mr. Song, sitting in the back office, were discussing something and seemed unaffected by the industrial volume of alcohol they’d consumed the night before. They returned my greeting perfunctorily.
I had a chance to talk to the Kurt alone before the others arrived for the meeting.
“What do you think of the set-up Kurt? It all seems a bit—how can I put this charitably—disorganized.” I laughed the last word out gently, not wanting to dampen my future roommate’s spirit. However, he reinforced my concern with his own apprehension.
“Yeah, they seem to be doing things on the fly, especially with our housing.”
“Indeed, I don’t want to be staying in that knocking shop they’ve put me into long term,” I replied. “I also can’t believe they don’t know when they’re opening yet, or what we’re teaching. Is that normal?”
“Well, as Richard said TIK,” said Kurt, surveying the increasing traffic of Koreans coming in and out of the premises. Clusters of them, mostly young and all impeccably dressed, congregated around the back offices. For the first time I saw the complex etiquette of name-cards being exchanged and the measured bows. There was a system of decorum here for sure.
“Are they teachers?” I asked and Kurt nodded.
“Yep. For the TOEIC classes, I think. That guy over there is Mr. Bae, I met him yesterday. He’s cool.”
“Have you seen the names of the classrooms?” I asked incredulously. Kurt shook his head and I explained what I’d seen, which cracked him up. Belinda and Shelly arrived and sat with us, and then Mr. Kim shuffled up to us with textbooks wedged under each arm. Mr. Choe followed behind, also with books. Once seated, Mr. Kim distributed sheets of paper to each of us, which had crude, dot-matrix printer tables on them. In the left column were our names, with columns going across indicating the classes, class levels and lesson times. It wasn’t the class level (mine was 2, whatever that signified) that caught my attention. What shocked me was the extremity of the time spectrum. For all of us, our first lessons started at 7.00 am and our last finished at 9 pm with a giant airstrip-size gap of seven hours between the end of our morning sessions at 11.00 am and the start of the evening session at 6pm.
“So, we’ll be getting up very early Mr. Kim?” I said.
Kim smiled and nodded, and while he glanced back towards the reception Kurt and I swapped bemused glances.
“Teaching at seven!” This was Belinda, conveying her dismay in nasal, New-Jersey tone.
“And when does the school open?” asked Kurt with a frown. Nobody had commented on Richard’s absence so far, but it had been silently noted.
“Tomorrow,” said Kim.
Surveying the disorder, the classroom doors still being fitted, and absence of any teacher’s room or resources I glanced at my colleagues’ disbelieving expressions.
