A tightly written, hilarious, and with hindsight tragic memoir of Shawn Matthews’ first three months in Korea teaching at a Hagwon on an island off the coast of Busan.
A qualified teacher working as a mental health counsellor for low pay, Matthews is living in Syracuse, New York. He still pines after his ex-girlfriend. He seems very low energy, and his one joy is playing with his cat. He has no idea how he’ll pay back his student loans. Why did he major in teaching? When he tried teaching teenagers, he found they were devils incarnate. But then he stumbles across the idea of teaching in Korea. ‘Don’t worry, over there you will be like movie star! Korean think all American are movie star!’ his recruiter Mr Wong says. But Mr Wong isn’t Korean…he hasn’t even been to Korea.
Arriving in Korea, Matthews meets his bosses Mr and Mrs Kim who will make his life hell. He is the only teacher at his hagwon English school and so very isolated. He gets down, he drinks, he tries to find a girlfriend in all the wrong places…there are many red flags for his mental health. But he also makes an effort to get out and about to the beaches, to the bars, and the restaurants – where he gags on the local seafood.
“I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so excited to face a new day. Back in New York, the morning brought about a looming sense of darkness and dread. Here everything was new, different and bright, mysterious and attractive. I wanted to embrace this sensation, hold onto it forever—the freshness, the anticipation of what lay ahead.”
There is a hilarious interaction with his grandfather through yahoo messenger – a good reminder of how we communicated at that time. There is no specific time reference but I’m guessing it’s 2001 or 2002 and the author is in his late twenties. In the end he has to escape the Kims, the honeymoon period of being in a new place has ended all too quickly.
“I hoped to evoke the exhilarating feeling I had when I first arrived in Korea. Instead, I felt as dirty and polluted as the water, full of empty cans, styrofoam, and other debris. As a used menstruation pad floated by, I realized I wasn’t going to recapture any magic.”
He would have been better off at a school with other foreign teachers when he first got to Korea…although an obvious loner who liked to stay at home listening to Radiohead…he needed guidance and support. The Kims were certainly not giving him that. They just wanted him in class as much as possible to make them money. Fair enough, but some pastoral care would have helped them get more mileage out of their cash cow. Korea, Japan, and China, while wonderful cultures and safe, are at the same time very alienating and have a different work culture to the West. Matthews’ subsequent adventures were recorded on his blog. Unfortunately, his mental state got worse after a move to Beijing…and we didn’t get any more books from this gifted writer.
You can still buy the PDF of Island of Fantasy on lulu.com for about 3 USD. Sadly, it’s not on Amazon Kindle. Hell, write to me and I’ll send you the PDF for free! But as I said to a friend, I can’t even get people to read my books…so why bother trying to get them to read the works of other obscure writers!?
His other book available on lulu, Korea Life Blog Special Edition, contains Island of Fantasy and some material from his blog. We have the saga of Windy, an annoying student; Matthews looking after stray cats in the neighbourhood; and some short profiles of vegetable hawkers and people selling things on the subway. Korea Life Blog Special Edition finishes with a short memoir of a trip Shawn and a friend took. It’s written by the friend, and compared with Matthews’ witty, concise prose, it’s a terribly dull read. Many who’ve been to Asia to teach English have wanted to write about it, very few have managed to do a good job of it. That’s why I treasure what we got from Matthews. He won’t hit you with kitchen sink details about culture and history like the patron saint of ESL teachers cum writers, Mr Peter Hessler, but he will make you laugh and cry.
By coincidence, Peter Hook of New Order and Joy Division fame was in town a few days after I read Island of Fantasy. I went to the concert of Peter Hook and the Light, which was split into two halves. They played New Order’s songs first, and Joy Division’s in the second half. While I love both bands, Ian Curtis’s Joy Division lyrics are a step above. I’m guessing that Curtis and Matthews had a lot in common. They had a knack of describing their innermost feelings using carefully selected words and weren’t well-equipped to deal with relationship problems or depressive episodes. Maybe the links I’m making are arbitrary and only seem meaningful to me because of happenstance. Nevertheless, both were talents gone too soon.