White Monkey by Carlos Hughes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a hilarious take on the English teacher in a foreign country story. To those who have been there, the stages are familiar. For the rest, it goes like this: A twenty-something with a university education but limited prospects accepts a job in the Far East. This character usually feels they don’t fit in back home and is naive about life in general. Here our protagonist is Darren, a redhead who goes to teach in South Korea. He comes from Wigan, an industrial town in the North of England with a great rugby league and opaque accent. You could say that about any town north of Manchester.
In England, the only opportunity on the horizon for Darren is to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a rubbish collector. At university in Huddersfield, Darren escapes Wigan for a few years…and finds some happiness. But things take a turn for the worse when his girlfriend abandons him for a mate. And it doesn’t help that his degree is in sociology – a course of study with fewer career prospects than philosophy. But then he finds a job as a teacher in Korea, much to the horror of his dad. Darren’s dad is a comic repository of all opinions non-politically correct. For him, the difference between North and South Korea doesn’t exist and his son is abandoning the family transition to go work under the Great Leader.
Darren’s teaching career in Korea is an amusing string of anecdotes with larger than life characters. His boss is the racist, cowboy-hat-wearing Mr Kim, who wants female American teachers but since his English cram school or ‘Hagwon’ is out in the whops, he has to take what foreigners he can get. Darren was promised he’d be in the capital Seoul, not the middle of nowhere – a typical trick recruiters use on newbies. Mr Kim hasn’t caught up that the West has become multicultural. The below is my favourite of the many disagreements between Darren and Mr Kim:
‘No!’ grunted Mr Kim.
I looked at him in disbelief. ‘I thought you asked us to bring our friends over to work for you. This guy was at univers–’ but Mr Kim tutted loudly.
‘I want teacher who look like Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie and sound like John Wayne, not look like Al Qaeda.’
‘John Wayne? What? Are you serious?’
‘I want my teachers to look and sound like Hollywood. Your friend looks like Osama bin Laden. Also,’ he took back the CV and scrutinised the paper in front of him, ‘Asif, no English name.’
‘English name? You know that people called John, Mark or Paul haven’t got English names either? For your information, he’s as English as me! Supports Liverpool, works in Poundland in Bradford! You don’t get more English than–’ but I was interrupted.
‘Parents don’t like dirty skin, so he no good. Last teacher I employed with dirty skin put witchcraft on students.’
‘Parents don’t like dirty skin? Witchcraft?’ I repeated to myself, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘The only person I will employ with dirty skin is Dr Cliff Huxtable.’
I let the image compute in my brain for a few seconds. In fact, it took me more than 20 seconds to get what he was blabbering on about until my brain focused on the words I
was hearing. ‘What? The only black person you will employ to teach here is a fictitious TV character played by Bill Cosby?’
‘Dr Cliff Huxtable looks like a kind guy, nice guy, the only dirty-skin person who will ever be employed at my school.’ And with that he scrunched up Asif ’s CV and threw it in the waste-paper basket. He looked straight at me and muttered, ‘Not even Bill Cosby would be employed here. Now you go back to work!’ he shouted.
Having read Dave’s ESL Korea Forum in the 2000s, I know these kinds of abusive Korean bosses were all too common when the Hagwon industry was at its height. Mr Kim is one hundred per cent an arsehole as is American teacher Joe. The obese Joe gets a ‘dong chim’ from the equally chubby Gordon, a student of ten. The dong chim is a game played by Korean boys where they stick their fingers up somebody’s arse. Joe’s reaction is to punch Gordon. Later that night Darren finds Joe drunk, naked and watching a video of himself shagging a ladyboy in Thailand. Needless to say, Joe doesn’t return to the school. The teachers come and go at Mr Kim’s Hagwon – it’s an industry with a high turnover.
The previous novel I read in this genre (whacked-out English teachers in Asia) was Quincey Carroll’s ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside’. Carroll is a real prose stylist but unfortunately one of his three main characters, Thomas, has no redeeming features and no backstory. A test of a good book for me is if some of the baddies are not all bad. The coordinator of foreign teachers in ‘White Monkey’, Kevin, is certainly an arsehole. He is lazy, racist and chases girls far too young for him. However, he comforts Darren on several occasions and sympathises with him – recognising in the younger man some of the troubles he went through when he first arrived in Korea. Darren himself if not a hero is neither an antihero. He is fairly ignorant and impulsive but he tries to put right what he does wrong. I also liked that his American girlfriend in Korea, Natalie, dumps him and then refuses to talk to him ever again. I thought this was realistic of relationships between twenty-somethings – do any of us miss those times?
Darren avenges Joe and other teachers dong chimed by Gordon by giving “the fat little bastard” cake laced with laxatives. This had me cracking up – who doesn’t want to give annoying students a dose of the shits? Undoubtedly this kind of thing will offend some though. Occasionally I wished the writing was more concise but the book had me laughing out loud on several occasions – and for that rarity, I can give it five stars.
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