the Green Onion

Foreign Teacher Judges English Contest, Impressed by Originality and Weightiness of Students’ Essays

English Teacher James Cohen (Foreign) received a request to judge an English contest nearly a minute before it was to take place, and found himself “floored” by the experience.

“Who would have thought of beginning a third grade essay with ‘four-score and seven years ago’?” Cohen wondered in all sincerity, “and then to spice it up with that hip political jab ‘malice towards none,’ oh yeah… I was just floored. Our students not only have a much more encyclopedic vocabulary than I knew, they also are up on all sorts of current events and hot topics.”

“Well,” one of James’ students said upon hearing his comment “[American] society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it. Anyway, all I’m saying is give peace a chance.”

“See?” James indicated in a gesture of floored wonderment. “They are something else.”

When one of his stateside friends expressed doubt in the authorship of James’ star students’ contribution, James acknowledged that some speeches were not in his students’ “usual halting voice.”

“I was a bit concerned about one essay which, if I understood correctly, was rating the effectiveness of various contraceptives. I heard the word ‘herpes’ in a nine-year-old’s biographical sentence and it did cross my mind that this could have been borrowed from a Planned Parenthood in New Jersey, but then I realized it was a dramatic flourish…ahhh, they blow my mind.”

Some of James’ friends and acquaintances remain unconvinced but, if nothing else, according to James, the resourcefulness and “pure plaigaric prowess” of these elementary school students is something to admire.

Anorexic Foreigner Wishes Everyday Were Pepero Day

Macy Szheinsman awoke to her 4:30 alarm this morning suffering severe withdrawals from Pepero Day.

“It ended too soon; I was still working on cards to send back home to my friends and family, wishing them all sorts of chronically painful symptoms and rail thin body-frames…” She mourned mournfully.

Macy has found a way to keep the spirit of Pepero day alive however by instituting a Pepero-only diet for herself, and chronicles her journey in an oddly angular diary that she hopes to publish one day as a how-to manual.

“I began the day with an indulgent nibble on my Wednesday Pepero stick, one cup black coffee, 120 crunches, 50 of those swinging around things in the pivoty self torture device in the park, and one laxative. I’m ready for a festive day.”

At school, after her first three classes, Macy recorded an additional nibble on the same Peppero stick and began worrying that she was moving through the feast too speedily.

For lunch, she purged.

During her journey home, Macy judged everyone she saw until she allowed her mind to wander hallucinatorily, replacing the human figures around her with lanky sticks of stale cookie-matter drizzled with a mysteriously non-chocolate substance, and found her spirits much refreshed by the time she arrived back at her apartment.

Once home, Macy divided her evening into three more nibbles to finish off her Pepero spread, and chain-smoked in the interims.

“Good Pepero Night,” Macy told herself in the mirror, “but not good enough.”

And then she called herself a bad name, because she didn’t look anything like candy.

Foreigner Meets Other Foreigner, Makes no Acknowledgment

At the junction of the live fish market and the cotton candy stand in Gunsan-si yesterday, April Vagner and Joey Giles, both foreigners, briefly encountered one another in passing.

“I first observed his gait,” April recalled, “it was irregular; he held his shoulders up like they were a separate weight and he appeared to be using his backpack to its full capacity as a survival trove, just like I do. I registered this just for a second and then pretended to be trying to sound out the piano academy sign on a distant fourth floor window.”

“Yeah, I saw her too, probably at exactly the same time,” Giles said.

The pair gave one another short wary smiles and then hurried in opposite directions.

“About ten feet away, I did mutter ‘hi,’” Joey said irrelevantly, “but I made sure the volume was so low I couldn’t hear it through my earphones.”

The incident contrasts sharply with one that occured last month in the neighboring town of Gimje, where two foreigners with absolutely nothing in common met at a Nongyup Bank, began hanging out at length and have nothing left to talk about.

Asked to describe an average encounter, both foreigners were free with their assessments:

“She begins by gabbering about her ex, the emotional fallout of her mid-twenties abortion, the challenges of purchasing somber clothing in her size or some shit… “

“Then he usually raps at me, uses words I don’t comprehend and keep awkwardly mistaking for obscenities, and finally I locate English errors on the menu while he plans a camping trip in nauseating detail.”

“It’s not rap; it’s spoken poetry,” he corrected.

“He’s patronizing and vain,” She added.

Obama: “U.S. Envies South Korea”

President Barack Obama held a midweek press conference yesterday to introduce his new “Copy Korea” initiative.

The plan purportedly broadens the scope of the President’s comments last year about Korean school children out performing U.S. children, turning sundry generalized assumptions about Korean culture into national U.S. policy.

“It’s time for some all-out copycatting, some good old fashioned Korea 같아요,” President Obama announced in folksily fluent Korean.

“It’s not enough to say ‘lets style our educational system after theirs.’ Times are changing, envy is everywhere and we must confess it: we need their job culture too.

“Small businesses are the core of both U.S. and South Korean economies, but let’s face it, they do it better. For every convenience store where we hire one or two strung-out workers, South Korea manages to employ not ten or twenty but thirty-six men and women to stock shelves, inventory merchandise, point out any foreigners or unusual people, and bow fantastically low at entrances.Think what would happen to our unemployment numbers were we to emulate such a scheme.

“We need their political culture too. To inform and reform our own. Instead of campaigning in cut-throat fashion three years out of a four year term, let’s do it all at once a week or two before, with sashes and gyrating church-ladies disturbing the peace in ever more aurally grating ways. I’m talking K-pop blaring through residential neighborhoods, monstrous dog claws on chalkboards, and in the end the loudest, most annoying candidate wins.”

To those resisting his plan, the president had a hard-line, straightforward rebuff:

“It’s already begun. It begins in my own cabinet. After this press conference, I will be dismissing all female staffers (permanently if you’re pregnant) and the boys and I will visit a daintily named place where we will receive some sort of sexual favor from young girls in exchange for money, all in company but somehow not homo-orgily.”

In response, Republican candidates are expected to hold a pre-presidential debate on topics of Korean theme, such as “Is Kim Jong-il to be our new go-to dictator to compare opponents to?” and “Was Obama born in Buk-gu?”

Foreigner Inspires Foreign Community to Give Korea Another Chance

Chase Kastler has begun gently advising his fellow foreigners to be “better neighbors” during their temporary Korean residences.

 “Go, therefore,” he urged earnestly at the Wednesday evening gathering that has formed around his teachings. “Go on hwaesheeks. I’m sure you’ve heard it said that attending noraebangs with coworkers will build relationships; I say to you, study the tambourine for six months, treat a tour-bus full of ajummas out for a night on the town, and see how many friends you will have made.

“Also, learn Hangul, and maybe even a little Korean.”

For some, his words are a dissonant mixture of common sense and preposterously artificial Jesus-posturing, but for others they elicit strong sensations of guilt and inadequacy that are “unmistakable harbingers of a new religious leader.” 

“I’m trying to be ‘even-tempered, as Chase himself is even-tempered,’” Elly Sweetfield confessed tearily near the end of the meeting, when participants were invited to join Chase in a shot of stale Hite and flat pancakes filled with dandelion stems, “But I’m a highly self-conscious person and I intensely dislike having people point at me, spit on me, expose their genitals to me unprompted, or talk about me - in veiled language, in sign-language, in any language - at any time. Korea is hard for me, but now I see I’m not progressive, and need to be more like Chase.”

“I learned the same lesson,” Chase’s former college roommate states, “back when he used to force me to listen to this version of Bohemian Rhapsody by Dresden Dolls, insisting that it was the best cover ever. The guy has strong opinions, he’s really sure of himself and very repetitive, so, yeah, I don’t know anything about Korea but everyone around him should probably share his views.”

Korean Chiropractic Conference Makes Headway in Curing Chronic Back Pain

Participants in the Eighteenth Annual Han Chiropractic Conference last week in Seoul have presented the world some groundbreaking recommendations expected to improve back health.

Dr. Lee, one of the key speakers at the conference, described their process of enlightenment in this way:

“I was at the podium, vocalizing unremittingly, when a commotion drew my attention to the left where an ancient personage was bent at something like a 15 degree angle with a miniature broom in her hands, sweeping away the remains of a glutinous rice cake.”

Lee stopped his prepared speech and instead challenged his colleagues to consider the factors involved in the cleaning woman’s stooped stance.

“We were all simultaneously struck with the diminutive nature if the broom that all but forced atrocious posture.”

Conference members appropriated the broom and began examining it. What happened next surely belongs in history books.

“Dr. Lee, our dear conference leader, spoke to us from the mouth of a seagull and told us to add 40cm of hollow piping to the top of the broom handle, making the broom 95cm total,” conference attendee Cho Hae-Young said, “so now one can sweep from a comfortably upright position.”

Foreigner Appalled at Accommodation Options on 2010 Census

The gathering process completed, participants have now only to gossip about the questions asked by last year’s census-takers, who came door-to-door to conduct the paperwork necessary to count anyone not previously accounted for by the pizza place, cow eating place, prostitution place and local church that solicited at said same door earlier in the day.

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All-American Thirteen Year Old Boy Fired From Designing T-shirts For Korean Women

Dakota Wilson, an adolescent with predictably unimaginative senses of humor and sexuality, has been forced to resign his role designing slogans to print on Korean women’s knee length t-shirts.

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