Josh Philip Ross

So much comes from asking the right questions.

As part of the writing project I mentioned back on my birthday, I’ve compiled a sprawling reading list to answer questions that have emerged as I’ve begun to think about my travels in India.

One of the books that’s a bit further afield is a brand new work, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I’m only a little way in, but already it has helped to reframe a great deal. They argue convincingly that the Enlightenment, and European ideas of equality and freedom — concepts rarely discussed in the Middle Ages — emerged from a serious intellectual engagement with a broad Native American critique of European society. (There is also a fascinating aside in which they point out that Europe, seemingly out of nowhere, adopted a system of culturally uniform states administered by liberal arts-educated bureaucrats who passed competitive exams, and did so after Leibniz and his followers specifically cited China as a model of statecraft, and that no one ever talks about this.)

Their insights come from asking a brilliant question: Why did Europe become obsessed with liberty and equality when it did? Instead of reiterating either Rousseau or Hobbes, as most scholars of prehistory tend to do in trying to understand ancient human societies (it’s there in Guns, Germs and Steel, which came out the year I went to India), they start by asking how Rousseau and Hobbes came to be interested in a supposed state of nature, and how they came to believe that inequality was something that happened, not something that always was.

The Enlightenment as an encounter

Their answer focuses on a neglected element of the Enlightenment, which they argue was to a great extent a response to Native American critiques of Western society. They point out that one of the reasons travel literature became so popular in that era was that it revealed alternative social possibilities: the way things were was not the way they had to be.

This dovetails with a track closer to my own study, which is the idea of an Oriental renaissance in Europe, a kind of sequel to the Greco-Roman renaissance with which we’re familiar. The emergence of ancient literatures predating the Bible, especially Sanskrit literature, inspired a burst of creativity and critique in Europe in the nineteenth century that led, circuitously, to Helena Blavatsky locating her mystic Masters in Tibet, to Nietzche naming his most famous work after an ancient Persian, to the invention of Shangri La in 1931, to Nazis adopting the swastika, to people like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg and Ram Dass voyaging to India in search of wisdom, to the Beatles recording “Within You, Without You,” and to yours truly taking a Cosmic Air flight through the Himalayas.

The biggest joke

I’ve worried sometimes that all this reading — I’m 3000 pages in, with 5000 pages to go, if I don’t add any more books — is a way of avoiding the actual writing. But then I think back to my master’s thesis, a mere 48 pages that emerged from four years of graduate school and two separate research trips to Korea. It takes time to gather all the pieces.

If you want an example of the long, discursive process of creation, you can do worse than watching Peter Jackson’s four-million-hour Get Back documentary. There’s a lot of screwing around, and a lot of journeying down interesting but fruitless byways, to create “Let It Be” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” and there are also unexpected serendipities like the appearance of Billy Preston that make things work. I have to remind myself to let the journey unfold — which is something I suppose I had to do in the first place back in India.

I was struck by Paul McCartney talking about his own time in India, when he wasn’t much older than I was back in 1997. “We probably should have been ourselves a lot more,” he says, and George Harrison replies that this is the biggest joke — that they’d gone to India to find their true selves. Then he adds, “if you were really yourself, you wouldn’t be any of who we are now.”

Is that why I went to India? And was I myself while I was there? Part of being confronted by cultures so different from my own was coming to grips with who I actually was, what was me and what was merely my situation. It’s the question Conrad asks in Heart of Darkness, and it’s the question that encounters with new cultures posed to Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Bonus: The reading list

If this all feels a little wandery and unfocused, that’s because it is. That’s where I’m at, and it’s great to be here. More will unfold as the research continues! For those of you who want to read along, here’s the list so far.

If you’ve spent time hiking in the Korean mountains, you know they can be more treacherous than they look. The trail gives way to open granite slabs, or clings to an unexpected cliff edge, or there’s a rope you need to pull yourself up by, and a chasm waiting below if your grip fails.

But in my experience, these visible danger spots aren’t where you get hurt. The twisted ankles and surprise tumbles come on the way down, at the end, when your legs are shaky and your mind has wandered from the trail to the cool drink you’ll have when you reach the inevitable country restaurants at the bottom of the mountain. The end of the trail stretches out longer than you thought it would. You see a drink machine and think you must be almost done, but the drink machine won’t take your money, and the trail veers unexpectedly into a boulder-strewn riverbed. The packs of overdressed hikers you passed on the way up seem to have disappeared. You start to wonder if you’re even on the right path. You look around for shortcuts.

This is where we are now with coronavirus in Korea. The sense of impending crisis is long gone. We know the end is near, but we’re not sure how long it will be until we get there, and we’re tired. We’re all going to get vaccinated sooner or later, but we hoped it was sooner, and it’s later. We’ve watched our friends and family get vaccinated in the US or elsewhere, watch as life back home has started getting back to normal — a normal, it should be noted, that looks a lot like how things have been pretty much all along in Korea, but still.

It’s easy to get frustrated under the circumstances. As far as vaccines go, the short-lived program to give leftover AstraZeneca doses to people under 60 felt especially demoralizing. It was never more than marginal — the no-show rate is just 2% — and the rollout of the Naver and Kakao reservation platforms was a technical feat, but it still felt like a bait and switch. It’s the broken drink machine before the boulder field.

But the trail does have an end. Teachers and high school seniors will be vaccinated during the summer break in July. A timetable for people under 60 is supposed to be announced in the third week of June, just a couple of weeks away. Herd immunity by November is still the goal.

When you’re in that boulder field, tired and thirsty, there’s nothing to do but keep moving and stay cautious. That’s where we are, and that’s what we need to do.

Most people don’t know this about me, but I was an award-winning rapper way back when. I was recognized for my rap game before Native Tongues, before Colors, before N.W.A. or “Boyz-n-the-Hood.” I have a certain claim to having been there early, if not actually at the beginning.

That I was recognized by the Kiwanis Club of San Rafael, California, bears mentioning. As a sixth grader at Miller Creek Middle School, in Marinwood, I won second prize in a contest they sponsored to make promos for a sober graduation. If this sounds like the whitest thing ever, that’s because it was.

The idea to make a rap was not my own. That came from, I think, my social studies teacher, who was also the art teacher. I have no idea what she knew about rap or why she thought I ought to try it. At that point, I only owned two rap albums, Run-DMC’s Raising Hell and The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill. I’d seen Breakin’ 2: Eletric Boogaloo in the theater, and I remember my dad saying he liked “You Be Illin’.” We had only recently stopped calling the genre “break dancing music.” In the next year or two, I’d get to know the Colors soundtrack, Kool Moe Dee, and the dirty raps of 2 Live Crew and Too Short. But that was all in the future. In sixth grade, The Beastie Boys were everything. I remember a field trip where the entire bus was chanting “Paul Revere.” No idea where we were actually going.

I may have known next to nothing about hip hop, but I took the rap recording very seriously. I can’t recall now where I got my beats, but I must have had them. I can’t remember any lyrics except for the final words, delivered with all the toughness I could muster: “Don’t … drink … and driiiiive.” I do remember laboring over one particular line where I could put the rhythmic emphasis either of two ways, and I liked them equally. I worked hard on my delivery.

I didn’t know anything about the Kiwanis Club or similar organizations. My grandfather was a Freemason because it made his father-in-law happy, but he had zero interest in it by the time I was born. My parents were hippies who didn’t go in for that sort of thing. We did Indian Guides instead of Boy Scouts. So the award ceremony, held at a Kiwanis luncheon, was like a visit to a foreign country. They started with grace and then the Pledge of Allegiance. It freaked me out. I’d never heard anyone say grace before. Hamotzi, sure. Grace, no.

The prize was two shares of Pacific Gas & Electric, worth about forty dollars, which, if I had held on to them until today, would be worth about twenty dollars. I don’t remember ever selling them, but I must have. It’s not much, but I can say honestly that I got paid for my award-winning rhymes before Jay-Z or Biggie or Pac ever did.

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn, Kiwanis Club.

Nearly twenty years ago, I came to Korea to teach English at an after-school academy. As a starting teacher, I got 2.1 million won a month and a place to live. Astonishingly, this is still exactly what new teachers get. The exchange rate has hardly budged for decades, always hovering around 1100 won per dollar, which amounts to about $1900 a month, or $23,000 a year. What has changed is how much those dollars are worth in real terms, and also how much everyone else in Korea is earning.

Inflation and GDP

Let’s look at inflation first. If hagwon salaries kept up with inflation, the starting rate would be about 3.1 million (about $2850 a month, or $34,000 a year) — not exactly riches, but above the median personal income in the United States. (US and Korean inflation have tracked closely, so the same is roughly true in dollar terms.) Throw in the free housing, and you’ve got a salary that was close to what dot-coms were handing out in those years to inexperienced college grads, and something well above what you could get starting out in publishing (these are the fields I poked around in, so it’s what I know about).

But in terms of wealth and what it feels like, a huge factor is how much you’re making compared to people around you. And that’s where things have changed most drastically for English teachers in Korea.

In 2001, the per capita GDP in Korea was $11,561 (2001 dollars). As an English teacher, you were making nearly double the per capita GDP, and you didn’t have housing expenses. This didn’t make you rich exactly, but it was enough money that you could afford luxuries many people couldn’t while still saving money.

In 2019, the per capita GDP had soared to $30,644. A hagwon salary is now around 75% of per capita GDP. Again, with the free housing, it’s not nothing. And inflation hasn’t kept up with the rising incomes, so what exactly does this mean in real terms?

Korean business have, of course, found ways to help people part with their greater wealth. In 2001, no one had a smartphone or a 40-inch flat-screen TV. Starbucks and the many homegrown Korean equivalents weren’t yet ubiquitous. There’s been a huge expansion in the available fashion, cosmetics, entertainment, cuisine. More Koreans have cars, and they’re nicer cars. More Koreans have foreign sneakers. More Koreans drink foreign beer, or drink wine. More Koreans travel abroad. Korea’s housing stock has improved, so a lot of people live in places that are nicer than a teacher’s one-room. A typical date costs more. And teachers are lower on the economic ladder than they once were.

Why salaries haven’t budged

So here’s where I’m gonna get into some conjecture, but if I had to guess why salaries haven’t changed in decades — why they have, in real terms, declined — I would give three reasons: Korea’s more appealing than it was, living abroad is more popular than it was for Westerners, and Korean demographics are changing.

The Korea of 2021 is not the Korea of 2001. When I first came here, there was no Korean wave. Winter Sonata was in the future. Bong Joon-ho had made just one movie, and it was a flop. Kpop was low-budget and derivative. Japan was cool, and China was the future, and Korea was nondescript. No one in the US knew about Korean culture. I remember going to a kimchi expo at COEX in Seoul back in 2002, where kimchi producers were declaring their plans to make fermented cabbage a global food. It seemed naive and a little sad. I would not have guessed that twenty years later, suburban Americans would be buying jars of the stuff at the local H Mart. Back then, my head would whip around when I spotted another Westerner because there weren’t many of us. To quote Monty Python, Korea felt like “a close second to Belgium when going abroad.”

At the same time, living abroad has become far more appealing that it was. Stagnant economies in North America and Europe are the push, but it’s the pull that has changed dramatically. These days (well, pre-pandemic, anyway), you can land in country not speaking the language and do most of what you need with a smartphone: book a hotel, hail a taxi, navigate public transit, even translate a menu. You can also message and video chat with the folks back home. Dating and social apps make it easy to meet locals and other expats and to find social events. None of this was easily available twenty years ago. I had to go across the street to the PC room just to check my email. To be an expat then was to be isolated in a way that’s barely imaginable today. Living abroad is just way, way easier than it was.

Meanwhile, Korea has had a low birth rate for years. The 0-14 population was 9.2 million in 2006 and 5.5 million in 2020. There are half as many kids, which doesn’t exactly translate to half as many teaching jobs — increased wealth can mean smaller class sizes and a higher percentage of kids in after-school academies — but it does suggest a declining number of teaching positions.

Thoughts for the future

It’s hard to know what the shape of the world will be after the pandemic is over, but it seems likely that people will again want to travel and live abroad, and that Korea’s social capital will be at least as strong as it was in 2019. And Korea’s economy has held up relatively well. Meanwhile, Korea’s demographic decline has only deepened.

Without new laws or a change in demand, the long, slow decline in teaching salaries should continue. Will the pandemic engender a shift to remote learning? I’m guessing parents will still want personal exposure to real, live foreigners. What might change is the reliance on inexperienced, largely unqualified teachers. As Koreans get wealthier, they may begin to demand a greater level of professionalism from their English teachers: a teaching degree, perhaps, or at least a certification.

But for now, it’s still 2.1 million and a one-room for any college graduate from the right countries. That’s just not quite the deal it once was.

Books that make the high school canon enter a kind of purgatory. They never go out of print, but they’re forever read by the wrong people. When F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing about fraying marriages in the Jazz Age, or when Ernest Hemingway was writing about war and impotence and alcoholism, they weren’t writing for kids. Even all those high school novels with kids in them — A Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — were written for grownups, not teenagers, and certainly not written as primers for close reading analysis and fodder five-paragraph essays. We think we know these books because we read them as children. But how well do we really know them?

Over the past few years, I started revisiting some of these books, and I can assure you that they’re not the same. Books that felt profound back then — The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies — now come off as a bit pat, a little too schematic. Others have deepened. I liked The Great Gatsby just fine the first time around, but it means a lot more when you’ve worked in Manhattan for a couple decades and been through a divorce. Holden Caufield is easier to take when you’re not his age and going to public school. Heart of Darkness means more when you’re reading it in a damp hotel room in India.

More recently, I got curious about the canon as a whole, as it was served to me during my high school years. This was 1988 to 1993. During those years, the Berlin Wall fell, and then the Soviet Union, and the Tiananmen Square democracy movement flowered and died. Anita Hill confronted Clarence Thomas, and Los Angeles burned. America had its first full-fledged war in a Muslim country. Bill Clinton was elected president. There was, as yet, no Internet, and post-cold war globalization was just getting started. Edward Said’s Orientalism was a mere decade old, and I doubt any of my high school English teachers had heard of it.

The books we read reflected the values and views of people on the far side of those events, mostly left-leaning English and education majors who graduated from college in the fifties and sixties, before the campus upheavals at the end of the decade. We read novels that showcased the plight of the poor. We were introduced to cultures beyond our own, but almost always through white male voices: Steinbeck on indigenous Mexicans, Hemingway on Caribbeans, Pearl S. Buck on the Chinese. Astonishingly, I can recall only one work we read by a writer of color, Loraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. We read dystopian novels, antiwar novels, novels that showcased the plight of the poor. We read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a brave bit of programming for a cold war-era high school curriculum. There was some emphasis on formal modernism, writers like Joyce and Beckett, but nothing too outlandish or difficult. We read a received canon of English-language and American literature, of course: Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain. There was some awareness of feminism, enough that we read A Doll’s House and Kate Chopin and Willa Cather. World literature went as far as Europe and no farther: Kafka, Remarque, Cervantes. Post-colonial literature did not exist for us.

This is not the canon I would put together today, but it was formative for me. What was actually in it? How might these books come across in 2021 to a guy in his forties who lives in South Korea and has a master’s degree in cultural studies? Will I still hate A Separate Peace? Will I still like Grendel? I’ve bought a stack of these old warhorses, and I’ll post about them as I read them. Stay tuned!