Why I Read The Yankee Nom’s Blog

When I decided to start writing this blog again I made brief mention to another blog written by an American in Korea that I read called An Idiot’s Tale! written by a guy calling himself Yankee Nom. That would have been the end of that if not for a comment from Chris of ChrisinSouthKorea fame which stated the following:

I beg of you, for the love of whatever God / Goddess you believe in, to never mention the Yankee Nom / Idiot’s Tale blog ever again. It may well be a popular blog that reaches to people’s most basic needs (in the same way ‘Ow my balls!’ did in the movie ‘Idiocracy’), but it has nothing credible to assist people in Korea. I can’t believe it’s considered popular, and hope it fades into a meaningless existence.

I was quite surprised by Chris’ reaction to that particular blog, and I think that rather than writing it off as something that ‘reaches to people’s most basic needs’ that it perhaps has much more to say than many give it credit for, if you are willing to delve into it a bit.

Let me start off by explaining how I became acquainted with the Yankee Nom. I first found his blog through an angry tweet by Brian several months ago objecting to several things YN had said about him. Forgive me for not taking the time to not link to the tweet, but it really doesn’t seem worth it. I followed Brian’s link to An Idiot’s Tale and instantly became engrossed. The blog is the story of a man in his early forties who lives in or near ‘a rice paddy’ somewhere south of Seoul and teaches at some kind of school for delinquent girls. He is married to a woman he calls The Dragon Lady and whose speech he portrays in what could best be described as a ‘Charlie Chan accent’ which bears no relation to the way an actual Korean accent sounds. His relationship to his wife’s family is at once distant (his inability to speak Korean makes it so) and relatively accepting (they annoy him but he seems to let it slide, usually).  He has two sons who don’t figure into his writing a great deal, except that they keep him off the computer in his house, driving him to the PC room and his beloved 10 cent coffees. The whole tone of his writings can best be categorized as fatalistic, in the sense that he seems to accept as his fate all the things that, as he writes it, are going on around him.

In a word, he was incredibly Vonnegut. In fact, for several weeks I was convinced that the entire blog was an elaborate creative writing project with it’s concept being ‘Diary of a Vonnegut character in Korea’. In fact, although I saw aspects of several Vonnegut characters in YN, the one that I was most convinced was an inspiration for the blog was Eugene Debs Hartke from Hocus Pocus. Note that the link to the Wikipedia page for the character fails to mention the aspect of the character that YN seems to be channeling: his work as an educator for the hopeless. According to some website I googled up:

The world is one that offers little to those who have little to begin with-one where comically stupid (and nearly inbred) children of well-to-do families can earn educational degrees free of charge while living in a pristine valley while, contrastingly, thousands of Americans (mostly non-whites) sit behind bars that were more or less all they ever knew.

In YN’s case, he teaches these girls, knowing full well that nothing that he’s teaching them will stick, letting them play games and not being overly phased when they don’t even show up, while the thousands of Americans in his case are

[D]own and out Americans flocking to Asia in order to get jobs. I notice this even in South Korea. The sheer numbers of English teachers have never been this high.

Some people argue that we aren’t going through a economic depression. I laugh at their foolishness. South Korea is not an easy place to live. It can be downright hell at times. The quality of life isn’t that great.

And teaching English is probably the lowest job for a white man living in the ROK. When this bullshit job market gets competitive, you know something isn’t right. Teaching ESL is usually a gig for losers and boozers. You make the commitment when you are desperate and have no other opportunities.

For weeks I read the blog convinced that it was a brilliant piece of fiction. The writing was good, minimalist, and suited its stated purpose well. The tagline for the blog is ‘A BLOG ABOUT LIVING AND TEACHING IN KOREA! CELEBRATING THE MUNDANE SINCE 2009!’ and the spare, repetitive, Vonnegut-inspired style suits it perfectly. For a while the typical post would include as a matter of course a reference to reading the newspaper on the toilet, the quality of YN’s bowel movements discussed with as much weight as the content of the newspaper. Each post would end with a guess as to what The Dragon Lady would be making for dinner. These calls to the mundane are what hold the blog together.

Evidently I was not the only one who thought the blog was a cleverly constructed art project, because YN eventually addressed comments that he was imitating either Vonnegut or Charles Bukowski or both.  Here’s what he had to say about it:

My writing style is a fraud. No shit. I stole everything I know from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When I was a kid in high school, I had terrible grades. I wasn’t interested in studying.

I was more interested in pilfering Chivas Regal from my father’s whiskey cabinet.

Nevertheless, I must admit that I really loved Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, and Albert Camus.

Sadly to say, I never had the IQ of Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, or Albert Camus.

I did, however, have a fat history teacher named Ms.LaBelle. She was way too plump and ugly to ever get married.

She told me to read a book called Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I took her advice. I couldn’t stop laughing.

He didn’t write to impress people with his knowledge. He wrote to be read.

I’m not the least bit literary. I’m a fraud who steals shit. That’s just the honest truth.

Nevertheless, I’m good for a cheap laugh.

So there’s that.  At this point I and all the other people who were reading the blog as a clever literary project could either admit into that vision a clever post-modern literary conceit (wouldn’t that be so Vonnegut, if he wrote about being influenced by Vonnegut!) but I and, I imagine, many of the others reading him (or her!  Did I just blow your mind?) in this way decided at this point that the reality of what he was writing was less important than the voice he was writing.  In other words, he’s probably real, not that it matters.

The key question to me, and it is obviously a question that Chris believes he has the answer to, is this: Does this blog have anything to say about Korea or living in Korea?  In Chris’ words, does it have ‘nothing credible to assist people in Korea’?

I personally think that not every blog by someone in Korea need assist those in Korea.  This may be Chris’ criterion for worthiness because Chris writes a blog with the primary goal of assisting those living in Korea.  However I do not, and nor do many of the other Korea blogs that people read regularly.  There’s that Barbie girl, who writes funny off-kilter stories about herself that take place in Korea.  There’s Gord Sellar, who writes about myriad things, many of them taking place in Korea, many not, but often with a Korean take on them.  I, for my part, am planning a series of posts on my reading of Plato’s Republic that I think may when complete be glancingly described as Korea-tinged, but not overly so.  Therefore I think that while there may be objections to YN’s blog, I don’t think the fact that he fails to assist those living in Korea is the best objection.

Is he an objectionable person?  Well, he certainly is frank, to a degree that I think many would argue it is not wise to be.  Anybody who says in the mixed company of the internet with only the thinnest pretense of anonymity ‘I’m not that fond of black people. In fact, black people grate on my fucking nerves.’ is clearly not concerned with his image, unless of course this is a careful attempt at image-building.  I won’t make the mistake of assuming that just because someone is not concerned with their image they are necessarily telling the truth, though.  The things YN writes are often offensive.  There are several writers who write offensive things that I don’t agree with that I nevertheless feel gratified for having read.

What can we take away from reading the man’s blog?  One of the things I most like about it is the fact that he has come to peace with Korea, albeit a fatalistic one.  In this respect he reminds me of no one more than Leon Trotsky Trout, the narrator of Galapagos.  Trout is the ghost of a shipbuilder who haunts the boat he was working on when he died.  this boat is the one that carried a motley crew of people to the Galapagos Islands just at the time when a disease is eating all the eggs in every human ovary on the planet.  Mankind thus dies out everywhere except on the Galapagos Islands, and Trout’s ghost has a front row seat over the next million years, during which the descendants of the human survivors evolve into what are essentially seals: flippers replace hands, small brains replace large brains, etc.  Trout views this process, the extinction of the human intellect, with detached humor, never once bemoaning the loss of all the great things the human mind made.  Not to imply that Koreans lack intellect or anything of the sort, but I must say that many of the expat bloggers in Korea, myself included, often seem genuinely angry when something they are familiar with from their homelands is absent from Korea, or when things don’t meet their expectations of how they should be.  Have a look at YN’s view on the issue of corporal punishment in schools, which seems to share the same detached humor as that of Leon Trotsky Trout in the face of the extinction of the human mind:

I don’t hit students. Why? I’m not a real teacher. I’m more of a public relations stunt. And to maintain good public relations, I have to keep my charges happy. It’s important for my students to like me. And they aren’t going to like me if I’m braining them with a piece of wood.

Now there are a number of things embedded in this passage that stand out.  The awareness of the fact that he is not a teacher so much as a gimmick; the primary goal of making his students happy; his rejection of corporal punishment not because it’s wrong but because it would interfere with his primary aim of making the students like him.  There is no judgment of corporal punishment in schools.  There is not even any judgment of the fact that he is working within a system that accepts the presence of foreigners maintained merely for the purpose of public relations.  One thing that you find reading the blog is a relative dearth of judgment of things Korean.  What I can’t determine is whether this abstention from judgment is the result of an actual lack of opinion or of a rare showing of prudence by YN.

There are so many other things about the blog that I would like to touch on but haven’t got the time for.  His relationship with soju and his wife, I feel, are a little bit outside the scope of this post.  His continued attempts to generate rivalry fall flat for me, as does his message board, and I just haven’t the time to listen to his podcast.  The bottom line of it all, for me, at least, is that An Idiot’s Tale provides a rare look at the Korean expat experience that transcends the simple ‘I live in Korea and I eat this and I go here and there and I am annoyed by this thing and I like this thing’ that we often see.  The blog is not full of academic pretense aimed at giving structure to the most puerile first-year expat gut reactions like some blogs.  If anything, the blog tells the story of one type of man put in the same locale as us (Korea expats) and what he makes of it.  Value it for its entertainment value, or its insight, or its perspective, or its cautionary lesson, or any combination of these, but I personally have been edified by reading An Idiot’s Tale, even when I only contrast and compare YN’s life to my own to see where the differences and commonalities lie.

~ by Joshing on March 8, 2010.