on saturday morning, i woke up early, made myself presentable, and went to the local market to buy one of those korean plastic stools. in “the story of stone soup,” which six of our students had adapted into a play, we were missing a prop that would hold the giant pot of soup. i figured that we could place the pot on one of these plastic stools, i could create a fire-like formation out of paper, and that’d basically act as a cooking site for stone soup.
i arrived at school a little before ten, made the fire, taped it onto the front of the stool, and it looked…decent. then i had a meeting with ms. son about our upcoming demo class. yeah, i am crazy to go to school on a saturday, especially when i don’t even get paid for it.
at eleven, our players gathered in one place and we had lunch, which ms. suh provided. we had ddeokbokki, kimbap, and cup ramen. they asked me if i wanted cup ramen, and i said no. only poor people eat cup ramen, in my opinion. but they insisted and i ate it and managed to keep it down.
after double-checking our props and costumes, we headed out to the east side of town, the center for the daegu branch of the girl scouts. the building was less than impressive, and i could see that this was not what my students were expecting. we walked up to the third floor auditorium and saw the stage and audience. and a whole bunch of elementary school kids. it was like…what i imagine a church play production to be held in. a place that smells of state funds and looks like a cross between a warehouse and a prison.
we put the boys and girls in make-up. the two first grade boys in our production were heavily matted down with BB cream (and they were not liking it); the girls looked great though. they changed into their costumes and in terms of representing characters named “the soldier,” “the butcher,” “the farmer,” “the girl,” “the beggar,” and “the merchant,” our troop looked pretty darn good. that is, until you start comparing our kids to their competition.
you see, the competition is open to all schools in the greater daegu area. there are two divisions: elementary and middle/high. every year, daegu science high school claims the first prize in the upper grades because they have a crazy korean english teacher who majored in drama (she’s crazy, i’ve met her) and writes the plays for her students. when diana and i heard about the competition, we thought to ourselves, “what? why haven’t our school ever participated in this english play contest? we are the foreign language high school, after all.” this year, after our school’s own theatre festival, we hand-picked some good kids and entered our school.
a month ago, we found out that daegu science high didn’t enter this year. well, eff that, we thought. then we found out that zero middle and high schools entered in the competition. according to the rules, if no more than three schools enter in the upper division, then all the schools compete in one division. in short, we would be competing with elementary school kids. yeah. when i first heard the news, i felt kind of relieved, because, you know, our kids can wipe the floor with children half their size. we would own the competition.
but we live in korea. and we cannot think like that. because korean parents are insane (well, all parents are insane). that saturday afternoon, i saw all these mothers hauling ginormous props into the girl scout center. trees, rivers, streams, backgrounds. and oh, the costumes. i saw a child in a homemade wall•e costume. there were girls in shiny futuristic tutus. the make-up and hair were done to perfection. these moms meant business.
i looked over to my students and could see discomfort setting in. we lingered in the hallway (we were afraid to go inside the auditorium) for a long time. ms. suh, my supervisor and our team’s sponsor (by default), had drawn #5 in the performance order. fifth out of seven teams. the moments that i did go inside the auditorium during the waiting time, i could hear people chatter…”oh my god, that’s taegu foreign language high school”…”the foreign language high school is here.” our school is fuh-ay-muss.
at 2:00pm, the performances started. the first team was not good. we couldn’t hear the performers on stage from my seat, which was the main problem (afterwards, i took this opportunity to tell my kids, “do you see why it is crucial that we hear you? because if we can’t hear the play, there is no play”). plus, the story was weird and it didn’t fit into the extremely corny girl scoutesque theme we all had to follow, “together we can change our world.” i wrote that team off. the second team was good. the costumes were elaborate, the set was…well, there was a set. and they did something that i didn’t even think to do. they used background music.
the third team was marvelous. all the actors wore hanboks and told the korean folktale of heungbu and nolbu. there was 
not only music, but singing and dancing. really, it was more like a musical production (which i thought was slightly against the rules). the fourth team was even more marvelous than the third team. their costumes and background were neither elaborate nor expensive-looking, but the actors and story were good. it was about a blind kid named charlie, who is bullied in school, and how his class goes on a camping trip out in the woods and how they all get lost in the dark but then charlie saves them by leading them back to the campsite (because he can “see” in the dark). it was great, and it even poked fun at the education board for not giving enough funds to disabled students (though, the whole story didn’t really fit into the theme).
then it was us. i said to my students before they went on, “if we don’t win today, then you don’t have to perform this play ever again. which means, this may be the last time you perform this play. make it good.” we huddled up, put our hands in the center, and, instead of doing a “1, 2, 3, fighting” we did a “may diana bless us” (because she was sick and thus, absent). i didn’t tell them that our particular huddle made it seem like diana had recently died…
we may not have had expensive sets or costumes or props, and we may not have had music or song and dance 
numbers, but my kids are fantastic actors who commit to their characters, and their english is superb. they were really good. near the end of the performance, i heard a little ding sound, which indicated that we had gone over the allotted 10 minutes. we knew we were gonna go over, so ms. suh had told them not to rush the play, for comprehension’s sake. they finished the play and it was, in my opinion, the best that they had ever performed. all the cues were hit, there weren’t areas of dead silence, no dialogue was missing, their voices were clear…
while they were performing, i stood near the three judges: a korean man, a korean woman (an official of the girl scouts), and a round, white woman. the korean man didn’t seem to be paying attention and the round white woman had her eye on our script the entire time (i believe it was her job to focus only on the teams’ scripts). i was pretty sure they had written us off as real competition.
after my kids performed, i told them they did a great job and we watched the rest of the performances. team six was okay, but not spectacular. team seven was not good.
we sat there, tired and restless, while we waited for the awards ceremony to start. i believe during this time, the elementary school students mauled our basket of (plastic) food we had used onstage. johnny, one of my students (he played the soldier), did tell me that the male judge questioned him, “did the teacher write the script or did you students write the script?” i was like, what? what kind of people does he think we’re mentoring? i wanted to ask the judge if he thought the elementary school students made the sets or if their mothers did. eff that shit.
the awards ceremony started at 4:00pm and something happened that i did not expect. at all. the person i assume to be the head judge, the korean lady, took the microphone at the podium and started to critique each school’s performance. okay, so ms. suh told me this would happen. however, she did not tell me that this lady would stand up there and correct every. little. mistake. in each performance. seriously, she looked at the papers in her hands and said things like, “on page six, our native english speaker wrote that there is a comma missing…on page seven, there is an extra space…on page eight, there is a misspelling of the word blah blah blah.”
i looked to the left and right for other’s reactions. i was shell-shocked or something. i couldn’t hold the ridiculousness inside of my body. i had to look for some sort of confirmation that i wasn’t completely nuts for thinking that this was absolutely insane. first of all, this was a play competition, not a play-writing competition. who the fuck cares if there are two extra blanks on paper. i looked over to ms. suh, who was equally stunned but, unlike me, composed, and said to her, “this lady is worse than our school principal.” ms. suh laughed for a good two minutes, because a person has to be a really bad person speaker in order for me to say something like that.
the lady went on and on and on about every little thing, and included comments on acting and costumes and whatnot. when she got to taegu foreign language high school…she spent two seconds on our school and went on to team six. i was again astonished. she said in our script, there were two missing blanks (which was not my fault…when you transfer microsoft word documents into hangul (korean word processor), it eats some of your spaces) and said nothing else of our performance. nothing. nothing good, nothing bad. this did not bode well for our students. i had already braced myself for the fact that we were not going to do well in the standings.
honorable mention went to three elementary schools. okay, i thought, so we’ll place. i had explained to my kids how much of a lose-lose situation they were in. if they won, people would point and say, “oh, well, it’s taegu foreign language high school. of course they won.” and if they lost, people would point and say, “wow, how embarrassing. elementary school students beat out taegu foreign language high school.” i had never imagined such a perfect lose-lose situation in all my life.
bronze prize went to…an elementary school. i looked over to my kids and said, “silver is awesome. don’t knock silver.”
silver prize went to…the elementary school with all the musical numbers. “wow, you guys. gold is ours. gold is awesome.”
then the emcee stopped and let us know it was between the high school and the elementary school (that did the story with blind charlie). one school would get the gold prize, and one school would get daesang (대상, grand prize). she would announce daesang first.
daesang goes to…taegu…foreign language high school! my kids jumped up and cheered. and my jaw hit the floor. no way in hell did i think we were going to take the grand prize. i am still flabbergasted.
after all the prizes were given out, i saw that the gold prize winners were crying. these little kids were crying because they did not win the grand prize. their mothers held them and consoled them. and then i told my students to go over there to congratulate the kids on doing such an awesome job. our school has bright kids, and our school has polite kids. a lot of people think our students are rude or ill-mannered; it’s a total misconception. we try to make them good people.
as we filtered out of the auditorium, we saw a crowd of parents at the judges’ table, complaining about how unfair it all was. they claimed that since we were the foreign language high school, we would, without a doubt, have great teachers who could help our students. and how we have english speakers at our school. and how we didn’t even have proper sets. i walked by and shrugged. yeah, it was a unfair, but we didn’t create these circumstances. we didn’t break any rules, we didn’t know any of the judges, and almost all of the work was done by our students. we played fair. if we won, we won based on merit.
the grand prize at the citywide level gives us the opportunity to compete with schools from all over the country for prize money. on november 14th, we will all go to seoul to perform “the story of stone soup” again. and this time, we may actually include backgrounds and incorporate music into our production. but really, we are the foreign language high school; we have no budget or much help from parents…and we have no time to make fancy trees out of papier-mâché.
so yes, we won the grand prize. however, it wasn’t a walk in the park. am i proud? hella yes.
last night, i mixed the concentrate for my 2 liters of the lemon drink—
