Who the fuck is Dave Franklin and why the fuck is he writing about teaching English in Korea?

It's been a while since I've lived up to my reputation as angriest Korea blogger, and it's high time I defend my title. Today's target is Dave Franklin. So back in January, Franklin, a 37-year-old former "teacher" in Korea, put out a novel English Toss on Planet Andong. It was mentioned in passing on Rate My Hagwon at the time, but I don't read that site so I didn't learn about this book until last week. Here's what an Australian article has to say about it:

The 37-year-old Alderley resident spent more than two years teaching English in South Korea, using his often surreal experiences as the basis for his fourth novel, English Toss on Planet Andong.

“I turned up and saw all the Korean teachers carried sticks,” he said.

“No one had bothered to mention that whacking kids was as commonplace as giving homework. But then again, I never received any training, guidelines, feedback or supervision.

“I was just on my own in a baking hot classroom with up to 40 teenagers laughing at me for looking like a bald, big-nosed alien.”

English Toss centres on a wildly dysfunctional expat teaching community trying to make sense of each other and the local culture.

“I think it’s a recipe for disaster but it’s undeniably big business,” the city-based ESL teacher said.

I'm inclined to believe that review was written by Franklin himself. Anyway, the book is absolute garbage, an embarrassment and disgrace to any self-respecting teacher here, and clearly the most dysfunctional member of his expat community is Franklin himself. You can find just about all of the book available from Google Books. Here's the opening paragraph:

The red dragonflies reversed, zipped forward and hovered outside the hagwon window. Paul Taylor stared at thte sexually conjoined insects, their wings a furious blur, wondering what it'd be like to fly and fuck at the same time. No doubt more fun than filling out student evaluations, a bi-monthly task that again needed completing. He glanced at the unmolested pile of one hundred and fifty or so papers on his desk, each one representing an individual human being whose young mind he was supposedly dedicated to nurturing.

Throughout the book the main character Paul refers to Koreans as Dollies, calls his students Dogs and his classroom the Kennel, and says kimchi looks like an abortion. A one-line summary from an online retailer says

English Toss on Planet Andong is a biting black comedy that centres on a wildly dysfunctional expat community teaching English in South Korea.

though I find the book is to comedy what the author is to education. From page 6:

'OK, time for my gare hokseng.'

She snorted, 'Dog students! You must not call them so!'

Paul shrugged. 'I'll stop when they stop behaving l ike dogs. If you gave me a class of actual dogs the only way I'd be able to tell the difference is the dogs would probably fart less. The only words I've managed to teach them so far are sit and walkies.'

Well, thankfully the dolly translated "gare hokseng," for otherwise I wouldn't know what the fuck that means. Just a note to teachers and potential authors, if you're going to demean and dehumanize your students for not knowing a language, it's best not to fuck up basic vocabulary yourself. From page 9:

Paul dragged himself up the flight of stairs and pointed to the Kennel down the narrow hallway. 'IN' he growled, making them scamper away. Brian slid two metres along the tiled floor in his football boots, banged into the water cooler, dived into the classroom and slammed the door shut in Vincent's face. Vincent turned and grinned, unfazed that he'd almost lost his nose. He yanked the door open, shouted, ran into the Kennel and slammed it so hard the glass wobbled. Paul rubbed his temples and leaned against the weall. Billy [teacher] lounged in Banana's doorway at the far end of the corridor as he eyed two approaching pig-tailed girls. 'Hello, my little wingless angles,' he said in his warm, upbeat voice. 'Please leave your clothes by my desk. It's time to meet Uncle Salty.' Billy leaned closer hissing: 'He's your only family now!' He ushered the giggling girls into the classroom and winked at Paul. 'What . . . ? You know I don't mean it.' Then he rubbed his hands and wandered in after them.

An example of student-teacher interaction from page 15:

'Teacher, marry?'
'You asked me this, Amy. Remember? About a week ago. Sorry to be pedantic, but how many marital statuses of foreign teachers are you tracking?'
Amy wasn't that easily put off. 'Teacher, marry?'
He smiled, the air leaking out. 'No, teacher, not married. Used to be, but not now.'
'Teacher, girlfriend?'
'No, Amy. No girlfriend. If you've got an older sister or aunty perhaps you can help me out Act as a chaperone, even. Shall we say something in the twenty to thirty-five age range? That's nice and broad, isn't it? Oh, and I like them busty.'
She frowned. 'Why?'
He smiled. 'Why, what?'
'No girlfriend, why?'
Paul pointed at his chest. 'Teacher poor and ugly.'
Amy nodded, indicating his ginger hair. 'Very ugly. Are you crazy?'
'A little, Amy. Are you crazy?' A bug-eyed Amy shook her head and scampered back to her desk.
'Page-e, teacher?' Brian called.
'I just told you. Try listening.'

A bit of the classroom atmosphere, from page 18:

[Paul] looked at Sally, coming back to his senses. 'Yes, OK. We see with our eyes. Let's say see.' Two Dogs managed while copying his actions. He tried again. 'See.' This time more than half of the class responded, a good enough percentage. Tommy was one of the abstainers. The child-sized waste of space had retrieved some objects from his bag. However, a miniature pack of cards and a plastic four-legged monster seemed unlikely to aid his quest to master a foreign language.

And dealing with disruptive students on page 20:

He got a black marker pen from his basket, marched toward one of the twins and stabbed a finger in the boy's face. 'Name?'
The child swallowed, 'Joey.'
'Joey? You're Joey?'
'Yes, teacher.'
'Right.' Paul grabbed the lower half of his face, holding him steady as he printed a large 'J' on his forehead. The Dogs found it hysterical. The branded Joey blinked and looked around. Suddenly the centre of attention, he didn't know whether ot join in with the laughter or burst into tears. He touched his forehead as Danny cowered, obviously believing he was next.

Most of the rest of the book focuses on the misadventures of the expats around town, and each character's flawed personalities, and is in all a very poorly-written exercise in navel-gazing. As if there is any other sort of exercise in navel-gazing. By all indications anybody can get published these days provided they struggle with paragraphs and have no sense of style. For characters who hate their lives so much they sure pass comment on the smallest of detail, whether it's the hunchbacked grandmother, the student named Camel Toe, or the quartet of nine-year-olds named Jiggle, Those, Little, and Titties.

Teaching English in Korea can be challenging, and browsing any if not every teacher's blog will reveal that. This one is no exception, and I've spent considerable amount of time and energy writing about the difficulties we face in the classroom, in the teachers' office, and in the neighborhood. In fact, this isn't even the first book published about shitty hagwon; take a look at Prisoner of Wonderland: An ESL Misadventure for what can go wrong. But what we find in Franklin's book is evidence of perhaps the most damning charge against us: that we don't care, that we're unprofessional, perhaps to the point of being dangerous.

The English education business in Korea just might be in bad shape: English test scores are down, private education costs are up, schools are having trouble finding teachers. And all the while native speakers are struggling to fit into a system that teaches almost exclusively toward standardized placement exams, which don't play to our strengths and which make English purely a subject to analyzed rather than a language to be used. Hell, half the time we can't figure out why we're there at all. Those are legitimate issues, and even if blogging about them isn't your thing, we ought to keep them in mind as we try to do our jobs. But "bad shape" is certainly relative; people who earn a comfortable wage and an apartment doing a job for which they have no qualifications perhaps have little else to complain about besides nose-pickers or Koreans who can't speak English.

The one theme that pervades the book is unrelenting maladjustment. Paul's description of Hangeul as

[what] appeared to be the brainchild of a pot-smoking computer game programmer who'd fused Tetris and Space Invaders

or a serving of kimchi as

the slimy pile of vegetables, half submerged in red liquid and speckled with spices, looked like a tiny abortion

or the appearance of Andong, or "Planet Andong" rather, as

one hell of a higgledy-piggledy place, suggesting a contingent of constipated 1950's Eastern Bloc town planners had been given carte blance

or the reason he calls Koreans "Dollies"

Koreans pretty much look the same, eat the same stuff and do the same things. As if cloned

and the descriptions of his job quoted earlier leave the reader wondering what the point of it all is. The other characters aren't much better, or any better-developed---one roomate speaks in uppity prose to confuse Koreans and the other is a fussy, hyperpatriotic 58-year-old Canadian---and Franklin himself in the book reviews gives the impression that he wrote the book 'cause some hagwon done him wrong. If the aim of the book is to make Korea look like an uncivilized wasteland, or rather an alien planet, the perfect setting for exploring the bleakeast and blandest people can half-form he succeeded, but only through rendering his characters so obscene and so ridiculously out-of-touch that you wonder why they never put bullets in their heads and ended the book 375 pages earlier.

I actually have no idea who the fuck Dave Franklin is. This book on Korea is his fourth novel, and Google turns up mention of a Dave Franklin born in 1971 who released a book through the same publisher. In an interview talking about an earlier book, this Franklin says something that touches on a point I'd like to make.

So how important, then, would you say it is for a writer to know his or her subject? "Well, it certainly helps, but it’s a mistake to say a writer has to know his subject. I doubt HG Wells was au fait with invisibility, alien invasions and time machines but he seemed to get by. Some critics argue that "Lolita" is the twentieth century’s greatest novel but Nabokov wasn’t a kiddie fiddler. It’s much more important to simply be interested in your subject. That interest can even be negative e.g. a fear or obsession with something. You just have to write about a subject that’s on your mind a lot. Hence, I write about alienation, popular culture, violence, humour, sex and an abiding hatred of Bryan Adams – often in the same paragraph."

I understand how fiction works, and that by writing characters the author doesn't necessarily vouch for them. Franklin may be no more a dysfunctional sadist than Nabakov, well, than Nabakov was a "kiddie fiddler." You have to question why Franklin would choose to paint this picture of Korea, of teaching, when his audience will have no other concept of either, and thus no basis to pick up on whatever satire he thinks he's attempting. In fact, such fantastic characters should make you read between the lines and explore their loneliness, their emptiness, their pun-sort-of-intended feelings of alienation, but there's really nothing in the novel to persuade the reader to work that hard. Simply put, it's not a smart book.

This brings up earlier discussions the blogosphere has had about expats in Korea and negativity. Me and pretty much every other active blogger has received comments or emails telling us not to write bad things about Korea, trying to correct our "wrong information," or discrediting our opinions because we were foreigners who didn't understand Korean culture. A lot of ink has been typed on the topic, justifying our existence as critics and observers with every right to opinions as anyone else. So I'm not here telling Franklin to somehow unwrite the book, or saying that he's wrong, or suggesting he write about something nice like temples, four seasons, and hanbok instead. I'm wondering why he went the route he did, and what if any goal he had by rendering teaching in Korea as an otherworldly experience. It certainly has no resonance to anyone who actually, as he put it, knows his subject or is interested in his subject. It does pander to those who hold the basest opinions of Koreans and who have no regard for their responsibilities as teachers. Or, since the average person hasn't the faintest idea of Korea, it panders to those who wish to hold the basest opinions of the country, its people, and its English students.

We can debate the term "unqualified teachers" all day long and get nowhere. We can talk in circles about the hiring policies of Korean schools, about how they'll pretty much hire any Caucasian with a pulse and a degree, about how demand trumps discernment. But what we really shouldn't debate is that regardless of our motivations for coming to Korea we owe it to everyone to behave like professionals, like teachers. That doesn't mean don't drink, don't go out, don't travel, don't date, whatever, but that does mean remember why they're paying you in the first place. That doesn't mean don't complain, don't be homesick, don't try, and don't make mistakes sometimes, but that does mean do your best, use your head, and work through it. In other words, you're an adult, fucking act like it.

I'm fully aware that by writing this entry I'm giving more publicity to this small-time book and its nobody author than they'd ever receive otherwise, but it's important to call out attitudes like this when we find them, and distance ourselves from the people who preach them. Everybody talks about getting respect for foreign teachers, about standing up for our rights and fighting back. But we also need to stand up and accept our responsibilities as well, and rather than demanding this and that from Koreans, start holding ourselves up to the standards befitting professional teachers. And to Franklin: great, you got paid, now fuck off.