Freedom Papers Part 1

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."




I bought my emancipation from Cunt Lee and gay husband on September 15, 2007 for the grand total of 877,853won. You see children I tried to be nice and accomadating to my Korean bosses. I tried negotiation. I tried sweet talk. I tried to appeal to their sense of fair play, honor, and justice. The darkness was coming and my depression was looming. After a summer of being called a nigger and treated worse I decided that I wanted my freedom. What brought things to head was the eminent departure of my friend Tish Dogg , the threat of witholding pay if I ever took another sick day even though I had 10 contractual paid sick days, and her revolving cast of idiot school managers.

Prelude

So I am sitting in a meeting with the entire teaching staff of International Sesamee and the school manager is passing out a rather thick document. Now ususally I listen to my ipod during group meetings because the meeting is usually conducted in Korean even though everyone present speaks English on some level. So I pick up the packet and I realize that he has just distributed a copy of my contract to everyone at the meeting. Now I am disturbed by the blatant disrespect so I take off the head phones and call him out.

Me: What is this Park?
Park: It is a contract I want to talk about foreign teacher behavior.
Me: Why are we looking at my contract though? Mrs. Lee has had 20 foreign teachers
in the last year? Plus the contract has my personal compensation information
on it.
So we continue the meeting with me interrupting him about every 15 seconds for either clarification or to refute what he is saying. It was like the running commentary in Mystery Science 3000. He gets frustrated and calls Mrs. Lee who calls me into a room and says she isn't happy with my behavior.So I said how about this I'll give you my 30 days written notice right now but I want my visa canceled. We agree and then she adds the noncontractual caveat that I may or not pay for this month depending on how I feel about you.

I'm working my ass off and keeping my mouth shut but I keep meeting with the school principal. Her shitty organization was renting space in an elementary and becase of that arrangement the school principal dictated a lot of what went on inside of our academy. I would have this Korean girl I was seeing translate my thoughts about the school into Korean and i gave the notes to the principal. After a few weeks of this Mrs. Lee said stop it you are stressing him out and he has cancer. I told her I'll stop when you pay what you owe . A morning of chemo and an afternoon of me. I was just letting him know how Super Ugly it could get and how his cushy job at an affluent elementary school could turn real shitty real quick with me in the building. One of my letters reminded him that the children walk to school everyday and it wouldn't look good if I was begging for money in front of the school every day with signs and fliers .

Now most people in my situation would do;what we call in the industry, a midnight run. A midnight run is when a teacher gets fed up with whatever KBS they are going through at the time and decides to leave the country without proper notice. This was unacceptable for me because I believe in acting honorably and being a man of my word. That lesson; and the consequences, was drilled in to me after seeing a dead body in my front yard.