![\"kb-no-couches-in-korea\"](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/KB-No-Couches-in-Korea.jpg\")
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Korea has inspired several volumes of English-language travel writing, even narratives of extended sojourn in or repeat visits to the country over long periods of time, but a full-fledged, high-profile memoir or novel of the expatriate-in-Korea experience has yet to materialize. Kevin M. Maher\u2019s No Couches in Korea<\/em><\/a>, which recounts the experiences of a young man who leaves his native America, his girlfriend, and their cat behind to teach English in the coastal city of Busan, falls somewhere between memoir and novel. Though formally neither here nor there, it nevertheless opens a window onto the sort of lives lived within a quasi-professional subculture that, for better or worse, has colored and continues to color the expat community in Korea to a deeper extent than most anywhere else in Asia.<\/p>\n
The author\u2019s biographical blurb unhesitatingly informs us that, just like his protagonist, he \u201cfirst arrived in South Korea for a one year stint in 1996,\u201d although the book\u2019s narrator bears not the name Kevin M. Maher but Adam Wanderson. Driven purely by a lust for, well, you guessed it, the 26-year-old Adam signs on to join the \u201cwave of English instruction spreading from Japan through the rest of Asia, now seeping into South Korea,\u201d and less than 24 hours after his flight touches down finds himself cast before a roomful of expectant, if not proficient, middle-school students. \u201cTypical Korean bullshit,\u201d declares his only slightly more experienced colleague over and over again. \u201cIf you have a white face, they figure you can teach English. No one here speaks English well; it doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re good or bad \u2014 they\u2019d never know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam has entered the shady if tolerably lucrative world of hagwon (Maher uses the alternative romanization hogwan<\/em>), the private educational institutes in which Korean students still spend so much of their time outside regular school hours. But many hagwon count as educational in only the loosest sense of the word, drilling kids in preparation for the Suneung<\/a>, Korea\u2019s all-important equivalent of the SAT, or, as in the \u201cEnglish\u201d classes we see Adam \u201cteach,\u201d having a Westerner repeat nouns at them over the course of a couple of hours. In one instance he throws up his hands and has the class play hangman, a game that now dominates the English-class memories of entire generations of Korean students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n