No. 5

These days I’m not in the classroom long before hearing someone – usually a student but occasionally a cheeky co-teacher – calling out “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!” to me in an unmistakably Konglish patois. Christmas is fast approaching and Santa is busy hawking everything from LCD televisions to gimchee refrigerators in Korea this holiday season. His rosy mug gives a wink and smile from just about every store’s window. So I can understand why kids would have Santa on the brain. But that doesn’t necessarily explain this new nickname of mine.

What is it about me that begs the comparison? At first glance not much:

Despite frequent bouts of gastronomical enthusiasm I do not share jolly Saint Nick’s jovial rotundity. My wardrobe consists of not a single red jumpsuit. I couldn’t locate the North Pole on a globe if the place didn’t have directions built into its very name. My working understanding of reindeer is slight, and while my knowledge of elves is (embarrassingly) considerable this is more of the Dungeons and Dragons/Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings" variety than it is Santa’s little helpers. I’ve never even ridden on a sleigh.

I don’t exactly sound like a guy whose gonna find out if you’ve been naughty or nice, right?

But there’s more to the story.

You see there is something about me – a quality so uncommon, so rare, and so significant in Korea – that it is seemingly capable of changing the fresh face of a boy from the Mid-West into the very visage of Father Christmas.

What is this caterpillian quality? What is the motivation of this transmogrification?

My beard.

Now my beard isn’t especially Clausian: it is of a chestnut hue and, despite three month’s of unmolested growth, doesn’t reach much beyond my chin. Judged against even a garden variety Santa at the mall in any American suburb I wouldn’t measure up. But I’m not in Kansas anymore. And around these parts a little scruff goes a long way.

The beard in Korea is an endangered species. A thick whiskered Korean man is as elusive a creature as the bird watcher’s ivory bill woodpecker: they may be out there but it’s been many a moon since one was spotted in the wild. True, you may from time to time run across a fellow with a little facial fuzz – the pencil stache is currently popular with gangsters and a few pop stars – but this is the kind of well-manicured, finely sculpted “beard” that looks like it took about three times as long to groom as it did to grow.

Gentlemen, if you could successfully audition for a boy band it’s not a beard.

This scarcity of facial hair, this paucity of pileousity if beards happen to make you rhapsodic (ladies you know who you are), is more a genetic matter than it is a cosmetic one: Koreans just aren’t very hairy. Any effort by a typical Korean man to muster more than a downy shadow on his chin is an exercise in follicular futility. Naturally, then, my beard is a bit of a novelty and reactions to it run the spectrum from awe (pre-adolescent boys) to envy (middle-aged men) to courteous disgust (women regardless of age).

I take the good with the bad. Sure my beard is essentially date-repellant, but it also provides me with the most effective means I have of keeping some of my sixth grade boys in line: they see it as a testament to my alpha-male status. (Clearly these aren’t the same students who liken me to Santa Claus). Luckily I’ve not yet had to join these boys on the soccer field where their perceived notions of my presumed manliness will collapse like a house of cards. I’ll milk it for what it’s worth while I can.

In just a couple of weeks 2008 will be winding down. And I imagine once the holidays have passed, after the sales have ended and the Christmas tree has been packed away till next time, I won’t hear so many shouts of “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!” as I walk the halls of my elementary school.

No, I’ll probably go back to hearing the refrain of “Chuck Norris! Chuck Norris!” that greets me for the better part of the year.

That’s right: Santa Claus and Chuck Norris.

I’d like to think I’m doing the beard proud.