How a naked parent-teacher meeting lead to an acclaimed book

Dartmouth-native Beth Ann Knowles has found a following of fans after recounting her bizarre trip to South Korea in the non-fiction narrative, ‘The Kimchi Experiment’

CITYnews halifax \ Steve Gow

Listen to this article

Just about everyone has had an experience in life where they thought to themselves, ‘I really should write a book about this someday!’

While most of us never act upon that fleeting notion, Beth Ann Knowles did and has ended up with a hit book.

“I couldn’t do it now,” admits the author of The Kimchi Experiment: Naked Parent Teacher Meetings and Other Exploits of a Canadian in South Korea. “I just had all the material in my head. It was so easy to get everything out at the time, so I think if people were taking the time, at the time ­— it’s a lot easier to revisit then to revisit it later.”

Adapted in part from a series of lengthy emails she wrote to family and friends at the time, The Kimchi Experiment follows the trials and hilarious tribulations of a year-long trip Knowles took with her husband in 2006 to East Asia.

“We had a friend there who probably went six or seven months before we went, and we were looking for something fun and interesting to do,” says the Dartmouth native, who recalls the couple quitting their jobs and spontaneously heading off to Hwagae — a South Korean village that they couldn’t even locate on a map.

“If she had been in Taiwan, we might have ended up in Taiwan,” adds Knowles. “We weren’t really looking at any particular country. It was more that we had somebody that kind of drew us there I guess.”

Once the couple arrived in the tiny village situated in the tea-growing region known mainly to outsiders as home of the annual Hwagae Cherry Blossom Festival, Knowles and her husband knew extremely little about the culture, history or customs of their destination.

As a result, the pair soon underwent a year of teaching English to locals — all the while compiling experiences riddled with miscommunication, personal growth and bizarre, culture-shock misadventure.

“People who have been to Korea kind of just say, ‘we have had the same thing,’” notes Knowles, who is currently an online ESL teacher as well as a stay-at-home mother to two children and pet pup, Gordie. “It really just really brings back great memories for people.”

One of those bizarre tales influenced the book’s subtitle and recalls a particularly shocking case of cultural disparity between the East and the West.

“The Hwagae Bath House” is a humourous recounting of an incredibly awkward experience when Knowles bumped into one of her Grade 5 students and the girl’s mother in the local sauna — while all were naked.

“That was something I didn’t think was ever going to happen or that I would write about for everybody else to read,” says Knowles about the nude encounter. “A lot of people really enjoy that story (so) that kind of motivated me to think, well, maybe I should tidy it all up and see what happens.”

Eventually, Knowles reworked the email narrative and submitted the short story to the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) where she won the H.R. (Bill) Percy Short Creative Non-Fiction Prize.

That acclaim soon caught the attention of Lesley Choyce, the longtime publisher of Pottersfield Press, and before Knowles knew it, she was crafting an entire book out of her South Korean experiences.

“I definitely wanted to finish it, but I still never thought it was a book really until a few years ago when I was doing a bit more writing at the time and I thought maybe I should try to take it out of email format and try to make it into story format,” recalls Knowles, adding the WFNS prize certainly buoyed her with confidence to publish her adventures.

“I get a lot of people saying they’ve been laughing a lot and enjoying it, and people saying they haven’t been able to put it down which is good,” says Knowles, who is next working on a collection of short stories.

“I just don’t know what people who haven’t been there do know about the culture and the country, so maybe they will learn some things about the deep, deep culture that is there (and) I hope they would gain an appreciation for the country.”

For more information on The Kimchi Experiment, visit the Pottersfield Press website.