Paying bills
may 06, 2008 03:22pm – in Korea
Naturally there are stereotypes for Weygooks (white people) among the more frustrating Koreans I've encountered. We're arrogant, fat bald, and smell like burgers. Those are universally held stereotypes of Americans, but another stereotype is that all foreigners are American. We all left our guns in a safe at home, and came here to bag Korean wives, which is fine as long as we take our racially impure children back to our home country (I'm being harsh, only a few have been so overtly racist). But what gets on my nerves more than any other stereotype is that we're all helpless.
Apart from demonstrating (what they perceive to be) their proficiency in English before even letting us try to address them in their mother tongue, store clerks, and especially restaurant servers love to dote over us like babies who wandered in looking for candy. Waitresses will maternalistically grab the utensils from our hands and demonstrate how to mix our food together. We can expect them to stand over us with an expectant smirk waiting for us to drop food with our chopsticks (which we certainly must be baffled by) and then laugh, rearrange our plates, and give us extra napkins. Our clumsiness couldn't possibly be inherent; it must be because we don't know how to do anything outside our own countries.
None of this is so repellant to me that I would have voiced my frustration about it alone. These people mean well, and on most levels they're trying to help... although maybe there's a sense in which they want to remind us that we are aliens here, and while we can try and adapt, we can never belong. But not everyone feels this way, and I certainly don't want to say they do.
But never, despite all attempts at adaptation, do I feel more alienated than when I have to pay my bills.
In the movie "Please teach me English," a white English teacher walks into a billing office, and with a meek, but seemingly entitled tone, asks the main character in English to make an adjustment. "Don't you speak English? Hello? Doesn't anyone speak English?" This is how foreigners are perceived: we expect to go everywhere in the world and have our language spoken. Rather than tell the American to go to Hell, like she should have, she sinks under her desk, ashamed. I resolved to never be that guy. That stereotype. But in the area in which he's depicted, paying bills, I have no choice.
The system in place doesn't accommodate for poor language skills at all. I remember the first time one of these inexplicable envelopes arrived in my mailbox without warning. I was pretty intimidated.
I've worked hard to be able to perform routine tasks without help, but I don't know where to buy stamps or deposit outgoing mail. There are shortcuts around these things, which allow me time to learn more important things like how to buy groceries, order at a restaurant, or find my way around the city without directions.
This turned out to be irrelevant, however, when I found out you just have to feed your bill into a machine at the bank, but the machine isn't just monolingual, it's finicky and esoteric. I watch Koreans struggle with it. Whenever I use it, it rejects one of my three bills, and I have to then pay a clerk directly. This is too complicated to communicate in my broken, practically non-existent Korean, so invariably the clerk just walks me (drags me) over to the machine, instructs me where to put my card, patiently correcting me every time I momentarily bumble, and eventually, after treating me like an infant for ten minutes, arrives at the same error as me, and then drags an equally patient English-speaking coworker over to inform me that there's been an error, and I'll have to pay her directly at the counter.
Yes, naturally these people are trying to help. They're the victims in a system at the top of which was a decision-maker who evaluated the efficiency of sending out bills with an English component, and a machine with an English option, and decided whatever time and money was needed to make those changes was an unnecessary sacrifice. He may well have been right. The percentage of bills that arrive in foreign hands must be a decimal, but the time and money it would take to include a panel of instructions on where to take a bill, and the effort to program the machines with English instructions (the ATMS have them), would be once-and-for-all changes that would surely make up for what must be a daily inconvenience for their employees.
Here's an unrelated picture of me near a temple:
