march 03, 2009 08:13am – in Korea
To be spoken to in English pains me. Invariably I ask directions/order food/apologize to a stranger for bumping into them in Korean, and invariably they chime back in English. For over a year this among the first in my battery of complaints. It's been tough going for person who, when he arrived here, would throttle you half to death if you told him who directed Jules et Jim rather than presuming that, naturally, he already knew. To address me in English after I'd already begun in Korean was like fetching me a children's menu when I'd asked for the wine list.
To say that I've changed meaningfully somehow would be overstating the case a little bit. When I left I hoped to return as some kind of enlightened soul, and never, ever again think about the mundane problems and petty frustrations that bothered me before. The reality is that when I come back, I'll be the same guy I was before except a year older. I'll have changed, but no more or less than anyone else I'll catch up with when I get back. Damned if I didn't TRY, at least, to make myself into some kind of Ubermensch. I learned to play the drums here; I learned as much as I could about the local culture; and I tried - God help me - to learn Korean. But if I really got anything out of this, it was the realization that sometimes I'm not nice enough to people, simply because they cross invisible barriers they had no reason to know were there.
I should mention that I also set out to constantly defy what I perceived to be the wrong-headed, hurtful assumptions about foreigners, and consequently I exhausted myself every day trying to look poised and coolheaded among a bunch of nonplussed strangers as I mounted one daring-do after another. "Behold! I can buy a train ticket." "Stand back! I'm going to put my possessions in a locker." "Look on, ye mighty, and despair as I check movie times, and I can do it BY MYSELF!" In the event that I furrow my brow, scan the same spot twice when looking for something, or stare blankly at something I've been running the risk of a stranger coming out of the woodwork to bark in - ahem - *English* at me in an effort to smooth out whatever difficulties I'm having. The NERVE! WHAT AM I, A CHILD?
Yes, the Koreans have very itchy good Samaritan triggers, God love them, and it makes me mad. I don't know why. I've tried to intellectualize this response I have, and I can't actually see a flaw in a cultural quirk where people leap up to help each other at the drop of a hat. "Can't get the money in that coffee machine, huh? Here's a crisp bill for that tattered one." "Hey, you're hiking without socks! You'll get a nasty blister. Lucky for you I brought an extra pair." These are real examples I've witnessed with the helper and helpee both Korean, and total strangers. But try and help me, and I'll put your lights out, pal. Best I can figure, in America we have an unwritten cultural law that says if you give unsolicited help to another person (Mike Pearl, specifically, but I don't think I'm completely alone) you are explicitly calling him stupid.
My own obnoxious habits are especially to blame here. I'm a person who was told from a very early age that he was sharper than the other kids, and as a miserable failure at sports, my smarts were all I had to keep me going through school, snarky know-it-all that I may have been. When I emerged from my cocoon of adolescent bitterness (When this occurred is a matter of some dispute: as early as 17 by some estimates, and by others, later this year.) I had picked up a nasty habit of always always trying to sink the battleship of other people's ignorance with the red peg of my brilliance all day every day (often when I try it, I misfire and wind up losing my own aircraft carrier.) It's a habit I fight all the time.
To compound my litost (that's a Czech word I got from Milan Kundera that I'd really like to turn into a bona fide loan word [Dear Oxford English Dictionary...]) I have failed to learn Korean to any degree except what you'd call "survival." So while I've been kvetching about the Koreans harshing my intellectual buzz it would have been easy to destroy me with a simple quiz: "Alright smart guy. You don't want to be treated like a foreigner? Put up or shut up. Do it. Say something in Korean. Go." And I'd choke, and I'd have nothing. Sure, I can stumble through "What a lovely purse" or "Your child is excellent at soccer," but seeing as they'd sound about as eloquent as "Bag pretty!" and "Son soccer. Good job!" you can't entirely blame people for wanting to bail me out.
Here's where I differ with them though, and sometimes I think I really do have a case. I've come a long way to be able to cough out even the ugliest broken Korean. It's obvious I did more than memorize a page of useful phrases and to not acknowledge that achievement with so much as a response in kind is, well, at the very worst a little tactless. Yes, they all got tortured through a few years of English in school. That's their tool for communicating with foreigners. The resulting situation is that both parties assume this other person is not going to understand them in their language, and lucky for that person "I've learned a little of theirs." What happens next is a kind of fight, both people struggling to steer the conversation into the other person's native language.
BUT if their English clearly outshines my Korean, I'm beaten, and the conversation will be entirely in English. And hen you have a conversation with some helpful old lady, or a convenience store worker who's never had an English class in his life there's still going to be the odd "No" or "thank you" learned from television, and thrown in, I suppose, for fun. It's up to me to figure out how not to find that kind of crap annoying.
At the worst of times I've taken to a kind of schizophrenia. I've overheard the nastiest things said about my race by strangers in a restaurant who were probably talking about the weather. I've concluded that absent-minded shoves in my ribs, or loogies spat in my path were messages of cultural rejection. I've spent walks home from work just dying for someone to blurt out a drive-by "Where are from?" so I could start a shouting match or maybe even a fistfight.
On the other hand I've been driven to depression. I've come to conclude in no uncertain terms (until I rethought it, of course) that international travel by Americans does nothing but spur outrage, and feelings of intrusion that are completely justified, and that at the next opportunity I should get on a plane and go back to MY country with MY people, and leave THESE good people to THEIR own, well-deserved way of life, agitated no further by the burden of foreigners who don't understand their culture or least of all their language.
I've never felt a kind of ecstasy to balance out my misery. I've never been lost in my adoration for Korea, or written a letter to someone just to say "Wow! this place is GREAT." But all around me, even as I write this are people who are satisfied with the way things are here, who couldn't give a rip if this blog just said Koreans are a bunch of ignorant dog-munchers. But I've reached a point now that I wish I could have left behind a better impression.
If you could somehow aggregate the impressions I've given strangers during my time here into some kind of Matrix, I'd get a very high score in the categories of independence, apprehension of history, and eating spicy food (not to mention perfect marks in "looking dour and dutiful"). I'd get middling to poor marks in spacial reasoning and poise despite my attempts to look adroit at everyday tasks. But tragically, after a year of brushing off or barking at people who tried to help me, I'd fail general niceness. Color me ashamed.