Two fascinating anecdotes for today.
Yesterday I went to Gangnam to meet my language partner, Habin (who is honestly one of my favorite people in this country, to the point where I should just stop referring to her as my language partner and just call her my really good friend). She is taking GRE classes in the area, which happens to feature an American-style breakfast joint called Butterfinger's that we both wanted to go to. We went with a couple of her friends from GRE class, and it was a fabulous and extremely fun time. The food was alright - the taste wasn't exactly spot-on American, but the brick feeling of fried bread and excessive maple syrup in my stomach post-meal certainly was - and the company was amazing. We spoke in a mix of English and Korean while we stuffed ourselves and I was reminded of how truly lucky I am to be in Korea, to not be paying a damn lick for it, and to have the friends that this language has allowed me to encounter in both Korea and the US.
But. Prior to this wonderful evening was an event that pushed me to the absolute brink of foreigner anger at Korea. Followers of Dana in Soko V.2 will know that the weather in Korea has been cold and snowy, which translates to ice and generally slippery conditions. Before this most recent storm, I had fallen twice - hard - while walking around Sinchon. Nobody stopped to help me or asked me if I was okay. Of course I was, but I was shocked by the indifference of the people around me to someone basically wiping out in front of them. Some people told me that it was a "Korean" thing, that they wouldn't help anyone, but this is generalizing and I don't like that. And then I thought that maybe it was because I was a very obvious foreigner - and helping a foreigner means that one has to (OH NOES) speak English! Which is ridiculous, because helping someone up can be done wordlessly and "okay" is a word in both English AND Korean, but...the thought crossed my mind.
Anyway, yesterday while walking towards the restaurant, I slipped again and landed hard on my right side. I have a couple of resultant bruises, thanks for asking, but in the two seconds that I was on the ground before I pulled myself back up, I saw a couple of people staring at me. Just looking. And then they turned around and kept going. Once again, nobody stopped, nobody asked if I was okay, and nobody helped me to my feet. And yeah, even though I cannot directly attribute this to my foreignness, and reflection has led me to believe that it's entirely possible that people just don't care about helping out someone they don't know and that has nothing to do with my ethnicity, at that moment, every bit of injustice I've ever felt as a foreigner in Korea - not being taken seriously by shopkeepers, hearing people talk about me on the subway/in coffee shops as though I'm not even there, children staring at me, etc - boiled to the top. My eyes filled with tears, and for a long two minutes (as long as it took Habin and her friends to show up), I hated, hated, hated being white in Korea.
It's important to recognize that Koreans are not really racist towards Americans - it's just that Korea is a society that is all about 단일민족, a one-race people, and outsiders are exactly that - outsiders. It's not like in America where any random person you see might have been born and raised there - people who see me in Korea KNOW that I'm not a native. The general treatment I receive is expected, and it in no way warrants me complaining about it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't bother me a little.
(Additionally, Koreans are more afraid of white people than anything, because they fear speaking English. I find this incredibly fascinating - in America, if you bump into someone randomly, you generally expect them to speak English - it's not like if you bump into an Asian, you're going to freak out that you don't know how to apologize to them in Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, etc. But nobody - nobody! I mean it! - expects me to speak Korean. And I don't mean that in the sense that my speaking Korean surprises them; rather, I mean that if I interact with anyone, they expect themselves to speak English! Since I'm on their home turf, you would think that they would react the way some Americans do (i.e. "you're in America, speak English!"), but nope. I touched upon reasons why that might be in this post if you're so inclined. The short version is English teachers generally don't learn Korean. Yeah.)
Anyway, this brings me to my second anecdote. I arrived home to a Skype message from a wonderful Korean friend studying at the Yale School of Music (aside: props to the Yale Philharmonia! You guys make me so proud!) who was very upset because she was having trouble understanding an undergraduate psych course she was attempting to audit. She told me that her academic adviser told her not to take the class, because he thought her English wasn't good enough; she then shared very dejectedly that she was afraid of foreigners, that she couldn't talk to them, and that she thought she'd never get better at English (side-note: for those wondering how a student studying at a Yale graduate school can struggle with English, know that the Yale School of Music has an absurd, ridiculous number of Koreans. It is completely possible - and I've seen it done - for students to listen to their lectures and take lessons in English while never, ever, using the language outside of class. The Koreans tend - just tend, there
Well. Maybe if that were the case, people would help me up when I slip on ice.
post-script: Oh my God, JYJ. TVXQ, sit down. You guys just got schooled.
post-post-script: do you like the news feed and other kitschy things I added to the blog? Feelin' profesh.
Let me get this straight. Your friend lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and yet refers to Americans as "foreigners" in their own country?
ReplyDeleteMockingbird - they're foreign to her, aren't they? And you should also keep in mind that we converse in Korean, so she was using the word for foreigner as she would were she talking to anyone who speaks Korean (and generally, those are Koreans). Translated for the benefit of readers.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy to feel that a particular behavior or lack of one is because you are a foreigner in Korea. It's unavoidable to come to that conclusion at times. But how many times have you seen Koreans, who are strangers to each other, rush over to help when somebody has slipped on the ice? (I don't think I ever saw it.) I also think that "face" plays a role here ... rushing to help somebody in an embarrassing moment can be viewed as only compounding the loss of face.
ReplyDeleteAny sometimes it's a misread of what the foreigner wants/expects in these cases. For example, I would get on bus that quickly became very crowded, yet nobody would sit in the empty seat next to me. This used to infuriate me: "What, because I'm a foreigner?!" I would ask myself? Then my Korean got good enough that I overheard a couple standing next to me, and the boyfriend was telling his girlfriend to take the seat next to me:
"No," she said. "Westerners have a different sense of personal space. It would bother him."
To which I said in Korean to their total shock:
"No, don't worry. I'm not a scary person."
It was a totally funny moment, because even as some of her reluctance had to do with some over generalization she had about Westerners, it was also clearly the case that she was a bit afraid of dealing with the "unknown," and in a culture as heterogeneous as Korea's, the mere act of sitting next to me posed all kinds of question marks. So why not avoid the matter entirely?
Thus, my quip about not being scary (a well-used joke in Korea) also signaled that I knew a bit about Korean culture, including its language, and in that brief moment, a connection was made possible. She sat next to me, and the three of us chatted a while. Delightful couple.
Anyway, I think this is a complex issue, and certainly xenophobia is playing a role. I think, though, Korea think in terms of "inside" vs "outside" groups, even within their own culture. On the positive side, I think it's entirely possible to join the "inside" with Korean friends in ways that I think can be harder in China or Japan. But unlike Japan in many ways, Koreans don't make pretenses about ignoring somebody on the "outside." It's all a bit of calculus about social contracts and how best to use up one's energy through the day.