This weekend I was in Daechon – a town on the coast that I’ve never been in before. I was there for the mud festival – a two week party on the beach.
We were walking down the street, covered in mud, carrying beers, when we saw a bar with a Korean man standing outside. “NO FOREIGNERS” said the sign on the door.
“Really. REALLY?” my (drunk) friend asked.
He glared us, nodded.
I have no words.
No wait. Yes I do. Here they are: FUCK. KOREA.
We were sitting on the subway when an older Korean gentleman sat down next to us, sandwiching my friend between him and myself. He stared for a minute, leaning over her, as if amazed to see me, as if I was some mythical animal he was sure didn’t exist.
“I’m a bloody unicorn,” I thought bitterly as I stared back, making it clear I knew what he was doing. He finally spoke.
“Russian?” he said, tentatively, hopefully. “Russia?” he said again, a little more forcefully, still leaning over and gazing at my blonde hair, eyes flicking down occasionally to my cleavage.
“No!” I said, angrily. I got out my teacher voice. “Anniyo!” I said again, then turned away from him. He backtracked a little, though the sad cow look did not leave his face. “Where are you from?” he asked.
I refused to answer, but my friend, after looking at me quizzically, turned to him and gamely started to chat to him in her new Korean. She was stumbling through, giggling, and he was responding but still staring at me. I elbowed her a few times, hissed her name, but she didn’t understand why I was being so rude to this man and continued to talk to him.
Finally, the subway stopped and I pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go,” I said, shooting a dirty look at the man, who continued to gaze sloppily at me. “Hurry.” As we waited for the doors to open, I stared right back at the man, eyebrows raised. The challenge didn’t work: he thought I was gazing into his eyes, and continued to stare.
The doors opened and I pushed through before they’d opened all the way, tripping as I did so. “Fuckl!” I swore loudly, frustrated.
“What the hell?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why were you so rude to him?”
“..Seriously?” I said.
“He just wanted to know where you were from….”
I looked at her unbelievingly, realizing nobody had told her and she thought I’d been unspeakably, unnecessarily rude.
“Sweetie,” I said. “In Korea, ‘Russian’ means ‘prostitute’. He was openly asking me if I was a whore. He wanted to know if I was open for business.”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh shit,” she said.
“Goddamn,” I said, looking around. “This is the wrong fucking stop.”
Filed under: cultural differences, idiocy (other people's), moral outrage, students
One of my students just came back from two months in Canada. The first two things he came out with upon his return?
“This sucks!” and “You’re gay!”
siiiigggghhhh.
“Jackson, I’d really like it if you didn’t call people gay in my classroom.”
“Why?” (really? we’re going to have this lesson? really?)
“Do you know what it means?”
“Yeah. Guys who are boyfriends.” (from the front of the classroom: “ew!”)
“What do you think about that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“Me neither. That’s why I don’t think you should use it to insult people.”
“What?”
“Well, lots of my friends are gay. There’s nothing wrong with it. So it’s mean to use it when you mean ’stupid’, and I don’t want you to anymore.”
“k.”
The thing is, he doesn’t really know what it means. Yes yes, he can get out his dictionary and he knows that gay means two men who are boyfriends. But he doesn’t have the cultural background that makes that an insult. He’s just parrotting what he heard on a playground in Welland.
I don’t know what’s worse: people who say these things with intention, or the fact that it’s become so much a part of our language that it transfers so easily, even without the intention. It transfered into a culture where they don’t even really acknowledge the existence of gays, where the gay community is invisible. Chances are, this kid probably hasn’t ever had any contact with a gay man, and he doesn’t give a shit about either his use of the word or my distaste when he does. And yet, there it is: hatred transfered.
I went to the DMZ in October. That was trippy. It’s so easy to forget that the war isn’t actually over until you’re there and North Korean soldiers have sniper rifles trained on you. Our tour guide, Sergeant Han, was definitely worth the price of admission. Perhaps will spend more time on military bases. There was one place where we stood at an observation point and were surrounded on three sides by North Korea, and, more importantly, a minefield.
That’s something that’s totally outside my experience. So far outside, in fact, that it was completely unreal to me. You can tell me as many times as you like that there are people with guns pointed at me, it’s not going to register. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t understand. Well I did and I didn’t.
You can see the border quite clearly because it’s where the trees end – N. Korea has cut all of theirs down. There are tourist trips that foreigners can take – South Koreans are not allowed – and I’m sort of curious to go on one, but at the same time I’d feel sort of…well, disgusting. For a few reasons. For one, I’d see only the part of North Korea that they’d want me to see, and it wouldn’t be real. And it’s hard to go into a starving country and eat well as a tourist. Not to mention that I’d be turning people’s suffering into a tourist attraction, which is sort of reprehensible, and my money would be going to fund Kim Jong-Il. And I can only go to Pyongyang if I go through China. If I thought I’d see something real and could come back and write about it, I’d do it in a second, but I think all I’d do is go hiking on the sacred mountain that South Koreans are no longer allowed to go to and spend the night in the kind of luxury North Koreans don’t know exists.
South Koreans are also vastly uneducated about North Korea. At least, my students are. According to South Koreans consitution, everybody in North Korea is a citizen of South Korea, and yet South Korea does dick all, to the point where in votes about North Korea in the UN, South Korea actually abstains from voting. The children here are convinced that the people in North Korea are happy, which is probably how they deal with their guilt, or something like it, (though, to be fair, I’ve heard the same argument from Canadians. “No no, they LIKE being hungry and scared! they don’t know anything else!”), and have no idea about the hunger and fear and control.
Kim Jong-Il is a source of joking in my class. I’ve even heard teachers using it towards their kids as a form of discipline: “In this class, I’m Kim Jong-Il and you’re the North Koreans.” To me, that’s as bad as saying “Pretend I’m Adolph Hitler and do whatever I say.”
Even I’m careful about talking about in class. It comes up as a topic of disucussion quite frequently, “would you like Korea to unite?” “what do you think about mandatory military service?”, as I strain for topics to make these kids talk in class. But I’m always aware of the fact that, just as in Eastern Europe you may find yourselves speaking to survivors of or family members of survivors of the Holocaust, in the classrooms here, I may find myself speaking to students whose grandparents are in North Korea. And to me, it’s just as bad.
