I (Chinese-American with ambiguous facial features, married to a Korean, two kids, tendency to slouch and procrastinate, addiction to cafe lattes) have been living in Seoul for three years: long enough that it is, unambiguously, “home”; long enough that I navigate through my daily life without much thought or preparation. Gone are the days of dictionary toting and rehearsing conversations in my head; gone are the days when a trip to the bank made me break out in a cold sweat; gone are the days of falling into bed exhausted at 8 p.m. from the effort of listening to and speaking Korean all day long.
And yet. There is nothing like a visitor from the Homeland to make you realize how far you've come, and how very far you have yet to go.
Emily (loud laughing, curly haired, opinionated, East Coast, Jewish rugby-playing feminist psychology PhD currently living in LA) and I have been best friends since high school and this was her first trip to Asia.
Like a Dummies Guide to Living in Korea I prepared her: I taught her to bow and smile, to take and receive things with two hands, not to be alarmed by women with Darth Vader visors or by being jostled in the street by older men smelling of soju and cigarettes. I gave her index cards with phrases like “where is the bathroom?” and “I am 32 years old” (over her protests). Armed with mental and tangible tools she lived with us for a month, eating barley rice and seaweed, bowing and smiling, paying outrageous prices for fruit, walking all over the place, throwing away food garbage in specially marked bins, and being the only white person in the vicinity.
On her last day here she was at the gym, running on the treadmill and lifting weights, and an older man approached her and chastised her, “You're exercising too fast! Slow down!”
I had warned her about this. One of the hardest things to learn about another culture is what is acceptable and what is rude. In Korea, it is completely normal to comment on other people's appearance: “You have gained weight,” “Do you know you have a pimple on your forehead?” or sometimes women will just come over and brush lint off my shirt or fix my crazy hair. It is also fine for an older person to give constructive advice based on his or her wealth of knowledge derived from age: “Your baby should be wearing more clothes.” “Don't use your MP3 player near your belly when you are pregnant.” “Eating kimchee prevents cancer.” Or: “Don't exercise so fast.”
Despite preparation and her determination to follow the local cultural norms, she was unable to follow through with the standard response: a “yes” followed by a bow of the head as acknowledgment, promptly followed by incident amnesia. Instead, she gave him that kind of smile/grimace which is technically a smile but communicates, “Fuck off” in any language. As she said later, still seething with anger, “It took all my control not to scream, 'I was a varsity athlete in college and am the only one in this gym breaking a $*^%$*% sweat!”
That's the hard part of cross-cultural interaction: if they receive you, it's on their own terms, and if you respond, it is on your own terms. I'm sure that man was trying to break the ice, trying to be friendly and welcoming. And Emily wanted to be civil and kind and friendly as well, but her upbringing and personality made it almost impossible to provide the kind of response that he would have expected. He had hit her at her point of vulnerability; for all her educational and athletic success, she was still afraid of not being taken seriously. And this I understand well, because it is my problem too. Although we grow up and travel the world, we can never quite shed the residue of past fears, insecurities, ghosts, relationships past and loves lost.
Aside from whatever baggage we all harbor, there is a particular psychology to being an ex-pat; to some degree I am always aware of my difference and perhaps overly conscious of what I represent. For the many Koreans who have never been to the U.S. and have had limited access to foreigners, my small habits and idiosyncrasies will fill in the largely absent pieces of a bigger picture of what Americans Are Like; but for Koreans who are sensitive to the perspective of other nations I also represent the judgmental gaze of the U.S. There is a power to being a First World foreigner and at times I brandish my outsider status like a light saber or a Get Out of Jail Free card. You — kid spraying graffiti on the side of our apartment building! I will scold you in two languages and watch you wriggle under my double-eyelided gaze! You — fancy woman judging me for having wrinkled pants! I am an American and don't have to adhere to your standards of dress! Mwah ha ha ha.
But to have my high school friend walk by side for a month was to remind me that I was always aware of my difference in the U.S. as well. Emily knew me when I had big glasses and braces and had to shop in the children's department and when all I wanted was to fit in. She, with her parents who spoke perfect English, nice clothes, popularity, and tickets to the Opera, was my idea of a “normal” American teenager, something I believed I could become if I tried. Years later, positions reversed, I was teaching her how to fit into Korean society, bequeathing to her the lessons hard won from my years in the field, making me realize that we haven't changed so much after all. Having spent my youthful years feeling like a spy or a shape-shifter in the U.S., the idea of coming and living in Korea just seemed like an extension of that same project. I never believed in monolithic, stable identities, because my survival and my power seemed to depend on being flexible and infinitely adjustable.
Although aware of my difference and not ashamed to use it sometimes, I still believe somewhere in my unexamined heart that cultural assimilation is a matter of knowledge and will. I am ambiguous enough physically that if I dress and walk a certain way I can pass for Korean; indeed, when I return to the States I find myself bowing and accepting things with two hands without even thinking about it. I have reached some point in-between, I think, a true cultural chimera/cyborg. Then BAM! Like Emily, some latent emotional baggage overcomes my hard-earned cultural and linguistic knowledge and I find myself regressing into some teenage version of myself. High school: second only to family, the source of all anxieties and insecurities — which, apparently, we are still overcoming.
Nowhere does this conflict rear its head more frequently than in my relationships with my Korean in-laws. I have spent ten years now working to master the Korean language and culture. I have studied the history, tried to fit in, and tried to be appropriate. I have just about mastered the smile-and-nod in front of strangers, but every time my father-in-law tells my how to clean something properly or how to line up my shoes at the door I boil over with resentment and anger. “I'm a smart, well-educated adult! Don't treat me like an idiot!” Even though intellectually I know that this is how he expresses his concern and affection for me, I receive every piece of patronizing advice as an insult to my intelligence and ability. I know he wants and expects me to respond with a respectful bow like a good little daughter-in-law, but I cannot. Even Korean women have trouble with their in-laws — how can he expect me to shed my feminist sensibilities and mimic subservience? I could gain power over this relationship, perhaps, by being meek and manipulating him into doing what I want. I see it all the time on TV in those Korean dramas I can't stand watching. But in order to do so I would have to abandon my sense of American-feminist individualism and power.
I would like to think that I've learned a lot since high school. I have travelled the world, learned new languages, created two new beings, and figured out how to walk fast while drinking a hot cup of coffee. As with many of life’s lessons this one catches me off guard: I must accept that I cannot (contrary to what my mom always said) become whatever I want. I am not limitlessly flexible. I learned my way into this ex-pat life through study and rehearsal, but the old modes are still there, molding my performance and giving it another dimension of meaning. I suppose that an ex-pat, like a teenager, is stuck somewhere in-between; not a child nor an adult; not quite this culture and not quite that one either. And like a teenager the ex-pat spends her day trying to fit in while simultaneously thinking of every act as a declaration of Self and what she can or cannot become. At least I don’t have to worry about pimples.
Ah, if I had a nickel for every time a relative commented on my weight!
It's so interesting to hear about the taken-for-granted cultural baggage that I'd grown up with all my life from the perspective of someone who's had to come into it from the outside.
I experienced the kind of double consciousness that you describe most intensely when my husband first joined our family. Every meal was another lesson for him about Korean food/culture/customs that my father wanted to impart. But talking wasn't enough--my father had to rearrange the dishes in front of my husband, so that the soup bowl was on the right side of the rice bowl. This, as he was eating! And my entreaties of “Dad, leave him alone!” fell on deaf ears.
Mealtimes: every gesture has a meaning.
If I eat my rice with chopsticks I'm asserting my Chineseness, if I eat my rice with a spoon, that's the Korean way. If I serve my in-laws with round wood or plastic chopsticks, that's the Chinese way, if I use flat, metal chopsticks that's the Korean way. Too many choices. Think I'll go have a burger.
I just wanted to say that from the perspective of an American living in China this hits home on so many points. I too find myself rehashing what seems to be highschool-ish emotions in certain situations where it almost never helps anything.
I really hate that they say “hello” here to everyone who's white. Most of the time I can ignore it but sometimes I find myself pretending that I'm French and telling them that I wouldn't speak Japanese to them if they came to France.....Childish, I know, but somehow fulfilling.
Is it just me or is the practice of observing gesture meanings more important in Asian countries than in North America. I recall going to Korean bars here in Toronto and my Korean friends giving me a heads-up lesson on gestures before we arrived just so I don't make a fool of myself (such as holding the glass while someone is pouring for you, the position of the glass during a toast/knocking of glasses, etc.)
Maybe I'll just chill at home with a beer instead.
My month spent with Jen (I am the angry-Emily of whom she wrote) in Seoul only exacerbated my pre-potent addiction to Korean food. So now back in LA I spend excessive time eating in Koreatown. And having had the basics of Korean manners drilled into me by our illustrious author, I am frequently disappointed when my efforts to be culturally appropriate (receive things with two hands, bow when I enter and exit, never rest my chopsticks across a plate) are neither noticed nor returned. I’m treated as any other white person (I even get the pre-packaged wooden chopsticks while Korean patrons are given the flat stainless steel variety). Even my attempts to speak Korean (culled from Jen’s flash cards) go unnoticed. I should probably be more appreciative of the clear efforts I’ve witnessed in Koreatown to respond to me with American dominant-culture manners. Nevertheless I find myself wistful for the Korean culture I came to respect and love during my month-long visit and I continue to head to Koreatown always hopeful that my next barbeque dinner will come with a small side dish of cultural immersion.
I'm no anthropologist but...
My knee-jerk response is that social interaction here is guided by a sense of status to an extent that it is not in the U.S., and that gesture is a way of marking status. All the rules about holding one's glass, who eats first, etc. have to do with acknowledging someone else's status. I have written a little bit about this in my blog on Body Language (http://yunmay.blogspot.com/...)
I don’t know if there’s any way to rank the importance of gesture in one culture or another, but I suspect that gesture and body language in general are also pretty important in U.S. culture. I’m thinking, off the top of my head, of facial expression (having lived in Seoul for a while I am always shocked by the facial contortions of friends and family visiting from the U.S.), the importance of a firm handshake, making eye contact, different kinds of touching to indicate familiarity or distance (and this is gendered — hugging, patting on the back, high-fives, etc.). I sometimes feel that touch is more sexualized in the U.S. than it is here — at least, in Seoul friends of the same sex can walk around holding hands, and you can touch other people’s children much more than you can in the U.S. without people thinking you are a pervert. So I think that there are lots of dimensions to gesture to consider.
It is a tricky thing, this line between opting out and being excluded, with a lot of messy emotions and intentions to parse. Depending on the person and the time of day, I run the gamut between feeling offended if people assume that I wouldn’t try to follow local norms (“they think I’m a rude American”), to feeling proud of my ability to adapt, to feeling offended that I would so casually discard my Americanisms just to fit it in (could insert whole historical debates about how kings/emperors should deal with visiting dignitaries here — who should bow? Who should be able to see the King? Which gate should they enter? etc.), to feeling proud to proclaim my position. And on the other side, perhaps my Korean friends feel it is presumptuous to ask me to take on their ways, especially since there is an awareness of which culture is globally dominant. My in-laws can presume because they feel some sense of ownership over me or feel that something is at stake when I behave one way or another.
I really enjoyed your piece. It has so much great detail and really gives me a sense of what it’s like living abroad. I think being an anxious outsider has trained you to be a keen observer as well.
I always find it interesting when two people trying to be polite according to different protocols produce a discord indistinguishable from rudeness. At meals my Chinese mother-in-law puts food I don’t want on my plate and then asks via my wife why he isn’t eating it. Personally I consider it rude to comment on another person’s eating habits, and while there may not be an entire nation that agrees with me, I know many feel the same way.
But overall I have had something of a free ride with my in-laws. My wife assures me her parents are secretly judging me, but as long as they keep it a secret I don’t care.
Just one more thing: You say you don’t believe in “stable identities” but if that’s the case then what could it mean to have “ambiguous” facial features? I assume you mean racially ambiguous, which in my opinion relies on a false assumption, that the races can be reliably distinguished by noses, eyes, lips, etc. Your own case proves they can’t but you seem to dismiss it as an exception.
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