I spend about ten months of the year thirty miles south of the DMZ, and the rest of the time, for the sake of my children’s English, my own sanity, and my need to fulfill all my repressed dietary cravings (reuben sandwiches, burritos, raspberries) I pack the bags, bribe the kids, and board the plane to return to the suburbs of the U.S. where I grew up. Among other transformations, I’ve noticed this one: as I go about my day-to-day mommy tasks in Seoul, a tank ride from the “axis of evil,” I feel relatively safe; returning to the well-manicured lawns of suburban D.C. and San Francisco I morph from protective mommy into anxious bodyguard.

That these places would hold different kind of dangers doesn’t surprise me; but the sources of danger and the ways I fear in both places aren’t necessarily related. This affective difference between my two lives has nagged and tugged at my mind for some time, demanding explanation or at least a rambling blog post, but I had none to give, and examining my own fears frankly scared me. But after the nuclear tests, when my seemingly humdrum and calm Seoul life was punctuated by panicked e-mails from U.S. friends, I felt somehow compelled to account for, or at least describe, this disconnect between feeling safe in a warzone and feeling fearful in the manicured suburbs of the U.S.

In the days after the nuclear test, I looked for signs of fear from other Seoul residents. The exchange rate went up so the bank was crowded with people changing money, the American embassy issued an evacuation plan, and we had our first air raid drill in months (scaring the living daylights out of a bunch of foreigners). Ramen sales increased slightly. Condom sales and “love hotel” bookings skyrocketed leading one newspaper to proclaim that at some level people were afraid; but bizarrely, nobody seemed to be. The only notes of panic I felt from people under the age of 60 were from friends in the U.S. In my highly unscientific poll of those who happened to be around in those days, the sentiment expressed was that Kim Jong Il wouldn’t harm “fellow Koreans” and that the biggest threat was not from North Korea but from other superpowers (the U.S. and Japan in particular) stepping in to control and dominate the Korean peninsula.

Why this general sense of safety? I wonder if the positioning of Kim Jong Il as “self” and foreign powers as “others” invites and reflects recent nationalist readings of history. But another reason for the widespread sense of calm could just be in a failure to really appreciate or comprehend war. In fact, the only person on this side of the ocean who expressed any fear was my father-in-law, also the only person I talked to from the generation who lived through the Korean War. North Korea has always been his biggest fear (and the reason he sent his sons to the U.S., but that’s another story) and he maintains a stock of supplies and cash just in case. Beyond stockpiling and leaving, however, there isn’t much that any of us can do about the madman at the border, and I suspect that this lack of control coupled with (except for my father-in-law) our inability to really imagine what war would be like leaves us in the comfortable realm of Denial. Fear is a funny thing; not always clearly manifested in behavior, or manifested differently due to different experience; hard to measure, and sometimes not consciously felt by the people who seem to be in the most danger. Fear and danger aren’t necessarily related; we may fear what poses little risk and not fear the things which actually pose a threat (consider anyone living along the San Andreas fault).

Even without the nuclear test, we live with small daily reminders that we are at war: the occasional air raid drill, barbed wire lining the walls around most apartment complexes (including the one in which we live), bomb shelter signs in subway stations and underground stores, soldiers with machine guns patrolling the airport and many areas of the city, e-mail and cellphone alerts from the embassy, beaches sealed off at night with barbed wire and patrols. On vacation on the east coast, we drive by strange looking bridges meant to be cut in order to block tank traffic should North Korea invade; in some areas near the DMZ there are signs warning of snipers in the bushes. Yet in my daily life in Korea I don’t even perceive these mementos of war; they have become part of the landscape, as noticeable to me as another fire hydrant or police box.

The city of Seoul provides what feels like a benign backdrop for raising my kids. In crowded stores and restaurants I send my six-year-old to the bathroom or play area by himself, I let him take the stairs while I take the little one up the elevator. He loves to find his own “secret” paths to our mutual destination and prides himself for the magic trick of disappearing and reappearing at will. He is old enough to have his own busy schedule of school, taekwondo and play dates, and I send him out to wait for the bus by himself with a quick kiss and goodbye. The sidewalks here are crowded with these commuting kids, chatting away and swinging backpacks, observed by the hordes of adults also walking around, selling food, making deliveries, or waiting for a taxi. These adults actively watch over the children and dispense free advice: “Don’t play on the bridge!” “Don’t pick your nose!” “Don’t throw the garbage on the street!” I send my son out to the playground in front of our building (sometimes leaving the front door open to listen for crying and casualties), and there he plays with the other children, few parents in sight. Some kids are as young as three, and the advice-giving hierarchy expresses itself here as well; the older children and whatever adults are present to some extent regulate the behavior of the younger ones. As much as I resent this advice when it is given to me, I appreciate the feeling of security that all these extra eyes and mouths provide; and I also participate in this community of nosy busybodies, dispensing my own advice and warnings.

Life here feels at once regulated and unregulated; we have seat belt laws, but no one follows them. Drivers obey their own set of rules only tangentially related to written law. Kids go to school healthy or with a fever. People have never heard of peanut allergies. Many times in Seoul I miss the effects of U.S.-type regulation: when my son’s shoe got caught in the escalator at Incheon airport I wondered why the airport authorities didn’t appear and take him to the hospital right away, weren’t they afraid of being sued? We take parasite medication twice a year here, food regulation and sanitation (particularly in schools) not being what it is in the U.S. And I have to be vigilant about strangers giving my toddler hard candy and gum, which are choking hazards for him.

And yet the absence of Rules (or non-compliance with them) are cushioned by the constant interaction on the street and the expected compliance with social norms. Although our lives are filled with strangers — strangers gently pushing us aside on the sidewalk, strangers helping me lift the stroller over steps (not many ramps here yet), strangers smelling of garlic or soju, strangers yapping away too loudly on their phones, strangers selling things or just contributing their own observations — I am often reminded that many of these strangers are familiar strangers. Seoul is full of neighborhoods; people live in their apartment complexes and frequent the same stores within walking distance, so that I am often meeting people who say, “Ah, you live in Hanshin. I see you with your boys all the time.” I pass the same delivery men on their scooters day in and day out, and the security guard/repairman/all purpose man for our building comments, “Didn’t you just get a shipment of diapers last week? Why are you getting more? And why is it that you guys produce so much recycling trash?” These are neighborhood people, not only dispensing advice but keenly observing and also judging.

Some feeling of safety could be an effect of underreporting, particularly of rape and child abuse, which are just starting to get a lot of media attention here. But I think that my main feeling of safety comes from this cushion of the busy social bodies at work on the street; not just because they are there, but because I participate in them. I feel, to some extent, that I have control over my environment because I too yell at kids who don’t cross at the intersection, or help the lost boy find his mom, or watch the neighbor’s kid when his mom isn’t home in time. I can’t control the nukes at the border, but I can exercise my mouth and eyes and feel that I am somehow making this place safe for my own kids.

And yet, thinking of what little I know about psychology, I wonder if I’m fooling myself. I think of the famous Kitty Genovese case and the subsequent Latane and Darley study showing that the more people are around the less individuals feel responsible to help someone in distress. How valid are these conclusions in a different cultural context? Perhaps my “eyes on the street” theory is just a bedtime story I tell myself to stay sane. Or perhaps there are other psychological explanations. Perhaps there is a hierarchy of fears — similar to Erikson’s hierarchy of needs — so that fear of one’s government would precede or preclude more local fears. Or perhaps we all just need to fear something concrete so we can avoid the specter of death.

Whether or not my story/theory about eyes on the street is valid, I’m fascinated by the way in which parenting horror stories function to create/maintain fear and to shape others’ behavior. In Korea, all the free advice gives durability to opinions and stories which may have no relationship to reality. Casual comments like, “Doing taekwondo from an early age stunts growth” (nevermind that my son is the tallest in his class); “Long term breastfeeding is not good for the child” (resulting in an argumentative denial from me); and “Sleeping in a closed room with a fan on can kill you” (the infamous Fan Death urban legend) gather a social momentum of their own, transmitted like viruses on the street and communal spaces of the city. I speculate that these stories also maintain their particular power because of the mistrust or absence of other types of authorities. My sense is that Koreans don’t trust their government, and for good reason: a long history of corruption, toadyism, kidnapping and killing of its own citizens, sacrifice of the welfare of the poor for the benefit of the rich in the name of nationalism. The government says the water is safe to drink and nobody drinks it. Authorities like doctors are almost inaccessible because of long lines and systemic habits (you’re not supposed to sit in the office and question your doctor, or even ask anything not directly related to your current condition).

Returning to the U.S., my kids become my appendages, constantly under my watchful eye, with heightened awareness of Rules and hidden dangers. I tell my son, “Every place has different rules. Here, you can’t go to the bathroom by yourself, you have to go to the women’s bathroom with me.” He says, “But mommy, I’m the only one with a penis!” I consider letting him go by himself, then look at the face of the mom sitting next to me at the bookstore and imagine her calling Social Services. We go together. He has to wait for his brother to wake up from his nap before going outside so I can chaperone him. He can’t go to the playground by himself. He can’t accept candy from strangers; indeed, he shouldn’t even talk to strangers, and I have to check all this Halloween candy before he eats it. He has to sit in a car seat until he is seven. He can’t bring the peanuts we received on the airplane to any of his classes. We finally have an oven to use (no oven in Seoul) so we are on a cookie-making spree, but we can’t bring any of those cookies to the schools, only store-bought ones. Each time I return even I feel how the rules and prohibitions have multiplied. I find myself anticipating every source of risk, every possible danger: child molesters lurking behind the jungle gym, rapists in the alley, the kindly neighbor who may in fact be harboring a terrorist cell or at least a stockpile of guns which a child could find and set off.

Controlling my fear in the U.S. has come to mean inserting myself into every interaction between my son and the world. A trip to the suburban playground reveals almost equal numbers of adults and children, with children playing while the parents (mostly mothers) are performing complex “interventions and facilitations” like ventriloquists (in Judith Warner’s words: “What that lady is saying is, she would really prefer you not empty your bucket of sand over her little boy's head. Is that okay with you, honey?”). I hesitate to tell other people’s children what to do, even if those children are doing something I consider “bad behavior” or even mildly dangerous, or upsetting to my own kid. This is the land of “You can’t tell me what to do,” “You’re not my mommy,” and “Do you have a problem with my child?”

And yet the U.S. playground is also site for the spread of a brand of particularly gruesome horror stories. You know the type: “My sister’s friend’s cousin’s kid had an immunization and died!” “I saw on Oprah that the leading cause of death among pregnant women is murder!” I wonder if these stories serve as a kind of advice-on-the-street — a way of telling people how to behave, but the extremity of the story and the way its told (not as a command but as a more detached “I heard...”) removes the stink of telling someone what to do, and provides a way of controlling collective behavior.

The nosy observations and comments of the advice-on-the-street in Seoul create a more homogenous social body, providing checks on individual behavior and ways of thinking; in the U.S. we protect difference and individuality and rely more on rules and prohibitions to guide behavior and action. I like not having to defend my decision to, for instance, breastfeed my two year old in public in the U.S., but increasingly my returns to American soil leave me feeling that the burden of protecting kids against the dangers of the world falls overwhelmingly on parents, without giving many outlets for feeling control over the environment other than micromanaging our own kids’ interactions, campaigning for more rules, or petitioning the government. I alone am standing between my children and the monsters of the world and any desire I have to make the world safer or protect the country’s innocent must be turned inward, toward only my own family, or escalated to the larger system of laws and governance. When I return to the U.S., my sense is that Americans trust the “system,” whatever that may be. We (loosely defined) believe Bush when he says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though we think he is a idiot because we trust that something about the system supporting him works (so much for that). But we don’t trust the repairman at the door, or the stranger in the dark parking lot, or the woman who offers to hold the baby for a minute while we go to the bathroom.

In the U.S. most of us spend our time in our own cars or in our own houses, at our places of work. We move around a lot, we don’t necessarily live close to our relatives. We don’t interact as much with strangers. We control ourselves and the places we inhabit, and we seem to want to control those places more and more tightly: burglar alarms, guns, metal detectors in schools, carbon monoxide detectors. If I had to characterize what I feel as I enter the American highway and shed the habits of my Korea-life, it is a turning inward, a tightening of the space over which I feel control and agency. It is a widening gap between the individual and the system, and alienated from the system of governance I use all my energy to protect the domain of my children and myself, armed with pepper spray, locks on the windows, and GPS tracking devices. To hell with the rest of them. That move inward scares me as much as my own government does: what happened to the model of agency embedded in “the personal is political,” where individual action could be seen as influencing the collective?

Three years of coming and going, and my Korea-self and U.S.-self have become, somehow, differentiated. I shed one way of being and without conscious effort morph into the other during those long plane rides. My daily rituals and routines are different in these places; and I’m not sure if the fear comes from the reenactment of the rituals which presume fear or if the fear comes first. But to look for clear cause and effect when it comes to fear is to invite oversimplification. My idiosyncratic experiences, the social cues to which I react, and the media in each place also shape the contours of my fears and practices.

Fear is socially and culturally embedded. Fear inhabits everyday practice. And perhaps we can look to the contours of fear to interrogate the shady characters of trust, responsibility, and agency. If in reading this you feel like you are rummaging through my orphaned sock drawer of theories, observations, and questions, it is because I also don’t have a clear idea how to grasp fear, to hold it out and examine it, to understand its mutations. But the length of this post is scaring me now, so I will retreat into my small apartment to hunker down and wait for the next air raid drill.