One day recently I was making my way through a crowded subway station, weaving through the clumps of people, silently annoyed at the slow-walkers, when I bumped into a woman going the opposite direction. I hit her with the edge of my bag. It was certainly my fault, since I had been trying to move faster than the crowd and underestimated the available space, but in Seoul getting bumped is a matter of routine, an expected occurrence. I must have hit her harder than I thought though (my laptop was in the bag) because she turned around and started screaming at me. I looked back briefly then walked on.

Later in the train I thought, “Shit, I’ve become one of those city assholes.” Next thing you know I’ll pretend to sleep instead of giving up my seat to the elderly and pregnant, I’ll ignore the old lady struggling with her bags as she ascends the steps, and I’ll let the door close behind me instead of holding it open. I could have apologized, and I probably would have, but the screaming was not a socially appropriate reaction (read: maybe she was crazy), and my reflexes said, “Get out of here.”

E Hayot has written about assholes before, and the way in which assholes emerge as part of the imagination of social comparison and competition. To paraphrase him paraphrasing George Carlin, anyone doing better is an asshole and everyone doing worse is an idiot. The designation of asshole marks one boundary of the sweet-spot of appropriate behavior.

But when it comes to city assholes, I suspect there’s something else also at work in the training of one’s perception of strangers. I always thought of the city asshole as someone who was so focused on her own needs and goals that she wouldn’t bother to consider the possible needs and goals of those around her. This works in two ways — by inhabiting a kind of private psychological space even when in public, and by making the Others part of the landscape, largely one-dimensional. Doctors, morticians, policemen and the like who have to deal with the bodies of strangers all day long have to learn to let in and shut out various dimensions of personhood of those they deal with in order to stay sane. And so do we all, especially if you live in a city and spend the day rubbing elbows with some small subset of twelve million.

This is something with which I struggle. Partially because I have an undisciplined imagination but also because I’m here as an observer, as a tourist. (And also because I need material to write about every week.) The trick, which the subconscious learns to do, is let in the attributes that matter and shut the rest out. Let in the fact that this person looks impatient, foul-tempered, and perhaps a little crazy, and avoid hitting her. Keep out the wondering about whether she was really hurt. Let in the fact that there’s a smelly, dirty person taking up residence on the steps and walk around it, keep out the speculation about how this old man ended up without legs and homeless. Do not wonder where is family is, or whether he has one. Do not think about his mental condition. Try not to imagine being his mother. Don’t let yourself wonder if your own children will end up this way. For the most part I can handle myself. I throw a few coins and walk on. I answer my son’s questions evenly and resist the urge to hold onto him too tightly. I remind myself that stress and lack of sleep are making me more emotional than usual. I tell myself to stop watching documentaries on North Korea and forbid myself from looking at photos from the Korean War.

But the dimensional shifts happen at unexpected moments. Call it the Dentist’s Chair Effect. I’m sitting, prone, in that awful plastc-covered chair, trying to think myself into some happy place rather than speculate about the number of cavities THIS time, taking a(nother) silent oath to floss twice a day for the rest of my life. Then the hygienist leans over me, her face made surreal by proximity and the concealing power of her mask. From the familiar routine of upright conversation her visage looked perfect, smooth, and clear. Up close I notice her pores, moles, and the unevenness of her skin tone. She has a scar near her eyebrow. How did she get it? Did she fall? Was she in a fight? Does her boyfriend beat her up? Was it a childhood scar? Does she feel self-conscious about it? This leads to a whole line of questioning about the life of this person — a person I would have passed on the street without even noticing. When she puts on her eyeliner in the morning (it is expertly applied) does she do so while thinking of all the people who will be examining her face at close range all day long? How does she feel about her job? Does she consider having plastic surgery? I don’t see why she would, but it’s quite common among women her age, it’s part of a lifestyle and a set of desires that I don’t understand. Sitting in that chair I try to reconcile this individual, whom I know nothing about (and I can’t ask since my mouth is full of gauze), with the preconceptions I have of “people” here. She takes on an uneven kind of three-dimensionality, fleshed out with imagination and fluff, partially rendered, real and unreal at the same time.

Or, on the subway, the dark-suited man next to me is dozing off, his head slowly making its way toward my shoulder. He jerks upright, suddenly, only to follow the gravitational course back towards my shoulder a minute later. I can smell his cologne. His thigh is pressed against mine since he has taken that very male, open legged “airing out” kind of position that annoys the hell out of me. I wonder what his life is like. Does he dream of becoming a manager who plays golf twice a week and drives an Equuis? Does he go to Room Salons and have a mistress, like I hear is so common? Is he happy? What would happiness mean to him? On the personal level, there’s a kind of voyeurism at work here, encouraged, I think, by the cultural consumption of reality TV and tabloid/gossip. This idea of other people’s lives drives my own imagined desires for my own life, and gives me a sense of comparison, helps me articulate what I do and don’t want to become.

But because I am an outsider this is also part of my cultural education. When we first came all my movements were wrong. I tried to pass on the right, I shrieked when scooters came barreling down the sidewalk, I glared at people who stared at me, misinterpreted gesture and facial expression, and I couldn’t tell what class someone belonged to by looking at them. The People were either The Koreans, an undifferentiated mass, or an uninterpretable parade of uncategorizable individuals. I’d put them into categories of my own, and these categories became more refined over time. At one point I explained to a friend that there are three types of Korean men: the smart, skinny, Seoul National University type, the thick-necked, large-bellied businessman type, and the fancy fashionable type. Living here, like learning the language, has been a process of taking what I learn from books and the newspaper and training the grammar of my vision, learning to take in, apprehend, and read people in the landscape. And like learning a language I could easily settle into a routine way of understanding the world that just lets me get by. To push past that sense of complacency and comfort requires, perhaps, moments of surreal or unexpected perception — moments like becoming the asshole, encountering someone who doesn’t obey social conventions, or confronting a stranger’s face up close and personal.

Looking back at the posts I’ve written over the past year or so I was struck by how many were about the sensory pressures of living in this city. In the first essay I wrote (chronologically — not the first one to be posted on this site), Walking in Seoul, I tried to capture the way in which this unfamiliar sensory environment made me receptive and innocent, like my son, but also the way in which the establishment of habits and rituals enabled me to slowly shut down some of that sensory input and focus on the tasks at hand. In a later post on city spaces I returned to this idea in more detail, talking about the ways in which city spaces required a different kind of configuring of public and private self. In my posts on signs, the signs were initially just noise. Later, as I became more accustomed to the visual stimulation and the linguistic landscape, I could begin to appreciate the signs first as part of a system of navigation and then later as part of cultural conversations on topics like the behavior of first-world citizenry.

In retrospect, blogging about my Seoul life has been part of the process of tuning the dials on my sensory apparatus, trying to find the configuration that allows just enough sensory data in so that I can be functional in the world. I’m trying, I guess, to find that sensory sweet-spot. I need to — to stay sane, but also to keep my sense of empathy and curiosity alive. To avoid being an asshole — at least, most of the time.

Now what are YOU lookin' at?