It is sad and negative of me to continue to bash Korea for the things I don’t like here and ignore the fact that there are more than a handful of things that I do like.
Many people will argue that since I have been living here for 4-5 years that I must love this country and that it must be doing something right, right?
I love the independence I have here. I have money, good money, an apartment that is rent free (Korean schools pay for a foreign teacher’s rent as part of their contract) the transport system is top notch and the cities are easily coordinated. Money goes far here, and if you ignore the lure of late night bars and south east Asian travel you can save a great lump of it.
I hate the staring, but I appreciate the reason why it is done. Korea is one of the most homogenous countries in the world.
Only recently (tail end of the 20th century) is it experiencing an influx of foreigners. Many Koreans have not seen white or black skin other than on T.V and the ‘shock’ of seeing something different is difficult to ignore.
Nonetheless, because of the short period of time that Korea has been established, as what we know today, many foreigners also lack much education about Korea before they arrive and therefore many tend to densely populate the cities that provide comfort with their westernized atmosphere, such as Seoul and Busan.
Jumping straight into the clutches of a different culture can be too much of a shock too soon.
After 6 months in Korea I suffered what could only be described as the darkest moment of my life, so far. I have not been a stranger to traveling and now I have Korea down to a tee but in February 2008 I was hit hard!
A lot happened to me in regards to relationships and, although I will not dwell on them (too much) and their insignificance, at that time they had a huge impact on my already fragile state. Now that I am older and a great deal wiser I know that relationships come and go, that being intertwined with another human being, sharing your deepest secrets and allowing your soul to be wide open to attack, judgment and scrutiny doesn’t mean that another person ‘has’ you. What I have learned, if anything, is the importance of being independent within a relationship. Although your actions should always take into consideration the partner in your life, your mind should always be free.
Unfortunately, at 24 I still hadn’t received this valuable lesson which, it seems, only mistakes can teach you. I believed that without a man you are a failure, and therefore life with ‘any’ man is better than that! On a cold February day, 4 years ago I sat in my apartment and I lost control of myself. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and yet I didn’t wish to seek breath. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know from where I wanted to leave. I had thoughts that were so black and frightening that I was scared of being alone but wanted for no company.I have no recollection of how long this dragged on for, I just remember receiving desperate emails from my mother who told me, quite obviously, “you can come home at any time, come home!”
This, at the time, seemed an impossible feat that was not achievable since I couldn’t even leave my swivel chair.
The person who saved me at this time was Erin. My closest comrade. We shared hours at a time together and I will always be forever sorry for the way I treated her when I fell ‘into’ a man. I fell so unimaginably hard that I spent 2.5 years climbing the walls of the relationship trying to get out. Of course there were good times, but now I realize these were just the moments in which I lost my footing and had to begin the scramble again.
Erin had possibly the worse apartment that I have witnessed in Korea. She regularly spent her evenings filming the mating rituals of her bathroom cockroaches, much to the amusement of everyone else in Korea whose apartments were bug free. She had no air conditioning and if you have ever experienced Korean summers you will understand the unbearable humidity that comes with it. An air conditioner is a necessity rather than a luxury. The location was the worst part, it seems her school found the cheapest most isolated piece of wasteland they could, gave Erin the key, and run away.
Anyway, the reason I point out the poor girl’s misery is to show why we spent so much initial time together. I was possibly the closest waygook, proximity wise, to her and she needed a decent roof over her head and this, I provided. When I met a man, this is what I took away!
I remember spending hours with her on my heated floor on a mat that she bought herself to put in my place(Korean heating is under the floor boards, it is called ‘ondol’ and is possibly the single most amazing idea ever, especially since the majority of Koreans have not westernized themselves enough to sleep on beds but rather the floor) with small bite-size packets of real cheese that we purchased at 6am from the local family mart, on the way HOME from a social night.
An expat guide to Korea : cheese and Soju
Two things to mention here is cheese and drinking;
Cheese in Korea is a rare commodity, they have it but it is expensive and considered more of a luxury rather than a weekly purchased item. Although, as I said previously I have a goal to be a vegan, as a vegetarian cheese is by far my favorite food and I know I will miss everything about it, but alas, the importance of where ones food comes from is far higher to how something tastes.
When I was ignorant to dairy issues, such as in 2008, I longed for cheese in mass quantities. Not just me but other foreigners, we planned nights around it ‘cheese and wine nights.. wine is optional!!’ Brie became my top cheese and I would eat large amounts of it on single sittings, it makes me nauseous to think I ate this way but as I once mentioned I was an uneducated 24 year old!
So, Erin and I would have nights out followed by morning cheese pig outs which were nothing short of glorious!
Drinking is at the core of Korea’s social life. A culture that works hard and parties rather than sleeps, to compensate. Koreans, in general, work extremely hard and for long hours. Having taught adults from Korean companies including, LG Electronics, Doosan Engine, Hyosung and STX I am fully educated on the working hours of the average Korean white collar worker.
Here are a few examples, overtime pay begins AFTER 10pm! Bear in mind work starts at 8am!
Some workers MUST work on Christmas day ( this is not a huge holiday in Korea in comparison to the western world, but it is still a national holiday!)
Vacation time, in most of the companies, is 1 week in the summer, 1 week in the winter. (This is 5 days and does not necessarily exclude weekends) For some companies it is just 1 week for the whole year ! Now after all these hours at work wouldn’t you want to just, go home?..
I taught a vice president at LG for a short period of time and most mornings he was ‘hungover.’ This is not at all unprofessional in Korea, this is the way business is done. I was told there are three levels of socializing/doing business after hours in Korea.
Level 1 ) eating at a restaurant with drinks
Level 2 ) going onto a bar and continuing with the drinking
Level 3 ) Norea banging! (Sleep is now officially sacrificed)
*Norea bang (translation; singing room) - a karaoke room that a group can hire at a reasonable cost for private singing along with a continuous service of drinks.
The sad reality of this way of life begins and ends with the wives. My partner and I were invited to dinner with an old vice principle of mine from Masan. She is slightly older than 40 and speaks coherent English. She was always eager to help me out (sometimes to my annoyance ) but I was more than willing to accept a free dinner for myself and drag my partner along too. We went to the local Indian restaurant, which we used to love, mainly for it’s lack of Korean food!! The awkwardness that always transpires in these situations subsided quite quickly and she talked willingly about her home life and in particular, her husband. When someone tells you a story about nothing less than abandonment it is hard to hide the pity in your eyes, but we have been here for a significant amount of time and one gets used to the culture differences, we knew to nod and smile as if the tale was a funny anecdote with a never ending punch line.
“My husband was an engineer and now works as a University professor, he leaves the house around 6am and finishes around midnight”(insert disbelief followed by heads thrown back with canned laughter) “He usually goes out drinking after with his co workers and sometimes he falls asleep in restaurants!” (insert silence followed by heads thrown back with canned laughter)
A marriage is not just a convenient business contract, it is a life long commitment to that one person who you can tolerate for years on end. It should be to your best friend and that one person who wants to spend most of their spare time with YOU! I am lucky that I followed a tragic relationship with a great one. I will never say again that this is ‘the one’ but I will say that if it isn’t, then the next relationship will have to be exceptional to even compare.
Some of the marriages in Korea sadden me. Although Korea has developed somewhat and fought hard to be more than just a confucian society, the reigns of the old society still hang around their necks and uneducated women still wish to be married before they are 30 rather than get an education!
In 2007, a co-worker, who I sat with in the teacher’s office pointed out another teacher, who had innocently and unsuspectedly come in to photocopy and subsequently become the victim of mindless gossip, the co-worker whispered into my ear,
“She is 30 and NOT married.”
I wasn’t sure what my reaction was supposed to be since in the U.K this is a perfectly normal scenario but now I realize I should have been belching forth my disgust and pity at her obviously long and lonely future ahead.
Today, 2012, things are a little different and that is a marvelous thing to have witnessed. One woman I teach who is 30 years old has had a boyfriend for 8 years but has no plans to marry him yet and is quite open and seemingly proud of it. She has a company job ( which is still rather difficult for a woman to accomplish) she has stocks in a few Korean companies and she has her independence. She sounds rather, well ...WESTERN !
However, as I said it is still important for most women to have a husband and this rush to be accepted by society sometimes pairs women up with cavemen!
As evident with my former vice principle, it is hard to imagine that she is not actually living with the misery that her husband would rather sleep in a restaurant than come home and share a bed with her. But, because of Korean society she puts on this comic front;
‘It’s ok, this is just how it is.’
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