Posts filed under 'Culture'
Japanese food in Korea seems to come in two types: everyday sushi from the corner store and special occasion food. I decided Tod had to experience Japanese special occasion food, Korean style.
We went to a place I had been for lunch with a colleague and his family. We ordered the least expensive dinner item on the menu “Special Side Dishes, $40 per person”. The waitress spoke some English and assured us that the meal would include “sushi, sashimi, and Korean food.” Japanese food seems quite expensive, compared to the huge plate of raw fish one can get at a Korean sea-side restaurant (see my blog entry called “The Western Coast” at http://blogs.saintanselmcollege.net/bethsalerno/2007/12/12/the-western-coast/). However, Japanese meals have amazing variety. Here is what appeared for our $40 per person. I have interspersed cultural commentary with the menu.
Starters:
*A small bowl of juk (rice porridge) *Cabbage salad with sweet, nutty dressing
*Cucumbers, carrots, garlic scapes (stems) and hot peppers with dipping sauce
*Sliced ginger, pickled radish, and pickled pearl onions
*Wasabi, soy sauce, and red hot sauce for fish.
Course 1:
*Mioku (thick, salty sea vegetable), shrimp and raw oysters in light cold broth
*Sliced octopus with cucumber in hot sauce
*Sashimi salad with cabbage, kim (dried, crunchy seaweed) and hot sauce
Course 2:
*Red snapper sushi *Sashimi plate of white and silver fish
*Sealife plate of oysters, scallops, conch or whelk, and two unidentified crunchy things
Both the sashimi and sealife plates were decorated with orchids, a plastic dolphin, small pine trees, marigold blossoms, and shells, and all the food was placed atop large mounds of glistening white noodles which you do not eat. At moments, there was barely enough room on the table for the silverware.
Course 3:
*Doenjang Soup (kind of like Miso soup - a soybean based broth with mushrooms and scallions)
*Cooked white fish steak - buttery and plain.
*Cooked fish filet with slow-roasted carrot, onion, and garlic.
At this point, I recognized the general outlines of the meal from previous outings and warned Tod that there were likely to be at least two more courses. He stared at me. From then on, every time he heard the cart rolling down the hall he looked a bit like a deer in the headlights. But we plunged bravely on.
In Korea, it is tradition that guests should be served more food than it is humanly possible to eat. That way everyone is sure to have enough to eat of whatever they like best, while the host is seen as extremely generous and caring. One simply cannot think about the wasted food if one wants to be properly polite and honored. Eating everything on the table would be both rude and suicidal.
Course 4:
*Haemul nurungi soup (a thick, gelled soup made from seafood and the scorched rice at the bottom of the rice cooking pot)
*Mussels, baby octopi, and other unidentified sea life with noodles in red sauce
*A whole fish covered with tuna slices so thin they looked like slightly burned paper and tasted wonderfully dry and smoky. The fish also had hot sauce and scallions.
Course 5:
*Prawns (still in their shell with heads attached) deep fried in tempura batter with a Chinese sweet and sour sauce with hot peppers
*Tempura Vegetables and shrimp (absolutely no hot sauce in sight!)
Course 6:
*Rice with sesame seeds, two kinds of fish roe, and dried, crispy seeweed in a hot stone pot, so the rice crisped on the bottom and made the dish quite crunchy
*Maemultang - equal parts water, leftover fish parts, and red pepper powder with a few greens thrown in. Unbelieveably hot. Tod had two bowls and said the inside of his ears were sweating.
*Kimchi
Dessert:
Plum Juice
We ordered green tea early on and got a bottle of ice water with a tea bag. It was good and kept us through half the meal when we again ordered green tea and specified “hot please”. Koreans do not drink water with their meals usually, preferring to get their fluids from the foods and soups, perhaps drinking a glass of water at the end of the meal.
At the end of our meal, we could not drink water. We could barely move. We immediately agreed to skip the cab and walk six blocks to catch the bus. Too many special occasion meals like this and we would definitely explode!
I am not wholly sure what is “Japanese” about the meal, other than the sushi and sashimi. Many of the dishes were quite Korean and others may have been Korean-ized. Perhaps it is like Japanese food in the United States, which also likely bears only a passing resemblance to what is eaten in Japan but is immediately recognized by Americans as “Japanese” - sushi, tempura, grilled shrimp filleted by a knife-wielding chef and tossed to you. Koreans recognize the combination of dishes above as part of a “Japanese” menu. We recognized it as good food worth eating, though next time, we’ll skip lunch and possibly breakfast too, in order to prepare enough space.
January 17, 2008
Happy Solar New Year to everyone! My extended “absence” from the “blogosphere” this past month was due to my husband’s 3 week visit to Korea. E-mail and 3-cent-a-minute phone cards kept us connected during our four months apart, not to mention surprise packages and old-fashioned hand-written letters. However, nothing compares to being together and I did not want to “waste” any of our time writing blog entries!
You will hear about our various adventures over the next couple of weeks. Some entries will even have pictures, when I remembered to take them! The most interesting part however was getting to watch another American adapt to Korean society. I have gotten so used to the crowding, hurrying, language and customs of Korea, that I had forgotten how overwhelming they can be to a new person.
By New Hampshire standards, Pyeongtaek is a major city. With almost 400,000 residents, it is four times the size of Manchester. I tend to think of it as a small agricultural town in comparison to Seoul’s 24 million people. But Tod saw it compared to Weare New Hampshire’s 8000 very spread-out residents. Through his eyes I experienced once again the amazing population density here in Korea. Koreans’ sense of body space is very different than Americans and one is pretty constantly jostled, brushed against, or leaned on whenever there is a crowd. As in American cities, most people are in a constant state of hustle, so anyone trying to figure out where to go (or simply sight-seeing and dawdling along) is an obstacle to forward progress. In Korea, the hurry extends to bus drivers and taxi drivers who engage in what feel like life-threatening driving feats to shave 5 minutes off their arrival time (think “New York City cab driver” and then add attitude). This “ppalli, ppalli” or “fast, fast” personality has rocketed Korea from third world to first world economy in less than 30 years, but it does leave one a bit bewildered in the subway station. On the other hand, an amazing number of people stopped to ask us if we needed help - always in English.
After two weeks, Tod commented that he was surprised there was so little variety in the food. I was a bit astonished - he had eaten kalbi and samgyeopsal (grilled beef and pork) as well as Buddhist Temple Cuisine, which is vegetarian. But we realized what he meant was that all the food he was eating was recognizeably Korean. In Manchester alone, an adventurous person can eat Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Irish food, to mention only a few. This is pretty standard in any good-sized American town. But in Korea, you have to search a fair bit harder for non-Korean food, though Chinese and Japanese dishes that have been “Korean-ized” are widely available. I think this says something important about America’s acceptance of diversity in the past few decades, while Korea is still trying to adapt from its previously multiracial society to its rapidly multicultural one.
Being with Tod also showed me how many things I now do automatically, though I had never seen or done them five months ago. When I hand something to someone, I use one hand for young people, two hands for people senior to me, and one hand with the other hand near my elbow for equals. The first time I handed something to Tod this way, he looked at me baffled and I asked him what he was so confused about! I half-bow to new acquaintances, bring bags to the supermarket, get my vegetables weighed and labeled in the produce section (not at the checkout), eat neatly with metal chopsticks, navigate city buses, subways, three kinds of trains, and two kinds of taxis, and read signs and communicate in a language that to Tod was “circles and lines”. Five months ago some of those actions felt completely overwhelming. Now I often take them for granted.
Seeing Korea through Tod’s eyes gave me a strange “double vision” - I could see Korea the way I had when I first arrived, and yet also as I see it now. It makes me wonder what the country will look like in five more months when I take my leave from here and head back home.
January 15, 2008
This morning I woke up to find this sight out of my seventh story window - a large metal “ladder” but without anywhere to put feet. After staring at it a few moments, a flat platform went up past my view. A few moments later the platform came back down, bearing a kitchen table! OK, now I’m willing to brave the cold on the porch to see what is going on. I open the sliding glass doors and screen, lean over the bust high metal railing, and look down.
There below, is a blue truck to which the long metal structure is attached. Next to it is a moving van. The men stop the platform at exactly the height of the moving van, move the kitchen table from the platform into the van, and send the platform back up. Over the course of two hours, it moves an 8 foot tall clothing cabinet, old wooden Chinese chests, boxes and boxes and boxes, and an amazingly large television. I assume six or seven floors above me men are cleaning out an apartment, loading the platform via the same large sliding glass doors I just opened in my apartment.
So after spending a couple of months wondering how dozens of people manage to move in and out of my apartment building without ever carrying a single piece of furniture down the stairs or elevator, or always doing it while I’m somewhere else, now I know - they move it out the windows while I am someplace else! What an amazing labor saving device!
While staring out the window I solve another mystery - why we had such a spectacular lightning storm last night without any thunder or rain. Turns out workers are arc welding on the roof of the church next door and the light bounces spectacularly off all the glass on my building.
The mysteries of the Christmas season are not so easily explained and perhaps that is one reason why they appeal to millions of people. Christmas is a “new” holiday in Korea, with Catholicism about 200 years old here and Protestantism about 125. (For comparison, Buddhism, the other major religion, is at least 2500 years old in Korea). Christians make up about 40% of the Korean population and that number is growing rapidly. However, Christmas remains a church-based holiday; only about ½ the subway stations in Seoul had Christmas trees last week and stores began their Christmas sales a full week after Thanksgiving. Even in the second week of December the Pyeongtaek market had very few signs of Christmas. Pyeongtaek University is a Christian college, however, so it has been lit up with wreaths since before Thanksgiving.
After the holidays I will post a few blog entries on religion in Korea. In early January I plan to stay overnight at a Buddhist Temple in the southeastern mountains and visit a Catholic monastery with connections to Saint Anselm College. I have also found an active Quaker meeting in central Seoul and I want to attend First Day meeting. In the meantime, I will enjoy a long-awaited visit from my husband! Showing him “my Korea” will likely mean I won’t post any blog entries for a couple of weeks.
Whatever your religion, I wish you joy in the lengthening of the days marked by the winter solstice, the promise of peace and forgiveness brought by Christmas, and the celebration of a fresh new year. I will spend six months of that new year here in Korea and I look forward to sharing it with you.
December 17, 2007
Since I have been in Korea I have grown out my fingernails. This was not an intentional action. I have always chewed my fingernails when I read or grade and I have done far less of both of those here than at home. So my nails grew. And I have discovered an important fact - fingernails are incredibly difficult to manage if you do not have a lot of experience with them. I cracked one off trying to open a pistachio nut. I caught another putting on my socks. I actually got one stuck between the keys of my laptop keyboard. Completely unconsciously I had developed a “short fingernail” culture. I am finding it very hard to adapt to “long fingernail” culture.
Some cultural differences between America and Korea are similarly small and seemingly unimportant, but they take some getting used to. I continue to be surprised by how many of our ordinary actions are actually set by our culture. Here is a list of some small things I have noticed now that I have learned to manage the larger differences.
Action 1: Buying eggs. Eggs in Korea come in multiples of 5 rather than 6. Eggs can be found near the vegetables in an unrefrigerated section, not near the dairy in a refrigerated case.
Action 2: Tallying up votes. In America, when we tally up anything on paper, we tend to write vertical slash, vertical slash, vertical slash, vertical slash, diagonal slash through all four. We count this as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. At the end, we count groups of 5 to get the total. In Korea, they write vertical slash, horizontal line to make a T, little horizontal line to make an F, vertical line to the left of the first one and a little lower, horizontal line to make an upside down T. They count this as 1, 2, 3 4, 5 and at the end, count groups of 5. Why such an exotic looking set of 5 lines? It is the Chinese character for rightness or justice. A fine 5-lined character to use when counting votes!
Action 3: Getting water in a restaurant. In many restaurants here, water is “self-serve.” You get little stainless steel cups out of Ultraviolet Sterilizing Cabinets and hot or cold water from the water “cooler”. The futuristic-looking UV cabinets are everywhere, and seem to be used after washing the cups. Most Korean students will finish their meal and then go get a cup of water; many believe drinking water with a meal makes it harder to digest your food properly.
Action 4: Walking in crowds. Both Koreans and Americans drive on the right-hand side of the road. Americans and Koreans also stand on the right-side and walk on the left-side of escalators in subway stations. So it is pretty strange that given the option, Koreans will walk on the left-hand side of any crowded area. Imagine a large number of people walking toward you. If you move to the right, you are American. If you move left, you are Korean. If it depends on where there are more people, you are in a hurry - that works in both cultures!
Action 5: Counting on your fingers. Put up your hand and count on your fingers - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If you started with your fist closed and counted by putting your forefinger up, then middle, ring, pinky and thumb, you are American. If you started with your hand open and put your pinky down first and then your ring, middle, forefinger and thumb, you are Korean.
Action 6: Eating Take-Out Food: In American cities and towns, you can call up the local restaurant and have food delivered to your house. This is also true in Korea. Deliveries arrive via scooters that defy all traffic laws and some of the laws of gravity. However in Korea the delivery person comes twice - once to deliver your meal and once to pick up the dishes! Thus the University and apartment hallways are lined with dirty dishes covered by a newspaper, waiting for pickup. Few restaurants provide “take out” containers.
Action 7: Dealing with Leftovers: Koreans assume that only the very poor would need to save food from a restaurant meal. No matter how good your main course was, if you cannot finish it, you throw it out. There are no “doggy bags”. Korea thus has the highest level of food waste in the world. On the other hand, at some restaurants uneaten side dishes are saved by the staff and put out for other diners. As usual, food is the most cultural item of all.
December 4, 2007
The idea of Thanksgiving is not uniquely American. Many cultures have a specific day, usually in fall, when they express gratefulness to God for all good things and spend time together with family. In Korea, this is Chuseok. But American Thanksgiving does have its unique aspects, particularly its food traditions. (The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and college football are pretty special too, and Black Friday must be unique in the world).
I celebrated on Saturday this year with a former American military chaplain and his wife, both of whom teach at Pyeongtaek University. Seven Korean friends joined us. Because our hosts shopped at the military base, the Thanksgiving food was wonderfully familiar - a 26 pound (beautifully cooked) turkey, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and green salad. We also had rice and kimchee. For dessert there was fruit salad, cheese pie, coffee cake and a decadent white cake with whipped cream and fruit from a local French bakery. I said to my hostess I was glad she had not made pumpkin pie, because then I would have had to nominate her for sainthood!
As in the U.S., we ate, and ate, and ate some more, telling jokes and stories, drinking wine and laughing. I was asked to contribute a Thanksgiving joke, so here’s my effort:
A woman bought a parrot a few days before Thanksgiving. She had been assured that the parrot knew many words, but so far he had not spoken. However, as each guest came in the door, he greeted them with a series of curse words! He sounded like a drunken sailor. The woman was frantic. She yelled at him, threw things at him. Finally, desperate, she walked him past the dining room table into the kitchen and put him in the refrigerator where no one could hear him. After 5 minutes she felt terrible and let him out. From then on, he was perfectly behaved, saying only the most polite things. When the last guest had left, he turned to her and asked, quietly, “So what did the turkey do?”
This is Korea after all, so after dinner there was no football. Instead we went out for norebang. Norebang is the Korean word for karaoke or “singing room”, a private room with karaoke machine, lights, and a wall of video monitors. I love to sing, but never know the titles of songs, making it hard to find something I know in a book of 6000 song titles, 5000 in Korean. But this was my third experience, and my colleagues are very supportive, often singing in English. Watching a former Korean military general belt out Frank Sinatra’s My Way ranks up there with my best experiences in Korea! This time I contributed Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, Desperado, and John Denver’s Take Me Home Country Roads. I have promised to learn one song completely in Korean before I leave for home!
Given all the richness of my experience here, I gave extra special thanks this Thanksgiving. While my family and old friends were far away, they were safe and happy. I had new friends and familiar foods and plenty of laughter. From the very beginning, one could say Thanksgiving has been an international holiday. Both the turkey and the Indians were named after countries far away. The Indians who joined the colonists were representing their own nations. Colonists were integrating European traditions (like harvest festivals and pie) with American foods (like turkeys and pumpkins). So perhaps my multinational celebration was more American than I had thought. I wonder if there was a colonial American tradition of norebang too?
November 24, 2007
A few weeks ago, the student assistant in the American Studies Department asked if he could take me to a museum. On a Saturday morning Ji Jae-yong showed up with two friends and a picnic lunch. We drove about 40 minutes to the town of Cheonan, eating tangerines and sharing stories. After a great lunch in a blustery wind, we headed into the museum complex, eventually seeing 6 buildings of out 10.
In case you do not know (I did not before I came here), Japan ruled Korea from the mid-1890s until the end of World War II. This is called the “colonial period” and it was filled with Japanese brutality and Korean independence movements. The March 1 (1919) uprising is the most famous. Japan required all Koreans to learn Japanese, to take Japanese names, and to serve the Japanese economy. Korean resistance was physical as well as cultural, especially the teaching of hanguel (the Korean alphabet) and the sewing of national flags.
The Independence Hall of Korea was created in the 1980s specifically to counter Japanese histories of this period. Koreans firmly believe that Japan has still not fully understood or repented its colonial activities. They point to Japan’s history books, which tend to gloss over any negative aspects of the period, as evidence.
While I could argue with a few signs in the museum which referred to “those wily Japanese imperialists,” one sign was absolutely perfect. It came after an exhibit depicting Japanese soldiers inflicting horrible torture on members of the Korean Language Association (being a Korean language teacher was a revolutionary and deadly position under colonialism). The Japanese appeared to be either enjoying their work, or bored by it. I wondered what the point of this horror was (I would have skipped the exhibit, but the students were eager for me to see it). Then I found the sign. It said, more or less, “The actions shown in this exhibit can be forgiven, but should never be forgotten. We did not create this exhibit to excite hatred or anger toward another nation, but to present the truth as reported in oral testimonies and historical documents. Only when we understand and accept the truth of the past can we create a united future.”
We all paused and thought. As an American I was particularly stunned. I fear some day I will read such a sign after an exhibit depicting American atrocities. Whatever our political beliefs about the reasons such things happen, torture by Americans has and likely is still happening. We will some day have to account for and perhaps apologize for it. If we do not, I hope someone creates such a carefully worded exhibit. We must understand and accept before we can move on.
A week later I went to the National Museum of Korea. It used to be housed in a building built by the Japanese during the colonial period. Late in the 1990s this was considered inappropriate for Korea’s national museum and it has been moved to a stunningly beautiful new building and park. I wandered the grounds, deeply impressed with the economic investment Korea could make in protecting its heritage. It has only been 50 years since colonization and a devastating civil war. Living people still remember.
A colleague provided excellent explanations of the moveable type exhibit (Koreans invented moveable type 200 years before Gutenberg). She underscored the connections between patriotism and hanguel, language and resistance. So you may understand why I was rocked a little off-balance when we next entered an entire exhibit devoted to Japanese art. Not just Japanese art, but Japanese art in the 1930s, when Japan was using Korea’s economic and human resources to build an Asian empire. The exhibit had delicately painted screens in gold and bright blue, modernist renderings of Mount Fuji, azure blue pottery, stunningly lacquered boxes, and intricately woven baskets. The exhibit was mounted with care, thoughtfulness, and a clear love for the pieces.
Here was true forgiveness. A curator at Korea’s National Museum installed an exhibit of Japanese beauty from a period of Japanese brutality. There were no signs pointing this out, no hint of politics, just a quiet act of acceptance and generosity. Here, in a sense, was also Korea’s self-confidence, the ability to showcase Japanese productions amid Korea’s own, knowing Korea’s art would not suffer by comparison.
I am grateful to the students and the English colleague who made sure I got to see the museums. And I am especially grateful to two museum curators for an unexpected vision of history and forgiveness.
November 18, 2007
[Sorry, no pictures this week. I have had some great experiences recently, but I have also had a cold. Learning how to say “Where can I buy cold medicine?” was NOT on my to do list! Hopefully there will be pictures by next week.]
Being a minority person means being stared at. Everywhere I go in Korea, people notice me and stare openly or covertly, briefly or until I return their gaze. Each look says, “That’s odd” or “What is she doing here?” So far almost everyone has seemed curious, noticing me the way one would notice a bright red bus. I am merely something unusual, almost always the only non-Asian in a crowd.
But being a minority person means I have to try and understand the stares to separate friendly curiosity from potentially threatening situations. My experience here has been so positive that I generally assume the stares are friendly. I attribute the rare, apparently unfriendly stare to causes other than me, like gas pains or a bad day. Had my experience been negative, I probably would feel singled out by the stares. The question, “What is she doing here?” would not feel like curiosity, but rather a denial of my right to be present.
I have the advantage here that I am a welcome minority person. I am white, which means racism works in my favor. A few Koreans are anti-American (and that number is growing). However, most have accepted the advertising culture which associates whiter skin, wider eyes, English-speaking, and relative wealth with success. Therefore I to some extent represent what Koreans want to be or have, rather than a threat to their culture and society. Immigrants and visitors from the Philippines, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam would likely have a very different minority experience. I know African American service members and African immigrants are still pretty baffling -and often less welcome - to most Koreans.
The respect for English speaking means my limited Korean does not make me look like a four year old as often as I had thought. In this way my experience is far different from that of visitors to the United States, who often are often met with frustration and anger when they cannot speak the local language. There is also great respect for professors and teachers here, so when I manage to say that I am a professor, most people immediately grant me some level of respect. A few people have even switched from the polite verb endings to the honorific verb endings (a major problem for me since I am less competent [more incompetent?] with the honorific endings).
Because it has been remarkably positive, I cannot compare my experience here to that of most minority persons in America. Yet there are two shared parts of the experience. First there is the shared sense of feeling different, separated, an object of curiosity, always defined as other due to the color of my skin, even by people who are trying to be nice. It gets very tiring to always be noticed and different.
Second, perhaps I can also understand what it means to “represent” my culture. In America, a bad action by a white person is an individual act. A bad action by a minority person is assumed to be due to their race and thus taints an entire group of people. Here I feel distinctly American in a way I rarely do at home. I feel like my successes (and my failures) will reflect on the next thousand Americans coming to Korea, giving them a little more or a little less respect in Korean eyes. Usually I try to forget this or it makes it hard to do much of anything! But it lurks in the background, the reminder that because I stand out, I am easily identified and easily judged. I wonder if that is the central aspect of being a minority person.
November 15, 2007
Living abroad makes clear that what we Americans take for granted as ordinary and common might be unusual or strange to other cultures. Halloween is my latest example.
South Koreans have not traditionally celebrated Halloween. It has recently become popular at big amusement parks and in a few neighborhoods in the capital Seoul, but generally South Koreans do not know about it. Therefore planning a Halloween party for my students was a major undertaking in cultural exchange and creative shopping.
First I looked for pumpkins. American history textbooks will tell you that pumpkins are a New World vegetable which delighted English colonists who had, until then, been carving radishes and turnips for Halloween (yes, radishes and turnips - I cannot quite imagine!). The jack-o-lantern pumpkins that are absolutely everywhere in America throughout October simply do not exist in South Korea. The much rarer, flattened, dusty orange pumpkin (sometimes called a cheese pumpkin in America) is the only kind of pumpkin I could find here.
Then there were the decorations. The huge supercenter in my town had orange and black balloons (which even said Happy Halloween!). Two days before Halloween I got the last bag. I also found a few tiny plastic pumpkins. I bought construction paper and used all the black and orange sheets to make bats, cats, spiders and jack-o-lanterns - and then had to look up why we used those symbols for Halloween so I could explain them to my students!
My students seemed to enjoy the story of Jack. When the Devil came for Jack, Jack trapped him in a tree and demanded an extra ten years of life in exchange for releasing him. When Jack died and went to Hell, the Devil got his revenge by refusing Jack entrance. Jack was forced to walk the earth with a lantern in his hand forever. I felt obligated to tell my students that most Americans have no idea who Jack is or why we carve Jack-o-lanterns. It is fascinating what we do not know until we have to explain it to others.
Only two students made an effort at a costume, but all helped to carve their first ever jack-o-lanterns and many made Halloween decorations. A few students collaborated on a glowing orange skull with a cigarette that looks like a great anti-smoking ad, and I now have a collection of tokaebbies or Korean ghosts on my wall. A few students shared Korean ghost stories, and all who said “trick or treat” left with candy. My local stores did not carry a single American candy item except extra dark Snickers minis. So my little pumpkins were filled with Snickers, red ginseng caramels, and sweet pumpkin chewies.
It was not quite an American Halloween - maybe “fusion Halloween” would be more appropriate. But when cultural exchange involves “brain surgery” on pumpkins, how can you go wrong?
November 1, 2007
[Important note: Taking pictures in a room full of naked women would be a quick way to get my cultural ambassador title - and probably my visa - revoked. So the pictures attached to this blog are not of the Korean baths. Instead they are images from my recent hike to Soraksan, South Korea’s northernmost mountain range. More pictures from that trip can be seen in the Soraksan set on flickr - including the endless metal stairways and stunning mountain views. However the two topics, Soraksan and Korean baths, are not unrelated. Hiking the first required a long visit to the second to soothe some aching muscles!]
For the Korean baths, imagine a temple to cleanliness. Showers line one wall. Another section has individual cleaning stations with a small stool, washbasin and mobile shower nozzle. A long, narrow stone water basin ringed with a stone bench is available for those who want to dip their washbasins, pour water over themselves and then sit and soap up. Take your pick and get clean, or try all three.
Once you are thoroughly clean, you can move on, but I do mean thoroughly clean. When was the last time you washed behind your left ankle bone? How about between your toes? Did you use a long scrubbly cloth or brush to scrub your own back? Or did you ask someone else to do it? If you are done in less than 20 minutes (not including the time you just stood around in the hot water!) you are not Korean-style clean.
Moving on means making choices. You can soak in the warm, medium hot, or broiling stone whirlpools in the center of the room, or try the medium hot wooden hot tub. Splash some water over the edge and have a seat to get used to the heat, or just slide in up to your chin. If you tend to be in a hurry when you brush your teeth, feel free to bring your brush and indulge in a 5 or 10 minute tooth cleaning. Just do not drip into the pool.
Or you can go try the saunas - hot and dry, hot and moist or sometimes hot with earthen/clay floor for its health properties. After each, come out and rinse off by pouring water over yourself and then take a plunge in the cold pool to bring your body temperature back down. Like Scandinavians, Koreans believe in both the health and cleanliness value of purging the body through steam and the stimulating value of cold water. The opening and closing of the pores is also supposed to create more beautiful skin.
If you have made an appointment, you can get a full body scrub from one of the on-site massage technicians. They will be sure to get any dry skin you missed while also stimulating circulation in every part of your body. At fancier spas you can also arrange a dip in green tea tubs, pine needle infused tubs, ginseng tubs and many others.
It would be all too easy to make simple cultural comparisons based on Korean and American shower habits. Do Americans have a lackadaisical, “good enough” attitude compared to Koreans’ careful, focused, and detail-oriented approach? Or are Koreans too focused on appearance while Americans are eager to get past the basics to the important parts of a day’s agenda? What about years of American mothers yelling “Stop getting water on the floor!” versus the Korean approach of putting a drain in the floor and simply allowing people to get water absolutely everywhere?
I will be sure to give these topics more thought over the coming weeks, preferably in the medium hot stone whirlpool at my local sauna.
October 22, 2007
After reading this blog, a few people have asked whether I am actually doing any teaching here in Korea! Yes I am, and I love it. Teaching students whose second language is English, or students from non-American cultures, was barely touched upon in my doctoral training. This was a major oversight given the makeup of the American population. I am learning many crucial lessons here that I will be able to apply back in the United States.
In some ways, teaching here is no different than teaching in the U.S. There are some hard-working, diligent students with their eye on future success and there are some students with no clue why they are in college. Many students in Korea put in 15-18 hour school days from middle school onward (including Saturday classes) . Increasingly, children in wealthier families spend a year in the United States or Canada to master English. Since “school reputation” is the number one hiring criterion in Korea (60% of government officials and 70% of top company executives graduate from the “top 3″ universities), your score on the college entrance exam determines much of your future life. Pyeongtaek is not one of the top three. So my students are late-bloomers, bad test-takers, kids from less privileged schools and backgrounds or kids who simply wanted something other than the academic grind during their childhood.
Almost all of the students have studied English for 10 years, but most have only spoken it for 1 or 2 years and many have never spoken to a foreigner before. Their grasp of grammar is amazing, but also inhibiting to them as they deal with Americans’ highly ungrammatical common speech!
I have one class and two study groups; the latter are informal weekly meetings to discuss culture and practice English. Here are some windows into my teaching here.
1) In one study group, a few students were too shy and nervous to get out a coherent sentence. Since some were urban planning majors, we headed out to the green where I asked them to describe to me their favorite building on campus. Soon we were discussing what buildings should be torn down, where to put athletic fields and whether to save an orchard or build a gym instead. Focusing on content enabled them to move past their embarrasment about their English, which consequently improved.
2) In another study group, I asked students to bring in debate questions. One student asked whether or not Koreans should be getting plastic surgery to improve their job prospects. Another asked whom should we blame : inviduals who forge their degrees or the society that values degrees over ability. A third asked why Koreans were buying so many high-priced luxury items - whether to show off for others, or reassure themselves. Each debate led to questions about values and to comparisons with American culture. Cross-cultural understanding is at the heart of what I do here.
3) My class is on Race and Gender in America. It is fascinating to teach about race to a nation that has long defined itself as mono-racial, but which is rapidly becoming multicultural and multiracial. In addition, I am teaching “Asian-American” history to people who question the concept of “Asian”. My students wonder how I can like America so much, yet also be so clear about our racial fault lines and injustices. Discussing such complexity would be hard enough with native speakers - making it accessible in simpler English is my greatest challenge.
4) In class, the students discuss the reading in small groups. Small group discussion is rare in Korea, so the students love the chance to help each other with translation, debate the main points, and answer my discussion questions. In order to enable deeper discussion of content, I allow the students to discuss in Korean. This is a bit of a problem for me though - how do I tell if they are on track or getting the right answer if I cannot understand the conversation?! I have been amazed to discover that a little Korean and careful observation makes this perfectly feasible - a timely intervention here or there works perfectly. The students then present their answers in English, so I have a second chance to check and correct their work, just in case I misgauged the small group!
5) I try to get out with my students when I can, so I have taken one group to dinner and another to a cafe in town. As always the students teach me as much as I teach them. One group has two exchange students from Mexico in addition to my Korean students, so our cultural sharing takes on different depths. Once we went to a cafe to experience the hot new Korean fad - Dr. Fish. These little fish eat the dead skin off your feet and massage the capillaries. Not your usual history class, but we all learned a fair bit about China where the fish come from and Korea’s passion for the new.
Overall, teaching has been the easiest thing I have done here - I have years of practice and I love experimenting with teaching styles. But at times cultural differences are an issue. Professors are both elders (by age) and superiors (by status) and thus there are extensive rules for faculty-student interaction - none of which are obvious to me. Being a foreigner means those rules are modified for me, but the students are not sure how much or when. Even the question of name is an issue - am I Professor Salerno (American style), Salerno Professor (Korean style), Salerno Kyosu-nim (Korean words) or just Beth (as some other American professors are)? I opted for Professor Salerno. It is my American title (I am teaching American Studies after all) and I thought a little formality might make up for my complete ignorance of the other formal rules. It hasn’t. However, not knowing the rules has forced the students to articulate them. This allows us to discuss the differences between American and Korean universities.
Sometimes I do not know about the cultural issue until it is too late. In a lecture about the evils of plagiarism, I joked that I would flog students who copy from the internet. After students looked up the word in their electronic dictionaries I got very respectful and amazed looks. I later discovered corporal punishment is still legal in Korean schools (though it usually involves a ruler, not a cat o nine tails!). So once again I got to explain the differences between American and Korean schools.
In the end, that is the essence of my teaching style - even my ignorance is a teachable moment. Having humility and a willingness to listen have been the biggest assets I bring to my teaching (my friends will tell you I’m still working on the humility). As one student told me after class “I have learned a lot about America and a lot about Korea. This is really interesting.” Another slightly tipsy student told me at a recent department dinner, “You give me pride in my English and my thoughts - you listen, you understand, and you reply. Thank you.” I cannot ask for any more than this.
October 14, 2007
Next Posts
Previous Posts
