Am I anywhere different?

The scenery doesn’t really change.  I’m still inhabiting this body.  I’m still outside looking in.

This is my first myspace generation type narcissistic self photo, taken in the bathroom of the Seoul Folk Flea Market.  I like how it could have been taken anywhere, and I am standing still and the rest of the world is moving around me.   It just seemed like what I should do at the time.  And later, after attending the Disbursed and Returned exhibit about returning adoptees, it wanted me to post it and write about it.

Rev. Kim Do Hyun, speaking to the Korean audience of subway go-ers passing through the exhibit, wrote:

Having to continuously explain your existence is not necessarily a pleasant thing….When international adoptees no longer have to explain and justify their existence, the returnees are liberated from the coercion of continuous self-explanation.

And yet I don’t have to do that here, not really. I recognize Rev. Kim is trying to elicit understanding from the Korean people, and the point he made later was that it is not us adoptees who have explaining to do:  it is the Korean people who should be making explanations to us.

Here, I WANT to explain my existence, but nobody really wants to know.  As soon as you open your mouth, they can tell, and they’d rather not talk about it.  You are a reminder of their shame.  And in the United States, with every new encounter, I had to explain my existence.  And the best one of all, that I got with alarming frequency, was, “What ARE you???”  I am not one of you, obviously…

Here, I blend in.  Here, I am not one of you, though it’s obvious I should be.

I really liked what Maria Hee Jung, returning adoptee from Denmark wrote.

I think most adoptees realize that they don’t really have a country that is truly theirs, when they come to Korea.  I think it would actually be easier for me to be accepted and to feel comfortable in a third nation without blood relation and anything else.

Tobias Hubinette, Swedish adoptee, wrote in Comforting an Orphaned Nation

It is precisely in the interstitial space, oscillating between this still unfinished reconciliation with the past and still on-going imagining of the future, that the adopted Koreans are appearing as comfort children in order to ease and console the homeless and orphaned Korean nation.

Our return, for the 500+ of us who have done so, is perhaps even more important for Korea than it is for us.  We adoptees were sacrificed in exchange for a better life: because they couldn’t see that they were already free, that it was only their colonized mind-set that enslaved them, and that they had the power to make change within themselves.  They need to see and recognize us so they can move on to the next phase of their personal development.

A particularly well-written assessment of Korea’s desperation to do ANYTHING to get ahead, the later shame of such desperate acts, and the denial of desperation and erasure of those acts, was written as an article entitled, The Korean Adoption Syndrome by Dr. Kim Su Rasmussen, PhD in History of Ideas, Seoul National University:

International adoption is a vector of deterritorialization in modern Korean society.  The Korean adoptee syndrome is a politico-historical phenomenon that involves more than 150,000 adoptees who have been subjected to involuntary migration.  And with the exception of a hyper-sentimentalized portrait of adoptees and their reunions with their birth families, which merely functions as a screen-memory, it is a phenomenon that has been wiped from the collective awareness in Korea.  There is no mention of international adoption in Korean history books, nor is it part of the curriculum in Korean elementary or middle schools. Myths and deliberate distortions of the history of international adoption are widespread.  Only the most progressive elements of Korean society are able to see international adoption as a dark side of the militarized industrialization of the modern Korean society.  International adoption is a constitutive blind spot in the modern Korean society.  The Korean adoption syndrome raises a number of questions about the phenomenological experience of adoptees returning to Korea and their historical and political position in the Korean society.  While the traditional approach is to explain international adoption by referring to various antagonisms in the Korean society, I maintain that the study of international adoption provides a unique opportunity for us to gain understanding of modern Korea and its phenomenal rise in the international order of industrialized nations.

My journey to Korea has been forty years in the making.  My radicalization has been forty years in the making.  It is not enough to sit back and observe and let this life happen to me.  Fatalism is not productive.  And people who read my works volley back to me that I am negative or angry.  And to that I say:  Sorting through this morass of complicated issues is a positive action.  Coming here to live is an act of bravery.  Confronting Korean society and questioning the world’s assumptions about adoption is based upon a love of humanity and a faith in the capacity of people to change for the better.  You must turn over the soil and make a new bed before you plant new seeds.

Dr. Kim Su Rasmussen also wrote about Self-Rejection and Emancipation:

Returning to Korea is a journey of discovery.  It is a discovery of an entire world of sounds, smells, and extraordinary sensations.  The magical country that was only a vague fantasy during childhood and adolescence suddenly becomes very concrete:  the pushing and jostling in the subway during rush hour, the army of impeccable suits and high heels, the ringing of a bell in a Buddhist temple, the unbearable hot and humid summer.  It is a pleasing shock to discover that for some people, the Koreans, this is the center of the world.

However, returning to Korea is first and foremost a journey of self-discovery.  It is an experience of radical disjunction between the past and the present, the West and the East, the mind and the body.  It is  a threatening experience that destabilizes and decenters the world of the adoptee:  returning to Korea is an experience of oneself as an other;  it is an experience of radical deterritorialization in which everything, including the very core of our self, is being questioned;  and it is, at least potentially, an experience of emancipation and empowerment.

So yeah, I’ve been abandoned and exiled and abused and marginalized and silenced and OF COURSE that makes me angry!  But once upon a time, I didn’t know I was angry.  I was uncomfortable, but couldn’t verbalize it.  Later, I realized that internalizing discomfort was really hurting me.

I can ignore my discomfort and swallow my anger and hurt myself, or I can work to make it so no child in the future has to experience such avoidable trauma.  Righteous anger has powerful energy, and channeling that energy is how the world changes for the better.  I am certainly destabilized here, and it effects me.  But I try to learn from the past and persist into a future where I can contribute to society in the most meaningful way possible.

This is what optimism looks like.

So the Seoul Folk Flea Market was awesome – more on that later, but I did want to throw this in here for you, before I try and cram for my Korean lesson, which I have neglected all week.

I went.  I saw.  I, unfortunately, didn’t make it up to the second floor to see the sex toy shop you spoke of.

I did, however, spend my last 10,000 won on this:

It’s a mouth organ.  What more does a girl need?

…awaiting your comments…

Okay.

Given that folk culture was so, umm, graphic, I find it really confusing why when I am wearing clothing head to toe except for my arms, I get counseled by my vice principle today that I need to have my upper arms covered.  I mean, I had a cowl necked tunic on.  It was sleeveless, but not like it had spaghetti straps or anything!

And it seems so unfair, and (I realize this is totally cultural) perplexing.  When we see mini skirts all through the coldest days of winter and when we see skirts so short you can see the crotch of girl’s underwear.  That’s okay.  But part of my shoulder showing is not.

I think my shoulders must have turned him on or something.  Yet another rule I learn about only AFTER I have broken it…I should wear a burka on Monday in protest.

To the left – no, your other left, no right.

So I was reading in the Korean Herald the other day (only the second time I’ve gotten the English Korean paper) that Korea is planning on instituting making pedestrian traffic move to the right.  Hip hip hooray!  Only, I have serious doubts whether it can be implemented or not…Back in the day when Korea was occupied by the Japanese, they began this walking on the left thing, and even as Korea became westernized in most every other urban way, those that were alive then kept the preference for walking on the left alive.  And in the subways, the pedestrian arrows still reflect that tradition.

Sometimes.

And sometimes not.

So, there is a lot of confusion because walking on the left has become part of the culture, and walking on the right is the modern way, and walking in the middle is what people do when they can’t figure out which way is dominant.  The government took a poll, and it turns out there is an almost 50:50 ratio of preference for one side or another, with walking on the right just slightly more.  So, because Korera wants to be analogous to most of the other major western cities, walking to the right has won.

But if you’ve ever experienced walking through the subways, like me you’ll be highly skeptical this can be implemented any time soon.

No double dipping

Today I had my adult English class discuss cultural differences, and one of the items was about sharing food.  I didn’t have my laptop with me, so I couldn’t show them the Seinfeld episode where George willfully double dips his tortilla chip to the dismay of a guy who then tries to take his chip dipping priviledges.

The teachers didn’t understand why this was so awful, but then I explained about directly passing germs, and that germs can be transferred by contaminating shared food.  The nurse broke in and said that America is doing it the right way, that it’s true, and that Koreans shouldn’t put their utensils in common food.  To which she looked at me and informed me that this practice would be changing very soon.

Again, I’m pretty skeptical, but you never know…

Good Citizen or Penny Pinchers?

Penny Pinching.

Take recycling, for example, Koreans are ten times better at recycling than Americans are, and it is because their recycling is free and they only pay for having the non-recyclable waste to be hauled away.  You can’t just put your garbage in a bin and walk away.  You have to purchase an expensive bag marked as garbage.  So, to cut down on that expense, Koreans have become fastidious sorters of recycling and trading of used items.

Good Citizens.

Prior to arriving in Korea, on eatyourkimchi.com I ran across video footage of the waste baskets next to Korean toilets filled with soiled toilet paper ostensibly because toilet paper wads in the toilets will clog the plumbing. The assumption was that the toilet paper is perfumed to reduce the odor of quantities of the soiled paper in the baskets.

However, my toilet paper isn’t perfumed, the plumbing works fine, and most places I go the waste baskets next to the toilets have very few items in them:  certainly not enough to indicate that this is a defacto thing all Korean citizens must do.  So, I am guessing the times where the baskets ARE full of soiled wads of t.p. is probably due to a sign, in Korean, asking for cooperation at one site with particularly bad plumbing.  So no, foreigners, every visit to a public bathroom does not have to be a culturally traumatic euwww-ick! experience for you.

You DO, however, need to check and see what the status of the toilet paper situation is.  Many places will only have one toilet paper dispenser and it won’t be in the individual stalls, but placed in a location handy to all of them.  So you must estimate what you need PRIOR to going into a stall.

Squat toilets are a little strange at first, as you’ll need to learn to hold your clothing out of the way.  The further towards the back you place your feet for urinating, the better.  And for solids, the opposite is true.  And it’s really nice to just step on the flusher.  The only drag is if the floor is wet.  Probably left by a foreigner!

And just a warning:  there are few places with liquid handsoap dispensers.  Instead, there is a wand with a bar of soap engulfing it.  So to soap up your hands is quite similar to giving a handjob, and THAT is a little bit of an embarassing association for those with experience in those things!  But the soap is a really pretty blue color, so that makes up for it somewhat…

K.  Just wanted to share that with you, and hope you enjoy visiting Korea.

These are from my new favorite link about Korea, Skyscraper City

and

Syncretism in Changdong (창동)

• Apr. 22nd, 2009 at 2:37 AM

One of the remarkable things about Korea is the degree of syncretism that takes place between religions. While there are several ‘universal truths’ to be found within the world’s belief systems it’s not often that they borrow from one another to the extant that they do here. Take, for example, the following sign that I encountered a couple of weeks ago:

I found this sign on the side of a Buddhist temple near the tomb of King Yeonsangun. One of the more prominent symbols on this sign is the swastika (卍), associated with the Buddhist principles of Dharma and harmony. The left-facing swastika is said to represent love and mercy while a right-facing swastika signifies strength and intelligence. Located within the swastika is a taeguk (太極) image, a reference to Daoism and, in particular, the notion of yin and yang. The first line of Korean – 태백산 산신령 – mentions Taebaek Mountain (太白山) and the mountain spirits (산신) that are an important part of Korean shamanism. The expression 산신령 adds the suffix ~령 (領) to imply possession of a dominion or territory.

The above is from another of my new favorite sites,

Back on the office kidnapping BBQ picnic day, when we were at the art museum, I saw several groups of children there on a field trip.  These kids were all attending a pre-school academy that focused on sports, and they all had on adorable little matching track suits.

Just like the high school boys, these 5 yr. olds (4 in American years) were an unruly bunch and totally different from the American preschoolers I have seen, who are all in neat orderly lines, hanging onto a string, following the day care giver like ducklings.  From out of nowhere, I hear their instructor shouting some drill call, and then all the kids shouting (ear shatteringly loud) a response.  And for a brief moment, there was order out of chaos.  The same phenomenon as when some sympathetic nice student in my classes gets the rest of the class to shut up when I am speaking.  Call and response.

I turned to the Korean English teacher next to me, telling him how amazing (and slightly scarey) and LOUD that was.   Then I tell him about my students doing something similar. To which he tells me.  “Yeah.  They’ve been doing that all their lives.  It’s Korean culture.”

There is something key in group think and group control here that is totally the inverse of what we know and operate by in America.  It is one thing to read about it, and another thing entirely to experience.  I really need to figure this out.

I need to figure out why these kids seem to think a teacher should entertain them, and I’m sure it is the fault of those early childhood education instructors.   There is something militaristic about the way in which those children are addressed…I need to figure out why the Korean English teacher thought it was appropriate to braid one of her student’s hair during the mid-terms, why the Korean home room teachers think they have to be the student’s best friend, and why in the absence of that, they have to bring out the “stick of love.”  The appeal to a child’s sense of compassion, justice, and reason, seem to be something they can intellectualize but simply not follow through on.

Mostly I need to find patience, as it may be another year or more before I figure out some of the subtleties of this system.

Anybody know some good call and response drills in English???  Right now, I am studying drill team stomps.

Seriously.