…Mostly because that wasn\u2019t my work assignment. I went there to teach. As did all the lemons that went with me. We always signed up to the same summer (or winter) camp In our early twenties, to fund our otherwise measly existence back in Cape Town for the rest of the year. English camps were always a month long. And we worked morning \u2018till night, teaching little South Koreans, who should\u2019ve (in retrospect) actually been spending their summer playing outside.\u00a0 But I was young at the time, without much of an opinion about anything of significance. So I did my job, ate my rice- and said yes to whatever my superior wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a smattering of memories from those days. Running in the rice paddies in the humidity of December, phoning my mom from a lonely telephone booth on my birthday (as there really wasn\u2019t a way she would be able to contact me), walking through fish markets, and listening to how some of my other friends got a little too close to a US military base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I remember how we had to adapt to her culture, heavily influenced by moments in history-like the Japanese invasion. The Korean culture is cute, and emotional- which is why Hello Kitty<\/em> made it big. In South Africa, we don\u2019t really do cute. Nor do we tolerate phrases like: \u2018Ah, that\u2019s so Cute\u2019. Nope. You could whack a South African across the face with a piece of boerie<\/em>, and the friendship would most likely still be intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The women are cute. The men are cute. Men will even attach a Hello kitty trinket onto their man- satchels. It\u2019s that cute. But the cats got it easy. Dogs, by comparison, are not cute. Dogs are there to be eaten, after having been sold at a backstreet market (but not if they are pedigree, of course).<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s also culturally pervasive is the value of respect. And to show this, people bow. Children bow to their teachers, teachers bow to their superiors. Shop assistants bow to the customer. It goes a step further than recognizing someone\u2019s presence and existence. It feels like a constant acknowledgment that someone else is more important than yourself. And that your life has a value associated to it- just because you\u2019re breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The downside to the somewhat overly emphasised recognition of superiority however, is that the Korean workplace can be chaotic. Plans are never properly finalised, as superiors might want to \u2018change their mind\u2019 at the last minute. We were told this is normal. So it always felt like a \u2018we\u2019ll do this or that, God willing\u2019 .But without the God willing part. And so a somewhat well-planned event can look badly organised, simply because everyone has been taking into consideration the fact that \u2018the boss may change their mind\u2019. I didn\u2019t care though. I simply bowed, and tried to look cute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And emotions. Those run high in Korea. People weep, and children get teary when saying goodbye to their beloved teachers. This originates in a concept called \u2018jeong\u2019. I wrote this down on a piece of paper many moons ago, which has since been lost. The idea though (stolen from Korea.net) is that unlike with other emotions, the notion of jeong<\/em> is highly complex but can be described as a warm feeling of love, sympathy and attachment between people who share an emotional or psychological bond. This mix of positive feelings is found in many facets of daily life in Korea and can also be applied to pets or objects of sentimental value. Jeong<\/em> has no definitive definition, not even in Korean, and the meaning is usually expressed through experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As South Africans, we tend not to appreciate the depths of this emotion, mostly because we have never been invaded by the Japanese. And so when it came time to say goodbye, we all stood there dry-eyed, smiling sheepishly at the teary eyes looking back at us. So the best we could do was to say a quick \u2018Dankie\u2019. En \u2018Totsiens\u2019! And off we scrambled. Not because we hadn\u2019t appreciated every moment or grain of rice, but because (as soon as our contracts ended) we were immediately back to being poor, in a currency stronger than ours. kamsahamnida<\/strong><\/em>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …Mostly because that wasn\u2019t my work assignment. I went there to teach. As did all the lemons that went with me. We always signed up to the same summer (or winter) camp In our early twenties, to fund our otherwise measly existence back in Cape Town for the rest of the year. English camps were always a month long. And we worked morning \u2018till night, teaching little South Koreans, who should\u2019ve (in retrospect) actually been spending their summer playing outside.\u00a0 But I was young at the time, without much of an opinion about anything of significance. So I did my job, ate my rice- and said yes to whatever my superior wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[103,100,102,101],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theministryofmuffins.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
And today, all I have left of Korea is my home-made Kimchi <\/em>(which my entire family refuses to eat), a few words (mostly centred around formalities). And of course a bow, somewhere in my memory. I still have a (very cute) dress which I bought at a fish market once, and an ice-cream pendant (of course). And a picture of me, surrounded by words and smells I didn\u2019t understand at the time, but which have since crystalised in my memory as a stalactite would do in a cave. Dark and old, but still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n