Differences

As I reflect on my time in Korea and the couple of months remaining, I find myself thinking a lot about differences. And about this passage from The Merchant of Venice:

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"


I got into a discussion with a fellow EPIK teacher about problems he's had at work with Korean co-workers. Apparently, the more he tries to fit in, the less he actually does. He feels excluded, confused, and ultimately, lonely. This friend of mine is someone who has tried far more than I have to be a part of Korean culture, both inside and outside of school, and I feel for him that he has not found the acceptance and the understanding he had hoped for. For him what it comes down to is a fundamental difference in the structure of friendship. He has experienced a shallowness of conversation with people he considered friends, and has been told that it takes at least one year for Koreans to fully accept someone as their friend and be more open. Maybe that Korean is just speaking for herself, but my friend's experiences tell him otherwise.

There's this common idea that I've heard and said often enough: that we are all the same in the world; meaning, we all experience love, pain, joy, suffering, and therefore, everyone is fundamentally the same. And therefore, we should treat everyone with respect and understanding, because regardless of where we are from, we share a common framework--things that bind us as humans.

I'm starting to wonder if this concept might be a little misguided.

Off the bat, let me say that of course I believe that everyone in the world, regardless of nationality, should be treated equally and with respect. This isn't about equality. What it is about is questioning what service a statement like "we are all the same" really does us. Especially those of us who decided to live in another country for whatever reason. Some of us might have thought we would come to Korea, meet our co-workers, be embraced into the Korean culture, share our own culture, and make fast and lasting friends. And it's true--this may have happened for some of us. I think though for others of us, we have sort of stumbled through the social and behaviorial expectations of Korea, trying our best to behave appropriately (bowing, saying hello and goodbye to everyone in the office when we come and go, waiting for the Principal to eat, even though he's 30 minutes late to dinner, bringing gifts to our co-teachers as a thank you even before we know them at all, etc.). And yet.

And for others, like my friend, making connections with Korean people has proven more difficult for some basic reasons. (Obviously, there's the language barrier, which admittedly is a barrier because we have not learned the language. But let's shelve that for the moment.) In short, what he considers friendship and what his co-workers consider friendship are vastly different. There are different rules, different obligations, different expectations. And even if you are the most eager of people, and the most willing to learn and adapt, you don't always learn the rules in time. Either because no one has understood that you don't understand, because they don't care to, or because you were too ethnocentric to pay attention. In the case of my friend though, I know he is paying attention. He's working his butt off to fit in and to understand these differences. The point for him? To make meaningful friendships in this place he calls his home for the forseeable future. It seems, however, that he is not succeeding.

I have felt alternately very close to and very distant from my Korean co-workers. It's a rollercoaster. In my experience, when you first meet someone you go through that awkward stage, where you're not sure how to behave, where you're feeling each other out for similarities and differences, testing the other person's humor, seeing how it fits with your own, determining if you have a similar take on life. And then, hopefully, that awkwardness goes away, and either you are left with a good friend or not. It's pretty clear what's happened on the other side of that stage. But here, that's not how it's gone down. For me, at least, and for my friend. I have had co-workers over for dinner, been taken on Sunday excursions, met co-workers' family members, hugged my co-teacher, talked about interesting stuff like how Koreans conceive of body image, their families, their jobs, the stress of education. I have had the kind of meaningful talks that typically would engender a fuller friendship. But they have not.

Let me be clear: I'm not blaming anyone. There's no judgement either way. It is what it is. But that's the point--it is what it is. And what it is is very different from what I/my friend/we know. And so this basic idea that "we are all the same" in something as fundamental as a desire for friendship or closeness is not exactly true. It could be said that some of us have suffered because we expected this sameness, and were surprised that it wasn't there.

Though I haven't entirely rejected the idea of "we are all the same", it has begun to crack a bit for me. Rejecting that statement makes intercultural relationships even more difficult. Because I can't rely on the idea that we all just want to love and live and make friends and have peace in this crazy world. There's safety, I think, and comfort, in that idea, but it's misleading. I have to understand that the ways that people love, live, make friends, and search for peace are vastly different, that each of those things look different to different people who have been raised in different cultures. In short, we're all different. More than we know. And more than one year in a country can possibly teach us.