Dispatches - November 25, 2009

Yesterday Jin and I went on a secret mission. I had in mind the perfect photo for the next edition of my holiday card and I knew Jin was just the man – or kid – for the job. For one thing, he has a Sony 14.2 megapixel digital SLR camera: a piece of equipment far too nice for someone his own age. Perhaps more importantly, however, Jin is a clever character – the kind that can appreciate the need for discretion...a need of paramount import when international clandestine correspondence (read: holiday cards sent to other countries) weighs in the balance.

For those of you hoping for a hint regarding the next installment of my coveted and much-anticipated holiday card, I'm afraid you'll simply have to stay tuned to your mailbox – I've revealed too much already. Well...OK...perhaps I can offer you, my loyal readers, a morsel: san. I'm such a softy.

Every year I look forward to my holiday card. My daily pursuits don't offer much opportunity to exercise my creative energies, but my annual card always scratches this itch...at least until I'm three dozen copies deep and it becomes tedious. But I digress. I enjoy keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives via old-fashioned letter-writing. Hearing how a card has brightened a recipient's day – or at least their refrigerator – brightens a moment for me as well. And the lingering and misguided hope always springs eternal that receiving a card will guilt the recipient into sending me one in return...*ahem*...

I suppose one could make a strong case that my holiday card is a personal tradition. And as much as I hate to admit it, they'd be right. While 'tradition' holds a place of esteem in the minds of most, it's a bit lower in my own lexicon. In my penultimate post, I promised pending commentary about my take on Korea and tradition. So hold onto your keyboards...

I've no problem with tradition reminding of shared values or reconnecting with a culture in common. Tradition offers the comfort of a collective beyond ourselves. It provides the promise of predictability. It returns the order of routine.

But tradition also insulates us from new ideas. It binds us to antiquated notions of acceptability. It prescribes limited possibilities and potential. When tradition ceases to be inclusive and crosses into the exclusive, that is where I respectfully – sometimes disrespectfully – step off the bandwagon.

Korea is steeped in tradition of both the implicit and explicit variety. A favorite joke among fellow ETA's is to refer to some element of life as 'traditional Korean'. It's a phrase that is uttered at near-comical frequency by our host friends, family, and co-workers. Of course I must remember that I am in a culture whose age easily surpasses that of my own culture by thousands of years. That being said, I had trouble suppressing a chuckle when I heard the 'traditional Korean' phrase applied to something as nondescript as a rice field.

Koreans are proud of their past – as they should be. The country is perhaps the best illustration of capitalism and globalization the world has ever seen. And maybe that's why I find some Korean habits so curious.

Take the recent swine flu epidemic. It receives considerable attention in Korea. Being that I am a teacher and children are one of the demographics most at risk, I am constantly reminded of the measures Korea is taking to combat the spread of the H1N1 virus. Students regularly get their temperatures taken upon arrival at school. Hand sanitizer dispensers have been installed in the hallways. Large group gatherings and festivals have been canceled for fear of easily spreading the contagion. All of these efforts to stem the spread of swing flu at school, but when the students sit down at the dinner table at night, these efforts are all for naught.

Korean food is traditionally served in communal fashion; small dishes are placed in the center of a table with diners reaching in with their chopsticks not to serve, but for each bite, returning time and time again with the same utensils to the same serving dish used by multiple people.

I suppose at least the spread would be contained to family members. But other traditions observed seem to run counter to logic as well. One of the first lessons about Korean culture that I picked up was the tradition of removing one's shoes upon entering a room or a building. Our dorm rooms at orientation actually featured a small recession built into the floor at the entrance that marked the area for visitors and occupants to leave their footwear. It doesn't take long to come up with a few benefits for removing shoes before walking through living quarters. In fact, when I think about some of the places my shoes travel throughout a day, I actually might extend this tradition to my State-side return.

Enforcing this tradition at school, however, is a policy decision of which I have no qualms firmly condemning as ridiculous. Students run through the halls in soccer sandals which they must carry to school, performing a silly balancing act at the doors each morning – rain or shine – as they remove their sneakers and put on their sandals. Now, if the school was clean this would make sense. If the sandals themselves were clean this would make sense.

But neither the school nor the sandals are clean. The school, in fact, is nothing short of filthy. As far as I can tell, there are no maintenance personnel employed at Se Kwang Middle School. In their stead, boys run around after sixth period with mops and brooms and – as one would expect from middle school boys – put in an extremely uninspired cleaning performance. My favorite part is the mops; students drench them at the stationary tubs in the storage closets and then drag them in a straight line down the middle of the hallways. I'm actually surprised I haven't seen kids break their necks on the slippery tile left in their wake. But I suspect that's thanks to the traction provided by years of grime layered on the floor.

I can't quite tell what color the walls in the stairwells used to be on account of the Pollock-like scuff marks that have been added throughout the years. One might suspect that the areas reserved for teachers would be substantially nicer.

Silly goose. With respect to the bathrooms, it's actually the opposite. I can't speak for the woman's restroom, but the male teachers' restroom is, delicately-put, unpleasant. At least some mental capacity is reserved for a daily value judgment as to whether I can forgo a visit to the facilities until I return home. After months at the school I have yet to detect the presence of a cleaning agent anywhere on the grounds, especially not in the bathroom. In my gyomoshil – or teachers' lounge – I've begun following an interesting method for cleaning employed by a few co-teachers. After watering the principal's flower boxes by the window, they proceed to circle the room, emptying the contents of the watering can onto the floor. Another teacher follows with a mop that, judging by its tatters, may or may not hold seniority over them at the school. At first I thought there must be a a cleaning solution involved and thus an explanation as to why the floor is watered daily, but after I saw the teacher move from flora to floor indiscriminately, I changed my evaluation.

During orientation we were advised to procure a pair of comfortable sandals or 'slippers' and save them expressly for indoor school use only. Once their virgin soles ventured into the out of doors, all was lost and wearing them inside would be the gravest of cultural sins. I frankly didn't have time to get a pair of new sandals during orientation and thus I showed up on the first day somewhat anxious regarding my footwear. My Italian loafers were well-polished and – if I do say so myself – pretty damn stylish. But they had seen the light of day and the sidewalks that go with it. I nervously asked my co-teacher about my shoes and she informed me that the policy at our school was simply for our comfort; if my feet were happy with my loafers than the school was happy with my loafers.

I felt a little self-conscious at first; my heels click on the floor. If it wasn't enough to look different than everyone else, I now announced my presence with my footwear. But it would be dishonest to say that the look created by school slippers didn't leave me at least slightly amused. One need not be fashion-savvy to answer this riddle: sportcoat, dress shirt, tie, cuffed-slacks, and … Adidas sandals: which doesn't belong? And thus I stepped over the cultural line – in well-heeled loafers – by wearing my shoes in school.

And after a couple of weeks I thought I had gotten away with it too. But the principal was onto my ruse. One fateful morning he brought me to the teachers' shoe locker, instructing me to change into some old pair of slides that had been long-forsaken by someone who wisely realized how ugly they were.

Allow me to pause for a moment. I fear that I am casting myself in an unflattering light and, as this is my blog, I see no reason to perpetuate anything but the most polished portrayal of its author. Yes, I am fashion-conscious. And yes, that is putting it lightly. I am perhaps (if by 'perhaps' I mean 'unequivocally') a bit too materialistic with respect to clothes. We all have our vices. Mine just so happens to go by the name of 'Ralph Lauren'. And while I'm not proud of it, I still assert that there are addictions far worse than a well-appointed wardrobe. Wearing my favorite blazer or a sharp tie puts a spring in my step. Whether this serves more as self-defense for my habit or commentary on the sorry state of my self-esteem is a topic for another post, but I see no remedy in the immediate future. And whatever effect this habit has on its owner, I try to balance it by remaining nonjudgmental with respect to the fashion choices of others. After all, let he without bow ties and bold colors cast the first critique.

But even after that digression into disclaimer, the point remains that it doesn't take a member of the fashion police to figure our that this look in school is ridiculous. At any rate, ever the cultural ambassador, once the jig was up I played along by dutifully donning my soccer slides everyday upon entering the front door.

That is, however, until I had a particularly taxing weekend – the kind of weekend that was so busy that it left you more tired Sunday evening than you were Friday afternoon. Hardly rested and rejuvenated for the lessons that lay ahead, I entered school on Monday in a mood that was, at best, less-than-enthusiastic. As I passed the footlocker, I took one look at my assigned cabinet and kept going.

I recall being in an emotional state of sorts (not unusual these days) and I wanted nothing to do with Korea. Seeing as how I was indeed in the geographic center of Korea itself, that first issue was not likely to get addressed anytime soon. The next item on my blacklist was school. Being a contracted middle school teacher on a Monday morning again left me with little recourse. And thus my displeasure with my presence in Korea under the auspices of teaching manifested that morning in the third item on my hit list: school footwear.

I gambled that I could play the naïve foreigner card if my principal caught me in loafers. And so I clicked past the cabinet and never looked back. To this day I have yet to return to my soccer slides. The principal must have noticed my footwear by now, but for one reason of restraint or another, he has yet to comment. I like to think it's due to guilt at his own footwear faux pas. Ever tending to the botanical garden of sorts that he has growing inside and outside of the school, he often walks between garden dirt and school hallway indiscriminately. Admittedly I cannot claim to be nonjudgmental at the top of the page and proceed to pass down a verdict a few paragraphs later, but let's call a spade a spade, shall we? The sorry state of the school aside, one can't very well claim that a strict policy of switching footwear is grounded in school cleanliness when the headmaster himself is traipsing around in fertilizer-laced garden clogs.

And so if the sneaker switch rests not upon maintenance – and it certainly doesn't hinge upon logic – then the buck stops with tradition. Changing shoes upon entering a building is how it's always been done in Korea. When I got down to brass tacks and pressed a few co-teachers to defend the policy, they quickly had to admit – sheepishly – that it was cultural tradition.

And that's fine...some of the time. But when tradition blatantly defies logic or efficiency or simple common sense, I must draw the line. Having kids carry extra cargo to and from school each day and requiring them to dance in the rain as they hop from one set of footwear to another all in the name of tradition (emphasized to connote the most cynical of voices) simply makes no sense. But more glaring is the fact that carrying out this tradition is a burden that interferes with day-to-day productivity.*

Entering a very different culture with very different traditions than those to which one has grown accustomed tends to have a magnifying affect. The U.S. is a young country by almost any standard and Korea has had a lot more time to develop traditions than my own country has. Beyond apple pie, the Super Bowl, and fireworks on the 4^th of July, there is little consensus that finds one activity or honored rite as particularly American. Spending my formative years – and all others – in such a society, I suspect that I am suspect of tradition because I have not grown to rely on the comfort and assurance they can provide. But by the same token, I have not grown to tolerate the assumptions and antiquity they also facilitate.

Two weeks ago I taught a lesson about the difference between nationality and ethnicity. If you're thinking that this lesson most-certainly failed on account of the material than you would be correct. But I digress. In Korea, nationality and ethnicity are the same in the vast majority of instances. In what is a by-and-large homogenous society, being a Korean citizen means you are also an ethnic Korean. In the U.S., however, it's impossible to say what an American ought to look like. With the exception of Native Americans, an 'American' ethnicity doesn't exist.

My reasoning for calling ethnicity to mind is two-fold. The first is to mitigate the scrutiny I place upon tradition in Korea. In an environment where one's national heritage and pride is shared with a personal physiological identity, it's not difficult to imagine a strong allegiance to a set of traditions. Simply because my home doesn't display this commonality doesn't make it wrong.

My second observation is a bit less benign. In my inexpert opinion, pride is an emotion that ought to be linked to agency. We take pride in something we had a hand in. I'm proud of my alma mater because I worked hard to graduate and, in some small way, I like to think that I am furthering her regard in the world. I'm proud to be an American because I agree with many of the explicit ideals of my country and I try to live a life that strengthens the fabric of the nation. I'm proud of the Bow Tide (my model Christ-Craft) because it took me countless hours to construct...and because it's a bad-ass boat.

But I'm not proud of my brown eyes. Even if I placed particular import in that feature of a person – which I don't – I had nothing to do with that quality in myself. Pride in race is at best misguided and at worst a short mental leap to bigotry. Ethnic dialogue in Korea is a curious phenomenon. In a largely-uniform society that is beginning to attract an ever-growing number of foreigners, Korea is increasingly forced to address a pride in homogeneity that has historically been seen as a source of national strength.

One Korean tradition – for better or for worse – is invasion and occupation. Throughout its history, Korea has had to fend off other countries while struggling to preserve its own culture. Most recently it was the Japanese early in the 20^th century (some might actually say the influx of native English speakers represents the most current invasion, but for once I will keep the discussion on literal terms). One not need look far to discover lingering resentment towards our neighbor to the east. Indeed half of the English newspapers I pick up at the bus terminal feature an article about still-delicate Japanese-Korean relations.

Fighting external aggression often requires inward strength and solidarity. Joining together with fellow countrymen to defeat a foreign threat takes a strong national identity and Korea has spent centuries honing their own. This spirit is not so easily turned off, however, in times of peace. And when there are no enemies at the gate, nationalistic tendencies can manifest in xenophobic fears. There is a developing dialogue in Korea between those that want to welcome outsiders and realize Korea's true globalized potential and those that want to protect Korea and insulate its ethnic majority.

Like much of Korea, this ongoing discussion moves the country two steps forward and one step back. At the same time I myself epitomize the embrace of foreigners, I have been privy to discussions that laud a homogenous and 'racially pure' Korea. As a student of history, I couldn't help but consider that, out of context, some of this rhetoric could easily be confused for that in 1920's and 30's Germany. I'll be quick to point out, however, that not once have I been victim to any such backlash against foreigners. In fact, I have found my presence received with nothing short of warmth and welcome wherever I go.

But it is fascinating to be a witness to the evolution of thought in a living and breathing country. And with that I come full-circle to tradition. While I'd like to claim that my refusal to sport soccer slides in school is my contribution to fighting prejudice and furthering the modernization of Korea, I'm fairly certain you'd call my bluff on a hand so patently false. I'm content to cast a critical eye to traditions we all blindly follow – myself included. Doubt, after all, is a personal tradition of sorts...just like my holiday cards.

* In the particular environment of an all-boys middle school, this tradition also poses a safety risk. Anything in the school not firmly bolted to the floor (read: everything) is employed as a weapon. Pencil cases and soccer slides are ubiquitous, always within reach, the perfect size, and thus frequently used as projectiles by the boys.