Family
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Previously, I have mentioned the mixture of feelings which swing around each year as the celebration of my birth arrives. This year, someone said something which really made me think . . .
Readers of this blog will recall my observation that the Koreans have a tendency to only seek out and retain a relatively small circle of good friends; socially they may have many networks and acquaintances but the number of people they would consider dependable in a crisis situation is usually a very small nucleus, which may represent an important lesson for the rest of us.
Despite what people may say about me, I actually think of myself as a modest person. Here in Korea, where I have now been working for over six years, I keep a low profile and try not to cause offence, irrespective of whether I agree with people. As a result, I rarely experience conflicts with them and like to think that I am myself well thought of; remarks made by a number of people recently seem to confirm that I am Doing the Right Thing.
When I arrived here in 2003, I knew absolutely no-one except through previous chat sessions; I also tended to stay at home rather a lot because I had not yet been introduced to the local scene and after the debacle in Taiwan beforehand, wanted to make sure that my cash flow was OK (it does help to pay the bills, after all). So the arrival in my life of people here whom I would consider "friends" was relatively late in the proceedings and actually centres around a venerable institution, Lee Soonyoung's International Pub in Jungang-dong in Changwon, where I lived for five and a half years before moving out to Miryang for a new job. *
Miryang is actually a perfectly good place to live and work, but again, I have tended to stay at home, especially as the new job has become more familiar and the requirements clearer. I have arranged my belongings, and particularly my computers, so that they are indispensable tools for preparing my lessons – document and graphic processing, printing, photography and video. The one regret I have in this regard is that I never seem to have enough time to do it all. I have always thought that it is important to render the best possible quality in the execution of any job, and since arriving here I have invested heavily in this, both in financial terms and in terms of investing time and effort. Everything else is secondary.
Socially, therefore, I am not terribly interactive here. To be blunt, nice though it is, Miryang does not seem to have anything like even the meagre foreigner-style entertainments to be found just down the iron rails in sinful Changwon. Now that's not a totally bad thing because it's better to go home and not be disturbed when you are working things out, but on occasion neither TV nor Internet offer anything new or entertaining and you do feel lonely. And that's where the "family" comes in.
Because you do meet people on your travels; some you remain in contact with one way or another, whereas others you know for a while and then lose contact with entirely. In this line of business, in a country where work contracts are uniformly for one year and not everyone actually renews at the end, the crowd tends to be transitory, so that every so often someone who has been here for a while decides to go to another country or just go home. Those involved with the various branches of engineering in particular may even only be here for a few days before returning whence they came.
While this usually offers a fascinating glimpse of social interaction and crowd dynamics, it is also sad. People whom you have known, possibly for quite a long time, and with whom you may have become very good friends, decide that enough is enough and they want a change; or perhaps they are just homesick. Those of us left behind discover then another hole in our lives which cannot be filled, because each of us is unique, and it's the unique nature of each friend that gives your own small crowd its particular kind of dynamic. When they leave, that dynamic has to change, and in the end, our frail little networks fall apart and regroup.
The long-term foreigner in a place like South Korea finds eventually that people band together to help each other. What makes this so much more interesting and enlightening than it would be back home is that it involves bonding to a greater or lesser extent with not just the Koreans with whom we live, but also a range of people of other nationalities who, like ourselves, find themselves here and in need primarily of advice and guidance. Personally, I feel that I have been privileged to help many of those who came after me in this way. For this single reason, I have felt much more needed and appreciated here than I ever did back home.
Respect is also something that you earn out here. I have been so surprised by so many things I have encountered that sometimes it is difficult to know where to begin, but let me say this first: to stay out here and work and live for any length of time requires a different kind of personal strength from that which is helpful at home. In the domestic situation we all have the advantage of a common language which allows us to communicate freely and easily with virtually anyone around us; in the expat situation this is not often the case, and especially in places like Korea where – despite the intentions of various parties both home-grown and foreign – the English language is not as widespread (or as desirably verbose) as it would be in the native-speaker environment, and we depend to a greater or lesser extent upon the tolerance of the locals, as well as their willingness to go the extra mile and learn our language. Those who can do this well – and I now know many – are greatly to be admired.
Surprising also as to the people who actually give the respect; for example, there is a group of Americans (with the odd Canadian) working for a certain company in Changwon, and I usually see them there. Talking to them, it slowly emerged that the older members of the group had seen action in Vietnam in their younger days; one, who at the time of writing is soon to retire, is an Englishman who joined the US Navy. Now, it's hard for someone like myself to judge what kind of person these guys would choose to respect; indeed, it's hard to imagine a man respecting anyone much after having to spend a tour of duty battling with the devious Viet Cong!
The Canadian contingent told me many stories of his past, but essentially it sort of fell like this: his parents were always travelling around Canada, and the children of the family went with them. The outcome was that they were never in one town long enough to really make friends, and were often together in fights with the locals, among whom they remained transitory strangers. Later, he would often be involved in bare-knuckle street fighting (and his account of this really made the K-1 etc. on the TV seem rather lame), and also had strange jobs such as humping rock sulphur around in a processing factory – and suffering frequent ignition events which left him walking home each day smelling not unlike something hellish.
But here's the surprise: their experiences have not left them twisted or maladjusted – unlike too many of their unfortunate compatriots, they were able to dust themselves down psychologically and get on with their lives. And this is something which, in turn, forces me to admire them in a way that is so difficult with their younger co-workers: hard to define, yet a different kind of generosity, perhaps the result of seeing too many horrors themselves, and perhaps the result of asking themselves whether all the bombs and bullets ever achieved anything that wasn't cheaper than just talking and getting along with people. Plus, I suppose, the kind of experiences which remind a man of his own mortality, but at a much earlier age than most of us would usually desire.
And it was precisely this question of mortality which led me to write this today. A new friend from my own country, who has shown me such incredible generosity over the past couple of months and though working, is now looking forward to his retirement (and never ceases to remind me about my own), came into the IP with a big bruise around his right eye and a small sticking plaster on his forehead. It turned out that at some point previously, he had passed out and collapsed; the doctor apparently found little or nothing wrong with him that was not already known. Anyway, I was talking my usual pile of crap with him over a salad and barbecued chicken when the conversation strayed into how difficult it has been for me to be away from a group of people who have taken such good care of me, and he said: "That's because they are family. They are your family here, now."
That was an idea I had never had before but it was easy to see where he was coming from. From the day I first met her, Soonyoung (the landlady at the IP) had been looking after me maternally, as she does with everyone who enters her door; I made friends with her staff; she introduced me to people and I met so many more myself by just being the kind of person who can walk up to a stranger and say "hi", or by being – as always – a "good listener". And by this time, I have become so much a part of the furniture that people always seem to expect me to be there; gradually, I have become something of a "fixture", not necessarily in the sense of the beer taps but in the sense that my presence is dependable and that in general terms, I am a reliable person whose opinion and advice can be sought out as and when it is required.
So the people who know me at the IP are like my "family": they support me emotionally and practically, and when there is some minor problem I need help with, there they are.
Perhaps I should have realised how true the idea of "family" really was when some of the other long-termers actually had children of their own and I started meeting them and getting along with them, in a sense, I suppose, being rather like an uncle to them – something many people in the past (and not just here in Korea) have described me as being. But the family is now indispensable, and it's hard to escape the idea that this makes moving to another country less appealing, because that would mean having to go through this process all over again. Some of these people are very dear to me, and I would really miss them terribly – it's almost unthinkable. And I think they should know that.
Another thing that many of these people should do is recognise the strength in themselves. I think that they often fail to see just how strong they are, particularly when some adverse event happens and they suddenly find life difficult, albeit temporarily. Some people find living in a place like Korea difficult for many reasons – it's very different from what they knew at home before, navigating around may be a problem, or perhaps events back home take a turn for the worse and suddenly they feel very, very alone in a place that feels very alien. There is only one solution: open up to people a little more, because when you do this, people finally see you as a real person and are more willing to help. If there is one single important lesson I will take with me when I leave Korea, this is it.
Because we are all strong if we can stay here for an extended period; nice though it undoubtedly is, South Korea is not a place for weaklings. If you can stay here, you're tough and you can take it, and if you can't, that's what your friends are there for. Nobody is perfect, and no-one here expects perfection of anyone else; they only expect you to get on with the job and get on with others as well as you can. This is all that any reasonable person can expect.
In the end, I return to one thought I mentioned above – that living and surviving away from home, and in particular outside of your own country and linguistic and cultural context, does take a different kind of strength from that which is required domestically. And while we may survive for a while as islands in the wide blue ocean, occasionally there will be a storm, and we need bridges for communication and lifeboats for survival.
And that's where the family comes in.
Andrew. ^_^
* By which I mean: "I lived in Changwon for five and a half years.", not: "I lived in the International Pub for five and a half years."
Ohh, I don't know, though . . .
Edited 24-10-2009.
Edited 27-10-2009.
Edited 12-10-2009.
Tags: elementary, foreigner, hagwon, Korea, living, Miryang, public school, teaching
