Admittedly, I've never lived or been in a situation where I've been linguistically uncomfortable prior to coming to Korea. Growing up bilingual, and confident in my French has taken me pretty far both at home and abroad. Sure, I've had to ask for clarification time and again, but at the end of the day I always know what's up. Like 98% of bilingual children, I'm grossly spoiled and take it all for granted. Now, after living in South Korea for nine months, I intend to hug every single immigrant I come across while I'm at home, and give them a hearty "Congratulations" because this is certainly not easy.
Let me paint you a picture:
Scenario #1: After living in the same location and teaching a mere 50 meters away, I'm 100% confident that I can pronounce the name of my middle school. Nevertheless, I get in a cab today, and after I tell him where to go, he started saying something to me. After looking it up on my handy English-Korean dictionary I realize that he is saying "backdoor." I just laugh it off and say "yes, this is a backdoor."Nope. He starts yelling at me even more in Korean, because, duh, that's the way to get people to understand you. I keep saying "I don't know. I don't understand Korean" (in Korean, obvs) but this man isn't taking it. Needless to say, he takes me to the wrong place (I mean, really wrong. Like "take me to Time Square" and he took me to "Austin, Texas" wrong - they sound NOTHING alike). Clearly, this is the ignorant waygook's fault and he yells at me further, and mumbles some stuff about America, women and respect. (At one point, I thought he was asking me to have butt sex with him, and I almost jumped out of the cab) All was very unclear. Now, you could easily replace this taxi driver with a (a) bus driver, (b) nurse, (c) flight attendant, etc. and the situation would go pretty similarly. (And before us Yankees think we're off the hook, on my flight over here I witnessed the exact same thing with a flight attending literally inches away and screaming in a poor Spanish-speaking man's face.) Utterly unacceptable. I'm not deaf, I just don't speak your language!
And Scenario #2: This may be a bit more my fault, but let's go with it anyway. For whatever reason, my bills weren't being addressed to me. One day, I happened to bring a random note I had found in my mailbox to work, and asked a student to translate: "Kenisha Teacher. Bad." Apparently, I had missed my water bill payment for four months. This delinquency hadn't gone unnoticed and now the government was threatening to shut off my water. So, simply because I couldn't read my bills, I had spent the last four months paying for some random person's water bill and had to go two days sans shower.
To Korea's credit, I'd say more often than not, the second I enter a building people get excited to take on the language challenge and we've both wiped out our dictionaries before I've even hit the counter. But for the few people in the "ignorants who Kenisha will now steer clear of" category, you're killin' it for everyone else! (Let it be said, that this is also true for the millions of Americans, like this total asshole.)
Moral of the story is: for all my ancestors, and the millions of people who have the cojones to move and live in another country ... my hat is off to you. Oh, and given the opportunity I'd love to throw Tim James in the middle of rural South Korea and see how he likes it.
사랑해 (sa rang hae -- "love you"),
Kenisha
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