Almost sixteen years ago to the day, I ended one of the most
significant experiences of my adult life: I returned to the United States after
having been an expatriate in the Republic of Korea for seven and a half years
(eight and a half including a prior experience there). For the geographically
challenged, the Republic of Korea is most commonly called South Korea here in
the West, although citizens of the RoK do not call themselves South Koreans,
for it is a reminder of the painfully ongoing separation that peninsula endures
because of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, on the 38th parallel,
drawn by national superpowers in the early 1950’s to separate the “communist”
north from the (mostly) democratic south.
It was
surreal to live in a nation that was, and still is, technically at war with its
only neighbor. Almost every month there were civil defense drills. When the air
raid sirens sounded, vehicles were supposed to pull over, and pedestrians were
required to take cover in buildings or beneath trees or bus stop canopies, or
in subways and underground shopping arcades. Armed soldiers and police
officers, and civilian volunteers wearing bright yellow vests, would blow a
whistle and give you a citation if you did not comply. Many Koreans did not, so
used to the drill were they, and so oblivious of the fear and suffering their
elders had faced during the conflict in their homeland. I and other expatriates
were urged to have an escape plan; indeed, I participated in a training on a US
military base outlining an evacuation plan should expatriate civilians be
required to leave the country at a moment’s notice. During my sojourn in Korea,
a North Korean pilot defected to the South in his Russian-built jet plane. A
North Korean mini-sub was found on the northeast shores of the South, its
sailors missing. And on a mountaintop near the city where I lived, South Korean
soldiers cornered and killed a North Korean infiltrator. All the while, my
friends and I ate ice cream, met in coffee shops, watched K-pop music videos,
played games in arcades, hiked to peaceful Buddhist temples, had picnics, and
went about our business, fully aware of the events going on around us, yet
fully confident that should the North ever break through the DMZ and invade the
South, they would immediately drop their guns and fill their hungry bellies
with the bounty found in South Korean markets, realizing that their Great
Leader had been lying to them all along.
Political
demonstrations were commonplace in the 1990’s in Korea. Every time I came back
to the US to visit, my friends and family asked me if I felt it was a dangerous
place to live. The fact is that South Korea was probably one of the safest places to live. The demonstrators
had no bone to pick with me, even if they were tromping on US flags, burning
effigies of the US president, and shouting “Yankee, go home!” They were able to
separate in their minds the individual American from the policies and
policy-makers of our country. I lived amongst them; I worked at a Korean
university; I made feeble yet sincere attempts at speaking their language; I
ate their food and actually enjoyed it (after I got used to it). So no, I never
felt I was in any danger. The only time during all the years I was there I ever
had a negative encounter, it was from a man who was obviously drunk, and even
then, the gestures were verbal only. The murder rate in South Korea at the time
was extremely low. When a homicide occurred, it was most frequently by stabbing
or poisoning, and most often the perpetrator knew the victim. Koreans were not
allowed to own guns without meeting very stringent regulations (Imagine that!
Strict gun control results in a low murder rate!).
Living abroad
made me both humbly proud and horribly ashamed to be an American. I saw the
prosperity and security that the South enjoyed, due in part to the
contributions of the US government and military. I witnessed the great good
that generations of American missionaries and humanitarians had done there.
Several times older Koreans thanked me for the sacrifices made by US military
personnel during the Korean Conflict. But I also saw the ugliness of American
military and economic imperialism. A huge chunk of prime real estate in Seoul,
the capital city, is occupied by a US military base. I saw military personnel
treating local people rudely. I heard stories from Korean young people about
their parents and relatives, mostly poor farmers eking out a living in rice
paddies, suffering due to trade negotiations manipulated by large American
corporations. And I watched as Western materialism and individualism seeped
into Korean culture, not by force, but by seduction. I will confess that
sometimes, when asked where I was from, I deflected with the answer “Texas” and
then pursued a conversation about cowboys and barbecue, because I did not want
to acknowledge my citizenship.
I’m not
saying that Korea is full of pure-hearted innocents who have been corrupted by American
blue-eyed devils. Some of the most racist, sexist, classist, homophobic,
religiously bigoted people I have ever met were in Korea. I saw more public
fistfights in Korea than anywhere else, and some of those fights involved
women. The rape culture there is abominable, the result of a culture that has
long treated women as chattel. Koreans consider the king, one’s father, and one’s
teacher (historically only males) as equal. That’s rooted in the philosophy of
Confucius, a Chinese man not known for being an equal rights champion. When I
lived there, it was illegal for a doctor to tell a woman the sex of her unborn
child. Too many women had been opting for abortions upon learning the fetus in
their womb was female. Physical perfection was idealized; I seldom saw people
with physical disabilities in public unless they were begging on the streets.
Adopting children was unheard of because bloodlines were so important to
Koreans. And if a couple divorced, the father usually got custody of the
children, who most often had no further contact with their mothers. I know a
young Korean man who learned after becoming an adult that his birth mother was
not dead, as he had been told throughout his life, but that she and his father
had divorced when he was only a baby and she had moved away.
Those were
sad realities in a nation that was extremely hospitable to me, a nation that made
me feel welcomed and comfortable and treated me almost like a minor celebrity.
A nation that never, ever would have accepted me fully into its ranks because I
didn’t look like them, because Korean blood didn’t flow through my veins,
because I couldn’t experience the han,
the collective angst that all Koreans possess by virtue of simply being Korean.
I found that reality to be both disturbing and relieving at the same time, for
while I longed to feel a sense of identity when I was there, to belong, I knew
that I personally could never feel comfortable calling Korea my permanent home.
It was a lovely, wonderful, memorable stop on my journey, but it was not my
destination.
And I think
that I would have had the same feeling, no matter where I had landed to spend
the decade of the nineties. Take away our passports and our traditional
clothing, strip away our political leanings and religious affiliations, feed us
food not spiced by traditions and regional produce, and give us all a common
language, and what you end up with is a planet swarming with nothing but simple
humans who all have the same needs and wants: to feel safe, healthy, and not
hungry or thirsty; to love and be loved; to be who we are and become all that
we know we can be; and to belong to a family, no matter how we define it.
Who I am
today is in large part defined by my experience in Korea. I’m proud of the fact
that I not only survived, but I thrived in a context where the language and
culture were so different from what I’d known previously. Others who have lived
abroad get this: missionaries, diplomats, some military personnel,
international educators and business professionals, we all understand what it’s
like to leave what we know for the unknown and integrate that experience into
our being. People who have never lived abroad get it, and only those who have
travelled extensively can relate. Saint Augustine of Hippo said it best: “The
world is a great book, of which those who never leave home read only a page.”
Can you imagine, holding a wonderful book in your hands, and reading the same
page over and over and over again? You’d never know the whole story, you’d miss
out on all its characters and places, and you’d begin to think that the one
page you know so well is the only page in the book. Yet how many people in our
world, even right here in the US, are stuck on the one page they know, too
afraid to keep reading and learning and knowing, afraid that what they will
find will challenge all they know and strip away their identity.
But it’s an
unfounded fear. Tear one page out of a book, and the entire book is ruined. All
of the pages are equally valid and necessary for the entire story to be told.
For me, Texas had its page. And then Korea. And later, Tennessee and Southern
California and Oregon. And now, Northern California. I don’t want to get stuck
on any one page. I want to keep reading, to know how the story unfolds, to go
back and reread some pages, and to leave some pages read only once. All of the
pages are part of the story of who we are, both individually and collectively,
and the great Author of the stories is still writing. Honor the Author’s work,
and keep on reading!
