THE MUNWHA AND KIBUN

Every day that I hung out with the tourist/travellers made it more difficult to look for work. I pretended to myself that I was here only for a short time and would soon join the migration of backpackers on to the next stop on the Asia trail. The English teachers were awake and working hours before I even opened my eyes. I would see them towards midday dragging their feet back to the yogwans to catch a couple hours of precious nap time before returning to teach the evening shift. To imagine that I was soon to join their ranks was too awful, and I drifted as long as I could until the day when the rapid disappearance of my precious $20 traveller’s cheques raised alarm bells too loud to ignore.

The very next morning, I began my serious search for work. I went first to the offices of an English newspaper, the Korea Herald. They had advertised for a copy editor/proof reader. I would have enjoyed the work, but the salary was low and required working 6 nights a week and I declined. I still imagined that I would want my weekends free for trips into the countryside, blissfully unaware that with the traffic congestion it would take all day Saturday to get out of the city and all day Sunday to get back in again.

The Korea Herald also ran their own school called the Korea Herald Language Institute, and their offices were in the same building. I arrived just at coffee time and met their six foreign teachers. They were all nice, friendly, and a little twisted. The Herald didn’t need another teacher, but they gave me the addresses of a few other schools and one bit of advice. They said that if nothing worked out I should go talk to John Valentine, known as the Don of English teaching.

They gave me a rough idea of the location of the Chong-no Foreign Language Institute where John was the Program Director. It seemed easy enough to find. They said it was a very large school and was just off the main downtown street Chong-no. But very soon I was hopelessly lost. Between the Korea Herald building and Chong-no lay endless square miles of roads, underpasses, overpasses, markets, alleys and subterranean confusion. Each time I figured out my location I was forced to go underground and lost my bearings again.

I dreaded the prospect, but I had no choice but to approach someone for help. The first few times I attempted to ask one of the many salarymen around me I thought I had stumbled upon a new psychosis. I was going to call it the “spinning syndrome”. I had a map of Seoul with me and held it open in my hands. I approached a likely looking young man in a suit to see if he could help me identify the intersection I was standing at. I didn’t assume he could speak English, but I had no chose but to hope he did.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He slowly began to rotate away from me. I thought perhaps he was turning so as to come at my map from a better direction, to get a clearer view. But he stopped turning when he was facing precisely away from me and looking firmly off into the distance.

I walked around him so as to get to his front and back into his field of vision. “Excuse….” And to my surprise before I could even get to “me,” he quickly rotated again and stopped when he was facing away from me – the direction from which we had started this little game. This was still a honeymoon period for me, and so I was in a pretty good mood and I decided to just stick with this spinning thing to see how it turned out. We went around and around a couple more times until he suddenly marched off down the street and left me as lost as ever.

Upon approaching a couple more people, I got the same curious reaction. I was becoming dizzy what with all the turning around and around. But I thought I had the “spinning syndrome” beat when a man on a delivery bicycle pulled up on the street beside me. I didn’t understand yet why everyone was inclined to spin, but I knew you could only twist so far when you are sitting on a bicycle. But before I even got within “Excuse me” range I was spotted and he pedaled off without a backward glance, right through a red light.

At this point someone noticed my plight and approached me. I saw the man coming and wondered whether in this situation Korean etiquette dictated that I should spin away from him! But I stuck with what I knew and looked him straight in the eye and faced him square on. I said hello and told him I was lost and asked him if he could tell me where I was on the map. He took the map from me and just from the way he handled it, I knew I was destined to remain lost no matter how willing my non-spinning friend was to help me. He looked at the map like he had never seen one before. He held it at right angles until I set it straight in his hands. He looked the map up and down for a very long time, his eyes straying off into all four corners miles and miles away from even the district I knew I had to be in. It was just my luck to have found a non-spinner who was even more lost than I was. He finally announced his conclusion about this strange piece of paper I had given him. “Seoul,” he said with a triumphant smile. His bus came and he got on it without saying another word.

There are two lessons in the above story for the newcomer to Seoul. The first is that the map of Seoul you confidently present to Koreans for directions will in all likelihood be the first map of Seoul they’ve seen. It will almost definitely be the first they’ve seen with all the words in English, and it will be of very little use to them or you. They’ve grown up in this mad place and have absorbed the information they need to get around. Using a map to get directions on a street corner may be rather entertaining but will only confuse the issue tremendously. In all likelihood you’ll get the craziest directions imaginable and then you are faced with the dilemma I faced in the train station already. Do you ignore their directions (which you know to be wrong) after they went to all that trouble to help you? Or do you bite the bullet and go where they direct you knowing it to be wrong to keep cross cultural relations on an even keel? The second lesson may help in making that choice.

The second lesson concerns the spinning. No, it is not a quaint local custom that needs to be studied and imitated. Nor is it a modern psychosis. It is the direct result of a concept called “kibun”. One of the greatest concerns of a Korean in day-to-day life is “kibun” or “face,” as in saving face. Saving face is much more important than anything else. Appearance triumphs over reality. Form is more important than content. A Korean will go to great lengths to avoid losing face. In fact, much of what the Westerner finds incomprehensible in Korean society has a logic based on nobody losing face.

With my spinning commuters, the problem was their inability to speak English well enough to talk to a foreigner. Perhaps they could speak English, but they weren’t confident enough to try. If they acknowledged that I was there speaking in English and found their English ability lacking, they would have lost face. Their kibun would have been damaged. The solution to this problem is to make the foreigner go away. Since I wouldn’t go away, the next best thing is to turn away so they couldn’t see me, and pretend that I wasn’t even there. In their memory of the day, I wasn’t really there. I never said “Excuse me”. I never approached them. The embarrassing situation was avoided and everybody’s kibun was warm and cosy. Of course, my reality hadn’t changed at all and I was still lost. Their reality hadn’t changed and they still didn’t know how to speak English. But on the surface they had transformed these potentially embarrassing realities into the perfectly acceptable appearance of a foreigner who wasn’t lost and a group of Koreans who could speak English perfectly if they needed to. To me it didn’t make any sense at all, but I was learning that if I wanted things to make sense I should have gone to Europe or stayed home.

 

 

 

Tags: John Valentine, Korea - First Days Teaching English, Korea Herald, Korea Herald Language Institute