Korea Dispatch

Winter in Korea

As Seoul’s first snow this winter is already turning black, I find myself pondering the quirks of a language I have resolved — again — to learn.

I’m essentially at a very rudimentary level of Korean, which allows for basic communication with a lot of umms and ahhs and jerky hand gestures thrown in for emphasis. But it also allows for some wiggle room out of a particular trait of the Korean language that is part and parcel of the country’s social hierarchy.

A colleague of mine, an American, is at a more advanced level and he often communicates with our Korean co-workers using Korean as opposed to English. Which means that when he addresses those senior to him he has to use honorifics — even with people he may not like or repsect — that nevertheless connote respect and bolster the difference in status. It is not a conversation between equals.

My own broken Korean, on the other hand, allows me to transgress the language’s built in rules of inequality by pleading ignorance. In simply trying to communicate, I may inadvertantly fail to acknowledge a person’s seniority over me. Which, truth be told, suits me fine.

A couple of cases in point.

There’s a few folks I work with who would often comment out of the sides of their mouth that I used ordinary speech, as opposed to honorifics, when speaking to them in Korean. Only later, when they learned that I was actually as old or older than they were, did those comments cease. Still, it used to annoy the hell out of me.

Another instance. There’s a grouchy old man that lives up the block from me. The first time I met him, I was sitting by a nearby stream that runs outside his house with my wife and kid. He stared for about ten or fifteen minutes, then launched into a gruff-sounding personal biography about how he’d been born on that block and all the honors he’d gotten for his extreme nativism.

Now, there are two ways to say “once upon a time” or “back then” in Korean. One translates as “at that time” while the other sounds more like “long ago.” The difference in usage still seems a little subtle to me though, and so I used the latter one. He didn’t like that. His face twisted into this angry scowl as he waved his finger in my face telling me I was still a young punk and how dare I say “long ago” in reference to my own life. Needless to say, it caught me by surprise.

Still, he calmed down and eventually even handed my son an apple from his yard. It was a lesson in the language that I won’t soon forget. Which, tangentially, leads me to the other thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head these past few days.

The first has to do with the seemingly incoherent events that transpire in a country where one is neither a native or native speaker. In a recent conversation with a friend who’se just returned to Korea after an extended abscence, he was curious to know what had happened with the beef protests that had rocked the country last summer and seriously perplexed him. I told him U.S. beef was selling like hotcakes.

More recently is the case of Minerva, the on-line freakonomist who was arrested for spreading $2 billion dollar lies on the Internet. Now, a lot of foreign press coverage I’ve read spins the issue as a simple crackdown on Internet freedom (guilty as charged). But behind all the headlines is basically a big question mark about the hows and whys of this issue. When you don’t understand something, it’s always easier to dismiss it as either stupid or malicious. While it could be both, there’s usually more to it.

A Korean friend who is logical to a fault explained to me that Minerva had become a sort of rallying point for all those who hate the current government. Like U.S. beef, it was less about the issue itself and more about the conduit it provided for netizen’s almost unconscious disgust with the Lee administration. The Internet too has become this sort of platform for political mobilization, though certainly folks are going to be more cautious about their on-line comments.

The other thought has to do with North Korea. I read somewhere that Seoul has just published a dictionary of literary terms used in either one or both of the two Koreas. The 60 year political and cultural divide has led to a growing divergence in the two countries’ languages, as for example their definition of the term modernism: it’s either a progressive cultural and artistic movement or a petit-bourgeois capitalist conspiracy. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one is which. They also use completely different words for computer and a host of other terms that often require translation.

Now you might think that this proves the two countries are wholly irreconcilable, but actually they’re more alike than one might think. Take for example the news that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has tapped his third son to be next in line for the communist throne. Nevermind the younger Kim seems to be in as bad health as his pop. South Korea too is lining up to introduce a few new leaders itself. Though not blood related, the political ties are a little incestuous. Except with Samsung, where dynastic succession seems to be the order of the day.