Culture Complex, part one

Are you suffering from culture complex?

I may not be sure of what I want to do for a "career" or even if such a thing is for me, but I knew that I wanted to spend at least a year living and working outside of the United States. Preferably in an East Asian country, since I was an East Asian Studies major in college.

Why not Japan? I missed the application deadline for the JET Programme and didn't want to wait another year to leave. I studied Japanese language and literature extensively and spent a semester in Kyoto. There will always be a part of me that lives in Japan (a horcrux, as Alissa would say), but if I lived there now, I would feel this pressure to be Miss Japanese Studies and I wanted a different kind of abroad experience.

As for China, my parents immigrated from China and I was born and raised in New York. I have never been to China. I know I will want to go someday, but for now, I didn't want to have a year characterized by grappling with my identity and heritage.

I chose South Korea because I wanted a particular type of living abroad experience. Aside from kpop and kdramas, I am unacquainted with South Korea and wanted to get to know a country with fresh eyes. I wanted to stumble through a brand new language with no expectations of being anything more than a beginner and a guest. I looked forward to a life where every basic daily interaction would confuse, delight, fascinate, and humble me.

What surprises me is how my mind is choosing to contain and translate the sensory overload of being here. As a New Yorker with immigrant parents, I am comfortable with encountering cultures other than my own and engaging in something that is more of a respectful understanding than communication. The problem is that all my prior experiences are making it difficult for me to see this country on primarily its own terms. A walk in downtown Gwangju reminds me of Flushing and many Korean foods, words, and customs are similar to Japanese or Chinese ones. Obviously cultures are not interchangeable, but there are enough initial similarities that the real challenge for me has been sorting them into "old knowledge with new names" and "randomly unique to South Korea." Forgetting nuances in either scenario is when I risk being offensive, more so than possibly someone who doesn't have a lot of prior knowledge of Japanese and Chinese culture.

Flat chopsticks? Mind blown!

One example is Korean utensils. The chopsticks here are stainless steel and flat-edged. Their shape and weight force me to hold them slightly differently than I am used to, but it throws my chopsticks auto-pilot completely off. It's also fine to hold one chopstick in each hand to slice food apart. It's almost like relearning how to use chopsticks.

The spoon thing is totally new to me. Both rice and soup are eaten with a flat metal spoon and it's inappropriate to hold a bowl closer to your face or drink from the bowl as I would at home.

juk vs. jook

Then there is my ultimate comfort food from home, congee. In Cantonese it's called jook and it sounds the same in Korean. I desperately craved this food whenever I lived away from home, as well as my mom's herbal soups. Both are readily accessible here and I've occasionally caught wafts of my mom's cooking from the shops on the street. It's disorienting to have such a distinct reminder of home and be 8000 miles away in a country I have never visited before. It's homesickness inverted to the point of becoming an utterly foreign experience.

onigiri vs. kimbap

One of my fondest memories of living in Japan is walking to the combini and picking up onigiri for breakfast to go. I can do the same thing in Korea, but it's called kimbap here. It's a small thing, but I have so strongly associated this specific simple act with my whole experience of being in Japan, living in a different country for the first time, and the person I was at that time in my life. I'm not yet able to describe what it means to me to be here now and be able to do the same thing, but it's something like time traveling and meeting that younger self again.

So not quite the starry-eyed bumbling new traveler, but an unexpected unfolding of something else that I'll be interested in tracking as more time passes.

Next up: More fun times in Gwangju! The Gwangju Biennale and folk art museum, copious food porn, and a burgeoning adoration of Benedict Cumberbatch