Koreanische Universitäten | Korea | Busan | Koreaner

Many foreigners say: All Koreans look the same.
Well, yes and no.
They are not born identical, rather their sameness is the result of laborious and lifelong effort. A successful Korean woman can be distinguished from another Korean only if the other Korean is male.
Note: If she cannot be distinguished from a Korean male, this would indicate that at least one of them is a failure.

Not all Koreans are successful, but the ones that are not know to minimize their public appearances.
If you are not successful and tired of hiding you can get plastic surgery. It is cheap and good in Korea and it doesn't take long.

If you cannot afford plastic surgery and need to go out into the public realm you can wear a facemask and a visor. These devices are very popular with women who are not young anymore but still young enough to care. These women are referred to as "azuma". The equalizing devices are very popular with me as well. I wear my mask and I am treated the same as any other "azuma". As long as people don't notice my feet.

I cannot buy shoes here. My feet are size 27.5 here, but women in Korea do not grow their feet bigger than a size 25.0 and even that is considered excessive; bigger footing is not acceptable. If they do it's their own fault and they have to pay the penalty. I assume it is cheaper to have your feet shortened surgically than to have shoes custom made for the rest of your life.
I'm being stared at. Most cultures pretend not to notice foreigners, but prefer to stare discretely from an angle. Koreans do not pretend anything. They just stare straight on. Some foreigners only go out in groups. The concept: 'Share the stare'.

Who can blame them, I am quite inappropriate, if I don't wear my mask. My feet are big, my skin is white, my nose is long, my hair is short. They don't like my short hair and they don't like my big feet. They don't pretend, they just tell me.
They like my white skin and my long nose. They tell me that also and sometimes they touch. "White! White!" or "Nose, good!"
I don't like to be touched by strangers.

The only thing worse is being ambushed. People pay a lot of money to academies that are supposed to teach the children how to speak English. So when they see me they tell their children: "Go and speak with the foreigner!"
Suddenly I am surrounded by a horde of children, ages 4 to 9. Three of them say:" Apple! Apple! Apple!" Another says: "He-rro!" And the others ask questions in Korean.
If I don't respond they get angry. If I say something they alternatively start giggling or get scared and start shrieking.
So I just take my life into my hands and run, and when out of view I readjust my visor and advance without further incident.

It is very important for Korean people to not do things that are Japanese. Therefore they do things they consider American. Like speaking English. If a child doesn't speak English well, it can have tongue surgery. The doctor will cut the tongue frenulum to make the tongue more flexible. The child will certainly not be speaking Japanese for a while after that. Or Korean. Or English. But after the tongue is healed the child is hardwired for English speaking just like a Caucasian child. If you give them the eye and nose surgery as well, the child practically is Caucasian. Mission accomplished. Almost.

Koreans know how things are done. And they cannot be done any other way. Unless a figure of authority says that things should be done differently. A figure of authority can be anybody who is male, old, rich and who went to a special high school in Seoul where only people from a good family can go. This Korean aristocracy usually rejoices greatly in making lesser Koreans perform unnecessary labor and making their lives miserable. The lesser Koreans who by definition are younger and have less money cannot refuse. In exchange for being maltreated, humiliated and abused they receive money from the rich Koreans.

A common greeting in Korea is: "Have you eaten?" Then they take you to a restaurant and make you eat Korean food. I happen to like Korean food. But I don't do everything right. I don't want to eat lots of white rice because there are vegetables and meat that taste so much better.
So I leave my rice. They tell me I need to put it in my mouth. I say I understand and I don't like it. They stare. They show me how to put the rice in my mouth. They try to feed it to me. I say why don't you go and shove my portion up your ass.

Actually I don't say that. I just put my rice in a bowl of soup and it becomes invisible and everybody is happy. I am also getting money from rich old Korean men. Presumably it is my moral obligation to make my rice disappear.
Koreans know how things are done. And they don't hesitate to tell me. They tell me how to eat, how to dress, how to wear my hair. If I don't comply they feed me, dress me, cut my hair. When I enter a store I can count on 5 girls breathing down my neck explaining what I'm looking at. "T-shirt" they say. "pants" they say. Obviously they doubt these items exist in other countries. At this point I usually have to leave.

I also have great fans: Korean women my age who don't want to be Korean. They so much do not want to be Korean that they do the exact opposite of what a Korean would do. They so much want to be a foreigner (of the white kind) that they do everything exactly the way I do it. They eat the same, drink the same, wear the same clothes and walk two paces behind me. Because it's ok to be different as long as you are the same as something else.
Feminism has not come to Korea yet. Those who want to escape Korean womanhood strive to be the like western women. One way to do that apparently is to hold hands with them in public. This is perfectly acceptable in Korea. There are no lesbians here. Everything in Korea is the way it should be.

I am not the same as anybody else and I am also different from the way I was before and from the way I will be. This concept seems to be very difficult to understand and impossible to accept.
I was invited to Korea to spread western thought. I try my best.
My colleagues are very curious about my western thought. "Which one you think," says the older professor, presenting to me three male students "is the most handsome?" There are many ways to respond to this question.
Let's try a few:

Or let actions speak:

But the most prominent western thought in my head is the thought of Paris and what happened to him. So I usually say to the oldest and most powerful member of the panel, they are all beautiful, but nobody is as beautiful as you. (Insert apple here.)

To exemplify my western thought on personal space I have invented a special belt. It is a barb-wired barrel wheel strapped around my waist.
I haven't yet worn it. For best results, its introduction needs an appropriate occasion. I am waiting for the closing ceremony at my University.
Letís hope there are not too many bloody injuries as a result. Shedding Korean blood is bad news.10% of Koreans are infected with hepatitis B. This astounding rate is probably achieved by having unprotected sexual intercourse. Condoms are sold in convenience stores, but mistakenly used as cell phone covers for rainy days.

Spreading Western thought is exhausting, so I'm usually happy to get home. A Korean home used to be a traditional little house with a heated wooden floor and a curved roof. But nowadays Korea is a westernized country, so everyone who can afford it moves into an apartment building. I think Koreans were watching western TV serials and movies and developed a great fondness for the federal housing projects depicted.

They gave me an apartment also; the number of my building is 102. The buildings are on average 18-25 stories high, square, identical and arranged in building-forests. The numbers written on them (at approximately the height of floor 16) distinguish one from another. After a few weeks of homecoming I had developed repetitive strain injury of the cervical spine.
But once you've found your home you can relax. Many modern security measures are in place: Video surveillance of the area surrounding the building. Video surveillance in the elevator. Parents can watch their children outside the building when they switch to channel 2 on the TV set. Or watch the foreigner take the elevator. Your choice.

Inside the apartment a high-tech automaton with various buttons and dials controls the intercom, telephone, answering service, hot water, floor heating (and other things if you pay more money).
This device is linked to the 24-hour security guard outside the building. There is also an emergency button that will cause an alarm to go off. It is very noisy. Once my neighbor pressed it by accident and it took over an hour and several phone calls to get the security guard to come up and turn it off. Most emergencies would probably have resolved themselves by then. One way or another.

Korean apartments also feature a built-in loudspeaker. It makes announcements about 3 times a day. The contents of the announcements are in Korean and announce the hours of the mandatory community service meetings, garbage regulations and other useful information and advice pertaining to the building community. Some foreigners, hired to spread western thought, also live in these buildings. The foreigners, including me, have a unanimous perception of the loudspeaker situation. After a brief meeting of our own we invested in a pair of pliers, located the appropriate wires and effectively solved the issue in our own apartments.
But loudspeakers and video cameras are relics from the last century. Koreans donít stop here, they have a vision.

This vision is called "ubiquitous government". Everybody's data is digitized and accessible from anywhere at anytime. This will enable the government to regulate everything conveniently and effectively. Ubiquitously, so to speak
Come to think of it, maybe American television is not the inspiration here after all. Maybe some Korean in power read "1984" and drew his own conclusions.

Spreading Western thought can be an arduous task. Sometimes I get tired and depressed. When that happens I try to bring to mind the things that are great about Korea, the food, the healthy looking people, its majestic mountains, the long beaches, the brisk winds. So I go on a walk, away from the crowds, to the top of a mountain or to the beach. Then I stand on a cliff and look out over the pacific. The wind blows on me and through me and cleanses me and blows away my fatigue. From here I can see past the ugliness of the apartment buildings. Past the congested freeways, the filthy rivers and the smog.
I can see the forests, the hills, the ocean. And on clear days I can see Japan.