Where should I begin, with everything that I want to say? This is going to be a long post, addressing a lot of different subjects, so I’ll put it behind a cut.
Today was a good and bad and good day, all at the same time. It started with me waking around 5, despite having not fallen asleep until nearly one last night. I got up and made the coffee and did a bit of reading and research, while Busan finished sleeping. I wasn’t what you might call rested, so much as just awake.
Busan woke up in a mood, which he called “blue”, but what he really meant was grumpy. So I fixed his coffee and he drank it while I showered, and we headed out for a walk in an area of town I haven’t taken him to yet.
We just aimlessly wandered and talked for over an hour, and it felt good, just to get out while the crowds were still away, and just to be outside. It’s been far too cold (not to mention icy) to enjoy walking for two months now.
When we got cold, we dropped in to a coffee shop to sit for a while, and he suggested we go over one more essay.
Now. What Busan has been doing for me is hard. And I don’t think that anyone who has never done it will understand how hard. I did it for two years in New York and, despite being trained in writing, fixing someone else’s second language essay in your native language is exhausting. Not editing, but walking them through step by step and helping them to understand what they’ve done wrong, why it’s wrong, and how it needs to change. Especially when there is a language barrier involved. I can only imagine how much more difficult with the second language speaking bit being mostly up to him.
It’s a frustrating and tense process. It’s part of the reason why my students and I became so close in New York, because you have these weirdly intense bonding moments over those small trials and triumphs.
Well. I had hesitated originally to even pull the essay out. I had a feeling that neither one of us was in the place, mentally, where we needed to be to do it without getting too frustrated. But he insisted.
The thing is, Busan is new at this. One of the first things you learn when this is your job is how to give your students a minute to process and breathe, and not to talk over them. Explain it once, and give them a minute to look it over and understand. Otherwise, you’re going to overwhelm them.
And that’s exactly what Busan tends to do. He would verbally correct a sentence, and while I looked down to read over the sentence, take in his correction, and puzzle it out, he would begin speaking over my thoughts again, in Korean, while attempting to pull the paper out of my hands.
I’ve explained it to him, and asked him to just give me a minute, several times by now. I can’t focus on the Korean on the page while trying to listen to the Korean coming out of your mouth. I feel overwhelmed. When I’m looking down at the page, just please give me a minute to think.
He just can’t do it.
You don’t want to get frustrated with people when they’re doing you a favor, especially people you love. So the second time he did this, this morning, I shook my head and smiled, folded my essay up, put it inside my book and closed it. “I think that’s enough for now.”
At this point, Busan lost it a bit.
I know he feels a lot of pressure to help me, and he interpreted that moment as a rejection of his help as not good enough, and he didn’t give me a chance to explain that I was just tired, he was not in the best mood, and I didn’t want to fight over something stupid, when he’s actually trying to do something nice for me — it just wasn’t the time.
He got upset, and I felt frustrated, because I had only been trying to avoid a fight in the first place, but was instead finding myself entering one quickly instead. I told him that he doesn’t need to get frustrated with me so quickly. Just give me a chance to at least explain, instead of just automatically assuming I’m trying to be bitchy (Sound familiar, Tumblr? We’ll come back to that.).
And then something came out of his mouth that I still don’t quite understand. It was born of frustration and didn’t even originally mean what it came out as. Essentially (and I won’t try to recreate the exact word choice, because it was muddled), he said that sometimes he gets frustrated with me like I get frustrated with Korea.
I didn’t even have a chance to mentally process why that comment pierced me through like a knife before the tears started to roll down my cheeks. He seemed to clock on to what he had said and why it was the wrong thing to say before I did, and started mixing his English with Korean to tell me he hadn’t meant that, and not to feel this way. I excused myself to the empty smoking room to get it together (I’m very much not a fan of crying in front of anyone, much less in a public place) and try to figure out what had just happened and why a comment I understood intellectually (I should understand that sometimes he gets frustrated with me, just like he understands that sometimes I get frustrated with Korea) had hit me so hard emotionally.
When I came back, this is what I explained:
I waved my hands over the book and essay and note cards on the table and said, “Why am I doing all of this? I want you to tell me your honest opinion — that’s not a rhetorical question. Why do you think I’m doing all of this?”
“For your better life.”
“For my better life where?”
“In Korea.”
I continued: Right now I am under so much pressure. I am working so hard to be and stay happy in this country, to do everything that I can to get closer to the language and the culture. I am about to make a commitment that I can’t take back — one that means that my life, in some way, will always be tied to this country, or else I will have wasted years of my life. It is not going to be easy, it is not easy, and it’s a very serious decision and commitment to make. I’m not doing that because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to. Because I want to stay here, to be happy and fruitful here.
And right now things are hard for me, because every little small thing I used to think was funny last year just isn’t right now. It’s not funny when the taxi driver mocks my pronunciation in Korean, or when a person who has worked beside me for four years asks me if I know that Korea will have a new president, or watches a student greet me, and watches me greet that student by name, and then says, “Do you know that student?” It’s not funny when men turn their chairs in the coffee shop to stare at me until I’m so uncomfortable that I have to pack up my things and leave. It’s not funny when people ask me if I can see movies in Korea or eat Korean food.
It’s not funny, because I feel like I’m giving everything I have to this my commitment to this country right now, and every one of those ultimately empty, meaningless, thoughtless things is hitting me like a tiny arrow. And there are handfuls of arrows every day.
And on top of that? On top of that, I feel guilty. I feel stupid for being a person who has the opportunity at any point to return to a place where I speak the language natively, where I blend in and am not questioned. I feel stupid for whining about things like this when I know very well how non-white, non-Western foreigners are treated in comparison to me. And how I’m here seeking a higher education sponsored by the government which will cost me nothing. How one out of a hundred times I may walk into a restaurant and have the owner wave me out, because they assume they’ll have to deal with me in English and don’t want to, but one out of ten times, I’ll get something brought over service just for sitting there with a Western face.
So yes. Sometimes when I’m with you, I complain. I complain about the men who turn 180 degrees to watch me walk past, or the woman who steps out in front of the bus from the back of the line to force it to stop in front of her. I complain about how the clerk behind the register refused to so much as look at me, let alone speak to me, throughout our entire interaction, but then greeted the person right behind me with a full smile. I complain to you because you are the person I consider my safe place and my rock right now. Because I’m going through this crazy pressurized time in my official transition to a lifer, and my identity as a foreigner. And I complain because bitching about the woman who cut me off in line is easier than saying that I really, really fucking hope I’m making the right choice right now, that I won’t fail, that I won’t regret it and that it will all be worth it in the end.
That those small things become funny to me again someday soon.
Did Busan’s comment merit all of that? Probably not. But he said he was fucking glad I had finally let him in on it. That he knew I was stressed over surface things, but he hadn’t realized how deep it is under the surface, that he forgets that I’m a foreigner (even the easy kind).
And after that, we ate samgyetang and walked through the market. I told him I thought I’d try my hand at mandu the week after next during my vacation. We ran into several groups of my old students, who it was very nice to see. I walked him to the subway station and quickly pushed him toward the stairs without more than a wave, because current students were crossing the street and coming toward us.
On my way home, I decided on a whim to pick up boongeobbang from a vendor up the street from my apartment. She said, “Would you like cream or pat? Oh, foreigners don’t like pat. I’ll give you cream.” I told her that actually, I do prefer pat (although she is, I have to admit, generally right), and she said she would make some fresh ones with pat for me, if I would sit and wait for about ten minutes. So I took a seat. We talked about how kids these days don’t really like pat anymore either, and she asked me where I was from, and then said she was surprised I wasn’t Russian, that I spoke such good Korean, for an American (more evidence that the Russian thing doesn’t always mean prostitute).
She asked me if I was a student and I said no, and told her my school’s name. She said the students these days are lucky, because they can learn English from native speakers, but when she grew up in a school out on one of the islands, they didn’t have anything like that. She said Korea has many foreigners these days, so I must not be lonely. She said, you must like Korean food. That’s right. Of course. Because Korean food is great. Who wouldn’t like it? She asked me where I live, and when I told her, she said, oh! There’s a Russian woman living in that building! She’s pregnant now.
She’s right. There is and she is.
When the bread was ready, she counted them out and then tossed two extra in for free.
Needless to say, I came home feeling much better.
And what I want to say to Tumblr after a couple of days of reflection is this: I am under a lot of pressure right now. My life is stressed, with real things that matter. I’m not here for a few years, anymore, and I don’t keep this blog because I want to be popular.
It’s appalling to me, the way things get handled on this site sometimes. That I could be mocked for championing the fight against “white privilege” (a phrase I don’t recall having ever used, actually), as if that had anything to do with the conversation in the first place, as if it’s something to mock in the second. And that the conversation could get passed around to the extent that it did. That I could be then told, for responding to that situation quite reasonably, I thought, by pointing out the lack of reading comprehension involved, that first of all, I was obviously being mocked and stupid for not knowing it, and that because I didn’t respond to it positively (I guess?), I’m alienating myself from my community (ie, I’m going to be sent to another table in the cafeteria). That someone could, in the same post, tell me that I’m being made fun of and that for having the nerve to respond in any way to that mocking, I’m stepping out of line and going to get punished. And to finish it all of with a flowery bit of nonsense about how heartfelt her interaction on this website is.
That for the simple crime of pointing out a blatant hypocrisy in someone’s off topic confrontation with another person (the confrontation stemming from the fact that that person…. just wanted to point out someone’s else’s hypocrisy) I’m told that I’m “pathetic”, that I’m a snob, that I should just leave the website, because ‘nobody likes me’. And that so many people could stand behind those posts.
There’s a certain portion of the website that cannot handle correction or disagreement of any kind. Either you’re in whole hog, or you’re out. Discussions are not handled like adults, and they certainly are not handled with the attitude that being fallible doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or that someone pointing out a mistake is just someone pointing out a mistake, and not a reason to unleash the hounds of hell, because how dare anyone ever contradict or disagree with you?
I’ve said this a dozen times before, but one of the most fascinating things for me with Tumblr has been watching how the social dynamic of the ‘in crowd’ and ‘out crowd’ unfolds. To a primarily female audience, posts about sexism, even in small, “innocent” forms, play extremely well. Posts about race, to a primarily white audience? Not so much. Posts addressing anyone who is not well liked on Tumblr can get as nasty as anyone wants, and no one says a word, unless it’s in support. Posts addressing someone a decent amount of people follow and like? Not so much.
Those people are not worth it. They’re not having honest discussions, and they’re not honestly engaged. They like what is comfortable for them, and that’s pretty much it.
I’ve had heated arguments with a number of people on this site who, by the end, I didn’t necessarily agree with, but from whom I still felt I learned something. And then there’s the other kind of argument, where all I feel at the end is like I allowed someone to drag me down to their level and get the better of me. Where what they wanted, for the price of having been contradicted, was to see me do wrong, too.
And I take responsibility for that, because it’s a stupid trap to fall into.
I’ve blocked about ten people over the course of the last couple of days. I’ve unfollowed a couple of blogs. I’m not going to be perfect in this, and I know that already, but I feel like I owe myself and this blog a renewed commitment to not getting drawn in by people who have made it clear time and again that all they want is to see me become dirty, to have a chance to point a finger back in my face and say, aha! You make mistakes, too!
Of course I fucking do. But there’s a difference between making a mistake and then insisting that you’re right and stampeding over the top of anyone who dares to contradict you, and just fucking owning up to it, and doing whatever you can to do better next time.
Which is what I’m doing now.
You. You all who are not blocked, who were not involved in the mudslinging over the past few days, I am apologizing to you. It’s not what the people who I want to read this blog come to this blog to see. It’s exactly what the people who I don’t give a goddamn about reading the blog love to see. So what does that make obvious?
That’s my whole, long day in summary. And now I’ll do a bit of studying (only a bit), and probably settle in with a movie for the rest of the evening.