"If the Shoe Fits, Wear It"

I just finally moved in with my wife. Last year, when we got married (and up until May 23rd of this year), I was in the middle of a contract, teaching in another city, an hours drive away. Now, we are having to integrate all our junk into a tiny living space, in an old, poorly maintained apartment building. We live in a single unit with this long hallway that is noisy as hell. The mechanisms that close the big metal front doors on all these units wore out at least a decade ago, so unless an occupant gently and quietly pulls the door shut behind them when they come and go, there is an almost deafening sound. No big deal sometimes, but the guy next door smokes (a very common vice among many, many nervous, apparently anal retentive Korean and non-Korean men), so he goes in an out to suck on his cancer stick at all hours.

And... the big, heavy metal front door of his apartment slams mightily with every single entrance and exit.

My wife has been suffering with this noise pollution for months now and so, now that I've moved in, I am trying to help soothe her nerves a bit by asking the other residents on this floor to PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE not let their doors slam! Thing is... people in overcrowded, pent-up, can't show your emotions (except the typical plastic, fake "happy" smile) Asia cannot take confrontation of ANY KIND. Almost any form of direct, honest communication, no matter how you try to approach it, is considered "RUDE" to them. This, unfortunately, seems to be the result of centuries of strictly enforced Confucianism, stacked precariously atop a whole slew of various other societal and environmental pressures.

So... yesterday, when I attempted to tackle a number of problems head on (such as, a guy double parked downstairs, blocking both our cars, and I even had to speak directly to several tenants who I observed firsthand letting their doors slam), we were confronted by this viciously grumpy building guard who tried to tell my wife that "no foreigners live here." His point was that I have no right to ask some asshole to move his double parked car, or to bother fellow tenants who are BOTHERING US (unintentionally, carelessly, passive-aggressively, or otherwise)! But... my Korean wife promptly and politely told this do nothing, who growls every time you even ask him a simple question, that she already registered me as an occupant of the building.

This grumpy guard (whom my wife is afraid to even ask if any packages have come for her in her absence) basically just sits in the guard office all day, watching Korean TV shows, and doesn't want to be bothered. If you actually make him work, he'll scowl and grump at you. After we shut his mean mouth up by simply and politely telling him that I am in fact a registered occupant of the building now, he even tried to give me the old Korean stare down when we were waiting to get in the elevator. This Asian version of the "Mexican standoff" is really the only way that people here have to vent their feelings. Well... that and GETTING STUPID DRUNK EVERY WEEKEND to kill the pain of this pent-up society.

In any case, I stared right back at him till he looked away. I won. But mind you, I am NOT supposed to do that because... I AM WHITE AND WAS NOT BORN IN KOREA. I played by Korean passive-aggressive rules and won, but he'll be back. The next step that most disgruntled Koreans resort to, if they feel deeply, deeply offended (and they OFTEN do), is to try to get revenge some other way, at a later time. You know, back stabbing or some other end around butt slamming - even if they have to make something up to try to get back at you.

So, yeah, I'd definitely have to say that this place is definitely a powder keg, just waiting to go off. After we went upstairs, after the Korean stare down game with the grumpy guard, my wife told me that very recently, a sensational murder case made national South Korean news. Apparently, some Korean guy endured door slamming in his building for so long, without recourse, that one day, he finally snapped, and went to another apartment and... KILLED THE OCCUPANT THAT HE THOUGHT WAS SLAMMING THE DOOR TOO OFTEN. Welcome to "the land of morning calm."

Oh, and one last thing.  The fact that I had the good old fashioned guts to address these problems with several Koreans face to face, apparently means that I am "a barbarian." I think I smell RACISM. Scratch that! I'm getting really sick to death of that over-used and abused term. Try, xenophobia.  If the shoe fits, wear it.

The Ever Deafening Sound of Silence

Just came back from the local South Korean grocery store.  PURE PANDEMONIUM!  It's a one story building with square footage not much bigger than you'd find in an average residential home in the US or Canada, but despite the fact that you could walk from one end of the place to the other, in any given direction, in just a few minutes, for some TOTALLY NUTBALL reason... the management thinks it's good to have some guy in the meat department SCREAMING... I mean... SHOUTING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS over an EVEN LOUDER SPEAKER, to get people to come and buy this or that "special" item.  Of course, I've been to noisy summer carnivals back home in the US before, but those events are usually OUTDOORS, and they naturally want people from far and wide to come and buy their crap, but... these little grocery shops in South Korea ARE NOT OUDOORS!

On the contrary, these otherwise handy little local "marts" are mostly indoors in Korea, where the noise level just about makes your blood curdle and your brain boil and threaten to explode like the latest North Korean nuke test!  Man, I hope the people in this region don't start EXPORTING the kind of senseless, polluting NOISE they routinely subject their own citizens to, because if they did... there really would be a third world war of epic proportions.

And the most frustrating thing is... if you do talk to most of the locals about disheartening, demoralizing and grossly mind numbing stuff like this... lo and behold, you find out that... THEY HATE THE NOISE, TOO!  When I taught English in Taiwan, I used to ask so many of my adult students and other acquaintances, "Then... if you feel the same, why don't you do anything about it?  Why don't you complain?  This is your country!  Get things changed!  You know, DEMOCRACY!  You pay taxes, don't ya?"

"DON'T COMPLAIN!  You Americans just like to complain!  I don't like it either, but what can we do about it?"  WHAT?  The pathetic sound of pure futility is deafening when you're forced to listen way too hard.  I mean, who would say such a totally impotent, gutless, idiotic thing?  Most East Asians, actually.  Instead of actually having a voice or any sort of genuine human rights (yes, the kinds of violations you hear about in the news all the time, where China is concerned), people here tend to be totally stifled and quite often, socially pent-up and just plain toothless.  Even forlornly passive aggressive too.

I mean, where do you think the term "paper tiger" came from in the first place?

It's neither democratic (as their token political systems usually attempt or even pretend to be) nor especially progressive in "modern" Asia, but a total and complete real world social failure.  Self expression doesn't really even exist in most Asian countries (or most other developing countries, for that matter).  And if it ever did, it's become something resembling the Borg Collective of Star Trek fame, a rotting, putrid, collection of zombie corpses that are just waiting to burst up from where they dangerously lurk just below the sod, to become an army of pseudo-human bipeds with only one thing on what's left of their rotting minds; the consumption of the healthy brains of those still yet living!

So, even if a western style "free market economy" has been put in place in countries like Japan, South Korea and China (and Taiwan, or what I like to call "South China"), and people actually "technically" elect their own leaders, it's still not worth all that much at the end of the day because the people don't always have much of a voice.  Although things are changing little by little, as of yet, most human rights in East Asia are strictly on paper.

So, it's all, like so many aspects of modern Asia... a façade; a cheap cardboard cutout meant to represent something that simply isn't really there.  It doesn't really exist in any truly tangible form beyond the simple ideal.  Like a lot of K-Pop songs, it's got a catchy tune... sometimes, but it's usually pretty derivative and typically shallow and not really all that substantial when held up to any kind of serious scrutiny or comparison to other forms of music.

So don't believe everything you read or hear about how the homogenity of so-called "modern" Asia makes people placid, wise and cooperative. Oh no it doesn't!  Rather, it tends to rob people of their very identity, in favor of "keeping the peace."  But when you keep human beings down like that, you don't really get inner peace.  You get a deep seeded passive aggressive RAGE that just won't quit.  Oh, they try to hide it.  Like their emotions, they try to suppress it, but it tends to ooze out while they are doing even the most mundane of activities, such as when driving or dealing with one another on interpersonal level.  All that pent up rage and frustration just tends to manifest in all sorts of bizarre ways, such as habitual "lying to save face" and, worst of all, SELF DENIAL of what they are truly thinking and feeling.

So, if you're thinking of teaching English in an Asian country, my advice is DON'T.  There really isn't all that much money to be made and the grass definitely ain't greener on this side, let me tell ya.  Hell... there isn't even any grass over here in most parts of the vast neon scarred shanty town anyway.

Worst yet, the grass they do grow, isn't even maintained properly!  You very seldom see a lawn mower over here in South Korea.  What they do in most places that are even lucky enough to have a wretched little tract of greenery, is let the grass grow knee high, until a bunch of poor, over-worked city workers come in and mow it all down with hand held weed eaters.

Yep!  They chop what little lawn there is all down to the dirt so they won't have to come back and do it again too soon.  So, as a result, there's a lot of soil erosion in still developing South Korea.  The grass simply cannot take hold for long enough to keep that precious topsoil in place, so every time it rains, the sidewalks (where you can even find them, 'cause they don't even exist in many places in Asia) are often awash with mud, and you can see that topsoil just draining gradually off into the city sewer system, where the right of every individual to free thought and speech also apparently goes to languish in the putrid muck.

It's all just so mind numbingly pathetic and just plain sad.  But whatever you do, "Don't complain!"  That might actually accomplish something!  But we don't want THAT, now do we?