How to Be an Alien

Questions for a letter to Obama:

"How much is the White House? Can you give me a pentagon?" - 3rd grade student, Yangmok Middle School

"Will you give me your daughter, Malia?" - 3rd grade student, Seokjeon Middle School

I am an alien. A registered alien, in fact. But I certainly do not need my alien registration card to remind me that I am an outsider. Whether strangers glare me down in the subway or approach me and stroke my arm as they call me “beautiful,” it is a rare and precious occasion to find myself amidst a group of Koreans who forget, for a brief moment, my alien status.

For some, becoming an alien is not an easy thing to do. Here are three rules to simplify the process.

1. Be prepared to make mistakes, be confused, and feel like an idiot.

As an alien in Korea, you will not always know what is going on or how things work. There is no way to combat this problem other than accepting it. For example, my apartment has an intercom on the wall, and at times a voice spouts off a string of very serious sounding Korean. My apartment has a floor to ceiling sliding glass door leading to the balcony, a window to my hallway, and a sliding glass door to the bathroom through which I can see the window to my hallway as I sit on the toilet, so before investing in curtains I already had a small paranoia that I was constantly being watched. It was not too big a leap, then, to suspect that the voice from this speaker was scolding me for doing something wrong, such as running my washing machine at an inappropriate hour or playing music too loudly. My co-teacher, Okhee, assured me that they were only announcements and not to worry about them. Soon after, the speaker came on in the middle of the night repeating what sounded to me something along the lines of “Da-da-da taygoimnida.” There was no way that this could just be another announcement, so I looked out the window expecting to see people evacuation. No one else was stirring. Upon investigating the situation, I found that the phone mounted on the wall below the intercom had three colored circles. The red circle had a picture of fire, the yellow circle had a picture of a gas faucet, and the green circle had a picture of an angry boy. The yellow circle was lit up. I first checked my gas to make sure that I hadn’t left it on, and then pulled on some jeans and went to the security office. Very distressed, I tried to imitate the voice from the speaker and drew the picture of the gas faucet on a scrap of newspaper, but the guard just waved me off as though nothing were the matter. When I returned to my apartment, the sound had stopped, but it recurred several times, always in the middle of the night. When it finally happened on a Sunday afternoon, I called my Okhee to translate to the security guard over the phone. He led me to a power box in my hallway and showed me how to flip a switch to turn my power off and on again, which did put an end to the voice from the speaker. I wasn’t sure how this would help if there was a carbon monoxide leak in my apartment, but I slept with my window cracked and made use of the power box until eventually the problem ceased.

Another incident occurred in the historic city of Gyeongju. My friends and I had spent a long weekend there touring the temples and tombs. It was our first outing long enough to be considered a trip, and we had heard that after going on a trip, it was typical to bring back food to share with the teachers at your school. We discovered a famous snack called “Gyeongju bread,” a sandwich of barley bread resembling sand dollar sized pancakes stuck together with sweet red bean paste, each individually wrapped in plastic. We loaded shopping bags full of them, and the next week I handed them out to all of the teachers, the principals and vice principals. Because I teach at two schools, I couldn’t distribute the second batch until a few days after returning from Gyeongju. As I sat down to share them, my co-teacher Jang sniffed the bread and asked if it was fresh. In the U.S., if something is individually wrapped in plastic, it generally means that it is loaded with preservatives, so I had never anticipated that the breads should require refrigeration. Surely enough, one of the teachers looked down at her half-eaten Gyeongju bread to find it spotted with mold.

You don’t even need to make mistakes like this, though, to feel a little self-conscious. Just as I think some things that Koreans do are ridiculous, some of my actions that I find perfectly ordinary, Koreans consider absurd. Going for a run on the path along the river, at least as a girl, chomping on an apple while walking down the sidewalk, or simply having a beer without buying a table-ful of food always take Koreans aback. During a school field trip, I picked a few flowers and tucked them behind my own and a few teachers’ ears only to be laughed at hysterically. I later learned that wearing flowers in your hair is considered a symbol of insanity.

2. Compromise

I know far too many Westerners who spend all of their free time drinking beer in foreigner bars. I don’t understand why they came to Korea to do that. There is much better beer available in the states. If you come to a foreign country, you should really try to learn about and experience the culture, even if it sometimes means compromising your usual behavior. My co-teacher boasts that I can eat spicy Korean food better than she can, and a group of elderly people clapped for me on the sidewalk in Seoul for speaking basic Korean. Even the smallest things are overwhelmingly appreciated.

That said, it is no better to abandon all of your beliefs and customs and become so immersed in the culture that you become resentful of other foreigners for detracting from your ‘Korean experience.’ I have been guilty of this phenomenon, and in the opposite vein, have been overly enthusiastic and friendly to foreign strangers. With this common confusion of how to react to other foreigners, my friends invented a game similar to “Slug Bug” or “Punch Buggy.” The first person to spot a foreigner when we are in public has a right to punch his or her friends, and bonus punches are rewarded if the foreigner sighted looks romantically involved with a Korean.

Really, though, it is often just as rewarding to share aspects of American culture with Koreans as it is to learn about Korean culture from them. Shockingly enough, Hollywood and the news do not always convey a full or accurate picture of Americans. Many Koreans outside of the cities have had limited contact with Westerners, and they are curious. As I was assisting one student with an assignment, she stopped me midsentence and said, “Oh! Your eyes are brown. I thought Americans had blue eyes.” They also marvel at my arm hair and, humblingly, snicker at my armpit sweat, which they don’t seem to have. On Thanksgiving, I “roasted” a chicken on my stove and baked sweet potato pies in my toaster oven for my co-teachers. On Halloween, my friend Megan wanted to make caramel apples with two Korean girls. She bought a big bag of candy caramels and we melted them on her stove before dipping in apples on chopsticks and rolling them in crushed peanuts. Unfortunately, the caramel on caramel apples is not the same as caramel candies. Instead, it was painfully chewy and became harder as it cooled until one of the girls asked, as politely as she could, “So… Americans like this?” Eventually, they ended up peeling off the caramel and holding it in their hands as they ate the apples. But after the caramel apple disaster, we taught them to carve a pumpkin while watching Edward Scissorhands, and they took to that much better than the apples. Chances are, they won’t forget either any time soon.

3. Don’t forget your ray blaster.

At a camp I once taught, the principal of the school gave a speech to the middle school students in which he referred to English as a “weapon” that they should wield to reach success. Man, did that make me feel like a colonist. That is one reason that I try to “Koreanize” as much as possible. Really, though, my weapon of choice as an alien in Korea is the electric fan. Koreans believe that a fan left running overnight in an enclosed room will cause “fan death.” The superstition is that the fan will create a vortex or suck up all the oxygen, leading to suffocation, or possibly kill via hypothermia in the night.

Actually, you can leave both your fan and your ray blaster at home. Most aliens are safer in South Korea than where they came from. The only thing you may need to fight here is xenophobia. The swine flu certainly hasn’t helped. It is as though “swine” translates into Korean as “foreigner.” While several people I know have complained about racism here, I prefer to think of how well Korea is dealing with foreigners considering the newness of their presence. It takes a long time for a traditionally homogenous country to accept foreigners living amongst them, and while I have felt racism during my time here, I am generally treated more like a guest than like an outsider. My friend Josh had a really touching experience as a foreigner. I was speaking to his co-teacher, Mr. Park, at Josh’s farewell party the night before his return to America. Mr. Park admitted to me, and to Josh, that he used to be racist against Americans because of his strong patriotic beliefs. His relationship with Josh, though, had been so good that he had come to perceive all foreigners with a more open mind. Even though Mr. Park did not like to drink or stay out late, he was out drinking with Josh until four that morning as a gesture of appreciation and camaraderie. Another of my friends taught an English camp with me, and one of the students wrote an article about him for the camp newspaper. She wrote that the only black person she had met before him had been unkind and that that was how she had come to think of black people until she met Landon, who was kind and had a warm smile. So rather than feel attacked by the xenophobia in Korea, my best advice to any foreigner is to welcome it as an opportunity to make change.