10/15/2019; Week 5 Response to "Cross-Cultural Miscommunication".

Hello,

I am on here again for a third time this week! I know you are as happy about that as I am. So, cultural miscommunication. I have so many stories and I am going to share a few of them. First up, in Korea it is a social norm to get married at 30. In LDS culture you would be considered an “old maid” or whatever that term is. But also, in America, or at least the America that I grew up in being married at 18 was not that strange and being married by 21 was completely normal. Even starting your own family that young was almost and, in many ways, still considered normal. My wife married me at 26 and I was 24. I thought we were a little older to be getting married as most of the people I knew were already married by our age. When my wife told her mother, she was getting married to me or rather when I proposed her mom did not like it at all. And to make matters worse my wife told me as plainly as you would tell someone hello. She just said her mom was upset that we were getting married. I did not like that. And after we got married, we moved to Korea and I had still not gotten over it. So, my first experience meeting my mother in law was done so with a scowl on my face. She did not like that either. I was upset. At that time, I was not great at sharing my feelings and so my wife was not aware. She knew I was nervous, and I was, I just didn’t want to ruin her reunion with her family. As time went on my wife and I grew closer together and now we share everything, but at the time we were still newlyweds, I had a John Wayne complex and that was that. So, her mom took us out to dinner, and she wanted to show she cared and took us to Outback steakhouse here in Korea. I did not know her mom at the time and did not really care where we ate, and so we went. I did not really know what to get as I was really tired from our 22-hour flight. I ordered Salmon which is not something I have ever eaten in a restaurant before then. I always ate steak or ribs or BBQ or burgers or whatever. So, I thought why not. Now, I have eaten many foods from different cultures due to certain things in my life and I was not unexperienced with foreign food. And I mean real foreign food. Not Americanized foreign food. Anyway, the food arrived, and I started to eat. It tasted weird to me, but I was not an expert on Salmon. I got halfway through it and realized it was raw. That was a new one for me. I did not react well and demanded a free meal out of it. I was mad and I was not in the mood. I could not have acted more like a fool than I did that night. A few years later her mom came to America to visit us. She saw firsthand how different it is than Korea. She was amazed by the size of the country and the space, Korea is about the size of Florida, maybe a little smaller actually but with like five times the population. So, she came to America and I was finally able to ask her what the deal was. I said it much better than that as I had really grown by this point. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me. She said you are a student and are young, I was worried that at your age and status marriage would be too challenging and stressful for you, I wondered why you couldn’t just date for ten years or something. I told her how Americans do things and how our church does things. We lived in Rexburg Idaho at the time and she soon saw I was telling the truth. Weddings every Saturday at the Temple really opened her eyes. We had a difficult relationship because I did not understand her culture and she did not understand mine. We had a cultural misunderstanding.

Second, I am going to say the one that has caused me the most stress and trouble is this, in Korea people stare at you if you look different than they do. Which means if you are a blonde and blue eyed American you will be aggressively stared at as though you were a superstar or something. Now, under regular circumstances that would not be a problem. But you see I grew up in an area where if you stared at someone the way they stare at me, it meant you were looking for trouble. So, when I first got here, you might imagine how that was difficult. I did not know why they were staring as in America seeing people of who looked differently than I did was common, and I never even thought about it, but in Korea I might as well be one of the wonders of the world. People will stare me down and one time someone followed me around the grocery just staring at me and showed no sign of shame or anything. When I first got here, I almost fought someone because they were staring me down and not looking away, it was late at night and in a type of alley and my wife and I were walking home. In Korea especially in the southern area of the country (not a North Korean reference) I am talking about the southern part of south Korea. So, it was safe, but this guy kept walking toward us and was staring me down, I took this as a sign of hostility and reacted. He got shocked and started talking in Korean. My wife came to his rescue and said that he was just looking. I was like “looking at what”? And she said “you”. The guy moved on and my wife told me about how I am unique to them and they are just staring because they may have never even seen an American in person. It is different now and not as bad, but still there are some days where I just about lose it and just want to walk around with a bag or a mask on my head. Just check out YouTube and search Koreans staring. And you will see what I mean. So, another misconception and misunderstanding that I did not react well to. When I was younger, I was a lot more motivated to certain actions than I am now, and so I may come off as wild or a bully, but it was not that way. It was late and, in an alley, in America is that ever a good place to be? Think about it?

Ivers BYUI