Today was pretty cool. I got up and accomplished everything I set out to do, which is pretty exciting. The only thing I haven't done is study korean enough but that isn't possible since I can't study enough ha ha. I'm getting back into the swing of school though. I have coffee now, so that's definitely a contributing factor. It's instant coffee though because regular coffee here is very expensive. No idea why, except that Korea is a lot farther from South America than the U.S. is.
It's a good thing the won (Korean money) is so weak compared to the U.S. If it's not food, it's expensive here. I wasn't aware of it at first, but so many things are more expensive than in the U.S. Some things are cheaper, but not a lot of stuff. Brand name clothes are incredibly expensive here, and it seems like everything is at least 20% more than in America if it has a brand attached to it. Maybe it's do to modern day trade policy and maybe it's do to the Confucianist structure of Korea. Who knows? I'm not in the mood to delve into it farther, I just know it is not good for my shopping pleasure.
Anyways, after I got lots of stuff done, I went to church. I had met a pastor a couple of weeks ago and he told me how to get on a bus to come to his church. It was a Presbyterian church but I didn't mind. I followed his instructions this week (couldn't get the motivation last week) and jumped on the bus I found there. However, this bus was definitely not going to the Presbyterian church in Hayang. We went into downtown Daegu to this giant other Presbyterian church. Turns out that the church had korean, chinese, vietnamese, and english services. We thought it was pretty cool and upon entering the church, were snatched up by a korean person and showed around the church. We went down to the Chinese part of the church and caught the Chinese service. It was good, I think. There was an english teacher there who spoke some Chinese so he outlined in the bulletin (in english) what we were reading.
So the sermon was on Matthew 13:24-46. This covered some parables which described how God would pick the good and bad people, and also what heaven would be like. The pastor was very animated and from my experience in American protestant churches I could kind of get what he was saying while catching very few words. After the sermon we got in touch with the english teacher guy and ate lunch in the little cafeteria there.
I'm going to digress for a minute or two.
Korean church culture is pretty neat. For us Americans, we're used to going to church on Sunday morning and being done in the early afternoon, dispersing to all of our personal plans for lunch or whatnot. The service is relatively short (1-2 hours) and fellowship extends right up until the moment the final prayer is said, and then whoooooosh! Everyone is out the door.
This isn't the way Korean church culture works, or at least how it was explained to me by Andy, the english teacher I met there (I have only been to the one church so I wouldn't know personally). The first service goes from ~10:30-11:30 and last roughly a hour-1.5 hours later. At that time, everyone fellowships and has lunch together there at the church. After the first service, everyone comes back and has another service which lasts another 1.5-2 hours. Apparently Koreans really value the whole deal about the Sabbath, at least the churchgoing ones do. The church usually doesn't let out until late afternoon and then everyone goes home for the day. It's pretty neat that here in the busy culture of Korea, church is actually much longer than in the states.
Also, I noticed something else in the church today. I met Andy and he was a really nice guy. He was trying to get into better and better teaching jobs and also trying to do some mission work. He knows some chinese and some korean and of course english (he's from ohio). He lived in China for a little over a year and has been in Korea for a year in a half. I guess he likes it here in Korea, because he is trying to become a college english teacher. This all brings me to my point.
The things I found today kind of bothered me. Not in an offensive sort of way but in a concerned, fascinated sort of way. Let me start off by saying that I'm not as nationalistic as many people, and lean strongly towards a global state of things. I wish everyone would broaden their horizons and study abroad. I want everyone to see what other places are like and how the basic human struggle is intrinsic, no matter the culture.
What I saw today in Andy awestruck me. At first I thought I was speaking in a strange tone or doing something wrong, because his nonverbal communication clearly suggested that he wasn't following anything I was saying, at least until he thought about it. The fluency in his english has seemed to disappear to give way to some kind of semi-natural way of speaking one would expect of someone studying and still trying to master the language. His verbal communication skills were also lacking, at least in english, as his tones were slightly off, and he had a considerably peculiar air about him as he talked, almost like he was unsure what he was saying. Right before I would begin to speak, I could see that he was waiting me to say something, but as I began to talk this melted into an instant uneasiness and a kind of disappointment. I honestly couldn't figure out if I was doing something wrong or if I suddenly developed a crippling lisp or something.
All this description is necessary, I think, to help me bring up my point. Is this kind of loss-of-fluency normal? According to Andy, he had only spent a total of 2.5 years overseas, and that time had been split between two countries. Does intensive language training result in a complete loss of your formal self? How fast does a person unknowingly assimilate into a new culture? It makes me worried about losing my ability in english as I'm immersed here, at least to the extent I saw today. It was actually kind of disturbing, I think, because I can definitely feel that my english vocabulary is shrinking in a rate directly proportional to the rate my Korean vocabulary and understanding goes up. Is this what's to come of me? Will I lose the only thing that makes me a natural citizen. Will I end up in a sort of perpetual awkwardness between cultures?
None of these questions will keep me from fervently pursuing my Korean studies, especially since become proficient is my goal. It's just unsettling, that such a natural ability would be easily lost like that. I'm pretty sure I wrote twenty questions just now, and honestly I might be able to answer like 2 of them. This is all a big pool of unknown territory to me. In the end it boils down to the fact that i really don't want to lose who I am in the pursuit of personal improvement. It's similar to waking up one morning and discovering that you've turned into an animal or some other Kafka-esque metamorphosis.
Thinking about it further, I can see the self-cultural shift is inevitable if one truly wants to be fluent in a language. Look at the naturalized citizens we have here who speak english very well. Many of them have assimilated into the culture in some way or another to a large extent. I'm sure if they were to meet someone from their home nation who barely speaks english, the impression they would give would be like the one I got today. The whole church trip thing essentially took up my thoughts and energy today. Like I said before, I got all the necessary homeworkish things done today but I've been hung up on what happened in church today.
For Now
Aron Huckaba International Vagabond
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