Lists and Limits
Erica Shindler Briggs | 29.Jul.10
Bow when meeting someone (even if you’ve met them already.) When giving something to someone (money, papers, a business card,) do so with both hands. When offering something (carrying bags, giving up your seat,) don’t take no for an answer; offer at least once more and if the offer is still refused, then relent, though asking again later is recommended. Take shoes off before entering a home and some public spaces. Don’t blow your nose at the table.
Before moving to Korea, I bought the books that guided me through the cultural do’s and don’ts. I don’t like making mistakes, at least not in public, and certainly not those that cause offense. I read up on everything - social hierarchy, professional etiquette, table manners. I noted what products and services were readily available and what I would have to learn to live without. I made a list of “Must-Bring” items: vitamin and mineral powder with lots of zinc, salmon jerky, plus size clothing. Upon arrival, however, I quickly realized that living as a foreigner is like having your first child. You can make lists as long as hair at a Pentecostal women’s prayer meeting and still forget the simplest needs. You can read all the books and still have no idea what to do until you do it, often learning after making mistakes - again and again.
More, books and lists don’t account for the particulars of each situation. Our personal baggage, quirks, and prejudices - all of which stem from experience, the stories that fit, (and sometimes misfit) together to create our lives - can either dissolve into more fluid living, or curdle into sour systems of control. A person moving to another country must be willing to rewrite and/or attach new meaning to old stories. Ultimately, there’s only one list a person should check twice before leaving, the “Top Five Traits Required for Living in Another Culture: 1) flexibility, 2) patience, 3) humility, 4) tolerance, and 5) a good sense of humor. Without practice, however, these qualities are just words. I thought I had all of these traits until I moved to Korea and discovered my limits.
I was of the opinion that I was a tolerant person. Tolerance is a close relative of patience, another fruit I thought I’d stored up sufficient supply to last me through a rough season. In a foreign country, however, storage capacity is weighed differently (along with just about every other form of measurement. I’m still having trouble converting celsius to fahrenheit.) It would be more accurate to say that I have the patience of an American. The average American has the patience of a two-year old. Though I’m not the average American, my patience is not much older - five, maybe six years old. Seven on a good day.
My lack of patience became painfully evident this past week at work. It started when my flexibility and tolerance were tested due to changes in the class schedule, added assignments, and students misbehavior; the latter more so because one of the students was my own child. Enter personal quirks, baggage, and prejudices. I’m patient with kids who misbehave, so long as their not my own. The difference is due to self-image baggage I’ve traveled with since I was a young mother with my first-born.
I viewed my child’s behavior as a reflection of my parenting. If she acted poorly, this translated into poor parenting skills on my part. After 15 years and a second child later, this insecurity hasn’t changed; it’s grown worse, and now even more so in a foreign country where parenting techniques are as mixed as a bibimbap recipe. Am I too strict? Not strict enough? Are public scoldings acceptable? What’s the appropriate discipline for a given offense? The details of the drama are not as important as the outcome; by the end of the work day at 5:30, all I wanted is to go home and go to sleep. Alas, there was a house to keep. We needed groceries, laundry detergent and a broom to sweep up the considerable dust that seems to accumulate more heavily in Korea.
After dumping our backpacks at home, we walked to the bus stop and boarded the first bus going our way. We could have gone to Korea’s version of the Walmart Supercenter; Homeplus has groceries, appliances, clothing, and cleaning supplies. It also has hundreds of people and three stories to traverse before one can find everything she needs. Not feeling very people-friendly and too low on energy to exercise, I chose the local equivalent of an American dollar store, not nearly as big as Walmart and no groceries, but it has everything one needs for the home, sold cheap. As an added incentive, this particular store gives coupons that add up the more I buy. Across the street, there’s a mini-grocery store where I’d grab some ingredients for a quick dinner and a sweet treat. Including travel time both ways, I could shop at both stores and be home by 6:30. This was my first mistake: setting a time limit; impatience increases the closer one reaches to the appointed hour.
I expected to be in and out of the first store in minutes, there were only two items on the list. Mistake number two: setting expectations. Like assumptions, expectations can lead to disappointment, breeding resentment which almost always gives birth to prejudice. Such was the case on this seemingly benign shopping trip. The detergent was found easily enough. Quieting my child’s pleas for this, that, and the other thing proved more challenging. “We buy what we need, not what we want,” I repeated my mantra that helps me stay within budget limits. This personal quirk provoked her standard five-year-old response: “Why?” Because I said so! was my desired reply, but I was never satisfied with this answer when I was a child. I answered instead using the re-direction technique: “Can you help mama find a broom with a long handle?”
The broom took more time, not because I couldn’t find one, they simply didn’t have the kind I was looking for. Apparently in Korea, long handled brooms are not readily sold. Instead, they offer short handles that require the user to bend over while performing the chore. Call me lazy, spoiled, whatever you like, but after using this short handled broom for my first three months, I was desperate for the luxury of being able to stand comfortably while sweeping my floor. They sell mops with long handles, why not brooms? Flexibility, Erica, I reminded myself. Be flexible.
I settled for a new mop-head and grumbled my way to the cashier. I pulled out my bank card and coupons, hoping to at least get a discount for my less than desirable purchase. The woman at the counter saw my bank card and shook her hand over the coupons, “An-yah [no]. Cash only.” Of course. No cash, no discount. Disappointment escalating, I mumbled under my breath. They could have said something before I spent my money here.
They did. It was written on the coupon, I just can’t read Korean. My own ignorance annoyed me more than my child’s last plea for something, anything, before we left the store. I put my coupons away, paid for my items, and gruffly grabbed my child’s hand as we left. I checked the clock on my cell phone: 6:10. I can still make it home by 6:30. My mind jumped ahead and started calculating time allotments for the evening’s list of duties: get the rice started, throw a load of clothes in the machine, sweep while dinner is cooking.....The plan was to accomplish it all and be off my feet by 7:30. Not an impossible feat, unless you’re an alien in a foreign country.
Choosing what to cook was never my favorite decision to make. The conundrum is compounded now that the variety of choices has been narrowed down to food items I can identify. I select the familiar, not wanting to waste money on something new that we might not like. Another quirk of mine, “waste not, want not.” Carrots, potatoes, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes. This is our list of staples. I bagged them up and waited to have them weighed and labeled. What about a sauce for the rice and veggies?
I dreaded the required forage down isles to look at pictures on the back of boxes in a futile effort to guess what the sauces might taste like. Meanwhile, I noticed, not for the first time, two children whispering to each other, looking and pointing at my daughter. Judging by their response, one would think cinnamon skin and woolly hair are as common in Korea as pigs in space.
With the exception of certain areas in Seoul, my child does receive quite a bit of attention from Koreans, and not always positive. I could tell these girls were not offering kind adoration. I’m familiar with disdain. I grew up in a small town in Oregon where I was the only brown skinned girl. The scars healed, albeit slowly, and are now neatly folded and placed in the side pocket of my carry-on baggage. This day, however, the stares and whispers unraveled my careful packing like airport security conducting a bag check. I glared at the children. Yes - I, a grown woman, actually gave two little girls the evil eye.
The Spirit tugged at my conscious, reminding me of It’s fruits: love, joy, peace, patience..... I wasn’t hearing any of it. To hell with the freakin’ lists! I skipped the sauce search, and headed straight for the register.
“Come on, Rio!” I barked at my own child. She stopped by the overpriced melons.
“Oooh! Mommy, can we get waterme.....”
I didn’t let her finish. “No! It’s too expensive.”
“Pleeeeese!”
The produce lady bowed to my child’s petition. She motioned to me, “If you really love your child, you will buy this sweet treat for her.” Of course, she didn’t really say this, it was the voice of my insecurities.
I snatched a watermelon, and dumped it on the counter with the rest of my groceries. The cashier asked me if I wanted a bag, at least that’s what I assumed she asked. I’d managed to overcome some language barriers by trial and error. I’d learned that the most common question a cashier asks at check out results in a .50 charge if you answer yes. If you answer no, you end up carrying whatever you purchased if you didn’t bring a bag of your own. What was an admirable eco-friendly practice when I first came to Korea had, in that moment, become an profiteering scam; fifty cents felt like $50. I took the bag resentfully.
In less than 45 minutes, I had become rigid, impatient, prideful and intolerant, the very opposite of every character trait on that list of what a person needs when living in another country. This was not a culture clash, rather a head-on collision between my own limitations and my willingness to stretch. It was the sum total of insecurity and disappointment, multiplied by recognition of personal ignorance, squared by personal quirks and baggage, divided by local prejudice. The result was the creation of a new list: “Things I Hate About Korea.”
“Don’t just stand there, help me!” I charged my five-year-old as I lugged our grocery bags towards the taxi. I’d reached meltdown and I wanted to be home, now.
“It’s too heavy, mama!” she complained.
“Fine, I’ll carry it all by myself!” I huffed. Loading the cab, I fussed and griped a minute more before realizing that although the cab driver did not understand English, my tone of voice and the sullen expression on my child’s face communicated clearly enough. My insecurity shut me up; I didn’t want him to think I was a grumpy tyrant who berates her child for no apparent reason.
A trip to the grocery store in America would never have been so complicated. Nor would it ever have been so enlightening. Though I couldn’t possibly see it in the state I was in then, I now have a glimpse into how transformation happens: it’s not up to us to be finished with the experience of changing, rather the experience determines when it is finished changing us. Apparently, this experience wasn’t finished with me.
I handed the taxi driver my personal label, a laminated card designed to ease communication, providing my address, phone number and emergency contact information written in Hangul. I expected to take a deep breath and collect myself on the ride home. Instead, it seemed that my address was not familiar to the driver and he needs further directions. You’ve got to be kidding me. Here’s where the last thing on that list of required traits would have been helpful. As it turns out, my sense of humor is dulled when other traits on the list reach their limit.
We made it home at 6:55 and ate rice and veggies with soy sauce for dinner. After eating, I swept the floor using the long handled mop and new mop-head; when dry it works fine as a luxury broom. By eight o’clock, my daughter and I had devoured half the watermelon, it’s sweetness softening my frayed nerves. As I said my prayers that night, I thanked God for exposing how much more I needed to grow, and for creating circumstances to flex my spiritual muscle.
I drifted off to sleep crossing out items on the hate list, creating it’s opposite: “Things I Love About Korea: 1) cheap rice-cookers, great for quick-fix dinners, 2) delicious watermelon and other fresh fruits and vegetables, organic taste without the American organic price, 3) their love for children, 4) their love of love, 5) an excellent transportation system - clean taxis, buses and subways that run frequently and on time. And though the taxi-driver may not understand your English, he’ll have a GPS unit that will eventually guide you home.
Before moving to Korea, I bought the books that guided me through the cultural do’s and don’ts. I don’t like making mistakes, at least not in public, and certainly not those that cause offense. I read up on everything - social hierarchy, professional etiquette, table manners. I noted what products and services were readily available and what I would have to learn to live without. I made a list of “Must-Bring” items: vitamin and mineral powder with lots of zinc, salmon jerky, plus size clothing. Upon arrival, however, I quickly realized that living as a foreigner is like having your first child. You can make lists as long as hair at a Pentecostal women’s prayer meeting and still forget the simplest needs. You can read all the books and still have no idea what to do until you do it, often learning after making mistakes - again and again.
More, books and lists don’t account for the particulars of each situation. Our personal baggage, quirks, and prejudices - all of which stem from experience, the stories that fit, (and sometimes misfit) together to create our lives - can either dissolve into more fluid living, or curdle into sour systems of control. A person moving to another country must be willing to rewrite and/or attach new meaning to old stories. Ultimately, there’s only one list a person should check twice before leaving, the “Top Five Traits Required for Living in Another Culture: 1) flexibility, 2) patience, 3) humility, 4) tolerance, and 5) a good sense of humor. Without practice, however, these qualities are just words. I thought I had all of these traits until I moved to Korea and discovered my limits.
I was of the opinion that I was a tolerant person. Tolerance is a close relative of patience, another fruit I thought I’d stored up sufficient supply to last me through a rough season. In a foreign country, however, storage capacity is weighed differently (along with just about every other form of measurement. I’m still having trouble converting celsius to fahrenheit.) It would be more accurate to say that I have the patience of an American. The average American has the patience of a two-year old. Though I’m not the average American, my patience is not much older - five, maybe six years old. Seven on a good day.
My lack of patience became painfully evident this past week at work. It started when my flexibility and tolerance were tested due to changes in the class schedule, added assignments, and students misbehavior; the latter more so because one of the students was my own child. Enter personal quirks, baggage, and prejudices. I’m patient with kids who misbehave, so long as their not my own. The difference is due to self-image baggage I’ve traveled with since I was a young mother with my first-born.
I viewed my child’s behavior as a reflection of my parenting. If she acted poorly, this translated into poor parenting skills on my part. After 15 years and a second child later, this insecurity hasn’t changed; it’s grown worse, and now even more so in a foreign country where parenting techniques are as mixed as a bibimbap recipe. Am I too strict? Not strict enough? Are public scoldings acceptable? What’s the appropriate discipline for a given offense? The details of the drama are not as important as the outcome; by the end of the work day at 5:30, all I wanted is to go home and go to sleep. Alas, there was a house to keep. We needed groceries, laundry detergent and a broom to sweep up the considerable dust that seems to accumulate more heavily in Korea.
After dumping our backpacks at home, we walked to the bus stop and boarded the first bus going our way. We could have gone to Korea’s version of the Walmart Supercenter; Homeplus has groceries, appliances, clothing, and cleaning supplies. It also has hundreds of people and three stories to traverse before one can find everything she needs. Not feeling very people-friendly and too low on energy to exercise, I chose the local equivalent of an American dollar store, not nearly as big as Walmart and no groceries, but it has everything one needs for the home, sold cheap. As an added incentive, this particular store gives coupons that add up the more I buy. Across the street, there’s a mini-grocery store where I’d grab some ingredients for a quick dinner and a sweet treat. Including travel time both ways, I could shop at both stores and be home by 6:30. This was my first mistake: setting a time limit; impatience increases the closer one reaches to the appointed hour.
I expected to be in and out of the first store in minutes, there were only two items on the list. Mistake number two: setting expectations. Like assumptions, expectations can lead to disappointment, breeding resentment which almost always gives birth to prejudice. Such was the case on this seemingly benign shopping trip. The detergent was found easily enough. Quieting my child’s pleas for this, that, and the other thing proved more challenging. “We buy what we need, not what we want,” I repeated my mantra that helps me stay within budget limits. This personal quirk provoked her standard five-year-old response: “Why?” Because I said so! was my desired reply, but I was never satisfied with this answer when I was a child. I answered instead using the re-direction technique: “Can you help mama find a broom with a long handle?”
The broom took more time, not because I couldn’t find one, they simply didn’t have the kind I was looking for. Apparently in Korea, long handled brooms are not readily sold. Instead, they offer short handles that require the user to bend over while performing the chore. Call me lazy, spoiled, whatever you like, but after using this short handled broom for my first three months, I was desperate for the luxury of being able to stand comfortably while sweeping my floor. They sell mops with long handles, why not brooms? Flexibility, Erica, I reminded myself. Be flexible.
I settled for a new mop-head and grumbled my way to the cashier. I pulled out my bank card and coupons, hoping to at least get a discount for my less than desirable purchase. The woman at the counter saw my bank card and shook her hand over the coupons, “An-yah [no]. Cash only.” Of course. No cash, no discount. Disappointment escalating, I mumbled under my breath. They could have said something before I spent my money here.
They did. It was written on the coupon, I just can’t read Korean. My own ignorance annoyed me more than my child’s last plea for something, anything, before we left the store. I put my coupons away, paid for my items, and gruffly grabbed my child’s hand as we left. I checked the clock on my cell phone: 6:10. I can still make it home by 6:30. My mind jumped ahead and started calculating time allotments for the evening’s list of duties: get the rice started, throw a load of clothes in the machine, sweep while dinner is cooking.....The plan was to accomplish it all and be off my feet by 7:30. Not an impossible feat, unless you’re an alien in a foreign country.
Choosing what to cook was never my favorite decision to make. The conundrum is compounded now that the variety of choices has been narrowed down to food items I can identify. I select the familiar, not wanting to waste money on something new that we might not like. Another quirk of mine, “waste not, want not.” Carrots, potatoes, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes. This is our list of staples. I bagged them up and waited to have them weighed and labeled. What about a sauce for the rice and veggies?
I dreaded the required forage down isles to look at pictures on the back of boxes in a futile effort to guess what the sauces might taste like. Meanwhile, I noticed, not for the first time, two children whispering to each other, looking and pointing at my daughter. Judging by their response, one would think cinnamon skin and woolly hair are as common in Korea as pigs in space.
With the exception of certain areas in Seoul, my child does receive quite a bit of attention from Koreans, and not always positive. I could tell these girls were not offering kind adoration. I’m familiar with disdain. I grew up in a small town in Oregon where I was the only brown skinned girl. The scars healed, albeit slowly, and are now neatly folded and placed in the side pocket of my carry-on baggage. This day, however, the stares and whispers unraveled my careful packing like airport security conducting a bag check. I glared at the children. Yes - I, a grown woman, actually gave two little girls the evil eye.
The Spirit tugged at my conscious, reminding me of It’s fruits: love, joy, peace, patience..... I wasn’t hearing any of it. To hell with the freakin’ lists! I skipped the sauce search, and headed straight for the register.
“Come on, Rio!” I barked at my own child. She stopped by the overpriced melons.
“Oooh! Mommy, can we get waterme.....”
I didn’t let her finish. “No! It’s too expensive.”
“Pleeeeese!”
The produce lady bowed to my child’s petition. She motioned to me, “If you really love your child, you will buy this sweet treat for her.” Of course, she didn’t really say this, it was the voice of my insecurities.
I snatched a watermelon, and dumped it on the counter with the rest of my groceries. The cashier asked me if I wanted a bag, at least that’s what I assumed she asked. I’d managed to overcome some language barriers by trial and error. I’d learned that the most common question a cashier asks at check out results in a .50 charge if you answer yes. If you answer no, you end up carrying whatever you purchased if you didn’t bring a bag of your own. What was an admirable eco-friendly practice when I first came to Korea had, in that moment, become an profiteering scam; fifty cents felt like $50. I took the bag resentfully.
In less than 45 minutes, I had become rigid, impatient, prideful and intolerant, the very opposite of every character trait on that list of what a person needs when living in another country. This was not a culture clash, rather a head-on collision between my own limitations and my willingness to stretch. It was the sum total of insecurity and disappointment, multiplied by recognition of personal ignorance, squared by personal quirks and baggage, divided by local prejudice. The result was the creation of a new list: “Things I Hate About Korea.”
“Don’t just stand there, help me!” I charged my five-year-old as I lugged our grocery bags towards the taxi. I’d reached meltdown and I wanted to be home, now.
“It’s too heavy, mama!” she complained.
“Fine, I’ll carry it all by myself!” I huffed. Loading the cab, I fussed and griped a minute more before realizing that although the cab driver did not understand English, my tone of voice and the sullen expression on my child’s face communicated clearly enough. My insecurity shut me up; I didn’t want him to think I was a grumpy tyrant who berates her child for no apparent reason.
A trip to the grocery store in America would never have been so complicated. Nor would it ever have been so enlightening. Though I couldn’t possibly see it in the state I was in then, I now have a glimpse into how transformation happens: it’s not up to us to be finished with the experience of changing, rather the experience determines when it is finished changing us. Apparently, this experience wasn’t finished with me.
I handed the taxi driver my personal label, a laminated card designed to ease communication, providing my address, phone number and emergency contact information written in Hangul. I expected to take a deep breath and collect myself on the ride home. Instead, it seemed that my address was not familiar to the driver and he needs further directions. You’ve got to be kidding me. Here’s where the last thing on that list of required traits would have been helpful. As it turns out, my sense of humor is dulled when other traits on the list reach their limit.
We made it home at 6:55 and ate rice and veggies with soy sauce for dinner. After eating, I swept the floor using the long handled mop and new mop-head; when dry it works fine as a luxury broom. By eight o’clock, my daughter and I had devoured half the watermelon, it’s sweetness softening my frayed nerves. As I said my prayers that night, I thanked God for exposing how much more I needed to grow, and for creating circumstances to flex my spiritual muscle.
I drifted off to sleep crossing out items on the hate list, creating it’s opposite: “Things I Love About Korea: 1) cheap rice-cookers, great for quick-fix dinners, 2) delicious watermelon and other fresh fruits and vegetables, organic taste without the American organic price, 3) their love for children, 4) their love of love, 5) an excellent transportation system - clean taxis, buses and subways that run frequently and on time. And though the taxi-driver may not understand your English, he’ll have a GPS unit that will eventually guide you home.
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1. Posted on 05.Aug.10 From: Chocho
Erica, this is your best yet.