Last week, I caught my two supervisors looking uncharacteristically tired. Concerned, I asked them, what was up? Jenny just groaned. Alice explained. “Me and Jenny Teacher stayed out until 3 AM yesterday.” It was a Wednesday and these are women who are typically asleep by 10:30. I was very confused. “Party, party?” I asked, palms up like a lecherous old man at a nightclub. Because what other kind of party is there, really? “No, no!” she insisted, “Mr. Yoon asked us to join him for one drink so we went. But he really didn’t want to stop drinking. He kept having more soju but we didn’t want to.” “So you drank with him till 3am!?” “Of course not!” Jenny Teacher chimed in. “We just had cola after the first drink but we couldn’t leave him early because, ah, it would be so rude.” This coming from Korean people, I immediately understood but, at the same time, was entirely baffled. Mr. Yoon is essentially the custodian of our private academy. He’s a hunched-over, string-bean of an old man who regularly creeps around the building, scaring the children and teachers alike with his grouchy, temperamental demeanor. In contrast, my two Korean supervisors are young, energetic people who behave in a friendly and socially acceptable manner, as far as I know. So why in the name of King Sejong would they subject themselves to more than four hours in Mr. Kim’s drunken company on a Tuesday night? Let me introduce you to a unique cultural nuance birthed straight from the bowels of Korean collectivism: In social settings, Koreans are extremely reluctant to be the first person to leave a gathering regardless of how tired, bored, or uncomfortable they might be. The trouble is, Korean gatherings can go on for hours. Broken up into “rounds”, a single night can see you travelling to a coffee shop, dinner, bowling, noraebang, second dinner, a dessert cafe , a pool hall, and finally, to wind it all down, another coffee shop. People will physically drop like flies during one of these 10 hour endeavours, falling asleep on cafe couches or doubled over drunk in the darkness of the singing rooms. Despite all of this, each exhausted member finds the willpower to trudge through the night and make it to the sunrise to disperse with everyone else. There are several reasons why this is a thing. First, in social settings, it’s considered a slight to the host or the person who organized a gathering if you don’t stick around the entire time. Leaving early suggests that you think the events or the present company aren’t fun enough or that you might not be having THE BEST TIME EVER. Second, it’s a work-related outing and the boss is picking up the tab. I’d say it’s also expected in Western companies that you will stay the entire time if a boss or authority figure treats their employees to a dinner or night out. The difference is that it can be taken to the extremes here because of the work hard, play harder culture. If boss man wants to finish a bottle of soju every 10 minutes, prepare to go shot for shot. If he also wants to stay out in Seoul until the trains start up again at 5 AM, you’d better stick around too. Last, social pariah-phobia. This one definitely had a strong influence on my poor supervisors and the situation they found themselves in. Mr. Yoon holds no power really at all in the school hierarchy, but he’s a drinking buddy of the school director. So that apparently gives him a high enough status that demands recognition. If they left and hurt his pride enough that he would mention it to their boss or anyone else at school, there could have been major social and professional repercussions. No irreversible harm came to my supervisors because of their forced night out, mostly just sleepy eyes and an increased need for coffee. But that’s not always the case. South Korea recently made international news because of two high-profile crimes committed against women. The first was a random murder of a young woman in the upscale Gangnam district of Seoul. The suspect claimed he did it because women never paid any attention to him. Aww, male entitlement is really cute right? Especially when it’s lethal. The second involved a young teacher who was gang raped by three men, two of whom were fathers of her students. Nice, huh? An article from the South China Morning Post explained how many teachers in smaller, more remote areas, like the island where this teacher was located, rely heavily on parent support and assistance to run their schools. This makes it harder for them “to refuse when asked to attend dinners, invariably accompanied by drinks” with those parents. In the gang-rape case, the victim was having dinner on her own, planning on an early night so she could have energy to explore the village the next day. The three men joined her and insisted that she drink with them, despite her refusals. When they had gotten her sufficiently inebriated for their needs, they “volunteered” to drive her home and then took turns raping her (The Korea Herald). What happened to this woman was in no way her fault and the guilty parties should probably be castrated - or just locked up for a long time, since medieval punishments aren’t acceptable anymore, even for rapists. However, when I first read about it, my gut reaction was, why didn’t she just not drink? I couldn’t imagine ever being comfortable enough to drink heavily around my students’ parents. Additionally, as a 24-year-old woman, my own society’s broken standards have forced me to accept that until both sexes are educated equally about rape, I will have to protect myself from men. Then I had that conversation with my supervisor and I understood more about how that teacher could have ended up in such a terrible situation. Koreans are very trusting. More so than most other groups of people that I’ve met. A friend of mine left his wallet on a KTX train at 1:30 in the morning. He was able to retrieve it after the train traveled three stations away and back. His bank cards, ID and cash were all still there. That’s very common here. I can see how that trust, so lovely and special most of the time, combined with the social pressure I mentioned before, could override a young woman’s sense of personal safety. Those same things could give a group of men the idea that they are innocent of wrongdoing - even, they would argue, that getting to have sex with this woman was justified, given how much they do for her and her school. Gender equality in Korea is just as screwed up as it is in the U.S. Maybe even more so because of the social pressures that are unique to an eastern society. This country is very safe, despite what you hear about our Northern neighbor and his flirtations with nuclear power. Unfortunately, as it is so for many other countries, half of the population is not as safe as the other. As gender rights progress here, the challenge will be even more difficult for young women and men to change the perspective because they will have to uproot deeply conditioned behaviors that are not only social, but cultural as well. My hope is that my Korean friends will discuss this issue and work towards changing it within their own social circles. I also hope that they continue to party like crazy people into the early morning hours. But if someone wants to leave early, I hope that person will not be embarrassed to go home, especially if their safety is in question.
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Do you recognize that quote? I'll give you a hint - it has something to do with Anne Hathaway's break-out role. If you guessed "The Princess Diaries" then you're right. Good job, you know your chick flicks. Let me refresh you on the context of this quote. It's towards the end of the movie. Adorkable Anne Hathaway, playing the recently royal and athletically challenged Mia Thermopolis, is up to bat during a PE class softball game. This is right after Mia's been betrayed by her new cheerleader friends, alienated her real ones, and is generally failing at behaving like a proper 21st century noble. On her first try, Mia barely hits the ball and it rolls through the group of cheerleader frenemies who are conveniently practicing their routines next to the softball field...not you know, attending class during an average day at high school because, well, evil movie cheerleaders are, as everyone knows, always cheer leading. On her second try, Mia hits the ball directly into the barely-protected by gym-shorts junk of her former-crush: the very douchey, popular boy Josh. Yessss, classic movie justice of taking out the jerk with a blow to the balls. If only that could happen more in real life. Mia triumphantly sprints around the bases and makes it safely home, winning back her pride and (finally!) passing gym class. Let's back track for a second. I'm happy for MIa and as a fellow athletically-challenged adolescent I completely identified with her struggle and longed for a reckoning of my own. Sadly, I never got that moment. Instead, I was more like the cheerleaders shrieking and running away from Mia's first hit. Long exposition aside, this is where I come back to that quote, shouted at the scattering cheerleaders by their exasperated coach: "Oh come on, girls. It's a ball not a snake!" As a teacher at a private academy, I teach a range of different ages. My youngest students are 5-years-old and my oldest are 16. It's fascinating and sad to watch my female students go through that transition of the ball turning into a snake for pretty much every athletic activity. I think about my third-grade girls who haven't really realized that running full-speed across a soccer field and charging past one of their boy classmates to score a goal will make them appear aggressive, tom-boyish and unattractive in just a few years. Right now, they give zero you-know-what's about how they look when they're playing soccer. They just want to score because screw that, soccer day only comes once a month and the other team is not going to win. Flash forward a few hours and I'm playing one-on-one in the gym with one of my 14-year-old male students.I box him out and sink my next three shots. This kid can be a pain so this one-on-one game is my chance to remind him who's really got the power. Luckily, I haven't totally lost my basketball skills gained from 6 years of bench-warming, uh, I mean, practice. Meanwhile, the three girls in the class are huddled in the corner, pulling at their too-short uniform skirts that had to have been an unfortunate choice made by a male administrator, ignoring my suggestions that they join in. When I toss the ball to Minseo she swats it away like it's a disgusting bug. When Ji Eun actually attempts to make a shot she gives it barely any strength, misses the rim by a foot, giggles (while covering her mouth, of course) and glances to see if the guys noticed - they didn't. Hyo Sheen's throwing Bon Seok into the Kindy ball pit, for the third time. Ok, time to go shout at them again... What's so infuriating is not this age group. What's infuriating is the groups in-between. I can see the girls starting to doubt themselves and their own strength, holding back, shrinking into their own bodies and valuing those same bodies only on how desirable they are to their male peers. It's not like this is something unique to young Korean women and girls. I was thinking back and trying to pinpoint when I first realized that being "lady-like" was more important than being athletic. I can imagine several different scenarios and I'm sure that it must have been a combination of a few of these that really made the impact. Maybe it started when my older brother got signed up for baseball and I went to ballet. Or maybe in elementary school, during a unit about future jobs, when the teacher encouraged the idea of the boys becoming sports stars but reacted with little enthusiasm to girls who had the same dream. Or perhaps it was in middle school, when the girls who were starting to get attention from boys introduced the idea that behaving (and talking) like their brains were just for show - probably learned from older sisters or that god-awful Laguna Beach - is what would land you a boyfriend. Whatever it was, it was somewhere in that intersection of discovering that very specific behaviors are seen as more attractive to men and realizing that as a member of the female sex, I have little choice of when the ball becomes the snake. |
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