Being a minority

If nothing else, being a white foreigner in Korea is teaching me a lot about discrimination and racism. I've been white all my life, but I've only been white in western countries, which is very different from being white here. Here you stand out a lot, and sometimes that can be a bad thing.

Aside from the country's own rules (including restrictions on banking for foreigners) and shops overcharging us (example: in Insadong I asked the price of an instrument, the guy asked his boss, who told him, in Korean, 80,000 won, and the guy turned back to me and said, "100,000."), there have been occasional examples of extreme, pure, individual straight-out racism, which I will now recount.

Emart has started to really annoy me. I'd been grudgingly accepting the little things, like cashiers failing to give me the sale price of some items or charging me the extra 50 won for a plastic bag after I said "anyo" ("no") to the bag question and then not giving me the plastic bag (presumably pocketing that extra five cents and feeling smug about putting one over on the waeguk... I tried pointing this out with a combination of English and my non-existent Korean to one cashier who tried it on me, who got upset and acted angry and frustrated, so I gave up). But on my last excursion it was overt racism, and that got to me somewhat..

Emart, like many other grocers, regularly has staff manning stands giving out samples of various foods. The staff are uniformly polite, using the higher form of politeness ("ni-da" endings rather than "yo") and bowing to the customers who ignore them. I've always been polite to these people, giving them a smile, an "anyang ha-seh-yo" when I approach and a "kam sahm ni da" when I leave (that means "thank you"), so I guess I'm not really acclimatised to the standard way of shopping, but that's not the point. I'd sampled a few things, but I was obviously not just there to nick free food as I was carrying a basket full of groceries.

In the seafood area, a woman was manning a stand offering small pieces of sashimi, which is quite possibly my favourite thing in the world. She was bowing and smiling at every Korean who walked up, picked up a toothpick, stabbed a piece of fish or five and ate it and walked away. There was plenty of fish left there as I approached. I gave her a smile and a greeting and reached for a toothpick, and she gave me the dirtiest look I'd ever seen from a grocery store employee, leaned over, covering the fish with her arms and hands, and shouted, "No!" at me.

I was rather surprised.

Looking back, there she was happily serving more Koreans their sashimi samples.

...

Of course, it's not all bad here, and many Koreans are very nice. Even in the Emart, which seems to be worse than other shops, I've met a couple of employees who were extremely friendly, smiling surprisedly when they see me buying kimchi, and one who even tried to talk my ear off about Canada when I got a bag of ginseng from her.

An example of Korean niceness:

I have a bike, a hand me down from Jen, which has not seen any use at all so far because it suffers from a myriad of problems, the worst of which being that both tires cannot be inflated - the valves don't close. It having been too cold to do any biking anyway and me being timid about the whole language barrier thing, I hadn't done anything about it, until today, when I decided I shouldn't be spending so much time indoors.

So I walked my bike on its floppy tires down to a bike shop, where I saw, as I was approaching, the shopkeeper leaving the place and locking the door. I glanced at my watch, which told me it was 4:45, a very unusual time for a shop to close. So I walked around a bit hoping that by the time I came back he might have returned. After meeting one of my students (one of my bad students) leaving a store, I came back and saw the shopkeeper with a heat fan set three inches from his body and watching television.

I went in and asked him if he spoke English, which got me a laugh and a "No English", so I found the words for "to repair" in my phrasebook ("suri haeyo"), which he seemed to understand. He got up, motioned for me to bring the bike over, I pointed to the tires, and he inflated them, discovering for himself that the valves leaked. So he pulled them out, fiddled with them, replaced something, and fixed them up, on both tires, then waved me away as he closed the door. Didn't even give me a chance to ask how much. I was ready and willing to pay, but he wasn't interested.

That was nice.