On Being Me

I’ve just returned from several fabulous weeks in Canada doing very little but eating fresh berries, reading good books, and enjoying long drawn out meals with loved ones. It was a nice refreshing break after a hectic semester, and it’s so nice I’m able to go for a visit every year. But while I was abroad, it was brought to my attention that I speak about too many negative things when it comes to my life in Korea. I’m not sure if the comment was made to suggest I should dwell only on the positive, omit the negative, or be more glass half full about life, but I was told that I shouldn’t say such negative things because then people will think I have a horrible life here. The comment got me thinking about how my personality has shaped how I approach communicating points about my life and how the way in which I communicate in my everyday life has shaped my writing voice for this blog.

First and foremost, I am a person who critiques, and I am very vocal about my opinions. I probably would sleep better at night if I could learn how to turn off my brain to dissecting the issues and situations which occur in my life, community, and world around me, but it’s not who I am. I’ve never understood the need to white wash or simplify complex issues for the sake of social propriety, and I have absolutely no personal understanding of the necessity of saving face. No, I don’t get into the complexities of expat life with the cab driver I’m going to be chatting with for 5 minutes. I do have my stock ‘Korean food is good. Korean people are nice. Yes, Korean men are good. Hanboks are beautiful’ for those fleeting and surface conversations, but that’s not who I am as a person, and I can’t reduce what I need to say about issues to a sound bite with longer interactions (if you are a regular reader of this blog, I’m sure you’ve noticed I have a problem with being succinct!). I was interviewed for a campus newspaper several months ago and confused the student interviewer to no end. She wanted to know the ONE place Korean students should visit if they go to Canada. I was supposed to say ‘Niagara Falls!.’ But rather, I told her I thought people should rent a car and drive across the country because they couldn’t understand the complexity and diversity of a place like Canada unless they experienced it firsthand. All of my answers were like that – sound bite-less and kind of weird. The interview never got published. I get that. Therefore, when I get to talking about my life and experiences in Korea, I find it hard to speak to people I know in a normal discussion without looking at the complexity of issues. I guess this sometimes gives people the impression that my life is horrible…personally I think it shows my reality and I have no problem with being honest about the ups and downs and the benefits and drawbacks. Can anybody claim life is perfect? All the time? Whenever there’s a star or a religious personality who makes such claims, it usually comes out in a tell tale book ten years later that they claimed total happiness and perfection to hide an addiction, deep depression, or major family issues. Nobody.Is.Perfect.

I’ve also been thinking about how to outsiders, our bad things often seem worse than insiders experience them. For instance, I don’t get people who do shift work. I can’t understand how people bounce from one shift to another, sometimes in the same week depending on their job or situation, and how they can deal with the physical toil that puts on their bodies. I can’t imagine being the spouse of a surgeon who works insane hours or the spouse of a soldier in a combat zone. My friend’s fiancé went to Afghanistan 3 times, and he wasn’t safely enclosed in some heavily guarded compound. He was in the field teaching people how to fight.

A friend with 2 children under 3 was telling me in Canada just a few weeks ago how she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope going back to work at a group home for developmentally disabled adults after her maternity leave because the toilet training and toddler behavioural issues she was dealing with at home mirrored the work she was doing with adults. I cannot for a minute imagine having to clean up a grown person’s accident in a dollar store and then return home to deal with a toddler’s accidents on the kitchen floor, but the reality is that from nurses to early childhood educators to social workers, there’s a lot of people in the same position. I don’t think my friend was telling me about the difficulties of managing her job and motherhood because her life was so unmanageable and horrible, and I don’t think that she would say that she wants pity. She simply was trying to discuss and communicate difficulties in her life and was musing about how to deal with the situation when she returned to work. I don’t think less of her or her situation because of that conversation. In fact, I respect her more for the talents she has and the insights she shared about the difficulties about being a working mum. People have many reasons for sharing their difficulties – they want to vent, they want to communicate the whys and hows of their lives, they want people to understand where they are coming from with the decisions they make, they want to help others in similar situations feel less alone, they are working out the situation through talking about it, or they are diffusing situations through sharing burdens with others. Perhaps other people dislike this approach and I suppose there are some who want to only hear or share the positives because they think they think sharing the uplifting is a better approach to life. But I’m not that person, and for me, listening to other’s issues or sharing my own difficulties is a way to be honest about the reality we live in as well as a way to deal with issues.

I would hope that when I discuss the difficulties about being a minority, living in a different culture, fitting in, or dealing with differences in marriage and life expectations that people do not think that my life sucks. It doesn’t. There are reasons why I stay, just like there are reasons anyone stays in a less than ideal situation. I try to communicate those reasons in real life and on this blog, but I understand that some people only hear, or only want to hear the negatives, and so sometimes the positives get lost in the complexities. I’m sorry for that, but it’s not my responsibility to ensure my readers have proper critical thinking and close reading skills or my listeners listen to and take in everything I have to say. And this attitude is really reflected in the voice which has developed for this blog. I’m not the kind of person who likes reading personal blogs about how someone ate a really great sandwich yesterday, and for the most part, that’s not the kind of thing you are going to read on my blog with the exception of a few reviews of veggie friendly restaurants. There are a precious few that do that style in the way I respond to as a reader, and they are either local people who point me to places I never knew existed, or the amazing Alien’s Day Out where Mipa somehow puts me on the edge of my seat wondering what she had for breakfast on her recent trip to Paris. The girl’s found her niche and she’s got a writing voice that speaks to me in a way that really makes me care that she ate that amazing vegan sandwich. But that’s not me, and that’s not where my talent lies in writing. I write the way I talk, and I can’t hide the way I feel when I talk. That’s just who I am.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hope you my readers don’t pity me for exposing some of the difficulties or frustrations I experience in Korea or living the expat life. And I hope you don’t think that I live a shitty life. I don’t. There are some pretty damn good things in this life of mine at the moment. I write this blog to work things out for myself because in real life things are not just ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and you can’t be a thinking person and just happily accept everything that comes your way without examining how it is affecting your life and the world around you. I also write this blog to document the changes, good and bad that are happening to immigrant wives, multicultural families, and expat workers, and I hope that as the years progress I will be able to do retrospectives on the positive changes that have occurred in this society. But to do that, I need honest documentation of my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And above all, I’ve started to realize that I write this blog because there’s a lot of people out there – some exactly like me – some in seemingly completely different situations who are actually facing similar issues on a strange bizarro-world level, that find some comfort in the confessional narrative that occurs here. And when those people leave comments or contact me directly, the blog becomes a way for us to collectively work out our issues in order to move forward. So perhaps people feel badly for me, perhaps people harbour ill-will against me for telling about my less than perfect experiences with Korea, Canada, or the expat world, and maybe some people feel my openness and critique reflect badly on me, my country of origin, and my country of residence. But I don’t really care what people think. I know who I am, and I have developed my writing voice, and I know that this is the way in which I communicate my reality.