I've never felt more unattractive or attractive in my life than I do in Korea.
I'm constantly gawked at, followed, questioned, smiled at, openly stared at and people frequently cross the street when they see me. It can be a pretty odd feeling.
When I go to restaurants, I'm stared at by both men and women, but the men continue to stare long after the women have gotten bored. School children stop to say hello and wave to me on the street. Older children follow me around in the grocery store so they can say hello and ask me questions in English.
I've had random strangers stop me to tell me I'm beautiful and they wish they had hair or eyes like mine. Men openly look me up and down and will completely turn around to watch me walk away once I've passed them, which completely skeeves me out.
Recently, I had yet another run-in with the illustrious Agnes and her lack of class and intelligence.
While I was waiting for a student who was going to be late to our one-on-one class, Agnes comes over to me dragging a little boy who was probably about 11 years old. She kept yelling at him, telling him to ask me how to spell a word. He kept trying to get away, but she was pulling his arms and pushing him in front of me. She, very audibly, explained to me that the boy was afraid of me and he thought I was scary.
Agnes said, "Erika, the children are scared of you. You have a scary face and your eyes are too big. You've got to be nice to them and smile at them."
And she kept repeating this, in case I missed it the first time.
I sat there completely shocked, not quite sure if that really just happened. Meanwhile, the kid just stared at me.
I'm not so good at keeping my cool when people insult me to my face so I, viscerally, told Agnes that she was being incredibly rude and ridiculous. She ignored me and flitted off to attack her next victim. She left the poor kid to stare at me some more.
I asked him as nicely as I could possibly muster what word he needed to know how to spell and he mumbled something that sounded like "Hyundai." I said, "Like the car?" and he shook his head yes.
I thought it was odd that he would ask me how to spell "Hyundai" but whatever. Then Agnes comes back in, asks me if he asked how to spell "hundred" and I said, "Oh, I thought he said something else." She gets all crazy, drags the poor kid back into the office where I'm sitting and props him in front of me again. The poor kid looks like he's about ready to burst into tears.
Agnes keeps screaming at him to ask me and I'm just sitting there thinking, "What the hell is going on?! and I would so much rather be anywhere else on the planet than my current location."
She just keeps screaming at this poor kid and keeps screaming at me saying I have a scary face and my eyes are too big.
Agnes runs off to grab a stick she uses to hit children with when they misbehave. The stick is in the shape of a hook. She comes back screaming at the kid, waving this hook around in the air and I decide that I'm out of there.
Luckily, the mother of the student I was waiting for was on the phone, so thankfully I got to have a very broken conversation with her while the poor boy who needed to know how to spell "hundred" got the crap beat out of him.
A few minutes later, I was having a conversation with one of my fellow teachers, Adya, who is from India, about what just happened. She kept apologizing, saying she was so sorry that just happened to me. I was mad, but I felt horrible for that poor kid. I just hoped he didn't think it was my fault he got the crap beat out of him.
Then Adya said something that made me feel odd and really horrible.
"You are white and they are still racist toward you and they are still scared of you," she said.
She is an Indian woman married to an African man. They've told me horror stories of racism they've encountered while living in Korea.
The majority of Koreans I have come into contact with have less than tolerant racial attitudes. Obviously not everyone is racist here, but Korea is a pretty sheltered culture and people in Dangjin especially have not been exposed to many - if any - people outside their own race. They can be very ignorant about the outside world.
I definitely, obviously, feel very different here and I've never really experienced racism firsthand until I got here. Most people hate Americans and I've gotten a lot of heat for that, but to be spoken to or treated a certain way because of the color of my skin and what I look like is definitely new to me. It's an odd feeling, but by no means compares to what other "minority" groups endure. And if you're black or someone from the Philippines or Thailand in Korea -- forget it. You have a bullseye on your back. You are considered the lowest of the low. It's absolutely infuriating.
When I walked by Agnes again, after she was done beating the boy, I told her she had been incredibly rude and that situation was ridiculous. She looked down at her desk and said, "I know," and then quickly changed the subject. I told her I couldn't talk to her at the moment, I was too angry, and I walked away from her.
I really don't think she knows what she did. That's not the first time something like that has come out of her mouth. A couple days prior to this incident she told me my eyes were too big. (It's a common gripe from her.)
I told her, "No, they are NOT TOO big, they are just big."
She replied flippantly, "Oh yeah, yeah." and walked off.
And corporal punishment is a cultural norm in Korea, but knowing that is no less shocking when you see it happen in front of your own "too big" eyes.
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