Here Comes Reverse Culture Shock

Some weeks ago, friends of mine might have seen a facebook status update noting my shock at the number of people in Memphis who have tattoos.  This might be a Memphis thing.  The average resident of WASP-y Western Springs, where my parents live and the wife and I cooled our heels a week before moving to Memphis, still has the same amount of ink, i.e. none.

Whether or not the tattoo thing is new or old, region or national, it doesn't really bother me. But there are some things that haven't changed, or perhaps have, that have shock me anew, as one having recently moved from a Korean University to an American one.  Let me treat you to a list.

1. Captive Audience Pricing.  A simple sandwich - two pieces of bread, lettuce, cheese, mustard, meat - and a coke in the building housing the English Department costs about six dollars.  If you change the coke for something fancier like a bottled Starbucks drink, some juice, or something from the coffee bar, the total is somewhere towards ten.  And if you add candy, a bagel, or some kind of dessert/snack for later, you are going to be over ten, for sure.  At my university in Korea, I once bought lunch for myself and two students for less then ten dollars and food isn't that much cheaper in Korea (in fact, it's much more expensive in grocery stores - even most kinds of rice!).

To aid my point, two more facts. First, my students in Korea frequently complained about how expensive the university was.  Second, a bucket of popcorn and two sodas at the movies (another captive audience situation) costs about the same in both countries.

At the movies, for sure, I grudgingly accept.  I don't have to have popcorn or soda.  But if I want to, my gracious hosts will make them available to me for a price that is 'convenient' to them.  This kind of pricing is what let's you know that you are in all senses a customer rather than a guest, a means by which the business enriches itself.  And that is absolutely fine, when it happens at a business.  It is still shocking to me, however, that such is happening more and more at universities, which, since the invention of the thing, have derived legitimacy from being specifically not a business.

I am dreading the day when universities start asking their 'patrons' to pay for on-campus internet access.  Why continue to charge tuition if you are going to nickel and dime everywhere else too?

2. Constant Soda Consumption.  I guess an off the cuff 'ermahgerd' would be enough.  Ermahgerd!  But no, there's more to say. The soda aisle in our neighborhood Kroger takes up more space than all bottled beverages put together in a Korean grocery store of a similar size.  In Korea, one will find Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero.  In the US: Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Caffeine-Free Coke, Caffeine-Free (but sugar, please!) Coke, Coke Zero, and depending on the place Diet Coke with Lemon and maybe also Diet Coke with Lime.  I can remember a time when various varieties of Vanilla Coke were also available.  This does not even scratch the surface; I've said nothing of the vast nation of fruit-flavored colored sodas.  I had an evening class once, back in Korea, in which the students made fun of my because I showed up with a bottle of coke most weeks.  Let me just say, this would not be possible here in the US.


3. Students Never Come to Class.  Big surprise, right?  To be honest, I don't care on any emotional level if my students come to class or not.  Those who do, do, those who don't usually pay for it in some way.  But what is interesting to me here is the way students miss class.  At my Korean university, each student would miss one or two classes.  The vast majority of students would contact me before missing class and would show up at the next class meeting with some kind of documentation of the reason for their absence.  In turn, students also had an expectation that I would excuse them, regardless of the reason, due simply to the fact that they had documentation.  ("So you see that I had to miss class.  How could you penalize me for that?")  It was even common, sanctioned practice (my department chair instructed us foreign professors in this matter) that students would be excused from long portions of the semester (for internships, extracurricular events, extended field trips for other classes) with no harm to their grade.  The expectation was that I would generate alternative assignments for the student to complete outside of class.  All the same, attendance was usually at 85 to 90% from week to week.

In the US, on the other hand, students come and go as they please, with very little notice and 'you gotta believe me' types of explanations when they return.  Lest I sound like some kind of #getoffmylawn curmudgeon, I actually don't blame students for this.  In the Korean context, the university experience is still sacrosanct.  It may get paused, jumbled up, or strategically altered, but when a student is in college, they are only in college.  In the US, on the other hand, students have to work themselves through college - the wages of this battle are well documented.  But as a result, college is becoming more like a health club membership: you pay your dues and get in when you can, but as expensive and fancy as it may be, other, more pressing 'real world' matters take priority.

When I was a kid, my mom, brother, and I would take long trips to Arkansas during the summers.  When we came back to our house in Western Springs, Illinois, I was always struck by the smell of it.  I didn't smell bad, not at all.  It was just a shock: my house suddenly had a smell.  This is why I've mentioned the above three things.  When you go away from home for awhile, you can come back to a shock.  The shock is also an opportunity, though, as you can use the shock to compare the home as it is in your mind, as you want it to be, and as the shock distorts it.  Which one is real?  And which one is ideal?

What is Church for?

My wife is Catholic and I am not—not by a long shot.  But since we’ve come back to the US, going to mass with my wife on Sundays is the best way for the two of us to connect, as a couple, with the Korean community.  It also makes the in-laws happy.

As a laissez-faire agnostic, I naturally don’t follow the service very carefully—it helps that the mass is said in Korean—but I do need to do something with the time.  Last Sunday, I found myself questioning whether or not this was perhaps the origin of ‘sitting still and being quiet’ for yours truly.  Upon closer thought, I’ve decided that whether or not I believe in and worship a deity, I do indeed go to church when I go to church.  Or, I can if I choose to attend my own church in the church of others—a church of sitting still and being quiet.

Let me lay it out like this.  Monday through Friday, from about 8:00 am until about 5:00 pm, give or take (actually, it’s from 8:00 am to 9:00 pm on Tuesdays!), my thought must be directed toward my duties as instructor and student.  Graduate school is for sure a full time job and then some.  Saturdays is for chores and errands before anything else.  I might be heard at 8:30 on Saturday morning already reciting my own rosary: “laundry, dishes, wash the car, get a haircut, go shopping for light bulbs…amen.”  So, the joy of attending church, for me, is that from 10:30 until noon on Sundays, my brain can basically do whatever it wants.

I might have done a good deal of begging, complaining, or crying; but through whatever technique of persuasion I won the privilege from my parents, at the age of 9 or 10, to do the following things ever Sunday:

1.     To read a book during church, as long as it stayed on my lap.

2.     To sit by myself in the back of the sanctuary, or even in the balcony seats that were sometimes used as a choir loft.

3.     To leave the service early (after communion, which, being unbaptized, I never received)

Why did I want to do any of these things?  Because, obviously, church was boring.  It wasn’t for me, it wasn’t about me, and nothing about it spoke to me.  At that age, I ‘already’ had it figured out: life lessons, check; institutionalized morality—that makes sense; adults and their coerced children wearing dressy clothes because ‘that’s what you do at church,’ double-check!  The spiritual, recuperative potentials of more general features of the experience, like stillness, meditation, and such, were not at all coherent, let alone compelling.

But in those situations (1-3) above, what was I actually doing?  In fact, all those activities touch what I consider as essential to church anyway—sitting still, being quiet, and reflecting.  So while some people (some of them even Catholic friends of mine!) might wonder why I don’t have issues attending a church to which I don’t belong in any spiritual sense, it makes a lot of sense to me.  And I’m happy to have that time.