The Mountain revisited

Clearly my hiking trip this weekend meant a lot to me, I spent nearly 4 hours yesterday detailing it for you guys, and today I reflected a little bit on why it was so important.  At first I thought it was just the great feeling that I got when I reached the top and the cool things I got to see up and down the mountain, but upon further consideration it occurred to me that it's a bit more complicated than that.

Of course each of the views from the five peaks we visited were truly beautiful.  My pictures can't really capture for you all what I saw on Saturday but my memories of the things I saw and went through are going to stick with me for the rest of my life.  Not discounting these memories it is instead the atmosphere of the whole mountain that remains in my mind as the most important part of the whole experience.  

Being here in Seoul has been great, it is an amazing city with an enormous amount of things to do, places to go, containing far more people than I can ever hope to meet in the short amount of time I have here.  I'm one in over ten million small people and on top of that I'm a foreigner.  This makes me doubly invisible, doubly ignorable.  Not in the sense that people can't see me but rather that I am just another Waeguk (foreigner) here trying to make a buck.  I had a conversation at a bar the other night with these two women who kept on asking me why I came to Korea.  I tried to explain to them my different reasons, rather drunkenly I must admit, but they laughed at me and said "Noooo you're just here for the money."  Money?  What Money?

   Regardless of the reasons they thought I had for coming to Korea, the women had some preconceived notion as to why I was here and had no intention to hear my side of the story.  They saw me as just another outsider and that attitude sadly characterizes my experiences with most of the Koreans I've met.  I'm not one of them and they are acutely aware of that.  Some people here mistrust me and some dislike me, hell some refuse to even look at me.  I walk down the road and smile at almost everyone that I make eye contact with but nine times out of ten, despite the fact that we clearly saw each other and I am clearly being friendly, the man or woman on the receiving end of my good natured grin looks directly at the ground, or into a shop they're passing, or at the traffic signal.  Invariably these people disregard my smile, disregard me.  This is even true at work where some of the Koreans who make lunch for the children have refused to talk to any of us foreign teachers.  

I've read that Koreans habitually mistrust outsiders, especially Westerners as they see our many intrusions into Korea as harmful and beneficial only to the intruding party.  This is especially true in the elderly who experienced the horrors of the Korean war, and the generation they reared which is now running the country.  Fortunately this mistrust has not spread to my students or else I'd have quite a hard time trying to teach them, but even in that case I get the sense that I am looked upon by some with doubt in almost everything that I do. 

Maybe this is just my first time in a big city and this impersonal way of life is just the way that everyone lives.  I've not been to New York but I hear that the people there are cold and unfriendly, I've heard the same for Boston, but I never imagined that one could be made to feel so isolated in such a big place.  That is an overstatement, I don't feel tremendously isolated, but I do feel like just another face in the crowd, easily ignored.  That doesn't really sit well with me, I like being nice to people and I like seeing people happy.  My previous experiences have taught me that a smile is often enough to brighten someone's day, that smiles are contagious and spread if only you're willing to be a carrier.  Here I've found the opposite to be true.  My smile is perhaps what makes me different, people don't seem to want to smile at each other here, they're content to be alone with their prejudices and preconceived notions about outsiders, and a smile to them doesn't cut through the walls they've built, doesn't cut into their community.

That's the problem, Korea is a definite community in which I have yet to gain a foothold.  Some of my co-workers seem to have broken into this community a little bit by dating Koreans, learning the language and other things.  I am new and have not had a chance to seriously study the language or develop any meaningful relationships with any Koreans, but from what I've been told Waeguk attempts to learn the language are looked upon with scorn as pronunciation is tricky and mistakes are a hallmark of anyone learning Korean as a second language.  It's almost as if you're trying to get your dog to do a trick and he does half of it right while completely ignoring or botching the other half, you smile, give him the treat and walk away thinking he did a good job, because well he's just a dog anyway, he's never going to get it 100% right.  You know you could do it perfectly and well, that's what separates us from the dogs.  From what I heard Koreans regard foreigners with a similar mentality, no matter what you do to improve linguistically or culturally, you're never going to be one of them and though you may be cute when you try to emulate them, you're always going to be a step below the real deal, a cheap imitation of a priceless piece of art.  That my friends is immensely discouraging as immersing myself in the culture is something I would very much like to do.  To be sure I can still do it but I don't know if I'm ever going to belong to that inner community no matter how hard I try.

This weekend however, I had the odd notion that I was becoming a part of something here, the mountain climbing community.  Though I was still a Waeguk people didn't seem to avoid my gaze and surprisingly my smile was returned to me a thousand times more than it had ever been in the city.  Though people laughed while I rested, laughed when I lost my footing, laughed  when I almost fell, I got the sense that I was being laughed with instead of at.  Even though I certainly didn't look the climbing buff I felt that people respected me a little more just for being there and sharing the mountain with them.  In my mind I found my first foothold in a Korean community on Saturday, and though it's a cooky community of people who take climbing far more seriously than I ever have and probably ever will, they definitely accepted me in.  I was invited to join in a mountaintop drinking session, I took dinner at a Temple alongside fellow climbers, and Korean people smiled at me!  The mountain proved itself to be a great arbiter between me and the Koreans.  I may not really be a part of the Korean community per-say but I've found a niche within this society where I can be at least be marginally accepted.  

I get the feeling that I'm not giving the Korean people enough credit and that the longer I am here the more accepting they'll be of me, but up until Saturday I hadn't felt a part of the culture here at all.  The attitudes of the people on the mountain changed that for me.  Maybe the city changes people, maybe the rat race makes people disregard things like smiles from foreigners, makes them refrain from trusting others, and maybe I'm just to new to really pass any judgement, but the open atmosphere of  Dobongsan didn't have any maybes in it.  We smiled at each other, we laughed together and we all climbed the same stony stairs leading up to a breathtaking look at the squalor of the city below.  Natalie and I've decided to go hiking on a different mountain every two weeks, to taste the crisp fresh air of the great outdoors, to feel the burn of exhaustion in our legs, to get away from the monotony of work and for me at least to rejoin a not so exclusive club whose only condition for membership is a person's presence on the mountain.  Perhaps most importantly everyone in this club is always read to smile back through sweat and exertion, through culture barriers and community walls, because here we're all the same, sore and tired.