Article I wrote for Art and Culture magazine with my brother (april 2010)

Life here isn’t just tough for foreigners

By Ryan Weaver and Damien Weaver

When my brother and I first arrived in Korea we wanted nothing more than to fit in -or at least not to offend anyone with our ignorance of Korean culture. At any rate, we had confidence that our sincere curiosity and tolerance were our greatest assets in this endeavor, and knew that the experience we were undertaking would be a great opportunity to broaden our world view and assess the values of our own culture.

In our first year we each had our share of promising relationships as well as disappointing setbacks. During our second year there were times that we were ready to call Korea our permanent home, and then days when we felt rejected to the point that we considered dropping everything and returning to Canada. Finally, by year three we began feeling that we had increasingly less in common with fellow expatriates; sensing that we were becoming ever more embedded in Korean society -until shaken periodically, by a cultural wake up call.

What became frustrating for us, after spending the better part of our 20's in a foreign country, was that we began to wonder whether their were cultural walls that were not meant to be breached. Our western told us that all people are fundamentally the same; that we all have similar wants and desires whether we use forks or chopsticks to consume them. If you stay in Korea long enough you will notice that a lot of foreigners go through a stage where they throw down those chopsticks they have tried so hard to become accustomed to and use their knife and fork to cut up everything they find backward and illogical about Korean culture. For this reason we still call each other on the phone now and then seeking cultural vindication after an encounter with an aspect of Korean culture that we find objectionable.

Walking down the street in modern day Seoul, surrounded by state of the art skyscrapers and sidestepping double-parked luxury cars, its difficult to imagine that this all emerged from dirt roads and Korean traditional style buildings roughly a half century ago. Back then in Korea, spending foreign currencies on simple luxuries like imported cigarettes and candies was considered treachery, purchasing a foreign automobile unheard of. These days, visitors to Korea are often amazed to find that Seoul is well-developed and as functional and well-equipped as any other large city you might find in Japan, Taiwan, or China.

Henceforth, one has to wonder what a Korean born at the turn of the twentieth century might think of the development this society has gone through at the expense of cultural loss. While some effects of western capitalism have had an astoundingly positive impact on the life of the average Korean, for example, longer, more financially prosperous lives, the stress that individualism has put on the family has meant a sky-rocketing divorce rate, single-parent households and all sorts of social pathologies that follow. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew put it best when he described how Singapore, not unlike Korea, needed the "good points from the west" to guide them out of the backwardness that gripped their country both economically and socially. He went on to lament, "We have left the past behind, and there is an underlying unease that there will be nothing left of us which is part of the old."