The Gift of Foreign

written by Deborah Oakley

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I wrote my previous post a short time ago.  None of what I’m saying now came anywhere near my mind while I was writing it.  When I began to write this post, I thought I’d be writing about the next leg of my journey.  Instead, another topic on Korea started writing itself.  Might be God, and I don’t want to get in His way.  It also might just be me.  Whatever.  I’ll go with it just in case it’s Him.

Years ago, when I joined the military, my first duty station was in southern Italy.  I’d never been overseas before; I was WAY excited about visiting a “foreign” country.  (The chance to travel was my primary reason for enlisting.)  Years later, when I went to Korea, my definition of “foreign” was completely re-aligned.

I was familiar with Italian food.  The Italian language comes from the same roots as my own, and it’s closely related to Spanish, which is commonly heard in the States; I even took a couple of Spanish classes in high school.  So, although I had to build a vocabulary, the sounds of Italian were easy to decipher.  They use the same alphabet as English, so reading was no problem.  And the culture is western.  In retrospect, Italy wasn’t foreign at all.  It was just a little bit different.

Korea.  Now THAT was foreign.  Many of the spices in Korean cooking were things I’d never tasted before.  My brain had no category in which to put the flavors my mouth was experiencing.  My first few weeks there, someone would ask, “Do you like [whatever it was I’d just eaten]?”  The initial answer that usually came to mind was, ‘No,’ but that wasn’t accurate.  The real answer was, “I don’t know what I just ate.  I’ve never tasted anything like it before.  I have no idea what I think about it.”  Over time, my brain became familiar enough with the flavors that it was able to properly sort things into my “like/don’t like” categories.

The Korean language was another totally foreign thing.  I’d never heard Korean before.  Their language isn’t rooted in Greek and Latin like mine is.  Their alphabet is nothing like mine.  It looked and sounded totally foreign.  I remember feeling so stupid when I first got there.  Someone would tell me a Korean word, and I couldn’t remember the word long enough to immediately repeat it back to them.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.  I’ve never been gifted with languages, but I’ve also never had any particular difficulties.  Sure, I’d had to work to memorize vocabulary, but I’d never had trouble simply repeating a word back to someone.  I learned what my problem was as I researched how to teach a foreign language and learned a bit about how the brain processes and learns.

First, my brain had to learn the sounds that make up the words.  (I didn’t have to do that in Italy.  Their alphabet and, consequently, the sounds of each letter, are the same as we use in English.)  Until it had a database of those sounds, it couldn’t put them together into words and move the words into short-term memory.  As I became familiar with the sounds of Korean, then I began to finally be able to put them together to actually hear and remember a word.  As babies, we spend a couple of years simply listening to our mother tongue being spoken by the people around us before we start repeating words back.  Something I’d never thought of until I was face-to-face with Foreign.

Same concept for food.  My brain had to become familiar with the flavors before it could move on to the next, more complex step of categorizing them.

It’s no small thing to learn to grasp how your brain operates.  You can use any tool better when you know how it works.  This is a gift for which I’m very grateful.  It’s made me more patient and understanding with both my students and myself.

It’s also no small thing to experience (and be aware of) basic learning like this as an adult.  It makes you really appreciate the complexity of the human brain.  And, you become more aware of the little, subtle things that go into learning.  Well, I like it.  I like to know how things work.

Here’s another really impactful moment I had while there:

Put yourself in my shoes.  I’d been immersed in a place and culture that smelled and tasted and sounded completely alien to me for about 2 months.  Buildings, people, vehicles, and nature were familiar sights, but all the stuff that characterized those things weren’t:  sounds, tastes, smells.  And, all the signs were written in Korean.  I couldn’t decipher them at all.  They were just foreign, incomprehensible scribbles to me:

나는 한국에 살았습니다

You don’t realize how much you depend on reading to understand and keep your balance in your world until the ability to read is taken from you.  Trust me.  It’s HUGE.

This was a different experience from my time in Europe:

Ho vissuto in Corea

J’ai vécu en Corée

Ich habe in Korea gelebt

Even though I don’t speak Italian, French, or German, I can at least read the words.  Occasionally even pick out a word or two.  It’s different, but not foreign.

One of the teachers at school taught me how to read Korean.  I didn’t grasp the enormity of her gift at first, but it hit me like a brick one day.

Once I learned to sound out the Korean words, my brain feverishly went to work trying to decipher the world around me.  Everywhere I went, I practiced reading signs.  It didn’t matter if I wanted to or not.  My brain did it without me telling it to.  In fact, I found myself doing it even when I didn’t want to be bothered with it.  That’s part of what God built into us:  the need to understand and bring order to the chaos around us.

One afternoon, as I walked home from my bus stop, I saw the following sign:

노래방

There were no pictures around to give me hints about what it said.  Just the one word.  I painstakingly sounded it out:  no-rae-bang.  Then it hit me:  I knew that word!  The literal translation is “song room.”  It’s the Korean word for karaoke.

For the first time in Korea, I read a sign and went away with new information and understanding about what was happening in a tiny piece of my new world.  The chaos around me suddenly sorted itself out, and I could now see the patterns.  Just like that, Korea was no longer foreign.  It had become simply “different.”  There was still a lot to learn, but the learning was finally possible.  I can’t begin to describe to you the wave of emotion that came over me in that moment.  The relief and excitement were so intense, I stood in the street and wept.

Let’s put the impact in perspective:  That was back in December 2008.  Today, more than 10 years and who-knows-how many signs later, and I can still tell you what that Korean sign said that day.  If we were in Cheonan, I could take you to the street where I read it.

God, bless Jang Bok-soon for teaching me to read Korean.

There’s another significant thing that comes to mind.

My first 2 years in Korea, I attended an English-speaking church.  My last 2 years, there was no English church close enough for me to attend, so I attended a small Korean church.  Everything was in Korean.  I could follow along with the hymns in the hymnbook as long as the songs weren’t too fast for my reading skills, but I understood very little.  I knew a few words in Korean, but not enough to actually know what was going on.  Sermons sounded like “blah blah blah blah blah God blah blah blah blah blah blah PRAY blah blah blah blah THANKS blah blah blah blah blah …”

There’s a clip from the movie The Thirteenth Warrior that depicts this most excellently:

My skill was at the beginning of the clip, when just the occasional word came through.

Although we were still in Korea, and there were cultural differences between western Me and eastern Them, we had Christianity and the Bible in common.  That meant our barrier was simply language, and that wasn’t all of the time.  The pastor and his wife spoke English.  Kyu-hee, the pastor’s wife, was an English teacher at my school my first year there.  She became more than a dear friend. She became a sister to me.  For the most part, the other members of our church didn’t speak English, but that didn’t stop them from letting me know they loved me.  They said it with their eyes and their body language and a hundred other different ways.  I loved them back.

I learned 2 big things from Jik-dong Church:

1. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t communicate with each other well. We still loved each other.  We were still family.  I got along with the teachers at my school, but I could feel the love at my church, even if we didn’t have the language to express it to each other.  That, more than anything else I’ve experienced in my life, taught me what being one in the Spirit means.
2. No matter how much you love the people you’re with, you need to be able to worship in your own language at some point. There are deep things of the heart that you need to express in your mother tongue.  Go too long without that, and your heart gets awfully tired.  When I got back to the States, I cried the first time I went to church and worshipped in English again.

As I’ve been writing, I’ve been pondering the significance of these things in my life.  This series is ultimately about God’s call on my life, the dream He’s been building in me, and the path He chose for me to walk.  I’m writing this series because He told me to.  These things didn’t even occur to me when I started writing about Korea in my last post, and yet they wrote themselves here.  Seems like it would be prudent to pay attention.

So, the dream itself has the following components so far:

• My job and my efforts have to be directly involved in helping other people, making their lives better.
• I have an inner connection with Israel and a desire to better understand the Jewish roots of my Christian faith.
• He’s taking me into something new. I can’t map out the path to it because I don’t know where we are going.
• I’m no longer able to dream of my future. I have to depend on Him to dream for me.

What have these things added?

• Now that “foreign” has been re-aligned, then transformed back into just “different” for me, AND I understand how it all happened, I feel comfortable and “at home” pretty much anywhere I go. I know all I have to do is hang on and keep trying, and eventually the chaos will be sorted.
• I better understand how to learn and how to teach. I don’t want a job as a school teacher, but I do enjoy imparting the things I’ve learned to people who are interested.
• I truly see myself as a member of The Church; political lines on a map don’t mean all that much to me anymore.
• I better understand what makes me, as well as others tick.

I still don’t know where He’s going with this, but it obviously revolves around people.

Next Series Post:  Anecdotes from Korea