Monday, November 03, 2014

dinner with my women

Here's a "mosaicked" pic of dinner at Seorae with two of my former Sookmyung students: EJ (left) and SM (right), now both in their thirties:



EJ is married and works in an admin office at her alma mater. SM is single (but looking) and working on her Master's in interpretation at the prestigious Ewha University. Neither woman consented to have her face splashed on the blog, hence the mosaicking. (EJ actually does display her pictures publicly on Kakao Story, KakaoTalk's social-networking service; like a lot of Koreans, she irrationally believes she has full control over what happens to her image when she uploads it to a public space.)

During dinner, EJ didn't go into much detail about married life; Korean women are often vague and evasive about their relationships with their boyfriends and husbands. Notions of privacy are strange here, not drawn along similar lines as privacy notions in America. People in Korea will ask a foreigner all sorts of offensively prying, personal questions, but will clam up when certain questions are asked of them in return. Even after nearly ten years here, I still don't know the boundaries. Lack of fluency in the language may be partly to blame.


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