Korean Girls and Old Ladies

I am editing this post because some of my readers found it sexist. Upon further review, this was true. So here's a better entry about Korean girls.

Again, I use the term girls because I do not consider students anywhere to be adults. We have homework. Grown ups don't have homework. Grown ups have bills. It's a trade-off.

Korean girls tend to be shy around foreigners, and more reserved in general. Ironically enough, my female Korean friends shared this insight with me. The engineers from KU coming to GW next semester are all girls, so I have been trying to make friends with them so I can answer as many questions related to student life as possible.  Also, I am trying to practice what little Korean I know as well as helping them practice their English. According to a few reports, they tend to be shy because they are nervous about their English ability and are afraid that I will judge them. I tell them that this couldn't be further from the truth, but their friends tend to remain unconvinced. The only person who wasn't at GW or isn't going to GW that talks to me is a girl in my circuit theory class who is friends with one of the GW bound girls. It has been really fun talking with them and learning about Korea and answering any questions they have about America. 

I try to debunk as many American stereotypes they have and sometimes tell them that they're actually true. They also all speak really good English. Like any second language, they miss the nuances and casual slang, just like I only speak EXTREMELY basic Korean without any nuance or shortcuts. For example, I don't really understand when I can use the shortened version of Korean hello, and they don't understand when I say something is "Messed up." 

Korean girls also react more strongly to certain facts about myself. They are astounded at my shoe size, a Korean 320. I have abnormally large feet for an American, so over here I feel like Andre the Giant. They are also very surprised that I am from New York, which they think is extremely dangerous. I try to explain that NY is the safest it's ever been, but that's kind of difficult to convey when all kinds of terrible things are happening in the US right now, whether it be bombings or explosions or stories of sexual assault. Don't get me wrong, NYC is no River City Iowa (Look it up), but it's not Mega City 1 from Judge Dredd. I tell them that people need to be smart wherever they go, and that no, not everyone in America has a gun. They also don't know about crime rates in Chicago, St. Louis, or LA. 

Korean girls are also much more concerned with appearance than American girls are. On the extreme side, there are hundreds of ads for cosmetic surgery in the subway. Before and after shots, enormous pictures of the medical team, even video ads for liposuction on the subway TV monitors. It's pretty prevalent. I've been unable to obtain a hard statistic on the percentage of Koreans who get plastic surgery, but it's not a small number. Lots of nose jobs and double-eyelid surgery for the most part; which aren't major surgeries. On the more reasonable side, Korean girls tend to check their makeup more often in class. They also tend to wear dresses and heels to class a lot. The heels seem unweildly because of the hills on campus, but they're really good at moving in them. I've seen girls run half a block just so they didn't miss the walk signal at the intersection. That's some coordination. It's a lot more business casual and preppy here when it comes to dressing for everyday activities for both genders, but it seems like a whole lot more work for women. However, there's another side to Korean women's fashion. Either a leather, denim, or KU varsity jacket with leggings and short shorts and a pair of converse (sometimes high heeled) or other sneakers. They also sometimes wear a flat brim MLB hat. It's a fairly contrasting approach to fashion which I find hilarious because that, together with the preppy look, are pretty much Sandy's outfits in the movie Grease. If you haven't seen Grease, come on, really? Really?

Older Korean women are TOTALLY different. They tend to wear whatever the hell they want, as long as they have a big plastic visor on and a really bright 80s track jacket. They also all have jew-fro haircuts. It's unclear when this transformation occurs, but I have seen very few 30-50 year old women. They're either 25 and under or 75 and over. The older women also tend to be surprised when I do nice things for them or others in public. Sometimes when I hold a door they look at me like I had two heads, or when I give them my seat on the subway they laugh and say thank you and then their friends all laugh and I hear the word foreigner in Korean a few times. I'll take the laughter as a compliment because making old people laugh is really fun. It means that even though they've seen about 50 years more of the same shit I've been looking at, I still did something original enough to warrant a response.