Adulthood

I wanted to follow up my last post by saying that last night at dinner my host mother brought up our conversation again. She was very curious why I asked her if she thought I was an adult or not. I didn't quite know how to phrase it to her, since a lot of my feelings lately about being treated like a child aren't exactly rational or easily expressed. I told her that I'd suspected that she didn't think I was an adult, and that was why I had asked. It was clear she understood that my question was a reaction to my homestay situation in some way, and she sort of apologized by saying that the vice principal of our school and my co-teacher are always telling her to make sure I am safe, that I don't go out at night alone or talk to strangers.

I appreciated that apology, even though I don't really feel limited in that respect (I don't have a curfew or anything like that), and I don't mind being looked after to the extent that they do. I didn't really know how to explain that what was bothering me was more of what I percieved as a general disposition of hers towards me--and like I said, I wasn't sure my feelings were really warranted or worth mentioning. So I just said, "Since I don't speak Korean, I feel like a child here, and I don't like feeling that way." Again Mrs. Lee was sympathetic and told me that she would feel the same way if she were in America (though her English is actually pretty good, light-years ahead of my Korean of course). She also conceded that a 21 year old is a child in some ways, but also an adult in some ways.

This morning as we walked into school she even said, "I'm sorry for treating you like a child." It was pretty out of the blue, so I don't know if it was a general statement or referring to something more specific that I had overlooked. It's good to know that she's sensitive and understanding of my position, and I'm going to work harder, for my own sake, at being more patient, and more understanding of her perspective.

As for adulthood, I think it is something that is definitely two-sided, that we can postpone or at least obscure, but at the same time can't. And I think it depends both on our external context and our internal development. As Patrick suggested to me today, I do think it has something to do with the way we relate to other adults, maybe our ability to sympathize with them. So maybe in the same way that my inability to speak Korean has rendered me a child, my difficulties fitting into or relating to Korean culture have also made me child-like.

That previous paragraph reminds me of the situation that sort of sparked my annoyance at my host mother, or my suspicion that she didn't see me as an adult, in either culture. We were driving to work, and she confessed a dream to me that she'd had where she'd had lunch with a strange man and felt feelings of guilt about it. And then she went on, sort of quickly, to talk about the movie, "The Bridges of Madison County" and how when it came out in Korea a lot of women had been affected by it, sympathized with it. Nowadays, women in Korea don't marry really young, but they do definitely have a lot more family responsibilities, in general, than the men do, including a sort of fealty to their husband and in-laws. I've never seen the movie, but I imagine that a lot of women in the U.S. and elsewhere probably identified with it on some level, and I can see why housewives in Korea might be particularly struck by the portrayal of something like that, which I don't think is acknowledged very much in Korea. Then she said to me, "I think you can understand." And I was just thinking yes, I can understand, when she corrected her English and said, "I mean, I don't think you can understand." I don't purport to be able to understand the situation of a married woman feeling nostaligic for more free and romantic days, but when she said that I felt a little insulted. In addition to talking about Korea, she'd talked about the situation of women in the world in general, and for her to tell me that I couldn't understand made me think that she was denying that I was a woman at all, or that I had the ability to percieve the situation of women around me. It made me think, "Just because I'm brand-new to Korea doesn't mean I'm brand-new to the entire world." And when she started talking about the responsibilities of adults in the same sort of exclusive manner a few nights ago, I was reminded of that conversation, and I asked her the question I'd been wanting to ask then.