conversations

Something that's occured to me recently in my conversations with Koreans, mostly with my host mother, is that I've picked up certain habits in speaking, of saying "unh" and "yeh" a lot during conversations. I think this is sort of a Korean habit, but I wonder if my host mother does it more than average Koreans. "Active listening" has sort of taken on a new meaning for me here---it seems like there's rarely any sort of silence in conversation. But it is useful to have a sort of neutral word to use when there's nothing else to say, particularly when conversation is sort of awkward or doesn't follow what I would consider a logical sequence. For instance a conversation I had with my host mother a few minutes ago about the fact that her cell-phone, which was left in the living room overnight, went into wake-up call mode at 4 am this morning, playing loud music.

Me: The wake up call on your cell-phone went off at 4 am this morning.
Mrs. Lee: My cellphone? My cellphone was here this morning (gestures to the floor near her bedroom door).
Me: Yes, I put it there. I didn't know how to turn it off.
Mrs. Lee: Ah. I heard it there this morning.
Me: (good-humoredly) Yeh. Yeh. (or 예, 예, essentially 'yes' in Korean).

It's actually become quite natural for me to end a conversation that way. I would even say that the above conversation represents a perfectly normal conversation between Mrs. Lee and I, though if I'd had a conversation like this back in August I may have been sort of confused about how to proceed. For instance, since English isn't a very easy way for Mrs. Lee to communicate with me, English conversations with her often seem by default to be weightier or more important, even if it's just something like "I can't find the laundry detergent." So the way that I say, "Yes, yes," at any point in the conversation, my tone when I say it, shows her how I'm feeling about the situation--how much attention she needs to pay to me. Similarly, by throwing in an "unh" everytime she ends a sentence, generally when we're talking on our way to work, shows her that I understand what she's trying to say (she's actually a bit insecure about her English) as well as that I'm interested and paying attention. I don't know if this habit will actually stick with me long when I get back to the States, I'll probably be embarassed and drop it pretty quickly since I think most Americans would find it sort of odd.

I didn't mean to devote so much space to that, I actually came on today because I wanted to write about an interesting conversation I had this morning with Mrs. Lee during our drive to work. Mrs. Lee's husband's family name is Lee, but so is her maiden name. There's a sort of young married couple who teach at our school, and when Mrs. Lee referred to them with separate family names, it piqued my curiosity. This morning I asked Mrs. Lee if Korean women generally take their husband's family names and she laughed and said that they never do. Until recently Korean children were required by law to have their father's family name, regardless of whether or not their mother remarried, but feminists fought to change the law, and now the child can choose to take their father's name or their mother's name or their stepfather's name. Part of the impetus for this change was that children of divorced parents were embarassed in school, because if their mother remarried it would be obvious to anyone that the child's original parents were divorced.

Then Mrs. Lee started talking about the Lee family name, which I think is the most common surname in Korea. When my friend Billie visited from Busan, she and Mrs. Lee discovered that they are descended form the same Lee bloodline (there are two in Korea). Mrs. Lee and her husband are from different Lee bloodlines. Long ago, Lees from the same bloodline (Boeun or Kyeonggi) were forbidden by law to marry, though that's been overturned now. Still, Mrs. Lee was relieved when she discovered she and her husband were from different lines. Then she started to explain something about names that I'm still not quite clear on; that certain name syllables are significant to the different Lee lines, that men are given a particular syllable (all Korean given names are two syllables) and women a particular syllable, and this denotes some kind of status amongst the Lees. I took this opportunity to ask Mrs. Lee if there's a particular reason all of her daughters have Seo as their initial syllable, and she said Seo wasn't significant to the Lee name. But actually, her husband decided on Seo because he decided that the Boeun Lee syllable for girls, which is Eun, wasn't a good syllable so he didn't want to give it to all the daughters. (Mrs. Lee made it sound as if they'd decided on the names before any of their children were born, but I guess they must have decided on a set for boys, too, since I doubt they were expecting to have three girls). So he spoke to his father about it, and they decided on Seo. The progression was going to be Seo In, Seo Eun (a nod to the line) and then Seo Young. The first born was named Seo In, and when the second came along they skipped to Seo Young. Then the last was born, and they decided that Seo Eun wasn't a good name because it resembled Seo Oon too much in pronunciation, and Seo Oon means "unlucky." So finally they decided on Seo Jin.

And then the most interesting part of this whole conversation was when Mrs. Lee said:

"With Seo Jin, we took a long time to decide on the name and so we were fined."

I don't think she mentioned the amount of the fine, but apparently if you take more than a month to decide on a name and register the government fines you. Maybe this happens in the States too but it seems strange to me. Mrs. Lee said that long ago (that vague and misty time that can mean a few decades or a few centuries) families might take several months before they registered the child's name, thus her husband's birth certificate has his birthday as a year later than it actually is (I don't know if it actually took his family an entire year register him or if the clerk just doesn't bother to look at the month and day of birth and just fills in whatever year it happens to be at the time). Her husband was originally bothered by this, but now he says its fortunate because it means he can retire a year earlier.

In other news, I unexpectedly found myself teaching what may be one of my last actual lessons of the year. I'll still be doing something with my students for the next month or so, but the teachers expect the grades from me sooner this semester, so next week I'll give the performance test and by the end of next week turn in all the grades for the students. Finals are in the beginning of July, but there are still about three weeks of school in the next month and a half, so I guess I'll be playing games or maybe showing more movies--anything that will keep their attention once the grade incentive is gone.

I had a funny moment in class today, when I handed out a worksheet and a particular student did the usual, "Teeeacher, diffiiicult." I said, "You say that every day," and the class erupted in laughter. Then I started to turn red, as I always do when the students unexpectedly actually pay attention to me, and the particular student, in mid protest, said, "Tamara, you are red, Tamara." And I said, "I turn red every day." And again the students started laughing. And I had to put my head down on the desk and try to will my face to turn pale. I know I can do it. I did it once inadvertantly, when I turned red and then instantaneously turned very serious again (the gaps of "Oh! Whitening!" almost made me lose it) and I decided recently that this is something I need to conquer. It's really gotten out of hand, and it bothers me more because though I am prone to blushing, and when I do blush I turn really red, it really rarely happens in normal social interactions but it occurs a ridiculous amount when I'm in the classroom. I think it got even worse when I hit a point of not caring and basically expecting myself to blush (facilitated a bit by the fact that my students blush a lot too and make a big show of fanning their faces when they're embarassed, instead of say, hiding it). So now I'm trying to get it back under control. Putting my head down the desk probably isn't the best way to go about it though.