Geeks, wonks and me

Yesterday I took the Foreign Service Written Exam. Got up at 6 to get to the American embassy by 8, at which I lined up with what seemed like a forest of tall white guys with backpacks on. I felt like I was back in a college poli sci class.

The test was really long -- we started around 9 and didn't finish til 3. I can't really gauge how I did. I know I rocked the English expression part (not any sort of achievement, I assure you -- it simply tests if you're at native speaker level). I'm not sure how I did on the Job Knowledge section. I do know that -- despite Nina's admonition to memorize the map of the world -- I missed the question on which country did not border Iran. I think I probably bombed the essays, because I was thrown off by the need to write in formal analytical essay style -- kept having to resist the urge to throw in snide parenthetical comments like I do here. I think a few crept in, despite my efforts.

In any case, it was a bit of a lark, a bit of hedging my bets, and a bit of fun. I'm gonna end up taking all the standardized tests offered in the United States.

I talked to two guys while we were waiting to get in after the lunch break. One of them had spent two years in the Middle East for Peace Corps and can speak (but not write) Arabic. The other was interested in getting into any of the foreign affairs-related government agencies -- foreign service, CIA, NSA, whatever. Both are married to Korean women. Both do not speak Korean.

Now this is a topic of much interest to me. You remember I met a British consulate officer in taekwondo class last week who is also married to a Korean woman. He's at least learning Korean now at my old language program. And further along on the scale is KB, who had fallen for a Korean woman, but who was -- at the point of his departure -- about as good as I am in Korean.

Now, there are a lot -- and I mean a LOT -- of stereotypes about the preponderance of
Korean women married to American men: Korean women who hang out in Itaewon, the area of town close to the U.S. base, are looking to get married to a soldier so that they can immigrate to America. American men who come here and get married to Korean women can't find any takers in the U.S., and so have to marry someone outside their culture. Korean women are more feminine than American woman. Korean women are the most beautiful in the world and themselves a reason to come to Korea. Western women are ignored in Korea by Korean men and their own countrymen.

There are, in fact, a lot of American men married to Korean women, just as there are a lot of American men married to women of (at first!) non-American citizenry all over the world -- that comes naturally from having bases all over the world. I haven't looked into the statistics, but I suspect that the percentage is particularly high in Korea, owing to the constant presence of thousands of GIs here since the 1950s.

There are a lot of advantages to the American-Korean marriage. On the whole, I would agree that young Korean women are more feminine than their American counterparts (this can change drastically in middle age, though!). Gender roles are, in some ways, similar to those in the American 1950s. The days when a new wife was expected to support her husband and have babies are not so removed; indeed, popular television dramas still often portray professional women as conniving, cruel biotches while the long-suffering, dutiful wife is glorified. Now, in no way do I mean all western men feel this way, nor do I mean to put down the western men that might feel this way, but I can imagine that this kind of traditional-appearing woman might be a relief to the western men who come here.

On the flip side, Korean women married into Korean families have a ton of responsibilities to their in-laws. In former times, the new wife became the servant in all but name to their new mother-in-law. In the families of my cousins, I still see that kind of relationship being played out with my cousins' wives and my aunt. So it must be a huge freakin' relief to marry someone with not only no expectation of that kind of duty, but no knowledge of it!

I don't mean to discount any possibility of true love in these marriages. Some men and women might be aware of these factors, some might not, some might just have it in the back of their minds. I don't know exactly why, but I often think of these things when I see a western male-Korean female partnering. (Okay, to be perfectly honest, I suspect I do know why I think about this stuff, but that's for another time.)

To finish off my geeks entry ... I had a blind date last night. Yeah, I know.

My friend Clif, the Korean American guy in the U.S. army, set it up, and I found myself sitting at a table in an upscale Italian restaurant across from a 28-year-old Korean guy who went to high school and college in the States. Funny enough, he'd also registered for the Foreign Service exam, but ended up not taking it.

At dinner, I stumbled onto his passion, politics, and had a pretty decent conversation about the state of it in Korea. He said that his hero is Park Chung Hee, the military dictator who repressed civil rights but also was the single person most responsible for Korea's incredible economic growth after the Korean War.

Sounding eerily exactly like the kind of person my dad described as supporting the conservative Grand National Party, he said that he thought Korean people needed a strong leader, and that stability and safety was more important than certain rights. The left wing Uri Party, which won a huge number of seats in the recent Parliamentary election, was dangerous, because somewhere up the line, there was undoubtedly a connection back to North Korea, and North Korea had only one goal: a communist Korean peninsula under Kim Jong-il.

(This is the exact kind of thing that makes me very confused about how to classify myself vis-a-vis Korean politics -- I think North Korea is very dangerous, which would put me on the right, but I also believe social equality and civil liberties are worthy goals, which puts me on the left. Very confusing. Not in Kansas anymore, are we?)

An interesting thing he said was that true democracy may never work in Korea -- Korean people would take advantage of the system and its rights. He pointed out the blithe way in which Koreans ignore traffic laws -- "if we can't even follow traffic laws, how will we react to being given bigger freedoms?" I was suddenly reminded of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which the cookie-gifted mouse then asks for milk.

I don't know, there may be some truth to all this. There have been too many times in traffic, waiting in line for the bus, or getting on the subway where I think, scandalized, "You can't do that!" -- "that" being an illegal U-turn, stopping in the middle of the street to pick up someone, or blatantly pushing others aside to get on first. The Korean response would be: "Eh, it's not hurting anyone, so so what? It's just for a minute anyway." Whether that necessarily indicates an unreadiness for democracy is not something I can gauge. Remember, though, that western liberalism hasn't been around for very long in Korea. Definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

As usual, when writing about something I know little about, this entry has been too long and somewhat illogical. Sorry, dudes.