Putting the pieces together

So why go to Korea?

I've spent 28 years teaching Koreans, living with Koreans, working with Koreans, eating Korean food, and more recently, studying Korean literature and history, but there's nothing like being in Korea and being surrounded by the people and the language and the culture to really start making sense of things.

Flushing and Palisades Park (the latter with perhaps less English on signs than in Korea!) are fascinating, but they're not Seoul.

It's as if all this time I'd been assembling a collection of puzzle pieces but didn't know what to do with them until now.

It' s not enough to go to a Korean restaurant or buy a bucket of kimchi at H-mart.

But . . . .

-after spending nearly two weeks eating Korean food with Koreans three times a day, sitting a low tables, using metal chopsticks and having only Kleenex for napkins and only a half glass of water after the meal and having my young homestay mother feed me with her chopsticks;

-after wandering through the endless market stalls selling fish and fruit and dried food and condiments and sauces and seaweed;

-after going for days with nothing but melon for dessert;

-after realizing that a meal is truly an interaction between host and guest, mother and child;

-after seeing every oddly-shaped bit of ground wedged between houses and roads and fences planted to the last inch with a variety of crops;

. . . only then did it all begin to make sense. Only then did I start to get a grip on a culture.

Even though I know only a handful of Korean words (most of them dealing with food), only by going to Korea and interacting with Koreans did I start to have a feeling not only for the rhythms of their language, but also the nameless aspects of their communication and interaction.

So that's why you go to Korea--to put the pieces together. (Duh.)