I think one reason I don't always enjoy hanging out with "fellow foreigners," in my current life, is because of the unshakable feeling that I'm "in the closet." In the closet about what? In the closet about really liking Korea. Most of the time, in my experience, groups of foreigners hanging out in Korea devolve into complainfests, during which nothing more is uttered than unending condemnations of some abstract Korean "way of doing things" and gross negative cultural stereotyping.
For me, it's all-too-easy to fall in with this style of talking and thinking, too. Of course there are things that are frustrating or annoying about my life here. But my perspective is that American ways of doing things, or Mexican ways of doing things (to name the two cultures which are most familiar to me, outside of the Korean one), are just as annoying or frustrating, and in some instances more so, in their own divergent ways.
My problem is that as a sort of social chameleon, I just go along with it. All the complaining is compelling. But then I regret having done so later. Negativity is kind of like alcoholism or something – you know it's bad, but social pressure drives you to drink, anyway, and then you regret it later.
When I try to buck this complaining-about-Korea trend – when I try to say something that focuses on the positive or points out the shortcomings of other cultures vis-a-vis the standards they're failing to enunciate – I end up feeling like a gay person in crowd of polite homophobes, or an agnostic at a Florida church meeting: there's no open vitriol, but there's a sort of "uh oh, what's wrong with this guy?" with lots shaking of heads and snarky asides, as the other foreigners I'm hanging out with come to the realization they're in the company of a closet Koreanophile.
Hanging out with Koreans has drawbacks too – not least is that I tend to miss the ability to have deep, intellectual converstations, due to the generally lacking language proficiency. But the negativity trap (and I'm openly admitting that I fall far too easily into this trap myself – it's not like I'm trying to blame others for my problem) is a dangerous one, for me. I need to stay out of it.
