Caveat: 미국 아저씨

We had a 회식 (work dinner) last night. This was no ordinary hweh-shik, however. It was, arguably, my first hweh-shik where I was the initiator. I’d proposed sometime back, to Curt, that I’d like to give a “thank-you dinner” to the hagwon staff because it was the first anniversary of my cancer surgery, despite the hard times and difficulties, overall the staff has been hugely supportive.
Curt said he’d take it under consideration. I’d even offered to pay for the dinner, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t think I meant seriously, because last night, when it finally happened and we went to a buffet near LaFesta and had our hweh-shik, I took out my card to pay at the end, and everyone was dumbfounded. In Korean custom, it’s almost always the boss who pays for these things, but in fact there is one situation where another might pay – which is if the person paying is “senior” (i.e. older) than the boss. And that, unfortunately, is the case – I’m the old man at KarmaPlus, by about 10 months.
I was congratuleted, therefore, not just for surviving my cancer, but also for behaving truly “korean.”
Several commented that they’d never even heard of, much less witnessed, a “foreigner” buying hweh-shik for Korean coworkers.
저는 미국 아저씨인데요, I said, half-jokingly. [“I am an American ajeossi.” – ajeossi is a difficult-to-translate term that means a typical Korean man of middle age and indeterminate social status, maybe something like “average joe” but also used as term of address toward people with unknown names… it could be compared to the way mid-20th-century Americans would deploy names like “Mack” or “Joe”].
picture[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]

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