I had a sort of vague mini-epiphany today, as I walked to work.
There aren't that many foreigners working in the Hugok neighborhood, where I work. I have seen the same 5 or 6 foreigners (i.e. Westerners) from time to time, on the street. I even have some idea which of the many hagwon in the neighborhood they each work at.
I have long realized I have strange tendency to avoid interacting with foreigners in Korea. Partly, in my own personal experience, I find many of them to be annoying people. Expat English teachers such as one runs into on the streets in Ilsan tend to either be wannabe hipsters suffering from incipient alcoholism and with a tendency to complain about everything, or else sufficiently "gone native" that they instead arouse feelings of jealousy in me that make it unpleasant for me to be around them. There aren't very many who fall in the gray area I have occupied for so long.
Today as I walked to work I noticed one of these "Hugok foreigners" and found myself actually crossing the street to avoid meeting him on the sidewalk. He is definitely in the wannabe hipster category, and I have interacted with him once or twice – he strikes me as one of those people who refuses to make any concessions whatsoever to being a supposed professional in a foreign and relatively conservative culture: a half-dozen piercings, visible tattoos, a mop of oddly cut hair and ragged clothing. Yet he's clearly accepted at the hagwon where he works – I guess he must be doing something right, as he's been around for a few years. I don't begrudge him his success, but I don't really approve of his style.
Anyway, this is not the first time that I have intentionally avoided meeting a foreigner on the street, but I always just wrote it off to my general anti-social tendencies. Nevertheless, I had a sort of realization today. It's not just that I'm anti-social or that I don't like foreigners, despite being one myself. It's that I actually genuinely like living in a country where there is a large and permanent barrier preventing easy communication. I'm just simply that anti-social.
This thought, in turn, lead me to my mini-epiphany: perhaps I deliberately sabotage my Korean-learning efforts for precisely this same reason. If I became truly competent at speaking Korean, I'd have no excuse not to interact with the vast majority of the people I see each day.
That's a pretty damning insight. Do I need to go live on a mountainside somewhere?
[daily log: walking, 7.5km]