Here’s an audio documentary in two parts from CBC Radio’s Ideas, on being and becoming Canadian, and the experiences of one Korean family.

The first time I took the citizenship oath, back in 1979, I was 12 years old. My family had been in Canada for only a few years and we were living in Regina.

The ceremony was in a big beige building on Victoria Street. And everyone in the family was very nervous.

My mom made us get “dressed up” in our very best outfits. They were so uncomfortable that my sisters Yu-Kyung and Hi-Kyung, and my little brother Ung-So and I were all fidgeting.

My dad kept saying (over and over): “This is a Very Important Occasion. When we come home today we’ll be Canadian.”

I had no idea what he meant: would we stop eating rice? Stop using our Korean names? Stop being… Korean??? And when I looked around the room, things got even more confusing. Everyone was white, except for us. As far as I knew, white people were already Canadian. So what were they doing here?

The question of what it means to be Canadian is one I like to think most Canadians have gnawed at sometime in the past.

For a Korean living in Korea, one of the world’s more monolithic monocultures, the question of what it means to be Korean is pretty easily answered. For an immigrant to Canada, the questions of what it means to be Korean or Canadian, or both, becomes a lot more slippery.

I’ve lived in Korea for more than ten years, and though I am a permanent resident and may soon receive dual nationality, I am not in my mind or in the mind of any Koreans I know, anything but Canadian, and that won’t change even if I receive a passport.

Were the situation reversed, it becomes harder, for the Korean immigrant, of course. Though in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of their fellow Canadians, once they have been granted citizenship, they are Canadian. But in their minds and hearts, the balance is lot more precarious — to what extent am I Canadian, and to what extent and in what ways Korean?

For most Koreans, the answers venture into things folks in the west, outside of America at least, feel a little uncomfortable talking about these days — bloodlines and ‘race’. We prefer to talk about ethnicity, or culture, or language, at least in part because it feels like history has left fewer examples washed up on the beach of organized murder and institutional hatred based on these.

I believe — the inevitable strains of racism and xenophobia aside — that Canada’s way (or at least ideal) of accepting and encouraging immigrants to become Canadian while retaining their own cultural identity has been the wisest way, and stands in stark contrast to the America’s ‘you come to American, you’re American now, son’.

But it doesn’t make for easy answers to hard questions.

In Korea, there’s F-Mart and D-Mart, L-Mart and G-Mart, and the current top dog of the X-Mart retailers, E-Mart. They are all much of a muchness, and are a microcosmic case study, I suppose, of the Korean predilection (and skill, it must be said) in taking someone else’s idea (in this case, a household goods retailer, K-mart (of course)), reshaping it for the Korean market, and barfing it out again, adding only the most cursory Groucho-glasses-and-nose disguise.

Recently my wife and I went to the nearby E-Mart to do some shopping, get out of the house, engage in the soothing Retail Ritual. The Retail Ritual calms me, these days, if it’s in one of these huge ultramodern, brightly lit stores. Odd, for an old hippiepunk like me, who has little good to say about our marketing-driven civilization, and often.

That said, I don’t care shopping for anything other than food, so I guess I can still fly my freak flag proudly. And although stores like Walmart and Costco are a scourge on the landscape back in North America, sucking the life out of small-town centers, feeding low-wage, no-security, permanent part-time slavery, homogenizing the already desperately whitebread-and-mayonnaise landscape even further …that’s not so much the case here. The box stores sit in the middle of already existing major shopping areas, beside subway stops, and have the opposite effect, if anything, revitalizing cruddy areas and triggering some urban renewal. These stores also tend to employ women under better conditions and for better wages than they might otherwise receive in this sexist nightmare of a nation. But more on that later.

So the wife and I were trundling around with our cart, happily sampling and grazing and knocking small children down (well, I was the one knocking them down, and the wife was the one scolding me – she pretends to tolerate my aversion to the little buggers, but I don’t think she really does), when one of those spine-chillingly weird Korea moments happened, that nobody much seems to notice or comment on, a situation which sometimes leads me to theorize that I’m living an extended hallucination in a Matrixy goo-filled pod somewhere, fed digital imagery to pacify me by some higher machine intelligence which is extracting my life energy to run pachinko machines in Osaka or something.

Some facts first that will help explain, I hope, my flash of The Weird.

In Korea, like Japan, walking into a shop or restaurant will usually result in a hail of welcomes and other ritualized greetings from the employees. I hate these, but I must admit they make me feel all shiny and special too. I am a good consumer, and I really am welcome here, and I should buy something to celebrate that, I say to myself, before I realize their cunning ploy and adopt the anti-salesperson scowl that is my customary demeanor while in-store.

In Korea, it’s (and excuse the romanization, but I’m going for clarity of pronunciation more than the current textbook romanization) ‘uh-suh-ohseyo,’ which more or less translates to ‘welcome, and please buy lots of our overpriced crap!’ On departure, particularly if you have in fact purchased some crap, it’s (phonetically, more or less) ‘kahmsahmnida‘ or ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, both of which mean ‘thank you, and spend again’. Well, OK, just ‘thank you’.

The other necessary fact to know is that upmarket department store chains like Hyundai or Lotte and also these more middle-class retails outlets like E-Mart and Walmart and Carrefour (foreign business, which are floundering and leaving Korea, more on which, later) all employ way, way too many people. Behind a typical watch-counter at Lotte, for example, you might see 6 to 8 men (always men, behind the watch counter, for some reason) loitering about, trying desperately to look busy, beseeching you with their eyes to please come and look at a watch or two, just for a freaking minute you rich bastard, come on …and then swarming up like Keystone-Kops-as-filmed-by-David-Lynch when someone does.

It’s good, in some ways, that so many are employed when they might otherwise not be, but you can be sure that the only way such a situation can be justified is by paying extremely low wages. The idea behind these clusters of clerks is that such heavy concentrations of service-people enhance the feeling — that wealthier Koreans, including the growing middle class, seem to just love — of being catered to by hordes of low-born types or a reasonable facsimile, grovelling before the shopper’s imperial whims. See also : Dynasty, Chosun.

Walking around the aisles of the supermarket sections of these stores is a hazard course of (usually) miniskirt-clad (invariably) young female product demonstrators, who want to give you a sample of coffee, or help you choose that perfect shampoo, and (usually) older (invariably) females in the fresh-food areas, cooking up some pork or slicing up some veggies, and inviting you to chow down, using the (invariably) plastic green toothpicks.

(What’s the female equivalent of ‘avuncular’? Damned if I know, but that’s what these fresh-food ladies are. Ajummacular, perhaps.)

The younger ones, the ones that staff the toiletries and dry-good aisles, are always goooood-lookin’, though, and pretty obviously hired on that basis, and apparently instructed to bend over, but demurely, whenever possible. Which makes astonishingly little sense, even ignoring the sex-discriminatory aspects, as the vast majority of shoppers are middle-aged women, who are unlikely to be seduced by the milky thighs of these miniskirted productistas.

Anyway. Any given row in the supermarket sections of these chains will house anywhere from a minimum to two to a maximum of six women, some of whom are apparently hired just to stand there and smile at people.

So back to the trundling and the shopping and the running-over of children. As we were rolling down the ramyeon aisle, the sixth or seventh repetition of the ecstatically faux-happy, 50′s-style E-Mart Song was coming to an orgasmic close, and there was a slight crackle over the PA, and a voice.

A female voice, one that was absolutely perfect in its unctuous, saccharine, mind-colonizing tone, oozing into your ears, grabbing whatever handholds it could find and whispering, irresistably : everything’s going to be all right, there there, just lay your weary head on my soft, perfumed, padded bosom….

Anyway, this voice sweetly but firmly intoned ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ (‘welcome’). And every single woman employee in the place turned from whatever they were doing, as one, faced in the same direction, towards whatever Mecca-equivalent was operative, and repeated ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ while bowing deeply, to nobody in particular. The voice paused a few seconds, then said ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, and once again, every single woman, matching the weirdly unnatural, woman-as-service-automaton voice, chanted ‘kohmuhpsoomnida.

This repeated perhaps four or five times, and you could hear the chorus of voices throughout the store. Nobody else even batted an eyelid, but I was just transfixed, with chills literally running up my spine. The Weird.

I know what the rationale behind it was, and understand that many Koreans really think that sort of stuff is spiffy, and are drawn to shop somewhere that shows that kind of rigorous employee-indoctrination methodology, but it was still deeply, excitingly Weird.

Of course, I forgot about it 5 minutes later, while buying beer, which was, after all, my secret mission for the day.

As it is for expatriates everywhere, after you recover from the initial ‘stop poking at my ego-balloon’ sensitivity of the first few culture-shocked months of living in a new and different country, there are a thousand little things you begin to take in stride, things that friends or family would pick up on instantly if they were to come and visit.

One of these, one you’ll notice immediately if you spend any time watching one of the many evening variety shows on Korean TV (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you’re curious and have the bandwidth : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily…) is what I’ve called the ‘schoolgirl howl’.

This is a sound I cannot for the life of me reproduce. I’ve tried. It is reminiscent of the kind of pre-orgasmic squeals that teenyboppers on those black-and-white newsreels in the early 60′s would emit when faced with the Beatles, or Elvis, and I suppose, in a deliberately more chaste fashion, that’s what it’s modelled on. It sounds a bit like a very high-pitched ‘ooo-WOOOO-OOoo!’, done chorally. The thing is, though, that it’s delivered with clockwork regularity every 10 or 15 seconds, when anyone does or says anything even remotely interesting. And even when they don’t — a chef is brought into the studio to prepare some normal, everyday food, and the guests on stage crowd around the table to sample his creation. One of them dips his spoon, tastes: the schoolgirl howl.

“Oh my goodness I am uncontrollably excited in a non-sexual fashion by the fact that that dog just jumped through a hoop!” is the message. It’s ritualistic, of course. It’s contrived in the same way that the applause light and audience wranglers elicit carefully-timed reactions from the bleachers on David Letterman. But the artificiality of controlled, note-perfect choral ululation, a simulation of wild abandon, raised at the most banal of actions in the studio, is enough to raise hackles if you pay attention to it, perhaps because it’s so unfamiliar to the western viewer.

To add an extra layer of weirdness, theschoolgirl howl is also omnipresent on prerecorded segments. It would seem that Korea has invented, parallel to the sitcom laughtrack machines in the West, a Schoolgirl Howl Machine. I imagine the engineer in the booth, bored look on his face, cigarette dangling from his lip, pushing the lever for another howl, and twiddling a knob for that extra bit of oomph because the current howl-ee is a member of the latest boy-band, wondering how he got there.

I rarely even notice it these days.

[originally published January 2002]

Here’s a story that might illustrate how differently some things we foreign devils tend to take for granted are approached here. I was standing at the University Shuttle Bus stop a couple of mornings ago, which is in front of the local equivalent of a 7-11.

Piled on the edge of the curb was a mountain of garbage. This was the detritus for a number of shops and ‘love hotels’ and restaurants and low-rise apartments in the immediate vicinity over the last day or two. Dumpsters are, for the most part, unheard of, although there lidded upright plastic bins, always overflowing with rotting matter, for organic waste. Garbage collection here is not funded by taxes or fee collection – it’s user-paid in the most instrumental of ways. In order to have your garbage collected, you have to buy surprisingly expensive garbage bags, available in various sizes, which you then stuff to their absolute limit, and put on the street in haphazard piles for pick up. The revenue from the bags pays for the garbage collection service, is the thinking. Anything larger, and you have to take a trip to the local ward office and buy a sticker to slap on the item, again to pay for the hauling away.

The unintended consequences, of course, are manifold. Public garbage bins are rare outside of downtown Seoul, for example. Who’s going to pay for it? Not me! tends to be the normal response. When you charge someone for the very act of discarding waste, they’ll find a free way to do it: litter on the street, drop regular plastic bags of trash in front of the place two doors down when nobody’s looking. Drive your sofa or fridge a few kilometers down the highway in the middle of the night and toss it out on the roadside. Once a pile develops (always on the same unmarked corners, despite an absence of any ‘pile the trash here’ signs), feel free to drop whatever unwrapped garbage you like on top, without bothering to buy one of those expensive bags.

So, I was standing there, and the garbage truck pulled up. Not unlike what one might see in Canada or America or Australia, with the requisite couple of sunburned guys hanging off the back with wiry, ropy-veined forearms. Where it diverged from the expected is that they didn’t just hurl the bags into the back, they sorted the trash! They made sure all the cans went into can bags, plastic with plastic, and *shudder* organic stuff into the organic bags, and so on. After it had all been sorted, the driver came over with a large whisk broom, swept the leftover detritus into the gutter, and off they went, presumably to the next reeking pile.

Labor is very very cheap here. The cheapness of labor has all manner of consequences, of which this is just one. And there’s not a lot of room for landfills chockablock with random crap. It makes sense, but it’s just….that….different enough to make you think twice.