The letter....yea the letter I wish I hadn't read. I told you about the horrible week at Kyle's work...well the week at our work wasn't much better. If Kyle had legal problems...Amy had relational problems. Amy and our defacto day to day boss. We will call her G-Boss. Because E-Boss splits time between our two ELC campuses.
I wrote last time that Kyle and Amy didn't want to work that last day of their contracts after their visa had expired...I think our school kind of took that as a snub...they were upset by that. And then in a weird twist....during the course of a phone conversation, Kyle's boss told our G-Boss that some Korean teacher at Kyle's school has overheard Amy calling G-boss " our secretary" instead of "our boss". For some reason this fourthhand overheard snippet of questionable reliability from a non-native english speaker provoked a wild unleashing of emotion unlike anything I have every seen. (It's important that you know the G-boss and Amy and me were all pretty chummy. Good friends. That's what made it so much worse. )
Anyway, amidst a week of high tensions, uber-awkwardness, crying fits and stony silence an unbelievable letter was produced which I really don't want to dwell on....but among other things called into question Kyle and Amy's intelligence, work ethic, maturity and integrity. Worse than that, how all caucasian people are lazy, dishonest freeloaders, disrespectful of Korea, and that she will never trust another foreigner again. Um. Wow. Pretty sure you would lose your job if you wrote that in Canada. Maybe even some legal problems.
And no, the letter was not for me....but I am included in "all foreigners". And she had to know Amy was going to tell me about it. So I'm not sure how to look at her anymore...I've never felt a hint of that before. But there the words are, right on the page. Not sure which boss is the real one anymore.
CULTURE FACTOR - I dunno...in every place I've ever been it's kind of like Murderers, Thieves, Rapists and Rascists go together...not so much here apparently. Jenny didn't understand why it was so offensive either. She said Koreans are often like that, bottle it all up till it explodes...uber-dramatic language etc etc. And from my experience that is true...they definitely suppress feelings a lot more here than in "Western" culture. But that doesn't make it much better.
3 comments:
boo racism.
lucky me took diversity training, so I am an officially certified non-racist. pretty hot, eh?
sorry to hear about your workingness. I'm sure she didn't mean it as badly as she scripted it out. When one bottles little feelings up over long periods of time, they look much worse when they finally explode.
Maybe you should buy her some flowers? or better yet - buy me some flowers. then we can all be happy again.
why are you not happy Mr. um...anonymous....haha. If flowers will make it better I'll get right on it. And it is her second language too...so that probably doesn't help her convey the subtleties of what she was trying to say.....but still...yikes...
Sounds like a normal day at work for me, so I guess we're all racists, abusers, etc. at work (no surprise). However, I feel the comments are highly unfortunate, highly inaccurate, highly insensitive and I agree likely highly emotionally loaded from some other (or many other) things. The human "condition" is alive and well in Korea too, I see. It's tempting to judge and criticize all these people, but nobody shouts my name out as the perfect example of love and peace either. I believe only God's grace can give you success to (once again) overlook "human" behaviour. I think you're on the right track with processing it, so kudos to you, but I feel for your predicament. Love, Dad
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