Alien Diary: The unconscious interrupted

If you ask people who have encountered different cultures, “What is the most interesting aspect of your experiences?” they will tell you how they discovered their own culture. They, for the first time, noticed things about themselves.

When I learned people in the U.S. describe the sound of a clock as “tick-tack, tick-tack,”I noticed how a clock sounds to people in Korea, “ddock-ddack, ddock-ddak.”When I heard people exclaim “ouch!” for the paper-cut on their finger, I realized how people in Korea say nothing for the same occasion. When I found out people in the U.S. see a human face on the full moon, I remembered a rabbit made of jade milling on the moon, a story I had forgotten since 2nd grade.

Of course, I knew all these things. I just never appreciated them much until I learned about how things are in the U.S. Some scholars would say that culture happened to me. Others would say that my unconsciousness has been interrupted. In other words, everything I have learned in Korea has been questioned.

After 11 years of questioning, unlearning, getting lost and learning between the two cultures, some things are not logical yet still make sense at least to parts of me as Korean. Others simply no longer make sense. Then, I started to understand people who have interrupted me, with their ignorant questions (“Can you catch a fly with the chopsticks?”) and random comments (“It’s unfair that all the foreigners come to my country and get everything, like houses and jobs, for free”), at a laundromat, at a grocery store, at a restaurant and on the street. I started to understand how I bothered their unconsciousness by being among them.

I haven’t figured out how they knew I was an alien even before they interacted with me.

Well, I could attribute their knowing to stereotype: They assumed I am an alien solely based on my different looks. Whether they thought I was Chinese, Korean or Oriental, they were right about one thing: I am not one of them.

According to scholars in intercultural communication, that alone must have bothered them. When I started shooting words in an accent out of my mouth, which is when I got that look on people’s face, I disrupted the order in their world. I was that stone that rippled the lake. They did not know they were bothered. They were not aware of my interruption.

Not knowing, they became uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, some people avoided me entirely, some jumped at me with questions and comments about banality of our lives and some tried to restore the order I disrupted mostly through what they knew already, which often perpetuated the already existing stereotypes, prejudice, and ethnocentrism.

If people had questioned their unconsciousness, instead of questioning my presence in their backyard, they would have understood who I am and who they are. We would have understood each other. We could have created our world.

So, next time your curiosity rises out of your unconsciousness, ask yourself, not a person who looks different from you, a question or two about your world, not about his/her world.