Another hump day, gone. Halfway done with the week and halfway done with my disobedient classes. Sigh.
Every Wednesday afternoon we teachers have free to catch up on work and, very often, play volleyball. I usually work or go home, but sometimes they con me into participating in things. Today, we went hiking at a mountain in Hongsan. I was really surprised—I didn’t think there were any trails in Hongsan, since I’ve been unable to find one and no one ever told me about one (everyone knows I like to hike). But there is, and I think the system might actually be quite extensive. I couldn’t read the sign because it was in Chinese, but something is over 10 km away. I’m excited, even though the heat and humidity are almost too much for hiking nowadays and the monsoon’s about to start. It’ll give me something to do next year, since I’ve worn the roads around my house thin.
I was thinking today about communication, and how I feel no one here really knows me because of the sometimes insurmountable language barrier. I can only express myself so simply, and vice versa, that I really don’t know any Koreans very well—what they think, what they feel…anything important, in short. And then I was reminded of a realization I suddenly came to in college. I remember it vividly: I was hanging out with my friend Gill, trying to express something, when I realized that language was such an inadequate medium for expression. No matter my way with words, my explanation would be a pale pale shadow of what really goes on inside me. I was reading this short story recently (“Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace) and the narrator put it like this: “As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.” I realized that no one would ever know me, really know me, and was hit with a wave of sadness. Gill’s response was that love tries to do that—to really get to know someone, beyond the confines of language and verbal expression. A really eloquent definition of love, and one that’s stuck with me.
The experiences of this year have shown me that I perhaps underestimate the power of verbal communication. Sure, I might only be shoving small, carefully chosen bits of myself through the keyhole, but it’s certainly a vast improvement over a nearly-closed hole. The truth is that I feel much closer to other English speakers, even though I see them much less frequently that the Korean speakers in my life. There are also cultural considerations to factor in, of course, but language, inadequate as it may be, does allow us to get to know each other a bit. Not completely, of course, or even close, but it does have greater power than I initially assumed. Viewed through this lens, then, I am actually doing a very important job—giving my students the tools to get to know all 6 billion non-Korean speakers. I deserve a substantial raise, I tell you.