Subject: Weekly update 20 Mar 94

Date: 20-Mar-94 at 21:01

From: Roger White

This week ended with a bang. Friday I gave my first large audience

presentation in Korea. I was speaking to sixty people at COTI (Central Officer's Training Institute). This is a prestigeous school where Korean government officials take advanced training--including English. One of my teaching assingments is COTI, and part of that assignment is putting on an hour-long presentation. I talked about growing high-tech industries in the United States, and used Novell as an example.

I put a lot of effort into this talk. I wrote it out, desktop published it for a handout, and I got the Novell Korea people to help out with some promotional material. Even so, it was spooky, and the Koreans were different than an American audience--much quieter. I left ten minutes at the end of the presentation for questions, and I got only one. In retrospect, I was trying to surmount a double barrier--the audience didn't understand English or high technology very well. But it was fun and I learned a lot.

Speaking of learning, there's always something new to learn in Korea, and there are always old truths that seem to map easily from my Western experiences.

I have one class that's developing into a real live wire class for

discovering things about Korea. I asked that class about regional

reputations--things similar to the Scottish having a reputation for being thrifty. The new thing I discovered is that these reputations aren't easy for Koreans to talk about -- many profess that they don't believe them, but they take them seriously none the less.

The new thing was discovering I'd have to pry to get a regional

reputation, the old thing was that the central mountain folk in Korea have a reputation for being slow... which is similar to the Appalachian hillbilly reputation.

This reluctance to talk about regional differences shows up in the history books I'm reading, too. I'm reading about the "Three Kingdoms" period (about 600 AD) of Korea right now in an authoriative Korean history text. The way it reads, the social strucutures of the three kingdoms were virtually identical--the social forms were identical, only the names changed from kingdom to kingdom. There's no equivalent in this history to the long discussion in United States history of how North-South differences lead up to the Civil War.

By the way, this politeness, if that's what it is, makes the history a really dry read, and I find myself more interested in what the author chooses not to talk about because that's also a mirror on Korean thinking.

The other thing I asked my class about was Confucian values--the Korans are famous for being the most diligent upholders of Confucian values. They pride themselves on being more dedicated to Confucian values than the Chinese who originated them. The question I asked is, "How do you decide what a Confusian value is? What's the reference you use?"

The answer I got back from my students was, "There are some reference texts, but they are old, hard to read and very hard to understand. We just know." When I pressed by asking how they knew, some said, "We listen to Confucian scholars who do read the texts."

This answer says to me that while the Koreans are literate, they still depend heavily on oral tradition to transmit values, and that the Confucian writings are a "white noise" source--they can be reinterpreted as necessary to fit contemporary demands.

Saturday was my first foray into shooting portraits of Koreans. I

invited one of my classes to join me in a photo session on Paldal

Mountain, and Miss Choi and Miss Lee accepted. Sometime next week I'll find out if I still know how to bring out the best in cute 20 year old women.

Sunday I visited the Seoul Farmer's Market with Mr. Lee, another student. It's a giant warehouse, but it was mostly closed Sunday. We got a couple of cases of fruit, then we went for lunch to Lotteworld--Korea's trendiest hotel/shopping mall/entertainment complex. Lotteworld has a five star hotel, dozens of restaurants, movie theaters, a Korean folk village, indoor amusement park rides, a skating rink and lots of shopping.

We ate at a restaurant serving traditional Korean food, and while we were there we stuck up a conversation in English with some visiting Japanese tourists sitting next to us. Mr. Lee was really excited to see his English pay off. It warmed my heart to realize how lucky I was that English is my first tongue.

Well, that's all for this week. Next week's the full moon; the weather's been warm the last few days. If the warm weather continues, I may return to Sorok Mountain next weekend and shoot some moonlit shots.

By for now, Roger