The mood at my great-aunt's house is close to mutinous. Apparently, our grandmother, despite being so rich she actually hires someone to cook food for her, doesn't like to turn on the AC at night, even when it's sweltering hot. She also hates the fact that her grand-newphews and niece doesn't speak English very well. And none of our relatives will drive us around, forcing us to run around in the hot sun and pay lots of money taking subway trains around town.
My mother is feeling miffed since she had brought a lot of expensive gifts to give to them, and they haven't really done much except for feed us every now and then, from time to time, and lend us a room in their spacious apartment to sleep in.
My brother and sister fear my grandmother and her English ban.
I made the unfortunate mistake in speaking English while telling a story about Dantzel to my mother. I wasn't even talking to my grand-aunt. She then walked over and said, "Only English!" but my mother wasn't understanding my story, and so I was clarifying in English when mid-sentence my grand-aunt pinches my lips together to make me stop talking with her fingernails. She pinched pretty hard; I was surprised she didn't draw any blood.
I was feeling incredibly rebelious at the moment and considered continuing in English just to spite her, but I didn't want to embarass my mother. Instead, I bit my tongue and silently ate and quietly excused myself from the dinner table. Later on, as we were walking in the sweltering sun to the subway station, I burst out in anger at what my grand-aunt did and my mother made it known that she was furious as well.
My father, whose side of the family this all is happening in, was quiet, and my sister asked him if he was mad when we would say mean things about her relatives. "No," he'd say. "They have their faults," but that was all he'd say. Then, today, as we were hopelessly lost looking for a famous market of which I am convinced does not exist, mainly because a) Korea doesn't coordinate their maps, and b) no one in Seoul actually knows where anything is, but will still give you false information to make it seem like they know, my dad said out of the blue (as most of the revelations of his inner thoughts and character are - bursts of random insight), "We have pretty crappy relatives, don't we?"
Shocked, we just mumbled and agreed, afraid to bring anything up. He never mentioned it again for the rest of the day.
Oh, and for those who don't believe my Korean toilet story, Google images "Korean toilet" to see them. Non-believers.
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1 comment:
Fret not dearest cousin. It's just the strange logic of Korean culture. If you were to live there a few months longer, you would find that half of all Koreans don't make any gawddam sense!!! They'll fight till they're blue in the face, not by using logic or in fact anything that makes any sense, but through force of will which is lots of yelling. I've met some of my dad's strange Korean friends. And he has plenty of stories about how strange Koreans are. I will provide the anecdotes another time. Seriously, when I try to think about it I get dizzy and my mind goes blank because I can't comprehend what in the world is going on in their brains.
BTW I did do your toilet google and I see the toilets in the ground but I don't think those are "typical". My dad said maybe in the less urbanized areas.
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