west meets east, like tupac meets biggie

I'm an avid Indiana Jones fan. The scene at 0:50 is one of my favorites. Cute Asian boy. Handsome white man. Card game. Hilarious. Stereotyped? Perhaps.

Every so often, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education gathers all the native English-speaking teachers together for workshops. The material given at these workshops are mostly pointless, but it's a good opportunity to network and freely speak English all day. They attempt to give us some "culture" by taking us to places like Suwon Fortress or to a Corean opera. Most of us agree that the best Corean culture can be found in a small 삼겹살 restaurant and a bottle of soju. Hoo-ah!

Now, when you stick a bunch of foreign teachers into one room, complaints and discontent run rampant. This is inevitable. This is expected. There are problems with age hierarchy, rigid bureaucracy, language barriers, payment dates, workloads, cultural misunderstandings, vacation conflicts and many others. I know all these. I understand them. I experience them.

At these trainings, I usually find myself straddling the line between East and West. My thoughts are torn between two conflicting sides. A part of me agrees with all the grievances expressed. Yet another part of me is angry that these foreigners are actually airing them out. We're operating in a Confucian-based society and they're expecting things to be the same as the country they came from? Doesn't make sense to me.

I'm taken back to when I was a child. I'd do my best to torment my younger sister -- and I was pretty damn good at it. However, the second anyone else would put her down or make her feel bad, my temper would flare up and I would not have any of it. I suppose my thinking was, "She's my sister to torment. Go find your own."

In a way, I feel the same about Corea. Although I know that their difficulties are justified, I don't like to hear them talk about it in the manner that they do. When they do, they're insulting the country that borned my parents, my family, "my people." My younger years would've found me angrily dismissing them as ignorant and the typical arrogant American/Westerner, but this time around I tried my hand at being diplomatic, trying to share my thoughts on why things were the way they were. Can't say it was all successful, but not all discussions are for the purpose of persuading. Sometimes, they just help us to know where our loyalties lie. Sometimes, discussions can surprise us.

But the past two days leave me wondering... can we ever truly cross the unavoidable barriers to understand another culture...