Foreign Feeling

Last Friday afternoon, I found myself at a busier-than-usual Busan Train Station, looking to buy a ticket to Seoul. The lines were quite long, but I moseyed on down to the line marked 'For Foreigners'. There were two men in front of me, who looked Asian. Shortly after I joined the line, the fellow working at the desk called out in Korean to inform these two (and so presumably Korean chaps) that they were in the foreigners' queue, and could they please join one of the other (very long) lines. One of the men waiting let out a splendid stream of expletives as he made his way to the back of an adjacent line.

Now this may seem like a very trivial incident, but the dynamics of this brief interaction highlight the very bizarre situation that foreigners (especially those who reside in Korea) often find themselves in. On the one hand, we often receive ridiculously deferential treatment, but on the other hand are sometimes treated quite rudely. Foreigners are really foreign in Korea, because the Korean population is very homogenous, and small numbers of foreigners have only been living in Korea for a relatively short time.

And so, the moral of the train station story? Well, it's double edged: I got my train ticket in a hurry due to my being a foreigner, and a Korean man was given justification to subsequently treat foreingers rudely.