[Perspective]
Who is ‘you’? Languishing in linguistic purgatory

Having been here for over three years now (my God!), my skin is now thick enough to repel most of the usual cultural burrs. It’s gotten to the point where when I go home to Vancouver, I have to remind myself to start getting profuse with the apologies when I bump into someone on the street.

In fact, other than the exercise that involves thrusting the groin against the trunk of a tree, there’s only one thing here that I’m still really struggling to get a grasp on. (Writing that just now made me realize how insane that claim is, but for the sake of this column, we’ll assume it’s true.)

For those who either just got here or still don’t know the first thing about Korean (my God!), the language changes depending on who you’re talking to.

If someone is older than you or higher up whatever hierarchy you are moving within, you need to verbally prostrate yourself before them pretty much every time you open your mouth. Naturally, this structure leads to lots of arguments over who should be respecting who, or who didn’t respect who enough.

Knowing who should be spoken to in the higher form and who you should expect the higher form from is no easy task, and can be daunting to an outsider.

And of course, any confusion about this situation is the exclusive territory of outsiders. My Korean friends, incredulous at my inability to sort through what to call who at the drop of a dime, have explained that it is more instinctive than carefully calculated.

Hearing this helped me realize how annoying it must have been when I explained to them that it was more a question of “feeling” English than trying to memorize all the exceptions.

So, speaking to a friend’s parents, a boss or the president is easy. You know that you need to put as much polite into your prattle as it can hold. But if, say, there’s someone you work with who may or may not be a little older than you and generally ranks on the same rung, you’re stuck in a linguistic purgatory. Or at least you are if you know as little as I do.

It can get complicated. Taking the very office I’m typing this in as an example, there are some cases in which one person technically outranks another, but is younger. The younger boss must therefore speak up to the older underling, and accept being referred to in the lower form.

And this is the part that is so hard to take as someone used to using “you.”

All you get for speaking up to a person is spoken down to. The form of Korean you use toward a person ends up ranking you in relation to them, and that can be very grating for people not from the Confucian forge.

But for now, lacking the instinctive understanding, I think I’ll just stick to the words of a wise Korean friend:

“When in doubt, just be polite.”

By Richard Scott-Ashe, Deputy Editor [richard@joongang.co.kr]