From Observer to Neighbor

Emigrant Sensibility in the Age of Globalization (15):

Living like a Laotian person ①

By Lee Yeong-ran

Published: November 28, 2015

Translated by Marilyn Hook

Editor’s note: Vacation, business travel, migrant labor, language study, study abroad, international marriage, immigration—many of us have such experiences of crossing national borders, and there are many immigrants living in our country. Ilda examines the emigrant sensibility we will need in order to live equally and peacefully in the age of globalization. This series is supported by the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.

Half of the year in Laos, half of the year in South Korea

Let me think about it—it started in 2007, so now it has been nine years. First, I spent two years volunteering in Laos with the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). From that time until this year, when I am the director of the Energy and Climate Policy Institute’s Laos Renewable Energy Support Center, I’ve been spending half of the year in Laos.

The author (the woman on the left) in the middle of a renewable energy education project in Laos’ Sainyabuli Province in 2014 © Lee Yeong-ran

“Oh, my! You are peeling that mak muang (mango) with the knife facing you!”

It was 2007, about 2 months after I had been sent to a middle school in the town of Sainyabuli, Laos, as a volunteer worker. That is what the ajhan (Laotian for “professor”; can also be used to address a teacher), who were by then often coming to my house to hang out, make Laotian food, and drink together, exclaimed with surprise and amusement when they first saw me peel a mango.

I was very surprised too—or rather, I was very surprised, full stop. It wasn’t just because, as the ajhan said, Koreans peel fruit with the knife facing towards their body while Laotians do it with the knife facing away.

Differences between South Korea and Laos

Sainyabuli, an average Laotian provincial city, was an area little visited by international aid organizations, let alone tourists. In its residents’ eyes, the Korean aid workers who came there to live for two-year periods were terribly interesting and amusing guests. Our appearance—despite also being Asian—and every other aspect of us, from speech to the number of spoons in our house, became a topic of conversation.

So the ajhan that we were close to, especially those who visited our houses and got a peek at our private lives, talked about us to the other ajhan, students, and neighborhood residents—more often than we talked about ourselves. That made us the target of even more attention. The main topic addressed by these popular, storytelling ajhan were the differences between Korea and Laos, and between Korean people and Laotian people.

Elephants are nearly the only tourist attraction of the Sainyabuli area.
This is an elephant’s evening bath, at the Elephant Conservation Center in 2011.
© Lee Yeong-ran

That unlike Laos, which according to various researchers has between 60 and 100 different ethnic groups despite a total population of less than 7 million people, Korea is a single-race [dan-il min-jok] nation (please don’t misunderstand: I’m not using this term in its ethnocentric meaning to emphasize racial purity, but as the best translation of the term Laotians use) despite a population of over 70 million people. That in contrast to Laos, where people of various ethnicities live as neighbors with little problem despite their different languages and religions, Korea is split into two countries, and even had a war, despite being composed of a single ethnicity that speaks a single language.

That, in 2007, the starting salary for a South Korean civil servant was 30 times higher than that of a Laotian civil servant. That a kilogram of beef in Laos cost 30,000-40,000 kip (3,000-4,000 won [about 3-4 USD], at the exchange rate of that time) while 100 grams of beef in South Korea cost over 10,000 won. That the tuition fees of any of South Korea’s numerous universities were approximately 100 times higher than that of Laos’s only university.

That while working hours in Laos are from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and include a two-hour lunch, working hours in South Korea are from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and allow only one hour for lunch, and also most Korean employees work past 6 p.m.

That Korean women marry in their mid-20s at the earliest and are often still unmarried in their mid-30s, while Laotian women marry sometime between their mid-teens and mid-20s. That unlike Laotians, who nearly all build and live in a house on their own property (rural people even have fields and paddies, farms and streams, and use rivers and mountains freely as common-pool resources), Koreans don’t (can’t) build their own houses and have to buy or rent them instead.

While talking about these kinds of things with Laotian people, it was common for me to wonder if South Korea was really an advanced, “well-to-do” country, and the provincial Laotians were really people of a “poor” country who needed my help.

Differences between Korean and Laotian people

Our school’s vice principal and her mother. Older ajhan are especially inspiring, sympathetic, and helpful. © Lee Yeong-ran

But our conversations didn’t start out on such a big-picture level. Having learned and taught others to associate Gga-ol-li (Korea) with North Korea, until the arrival of the South Korean foreign volunteer corps, these teachers in a socialist country were simply curious about how and why North and South Korea were different

While looking at the nice things we had brought with us from Korea, they asked us how much each cost, and what our monthly salaries were that we could afford such nice things. Except me, all of the volunteers were unmarried, and so as similarly-single men and women, they were curious about our ages. And they were very interested in how Koreans “form a family” (how Laotians describe marriage) and live their lives.

I have sometimes used these conversations to explain why Laos must not follow the development path that today’s advanced countries—and especially Korea—have, show that our attitude as aid providers from an advanced country is not one of superiority, and demonstrate the ideal of international cooperation that we must show as equal partners in development aid. (I still do.)

However, repeating these clichéd comparisons did become tiring. That’s when I started to look at Laotian people’s lives not from the aid worker perspective that I had been taught but as if I were an anthropologist.

I observed the Buddhist priests asking for alms every day at dawn, the landlord’s second son reciting Buddhist scriptures every night before bed, how without exception every calendar in Laos included not just the lunar calendar but also Buddhist calendar, and that the Buddhist temple is still a major space for big community events and even has some of the functions of the modern school. I learned how Buddhism plays a central role in Laotian life, at least for its majority ethnicity.

I learned from experience that because of the semitropical climate, evening and early morning are the best times for activity and one must rest in the shade during midday. The climate is also why, as I learned, “Have you washed?” was a greeting similar to our asking “Have you eaten?”, and saying, “Let’s sleep together” around lunchtime was the same as “Let’s rest together.”

In most regions, there is no need to worry about cold weather, and there is no fear of starving to death because wild produce is plentiful 12 months out of the year. In addition, relationships between people and their relatives and neighbors are so close that the amount of care, emotion stability, and material support and aid they share with each other makes them similar to a big immediate family in our terms. This culture is contagious and spreads to observers; I think that this feeling Laotian people give is the biggest reason why people who have visited Laos once always come back.

Volunteer worker, observer, immigrant woman

Ketlakhone, the ajhan who, as an English lecturer, taught Laotian language and culture to Korean volunteer workers © Lee Yeong-ran

At the same time, as people accustomed to competing to survive, this Laotian culture functions to make the people seem lazy and dependent, and thus incompetent, to us. Also, though it’s nothing like the level of ethnic or religious strife that is a frequent topic for international news, I noticed subtly-expressed discrimination between the ajhan based on ethnicity, hometown, and race.

Like this, I had grown past being a Korean volunteer worker to become someone trying to observe them in a more delicate but still neutral way. But because of the way I held a knife while peeling, I became just an “immigrant woman.”

At the time, in an effort to defend this Korean habit as a representative of my people, I asked if it wasn’t better to hold it that way so that if something went wrong, it would be me who got hurt and no one else. The ajhan pointed out that there would be no problem if I just faced it away from everyone, laughing at my poor logic and completely dismissing it.

I laughed along like I was ashamed of my poor logic. But actually, I was agitated by the many thoughts flashing through my head. And I was laughing in order to keep from frowning

The number of female marriage immigrants to Korea started increasing sharply in the early 2000s. Their way of holding a knife has been widely discussed as a seed of conflict, one of the reasons the women face discrimination from their husbands’ families and wider Korean society. 

Far from sympathizing with them, I had barely even understood the countless articles, petitions, and academic papers about immigrant women’s plight—but now I felt it in my bones. Fear of a hidden sense of superiority, about which I had deceived even myself, ran down my spine. So this is who I am!

A student and teacher of electrical engineering at a vocational/technical school, Ministry of Education employees, and the author (right) look at a broken solar panel installed by the Sainyabuli Province Bureau of Energy and Mining, and consider what to do about it.
© Lee Yeong-ran

After that, the volunteer worker who stood back a bit and smilingly pretended to accept everything made few appearances. Though I was a mere “immigrant woman” in the eyes of the Laotians that I had come to help, I started asking questions when something didn’t make sense, and resisted and even fought back when I thought something was wrong.

And what I’ve worked hardest on is to learn from people in Laos and be like them, as a person who lives here. There has been more touching moments than fights in this process, so I’m happy. This process is still ongoing.

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=7299&section=sc4