Hweshik Dinners in Korea

I sit there and watch as the boiling broth of seafood, including a live octopus, moves and squirms around beneath the lid. My appetite? Elsewhere. It’s another hweshik 회식, a post shift co-worker dinner - a Korean cultural thing – yet always somehow at a restaurant that serves the most exotically gross national dish. “Ohhhh mahsheesoo!” they exclaim in collective delight. “Not so much!” I think – fucking every time without fail, these stupid affairs lead me to the worst dinners, to dishes that would never make it internationally, because they are goddamn gross as shit. I grin, and act as if it’s such a novelty to be eating another fucking disgusting preparation of seafood done in all the wrong ways. Oh! Look! This time a bunch of seafood is in the same broth! Awesome! Can I please gnaw on a prawn still in the shell! Then can I follow that unsatisfying bite up by maowing on a giant, rubbery, boiled, bland-as-shit octopus tentacle? Awesome! “Masheeso!” So glad that I came! I think of Bukowski and so much of life being an unromantic test of grit, endurance and private sarcasm - just another chance to prove my social stamina and wits in a culture as awkward as eating spaghetti with chopsticks. I’m expected to attend these painful socially maladroit fucking gatherings every so often and they are as dreadful as the live octopus that is slowly boiling to death in the broth in front of me. I’m always invited, yet never made welcome. It’s a very weird thing indeed. But Confucianism in Korean culture seems to have mastered the distillation process of social awkwardness down to a science. And as a foreigner, marinating in it every so often, will bring about some hatefully cynical and sinister thoughts, such as the following. Apologies. It’s just that for two hours I overhear bits and pieces of conversational tidbits in Korean, understanding just enough to know that they are talking about me at times, shared anecdotes around the table of mostly Korean middle aged women, save for the two younger women, my age, who seem to be talking the most shit. Why? I have no idea. I’ve established very cordial and efficient working relationships with both of them. Yet, as I sit here, my name is mentioned more than once to which it is then followed by a self-satisfied collective session of laughs, chuckles, smiles and glances from the Korean Ya-Ya Sisterhood. No one attempts to hide their contempt or the blatantly obvious effect that their behavior is having on the token foreigner. I sit there and fiddle with my smart phone. I give them not any indication that I understand, nor give a flying fuck about anything that is being said. Occasionally, I look up and around the table, attempting to make eye contact and engage my presence with anyone gracious enough to bring me into the laughter or funny anecdote. No one seems willing. I look back down to the phone and scroll mindlessly for someone to text. I yawn. I hear my name. This time I look up so as to not to appear completely aloof, and to assert to the contrary of the table’s collective opinion, that I’m not, in fact, retarded. I look up. I look around. Still no one cares to bring me in on the inside joke, literally, anecdote after anecdote, for nearly 30 minutes, definitely about me, to which everyone seems to be so amply amused by. Finally, one of the teachers says something to appease my paranoia. She gives a half-ass attempt to translate. She seems full of shit. She waited too long to bring me in. It’s too late. I don’t believe her. My contempt for the group has festered. My good humor has boiled to death, much the same as that octopus that squirmed awkwardly to death in the broth. I try to give off an easy-going, good-natured demeanor but my patience and graciousness expired, my imagination now drives my mood into a cynical prickishness and has unburied and laid bare the misanthropic maladjusted maudishness that is my usual self, never far beneath the surface of my seeming good-natured spirit and it has begun writing the word ‘cunt’ in bold typeface font across my visual spectrum. Everything is now colored with the ill-will of my emotional auto-correct. And as I look around the table I don’t see faces but a single eloquently legible noun, and it’s plural. I wanna upturn the table in a mounted Hulkean fury and self-righteous display of anger at unjust and unnecessary social persecution. I think about all the times past in the office or in private conversations when I was an altruist. All the times when I let egregious, laughable, retarded usages of the English language slip beneath my finely attuned radar of contempt. I am now flush with anger at the kindness I’ve shown to these people, considering the ease at which they talk shit right in front of my face to each other, and seem to revel and relish in the fact that I can understand very little of the insults and condescension, but just enough. I'd dismiss the gossip and rude manner in which they've conducted themselves this evening and say it was a cultural thing, uniquely Korean. But I'm not buying that anymore. If it's cultural, then it is a culturally immature, adolescent, regressive, passive agressive at best, and should be relegated to the cultural trash heap of unenlightened modes of being-in-the-world.

But any Westerner here in Korea knows this adolescent manner by which Koreans treat foreigners. The kids that shout, "Waygookin inee-dah!" (Foreigner!) or the store clerks, waiters, the baristas that giggle, smirk, and look down like middle school students while taking your order or assisting you, or the stares you get while passing-by restaurants or store fronts, the Korean men who whisper into the ears of their women on their arm as you approach a crosswalk, etc. Shit never ceases to get less annoying. But as an expatriat, you learn to deal. You mostly ignore, staying in your blissfully ignorant expat, English-speaking, non-xenophobic cultural bubble... but... occassionally it gets to you. You stare back. You give an unamused, expressionless stoneface bordering on hate-fucking them into submission until they recognize their unselfconsious, unbecoming dipshit demeanor is about to give them a confrontation with a big white man or worse, an ass beating for being an insensitive fucktarded rascist prick.

I digress.

(Back to the table.) A flood of nuanced emotions and violent images pass by in a barrage of immediacy. Somehow I manage not to let any of them creep through the cracks of my physiology, manifest, and disaffect my countenance. I smile. I am Brando. They have no idea. I wait. I wait 2 hours. They still talk. It’s now 7 pm – 3 hours since my work day ended. Yet, I’m still on the clock. "Fuck this" I think. It becomes unbearable. I finally get up and dismiss myself to the bathroom. Any excuse, to get-away from the thick awkwardness of Korean Confucianism and xenophobic, gossiping post menopausal hairy ungroomed, bitter, resentful cunts. Fuck them. In a self-protective pivot of consciousness my mind reels. I tally the score. I calculate in poignant comedic vignettes as to whom the joke is actually on. I have a private snicker. I look into the mirror and remember the true score. A Jack Nicholson smile creeps onto a corner of my mouth. These idiots pay my rent, and give me 5 weeks of paid vacation, annually. I work 25 hours a week and get paid for 40. I have health insurance, a government pension and get a severance package when I decide to finally bail. I think about Manila, where I’ll be in a month with my 19 year old Filipina lolita on a hotel rooftop, poolside, sipping boutique cocktails and getting a tan, while staring at my ladies perfect size C cleavage, knowing that every night of a long 4 day weekend will be a good night, watching those bounce in my executive hotel suite. A room with a view. I’ll be jet-setting to the South Pacific, yet again, and miles away from these awkward Korean fuck-headed-teachers, from my stupid-ass English teaching job, and from moronic barely-monosyllabic-English-speaking-retarded-kimchi-eating-pre-pubescent-bratty-twats, and the working class shithole of a Seoul city village, where I live. So, it looks as though I’m still ahead of the game and by a wide margin. I take my lonely place back at the table. Dinner finally ends. Thank the fucking Lord. We’re leaving. We exit the terrible seafood restaurant. Oh, wait. . . they now want to head for coffee! “Not a chance in hell.” I think. I bail. I wave goodbye to the herd of Korean jackals as they head towards the coffee shop and give one last "Masheeso!" which loosely translates to "delicious". Finally the weight lifted, I exhale and slowly begin walking home. Opening the door to my place, I look around my well-furnished apartment, gaze at the upcoming travel itinerary posted on the refrigerator, uncork a fine bottle of Chilean Malbec recently gifted to me and smile, "How very masheeso 맛있어, indeed."