Mr. Kim

Not too long ago, the father of one of my kindergarten students wrote a very kind response to me in one of my weekly progress reports that I deliver for his daughter. He extended a dinner invitation to me and insisted he repay the kindness I had been showing his daughter by taking me out for a meal. It is impolite to refuse, so I said yes and within a few days we had made a plan for him to pick me up from work to go out for dinner.

My first indication that he is very wealthy came when I noticed his spanking new Land Rover roll up outside LCI. It’s an impressive vehicle in any situation, but when you consider that absolutely everyone here drives a domestic car (either a Hyundai, Kia, Samsung, or the like), then the fact the he has a luxury foreign import is all-the-more remarkable. Despite him not knowing the exact English word for it, I think from his description of it that his job is a land developer of sorts. Considering how fast this country is still urbanising and expanding, it’s no surprise. (Note – most of my other students’ wealthy parents are also in residential development or construction in some capacity).

So I hop onto the sensual new leather seats and he asks me if I like sushi. Hell yes. We end up an extremely fancy restaurant in a part of town I had never visited before and my god did we feast! First off, this is the kind of joint where you get seated in a separate room with its own sliding door so that you and your presumably gigantic wallet can dine in complete privacy. Mr. Kim proceeds to tell me that he enjoys large meals and then on comes the onslaught of decadent, extremely high-end sushi that left me just short of orgasm by the end of the meal. He refuses to take any of my money for repayment of the meal, but I am sure that my portion alone was at least 80,000 won.

As for conversation, Mr. Kim’s English is pretty decent, especially considering he has never actually visited an English-speaking nation. (He learned his English while at University in Seoul). He did say, though, that he very much wants to visit Canada and specifically not America which seems to be the inverse of most of the other Koreans I’ve met. (Despite this fact, Mr. Kim claims that most of his countrymen have the same affinity for Canada as he does for reasons that he never fully explained). He said that the main reason he wanted to take me out was to help a foreigner adjust to life in a new land. He himself lived in China studying Chinese literature for a year so he understands the stresses and loneliness associated with living in a foreign culture. Regardless of his reasons, I was certainly glad to have such a courteous (and indeed straight ballin’) host to show me the finer points of my otherwise mundane new town.

A few weeks later, Mr. Kim took my friend Mike and I out for dinner again, this time to a more rural but no less fancy high-end restaurant – this time with traditional Korean fare. Again he refused to take our payment and again he piled on the decadence with the quality of the meal. He has promised to introduce us to all kinds of amazing Korean dishes over the course of the next year including an all-you-can-eat crab festival and a taste of ‘bosintang’ – a special dog-meat soup that both Mike and I have been dying to try. Needless to say, we are both extremely excited. (Note: I debated whether to say ‘howling with excitement’ here or make some other dog-meat pun but I figured I’d refrain from unleashing my entirely offensive side for the more sensitive readers out there).

Despite all this awesomeness, there are still some disconcerting things about the culture here that, as always, come across as entirely normal until you take a second to double-think them. When asked what his wife does for a living, Mr. Kim replied “oh, you know women... mostly cleaning up the house. (laughs). No seriously though, she enjoys baking and things like that. (serious face)” Upon slightly further prompting of whether his wife has ever had a job, he replied a little more sternly that “of course she had a job before marriage but now she is a mother” with an almost inquisitive tone that implied that it would be strange for the situation to be any different. This 1950’s-esque separate spheres mentality is a little jarring when witnessed firsthand, but the odd nonchalance with which it’s presented makes you simply accept it as natural in an eerily mind-numbing manner.

The blatant flaunting of material wealth here is another thing that I am not used to, although perhaps this lack of familiarity is just because I’m out of touch with the bourgeoisie back home as well. As we were driving back to my house, I pointed at a high-end department store called Shinshegae and asked if Mr. Kim ever shopped there. He shook his head slightly and said “no, that place is very expensive and I do not have much money.” Then he looked at us mischievously and cocked his head back in an aggressively loud belly laugh as he put the pedal to the floor of his $70,000 automobile. Mike and I laughed heartily as well at the unabashed pride the man takes in his paycheque. Such joking around about one’s own (extreme) wealth was hilarious to us, but I feel as though back home it would be somewhat of a faux-pas for most people, especially when parties of two separate income-brackets are conversing.

All in all it was a great time and I am quite happy I took him up on his offer. If nothing else, I now have a new friend on this planet and it’s really funny to think of this distinguished man and his fancy car when I look at his daughter picking her nose or pulling her dress up over her 5-year old head each morning.

Oops, no pics again. My B. I’ll try next time.