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Take a Picture, Anger a Korean
03/13/08
Take a Picture, Anger a Korean
This afternoon it started raining, a light, drizzly mist.
Walking from school to my bus stop I passed two kids playing a computer game outside of the stationery shop. Their huge umbrella dwarfted them and I thought the scene was perfect for a picture.
I had to back up again a wall to get the photo. I took one photo and a man in a truck nearby rolled down his window.
"What are you doing?" he asked in Korean.
"Taking a photo," I said sweetly, while taking a second shot.
"Why? Who are you? What are you doing?" he said very angrily, aggressively.
Note that this man (and the woman in the truck next to him) had not told me who he was. He had not identified himself as a parent or anything of the sort. I looked at him and said, "I'm taking a photo. It's funny, because the umbrella is so big."
"You can't take pictures!" He started shaking his fist at me, about eight inches from my face.
"Why?" Before he could answer, I suddenly got very mad.
My schoolyard's wall was 150 feet away. I have walked up and down that same street every school day for nine months. I have never, ever seen another identifiable foreigner in that part of town. Most of the shop owners (including the one at that stationery shop) know who I am. I get free food sometimes, because I am Amanda Teacher.
The Pakistani sock seller knows who I am. Halmonis have watched me scold middle school boys who have yelled at me for free English practice. The ice cream shop woman has watched kids run out of her shop to yell, "Amanda Teacher! I love you!" I've brought students into shops and bought them pencils, practiced English with them.
Just yesterday, the pizza truck guy, Strawberry Guy, and a random old woman who spoke flawless English and lived in the States 25 years ago, and I all had a twenty minute conversation in the middle of the street. In Korean.
The two kids playing video games are first graders at our school. I teach their sisters, brothers, cousins. These children are playing games in public. There was nothing wrong with my photo at all.
Before he could answer, I said, "I am a teacher. I teach there!" I pointed. "I like photography. Every day this year I am taking one photo. This is a nice picture."
As soon as I said I was a teacher, they started to back down a bit. Luckily (and unusually!) I had my name card. It doesn't have my school on it, but it clearly states my name, degree, and graduate university in both Korean and English. Since I have my M. Ed, it shows that I am a "real" teacher and not just some fresh-college graduate here because I couldn't get a job back home. I thrust a name card in his hand (with one hand tucked under the other arm, as I am polite to older Koreans, even when I'm angry) and shot two more frames.
Then I walked away. The woman in the truck got out, went to tattle on my completely legal and appropriate photography to the woman in the stationery shop. I left.
And as I was coming home, I got angrier and angrier. What in the world did I look like I was doing? Who did they think I was? Would I have been bothered were I Korean? Would I have been bothered had I been using a tiny point-and-shoot instead of a DSLR? And who were they? Why were they getting mad at me?
Rest assured: had they identified themselves as the children's parents, I happily would've identified myself, shown them the photos, offered them prints. But as far as I know, these were just two creepy adults watching kids play video games. (I have never, ever seen adults watching their kids at these gaming spots. Never.) Also rest assured that there are many, many photos I have not taken in this country, the homeless woman being only one, because I didn't think they were appropriate. Photos I have wanted to take.
Young children are grabbed by strangers in this country. On the bus, on the subway, on trains. They are picked up by strangers, and this is considered completely fine. Yet I take a photo in public, in a neighborhood where I am (or should be, if they've been paying any attention!) known, where you can't even identify if the children are male or female and some random Koreans get upset about it?
Children Under An Umbrella
6 comments
Second, it's very interesting that knowing Korean has an unpleasant side to it, isn't it? Like if you hadn't known what he was saying, and if you hadn't tried to politely answer his questions, you might not have been bothered as much...
I feel frustrated at times by the constant outsider status foreigners get here... even when we do try to acclimate to the very strange and difficult culture. Maybe those of us who try so hard to understand (learning the language, the national sport, visiting the cultural sites, etc.) are destined to be hurt more when crap like this happens, because it isn't the normal treatment we're used to from the people we know and love in Korea (like all the shopkeepers and such you describe on your walk to/from work)...
Feel better.
http://keenascrusade.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-i-got-beat-korean-style.html
It's getting creepy everywhere. Prejudice and general fear aside, I have to watch myself even more than I used to.
I never talk to kids alone because of the not talking to strangers idiom, but now I feel that it's gotten where people are so spooked about the "lack of control" that I have to catch myself with talking to kids even when their parents are around. It should not be such a scary world.
The weirdest photo drama I've been involved in was at the Chungjangno Street Festival in Gwangju this past fall. They had a few small tents of old photos of downtown Gwangju, and I was taking pictures of these pictures. Then this Korean guy gets a few feet from me with this long-lensed camera and starts taking my picture. I didn't see him until I turned around, and once I did he turned awy. Then I turned back around, looked for a few seconds, took another photo, and when I turned around again he was just taking his camera off me a second time. I gave him a "ya" because we were the only two people in that little tent and it was clear what he was doing. I turned back around, looked at a few other photos, and lined up my camera for another picture, and turned around to find him pointing his camera at me again. When I went up to him he backed away and I chased him, sort of, back to the street.
Weird. And the stuff the Metropolitician wrote was going through my head . . . not b/c I'm obsessed with protecting my likeness, or whatever, or interested in pressing charges . . . just weird how, in cases like this (when I approached the guy he said it was for a university project) and other examples of westerners used for promotional purposes, the laws fly out the window. We all know people who have been put, unknowingly, into advertisements for their hagwon, or who have played the unwitting token foreign endorser in the local festival's advertisements.
As I understand it, in Korea you have to ask permission to take a picture of someone - not that that has ever stopped me before. My take on this is that these people were just busybodies who get off on interfering in peoples lives.
And, I applaud you for having the courage to talk back to a Korean man!
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