I'm not a smart man, but one thing I've learned in my time in Korea - almost three years now, holy crap - is that living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language requires a pretty tremendous degree of trust in your fellow human being. I've never fully appreciated until recently just how much I depend on other people for literally everything. Banking, employment arrangements, housing, taxes, everyday translations, purchasing things, setting up basic household services like phone or WiFi, getting directions, giving directions, and even just the simple task of explaining yourself and your own point of view - you depend on other people not only being patient enough to let you explain yourself but to actually believe you when you do. And that's true no matter where you live, but when you add in the barrier of not even speaking the same language it becomes a never ending circus of nightmares.
You find yourself explaining what you need in your language to a person who perhaps doesn't 100% understand you, and then trusting that person to accurately translate your stupid requests to a third person. Then that third person talks to your helper, who translates back to you, and you repeat the whole process and there is a none percent chance that something doesn't get loss in the cross talk. And you know the whole time that something you're trying to say isn't going through, and you have no idea what but you just accept it anyway. And this goes on and on with everybody acting like you're on temporary loan from a daycare for adult-sized children and you end up signing any piece of paper put in front of you just so you can go home and hide under a table.
Or hey! Maybe you make an actual effort to learn the foreign language and communicate that way? That certainly would save a step, but if you're some kind of idiot, you find yourself living in a country for almost three years and the only thing you can reliably say in Korean is "CAN I HAVE ANOTHER BEER PLEEEEEAAAASE?"
The point is that I think you need to be a trusting person to get along here. You need to be at least mostly sure that the people helping you have your best interests in mind or at the very least lack some suspicious ulterior motive. The alternative is, what? Just drive yourself mad with worry that every time you pay your bills the friendly lady at the bank is gonna steal your social security number even though you don't even know if you have one? Nah, not for me. I've always tried to be a trusting person, bordering on or full-on crossing into the territory of naivete. I figure if I go through life and only one in a hundred people try to screw me over, it's worth it for the other ninety nine people I might not have known if I suspected them from the outset.
And the surprising thing is that that's how it's worked out for me so far. Maybe I've been lucky, but I talk on this blog a lot about how awesome people have been here to me. People in Korea go way out of their way to help me out when I need it, and other than a few misunderstandings everything has gone stunningly smoothly. One of my biggest fears before moving here was of a general inability to do anything or get things done when I needed to, and thanks to that 99% of people I mentioned that fear has never really come to fruition.
That 1% though? When it happens? It does kick you pretty god damn hard. It kicks you until your entire concept of trust in other people gets knocked right out of you for a while. And it doesn't matter how little it happens, only that it happens once, and you're left with one question: Why?
But you do get to choose: do you become paranoid and suspicious of everyone, afraid it may happen again? Or do you dust yourself off and start over again at person number one? I don't know if there's a good answer for you - curious person, worried person, or indifferent person who actually made it all the way to the end - but I know what I'll pick.
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