I find it amusing to think of myself as a foreigner. As someone who doesn't belong, and seemingly never will. I wonder what this can do to your psyche, constantly being called a foreigner until you identify yourself with this.
Identity changes depending on where you are. It makes you take a different point of view in your life. In any given place you could have several different identities, though usually one is the most prominent. It is a strange concept to identify yourself as ‘foreign.’ What does it exactly mean? The OED defines foreign as ‘strange and unfamiliar’ coming from the latin foras, or fortis which literally means ‘outside.’ So being classified as foreign automatically places the stigma of a strange being, something from outside, that you don’t necessarily want inside, an alien. How does having this stigma placed on someone, and never removed, affect the way a person identifies themselves.
I can classify myself as something different depending on where I am. When I am with my niece I am a loving aunt, with my brother I am a sister, and my mother I am a daughter. when I am at school I am a student, a writer, a researcher and an idealist.
When we are called foreign again and again, as we are in Korea, we come to identify ourselves as such, foreigners, and end up calling ourselves the word. This word, for me, has developed somewhat of a negative mean. It has become a dirty word in a sense.
It is only recently that Korea has begun to welcome and embrace different cultures. They prided themselves on being ‘pure’ and un inhabited by these outsiders.. these foreigners. But with a recent influx of military and teaching staff to their country they have had to adapt this attitude.
One of my friends who lives in Korea recently told me that they find being foreign in this county a “strange, horrific and wonderful experience” all rolled into one. She continued to point out that on one hand you get the experience of bringing yourself into a place that hasn’t dealt with you which is awesome, because you get to give them the positive impression you hope to create about these outsiders infiltrating the streets, but on the other hand, its difficult on your psyche to constantly be treated as an outsider, and often ignored, shooed away or blatantly yelled at because your background is different. I suppose coming from a non Asian country where most people have various backgrounds, and we are still of the generation where this is common, that it never would occur to us to identify someone as ‘not the same’ just because they look different. After all, aren’t we all just human beings?
