ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
My Korea. Kevin O'Rourke
Читать онлайн.Название My Korea
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781898823346
Автор произведения Kevin O'Rourke
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
I’m not too sure what my loss of status is all about, because I think I’ve gained greatly in dignity in the intervening years. Yeats says that men improve with the years. In the case of the great poet, ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum’ is the guiding principle, and when the time comes, I would hope for such treatment myself. At any rate, I now have a nice salt and pepper mop of hair in place of the original nondescript mousy brown. And while I’m not a natty dresser, I’m certainly not the slob I was as a young man. And in addition to a doctorate in Korean literature, and an honoris causa doctorate from NUI in Ireland, I have published more than twenty books, some in prestigious US university presses, I had a poetry column in the Korea Times for many years and subsequently in the Korea Herald, and I travel free on the subway because I’m an honorary citizen of Seoul. Not bad for a sangnom. Of course, none of this does me much good. Only those who know me well give me a title, and to tell the truth I’d prefer if people who know me didn’t use a title. For the rest, I’m harabŏji or ajŏsshi. I have been called much worse. An angry motorcycle policeman once called me a shipp’al shang nomsaekki, a phrase I’d rather not translate, but believe me it’s pretty bad. I don’t even know what my offence was, but I think it involved an illegal U turn at a time when U turns were part of the daily diet. How times change! We once bet our driver $20 he wouldn’t do a figure of eight around the policeman at the center of Kwanghwamun intersection. The nice policeman laughed and waved. If you tried this in the US or Ireland today, you would get a huge fine and maybe even a month in jail.
A little reading poked large holes in my ideas on status. I was shocked, for example, to discover that the monk was sangnom, and that for hundreds of years monks were barred from entering Seoul. It was actually the Japanese who permitted them to come back to the capital. The priest could not reasonably expect to fare much better in status politics, but I never knew one who thought for a moment that he might be sangnom. While priests always seemed to be treated with great courtesy, my reading introduced me to stories where the priest nom was a recurring character and the yasujaengi was very bad news indeed. Chungnom is a common appellation for a monk; and shibunom is not as rare as most priests think. At the end of the nineteenth century when missionaries were banned from entering the country, some of them adopted the guise of mourners. They were clad in white and wore veils over their faces. It worked great until they went to rural villages. The village dogs were not fooled by mourning garb. The butter-cheese smell of a foreign sangnom was unmistakable; the dogs duly went berserk. Not to worry. Clergy, whatever their status, have always managed to move in the higher echelons of society.
Yangban sometimes had surprising ideas about what constituted decorum. When Ch’ae Chaegong, prime minister to Chŏngjo, was holding a meeting with his ministers in the sarang-reception of his house, he was mortified to hear what sounded like someone urinating loudly in the brass chamber pot. Upon investigation he discovered his mother sitting on the pot in the next room, urinating to her heart’s content. ‘You mustn’t do that, mother,’ the prime minister said, ‘when I’m holding a meeting with my ministers.’ To which the redoubtable lady was said to reply, ‘My undercarriage produced a prime minister in its time. Is something as inconsequential as a pee now to be denied?’
The bottom line is that anyone with plenty of money is yangban nowadays. And the foreigner’s sangnom status is really marrowbone talk, only of consequence when he is unknown or when there’s trouble in the air. On the surface, where so much of Korea’s interrelating takes place, the foreigner will usually be treated as yangban unless he is foolish enough to antagonize everyone. Yangban status for a foreigner is a sort of pseudo designation that breaks down under stress. And when it breaks down, look out!
6
THE CULTURAL EXPERIENCE: WHERE TO BEGIN
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.