hangin' wif mah PEEPS

Not counting the college student population, the city of Walla Walla has only about five Korean residents, at least half of whom work at the teriyaki-jip down the street from my motel. I went over to the resto again this evening and was met by the same Korean waitress. We spoke in Korean the entire time I was there, which was good practice for me, and which is how I discovered how few Koreans there are in these parts. Upon hearing about the dearth of Koreans, I said, "Ah, so you must be learning a lot of English." The waitress said she was learning mostly restaurant-related English. I guess she either doesn't have much time to mix with the townies or, like many first-generation Korean immigrants through the ages, she's more of an insular, hang-with-da-peeps type, keeping with her tribe.

One thing about establishing friendly relations with Koreans who work in or run restaurants is that you end up with free goodies. Tonight, this translated into extra types of kimchi (only one type, a fairly standard cabbage kimchi, is featured on the menu for a whopping $3 per serving, but I got oi-kimchi, ch'onggak-kimchi, and ggakkdugi for free, and for no reason other than that I can speak the language (well, somewhat).*

When I first met the waitress and her opba** yesterday (he's one of the cooks), he told me "Jaju-osaeyo," or "Come often." Tonight, the waitress said, "Kagi-jeonae ddo-osaeyo," or as I might translate it in this context, "Come back before you move on." (I had told her yesterday that I was only in town for two weeks.)

Dinner tonight also included a tall, unasked-for glass of misu-garu, a drink made with a gritty, grainy powder that might remind Americans of some diet drinks or bodybuilders' protein shakes. Not one of my favorite drinks, but I do like it, and appreciated the chance to have a little taste of Korea. I asked the waitress whether her family had brought the powder from Korea, and she said it had been bought, along with a ton of other Korean products, during a run to a Korean market waaaaaay the hell across the state in Seattle. "A five-hour drive," she said, a mite sadly. The family makes the Seattle supply run several times a year, usually before important events like Ch'useok (the Korean harvest festival), an event with which I'll be out of touch this year.

I'll probably visit the resto once or twice more before I leave Walla Walla, and while I'm likely to give the URL for this site to the restaurant staff, I have no idea whether they'll have the time, energy, or motivation to read it with any regularity. All the same, it doesn't hurt to network.

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*A similar phenomenon occurred with the French dudes running the Cordon Bleu academy in the building where I taught in Seoul: once they discovered I spoke fluent French, the world opened up to me and I was told I could come by anytime and take whatever I wanted-- baguettes, various meats, pastries, etc. Some of those guys spoke no Korean at all, and since French isn't a very popular language in Korea in general (English, by contrast, is an academic requirement), the cooks and bakers generally had to get by in Korean society with English. It therefore came as a relief to some of them to find a non-French person with whom they could speak at full speed in their native tongue. My experiences with the Seoul branch of the Cordon Bleu are worth a whole book unto themselves, but I'll stop here.

**Opba (more commonly romanized as oppa; pronounce it "ohp-bah") is the term a Korean woman uses for her older brother; it's also used by women when they're calling out to their boyfriends or husbands.

I had one memorable discussion with a female Korean colleague who found it creepy that Americans would use the same terms of endearment in both parent-child contexts and romantic contexts-- terms like "honey" and "sweetie." I pointed out that the whole opba thing was equally creepy to me. My interlocutor smiled.

Back in undergrad, I had a friend, Paula, who'd spent her junior year in a French-speaking African country (I'd spent my junior year in Fribourg, Switzerland, picking up decidedly German-accented French). She would sometimes make reference to mon mari-- "my husband," so I finally asked her whether she'd gotten married. She laughed and said that many francophone African women say "mon mari" in reference to their boyfriends. I guess that's pretty harmless, as expressions go, when you compare "mon mari" to the way some American boyfriends and husbands say "Who's yer daddy?" to their women --an expression I always mis-hear as "Hoosierdaddy." I can't imagine calling myself "daddy" when talking to my girlfriend.


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