norumok, south korea | What should it matter if you shower once a week and I shower once a day? Or if you peel the skin off your produce and I eat it with the skin on? Or if you believe Jesus died for our sins and I don’t? At least, this is what I hoped my new host family would think when I first heard the news that I, a Los Angeles Jew on a Fulbright Scholarship, would spend the next 10 months with a Methodist minister and his family in South Korea.
The Lees and I lived together in a narrow bungalow, just a few paces away from a one-room red brick church with a red neon cross that buzzed its siren song atop the crest of a tiny hill. The fact that our adjacent house boasted only one bathroom for six people bred more controversy than our religions. Luckily for me, our life together was a tale of compromise and compassion.
Twice a day, somewhere among vast plots of ginseng fields in a little house teetering on top of a tiny cliff, you could find my host family and me sitting down to eat. My host dad would bow his head in silence and before he had raised it again, his three sons had already consumed half of the fattiest or saltiest offerings on the table. Host mom was still puttering at the stove and hadn’t yet sat down to eat.
I was the white girl at the other end of the table, dropping food anywhere but in my mouth. There was usually no conversation save the cows mooing outside until my host mom finally sat down next to me and we ate to the strains of “Eat this, why aren’t you eating that, come back, you didn’t finish this.”
Long after the boys made their dish-clattering escape, the women cleared the table and prepared the tea and fruit. Over tea, my host mom and I gossiped despite our language barrier and my host dad tried in vain to bring the conversation around to business or the local agriculture. Once our routine had been established, religion was not discussed, but there was a period of adjustment.
Korean cultural norms dictate that abstaining from public religious discussions is as taboo as participating in them in Los Angeles. So it was just moments after learning my name that my host dad asked me, “You are Christian?” While he awaited a confirmation nod, I awkwardly squinted and shrugged my shoulders. In my pidgin Korean I eked out, “I am Jew. Is that OK?”
Lee’s reaction was coincidentally in a language all Jews understand: “Yeah, Jew is OK. Let’s eat dinner!”
His words immediately put me at ease. I never had to worry that my Sunday morning enthusiasm would invite pressure to convert and soon I was a biweekly regular in the pews.
In Korean Methodist farming society, the sense of community was overwhelming. The average age of the congregation was about 80, and on every walk I took along the country roads that frame our area I got bear hugs and double-fisted handshakes from each hunched, shriveled church-member of unknown sex I met.
In church, they often shared bemused looks as I stumbled through the Korean hymns set to Old English tunes. The instant after my host mom played the “amen” bars of the last hymn on the piano, the boys raced back to their cartoons in the bungalow and I soaked up more bear hugs and handshakes.
However, were these same church-members to learn that I am Jewish, I wonder if they would have welcomed me with such unqualified warmth.
As it is, my gracious acceptance into the pastor’s family was partly based on their deeper bias against Muslims. I represented, it would seem, the lesser of two evils. Over the course of four taxing years, the Lee family endured heat and hurled rocks as missionaries in Bahrain. To hear Lee grimly put it, “My God told me to go to Bahrain. Then my God told me to leave.’
He resented Muslim extremism, especially the brand reserved for his family while they lived as a distinct minority in the Middle East. It was his bitterness against Muslims and not his support for Jews that pushed his politics into a staunchly pro-Israel camp.
As for his religious philosophy, Lee tended to focus on matters of property. An avid reader of corporate motivational books, he believed that life is a business and he preached accordingly.
Through the story of Jacob and Esau, Lee advised his ancient flock of cucumber farmers to separate from one another when they accumulate vast fortunes, in order to avoid any tension borne of envy. Therefore the stereotype that Jews like money, of which I half-heartedly tried to disabuse him, was for Lee, a plus.
All my life at temple, at school and at home, I also judged people based on what they said, how they said it and what they wore and then I cultivated relationships accordingly. I relied on language as my guide to the cultural norms that shaped my every action.
In Korea, I was dropped into this context-free zone, culturally and literally illiterate and I had to wean myself off of my language dependence. In fact, the language barrier, once my greatest fear, became my strongest ally. Strapped to our bungling and limited language skills, the Lees and I were forced to engage in a dialogue of actions.
There is a huge space between the pastor and me that was never bridged, but rather than engage in a doubtless misunderstood shouting match from opposite sides of the gap, we simply scaled the lip and met across the kitchen table for tea after church.
Over our post-service snack, Lee and I discussed the most innocuous and easily translatable aspects of the Old Testament, never veering toward the murky terrain just beyond Deuteronomy’s border. Through these stunted and uninspiring chats, I felt the full weight of ritual’s value. Our differences set us apart, but it was our mutual willingness to meet somewhere beyond our divide and participate in a common experience that made our relationship all the more intimate. With a little work and a lot of food the Lees and I found the great expanse of heaven, right inside our tiny house.