{"id":59,"date":"2013-05-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/05\/13\/post-52-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-7-what-to-call-the-boss\/"},"modified":"2013-05-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:00:00","slug":"post-52-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-7-what-to-call-the-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/05\/13\/post-52-one-night-in-april-of-2009-pt-7-what-to-call-the-boss\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-52: One Night in April of 2009 (Pt. 7): What to Call the Boss"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nNOTE:<\/strong> These are my memories of the night I arrived in Korea in 2009.
The memories are vivid, even as I sit here in the spring of 2013, four years later.<\/em>\n<\/div>\n
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\nThis is a follow-up to:
Part I: “A Pig Virus Delays My Arrival”<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and <\/font>Part II: “Into the Wild Neon Yonder”<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and <\/font>
Part III: “Meeting the Boss”<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and <\/font>Part IV: “Meeting New Coworkers”<\/a><\/strong> and<\/font>
Part V: “Hwe-Shik”<\/a><\/strong><\/font> and Part VI: Affable Predecessor<\/font><\/a><\/strong>\n<\/div>\n
\n[Simple synopsis of Part I: In the airport, I find the woman waiting to pick me up]
[Simple synopsis of Part II: Travelling by car from the airport to my new workplace; observations along the way]
[Simple synopsis of Part III: Meeting my new boss; relation of her personal history; departure for the restaurant]
[Simple synopsis of Part IV: Meeting new\u00a0Korean coworkers at my first “hwe-shik”]
[Simple synopsis of Part V: Discussion of “hwe-shik”; its purpose\/importance; subsequent hwe-shik experience]<\/font>
<\/span>[Simple synopsis of Part VI: Meeting my predecessor; <\/font>description of him; amazement at his ability to read Korean<\/font>]<\/font>\n<\/div>\n
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\nPart VII:\u00a0 What to Call the Boss<\/strong><\/font><\/u>
Sitting around the table, I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember many names. I was interviewed by Mr. C some weeks prior, so I knew who he <\/em>was. That night, I didn’t actually <\/span>know who Mrs. Y<\/em> was, though. No one had told me. Knowing the boss’ name seems like an important thing. I needed to know what to call her, after all.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Not so fast. It turned out that “what to call <\/em>her” and “what her name <\/em>is” are entirely different questions in Korea. At the end of this night, which I hope to get to by Part XII, I made the mistake of calling her “Mrs. C”. She got confused at this. She said, “No, I am Mrs. Y; my husband is Mr. C!”
<\/span><\/em>
It may be because of this confusion that, o<\/span>n my second or third day, she handed me a piece of paper with two pieces of information on it: Her phone number was one. The other was a word totally unknown to me, written in pen in neat handwriting. The word was Wonjangnim <\/em><\/strong>[\uc6d0\uc7a5\ub2d8]. She said, “You should call me that”. And that <\/em>was that<\/em>.
<\/span>
Address the Boss by Her Title<\/strong><\/font>
<\/span>Wonjangnim <\/em>was the title of her position. I came to learn that it means something like “Honored Director [of the Hagwon]” or perhaps “Honored Headmaster”. <\/p>\n

This was the term the Korean staff used to address her, in all cases. I halfheartedly appreciated that I wasn’t “being singled out for special treatment” and told to call her something else than what others call her. It took me a long time to realize how unusual it really is for a boss to request that a foreign English teacher use that title to address him\/her. In a way, I should have felt honored for being treated like an equal. I was mostly just confused at the time, though.<\/p>\n

<\/span>At the same time, it was very… awkward for me to address this woman, or any person at all, using a title and only a title. I don’t know if I’d ever hitherto in my life addressed anyone <\/em>by a pure title<\/em> with no name attached at all. It was “Professor Smith”, not just “Professor”; “Pastor Jones”, not just “Pastor”, and so on. Addressing someone with a pure title would be very out of place in the USA in which I grew up; I even feared sounding patronizing. It was even more awkward, I guess, that the honorific is added in the Korean, though I didn’t know any such thing in April of 2009.<\/p>\n

My feelings of awkwardness and discomfort using this title weighed down on me. It took me a while before I actually used this title to directly address her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Titles in Korean Work Life and Social Life<\/strong><\/font>
[Many benefits come from writing these memories four years later. One is that I can say the following, which I could not have done had this been written in May 2009, because I didn’t know much about Korea yet:] <\/font><\/em>
<\/span>
<\/span>Why <\/em>was this woman asking me to call her by this strange-sounding title? Was it personal arrogance on her part? A Canadian who’d been in Korea for some time, whom I told after I met him at the foreigners’ office, seemed to think so. He scoffed that I’d actually been told to use the honorific “nim”.<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>In fact, titles are obligatory among Koreans working together, even when they are on very friendly terms. Addressing another teacher, one says “Kim Teacher” (Kim Sunsengnim<\/em>), or just plain-old “Teacher” (Sunsengnim<\/em>), not just “Kim”, or — God forbid — a given name.<\/p>\n

<\/span>More surprisingly, titles are very common even in purely-social situations. A male addressing an older male friend, for example, will call the older one hyung (\ud615), meaning older-brother. This seems so antiquated — like something you’d hear from the Amish, or something. One would think addressing everyone by title, including friends<\/em>, would a declining practice in the modern world. Not so: Even the youngest of Koreans alive today follow this “addressing by title” custom, religiously. In a classroom in which grades are mixed, a 5th grade girl will call a 6th grade girl un-ni<\/em>, a word meaning older sister. Friends do it, too. It’s quite remarkable.
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This is exactly the kind of thing about which I was in total ignorance on that night in April of 2009. Korean food was another. I’d never even tasted kimchi!<\/em>\u00a0 Soon I would. And my tastebuds have not been the same since. . . . <\/span>\n<\/div>\n

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\n[This is the End of Part VII]<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Next: Part VIII, Part IX<\/font>, and Part X]<\/strong>
[Previous: Part I<\/u><\/a>, Part II<\/u><\/a>, Part III<\/a>, Part IV<\/a>,<\/strong><\/font> Part VI<\/font><\/a>, and Part VI<\/a>]
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NOTE: These are my memories of the night I arrived in Korea in 2009. The memories are vivid, even as I sit here in the spring of 2013, four years later. This is a follow-up to:Part I: “A Pig Virus Delays My Arrival”\u00a0and Part II: “Into the Wild Neon Yonder”\u00a0and Part III: “Meeting the Boss”\u00a0and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}