One should never assume they’ve got an
essay figured out until they finish it. I intended for this post to be on what
talking about race with college students around the world is like, but I found myself
writing about the ways that Yonsei University groups foreign students together.
In one sense, this school is a great host, creating a campus that can be easily
navigated with only a minimal Korean. But in other sense, it can feel stifling,
as though there is a “real Korea” kept just outside your reach.
Dining is an excellent example of
this. The different cafeterias and coffee shops can be easily found from the
English signage around campus. Among the options are a Starbucks (and it’s
Samsung-owned clone, Paris Baguette), and a couple of sandwich or burger
places. There is an entire room of the student union devoted to seating for
“The Pizza’s Pasta” a charmingly named Italian eatery. The heavily automated
nature of the cafeteria means that you can order through an English interface,
though all of the cafeteria workers speak enough English to understand you
anyway. It would be completely possible to live at this University and eat
western food every day, drink American coffee on your break, and never speak a
word of Korean. Not only is it possible – it’s easy.
This terrifies me; that in the rush
of classes, drinking, and the inevitable homesickness I will become stuck in
the comfort zone provided by Yonsei. In July, there was an excellent piece in
the New York Times written by Ross Douthat, outlining what he called “The
Global Tribe.” After Brexit and the rise of Trump, our eyes were opened to the
ideologically stagnant, partisan populations that trusted only one another. It’s
not just a mob mentality; it’s a mob lifestyle. But Douthat writes that an
equally close-minded tribe exists, its members plucked from around the world
and brought together in places like the exchange-student program at Yonsei. From
Douthat:
“The people who consider themselves ‘cosmopolitan’
in today’s West… are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference in
similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing
them into the peculiar species that we call ‘global citizens’”
Douthat’s
article has been on mind since I arrived in Seoul. The other students around me
frequently have stints of travel and time abroad, coupled with an outgoing
charm that fits the bill of a classic “global citizen.” Almost every exchange
student is eager to meet one another and make friends, like it’s the first week
of freshman year. And there is a great deal you can learn by meeting other
travelers, as some great interactions here have proven for me. But if you are
both people willing to spend a semester abroad, chances are you have more in
common than what sets you apart. Even if I am truly different than an exchange
student I am with, the places that we socialize and live in program us for a
very westernized experience that will be familiar to me. More Douthat:
“This species is racially diverse (within
limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures –
food, a touch of exotic spirituality… And like any tribal cohort they seek
comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western ‘global
city’ (like each ‘global university’) is increasingly interchangeable, so that
wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.”
Meet
for a coffee? There’s a Starbucks around the corner. Grab a drink? The bar
plays western music or K-Pop, which is disorienting in some senses but remains
friendly to the American ear. These places feature English in their decoration
and their function. The coffee shop in which I wrote most of this piece
features English phrases about luxurious espresso lining the walls, and the
signs warning you not to smoke are in English, not Korean. The landscape of our
time abroad can feel saturated with a bland, globalized flavor.
Is Douthat right to call us a tribe?
I think so, because of the material conditions of our experience. We sleep, eat,
and shit in places that could easily be found in the United States and Douthat
is right to call them interchangeable. The tribe is being created, a group of
educated young people with bright futures, who will return home with stories of
our fun time abroad at Yonsei University. A tribe with shared memories of
partying, studying, and socializing. It’s a cliché to call study-abroad “life
changing,” but I believe it to be true. But I am suspicious of that change, and
who is dictating its terms. Yonsei University has an industrial-level study-abroad
office, and I’ve outlined above how committed this institution is to making
foreign students feel comfortable. This school provides parties, student clubs,
and trips for us. These trips can feel like what Douthat calls “the fun-seeming
bits of foreign culture.” They can be eye-opening, but more often just a
diversion that never truly feels uncomfortable. It would be very easy to hand
over the wheel to Yonsei and allow them to change your life for you. There is a
kind of oppressive generosity here, when an institution is trying so hard to
satisfy you that it prevents you from reaching just what you came for. The desire
to be unsatisfied, scared, and alienated in a foreign land. Simply put, the desire
to grow.
My description makes Yonsei sound
much more diabolical than it really is. The worst crime they’ve committed is
making foreigners feel comfortable. It’s a case of simply being too good of
hosts. But we exchange students are at an impressionable stage of our lives,
freshly arrived at a new place and clinging to any sense of routine we can find
here. Our time in Korea will color how we see the world and ourselves. The
University seduces us with a plateau of westerner friendly establishments and ubiquitous
English language. This place is the Island of the Lotus Eater, where the
narcotic is familiarity; it’s only antidote the pursuit of unfamiliarity.
“Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing.
It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that truly exotic
relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that ‘nothing
human is alien to me’ and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it
finds.”
Be
sure to give Douthat’s article a read, I really haven’t done it justice here- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-cosmopolitanism.html
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