The other week, I listened to a rebroadcast episode of This American Life called “Americans in Paris.” It opens with humorist and author David Sedaris chatting with host Ira Glass outside of the Louvre…..which David has never visited despite having lived in Paris for two years.

So why is David Sedaris in Paris in the first place? Well, for one reason his boyfriend Hugh is there. But Ira also comes up with an elegant explanation of why David stays in Paris despite the daily humiliations that come with living in another country and trying to speak a foreign language. Ira suspects that once David gained enough fame as an author in America, he needed something big to balance it out.  And David agrees:

A foreigner—the lowest life form, according to David’s experience of it. But he’s just talking about France, right?Well….yes and no. Being a foreigner in Korea is definitely different from being a foreigner in France, but there’s something about David’s experience that really resonated with me. I would describe being a foreigner in Korea like this: in a lot of ways you are privileged, and you definitely stick out unless you happen to be Korean-American; at the same time, however, no one seems to really care.TL;DR: You’re special, but no one’s treating you that way. Let’s break this down in a few different categories.Work Life
When it comes to teaching in Korea, English speakers are in demand, and we get a lot of perks as a result. Housing, pay, airfare, and we get to breeze in and out of the country–here for a year or two, and then we’re gone. Not to mention that if we do break our contracts and decide to leave because of a better offer or because (God forbid) we just can’t take it anymore, there isn’t really all that much that employers can do about it. 

But just because we’re in demand, that doesn’t mean that we’re treated like royalty. Maybe some would even go so far to say that we’re treated with suspicion (like we have to prove ourselves), but in my experience, we’re just held to the same expectations as everyone else–and the expectations are high. We have to go through training and do mock teaching. We have to be fun teachers and serious teachers. We have to please the students, the parents, our coworkers and director, and the company’s headquarters, and to do all four at once is nearly impossible. You know that ancient killing technique where they would tie each limb to a horse and get them all to run in different directions? On the worst days it’s a little bit like that.

Love (or should I say lust) Life
I usually have a good sense of when I can pass as a non-foreigner and when I can’t, and in my past experiences, sticking out and getting a lot of male attention has gone hand in hand. In France, I’d get asked for directions and I’d get no more or less male attention than I did in America. In Morocco, I stuck out like a sore thumb, and I wouldn’t be able to walk 20 minutes to school without an audible comment from EVERY SINGLE male I passed on the street. That is not an exaggeration.

BUT. And this is a big but—I’d only experienced Europe vs. the Middle East, and Asia is a whole different story. I’ve never gotten so little attention from men on the street as I have in Korea. All of the reasons for this merit an entire article in itself, but one of the easy explanations is that Korea is a culture in which you date people you know or that someone you know knows; it’s not a pick-up-a-random-cute-stranger culture. The meet-cutes don’t go beyond the Kdramas. This is the case not only for daily life, but also for night life. As my blunt (Baltimorian) surgeon friend said to me as we were making plans to hang out in Seoul: “Asia nightclubs are so different. None of that US macho douchebag shit.” As I later said in a Facebook status: “In America and Europe guys at night clubs try to pick me up; here they try to have dance competitions with me.” In Korea, a night club really can be a place where people are just there for the experience of drinking and dancing to music. 

Daily Life
Being an expat automatically makes you special in a certain way. Your friends and family think you’re either super cool, crazy, or a free spirit. You get to live in another country for a significant period of time, which is not something that all that many people can claim to have done. You’re in this weird liminal state where you can forget for a moment that you’re eventually going to need to get a “real” job and get on with your “real” life. And then there’s this thing about being an expat, where you can make other expat friends really easily. Though I’m not one to try to befriend a random stranger just because we look the same, to do that here is at least 50% less weird than in the US. Maybe even 70-90% less weird depending on who you ask.

Then again, there are some days when you think Korea is engineered to make your life difficult. Trying to do things in another language is by de facto difficult, which then makes things like laundry, rice cookers, internet routers, directions, shopping, banking, and every normal thing that you do a potentially stressful experience. You get so sick of asking people for help that you just try things and end up messing things up for awhile. Confession time.

I have….
– ridden the completely wrong bus line all the way to the end (I really thought things would start looking familiar) very late at night, and it was such a hopeless situation that the bus driver took pity on me and found a university student to drive me in her personal car back to my hotel
– tried to transfer money to pay a phone bill and typed in the wrong bank code; luckily the money didn’t transfer instead of transferring to a random person’s bank account
– made some really sticky rice when I accidentally put my rice cooker on the pressure cooker setting…actually I’m not even entire sure that’s what I did, but it was taking so long that I fearfully unplugged the machine to stop it
– almost paid $50 for tacos instead of $5

I’ll stop there.

Expat life is exciting and fun, but the dark side of that is that it’s sometimes just plain difficult, and there are opportunities for small humiliations on a daily basis.But let’s go back to David Sedaris for a second because there’s one more thing he says that’s interesting, and I think it’s important.

Despite the difficulties and despite the daily humiliations, there’s something about life not being easy and something about life not being just about you that’s extremely compelling. In the US I sometimes fell into self-centered thinking–how could I get into grad school? What if I didn’t? What did these people think of me? Why wasn’t I in a better relationship? Why hadn’t I figured my life out? It was this depressive cycle that was just about me me me. And it was tiring and destructive.Living in another place, it’s right there in your face that there is so much to the world beyond you. Whole countries. Whole mini-universes. That previously (and maybe still) have nothing to do with you. And the world throws you into survival mode; you must struggle, and there’s something immensely satisfying in that. To have to work for your daily comforts. To have to work to build and maintain a support network. To have to deal with crazy things and to have to be ready for anything, anytime, out of nowhere.It keeps you on edge; it makes you feel, in a certain way, more alive. My theory is that’s the one thing people who come to Korea have in common. Yes, some people want a job that will help them pay off their student loans. Yes, some people want a way to get paid while they experience a little more of the world. Yes, some other people do it because they want these things and they’re dedicated to teaching as a long-term career goal. But I think deep down, no matter our primary and secondary motivations, all of us want to feel a little more alive.

Check out more of Hannah’s experience in Korea here.