Engagement Special

Mom, Alysse, Megan, Kalli? Remember how you joked with me before I came to Korea? How you said I'd come back with a wife and a kid?

Well, stop laughing. It's not as funny when it's true.

In my defense though, I was tricked. Turns out you can't trust a seven-year old Korean girl, no matter how innocent she may appear.

I suppose I should explain myself a bit before wedding plans get made. Last Friday our school had a big celebration for the preschoolers who graduated to elementary school. After the graduation ceremony was a "variety show" featuring groups of preschoolers in ridiculous outfits dancing suggestively to selections from the canon of Korean and American pop while foreign teachers danced competently behind them.

Sprinkled between the dance routines were short skits starring both preschoolers and the foreign teachers.

My skit was about helping foreigners. I was told to go onstage, recite a few lines, then repeat what Lily, my 7-year old costar said to me. Easy enough.

The skit opened at an airport. Exhausted from a long flight and alone in a country I knew next to nothing about, I met Lily at the gate, a friendly Korean girl who offered to help me learn the ropes. "I'm so glad to meet someone who speaks English! This is my first time in Korea, and I don't know anything! Can you help me?" She said something in Korean to the audience and agreed.

After a lengthy bout of Korean speaking, she asked me if there was any Korean I wanted to know. Whatever you just said, I thought, but decided to let it wait. "Greetings," I answered. "I want to know greetings."

"When you greet someone in Korean, you say 'Sarang-heyo!'" she said as she hugged me.

Weird. On the plane, I had read in my Korean culture book that 'sarang-heyo' meant 'I love you.' And I certainly wasn't sure I was supposed to hug everyone immediately after meeting them. But then again, I'd also read that Koreans are a very friendly and welcoming people. And anyways, when an adorable girl hugs you, you hug back. "Sarang-heyo!" I said dutifully, as the parents chuckled quietly.

Later, we went to a restaurant and ate some sort of delicious rice dish while Lily said something to the parents. The food was so good I asked Lily how to say "It's delicious" in Korean.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh" she answered, down on one knee with her hands raised, palms up.

I paused. This whole knee thing was strange, I thought. But what did I know? I was a newcomer to a strange and foreign land. Their customs were different from ours. If they got down on one knee to praise the deliciousness of the food, who was I to judge? Maybe it was some sort of legacy from the poverty following the Korean War, kind of like thanking your host for preparing such a delicious, life-sustaining meal.

I could feel the parents watching me. How would I react to this strange new custom? Would I refuse to partake? Would I mess it up? I decided it was better to just follow Lily's example. I got down on my knee and raised my hands, palms up like she showed me.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh!" I said as loudly as I could, beaming at Lily proudly. 

I'd done it, my first cross-cultural learning experience! I had eaten a strange and delicious food, and complimented the chef in her native tongue! Maybe this whole cultural assimilation thing wasn't so hard after all! The audience cheered wildly.

In a flash, it was over. While I was congratulating myself for having successfully navigated a small part of Korean culture, Lily was snapping a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs around my wrist. Before I could even grab my suitcase, Lily dragged me off stage left to the sound of the parents hooting and hollering.

"What was with the handcuffs?" I asked Monica, one of the Korean teachers backstage.

"Do you know what you just said?" she asked, laughing. "You asked her to marry you." 

I'd been duped!

Instead of being about how to help foreigners, the skit was about how to trick them into marrying you! It all made sense now. The too-friendly girl at the airport looking for the first foreigner to step off the plane looking completely and utterly lost. The knowing smiles and laughs from the audience as I greeted her. It was all just an elaborate guise to trick a foreigner and find a husband! And I fell right into her devious little trap!

I'm going to see what I can do to work this out over here. Devon's not too happy about my engagement to a seven-year old student, and I'm already feeling intense pressure to impress Lily's parents.

But if I can't figure this out and break the engagement, Mom and Dad, you might be getting some angry phone calls from a couple of Korean parents wondering where their future son-in-law is. If that happens, just pretend to not speak English and hang up. Go for some random language that nobody speaks, like Korean. That should fool them.