March 2006

I was all excited about going to this, until I saw this. Now, I am not so sure.

It’s not that I think such incidents are unique to Korean culture. (Anyone remember Elmo-mania?)

But Seoul has 13 million residents. It can give “when push comes to shove” a whole new meaning.

There aren’t many things that would make me wish I were still in college, but this is one of them.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is offering to take a university student with him on a reporting trip to Africa.

We’ll visit schools, clinics and villages, perhaps chatting with presidents in their villas and Pygmies in the rain forest. The winner will write a Weblog for nytimes.com and prepare a video blog that will be shown on mtvU.

He’s doing this to make the point that students in the United States need a more international education. We grow up so ignorant about the world outside our borders. In an increasingly globalized economy, workers of the future need information about the customs, culture and attitudes of societies other than our own.

In many other countries, students take a “gap year” after graduating from high school to get this kind of unofficial education. It’s a year, I wish I’d taken when I had the time.

Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of such a “gap year” in this country by offering university credit for such experiences. So here’s my proposal. Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. A student might, for example, start off teaching English and studying Latin American history in Ecuador, then learn Chinese intensively in Chengdu, then work at an AIDS clinic in Botswana while reading African literature on the side, and finish up by studying Islamic history in Istanbul. In each place, the students would live with local families.

Since I was a teenager I have wanted to live abroad — to experience a culture and life radically different than the one I was familiar with. In college, I considered studying in Spain, but different circumstances intervened and I never took the opportunity. I also toyed with joining the Peace Corps, but compelled by the need to earn a living, different choices seemed to make more sense, to be “safer.”

As a fledgling reporter, I remember interviewing a university professor who regaled me with tales of bargaining with rug merchants in Ankara and buying beautiful saris in India. I remember thinking wistfully that I’d never have the opportunity to drink tea in Thailand, the way that she had.

As time went on, I consoled myself with the idea that one day, maybe after I retired, I could join the Peace Corps or take an extended trip to live abroad. I’m really grateful that fate has intervened and pulled me out of the path I thought I was on, sending me packing to Asia while I am young enough to appreciate it.

It’s not that I think there’s so much wrong with my own culture that I have to get away from it. I just think that you learn more about your own history and beliefs when you can look at them from the outside. I also expect to learn more about the world and about people, than what I can experience from my own small part of it.

Recently, Jodi over at The Asia Pages has written about her experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Krygyzstan and how it opened her eyes to how narrowly people view cultures other than their own.

Sometimes I’d find myself shocked at what the Kyrgyz didn’t know about the United States and the life I lived there.

What? You know who Mike Tyson is but not Michael Jordan? You’ve never heard of nachos, tacos or enchiladas? You’ve never seen an escalator before? You’ve never been in an airplane?

Eventually I learned. The world may seem to revolve around the United States yet at the same time, it does not. And things that were obvious to me were completely foreign and abstract to some. It came as a shock at first but over time, I got the message: There is a world beyond the US of A.

It’s a lesson that I think too few people ever learn.

*Title of the famous book by Maya Angelou.

Since I’m still here and not there, I haven’t had much to write about. To keep things from getting too stale, I decided to rip off the blogroll some more, posting links to interesting things other people have written. For those of you back in the States who might be curious about what’s going on with the Asia expat scene, here’s a sample:

Eating Asia introduces the rest of the world to the pleasures of kao soi. If you can read this without drooling you are stronger than I am.

Jodi at the Asia Pages takes on Korea’s entrenched devotion to Confucian thought.

Robert at From the Nakdong to the Yalu links to a proposal to aggregate a Korean blogosphere.

Shaun at I Have Seoul reports on his experience with the Korean health system.

Riding Sun’s Gaijinbiker says Japanese bloggers may be surpassing English ones in quantity but not quality.

And, last but not least, I got really excited reading about this in the Chosun Ilbo today.

That should keep you busy.