SchneiderWeb

It has been six months to the day since I arrived in Korea. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point during those six months I crossed the threshold from visitor to resident. Korean society is a dichotomy when it comes to foreigners. Korean parents want their children to learn English, so the public schools and after-school educational centers are filled with teachers who are native English speakers. Yet the culture overall is not accommodating of foreigners. No one at the immigration office speaks English; most foreigners I saw there had a Korean friend to help them navigate the byzantine bureaucracy. Opening a cellular account is more complicated than taking out a mortgage in the States. And what Koreans consider pizza is unrecognizable--a mass of dough and cheese with no tomato sauce and topped with corn and sweet potatoes. I don't know whether I will ever consider Seoul "my city" in the way that I still do New York, even though it's been fo...

I have always believed in going native when visiting, and especially living in, a foreign country, attempting to live like a local as much as possible. Here in Seoul that has meant riding my bike to church, eating Korean food every meal of every day ( every day), and speaking almost passable Korean in short bursts. Most of these measures are born of a desire to fit in and a respect for the culture. Yet one measure I've taken is purely out of self-preservation. More often than not I wear a surgical mask whenever I am outdoors. Seemingly every day the nightly news features warnings of air pollution for the following day. The pollution emanates from China and is a product of the fact that everything in the world is made there. Known in Korean as mesae munji (미세먼지), or microscopic dust--a name that sounds far too cute for a poisonous industrial cocktail--the dust is composed of microscopic particles of metals used in heavy industry--lead, cadmium, nickel, and others I'm probab...