The first cracks in the relationship appeared when Kim’s husband met her parents. He learned enough to formally introduce himself but after they’d approved the marriage things really went downhill. “I thought he understood he was marrying into a Korean family, but sometimes he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s living in Korea.” She went on to explain how he still navigates the Seoul subway system using the English signs and spends his evenings watching American TV shows downloaded from the Internet. “All his friends are foreigners.” she adds, sadly.
Kim is now facing up to the possibility that, despite the college degree, her husband is ‘really dumb’. “He often talks about returning to ‘The States’ and how much better life is there because of the open spaces and the guns. I’m beginning to think he isn’t learning Korean because he thinks he doesn’t have to.” Kim is also realizing that while earning a university degree in Korea involves an entire childhood of studying long hours just to gain entry, not to mention the post-entry studies, initiation ceremonies and the trading of sexual favors with professors to increase grades, a college degree in the United States, with its no-child-left-behind refusal to acknowledge failure, is often awarded mostly for turning up at classes, and sometimes not even that. “Now I know that one-in-five Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, I worry that there’s a one-in-five chance that I married someone who - in Korea - might be classed as mentally retarded and properly hidden away from society afterwards.” she said. “In America, it seems that they celebrate intellectual sub-normalcy, and let them out into society with no way of warning people.”
Kim says that next time she plans to marry a Canadian.
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