Posted on: Friday, October 1, 2004
HAWAIIAN STYLE
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By Wade Kilohana Shirkey
Advertiser Staff Writer
Min-Sun Kim thinks intercultural gaffes between people should be delightful — not embarrassing. What makes us different, says the authority on intercultural "miscommunication," also makes us interesting.
And interestingly, it's often how much you talk — or don't — that determines how well we get along across cultures.
Such appreciation of other cultural traits wasn't always as easy for the South Korea native. "When I was young, we all thought North Koreans had red faces and horns — what we learned in school," she said. At age 11, on TV, she made a startling discovery: "Hey, they look like me!"
Later in life, she encountered what many refer to as that "pushy Mainland attitude." "Culturally assertive personalities" would be a more palatable term, she said. That experience sparked an inner need to know more about the way various cultures think, act and communicate.
Teaching in Michigan, the young master's degree candidate was appalled to find students interrupting her before she'd even finished sentences. Someone took the immigrant teacher aside to gently hint that "people didn't think I had so much going on (upstairs)," she said.
Kim was"amazed at how many students missed class (or assignments) because of a grandparent's death!" It was tomfoolery that the students didn't think she'd catch on to.
Her Korean upbringing was hitting Western ways head-on. "I had to change," she said.
So Kim pushed her assertiveness while feeling alienated from what she grew up knowing made a "good Korean girl." But she feared her "inner turmoil" would sabotage her academic program. "Then I heard the term 'culture shock,' " she said.
"Ahhh, that is what it is!" she remembers thinking. The epiphany led to a crucial discovery: "All (these intercultural differences) were very interesting!" It became her life's pursuit.
As an assistant speech professor at UH, after getting her Ph.D. on the Mainland, she found a "world's classroom" of multicultural confusion with misunderstandings between arriving Mainland and local students.
Kim suggested that what these Mainlanders needed was to understand the culture. Instead of fixing the seemingly "minority culture," they needed to "fix their vision of it."
Kim found this mix of Western, Asian and Island ways in Hawai'i "quite refreshing," after six years of Mainland abruptness and "me-ness."
Kim even reveled in the Islands' propensity for kim chee — Mainland roommates had tossed jars of her "putrid cabbage dish" from the refrigerator.
And, on a first date, her husband-to-be from India scored "cultural awareness points" for trying the pungent Korean national dish. "That was an instant forging (between us)," she said. Still intercultural amusements persisted: "Being Indian, he ate it with his fingers."
Later, her husband complained that the odor emanating from a takeout restaurant reminded him of funeral pyres in India. They happened to be walking past a Korean barbecue restaurant.
Her advice when confronting things culturally confusing: "Expect to fail, for it not to work well at first."
Second, take the experience "as an opportunity to learn, especially for Mainlanders, first coming here to live, who not only have to deal with pidgin, new foods and customs — and being accepted — and the fact that here they are perhaps a minority. Hawai'i has a learning curve.
"Those cultural differences," she said, are the spice of life.
"Imagine the world if everyone were the same," she said. "How boring!"
"Asians," she said, "are often portrayed as shy, unassertive, quiet — inscrutable," she said.
Min-Sun Kim
