My wife and I were sitting outside a supermarket enjoying some ice cream. We were waiting for a ride from my Mother in law. We were going to visit her maternal mother, who has just moved in with an aunt. We were sitting around enjoying ourselves. I had tried to play a crane game, but couldn’t win the prize because the cage containing the portable flashlight was too big to fit over the lip of the prize drop. I had given up putting money in the machine and we sat down under a canopy talking.
An elderly woman approached us and looked as if she had something to say. This is usually a bad sign. I’ve been harassed by surprisingly few people in public since I’ve arrived in Korea, but the elderly are occasionally unpredictable. This woman looked as if she had some grudge to bear about us sitting around talking in English.
The woman, in a rambling way, went on to tell a story to my wife about this guy that was taken to America. Some pastor at a church convinced him to sell all his worldly possessions and move to the United States. Then she went on about how this neglectful man abandoned a niece and grandfather in Korea. She claimed that this guy, and she even gave us his name, had abandoned his relatives and they all died because he had stayed in the United States. She kept mentioning details about him, as if I was going to stand up and say, "Oh, yeah, I know him." She then sort of deputized us to go, find out information about him and report back to the "red apartment, over there, where I live."
Whatever grudge she had about Americans might not have been formed in a still fully functioning part of her brain. One of the more enjoyable parts about understanding a situation as it unfolds is when I catch my wife lying. When this woman started asking where I was from, and if I knew the man she was going on about, my wife said I wasn’t from the United States. I played along, mostly because it would spare this woman from getting more upset than she already was. My wife, always the quick thinker, claimed I was Australian, not American, It’s not like this woman had any idea, so I didn’t have to start talking about dingos and surfing to pull off the impersonation.
Eventually the strange woman left us alone, but as she was walking down the street, I saw her yell at another man for entirely no reason at all. She just had to get her aggressions out. I don’t take it personally, as I think she probably had some wires crossed in the head. The last time a crazy old person approached me five years ago, they were drunk and were spitting chicken at me as they screamed in my face, so this was almost a pleasant conversation by comparison.
