The one about mistakes

Here is today's email from the department I work in:

Dear teachers,

At first, I want to apologize to you about contract that you signed. I made a mistake again. Before as I know we have to get a signature from president, but it has been changed from this year. We need to get a signature from the chairman of the board. And Chairman said he want to get a contract in Korean, too.

So I want you to sign 4 contract. 2 - English version, 2 - Korean version After I get a signature from the chairman, I will give you yours. Second, you signed the contract before, we will destroy. But if you want to destroy, you could bring. We have your contract that you already signed before. Again, I am really sorry for this inconvenience. I will try to be more professional. I hope see you soon in the Lounge. Have a lovely weekend.

Sincerely,

[name withheld]

Our contract period begins on March 1st every year... every single year, the same date (our lowly status as faux-assistant profs makes us ineligible for multiple-year contracts). We are notified in mid-December if we are not going to be offered a new contract for the coming year. Those who are going to be offered a contract are not told anything one way or the other. I suppose it works, but what if they make a mistake... "again" ?

Since we are just now getting our contracts, what was that "contract" I took to the immigration office to get my visa a month or so ago? Hurried explanation from the office: that was just a generic contract to show the government. Great. Being a foreigner in a strange land and deceiving the government doesn't instill much confidence in me, but what if that's why they do it? Keep the foreigners off their balance. Make sure they're in a constant state of borderline confusion. And who signs what? Shouldn't that be known by the people who are drawing these papers up? Which contract is the legal one, the English or the Korean? My first contract here a few years ago, I discovered a discrepancy between the English and the Korean versions (which they fixed in favor of the English version).

When you come to Korea, there is a period, a grace period, I suppose, where the newbie expat is learning so much that he/she lets a lot of stuff slide to focus on basic survival skills. After the expat gets her/his feet solidly on the ground and is used to the landscape, then the bizarro world of Korea becomes the elephant in the room we kind of felt before but never looked at too closely. We complain about the nutty and incongruous behavior here, but then we learn that nobody likes to hear us complain, not even other complaining expats! And complaining does absolutely no good.

So we live with it. We live with the haphazard, slapdash way they do everything, from legal contracts and immigration law to painting the rusted out aluminum siding on the general store. We live (and sometimes die) with the reckless and irresponsible mania that passes for driving here. We tolerate the constant noise. We learn to ignore the thousands of children over the years who point at us on the sidewalk and scream "America person!" in Korean and run to their mothers' sides.

I'm not ranting about this email specifically. This email is simply another manifestation in a long string demonstrating what a fish out of water most of us expats are in this land. We were raised to try, try as best we can, to get and keep our ducks in a line, plan ahead so as not to make someone else's life a living hell for no reason, to drive politely and safely, to lower our voices in public places, to not stare at people who look different and certainly not yell out and point. (It's not polite to point, remember?)

Fourteen years of this, and what have I learned? I guess it's patience. Without patience, someone would have died by now.