Sometimes the cultural divide between American people and Korean people takes me by surprise. I remember working in a teachers' room in my Korean middle school. I had some free time before Christmas and I began to compile a list of family and friends to whom I would send cards. My ball point pen ran out of ink and I continued to write the list with my red teacher's pencil. After a while, my co-teacher Mr. Chang asked me what I was doing. I showed him the list of names and said "I just bought these Korean Christmas cards and I'm making a list of the people that I'll be mailing them to." He looked at the list in shock. I saw the emotion on his face and asked him what the trouble was. Mr. Chang said "why are you writing their names in red? That means that they are dead people". I said "what? I never heard of that". He assured me that in Korea you never ever write a person's name in red. I learned that a red name means that the person is dead. If they are still alive, it's like writing them a death curse.

I learned more about Korean beliefs about a year later. That's when I married by beautiful wife. Just before the wedding, we went to a photo studio and posed for an engagement picture. I tried to get her to smile for the picture, but she that smiling was "bad luck". Later, I tried to get her to smile for our wedding pictures. This time she explained that smiling for a wedding picture would be really bad luck. She said if she smiled our first child would be a girl. I guess I'm too much American. I told her a girl would be OK with me. I always thought that having a girl first was lucky. That way we would have a built-in baby sitter.

My cultural ignorance came to mind when my wife told me about an incident that happened in her sister's life recently. My sister-in-law, Nancy, lost her husband to cancer a few months ago. David Ko was only 48 years old. He was a good husband, a good father and a good Christian. One of the people who attended his funeral was an strange American woman named Linda. She was a worker in Nancy's store and she assumed a closer relationship to Nancy and her family than was appropriate. She gave little gifts to Nancy and made unwanted visits to her house. I am convinced that Linda was just trying to be kind, but the result was just the opposite. No one could figure out why this woman pestered her with visits, letters, and phone calls during a time of grief. My sister-in-law tried to remain patient during these trials, but her patience finally ran out last week. In an act of innocent kindness, Linda visited the grave site of Nancy's husband.

  I assume she wanted to pay respect to the deceased. She made a cross of two chop sticks and stuck the cross in the dirt above grave. The next time Nancy visited the grave site she nearly freaked out! She couldn't figure out who would want to disrespect her husband so much by stabbing a stick into the grave. She got her answer a few days later when Linda dropped by the house uninvited. Linda mentioned that she had visited the grave. Nancy really got angry this time. She yelled at her and threw her out of the house. No one has seen Linda since then. Cultural ignorance by an American person caused great pain for Nancy and great confusion for Linda. With such a cultural gap, I think that it is remarkable that Americans and Koreans get along as well as they do.