Wagon Train to the East

A year removed from your homeland puts you in a unique position. As a foreigner living in a strange new world, all of the differences between the home you left and the new world are lit up with miniature spotlights. You're able to see things the locals take for granted and wonder why and how their society lives the way it does. I've had plenty such musings this year on subways, metal chopsticks, rudeness, pepper-flavored peppers, and the Hangul alphabet. And all of these insights have been truly helpful to understanding my place in the world.

But this week I realized something was missing from this year of discovery. Yes, an American living in Korea is able to see clearly the little-things of life that a Korean would dismiss as ordinary, because they are the addition of something unfamiliar. But this American would also notice, for the first time, the absence of many things he had simply taken for granted as part of life in America. Taking time to think on this subject this week, I've learned a lot about what it is to be American.

In many ways, my year in Korea has been the most American year of my life.

Allow me to explain.

America is a land founded by those who made a similar leap to mine. They knew only that opportunities existed across the sea that did not exist back home. The Mayflower was a ship full of people who left their native land behind for myriad reasons, the most prevalent of which were either idealistic (Puritans seeking religious freedom), or economic (about half of the passengers had simply taken the offer to ply their trade in the new world and were in fact paid to go to America.) They would, of course, suffer the hardships of an undeveloped land, but most brought their friends and family along for company.

The English teachers who have come to Korea also fall into these two categories, though not as evenly. Many do come with a passion for the teaching itself, making the trip because they have a strong desire to be one of the educators of the system. Many more, however, end up like the barrel-makers aboard the Mayflower: lacking in good opportunities back home, these teachers take an acceptable amount of money to take the one thing they are able to do well and leap-of-faith across the sea.

Of course, the experience of leaving behind the Europe of their time was changing for the very character of American society. Europe had nobility, philosophers, and orchestras. And as Frederick Jackson Turner noted in his Frontier Thesis, the character of the settlers became something new- something that , while keeping the Puritan values of simplicity, devotion, and thriftiness, was notably more violent and hardy, with many of the trappings of native life. Similarly, American English teachers here are often viewed as a rowdy element of America, who occasionally drink too much or pick fights in the pubs. But they learn and adapt every day. They take on the clothing styles, hairstyles, language, foods, and customs of the natives here, many of which would seem unseemly to the civilized world from which they had come (for one, they learn to eat the local foods by taking bites much larger than their mothers would've allowed at the dinner table back home).

Of course the metaphor of leaving Europe for America is an imperfect one, because it ends with the Boston tea party and some war. And because I don't fancy dressing in a Hanbok and dumping crates of Budweiser into Incheon harbor, I'm going to skip my metaphor ahead a few hundred years to when Americans were Americans, and the frontier was no longer the New World, but the West.

The time of Manifest Destiny was a time of opportunity and disappointment. Many in America were finding the America Dream held very little actual promise for them, were they to stay in their cities and work in a factory. The good news was twofold, however; the Homestead Act, promising them land and a place out West- all they had to do was give up whatever lives they had been living and take up the new career of farming; and the Gold Rush, tantalizing the dream-frustrated Americans with the promise of a new fortune and a new life if they'd just give gold mining a try. Once again, as before, Americans jumped at the call. They squeezed their lives and families into covered wagons, bringing only supplies and their now evolved values of hard work, determination, and the dream of riches, and set sail again. They sailed this time across the Great Plains instead of the Atlantic. Many of them had been failed by the system in which they lived, and conversely many had failed at the system. Regardless of the reason, they were off again. Somewhere beyond the Western horizon a new life waited. How could they stay?

Our times are not so different. Many students do finish college to find that their American Dream is not what once was promised. Many have put in their time, work, and money and come away with working degrees only to find that the jobs aren't there. These have been failed by the system. Some finish college and then don't find the work they'd wanted, or have a degree that's insufficient to get them into the promised dream. Sadly, this writer falls into that category, having a degree that's insufficient on its own, without significant effort put into the actual obtaining of a career. Whatever the reason, one day these unfulfilled graduates glimpse an offer they can't refuse. Maybe they see a job advertisement online, maybe they hear a rumor that so-and-so will be moving to Asia to be a teacher. And like the Homesteaders who saw the advertisements tacked on the general store walls, or the would-be miners who heard whispered rumors of prospectors who had struck it rich before, they were off into the sunset.

Trading wooden ships and Conestoga wagons for carry-on bags and 747s may not have the romance of sailing or riding into the unknown. But somewhere in it is a universal truth, and I believe that grain of truth to be something found in Manifest Destiny.

Manifest Destiny was the belief that America not only could spread from New England to the Pacific, but that it should. And not only that it should, but that it must. American spirit was forged in such a unique experience- becoming a civilized nation while still living on the Wild Frontier of the known world- that Americans need that journey as part of their life. That is the reason there is something so alien about seeing a Korean marry his sweetheart and move back in with his parents, who still live with his grandparents after having moved back in themselves decades ago. Manifest destiny dictates not only that Americans feel the need to make the journey, but that they bring something worthwhile with them when they do so. I'll touch on this assertion in next week's blog- that there's an American value worth spreading at any price. But for now, the journey is what's important.

Almost four hundred years ago, my 14^th-great-grandfather spoke to a small, frightened group of people soon to board a flimsy little ship that would be remembered forever. The ship was headed for a world these brave souls had never seen, and they needed his guidance to make the trip. Many generations, many wars, many cities and inventions after the Mayflower made its mythic voyage, after the closing of the last frontier, how could the founding fathers have known that alabaster cities gleaming far away would relentlessly call their descendents West? The spirit of Manifest Destiny didn't die at the Pacific Ocean, as Frederick Jackson Turner thought. It just waited there until Boeing could catch up.

O beautiful, for Patriot dream, that sees beyond the years.

Its been a good week to be American,

Jeff-Teacher