Communication and Food

A few weeks ago I befriended San Hyeong. He is a working class man of my age. He drives a flatbed truck 6 days a week for a Hyundai business. He invited me to eat with him and his friend when I was eating alone one night. He is good natured, and physically healthy. He has an English vocabulary of 20-30 words.

Half of his English is in the form of Corporate slogans, or movies lines. "Nothing is impossible... Adidas." "No pain. No Gain." "You can do it." "Just do it." "Okay!" "Jim Carey, YES Man." In addition to San Hyeong I have Korean friends who speak English well, because they are Korean English teachers. Then I have some American friends who are obviously fluent in English.

San Hyeong and I are like a dinner show for the others, because they are amazed we can communicate through gestures, sounds, and English or Korean respectively. Our communication is part game of charades, and part talking to the deaf. I picture explorers talking to Native Americans and wonder if this is what it was like.

Examples of communication, "chicken fingers." Chicken fingers turns out to be chicken feet... chewy but tastes like chicken. "Fish snake," is eel. Chewey but with enough red pepper sauce it tastes fine. "Morning food," is breakfast. "bok bok," was chicken before he learned chicken.

Speaking of food. I was photographing people ice fishing for what I am told is a delicacy. The fish they catch is a 3-5 inch nearly translucent, or "x-ray" as they say, fish. They are eaten alive with hot sauce. Being the fine Koreans they are I was offered and then forced to have one. So I dipped the live fish into hotsauce, chewed and swallowed. Just one more strange food to add to the list with chicken feet, pig intestines, fish-snake, raw crab, and so forth.