12.27.2009

It's beating for you.

Okay. I don't want to get into the details, because it wouldn't be hard for everyone in the world to figure out who and what I was talking about. But let's just say this thing last night was kind of a big deal. Or rather, it was a party held to celebrate a company that's kind of a big deal.

I really wasn't expecting that. JH was so casual about the whole thing, and when I got there, everyone else was as well. What I did know was that, as the evening went on, the entire room started to fill up with some of the most gorgeous young men I've ever seen. Come to find out, their looks play a big role in the work that they do. And the work that they do is pretty fucking cool. Even if it is advertising.

These boys all work together and are around 18-21 years old. So a strange dynamic started to develop that very much reminded me of my job. I guess I kind of went into teacher mode. And the boys started to respond like my students. When I came up out of the elevator from having been on a phone call downstairs, I startled them where they were all in a group smoking outside in the stairwell. They turned around and gasped and grabbed each other's arms. I didn't know what to do other than just give them a strange look, followed by a slight bow, which they all responded to with full ones.

Once back inside, they filed in behind me, and an argument was started with them pushing and shoving each other to come over and sit across from me and the other foreigner. Once they noticed I was watching this, they literally scurried to the other side of a wall. Ridiculous. The owner of the company, who was self-declared "pretty fucking wasted" at that point", saw me sitting there with a strange look on my face and came over to ask what was going on. I pointed to the group of boys who were leaning over the dividing wall, trying to shove each other to the other side. He grabbed three of the unlucky ones standing closest to him by the scruffs of their necks and pushed them down into the booth across from me, where they proceeded to giggle and scream at each other to speak English. I was laughing my ass off.

Later, after they got more comfortable (and drunk), they brought over their prettiest members to introduce themselves to me and then gave me my own personal performance of 2pm's "Heartbeat".

As cute as they were, I spent the majority of the evening talking to the older, more reasonable actual workers of the company, who kept trying to tell me I had to call them "오빠". One in particular was quite nice to talk to, but we got interrupted when he tried to ask the company owner the English word for something, and got dragged off in a headlock to stand in front of a table full of people and shout, "ONE! TWO! THREE! [COMPANY NAME]!" over and over again while the owner blew a whistle. He came back at the end of the night to give me his card before he went though. He won my heart, just a little, when his friend came over to inform me that I must call him 오빠, given that he's a year older, and instead of standing there beaming, he cringed and swatted his friend away and said, "No. We are friends. I don't care about that."

And I got to meet a whole foreign family who have been living here for four years, which is a pretty unique situation. The father is the professor who inspired the company owner to set out in his business pursuits, and the daughter was just slightly younger than me and great to talk to. It's so nice to meet other foreign girls when I get the chance, and I took full advantage of the time to talk and relate. She did eventually get around to asking the "yellow fever" question. I told her I wasn't particularly bitten, that I was pretty open to everything, including Korean guys. She said she loved everything about Korean guys in the sense that they are generally kind and polite and make brilliant friends, but she just can't find them attractive, no matter how hard she's tried. I told her that was quite strange to me, because you would think that over the course of four years, no matter what your tendencies before, you would adapt eventually. She said she wished she could, but she just didn't have it in her.

All in all, a pretty interesting night. I wish I had more than just a few hours to get to talk to all of the people who were there. By the time we left, we were all three "pretty fucking wasted", so we took a cab to Gangnam where I proceeded to turn full-on Korean speaking, including giving the guys working at a bar a load of totally uncalled for attitude in Korean for telling us the last available table was reserved. God. Drunk Liz can get too feisty sometimes. I think they were so amused that I was speaking Korean that they didn't really mind though.

I'm kind of ashamed to say it, too, because I hate it when other people do this to me, but JH would sometimes switch to Korean when she wanted to talk about something she didn't want the foreign guy who was with us to understand. It's not the nicest premise in the world, but I'm still quite pleased with my ability to do so.

Some other nonsense went down once we made it back to Incheon, but nothing too life-altering. JH seemed like she could've gone all night, but I stuck by my Nonsense Rule and caught a taxi home just as the clock turned over on 3 am. I did meet some lovely new foreign guys though, which was refreshing. Somehow these ones were able to not cop any weird attitude and also not regurgitate the same boring I'm-a-foreigner-you're-a-foreigner conversation. Even though one of them didn't believe I was American because he said I sound Russian and/or Scandinavian, which later changed to just "European", which doesn't really make sense, but also isn't the first time I've heard that. I'll be seeing them again soon.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've known some very good looking Asian women. But I've never really seen the appeal. They're built too small, perhaps, to have much sex appeal in my book. But that's probably different for many women, given that, when men are considered, as most men are built the same except for magnitude. It's like zooming in with a video camera; the big African becomes the medium European and then scales down to the more lithe Asian. All stereotypes, of course, but I guess you get the idea. With women it is a little bit different. You cannot zoom in or out proportions.

Sounds like you had a fantastic night. So many young, "gorgeous" men *swoon*ing over you. I feel a bit redundant in an "I'm happy for you" kind of way.

Anonymous said...

wait, you met 2pm?? O_o If you did that's pretty fucking cool! haha

I'm no Picasso said...

Spesh -- I guess I understand (and I certainly respect) other people's personal tastes. I mean, you can't help what you are or are not attracted to, in the end, despite all the philosophical posturing we could do on the subject. I just think that maybe, once you got over here and were surrounded by Korean girls all the time, you might start to see them differently.

The girl last night got on the subject of "masculinity", which always seems to be where the conversations go with foreign girls in this vein. I told her that I certainly acknowledge that Korean men have a very different sense of masculinity, and maybe I've just adjusted to it at warp speed because I work at an all boys school, but the masculinity is definitely there. There is a difference between a "feminine" and a "masculine" man by Korean cultural standards, just as there is in the West -- the standards are just different.

Personally, I find the female Asian body type to be quite beautiful -- sort of graceful. That's entirely affected by my own cultural ideas of beauty, of course. But there you have it.

Anonymous -- Haha no I most certainly did not. This post would be a lot more excited if that were the case, and I doubt very seriously that the members of 2pm would act all goosey about coming over and speaking English to the foreign girl. They were ordinary guys who just happened to be a cut above, physically, because of their visible performance work for this company that's quite famous.

They just performed the "Heartbeat" song and dance for me after getting a bit plastered.

Kali said...

How exciting! I'm happy you're getting yourself into situations that don't sound as irritating for you :] (like being lugged around all night in your long ago previous post)