A Slapping on the Subway

And not just any slapping. A 75 year old woman bitch-slap. Okay, not really a bitch-slap, it was a slap on my arm, but if she were younger, you know she would've done it across my face. 

We're all just standing around chatting it up like normal. There's about five of us, and I'm the only one who looks fair, lets just put it that way. Or as my friends here would so eloquently say, I was the "white person" or "white girl". So, one of my friends turns and starts talking to me. I go for the reply, and I get about one line out when I feel the intense slap to my forearm. My first reaction was like "WTF just happened?". Then I see my friends turning to watch this 75 year old woman creeping back to her seat. Then the woman continues her battle with me by waving her finger in the air and then putting it up to her mouth as to summon my silence. I stand there in shock thinking, "What did I do to offend her? We're all just talking. There's Korean people over there talking and they aren't being slapped!" Actually, I didn't think all those things. I really just stood there in shock and pure embarrassment, while all my friends and all the Korean people on the subway looked at the woman like "no she diiin't!!". 

My friends told me as we were leaving the subway (which thankfully happened to be the next stop), that things like that happen here sometimes because some elderly Koreans don't like people using English. Some people are bitter towards Americans and the role we've played in their society. Some are bitter towards the influence that English is playing in their culture. They don't like to hear it. They don't like people using it. And unknowingly, that day, I represented all of those bitter thoughts to this woman. As much as I considered it really rude to slap a complete stranger and a foreigner, I had to think twice about how I'd feel in her shoes. Here, the older generations rule. The hierarchy goes by age above all else. It's not uncommon for the elder people to behave in manners such as this. They feel it's their duty to inform the young of their wrong-doings. And though it seems universal for older people to shed such light on us young ones, here elderly people just go up to complete strangers who are young, and correct their behavior. 

Obviously, I'm not used to a culture in which the elderly act the same way. I don't have some random grandma lecturing me in public or slapping my legs when they aren't crossed in the US. At the end of the day though, I'm in her country, on her subway, not speaking her language, to people who to her, look like her people. I guess if I were her, maybe I'd have slapped me too. 

Probably not. 

But maybe. 

Not.