Saving Face

Any travel book you read on Asia will, without a doubt, mention the notion of ‘saving face’. That is, the idea that it’s better to smile through any negative emotion rather than cause someone to be embarrassed or feel uncomfortable. Saving face has been the bane of my existence since coming to this side of the world.

Yesterday, while shopping in Namdaemun Market (one of the giant market of anything and everything here in Seoul) I asked the female store clerk the price of a large bag of candy to use as prizes for my winter camp students. I asked in Korean, the woman responded in Korean and, while taking a minute to compute what she had just told me, she barked “Seven thousand!” in English and turned around to continue re-organizing things in the stall. Looking around some more, both Kelly and I decided that these bags would be the most bang for our buck and went to purchase. Kelly bought hers first. She handed the male cashier a 10 000 won bill and received 2 500 won change. She was rather confused but accepted it and walked away. I, on the other hand, decided to make a fuss. I asked the price before I gave the man my money and when he said ‘chil chun o bak won’ (7 500 won) I took the calculator to disagree while motioning to the other woman and punching in 7 000.

Granted it was a matter of 500 won (a little more than 50 cents) but it was the principal of the whole thing that got me. The man shrugged okay, and started making change. I felt better about things until he handed me 2 500 won. I again pointed to the other woman and said again that she said 7 000 not 7 500. He then takes out 3 000 won in change and the woman jumps in and says “No, no no, 7 500” as if I’m the foreign idiot who couldn’t compute prices. Absolutely frustrated with the whole thing, I say okay, take my change, force a smile and marched out of the store unknowingly knocking my empty coffee cup on the ground and looking like the rudest foreigner around.

In theory, it was the two at the store who were in the wrong. One told me one price, the other told me a higher price, and I should have been given the lower price in that kind of market situation. At least, in theory. Here, however, the notion of saving face seemed to be much more important than what may be right or wrong.

The reason while the difference of 50 cents really gets my goat goes back to last year in China. All during the year, I regularly spent time asking the teachers I was working with in China if what I was doing in the classroom was satisfactory. I asked if they would prefer if I did something different or take another approach to the lessons. With a smile, they all told me that everything I was doing was fine and the students liked me as their foreign teacher. Come time to collect my final pay and “end of year bonus” from the company (the day before I was schedule to fly out of Shanghai), I found out that this wasn’t quite the story – that in fact the schools weren’t so satisfied with my teaching – and consequently, I received a horrible end of year bonus.

Now granted, the teaching portion wasn’t the whole truth of the bonus and it was more that the company was run by some less than savory characters (who knew that I wasn’t re-signing and leaving the next day and could consequently do whatever they like to my pay) but all of that aside, the predominance of ‘saving face’ rather than a sense of right and wrong has soured my opinion of people more than once and left me as one frustrated foreigner in Asia.