“She is your friend?”: On being “friends” in Korea

This week at church I met an interesting character. His name is Jo. He is the uncle of my friend, H.W., and has lived in Chicago for the past 30 years, 25 of which was spent working at a steam factory of some kind. Incidentally, his Chicago accent was so thick and strangely mixed with his Korean that I couldn’t tell where he was from until he told me. I mean, really thick Chicago accent.

One of the first questions he asked me was a question of clarification. Indicating H.W., he asked, “She is your friend?” Now, H.W. is a girl around my age and the pastor’s daughter and knows English and so has been quite helpful to me, so the natural awkwardness of this situation would be an implication that we are dating or at least interested in dating. That is, this would be the natural awkwardness in America.

The natural awkwardness here is the difference in the concepts of “friendship” that Americans and Koreans have. In America, a mere acquaintance can be a “friend”, and thus my answer would be “Yes” according to that idea of friendship. In Korea, it takes a little bit more to be friends. First, the people in question must know each other fairly well and must have known each other for a good amount of time. Second, the two must usually be of the same age, otherwise the person is not called friend but rather by the appropriate familial nomenclature for someone their age. Thus, in Korea, I would probably have to call H.W. nuna (older sister) unless she gave me leave to call her chingu (friend). As it stands, I only have one chingu in Korea, and I’m fortunate that he has said we are chingu as he is quite a bit older than me and we’ve known each other for about two months. (Being a foreigner probably helps us bend the rules a bit.)

The problem was, I didn’t know if Jo was asking me in the American sense or the Korean sense, and as H.W. was right there, I was also concerned about possibly embarrassing her. So, I stuttered a bit, looked at H.W. for confirmation and said, along with her, “Uh… yes. Yes, we’re friends.”

Later on, I explained my hesitation to her. She laughed and said she understood my dilemma. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her to clarify her position. After all, she had said, “We’re friends” with me. I just have to find out if we’re Korean friends or American friends…