Teacher

This was not long after I had joined the company, still less than a year in. I was on a work call with someone at a provincial office of education. We finished the usual business and hung up, but something odd lingered afterward. It was the way he had addressed me: he called me seonsaengnim, “teacher.” He wasn’t under the illusion that I was actually a schoolteacher, and it wasn’t simply because he worked for an education office. He probably couldn’t find a title that felt comfortable and fell back on that, the way I might call the owner of a neighborhood restaurant sajangnim, “boss.” If I had at least been a daeri or a juim, he could have used my rank and said “Manager Kim” without a second thought. But because I was still at the awkward sawon level, where rank titles feel clumsy, honorifics got messy.

Textbooks for learners of Korean will never really teach the habits native speakers pick up in daily life. Seonsaengnim and sajangnim belong to that layer. At your regular diner you order from imo, “auntie,” even though she’s no relative. Fans of girl groups call themselves samchon, “uncle,” with no blood tie at all. Saying wife in English feels natural when you mean your spouse, while people who literally call their husbands “my husband” in English conversation are much rarer.

Scenes that feel completely ordinary to us must look pretty funny from the outside. That thought struck me all at once.