Caring Neighbors

(Neighbors in Kathmandu helping with home construction)

Pawan Mishra once said, “Good neighbors always spy on you to make sure you are doing well.”  In America, many of us have lost that neighborly care and concern, but it is still alive and well in other cultures.

A humorous perspective on this comes from a Ukrainian American friend in Chicago who lived in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood all her life – where every neighbor knew everyone else and kept tabs on them; something she found a bit irritating.  When she was in her 30s, she had purchased a live tree for Christmas one year, but got preoccupied with holiday events and a new boyfriend she was seeing.  Christmas came and went, New Year’s came and went, the Epiphany came and went, and one day in March, she realized that the dead tree really needed to go.  But her neighbors were nosey – a bunch of older Ukrainian ladies who gossiped like “The Real Housewives of Kiev.”  So she borrowed a handsaw and headed up to her apartment to dismember her tree.  She packed the various sawed-off limbs in black garbage bags along with her regular trash and skulked down the three flights of her greystone every couple of nights for a week until all of the garbage bags had been placed into several different dumpsters.

Though this is a bit of an extreme example of neighborly concern, it illustrates something that many of us no longer worry about too much – our neighbors.  Unless you move into a relatively small, tight-knit community development, you likely won’t receive a basket of muffins or a bottle of wine from those who wish to welcome you, or expect to borrow a cup of sugar from them when you are baking.  It is becoming less common to know our neighbors beyond a friendly wave across the yard.

Maybe because of this change in our own society, many people are more critical of South Koreans and their keen sense of what others think of them.  It permeates their society, and caring about what others think is a cornerstone of their collectivist society.  We should be careful to not consider that this is necessarily a bad practice, though it can have unintended negative consequences: an overarching beauty ideal that leads to the highest percentage of cosmetic surgery in the world (with the top ranking US and Brazil both just over 1.2% and 1.4% of their populations respectively, while Korea is closer to 2.2%); very high stress-related issues among students and workers (drinking, depression, lack of bonding time with family and friends); and even suicidal thoughts among some teens who are not admitted into top tier universities.  At the same time, however, there is a sense of rootedness with this kind of community awareness.  You know your people, and you know that people will still take care of you, even if they judge you from time-to-time.

The first month I lived in China, I got sick – a terrible cold that just would not go away.  One morning, after I had called in sick to the school where I worked, I heard banging on my apartment door.  I shuffled to the door with my comforter wrapped around me, and the next thing I knew, there were 4 older Chinese ladies moving through my apartment.  They stripped my bed, beat my pillows, opened the curtains, looked in my fridge, and then put a pot of Chinese medicine on my gas burner.  Although it seemed a bit like the Normandy Invasion, and I could not understand a single word any of them said, I realized that this was a side effect of me being part of their community – they heard I was ill and wanted to take care of me. 

On the flip side, after I was better, I realized that everything I did was noticed by everyone in the school and the girls’ dorm area where my apartment was.  Guards marked my comings and goings for a weekly report to the principal; the dorm mom would tell others if I went for a walk in the sun during the lunchtime “rest” period, which led to people telling me about the evils of the sun; and after sharing with one person the price of a futon that I bought, suddenly everyone started to ask how much money I made.  But I’ll tell you what – I sure kept my fridge clean and did my laundry when everyone could see it to avoid another home invasion.

Caring to some extent about what others think can be a powerful motivator and provide deeper ties to one’s community.  Just don’t let it scare you into discarding a bagged-up Christmas tree like it’s a dead body you are trying to get rid of!