A difference in expectations

There is a difference in expectations. For example, I was watching the movie Cinderella Man with my friend and it is an excellent, yet prototypical boxing movie. The boxer who was once great has gotten older and he he decided to retire before boxing took too much of his health. He becomes the everyman who works hard to earn enough to live on. He is forced back into the ring to earn enough money for his family. The movie culminates with the boxer having to fight the meanest, dirtiest, and best fighter. It’s a classic David and Goliath story and the outcome was inevitable. Well, for me. While my Korean friend Eunju watched the film she got more and more excited as the fight went into later rounds. At the pivotal moment, I knew that the Cinderella man, the Cinderella man was going to win and he did.

     She looked absolutely shocked and said, “He won?...He didn’t die.”

    

     I found her reaction perplexing because of course he lived. Of course he won. She thought that the man was going to die because that’s how it normally happens. This was a twist ending for her.

 

     Are Korean people more realistic and are Americans ridiculously optimistic? I would like to say yes. Everyone loves underdog stories, but I feel that the underdog hero in Korea is a being that has to fight against far more incredible odds than it’s western counterpart.

 

     One of my favorite Korean expressions is 헝그리 정신, which means spirit of the hungry. It means that when you are running on empty, the will is what keeps a person moving and motivated. Take the story of Lim Chunae. She was a female runner that trained to compete in the 1986 Asian Games, which were held in Seoul. She didn’t have the fancy training facilities that more developed countries had. She had to work and train often by herself and she was so poor that she basically lived on ramen. But there was something that drove her to be the best and she went on to win 3 gold medals in the games.

And Lim Chunae wasn’t the only one. Korea in 1986 was a developing nation and yet that year had the most medals in those Asian games. The athletes did it through sheer will and they suffered through hunger and pain to succeed.

I guess my point is that if I was raised on more realistic fare than the fact that the boxer won would have been shocking to me too.