But while many Koreans possess an alert mentality, this is often offset by superstitions, prejudices, conceit, and the lack of initiative and perseverance. They seem to have been slaves to clan or village opinion for so long that they can seldom assert themselves individually. They learn elementary things quickly, but they are prone to run out of steam in the higher reaches. One gets the impression that they have less self-control, that they are undisciplined, both by training and temperament, compared to the Japanese. Unlike the Chinese, they will fight upon slight provocation, which may be another proof of a lack of self-control as well as of manliness. Such things as school strikes against missionaries who have given them long and unselfish service to the full extent of their resources indicate but little sense of gratitude. Even their most friendly foreign teachers admit that almost any of them will cheat at examinations if given the opportunity. Their cruelty, or at least indifference to the suffering of others, is perhaps as much an Oriental as merely a Korean trait. In the village just over the hills from Seoul near which we made our Korean headquarters an old man was found ill and half starved in a straw hut in the outskirts. If the foreign gentry who pass that way almost every day take no notice of him, the villagers evidently asked themselves, why should we? But the first information the foreigners had of the invalid or his condition was when our host happened one day to see him lying all but naked beside a muddy stream, apparently trying to drink, his skin mere parchment stretched tightly over his bones. The American gave the villagers a note to the mission hospital and paid some of them to carry the old man there on an improvised stretcher. Next morning nothing had been done. Called to account, the villagers explained that they had decided not to take him to the hospital, because he would only die soon anyway, and if they buried him themselves it would cost less, they thought, than if the hospital did so and then made the village pay for it.
It seems to be Japanese policy to keep deformity out of sight, but Korean instinct and custom work to the same end. The native teachers of a mission school vociferously objected to admitting a particularly brilliant candidate—because he had only one eye! “If this thing goes on,” one of the teachers raged, “we’ll be nothing but a collection of cripples,” and to illustrate the point he sprang up and humped himself across the floor like a paralytic, with the dramatic effect at which the Koreans are adepts. Whatever his opinion of the Japanese in that respect, no one would accuse the Koreans of having no sense of humor, though they are much more solemn of demeanor than the Chinese. An American resident who carries a massive old watch that once belonged to his grandfather drew it out one day as he was leaving a railway station—whereupon a Korean boy wearing the _jiggy_ of the porter’s calling promptly backed up to the watch and solemnly asked if he should transport it. There is less curiosity, or at least less child- or monkey-like inquisitiveness about the Koreans than their immediate neighbors either to the east or west display, more personal dignity, one feels, and the stranger does not collect a following half as easily as even in Japan. It is true, however, that villagers poke holes in the paper walls of any inn-room housing foreigners, and missionary ladies are obliged to carry a complete curtain-room with them on their travels in the interior. Superstitions are still rife, for all the outside influence, and some of them take quaint forms. As in Haiti, it is a common thing to have a pedestrian dash across the road in front of a moving automobile just as it seems to be upon him, the idea being to get rid of the evil spirit which dogs his heels like his shadow, either by having it crushed beneath the wheels or attaching itself to the motorist. In fact, there are many little suggestions of the black man’s republic of the West Indies about Korea—Napoleon beards, little pipes, thatched market-stalls and the tiny transactions they are willing to make, the custom of sleeping peacefully at the roadside or in the roadway wherever the whim overtakes them, the same swing of the women carrying burdens on their heads, a similar carelessness about exposure of the person.