A Gyopo In Korea: Not Meeting My Housemate

I’m Dylan, a 3rd generation Korean-American, and I’ll be living in Seoul for three months. In that time, I hope to improve my near non-existent Korean skills and experience the culture that I’ve been removed from. In this series, I’ll be detailing those experiences. If you’re not caught up, you can catch the other chapters here.

I have been living with my housemate for nearly four days so far and we have not seen each other once. Quoth my friends over text, “Bro, how does that even happen?” Here goes.

It’s a sharehouse, but one with only two bedrooms and a kitchen. Thus, she is the only other person living there. When I moved in, she was nowhere to be seen. The sharehouse manager said that she was out on holiday. I presume she was visiting her hometown for Seollal, the Lunar New Year, since the other thing he told me about her was that she was Korean despite the sharehouse being an international one.

I’m not gonna lie; despite me writing my first article about getting over fears when it comes to language barriers, I was scared to meet her. I still am, actually. Though, I suppose that language isn’t the full reason. What if she doesn’t like me? What if we don’t get along? What if she steals my things and tries to extort me for money? These were the kinds of thoughts running through my mind.

I thought about going out to greet her in the common area when she came home that first night, but I decided against it for a multitude of reasons. I had just showered, but I was laying down in my bed and my hair had dried just enough to lock it into an incredibly oblong blob of a bedhead, and my face was all red, having just exfoliated it. Moreover, it was past midnight, and I could hear her lugging her luggage into the house. I figured she wanted to get to sleep as soon as possible. But I didn’t want to make my presence known. What if she would think I was avoiding her? Thankfully, I had left the light on in the common area, which made it so that when I stealthily got up out of bed and switched off my light, she didn’t notice it going out.

After that, I hoped that I would meet her naturally. Like that I’d come home and she’d be sitting at the kitchen table and we’d greet each other. But for the first couple of days, I’d be asleep by the time she came home, and I’d be out of the house before she left her room in the morning.

It seems, though, that she’s nervous, or shy, about meeting me as well. The last couple of days, we’d be in the house at around the same time. But she would never come out into the kitchen at the same time as me. It felt as if she were waiting for me to be in my room before she would leave hers to wash up in the bathroom or do something in the kitchen.

Mom says that it’s probably a very awkward situation for her. She may not be used to sharing a house with a guy (right, I’m a guy, I forgot to mention) if she never had any brothers, and even if she had, she doesn’t know me at all. “So be cautious,” Mom told me, “and respect her space. If you just do your own thing, and she does hers, it’ll make things a lot easier for her.”

We’ll meet eventually, right? She keeps the common areas—the kitchen, the bathroom—very tidy, and I assume we’ll have to coordinate a couple of chores to keep things clean. I also noticed that after every time she took a shower, she would prop my bathroom slippers up against the wall along with hers so that they would dry quicker, since the entire bathroom floor becomes wet when one showers because of how it was designed. In return, I took out all the trash from the bathroom and common area.

I hope that we can become friends, or be friendly at the very least. It would also be of great help to my Korean learning. My mom suggested that I put a sticky note on the kitchen table when next I leave in the morning, introducing myself and saying hi. I suppose I could write that in Korean. I think I’ll do that if we don’t meet each other tonight.