Personal Essay_cultural experience

It was the first time to be on stage in front of hundreds of foreigners for DANCING. How embarrassed and awkward I would have been when I stood in front of my Filipino friends and teachers wearing a Filipiana dress.

When I was in fifth grade, I had to take a subject called ‘civics.’ It was about Filipino history and culture, and Koreans, who made up a quarter of the student numbers, were no exception. Civics was the most difficult subject for Koreans, for we had to memorize names of heroes such as Emilio Aguinaldo, and Lapu-lapu, the sequence of the Presidents (that I still remember vaguely), and different regions of the country (by the way, the Philippines is composed of 7,107 islands!). For the first semester exams, when I could not understand English at all, I memorized the whole book word by word but still got a failing grade. Knowing the distress of Korean students, most of who took ESL class but had to learn Filipino history and culture with their short English, our considerate civics teacher Mrs. Nora proposed an activity to substitute for our grades. That was performing Filipino folk dance in Linggo ng Wika festival. Linggo ng Wika, or the National Language week, is a very popular cultural event celebrated on the first week of August. The whole school was decorated with posters and artworks that represented the beauty of the Tagalog language, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. At the end of the week, there was a festival where each class had to perform drama, musical, ensemble, or, like my fifth grade class ‘Perseverance’, dance. And there, Korean students had to perform Filipino folk dance, the Polkabal.

For a couple of weeks, we were assigned to another classroom to learn the nine steps of the Polkabal, while the rest of the classs memorized the dates of important events, and the names of islands of the Philippines. Learning the dance was as difficult as studying the subject itself, but soon I figured out that learning the dance steps was not merely an activity to make up my grade. As I could experience the sentiments of Korean traditional agrarian society when I watch Samulnori performance (I was fond of Samulnori back then, too), I could appreciate the exotic but a bit familiar Fillipino sentiments. Also, shopping for a Filipiana dress with puffed sleeves and a Sampaguita (the national flower of the Philippines) hairpin in traditional market was fun.

The audience seemed excited to see Koreans on the stage for the Linggo ng Wika celebration. And I was also excited, though somewhat uncomfortable, to be on the stage. The music flowed from the speaker, and we danced.

I cannot count how much applause and words of praises we received after the performance. What I remember is that I took numerous pictures with my Filipino fellows, as if I were a celebrity, and that I received a score of 90 on civics that semester. 90 was a high enough, because it would have been impossible for me to get that much on a real test, but it was not enough to evaluate the meaningfulness of the experience. The experience made me to get involved in the Filipino sentiments, helped me establish a kind of common denominator with my friends, and encouraged me to be affiliated with the Filipino society more deeply.