When a foreigner comes to Korea, they soon come to notice that Koreans say “Pali-Pali” A LOT.
Any wild guesses on what Pali-Pali means?
“Pali-Pali” literally means quickly quickly. You can just say “Pali-Pali!” when something needs to be done quickly, for instance, “Do it, Pali-Pali”, “Finish it up, Pali-Pali”, “Eat it up, Pali-Pali”, or even “Fall asleep, Pali-Pali”. By the way, can people fall asleep quickly, when they are told to do so?
Here are a few examples of Koreans’ Pali-Pali behaviors:
We Koreans often put our hands inside a vending machine while waiting for our item to be dispensed, in order to quickly grab things out. Another Pali-Pali behavior is that most Koreans do not want to wait a few seconds until the elevator door automatically closes. So, we press the close button as if we are sending only the dots of morse code or frantically hitting a game console button in a life-or-death game. And this last example will sound nuts to most people, indeed. When we pay by credit card at a restaurant, the restaurant staff signs on behalf of you, by drawing a circle (o) or dash ( — ). I know this is not believable nor acceptable in most cultures.
I am Korean to the bone, and my Pali-Pali behavior ranks second to none.
I often close the door before making sure my hands are inside, and my fingers are jammed. Ouch!
Sometimes, I am too impatient to wait for “instant” glue to set, so I press on it with my finger — usually to immediate regret because the object sticks to my skin. Then, I end up peeling the skin off of my finger tip. Gross!
Anyway, that’s me.
Now, I want to share some recent experiences of mine which made me think about my “Pali-Pali” behaviors.
There is a senior center in my neighborhood. They serve free hot lunches to about two hundred local seniors every weekday. Since last March, they have prepared hot meals for curbside pickup. I have been helping out there twice a week.
As soon as I started working there, I realized that the speed or efficiency of being Pali-Pali is not always good or desired, contrary to what I had believed prior to working there.
The work at the senior center consists of three parts: cooking, packaging, and distributing. The task I do is distribution. I hand over the packaged lunch boxes to the seniors, with two other volunteers.
At first, when a drive-thru car came in, I quickly said, “Hi”, grabbed one of the packages swiftly, handed it over to the senior, and completed the task by shouting “Have a good day” and even tapping the roof of the car twice, as if to say “Please leave Pali-Pali”. Then, I quickly moved on to the next car in line. It took only a few seconds per car.
On the contrary, my co-volunteers acted differently. They started by asking “How are you doing?”, and exchanged a couple of greetings like “Today is a bit cold. Bundle up.”, “This weekend will be gorgeous weather. Enjoy some time outside.” Or, sometimes when some music was playing in a drive-thru car, they asked about what song it was, and so on.
To begin with, I did not understand this kind of “unnecessary and frivolous” small talk, which slowed down all of the distribution. Not long after, however, I learned that the seniors came to the center/ not only to pick up free meals/ but also to meet and talk with people. Probably the latter can be more true for some of them during this pandemic, considering that the interaction with the volunteers would be their only and single daily moment to have a “meaningful” conversation with “real” people. That was my first realization.
Then, there was another moment, which made me change my thoughts on Pali-Pali. The way the cooking team works there looks very slow and inefficient to me, who is the epitome of the Korean’s Pali-Pali culture. They prepare meals by a batch system using ovens and stoves, concurrent to the distribution team giving out the meals. I thought it would be even faster and easier if they completed all the meals before the distribution started. I found out later that they try to make the meals ready as per the speed of distribution, so that they can provide the meals as warm as possible. I learned that the lunch meal is the only hot meal of the day for some seniors. I was solely thinking about completing my task of giving out the meal boxes. Embarrassingly, I gave no thought to anything beyond that, such as how they were going to eat the meal later.
Now, having worked there for about one year, I also do the same thing, like asking, “How are you doing?”, “Do you have any plans for the weekend?”, etc. Also, I try to make eye contact with each of them when I say “Have a good day”, instead of just shouting it in the air like I did before.
Most of the seniors I see there love to engage in small talk with me, and that has led to one of the most significant lessons I have learned during this pandemic, which is Slow is Better than Pali-Pali.
It is just like someone said,
“Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.”
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