THE JOYS OF BANKING

Part I: OPENING AN ACCOUNT

My second day in Korea I had to go with my boss’s Korean wife to the bank to open a bank account. I had to go on my second day because it was Friday and I was at home that day. Banks are closed on weekends and are only open Monday-Friday from 9:30 – 4:30. I leave for work at 7:00 and come home at 5:30 p.m., and there’s no bank at work.

I had three choices in banks. This is not because there are only three banks in Korea or only three banks in my neighborhood even. It’s because according to my employee handbook, only 3 banks could arrange automatic payment of my apartment’s monthly maintenance fee. I didn’t ask questions about this at the time because I was fresh off the boat and didn’t feel it was my place to ask.

I chose Hanmi bank because it was the closest to my apartment. It took me months to learn enough Korean to know that “HanMi” means “KorAm”, which is an abbreviation for Korean-American bank. Despite the name, the staff inside speaks almost no English, so my boss’s wife had to do all the translating for me. She even had to write my address for me because I didn’t know how to write it in Korean. With apologies to my professors at Penn, I have to say I had more empathy in that moment for illiterate people than in a whole semester of adult literacy classes.

There are two things I recall that lifted my spirits that day. One, I was able to read a Korean name on the teller’s business card, and my boss’s wife was impressed that I could already read that much. Two, to thank me for opening a bank account, the bank gave me a box of Ziploc bags (resealable plastic bags for storage). Many people already know that when I lived in Ukraine and Moldova I not only brought Ziploc bags from home, I washed and reused them because they were so rare and precious. To live in a land where whole boxes of them are given away for free by a bank to thank a customer for coming in was truly to be in the land of milk and honey.

PART II: DAILY ROUTINES

Although I needed help to open a bank account, surprisingly it didn’t take me long to figure out other aspects of banking in Korea. I’m sure it helped that the ATM machines always have an option to use English commands and that my colleagues could explain other things to me. Some things I’ve found that are unique to Korea (compared to other places I’ve lived):

*I have a “passbook” with an electronic record of my account balance. I learned how to feed it into the machine to get a printout of my withdrawals and automatic transfers. I also learned that the computer even “knows” when a passbook is at the end of the page.

*ATM withdrawal fees are unavoidable. Even if I take money out of my own bank account, I get charged 600 won (about 60 cents). If I go to a different bank to withdraw money from that account, I get charged 1000 won (about 1 dollar).

*Goods and services can be purchased through bank transfer rather than by cash or credit card. For example, when I buy plane tickets, my travel agent gives me a name and account number to transfer the money to. I go to the ATM and select his bank name, type his account number, confirm the name on the account (which he sent me in an email in Korean letters), and enter the amount.

*I haven’t had direct experience with this, but I’ve been told by colleagues that Korean ATMs do not work 24 hours a day. It can be hard to get money late at night because many of the machines are closed. Furthermore, a person who uses a Korean ATM card in the States can only use that ATM card during Korean banking hours.

PART III: THE DAY THINGS GOT UGLY

One other major banking task is wiring money home to my U.S. bank account so that my my mother can pay all of my American bills (e.g. the loans for the education that allows me to work in Korea as I do). Because other foreigners have similar needs and because of the banking and working hours I’ve already described, the company has arranged a monthly “Bank Day” for employees.

I should specify here that all though it’s called “Bank Day”, it’s not a whole day off from work. It’s not even a morning or an afternoon off. We still leave for work at 7:00 a.m. We teach for two hours, then about an hour later we take the 25-minute bus ride into Bundang, the neighborhood where we live. We have about an hour and a 15 minutes to do our banking grab some lunch, and get on the bus back to work for our afternoon consultations and classes which start about half an hour after we arrive. (Our students’ elective classes are cancelled and they get a special lecture during this time.)

As you can imagine, it’s a very hectic, tight, and therefore stressful schedule to begin with. It’s even worse if you teach only morning and afternoon classes and no electives regularly; you don’t get out of teaching a class, you just lose two hours of prep time. But I know how considerate the company is to give us that time at all so I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Anyway, this was my third banking day and my second experience transferring money from Hanmi Bank. (I did another transfer before from Woori Bank, which Samsung uses for all of its expense reimbursements such as my travel and shipping allowance). I knew the wire transfers were special procedures that usually take a while, but I wasn’t expecting any more trouble than usual.

My colleague Connie was with me. She is a fellow Penn grad (two years after me) and is a Korean Canadian. That is, she grew up in Canada but her heritage is Korean and she is fluent in the language. She lives in my neighborhood and banks at Hanmi also.

Everything went fine at Hanmi bank until they ran my passport. They asked me to wait a while. Then they told Connie that they needed proof of my employment in order to transfer the money. I happened to have my pay stub with me and showed it to them; apparently sometimes in other banks that’s enough. But this time it wasn’t. I flung my Alien Registration card and a phone list on the desk. Still this wasn’t enough; they needed a letter from Samsung verifying my employment. I knew I couldn’t just come back the next day with the document; I had only today, this moment, to be able to get that money home. I said in my best angry English, “this has never been a problem before. You can’t change the rules like this on me. My family is waiting for the money.” It didn’t matter to me if they understood my English or not; what mattered was to make them understand that I was angry, and to let them know I was capable of producing sentences with more than one or two words in them.

According to Connie, the bank manager said this was “new government policy” that had come down two weeks before and that all banks were enforcing this policy. She was also told that Hanmi is merging with Citibank and that could also account for some of the problems. I asked if banks were required to send notices out about policy changes and she said, “This is Korea, they don’t have to do that.” Finally, we tried calling Stephanie, or manager/miracle worker. No answer on her cell. We called Laura, a colleague who stayed behind at the office, and had her track down Stephanie. We managed that, and Stephanie told the manager she would fax out the documents in the afternoon. Satisfied, the bank agreed to process the transaction.

Connie left when it was clear that I could handle the rest of the transfer on my own; it was already after 12 and we both needed lunch. I said I would meet her at Subway sandwich shop and gave her money to order for me. I was finished 5 minutes after she left. I mustered my best ironic Korean to say “see you next month” (ee warl popshida) and half ran, half walked to the sandwich shop. My only joy at that point besides getting out of the bank was the joy of finding my cell phone useful for the first time, when Connie called to ask what kind of bread I wanted my sandwich on.

At Subway I met Connie. We got our food and walked to the bus stop. We sat outside and enjoyed our lunch. I started polling people as they came back about whether they had had similar problems with their banks. No one had. It was literally just my luck. (Though I found out later that another employee had similar troubles at an Woori bank in Yongin.)

To top off the day, about 5 minutes before we were to get on the bus I decided to sort out my purse and to do a routine “passport check”, i.e. to make sure it was really there and hadn’t gotten lost somewhere. Alas, it wasn’t in its usual storage place. I started looking through the papers shoved in my purse but couldn’t find it.

Thoughts started racing in fragments through my mind: Passport isn’t here. Last time I saw passport was at the bank. Passport must be at bank. Can’t go to bank now or I miss the bus. I am going to Taiwan in a few weeks; I can’t lose my passport now. Must see if the bank has the passport and then take a taxi to the bank and then take the taxi to work. Might still make it in time to work.

Fortunately, I had the cell phone, the business card of the bank manager with the phone number, and the good sense to use both. I started calling the bank on my cell; while the phone was ringing I continued looking through my purse one more time. Whew! I found my passport in purse after all. I got on the bus a relieved woman, though as my friend Peter would say I lost three years off my life in that experience.

PART IV: EPILOGUE

I went back to the bank on the next bank day and things went much more smoothly. I still messed up by not bringing my pay stub with me, but I was able to show the deposit amount in my passbook so after that things went smoothly.

I have to close my account on the 18^th though, so anything is possible.

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