"Did you eat?"

When I taught in Gunsan, I was sent to do a two-day English class in neighboring Iksan.  Upon arrival, I was asked “Did you eat?”  Were they offering me a snack?  I said no, since breakfast had been a few hours before.  They looked startled at my honest response.

Turns out they didn’t really care whether I’d eaten.  Asking someone if they’ve eaten is simply a greeting.  How did such strange greeting come about?  During the Japanese occupation, Korea suffered years of, among other things, hunger.  So it became customary for people to greet each other with this question.  When one is starving, food becomes an all-consuming thought.  When people met, it was the foremost thing they talked and worried about.

In the same way that, in the West, when we ask “How are you?”  We usually expect to hear “Fine,” not a rundown of someone’s current physical/mental/spiritual state.  In Korea, when asked this question, they expect to hear yes, which explains the Korean teacher’s reaction when I answered truthfully. 

What’s crazy is that the Japanese occupation was 1910-1945.  Very few people are alive now who experienced it firsthand.  However, a greeting from that era remains in use and, in this case, is being translated to English without thought to its origin or whether it even makes sense in another.