Ok, here's something for you to think about...fan death. Yes, go to wikipedia.com and enter in "fan death." Step 2 read. Yes, I know a little strange. Fan death is the belief (shared by all Koreans, if not all pretty darn close to all) that if you leave an electric fan on during the night and close all the windows you will die. All the fans sold in Korea have timers on them so you can turn on the timer at night and the fan will shut off by itself and you will stay alive. Koreans believe that you will suffocate or you will get hypothermia if you leave the fan on at night. I first heard of the idea of "fan death" in our orientation guide that we received from our recruiter and thought that it was a belief of the past, shared only by a few Korean traditionalists. Ok, I was wrong. I brought it up in one of my classes and my students (who are primarily engineers in their 30's and 40's) very solemnly looked at me and said "Yes, it's true, many people have died." And, all of my students so far that I've talked to believe it is true. Here's some rough excerpts from our discussion. My students said that it was because of their "unique Korean physiology" that their bodies succumbed to fan death. When I told them that I had friends who were Americans but were adopted from Korea, who had slept with fans their entire lives, my students wouldn't believe me. After a while I finally told my students that I would sleep with the fan on and close all our windows. My students were pretty worried and replied that they liked having me as a teacher and didn't want me to die. I told them I'd see them in class the next day. And I did and with me I brought in a few excerpts from the Wikipedia article. After reading the article, they were still reluctant and still didn't think that they would ever sleep with the fan on the whole night. Amazing.
But now it's got me thinking, what ridiculous things does the American culture have me convinced of.... hmmm....