Racism
Many Koreans are racist, either subtly or overtly. This is not a contrasting statement. Many Kansans are racist in the same ways. Some of the prejudices have swung in my favor. I think Americans are respected perhaps more than they should be by the general person. At the very least, everyone should be treated the same.
Many of the views are negative, though. For instance, the Chinese are sometimes looked down upon. They have just the right exposure to Korean students to foster generalizations about bad individuals and have them applied to the whole. Japanese are pretty rare in Pohang, but they are generally disliked. Probably, this is mostly historical. When we talked to students about what languages they thought they should learn, most said English (some students insisted on calling it “American”), because so many countries used it. Some thought they should learn Chinese, because so many people spoke Chinese. Then they went off to French and Japanese and their opinions began to fragment. But when asked if they should learn Spanish, they seemed wholesale disinterested. Even when I pointed out that Spanish was essentially tied for the second most spoken language, they didn’t care. In many ways, I think English is adopted purely because rich nations like America use it, and it’s seen as a “prosperous” language to know. I guess that’s not racist, but it’s interesting how completely and willfully ignorant a culture can be about Mexico, South America and parts of Europe. Not that we aren’t ignorant of the same, as well as most being totally ignorant of Asia.
One of the best, and to me, funniest racist events happened in the middle school camp. I had two middle school roommates during the camp. They were great kids. One was especially talkative and helpful. He was really an all-around sweet boy. So it was kind of a shock when one night he basically insisted that all black people were criminals.
You must understand that almost all of their exposure to America is through our TV shows (Prison Break is popular here) and music (Hip Hop is popular here). And many of these don’t portray black people as particularly upright. I told him that I didn’t think black people were any worse or better than white people. I pointed out that I had two black roommates in college, and my sister was dating a very upstanding Jamaican man. He looked at me for a few seconds, nodded sagely, and asked if Kansas had very many black people. I told him that outside of Kansas City, there weren’t many. He smiled and said that Koreans don’t like to go on vacation where there are black people.
And I haven’t seen any black people in Pohang. Or Mexicans. I’ve really not seen that many white people, so maybe my outlook would change if I were in Seoul. But of all the Non-Korean, Non-Other-Asians I’ve seen, they have been 100% white.
I don’t know how much of it is individual. When my sister started dating her Jamaican boyfriend, a few of the KS locals told her to stop with varying degrees of threat. But most of the people didn’t care enough to say anything. Maybe just a few of them are vocal enough to get noticed. To some extent, I’m looking hard enough that anything that sticks out gets noticed, and probably applied to too many people.
Generalizations
It’s easy for me to make generalizations here. Chinese people are loud. In the dorms, I hear them all the time. Koreans always hack and spit in the bathrooms, at least, every time I’m in there with one. Koreans are bad drivers, because I feel like every trip down town is going to end in an accident (and many cars seem to support that, though I’ve since ridden with some very skilled drivers). All Koreans look the same (this is untrue, though they are more similar than a random group of Americans based on the fact that they all have similar colored hair).
There are lots of generalizations they use for us. For instance, all Americans are rich (Hahahaha). All Americans eat bread, either with every meal, or the idea is that bread is the majority of the meal like rice is here (And while we eat MORE bread than Koreans, we eat a lot less than they eat rice). We eat our dead (ok, so they don’t believe that, but there are plenty of weird ideas they get about us).
I think I’m prone to writing about generalizations here. I actually have a very small exposure to Korea (one city, around 500,000 people), and I spend most of my time on campus around people my age. Koreans are just as diverse as Americans, and I imagine they vary as much regionally as we do. Things that might be true of Californians are often untrue of Kansans. In the same way, I’m willing to bet that things which are true of people from Seoul might be untrue of people from Pohang. Scale is much different here.
So take these things with a grain of salt. They are generalizations for the purpose of expressing what I see, not what really is.
And my favorite generalization has always been “There are no pianos in China”, anyway.
