Race in Korea
The Metropolitician has a post up describing a racial incident he experienced, reinforcing the theme of a recent NYT article on race in Korea. He writes,
Just this past weekend, when a friend of mine who is the global HR director for an international firm was here visiting the Korea branch, along with her younger sister, a lawyer from LA, in tow, I was joking about how I always avoid the subway, and try not to violate my own rules from “Tips to Avoid Being Assaulted in Korea” post. The two sisters happen to be Korean American, by the way.
Lo and behold, we were sneered at by most of the passengers and yelled at by the bus driver for speaking English in a perfectly normal tone of voice. Such derision isn’t given to the irritatingly loud students or irritating [older women] yelling into the phone; basically, English “sounds” louder and more irritating. Sure, I’m no saint — when people speak Cantonese or Thai in the Midwest, people stare. But we’ve had enough training in tolerance — and use a bit more common sense — to not constantly attack them for it.
Which is what happened when we got on for literally 2 stops, as we traveled from Kangnam to Samsung Station. The Korean American two sisters and their two Korean cousins and I are literally discussing which exit to use and other directions-related stuff when an [older man] yells for us to “shut up!” My older friend looks at him like he’s crazy, but I calm her down. From her perspective, she’s an American-educated corporate executive, not used to being pushed around or swallowing a public insult, especially for doing something no worse than anyone else in the extremely noisy subway car was doing — talking in a normal tone of voice.
Given that he’s not a white guy, this doesn’t surprise me at all. Over the years, I’ve heard accounts of similar incidents from non-whites on more than one occasion. And how do whites often react when they hear this sort of news?
I also wonder whether certain white folks can stop the implied victim blaming when they puzzledly point out, “Well, I never had a problem.”
Well, that’s YOU, white man. Good ON ya.
He’s right. As a white guy, I can say we’ve got it good in Korea these days. There’s the occasional dirty look, but they’re quite rare. I can attest, though, that it wasn’t always that way. It’s only recently, in the past few years, that I’ve noticed a change. In the 18 years I’ve been here, the country has changed dramatically. But I can list a number of incidents involving racially motivated attacks against whites through the 90s and early into this decade. I experienced them myself. And I can never forget, when I was still in the dating game, the dirty looks, sneers and hostile language directed at me and my date as we simply went about minding our own business.
I recall once walking up to Seoul Tower with a Korean American woman, Cindy, I was dating not long before I met my wife. In those days, I couldn’t speak Korean well at all. Three college-aged guys were walking behind us, talking to each other in disgusted tones. Later, Cindy told me they had been talking trash about her, saying that only whores and ugly bitches date white guys. All intentionally so that she could hear it. Another time, around 2002 or so, I was with some friends at a bar in Chongno, just after Christmas. Two Americans, one Canadian, one Australian, and a couple of Korean women. A group of guys at the next table were talking trash, yelling, “Yankee go home!”, a phrase usually directed at soldiers. And when I was a soldier, I can’t count the number of times I encountered drunk guys cursing me out in Korean, interspersed with the occasional,”Puck you!” One or more of his friends would have cooler heads and work to turn him around while apologizing to me.
Those sort of situations were harmless, but common. Other people experienced more serious incidents. In the early 90s, a high ranking enlisted soldier with over 20 years in the Army was beaten to death with a weight bar. A couple of Korean guys passing in a car saw him walking down the sidewalk with a younger Korean woman. So one of them jumped out in a rage and murdered him. In the mid-90s, a young American man and his young Korean wife, who was several months pregnant, were attacked by several young men in front of the main US military compound in Seoul while waiting for a taxi. The men repeatedly kicked the woman in the stomach, causing her to lose her baby. Around the same time, an American soldier got into a scuffle on the subway with a couple of older Korean men. One of the men had called the wife a whore. The two got into a verbal argument which ended with the man slapping the wife. The soldier did what any husband would and punched the guy. In the end, it was the soldier who was convicted of assault based on the testimony of witnesses*.
I have so many more stories like that. Most relatively mild, some quite severe. Granted, many of them involve soldiers. But there are plenty that don’t. The most severe ones, which resulted in the death of a foreigner, never made the front page news. But any time a foreigner, especially a soldier, murdered or raped a Korean it was all over the papers. And some of my students would bring it up to me in class, asking me why soldiers committed so many crimes. When I asked their opinion on the other cases, where a foreigner was the victim, they had never heard of it. White soldiers still have it worse off than other whites, but even with short hair these days I don’t get the issues I used to in the years after I left the Army.
So to my fellow whites in Korea, yeah, you’ve got it really good now. And if you’ve only been here for a few years, you very likely have no frame of reference for what the others races are experiencing every time they go to a crowded place with a Korean woman, or get on a bus or subway train. So the next time you hear one of these stories, don’t make like it’s too absurd to be true, or that it’s somehow the victim’s fault. It’s real. Hopefully though, with time, the situation will improve as the generations move on.
* To clarify, most of the witnesses testified that the wife slapped the man. The couple’s accompanying friends and at least one Korean witness testified to the opposite.