White Man, Asian Woman

I mentioned before that I see, maybe, ten white people on an everage day. Of those, probably 2 or 3 are white males walking with their Korean girlfriends/wives. In the US, the white male/Asian woman coupling is hardly an eye-popping spectacle. But Koreans are not too keen on white foreigners dating their women.

I went to class this morning without an umbrella, but it was pouring when class let out this afternoon, so I squeezed under my friend Yan's tiny umbrella. Trying to cover as much of ourselves as possible, she grabbed onto my arm and we walked close together. It's about a fifteen minute walk from school to where we live, and just before we turn the corner from the main street into our little alleyway, we pass by one of the many Korean equivalents of Bath and Body Works. This one is a cutesy little shop called Etude House with a cottage-like facade painted white with pink trimmings. In Korea, these shops all have salesmen--usually female, but ocasionally male--standing in front of the door hawking their goods and motioning for passerbys to step inside. As we rushed past it, eager to escape the rain, I caught a quick glance at the twenty-something guy standing in front of the store today. The usual female salespeople always seem chipper and energetic; this guy just seemed bored out of his mind.

Our arms still linked, we turned the corner, followed a few seconds later by Kaila and Jane(also squeezed under one umbrella) who laughed and called out "Mark and Yan are a boo boo(couple)!" Right after we walked past the salesman at Etude House, they told us, he executed that whiplash headturn we've all used to get a second look at someone really hot or someone/something really shocking or odd.

In Korea, interacial couples fit under the latter category. I knew before that Koreans weren't too keen on white male/Asian female couples, but I found out a little more with some internet snooping tonight. In Korea today, men have used a classic technique to other the white male foreigner: the sexual threat. It's not all that different from the way white American men have historically justified their racism by othering black men as primitive, sexual beasts.

Here are some choice quotes that appeared in an article in the Naver News last summer around this time:

"Presently some foreign English teachers staying in Korea and working in private english schools around the country have been shockingly revealed to be having indiscriminate sex with Korean girls."

"Mr Kim Seung Hyun, a Korean-American, approached our head office and claimed that ‘Foreign teachers working in English academies regularly tempt staff members and students, and perform abnormal sex acts with them."

"Mr Kim made it clear that highschool girls are among that number of people having sex with the foreign English teachers, and that they often contracted venereal disease from them, then were abandoned to worry on their own and go to the hospital alone."

"a great many foriegners seeking work in Korea as english teachers think, ‘money is money, but if I go to Korea I can have sex to my hearts content."

The press wasn't the only place this xenophobia was manifested. Also, last summer, the blog Occidentalism, reported a "wave of sites set up by Koreans to ‘expose’ foreigners who dare to date Korean girls. These sites are not looking for illegal acts by foreigners - they criticise legal dating or foreigners meeting Korean girls." What could be found on these sites? Basically pictures of white men with Korean women with captions like "Foreigner dares to pick up!" and "Another wicked foreigner." Now, I will admit that the "sexual threat" of white male foreigners is far more based in reality than the fear of black men in America ever was. And, I will admit that maybe some of the men in these pictures were of sketchy white guys with raging Asian fetishes. But, this is a little extreme. I'm betting that most of these guys were on legitimate dates. Invasion of privacy much?

It doesn't take much to effort to find ugly, dark things about a person or place. In Korea, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance are the ugliest and darkest things to be found in this country in my opinion. Korean intolerance doesn't take form so much in external actions so much as internal attitudes. The Korean word for "black person," for example, is derived from the word for dirt. I'd like to think that the word-choice was soley based on perceived color-similarities, but that'd be pretty naive. Homophobia exists here too, but in a much different form than you find in the U.S., I think. I haven't observed intense hatred towards GLBT people as much as I've noticed an amusement with them. Koreans, it seems to me, don't expressly hate GLBT people; they just see them as kind of a joke, spectacles without any real legitimacy. I was at a Buddhist temple with my twenty-five year old cousin when he saw two men holding hands and exclaimed, "Whoa! Are those two guys gay?" in a tone that expressed both fascination and amusement at the site. In class, one of my teachers jokingly said she'd kiss whoever won a vocabulary game we were playing. Looking at the three guys in the class, she exclaimed cheerfully, "One of you guys better win! This isn't San Francisco, you know."

In pointing out what I've noticed, I'm not giving Koreans much credit, I know. But, there's far more good in this place than bad, and the intolerance I've pointed out can be found anywhere. Certainly, the United States isn't all that far head of Korea in this race if at all. Maybe we're more accepting of interacial dating, but that doesn't mean that we weren't once in the same place Koreans were. And at least Koreans aren't using these attitudes as an excuse to indiscriminately kill white foreigners.