"Excuse me, I've been listening to your conversation even though I tried not to, and I think you're really stereotyping Koreans." That's how a girl began a conversation with me at a coffee shop here in Toronto. She butted into a conversation I was having with a Korean friend, speaking to him in Korean and then to me in fluent English. Korea is very homogenous, she said, but I was making too many generalizations, she said. At first I thought that she was taking issue with the way I cut corners to simplify matters for my friend, whose English isn't quite perfect. In doing so, she was really saying what I thought every time I used four words instead of twelve and spared my friend a barrage of largely irrelevant information.
What I realized after the end was that really she was annoyed by the fact that I was speaking about something she knew very well, but I wasn't an ethnic Korean like her or my friend. This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. As a member of few other niche communities, namely Western Muslims and serious distance runners, I often see a mainstream report on either community ripped apart over peripheral details. Runners spend a lot of time accumulating knowledge that is ignored and then disseminated by the New York Times for all to see. They irrationally feel that their role as caretakers of how to train for a 2:47 marathon has been usurped, which they try and retake by pointing out things like Belayneh Dinsamo's world record was 2:06:50, not 2:06:52, and that Angela Bizzarri qualified but did not participate in this year's World Championships.
When I apologetically told the girl that she was right, assuming that her problem came from my using simple English, it turned out this had nothing to do with it. She went back to something I had said maybe a half hour previous, when I compared Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper waiting to see what America did about climate change before making a decision to 29-year-old Koreans I knew who didn't take a vacation overseas because their mother was concerned about swine flu. Her issue here was that, first, I couldn't generalize about Koreans based on this one example (which I didn't) and that it wasn't something to deride because my friend passed up a vacation out of deep respect for her mother.
Whatever you think of a 29-year-old being obedient to her mother's whims, the issue wasn't obedience to your parents, or else she would have chastized my friend, who laughed at what I said and agreed. This girl felt a general discomfort at my talking about Korea in her presence, especially at negative comments, because I was not an ethnic Korean. I've been guilty of pulling rank in the way she did, namely that her 20-25 years of being Korean outweighed my one year living there, and I'm sure most people have done this in some way or form when someone who has a a vague familiarity with a topic near and dear to them says something that is otherwise true.
So it wasn't what I said so much as it was the fact that I said it, a somewhat more absurd version of the double standard that says it's okay for a black person to say the word 'nigger' but not a white person. It's common for members of an ethnic minority to reflexively react against any criticism of their group, even if it's a criticism they'd agree with if someone within the group said it. My Pakistani family will criticize Pakistan privately, but this privilege does not extend to others, particularly the Western media. Even Canadians, not exactly an ethnic group, will make self-deprecating jokes about our history being boring and our culture being non-existent, but we would never tolerate an American or a European saying that about us.
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5 comments:
Adeel,
That just goes to show you, no matter what you are discussing (black or white, right or wrong) you have to be careful when speaking in public, or for that matter, when others are around.
Personally, I think those "mitigating terms" (e.g., many, most, some, a lot, often, sometimes, etc.) are important because they not only reflect our acknowledgement that the group we are talking about is not a uniform entity with universal characteristics, but it also affects our ability to keep recognizing that.
What I mean, for example, is that if you hear someone always going "The Koreans are..." or "Americans like to ..." or "Japanese are really..." then that person is probably slowly eroding their own ability to recognize that what they're talking about — especially bad stuff — is not a uniform group characteristic. And this leads to things like cognitive distortion.
Trust me, there's scientific evidence to back this up.
You can see this stuff all over the K-blogs. Places like The Marmot's Hole or Korea Beat where there's a negative story about someone who has done such-and-such, and someone replies, "Why are Koreans so..."
Not that you were doing that, Adeel.
Sorry for being all soapboxy. I've been watching this movie on Netflix where the narrator is thinking back on his teenage years in the mid-1980s and people are saying things like, "What is it a Puerto Rican? Did a Puerto Rican do that?" And someone else says, "Those Puerto Ricans are so something or other." Everyone is labeled by being a Puerto Rican, Irish, Italian, or Black. No one is an individual person.
kushibo, you're right about not using general terms. I had a coworker in Korea who was Canadian but from a Korean background, and she always used generalizations about "Korean people" that drove me nuts. Hers were just general observations, but instead of saying "I see a lot of people wearing baseball caps", she'd say something "Korean people love baseball caps".
LastnameKim, you're generally right, but I don't see how this anecdote proves that. There was nothing I did or said that was inappropriate. In Korea, however, I've been guilty of assuming that people didn't speak English, with some embarrassing results. I've also been on the other side of it, such as the time I sat with two Koreans on a train in Europe and listened to them talk about everybody else in the compartment.
Adeel,
I'm not saying you said anything inappropriate (whether you actually did or didn't). But what I was saying was that if you talk about others (in particular, a group of people) those prying ears will generally hear it a different way. I have a funny story to add to your anecdote about being on the train in Europe. My father always tells me about when he was in Korea in the late 1950s and his friends were talking about this caucasian on the bus who had a big nose. Then the guy turned around and said (in very good Korean) "I'm sorry for having such a big nose". It left my dad and his friends flushed with embarrassment.
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