The narcissism of small differences

"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.

And now for something controversial

The speed with which ATEK went from being a blog issue to being reported in the Korea Times speaks to the insular nature of Korea's English-language press. It reminds me a bit of my university paper, which was written by the people who read it, and the only people who read it were the ones who wrote for it. Reactions to articles and debates on letter pages were severe, but they were limited to the group of, at most, 50 people, who were part of the cliquish group of campus journalists and those with agendas to push.

Much of what gets reported about foreign teachers or foreigners in general might be true, but the better question, as advocates of English teachers often point out, is why it's reported in the first place. It's not entirely the sensational, often false reports that manage to link, however tenuously, an English teacher with disease or sexual abuse that this argument refers to. It's also the surprisingly regular articles or pictures showing foreigners wearing a hanbok or making kim chi at a department store.

Similarly, the campaign ATEK has launched against the Anti-English Spectrum, which to my knowledge has not harmed or adversely affected an English teacher in Korea outside of the Internet, is a little over-the-top. If harsh words against every minority in the West by xenophobes and racists merited this sort of attention, the Urdu and Arabic-language newspapers here would be filled with reports about the European-based Anti-Islam Facebook group, which has almost 3,000 members, and the Korean-language press would have a field day with the racist remarks on the de facto online home of English teachers in Korae, Dave's ESL Cafe.

The point is that not every slight, insult or slur is something to worry about or deserves a response. Presumably, most foreign teachers are white and have never been a minority that was abused by some members of a majority group. Immigration regulations like criminal background checks, as well as drug and HIV tests, which have been legally challenged, are simple compared to the six-page medical check that Canada requires. Entry to America, until very recently, was not possible for tourists who were HIV positive.

On the other hand, it would be ludicrous for a minority group to let itself be walked over, presumably a group that is well-educated, relatively wealthy and relatively well-organized (there's a message board, if nothing else). But groups representing ethnic minorities in the West don't squander their time, energy and resources protesting malicious but otherwise harmless websites. The effort spent trying to clean up AES could have been spent on the sort of lobbying that might bring about improvements, however small, in the lives of foreigners. The current course of action seems to indicate that many English teachers have simply never been insulted.