Million foreigner march

I turned on the TV after arriving in Korea this week and I was greeted by a TV program examining various stores and restaurants catering to foreigners in Korea, as well as the foreigners that frequent those places. The name of the program, or perhaps the tagline, was 외국인백만시대 (One Million Foreigner Era). The program gave it the air of it being something to celebrate, which was heartening, particularly because it focused on South and Southeast Asians in Korea, not a very highly-regarded group otherwise.

The statistic of 1 million foreigners is somewhat misleading because about half of the 1 million are ethnic Koreans who retain Chinese citizenship, but given that almost half of all rural children in Korea will be mixed-race, there will be no shortage diversity in the future. Parenthetically, I don't think diversity for its own sake is a good thing, because it means that you think a town full of nothing but ethnic Koreans is inferior to a town of a mixture of Koreans and half-Vietnamese. I often hear fellow Canadians deride a place as "the whitest place ever", and it really only makes sense if you're not being serious and really just complaining about the paucity of dining options.

At any rate, it's interesting to consider that Korea will have an admixture of races in the future. If this helps Korea avoid going the way of Japan, with a stalled economy and a population that will drop by about 40 million in the next 40 years, it's a good thing. It will certainly challenge the conception of Korea as a nation-state populated exclusively by ethnic Koreans, and finding a place in Korean society for the mixed-race children, one that's somewhere other than an obscure corner, will be a significant challenge.

What do you think are some of the unforeseeable changes of an increasingly multiracial South Korea?

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.