Scribblings of the Metropolitician

A Shorter Post and the first in the "Photo Essay" Series

Thanks, Luke, for the nice response to my post.

And I do think we were in the same stop that night (actually, I think half of Seoul was as well). This picture already appeared in the Seoul Selection newsletter, but since many of you might not have seen this picture, or might not remember it, I've pasted it in below.

That night was intense. The trains kept dumping out people faster than they could clear the platform. We were sardined in all the way up to the stairs to the top of the station. I think it was the highest population density moment of my life, and I had to consciously stave off panic. Considering that I'm an American from the Midwest, I reassured myself that there wouldn't be a mass trampling incident because Seoul people would likely not be as likely to freak out as I was starting to feel. Turning to take the picture was definitely a reassuring thing to do, as it kept me busy and focused.

I've never had the experience of taking photos while also thinking about my options and the possibility of dying (as unlikely as that was) while working with my camera, and it certainly wasn't a firefight-in-Vietnam-war-photoographer moment, but it was about as interesting a sensation I'd experienced as a photographer to that point.

OK. So I'm a wimpy Midwesterner and have lived a pretty comfortable life. So shoot me.

Wait. Don't shoot me.

Hehe.

"A Coex Christmas"

Essays on Seoul: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love “Hell” (1 - text draft)

Let’s begin this series with perfect honesty – upon first glance, Seoul is not a pretty nor memorable city. When thinking about the great metropolises of the world – New York, Paris, London, or Rome – certain stock images spring instantly to mind, seemingly out of instinct: the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, or the Colisseum. Or even without structures that overshadow the very cities they hail from, there are entire cityscapes that are just as deeply burned in the world’s imagination, such as is found in the urban wonderland of neon signs and corporate logos that is downtown Tokyo, the stunning architectural wonders defining the skyline of Shanghai, or the quaint charm of the great seaport city of San Francisco.

But Seoul? Are international visitors charmed by the wonders of a building named after a once-impressive (to Koreans) claim to having 63 floors? Does Seoul possess a world-famous marvel of architecture, wonder of engineering, or even a recognizable skyline? In fact, the city seems to possess no particular sense of design at all, since strictly-enforced zoning laws and sensible urban planning are relatively new concepts, as is the practice of building streets in grid patterns, or the careful construction of new buildings. One look at the difference between Seoul north and south of the river is testament to this fact. Kangnam is a relatively ordered lattice of streets, while older, northern Seoul is positively labyrinthine.

Still, I do not mean to be too hard on the city, as I am more than able to acknowledge Seoul’s myriad hidden charms, as well as the fact that there are reasons to fall in love with this peculiar, quirky place. Of course, the taste for Seoul is somewhat acquired, requiring a bit of time to build, just as one might first taste a strange but pleasingly complex wine, or sip an extremely dark beer, or take the first bite of an exotic new food that has an unfamiliar initial punch, but follows up with a pleasant aftertaste that lingers and requires another bite to make sense of what was just tried. And it is in such ways that a new affinity for something is born, out of something that initially seemed strange – or to the eyes and palates of others, downright unpleasant.

So did my affinity for Seoul begin to grow. I, like most other people living in this imposing yet cramped city, did not come to live here completely voluntarily. Many Seoulites were simply born here, while another great many moved here from the countryside in the mass urbanization that happened as Korea modernized. As a foreigner, I originally came to Korea in 1994 on a Fulbright grant and worked in a middle school on Cheju Island for two years before going back to start my Ph.D. work. After receiving another Fulbright to conduct dissertation research in Korea in 2002, I was faced with the fact that I could no longer live in the island paradise that Chejudo bills itself as being, but rather the urban “hell” that is Korea’s capital city. So it was with a literal sense of dread and trepidation that I came to live in Seoul, a city to which I always came for weekends or short trips while I had lived in Chejudo, and so had always thought to myself was the epitome of the clichéd refrain “a nice place to visit, but not to live.”

So what do I mean by describing a city as an urban "hell?"

Seoul is a city of hustle and bustle, dust and smoke, insanely crowded streets, and is an incessant visual and aural assault on the senses. The haphazard clustering of neon signs is as visually noisy as the painfully loud techno music shrieking out of newly-opened bakeries and clothing stores at near-unbelievable decibel levels, as pairs of scantily-clad girls feign pleasure while wildly dancing and sweating to win the attention of passersby. The dizzyingly dense concentration of people in areas such as Myeongdong was positively frightening to me the first time I went, as it was when I found myself in the Samseong subway stop on Christmas Eve, when I had to suppress the urge to panic because I feared there might no be enough room on the platform for all the people. Nearly getting run over by motorcycle delivery men upon getting off of fast-moving buses that open the doors well before stopping, or being pushed brusquely aside by an ajumma who will stop at nothing to get that taxi before you do – these are the things that might make Seoul hard to swallow to the newcomer, but to the true Seoulite who can appreciate the city in a comparative perspective, actually defines the dynamic and lively character of this place. Like that quirky aunt who irritates but one can't help but love for all her idiosyncrasies, Seoul can – with a little mental effort – become quite endearing.

But there are a million reasons to hate this place, and I see many Seoulites scowl their ways to work, curse each other through clenched teeth in rush hour traffic, or shoot irritated looks to one another while being bumped and jostled in the tight confines of subway cars in the morning. To the person who is too busy, stressed, or just plain angry to notice see the forest for the trees, life is Seoul is not much more than a rat race. As a foriegn researcher and photographer who can benefit from being able to earn my way through life more easily while living here, it is a bit easier to see the city for what it is; not only do I have the time to do so, but this is my very project while being here. So, dear reader, you might be skeptical of my view of Seoul as an interesting kind of hell, as anything above being purely hell itself.

This is the perspective that is afforded me by being a foreigner; I have the time, relative financial privelege, and inherent perspective to see things a little differently from the average native Seoulite. And as a photographer, I am already a close observer of my surroundings, a fact that further predisposes me to look at city life with a more positive eye. For now, my work is somewhere between art and reportage. Photo-reportage? In any case, it is what defines my choice to express what I have seen in terms of equal amounts text and images. It is said that "a picture is worth 1,000 words," most often to express the idea that a picture can replace the need for lenghty description, that the need for prose is obviated by the obviousness of the picture.

However, prose has the ability to express thoughts more exactly, since what I am doing is not pure "art," and not something I want to leave to interpretation or semantic ambiguity. In this way, the images presented here are made all the more meaningful by the text that accompanies them. The need to describe does not disappear with my photographs – for me, images and text exists in a mutually meaningful relationship.

So this "photo blog" is more than just that – a collection of mostly photos with a few captions. This is a place where the complex meanings bound up in visual images find their full purchase when they are laid and and – I hope – artfully described.

Such is the purpose of this "photo blog," which I hope to raise to a higher level than most others, both in terms of the written word and the captured image.

Best Tool Ever!

I've discovered the kickass blogging tool: I can't recommend it enough: Ecto™!

It integrates perfectly with Typepad™ and allows offline blogging, and allows full control without having to enter HTML tags - which was getting pretty irritating from working off the web. Also has drag-and-drop functionality, so you simply drag the pictures in where you want them and edit them with a double-click.

I am totally paying the $17.95 shareware fee. Man - one of the best buys in a long time.

Can it type in Korean? 한굴이 나오나요?

Yes! Ecto™ rocks!

The Big, White Elephant in the Room

Note: The pictures in this post were taken from the web – they were not taken by me.

OK - I'm responding quite generally to a respected fellow thinker in the Korean blogosphere, Nora of "Nora Knows Nada?"

Generally, the gist of the point she was making (and that others make) about the tired, tired subject of plastic surgery in Korea is that women aren't getting it to "look white," in the way viewers from the West who don't know much about Korean society and thought patterns seem to believe. Rather, it is argued, women are simply trying to "improve" their appearance by exoticizing their features along an aesthetic that has become Koreanized.

OK - fine. I can buy that to some extent. I also don't believe that Koreans are trying to look Caucasian or actively think about the looking "whiter."

And yes, white skin was a premium, as it was in most agrarian, pre-industrial societies in which possessing skin undarkened by the sun was a sign of extreme privilege. Such standards did pre-exist contact with the West in Korea, and such a beauty standard was influenced by Chinese culture as well, which held similar standards of beauty that held great influence on the peninsula.

That being said, let's break down these two ideas – that of trying to "look white" and the coveting of white skin – with a little more realistic, structural analysis. If we want to limit these ideas to the notion that desiring features that are undeniably rooted in one dominant "race's" beauty standard still occurs within a Koreanized context, it is easy to do so. If we argue that desiring white skin pre-existed contact with white people, that's easy to prove as well.

But this is a dangerously simplistic inductive logic, resting on a limitation on the analysis, and not pushing certain hypothesis to the point of an actual theory of how things came to pass. The logic of such arguments don't offer any explanations – and they can't – not with the lack of any explanative element. What happened to the older beauty standards? What about the timing of the change? What about the fact of the psychic commitment required to alter the body (the pain and suffering that results from cutting skin, shaving jaws, snipping nerves)? Does the fact that women are willing to go to extremes to alter the bodily traits that generally do not occur within their geno-hence-phenotype mean nothing qualitatively? Is this really the same as Jewish women getting a nosejob, or black women simply using hair relaxer?

When you look at plastic surgery in relation to Korea, you have to not just look at the limited aspects of the issue, but also see

the big, fat, white elephant in the room that is America and the West. You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn't have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one's skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.

As a foreigner with brown skin and "raced" as Black, who speaks fluent conversational Korean and knows a lot about the culture, I can tell you that this buys me not even the same treatment as an American white man who stutters out a jumbled "an-nyong-ham-ni-sheekers" that never fails to get him a boisterous round of pats on the back and girls simply yearning to ride on his jock. And nooooo – this is not my sour grapes sentiment – it's actually the same embarrassment for the Korean people when I see displays like that. Can we say "sa-dae-ju-ui" for the 21st century? Deference to white skin here is so alive and well, how can one deny that it plays any role in the decision to get one's eyes cut larger, nose Romanized, old-school high cheekbones shaved down to size, breasts enlarged, asses and lips pumped full of silicone, and nerves in the calves snipped? One can say that plastic surgery in the States or the West is also in major effect these days, but the crucial difference is that Westerners aren't getting their epicanthic fold removed, breasts reduced, cheekbones raised, nose bridges removed, or calves fattened up. Let's get real here – cultural sadaejuui goes in one direction. That's what makes the case so sad when it comes to one culture trying to attain a beauty standard set by another one.

And granted - if plastic surgery were really just a function of "personal choice" or whatever, people would be getting whatever suits them: big-ass J-Lo asses, cute flat chests, quaint "radish legs," or even ritual scarring, tatoos, etc.

But they don't. The fact is that the media and the fashion industry play a big role in setting standards for a great many people, and in the Korean case, those standards are set in the West, or even other countries that receive the same cultural messages from the West before internalizing them – namely, Japan. And a quick look at all the fashion magazines (and most fashion trends) are just rehashed American and Japanese ones. And the domestic Korean ones certainly don't set the standard that bounces out across the ocean to the West. It's big eyes and big titties for everybody, all while trying to get as much ass as you can get while starving yourself to the point of what many Korean doctors call "thin obesity," which is the strange-but-not-uncommon medical condition in Korea in which a person is at or under-weight but is possessed of so little muscle mass relative to fat that she (usually) is actually defined as medically obese (as usually defined by a set percentage of body fat). You've seen these people on the street. Just watch for girls who are as thin as rails whose calves and upper arms jiggle as they walk. Or you might just see a woman whose knees are the widest part of her leg.

Yeah, yeah. I know – everybody's trying to be thin these days. But everybody ain't cutting their faces and bodies according to the psychoses of their own culture. If Korean people had a fucked up body image problem in which women were all trying to look like Chunhyang, with the delicate features, small eyes, long black hair, and porcelain skin – that would be one thing. But middle school girls too young yet to cut their faces who get by by taping their eyes wider, who awkwardly glare their eyes as wide as possible for their euljjang cellphone camera pictures – these is what defines it as different for me.

Who are Korean people trying to be? It sure ain't any brotha man I know about. Smells like the "other man" to me.

Why Korea Needs Star Trek

I love me some Star Trek and always have. I have always thought that people who claim not to like it have either a superficial impression of it or think that anyone who watches the show must automatically be the geeks who we tend to see represented as the typical fan: "Get a life," as it was cheekily put by William Shatner during his appearance on Saturday Night Live.

OK. There are geeky aspects to the Trek. It is quite geek compatible. I fully admit that. The show's takes place in outer space, there are aliens, blinking gadgets, and oodles of techno-speak.

But that's the flippin'-through-the-channels view of the show. If you look under the surface, you'll see some of the best writing on television (the various series have won more than their fair share of Emmy awards), extremely well-fleshed out characters, long-running, consistent, and soap operatic plot lines – all of which mesh together to make for a pretty good yarn. You add on top of that some of the best elements of real science fiction (that being defined against "fantasy" as stories using plot devices of the future society, technology, or other themes that are sufficiently familiar and realistic enough to the viewer to allow a critique of the society we live in today, which is what actually makes Star Wars fantasy, but with the chariots merely replaced by spaceships and swords replaced by lightsabers) and you get some really smart television that asks a lot of questions that are pertinent to us in the now. Good science fiction is interesting, fun, and most importantly – challenging.

That's why the original 1963-1966 series of Star Trek was banned from most Southern stations as too feminist, Communist, and suggestive of too much race-mixing. And there was even a Russkie deck officer from the second season, along with a Japanese navigator, a Black female main character, and an ostensible Scotsman on the bridge. The 1960's viewer was reassured by a cocksure, white captain who didn't take shit off no bad aliens always bagged the babes, but his first officer was a decidedly Asiatic-looking alien half-breed with devil ears. He was the walking, talking embodiment of miscegenation, and he worked on the bridge!

It should come as no surprise, for those of you not up on your Trek trivia, that Star Trek was the first show on television to show an interracial kiss, which got most Southern stations up in arms. Of course, the science fiction was the only possible cover to get it through the censors in the liberal, Commie North as well, since Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura had been under the control of an alien force using them for his own demented amusement. Neither is kissing each other by choice, so the factor of a forbidden, expressed desire for interracial sexual contact is eliminated by this neat plot device. At least it made it palatable, and actually depended on the 1960's viewer's assumption of this interracial kiss as a taboo in the first place – which is what made the moment so decidedly embarrassing for the characters within the plot itself. The characters apologize for not being able to stop themselves and being parties (however unwilling) to the humilating display. Genius.

At this point, dear reader, you must be asking the question – so what the hell does this have to do with Korea?

Well, the fact is, for some inexplicable reason, Koreans hate Star Trek. And I mean DO NOT LIKE AT ALL. So what, ask you? But think about it. For a country that is so relatively culturally colonized by America, in which almost every major genre of any art form is reproduced here, and most anything that enjoys some degree of popularity in the US holds a proportionally similar degree of reknown here, Star Trek is noticably, glaringly absent from the pop culture scene. No DVD's of the television series here, and the movies get almost no play. I saw a poster for Star Trek: Nemesis a couple years ago, and it got only a single night of play in a tiny theater in Kangnam. The only other people there was a couple on the other side of the room, and the woman was obviously dragged along by her man. It was sad, very sad.

I am using one of my favorite shows as a foil to get right at the heart of what is an oft-overlooked cultural pattern in a progress-obssessed society that is so deeply and uncritically steeped in a balls-to-the-walls hyper-modernity, the cracks through which one might look to see the under-layer of a deeper pre-modern web of thinking that lurks beneath and informs everything in the layer above.

What I am saying is that there just might be a reason that this very American cultural product doesn't translate well into the Korean market – because the show, its assumptions, concerns, and core concepts just don't mesh with anything within the Korean cultural framework of the familiar – cultural colony of America or no.

In fact, the reason shows such as Friends or Sex in the City are hits all over the world lies in those shows' universality, as opposed to the specific and peculiar fit of that foreign culture to the American one. The real reason shows such as Star Trek find such little purchase in certain countries (such as Korea) versus others (such as Germany) is because of the fit – or lack thereof – with the mode within which the countries operate, as well as the extent to which those countries match up with the haughty and barely-concealed Americanness of the show. And Star Trek fan or not, one must admit that the show has had quite an impact on American popular culture, and in its several incarnations, probably has the most screen time of ANY show on television. We're talking 29 combined years on television, 10 movies, an animated series, and countless other forms of cultural collateral fallout in the forms of toys, conventions, the naming of Navy and NASA ships, and catch-phrases ("Beam me up, Scotty) in general culture.

If one were to take the standard cultural imperialism analysis, one would expect that the structural power of the core would simply express replicate itself onto the culture of the periphery. In other words, the cultural colonialism of America would leave an impression on foreign cultures with roughly the same proportional popularity, that specific cultural products and phenomenae in the home culture would manifest themselves in similar ways in the cultures on the recieving end – but that doesn't happen.

There are obviously many filters – different mores, values, standards and modes of living, religions – that affect the reception of cultural products. I'm just making the simple argument that because of certain specific factors, some cultural products don't make it over to the Land of the Morning Calm. Space aliens. Shows without a white main lead ("I see Black people!" – shudder). The two most famous public figures of Korean descent in America – the two Chos (Margaret and John) – who would never be able to make the rounds of Korean TV showing why it was they are famous in the first place (standup routines about gay sex and "warrrrshing" one's vagina or the concept of the "MILF" and getting high on a blunt and riding a cheetah to White Castle don't seem like they'd fly). These things are filtered OUT.

Along with this anecdotal evidence, I can also present to the reader the fact that every single Korean national with whom I have watched the show, of various backgrounds and levels of education, invariably have the same reaction to watching aliens and humans interacting as if nothing is out of the oridinary: "Eewww. They're so gross. How can you watch such a ridiculous thing?" Or alternatively – "It's so unrealistic! How can something like that even talk?" The comments are generally variations on this theme. What fazes the Korean viewers is the fact of the aliens' difference and the fact that they look so animalistic and...alien. Most Koreans can't seem to get past the "alien" part, aside from the fact of the plot being in the far-flung future, or the transporter beams, phasers, and galavanting throughout space at "warp speed."

Although watching a bug-eyed "Hobbit" and his shriveled little friend climb a lava mountain with a magic Ring of Power that grants the wearer invisibility and an unnaturally long life, as he's chased by hybrid Elven-Orcs controlled by an evil wizard with a white beard – that's believable – and pretty good drama.

OK - am I being nitpicky, or is there something more under the surface here? When I consider that question, I think about the fact that Star Trek, judged as an American cultural product, is so very...American. It is steeped in the discourses of multiculturalism, collective Western guilt over colonialism, and in the larger progressive discourses of equality and democracy, as expressed in more specific stances asserting parts of a Utopian vision of equality between the races, gender equality, and the rehashing of contemporary issues (e.g. the Bajoran "comfort women" or the unmistakably Israel-oriented critique of the Cardassian "settlers" encroaching on Bajoran lands). Star Trek is unabashedly steeped in the "real" – the pressures and politics of actual human life.

Star Trek is simply more "American" in regard to the way one might define this as a set of ideals that were the basis for every form of progressive "advance" in America – and around most of the world, actually. For better or for worse, whether one thinks of them having come too late or too early, the ideals of equal qualifications for citizenship, racial and gender equality, gay rights, and every other "movement" one might think of involving a group in a disadvantaged position in relation to the white, male, Protestant majority in power – owes its existence to peculiarly American founding ideals.

To the extent that Star Trek's "prime directive" of non-interference with developing civilizations expresses doubt over the guilt of the telelogical notion of "progress" that is responsible for so many of the West's excesses (e.g. American westward expansion, the eugenics movement, or the Holocaust), Korea is still very much caught up in this paradigm of "moving forward" and "development." In a very fundamental way, Star Trek is a post-modern set of discourses, whereas Korea is still caught up in a mix between the pre- and presently modern. I mean, add to the aliens the fact that we have a Black bald captain telling white people what to do, and a woman (!) captain on another Star Trek series – whew! That's enough to be downright confusing to a foreign audience used to watching the one Black dude in the commando unit get killed first, or big stars such as "Big Willie" Smith always adding that special extra helping of blustery Blackness to all his characters. Such is another reason Star Trek might go against the established Western viewing habits of Korean (and other foreign) watchers.

And Star Trek simply looks much more like America than Friends, Sex in the City, Dawson's Creek, Felicity, etc., ad infinitum. Is American still a land of only white folk? And don't even get me started on the Step-n-Fetchit antics of "The WB" or UPN. There's not too much difference between just having some laughin-n-shuffling black faces on TV and good ole' blackface. Either way, I think the power of "The Man" is still much in effect.

But I digress; here's the important point here, I think: A postmodern Star Trek hesitation about the direction of modernity seems to run up against a Korean modern urge to move forward, ahead Warp Factor 9. In this way, the Star Trek spirit is a conflicted one, one that is reflected in the present American moment, in which the urge to "trek" is balanced by an equally strong "trepidation." In any case, even if a Korean viewer might be able to identify with some of these messages, I think that same Korean viewer might never get past a very pre-modern, pre-contact view of the outside world, a paranoid and suspicious view of Otherness. This simple fear of the alien prevents any real (re)consideration of the modern.

In this way, in a worldview unmarked by a Star Trekkian trepidation about the very progress that is the lifeblood of that civilization's existence (the "prime directive" mitigating the urge to "go where no man has gone before"), Korea is a culture in which national pride over the very questionable triumph of having successfully cloned a human being goes incredibly under-questioned. Well, hey – it's another first in the constant struggle to bolster national pride! But, a thought experiment: if it had been a Western nation – say, for example France, the United States, or Germany – that had led the charge to duplicate human beings from srcratch in a petri dish, surely there would have been more trepidation, if only because of the history of the grotesque acts committed in the name of progress in the histories of those very two states.

This is one of my points – why a Star Trek worldview might actually offer a lot to considering the Korean situation; but it is also a clue as to why it might also be taken as silly and irrelevant at best, or at worst, actually anathema to Korea's view on the world.

So one might not be surprised by the Korean view of a very American cultural product. Perhaps in an American effort to express fears of progress and its associated excesses, by involving the alien Other, another palpably real fear of the different and the outsider comes to the fore in the mind of a Korean viewer watching the show for the first time.

In any case, it would be ridiculous to say that Star Trek itself needs to be watched directly by all Koreans, or that doing so will magically make people on the peninsula more moral, further enlightened, or somehow better people.

But – to add to the words of a friend who once said that Koreans are, more than most other places in the world, in serious need of some good-ass weed, I'll say that sitting back and watching some Trek along with that might do a lot more to mellow Korean folks out. Shit – it can't hurt – and surely it's better than importing The Jerry Springer Show and Freddy Vs. Jason.

Am I wrong?

The Dark Side: Quicker. Easier.

Before ya'll get to thinking that I am irritated only by things Korean, just remember that my blog is young and ya'll don't know me so well yet. Let me relay a little story of an exchange I overheard that irritated the sweet bejesus out of me this past weekend, when I attended a little soirée for a group of foreigners who had just completed a year of good work spent in Korea. I will say, without naming program names, that these are some of the best-trained and well-intentioned group of Americans working as teachers in Korea, having received extensive language training and cultural workshops over a two-month period before being placed in Korean middle and high schools in a program jointly run and maintained by both the American and Korean governments. As a whole, the quality of people you get is far and above the rest of other foreigners - as a whole - but when we get down to the individual level, exceptions start becoming apparent.

So a white kid, probably around 23 or 24, is talking to this Korean American kid over hamburgers and macaroni salad and lamenting how "everything is Korea is so opposed to my personality and everything I believe in." He was going on and on about how "in Korea" people do this, and "Koreans" do that, ad nauseum. The arrogance and ethnocentrism that laced his every utterance was astounding. I was ashamed to have come out of the same program as this kid was about to, albeit eleven years previous to him. He had fallen into the ethnocentric trap of what I call the "Dark Side" of foreigner thinking.

It's a tempting way to think, and it takes quite a bit of time to conquer. It goes something like this:

Everything bad that happens to you in Korea is because of...well, "Korea." Everything good that happens to you is simply filed away, going unchecked against the unconscious yet ongoing tally of everything bad that happens to you while in this country.

So some pimply-faced, greasy-haired 19-year old is rude to you in a Lotteria? Well, it's because customer service sucks in Korea and not because you're being served by a pimply-faced, greasy-haired 19-year old working the front counter of a fast food chain for 2,500 won an hour. Here, there is no organizing logic used to rationally break down and process one's experiences when it comes to the bad things – something we generally utilize to process our experiences in our own respective cultures.

When it comes to the good things, such as that co-worker who dropped 100,000 won on dinner on you when you first arrived and still hadn't yet started looking at money with dead kings on it and that came in different sizes and colors as real money, this experience usually goes unchecked. Forget about the fact that that dinner was 1/20th of his salary, and I make twice as much as he does for far less real work – I better get bought some dinner! I can't be eating all this fish and weird other stuff every night, and I better get some karmic compensation for getting such bad service in Lotterias, right?

The problem is in point of view. Too many people, on both the Dark Side and the Light, see Korea as...well, Korea. One tends to look at this place as a singular entity, alternatively lashing out at us and not offering us good customer service, or sometimes being inexplicably being pleasant, or inviting, or downright endearing.

So this kid, who had been teaching in some small town in Korea, hadn't been thinking complexly and was too caught up in his Dark Side thinking to realize that had he been living in rural Kentucky for a year in his own good ole' United States of America, he would probably come up against some values that went against his hallowed, vaunted belief system.

Yeah – as if the United States is the pinnacle of progressivism and democratic thinking. Wait a minute – isn't that what a lot of Americans (and let's face it, most other people from developed Western countries) come to think about their countries? "In America..." tends to start leading off a lot of sentences for people in possession of blue passports sporting a stenciled eagle on the cover. There are different versions for people with passports of different colors and designs who come from the West, but the gist of the sentiment is the same – everything that is bad or "backwards" is so because it is quintessentially Korean," while anything that isn't is the exception that proves the rule, or the influence of non-Korean things (e.g. "I'm glad Korean is finally catching up with America.")

So we don't have hicks in equally "backwater" America still donning white hoods and throwing beer bottles at black people, or tying them up to the back of pickup trucks and dragging them until they are dead? Are we not a "culture" with homophobic thugs who kidnap and murder a man who "looks gay?" At least Korea has developed enough to realize that trying to replace the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution with the Genesis chapter of the Bible violates what (ahem) the United States established as a basic principle of its own Constitution (and myriad others that came after it). Residential segregation is now higher than it had been before the Civil Rights movement began. (Yes, I don't have any real non-white friends and neither do any of those friends, but I'm not a racist. I live in my community because it's "safe" and hey, I liked Chris Rock in Rush Hour. Or was that Chris Tucker? I mean, they both look the same, right?)

But we Americans would defend our country against the queries of Koreans who might point out such things by saying, "Yes, but those people are pretty rare" or "That doesn't usually happen." Wait – that person is an exception? A non-representative example? And beyond even that, my take on it is that, in American history and culture, there's something more to it than an exception. Would you want to be a flaming gay man walking downtown in a sleepy town in Iowa? Or a black man holding hands with a white woman in Howard Beach, New Jersey? Or a brown person driving in any major city in the US, who is constantly pulled over by the police on the flimsiest of pretexts? Oooooooooooooooooooooook. I don't even think that such incidents as mentioned above are even "exceptions" – but even if they are, why can't we look at Korea in a similar way?

Maybe – just maybe – the drunk ajussi on the subway who starts yelling at you isn't REPRESENTATIVE of all Korean people. What a novel idea! But isn't such a radical idea completely untenable? What about those pushy ajumma? But we've never had one of those old ladies make us another plate of food, or offer us up a seat next to them on the bus, have we? (I've found that certain young, princessy agassi would always rather stand for an entire 30-minute bus ride than take a completely empty seat next to a smelly, foreign, savage man like me. It's a standing insult (literally) that irritates then hell out of me.) Your conniving language institute manager is representative of ALL Korean people, right? Or might we rightly take such people with a grain of salt, given the nature of this tainted industry itself? I've never met such people as who might take my passport from me, not give me my salary, or even physically attack me. But I've also never stepped foot in a language institute. Maybe that's just a coincidence. Somehow, I don't think so, though.

I am talking about an American (and usually white) privilege and ethnocentrism that causes us to look at a foreign, "inferior" country monolithically without doing the same to our own. What negative aspects of "American" thinking are there? What about aspects of the culture that manifest our arrogance, racism, sexism, homophobia, and unilateral thinking? What makes us think we have the right to deride people for the "lack" of English abilities when we are a guest in their country? How many white westerners can even speak Korean in complete sentences? What does that say about our relative privilege as well as the comfort with which we can live here in that we often don't even feel the pressure to learn the language of this place?

So us waegukin get all indignant when we see Koreans displaying some obvious prejudice and bias in our direction. Hey – I get irritated, too. The middle school girls. Spectrum-gate. Anything regarding foreigners in the Korean broadcast media. I'm sick and tired of being the ideological whipping boy every time there's an economic dip or stupid, so-called "scandal" involving white men, Korean women, and recording equipment of some type.

But let's look at ourselves monolithically, not allowing us the room for individual cases, the many exceptions to the rule, or the fact that it is the monolithic view itself that has created this false picture in the first place. Then we might understand some Koreans who might be thinking, "Fucking foreigners. Can't STAND 'em!"