Meanwhile, on the Korean side of the big water...
As a professional educator, I think about "teachable moments."
Like on September 11, 2001, I refused to cancel my class on nationalism, war and historical representations of WWII (as the material was eerily appropriate) and showed several clips from The Siege (in which Arab-Americans were put into internment camps in reaction to a string of terrorist attacks and "Freedom Is History"), chickens coming home to roost, the erosion of civil liberties, and what it means to resort to the degraded moral level of one's enemy.
And in South Korea on April 17, 2007, I instantly thought about the divide between nation and culture, scapegoating, and the dangers of categorical thinking from even before the moment that the shooter at Virginia Tech was announced as Korean; when he was, I knew that the vicious scapegoating of racial and national Others that is the modus operandi of much of the sensationalist and highly unprofessional Korean media would be harder to pull off, as talk in Korea turned to fears that Koreans would be "hunted" in the streets or "targets" of national retribution.
The US, while a country still fraught with racism and a complex about that subject, has come a long way since the race rioting (of whites lynching blacks) after the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, the railroading of Sacco and Vanzetti, the injustice committed on the Scottsboro Boys, the murder of Vincent Chin, and even September 11th.
And even on that day, when the terrorists turned out to be who everyone suspected they were, or most feared they were, depending on who you were – and even after hate crimes shot up 600% and innocent brown people were the targets of sporadic violence, the overwhelming public reaction I remember on that day was in official messages and in moments of silence and in candlelight vigils was one of keeping measured reaction and to refrain from scapegoating.
But the Virginia Tech case, while shocking, differs from 9/11 in two major ways, both in terms of scale and socio/ideological meaning. First, the grandiose and sheerly terrific effect of this attack on an entire nation undergirded the reactions to Arab-Americans and Muslims in the US. Second, no such pre-conceived notions, nor deeply felt and culturally embedded fear and loathing of Korean/Korean Americans exist, as they did and do for "swarthy" people from the Middle East. In the American cultural imagination, the "Arab terrorist" was guilty even before he was accused, as Oklahoma showed us in 1995.
So I knew that there would be no mass lynchings of Korean people, public vilification of them resulting in assaults or shootings, or even verbal/physical fisticuffs on a mass scale.
FEAR BY EXTRAPOLATION
But such direct retaliation and mass discrimination is what Koreans in Korea fear(ed), because I think it is a fair extrapolation of how foreign Others are treated as scapegoats and categorical symbols of many Koreans' opinions of other nations and races.
One might say that this is not the time to bring this up; I say there's no better time.
I have to point out one thing: if this had been a white foreigner who had done anything like this, I wouldn't have left my house, would have ordered in for a few days, and have canceled appointments. I am dead serious, and based on the noticeable increase in verbal and physical attacks on foreigners in the fall of 2002, I stopped taking the subways (for some reason, older Korean men would always seem to come out of the woodworks to start a fight) and started taking the bus (where for some reason, I never found any trouble).
And under no circumstances would I take the blue #1 line, which is the place where the majority of Korean-foreigner confrontations happen, and where it was nearly guaranteed, at that time, that you would be yelled at for being a foreigner.
And that was in reaction to an accident, albeit one that was the fault of the American military, which is no favorite of a younger, more prideful generation of Koreans who see the United States as enemy, not friend.
I have always said about the 1995 incident in which 3 black men raped a middle school girl in Okinawa (see my post "When Blood Mixes") – if that had happened in Korea, there would have been serious and personal retribution. I am not being paranoid – given the fact that I felt the need to be on my guard in 2002 for Americans who committed a traffic accident, I wasn't one to be the newspaper story.
And regardless, the public reaction – or lack thereof – to many proprietors who put up signs refusing to serve Americans or even "all foriegners" directly after incident, or the fact that "Fucking USA" became a soundtrack I heard several times a day while walking nearly anywhere in central Seoul, while "미국놈" ("American asshole", roughly translated) became just as common in street usage as the neutral term "American"– that was the benchmark that I believe Koreans assume Americans will have.
That was just a popular rendition, upped to YouTube. See the much more interesting original version that was played on Korean television, in classrooms, and made the rounds of the Internet.
Clearly, there is a pattern of extreme scapegoating, xenophobia, and even racism in this country; I think the assumption is that in America, the reaction would be the same.
So this fear comes not from any observed pattern of mass vilification of Koreans in the US (even though many Koreans still think, thanks to the Korean media, that blacks spontaneously attacked Koreans, and when asked, many people have never even heard of Rodney King), but rather from an extrapolation of this society's actual pattern of treating and defining "Others" in Korean society.
A DISCRIMINATING LOGIC
See, I've already done a "thought experiment" in which the shoe was on the other foot when it comes to overt discrimination, which is unapologetically practicable here.
Interesting is the ongoing stereotyping of westerners as sexual predators, perverts, and bail jumpers, when in fact these people are in the minority.
Even after the scandal that erupted when a teacher at the Paju English Village was accused of sexually harassing a student, when the media had a field day and the Korean Teachers' Union officially demanded a re-examination of allowing foreigners to teach English in Korean schools – even after it was revealed that the perpetrator was actually Korean, the KTU refused to retract its assertions.
Or the antics of SBS, which traveled to Hongdae after a crazy GI raped a senior citizen, at which point the entire area was characterized as a dangerous area where foreign men roamed wild, looking for fresh, female Korean meat to kill. Shortly after the area was again declared off-limits to American GI's (which it had been in the past, actually), SBS did a follow-up report the very next week that showed the equivalent of clean streets, fresh air, and chirping birds. The report was so utterly ridiculous, it made the reaction to the Central Park "rapists" or the Boston carjack race panic look nearly rational in comparison, although it could never have approached the scale. But at least they were vilifying a single group – how are "all foreigners" dangerous, roaming the streets one week (in an area where some occasional rude and drunk GI's make a bit of trouble in certain clubs, but generally aren't even on anyone's mind, much less foreigners in general), and squeaky clean the next?
Foreigners here always talk about the inevitable day when a foreigner will actually be accused of some actual, heinous crime against Koreans; given the treatment of foreigners who have generally not committed any serious crimes of that nature here – besides the "crime" of being seen in a picture with a Korean woman in a tasteless, nevertheless fully consensual situation (English "Spectrum-gate" and a more general post on Netizen "witchhunting" here) – no actual major crimes have been committed here. Well, the Korean police are always reporting any time some idiot foreigner gets caught mailing pot to himself or they bust a few people in Itaewon with drugs; that's bad enough.
What we fear is some foreigner – especially some Yank or Canuck English teacher –gets convicted of molesting children in their hagwon. Although that's horrible, we know what would happen. Without a heartbeat's hesitation, the essential cultural morality of "all foreigners" would be called into question without a second thought. Crackdowns of hagwons would happens, some more restrictive hiring laws would be passed (which can't be a bad thing, though), and people would surely be assaulted.
Given that this pattern of behavior and general xenophobia already exists and has already made itself apparent in South Korea – without any major crimes even having been committed in recent years – lawd know what would happen if some idiot Outlander, especially a white one, started knifing or killing anyone.
The recent case of the Chinese man caught in the act of hiding a body in Ansan, which is infamous amongst Koreans as the place where many "dangerous" foreigners live. In a population that barely even tries to hide its strong anti-Chinese sentiment, this wasn't good news for Chinese folks. So you hear talk of the Chinese being confirmed as being as "dirty" and as "sneaky" as most South Koreans have already decided them to "be." But he wouldn't fall into the same category as a "real" foreigner, the ones who teach English to South Korea's children and spend looooots of time alone with them.
Or the spate of widespread verbal and sometimes physical acts of violence committed upon foreigners in Seoul (none of which were reported in Korean newspapers, even the attempted murder of an Army officer stabbed nearly to death by 3 Korean assailants on his home away from duty, while even verbal altercations between taxi drivers and GI's made national headlines) after the 2002 death of two middle school girls accidentally run over by a US Army armored car (here and here for some US military blogs related to it, and here for my more media-related critique).
One thing that a few people I knew were talking about before the shooter's identity and nationality was officially revealed was the fact that it he had turned out to be Korean, how interesting that would play out for a Korean media and pliant population that is notorious at unfairly targeting entire communities.
And that has yet to play out; this is something that should be as interesting for observers of Korean media as the Hines Ward show was. And you know I'll keep on blogging about it.
UPDATE:
Apparently, many Koreans would agree with this article. From The Christian Science Monitor:
Several of the people interviewed added that had an American student living in South Korea killed 32 people, American expatriates would face serious reprisals. To describe such an eventuality, many interviewees used the word nallinada, which can be loosely translated to mean upheaval, disaster, or chaos.
"Anti-Americanism would have become extreme," says Mr. Yook, citing the groundswell of anti-American activism during negotiations for the recently signed free trade agreement between the US and South Korea. The country also saw a protracted uproar after American soldiers hit and killed two young girls while driving a convoy in June 2002. The direct fallout from that accident lasted several months, says Yook, and hard feelings persist today.
One woman, who was interviewed in Seoul on Wednesday, said she is married to a Korean diplomat. Korea's foreign ministry, she said, held late-night meetings to discuss how to protect Korean-Americans from possible reprisals. She was certain that, had an American attacked Koreans, the reprisals would have been swift.
"People will throw rocks at them and tell them 'Yankees go home,' " said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because her husband is a government official. "People will go even crazier here if exactly the same incident at Virginia Tech happened here but committed by an American."
You damn skippy. I'm glad that this has become, at least to some, a teachable moment. Perhaps some good can come out of this.