How South Koreans feel about Americans
Bret L
>> "From the NYT;
Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of
white Americans, is apparent in daily life.
The government and media obsess over each new report from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the
country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular
television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where
young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean
discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in
private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as
when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical
masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” ...
Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her
family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives
grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a
cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if
her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.
The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim
Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea
adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure
blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the
notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said,
“no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”
But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial
discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who
had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a
law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South
Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested
slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially
or culturally offensive.
“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics,
Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant
workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country
won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”
Generally speaking, rescuing your country from conquest and then
garrisoning your troops there for half a century to prevent another
war doesn't make you popular. The French loved us when we owed them a
favor for the Revolutionary War, but us bailing them out in two 20th
Century wars has reversed their feelings. Thus, President De Gaulle
kicked American troops out of France in the 1960s, which probably
helped turned down the emotional temperature."<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-south-koreans-feel-about-americans.html