By Michael Stevens
In response to ``Many Foreign Books Misrepresent Korea,'' I decided to go do a survey of my own for which I visited several chat rooms overseas and asked a simple question. ``What is your image of Korea or the Korean people?'' To be totally honest the majority of the responses can be summed up in one of the following four responses.
Ella, female (30), Philippines, telecom communication coordinator: ``Not very familiar with the place … Don't know much about it.''
Atif, male (38), Pakistan, pharmaceutical purchaser: ``Korea is our best friend, Korea gave Pakistan missile technology and the Korean people are very rude but hard working.''
Charles, male (57), U.S., moderator for IT company: ``I feel that Korea is an industrious nation that given time they will or should become a major financial player in the world. However, they need to stop protesting against their friends.''
Kyung, male (31), Korean-American, insurance claims representative: ``Korea's image is of a people who are in a first-world country that is very modern but it still continues to hold fast to its strict Asian culture, a country of old and new values colliding. Its people are still very young and seem to like to protest and that the younger generation also seems to dislike the U.S. government.''
Other people who answered this question were from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Japan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam among others. Yet, the overwhelming response was ``I don't know much about Korea."
This was even the case in America where I surely thought that many people would have a negative response yet this wasn't the case. The majority of them either couldn't give a response or it was generally positive yet, they clearly didn't know the issues that are currently happening here.
For the Americans that gave a positive response I decided to ask an additional question of ``What do you think about the violent anti-American beef protests that happened in recent months? And the overwhelming response was ``I didn't hear about it.''
I don't want to imply that this survey was in any way scientific, since it was just randomly done using three different message boards: Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN and since I limited my responses to only 400 people.
Yet, what this survey clearly show is that the people I asked who live in many different locations throughout the world do not have an opinion or know anything about Korea, let alone whether it is sparkling or not. Korea is not getting its message or its image out there to world community.
However, seven years ago when I was preparing to come to Korea I can remember the people that I worked with half-joking about the fact that I would have to carefully watch my dog in case it was stolen to be eaten and I also remember people telling me that it was so filthy and polluted that the minute the plane hit Korean airspace that I would smell it. I'm happy to report that both cases were wrong, but still this is an image that people have of this country and most likely will not change in the near future.
What can Korea do to correct this apathy that the world has for this country? I'm not sure since I'm not a policy-maker but as one person put it Koreans should really focus on micro issues such as rudeness, dishonesty, hot temper and so forth, rather than the macro issues such as how Korea and Koreans are described in textbooks.
When tourists or foreign workers leave this country with a bad impression because of being cheated, or because of trash on the ground or because of a Korean being rude to them during their visit, this image is carried to their home country and over time it is amplified to where it causes people in that country to view Korea as a less then desirable place to do business in, to work or to visit.
The writer is student of biblical studies. He can be reached at eslcity@gmail.com.