By Yun Chung
An article with the above title appeared in The Korea Times on Jan. 30. The author signed off, ``"The writer teaches sociology at the University of xxxx, Asia." He tried to offer sociological explanations as to ``why Korea is strange." His opinions were, however, grossly ethnocentric and need to be whitewashed. I will call him David.
David wrote, ``[Korea's] thought pattern [is] among the strangest, and its behavioral rationale among the most difficult to comprehend" and ``Korea's social structure, food, clothing, manners of living, language and other aspects of life are some of the 'strangest' the Western world has known about." Wow! David sounds as if he has dug up a Korean tomb in 3009.
David thinks ``hermit kingdom" is a fitting label for Korea, even now. In the late 1800s, Korea was trying to protect itself from Western gunboats and earned the contemptuous label. But it could not remain a hermit, thanks to the secret 1905 ``Taft-Katsura Agreement," in which the U.S. sold Korea out to Japan in exchange for the U.S. right to colonize the Philippines. Thus, the U.S. violated the ``Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between Korea and the United States of America," known as the 1882 Jemulpo (Incheon) Treaty.
David continued: ``Many conclude that Koreans are too impenetrable and weird to understand." He cited ``the mad-cow protests, the National Assembly brawls, the Internet madness, and now the 'Minerva' phenomenon, among others" as examples of the ``incomprehensive strangeness about Korea."
The Abu Ghraib and Gitmo phenomena are more incomprehensive than the ``Minerva phenomenon," and brawls among politicians are not uniquely Korean; they occur in other countries as well. In the U.S., brawls are part of national sport events. The mad-cow protesters were demonstrating against U.S. beef imports. They were also demonstrating against U.S. arrogance.
Some U.S. leaders wronged Korea with their arrogance toward it. Woodrow Wilson was a hero to Koreans when he first proposed the national self-determination principle in 1918. Future president Syngman Rhee was Wilson's student when he was President of Princeton University, but when he appealed to U.S. President Wilson for help in attaining Korean self-determination, Wilson acted deafly and prevented Rhee from obtaining a passport to go to the Paris Peace Conference. President Roosevelt and former Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk divided Korea along the 38th Parallel, the mother of all evils to the Korean people, as if they were cutting up their lunch steak. 51st United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson excluded South Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter in a policy speech in 1950, prompting Kim Il-sung and Stalin to start the Korean War.
In the spring of 1951, I stood in what was once a village of about 80 homes in Korea. All had burned down, probably due to U.S. napalm. There was not one life in the entire village. I cried for the innocent people who once lived there, laughing or crying. I saw more such villages and cried more. The late United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay was arrogant when he said without any sense of regret that the USAF had reduced Korea to rubble.
David said that the Korean language is unique, and it's true. Windows can support 11,571 Korean syllable blocks, all by simple arrangements of 24 Hangeul symbols. David also said that Koreans can change simple phrases, like ``to eat and live," so as to express ``different degrees of emotions and feelings" that only native Koreans can understand. This is incorrect. He was arrogant and malicious when he stated, ``As a curse, it [the Korean language] keeps Korea forever in the black hole of impenetrable oddness."
If the Korean language were a curse to Korea, so would the Japanese language be to Japan. Both languages share many similarities, including syntax, speech levels, and honorific expressions that may be ``strange" to Westerners.
The U.S. State Department classified Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean into ``Category III, languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers." For me, however, Japanese was very easy and English the hardest, harder than German, to learn. I have been living in the U.S. for over 50 years. My English still hiccups on articles, prepositions, uncountable nouns, tense, and numbers. I just do not have the ``feelings for picking the right words that natives do unconscientiously.
Few Americans, white or non-white, behave arrogantly in the U.S. White Americans abroad, however, seem to feel the urge to display white supremacist arrogance, particularly toward non-whites. They represent a different USA, the ``United Slobs of America" according to a British headline. Why have white Americans abroad behaved differently and arrogantly to perpetuate the unsavory moniker ``Ugly American" since 1958? No other group of people, e.g., non-white Americans, are capable of offending other peoples without really trying.
Of 141 nations that have become U.N. members since 1946, Korea has done better than most, proof that David was wrong in his sociological explanations and claim that Korea will remain in ``the black hole of impenetrable oddness." Odd that there are still many Davids outside the US. Strange that they do not know they are the ones who will remain stranded in the supremacy orbit. Nonetheless, America is a great country in spite of my misgivings as stated above.
The writer is a Korean engineer living in California. He can be reached at yunchung2@comcast.net