By Deauwand Myers

A year ago, I taught at a very expensive, private English summer camp. The children were refreshingly bright, kind, well-educated, and spoke English at near-native levels. It was one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve had. Most of the other teachers were great.

One of the teachers, however, proved to be egregiously insensitive. We’ll call him ``John.” John and I had the highest-level classes at the camp (the ones with the best English skills). We co-taught a few of our classes. Upon entering his class, I discovered he had given students nicknames. He chose them all.

One boy, a very well-mannered 13-year-old, had a name similar to the autocrat Kim Jong-il. John thought naming the boy Kim Jong-il would be funny.

For those who don’t know, Kim is the elderly dictator who rules North Korea with absolute power. He has presided over one of the worst famines of the past century, and coupled with his prison labor camps, summary executions, and proscriptions of intellectuals and political dissidents, is responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens, not including the North’s intermittent acts of aggression against the South, which often results in loss of life. He represents, in flesh and blood, an existential crisis facing South Korea’s entire body politic.

I found John’s actions to be emblematic of, at the very least, a breathtaking lack of intelligence, or worse, a kind of racially prejudiced, ahistorical gesture. It said: ``I am American. I am important. I am better than you. Your historical sensitivities are both meaningless and worthy of ridicule and laughter. I will name one of you the most evil man in your country’s millennia-long history.” (Full disclosure, I’m an American). In rather forceful language, I made my displeasure known to the class, the unfortunate boy in question, and to John. The boy’s name was changed a few days later.

I found John’s action’s racially-charged because it smacked of a particularly Western kind of thinking. It sees the victims of imperialism as ``whiners,” and in one gesture, disrespects the culture in question and reifies the notion that many in Asia already have; the West, especially America, ``won,” while all other parties, did not.

There are many other examples. I’ve seen foreigners in Korea ridicule the poor, racially mock the slanted eyes of Asians by pulling their own eyes back while taking pictures, the endless, sometimes bloody fights of drunken foreigners in Itaewon. One of the worst incidents is when a former professor at my university mocked Koreans for crying and grieving at the suicide of former President Roh Moo-hyun.

Some foreigners even recant racist ideology about other minorities to Koreans, in the (sometimes successful) hopes of recruiting believers. Years ago, in Yeosu, South Korea, a white, young Mormon man mocked the death and despair in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, many of the victims being poor and black. He said to some Korean faculty, not knowing I was listening in the hall, ``Katrina was just God taking out the trash.”

Lovely. Considering their past theology, I shouldn’t be surprised by racist, evil rants coming from a Mormon. But all of these instances are illustrative of my argument: There is the bad foreigner. He doesn’t ride gunshot in a stolen car ravaging the countryside, but he is nonetheless destructive. He isn’t molesting children or selling drugs, but he is nonetheless cruel, indecent and foul.

And though there are very few of these bad foreigners, what they lack in number, they make up for in outrageousness. I, for one, am embarrassed. We all need to be more mindful that as humans and as guests in a foreign country, we should mind our manners. And if you have none, be quiet altogether.

Deauwand Myers holds a Master's degree in English literature and literary theory and is currently an English professor outside of Seoul. He has written novels and poetry. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.