Splitting Hairs and Cultural Imperialism

Yeah I know it's not the best picture.

Important things first.  I gave myself a haircut for the first time.  I think the motivation came as a combination of wanting to be cheap and seeing one of my roommates doing it.  Admittedly he has a much simpler haircut than mine... not that mine is complex.

I think a part is slightly shorter than the opposite side but two of my Korean roommates don't think so.  Maybe I'm just paranoid... or maybe it is and I'm still paranoid.

As I work on this a female coworker (I trust her opinion more than my roommates') stopped by and said it looked good.  Mission accomplished!

Disclaimer:  Not all Koreans are like this.

You know it's good when it starts with a disclaimer.

Moving on to the subject of cultural imperialism.  From what I've seen and heard from expat friends, Korean culture has some not too nice parts to it.  Specifically, this ugliness is in the treatment of strangers.  Early in my stay here it was explained to me that Koreans (especially more old school ones) see Westerners and wonder why they're so friendly to strangers and cold to their friends.  A less charitable characterization that I've taken to using is, Koreans view people on the street as obstacles rather than people.  This is more an issue with the ajumas and ajushis, the women and men in their 40s-50s, I suspect it's because they're old enough to be fairly high in the age hierarchy but not so old they can't push someone a bit.  For instance... I was told a story about how a friend's fiancee, while she was getting out of a seat on the subway, was grabbed by an ajuma and pulled up.  Or those people who stand in the doorway to a subway car and, by doing so, block your attempt to get on the train.  Not because there is no room mind you... but because they want to stand by the door.

Hmm....  There's the standard of feminine beauty that is pre-feminist movement America with modern technology and fashion.  That is to say, there are billions of ads for plastic surgery, very high standards for how women dress (I've been told some women wear heels when they hike) that aren't mirrored for men, and a image of what an attractive woman should be that is remarkably shallow:  Cute and docile.

For the sake of fairness, compared to older generations the modern Korean woman is much more likely to have a meaningful career.  Is this a male dominated society?  Yes.  Has it been getting better?  It seems so.  Does it have a long way to go before it's even to the standard of the US?  Definitely.  Not all Korean women fall within the older expectation of what they should be like and there are those who fight against it.  One of my students mentioned a feminist rally where women walked down the street smoking (apparently it's a bit of a taboo for women to walk while smoking).  He disagreed with it... because it involved smoking... and he's a doctor.

One thing I saw in the Philippines that bothered me a lot was the presence and use of skin whitening products.  While they don't seem as common here, there is still whitening makeup available here and on some occasions I've seen people skin that looked a shade or two too white (and on one person you could see where the makeup stopped).  As a brown person who grew up in Caucasian neighborhoods, that REALLY bothers me.  To be perfectly frank I'll go ahead and say it... the American image of a beautiful person is, more often than not, white.  It has been getting better with the rise of various attractive celebrities of color but I wouldn't call it fixed.  To come to the other side of the world, to the place of my birth, and find that people use whitening makeup to make themselves beautiful makes me wish to use language that would prevent my niece from reading this blog.

This post is getting bigger than I expected.  It's 2:14 a.m. right now so it's a bit late but I will soldier on... I can always sleep on the weekend right?  Anyway....

Korea is extraordinarily homogenous.  I went to the CIA World Factbook to pull their data on the racial demographics of Korea and found:

homogeneous (except for about 20,000 Chinese)

So yeah.  I think Asia gets away with racism more than most other places.  In Korea, it probably helps that there isn't really anyone to complain about it.  When I've had conversations with friends about dating between Koreans and foreigners the hierarchy is something like: 1. Korean 2. Caucasian.  After that it sounds like it's pretty much a list of light skin to dark skin.  I suspect Japanese and Chinese are lower than their skin tone would normally place them considering the history between the countries.

Before I continue I think another disclaimer bomb would be nice here.  Not all Koreans are like that.  This is a problem with traditional households who, by the way I'm characterizing them, sound like the Korean version of the Tea Party... the Green Tea Party!  Wow that's a horrible joke.

There are some problems with borderline xenophobia.  By that I mean restaurants/bars/clubs that won't permit foreigners.  Awhile back, before I came to Korea, my fellow foreigner roommate went to a restaurant with a Korean friend.  Another day when he went with another foreigner they weren't allowed to enter, presumably because they didn't have a Korean with them.  For some of these places it might just be a reaction to negative encounters with foreigners.  I've heard some places near/in Itaewon won't allow foreigners to enter so, given Itaewon's reputation, the negative encounter theory probably has some weight to it.

So before I sign off for tonight and I'll leave you with one more wonderfully uplifting thought.  I've been told that people who visit Korea love it here and people who live here end up hating it.  Interestingly, I remember someone saying almost the exact same thing about Boston.

Later.