Korean Derangement Syndrome

I spent a good chunk of last night looking into the topic I'm going to try to write about on here in a bit of depth at the end of the week; fan-death. More on that later, but let me just say that it is way more of a can of worms than I had suspected. I did come across a pretty interesting (but polarising) article by George Hogan in the Korea Times. Apparently, George has been/was teaching "Korean social issues and current events" in southern Seoul. He blogs at www.asktheexpat.blogspot.com. It's polarising because he basically chastises all English teachers in Korea and accuses everyone of being narrow-minded and ignoring facts in favour of broadly criticising Korean culture and looking at things only from the point of view of their home culture. A subsequent article by Sandy Fortune correctly points out his over-simplified generalisations and some flaws in his research, but he raises some interesting points.

All too often in my time here I'm jolted by conversations starting, "All Koreans {insert wild exaggeration or vague, unsupported generalisation}...." It bugs me. A lot. Of course we can make generalisations about Korea (or any country, state, locality) that are backed up by facts and figures (as Burndog did on his blog regarding dangerous driving in Korea just the other day). However, what I often hear is unjustified dismissal of beliefs, cultures and attitudes based often on little more than "something I read". It doesn't seem to matter that this "something I read" was a forum post or one single article by a journalist living on the other side of the planet (or maybe even a blog!). It can be frustrating when we, as foreigners, are pigeon-holed according to stereotypes of our nationalities. That doesn't make it ok to do exactly the same thing ourselves.

Too often these differences are framed according to nationalities, instead of individuals. Just yesterday, I heard colleagues giving out about a Korean mother who threatened one of my co-workers after her daughter had been bitten by that person's dog. There seemed to have been general agreement that the Korean mother was wrong and had over-reacted. I'm not sure that would have been the general opinion had this event happened between two foreigners. If your kid was bitten by a dog off it's leash, wouldn't you maybe be a bit pissed off?

Anyway, I'm feeling a bit flat today so I'm going to wrap it up. Wednesday is my easy day so one more class and an hour of 'volunteer' writing lab sessions and I'm free to study for a couple of hours and then hang out with Ji tonight. Have a good one everyone. Oh and apparently today is 'Forget Me Not Day' (I have no idea what that is but they mentioned it on tbsefm this morning), so - call your Mum. Or something.