Following on from Wednesday’s post on a recent party incident, I would hate for anyone to think I’m deliberately targetting old white guys for my ire. Let’s go … hmmmmm, how about … South Korea! Via the New York Times.

Ah, South Korea. They of the full-contact democracy, stratospheric education ratings, unimaginable broadband penetration, one of the largest concentrations of land mines in the world (the meat from animals that go grazing in the DMZ along the North/South border, and are blown to shrapnel as a result, are then sold to Indian Muslim restaurants in Malaysia for turning into mutton curry … just fyi), and wonderful wonderful barbeque and kimchi. My favourite movie of the year (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) comes from Korea. As a result of all this, I’ve often wanted to visit Korea. But then I read something like this:

On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them. The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

South Korea is a case (yes, another one) of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It likes the part of globalisation that means people enter the country to do work that nobody else wants to do, or pay the government to study there, but it doesn’t like the bit about having to actually deal with those people as fellow human beings. But, as with most things, some are more equal than others:

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

I think it goes without saying that we’re talking about a white German here rather than, say, a naturalised German of Turkish origin, nyuk nyuk. ‘Cos if you’re brown, here’s what you can expect from fellow Asians:

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

I have to admit, the idea of always having a train seat to myself is tempting, but I wonder if it’s worth the surrounding angst? Let’s be blunt. The East Asians are obsessed with skin colour — Chinese, Korean, Japanese. Even the most bigoted Westerner envies a nice tan, but not so for millions of Pacific Rim residents … and Chinese Singaporeans. And it doesn’t stop there. The Koreans hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Chinese hate the Koreans. Good Gods, most people from the rest of the world can hardly tell the groups apart and, with the way the winds of history — and population drift — have been going for the past few millennia, I doubt there are many utterly pure-blood Chinese, Koreans or Japanese around anyway!

In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination … urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

If it ever did.

My current hypothesis is this. The discrimination of skin colour in Asia can, I believe, be traced back to manual labour. That is, if you were a peasant then, by definition, you spent more time out in the sun, working your skinny arse off. Spend more time out in the sun and your skin becomes darker. Ergo, darker skin == cultureless, brainless peasant. On the other hand, don’t spend any time out in the sun, concern yourself with scholarly duties — or nothing at all — under a roof all day, and your skin remains lily-white. That, of course, has to mean that you don’t have to slog outside, either because of your education or wealth. Ergo, whiter skin == educated, rich, aristo type.

It sounds too moronic, too simplistic, to be true, but nothing I’ve come across in decades of pondering this question leads to any other conclusion robust enough to encompass almost an entire continent. I’m open to alternate suggestions, if anyone has one, honest.

I’d segue into other racial groups here, but I wanted to concentrate on the Koreans in this post. So, holiday there? I don’t think so. I know what you’ll say: “But, Kaz, you can’t just refuse to visit a country because of some incidents of stupidity!” And I’d just tell you how utterly sick and tired I am of having to pay to put up with even the probability of this kind of behaviour, year in and year out, and having to subject my children to it, and how about a frickin’ break, OKAY??!!

(Oh, am I out of valerian already? That bottle went quick.)

You’re after a happy ending, aren’t you? How about this?

What was different this time, however, was that, once … [the incident with Hahn and Hussain] … was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

Will it work? I say no. There is too much embedded racism already at play in Asian society. Literally millennia of it. So, you see, it’s not just a Western problem. It’s a problem for all of us.

ADDITIONAL: And, when I say it’s a problem for all of us, I include myself as well. My taking offence at the assumption that I was the servant of the house, for example (ref. last post). Upon reflection, one reason I felt such anger was because I consider myself superior to the average servant. There, I said it. So, being lumped in the same category with a domestic worker was deeply insulting to me. This is despite the fact that I know that many, for example, Filipino women who are tertiary qualified are driven to domestic servitude overseas due solely to their country’s woeful economic, short-sighted and rapacious policies. And, in any case, there but for an accident of birth, goes I. This is a demon I’m going to have to wrestle with myself. I just hope I win.

ADDITIONAL THE SECOND: How about I lighten things up next week? I actually have * shock * horror * writing news and I’ll see about putting up an update on mini bull terrier and general vandal, Sausage.