SEOUL - In a land of contradictions and
contrasts, Hines Ward of the Pittsburgh Steelers
football team epitomizes the yin and yang of the
South Korean flag.
He's
African-Korean-American - the offspring of a black
American GI and a Korean bar hostess, a child of
war and postwar suffering, a potential outcast
viewed with shame and contempt among Koreans. Yet
today, as Koreans greet him this week in a
triumphant homecoming, he's a hero among a people
to whom
ethnic and racial origin
defines nationality regardless of proof of
citizenship.
Ward's ascent to hero status
dramatizes the aphorism that nothing succeeds like
success, for he did not become a figure of great
respect in Korea until his proclamation as "the
most valuable player" of Super Bowl XL in which
the Steelers defeated the Seattle Seahawks 21-10
on February 5. Few Koreans understand American
football, but by now just about everyone has seen
a replay of Ward finishing off the scoring in
storybook style with a touchdown on a 43-yard pass
play. The failed marriage of a poor bargirl to a
GI with an open wallet and false heart and his
mother's desperate struggle to raise their son
alone in the US would have made just another
tawdry little tale of shame, stereotypical of
thousands of such affairs, had Ward been less than
a superstar success.
While reveling in
Ward's glory, however, South Koreans are wallowing
in a round of soul-searching about their innate
prejudices, their "homogeneous" society and
centuries of resistance to foreign intruders. Such
introspection raises questions and issues that go
beyond memories of raucous soldiers in the
glittering bars that line the streets outside US
bases. Foreigners coming here for whatever reason,
artistic, social or commercial, face barriers that
signify an innate need to defend the national turf
against exploiters.
The fact that South
Koreans are often divided among themselves hardly
diminishes the sense of unity against interlopers
eager to undermine and destroy the legacy of 5,000
years of history. This fear of foreigners has an
obvious basis in a tradition of tragedy and
suffering. The most dangerous invaders were the
Japanese, who enslaved hundreds of thousands of
Koreans, stole their land and ransacked the
countryside.
It's more difficult, however,
to figure the foreigners who rescued the country
first from Japanese rule, next from other Koreans
pouring down from the North, and then from the
Chinese who in turn rescued North Korea for the
communists. Shame over the need for foreign troops
to have fought here at all fosters a desire to get
rid of them except for the nagging sense that
South Korea might again be exposed to invasion
without them. The foreign troops themselves are
often true to image, loud-talking, aggressive,
occasionally violent and contemptuous of the
Koreans whom they're here to defend. Racial and
ethnic prejudice cuts all ways.
Over the
years, the clash of cultures and civilizations has
created a sense of confusion, of shifting values
and standards that defy analysis. Outside Camp
Casey, in Tongducheon, "TDC" to the hordes from
the 2nd Infantry Division who've swarmed the town
after grueling exercises on historic battlegrounds
south of the line with North Korea, black soldiers
for years flocked to what were regarded as their
own bars. Overt segregation is rare these days,
but Koreans, more so than the Americans,
instinctively place blacks in a category below
that of others of mixed blood. Offspring of
Koreans and black GIs have a much tougher time
over here, in school, on the job or on the
streets, than do those of mixed "Caucasian" - the
politically correct term for "white" - and Korean
blood. Ward may have broken down prejudices, but
the outlook runs deep in the Korean psyche.
The sense of shame extends, moreover, to
ethnic Koreans adopted by foreigners, whether
American or European. The specter of putting
babies up for adoption grew out of the poverty of
the Korean War, but Koreans now ask why Korean
babies are still falling into foreign hands when
the country now ranks among the world's dozen or
so wealthiest. Here too recent athletic success
has aroused feelings of pride in the ability of
Koreans to compete abroad while provoking
questions about Korean pride and prejudices.
Toby Dawson, left on a doorstep in the
port city of Busan at the age of three and adopted
by ski-instructor parents from the US state of
Colorado, made headlines in Korea for winning the
bronze in the men's freestyle skiing moguls in the
Winter Olympics in Italy. A man in Busan says he's
"sure" Dawson is his son, and others are vying for
the honor of proving him as their own. For Dawson,
the publicity was so embarrassing that he canceled
plans to return to Korea at about the same time as
Ward was getting a hero's welcome.
For
Koreans, the unsettling question is why any Korean
parents surrendered their flesh and blood - and
what kind of life would either Ward or Dawson have
led had they grown up here.
Such
sensitivities, though, hardly tell the whole story
in a culture where foreigners are relegated to
second-class status at South Korean companies and
universities, paid less than their Korean
colleagues and shunted off to teach English or
edit or rewrite English reports with no chance of
competing for real jobs. Nor do they explain why
foreigners, regardless of qualification, need not
apply for most professional positions or why
foreigners, while investing heavily in the local
market, are denied more than token board slots, or
why the streets are jammed with Korean-made cars,
trucks and buses while foreign cars remain the
toys of the rich. Under such circumstances, one
suspects that a driving factor in outbursts of
anti-Americanism is plain old xenophobia, the
deep-seated desire to cleanse the country of those
seen as standing in the way of pan-Korean
nationhood.
Yet South Koreans need
foreigners, not only for defense and business but
for ideas. South Koreans compete to attend foreign
institutions; they crowd planes overseas; they
copy-cat invention. From this milieu spring
Korea's own products and ideas, bursting on the
world in manufactured and cultural exports, on
screen, on television and in K-pop music. The
hero-worship of Ward and Dawson will have worked
if it helps to explode myths and phobias that
inhibit Koreans from accepting the foreigners
themselves.
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been in and out of Korea since
1972.
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