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TheUrbanMyth
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Location: Retired
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 Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 8:44 am Post subject: |
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| keithinkorea wrote: |
This is to Toby(met IRL) though others may read it of course. I've had few minor incidents in my time in Korea. Very minor and thats a reason why I'm here.
Korea is catching up with the rest of the world. But that fact is no excuse for the BS you had to put up with the other day.
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Toby's post was about a year and half ago, which is/was not exactly the "other day". |
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Bozo Yoroshiku
Joined: 23 Feb 2005
Location: Outside ???'s house with a pair of binoculars
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:31 am Post subject: Re: Screamed at for the duration of 3 bus stops this morning |
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| lush72 wrote: |
| So this morning I'm sitting on the 85 bus to city hall reading my newspaper and minding my own buisness. The bus stops and on gets a drunk man who looked to be about 40-45. He sees me and goes right up to me SCREAMING curses at me. |
I had the opposite experience, uh, Tuesday night near Tapgol Park. Waiting to flag down a taxi, and a totally SMASHED ajosshi (still holding a 1/4-full bottle of something, not soju) approached me. He started talking to me quite animatedly, but he was so gone I couldn't understand a word. He laughed his ass off cause I kept shaking my head and saying "mwo reu gessoyo". Finally, he waved me closer, and I lean in to hear what he's trying to say, and he wants to give me a kiss! "Bbo bbo heh!" Laughed his ass off at that, too, before walking off.
Not a full moon, but, man, the crazies were out that night.
--BY |
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jajdude
Joined: 18 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:32 am Post subject: |
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Getting back to the original question:
Why do racists bother?
Simple: they're idiots.
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On another slightly different note, I watched a movie on AFN the other nite, about Dorothy Dandridge, black starlet in the late 1950s. (Played by Halle Berry --- not exactly ugly.)
She was the first major black female star in Hollywood. She stays at a nice hotel as a star. But cannot use the swimming pool. Whites only. She dips her foot in it to be a rebel. The whities freak out. So they drain the pool and scrub it out.
I don't know if such a thing ever really happened. But talk about how stupid some people... hell, an entire culture can be!
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Many cultures have been, and many cultures are now, possessed by stupidity that defies explanation. |
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keithinkorea
Joined: 17 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 8:57 pm Post subject: |
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Not the other day! 
Totally occur with the above. Being racist is not clever, being an apologist for racism is possibly even dumber. Korea has I'd say more than it's fair share of vocal racist idiots and it is pumped in at a young age. Why do all the kids laugh if you talk about Africa? |
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Blind Willie
Joined: 05 May 2004
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 9:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Probably the same reason most of the people back home think Arabs are nothing more than Al-Qaeda operatives in waiting... |
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shakuhachi
Joined: 08 Feb 2003
Location: Sydney
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 11:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Blind Willie wrote: |
| Probably the same reason most of the people back home think Arabs are nothing more than Al-Qaeda operatives in waiting... |
Does blindness cause people to run off at the mouth? |
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Gunshake
Joined: 01 Feb 2005
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| Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 11:04 pm Post subject: |
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| jajdude wrote: |
Getting back to the original question:
Why do racists bother?
Simple: they're idiots.
==============================================================
On another slightly different note, I watched a movie on AFN the other nite, about Dorothy Dandridge, black starlet in the late 1950s. (Played by Halle Berry --- not exactly ugly.)
She was the first major black female star in Hollywood. She stays at a nice hotel as a star. But cannot use the swimming pool. Whites only. She dips her foot in it to be a rebel. The whities freak out. So they drain the pool and scrub it out.
I don't know if such a thing ever really happened. But talk about how stupid some people... hell, an entire culture can be!
==========================================================
Many cultures have been, and many cultures are now, possessed by stupidity that defies explanation. |
--------------------------------------------------
Basically I agree with you.
I would like to introduce some change of air from that of the dusty hubbub of the Korean subway, and talk about my experience in the U.S.
I have been to America three times so far, but the total number of the days I spent there does not exceed ten. My second visit was in 1994: to look around the L.V. Electronics Show. On my way back home to Korea, I was supposed to change my flight in LA and spent another two days there.
I wanted to take the opportunity to drop by a home depot and see what the portable generator market was like in the U.S. The hotel gave me the address of a big one located in a remote suburban area which was too far to use a cab with my thin wallet. Fortunately, the hotel informed me of a bus line ideally servicing between the depot and my hotel. The incident happed in the bus of my return trip from the depot.
The bus was not much different from ours in Seoul, but the scenery outside was far from being similar to any place in Korea. The bus was trundling along a road that traversed an arid landscape in a straight line. It was just a sea of land with no hills or mountains in sight as far as the horizon all around. The bus was half crowded, and I was standing toward starboard looking out of the window. My thought was just drifting aimlessly about one theme: what is land to man, a territory to a nation? I was envisaging a long march of troops from the dritte Reich across the endless plain of Ukrainian wheat belts. If land had no more scarcity than sea water like that, did they really feel any morale to bleed for it? The scenery outside the bus in my view was assuming the same similitude. It was then when a voice blared into my right ear. It was just a short question: "Are you a Chinese?" Astounded literally out of shit, I looked around and found a face hissing a couple of inches away over my head. He was about 1.75 m tall - some 10 cm taller than me - approximately forty or so. He was as sober as I was, with two limpid, well-fixed pupils implying no signs of doping or insanity. The only offbeat impression was given by his two upper incisors protruding over his lower lips: a rare dental formation for a Caucasian. Neither did he look like a bum, wearing no formal jacket but clean white shirts and a pair of decent trousers though.
Flummoxed at first but gripped by an anger a moment later, I retorted with my own question: "What for are you asking me that question?"
"Cause I wanna know!", he snapped back in the same blaring tone, and I could feel the tickling vibration even with my tonsil. I stared into his eyes for a couple of seconds and turned my face away towards the window without answering him. In the meantime, the other passengers in the bus were looking at him and me back and forth. Nothing more happened till he got off at the next stop. As the bus was sliding off the stop, I could follow him with my eyes. But strangely enough, he looked utterly nonchalant as if he were sitting up from a bench after reading a newspaper. It was my turn to get off a few stops later. The passengers in the corridor squeezed hurriedly to let me pass, some of them, especially white people, making notable grimaces on their faces. The implication was that I was from an untouchable caste and was arrogantly and unforgivably defiant to their own.
I have never told this story to anybody else so far other than my wife who must have forgotten about it completely by now. But I could not forget it and this is the reason why I have not repeated this episode to others. Every time the memory comes alive, I feel too ashamed of my having been there in the bus and in that small society where I supposedly did not belong, to impart my experience to others. I am ashamed of the way human nature is to feel about someone whom its owner labels to be an outsider and of the high possibility that I was also created the same way.
What Toby experienced is not exactly a case of a racist's abusive verbal attack. It was rather a case of a crooked moralist's overstepped sermon with no willing congregation on a very irrelevant occasion. If he shouted,
"Go back to your country!", it was no more than a makeshift remark he fell back upon when he ran out of his proper elequence. What's more, it happened for the first time in more than two years since he first came to Korea. And what lush72 underwent in that bus was also no more than a drunkard's harangue and misdemeaner that could be expected to happen to ordinary Koreans once or twice a month in local versions. That is one of reasons why the bus fare is so cheap in Korea. You are paying the invisible premium with your patience. To term those two incidents as racists' attacks is a tempest in a teapot. At least, the bus driver, the commander of the situation, was on lush72's side.
O.K. I will concede that Toby and lush72 were outrageously victimized by the organized racism of Korea. But as far as racism is concerned, is it typical of Korea? Or is it prevalent in this country to any higher degree of intensity than in other ordinary countries? Have you ever heard about a story of Korean-version neo-Nazi gangsters raping and killing a Western girl in a back alley of Kangnam? If you want all Koreans to be good Samaritans or to have diplomatically polished manners, then isn't it that you are asking too much? We are just ordinary people neither higher nor lower than average. If you insist that you experience racism in Korea too often, examples of no less frequency or intensity can be enumerated in your own country as well. It is a ubiquitous problem in the whole universe. Star Trek is nothing but a saga of intergalactic racism. And I can not count on the fingers of my both hands the number of the genuine strain of incorrigible racists actively participating in this forum. But most of them are far more tolerable than the man with two overhung incisors I met in the LA bus. |
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GoshiwonGuy
Joined: 31 Oct 2003
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| I wonder what would happen if a little asian man like myself hugging a western blond in public in (put your country) and speaking Korean. Would that annoy some natives? What do you think? |
Almost no one in the West gives a shit. At least people from the West Coast of Canada; but there are loads of Asians there.
And I don't know how Koreans look at foreigners with Korean wives or girlfriends, but have a pretty good idea.
When I was walking with my Thai wife (who could in theory I suppose pass as a one of the darker Koreans that you can see), I had some old dude walk behind me and start toying with our 2 1/2 year old son; he had a 10,000 won bill in his hand and was essentially teasing him with it while yelling and saying something in Korean to my wife.
I gathered it to be something along the lines of, "Here you little moolie tyke, give this to your sellout w.*beep* mother".
I don't know if I'm right or not but I don't think he was just trying to give him money because he is cute, as I've heard occasionally happens...because when I turned around and said, "No, No", and pulling my sons hand away from the money he started yelling, "M.otherfucker" at me and my wife in English.
We also felt stares quite often and often physically has (mostly) older Koreans walk right up to us and stare at us like we were a zoo exhibit.
But the most angry I got in Korea was when my wife and I were walking in Itaewon and some guy who must have realised that my wife was Thai (and therefore 'obviously' a *beep*) said loud enough to hear, "Looking for company?"
A grade-A fool who looked like a coward on top of it when I publicly called him on it.
Koreans in general are a bunch of racist fools; there can be no denying it...although of course a whole band will come along and say otherwise...
GG |
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GoshiwonGuy
Joined: 31 Oct 2003
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 7:46 am Post subject: |
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double post.  |
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Hyalucent
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: British North America
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 8:05 am Post subject: |
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| GoshiwonGuy wrote: |
| Quote: |
| I wonder what would happen if a little asian man like myself hugging a western blond in public in (put your country) and speaking Korean. Would that annoy some natives? What do you think? |
Almost no one in the West gives a *beep*. At least people from the West Coast of Canada; but there are loads of Asians there.
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As a side note from the homefront (in Canada), there are an awful lot of TV commercials these days with mixed white and asian couples on them, going for financial planning, or eating yogurt,, or whatever. |
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Blind Willie
Joined: 05 May 2004
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 8:48 am Post subject: |
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| shakuhachi wrote: |
| Blind Willie wrote: |
| Probably the same reason most of the people back home think Arabs are nothing more than Al-Qaeda operatives in waiting... |
Does blindness cause people to run off at the mouth? |
Well, I was going to change it to "Probably the same reason most of the people back home think gay marriage will case the apocalypse" but I got a "Cant connect to database" error when I tried, so I left it as is.
But I think any idiot (And I dont think you're just any idiot, so dont be offended) can tell that I was pointing out that there are ignorant S.O.B.s in every culture. Even our own highly enlightened one. |
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Bozo Yoroshiku
Joined: 23 Feb 2005
Location: Outside ???'s house with a pair of binoculars
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Blind Willie wrote: |
| Probably the same reason most of the people back home think gay marriage will case the apocalypse |
Don't even get me going no those American fundie freaks harassing (via phone, email, and fax) the Canadian MPs and trying to influence how they vote on the gay marriage bill. Don't they have enough things to b.itch about in their own country?
--Boz |
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TheMrCul
Joined: 09 May 2003
Location: Korea, finally...
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| Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 6:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
I had the opposite experience, uh, Tuesday night near Tapgol Park. Waiting to flag down a taxi, and a totally SMASHED ajosshi (still holding a 1/4-full bottle of something, not soju) approached me. He started talking to me quite animatedly, but he was so gone I couldn't understand a word. He laughed his ass off cause I kept shaking my head and saying "mwo reu gessoyo". Finally, he waved me closer, and I lean in to hear what he's trying to say, and he wants to give me a kiss! "Bbo bbo heh!" Laughed his ass off at that, too, before walking off.
Not a full moon, but, man, the crazies were out that night. |
Wierd.. Almost exactly the same thing happened to me the other day..  |
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