Right now I'm reading this book called The Koreans: Who they are, What they want, Where their future lies by a British journalist named Michael Breen, and it raises a couple of points that are a little bit interesting -- at least to me, hopefully to you:
1) Koreans don't allow non-Koreans to become Koreans (in a spiritual, nationalistic sense). This is a typical refrain that I've read in countless books about Japan, too -- that foreigners, even those who have lived in the country for decades, speak the language, are married to its citizens, are still not fully accepted into the patriotic brotherhood of the country.
I've never quite gotten the point of this point, because it's usually used to highlight how xenophobic Japan/Korea/insert country name here usually is. It seems to me that almost every single country in the world, with the possible exceptions of, I don't know, America and Canada, wouldn't accept a foreigner as one of its own. I don't find that racist or indicative of a 'closed' mentality at all; I find that to be human nature. It's like that new kid that joins your elementary school in Grade 4, after you've gone through the last five years of school with the same classmates. Sure, the new kid is part of the school, yeah, but he'll never be considered truly one of the boys. Most countries are freaking old, right, so how or why could a foreigner possibly be accepted, integrated, amalgamated? (New countries like the U.S. and Canada, being immigrant countries to begin with, are better at this sort of thing...although, I'm wondering by how much.)
2) It's a shame that most people can't read Korean, because they're literature is out of this world. This is a point that I wholeheartedly agree with, meaning, it is too bad that the majority of the people in the world can't read a certain country's language. There's so much nuance, texture and just plain coolness in foreign languages; if you don't know the language, entire artistic continents are, unfortunately, labelled off the map. (Certain of the arts, namely cinema and music, are still able to be enjoyed by the world's masses; others, like books, are forced to rely on the good graces and skills of translators, who do admirable jobs of capturing the essence of the work, but inevitably, something is lost -- that something being the musical cadence that makes language, well, language.)
The root of this book, and others like it, centres around identity. Who are these people, and why do they act the way that they do? Anytime you're in a foreign country, whether it's for days or weeks or months or years, you're going to be find yourself asking these questions.
And I'm not sure an answer is possible.
I'm not sure an answer is necessary.
The search is necessary. The questioning is necessary. It puts you more in touch with yourself and allows your curiosity and empathy about others to flourish.
The answer, though?
There is no answer to the who and the why. There's theories and observations. That's all. And yours are just as valid or crazy as the next guy's.
In the end, trying to pin down the actions, emotions, sensibility and transparency of an entire nation is a pointless task. It's hard enough to understand a single person, let alone a country or its people.
Just imagine if you could understand, truly understand, in all his contradictory human complexity, the freaky-looking teenage kid who bags your groceries at the supermarket, the kid with the tattoo of you're-not-sure-what on the base of his neck.
That would be a book worth reading, I think.
