My friend Bob asked me in an email about what it’s like to be an American in Korea right now. I realize that, if you look at U.S.-based news coverage of the events here, you’d think things were suddenly pretty bad. And I will admit that I definitely am careful about what I do and where I go on the weekends – avoiding places where protests occur, like downtown Seoul (I haven’t gone near downtown in almost a month except a quick shopping trip to pick up some presents for my students on rainy Sunday early afternoon).
But it’s not really that different, for me, as a foreigner, than it was before the recent explosion of protest and anti-Americanism. Which is to say, there are inevitably people who seem hostile to westerners, or at the least, suspicious. With strangers, however, there’s nothing on me or about me that brands me as, specifically, an American (as opposed to some other type of anglophone westerner, such as a Brit, Australian, Canadian, etc.). But the other thing, which I think I’ve noted before, is that I really think this whole anti-American-beef / anti-American-trade-agreement is much more about dissatisfaction with the recent downturn in the global economy – which America is experiencing too – and about frustration with Lee Myung-Bak’s imperious young presidency.
“Compassionate” and reformist conservatives all over the planet are in trouble with their unfaithful publics, these days: Bush, Sarkozy, LMB, and Howard (who was recently thrown out by the Australians). People get worried when the entrenched social safety nets get threatened too much, on the one hand – especially when economies turn South. But also, what all these figures have had in common is an imperial style that wears thin fast in the face of scandal and evidence of mismanagement. Not that I think liberals necessarily do any better. But there just seems to be some unifying characteristics, is all.
So… I don’t think the protests are so much anti-American as they are anti-LMB and anti-Bush and anti-globalization. But Korea relies more on globalization than almost any other country – certainly among the world’s top 20 economies, it’s among the most dependent on external markets. China depends just as heavily on external markets, if not more so, but the immense size of the country and its population means that it’s inevitably more resilient (I think… I theorize) to global shocks and shifts.
Anyway. All of which is to say, I don’t feel, for example, any notable increase in hostility toward me from either strangers or from acquaintances. Those who are hostile to me are hostile for the same reasons they were before, and are in any event a minority.
On the other hand, I would not want to be an American cow in Korea, these days. That would be… scary. Very scary. The mad American cow is like this eerily reviled symbol, now. But what it stands for is as much a cypher of Korean government indifference as for anything specifically American.
Keep in mind that Koreans believe some unusual things – their weird, wired, webophilic culture has embraced all sorts of urban myths as fact, accentuating and exaggerating things that, on objective analysis, seem patently silly. I remember learning last fall, for example, that a plurality of Koreans believe that it is possible for an electric fan to kill a person while they sleep, merely by blowing on them. Here is a blog on the subject of “fan death.”
I don’t think that paranoia about American beef products is quite in the same mythical category as fan death, but I think it provides a context for understanding how unsubstantiated scientific “facts” about some given health risk can be transformed by a very large, tightly-networked culture into a fearsome reality and lead to mass protests. The main thing that is surprising to me is not that so many people have developed such an inordinate fear but rather that the current Korean government has proven so remarkably inept in managing the situation. They seem weirdly incompetent and naive with respect to forces that their recent high-speed technological bootstrapping of their society have unleashed.
I like to point out – as mildly and nonconfrontationally as I can when talking to people – that FAR MORE people have died in the recent protests about mad cow disease in South Korea than have EVER died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human version of mad cow that is presumeably caused by it), not only in Korea (where no one has died from it), but in the U.S., too (where only 3 people have died from it). In fact, the only country where there has ever been more than a few cases reported of vCJD is the U.K., which is where mad cow first exploded and was identified as a cause, and where subsequent changes in meat processing and cattle raising techniques have basically shut down the avenue for perpetuation of the disease.
