I wrote this essay for my Perspectives on Race class that I'm taking right now. It's an interesting class, for all that we mostly just sit around discussing the issue more than trying to find an answer. Which begs the question, Is there an answer? We were supposed to write about a time that we were a minority or a time we were discriminated against, so I chose to write about living in South Korea. We were supposed to keep it to two pages (it's a large class, over 80 people), but I could have written a lot more on the subject if I'd had the space. If I had written more, I think I would have included more about what I learned and discussed in greater detail the treatment I received while I was there. But here's what I did get written.
"It's hard to be a minority when you're white and middle-class and living in America. I was never “normal”, per se, but I didn't stick out too much if you just looked at me. Which is why moving to South Korea for a year and a half rocked my world so much.
The United States may seem like the bastion of white middle-class-ness, but compared to South Korea it's incredibly diverse ethnically and culturally. For the first time in my life, I was the outsider in every way it was possible to be outside the norm: I wasn't ethnically Asian, I didn't speak the language, I couldn't eat the food, and the culture was totally foreign to me. I couldn't walk the walk or talk the talk, and I definitely didn't look the look.
My time in Korea wasn't my first experience being a minority – I grew up in an LDS family smack dab in the middle of the small-town, Bible Belt American South – but it was the first time people stared at me
before I opened my mouth. In fact, I didn't have to do anything other than exist to get looks, both covert and overt, as I walked down the street. I was used to being “strange” because of what I believed and certain things I did or didn't do, but I wasn't equipped to handle the curious stares and whispers that trailed in my wake. I had years of experience explaining myself and my religion to skeptical and sometimes even hostile listeners; but now I couldn't communicate more than a few halting sentences, and anyway how can you confront people for merely looking at you? What could I have said?
My initial reaction to being so utterly foreign was a crippling self-consciousness. I tried to comfort myself by telling myself that not everyone was staring, but the truth was most people were. I'm average height in America, but in Korea I'm on the tall side. My hair, though light brown, is naturally wavy instead of heavy and straight. Even bundled up against the cold as I was there was no mistaking my double-lidded green eyes, and the weak winter sun and harsh wind only made my skin paler and my cheeks redder. It didn't help that little old ladies would come up to me, fascinated, and pat me on the back.
You look just like a doll! they'd exclaim, reaching up to run their fingers through my hair.
Is it natural? they asked.
After a few weeks self-consciousness gave way to anger.
Stop looking at me! I wanted to shout.
I'm just minding my own business, riding the bus just like you. Have you never seen a white girl before?! But of course they probably hadn't, not up close, and so the anger never made it past my thoughts. In time, the anger faded into amusement and the amusement faded into indifference. The stares and the whispers, the pats and the questions and the exclamations – they were all just part of life. It became such a part of life that coming home and fitting in again was almost as much a shock as sticking out had been when I first got to Korea.
I wouldn't say that I was particularly prejudiced or close-minded before going to Korea, but my experience there had a profound effect on me. I know what it's like now to be the person that isn't like everybody else. I know what it feels like now to be lumped into a stereotype willy-nilly, with no thought for who I am as an individual. I know how it feels to tamp down on the annoyance or anger that bubbles up when people make off-hand comments casually condemning something about which they know nothing.
It would be a lie to say that I don't have stereotypes and biases of my own, but since my experience in Korea I have tried hard to judge people on their own merits. I resist expecting people to act according to what “everyone” says. I've made a concerted effort to realize that people sometimes have very different ways of approaching life and its problems, and to reserve judgement on people's actions until I've at least tried to see things from their perspective. The outcome of those efforts has been profoundly enlightening, and I have come to see the world in a very different way from how I once saw it.
I don't relish being a minority. I returned to Korea one summer after I'd been back to America for about a year, and on bad days that annoyance and anger would flare up again. It's not particularly enjoyable to be stared at and whispered about and pigeonholed into a certain stereotype, but my life has become so much richer for that experience. My life has changed for the better, and I have become a better person for it. I cannot claim to be wholly without prejudice or bias or stereotype, but I can now recognize more easily when I've allowed them to creep into my judgements or my perceptions of people. My experience as a minority certainly doesn't equate with those whose experiences have been lifelong and overwhelmingly negative, but I can try to empathize based on what's happened to me. But I think most importantly my experiences have left me with a need to reach out to others, to overcome those small things that separate us so that we can learn from each other. Because what makes us the same is so much more than what makes us different."
