My first experience with Asian race relations came when I started teaching. I was fresh from Ohio and naive about the splendors of racial purity, but my Japanese and Korean students quickly got me up to speed. Perhaps I erred, Takumi implied respectfully, when I put a Korean in his small group.
"Nope."
When asked how her small group was going, Yuko blushed and confessed that she'd never seen a black person before and that they all looked alike to her.
"Good thing there's only the one, then. Anything else?"
Were there any big incidents? No. But there were lots of these tiresome little ones. As time went on, my students taught me about the hostility between Koreans and Japanese. It was so, so tempting to tweak them—"Like there's a difference?" And we discussed each nation's fondness for racial purity. Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone had recently driven home that point by explaining the Japanese economic boom thusly: whereas the Japanense worker benefited from his nation's "racial homogeneity," American workers were intellectually handicapped by the presence in this nation of blacks and Hispanics. (Guilty pleasure: How's that racially homogeneous economy working for you, lately?)
Once I discovered the buttons, I couldn't resist pressing them. The first day of each quarter, I would anxiously await the first Japanese name on my roster. "Sota? Sota Yakamura? Hi. Is that a Korean name?"
And then I would watch the student implode. Great fun. All I needed was popcorn.
It's with mixed feelings that I read about Hines Ward's visit to Korea. Ward is a Steeler, and my favorite one at that. He's the child of a black American serviceman and a Korean woman—a demographic shunned and often abandoned in Korea. Fleeing certain marginalization, his mother brought Hines to America when he was one, and she worked countless menial jobs to give her child a chance. Hines became a star, of course, and years later he won Super Bowl MVP. It was at that moment that all of Korea embraced him. He and his mother are currently touring Korea. Says the government: "He showed perseverance, resilience and modesty, the core characteristics of the Korean people, and gave pride to all Koreans at home and abroad."
The desire to glom on to Ward's success is forcing Koreans to confront how they treat their mixed-race children, which can only be a good thing. Any credit I give is mitigated, however, by the fact that soul-cleansing comes not from within but from a need to explain the hypocrisy of canonizing someone who once fled the country. Ward has been famous for years. He's been half-Korean for even longer. Where's the shame?
Also irksome: last I checked, Koreans didn't give two craps about Hines Ward or American football...until this half-Korean won Super Bowl MVP, that is. Now he's a "returning hero." Please. Stop piddling yourselves. Show some dignity. I can say with confidence that if a half-American helped England win the World Cup, he wouldn't exactly need a police escort upon his return here.