Never mind the Foreighners

Yesterday evening, on my way home, there were a bunch of people in the next carriage on making noise. I wasn’t really listening and just assumed it was a bunch of older drunk Koreans.

Every now and then people in my carriage would lean over and glance into the next carriage to find out what the raucous was about. Very often you will find yourself on the train and every person around you is alone, but this evening the three people next to me were together. One leaned over to look at that was going on, came back and said in Korean: “Foreign people.” For them that seemed to settle the matter.

Usually when I hear the the word “Waegook”, it is associated with a white or black person being somewhere in sight, so I was a bit confused over why they would call these noisy Koreans foreign. As I was waiting to get of the train and transfer I got a better look at these foreigners and indeed, they didn’t look Korean. I’m guessing they were Chinese, but I can’t be sure. They did have all the tourist gear with them though.

What I found interesting about the comment of my fellow passengers that being foreign was somehow an explanation for why they were being noisy when, like I mentioned right at the start of the post, it is so common for Koreans to do this that I didn’t even think twice about it.

I also found it amazing that ‘Foreigner’ is used in such a broad sense. it would seem that in their minds, these 5 people are representative of the four billion people who live outside of Korea. Apparently it is just expected that only the fifty million Koreans who live here know how to behave in public. Somehow I, standing quietly next to them as annoyed and any of the other passengers, was included in that broad group.

While all this was happening the guy sitting across from me spend about 15 minutes openly staring at me. Yes, only foreigners have no manners.

I have to admit that all to too often I say things like this as well, and I will do so again,  but more and more I prefer to just say “People” without qualifying their behaviour with their nationality or race. (I refuse to give up stereotypes. They are completely wrong, but they are very useful for getting a point across.) There are times when people of a nation do tend to do things in a particular way, but fact is that maybe half the world  will subscribe to the particular behaviour that you feel is oh so strange.

Sometimes, however, we are just straight out offensive.