Seoulscapade

It’s trash like this that gives Korea a bad name. Here he is caught with his pants down, drinking beer, doing drugs and no doubt he sleeps with a lot of Korean girls (actresses and such).

Korea’s Incheon airport is like a revolving door in way, with foreigners coming and going. A lot of Westerners, especially Americans and Canadians, come here to make some cash in between semesters or during a break before heading off to graduate school. As well as them, you get a lot of older graduates who had just drifted around after university, not in a good job or even able to find a job, some of them in their late twenties and early thirties. What makes Korea attractive for these older ones is that it’s door is open, when, for them, so many are closed or closing at home.

With such an influx, you get an infinite variety of white trash infesting the country. It’s galling that they should have it so good, yet not deserve it. What they get in Korea, they would never get at home. To be treated well and get paid well just because they happened to be born into the English language.

Foreigners have directly caused me aggravation as well, inside and outside of work. I’ve had a few bad foreigner neighbours, not ESL teachers, but teachers at a university nonetheless, and others that were probably foreign students. After experiences with them, with how incompetent, uncouth or inconsiderate they are, my prejudice has grown against foreigners in Korea.

On top of that, Korea has treated me well, so I don’t warm to foreigners who bad-mouth the country. And I don’t have much sympathy for the white trash that ends up in the news. When they screw up, effectively ruining a good deal for themselves, a better deal than they’re likely to get back home, I’m delighted, on the one hand, but filled with trepidation, on the other. They’re behaviour reflects badly on us all over here.

Nonetheless, I love hearing about their latest antics. For example, some pictures of a party at a bar came out, featuring Korean girls cavorting with drunken foreigners. The pictures were spread all over Korean sites, together with comments from plenty of angry Koreans. Of the extreme kind were those who wanted to get a posse together to go out and bash foreigners—any foreigners. Scary stuff. By the way, I saw the photos, and I’ve got to say, it all looked pretty tame to me.

Other than the standard illegal working, drunkenness and drug taking, you get incidents like the foreigner was bragging on an online forum about how he molested Korean school kids while teaching. The guy was probably just a stirrer, but who knows? They immediately shut the site down but I managed to read the text thanks to cached pages by Google. I wish I’d kept all of that stuff because I can’t find much on it now.

One can sympathize with Koreans who must hear the same old MO year after year–white trash foreigners misbehaving again. Don’t get me wrong, many genuine and committed individuals make a go of it here in Korea. But I’m not interested in them. I’m going to start keep a record from now on, for the fun of it, on white trash behaving badly. I love hearing about their antics and watching them bite the dust, and I’m sure there will be plenty of material to entertain me in the years to come.