Making an 'us' from 'us and them'

"New York was great. I had a great time. But..."
Chung-Hee pauses for a moment, searching for tactful phrasing, "I just could never understand...the idea that you can't go outside at night, except in certain places."

I know where this conversation's going. Violence is something that for the most part does not exist in the minds or concerns of modern Korea, even in really impoverished areas, even late at night. I know that somewhere in Chung's mind there's an image of America (and most non-Asian nations) as being a land of racial and ethnic-warfare that isn't always distinguished from the pervasive, latent idea that non-Asians are more-or-less barbaric. I never really know how to explain my country to other people, a place that I don't quite understand myself. "It's just... complicated, there's all sorts of social disparity, and racial tension that's, like, become institutionalized, and-" ... I'm not doing a very good job.

Growing up, I've always taken it as a given that multi-culturalism was either a already a reality everywhere in the world, or it was quickly becoming so. But here I see that that's not necessarily the case. Indeed, even for me it is difficult to envision a Korea that is not in someway based on the Korean people and the cultural and genetic bloodlines that go back over 5000 years - as far as any other culture or people in the world today. People here openly praise their cultural and ethnic unity as something that makes them 'one big family', wherein one's sense of personal pride has a vested in lifting everyone else in their society out of poverty and in in which there are few clear lines of institutionalized repression. In a way it does seem like a really great thing, they don't have many of the same problems here that we do in the west, but it's also a rather scary mentality that harkens troubling memories of ethnic nationalism the world around. I suppose whether they like it or not though, rates of interracial marriage and mixed-race children are fast on the rise in Korea, so it's something that will have to be addressed sooner or later.