Centering Europe, Devaluing Everybody Else

Why are they eating white bread toast for breakfast? Yuck!

After watching dozens of K-dramas, I have learned about Brahms in Do You Like Brahms and Modigliani in Dali and the Cocky Prince. In Hometown Cha Cha Cha, I saw the male lead debate the merits of Burgundy versus Bordeaux French wines. However, I cannot recall characters lauding over Korean artists or contemplating regional varieties of Korean alcoholic beverages. For some reason, there was a moment in 2020 in which several K-dramas exhibited the Union Jack, the British flag, randomly in Korean homes. I have not seen Korean visual artists or real classical or traditional musicians. They will quote Shakespeare, Dickens, and even Becker, the family economist I was familiar with as a family sociologist in Because This Is My First Life. I do not recall quotes from famous Korean authors or intellectuals, only traditional sayings.

Through K-dramas, I have had the opportunity to visit Montreal (Goblin), Slovenia (Dear My Friends), Paris (several, including Now We Are Breaking Up) , Switzerland (Crash Landing on You), Ireland (Reflection of You), my former home of Los Angeles, California (Heirs/The Inheritors), and my study abroad city Granada, Spain (Memories of the Alhambra). Apart from locations in South Korea, the rest of the world does not exist or is portrayed negatively. Descendants of the Sun made up an Afghanistan-like war-torn country, likely to avoid offending Afghans the way Borat did to Kazakhs years ago. In Lawless Lawyer, the antagonist’s friend plotted to leave Korea with him and said, “Let’s not even consider going to the dirty countries,” repeating President Trump’s watered-down racist comments about s***hole countries. The Western hemisphere, from top to bottom, stops at the US border with Mexico, despite the small but significant presence of Koreans in South America.

Africa is portrayed as a country, not a diverse continent with a billion people who produced (and could) reproduce the entire world population. They do not give Africa the respect it deserves as: the cradle of human life where the richest person ever to live used to reside; home of the world’s oldest universities and churches; or where scientific discoveries such as the Omicron variant occurred; and the true origin of Imhotep’s Pythagorean theorem (the pyramids, duh). The continent is erased or diminished.

One of the few recent exceptions was in Itaewon Class in which Black American (not African), Chris Lyon portrayed a man from Guinea who had a Korean father and spoke fluent Korean and French. No African languages were mentioned. Given the negative depiction of Africans in Korean films like Mogadishu, perhaps it is a blessing that African nations are often ignored in K-dramaland.

Korean dramas make only passing references to other Asian countries. China is often portrayed as a large economic force that needs to be appeased, managed, and negotiated. This is not surprising given China’s proximity, major political and economic influence, and historically fraught relationship. China played a major role in the peninsula’s partition decades ago. This is not to mention their own recent “culture wars” and economic issues between China and South Korea. The significant Korean Chinese population in South Korea is often stereotyped as criminals, gangsters, and thieves, as recently seen in Taxi Driver.

On the other hand, Japan, which colonized and racialized Koreans over a century ago, often appears as an antagonistic force. In The King: Eternal Monarch, there is even a war with Japan that is averted between a fictitious unified Korea that has its capital in Busan, not Seoul. On occasion we see business dealings with the Japanese with random individual capitalists. However, other Asian countries barely exist in Korean dramas. This is despite Asia being the most populous continent on the planet. The exceptions I’ve seen were the gambling haven Macau in Boys over Flowers and an older auntie sitting poolside with her much younger Filipino lover in the Philippines (Love Featuring Marriage and Divorce).

More recently, there have been Korean-Japanese collaborations. They often involve Korean women with Japanese men in Tokyo. I imagine this type of relationship would be very stigmatized in Korea. With Japan sex trafficking Korean children and young women as “Comfort Women” during the colonial period. I’m curious about whether we might see Korean men with Japanese women dramas in Seoul one day.

Squid Game was revolutionary in showing the life of a North Korean in South Korea. Kang Sae-byeok (played by supermodel Jung Ho-yeon) was not a stereotypical spy, but a defector struggling to reunite her family. Prior to Squid Game, I had seen Indian actor Anupam Tripathi in Taxi Driver in a voiceless role as a stereotypical immigrant thief. When he portrayed Ali, a Pakistani immigrant in Squid Game, it was exciting to see the deference forced upon South Asian migrant workers who are expected to work in jobs that are dirty, dangerous, and demeaning (“The Three D’s” of Asia). With 1.3 billion strong, India is the most populous country on the planet, yet Indians are rarely portrayed, despite their consumption of Korean media and their economic influence as migrant workers in South Korea.