Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Korean... netizens... taste of... own medicine
This Taiwanese man is taking out his anger toward a Filipino judge of Korean ethnicity* on products of the Korean wave, aka Hallyu [HT to theotherkorean, Wangkon's favoritest kyopo in the whole world].
The background for this story can be found here (and here and here).
The irony is that he has clearly been influenced by Korean netizenry's sports nationalism. Will he be forced to smash his own self? Would he like some help?
* A Taiwanese friend tried to explain this to me (I had asked; this was not something at the front of her mind that she was eager to offer up) and basically came up with one of the judges being ethnically Korean and the leader of the taekwondo body being Korean. That was it, and she herself emphasized she thought this was terribly stupid. Such goofiness aside, I think depicting most Taiwanese as this vehemently anti-Korean is quite an overstretch.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"I think depicting most Taiwanese as this vehemently anti-Korean is quite an overstretch"
ReplyDeleteI would also like to think so, Kushibo. I really would. I work with about 5 Taiwanese (most of them were born in Taiwan but came here 15+ years ago) and after that Asian Games incident, they all were pretty pissed off (yes...at Koreans). And many of them weren't even following the Asian Games. One girl even told me that her friends would get upset if they knew she "was talking to me about it". Whenever I asked them "but why target your anger at Koreans as a whole??"...the most honest answer was "Well..because Koreans just seem to always play dirty". It's a total media blitz against the Koreans in Taiwan. Aside from all the political explanations, maybe they're just jealous of us always winning and beating them in sports and tired of the Korean Wave stuff. I know I might be tired of it if I was Taiwanese.
I guess if I looked I could find a few people who were that adamant. Maybe the people I know are just pretty mellow, at least about Korea. The aforementioned friend is a hothead when it comes to talking about China, but she is much more subdued about things like this. Maybe she's afraid of giving me a bad impression.
ReplyDeleteStill, I'm imagining that Taiwan's netizens are a bit like Korea's netizens, where a handful of people are driving what appears to be nationally shared sentiment but often isn't at all.
Call TOK whatever you want. Just don't call him "gyopo" or "mins0360"... hehehe.
ReplyDeleteWell.... one must understand that Korea is pretty much the only country Taiwan can give the finger to. Japan is just too far outside their reach and China is just plain huge.
ReplyDeleteWangkon/Edward (is that okay to say? If not, I'll remove that, but I'm just trying to go for consistency since some might not know you're the same person... it's not privy, right?)...
ReplyDeleteI think many Taiwanese (even most) not only would not give Japan the finger, but they would prefer to cozy up to it. Many of the Taiwanese I know here in Hawaii speak Japanese like Americans speak Spanish, and they see Japan as a positive balance to the heavy-handed China.
I dare say some of them, if given a choice, would prefer that Taiwan join a federation with Japan than remain a province of China. (And I don't mean this in a negative way; the Taiwanese experience with Japanese colonialism was rather different from Korea's, and the post-liberation looking back was correspondingly different as well.)