4th of July in Korea

Since I'm American and this week is the week of the 4th of July, I decided to take the opportunity to do a lesson with each one of my classes to do some basic US history of why the 4th of July is celebrated in the US.

The lesson, found from the convenient website of waygook.org, starts with the simple story of Christopher Columbus and then talks about how people migrated from England years later.  The powerpoint portion ends with a discussion of what the US flag symbolizes and traditional activities for the 4th of July.  I then do a Simpsons review game with them over the material discussed.

Naturally, one would suppose that this would be an only natural thing for an American to do when teaching in an  ESL classroom in order to promote greater awareness in cultural differences.  These are things that I've done more in my morning classes so far, but not necessarily in my regular classes until now... so that means that I've only done these lessons with only myself and the students in the room and no other co-teachers.

I must say, that by doing a lesson such as this I have felt that it makes the underlying feeling that Koreans have for foreigners to be more obvious than it already is in your day to day life as a foreigner.  The truth is: Deep down, Koreans don't like foreigners.  Now, this isn't so much as a statement that would imply that all hate you and would steal from you or vandalize something (quite the contrary actually, as this is country is VERY safe in that regard -- safer than the US).  However, my point is that in the mist of these lessons where I'm constantly saying words like "independence", "freedom", "declaration of independence", etc. and then looking to who I'm talking to the only vibe that comes reflected back to me is: Freedom of what?  US politics preach it, history classes preach it, schools preach it, the news says it, etc.  But honestly - what freedom?  From an outside perspective, the US appears to be a contradiction of what they preach.  "We fight for freedom".  Okay -- WHO'S freedom?  The US invaded South Korea post WWII while the USSR invaded the North in the midst of "fighting the cold war" because Korea was no longer occupied by Japan.  Neither the USSR or the US allowed Korea it's own "freedom" to do as they wish but rather fought for them to be what THEIR country's economic philosophy was.  As a result, the country is still separated, still technically at war, and the US military is still occupied here... and I can't help but constantly get the vibe that South Koreans don't even want them here.

It's certainly not just the US, but rather just an underlying unconscious, almost, fear that they have for anybody non-Korean.  But, I suppose, you can't really blame them when every single group of foreigners that have come here through many years of their history was to invade.  In the upcoming years with the younger Koreans this would likely change -- a mixture of their developed economy at this point along with these kids being exposed to cultural diversity at such a young age could very well impact things for the better.  Yet, the underlying hurt and damage of this culture is still very much so present, unfortunately.