Ethnicity Trade Reactions - Commentary OT 270-275 (Patreon)

The question came up of “What would local Koreans feel/do if they knew Young-Mi’s origins?”

The very short and oversimplified answer: As far as I can tell, they wouldn’t care. 

Now, we are dealing with how real people would react to the use of a fictional technology in a country I have never visited. So I am learning a lot from friends who have been there and the internet. But this is what I’ve found that leads me in this direction. So give me a few grains of salt as I could be wrong about things. 

This is not my opinion on how I think people should react, but my armchair, unprofessional sociologist view on how I think they could react.

Plastic Surgery is not demonized in South Korea

Ok, this is a weird place to start, but I’m using it as a baseline of what people might feel about the use of nanobot technology for altering physical appearance in general. From what I can see it seems to be fairly accepted as opposed to the stigmatized feeling in the US. 

I’m painting with a pretty big brush. America (maybe the West in general) does not have a healthy relationship with body modification. There are too many shows welcoming people to point and gawk at plastic surgery gone wrong, or people speculating what celeb got botox and how shallow they must be. 

So with a healthier outlook on people wanting to modify their bodies, I assume more acceptance of the trade market as a whole. I’m sure it still ruins people's lives and a plenty of people hate it As a whole, I’ll say in this fiction, it’s probably looked upon favorably. 

A Willingness to Share Culture

That’s kind of the best way I can say it. 

Stephanie/Young-Mi mentions that you can rent traditional garments to wear at the temple. From what I can see, no one cares if white people do this. I can see in the US it’s viewed with a bit more problematic lens. But it is more along the lines of someone coming from another country and dressing up in colonial era wear to visit Colonial Williamsburg. Is it a bit tacky? Sure. But no one is policing to make sure that only ‘authentic’ people are doing it (at least no one should be). 

Similarly with the sharing of stories, there seems to be an openness to other countries adapting and altering stories for their local people. I’ll extend this to other Eastern countries for more known examples. Biggest one I can think of is that Japan doesn’t give a shit that Scarlet Johansson was in Ghost in the Machine. Most stories coming out of Japan are about Japanese people. It is an expectation that when selling a story overseas that it will change. The meaning will change. 

But even in the US we sell our stories to be in other countries all the time. American characters are changed all the time. There is a version of Breaking Bad set in Columbia with a fully Latino/Hispanic cast. 

Because of the size and make up of the US, things are much more delicate. 

The makeup of South Korea is 95-99% Korean. That percentage is excluding people of Chinese, or Filipino, etc descent. There isn’t really a motivation to accommodate other cultures. 

Meanwhile in the US, a basic breakdown is 58% White/European; 12% Black/African American; 19% Hispanic/Latino; 6% Asian; 5% Multi-racial; <1% Other.

The US gets even more splintered when we let people self-report their ancestry with 14% Black/African American; 12% German; 11% Mexican; 9% English; 9% Irish; 5% “American”; 4.8% Italian; 2.5% Polish, so on and so on. 

We have so many different identities, and instinctively people are more defensive of how they are portrayed and they want to fight for representation. This isn’t just Japanese Americans angry at Scarlett Johansson. This is also the Italian Anti-Defamation League suing the Sopranos. Anyone angry about how the Irish are portrayed in Star Trek. 

The cultural identity is so strong in South Korea that someone like Stephanie isn’t really causing any ripples. 

But if I’ve been ignoring something, it is that people would be much more angry at Stephanie and Lexi in the US.