Reply #40: my dad says to tell him -- "this too shall pass" [View All]

[Lisa]

My family is of Japanese extraction (and we were "extracted" and living in North America decades before WWII). Dad remembers the whole mass internment thing (and at least some things have changed enough that the government didn't succumb to the right-wing loonies and repeat that particular experiment). They let him out of the camp in the spring of 1945 (even at a time when they weren't sure how long the war would go on, perhaps because it had become evident that the Japanese-Americans and Canadians weren't the problem they'd been made out to be). Dad says that he spent VJ Day in his apartment with the door locked, just in case ... but he adds that things did get better from then on.

It will take a whole lot more than one loony -- or George W. Bush, for that matter -- to get the whole society thinking that Koreans are evil. Remember, Reverend Moon and the Kim dynasty have been around for decades, and no reasonable person thinks any less of Koreans because of them. I know that the "unreasonable" ones will probably be saying dumb things -- but they likely can't tell Asians apart anyway, and they have a very short attention span. When I do have racist slurs hurled at me from passing cars, I take some comfort in the fact that they always use the wrong one .... the c-word or g-word, not the n-word ... I mean, the OTHER n-word. (And the last time this happened, I started running after the car, yelling, "that's 'nip', you ignorant honky!" -- he was so scared that he floored it.)

Anyway, this is just one of those things that happens ... if your roomie is still stressed by next weekend, why don't you have a nice little dinner with a few friends, to cheer yourselves up? It's almost BBQ season, and I happen to know that Korean BBQ is some of the nicest around. One of my Korean high-school classmates (she's a doctor in Toronto now) gave me her mom's recipe for "kalbi", the type with Coca-Cola and ripe pear, and it's always the first thing to be gobbled up at potlucks.