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Koreans' Pet Peeve
A burden rests on the shoulders of the headline writer. Newspapers ask this yeoman to spin turns of phrase that tempt readers to investigate a story while assuring nonreaders that all they need to know is right there in the headline. (A newspaper's prosperity hinges on the continued patronage of skimmers willing to stay abreast of current events so long as the job can be done in under two minutes.) The best headlines don't simply summarize the articles below but drive them to the conclusions the reporters would have reached themselves if they'd had the nerve. An excellent example appeared over Mark Brown's column in the Sun-Times on June 18: "Nation of dog-eaters turns us off to World Cup." Brown didn't call Korea a nation of dog eaters, but he almost did. He confessed that he couldn't "work up much of an appetite for the World Cup" and explained, "Here's the gist of it: A lot of people in Korea enjoy eating dog meat, which a lot of people in the rest of the world think is really sick." He informed us of Korea's farms "that raise a special breed of dogs for eating," and of a Korean professor known locally as "Dr. Dogmeat" who defends dog as "a centuries-old Korean culinary tradition." From this to "nation of dog-eaters" was not a mindless leap. Kent Lee, executive director of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center in Chicago, spotted Brown's column and asked a staffer to prepare a letter of protest. "I am deeply disappointed and offended," this letter began. "It is disturbing that the author should be allowed to derogatorily refer to any nation, such as South Korea, as a `dog-eating nation.' . . . Of course it is our first impulse to simply correct your false statements, and clarify that most Koreans do not eat dog meat. If the author had even called one Korean American, this point could have been easily clarified. But the statements bring to the forefront a much larger concept, which is the notion that one culture is better than another." The letter noted that some cultures abstain from the cows and pigs that Americans gorge themselves with, and that people in many cultures, including Koreans, eat much less meat of any kind than we do. "Although we may not choose to practice customs or traditions of others, we also do not have a right to judge them." Lee posted the letter on the Web site of the Asian Community Online Network and E-mailed it to members of the Korean American Human Service Coalition, with instructions to forward the letter to Brown and the editors above him. A lot of people did, and it soon became clear that the headline writer was going to take the fall. "I did not call Korea a `nation of dog eaters,' nor would I do so," Brown wrote back to one critic. "However, I realize that my newspaper did so, and I am trying to figure out how to deal with that." Editor in chief Michael Cooke responded, "Mark Brown did not describe Korea as a dog-eating nation. That was in the headline, which Brown did not write." Cooke said he regretted the headline, but he didn't think the column itself insulted Korean-Americans. He asked the woman whose letter he was answering to identify the passages she believed were offensive. By the pugnacious standards of Hollinger International editors, Cooke's reply was remarkably conciliatory. He soon had second thoughts about it and wrote the woman again. "Also," this appended response began, "I disagree with you when you say: `Although we may not choose to practice customs or traditions of others, we also do not have a right to judge them.' Yes we do. . . . I offer example from today's news: Iran is raising the age at which a girl can get married without her parents' consent -- to 13. . . . Nine-year-old girls will still be able to marry, but only with their parents' permission and `approval of a "righteous court."' "I would say we have the right to judge that custom, wouldn't you?" Cooke asked. Thanks to the Internet, Cooke's riposte was soon read by many more Korean-Americans than the woman he'd sent it to. Hostile reactions flowed in to Lee. "I sense defensiveness and denial in Mr. Cooke's assertions," one began. "The comparison with Iranian cultural practices is incongruous, unfair, and out of context." Last Wednesday Brown himself came back to the subject. Imagine how Mike Royko in his later years might have handled the predicament Brown described himself in -- "wading through dozens of angry messages every day, which cumulatively have grown into the hundreds." When Royko found himself in hot water up to his chin he kept going until it was over his head; I can picture him recalling how he'd risked life and limb as a GI outside Seoul back in 1953 to defend the Koreans' right to eat dog, so he had no idea why they were mad at him now. Seeking conciliation, Brown merely explained that he'd read that 3 million of South Korea's 47 million people eat dog -- far from most, but "a lot more people than eat dogs here" -- and that he hadn't meant to be judgmental, but he did mean to be humorous. And though he couldn't quite understand why everybody was so mad at him, he allowed that his earlier column "definitely has at least one problem. The problem is a headline. . . . Without boring you with the details of how the newspaper business works, I don't write the headlines." Brown told me he doesn't know who wrote the headline over his dog column. I didn't try to find out. It was someone doing his or her job, and almost certainly not landing in any trouble for doing it. Brown reported in his original dog column that the "dog-eating controversy" had received much more attention in Britain than here at home. True enough. A friend of mine who was living in London when the World Cup began tells me the English team seized on dog as a way to justify "turning up their noses" at their Korean hosts. "I'm thinking -- is this the country with mad cow disease? Give me a break. The whole judgmentalness of it is so interesting to me. It's a way of distancing -- `They're not as good as we are. There's something savage about them, not quite right.'" Every four years my friend and her husband go to the summer Olympics. The '88 Olympics in Seoul "were far and away the best we ever attended," she says. "And when I came back and read the way the country was being portrayed here, it was mind-boggling. Journalists were looking at anything odd to exploit, rather than writing about the incredible food and incredible organization." I also spoke with a Chicago woman born and raised in South Korea. "We had a big landscaping business," she says, "and there'd be like 50 people working on a big project. At the end of it my father used to buy them a dog, and they cooked it. It's like a delicacy. Not everybody was into it -- just a certain sector of blue-collar people." She's never eaten dog herself, nor even seen it served, and the restaurants that offer dog "are like tucked into the end of the alley, and the sign doesn't say it, so you have to figure out which one. It's not like China." China eats lots of dog and is unabashed about it, she says. A friend of hers spotted a restaurant in Beijing that announced its fare with "a big neon dog sign with the head moving around," a sign such as you'd never see in Korea. But nobody snickers at the dog-eating Chinese, she reflects. South Korea can be dismissed as a "lower-than-third-world country," but China can't. Korean-Americans who reacted to Mark Brown's column -- or to its headline -- weren't angry because it isn't true that Koreans eat dog. They felt they'd been reduced to a caricature and ridiculed for it. Which is why Brown's dog column should be remembered as an instance when a columnist chose to kid around a little instead of seizing a golden opportunity to read several books on his subject, survey immigrant groups and anthropologists, and use his space to peel away the layers of cultural confusion that divide one civilization from another -- the way newspaper columnists usually do.
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