Every time the door swung open at Lucky Strike, Ben looked at it like an outlaw waiting for a federal marshal. He has been in country for just short of two weeks and was still jittery. Although South Korea wasn’t exactly the most dangerous country on the planet he still felt he had to keep his wits about him.
Koreans weren’t the people he had to worry about; they were predictable. Korean men either hated him or wanted to be his best friend. Korean women were shy and wary, but generally kind and curious. It was the male expatriates Ben had to worry about. They were the dangerous ones, especially the two who knew and were looking for him.
Ben never knew what he was going to get with the foreigners here, which in a way made him more Korean. The one issue that Koreans weren’t shy about discussing in public forums was their not-so hidden hatred of “waeguken.” One only had to flip open any of Korea’s newspapers and read the editorials to find out what many Koreans thought about foreigners. If the editorials were to be believed outsiders were rapist, disease spreading, barbarians.
The attitude made sense considering Korea was historically a country that lacked enough internal organization to fend off occupation. Japan had practically made a hobby of overthrowing the peninsula every couple hundred years, and of course there was the matter of The North. In the end the attitude came off as xenophobic, stereotypical, and to a degree, racist. Ben wasn’t a rapist, or full of disease. If he was a barbarian it was a matter of perspective.
The bartender stopped in front of Ben and in broken English asked him if he would like another. “Nay. Guemsa-hamnida.” One more for the road. Tomorrow he would begin his search.
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