White girl from Korea

In Burkina, people call me a white girl. When I first heard that, I thought they had made a mistake and I told them, “I am not a white, I am from Korea.” Then they told me, “you are a white girl from Korea.” Later on, I found that there are two races here, black and non black, which is white.

Come to think of it, in Korea we also didn’t have those words like white, black and yellow before we opened up our country to Western countries. We called some foreigners colored-eyed people in the 18th century. Maybe people didn’t recognize much difference in skin colors when the first European, Dutch fisherman, Hamel, came to Korea by typhoon.

My friend Denise was taught a song in a US church when she was a child. The lyric was that god loves all kids, black, yellow and white, and she could not understand the meaning. Those words are commonly used in many countries with different races, but they convey a stereotype.