| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Hence, transnational capital flows between the United States and South Korea have increased greatly in the last 60 years.
In spite of globalization and the higher profile Koreans have gained in market capital in the last few decades, the image of Koreans in the United States as foreigners has persisted in popu-lar media representations. The most well-known image of Korea, as portrayed in the mainstream, is Robert Altman’s acclaimed movie, M.A.S.H. and the very popular television show of the same name that followed. In the movie and television show, Koreans were most often portrayed as poor peasants in need of rescuing by intrepid American doctors. The differential in power between Americans and natives in this show emerges in multiple ways. For instance, the intrigues of the doctors and nurses are pursued in the search for a semblance of civilized American ways of being in a primitive land where the inhabitants are ignorant to a life beyond their impoverished state. Moreover, by portraying Koreans in the 1980s in popular media as they were in a land leveled by war in the early 1950s, Koreans—and consequently, people of Korean descent in the United States—are perceived in American media as ignorant foreigners.
In terms of media representations of Koreans to-day, Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim portray castaways in Lost who are struggling with their marriage. Interestingly enough, this drama series portrays Daniel Dae Kim’s character, Jin, as a stoic and controlling Korean man who does not speak any English and thus is isolated from the castaway community, and Yunjin Kim’s character, Sun, is portrayed as a Korean woman who secretly learned to speak English to escape a controlling husband and is in a constant struggle between her devotion to her husband and her independence. In episode 6 of the first season, Mi-chael, one of the African American characters, who inadvertently involves himself in the marital conflict, tells his son that “They don’t like people like us!” In later episodes, they develop a friendship and an uncanny ability to understand each other implicitly. However, this friendship was built on the background of racial conflicts that came to a head with the Los Angeles Riots/Uprising in 1992.