Having spent almost two-thirds of my life away from my motherland, I wanted to spend this graduation period looking back at my roots and the culture in South Korea. One phenomenon that stood out the most in my observation of South Korea was its Americanization, starting from our country’s culture, systems, and values to the minds of South Korean people. I could not begin to tell the presence of America in our country without telling my story – how I have spent most of my time at school learning from the West’s perspective, including the history of my motherland, and have lived with my goal focused on getting American knowledge, as most people from our country desire to do so.

When noticing how difficult it is to find articles published in the West that deals with America’s intervention in Korea, I realized how I have been training myself to look at myself, my roots, and the world through the eyes of the West. While seeing our country’s current administration proudly shows off making our country close with and depend on the US again, I thought that myself from several years ago would have believed in such a direction as well. I have never seen the danger of standing closer to America’s perspective and values more than today. Last week, I saw our current president Yoon Seok-yeol showing off the dog leash he received as a gift from Joe Biden on the news. The week before, our president went to the US and signed all the documents of the US demanding our country to stop participating in trades or projects with certain countries. I saw my friends and relatives in South Korea whose trading and communication businesses suffered after the Yoon administration defined several countries, such as China, Russia, and Iran, as our enemies over the last year. My friends that are still in their obligatory military service told me with laughter not to return to South Korea too soon because the fear of our country having another war has spread fast amongst South Koreans.

But despite all struggles that different individuals go through, many people in our country do not see such a phenomenon as a problem because no matter what happens politically or economically, the knowledge and value from America are the standards of our country, and that has not changed for the past seven decades. Several people back home told me – your political creed does not feed you; money does – when hearing about this research. Our country still has so many steps to go in discussing why we need to decolonize our country or what decolonizing even is. And yet, it is the exact reason why I write this research. How long have we, South Koreans, lived not seeing what the umbilical cord attaching ourselves to the US does to us because we were so occupied with making a living and improving our country? I hope this research is the beginning of recognizing the footsteps America’s intervention left on South Koreans' minds and finding ways to detach our sentiments and consciousness from the US.

“You have no idea, do you, she says. How could you? They don’t teach you any of this. Too unpatriotic, right, to tell you the horrible things our country’s done before. The camps at Manzanar, or what happens at the border. They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don’t they? Because telling you what really happened would be espousing un-American views, and we certainly wouldn’t want that.

Bird doesn’t fully understand any of these things, but what he does understand, suddenly, and with head-spinning force, is how much he does not know.

I’m sorry, he says meekly.

The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you and no one ever talks about it, and all the books about it are gone?

A long silence unwinds between them.”

(Ng, 2020, p. 114)