They told us that the Foreigners called us pigs because our streets were so dirty.

There was an announcement.  I think I was in second or third or fourth grade.  That part is a little vague. 

Throwing trash on top of an already messed up world, where our king's palace had been turned into a zoo 50 years back, was a norm. And like good little Stockholm syndrome victims, we kept it a zoo for many more years after we were freed.  Well, only half of us were freed, the northern half was to be tortured under horrific leadership even worse than during the occupation era with no end of it in sight. 

South Koreans desperately tried to cope with the financial and spiritual ruins. The air was thick with the sorrow of loss and pain of poverty.   Koreans blamed themselves.  Some elders used to say to me, “It’s because we were so weak why we were so easily taken over.”  What they forgot about was that for hundreds of years prior to the takeover, the Korean Navy had been successfully fighting off the invasion.  All the elders remembered were the 35 torturous years where their children were beaten with metal poles in schools if they spoke their own language and their young girls sent to the battlefields of our occupiers to be sex slaves. 

We did not love ourselves.  We could not love ourselves.  This meant that we did not take good care of ourselves. It was normal to see trash on the streets in any part of Seoul.  That’s just how things were.  We lived poor.  We looked poor.  We desperately needed to wake up.

One Day there was an announcement.  On TV, on the radio, in the newspapers.  We were bombarded with the news that the foreigners were laughing and saying Koreans are pigs upon seeing our dirty streets.  They were calling us all pigs, the government told us.  

It seemed a matter of days before the streets of Seoul had no trash.  No one had to tell us twice.  Since then the streets of Seoul have stayed clean and because of that day, that announcement, even here in my new home, I can't stand littering.

I grew up hearing grownups blame ourselves for being taken over by Japan. 

I look at how Koreans have attacked the CoronaVirus, in the same ambitious way that we cleaned up our streets so quickly working together as one(Han-Gook) and never going back to having dirty trash-filled streets.

I don’t care if the government shamed us into cleaning up our streets.  What it shows me is how strong Koreans really are and I am proud to have that Korean blood running strong through my veins.

- Nancy