april 11, 2001
tonight i went to the oakland athletics - seattle mariners game at the oakland coliseum with some friends of mine. i didn't realize this until i got to the stadium, but there were a lot of japanese people at the game tonight, primarily to see ichiro suzuki play. suzuki is a rookie outfielder for the mariners, but was a star in the japanese professional leagues. so far this season he's been doing really well, batting over .300 and among the league leaders in runs scored.
i'm not really an ichiro suzuki fan. that's not a personal thing - i'm just not a mariners fan. i admit however that with the recent influx of major league talent from asia, mostly from japan, that i've kinda taken sides with the korean players. being korean, i'd say it's pretty natural for me to want to cheer for players like chan ho park, or byung hyun kim. and given a choice, i'd cheer for them over players like suzuki or hideo nomo (not that i'd ever have to make that kind of choice). even so, i'm personally very happy to see athletes from asia - korea, japan, wherever - come over to the states and succeed.
the reason i bring this up is because of what happened at the game tonight. i had joked to my friend kevin that i was gonna boo suzuki when he came up to bat, referring to historical hostilities between koreans and the japanese. but in all seriousness, i wasn't going to boo him for any other reason than the fact that he was a seattle mariner, certainly not because he was japanese.
suzuki didn't start tonight but when he came up to pinch hit in the eighth inning, the stadium erupted in boos! and this wasn't just the "boo the opposing player simply because he's on the opposing team" kind of sound. this was intense, and mixed in with the boos were comments directed at the man for being japanese, rather than a mariner. and even the simple "ichiro sucks! ichiro sucks!" cheers had a tone more sinister than anything i had heard in a while.
i was shocked. we're supposed to be living in a day and age where we have supposedly become more knowledgeable and more savvy about issues of race. we blame the ignorance of others for past injustices, and claim that in the enlightened present such prejudices would not come to light as it did in the past. what's more, i live in the san francisco bay area, where recent census counts have asian americans populating more than 50% of a few cities and similar numbers in many other communities. and this man - a baseball player - was the target of racist cheers, simply for being japanese??? (by the way, in the first game of the series, there were reports that people were throwing objects at him when he was in the outfield.)
it made me feel defensive. it made me feel like going up to some of these people and confronting them, taking them to task for what they were saying. it also made me wonder if these same people would treat me the same way if i was the one stepping in to bat. i'm sure for a lot of people, i look just like suzuki, never mind that i was born and raised in the united states. and i came to the conclusion that, yeah, there's a good chance that i would be treated as suzuki was tonight. in some ways, i felt like this was a glimpse of how it must have been back in the day when the first blacks and latinos began playing in the majors. on the other hand, a part of me told me not to do anything at all, that it wasn't worth my time and energy to let the ignorance of others bother me.
how would god want me to respond? how important should my identity as a korean american, as an asian american, be to me? and what if these people had been jeering an individual not for his ethnicity but because he was a christian? what if that individual was me? these are all questions that i thought about tonight. and i've gone through lots of different scenarios in my head. although i'm not gonna write them all out here, i will share some of the things i prayed about as a result:
1. for peace - that i would not let anger burn in my heart against others.
2. for faith - to know that the injustices of this world are not bigger than god's power to overcome.
3. for wisdom - to better understand god's love for all peoples of this world; that we are all equal in his eyes.