ABSTRACT
Thinking about the differences between Korea and the United States is an inevitable career by product for Americans who study Korea or Koreans who study America, because they are, or they become, people who have a foot in both cultures. Such scholars also change, and they become people with both feet planted firmly in neither culture, that is, feet planted nowhere, or in an indefinable space existing between the two countries. But what is always so striking to such a person is the contrast between his or her daily life, where thoughts and images of Korea and America mingle profusely, and the stark contrast exemplified by the two peoples: Americans and Koreans were joined together as allies and friends since 1945, but they rarely think about each other (although this generalization is more true of the American people, who know little about Korea), and even more rarely do they actively compare each other on the same plane. In a recent book I tried to under stand the complexity of perception that results from these juxtapositions, using metaphors of vision: clear, blurred, and double vision, and also the complex vantage point afforded to a person who is poised between two cultures, reflecting critically on both of them.1
