Taegeukgi and Donald Trump

Lee Seong-hyon
The author is a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center and a senior fellow of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations.

“What you see and hear here is not representative of America,” said a Japanese scholar I met at Harvard University. In Massachusetts, where I live, Democrats form the majority.

Harvard University, located here, is a progressive university. An acquaintance told me that its English Department was once called “the cradle of Maoism” in the 1970s. It may be surprising to hear this now, since the U.S.-China conflict has turned into an ideological clash, but it was not a big deal at that time, he said. He also told me that quoting Mao Zedong in an English literature seminar was considered somewhat elegant.

I was struck by the Japanese scholar’s comment. Despite having lived in the U.S. for a decade, including for six years as a student, I never had time to reflect on how “representative” what I saw and heard was. I wondered if I had settled for the automatic perception that what I saw and heard was the “real America.” While I was listening to a radio talk show, someone commented that the people who support Donald Trump must have moral problems.

Many people share this opinion. My neighbor Veronica seems to feel superior for supporting the Democratic Party. She told me to observe what was going on in Texas, where the Republican Party is the majority. It is not safe, so everyone is carrying guns for self-defense, she said.

As I live around people like her, it is easy for me to be emotionally pro-Democrat. My brain quickly makes a conclusion and tells me subtly that this is “normal” American society.

But a serious problem is looming. The Democratic Party could lose in the upcoming presidential election. Many polls show Trump in the lead. The people around me are slowly accepting the possibility that there will be another season of the Trump administration. “This is not normal,” is what I hear from the people around me.

I had an opportunity to see “abnormal” America in action. Last May, I visited a rural town in Iowa. While I was driving down a boring country road, I noticed something familiar. I drove back to check it out. It was Taegeukgi, the national flag of Korea. I became emotional as I saw it in the garden of a house in a rural town. I assumed that it was probably a veteran’s family.

Although my family members tried to stop me, I got out of the car to say hello to the homeowner. As I approached the house, there was another flag besides the Taegukgi. It was a flag with Trump’s name on it. I froze.

The unfamiliarity of the combination of the two flags in the rural town confused me for the rest of the day. What hope did this simple old American man, who had fought in the 1950-53 Korean War, find in Trump? I tried to imagine and analyze, but I could not come up with an answer.

The United States I came back to is not the country I knew when I studied here 20 years ago. The sense of alienation and insecurity is even more clear now that the presidential election is just 10 months away. I recently attended an election study group with former members of the Congress in attendance, as well as White House staffers, professors, journalists and poll experts at the invitation of a friend. After several sessions, I came to the conclusion that the upcoming election will be a competition of the most unlikable candidates ever. A joke is spreading that the only Democratic candidate who can lose to Trump is Joe Biden — and the only Republican candidate who can lose to Biden is Trump.

And yet, they will run against each other. I never thought I would see this in America, but this is what I am seeing now.

I was unable to satisfactorily pinpoint the source of the unfamiliarity I felt in rural Iowa, despite having met with thought leaders. They, too, are anxious and dissatisfied with the current situation and are using those meetings as a place to vent their frustration with an irrational reality that they don’t understand.

The diversity and complexity of American society is something that I truly felt at Harvard. I guess a journey to find the “real” America begins when you leave the classrooms of Harvard and head to rural Iowa.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.