The "Han" Question

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Excellent article by Gord Sellar about the supposed uniqueness of 정 in Korean culture, with a few mentions of 한 and 화병.

But as much as I liked the article, I found myself shaking my head its description of 한 (han), because to me "victimhood" was never not what 한 was, or at least, not the best way of summing up 한.

As I understand it, 한 is loss and sorrow, made all the more tragic because it is a sorrow so profound and so deeply existential that it can never be truly pacified. It is linked to the Animist tradition of seeing humans as mere vehicles for primal forces of longing and hate that transcend death, living on in nature, passed down through generations. It is also influenced by the Buddhist concepts of karma and the idea that peace can never be had until one fully renounces the world.


While this particular way of framing 한 may be culture-specific, stories of ghosts—souls stuck in a limbo between life and death because of unfinished business, regrets, or vengeance—are universal. And the canon of Western literature is positively lousy with stories of lasting grudges and sorrows tainting entire dynasties: Wuthering Heights, for one, and possibly the entire body of Faulkner's work.

So I have long been puzzled when Koreans assert that 한 is not just a word that stands for a culture-specific way of communicating an emotion that all cultures have an experience of, but a characteristic, even a defining one, of some collective Korean psyche. I do not see why Koreans should have intellectual property rights to 한, when Jews—along with Romani and Irish and countless other ethnic groups—also suffered, not only the Holocaust, but hundreds of years of pogroms and libel and discrimination. It is notable that for this history, the Jewish nurtured a belief that the world owed them recompense for their suffering, that recompense being the Palestinian territory they seized to build their Zion. And very much like the Jewish, Koreans embrace their suffering and turn pent-up frustrations into a form of social credit that bestows carte blanche for violent unprovoked outbursts, passive-aggressive complaining, and generally making everyone else's lives miserable.

They call this sublimated aggression 화병 (hwabyung), and the phenomenon makes an appearance in the DSM (along with Fan Death). Many Koreans take this as official endorsement—by the American medical establishment, no less—of Korean specialness. This is doubtful, as the section of the DSM-IV dealing with "culturally-bound syndromes" encompasses all cultures, and along these lines, I see no reason to consider 화병 any different from the Malay mengamok, or school shootings in the United States. The only difference is that few Americans attempt to excuse school shooters because "they were repressed" in the same way that the destructive effects of 화병 are handwaved.


Consider what would have happened if Germans had clung to their Dolchstoßlegende—their own post-World-War-I persecution complex—and thereafter preferred to stew over the razing of Berlin, the firebombing of Dresden, and you may get a decent picture of what the narrative of 한 and 화병 that currently enjoys wide currency has always looked like, at least to me.

The comparison would incense many a Korean. I can already hear it: "But the Germans clearly brought it on themselves, therefore they deserved it! We were innocent!"This kind of reply is disingenuous, and it ignores the reality that Korean collabos were actively involved in the process of occupying Korea, as well as the fact that many Koreans weren't really gung-ho nationalists: vicious Japanese soldiers or tyrannical noble landlords, it was all the same to them. And before anyone starts to blather about how much dictator president Park Chung-Hee did for the country, and how everything that went wrong under his regime administration was due to the meddling of foreign powers, I would like to remind everyone that Park not only led the way in slaughtering and pillaging fellow Koreans as an officer in the Japanese military, but later actively pursued and signed the "독도밀약", granting the Japanese government full (though not sole) rights to the use and claim of Dokdo and renouncing all future claims (including individual ones) to compensation for the horrors of occupation.

This all the while textbooks at the time were portraying the Japanese as rapacious vandals determined to steal our territory and culture—because Korean culture is so indisputably superior to others that everyone wants to steal it. And not surprisingly, to this day the discourse overwhelmingly focuses on how unfair it all is, how every powerful nation in the world is part of a conspiracy to screw Korea (with Japan in the lead), how Koreans shouldn't have to prove anything because it's patently obvious how wrong the Japanese are, and anyone who does not fully subscribe to this conviction is not worth humoring. It so happens that "anyone not worth humoring" also happens to include any international courts that may arbitrate on the matter.As may be expected, this refusal to "condescend" to debate—along with the "독도밀약" and the tacit concession to Japanese claims by former president Lee Myung-Bak's administration—immensely hurts any reasoned and earnest efforts to advance the Korean case.

Which is perfectly fine by politicians like Park and Lee, who peddle the myth of persecution to wounded Koreans, pretending to stand for their collective anger and frustrations, and using the gains got for their own ends: most of the compensation meant for Korean victims of Japanese occupation went to infrastructure projects which benefited Park, his political allies... and the Japanese companies that were hired for the purpose.And yet the same powerful Koreans who enthusiastically colluded with the Japanese have now become our politicians, the chaebol, and the heads of the powerful media conglomerates. Just last year, Koreans elected Park's daughter, who milks her association to her tyrant father for all it's worth, to the very presidency. If the Germans—who, by the way, have acknowledged their own civic irresponsibility in enabling the Nazi rise to power—were "deserving" of their own misfortune, what exonerates the average Korean who voted for Park Geun-Hye because "she's the big thing these days", "she's an orphan!", or because "my old man told me to"? (All quoted directly from people around me. I wish I were making these up.)


Two wartime memorials, left standing for posterity.

Simply put, so many things—like kimchi, and 한—have been appropriated to define a "Koreanness" that, pardon the analogy, I've never seen in the wild. What was once an indescribably expressive word rich in cultural associations has now been turned into a one-dimensional narrative of martyrdom, just as Koreans have grown so accustomed to polemics that their true history, in all its ambiguity and complexity, is mostly lost to them. And, quite frankly, if the definition of 한 is limited to being the end result of persecution, then how does making it part of a national identity—as the Jewish did—do anything but perpetuate the cycle of ignorance, violence, and exploitation?

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gordsellar said...

Anne,

Wonderful stuff. This response will be in parts, because it's too long. Maybe ill-thought out, I'm not sure, but you can obviously point out where you see errors...

But as much as I liked the article, I found myself shaking my head its description of 한 (han), because to me "victimhood" was never not what 한 was, or at least, not the best way of summing up 한.

Fair enough. I think I was really trying to present my perception of how 한 actually functions discursively in South Korea, rather than how Koreans themselves would characterize it. It's a bit like the disconnect between how a fundamentalist Christian would characterize his or her faith in the Bible (a gift from God, the gift of grace and belief) versus how an atheist like myself might do so (a sort of complex form of make-believe, or a renouncement of reason and critical thinking). Or, for another parallel, most expats teaching English in Korea think they're doing something positive in Korea, whereas a critical analysis of the hakwon system itself would reveal otherwise.

In other words, I agree that most Koreans would never hold up 한 as a form of self-victimization, but that's certainly how I see it... and like you, I see that as clearly tied to the status-quo propagating forces that seem to have conveniently penetrated South Korean culture to the point where national identity seems to be chained to the concept.

The stuff about the ties to the animist tradition, Buddhism, and so on are interesting, though I wonder whether the overwhelming negativity you mention within the animist link is also modern: some recent author on Korea (I forget who it was) chose to emphasize the concept of 흥 as opposed to 한 as characteristic of Korean culture. (Which sounds a little bit suspect to me: five minutes on the Seoul subway were enough to drive home for my mother the fact that 한 dominates.) Still... I wonder if 흥 and 한 were more of a dualistic binary, both fundamental in Korean conceptions of life, in the past, until it became politically expedient to emphasize Korean victimhood.

The idea of Korea having a premium on suffering has always irked me, ever since I first encountered it--and especially since seeing Jo Jung-rae trying to intellectually justify the claim. (To be fair, I think it's pretty unfair when anyone makes that claim: the history of humanity is one of a slow, painful climb from what most of us would consider near-ubiquitous horror and there was more than enough to go around. Also, those who make the claim tend eventually to use it to justify doing all kinds of horrible stuff themselves.)

It's hard to watch all this happen because it also ties in with an inferiority complex, which makes any and all critical discussion difficult if not impossible. (I find the same true of elements of Canada's inferiority complex when regarding the USA, and so on.) Inferiority complexes, like many psychological distortions, end up leading to a spiral of justifications of this or that nonsensical belief that one cannot dissuade by any reasoning whatsoever.

gordsellar said...

As for 화병: the thing that comes to mind (in terms of its apparent untreatability and the justifications that get attached to it) is religious delusions. I mean, my understanding of 화병 is essentially that it's a release of rage and resentment accompanied by specific (psycho)somatic symptoms like, if I remember right, a burning feeling in the chest. Like religious visions and obsessions, 화병 and the suffering and damage it brings about seems to get justified for the sake of holding together a worldview incompatible with critical consideration of the condition as treatable. (Let alone as the result of changeable social conditions: isn't 화병 primarily reported by female sufferers more than male ones?)

Consider what would have happened if Germans had clung to their Dolchstoßlegende—their own post-World-War-I persecution complex—and thereafter preferred to stew over the razing of Berlin, the firebombing of Dresden, and you may get a decent picture of what 화병 has always looked like, at least to me.

Well... some Germans have done so... and they're mostly neo-Nazis.

Which is to say, people who prefer to cling to modernist (and exceptionalist) conceptions of race, nation, identity, and so on. the comparison of Korean conceptions of race, nation, and identity to the Nazi one is common in expat-in-Korea blogs, of course, and I've made it myself occasionally, though usually from the point of view that Japan's spin on fascistic race-ideology was taken in part from European ideology, and Korea's was pretty much copy-and-pasted from Japan's after independence, or so I've read.

(Caveat: I'm using the sense of modernist put forth by Hiroki Azuma in his discussion of SF in Japan, as involving by a longing for unity, for a single "true" narrative, and for power. But the weird pop-cultural affinity that crops up sometimes in places like Korea and Indonesia for Nazi imagery also sort of brings the comparison to mind. Nazi bars probably exist in Canada too, but I get the feeling you'd have to go looking for them whereas in Korea they're more out in the open, or they used to be, anyway.... The night ended up playing a gig in a bar that had a huge Nazi swastika (and some other fake Nazi memorabila) still disturbs me, as do memories of conversations with a surprising number of students who were more than happy to call Hitler a great leader, until I interrogated how great it was when Hitler and the Japanese buddied up, facilitating Japanese imperialism in Asia. The Hitler praise is something my wife observed among some young Indonesians as well, to her shock and horror... and these were consistently the same Indonesians who praised Park Chung-Hee, of course.)

Which is to say that racial/national/cultural exceptionalism seems to be a kind of fantasy not just suited to, but perhaps even an integral part of, you know, "Hegelian" modernism.

The "we" that was "innocent" under Japan is a fantasy necessitated because otherwise how can we talk about "we" in all the ways that people have been taught to think were useful? Again, it reminds me of how every postcolonial nation seems, eventually, to forget that there were collaborators and quislings and so on... or to destroy itself in purging them.

But perhaps here Frantz Fanon's observation in The Wretched of the Earth is useful: that a society that doesn't violently overthrow its colonial oppressors is doomed to suffer under along-term inferiority complex as well as long-term psychological distortions about how independence was achieved. (The Korean fantasy of universal resistance, and its massive disconnect with actual history that you describe, seems to bear this out.)

gordsellar said...

And before anyone starts to blather about how much dictator president Park Chung-Hee did for the country, and how everything that went wrong under his regime administration was due to the meddling of foreign powers, I would like to remind everyone that Park not only led the way in slaughtering and pillaging fellow Koreans as an officer in the Japanese military, but later signed the "독도밀약", granting the Japanese government full (though not sole) rights to the use and claim of Dokdo and renouncing all future claims (including individual ones) to compensation for the horrors of occupation.

Hear, hear!

This all the while textbooks at the time were portraying the Japanese as rapacious vandals determined to steal our territory and culture—because Korean culture is so indisputably superior to others that everyone wants to steal it.

Yes, it was fascinating to watch my students try to come to terms with my discussion of E. Taylor Atkins' Primitive Selves (more here). From Japanese looking at Korea with nostalgia (and not just hate) to the idea of Koreans willingly going to Japan to become stars and Japanese coming to Korea with the (problematic, but well-intentioned) agenda of trying to preserve intangible Korean culture, there was a constant desire to swerve everything over to the rapacious, monstrous Japan, and the poor, victimized Korea model. Even our discussion of an article that demonstrated self-contradictory policies in penninsular radio programming during the colonial era ended up tied up in knots of self-contradictory pseudo-logic as students tried to explain how special radio programs on proper Korean grammar, in Korean, and by/for (one would think, exclusively) Koreans, were actually part of a conspiracy to wipe out the Korean language by "purifying it" so that it would be easier to kill.

(All pretty reminiscent of what Edward Said writes of the US-centric conspiracy theories that so troubled him in mainstream discourses among Palestinians and other societies in the Muslim world.)

It so happens that "anyone not worth humoring" also happens to include any international courts that may arbitrate on the matter.

Unfortunately, "anyone not worth humoring" is not a mutually exclusive group with "anyone we can get to mouth words of support, however poorly understood." Which makes the conspiracy theory so laughable and makes it so hard to take all of Korea's more reasonable political concerns seriously: it gets lost in the noise. (As do the serious political concerns of the Arab world, amid similar conspiracy theories like those mentioned by Edward Said toward the end of Culture and Imperialism, I think it was.)

I tend to think a refusal to "condescend" to debate is damning mainly when the "arguments" presented in the past by that person or group have been thoroughly reasoned and reasonable, and have fallen on deaf ears. Frustration is a fair reason to bow out of a discussion... but the thing is, when one refuses to debate with reason -- but instead starts depending on emotion and a sense of woundedness and victimhood -- then I'm afraid one simply doesn't deserve to be heard out. Refusing to condescend to debate because people outside one's group aren't likely to be willing to buy into emotional manipulation and special pleading is a whole different ballgame.

gordsellar said...

(Which is where I think Zionism is a little different: whether or not one agrees with the argument, Zionists made a claim that given all that had passed before, Jewish people needed a physical, territorial homeland, and they were willing to ground that claim in logic and reasoned argumentation, not just in tears and shouting and refusing to sit down to discuss the issue. (Surely there was an emotional component to their argument, but that wasn't all there was.) I realize that saying that privileges the Western way of doing things, but Koreans in general have no problem with the Western way of doing things as long as it benefits Korea or Korean (or chaebol) interests. Koreans didn't shrug and dismiss it when Ban Ki-Moon ended becoming Secretary-General of the UN; they endorsed the UN by their recognition of this as a big deal.)

And yet the same powerful Koreans who enthusiastically colluded with the Japanese have now become our politicians, the chaebol, and the heads of the powerful media conglomerates.

... who, because it benefits them, milk the anti-Japanese rage and paranoia and the sense of victimhood being a major component of national identity for their own benefit. It's a really vicious cycle.

And this, at least, seems to be a universal, if horrifying, political phenomenon among humans. I see the same sort of dynamic at work in the Tea Party: the Republicans generally screw the middle class, then point their fingers at the left and say, "They did it!" and the gullible right-wingers all start tearing up with rage and mobilize. People en masse seem to be distressingly manipulable and distressingly stupid, and it is consistently the worst people in any societ who manage to best exploit this fact.

Put one way, "Shit floats," but also, "Humans seem prone to helping shit float." What can we do about that?

Simply put, so many things—like kimchi, and 한—have been appropriated to define a "Koreanness" that, pardon the analogy, I've never seen in the wild. What was once an indescribably expressive word rich in cultural associations has now been turned into a one-dimensional narrative of martyrdom, just as Koreans have grown so accustomed to polemics that their true history, in all its ambiguity and complexity, is mostly lost to them. And, quite frankly, if the definition of 한 is limited to being the end result of persecution, then how does making it part of a national identity—as the Jewish did—do anything but perpetuate the cycle of ignorance, violence, and exploitation?

This certainly gives me a new (and useful) view on the concept of 한, and one that fits me general sense that even fundamental chunks of the culture in Korea have been retooled in ways both deep, and insidious, to benefit the elites, to prop up a status quo that is toxic to most people within it.

gordsellar said...

It also, very usefully, gives me some ideas to consider working into an old novel manuscript I have kicking around and which I am considering revising later this year! So thank you for that!

Finally, and this comes to mind a day after I drafted the above, it seems likely that with this conception of 한 shaping Korean perceptions, it may be part of why "foreigners" are so often depicted as either victims (mostly whe they're migrant workers) or victimizers (mostly when they're white Western males), a dynamic discussed in this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling. I certainly found that dynamic to be consistent in most of my own interactions with strangers (and some acquaintances) in Korea. It reminds me a bit of how my wife sometimes points out that Westerners (and myself in particular) tend to think of conflicts in terms of which party is more at fault... something she perceives, in personal interactions, as being very "Western"... which is funny, given the parallel I see in the popular perception of Korean/non-Korean relations. (And not just personal ones, but also in broad terms of international politics.)

Anne said...

First of all.... wow. Thanks for the thorough reply.

As for the negativity of 한, of course I personally have no way of knowing how Koreans thought and lived and put their lives in context... even as recently as the days of early modernization, so it would be ridiculous of me to claim to know how a person living in the Joseon Era or before would have lived. Also, though Koreans like to think of the Joseon period being culturally uniform (and then all of a sudden blam! modernization happened!) how could that possibly be true, when the Joseon Era lasted for 500 years and, as much as it tried to, did not exist in a vacuum?

I think 흥 would have been a significant part of that culture though. The salpuri dance I posted above (an artistic form that I would say is an attempt to embody 한) and tal-chum (more along the lines of 흥, though a way to pair that 흥 with biting satire and ribald slapstick) are stage reformulations of dances that existed in disparate forms all over different regions and time frames within Korean history, but these dances are still some of the biggest links we have to a Korean culture that actually existed in a vibrant, self-sufficient form, rather than the manufactured dogma currently sold.

I would not say 흥 is the binary opposite to 한, however: my intuition tells me that 한 is more of an existential condition, while 흥 is humankind's response to it, a way of combating the sorrows of existence.

Or possibly--and on reflection, I think this the likelier theory, though it doesn't rule out the possibility of the other one--흥 is what enables 한 to exist: a sense of loss implies that there was something good to lose in the first place. I say this because, in the process of researching this article, I read a traditional funeral song/lament that was collected early in the modern period, and have a basically preserved structure and content over different regions: a list of all the good things in life (good food and wine and clothes, song and dance, friends and neighbors, family) that the deceased person has left behind, and imploring for the dead to take it easy and have no fear during their journey to the afterlife. Touching stuff.

I meant to include my thoughts on the cultural effects of the Asian Financial Crisis in this article, but it was getting too long as it was, and increasingly I came to realize that that topic was begging for an article of its own, which I plan to write once exams are over. Suffice it to say, I think that while nationalistic polemic has been an unescapable fact o Korean life since the 6.25 War, I do notice that it has shifted in focus over the years, from a military/historical/McCarthyesque approach in the early years to an attempt to define what is culturally "truly Korean."

I make the connection because to the best of my knowledge, the later approach gained traction around the mid-eighties, a time when Korea was growing increasingly prosperous and looking forward to hosting the Olympics. And then boomed after the IMF crisis.

Anne said...

First, the Nazi bars, to which I can only reply: 헐?

I've never encountered anything like throughout my entire stay in Korea, nor even heard of anything similar. Maybe I've been hanging out with the wrong (or in this case, right) people? You sure people aren't mistaking the Buddhist swastika for the Nazi insignia?

But as for 화병, I've perhaps been overly vehement about it, and I am fully willing to admit that my reaction stems partly from my personal experiences, which not all Koreans may share. MY exposure to 화병 mainly comes from talk shows aimed at middle-aged women. The shrinks that come out on these talk shows say things along the lines that 화병 is so prevalent among middle-aged women because repression is a problem in our society. The conclusion? Yes, we should learn how to manage our anger in constructive ways, but that particular voice of reason is usually drowned out by the clamoring of the ladies on these panels: feel no guilt about being as horrible to your husband, repressive to your children as you want, you earned it!

Anne said...

Frustration is a fair reason to bow out of a discussion... but the thing is, when one refuses to debate with reason -- but instead starts depending on emotion and a sense of woundedness and victimhood -- then I'm afraid one simply doesn't deserve to be heard out.

Right. I'm sure there are some Koreans out there who can argue on the matter with a reasoned approach. It's just I haven't met one of those yet, or at least, one who has opened their mouth about the issue... and a refusal to get involved in the subject is understandable here, as it's a topic I personally avoid talking about in front of Koreans. I've actually had more conversation on this topic with Japanese kids, who were totally cool about it.

About Koreans' overwhelming need to paint themselves as the victim, I think it's partly understandable, if not desirable, because there are a substantial number of "Colonization Deniers" and apologists for the Japanese occupation in Korea, just like you have "Holocaust Deniers" and Japanese textbooks are a total clusterfuck. So while I frown on it, I can't really simply blame any Korean who automatically looks on all efforts to deviate from the commonly accepted narrative with suspicion.

Anne said...

Well migrant workers aren't always cast as victims, as I am sure you know. There was that murder case last fall, where the murderer was a Joseon-jok or something like that, and supposedly killed the woman in order to sell her flesh on the "long pork" market. That was followed by a spate of media coverage on the "rampant" rape, murder, and theft committed by migrant workers. So... yeah.

I think they did a study a while back where they had speakers of different languages watch a video where a man sits on a bed then the bed breaks. I think the American viewers had an unconscious tendency to blame the man for the bed breaking because their language structure requires them to find a subject as a starting point for the verb, while Chinese viewers didn't think the man was at fault ("the bed broke.") Suspiciously pseudoscientific, but there may be something there.

Specifically, I think of it more like Westerners tend to try and localize fault, track it back to the source, while the Korean approach to fault-finding is blame whoever's standing closest, whoever is most convenient.

Anne said...

And more about this inferiority complex you speak of:

Isn't it interesting that Koreans love nothing more than to be noticed by other countries? Especially white north-american-european ones? Specifically, nationalism these days seems to be comprised in large part of talking about how Americans love bibimbap, or how Hallyu pop stars are so popular abroad, or how Bae Doona featured in Cloud Atlas. I gather Canadians are also similar in that respect, the way they fiercely support Celine Dion and Shania Twain. And uh... Nickelback? LOL. But please, correct me if I'm wrong. And Leonard Cohen is legitimately deserving of adoration, in my book.

But yeah. The point being that Korean appreciation of Korean culture can't be done for its own sake, it must always be supported by the "white endorsement monkeys" I remember you mentioned some time back. Or must be turned into "명품", something that people the world over will covet like luxury products. Everything is 명품 these days, not only bags but apartments and hospitals and even entire cities. (huh?)

Anne said...

And good luck on the novel! I look forward to reading it someday!

gordsellar said...

Yeah, what you say about a complex interrelationship between 흥 and 한 makes sense. And I agree about the shift in nationalist rhetoric over the last few decades... it's what I see when I look back and writings and talk to older people.

As for the comment that "Koreans love nothing more than to be noticed by other countries"... well, yes, if the notice is positive. They resent nothing more than being noticed negatively by other countries. By which I mean, they are more resentful than people in countries with more self-confidence. If you tell a French person French food sucks, they sneer at you as if you're a barbarian. Tell a Korean that Korean food sucks and you're in for a world of trouble.

Canadians have a very similar inferiority/superiority complex regarding the US, or did when I lived there. On the one hand, while I don't endorse the picture of Canada Michael Moore paints in his documentaries, he is right that when you hold up Canadian TV news beside American TV news, it is (or used to be, circa 1998) like the difference between graduate school and middle school. Canadian news seemed to assume people were not morons, American news (at least the American news we got in Canada, and this goes back to the pre-FOX news days) didn't. But at the same time, America has long been such a powerful, successful kind of juggernaut that Canadians in the creative arts and in entertainment have often simply gravitated there so they could make a living in the bigger, better market offered by the USA. So Canadians have often been very chihuahua-like in claiming all kinds of entertainers as "Canadian property."

The one difference between Canada and Korea being that Canadians don't tend to say, "John Candy is the Canadian Jim Belushi!": they would just say, "John Candy is Canadian." (And so on.)

Well, and also, they don't take Americans' endorsement of this or that pop star or food as an endorsement of Canada--there's no desire to turn Americans into Canada-endorsement monkeys, as is so common in Korea. But you will find Canadians strutting about saying things like "Canada is the best country in the world," even as graduates from college are streaming out of Canada to teach in Asia because there just aren't any jobs in Canada.

Which is sort of parallel to the 명품ization of everything... which I see as a sort of gentrification-run-amok. Which I see happening across the developed world now.

(Also, to hell with Celine Dion and Nickelback and Shania Twain. I am agnostic on the point of Leonard Cohen but his novels are not very good and his poetry I don't care for. I've found generally that smart women like yourself seem to like him for reasons I don't quite grasp, so I just shrug and go back to my John Coltrane.)

gordsellar said...

Ha, yes, Nazi bars. I don't know if they're still around now--there was a furore online about them a few years ago, so maybe they were shamed into closing. No, they're not just misinterpreting Buddhist swastikas, these are actual Nazi flags. Sometimes you see posters of Hitler up, or fake-replica Nazi helmets too. Sometimes the bars are named something like Hitler.

There's a weird, underground strain--but not so underground as it would have to be in the West--of Hitler/Nazi-adoration in various parts of East Asia. I've run into it with Japanese people, Koreans, and my wife talks about encountering it in Indonesia too. I think it has some connection to the trauma of dictatorship and the post-dictatorship economic uncertainties manifesting as nostalgia. Like I say, I remember even as far back as the first class I taught in Korea, trying to figure out what the hell was going on in the head of someone who praised Hitler as a "great man" and a "great leader," and avoiding discussion of the things that make it obvious to everyone else that Hitler wasn't great at all...

I don't know if you're hanging out with the right or wrong people, but if your friends don't take you to Nazi bars in Korea, then that's one point in their favor.

My experience with 화병 consists of talking to people who attributed their really over-the-top behaviour to it, and consistently refused to talk about what was bothering them. Though some of those people have in recent years figured out it was hurting them as much as anyone else. That said, I get the sense that 화병 ends up mainly being about taking out your frustration on others without having to do the scary, painful, and of course transgressive work of expressing what is pissing you off. And it doesn't need to be direct, topically-related transferrence: torture your kid into going to church though you know unconsciously thy don't believe; sequester your offspring in hakwons that cost the full total of your spouse's income, and deceitfully claim it's for the kids' own good... that sort of thing.

gordsellar said...

Oh, and... usually it wasn't so much friends taking me to a Nazi bar as it was a gfroup of expats walking into a place and then discovering... though one such place was a live music venue, I'm pretty sure in Busan, and we discovered it only when we showed up for our gig. After traveling hours and hours to get there, we weren't about to pack up and leave without playing.

(Though, on reflection, with the tiny audience that showed up, maybe we should have...)

gordsellar said...

Right. I'm sure there are some Koreans out there who can argue on the matter with a reasoned approach. It's just I haven't met one of those yet, or at least, one who has opened their mouth about the issue... and a refusal to get involved in the subject is understandable here, as it's a topic I personally avoid talking about in front of Koreans. I've actually had more conversation on this topic with Japanese kids, who were totally cool about it.

Yes, well, I tend to find that anyone intelligent and informed enough to talk reasonably about the subject--a rare person from the get-go--tends not to be very invested in it, too. But they know from experience that pointing out to their more easily-manipulated fellows only leads to recriminations and not-fun-times, so they mostly keep their opinions to themselves.

Most of the Japanese I've talked about this issue with seemed genuinely perplexed as to why Korea was going into paroxysms of rage over what some obscure group of bumblefuck country politicos in ass-end-of-nowhere Japan said about Dokdo.

About Koreans' overwhelming need to paint themselves as the victim, I think it's partly understandable, if not desirable, because there are a substantial number of "Colonization Deniers" and apologists for the Japanese occupation in Korea, just like you have "Holocaust Deniers" and Japanese textbooks are a total clusterfuck. So while I frown on it, I can't really simply blame any Korean who automatically looks on all efforts to deviate from the commonly accepted narrative with suspicion.

Perhaps, though you know, Korean textbooks are a total clusterfuck too. (Or used to be. They're a bit better now, though from my experience writing a few and editing a bunch, it's amazing how clusterfucky they can get even after you've pointed out, "No, this is racist," or "No, that's totally sexist," or "Uh, this is historically flat-out wrong..."

Last night we were talking about how Vietnamese people seem so much less resentful of Americans than South Koreans... despite their having fought a long, severe war with the USA in living memory. My housemate pointed out that South Vietnamese felt the US was fighting on their side, while the North found it harder to resent a war where, "ha, they kicked America's ass anyway."

But it brought me back to Frantz Fanon and the psychological effects of throwing out an invader, versus achieving decolonization not through one's own efforts. (As discussed in The Wretched of the Earth.) The endless resentment is one of the symptoms Fanon suggests as proceeding from the latter. I've long thought of this as exemplified in South Korea.

gordsellar said...

Well migrant workers aren't always cast as victims, as I am sure you know...

Oh, yes. I remember the case you mention, and how my wife's "friends" from high school (the word seems to be less and less applicable these days) would bubble with speculation about how it had to be a Joseon-jok or a Chinese immigrant every time any other violent crime occurred. (Even though it consistently turned out to be Koreans in the specific crimes they discussed, they never seemed to learn that, "Hey, I assumed it was a Joseon-jok and it wasn't... maybe I'm a dumbass!") Migrant workers do get a bad rap sometimes, but I find a lot of effort to cast them as put-upon victims... as if a foreigner being a put-upon victim is the only permissible way for a Korean to sympathize with them.

My students even did that with me, when I showed them that sexist/racist MBC thing about predatory Western men and Korean female victims thing from late 2011, or was it early 2012? They were like, "Poor you, life is hard for foreigners in Korea!" and I had to stop that train of thought, and point out that, no, this wasn't a pity issue, this was an ethical issue.

I think they did a study a while back where they had speakers of different languages watch a video where a man sits on a bed then the bed breaks.... Suspiciously pseudoscientific, but there may be something there.

That's interesting, but as you say, suspiciously pseudoscientific. (I'd have to know more about attitudes in China and in the US towards the assumed functionality of objects. Certainly in Korea people seem to be quite willing to accept shit breaking down without blaming someone--well, unless it's going to cost money, at which point the person who pushed the button is to blame, and not the moron who did zero maintenance over the past decade.

Specifically, I think of it more like Westerners tend to try and localize fault, track it back to the source, while the Korean approach to fault-finding is blame whoever's standing closest, whoever is most convenient.

Well, the other interesting thing is that given a society where "crisis management" is the normal (and in many institutions, the only) mode of management, things almost falling completely apart isn't regarded as a big deal as long as the collapse is somehow, at the last minute, averted.

I definitely found that when it came to institutional, systemic breakdown--where a change in how things were organized or done could fix the problem, that there was always great resistance to acknowledging a problem because, hey, it turned out all right in the end. Never mind that the outcome cost ridiculous numbers of hours and was completely avoidable... wasting a week and a half and setting all your other work aside for damage control was somehow seen as more acceptable an option than admitting there was a problem and making a few basic, institutional changes to avoid having the same damned mess every six months.

Of course, most of the institutions I've worked with in Korea have almost no institutional memory at all. (Changing office staff completely every two years, no record-keeping, no training to speak of...)

But I do think that there was some kind of face-saving thing at work: for me, I was always concerned with how the system could be streamlined to minimize the chance of problems; but I guess some people perceived me as seek to blame someone (who, carrying out the system as it was, caused the problem). I really, truly found that looking at systems from an algorithmic point of view, searching for flaws that could be addressed to avoid potential future problems, was something most Koreans I worked with or taught didn't seem to see as a useful or comfortable mode of operation.

Which would explain a lot about the nonfunctionality of Korean-made software and websites, come to think of it.

Anne said...

Yeah, claiming Kim Yuna and Celine Dion as national treasures is a parallel tendency between Canada and Korea, but that's where I'd say the similarity ends. Rather than "notice," I probably should have said "acknowledge," because it's more that Koreans care, so fiercely, what other nations think about them.

It's a self-defeating goal, ultimately: the more you are invested in having others think a certain way of you, they're going to sense your desperation and assume (often correctly) that you have nothing valuable of your own to offer.

Anne said...

Hmm. The question was rhetorical anyway, I assume you're smart enough to know the difference between the buddhist swastika and the nazi insignia. But that is comically horrible. I never knew such bars existed, though in retrospect it could happen. I have a bundle of biographies for children I read when I was little, which included Napoleon (dickhead and co-opter of the name of Liberty to his cause), Columbus (exploited the Taino to death), Edison (most of his "inventions" were not his own), etc. and there is a definite tendency for Koreans to idolize leaders that achieved power, regardless of the circumstances or the effects of said rise to power.

Anne said...

I suppose it helps that Koreans themselves never felt the aftereffects of the atrocities committed by the aforementioned, and therefore, worshipping Hitler is not socially taboo (which is possibly why Hitler worship over here is not confined to certain subcultures... in the West you'd need a separate enclave in which to express those kinds of tendencies).

If that is taken into account, Hitler-fetishization is perfectly possible... and though I've never encountered it, my boyfriend apparently has.

Anne said...

Most of the cool, intelligent people I know are into jazz in some form, and I'd love to get it like they do (one more thing to enjoy in life!) but jazz has never tugged at my heartstrings the way it seems to do with them. My tastes are evolving into what I'd describe as more grown-up, these days though. I'm really getting into Janelle Monae, have you heard of her?

I can get why Cohen would leave you cold, it's adolescent groanings if you think about it. I mainly like it because the lyrics read like poetry. I didn't know he wrote actual poetry and novels though, and I'm not sure how his style would translate to that particular medium.

Anne said...

Migrant workers do get a bad rap sometimes, but I find a lot of effort to cast them as put-upon victims... as if a foreigner being a put-upon victim is the only permissible way for a Korean to sympathize with them.

I sorta could feel what you were getting at before, but this sentence crystallizes it for me. It's absolutely a clumsy way to do something (not think of foreigners as crap) that Koreans find very difficult... though I suspect they are making the task more difficult than it needs to be.

I remember watching this one documentary where a Vietnamese woman ran away from her Korean husband. Ostensibly their main source of conflict was money, though her closest friend said there were other problems too. Now, money disputes can arise between couples of any nationality, mixed or no, but the MCs chose, not surprisingly, to cast the problem in the light of a failed "Korean Dream" (the comparison to the "American Dream" which doesn't hold water, but more on that later). One panel member even went so far as to suggest that the woman had come to Korea with the specific intention of fleecing her husband and staying only until she had Korean permanent resident status. She made no attempt to hide her sneer, and no one called her out. So part and parcel with the pity there's a great deal of dehumanization and malicious speculation.

Anne said...

The clusterfuck that is the Korean software and internet community is more ascribable, I think, to government stimulation of those industries in the late nineties and early noughties. But yeah, after that the problem gets worse and worse because the Korean concept of crisis management does not include periodic upkeep.

Koreans like to flatter themselves that they can get anything done in a short amount of time with sheer elbow grease and "the power of will", but when you consider that "getting anything done in a short amount of time" means doing a shoddy job on not nearly enough time and no sleep... while spending the stretches in between project deadlines dicking around at work (because if you're seen as a hard worker, that gives the boss a reason to saddle you with all the work, then discard you later when you've outlived your usefulness) you have to wonder if this system is not only inefficient, but holding Korean development back significantly. For the reasons I've mentioned above, Korean workers actually have an incentive to limit their output, and in a job market where everyone is overqualified, this is tragically and exasperatingly wasteful.

Plus, the "elbow grease" explanation worked in a time (the 1970s) where most of Korea's economic success was based on stealing ideas from Japan and America, and then really just doing the parts that required elbow grease. Now, Korea's industries have moved away from factory and mechanical labor, and toward IT and other fields where creativity and brain power are required. And the "hit a tree 10 times and it's guaranteed to fall over" approach is actually detrimental to mental labor, or at least the quality of the results. Again, ignorant elders who think that administering the stick without the carrot is an efficient way of running a business screw over the country.

I think Koreans are hesitant to give constructive criticism because so often, such criticism is seen as a personal attack. I've seen this reluctance in class, where other students absolutely refuse to give negative feedback on student case presentations, and the profs have to make all the criticisms. They try to get us criticizing each other on top of practicing English, because they see it as preparation for the "cutthroat" international scientific community. It's an uphill struggle, though, at least during med school.

There are a lot of workplaces that are moving away from this kind of approach, though. I know a couple of people (my cousin, my boyfriend's brother) who work in departments where they are encouraged to work as hard as possible during the workday (albeit with a great deal of autonomy for a Korean workplace), and in return go home at 6 and are even given a separate allowance to cultivate personal hobbies.

gordsellar said...

I agree, the parallel stops in the point where Koreans tend to want Americans (especially) to "recognize" Korea's... I don't know. Greatness? Validity? It's somewhere between those two. Canadians, on the other hand, tend to just point to the obvious flaws in America and mock when they start to feel too insecure. (Or that's what I remember from over a decade ago.)

And yes, somewhere or other the way I characterized that self-defeating goal was like when you goo on a first date and you try WAY too hard to show that you're a cool, neat, interesting person: it just reeks of desperation and is a big turnoff.

That said, trying way too hard on blind dates may also be more acceptable in Korea. From the stories I've heard, which have always made me both glad--because good lord--and regretful--because it'd be a funny story--that I never accepted any of my friends' offers to set me up on a blind date during those times when I was single in Korea...

gordsellar said...

Yeah, it's always easier to idolize other societies' most successful mass murdering psychopaths, I suppose, and the American fascination with figures like Tojo and Stalin come to mind. But, that said, most North Americans I've known who knew all about Stalin or Tojo or Pol Pot were unequivocal about them being dickheads. (It was more easy to have illusions about Columbus or Napoleon, because of the prevalent narratives of heroism or discovery or whatever.

I think the worship of power is part of it, but I also think there's some kind of nostalgia for a strong, paternal male leader among young men in a lot of places, including in parts of Asia. Young men of a more conservative bent seem to see themselves as having "lost out" since they don't have the benefits of age, and since the benefits of whatever snippets of feminist reform have filtered into their societies get perceived as losses, because (being modernist thinkers) they tend to see things in a zero-sum game sort of way.

As for great innovators whose innovations are not their own: ah, yeah, well... people (not just in Korea) idolized Bill Gates as a successful technology magnate until Steve Jobs got popular... ironically, they're both primarily shiny-repackagers of others' innovations.

gordsellar said...

But this is the thing that perplexes me: most North Americans never felt the aftereffects of what Pol Pot did, but worshipping him is socially taboo in North America nonetheless. Interestingly, the examples you mention above tend to be 19th century or earlier... perhaps there's a cultural statute of limitations in every culture, but the rules determining what it is differ from culture to culture? I wish I'd talked about Pol Pot with more Koreans, though I suspect a lot of my students would never have heard of him. (English Language & Culture majors tend to be pretty focused on the US, Britain, or Australia and to know much less than they should about, well... everything else.)

I wonder whether, in the case of Hitler-worship not being socially taboo for Koreans, it might be a case of hypertrophied nationalism cutting off the blood circulation to other bits of anatomy (like, say, compassion or a sense of moral decency) in that particular percentage of the population?

(Sort of the way the same hypertrophied nationalism, combined with fearmongering media, cuts off the common sense resulting in, say, the Tea Party and sends some Americans into shockingly xenophobic rants?)

gordsellar said...

Hm. My wife was talking about how jazz kind of left her cold (aside from some vocal jazz; that is, instrumental jazz, of the kind that obsesses me, bored her) until she went to the Java Jazz Festival a couple of years ago. Suddenly, she saw these people up on stage, with these instruments in their hands or in front of them, making up almost everything as they went along, and she was like, oh... holy shit. Wow.

So I'll ask: have you gone to see jazz musicians who are in top form--the really, truly good ones--live? If you have, and the bug didn't bite you, then I'd say it's just not for you. But if you haven't, it's sort of like saying, "Meh, I hate pizza," when all you've tried is Pizza School.

Sadly, I don't believe there are many options for seeing truly top-class live jazz in Korea, except at festivals... and a certain number of such "festivals" seem to feature white European performers little-known in the jazz world, or the crossover stuff that is "jazzy" but lacking in the things that make jazz itself interesting.

I think it's probably difficult to get into jazz without having grown up around it, unless you have put in a certain amount of time learning how to listen to it. (I myself came to it in middle school, ie. as a latecomer, but I also spent probably a quarter of my waking hours in late middle school, high school, and the first half of undergrad constantly listening to it and studying it, as well as playing it... so for me, it was about putting in a lot of time to come to grips with it.)

I do know who Janelle Monae is, and think she's interesting and weird, though I don't listen to her much. (Some NYC SF/fantasy writers I know introduced me to her music during a long car ride.)

Cohen: yeah, sort of. Cohen has this kind of weird mystique, too. He'd walk up to a beautiful woman at a party, take her ponytail, dip it into his wine, and then suck the wine out of her hair. (True anecdote I picked up somewhere.) The women I knew in grad school who idolized him would go on about gender politics in literature, but then would sort of go woozy over Cohen at his most overtly, self-consciously, self-brandingly sexist. It sort of rubbed me the wrong way... or maybe I just envied him the panache and good looks that allowed him to make a habit out of crazy stunts like that and still have all the intellectual women I knew gaga over him.

Weirdly, a lot of the same women were also into Tori Amos, whose lyrics seem to me the female equivalent of Cohen's. (So maybe not-so-weirdly, then.)

Funny all this should come up. I've been working on a (delicate, trying not to make my friends feel bad) post about why most popular music simply means nothing to me, and how hard it is to explain to most people (whose default definition of music *is* pop music) why that is. Stay tuned...

gordsellar said...

... though I suspect they are making the task more difficult than it needs to be.

Ha, this reminds me of an old work supervisor in a music store where I worked. Long story short, at some point she said to me, "You like to make things like three times harder for yourself than they need to be, don't you?" And I told her, "Well, yes, I suppose I do." Maybe this is why I'm fixated on the same dynamic in Korean society, applied to so many things.

That documentary sounds horrible... and very unsurprising. The whole "scheming foreigner" thing even gets applied to white expats sometimes. (I had it applied to me, once, when I was dating a Korean woman whose family wasn't even particularly rich or anything. Baffling how these stupid narratives propagate.)

But, yes, now that you mention it, the reality that "pity" and "dehumanization" are two sides of the same coin is why I tended to react so negatively when people felt pity for me... it's also something I've often seen wherein pity and disrespect seem to be necessary prerequisites for compassionate depiction in the media.

And, for that matter, I've seen the same tendency in Korean media (especially MBC) whenever the issue comes up of "victimization" of Korean women by foreign men. The expats usually all get mad about how racist it is, and forget to notice that, wow, it's also very misogynistic, with the narrative amounting to, "These poor brainless Korean bitches who can't help but get used and ripped off by evil foreign men... oh, those poor stupid Korean sluts." Which is to say, pitying these women becomes an excuse for making all kinds of insulting assumptions about their intelligence, their motivation, and their, er, sexual propriety.

The example that comes to mind is this MBC news report that got kind of notorious online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B09FXOZVw4g

It's quite stomach-turning, and was the motivation for that first parody video we released as Brutal Rice productions. This one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elZilTWDOag

Tellingly (but tragically), foreign guys started in on how this was all racist and it was unfair to attack Korean guys with stereotypes... missing the point, as my wife put it, that the stereotype being attacked with all those "hyperphallic foreign males" references is the stereotype (often encountered by her) that a Korean woman would only disgrace herself and her family by becoming involved with a foreign guy either to learn English, or because he has an enormous organ... an implication my wife was sick and tired of hearing, and which she wanted to throw into the faces of those who perpetuate it.

Would love to read your critique of the "Korean Dream," which I agree doesn't compare coherently to the American Dream... though I'm pretty skeptical of the "American Dream" narrative too. Sort of. But I'm more skeptical of the "Korean Dream" one...

gordsellar said...

The clusterfuck that is the Korean software and internet community is more ascribable, I think, to government stimulation of those industries in the late nineties and early noughties....

Yeah, I know about the government's sordid role in getting Korea stuck with ActiveX... But it's been over a decade and a switch wouldn't be impossible at this point, if anyone would be willing to admit that it's a problem. But nobody seems willing to.

Down here in Vietnam, we've been readjusting to the shock that Vietnamese websites just... work. Or so far they have. Whereas ordering a pizza online in Korea is an hour of hairpulling and reloading the page and slwoly building rage, here yoou click OK and the shit just works... but we always seem to expect it won't.

That said, I still think even beyond the crisis management thing, that algorithmic thinking is something I've found Koreans around me struggling with to a degree that would shock me in Westerners. I tend to think it's just that people who've been part of an industrialized society for a certain length of time tend to have internalized the absolute primacy of systems (rules sets, protocols, coontingencies, and adjustments of same) for getting everything done. "What could possibly go wrong?" is the sort of sarcastic line that no amount of explanation seemed to clarify for my students.

Maybe, though, it's just because they were all lit/culture types. My Korean SF fandom friends are way, way more canny when it comes to thinking about systems and algorithmic processes and so on.

Koreans like to flatter themselves that they can get anything done in a short amount of time with sheer elbow grease and "the power of will", but when you consider that "getting anything done in a short amount of time" means doing a shoddy job on not nearly enough time and no sleep... while spending the stretches in between project deadlines dicking around at work (because if you're seen as a hard worker, that gives the boss a reason to saddle you with all the work, then discard you later when you've outlived your usefulness) you have to wonder if this system is not only inefficient, but holding Korean development back significantly.

And that's not to mention the way sexism holds back development even more significantly. (My female students outperformed my male ones consistently, but I know that on average their career options are less promising than their male classmates... indeed, that may have been why they outperformed them, but I still see massive underutilization of female talent in Korea.

But that's a tangent, and your point about last-minute completion of everything with too little time and no sleep and shoddy workmanship... yes. And also, when you're always either rushing to get things done at the last minute, or recovering from having done so, when does one bother with maintenance? One doesn't, is the answer.

For the reasons I've mentioned above, Korean workers actually have an incentive to limit their output, and in a job market where everyone is overqualified, this is tragically and exasperatingly wasteful.

Yes, though of course I blame the way big companies are allowed to dominate everything. I can envision a Korea where smart, small businesses do incredible things that chaebols would never dare to risk--things that actually improve people's lives, and are innovative, and so on... but I don't know how we get from here to there, without tearing the whole mess down and starting over.

gordsellar said...

Again, ignorant elders who think that administering the stick without the carrot is an efficient way of running a business screw over the country.

To quote a high school a friend of mine taught, "We're just waiting for all the old people to die, so things can change here."

To quote my wife, "But they keep making new ignorant people, so we're going to be waiting forever."

I think Koreans are hesitant to give constructive criticism because so often, such criticism is seen as a personal attack. I've seen this reluctance in class, where other students absolutely refuse to give negative feedback on student case presentations, and the profs have to make all the criticisms...

Ah, you're bringing back memories. Yeah, I think one needs to really carefully cultivate an environment where students are critiquing in way that everyone can see is constructive, and it needs in some sense to become the students' job. I managed to create that in some of my courses pretty consistently--creative writing and public speaking courses especially--but it doesn't happen overnight, and would probably be REALLY hard to work into a medical school course.

(I've heard lots of stories from an ex who did medical school in Korea about the conservativism of the "medical society" there, and about risk aversion among Korean students. She's also said eye-opening things about the stuff that shocked her after she went to do her residency in Illinois... like, how residents who got treated like animal shit by a professor could complain, and if enough of them complained and it was warranted, the prof would be removed from the medical training program... like, residents being seen as having a right to a little human dignity, was a shock to her when contrasted with how it was in Korea.)

gordsellar said...

There are a lot of workplaces that are moving away from this kind of approach, though. I know a couple of people (my cousin, my boyfriend's brother) who work in departments where they are encouraged to work as hard as possible during the workday (albeit with a great deal of autonomy for a Korean workplace), and in return go home at 6 and are even given a separate allowance to cultivate personal hobbies.

Ha, which I'm sure stresses out some individuals who suddenly worry about what kinds of hobbies they're "supposed" to cultivate. I've heard of people pushing for promotion who end up having to take up the same hobbies as their supervisors to curry the necessary favor. "I don't even like wine, but now I need to know how to judge a good merlot if I want to move up..."

I've heard about some reform in the area of work/homelife balance, though... although it still seems pretty uncommon and a lot of workers seem pretty scared of joining in on this, for fear of being seen as lazy or undedicated to their jobs. (I met a guy who was in some division of (I think it was) Samsung where they were telling people to go home at 6pm, etc., and one part of his job was to try to get people to start going home at that time, or to bank their hours if they did and take off the banked hours later, or something like that... it was an uphill battle, from the sounds of it.) Maybe things are changing faster than I've noticed, though, as I've given up keeping track on such a depressing status quo as things were a few years ago.

But even recently, for every story I hear like that, I hear ten of the other kind... the most recent one being the boyfriend of a friend of ours who was all stressed out because everyone at his workplace was using MacBook Airs and iPads, and he preferred Windows and Galaxy Tab but felt like he was being constantly, silently expected to switch. (At his own expense, of course.) This was at a job where he worked some crazy number of hours the first week, at the end of which he was told, "Usually new people in this job don't have as much free time as you did this week... we'll step it up next week, though, don't worry."

(He's since quit, thank goodness. But he was saying how this was so much better than a lot of jobs out there... and to be honest, it all sounded very familiar from what every former student who's dropped by to visit has told me. Hell, the Korean businessman I'm tutoring here was apparently told by his company that he is not allowed to have his wife and children live with him down here... what kind of company tells its employees they're not allowed to live with their families on months-long overseas assignments? Even armies don't that except when sending troops to warzones, amirite?)

Anne said...

He'd walk up to a beautiful woman at a party, take her ponytail, dip it into his wine, and then suck the wine out of her hair.

Fuck, I'm boycotting Leonard Cohen.

But yeah, Cohen's lyrics are definitely sexist... or to put it closer to how I think of it, it's that Cohen's (antiquated) view of sex is driven by inequality between male and female, in which male is the origin of movement and female is the passive receptacle for said energy. If not sexist, then at least based on a severe, severely outmoded and unsustainable kind of sexual dimorphism.

That sort of thing seems to strikes a certain chord with women, and did with me at one point (after all, I was a teenage girl once), but... the thought of being seen as or treated like a "woman" nauseates me, currently. It's a sentiment that's currently working its way into my story, actually, and I like the direction it's taking.

Weirdly, a lot of the same women were also into Tori Amos, whose lyrics seem to me the female equivalent of Cohen's. (So maybe not-so-weirdly, then.)

So eerie that you mention that, because I used to be a huge Tori Amos fan. I say "used to" because I listened to some of her stuff recently after a long break from it, and it sounded... so juvenile.

Anne said...

Suddenly, she saw these people up on stage, with these instruments in their hands or in front of them, making up almost everything as they went along, and she was like, oh... holy shit. Wow.

I've had an epiphany like that about food. It sounds funny to say but those kind of experiences are life-changing. To answer your question, I do believe my exposure to jazz itself has been far too limited, and I'd be the first to admit that.

Maybe the opportunity will present itself soon. My current playlist is mostly Janelle Monae and some mid-90's Korean indie, which I like well enough but it's still a very limited selection; I've listened to these songs so often that they've burnt holes in my ears, all my old favorites seem juvenile (I'm using that word a lot lately, eh?). Musically, I'm living in a vacuum.

Anne said...

... though I suspect they are making the task more difficult than it needs to be.

It's more like... "instead of bending over backwards to avoid being a meanie... you could just see these immigrants for what they are? People? It's such a simple concept, is that really so difficult?"

But, yes, now that you mention it, the reality that "pity" and "dehumanization" are two sides of the same coin is why I tended to react so negatively when people felt pity for me...

Korean xenophobia is tempered by the vague awareness that "this" (meaning discriminating against foreigners) is not how they do it in "first-class nations." There's a considerable amount of uneasiness, therefore, when you're battling between a superego that wants to reach out (or at least avoid censure) and vast cultural prejudice and ingrained fear that foreigners are here to "take your precious bodily fluids." So I think they've confined the scary concept of "foreignness" in a neat little cage... as long as immigrants conform to the premade image of the "nice foreigner", you can be nice to them (the same way you'd be nice to a pet). Once they start deviating from that image though, you can make nasty insinuations, cheat them, chase them down and return them to abusive husbands, or even beat them to death without any qualms.

The expats usually all get mad about how racist it is, and forget to notice that, wow, it's also very misogynistic, with the narrative amounting to, "These poor brainless Korean bitches who can't help but get used and ripped off by evil foreign men... oh, those poor stupid Korean sluts."

Oh god. I hate that too. I mean, your wife's reaction says it all. My boyfriend is not foreign, but he is significantly older than me, and often gets called "도둑놈", in a congratulatory way by his male friends, and in a despairing wail by my family. And that just begs the question, oh my god, what respect can you have for me, for my side of the equation, if that's what you really think?

Would love to read your critique of the "Korean Dream," which I agree doesn't compare coherently to the American Dream... though I'm pretty skeptical of the "American Dream" narrative too. Sort of. But I'm more skeptical of the "Korean Dream" one...

It's not much, just that what attracted people to America was the promise of land, yes, but also the possibility of new beginnings, self-sufficiency, freedom from persecution that signified. It wasn't the prospect of property and land, it was more about having property and land of your very own. (whether or not such expectations were disappointed or not, that was what "The American Dream" was for immigrants. I know well that was a load of bunk, but for some, it was a real dream.)

I mean, sure Korea has a higher GDP, and no malaria. On the surface, Korea is a much more advanced nation, yes. And this is what a lot of Koreans think is a sufficient condition to make Korea desirable, at least to poor schmucks living in Southeastern Asia, above their own homes where they were born and raised.

But is Korea inspiring the way America was inspiring to immigrants back in the 19th century? One xenophobic rationale for discriminating against foreigners, in the discourse of both Korea and America is that "these foreigners don't want to integrate into our society." Well, I would like to ask Koreans what they have done to make foreigners want to be a part of Korean society, over their own.

Anne said...

My Korean SF fandom friends are way, way more canny when it comes to thinking about systems and algorithmic processes and so on.

Hah. My boyfriend likes to say "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and gems like that. But yeah, when literature courses in Korea basically consist of rote memorization of the "correct" analyses to well-known literature... it's not just creativity that suffers, what is also compromised is the ability to build a logical system in your head. (I do not think, in fact never thought, that the two were mutually exclusive, they in fact depend on each other).

I've heard lots of stories from an ex who did medical school in Korea about the conservatism of the "medical society" there, and about risk aversion among Korean students.

Oh yes, people here are extremely socially conservative, and very risk-averse. What happens before case presentations is that the students who do the presenting pass out questions among the watching students, in the hopes that having their fellow students ask questions to which they already have the answers will stave off the professor's questions. When someone gets a pile of criticisms from the prof, someone will say "oh, you totally got destroyed", which has always, always puzzled me. I mean, professors are not always nice, and I dislike criticism myself (I'm so sensitive I'd bruise at a puff of wind), but the person who got a pile of criticism wasn't destroyed, they got a valuable opportunity to learn.

A professor pediatrics at our school told us that the professors at this school (one of the top-ranked in Korea) are not the most knowledgable or the best clinicians, but tend to be the ones who adjusted most seamlessly into the system, figured out how to work it to their own benefit. And from my experience, I believe it.

One horror story: there was a student from our school last year who topped the nation on the KMLE. Everyone knew he wanted to match into osteo surgery, but he became an internist instead. Why? Well rumor has it that the Head of our department of Internal Medicine called him and told him he would make sure that the student would not be accepted into ANY department at our hospital if he didn't apply to IM. It's only a rumor, so it should be taken with a heaping spoonful of salt, but the IM Department Head is well known for being the kind of man who would be capable of that kind of stunt.

The horror story here being, not that he threatened the student, but the mere fact that he is Department Chair at our hospital is intimidating enough that no one dares to call out the Emperor for being naked. That so many people let themselves be intimidated that badly.

Anne said...

No, you're right, there is a difference between Western hero-worship of horrible leaders and Korean hero-worship of horrible leaders. I can't put my finger on it either, though.

gordsellar said...

It's more like... "instead of bending over backwards to avoid being a meanie... you could just see these immigrants for what they are? People? It's such a simple concept, is that really so difficult?"

Well, when you have been taught to believe that people in your little category are fundamentally different, and your experience is limited to only people in that category, then apparently yes, it really is that difficult.

Uphill battles, and all that.

Korean xenophobia is tempered by the vague awareness that "this" (meaning discriminating against foreigners) is not how they do it in "first-class nations."

Interesting you should say that, though I'd say perhaps "between 'first-class nations'" might be more accurate... as I've often heard Koreans with no experience abroad seem to be aware of (and talk about) the racism endured by blacks (and Asians) in America, Australia, etc... either to justify racist attitudes or systems in Korea, or to claim it's worse in other places.

Not that this contradicts your point completely: the tempering is just hampered by that vague awareness that there's racism all over... It reminds me of how one of my students got mad when I brought up--in a "Business Across Cultures" course--the question of whether we ought to consider economic imperialism just another form of colonialism, or something less horrible. After some discussion, the class felt it was the former, except one student who reprimanded me, saying, "Your people had their turn to exploit poor people far away... now it's Korea's turn." She didn't have much to say when I pointed out that we (or at least the educated among us) remember those who did that exploitation as shameful, bad people, who have left us with a shameful, difficult-to-overcome legacy of shit and evil.

My response didn't seem to go very far: "Can't you learn from our mistakes, instead of repeating them? And by the way, the English colonized the land where some of my ancestors lived, too, and exploited them as well..." (I'm half-Scottish.)

There's a considerable amount of uneasiness, therefore, when you're battling between a superego that wants to reach out (or at least avoid censure) and vast cultural prejudice and ingrained fear that foreigners are here to "take your precious bodily fluids."

Hahaha. We're vampires! I love it.

So I think they've confined the scary concept of "foreignness" in a neat little cage... as long as immigrants conform to the premade image of the "nice foreigner", you can be nice to them (the same way you'd be nice to a pet). Once they start deviating from that image though, you can make nasty insinuations, cheat them, chase them down and return them to abusive husbands, or even beat them to death without any qualms.

Love that less, and yes, on the money. Maybe I already told you about my wife's stories of Korean classmates in the Indonesian language program she took in Jakarta warning her of certain classmates who "hated Koreans": she was baffled and couldn't figure why they thought this when her own interactions suggested the people were neither particularly aware of Korea (let alone anti-Korean) nor anything other than ordinary white folks. After a little investigation, it turned out that all it took to qualify as anti-Korean was failing to smile, mug like a hakwon teacher, or speak in a ridiculously slow and exaggerated manner when talking to Koreans. My wife actually said they were scared of anyone who didn't act the way white people in Korean TV talk shows act. (Pre-Misuda, that is.)

gordsellar said...

Oh god. I hate that too. I mean, your wife's reaction says it all. My boyfriend is not foreign, but he is significantly older than me, and often gets called "도둑놈", in a congratulatory way by his male friends, and in a despairing wail by my family. And that just begs the question, oh my god, what respect can you have for me, for my side of the equation, if that's what you really think?

Yeah, people said similar things to me regarding my (also significant) age difference with my wife, when we were still dating. I think that's how I learned the word 도둑, actually.

I mean, sure Korea has a higher GDP, and no malaria. On the surface, Korea is a much more advanced nation, yes. And this is what a lot of Koreans think is a sufficient condition to make Korea desirable, at least to poor schmucks living in Southeastern Asia, above their own homes where they were born and raised.

Whereas, walking around Vietnam, I'm sad for Korea because it's shocking how much more balanced people's lives seem to be here... at least in the city. People meet at parks and hang out. They take dance classes. They aren't constantly texting and interacting through tiny screens. They aren't frowning all the bloody time. You actually see children... like, other than being bussed from one hakwon to another. I mean, kids, playing during the evening in parks. And they actually HAVE parks!

I'm sure there are issues here, but at least in Saigon, I can't help but feel that socially, this is what Korea should have shot for in terms of standards of living, except standards of living... that discussion went out the window the minute it became all about the economy.

And so I can imagine Vietnamese people ending up in Korea and being shocked at how much more miserable everyone around them is. And as you say, as bunk as the whole "American dream" ideology is, it did motivate people and a lot of people seemed to manage to fight hard enough to carve some of it off for themselves. I can't realistically see that happening in Korea... not for the people who supposedly are drawn by the Korean dream. In fact, talk of the "Korean dream" really just sounds to me like Koreans wanting to imagine Southeast Asians thinking of Korea the way some Koreans used to think of America... as a place one would emigrate for a better life, if one could pull it off.

gordsellar said...

Fuck, I'm boycotting Leonard Cohen.

Good for you!

But yeah, Cohen's lyrics are definitely sexist... or to put it closer to how I think of it, it's that Cohen's (antiquated) view of sex is driven by inequality between male and female, in which male is the origin of movement and female is the passive receptacle for said energy. If not sexist, then at least based on a severe, severely outmoded and unsustainable kind of sexual dimorphism.

Meh, it's sexist. The funny thing is, a lot (a lot) a women seem to like to hear that or have fantasies tied up with that very notion even after they "grow up" and consciously realize it's problematic; but since it's just music, and wrapped up in what people sees a poetry-like lyrics, there's a sort of way to justify it to oneself, and... well, it sells. And not just the music.

So eerie that you mention that, because I used to be a huge Tori Amos fan. I say "used to" because I listened to some of her stuff recently after a long break from it, and it sounded... so juvenile.

I had much the same response to her music last time I heard it, after rather liking some of it... after being infected in the way most people seem to be. (By someone whom I thought had busted my poor ticker in twain. Tori doesn't hold up well once you've outgrown feeling sorry for yourself. But she does do self-pity theatrics very well.)

Amusingly, I had an epiphany about food with the same person who was the vector for my erstwhile Tori Amos infection... such experiences really are life changing. (I've had another since moving to Ho Chi Minh City: I'm eating about a third what ate in Seoul, and am no happier or sadder than I was there.)

Anyway, if your exposure to jazz has been limited, I'm afraid Seoul is a terrible place to address it: I've heard tell of maybe five or six major jazz concerts in the decade I was in Korea. There's just not that much motivation to come to Korea where audiences appreciate your efforts only a tiny faction as much as Japanese audiences do... and sadly, four out of the six acts I know about were white, which is a bit embarrassing compared to the proportions of jazz groups who go to Japan or Indonesia.

(I've heard there's a jazz festival on an island somewhere that was more balanced, but it's in the middle of the horridly humid summer and expensive as all-get out to attend, because the accommodation all gets booked solid. Really, Seoul ought to be hosting such a festival, but the festivals I've made it to in Seoul? Serious melanin deficiency.

So: musical vacuum, and not much you can do about it in Seoul, anyway. Janelle Monae isn't bad (and there's mid-90s Korean indie I rather like... you don't happen to have any Uh Uh Boo Project Band CDs, do you? I've hunted for several hopelessly for years)... but hmm. Well, email me if you'd like a few suggestions for CDs to check out... though I think a live show of a top jazz musician from the US would be the best approach.

Anne said...

Hahaha. We're vampires! I love it.

Actually, that was supposed to be a Doctor Strangelove reference. But vampires work too. :)

I'm sure there are issues here, but at least in Saigon, I can't help but feel that socially, this is what Korea should have shot for in terms of standards of living, except standards of living... that discussion went out the window the minute it became all about the economy.

Oh for shit sure. I would say Koreans have a poor sense of economics in its most fundamental sense. As the cliched refrain goes, among people bemoaning the state of affairs over here, money and things that can be parlayed into money are the only valid things here. No such thing as thinking about true value, which is often why people talk about 명품 cities and hospitals and schools like it was nothing, not with an ounce of self-consciousness for talking about everything as if it were made of 10,000 won bills... or an awareness that, in fields such as municipality and medicine and education, there are other things that should be valued first.

They say that nothing is sacred these days, as the new gods are consumerist gods, but honestly, I find it hard to relate with the fuss Americans are making about that particular phenomenon (and I know Americans are pretty bad about consumerism) because those particular gods hold far greater sway over here and go completely, completely unchallenged.

Funnily enough, I was at Garosugil today with my boyfriend. It was the first time I had been there in years, and going back there brought back memories of discussions I'd had with a friend there--a hakwon teacher who's since gone back home--about how Koreans, when they spend their hard-earned money, spend it really really poorly.

Anne said...

Since I think you'd be interested to hear how that particular discussion went, it started when my friend (who can doenjang it up with the best of them) deplored how Korean girls seemed to spend so much time and money on their appearance and yet still turned out looking, though meticulously groomed and not a hair out of place, not at all sexy or even unique or confident. They all end up as completely awkward in their own skin as their pedicured feet in their ill-fitting hooker heels, and even at their best they rarely escape looking like bland copies of each other.

I don't think we ever managed to pin it down, but some part of me tells me it has to do with how value is never really taken into consideration, like throwing money at a problem will solve it (and this goes hand in hand with the other discussion here, about how a reasoned approach to troubleshooting just doesn't happen here... people simply won't believe you when you say an intelligent retooling may be enough to avert spending millions, they'd rather spend the millions then pat themselves on the back for having "tried".)

Since clothes mean a lot to me, I actually have entire theories about dressing well, and what that means. It involves a lot of work, one half of it being money and taste, yes, but the entire other half of it being self-knowledge. What "dressing well" means to me is NOT adopting the trends wholesale, as they are marketed to you, without regard for your face or body shape or what flatters you best. And by those standards, on Garosugil, where you will find no shortage of fashionable women, you will find very few that are well-dressed.

Sorry if I just put you to sleep. :)

gordsellar said...

Actually, that was supposed to be a Doctor Strangelove reference. But vampires work too. :)

Oops. I've not seen the film yet, I must admit now. :)

Oh for shit sure. I would say Koreans have a poor sense of economics in its most fundamental sense. As the cliched refrain goes, among people bemoaning the state of affairs over here, money and things that can be parlayed into money are the only valid things here.

Which is probably why so few people are actually happy there... and those who are, mostly are the ones who see past that and/or opt out of it.

They say that nothing is sacred these days, as the new gods are consumerist gods, but honestly, I find it hard to relate with the fuss Americans are making about that particular phenomenon (and I know Americans are pretty bad about consumerism) because those particular gods hold far greater sway over here and go completely, completely unchallenged.

Oh, oh, I got it! It's because in the US, they've gone through that dark tunnel and in some ways emerged from the far side... enough so that they can now look back and see all they've lost. This is why there's a craft beer movement, why people are calling themselves "foodies," why people are making soap and curing their own meats and so on... because all the things that got jettisoned from American life (in the service of corporations, naturally) and crappified American life, were seen as advancements and improvements. Think of America as a big huge nouveau riche mess in the late 19th and most of the 20th century, so hell-bent on being rich and modern and convenient that they forgot about savoring their food, about filling the air with music worth hearing, with telling stories that matter to them on a deep level.

And now, because they've come out the far end of that, they're exhausted of it, and want what they've lost.

Korea's just still somewhere along the tunnel, far from emerging the other side. So DIY is a tiny, marginal hobby. So people talk about 명품 cities and hospitals and schools. So money is the absolute bottom line when it comes to everything.

Funnily enough, I was at Garosugil today with my boyfriend. It was the first time I had been there in years, and going back there brought back memories of discussions I'd had with a friend there--a hakwon teacher who's since gone back home--about how Koreans, when they spend their hard-earned money, spend it really really poorly.

Yeah, I have to say I was not impressed with the neighborhood, to be honest. I'm told I never went to the good bits, but what I saw mostly just filled me with a wish to see what people would be doing in the neighborhood when, a generation or two frow now, young Koreans come to their senses and start rebuilding the parts of their jettisoned culture that were good, nurturing and fulfilling. (Every culture has such things, after all, and those are often the first to get steamrolled and/or jettisoned as modernity and corporate-built convenience take hold.)

Anne said...

The funny thing is, a lot (a lot) a women seem to like to hear that or have fantasies tied up with that very notion even after they "grow up" and consciously realize it's problematic; but since it's just music, and wrapped up in what people sees as poetry-like lyrics, there's a sort of way to justify it to oneself, and... well, it sells. And not just the music.

Twilight, anyone? I dunno, I thought my newfound preference for being identified as something other than "a woman" must have been a phase, because every female I know dreams of being swept off her feet... they don't aspire to bust guys' asses in soccer matches and treat and be treated like equals. But if that's just a juvenile phase, really I don't want to grow up, because I don't miss the sexist-masochistic tango one bit.

Tori doesn't hold up well once you've outgrown feeling sorry for yourself.

Oh, BAM!

gordsellar said...

It looks like one of my comments from the other day got lost, so... a summary:

1. I agree that being able to build a logical system in one's head does connect to creativity. Indeed, I find the rule is that as someone becomes more involved in creative pursuits, they of necessity--even if they aren't by nature prone to analytical thinking--become more analytical about the field in which they're working creatively.

2. Korean hospitals. My ex was a med student and intern, who refused to do a residency in Korea because the hospitals and the residency system are too fucked up. I've heard horror stories aplenty, far more horrifying than the above... and I bet you have more horrifying ones. In my lost comment, I told one involving a resident nicknamed (by the interns and younger residents) "Malig" (for "malignancy") who basically threatened my ex (physical intimidation AND physical threat) when she, a mere intern, dared to wake him when he was needed in the E.R. Whoever was the responsible supervisor was such a coward that he refused to do anything about it, and just asked her to avoid him from then on. Which led, eventually, to a patient almost dying in the E.R. when he was needed and she, by order of the supervisor, couldn't go get him but had to send someone else, and the other intern on shift was dealing with someone else in critical condition. And when someone could be sent, and the guy showed up and fucked up collossally on an elementary procedure and almost killed the patient, what did the supervisor do? He said, "Let's wait it out, his residency is over in a couple of weeks, let's not make trouble."

Funnily enough, I've heard of a resident nicknamed "Malig" at several hospitals, too. It's like a thing, or seems to have been. I heard it not just in Seoul and Bucheon, but also down in Iksan, far enough apart that it couldn't be the same guy or anything.

Meanwhile, now in Illinois, my ex went into shock when she discovered professors could not treat residents like dog crap. (Someone who consistently did so was basically kicked out of the teaching position at the hospital after one too many residents complained and it was discovered their complaints were not exaggerated.) In Korea, who would dare complain?

And the people who lose out? Well, everyone: the doctors have to work in a shit environment, patient care suffers, and... ugh.

Don't even get me started on the "grading" system for interns, and how going out drinking with residents and professors is required if you want an A. (My ex was told by several department heads that she was the best intern they'd ever seen, and they wanted her to do a residency in their department... and IIRC managed a solid B overall because she'd bowed out of the all-night drinking sessions, lying and citing allergy to alcohol. Because she didn't want to be the idiot who killed someone in the E.R. because she'd been drinking until 3am the night before she cycled in to her second month in the E.R., starting at 6am. And yes, she knew of profs and residents who were still drunk when they showed up for work the next day. And this is in a relatively well-considered hospital network in the Seoul/Kyeonggi area.

The naked emperor needs a good, thorough shaming, but I can't see anyone willing to do it.

Anne said...

Yeah, "Malig" exists in every teaching hospital in Korea, or so I've heard.

One of my favorite professors likes to tell stories of the time when he was an intern, and an alcoholic GS resident decided to make him a drinking buddy. He makes us howl with laughter with those stories, but honestly? It's all black humor.

gordsellar said...

The Tori thing... it was true of me too. Hence my theory people get infected with an interest in her when someone who likes Tori breaks their heart... and of course those people were infected likewise, at some point... it all traces back to Patient Zero, which is Tori herself. :)

As for the disconnect between feminist empowerment and the subterranean world of fantasy, it can survive even when someone is ardently feminist, is what I'm saying. The women I knew who were all weak-kneed for Old Lennie Cohen were also engaged in their own creative work that ranged from aggressively, angrily feminist, to logically analytical in deconstructing gender codes and stereotypes in literature... but they loved them some Leonard Cohen.

Reminds me of a line in part 6 of this essay that a prominent SF author (yes, female) recently linked on Facebook. (Take your pick as to which one.)

But yes, Twilight is, well... alarming, because it takes that stuff that may be partly mammalian wiring and partly socialized into us, with which we're rightly a little uncomfortable, and maps it out onto a whole social order which it also seems somehow to want to justify and to use as justification for really, really wrong crap.

I don't know whether to feel more sad, more worried, or more vindicated (as a misanthrope) when I see women gobbling up those books and films. Well, I don't know about the films, I heard the last couple were so bad even the fans wised up a little.

gordsellar said...

Sobering.

As my ex said to me one day when I walked out the door, after a particularly harrowing shift, "You really don't want to end up in an E.R. in Korea. Be very careful..." Her hospital's Malig was pretty much deserving of a bullet in the back of the head from someone in a uniform on a rainy night in the mud, for the number of patients whose treatment he screwed up (let alone the damage done to other interns and residents and the stress that caused them to screw up too).

Or, well, okay, at least, deserving to be stripped of any hope of practicing medicine on human beings ever again, but... nobody had the guts to do anything. As per bloody usual.

gordsellar said...

Since I think you'd be interested to hear how that particular discussion went, it started when my friend (who can doenjang it up with the best of them) deplored how Korean girls seemed to spend so much time and money on their appearance and yet still turned out looking, though meticulously groomed and not a hair out of place, not at all sexy or even unique or confident. They all end up as completely awkward in their own skin as their pedicured feet in their ill-fitting hooker heels, and even at their best they rarely escape looking like bland copies of each other.

Yes, it's the awkwardness. Though, to be frank, I've always thought the awkwardness and the seeming lack of confidence was... well, by design. It's a way of advertising oneself as, fundamentally, unlikely to be trouble of the sort that a certain kind of man dislikes. Cuteness (and/or straight up awkward insecurity) is the milk that is always required to be poured into everything to dilute any sexiness at all... one sees it almost everywhere in Kpop for example, or just out on the street.

What I mean by this is that most guys who "dislike feminism" do so because they feel it is threatening to their masculinity and their, ahem, "rightful dominance" in the relationship. Women who advertise insecurity are subtly making a display of the fact that whatever arguments and transgressions they may engage in, they will never, ever transgress across one that takes a sense of dignity, female empowerment, and equality.

And of course, in nature, the best way to effectively advertise something is for it to be true.

My wife has a few friends who are the textbook example of this: nothing is wrong with them, except that they are somehow convinced everything is wrong with them... which pushes them into ridiculous relationships, and ridiculous situations, and... well, yeah, all that.

But the idea that throwing money at a problem will solve it, the lack of reasoned, algorithmic thinking, the failure to differentiate between cost and value. Also, you know, plain old conformity in what is, very much, a nouveau riche culture: pne woman we know was, a few years ago, horrified to discover her new coworkers were all buying Louis Vuitton bags, and said it was an incredible waste of money, and so silly. Within a year... she was buying Louis Vuitton bags herself.

gordsellar said...

Since clothes mean a lot to me, I actually have entire theories about dressing well, and what that means. It involves a lot of work, one half of it being money and taste, yes, but the entire other half of it being self-knowledge. What "dressing well" means to me is NOT adopting the trends wholesale, as they are marketed to you, without regard for your face or body shape or what flatters you best. And by those standards, on Garosugil, where you will find no shortage of fashionable women, you will find very few that are well-dressed.

Sorry if I just put you to sleep. :)


Nah. I have long felt, well, very ambivalent about fashion and clothing, for a lot of reasons: living in ill-fitting hand-me-downs, and in places where your clothes could get the shit beaten out of you by strangers, during early childhood probably has something to do with that, so that I'm in some ways resentful of the amount of attention people give to clothing.

But, that said, I've also felt that it's partly because I don't want to stray into the territory of finding that I've been doing it wrong all my life. (As John Gardner argues in The Art of Fiction, probably most people also wash themselves wrong--that is, sloppily, inattentively, and so on--because most people do most things that way.) But living in Korea has given me a half-way passable excuse: very little men's clothing fit me, and not just in the phases when I've been more overweight--even when I was swimming every day and very slim comparatively, I couldn't find much that could accomodate my shoulders; and the men's clothing that did fit was always too... girly.

But I did find that when I finally could afford to order some clothing in my size, I felt better about myself and more confident and so on. Indeed, going through my wardrobe and discarding things I really couldn't either store or bring with me to Vietnam was palpably painful... I had these nice clothes, which I just couldn't really keep. (I am a bit short on clothes here, though I have enough if I get laundry done regularly... but it's heavy on the T-shirts and shorts, and I'm beginning to feel like a backpacker schmuck a little too much of the time. Sigh.)

Actually, I kind of feel like now is probably a good time to figure out what clothing I'd really like to wear, as tailors in Vietnam are very affordable and if you find the right ones, they do top-quality work, so I've heard. When my weight stabilizes, that is. I'm not sure if it's the climate, or a lack of comfort-eating that seems to have been reflexive back in Korea, but I'm losing weight, and want to see how long it'll stay off before I invest in more clothing, however nice.

Anne said...

Cuteness (and/or straight up awkward insecurity) is the milk that is always required to be poured into everything to dilute any sexiness at all... one sees it almost everywhere in Kpop for example, or just out on the street.

I think James Turnbull said something along those lines a while back, when commenting on the difference between "Western" and Korean "sexydance".

But yeah. I got into an argument/debate with (male) classmates the other day about whether gays should be allowed into the military or not, and a few other girls were giggling nervously. Funny enough, they seemed totally happy to pretend the discussion wasn't going on at all when it was just the guys talking. Once I jumped in, though, they acted really antsy, and after I said "aren't the vast majority of the guys in the military who tell their underlings to 'pick up the soap' heterosexual anyway?" they would not look me in the eye, though the boys found it highly amusing.

What's most interesting is that I remember a time when I acted like that myself, even though a part of me (the "American" part) has always been rabidly feminist and aggressively competitive. I have two selves, a Korean self and a "Western" self, and before this year, those two rarely met, just let each other carry on their separate inner lives.

All these criticisms and stinging invectives I'm hurling around here and elsewhere? Most of it is directed at my former self: I was one of the most hard-core proponents of the Korean patriot cause at one point, I spent a lot of time in my former relationship turning myself into a sex doll for my then-boyfriend, I spent a lot of time wallowing in self-pity and blaming others, I let myself be manipulated for a long time into self-pitying and blaming others.

I'm only just emerging from that cycle of hurt and blindness, and now I feel compelled to look at everything that went wrong then, what fed it, and how to destroy it.

Anne said...

But, that said, I've also felt that it's partly because I don't want to stray into the territory of finding that I've been doing it wrong all my life.

That's how I felt about clothing at first too. I was so anxious to find out how this mysterious thing called "fashion" works that I used to spend hours browsing online style diaries for ideas, and it took me way too long to figure out that I wasn't going to learn anything by looking at what the fashion glitterati wore on their off-time (answer: pretty much the same impractical useless shit they wear on the runways... they are NEVER actually off-duty, because they are paid to live and breathe as billboards).

The "Fat Guy" from Gag Concert has some pretty funny and incisive things to say about discrimination against the obese in Korea. Last Seol, coming back home from my grandmother's house, my mother said "I admire your nerve, coming to see the family in your state," and she was referring to my weight. By that time, I had enough of my wits about me and enough energy stored up to tell her exactly how insulting that statement had the potential to be, and I think that spelled the beginning of the speedy deterioration of our already declining relationship.

But getting back on topic...

But I did find that when I finally could afford to order some clothing in my size, I felt better about myself and more confident and so on.

I feel like that was the turning point of my own relationship with clothing, as well. Gwangjang Vintage Market and the new plus-size section at the Dongdaemun Doota were lifesavers for me: walking into those places and walking back out with clothes in hand that FIT and that I LIKED made me bawl with relief, partly because I now didn't have to wash my one pair of pants every day, and partly because I finally know what made me gravitate to those particular pieces and now I don't have to waste money on clothes that I don't know if I'll like or not.

Anne said...

And the comfort eating is a big hurdle to overcome, I'm glad you're free from it. I'm not, and I'm not only under a lot of stress, I'm on meds for mood swings that make the compulsive eating worse.

Out of fear that the eating will persist as a habit even after I (one day) get taken off the meds and the impulses will stop, I'm trying to cut snacks out of my diet entirely, but I so often slip up. :(

gordsellar said...

I think James Turnbull said something along those lines a while back, when commenting on the difference between "Western" and Korean "sexydance".

Maybe. I've said as much on his blog, and he sometimes draws on what I've said. (I seem to remember hammering at that particular point on some post or other about some random Kpop group I couldn't care less about.)
What's most interesting is that I remember a time when I acted like that myself, even though a part of me (the "American" part) has always been rabidly feminist and aggressively competitive. I have two selves, a Korean self and a "Western" self, and before this year, those two rarely met, just let each other carry on their separate inner lives.

That definitely sounds like story fodder. I can't say I've had anything like that experience between as radically different cultures, though I can imagine it: my parents came from somewhat different cultures, but anyway whatever the forged between them as our family's "home culture" was pretty radically out of step with the culture of my friends, and being that my parents were not from the place we lived, they seemed to interact with it in the way a lot of immigrants do: shock, horror, distrust, disdain. I seemed to understand the parent-child relationships of Chinese-Canadian friends (for those friends who were second generation Canadian) better than my white friends. (Come to think of it, my best friend in high school had parents who'd immigrated from the Caribbean, and were very much old-country in their thinking and attitudes, too.)

All these criticisms and stinging invectives I'm hurling around here and elsewhere? Most of it is directed at my former self: I was one of the most hard-core proponents of the Korean patriot cause at one point, I spent a lot of time in my former relationship turning myself into a sex doll for my then-boyfriend, I spent a lot of time wallowing in self-pity and blaming others, I let myself be manipulated for a long time into self-pitying and blaming others.

Owch. I'm glad you've decided to beat the crap out of that girl for doing that to you... though you know, we all do the best we can with what we have at the time. Heaven knows, just about every intelligent, interesting person I know has some kind of self-deluded, painful period in their lives... often a very long one, often somewhat self-destructive. We live in a corrosive world, and I suspect the brightest and best among us are also the most sensitive to the corrosion.

My own arteries didn't get prematurely hardened by me taking good care of myself all the time... though I'm working on it now. Hence the no more comfort eating... though it helps to have a small fridge and not have a lot of snacks around. You have to go out and walk to buy stuff to cook, and hell, even the ongoing war with giant brown/black Vietnamese cockroaches is helping: I'd rather not venture into the kitchen downstairs at night, except maybe hurriedly, for a glass of water. Having no options except a glass of water is the absolute hardcore way to cut back on snacks, lemme tell you.

As for clothes: well, being plus-sized (especially in women's clothing) in Korea doesn't necessarily mean much. The constant talk of who was fat seemed insane to me: in eleven years in the country, I never saw even one person as fat as the person I saw the first day on a visit to my family in Saskatoon... in a Wal-Mart parking lot, of course. I've known Korean women who were on the small side, by my terms, who had no choice but to shop in plus-size shops in Korea.

Our bodies are what they are.

A Deceit of Lapwings

All happy people are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy people are more or less alike.