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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Being and Seeing: Biracial Identity and Media Representation

by Maddie Hawk / photo: the author

It wasn’t until I was in middle school, about 14 years old, that I saw a representation of myself on the TV screen. It was Olivia Munn, then co-host of Attack of the Show! on G4, a show largely directed toward young men with interests in technology and gaming. It was obvious I wasn’t the ideal, intended audience. I wasn’t wholly interested in the content of the series or the reviews of games and digital media (although digital media would become a huge part of my life later on). But I watched the show (fairly) religiously, on my couch after school, glued to the screen. It was the first time I had ever seen a half-Asian woman on television.

Biracial-ness became something of an obsession for me. I followed Munn’s career closely, watching nearly every TV show and movie she appeared in. Her biracial status was almost never mentioned. Jennifer Beals’ Bette Porter, in Showtime’s cult favorite The L Word, was onscreen and offscreen biracial. I was a junior in college when I saw The L Word for the first time, and it was a relief to me. Finally, an acknowledgement of a character of biracial origins.

But this was rare. Surprisingly, even today it’s hard to find a representation of myself on screen. Lara Jean, in the book, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a half-Korean character. I awaited the adaptation in eager anticipation to see someone finally mimicking my very exact identity. She was played by Lana Condor, a Vietnamese-American actress. Thrilled for the Asian representation so rarely portrayed on an American screen, I still couldn’t help feeling cheated. Growing up never quite Korean enough, never quite American enough, never one or the other, it stung when the representation signaled itself to me a choice already made: half-Korean could be played by full Asian. I wanted this not to be a big deal to me; I didn’t want a simple Netflix movie to weigh on me so much. An Asian American actress was projected into the limelight through this and I was ecstatic. But this excitement over one representation was tinged with disappointment and bitterness over another representation denied. It weighs on someone who lived their entire life never being full, seeing a representation of herself something that has never been obtainable. Something whole.

Where was I in the shows I watched? Where was my story?

It seems odd that something so personal would propel me into a world of academia, seemingly impersonal. Academia is one of the view places you rarely see an “I” statement invoked, a place of purely looking at things analytically. And so little of my obsessions of seeing myself on screen remain in my work today. But the seeds of this obsession with seeing myself painted on screen stem from a singular root: representation matters.

I realized it in retrospect; all my research had to do with the representation of some identity. Though I don’t know exactly when I realized that representation matters, I often think back to writing my personal statement for my MA program. I used an anecdote of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, where Peter Lorre’s character was coded as homosexual through the way he held his cane, his gloves, his scarf, his very “Other”-ness (the fact that he wasn’t white). I think back to this moment, mostly because it was a (stereotypical) representation of sexuality used to reinforce negative depictions of “Other”-ness. It all intersected in this one portrayal: Joel Cairo was not white, he wasn’t heterosexual; he was the perfect antithesis to Humphrey Bogart and therefore the perfect portrayal of a villain. The slow process of obsession over representation was gradual. Something that focused my entire concentration when I was younger developed into a passion of representation on screen, extending itself to issues of everything that has touched my life. Little seeds of myself I see in every paper I write, in every thesis I make.

I’ve recently finalized my tagline for when people ask me my research interests:: I study trauma and memory formation in contemporary Korean media. If they show interest, I might pepper in: more broadly, anime studies, fan studies, queer theory, gender theory, postcolonialism . I don’t study classical Hollywood cinema. I avoid writing about American TV shows if I can help it. The elusive concept of world cinema is where I find home and comfort; it’s what I turned to when I couldn’t quite capture a definition of my own identity.

Most of my research in graduate school focuses on two broad topics: Korean media and anime. Korean media is simple and easily explained: I’m Korean, I lived in Korea, I am the product of Korean diaspora, it’s a natural fit. Anime studies is a little more perplexing. I don’t speak Japanese, I’ve visited but never lived in Japan, my familiarity with Japanese history lies in its colonization of Korea (a very biased familiarity). But anime drew me in as a child like a misty forest full of open possibilities. Anime has always been a medium of potentiality, where anything can happen. It transcends space, able to permeate onto global screens because of its easy dubbing nature (don’t argue this to a purist though). It’s precise and nuanced in its design. And it’s an excellent pool of research on transgression: it reflects what society is too afraid to confront. We can find sexual fluidity and moral ambiguity in anime in ways not shown elsewhere. At its heart, I’m a fan. I enjoy watching anime, and it’s an added bonus to research something you enjoy.

I find little bits of myself, my interests, my identity in my research. I’m excited when people ask me specifically what I study. More importantly, I choose every day to specialize in them because they are more than a broad interest, they present the potential to see stories about myself I never had before. I study film not because it’s fun, not because it’s entertaining, not because it’s easy (I’m looking at you—every person in college that told me they liked movies but didn’t study them in their condescending way). I study film and media because it informs a culture. A society. A global world. Someday a universe. But for now, at its most basic, I study film because my stories are out there too, just waiting to be resolved.

Maddie Hawk is a graduate student studying Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include postcolonial traces of memory and trauma in contemporary Korean media, as well as anime studies, queer theory, gender theory, and fan studies. Previously, she was a Fulbright ETA from 2016-2018 in Gimhae, South Korea. She is also a big fan of Korean music and is the co-host of podcast, U Should Stan.

#South Korea #United States

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Knowing Your Literary History—Interview with Shawn Wong on Asian-American Literature

by Kevin Mei

Shawn Wong is a writer and Professor of English at the University of Washington. He has published two novels, Homebase (1979) and American Knees (1995), and is the editor of many anthologies of Asian-American literature, including Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, which helped establish the field. He has been critical to the rise of Asian-American literature in its writing, teaching, and discussion. When Homebase was first published in 1979, it was the only Chinese-American novel in print in America. As a scholar, Shawn Wong pioneered Asian-American studies and co-organized the first Asian-American writer's conference. In this interview, we discuss these beginnings, the state of Asian-American literature now, as well as his works and teaching.

Kevin Mei: Thanks for spending time to talk with me! To start, could you tell me about your teaching career?

Shawn Wong: I've been at the University of Washington for 35 years, but I started teaching 47 years ago in 1972 in Mills College in Oakland while I was still in grad school in San Francisco State College. Mills Colelge, a private women's college, had just started an ethnic studies department and I had just graduated from Berkeley with my Bachelor's in English in 1971. There was a job opening to teach an ethnic studies course. Most of the professors didn't have graduate degrees because ethnic studies was still new. I had no teaching experience, no publications, and no graduate degree. I was hired for a class on Asian-American literature and I don't think they even knew what that was. At the time, the only other Asian-American literature class taught in the country was by Jeff Chan at San Francisco State College, so I taught the second Asian-American literature class in the US. The co-editors of Aiiieeeee! and I had the manuscript ready and we were looking for a publisher. I used the manuscript as lecture notes for class.

KM: How did you explain what Asian-American literature was back in your interview?

SW: I tried to be as vague and simple as possible. I told them it was American literature. All the writers that would be taught would be born in America or came at a young age and had written in English. I had to emphasize that the literature was not in translation. I said that there were many parallels to African-American literature, which people knew about, but people didn't know about the literary history of Asian-American writers.

KM: How do you define the genre of Asian-American literature? Are there subject matters or themes that are broadly found? And how has the definition changed over time?

SW: The initial definition of "Asian-American" was quite a political and racial term. And included mainly Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-Americans, who were featured in the first anthology of Aiiieeeee! in the early 1970s. There wasn't a lot of published work prior to 1970. Many of the other Asian-American communities today hadn't developed yet. Vietnamese-American writing was post-1975. We expanded the definition of what Asian-American writing was in the second edition of Aiiieeeee! to include Korean-American, Vietnamese-American, and other Asian-American writers who started publishing in the 70s, 80s, and on. As a teacher, I have expanded that definition in my literature classes to include Asian writers who write in English living in the Pacific Rim, such as in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Canada. As well as Asian-British writers like Timothy Mo. Asian-American literature generally focuses on family and identity and race. The differences are in the cultural foundations of the work. English writers in the Pacific Rim have colonial experience in their background. It's interesting to teach colonial history in writing. Currently, the definition of Asian-American literature has become much broader and inclusive, taking in new kinds of Asian-American writing, where the relation isn't obvious. The old model for Asian-American writing is grandma arriving in America or a Chinatown story or a Japanese-American in concentration camp story. Now we have a whole host of Asian-American writers creating science fiction and speculative fiction.

KM: What do you mean when you said Asian-American was a "political and racial" term?

SW: In the early 70s and late 60s, what we wrote was highly political. Civil rights movements were happening. Vietnam war was on. There was a battle for ethnic studies. As young writers, we were all caught up in that as well and our writing reflected it. The intro to Aiiieeeee! has that political tone because that's the period in which I was raised. One of the best parts of Asian-American studies now is that there's a substantial body of scholarship on Asian-Americans. There are literary scholars and literary criticism. I'm entirely self-taught. It's interesting that I started teaching a course that I never learned in college, teaching a subject I had to teach myself. Today, a modern Asian-American literature professor is highly trained and actually had Asian-American literature professors train them. It was said in the intro of Aiiieeeee! that one measure of healthy literature is the health of its critics. We certainly have that now, a large community of Asian-American literary scholars that help legitimize the literature. No one questions anymore that Asian-American literature is not American literature. When I first started teaching at Mills, the English department would not give English majors credit for taking my class. They didn't regard it as legitimate literature. I just saw an ad the other day that Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton are looking for Asian-American literature professors. It's 2019, people, where have you been? They are supposed to be the academic leaders, but they're only now getting into this, thinking maybe we need Asian-American literature.

KM: Do authors have to be Asian-American to write Asian-American literature? Do the characters have to be Asian-American? Some books I am thinking about are Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, and Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere.

SW: Depends on the background of the writer. You mentioned Snow Falling on Cedars. David Guterson is a good friend of mine. He wrote a good story and did a lot of research on Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and it's a well-known history in this particular area. Not being the ethnicity you are writing about is traditional in minority literature. If it's a white writer who writes a book about Vietnamese people, but speaks Vietnamese and grew up in the community and has a linguistic-cultural attachment to the community, I think that's fine. What I don't think is right is to assume an Asian-American pseudonym and write Asian-American literature. I think that's patently dishonest and there's no reason to do so. It's basically writing in yellowface.

KM: And what about books written by Asian-Americans that don't feature Asian-American characters—would you consider those part of Asian-American literature?

SW: David Wong Louie published stories where the main characters are not identified as Asian but the themes are about marginalization and displacement, such that someone who is Asian-American would read the stories and understand those themes are related to identity. It's a tactic in being an Asian-American writer to not make your main character Asian-American, but to have readers try to understand and figure out where that identity is thematically addressed, rather than labelled or visually apparent. On the other hand, you can just write Asian characters. A TV commercial, for example, could star an Asian actor, speaking perfect English, but the fact of them being Asian has nothing to do with the commercial. They could be eating cereal. I don't need Asian music in the background or for the actor to be wearing culturally relevant costumes; they can be representing themselves as an American family. I know when I see those kinds of images on TV, I think to myself, oh that's good, we don't always have to be martial artists or houseboys.

KM: What are some books you are reading or some of your favorite books? Or important books you think should be read?

SW: I'm currently reading Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Ted Chiang's Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a science-fiction writer who lives in the Seattle area and his work is interesting and doesn't have Asian-American characters. One of his short stories, which was about communication and about language, was adapted into the movie Arrival. I'm interested in what comes out of the mind of an Asian-American writer these days and where Asian-American writing is going. We all read each other's work. Viet Thahn Nyugen talks about reading David Wong Louie. Ocean Vuong thanks all Asian-American writers who came before him. As for the past, No-No Boy by John Okada, Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto, and Toshio Mori were all part of the older generation. If you're an Asian-American writer and you haven't read the generations before you, you're not doing your homework. Young African-American writers read Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. It's important to know your own literary history in order to call yourself a part of it.

KM: Could you speak on compiling Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers?

SW: Yes. When we edited our first anthology of Asian-American writing, we knew of 14 books at the time. Only one of them was still in print: No-No Boy. All the others were out of print, neglected or ignored. Some of their authors, Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi would later become well-known. It took a lot of effort to find their writing and we resorted to odd ways. I remember for Toshio Mori, we found a review of his book, Yokohama, California, that was dated 1949. The newspaper review said he lived in San Leandro, California. Frank Chin and I looked through the phone books, found Toshio Mori was still there, called his number, and asked "Is this Toshio Mori?" He said "yes..." We asked, "Did you write Yokohama, California?" There was a long pause. Then he said, "yes.........." And then we introduced ourselves: "We're young Asian-American writers and we loved the book about Japanese-Americans living in the East Bay." And we asked if we could come over and meet him. And he said "Uhh.... okay...." He wasn't quite sure, but agreed to be interviewed and we went over to his house and asked him what it was like to be a writer. We hadn't published anything ourselves and were so excited to meet him. It turned out, and this was 1971, that since 1949, in the 22 years since the publication of his book, no one, no one had ever called him and went over to talk to him about his book. Not one person. And we were the first to arrive. Yokohama, California was the first published work of fiction by a Japanese-American writer. He had so much to tell us that we went back to his house two days in a row after that first one and brought our tape recorder and he had four books on his bookshelf that were unpublished at the time. It became our mission to rediscover these lost books of Asian-American literature. In the 1970s, we were obviously excited to meet new writers, but we also knew we were responsible for rediscovering and reviving the Asian-American writers who came before us who were primarily Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino and lived through the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.

KM: Could you tell me about the process of looking for Asian-American literature back in the 1960's and 70's? What were some methods you used to find these books and authors?

SW: Berkeley had lots of used bookstores. No-No Boy was 50 cents at a used bookstore. We also started asking people we met if they could remember other writers. Toshio Mori said there's this person called Hisaye Yamamoto in Los Angeles and we looked her up. She had written during her concentration camp years. She told us to find Wakako Yamauchi and we'd talk to her. Luckily, we recorded these interviews, which have been collected by UC Berkeley, which has digitalized them and released them to the public, so everyone can hear our original conversations and the strange questions we asked. It's all online. We interviewed people that weren't writers as well. Asian actors in Hollywood, like George Takei. Only thing he had done at the time was Star Trek in 1970. Also white actors who played Asians, like Charlie Chan. We started an organization called Combined Asian-American Resources Project—and our files are archived at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Note: The University of Washington Press is publishing a new edition of Aiiieeeee! to commemorate its 45th anniversary in November 2019. There will be a website for the archival material compiled in the 1970s with the publication of the anthology, so literary researchers can look at how the book was put together.

KM: What happened to many of the writers you rediscovered?

SW: A lot of them had stopped writing. They weren't getting published and were getting ignored. After being discovered by the anthology, some started writing again. All of Toshio Mori's unpublished manuscripts were eventually published. Wakako Yamauchi took her short story, "And the Soul Shall Dance," and converted it into a play, which was performed by East West Players in LA and was very popular. The anthology was published in 1974. In 1975, we organized an Asian-American Writer's Conference at the Oakland Museum and invited every Asian-American writer we could think of, even unpublished, young people and old, and the most amazing thing happened: everybody came. Everybody came. Every Asian-American writer who had published anything came. The older generation, such as Bienvenido Santos, the younger generation. We even invited writers whose work we didn't really like, such as Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, and gave them a platform because it was important to recognize their work and reward them, not start a debate. The point was to inspire a younger generation who were interested in how these writers became writers. The conference was held again the following year in Seattle and the year after in Hawaii. A few weeks ago, the Asian-American Literature Festival was held in D.C by the Smithsonian. The irony is no one had invited the editors of Aiiieeeee!, but that's okay.

KM: I understand that Aiiieeeee! started a controversial but important debate, by trying to define what Asian-American literature should be like. Why didn't you like certain books of the time, like Fifth Chinese Daughter?

SW: When a writer looks at another writer's book, you try to see what it is they are trying to understand. When you read No-No Boy, you can tell John Okada is trying to understand the concentration camps, even though it is not about the camps. He is trying to understand the camp experience and what came after, the sense of displacement and alienation. Toshio Mori is trying to understand the pre-WWII Japanese-American, a community that is completely gone after the camps. Lewis Chu was trying to understand the fading bachelor society of Chinatown. The government had created a Chinese bachelor society that was disappearing and dying off. Fifth Chinese Daughter is a memoir. We were more focused on creative works like fiction and poetry. Jade Snow Wong's book was important because it was one of the first books written by a Chinese-American author and quite popular. It's a story about her struggles. Basically, a book that showed the struggles of an ABC girl with a traditional upbringing in Chinatown, with a strict father, who didn't believe girls should go to college, but she defies her father and goes to Mills College. She becomes a successful businesswoman, artist, and ceramist.

KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?

SW: I remember thinking at 19, what do I really want to be? In truth, I was a premed student like most good Asian-American kids. Premeds have to major in something, so I majored in English. And I remember at 19, I decided I really wanted to be a novelist and I thought, well, I should try that out first. Creative writing graduate school is only 2 years long, let's see how that works out. If it doesn't, I can still apply to med school, which might like me better because of the creative degree. In 1969, when I decided I wanted to be a novelist, I was the only Asian-American novelist I knew in the world. No teacher had ever mentioned one or assigned a book by one. I had no classmates who were Asian-American and trying to be a writer. I didn't even know any unpublished Asian-American writers. 1100 English majors, and I was the only Asian in the entire department. Berkeley back then was a different place than now. I got in through the Educational Opportunity Program for underrepresented minorities, which gave me a scholarship to alleviate the underrepresentation of Asians. The only Asians there were like me, middle-class Chinese- or Japanese-Americans. Now 50% of Berkeley is Asian. In the late 60s, Asians were 6% of the student population. If you go on a modern campus like here at the University of Washington or UC Berkeley today, there might be 15 different Asian ethnic groups on campus and a lot of Asian international students too.. I went to San Francisco State College, where I was lucky to have as a mentor Kay Boyle, who basically made me a writer. She taught me in an Old World master–apprentice style. She was the master. I was the apprentice. After I graduated, she continued to be my mentor until she died in the 90s. I lived in her house. She had a large Victorian mansion in Ashbury. She lived in a separate apartment on the second floor and rented out the rest of her house. As a professor now, I find it appalling to have a student living in your house. That'd be the last thing I want. In the Old World, the apprentice lived with the master to learn his craft. It was a great opportunity. Kay Boyle was a young writer in France in her 20s so she knew Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and what I learned from her was not only how to be a writer, but how to live my life as a writer. I remember coming home one day, putting my books down on the table, and sorting mail for various people in the house. Kay saw I had put Dubliners down and said, "Ohh, you're reading Jim's book, how do you like it? I knew Jim. His old letters are down in the basement, feel free to go and read them." Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams were all friends of her. I was living in a literary household, became involved in literary conversations all the time. Because of her, I knew then I was going to become a writer. I met other people at the time too. The English major at Berkeley was very conservative—only included British literature. I took a whole year of American literature and it didn't count. Only a classic education in dead male British writers. When I came out of college, I was hungry to read writers who are actually alive and writers of color. Luckily, I lived in San Francisco, and even though I was a young undergrad in 1969, I was taken in by African-American writers such as Ishmael Reed, Alex Haley, who wrote Roots, and Al Young, who basically included me as part of their group, invited me to read my work, even though I was a terrible poet, and they never considered me a student, they considered me a writer, and gave me the confidence to continue to write. I met Native American writer Leslie Silk before either one of us had published a book and we wrote letters and talked about writing we were working on. After my undergrad years, my literary world was made up of multi-ethnic contemporary literature that was exciting. A lot of writers 10-12 years older than me were giving me access to that world. I don't think I'd be a writer without people like that.

KM: Your two novels, Homebase and American Knees are so different in tone, style, and content. I loved American Knees because the characters are so diverse in life experience and viewpoint. The main character Raymond is an ethnic studies professor who insists on educating his girlfriend Aurora on being "woke" about Asian issues in contrast to characters like Brenda who only dates white men and chafes at political correctness. Can you talk about the characters in American Knees?

SW: Homebase is a very different novel in the sense that at the time, and when it came out in 1979, it was the only Chinese-American novel in print in America. Knowing that your book is going to be the first Chinese-American novel out, I felt I definitely needed to tell part of the Chinese-American history, to legitimize our presence here, because people don't know that history. By the time you got to American Knees in 1995, there is a corpus of Asian-American literature out there. Readers are more culturally articulate about things in Asia. I was freed up; I didn't have to educate an audience on history. I could move onto topics like media stereotypes. And so, one of the things I did with American Knees, is in some ways like how stand-up comedians talk about race and ethnicity. The first part of their routine is to educate an audience on the cultural standards they're talking about. In the first part of American Knees, I laid out all the terminology I'd be using. In the second part of the novel, I apply all the standards about identity and stereotypes and race and ethnicity on the relationships that occur in the latter half. The lectures that Raymond went on in the first half were no longer needed in the second half. I wrote American Knees using a lot of characters that have never appeared in Asian-American literature. I wanted to write a contemporary story, but there were also no Asian-American comedies, and no romantic comedies. There were never any relationships in Asian-American books, other than difficult relationships with your mother or generational clashes. Everything you read in American Knees was missing in Asian-American literature in the 1990s. There were no characters like Brenda before, even though when we read a character like Brenda, we recognize her, like "oh yeah, I know lots of Brenda's" or "yeah I know lots of white guys who like Asian women." I had a lot of fun writing a character like Brenda because she's a walking contradiction: an Asian-American woman who hates Asian-American men but defends Asian-Americans and says lines like, "We've been married to them for four thousand years, let someone else marry them." It's important for me that people read the truth because Asian-Americans never seem to have relationships or talk about their relationships in media. I also wanted to show that Raymond was wrong and strict categories about race can't survive a relationship. He's not a hero, he makes plenty of mistakes. He doesn't need to lecture others. People come around to understanding who they are.

When I first started teaching at UW, I had a lot of Hawaiian students in my Intro to Asian-American Studies. We discussed the Chinese Exclusion Act, institutional racism, and systemic racism. After class, the Hawaiian students would come to me and say there's no racism in Hawaii. I go, oh no, you are so wrong. Of course there's racism in Hawaii. Have you heard any Portuguese jokes? What do you call the white people in Hawaii? Just because Asians are dominant in that state doesn't mean there's no racism in Hawaii. The entire plantation system was racist and stratified society with Japanese on one level and Filipinos on another. And the students go, ohhh I see what you mean. The idea is not to take what I believe, based on my own experiences, but for them to understand the tools for gaining some clarity about their own experiences. Like, oh I didn't realize so-and-so was being racist to me but now I do. Sometimes, I get these ridiculous emails from readers like, after I read your book, I broke up with my white boyfriend. They began to see their boyfriends were racist. I sometimes imagine there's a group of white ex-boyfriends coming after me. But it's interesting when you open up students' eyes, they are more aware about things like microaggressions, someone saying to you "well, where do you go eat Chinese food?" and not realizing that's racist. I was having lunch with an insurance executive, and he suddenly says to me during lunch (we were talking about the arts community), "So, uhh, how long have you been in this country?" I told him my age, at the time it was 50 or something, and he didn't get the joke, and said, "Oh, no wonder I don't hear an accent in your voice." I didn't even know what to say. We all have those sorts of moments where we go what? Where the hell did that come from? After reading American Knees, the overwhelming reaction of white readers is surprise and they say to me, do Asians really sit around and talk about race and racism? I say, well, yeah, we do. And certain white readers will say to me, well, is that really what you think of me? And I say, well, yeah, sometimes. Why is it a surprise that Asians talk about racism?

KM: Disoriented is a blog that invites everyone's voices and experiences. Do you have advice for people who want to write about their experiences but aren't "writers"?

SW: You have to have a reason to write. You should try to indicate what you are trying to understand, not what you already know. If you're just writing things that you already understand or already know, you're basically just writing facts. What I tell students is to write the truth, not the facts. Always seek the truth in what you're looking for. If there's something that you're struggling with, this is why you become a writer. Let's say there's some trauma in the past. You know you can't change what happened to you in the past, but as a writer, you can control the message. That's when the writer has some power over the message and can make that message resonate with readers, because presumably you're talking about people who want to be read, and not just write for their own therapy. So three things: write what you are trying to understand; truth not facts; you can't change what happened to you in the past, but you can control the message. David Wong Louie who died last year from throat cancer wrote an essay called "Eat, Memory." It's a history of his relationship to food, and also his battle with cancer. He had to make a choice. The doctor said, "Do you want to eat food or do you want to talk. You can't do both." He gave up eating, and that's a really amazing essay that combines all those things I was talking about. You can see that by writing that essay, he's trying to understand or come to terms with something. He can't change the fact that he has cancer, but he can control the message of what that disease is doing to him.

KM: What do you want your students to take away from your classes?

SW: I think the important thing is to give students a sense of their place in history. Before we can go forward as a generation, we have to understand the past or we won't be able to define our future. For example, the current border crisis. What the Trump administration is trying to do is not new. There was a recent protest by Japanese-Americans who wanted people to know that the internment of families at the southern border is very much like the internment of Japanese-Americans. Understanding that racist past is important. It's important that students study the mistakes of the past to frame the discussion properly. And it's important to recognize how certain civil right have come to pass and who the people were who have paved the way.

KM:

Thank you for sharing so much with me!

#United States

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Three Poems

by Sujata Gautam / photo: the author

Intertwined

In this world, We strive to make sense, But why not strive, To live in this wonder?

March 26th, 2019

Finding Root

Where is home Where is identity Can there really be, An all or one? Or will I always feel fragmented Torn between Two worlds?

July 8th, 2019

Rippling

I drive from one world to the next Ever wondering if I make the transition Smooth enough.

August 23rd, 2019

Sujata Gautam is currently pursuing a M.A. in Social Innovation & Sustainability Leadership at Edgewood College and completed her B.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Houston. These poem excerpts come from her "365 Days of Poetry" challenge she and her best friend, Umme Hani, set for themselves this year. Sujata finds her poetry topics range from the light-hearted and mundane, to questions about identity, as a Nepali-American, and purpose. She finds joy in the many wonders of life, and particularly enjoys being out in the Natural world. Sujata is inspired by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, beautiful poetry, and the magnanimity of human courage, among many things.

#Nepal #United States

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Self Portrait on Paper

by Mika Obayashi / photos: the author

In Kochi Prefecture, I worked in the fields cutting grass, weeds, and thinning the kozo plants so they had ample room to grow before harvest in the winter. Each day I woke early to tend to these plants, and in the afternoon we made washi, Japanese paper. My instructor was Rogier Uitenboogaart, one of the most prominent papermakers in Japan. He was precise to the point of absurdity, but this is how good paper is made. Even something as simple as beating plant fiber to a pulp is prone to novice mistakes. “All papermakers have their own rhythm,” he told me as he took the wooden mallet from my hand and showed me his practiced, steady beating technique.

That summer, I traveled to Japan, among various papermaking locations, stopping at art and cultural hubs in between. This was only my second trip to Japan despite being half Japanese. My father had come to the United States when he was in his twenties. Growing up, I watched him travel between the two countries visiting family when he could take time off of work. Only once – when I was four – did I have the opportunity to go with him. I was left with vague memories of the dense, green garden at my grandmother’s house, the cool tatami mats on which we slept, and a strong desire to return.

We only spoke English at home, but my father carried his Japanese culture to the United States in other ways. He was a sushi chef, and my siblings and I grew up on a solid diet of Japanese cuisine. Our perception of the world developed along the line of the magical realms of Hayao Miyazaki movies he insisted we watch, rather than Disney princess films. The female heroines in Miyazaki’s movies always seemed to connect with nature on a profound level and as a child I tried to gain access to their magical worlds. I spent hours in my backyard constructing tiny houses from leaves and bark or molding small objects from clay dug straight from the ground. Between the branches of trees, or in the wet moss clinging to a stone, I felt a great depth of possibility: nature could hold far more power than beyond its physical beauty.

I continued to draw inspiration from nature -- sketching, painting, and sculpting through high school and college, where I took part in a student art exhibition at a nearby university. This was my first show at a gallery, and I was excited. A professor stopped to discuss my work, noting my very Japanese-sounding name. “You should enroll in my Japanese Papermaking class next fall, it’s full now but we can squeeze you in,” she told me.

The next semester, I spent hours upon hours in the papermaking studio, often missing the last bus home. I found that my papermaking professor possessed the same sort of obsessive precision that seasoned craftspeople always seemed to possess, harshly critiquing the class’s flawed sheets and somehow always knowing precisely which step was botched in the process. It was as frightening as it was inspiring.

Our assigned class texts revealed that much of Japanese culture and ritual emphasizes natural simplicity; valuing humble, unpretentious beauty and a connectedness with nature. Washi-making is no different. Although this was my introduction to Japanese aesthetics and craft, I felt as though I had already read these texts before, and that they had been a part of my life ever since I was arranging small rocks in the backyard or admiring the subtle beauty of a weathered piece of sea glass as a child. I wanted to make good washi. Even more, I wanted to go to Japan to make good washi. I had only caught glimpses of Japanese culture while growing up but these glimpses revealed the range of possibilities open to me because of my ancestry. I was at once alienated and welcomed by my Asian heritage. I knew I had to go to Japan to learn more.

Several months later, and thanks to a generous Amherst College fellowship, I was in the town of Otado, population: about 30, swatting away enormous spiders and coaxing flawed sheets of paper from a vat of water and pulp. Japan was full of vague familiarities: the taste of bonito flakes sprinkled atop a bowl of soba or the way my name slid so easily off the tongue of a native speaker.

In Otado, it rained for 10 days straight. The river swelled and the kitchen in the old farmhouse I lived in flooded with rainwater that had washed down from the mountains. I harvested some paper plants, stripped them of their outer bark, and cooked the inner bark in preparation for papermaking. After the inner bark had cooled, I cleaned and beat the material to a pulp. The paper I made from this bark—thin, brittle, and waxy to the touch—was arguably the worst paper I made during my stay in Japan. The branches I collected were slim and green, not ready for harvest, and any seasoned papermaker would not even bother with such poor quality material. But I was only in Japan for a short period of time and I wanted to follow the entire timeline of making a sheet of paper, from the harvesting the kozo plant straight from the ground, to drying a finished sheet—something I was not able to do back at the studio in the US.

Rogier’s paper pulp-beating rhythm stuck in my head like a catchy song. whomp whomp WHOMP, whomp whomp WHOMP. I wondered how he had decided on this specific rhythm. He did not seem to be forcing the fibers apart in a strong act of domination over the material, rather, he seemed to guide them apart gently. whomp whomp WHOMP. With each strike was a sureness of movement demonstrated with a respect of the plant: A fine balance between personal conviction and awareness of the natural.

I could not have guessed, of all the things that could possibly bring me to my father’s homeland, that it would be something as simple as paper. It feels appropriate that an art relying on the same natural elements that composed my childhood would be what would draw me, so immediately and so closely, to a place that had been so far most of my life. As I guided sheets of washi into existence from the vat of water and pulp, I felt as though I was merely encouraging the plants to form a sheet of paper, rather than forcing them into shape. Guided with a gentle hand, nature can take a radically different, and beautiful form. My natural rhythm wavers between moments of acceptance and alienation, between the natural and manmade, between understanding and not. I bounce around in the space in between these supposed dichotomies and I cannot help but feel inspired by what I don’t yet know.

#Japan

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Searching for the Hyphen

by Natalie Sun / photos: the author

“中白鷺的腳腳和嘴巴是黃的. 大白鷺有黑色腳腳, 黃色的嘴巴．” (Intermediate egrets’ feet and mouths are yellow. Large egrets have black feet, yellow mouths.)

白熊 (pronounced “by shiong”) patiently explained the differences between the large and intermediate egret to me for the umpteenth time. 白熊, which translates directly to polar bear, earned this nickname due to his height and paleness. To this day, I am still not sure what his actual name is. He hurriedly pointed out the window as the van drove past an egret wading in rice paddies. “你看．中白鷺.” (Look. Intermediate egret.)

“那小白鷺呢？” (How about small egrets?) I asked. “我已經忘了.” (I already forgot.)

“黑嘴巴,黑腳.” (Black mouth, black feet).

I try to commit it to memory, but after a minute I turn my head and give him a blank stare. “算了, 我每一次看到一隻鷺就問你吧.” (Whatever, I’ll just ask you every time I see a white bird.)

He chortled in response. “喂, 你別像這樣啦! 你努力一點吧.＂(Hey, don’t be like this! Put some effort into it.) The van lurched to a stop, throwing me and 白熊 against our safety belts. We eyed each other before looking outside. “喔，我們快到了.”(Oh, we’re almost there.)

The van slowly turned and pulled up the dirt path to the dairy farm we were getting blood samples from, rocking side to side and jostling awake the students in the back that were shadowing us for the day. As 白熊 and I waited outside for them to sleepily file out of the van, I twisted my waist for a deep stretch and breathed in the familiar scent of cows before I heard a rough voice from in front of me,

“你好像不是台灣人… 你是…韓國人.” (You don’t seem to be Taiwanese. You are….Korean.)

白熊 and I turned to look to see who had said the all-too familiar phrase. I was facing the driver, who had been quiet the entire drive there. He squinted in the sunlight as he threw on a driver cap over his balding head. I smile out of reflex but before I can open my mouth, he throws in a second guess, “還是日本人?” (Or are you Japanese?)

When I speak to someone new here – or when someone hears me speak – for an extended amount of time, often a barrage of guesses in the form of statements come hurling at me. You are from Korea. Japan. China. Singapore. Malaysia. Eventually, ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, they give up, and ask the question that minorities are too familiar with. Where are you from?

Unlike in the States, I was rarely insulted by the question (albeit annoyed), because I believed they had enough evidence to justify their conclusion that I was a foreigner. I consider myself Taiwanese-American, but I am fully aware that there are giveaways that indicate I was neither born nor raised in Taiwan. Given time, Taiwanese people can hear the difference in my voice. My intonations don’t fluctuate as much, I curl my tongue a little, and my Mandarin, though seemingly fluent at first, shows its holes as discussions become more complex. But at least in asking, it was an invitation for me to present a holistic rundown of who I am.

More confusing and frustrating for me to navigate, however, are interactions so short that people assume I am a local. Interactions with servers at stalls and restaurants make up a considerate part of those. I could feel their impatience and frustration as they attributed the amount of time I spent looking at the menu to an inability to make a decision rather than my inability to read all the characters. Or when the veterinarians I work with overestimate my vocabulary and start explaining procedures and complex statistical analysis in Mandarin. On a good day, I can understand everything save a term here or there. On a bad day, I can only catch the general topic of the conversation. Do I interrupt and ask them to translate everything they just said when they might not know the terms in English? Do I ask the servers for an English menu? Do I explain that I am American-born when I enter the store to gain some judgement-free time or to justify my different behavior? These questions followed me into the stationery stores, boutiques, and food stalls that I visited, along with the veterinary hospital I worked at.

Subconsciously then consciously, I slowly began to mold my identity to avoid these situations. I began drifting from Taiwanese-American to either Taiwanese or American, “us” or “them,” in every day interactions. Whichever language I started with was the one I spoke with for the entire conversation. My Mandarin shifted a little by picking up common Taiwanese phrases and forcing my tongue flat when I talked. When I anticipated an interaction outside of my linguistic comfort zone, I spoke English, and consequently didn’t have to explain why my Mandarin was half-baked or why I didn’t understand certain social etiquettes or customs, amongst other things. I began prefacing my order at new restaurants that I was American, and indeed gained a ridiculous amount of judgement-free time.

At first, this worked. It was easier for others to categorize and interact with me as “us” or “them” and I had learned both parts and acted accordingly. At the least, it certainly made trying and ordering at new restaurants easier. But after a couple weeks, as these choices became more deliberate, I felt little bits of myself eroding every time I chose to adopt one part over the other. And the more I flip-flopped, the more I began to question my right to either components of my identity. The repetition of my actions over time, much like how water carves chasms through canyons, had weathered my internal landscape to the point where I was struggling to remember what it looked like before. In trying to be Taiwanese or be American, I began to forget how to just be, as myself.

Even before I started reflecting seriously on this issue, I knew that this strategy was unsustainable. It was a quick and dirty fix, a little trick you can mentally afford to use a couple times during a short trip. But I am here in Taiwan for a year, and the consequences of overusing it were significant, and alienating. Through my actions, I was blatantly stripping away the hyphen in Taiwanese-American that made space for the diversity, richness, and spectrum of an identity that so many people took pride in, of an identity that I belonged to.

I have yet to find the ideal way to navigate these interactions in such a way that indicates that I am something in between the “us” and “them” in Taiwan without having to explain my family’s life history. I know that I am far from alone in this regard. Navigating hybrid identities is a century old question that millions have had to learn how to navigate, each in their own way, and I would too, eventually.

Slowly but deliberately, I’ve learned to warn restaurant workers by letting out an “um” and then continuing in Mandarin if I wasn’t sure of something. I hesitate less to stop veterinarians now to throw in a “��一下, 我不懂.” (Wait a second, I don’t understand.) They too have adapted, and now stop to laugh and backtrack when they recognize the lost look on my face. Just as I had to learn to navigate the space in between “us” and “them,” those interacting with me did as well. I just never gave either parties the chance to do so.

The van driver looks at me expectantly, having run out of guesses.

I shake my head and laugh softly before responding: “我是美國人, 但是我父母是台灣人.” (I am American, but my parents are Taiwanese.) This answer is the closest to Taiwanese-American that I have managed to get so far.

Natalie Sun hails from Northern California and graduated from Amherst College in 2018 with a BA in Biology. She continued on to a veterinary research grant in Taiwan through the Fulbright program, and also took this opportunity to explore her heritage and what it means to be Taiwanese-American. Natalie is currently a veterinary student at UC Davis and hopes to practice in companion animal medicine in the future.

#Taiwan

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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The Colors of Vietnam — A Photo Essay

by Cindy Trinh / photos: the author

For the first time in my life, I traveled to Vietnam in January of this year. I had always wanted to go with my mother, but she felt too much pain and trauma at the thought of ever stepping foot back in Vietnam. As a photographer, I wanted to highlight the amazing colors of Vietnam and the beautiful people that make Vietnam such a wonderful country. Vietnam is so colorful and vibrant, which I aimed to portray in my photos: the bright lanterns of Hoi An, the vegetable vendors on the streets of Saigon, the neon lights of Hanoi and the endless rows of colored plastic chairs. During my travels, I learned a lot about my race, my culture and myself. As a Vietnamese American, I have never felt like I belonged anywhere; I don’t belong in Vietnam because I wasn’t born there and I don’t quite belong in America because of racism and discrimination. When I saw children in Vietnam, I thought about how that could have been me if my mother hadn’t fled to America. It affected me on a deeply personal level. During the month of April, I showed my photography from Vietnam in a pop-up exhibition at An Choi, a Vietnamese eatery in Lower East Side. I showed my Vietnam photography again during the month of June at Canal Street Market, an arts and events space located in Chinatown, NY. My work was featured in the popular media site Saigoneer, a lifestyle publication based in Vietnam.

#Vietnam

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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“Running Is My Church” — Interview with Adrian Jue on Running Marathons in Asia

by Angelica Guilbeaux / photos: Adrian Jue

Adrian Jue is a Chinese-American avid runner who has lived in South Korea for nearly a decade. He has run more than 40 marathons and 25 ultramarathons in South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, and even a 100 mile race along the Berlin Wall. When he was 28, he was diagnosed with a heart condition two weeks before he left to teach abroad in South Korea.

He occasionally writes about life in South Korea, running, and teaching English on his blog.

Angelica Guilbeaux: Tell us a little bit about yourself?

Adrian Jue: Hi, my name is Adrian and I was born and raised in San Francisco. I doubled majored in Political Science and Communication at the University of California at Davis, where I developed a penchant for endurance sports (mainly road cycling).

I have always tried to understand what it means to be a Chinese-American, and I try to remain close to my roots--more so, as I have gotten older. I am currently teaching in Daegu, where I have lived for almost 9 years. Naturally, Daegu has become a 2nd home to me and it is very dear to my heart as I have lived almost a 1/4 of my life here. Prior to Korea, I worked for a startup company in San Francisco that licensed sheet metal technology.

AG: What encouraged you to go to Korea? What's encouraging you to stay?

AJ: I was employed at the startup company for a couple years before it downsized, and I was affected. The company was showing gradual signs of cutting cost, and I prepared for the worst a month before the company let me go. The moment I became unemployed was bittersweet. I was left without a job, but it also presented me with the opportunity to do what I have always wanted to do, which was to travel. Nothing could go farther south than “rock bottom”, which was how I felt at the time.

One of my running friends around that time had told me that her daughter was teaching in Bucheon, South Korea, a satellite city close to Seoul. With running always on my mind back then, I quickly went online and registered for the Seoul Marathon in 2010. Visiting Seoul for the first time is a memory I cherish quite fondly while it amazes me to think it was nearly 10 years ago!

When I went back home to San Francisco, I really thought about finding a job in South Korea. I looked into the teaching program in Korea and decided to combine working in a foreign country and experience teaching as a possible career in the future. I have never regretted that decision ever since.

AG: Do you think you've changed since coming to Korea? Or do you think you're the same person since first arriving?

AJ: South Korea has started a new chapter in my life and it has given me new opportunities to become less timid in overcoming challenges that I would not have taken back home in San Francisco. Before coming here, there was no way I would have been satisfied or even complacent with uncertainty. I also have never liked speaking in public, but given my job, public speaking is absolutely necessary. It was a challenge that I hated, but now I really enjoy it.

As a teacher, every situation has presented me with a new challenge that I wanted to overcome. Part of the reason for being in South Korea for so long is that every one of the five schools I’ve taught in have been quite unique in student ability level and school objectives. I have taught in a low performing middle school, a technical high school in the countryside, one of the top middle schools in Daegu, a girls' high school, an art and music high school, and a foreign language school. There is no one design for teacher instruction for all of these schools.

Living in South Korea also requires trying to make sense of what I am doing and why I am here. Not only have I developed many friendships with Koreans, but I have also developed a stronger understanding and affinity to other Asian and Southeast Asians that I meet while living in Korea and visiting other countries. A rule that I impose on myself is to make a strong contact with people in every country that I visit and to continue to maintain those contacts.

So not only has getting older, grappling with a heart condition, living in a foreign country, and teaching in many schools really changed my life, but it has also been the connections I have made. I have met so many people from many diverse backgrounds and I am thankful to really discover that the world is a wonderful place.

AG: On your blog, you write that running is important to you. How did you get into running?

AJ: Running has been a huge part of my life after I graduated from university. I had difficulty finding time to go on long bike rides for training and I also wanted to enjoy an activity that wasn’t so much of a strain on my budget. I started running about 15-25 km a week with no strict schedule. I just ran when I felt that I needed to.

I found a local running club called Dolphin South End (DSE) that would meet Saturday mornings and jog a leisurely 10km through the scenic Golden Gate Park and Land’s End. After the runs, all the runners would meet up for brunch and conversation near Ocean Beach. DSE also had Sunday morning races almost year-round and that was where I developed many friendships and fast speedwork.

It was at one of these DSE races where I overheard someone mention entering the lottery for the NYC Marathon. Not thinking much of it, I decided to put my name into the lottery and months later, I got accepted. From then on, I had to be more disciplined about running on a more consistent basis, but it has deepened my affinity for long-distance running in the 26.2 mile marathon distance and ultramarathons, races longer than the marathon distance.

AG: How would you describe running culture? What's the community like?

AJ: Living in San Francisco is a paradise for runners. Not many places in the world are blessed to have a rich culture of outdoor sports such as running. The culture of running continues to evolve in many ways--albeit the challenge of running farther distances such as ultramarathons, exploring miles of national and state parks through trail running, big city marathons, obstacle races, and charity events.

Running can be a very selfish sport if one thinks about personal goals in running. After all, if you train for so many hours and time away from loved ones and social events to obtain a goal, you are sacrificing so many other things in life. However, running can also be full of consideration and compassion by returning the acts of kindness that may have helped you reach your own goals.

To understand the sport of running on a deeper level, it is not just about running; it’s also about volunteering in races, being part of the aid station crew, directing a race, or pacing a running in an ultramarathon. There’s always a role that is needed to make running events possible.

I was fortunate to be a member of Pamakid Runners in San Francisco. This running club has enabled me to achieve my goals in 2010 when I got 2nd place in my age group in the PAUSATF ultrarunning category. The club also has wonderful track workouts to develop speedwork led by Andy Chan on Tuesday evenings (now Thursday evenings) at Kezar Track. This wonderful running club gives back to the community by donating to Salvation Army Harbor Light Foundation, Support for Families of Children with Disabilities, and The Family House.

AG: How many runs have you participated in? Where were they?

AJ: Too many to count! After my 30th marathon in Tokyo in 2014, I lost track. I must have run about 40-50 road marathons. For ultramarathons, I may have run over 25.

For road marathons in the United States, I have run in Sacramento (CIM), Napa, San Jose (Silicon Valley Marathon), Eugene, Houston, Twin Cities, Chicago, NYC, and Washington D.C.

In South Korea, I have run full marathons in Seoul, Daegu, DMZ, Chuncheon, Yeongju, Yeosu, Sacheon, Samcheok, Namhae. For shorter distances in South Korea, I have run in Busan, Daejeon, Gyeongju, Pohang, Incheon, Geoje, Bucheon, Gwangju, Ulsan, Tongyeong, Jinhae, Suncheon, Pyeongtaek, Changyeong, Suwon, Yeongdong, Boryeong, Yangpyeong, Gwacheon, Miryang, Yeongdeok, Masan, Yangsan, Gochang, Hwasun, Bonghwa, Gangjin, Anseong, Gangneung, Gimhae, Uiryeong, Naju, Icheon, Changwon, Hapcheon, Gwangyang, Damyang, Sangju, Cheongdo, Gunwi, Gapyeong, Geochang, Hamyang, Mokpo, Pocheon, Yeoju, Boseong, Andong, Jinju, Buan, Jangheung, Gyeongsan, Yeongcheon, Wonju, Okcheon, Wando, Goseong, Seongju, Jinan, and Gunsan.

For ultramarathons in Korea, I have run Busan 100km (trail and road), Jeju 100km, Tongyeong 100km, Ulsan 100km, Yeongdong 100km, Jeonju 100km, and Cheonan 100km.

Other races abroad include Tokyo Marathon (2 times), Osaka Marathon (2 times), Fukuoka Marathon, Ibusuki Marathon, UltraTrail Mount Fuji-STY 89km, Dubai Marathon, Taipei Marathon, Ho Chi Minh Marathon, Hong Kong Marathon, Hong Kong 100km (2 times), Mumbai Marathon, North Face Thailand 50km, and the Berlin Wall 100 Mile that runs along the route in Berlin and Potsdam(2 times)

Running the Berlin 100-Mile race in both 2016 and 2017 were memorable experiences. In 2016, it was a very hot weekend. Crossing the line with 2 other runners hand in hand was a special moment as we all completed our first 100-mile race! Heading back to work in Korea, I met up with Ki Bo Bae and the gold medal archery team at the Frankfurt Airport; the team was coming back home from the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In 2017, it was a cold and rainy year, but I was able to finish the race almost an hour faster! I also met Malcolm Gladwell while waiting for the red light to change on Alexanderplatz. He was standing right behind him and I heard his voice. We had a brief chat and he wished me well for the race.

AG: Is the running community pretty connected worldwide? Does running culture vary from region to region?

AJ: Running is universal. You don’t need words to communicate. You talk with your legs and you let your actions do the speaking.

Training or running marathons in South Korea is not a common activity compared to soccer or badminton. But it is getting much better in terms of organization and getting younger folks to be involved in the sport. Still, however, it is much of an old man’s sport in Korea.

I am most impressed with the running culture in Japan. People cheer for the runners from the sidelines and people know about the university collegiate runners who run on the track or do the ekiden relay races. I also enjoy running in Japan because if a race starts at 9 am, you can bet that it WILL start at 9:00:00 as I have witnessed while looking at my GPS watch at the Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka marathons.

AG: In one of your blog posts titled “Running Scared”, you wrote about a particular life-changing run that ended up with you in ICU at St. Mary's Hospital. After going through an ordeal like that, how did you bounce back? What was the healing process like, physically and emotionally?

AJ: So after running an easy 4.5-mile loop around Lake Merced in SF, I felt something was wrong. My pace was slow, yet I was having cold sweats. I tried to rest in my pickup, hoping to make my heart rate go down, but nothing I did would help. I was getting impatient and worried and I drove myself home. I’m not sure how I did it because I did not feel well at all.

Long story short, my heart rate did not subside for hours and so an ambulance was called to have me picked up. Inside, the EMT said my HR was above 240. They decided to put me into ICU for observation for days and discovered that I had ARVD, arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia, a progressive disease in which the right ventricle has structural and functional abnormalities that can cause tachycardia. The diagnosis for me was to be on daily medication, have a defibrillator implanted inside me, and to have an ablation to burn off the cells that are causing problems in my heart. Despite all of those solutions, they are not a cure to my condition, so for the rest of my life, I cannot push myself through exercise or else it would worsen my condition to the point of having a heart transplant. Keep in mind, this all happened with two weeks before I would go teach in Korea!

When I was discharged from the hospital, I tried to find more information about ARVD. There wasn’t much information to be found back then because the research was and is still ongoing. The doctors, moreover, did tell me that running at full effort would have to be history now. Competitive and high exertion sports are to be avoided.

I used to get angry when people would self-denigrate themselves if they had to miss a day at the gym or miss a day of running. They still had a gift that they could just do on another day. I always set my sights on qualifying for Boston, but that dream would now have to be shelved. I believed that I would never do what I loved ever again.

What made me come to realize that having this condition was bittersweet occurred when I read about the autopsy of Ryan Shay. Ryan Shay was a 28-year old elite marathoner who died during the Olympic Trials in Central Park. Although we don’t know what kind of heart condition he had at the time of his death, it did make him think about how the heart can be a beautiful thing and also a mysterious organ that can just stop at any time. I was the same age as him when I found out I had ARVD. The major difference is that I am still alive and have another chance at life.

AG: What inspires you to keep running?

AJ: “Running is my church.” This was a saying that my friends and I in my running club would say to each other. In the past, it was all about running fast times and running your personal best. I still miss those days, but now, it’s really about discovering a new place. Running a marathon is akin to a 5 hour tour of a city or region by foot.

AG: So switching gears a little bit, in your blog post "Perception: Which side are you on and does it matter", you write about your experience being Chinese American in Korea. You mention you come across different sets of challenges and situations that are specific to your ethnic identity. From the post, it seems like many of those situations arise from people not really knowing how to "categorize" you. Can you speak more on this? What's your attitude towards this labeling?

AJ: Some people don’t really understand when I tell them that I am Chinese American. I tell them that I was born and raised in San Francisco but ethnically I am Chinese. After giving a lengthy explanation of how my grandparents came over to China and how my parents have settled in San Francisco, they still ask me how my parents are doing in China. If a question is asked, one has to listen carefully and respect the response from the respondent. I do sometimes wonder why it’s hard for them to fathom Asians in America as Asian Americans, a blend of two cultures that are not mutually exclusive. There are Koreans who have sent their child(ren) abroad to study; why is it hard for them as a possibility that they or their future descendants be someone like me?

AG: As a runner, you know well the moments when you're out of breath, but that drive is still there; so, you keep going. In those moments of cultural clashes, what helps you keep your stride? What helps you keep going?

AJ: The longer I have lived in Korea, the more I find how connected I am to my Asian-ness, either through my teaching or through the social connections I have made here. For example, it was my second year teaching in Daegu and I remember being really upset at my students for talking over me and I yelled at them for being disrespectful. After class, a few students apologized for disappointing me. I was taken aback because when my students are told off for doing something wrong, they will take it personally and try not to make the same mistake. Likewise, when I was taking Korean classes, I was told more often than not of the mistakes I was making and I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to disappoint the instructor and so I studied really hard to not make the same mistake again!

In another example, I have taken up the sport of badminton seriously since November 2018. After taking lessons four times a week for many months since I started, only now, I have earned respect from my club. That’s the thing I found in Korea--you don’t get respect, you have to EARN it, and that’s pretty hard to do, especially from older people who try to give you hell. But if you stick to anything with 100%, you can make strong friendships and connections.

AG: Lastly, do you have any advice to share?

AJ: It’s easy to think that living in Korea can be fun and exciting in the beginning. And that is true because the novelty of it all is pleasant to the senses in overdrive. Six months, maybe even a year, you don’t have to deal with challenges that come with being abroad for a longer period of time. Some might think that because I have lived in Korea for over 8 years, I love it here more than the United States. The fact is that I have lived here for so long because there is much more potential here to develop skills that I can bring back to the US.

If you have a passion for doing something wholeheartedly, pursue that with 100% effort. Many Koreans I have met have told me that they are typically disappointed when foreigners give up way too easy maybe because of the communication barrier or the intimidation of skill and ability. But I suggest not losing hope and to remain resilient just as the many Koreans whom I have met and have inspired me. It’s about being taking charge of new challenging situations. You can really find amazing possibilities for personal growth if you actively seek them in a foreign country such as Korea.

#Korea #SouthKorea #Running #Marathons #Chinese

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Impermanence and South Korea — Interview with Photographer Hon Hoang

by Eugene Lee / photos: Hon Hoang

Hon Hoang is a Vietnamese-American photographer and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles, California. He was born in Ho Chi Minh City, and grew up in Los Angeles, where he studied Psychology at UCLA. His work has been featured in the Ici Vietnam Film Festival, National Geographic, and Life Framer. He is currently freelancing and working on various photography projects such as EnFlight.Design and Asia Photo Review. Follow his work at his website at honhoang.com and Instagram: @honnnhoang.

This interview is largely centered around Hoang’s photobook Impermanence: South Korea in Portraits and Photographs which can be found and downloaded here. Excerpts will also be presented throughout the interview.

Eugene Lee: Great to have you, Hon, and thanks so much for your time. Just to get started, could you give us a little background into what led you to Korea, and maybe also how photography/filmmaking might have played a role in that move? Did you travel much before Korea?

Hon Hoang: I didn’t travel much at all before Korea. I visited Vietnam for summer when I was a teenager, but not much besides that. Before making my move to the peninsula, I was working a digital marketing job that I didn’t have too much passion for. It made me question, “is this really what I went to college for?” I worked there for about 2 years and realized that if this might as well be the rest of my life, I should at least live a little before committing to such soul crushing monotony.

With the money I got from working, I was able to buy my first DSLR shortly after finishing college. From there, I took my camera everywhere, learning as I went along. Eventually my camera took me to Korea, I ended up in a city called Changwon. I just wanted to see more of the world and my photography was just another reason for me to go.

EL: A lot of your photographs are really intimate encounters -- was your camera on you at all times, or did you pick particular days to go on photo walks? What was your photo routine like?

HH: I had my camera on me at all times (with exception of some days), it was essentially an extension of myself. Just like putting on a shirt or a pair of shoes, my camera was just a part of that routine. I knew that I only had a year, I wanted to make use of that time. You just never know when something beautiful might capture your eye. A quiet and intimate moment that breaks through the noise of a city.

EL: Did the way you approached street photography change while living in Korea, as opposed to LA?

HH: I didn’t do much street photography in Los Angeles, mainly did portrait photography. Street photography started when I moved to Korea. Everything seemed new and I wanted to capture it all.

EL: How do you understand portraits and storytelling through controlled (as opposed to spontaneous) images?

HH: With portraits, I write the story and capture pictures to revolve around what I write. When you have something you want to say, you have the model help you tell that story through images. It’s something that is pre-planned.

With street photography, it’s spontaneous, but you’re still trying to tell a story. You want the viewer to see what you’re seeing, an observation about that moment in time, about the people, the setting. You’re still creating a story, but one that you have little control over how it begins and ends.

EL: How did you come to better understand yourself as a Vietnamese-American, if you did at all? Do you feel like you have a better understanding of yourself after living abroad?

HH: You learn a lot more about yourself when you move away from what you know. Learning to appreciate things that were always there, now that you’re away from it all. I would highly recommend living abroad if possible. Do research, find ways to get a job abroad, work and travel without spending money that you might not have.

As a immigrant twice over, I learned about the difficulties my parents and family had to struggle with. Simple things such as ordering food or finding your way around could be tedious. You learn to respect and understand firsthand. You learn that knowing how to speak English is a privilege that most people don’t have.

EL: And for a final question, any words you’d like to say to photographers living abroad, or people looking to live abroad for a while?

HH: Going on vacation and living abroad are two very different things. When on vacation, you have very little time to get bored. To slow down and experience the monotony of life in the city you’re visiting. You experience things that you normally wouldn’t when vacationing. Whether it’s opening a bank account or shopping for homegoods. You get to understand people and the society they live in by living like them as oppose to spectating.

For photographers, capture your photographs with honesty and respect. Imagine how you would like to be portrayed and how you want your culture to be showcased then tell a story.

#South Korea #Photography #Korea #Vietnam #United States

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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都在酒里, It’s all in the alcohol — Interview with EJ Mitchell on Opening a Bar in Beijing

by Esther Song / photos: EJ Mitchell

EJ Mitchell has been working as an educational consultant in Beijing since 2014, and is a co-owner of Sanlitun cocktail bar 50/50. Launched as a passion project for himself and his friends, the bar now serves as a homelike space for a diverse population of local Beijingers, expats, visitors, and many others.

You’ve been living in Beijing for five years now. I’m curious to know what initially took you to China and what made you stay.

My first time in China was during my study abroad in the spring semester of my Junior year at college. At the time, I was really invested in my acapella group and was hesitant to leave for a whole semester. But being an Asian Languages and Civilizations major and having taken Mandarin ever since my freshman year, I knew I wanted to go to Asia. I ended up applying last minute to a program in Beijing and was admitted. Looking back now, I’m grateful that I made the decision that I did, since I’ve ended up spending the majority of my adult life in Beijing.

Coming back from China, I knew I definitely wanted to return. So the fall of my senior year, I applied to the resident counselor position at the program I’d studied at. It was a year-long position, so at the time, I expected to return to America after that year was over. Most expats in China have a lifespan of between one to two years before they relocate, and I didn’t think I’d be an exception to that rule. This is my fifth year at the company I’m working for, and I don’t see myself returning to America or going anywhere else in the foreseeable future. But if someone had come up to me my senior year of college and told me that I’d be where I am now I wouldn’t have believed it.

It seems like your moving to China was a pretty smooth and natural process. That being said, I’m curious to know what your experience adjusting to a foreign country was like—were there any culture shock moments?

I think the culture shock wasn’t nearly as bad for me as it is for most expats, because I had a friend who gave me a lot of perspective on what my experience would look like. He’d been abroad before and warned me of some different things that I might experience, like being asked for pictures and certain things people would say—I knew going in to my experience that I would be a “first” for a lot of people. That was some of the best advice I had gotten, and why I think I was able to have such a positive experience. It allowed me to have a lot of empathy for the people I interacted with. Foreigners that go to China without these understandings often get hung up over some ignorant comment that they hear and equate it to racism like how it’s defined in the US. I think it’s just not the same. You can’t use the same standards here that you use in the US because the two countries—their culture, history, people, everything—are just too different.

Could you give me an example of something that stood out to you as particularly different in Chinese culture?

Well, one thing I find fascinating about China is how interpersonal relationships are handled here. There are a lot of things that you do in the name of family or friendship that I don’t know would be upheld in the same ways in the US. For example, there’s this concept called 发小, faxiao, which basically means a childhood friend that you’ve known ever since you were very young. Between these childhood friends, people would literally do anything for each other. And by anything, I mean anything! Picking people up at odd hours, lending them huge sums of money—I’ve even been in situations where I had to call my friend’s parents to ensure them that their son was with me. This level of friendship is something I’d never have imagined in the US. There are parts of me that really admire that, and then there are parts of me that feel like it can be a little bit too much at times. But now, I mostly find myself partaking in the whole thing, holding certain expectations for my close friends just like they would for me. I guess I’ve grown into the cultural practice, and to be frank, it’s quite a nice feeling knowing that your friends hold you so close.

It sounds like you’ve found a trusty group of friends in Beijing. Tell me a little bit more about your community there.

I’d say around 60 to 70% of my immediate friend circle is made up of local Beijingers. Amongst them, it’s a mix of people that were born and raised in Beijing, and others that attended international schools in Beijing or went to college in the US. It’s funny because the way I met a lot of my current friends is through the few Beijinger friends I met at a local bar at the beginning of my time in Beijing. The way I expanded my circle from there was through people introducing me to their faxiao, and then those people to their faxiao, and so on and so forth. Going back to my earlier point on how closely people hold their faxiao, I’m really quite grateful that I was able to become part of that intimate circle. I don’t take it for granted that I’ve been able to find such great friends here, especially given that I’m the only black and queer person in my friend group. I also don’t take it for granted that they’ve invited me into their social spaces and don’t regard me as an intruder of any sort. Over time, I’ve learned to properly invest in those relationships, since I know that those are the ones that are going to last.

Tell me the story of how you came to open a bar in Beijing. Why Beijing? Why a bar?

There’s an urban anthropology theory that says in cities like Beijing where it’s not the cultural norm for people to invite friends into their homes, people tend to find establishments outside of their homes to treat as a second living room. For me and my group of friends, that place was a cocktail bar called Scarlet A. It was a nice bar with an eclectic mix of people, from local Beijing people to expats and tourists. But it was located in a part of Beijing that was subject to a lot of shutdowns by the government, because a lot of the institutions there had illegally modified buildings. So we knew that this bar was bound to be shut down some time.

January of last year, a Beijinger friend of mine first brought up the subject of opening a bar together. At the time, I thought it was just a wild idea that he’d thrown out as a joke. After the Chinese holiday in May, he approached me and said that it was actually going to happen and what’s more, that they were going to name the bar after me—EJ!

I learned later that he’d gotten a word from the manager of Scarlet A that they were going to shut down in a couple of months, and my friend realized that this was the perfect timing to go through with the project. We weren’t necessarily opening the bar because we wanted to make money or felt the need to run a business. It just seemed like the perfect opportunity to create a space in Beijing that feels like a second home for all of our friends. From then on, everything happened pretty quickly, meeting with the designer, designing a menu, picking out furniture and color palettes, tasting menus… It was really crazy to go from joking around with a friend into actually seeing that idea come into fruition. Scarlet A closed in August, and our bar opened in November.

Were there ways in which your identity as a foreigner influenced your experience with opening and running a bar in a largely homogeneous community?

It would be hard to say that our experience with the bar wasn’t influenced by my being a foreigner. There are aspects of the business that are made easier if you have a foreigner on board, like having greater access to certain customer groups in terms of PR, being able to talk to English magazines that want to feature our bar, and coming up with English names for the menu. The name of our bar, 50/50, is an allusion to the measurement of a type of martini, but we also wanted to nuance it to express a coming together of contrasting objects—half Chinese, half expat, Ying and Yang, and so on. The design of the space, décor, logo, and menu all reflect this idea of half and half, or playing off of opposites. Personally, I think having different perspectives is always beneficial to a team. It’s definitely allowed us to take the best of how both of our minds and cultures work, and to use those differences to complement each other.

So cultural differences actually contributed positively to your experience with opening the bar. Has that also been the case in other parts of your life?

I definitely feel the cultural difference most keenly when having conversations on topics like race, culture, identity, sexual orientation and gender, which I think goes back to bigger differences between national cultures of China and the US, rather than personal differences. These kinds of topics still tend to be treated as taboo in the workplace and general social spaces. For example, in my other job in education, there are certain topics that people would avoid bringing up in front of the Chinese staff, mostly because they don’t want their personal business to become company gossip, but also because culturally, it’s something that’s still not openly discussed. I think there’s a lot of fear in that respect of offending or being offended.

Is there any way of bridging across such cultural differences that has been particularly effective for you?

I’d definitely say that being able to speak the language makes all the difference. When you’re able to communicate with people in their native language, and in authentic ways too, it becomes much easier to bridge differences. When I first came to Beijing, getting to know people over a drink at the café bar was definitely a good way to connect with them, because that helped simplify a lot of our relationships from the beginning. There’s a saying in Chinese that says “都在酒里,” which means “It’s all in the alcohol.” I guess when people drink, it becomes easier to open up and be your authentic self, and of course, the more you drink, the more your inhibition goes down. We’d just start off by having casual conversations about our studies, they’d teach me Chinese drinking games, and soon, we’d be sharing things that we wouldn’t normally share, having drunken heart-to-hearts. I think those were times when I felt the least foreign, both in terms of being a foreigner and being socially on the outside. And of course, it didn’t matter that my Chinese was bad because, well, we were all drunk!

“It’s all in the alcohol.” It seems like bars and alcohol have an important place in China’s social culture. What kind of social space do you envision your bar becoming in Beijing?

I’d love to use my bar to support black and queer business owners in Beijing and use the space we have to build a community that is more diverse and inclusive. Things can get quite polarizing and segregating here in terms of gender and sexual orientation, so I think we’ll be a good addition in a city where there aren’t as many inclusive options for queer people. It’s exciting since most other bars don’t think to do that because there’s no one on their team that has that kind of intersectionality in the first place.

What do you find most rewarding about living and running a business in China, and conversely, what’s the most challenging part?

One of my most rewarding experiences in China would definitely have to be my recent dabbling in entrepreneurship. The whole process of creating a space and product that people enjoy and come back for has been extremely rewarding. Personally, I know how meaningful it is to have a place or establishment where you feel remembered, where people already know your orders and other little details about you. Being able to partake in the actual process of creating a space like that was definitely one of the coolest parts of my whole experience with the bar. The design process was really fun, and of course, as a foreigner, the whole idea of conducting business conversations in Mandarin was quite an accomplishment too.

That being said, the food and beverage industry in China is very competitive. I know we have a great product and that our bar is an awesome space, but in truth, so is everyone else’s. So really, our main focus is to create something that’s different, and to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the crowd. Of course, the hardest part of it all is the pressure of not failing, and making sure that all our monetary, emotional, and experiential investments will come back in some form another.

What do you see yourself doing in five years’ time?

Ideally, I see myself still living in Beijing. I think it would be cool to still be in the hospitality, food and beverage industry. If I had it my own way, I’d probably open up another bar that focuses specifically on providing an inclusive space for the queer population here, since there’s not a single cocktail bar in Beijing that I can think of that’s an open queer space. I’ll also probably be continuing on with my profession in education, since that’s my main source of income. But all in all, I think what my experience with the bar has taught me is that I’m capable of dabbling in multiple things. I’ve always been a very risk-averse person, and opening this bar was a huge risk for me. But it’s taught me that it’s worth putting myself out there and challenging myself to think in different ways. I’d love to have other adventures in the future, and to create more passion projects for myself that are more personally meaningful.

#China #Beijing #Bar #Interview #Asia #Identity

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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举杯望明月，低头思故乡。- I Raised My Glass and Look to the Bright Moon, Then Lowered My Head and Think of Home

by EJ Mitchell / photo: Bufan Zhu

He smiles, satisfied.

I watch as Mark rocks the shaker back and forth, the ice, green tea infused gin, passionfruit, and red pepper syrup sloshing around until they are perfectly blended. He takes a straw to taste his concoction. “嗯。”

(“Mmm.”)

He grabs a fizz glass and carefully places three ice cubes inside. He pours the mixture, gently shaking out every last drop. I appreciate such care.

He adds a few splashes of seltzer, and the fruity aroma begins to perfume my nose. I pick up the glass and inhale deeply, taking a generous sip.

“嗯，��以 !”

(“Mmm, pretty good!”)

Mark helps another guest as I enjoy my drink. AirPods in ear, I listen to Amber Mark’s “Love Me Right” for the nth time, letting the layers of Mark’s creation and Mark’s harmonies soothe me. I normally don’t drink by myself. But around this time of year, when Beijing is emptied by 春运 (the Spring Festival travel rush), I am alone and most reflective. The beginning of 2019 begets the transition into a new zodiac year, the anxiety surrounding performance reviews, and my fifth annual winter odyssey back to the US. I also find that people are at their most inquisitive:

What are you doing for New Years?

Where are you going for Spring Festival?

Are you staying for another year?

How much longer do you see yourself in China?

When are you coming home?

These questions assume a lot—that I have funds to do something or go somewhere, or that I am thinking about leaving China, or that one day I will eventually “go back.” The longer I live in Beijing, the more the last question perplexes me.

Beijing is where I have accumulated over six years of formative experiences. I’ve cried because I was in love (or so I thought). As an educator, I’ve experienced my worst nightmare—the loss of a student and the ineffable numbness that follows. I’ve even danced my way into free rounds of tequila shots on my birthday. At least that’s what I was told. If nothing else, Beijing is certainly the only place where I feel confident in my adulting skills. Literally, and I mean literally, every time my Didi arrives, the driver says,

“我还以为你是我们中国人！没想到你是外国友人，打电话听不出来！”

(“I thought you were Chinese! I didn’t think you were a foreign friend. Couldn’t tell over the phone!”)

This is a compliment that I have learned to authentically accept humbly (”我中文还行吧…“ / “My Chinese is okay…”), instead of simply saying thank you. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of my Beijing accent, but I know better than to think that just because I have adopted erhua and say things like “Bu ri dao!” or “Ma qu?” that I can by some amount of sheer effort become or be seen as a true Beijinger. When asked, “你什么时候回家？” I intentionally, and perhaps defensively, reply, “我要去美国,” emphasizing that I am going to America, not returning home. Have I not done enough to demonstrate to others that I am at home when I am in Beijing?

I have the last gulp of my drink and have a feeling that I am going to need another.

“Mark，再来一杯。你随便调吧。“

(Mark, another one. Mix as you see fit.)

As Mark readies a mixture of blackberries, aged sherry, port, and rum he calls “Darker the Berry,” I find myself starting to feel guilty. Here I am, sitting in not just any bar, but my bar. Five Beijing blocks away the streets are lined with H&M, Alexander McQueen, stadium-style night clubs, and the entrance to my gated apartment complex. In a mere few days I will return to Forest Park to sleep on my mother’s living room couch in a Cincinnati suburb of fewer than twenty-thousand people, in contrast to the three and half million that call Chaoyang district their home. If I’m honest with myself, though I love my mom’s cooking and dearly miss my five siblings, I could do without the tear-filled overtures of emotional baggage and petty arguments masked as “discussions.”

“很快就能回家啦，开心了吧？” Mark asks.

(“You’ll be returning home soon. You must be happy?”)

“嗯。” I feign a smile.

(“Mhmm”).

Counting the time in my head, I haven’t gone back to Cincinnati in over a year and a half, choosing instead to visit a friend and former colleague from Beijing in Scotland last summer. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just running away.

“You don’t know…you weren’t there! You’re never around!”

This isn’t the first time my brother’s words have echoed in my mind, but this time I feel different. My ears are warm. I can’t tell if it’s from the stiff drink or because of recalling my adult brother’s emotional eruption the last time we were together. His words, though at the time came as a shock, were true, and to some degree still are. I remember writing in my personal statement for college about how, following the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, I felt that I had outgrown my family and that I, too, needed a divorce. Now 6800 miles away in Beijing, I have my chosen family, a job that I don’t just like but love, memories of vacations to St. Petersburg’s palaces and Almaty’s mountains, a savings account with actual savings…

Haven’t I done enough? Am I not the child my parents raised? Am I not a person that they—no, that any parent or family—would be proud of?

“You’re never around! You’re never around! You’re never around!”

Apparently not.

I have reveled in the freedom that I have discovered in Beijing, a place I did not have or want to share with my family until their first venture out of the US to visit me; I was too hurt by what was behind me and too overwhelmed by what was in store. Yet, in my attempt to free myself from the aftermath of my parents’ divorce, I have created a distance between myself and my family beyond just physical separation—a college degree, language barriers, and inadvertent intellectual elitism, to say the least. But the distance hasn’t been all bad. In fact, in many ways, it has provided the critical space that I have needed to begin metabolizing the guilt that has been left to fester over time.

With a fonder heart, I am learning to patiently explain that Tokyo is neither where I live nor a city in China instead of rolling my eyes, and I strive to get as many hugs and selfies in with my youngest sisters, though I often wonder if they even know who I really am. Acquaintances and strangers alike have a habit of reminding me that I could always “just go back home,” reasoning that I would be closer to, and arguably closer with, my family (and definitely less frequently stared at). But one doesn’t just simply “go back” and expect years of mismanaged expectations and trauma to be fixed. Though well-intentioned, they are missing the point. I choose to stay because of the acceptance and affirmation from my friends. I stay because when I walk the streets and hear or see police I am not afraid for my life. I stay because when I look at a billboard I am not perplexed by the characters’ strokes but still in awe that I understand the language of the future. I stay because the look of ecstasy on my sister’s face after having her first bite of kaoya or my mom’s after her first sip of baijiu at dinner in Haidian with my host family is priceless.

As I empty my glass, my attention turns to the Cocaine 80s song in my ears.

“Or maybe you're just going through shit

And that's a part of your design

Just maybe all your dreams are lucid

Been in control the whole time…”

I used to dream that one day my family’s issues would work themselves out. But dreaming that I’m there for my brother isn’t enough to lift his spirits when he’s down. No amount of dreaming can change the fact that I can only remember celebrating one birthday with my sister who turns ten this year. The distance between me and my family is our reality, but that doesn’t mean I can’t build bridges. I can pick up the phone more—I’m always on it anyway—or offer to help offset the costs of visits. My experiences leading up to and in China have provided access to a life that was previously unimaginable, for me and my family. If I want to continue to do better for us, I have to acknowledge that things don’t work themselves out. I have to put in the work, despite how uncomfortable it may be.

“...Relationship nightmares

Your soul is drained

The demons that you've been dreaming up

Are angels under the pain”

Maybe, just maybe, I’m finally ready to do that.

EJ Mitchell has been working as an educational consultant in Beijing since 2014 and is a co-owner of Sanlitun cocktail bar 50/50.

#China

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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“A Form of Excavation” – Interview with Jihyun Yun on Writing Poetry in Korea and in Diaspora

Jihyun Yun is a Korean-American poet from California. A 2017 Fulbright Junior Research grantee and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis and her MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, 32 Poems, Adroit Journal, AAWW The Margins, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Ann Arbor Michigan where she is editing and querying her first full-length collection Some are Always Hungry. Follow her work on www.jihyunyun.com and on Twitter @jihyunyunpoetry.

Paige Morris: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with Disoriented. First of all, could you tell me a little about yourself? Your essential or inessential biography, anything you deem noteworthy, is welcome.

Jihyun Yun: Thank you so much for reaching out! I’ve loved so much of what I’ve read on Disoriented and wholeheartedly support your mission, so I’m thrilled to be in dialogue now.

I’m a second-generation Korean-American. Though I was born and raised in California, Korean was my dominant tongue until I entered school, after which I swiftly and deliberately stopped using and forgot much of it. It’s a huge regret of mine that I’m trying to rectify now by practicing Korean as much as possible.

I came to poetry when I was a junior at UC Davis in California. Before then, I was a psychology major actively pursuing a career I wasn’t really equipped for in crisis counseling. The poem that flipped the switch in my head was Li Young Lee’s “Persimmons.” The way the poem handled identity and linguistic estrangement really spoke to me. That one poem was the reason I switched tracks so late in my undergrad to major in English and eventually enroll in New York University’s MFA program. It completely rerouted my life, which I am thankful for.

An inessential piece of biography is that I’m a complete glutton, and my love-language is food. My family and I cook for each other in lieu of saying I love you which I feel is true for many immigrant families. This is embarrassingly prevalent in my poetry.

PM: I, for one, love the centrality of food in your poems. I’m currently an MFA student myself, and in a recent class, a professor of mine—the poet Brenda Shaughnessy—said poets often spend their lives writing the same poem, carving smaller poems out of that one, writing variations on the same theme. How true would you say that is for you and your poetry? What would you say is the poem—the theme, the obsession, the question—you tend to circle back to in your work?

JY: (First of all, swoon. I love Brenda Shaughnessy’s work so much!) I would definitely agree with that idea, at least for myself. My work is obsessed with being the daughter of a family of immigrants, with my family history—particularly my Grandmother’s experience fleeing from North Korea during the war—and with food—both the having of and the dearth of, how food is informed by history or used as a vehicle to survive where you are othered. My poems really circle mostly around the lives of the women I love, so much so that my body of work is almost bereft of men. If they appear, they appear mostly as a vague, ominous force, like dangerous weather.

This vulturing around a handful of topics used to be a source of anxiety for me when I first began writing, but I no longer discredit myself for it. Navigating the same themes is a form of excavation for me. It’s interesting to read back on some of my very first poems about identity and those same obsessions I write about now, seeing how much internalized racism I still held in my throat at age 21, and understanding how far I’ve come.

PM: There are some fantastic, contemporary Korean American poets writing in diaspora today. The access each poet has to the place(s) they write about, from, and/or toward in their work, of course, varies. Some poets like Lee Herrick are said to be writing toward Korea from outside about topics like adoption, location, and exile. Other poets like Emily Jungmin Yoon write poems with dual sensitivities, rooted in both Korea and North America. Where in this diaspora, this conversation, do you see yourself and your poetry?

JY: I think I’m still trying to understand where I fit on this spectrum. On one hand, I know I am an inheritor of much of Korea’s modern history: my Grandparents both lived through the Japanese colonization of Korea and then the war, and my Great-Aunt was a “Western Princess,” a somewhat derogatory moniker that was used to refer to Korean prostitutes on US bases and camp-towns during the Korean War, many of which were conscripted into sexual labor via coercion and desperation. It’s impossible to feel unaffected by their testimonies I grew up listening to, and I believe it informs me in more ways than I fully understand. I feel a personal call to write towards them, but I know I must do so from the position of a guest, not fully rooted in either.

PM: Speaking of place, the first time I encountered your work was during a conference on Jeju Island in South Korea. You were a Fulbright scholar presenting your creative project, a collection of poems exploring the lives of the female divers, the Haenyeo (해녀), in Jeju and Busan. Can you talk about the origins of that project?

JY: I was actually encouraged to apply for the Fulbright grant by my thesis advisor, Yusef Komunyakaa. So many of my thesis poems were about family history and Korea, so when I told him that I’d actually never gone to Korea before except as a two-year-old, he insisted it would be important for me to experience living there.

I’ve been fascinated by the Haenyeo since I was young. My Grandma used to tell me stories, and I remember us watching a television documentary about the tradition together. I think when I first set out to write that project, I felt an urgency knowing that the tradition is slated to disappear in my lifetime.

About halfway through the grant, though, I noticed myself distancing from the project. Not because I was not interested and in awe of these women, but because I realized I wasn’t the right person for this task. I think this goes back to your question about where I see myself on the spectrum of Korean writers of diaspora. As a guest in the country with no familial ties to Jeju, I just ethically didn’t feel right about being the one to write this collection anymore.

I still continued to go observe and interact with the Haenyeo for the duration of my grant, but I no longer wrote poems about their work. Now my Fulbright work-in-progress manuscript is a long-form hybrid essay/memoir about my family’s immigration and repatriation, my feelings about failing the mission of my grant, and just basically being in Korea for the first time as a second-generation Korean. I’m realizing now that there is really no way for me to make that sound at all interesting, but I’m having a great time writing it.

PM: What is most salient to you now about the time you spent living in Korea?

JY: I lived in Busan on a street lined with love motels. A pickup truck drove down my alley every morning with a megaphone atop it announcing the price of hairtail and tilefish. The men on mopeds often nicked my ankles with the business cards they were paid to flick as they drove around the city. There was an old-school liquor store in my neighborhood run out of a grandma’s one-room home. When I went in to buy water or beer, she was usually behind a curtain watching TV. She would tell me to leave the money on the table and take whatever I need. I never even saw what she looks like. I spent many nights on Gwangalli beach, and the light show never failed to make me happy.

In Jeju, I helped a group of Haenyeo harvest a bunch of turban-conch from their shells. I did a homestay at one of the women’s home in a village where no one locked their doors. I went on a Jeju Massacre remembrance tour and listened to the testimony of a living survivor. I went to the basalt beaches and watched tourists enjoy themselves in the water. I took a volcanic rock back home with me in my pocket.

PM: How did your writing process change, if at all, while you were living in Korea?

JY: My time in Korea was such a gift in that it allowed me to treat writing as my full-time job, something I’d never experienced up to that point. In California and New York, I was always juggling writing with waitressing in order to make ends meet. In New York, I sometimes worked upwards of 50 hours a week and put writing on the backburner. I was lucky if I wrote one poem every few months. In Korea, I got to fully commit to immersing myself in the day-to-day life of the city, strike up lazy conversations with strangers and write for hours every day without guilt. Travelling was also a big part of my year in Korea. Most often to Jeju to talk to the Haenyeo, but also often to Uijeongbu, which is the city my mother was raised in and where my Grandparents have recently repatriated to.

PM: In what ways did your experience living in Korea inform your poetry, in the end?

JY: If living in Korea has informed my poetry in a significant way, I don’t think enough time has passed for me to detect it. As someone who had never travelled abroad before, I thought the transformation in my writing would be immediate and obvious, but it hasn’t really been so. Perhaps with more distance and time, though, I’ll look back and realize a shift had occurred without me even knowing it.

What I am thankful for are all the experiences and memories I have that I was able to render into poems. Like exploring Seoul with my Grandma and seeing the city through her eyes like a double-exposed film: the Seoul it is today and the Seoul it was in her youth. Revisiting her old elementary school, and the location where her first love’s cigarette factory used to stand (it’s a shopping complex now). Even if my general tone and way of writing experiences has not changed dramatically, I’m so glad to have so many memories catalogued to wrought poems out of.

PM: What draws you to places as subjects of poems? Are there other places you’re interested in writing about?

JY: This is also within Korea, but I regret never going to Iksan in Jeolla province during my Fulbright year, as that is where my Grandfather is from. My Grandfather’s early life has always been a bit of a question mark to me, but the bits and pieces I am told by my Mother and Grandmother are fascinating. I know he has some living relatives in Iksan, and I would love to talk to them. Whether or not I write about it would depend, though, as I’m not sure if there would be a permission there. But in the future, I would like to write about my Grandfather (and perhaps the other men in my life) more.

PM: What’s next for you? Are there any projects you’re excited to share, poetic or otherwise?

JY: An unexpected gift from my year on the Fulbright is that it helped me finish my first full-length collection of poems which I’d been working on since my MFA. I’m in the process of querying it now at various presses. In April, I am collaborating with The Visible Poetry Project and emerging filmmaker Damani Brissett on a short film based on my poem “All Female.” And I am steadily working on my aforementioned memoir, tentatively titled Our Blue the Hue of Thirst. I’ve never written memoir or lyric essay before and the newness is still giddying.

Photos provided by Jihyun Yun

#SouthKorea #Korea #Poetry #Inteview

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Arrival, Return (Stay the Course) November 2018

by Erin Wong / photo: Sam Kay

After a timid knock, I peer around the corner at my boss glaring into her computer. Hey, I say softly in fragile Chinese. Can I have a minute?

She nods, and waves me into the meeting room, barely pausing to look up. What’s up?

I have to take a call, I murmur, and continue to stare at her, still standing in the doorway, a child clinging to her mother’s skirt. Her face opens as her eyes find mine, and she breaks into an empathetic smile.

Should we maybe take the call together?

My shoulders relax as I settle next to her and dial. A voice answers and meets my own with surprise, so I rush to introduce my colleague before virtually disappearing amidst the rapid Mandarin that ensues. At first I listen in earnest, concentrating on the clipped music as someone might grasp at fading sound. But eventually, as a child would, I allow my mind to wander in between the complex corridors of their language.

For apprentices in Chinese – and I imagine many types of discourse – phone calls pose the additional challenge of conversing without the unspoken apology of a bowed head and series of smiles, without the diversion of humor or charisma. Yet these buffers serve of critical importance, because in hiding my appearance, I experience both ordeal and private blessing. We avoid the essential, mystified moment in which my fellow observes, wait, but you look Chinese, and I must say, yes, well I am Chinese; and yet I miss the parrying emphatic pause in which I reclaim a sort of common ground – and so I’m here to keep on learning.

Sometimes we never arrive at understanding. This first moment can extend anywhere from a grunt or shrug to the entirety of our relationship. One can never know whether these new encounters will bring a gush of welcome or a sniff of contempt, whether I am allowed the agency of an American expat or reduced to the daughter of negligent parents. I am given only one faithful assurance: that I am an oddity in Beijing, and my existence here is defined and disrupted by the ever-present dues of a past divergence.

—

For the first fourteen years of my life, I thought miraculously little of this divergence – that of my ancestors’ departure from a distant continent to the one I call home.

My childhood took place in suburban Seattle, insulated by way of entry into affluent neighborhoods and private schools. My parents folded easily into western convention: my mother, a Hong Kong native with British education, who moved to the Midwest at the age of sixteen; my father, a third generation immigrant, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. On Thanksgiving weekend, they would drive my brother and me down to Portland, where we’d bake pies with white aunts and uncles, then sneak into the movies with a troupe of Hapa cousins. White America bore my first friends, role models and educators, the first romantic rhapsody when a boy takes your hand and asks you to dance. And in the darkness of a grade school gymnasium, it was possible to believe myself both seen and invisible.

Once removed from this vacuum, however, I began to see etchings of color. Between packing my childhood into boxes and stepping off the plane in Hong Kong, this epiphany gave way to a series of unshakable patterns and behavior as high school flooded around me, like rapids at a crossroads of culture.

I pursued familiarity in those from the U.S., with whom I shared a cadence of language. Though I oscillated between overlapping groups of Korean, Hong Kong, and American classmates, I related most to the latter, and shamefully attempted to win their allegiance at the expense of the others. More than once, I sat in earnest discomfort, listening to new friends mock the accented English or alien pop music of another student—a practice I could not justify, not only for the acceptance I enjoyed in Seattle, but also because Hong Kong was clearly a part of me. I knew this now in the arms of extended family, and in the mirror, as my placement of features echoed in the millions outside. Still, I grappled to retain the exempt invisibility I once possessed. When asked if I cared for the eccentricities of other Asians, I repeated without hesitation, no way, you’re right, that is weird.

The city seemed to echo our high school hierarchy, with whiteness concentrated in office buildings and elite clubs, while local Chinese manned the wet markets and sustained the service economy. Although padded in privilege, I watched without direct harm the results of a system in which social capital stretched along intertwined axes, a system that promised my family and I would forever place below the utmost echelon. This dichotomy, though imperfect, proved just enough to insert itself insidiously in the mind of an adolescent. And in my youth, I learned to hate this part of myself, to hate this new environment that forced me to forfeit worldly access.

Thus I retreated to the U.S. for the remainder of high school, and learned to hide these aspects well. I distanced myself from Chinese America, eager to rewrite statistical bias and failing to find solace there. Though I flexed the ability to feign whiteness, I could no longer ignore stereotypes or prejudice; but this time, rather than implicate others, I resorted to a silent resignation.

In college, it was not uncommon for a partner to say something alarming mid-tryst, where vulnerability lets loose the laws of good conduct. On one occasion, I sank into the embrace of distant friend, and he stopped to stare at me hungrily, his eyes flickering in the dark so like the freedom of that first dance. Then he leaned in and whispered drunkenly, God I’ve missed Asians, with all the tender calamity of a husky sweet nothing. Nausea coursed through me, but I could no longer tell whether rage and revulsion pulsed outward at my accomplice or inward, against my own body, as we continued on.

I recall lying awake well into the night by his side, imagining a world in which I put on my clothes and walk out of his life without looking back. In this world, I call the Asian American friends I do not have and they tell me people like him know nothing of beauty, beauty like a deep purple bruise pressed into a rabid strength born of affliction.

Years later, walking through a park in south central Los Angeles, a friend would turn to me and say in thoughtful reflection, you know, I think we might be the only white people here. To which I could only throw up my hands and laugh a small, triumphant laugh, for it had been my private mission all these years to erase my ethnicity completely. But when this goal was at last accomplished, I knew whiteness only as something in which I would never take part.

—

Despite my best efforts to hide our relation, China refused to keep quiet. As the nation came to occupy more of the global stage, I wore the threat of its industrious population like a badge across my face; and when asked to represent views I did not know, for the first time, I found I wanted to know. Of course, I faced a fraught relationship to China, with part-time inhabitance in an autonomous territory and the language capacity of an inattentive student. Yet the call of awe and adventure, ignited by my years as an unwilling envoy, convinced me that acceptance lay in wait for wayward diaspora. After two decades in hiding, I took the leap – and shattered myself across the streets of Beijing.

The first blow came from my colleagues at the international office of my fellowship. Though I arrived in the midst of other fresh-faced Americans, and repeatedly offered assurance that I did not speak well, some combination of generosity and general bias led most to continue as though I understood them perfectly. It was an active battle to emphasize the opposite, and the first few days I carried an open secret that somehow only I believed. Then, all at once, the full story broke open across the kitchen table.

As the conversation shifted into comical banter, I smiled uncertainly in a room full of laughter, causing a colleague to turn to me and ask, so how much of what we say can you understand? To which I replied meekly, at least 50-percent? An unreasonably high estimate at the time, but one that felt necessary to dampen the sting of an ousted charade. I watch as their collective expression molds around this new information, hovering in the shape of disappointment as we stare into our food. The color that crawls into my face feels just as unbidden as this tide of assumptions; I entered the role of imposter for no other reason than my face, and the immigrant version of a once-native last name. Over time, we develop an equilibrium at which both Chinese and English offer buoyance for friendship, but this moment of mortification buries itself into my subconscious, germinating into a strain of social anxiety.

I start to avoid getting lunch in large groups, leave meetings early, smile and wave instead of stopping for small talk. I ignore invitations and let new friends slide, an introversion so unlike myself that I question my motives for moving here. Somewhere, far beneath the waking mind, I acknowledge this reaction as self-defense, an attempt to buffer the sadness of what feels like failure – to my family, my heritage, but foremost, my own expectations. The city had opened fire on the naïve notion that I shared anything in common with its populace.

In an ironic twist of solidarity, compassion comes in the form of other foreigners. Yet the world continued to haunt me in a way it did not them – waiters, drivers, front desks and phone calls, always the same incredulous expression, but you never learned Mandarin, or even Cantonese? I reluctantly empathize with the opposition, as invisibility returns at the cost of silence. China is, in its majority, comprised of those who have never met someone like me; I am a surprise, and a cliché—a student who didn’t study hard enough the classical art of knowing oneself.

It’s as though we approach understanding on winding highway, and at every stage, one has the opportunity to stop or find a route elsewhere. Sometimes it’s me, exhausted with the same explanation time and again; sometimes it’s my collocutor, daunted by the prospect of additional patience in engagement. In Beijing, my anxiety and resentment compound with local surprise and disinterest, such that the off ramps double in number. And it is this looming dispassion that scares me most. I am met with the possibility that I alone without my words, without a presupposition of innocence and significance, do not warrant pursuit in camaraderie. This, compounded with the towering notion that learning Chinese might simply be too hard, that cross-cultural closeness might never coalesce, forms the paralyzing and insurmountable fear that I might never find footing in a world I had come to believe I must belong.

—

After a year of emotional tumult, I find myself back in the amicable throng of my father’s family, thirteen cousins of varied age, build and character grinning at each other as we prepare dinner for our parents. My grandmother sits silently at the dining table, watching us work with an absent-minded smile.

She and I, we rarely spoke in my childhood. Affection translated instead through heaps of steaming food and the press of an extra sweater, wide smiles across the dining room table. She might mutter snippets of advice in English, or I’d overhear her converse in Cantonese, but she largely remained a fixed point of silence, always with the same short grey hair in contrast to the brilliant floral patterns nestled around her. No more than a week away from Beijing, I realize that my time abroad may have opened a new channel of understanding between us.

Mah Mah, I offer gently in Mandarin, sitting beside her under the pretext of cutting olives, I visited your campus last year in Beijing. She turns slowly, her smile no longer absent-minded. The university, you mean? I was studying to be a doctor there.

Yes, I know. I saw the lake too, the famous one, and walked around the gardens; it’s beautiful there.

Yes, it is beautiful. I lived there for almost four years, she says, nodding, her eyes clouding over. I had heard her story before, wherein she graduated top of her class, moved from rural Guangzhou to university in Beijing, and on the brink of becoming doctor, the tremors of revolution convinced her parents to send her away.

When she looks at me again, I feel that she is seeing me for the first time, a memory on the opposite shore of eight decades. I watch her on the western bank, wondering what she must see in her progeny, none of whom remember her native language, most who will never know the depth of her story. From the east, she watches an alternate universe where, with the blessings of privilege and peace, she lives freely in the urban epicenter of her mother country.

I am lucky, I blurt suddenly, and I am grateful to be there now.

She blinks, and she forgives me. Well, I imagine it’s quite different from when I was there.

We continue on this shared wavelength, onto other places we used to live, other things we used to do – church, piano, painting – stories long since tucked away. We talk of the new Asian American support center opening up in Portland, an enterprise I once would have disregarded, but now declare a necessity. We sit quietly on the edge of a bustling kitchen, and my grandfather emerges from the ruckus to place his hand on my shoulder.

For a moment, I am transported from the world around us, in which we prepare a feast of Mexican food at a summer lodge beneath Mt. Hood, where hip hop booms within the walls and Frisbees kiss the cedar pine, away from the glamor and sex of America, into the shadow world on which our story is built. In this world, my grandparents fought tooth and claw to keep their family of seven afloat, working night shifts at the Flower Drum, fetching bread ends from the bakery to feed the coming day. From long hours as a waitress at the Sichuanese diner to his white uniform in the Second World War, from the brief exchange of faded pictures that determined who they both would marry, all the way back between the mountains of Guangdong, where, for the first time, this story began – I watch in my mind’s eye as though to remember.

I gaze at my grandmother, and into the decades of pain and resilience that sit like a well dug miles deep behind those eyes. At the bottom, I see myself in Beijing, scrabbling to find a way to the surface, to recover some semblance of acceptance. But in fact, I belong nowhere else upon arrival; my grandparents labored for years to escape that world, their sacrifice evident in our assimilation sprouting from the ashes of departure.

Shrieks of joy come from the living room, where my youngest cousin in being shaken upside down by my brother, pulling me out of my reverie. I am tempted to hide, and cry, but the hand on my shoulder squeezes, and my grandmother makes a soft noise, 嗯. She watches the tousle of grandchildren on the carpet, laughing in tiny, shaking cackle.

—

I come from a long line of irrepressible immigrant energy. My mother’s grandfather, an entrepreneurial boy from Haining, who built his fortune on fine cloth and wrote history in Hong Kong hours south of the revolution; his first daughter, on the passenger ship home from college, fell in love with an introverted academic who would whisk her from Texas to Canada before growing roots back east again. My father’s grandfather, a thin bookkeeper from the outskirts of Guangzhou, answered the call of his uncle’s fish cannery and opened an import store on the Oregon coast. He and his wife, and their children, and their children, lived through a bloody America that bore exclusions acts and riots and murder before packaging the Chinese alongside distinct fellows in a single Asian entity that made fervent gains in wealth, education, and social grace. On this battleground, they fought and won survival, amid violent slurs and exoticization, the isolation and certain despair, persisting such that one day, decades down the line, we might claim this land our own. And on Thanksgiving weekend, my brother, mother, father and I drive down to Portland together, to reunite a circle of loved ones and rest atop our tired empire, buttressed by the nobility of forefathers who simply put their heads down and beat on.

On the plane ride home to Beijing, a strange insignificance arrives, like that of a single thread, braided into an intricate fabric stretched halfway around the world. I am but one of many millions of migrants who were granted safe passage between these nations. Not only this, but other identities in both have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of darker tragedy; to seize up in light of indelicate acceptance is to forsake the brave knowledge of those before: discomfort and rejection are the pedagogy of self-acceptance; oppression, the window to truth. Like my forebears from Asia, I travel with agency, and with respect to their decision, I bow in the humility of return.

In my second year, I find footholds in friendship, working to bridge the distance from expat to local. Passersby still stare as I struggle to read, but I concentrate instead on my teacher’s rounded smile, the way she pedals her hands to signify balance between characters. I catch dinner with an old friend, and she tells me she hears a new confidence in this voice; confidence, perhaps not in language, but in the art of knowing oneself, knowing that my first name and face represent the south, knowing why my great-grandparents sewed gold into their clothing and once fled far from here, knowing the dignity, grit, and unparalleled intrigue of my Chinese colleagues and friends – uncovering at long last, a story to expound my existence, and a reason to continue its writing.

I don’t claim to meet expectations, but I do lay claim to a life here, swimming my way back to an identity I must earn, paying dues for the past divergence, day by day, character by character. And acceptance, when it does come, rains down with a depth of understanding more honest than any identity crisis, one that says this ‘white-ass’ Chinese American bit the bullet and made a home for herself, that much closer to the middle between two worlds.

Erin Wong served as a Princeton in Asia fellow in Beijing from 2017-2018 and continues to live there, working at an environmental NGO.

#China

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Back in Korea

by Chris Yang / photo: Flickr Creative Commons

On the first day at my new high school, my history teacher began his class by asking a question.

“Why are you Korean?” he asked. There was a brief moment of silence in the classroom.

“Uh, ‘cause we were born in Korea?” one of us finally answered.

“So just because you were born in Korea you are a Korean?” the teacher retorted.

“Yeah, because I have Korean citizenship.”

“Don’t approach the question like that. Stop thinking of the law. What makes you Korean? Why do you think you’re Korean?”

Another long moment of silence.

We sat there for minutes without being able to provide a clear answer.

“Because we grew up in Korea.” Another one of us broke the silence.

“Because you grew up in Korea. But what if you grew up in Korea and were born in America in a typical American family? What if you grew up in Korea, but attended international schools and knew nothing about Korean culture?” the teacher posed even more questions.

“...then you’re an American.”

“So the place of your birth doesn’t matter,” he pointed out.

He waited another few minutes in silence in the hope of one of us coming up with a good answer.

There was no good answer.

He finally gave up waiting and gave us his answer. “You’re Korean. You’re Korean because you speak Korean and learn Korean history. Because you know Korean history better than the history of any other nation. Because you speak Korean better than any other language in the world. Because you are comfortable with the Korean culture. Because you take that culture as part of yourself.”

Everyone else seemed to agree.

I did not.

On July 26th, 2013, my cousin and I boarded our first flight to Toronto, Ontario. It was the very beginning of my temporary life in Canada. I lived in Scarborough with my host family and attended a private elementary school about thirty minutes away from the house. My parents stayed in Korea and my younger brother joined me six months later.

My memories of those next three years have been glorified a little, but, in the end, it is an undeniable fact that those years changed me in more ways than anyone can possibly imagine.

I came back to Korea on June 26th, 2016. I was fourteen years old at the time.

When I transferred to my local Korean middle school in August, I was quick to realize that I no longer fit into Korean society. I felt like an outsider. I couldn’t quite understand this strange feeling. I was born in Korea, grew up in Korea and had absolutely no affiliation with Western culture until the age of eleven. Yet, when I came back to my home country, the very culture I was raised in seemed unfamiliar. It was like living in a foreign country all over again.

I remember telling my friend, just a few days before my final trip back to Korea, that I missed home after three years of living abroad. She told me she could never imagine herself doing what I was doing. That is, studying alone in a country halfway across the earth within a different culture and using a different language to get around. Until then, it didn’t occur to me that not only did I leave my parents behind, but also my country, culture, and language. I began feeling nostalgic and was finally ready to go back home.

But when I did come back home...home was no longer home.

I spent months thinking about why I felt so foreign in the very country where my identity originated from. I managed to come up with two broad, reasonable answers by the time I graduated middle school: 1) bilingual problems and 2) cultural differences.

Being bilingual comes with its benefits. But for me, those benefits came with a somewhat costly price, particularly during the first six months back in Korea. I had rarely used Korean in the past three years and now I had trouble with my native language. I would have sentences I wanted to say that I could only think of in English. I would spend most of my speech stuttering while trying to translate words in my head.

The same problem continues even to this day although it is not as severe as it used to be. I use two languages interchangeably but in different proportions. I speak faster and more fluently in Korean, but I have a richer vocabulary in English. While I still have trouble understanding idioms and cultural references in English, my comprehension of academic materials in English is undoubtedly better. In my history class, I was asked to explain my opinion of the dissolution of Singanhoe, a Korean nationalist organization during the Japanese colonial era. I knew my stance, but I struggled to get my answer out in Korean. After spending a few minutes stuttering out a few random words for my argument, I gave up and said the sentence in English, just like I did other times when I faced similar situations. My classmates understood and kindly translated the sentence for the teacher. I also remember spending hours trying to understand the concept of quantum fluctuation before my first science exam in high school. I struggled to understand the sentences in the textbook. It was as if Korean was my second language, not my native one. My friend suggested to Google it in English. It worked and it only took 15 minutes. My Korean writing is so hopeless that at one point I decided to write my entire physics essay in English and use Naver Papago, an online translating service, to translate my essay to Korean. But again, my English pronunciation is nowhere close to being that of my native Korean one and I have always had difficulties with various English accents. Oh, and of course, definite/indefinite articles and preposition struggles are real.

The cultural issues I faced are slightly harder to explain in words, even though it was just as problematic and complex as the challenges of my bilingualism. There were certain aspects of Korean culture that I had forgotten about and, as a result, had grown distant. Think of head-bowing. You know how in Asian countries you bow your head to show respect for others and especially elders? For some reason, I had to relearn this and probably appeared to be extremely rude on my first day of school until I got used to it again. I also had trouble keeping a straight face as strangers at school grabbed my hand, hugged me and made other physical interactions. Korea has a very intimate culture and I did not realize this until I came back from spending a few years in a culture where physical intimacy was not as socially accepted.

Another aspect of Korean culture that I struggled with, and still wrestle with to this day, is the hierarchy of students. And by hierarchy, I mean the alpha-omega relationship between students in different grades. I understand the need for teachers’ authority over students. What I don’t understand is how upper-class students are granted the same, if not more, authority and control over younger students. Age is power in Korea. Younger students are openly exposed to frequent physical hazings and have absolutely no voice within the student council and no say in any form of decision-making processes. Whatever is decided by older students, we are supposed to follow without question.

Most problems with cultural differences faded after a few months, but not the student hierarchy as I was part of that pyramid of authority. Likely, language issues were also something I had to face every day. My inability to use my native language as fluently as others around me and my struggle to fit into the culture I grew up with, but left behind years ago, made me question who I was. Legally I was a Korean; but, did I consider myself a Korean? Did I belong in the same country and culture my classmates belong in? Do we share the same cultural understanding?

I couldn’t come up with a clear answer.

“I’m Korean because I speak Korean the best”. But what if that’s limited to certain situations? What if I feel more comfortable with English? “I’m Korean because I learn Korean history”. But what if I learned Canadian history first and then Korean history next? Do I know Korean history better than Canadian history? I’m not sure. “I’m Korean because I take Korean culture as part of myself”. Do I? Am I able to fully immerse myself within Korean culture? Can I consider that as part of my identity? Again, I’m not sure. But if so, am I more comfortable with Korean culture than Western culture? My answer is closer to a no.

So who am I? Am I “Korean” enough to call myself Korean?

After countless debates with myself, I have come up with the answer. No. I no longer feel like I’m part of this country, this culture, nor this society. I have no idea why but I do not see myself as the same person as I was before I left for Canada. I feel foreign no matter how hard I try to assimilate myself back into this community. I just don’t feel like I belong here.

Then where do I belong?

Because as much as I don’t feel like a Korean anymore, I don’t see myself as a Canadian either. I know I don’t belong in that country either. I lived there only for three years. That time took a chunk of identity away from me but didn’t give back anything to replace that missing piece.

It left me stuck between two nationalities.

My theory is that I am in this position now because I spent my early teenage years in a culture so foreign to my home country. I went through a lot of rapid, personal changes during those three years. It was in Canada that I established my identity, shaped my beliefs and developed my personality. This does sound a little odd, but my lifestyle changed dramatically from that very moment I landed at Toronto Pearson International Airport. I became a completely different person.

I used to define myself as a Korean, especially in Canada. My identity was my nationality. Whenever someone asked where I was from, I answered “South Korea” without a moment of hesitation. My answer stayed the same even when someone asked me who I was. But when I came back to the place I defined myself with, I realized I was no longer who I used to say I was. That realization was basically the denial of the person who I believed I was.

Although I came to admit that my nationality no longer defines me, I still question where I belong and where I fit in. The sense of belonging has been missing ever since I came back to Korea.

Now after about two years of living in Korea, I am planning on leaving again. This time not to Canada, but to the U.S. Partially for better future opportunities, partially to redefine my identity, and partially as the result of my failure to adjust back to the culture that I left behind years ago.

But for now, I shall go back to my school and try to figure out how to survive another year of what some teachers call “a government sanctioned, illegal social experiment.”

Chris Yang is a student at a foreign language high school in South Korea.

#Korea #south korea #student

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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On my last night in Beijing: 五味俱全 - The Five Flavors of Life

by Esther Yoojin Song / photo: the author

It’s my last night in Beijing and I’m walking down Jiubajie, or bar street, with my friend behind me. Around us, the whole street is nothing but a streak of blaring lights and sounds, interjecting hands and bodies trying to steer us towards open doors regurgitating the all too familiar beats of hackneyed tunes. Here, the simple task of two people walking side-by-side for more than a few seconds is no longer so simple; one needs to mark positions, strategize, exchange signals, swerve, slow down, and speed up at the right timing—It’s a tiring process, really, which is why I feel particularly happy when we come across a little secluded bar at the quieter end of the street. Finding a table in the corner furthest from the door, we settle down, the walls around us dulling the chaos of before into a muted buzz.

A few half-hearted flicks into the menu, we settle for fries and some kind of carbonated drink. One familiar character, qi, meaning steam, is more than enough to make us eagerly point the item out to our waiter. At this point, the excitement for something ‘new, authentic, Chinese’ that we once had has long fizzed out into an arbitrary eagerness that emerges only occasionally. Tonight, our standards aren’t too high— we came in seeking refuge more than food— and we’ve both agreed that we’d rather not spend any more time trying to decipher the awkwardly literal english translations of drink names that our translation app shamelessly churns out: 贤妻良母- Good wife and good mother and 燃情百加得 - Hot burglary are the last two that we see before putting our phones away.

要两个这个。

Please give me two of this.

I say to our waiter. He nods after checking where my finger is pointing at. He’s been eyeing our table for some time now, the rhythmical sound of his clicking pen a constant reminder of his presence as well as his growing impatience.

再加个薯条。

And fries too, I add hastily.

The words come out rushed, different from how they’d sounded being rehearsed in my head. After eight weeks of living in Beijing while taking daily Chinese classes in a rigorous summer program, ordering food still remains a stressful ordeal. When the waiter leaves, we laugh at our own incompetence. It’s funny how we can talk about things like China’s skewed sex ratio or Deng Xiaoping’s “One country, Two systems” policy with comparable fluency, but fumble around when a waiter asks us if we’d like straws with our drinks.

In an individual session I had with my laoshi a few weeks back, we’d talked briefly about this very real issue of ordering food. Listening to my complaints on how difficult it is to decode food names, and how thick the menus can be (some of them literally like books), she nodded sympathetically and began to tell me how some Chinese restaurants would go a tad bit too far with their creativity.

Guess what this dish is, ‘A white dragon stranded in the sea’.”

I blink, confounded by the sudden literary allusion that’s been dropped in the middle of a conversation about food.

Um… Some kind of soup with something white in it?

I respond after some hesitation; I’m bad at guesswork, and hope my perfunctory answer will be good enough to lead us to the part where she discloses the actual answer.

That’s actually really close! It’s a soup with a single white radish in it.

A single white radish?

I don’t understand the word radish in Chinese, so she has to show me a picture of it on her phone.

Yeah, haha- You see, names like these, even I wouldn’t be able to tell what dish they were referring to.

I crack into a smile at the thought of someone ordering something as lofty-sounding as ‘A white dragon stranded in the sea’ only to find out that it’s nothing more than a bowl of soup served with a single radish sunken at its bottom. ‘That’s so Chinese,’ I remember thinking to myself, not really knowing what I meant by it.

When our drinks come out, we’re pleasantly surprised by how good it is—it’s a sweet fruity flavor with a zing of fizziness to it. And the fries are just as divine as always, except better, because there’s a poached egg sitting on top that makes the whole thing look and taste ten times more expensive than it actually is. I’m starting to feel a lot better about the way this evening’s turned out.

Turning a fry around in egg yolk to make sure it’s evenly soaked on all sides, I point out how fitting it is that we spend our last night in Beijing having fries in a tapas bar in the most westernized part of the city, a slab of sarcasm tinged with laughter. My friend nods enthusiastically to reciprocate my feigned sincerity, and then reminds me how the McDonalds outside our campus would be brimming every weekend with people from our program on their way back from a night out. “Dididaodaode Maidanglao”, we’d say jokingly, calling McDonalds the ‘true authentic Chinese food’ while unashamedly munching on our McSpicies as we strolled back to our dorms. Any self-deprecating humor that made fun of our own detachment from Chinese culture, our obvious ‘otherness’ in what seemed like an impenetrably homogeneous community, was the unspoken buzzword of our makeshift community. If the program had brought us together through our shared interest in Chinese language and culture, what kept us together afterwards was oftentimes the very opposite—our ignorance of and indifference towards the very same subject— a sense of comradeship budding with every passing joke, a low giggle followed by discrete exchanges of glances when we encountered something so blatantly ‘Chinese’.

I slurp the last few drops of my drink until I hear the loud crackling noise of straw sucking on air. In the opposite corner of the bar, a giant fan sits rotating, sending periodic whooshes of cool air in our direction. The whirring sound that slightly amplifies whenever the fan’s head turns our way is only just audible over the sea of chatter that floods my resting ears. I sit back and try to listen in on the conversation that’s taking place in the table next to ours. A handful of familiar phrases and words stick out amidst a stream of incomprehensible sounds, exaggerated intonations and constant interjections distorting their speech into incomprehensible forms. I let my ears grapple with the sounds for a few more seconds, and then stop trying. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the past eight weeks, it’s how to sit comfortably in my own ignorance and not grow too self-conscious of it.

Last nights are always a little bittersweet. The idea of something coming to an end softens your senses with sentimentality, making everything appear a little bit more romantic in retrospect. I look over at my friend who is finishing the last few sips of her drink and realize that we’ll probably never see each other again after tonight. This idea saddens me, a premature wave of nostalgia taking over.

“Bittersweet,” I tell her, “that’s the word I wanted to say in that farewell video Lu laoshi filmed. But I couldn’t remember it in Chinese so I just said something about how unforgettable these eight weeks will be instead.”

“Ooh, I know Bittersweet in Chinese. Ummmm……...Wuwei something. Wuwei.. Wuwei.. Wuwei…..juquan? Yeah, that’s it. Wuweijuquan.”

Of course, it’s a Chengyu that we’d learned in class, a four-character idiomatic phrase that translates directly into ‘Having all five flavors,’the flavors of life—sweet, bitter, sour, spicy… what was the last one? Neither of us can remember.

The image I have in mind when I think of this phrase is that of a faceless Chinese cook skillfully shaking a giant stir-fry pan above a blazing stove fire as he throws in one Chinese seasoning after the other, his finished dish nothing other than a delectable stir fry of life, Chinese style. It’s impressive how four characters gleaned and sewn together from banal everyday speech manage to convey so much with so little. It gives the language a certain poetic quality that I revel in. Instead of settling for the binary ‘bittersweet’, why not pack in three more flavors with one extra syllable? From our cozy nook in the bar with less than 24 hours left in this country, I suddenly feel a new surge of appreciation for the very language that has beset my past eight weeks.

Wueweijuquan. As I continue to turn the word over in my head as we step out of the bar, a loud jeering noise comes from the corner. Turning our heads in the direction of the noise, we see a throng of people emerge from a narrow alleyway we hadn’t noticed before, women dressed in skin-tight dresses and high heels, men in expensive-looking shirts and loafers. They’re headed in the direction of the busier part of Jiubajie where we’d been previously.

I look down at my phone; it’s slightly past midnight. Our flights tomorrow aren’t until late afternoon, and I don’t feel like going back to my dorm to pack just yet.

“Plus, there’s that club street we’ve been meaning to check out for the longest time but never got around to doing.”

My friend adds. I nod, smiling—we both know where this is going.

So when the crowd gets close enough for us to smell the wafts of alcohol coming from their happy drunken singing, we turn in the direction that we came from. In front of us, Jiubajie moves in the same stream of clashing lights and sounds that we left it in, only this time, with a conviviality that I hadn’t quite noticed before. A few steps in, we are greeted by the familiar hodgepodge of lights and sounds, the numbing sensation of countless bodies knocking against your own, moving forward but also sideways and backwards at the same time… and just like that, we are once more back where we started. On my last night in this city of unruly sounds and tangled bodies, I decide to let myself be engulfed by its sweet chaos for one last time.

Esther Yoojin Song studies English and Statistics at Amherst College, and spent the summer of 2018 participating in a Chinese language program in Beijing.

#China

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disorientedblog-archive · 7 years ago

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“I Didn’t Want to be That Stereotype” — Interview with Jason Addy on Dancing in South Korea

Jason Addy graduated from Brown University in 2016 with a degree in Education Studies, and has taught high school in Daegu, South Korea, for two years through the Fulbright program. He is an aspiring dancer who led a dance team in college and now in Korea. He wants to give underprivileged youth access to dance, and hopes to be a dance teacher and run a dance school in the future. Interview by Eugene Lee and Paige Morris.

Tell me the story of when and how you got started dancing.

Before college, it was just a lot of social dancing at things like my cousin’s birthday party or just hanging out around at friend’s houses. There was also this TV show called So You Think You Can Dance that made me more interested in the differences between genres like classical and hip hop. I started taking dance classes in college, and auditioned for the dance team. I didn’t make it, but auditioned again in the spring semester. It was good that I failed the first time because the second time I didn’t take it as seriously. I just thought to myself, “If you make it, you make it, and if you don’t, then you don’t,” and danced better because I was more relaxed.

It wasn’t until junior spring that I even entertained the idea of pursuing dance seriously. I thought that dance was too unstable and that it would be too stressful to do it full time. But when I came back from my semester abroad, I had a period of uncertainty about my major, and that’s when I realized that dance was something that mattered to me a lot and that I might try it professionally. By then, my parents had opened up to the idea a bit more, too.

What initially brought you to Korea? What did your journey(s) here look like?

Initially, as I was choosing between majors, I was really interested in learning languages. At some point, I even wanted to be an interpreter. So I had this goal of learning 7 languages before turning 25, one for each continent. I already spoke an African language from living in Ghana (my mother tongue), and then I arbitrarily picked languages like Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian. I really thought (and still think), that language is the best gateway into another culture.

But when it came time to take classes, I found out that Japanese had level requirements, and my friend told me that Korean didn’t. She also told me that Korean was easier than Japanese, and even showed me a Girls’ Generation music video. It was my first exposure to Kpop, and I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot going on here.” But I was watching anime and had some familiarity with Asian media so it wasn’t that weird (laughs).

Later, I studied abroad in Korea. After the semester, something in me knew I would come back so I wasn’t so sad when I was leaving. I knew I would come back to see my Korean friends (one of which was a pen pal from the summer before I studied abroad), and I felt like I had unfinished business in Korea. I wanted to get to know Korea more, and I also didn’t want to be stuck in the foreigner bubble.

What did you know about Korean dance or dancing in Korea prior to coming? What history, techniques, and theories were you aware of?

Honestly, I knew nothing. The most exposure I had to Korean dance was K-pop, so I went in with a fresh mind. I took a jazz class while abroad, primarily just to take a class with Koreans because most of my classes were in the international department. But I was interested in how Koreans related to dance, because for me the only way I conceptualized dance was as things I had experienced or seen like social dancing, dance team performances, or commercials. I wondered if all of this was the same in Korea, and also if they even did classes the same. I wanted to see how dance and education intersected in general, and how that looked culturally.

How would you describe your relationship with your current studio in Korea?

When I first joined, it was a bit awkward at first, because I was the only foreigner in my classes and there were only two foreigners in the studio. They also kept trying to speak English to me in the beginning. But it’s been two years, and the studio has been one of the centers of my experience in Daegu. They started a foreigner dance team that I became the leader of, which connected me more to the studio. A lot of the students took an interest in me and knowing Korean helped me get to know them. I’m really close to everyone and they really don’t want me to leave Korea, and I think that says a lot.

What are some differences or similarities between your dance studio and ones you’ve experienced in America?

In your general American dance studio, you take a class, and you learn the choreography to an entire piece. Once the class is over, you don’t really see the choreography again — it’s almost like little islands of different pieces you can learn. In Korea, the way they teach is that they’ll spread out the piece, so you’ll learn some on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and by the end of the week you have learned the whole piece. I like that better because it allows you to absorb everything more fully. The dance academies in Korea are also more family-oriented, and the students feel more at the center of it all. We always see the scholarship students and the director with those kids. I just didn’t see this as much in America. That’s probably a cultural difference, because in America, even if I take a class all the time, the only way I’d be super familiar with the other people in it is if I took a particular instructor’s class for a month. It might also be that the dance industry isn’t as big in Korea, and so maybe people are working together to help each other more.

Given that there are foreigner and non-foreigner groups within your studio, how do you feel you fit in or don't fit in with your team? Tell me a story about a time you felt you fit in, and a time you felt you didn't.

In the beginning I was really nervous about dancing too well as a Black guy because I didn’t want them to think I was dancing so well because I’m Black. That sounds super pretentious, but it was a concern because I didn’t want them to equate my dancing skills to my Blackness. For example, at the end of class, the instructors will pick people they thought did really well and have them perform for everyone else. But there were definitely times where I knew I wasn’t that good in my hip hop piece but just because it was a hard hip hop piece or “gangster” or whatever you want to call it, they would pick me. And that made me feel removed from the situation because I knew I was being picked because I was Black. Some other students would say that Black people have this “swag” or “bounce” in hip hop built into them, whereas Korean people have to learn it. Admittedly, it comes more naturally to Black people because we grew up in a certain culture in America, but those kinds of comments really isolated me. It made me feel like I was this Black guy who was good at dance because he was Black, rather than them saying, “Jason is a good dancer because he’s been on a dance team.”

One time I did feel like I fit in, though, was when we had a Christmas party performance and my jazz teacher invited me to a piece that was originally going to be just for her scholarship kids. She asked me last minute and helped me catch up. And maybe it was just a difference in the way this teacher and my hip hop teacher interacted with me, but it was never made explicit that my talent came from being Black. I don’t really know how to explain this — it just felt like in this jazz piece, the interactions were more organic and genuine.

How do you understand the difference between this innate “swag” and cultural differences?

I feel like Korean people tend to think there’s some secret inner thing I have that they don’t. Which is partially true, because part of the reason dance comes naturally to me is because dancing is a big part of Black culture. But it’s not a DNA thing. It’s not like if you’re Black, you suddenly have rhythm. The reason this bothered me so much is because I didn’t want to be that stereotype — I didn’t want my being a good dancer to be a result of my DNA. One thing that bothers me a lot is if I do a dance and I do it well, a lot of people might think, “Oh of course he can do it well (because he’s Black).”

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What are the expectations you feel American—and maybe specifically Black—audiences and dancers might have of Korean dancers? What kind of dancer and what kind of dance might they imagine?

When I think about Japanese or other Asian dancers, I think we generally think that they’re “more crisp” than other dancers. There are a lot of techniques, but if I break it up into two categories, there’s the groovier side that’s more wavy, and then there’s the crisper side that’s more reminiscent of BTS’s super sharp movements. So many Americans may think more of a BTS style of dance when they imagine Korean dancers.

How do you think your time in Korea will affect your understanding of identity in America?

Understanding myself as a Black person in Korea has helped me a lot in thinking about how dance ties into education and how I want to eventually uplift communities with Black kids like myself who didn’t have as many outlets to dance. Students here go six days a week and work really hard, and I’ll definitely take that sense of determination and drive back with me. I think I’ve also been able to better own my multifacetedness and not just be one thing. Before, I was really insecure about being a stereotype and having that take away from my abilities, but now I’m much more comfortable with the idea that being Black doesn’t take away from being a good dancer. I think this experience has just made me more secure in what I want to become. I’m not scared to dance too well anymore.

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#Korea #SouthKorea #Dance #Interview

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