Category: Asia

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The Student Life

I am currently in Seoul, lying in bed in what is the tiniest room I’ve ever stayed in, resting my head on a pillow called Ratasha. I’m here at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in an outlying and moderately dumpy neighborhood, for a month of intensive Korean language study before I take my proficiency exam at Columbia University. I’m staying at what’s called a goshitel, which is a combination of the words goshi (exam) and hotel, and is a kind of fancified word for what’s more often called a goshiwon, or exam housing. They’re basically dorms with tiny little rooms for students who are cramming for tests or studying at universities. Mine is so small that I sleep with my feet under my closet. But it’s reasonably clean, reasonably cool, there’s a laundry machine down the hall, there’s free rice and kimchi in the kitchen, and it’s costing me a little over $400 for the month.

I’ve actually grown kind of used to the little place, as one does with pretty much anything in life. And I like the student life here. I have Korean classes every day from 9 am to 1 pm, at a high enough level that we’re having somewhat interesting conversations. My classmates range from a passel of undergrads of various nationalities — English, French, Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese — to an 80-year-old Japanese guy who’s pretty much deaf, shouts a lot, and tends to make lots of semi-rude comments about drinking and the attractiveness of HUFS teachers. There’s also a retired Japanese woman, a Japanese woman who’s something like my age (she’s secretive about it), and a Spanish woman who teaches Spanish in Spain and wants to teach it here instead. After class we all go to the shitty campus cafeteria, where cranky ajummas dish out low-grade Korean food but it only costs $2 for lunch and you buy your meal tickets from big computerized vending machines.

It’s hard to believe I arrived just a week ago. It feels like I live here.

When I think about my plan to move to Seoul, I sometimes go down this rabbit hole of fear where I imagine myself all alone and miserable in the middle of a long Korean winter, with no one to talk to, living in some hellhole and hating myself for having come here. But every time I do come here, I find that my schedule fills up to the point that I have to plan time to be alone and do the alone things I want to do, like writing or studying. I have friends here, and I make new friends here easily, and I’ve been having fun on both counts. I’ve been all over Seoul, out to Gimpo, down to Suwon. I’ve seen foreign friends and Korean friends and gone out with classmates. I have discovered new neighborhoods where I might want to live when I come back. I have also studied quite a bit. I like it here.

Seoul by now is easy. I still have fears about living here, but it’s easy both because I’m used to it and because it’s improving. You can get flossers now at Daiso, and I’ve been told that you can walk into a pharmacy these days and just ask for the medicines you want — not like the old days, where you told the pharmacist what was wrong with you and received a mystery packet of pills. There are bagels, though they are not ever going to be New York bagels.

There are friends. There are, in fact, people here who love me.

Things that used to be sticking points have come unstuck. I can make it here. After all, I made it in New York, and the song tells me I can make it anywhere after that. And in the meantime, I’m having a blast, learning a ton, and occasionally even sleeping.

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Vietnam and Korea

Just a quick post to note that I’m alive and well in Korea, after five fascinating days in Saigon. While in Saigon, on my first day, I had the privilege of delivering a seminar on Jewish child-rearing practices to an audience of 120 Vietnamese. They were hungry to learn new ideas — many were taking notes — and I was glad to be able to share the best aspects of my own culture, like Judaism’s emphasis on asking questions and following one’s curiosity. The seminar was held in a beautiful cafe in the Bitexco Tower, Saigon’s tallest building.

Beyond that, I spent a bunch of time with my good friend who showed me all around the city and took me on a Mekong Delta tour as well. Vietnamese food is delicious, and you knew that already, but it’s delicious in ways that surprised me: the fresh herbs and greenery that come with just about every dish, the fish, the curious rice cake concoctions.

Saigon is a city that’s going through rapid changes, growing into a modern city, with bits of Communism still, and bits of third-world chaos, and bits that look as new and organized as the fancier stretches of Seoul. (Korean investment is everywhere.) The people there seem excited by the changes but still uncertain about the future, and it will be interesting to see where Vietnam goes in the next decade. I can’t wait to go back.

Seoul, meanwhile, is my future home, and I’m pretty used to it. My goshitel — a sort of student dorm hotel — is fine, though this is the tiniest room I’ve ever stayed in. Classes are good, the neighborhood by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies is more OK than I thought it would be, and I’ve been busy with old friends and new. I have this longstanding fear that when I move to Korea, or when I visit, I’ll spend long stretches of time alone and lonely, staring at the walls, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. And then I get here and discover I don’t have a minute to think. Since I arrived Thursday morning, I’ve taken a placement exam, started classes, spent time with a couple of different friends, gone out to Gimpo for a night and a day, and today went down to the Suwon Folk Village for the first time since 2002, in the company of a Japanese classmate, and then afterward met a bunch more classmates and a couple of their Korean friends for a barbecue dinner. In other words, Seoul life!

There’s much more to say about both Vietnam and my time here in Seoul so far, but I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to say it, so I figured I’d better start now and fill in the details later.

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The Lure of Asia

The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Asian Peoples, inaugurated in 1980, opens with a diorama of a Samarkand market stall, undated, over which is the tag line “The Lure of Asia.” One couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of the kind of Orientalism Edward Said took to task four years earlier. There’s the othering — Asia is only a lure to non-Asians; for actual Asians, it’s just home — and the presentation of authentic Asianness as an undated premodernity. You see the same thing over and over throughout the exhibition, like the bier that’s presented as part of a Chinese marriage, with no notion that Chinese marriages in 1980 might be any different from whatever they were in the static eternal traditional past.

For all its flaws, though, the Hall of Asian Peoples was at least an attempt to make Asian culture, traditions, and artifacts legible to an audience unfamiliar with them. It belongs to a different era of ethnography — one corner describes “man’s rise to civilization,” as if it were unidirectional and didn’t involve women — but it’s not irresponsible. The collection is presented carefully, thoughtfully, with great attention to detail and a genuine attempt to respect the cultures presented.

The same, alas, can’t be said for China: Through the Looking Glass, the Costume Institute show at the Metropolitan Museum. The exhibition begins with a wall text that name-checks Edward Said in order to cast aside any serious reckoning with Orientalism as a field of power relations, choosing instead to see Asia as a source of inspiration and creativity for Western artists through the ages. All well and good, except that the show then colonizes the entirety of the Met’s Chinese art galleries, literally casting them in its own light, and making the objects and history of the actual China almost impossible to see. If it’s a show about Orientalism in action, it delivers.

At the Met, the Chinese galleries begin with the monumental, breathtaking 14th-century Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru, which, at 25 feet by 50 feet, gives a sense of the grandeur of Chinese tradition. Except that now you can’t see it, because of forest of glass bamboo poles is in the way, a work meant to reflect, I suppose, the repeating film clip we see of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The takeover continues, as the long hallway of early Chinese art is dimmed, lit in weird colors, and overtaken by an unnecessary wash of vaguely Asianish synth washes for no discernible reason. The Astor Court, normally an elegant refuge, is turned into a sordid nightclub, the rear wall lit red, the floor covered in black plastic meant to look like lacquer, the usual hush overtaken by kung fu movie sounds. The weird, bad lighting throughout — meant, I imagine, to preserve the clothing — destroys any opportunity to engage with the Met’s substantial Chinese art collection on its own terms. The exhibition even wanders down into the Egyptian wing, as if to say a little hello to Edward Said’s corner of the world. And you can’t escape the noise of this behemoth, even when you sneak off into the Chinese decorative arts, or the Korean collection, or the Gandharan Buddhist sculptures. Like any colonizing force, it’s insidious.

The exhibition tries to be clever, juxtaposing dresses and historical pieces. Sometimes it works, and other times it’s just facile. It might have been kind of hip if it had been put in the Costume Institute, or in its own special exhibition area. Instead, it’s just unnerving and weird: you look for your favorite pieces, like the Han Dynasty dancer, and they’re gone, only then you find them in some dim Plexiglas vitrine next to a dress with a dreadful Asiatic kitsch hat thrown on top for no good reason.

It is, I think, the first show I’ve ever seen at the Metropolitan Museum that actually pissed me off. I wanted to go look at the Chinese art, and it was buried. Fashion has a nasty habit of borrowing and burying, and also a nasty habit of turning Asia into raw material, whether it’s silk, ideas, or labor. That the Met gave it free rein to do so in its Chinese galleries is a disappointment.

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Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

Posted on

Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

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New and old

Design Korea has posted some pictures of a Korean house with a cutaway roof, designed by the Korean architecture firm IROJE KHM.

The house looks exquisite, if perhaps a bit awkward to furnish. But what I find fascinating about it, beyond the intrinsic cleverness and whimsy, is how well it manages to be at once contemporary and rooted in local tradition — in this case, that of the Korean hanok,

I find this fascinating not just for its intrinsic cleverness, but because it is a very rare example of an architecture that feels at once contemporary and rooted in a local tradition — in this case, the Korean hanok, with its dark-gray sloped roof and its interior courtyard.

It’s a synthesis that’s hard to pull off. Too often, especially in Asia, the attempt to integrate local traditions into modern architecture results in modernism with retro decorative flourishes. But it’s not surprising to me that Korean architects would be feeling their way toward a deeper fusion. Korea has made a concerted effort over the past decade to find ways to bring its traditional culture into its modern culture.

Korea has an interesting history when it comes to working with its own traditions. China went through the Cultural Revolution, during which traditional culture was vilified and destroyed in an orgy of violence. Japan, on the other hand, after the rapid modernization of the Meiji Restoration, suffered the defeat of its modern nation while retaining its emperor, leading to a reactionary cultural conservatism that’s much less prominent in Korea. Korea (and here I mean South Korea) has used its traditional culture for various purposes in the modern era, first as a rallying point for national autonomy against Japanese colonialism, and later both to legitimate the conservative military government and to rebel against it. The result is perhaps more flexibility than one finds in either China or Japan when it comes to working with traditional culture in a modern context.

When I first came to Korea, in 2001, traditional culture was still somewhat fenced off, seen as maybe a bit of an embarrassment by a country keen on taking its place among the developed nations. But as Korea has grown more confident, there has been more willingness not just to preserve traditions, but to extend them, to grow them, to let them live and breathe. This unusual house is just one example of many, and a rare architectural example. I hope to see more such architectural innovation coming out of Korea.

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Ways of telling tales

I like the way Owen Lattimore writes. He’s got style and verve, and he doesn’t shy away from bold statements, whether it’s comparing the Urga Living Buddha’s shopping spree in Shanghai to that of a drunken sailor or simply declaring this or that political action a disaster. It’s probably only my Asian studies friends who will ever end up reading Lattimore, but as I make my way through Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, from 1962, it makes me realize how useful it is to have a plainspoken, amiable guide to obscure times and places.

Lattimore was a mid-20th century China Hand, to use a now-dated term. He advised Chiang Kai-shek during World War II, and he spoke fluent Mongolian when no one else did, and he wrote it as he saw it. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he never earned an advanced degree, though he served in major academic posts. He never went through the seasoning — deadening? — process of learning to write only sentences that you can defend to a committee.

And if there was one thing Lattimore failed at, it was defending himself to a committee. His later years were damaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed that Lattimore was “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.” The charges mostly amounted to invented hearsay, and stemmed perhaps from what looks, in retrospect, like Lattimore’s eminently sane approach to Communism and Communists, which was to consider them carefully and write about this or that particular action or person on the merits.

So set aside the Communist nonsense. What strikes me is that I write a lot about foreign places, I plan to write a lot more about foreign places, and Lattimore is an example I like of how to do it.

There’s room to criticize. Lattimore’s breezy confidence smacks of a casual imperialism that was common among British writers of an earlier era and American policy experts at mid-century. Nomads and Commissars is written at almost the last possible moment before any serious thinker on Asia had to take into account Orientalism and postmodernism more generally. The best products of the new ideas — Laurel Kendall is a personal favorite — have found new ways to tell good stories without the narratorial remove of earlier writers.

But just as the earlier writing was (usually unintentionally) dishonest about the motives and power dynamics that underlay it, post-modern scholarship is often dishonest in the other direction, as writers strive to pretend that they don’t have personal opinions. Kendall, for example, always dodges the question of whether the shamanism she studies is “real,” and of course any good postmodernist can tear apart the whole concept of the real until the person who asked the question feels like an idiot for believing in reality.Another fine postmodern storyteller, Heonik Kwon, dodges questions by fictionalizing his accounts, putting them entirely into the voices of his informants. And yet I am sure that Kendall and Kwon have some gut-level beliefs about ghosts and spirits, one way or the other, and it seems somehow a little sneaky never to come out and say what those beliefs are.

Somewhere there’s a balance. As I continue to write on topics that interest me in cultures not my own, I’ll have to work on that balance. As I do, I should remember Lattimore and the pleasure of a bold assertion well stated.