Category: Asia

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Learning enough to understand sorrow

When I first went to Korea, in 2001, I knew next to nothing about it, and I didn’t speak the language at all. I’d given myself a crash course in the hangeul alphabet and knew a few basic phrases, and that was it. I was in those days too intimidated by the language to give it serious study, but I couldn’t help picking up words and phrases as I went along.

One word I heard constantly was 어떻게 (eotteoke). One day I asked one of the Korean teachers what it meant. Literally, she explained, it means “how,” but it’s much more than that. Koreans use the word kind of the way American English uses “what,” as an exclamation, a complaint, a rebuke, an expression of bafflement.

Early the next morning, I stepped out onto my little street of Pambat-gil (which I did not know until after I left Korea meant “Chestnut Grove Street”). Off in the distance was an ajumma. She stood in the middle of the street, arms spread wide. I could see that she was gripping a cell phone in one of her uplifted hands. And she was crying out, in the most mournful tone, with the final vowel long drawn out, “Eotteoke! Eotteoke!”

I felt a giddy sense of elation: I understood! Something was happening in Korea, and I got it. What I got, though, was that this poor woman was howling out her shock and sorrow in the middle of the street at 8 am. Whatever news had come through that cell phone, it wasn’t good.

I was reminded of that dissonance — of the thrill of understanding tempered by the sorrow of what’s understood — as I read a long Facebook post in Korean today. Usually I let those pass by unread. They’re still difficult. But I’d just yesterday finished reading the classic Korean short story 사랑방 손님과 어머니 (Mother and Her Guest), and I thought maybe I could manage the five paragraphs my friend had written.

I’m glad I did. I learned that my friend’s grandmother had passed away, an important event that I otherwise would have missed. She wrote beautifully about the way her grandmother had been a teacher to her, how at a difficult time in her life her grandmother had taken her in and taught her how to make dolls’ clothes, how the family sat together sharing memories and how each person’s memories were different, but they were all warm memories.

I’m sorry that my friend has lost a dear family member, but I’m also thrilled that — with much help from an online dictionary — I could share in my friend’s memories of her beloved grandmother, her sense of loss and sorrow. I’m pleased that words I learned from reading Mother and Her Guest helped me to understand what my friend had written. I am also grateful that I know enough Korean now to find out about my friend’s loss and express my condolences.

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7 thoughts about The Interview

People know I’m into Korean things, so they’re asking me what I think about The Interview, the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the subsequent pulling of the film from theaters.

1. The quality of the film is irrelevant

This point seems to confuse a lot of people, who are busy debating whether the film is The Great Dictator. As part of that debate, some are pointing out that The Interview is “a bad film.” This is kind of unfair considering that no one has seen it. But more importantly, it’s utterly irrelevant. So what if it’s terrible? Sony didn’t get hacked because the movie was good or bad, and the movie didn’t get pulled from theaters based on its quality. In geopolitical and ethical terms, the quality of the movie is a non-issue.

2. It’s OK to make a movie about assassinating a sitting head of state

It might or might not be in poor taste, depending on your taste. But it’s not wrong. Hollywood produces and distributes movies on every conceivable topic, glorifying all kinds of horrific violence, depicting the destruction of the United States, and on and on. One of the great classics of American cinema is about our own government plotting to bring about global nuclear armageddon. The Interview might be a lot of things, but incitement it is not, and it falls easily into the realm of speech that’s protected.

3. It’s OK to make fun of North Korea

Again, you might or might not find it to be in poor taste. But it’s OK to make a movie that makes fun of Hitler (cf. The Great Dictator, The Producers) or a comedy set in the Holocaust (Life Is Beautiful), or even a film that makes fun of a Kim who rules North Korea (Team America). The Atlantic gets it completely wrong in saying that North Korea isn’t funny. North Korea is hilarious, as dictatorships usually are, and one of the best weapons against them is humor.

North Korea’s leaders have been the butt of jokes on SNL, 30 Rock, in Team America, and elsewhere because they’re self-important buffoons. They should be lampooned. Dictators everywhere should be lampooned. Democratic leaders should also be lampooned. Making fun of the people in charge is important work.

4. Seth Rogen and James Franco are acting courageously

And as for that Atlantic article insisting that the film is “not an act of courage” like The Great Dictator because Hitler was at the height of his powers and North Korea is weak? Declaring that “it takes no valor and costs precious little to joke about these things safely oceans away from North Korea’s reach”? Well, it appears that North Korea has been able to hit Seth Rogen and his backers harder than Hitler ever hit Charlie Chaplin and his backers. North Korea has been known to assassinate people it doesn’t like, and quite famously kidnapped and enslaved a couple of South Korean movie people when they were in Hong Kong.

No, North Korea appears not to have gone after Trey Parker or Margaret Cho. But they might have. And they have gone after Rogen and Franco.

5. Sony and the film distributors aren’t cowards

Sony Pictures got hit really hard. Nobody died, so this isn’t the sort of thing where we ought to respond with missile strikes. But their business was paralyzed. And Sony Pictures is a business. And businesses are not moral human beings who take a stand. There is no Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. Businesses are risk-averse organizations with a profit motive. None of these companies want to risk their holiday-season profits, and none of them want to risk being involved in the actual violence that’s been threatened.

Nor does Sony Pictures have the sense that the US government has their back. This form of cyberterrorism is new, and the US doesn’t know what to do about it exactly. We can’t call in the National Guard and ground all the planes. Sony Pictures is kind of on its own right now, and that’s not a comfortable place to be. I don’t blame them for not wanting to go to war with North Korea over Christmas.

6. We still don’t know whether it really was North Korea

Don’t forget that. These sort of attacks are hard to pin down. It might be a disgruntled former employee. We just don’t know.

7. Isolating North Korea’s economy is not the answer

The other bit of important news this week — way more important than this whole Interview situation — is America’s at-long-last opening with Cuba. We’ve been maintaining a policy of isolation for decades, and it has failed to topple the government of Cuba, resolve human rights issues there, or really serve our interests in any useful way.

So what do we want to do in response to North Korea’s hack attack? Cut off their dollars.

Corporations, as I said, are risk-averse. They don’t like wars or conflicts because they’re hard to predict in quarterly estimates. North Korea is free to be belligerent because it doesn’t have influential corporations. But there is business in North Korea, much of it controlled by the military. Rather than further isolating and limiting that business, it might make more sense to engage with it, embedding it in the global system that makes war unthinkable between any two major economic powers. If North Korean leadership had something significant to lose beyond their own borders, they might be more hesitant to threaten and attack. The way that happens most effectively in today’s world is through international trade.

North Korea doesn’t make that easy, but it may be the best bet for creating a class of influencers in North Korea who have an ownership stake in something significant and who will press within the system for a more moderate approach to the outside world.

Update: President Obama has now confirmed that North Korea is behind the hacking and said that he thinks Sony Pictures made a mistake in pulling the release of The Interview, though he is sympathetic. Sony Pictures responded, putting the blame on the theater distributors and claiming that they are still looking into ways to release the movie.

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Pitchfork’s K-pop tastes

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. Back in August, Pitchfork put together its 20 Essential K-Pop Songs (with the usual Pitchfork sense of self importance, since the notion that any K-pop is essential is pretty silly). I don’t love every one of their selections, but they hit on some great stuff, and their approach serves as a reminder that even if it’s manufactured, it’s creative and innovative too. Worth a look and listen.

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The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea

Fans of Park Chan-wook, or of his classic thriller Joint Security Area, may remember the scene in which a North Korean soldier spits out a Choco Pie to declare his loyalty to his home country: rather than flee south, where he can get all the Choco Pies he wants, the soldier insists that he will wait until North Korea can produce the best Choco Pies in the world.
Choco Pies have long been a symbol of South Korean modernization: cheap, tasty, popular, utterly manufactured, completely divorced from any preexisting Korean tradition. Now South-Korean born artist (and Columbia alum) Jin Joo Chae has an exhibition at Julie Meneret Contemporary Art on the Lower East Side entitled The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea. Chae highlights the significance of the lowly Choco Pie in North Korea, where a single pie can fetch as much ast $10 on the black market in a country where the average monthly wage is $150.
I’m happy to see South Korean artists finding new ways to acknowledge and engage with North Korea. In this case, Chae focuses our attention on the marketization of North Korea, which often goes unnoticed beneath the news stories about Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman and nuclear weapons. I definitely plan to check out the show, and I hope you can too.  

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[things i’d like to write about but haven’t]

  • My trip to Budapest and Vienna.
  • My trip to Ann Arbor. And Ypsilanti.
  • All the churches in Brooklyn Heights: visit each, learn about it, attend a service, blog it.
  • My life as a Korean dancer.
  • My theory of Tom Tom Club vs. David Byrne.
  • My trip to Ghana.
  • Being sick abroad.
  • Toilets of the world (this one’s more of a photo essay).
  • My trip to Mexico. (Noting a theme?)
  • My trip to Paris.
  • An open letter to the mayor demanding seasonal weather changes. (This will be funnier when actually written, I hope.)
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[drop the red lantern]

I have just seen Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou’s claustrophobic 1991 film about a woman who becomes “Mistress Four” in a wealthy Chinese household sometime in the early twentieth century. The film received a great many awards and is widely considered a classic. I hated it.

Though it presents as a chick flick, centered on female characters and chock full of fancy costumes, it’s a decidedly misogynistic movie. The plot is driven by the wives’ (and a servant girls’) struggle for the attentions of the Master in a ritualized environment where every coupling is formally announced to everyone else through elaborate ritual. To make this plot work, it’s crucial that the women have about the same level of characterization you get in a high-end porno: Third Mistress was an opera singer, Fourth Mistress is a college girl who’s father was in the tea trade, and so on. As in a pornographic film, the outside world is excluded; everything takes place within the household. Clearly that’s an artistic choice meant to heighten the claustrophobia, but the story itself acknowledges that the women leave the house, sometimes unaccompanied: the Master offers at one point to take Songlian out for dumplings at a place she likes, and Third Mistress manages to get caught in a hotel having an affair with the family doctor.

And that’s what gives the lie to the whole thing. At the end, Songlian is driven mad by her helplessness in the face of the servants’ murder of Third Mistress for her affair. She paces the courtyard, alone and disheveled. There is, first of all, sheer laziness in that. Declaring your lady character insane is much easier than imagining how she might live with her trauma, and also totally unrealistic. And there, again, is the misogyny: depicting women as fragile, with minds that snap all too easily.

And it also goes against the facts we know. We know that Songlian connives. We know that she’s unhappy. We know that people come and go from the house. Why does she stay, permitted to pace about the place? Alas, we know too little of that outside world to imagine what she might fear in it. Everything is inward-focused, to the exclusion of reality itself.

OK, so is this some kind of complicated metaphor for life under Mao? Is the hothouse craving for the Master’s attention, and the infighting, and the murderousness of the servants, all some kind of allegory about the Communist Party? I don’t think it is, or if it is, it’s just not good enough.

Raise the Red Lantern is, in the end, a stylized costume drama. And it is, admittedly, haunting and compelling in some of its imagery. But it’s an overbearing film that dehumanizes its characters to no particular end.

Also, it’s boring.

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[national fears]

Because I know a little something about Korea, people often ask me about the Chinese government. I suppose Canadians probably get asked to explain America, so I kind of get it.

In any case, a question that often comes up is why the Chinese government is so terrified of Falun Gong. I don’t know from any detailed insider knowledge or anything, but my guess is that it has to do with a vast and little-known war called the Taiping Rebellion.

At roughly the same time that some 600,000 Americans lost their lives in our Civil War, China was going through an epic struggle that cost some 20 million lives — some 30 times as many casualties. (I found one reference to China’s population in 1834 as 400 million, while the US had some 31 million in 1860, so the percentage losses are closer: something like 5% in China, and 2% in the US.)

Wars on this scale leave national scars. America certainly hasn’t resolved all the racial issues that lay behind the Civil War, and fear of race-based insurrection has continued to haunt the national psyche.

In China, the haunting fear is of a different kind. It’s a fear of disruptive religious movements, because that’s what Taiping was. Hong Xiuquan, the movement’s leader, claimed to be Jesus’s brother, and he led what was called the Heavenly Kingdom in a great battle to rid China of Manchu rule and spread a peculiar brand of heterodox Christianity.

So I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that when Chinese officials see a movement like Falun Gong — a religious movement with the power to mobilize great numbers of people — some national memory of the Taiping disaster kicks in. On a gut level, mass religious zeal produces panic.

None of this is meant to justify the abuse, repression, or torture of any group of people for their religious beliefs, of course. The question isn’t whether such repression is OK — it’s not — but why it happens, why this group in particular gets the Chinese government’s panties in a bunch. And I think that maybe it’s that legacy of Taiping.

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[how to fail like an olympian]

When you watch the Olympics, it can be easy to forget just how ridiculously good these people are at whatever bizarre thing it is they’re doing. Take, for example, figure skating. Early in the evening of the ladies’ long program, long before Kim Yu-Na and the other medal contenders took the ice, there was Tuğba Karademir, a Turkish skater who ultimately came in 24th.

Now, I have never been the 24th-best person in the world at any particular skill, as far as I know. It’s an extraordinary achievement. And yet, watching her skate, it was absolutely clear why she was in a different class from the top five or six skaters in the world. So when you’re watching the coverage of a medal contender in the slalom who misses a gate, or of a bobsled team that plays it conservatively and can’t shave off that hundredth of a second they need to take the lead, you go, “Yeah, that was a mistake,” and you forget how insanely difficult it is to do whatever it is the athletes are doing in the first place.

And after a couple of weeks of that sort of thing, today I went to my Korean dance class, and I imagined what it would mean to be the best in the world at it, or one of the top ten or twenty. For one thing, it would mean practicing more often than once a week for 90 minutes. My dance teacher is an extraordinary dancer, and part of how you get to be that way is to do it a lot. And then there’s the level of detail: spending a week or a month or six months concentrating on just the right way to get your torso to expand and contract, or how to extend your fingers to draw out a line.

Beyond that, as I fumbled my way through my little bit of choreography, I started thinking about how much concentration is a part of athletic success. Sometimes, as I dance, some move I’ve just done half a dozen times will suddenly desert me, and I’ll be shrugging my shoulders when I’m supposed to be twirling already, or my arms will be flopping at my sides because I’ve forgotten where they’re supposed to be. Again, this is incredibly far removed from the kind of mental effort that serious athletes make, but I felt like it was an inkling, at the very least, of how it is that someone who’s done a routine a thousand times in warm-ups can suddenly flub it in competition.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

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[the plan, as it unfolds]

For a while now I’ve been thinking about graduate school. Here are my reasons:

  • Everyone else seems to be doing it.
  • My brother and sister are doing it, which means I’ll be the least educated member of my family if I don’t (dad has an MBA, mom an MA and JD, grandma a Ph.D., grandpa a JD, sister and brother both working on MAs).
  • Barack Obama asked every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education, and while this obviously meant at least one year past high school, which I have, I’m taking it to mean at least one more year than I already have.
  • It might be vaguely useful professionally to have a higher degree, though that sort of depends what it is.

Those are my reasons for thinking about grad school. So I talked to a few coworkers who’d done the whole master’s thing, and one of them told me to study something I love, because it’s a ton of work, and I won’t want to see it through if I don’t feel passionate about it (he has an MFA in creative writing).

So that got me thinking about specifics. An MBA is right out, ’cause I completely don’t give a shit. International affairs? Maybe. Central Asian history or linguistics? Off chance. Asian studies?
Duh.
I mean, look at what my plans were for the weekend: go to a lecture at the Korean Cultural Service on Friday night, by myself, to learn about traditional Korean music; meet a new Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet an old Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet a friend from the Korean Mission to the UN on Sunday; go to my Korean dance class.
Sure, I read articles from time to time on foreign policy. And sure, I’ll slog my way through tomes on Central Asia. But I waded through nearly 5,000 pages of East Asian history and translated political and philosophical documents as a self-study program. And on weekends I study the Korean language and go to lectures on Korean culture for fun. When I arrived in Seoul in October, I was ecstatic to discover that here was an entire city completely dedicated to my hobby. For reasons I’ve never been able to pin down, the study of Korea has become my passion.
You knew that. I knew that. But I only just realized that this had a direct bearing on what I should study.
An obvious practical question arises: What will I do with an MA in Asian Studies? And a practical answer: No idea. Yes, it’s a lot of work for no concrete result. Yes, it’s expensive. But I want to do it. And the advantage of being passionate about the subject while not needing the degree is that I can drop out without feeling like the whole thing has been pointless.
My plan, then, is to do this … eventually. I’m hoping to move to Manhattan when my lease is up, in September of next year. Starting grad school at the same time that I move strikes me as pointlessly exhausting. So I’m going to shoot for spring of 2011 to begin my studies. Between now and then, I’d like to make substantial progress on the language. I’ll also need to talk to people at the Asian Studies programs at Columbia and NYU, and also maybe CUNY. And study for the GREs. And that, in sum, is the plan so far.
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[so what’s this korean dance you’re learning?]

This is a reasonable question that a number of people have asked me, including my mom. A quick search for Korean dance on YouTube turns up mostly pop, and if you throw in the word “traditional,” you get mostly women. And I had to admit that even I wasn’t very clear on what the dance style I’m learning is supposed to look like when a man does it. (When it comes to men’s dancing, I’m much more familiar with the twirly hat stuff and the 사물노리 (samulnori) farmers’ dance.)

So I went searching, and I’ve turned up a few examples, which I will present for you here without further ado (better to link through where you can see the YouTube videos in a bigger size):
The first one is, I believe, roughly what my teacher has in mind for me. The odds of my dancing that well are not high. My parents told me about a budding jazz singer they knew who started weeping when they played a Sarah Vaughan record for her, and I kind of feel like that watching this video.
All of these dancers are impressive, and having taking a few classes, I have a much clearer idea of just how challenging it is to move gracefully through these poses. It’s a beautiful form of dance, and extraordinarily foreign to me. I remember how startling it was when a crowd of people started up with a folk version of this sort of thing during the halftime of Korea’s quarterfinal game in the 2002 World Cup, dancing in a circle and banging drums and cymbals there in the dirt field of the local middle school.
Bonus: For those who don’t know, Korea has perhaps the world’s most badass b-boy culture. Please to enjoy. 멋있다!