Category: Personal

That number, in real terms, is terrible. It’s gone down throughout Obama’s presidency, and it has stayed down. It’s now at the same level it was in 1995, as it was climbing out of the recession trough that took down George H.W. Bush, made Ross Perot briefly plausible, and beat up Bill Clinton in 1994.

There are some systemic reasons for the decline that go beyond the economics of the moment. The retirement of the baby boomers is likely a factor, though I gather from talking to my parents that a lot of that retirement was involuntary and isn’t going very well. And older people are a significant part of the electorate, especially in non-presidential years.

If you wonder how much median income matters, look at this graph of satisfaction over time.

It looks a lot like median income, doesn’t it?  It bottoms out in the early 90s, climbs steadily through the Clinton years to a wobbly high, starts to fall after 2001, and starts a decline in the 2000s.

There are a lot of complicated economics and statistics and demographics behind median income, including the changing composition of households and much more. But it seems to be a significant factor in the national mood, and it may help explain why many Americans feel that the drop in unemployment and the rise in the Dow is somehow not helping them.

But that’s not what’s happening in Korea.

And Jews are a high proportion of Nobel Prize winners, prominent in education, prominent in finance, and prominent in the media industry. This is a thing we talk about all the time amongst ourselves. We’re proud of Albert Einstein and Mike Bloomberg and Jerry Seinfeld and Goldwyn and Meyer and lots of other Jews who have excelled. We need to move past the ghetto mentality of assuming that any outside praise is a veiled attack. Just as one can criticize Israel without necessarily being an anti-Semite — their own members of parliament do it all the time — one can also praise Jews without necessarily being an anti-Semite.

Second, Hazzan is exactly right about “too much,” but could have explained further. In Korean, “too much” (너무) is a modifier like “really” or “totally” in English. It’s common to say things like “That food was too delicious!” or “Your girlfriend is too pretty.” The implication is not that the food has exceeded a deliciousness limit or that the girlfriend really ought to be uglier. Like “totally,” which doesn’t always imply actual totality — “She’s totally pretty” doesn’t mean I think her toenails and her liver are gorgeous — “too much” or “too” is often just a strengthening modifier in Korean.

Third, it is drastically absurd to expect Koreans to have the same kind of linguistic care around racism that we do. Their culture and history is different, and so is their language. We make a very big distinction between “There are a lot of really great African-American athletes” and “African-Americans are good at sports.” It is, in the American context, a really important distinction. It’s also a distinction many Koreans don’t quite grasp. Their country had close to zero foreigners in it until the 1890s, and even now it has fewer foreigners than most countries. The proportion of foreign residents is now up to 2%, about half of whom are Chinese. Until the 1990s, few Korean traveled overseas and few foreigners came to live in Korea, so Korean society is relatively new at dealing with issues of race and ethnicity. (There’s basically no ethnic variation within Korean society outside of foreigners.)

Finally, we should not do to Koreans what the ADL accuses them of doing to us, which is applying a single perspective across an entire population. Some Koreans are undoubtedly racist. Some are idiots too. Some are well educated and worldly, others are poorly educated and ignorant. Kind of like Americans. Or Jews. You can point to specific incidents of Koreans acting racist — and the press is very happy to do just that whenever they get a chance, as in the recent case of an Irish job applicant who was rejected because her kind are alcoholics. That case was presented as if “Irish Need Not Apply” signs were on display all over Korea, but they’re not.

All of which makes me question the ADL’s surveys and methodologies everywhere else. They’re an organization committed to fighting anti-Semitism, which means they’re an organization committed to the widespread existence of anti-Semitism. One should be very careful about taking these kinds of surveys at face value. Like global happiness surveys or measures of what people care about, they often fail to take into account local cultural variations (Which cultures like to complain while happy? Which like to say they’re happy when they’re miserable?) and come up with results that are facile at best, grossly misleading at worst.

In reading Laurel Kendall’s The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, I was struck by a passage describing a cramped, dim inner courtyard that approximated the larger, brighter courtyards of traditional Korean home. This was in the 1970s, in the then-modern home of a shaman who lived in the not-quite-countryside on the outskirts of Seoul.

A DIY under-floor heating system.

It got me to thinking about how architecture incorporated, modified or discarded aspects of traditional housing as Koreans made the rapid transition from mostly rural villages with thatched-roof homes to mostly urban, stacked apartment towers. Early attempts at modern homes kept some semblance of the traditional courtyard spaces, but these seem to have disappeared as Koreans moved to what they call villas — small brick apartment buildings — and then the larger apartment towers that have become so common. Under-floor heating, for example, seems to have been maintained in the transition to villas, but I don’t know about the more modern apartments. Sliding doors were also common in older buildings. And entrances to apartments had a recessed area for shoes, approximating the step up to a traditional house’s platform.

There’s a paper to be written about this, or perhaps a book. Maybe someone has already done it. There’s comparative work to be done on China and Japan at the very least. And I’m not going to do any of that. But if it strikes your fancy, maybe it can become your research project.

I have recently upgraded modems with Time Warner. As expected, the process was not smooth. Nevertheless, for a company that took three years to replace some waterlogged cables in my building, there were some surprisingly clever bits of customer service.

Initiating the process

One day, out of the blue, my modem reset. This isn’t exactly as rare an event as it should be, but it’s never good. When it finished rebooting, I had some brief trouble accessing the Internet, until Time Warner redirected me to a webpage where they told me that my modem was out of date and took me through the process of ordering a new one.

The good:

• This is the first time ever that Time Warner has proactively let me know that my equipment was out of date, rather than waiting until it began to cause problems, and then sending a technician to say, “Oh, this box is really old!”
• The ordering process was remarkably simple, and the new modem showed up in just a few days.

Freedom is a pretty strange thing. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away. Then, as an individual, you can be more powerful than a whole country. -Ai Weiwei

Right now, Liberty in North Korea is raising funds to rescue 200 North Korean refugees. That might seem like small potatoes against the daunting power of the North Korean state. But I’m gonna go with Ai: freedom is a pretty strange thing.

Last night, at a fundraiser, I spoke for a long time with Joseph Kim. He’s a sweet kid. We talked about North Korea, and we talked about Max Weber and sandwiches and cheap ways to travel. His English is better than it was the first time I met him, and he’s studying hard in school.

He’s just one individual with freedom in his heart. And it makes him powerful. It’s voices like Joseph Kim and Ai Weiwei that the dictators of this world fear most: people who speak the plain truth.

And it’s not that they speak without fear. In Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the documentary where Ai spoke about freedom, he admits that he’s afraid — maybe more afraid than most other people, which is why he realizes that he must speak now. He sees the danger of not speaking.

LiNK is working hard to bring 200 more Josephs to freedom. They won’t all do TED talks. Many may choose not to be activists at all — but choice is exactly the point. Given the resources and opportunities of freedom, North Korean defectors might open a kimbap stand together on the outskirts of Seoul, like the mother of a defector friend of mine and a few other defectors. Or they might get degrees in political science at one of Seoul’s top universities, like someone else I know.

But their acts of freedom, large and small, have an impact. They change the way the world sees North Korea and North Koreans. And many North Korean defectors remain in contact with their families back home, sending them money, sending them information — and planting the experience of freedom in their hearts.

If this matters to you, now is an especially good time to give because your funds will be matched. Even small donations make a difference — most of LiNK’s 265 rescues to date have been funded through the efforts of college students who’ve done things like bake sales. Sometimes it can make a difference just to talk to the people around you. Whatever you can do to give the experience of freedom to others, on this issue or somewhere else, please do it. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away.

North Korean officials recently dropped in on the Asian Games in South Korea and offered to renew talks between the two nations, an offer that South Korea was happy to accept. Meanwhile, North and South Koreans are exchanging gunfire across the border. What’s going on?

One of the most common misunderstandings in international relations is the belief that nation-states act like coherent individuals. People say things like “North Korea wants engagement” or “The United States has shifted its focus to Iraq” or, as I did above, “South Korea was happy to accept,” as if these countries were individual people.

Now, you could question whether even individual people act coherently all the time. But when it comes to large nations whose governments comprise thousands and thousands of people, it shouldn’t be strange that some of these people are working at cross purposes, or simply don’t know about each other’s intentions. In democracies, these variations are made explicit. We have presidents and legislators and appointed officials from different parties, and we have layers of government at the local, regional and national level. Politicians openly debate with each other.

In dictatorships, however, disagreements are hidden, as is so much else about how government works. It’s easy to believe that in a totalitarian state like North Korea, everything flows from the leader, and all government actions are under his control. But the reality is more complex. First of all, it isn’t always clear what the leader wants, and in fact dictators are often cagey about how much they reveal of their intentions. It isn’t just the outside world that has to struggle to parse Kim Jong-un’s intentions. North Korean officials have to take actions and make decisions based on cryptic instructions, or none at all, and they can face dire consequences if they guess wrong.

Second, we need to remember that information flows less effectively in dictatorships than in democracies. Totalitarianism is not the same as efficiency. Totalitarian states expend enormous effort to limit the flow of information, and that very much includes the flow of information within the middle levels of government. The top leadership must ensure that no individual or group is able to organize sufficiently to be a threat. That means siloing leaders and siloing information. Any system of information distribution that would allow a high-level minister to call a mass of people to action — the banality of a foreign minister sending a general memo to the full staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — is a danger to the leader. The leader needs multiple paths of information that lead to him, and he needs to limit the ability of those below him to share information widely.

So what does all this mean in terms of the gunfire at the border? Possibly nothing much. Peace talks, after all, do tend to happen in the context of conflict, and that’s what’s going on in Korea. The exchanges of fire, which led to no casualties, had to do first with North Koreans trying to shoot down balloons sent over the border by South Korean private citizens, and later with South Koreans warning North Korean soldiers not to move any closer to the demarcation line. Who ordered the North Koreans to fire at the balloons? Quite possibly a low-level border officer who knows absolutely nothing about the recent high-level exchanges with South Korea. Who ordered the South Koreans to shoot back? Probably a South Korean officer with standing orders to do exactly that, and whose orders don’t change because of the vague possibility of a thaw at the highest levels of his government. And why did the North Korean soldiers approach the demarcation line when they did? Who knows? But it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that they did so as part of some kind of clever cat-and-mouse game ordered up by Pyongyang. Instead, like so much else from North Korea, it’s probably just noise.

In traditional Chinese religion, people worship gods and ancestors.

For those who know their way around East Asian religious studies, it seems like an uncontroversial statement. But the deeper I get, the more it seems fundamentally incorrect. Two terms seem especially problematic (though you could quibble about pretty much all of them): worship and gods.

We can start with the latter. According to Myron Cohen, scholars of Chinese religion decided to reclaim the term “god” from the Judeo-Christian context in which it was most often used. And there are ways in which the Chinese gods resemble the gods of India or classical Greece and Rome. But the differences loom large. “Gods” can be both guei and shen, or (for lack of better terms) ghosts and spirits, although my ancestors might be your ghosts and vice versa.

But East Asians don’t necessarily treat their “gods” with the kind of respect and veneration — in a word, worship — that a Westerner might expect. When a local god wouldn’t provide rain, officials were known to take it out and leave it in a hot field to suffer, thrash it with sticks, even smash it if no rain came. You can’t do that to Yahweh or Jesus or Allah, or even Zeus or Odin, although maybe you could with some minor god.

And from the problem with gods, we can see the problem with worship. Even if we set aside such cases of spirit abuse, more orthodox ancestor veneration or propitiation is simply not the same as what we usually think of as worship. For one thing, ancestor rituals very closely resemble the respect paid to living ancestors, and no one thinks East Asians are actually worshipping their living parents or grandparents. If your dead parent is being fed and bowed to the same way he was when he was alive (with minor differences), why is it now worship? Care or propitiation or veneration seem like better terms.

It is never easy to find the right balance between translation and obscurity. To say that Koreans engage in god and ancestor worship and that shamans perform exorcisms is misleading in all sorts of ways, but to say that Koreans perform kut and chesa for shin and gajok is difficult for the layperson. I haven’t got a satisfactory solution to this problem, but I think it’s worth noticing that the problem is there.

In the past week, I’ve made three big musical discoveries: the pleasure of seeing minimalism performed live, the weird post-Orientalist electronica of Fatima Al Qadiri, and a new (to me) genre of music I’m calling dishwasher beats.

Minimalism is not exactly new to me. My grandmother was an avid listener of New Sounds on WNYC, so when I lived with her I got exposed to John Schaefer’s taste for Arvo Part, Alvin Lucier, Brian Eno (particularly My Life in the Bush of Ghosts), and the like. Nevertheless, I’d somehow never seen an actual performance of minimalist music, which is quite different from hearing it on recordings. (I might have missed this chance too, but my girlfriend is an artist who does things like 18-minute videos of lighting and shaking out matches, and she bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale.)

There’s a tendency, when listening to minimalism, to let it fade into the background. In my grandmother’s case, evenings of Terry Riley and John Adams served as a backdrop for reading The New York Review of Books or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. A concert hall forces you into a different relationship with the performers and the music, even if you do let your mind wander (I did). And there is a theatricality to the performance of these demanding works — particularly the two pieces by Reich, Four Organs and Drumming. The former involved a surprising amount of headbanging and hand-waving by the musician leading the ensemble, while the former became almost a stark sort of Blue Man Group Goes to Indonesia mix of precision ensemble percussion and peculiar walking about. After the intermission, Philip Glass’s gaudy pieces felt positively lush by comparison.

Part of the charm of seeing these works performed live is recognizing both their influence and their anachronism. Steve Reich’s work in particular, going back to It’s Gonna Rain from 1965, prefigures so much of hip hop and everything after (Jamie xx and Gil Scott Heron, anyone?) that it’s almost impossible to imagine how weird it must have sounded when it was new. And I kept thinking of Suicide (the band, not the act) during Four Organs. But nobody today would think to phase two drum patterns, or three or four of them, by actually making musicians do it live on a stage. What was a necessity is now a stunt, a kind of artistic equivalent to having Rain Man do arithmetic really fast. There were wires and cables all over the stage for the electric organ amps, but no one had a MacBook, or even a Korg or a Moog. Contrast that with the enormous sound St. Vincent can produce with just four musicians (but at least two onstage computers), in a performance that owes a great deal to minimalism both musically and visually.

Earlier in the week, my girlfriend had complained to me that she needed new music to listen to, so I began digging around on various best-albums-of-2014 lists, and a name that kept coming up was Fatima Al Qadiri. Born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait, and now based in Brooklyn, she makes a kind of creepy Orientalist electronica that owes something to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and something to the spaciousness of minimalism. Her album Asiatisch opens with a piece that sounds like it was made for an international art exhibition because it was: a Chinese woman singing a song that isn’t quite “Nothing Compares 2U” in nonsense Mandarin. It’s as weird and as good and as bad as you think it is: Cremaster at the Beijing Airport. I’m not sure it’s actually a good album, but it’s certainly fascinating.

Even more fascinating, in its way, is what happens when you tell Google Play to create a radio station based on Asiatisch. What it plays is a genre I’m calling dishwasher beats. Last night we put it on while the dishwasher was running, and it was sometimes hard to tell which noises were from the kitchen and which from the stereo. Artists like Emptyset, Rashad Becker, Millie & Andrea, Andy Stott, and Logos make stark music that pulls together strains of minimalism, industrial, Detroit techno and noise rock to make background music for a post-industrial wasteland. (The album covers alone deserve some kind of genre designation; you can tell as soon as a track starts whether it’ll be genuine dishwasher beats by whether the cover looks properly abstract and art school. If the cover isn’t abstract or stark-black-and-white enough, you might find yourself with something actually danceable).

There is, as yet, no good way to share Google Play radio stations, so go try it out. It’s the music of a generation that has grown up with Kraftwerk and Steve Reich far in the past and dishwashers all around.

At my birthday party, a dear friend taught me a Korean version of “Happy Birthday” with the following lyrics:

왜 태어났니?
왜 태어났니?
얼굴도 못생긴 게
왜 태어났니? 

Why were you born?
Why were you born?
Also your face is ugly
Why were you born?