Category: Personal

It’s hardly breaking news, but back in 2010, South Korea changed its tourism slogan to “Be inspired.”

Back when I first went to Korea, in 2001, the tourism slogan was “Dynamic Korea,” created by Kim Dae Jung’s administration. The idea seems to have been to represent the South Korean economy primarily, marking Korea as a modern nation capable of hosting major events and serving as a corporate hub. The trouble with the slogan is that it doesn’t mean very much to an actual tourist.

The replacement campaign, “Korea Sparkling,” was a hasty mess. It meant even less than “Dynamic Korea,” though it appeared to emphasize Korea’s shiny new buildings and economy. Unfortunately, that focus gave short shrift to much of what is best about Korea: its earthy vitality, its sour and pungent cuisine, its bloody cinematic thrillers, its forested mountains jutting up out of the big cities. It overlooked Korea’s dynamism, ironically enough. “Sparkling” could just as well describe Singapore or Dubai.

The “Be inspired” slogan moves in another direction entirely. First of all, it’s something of a step for Korea to feel that it can go beyond describing itself and venture to tell you how to feel. That in itself is a kind of confidence that wasn’t there before. But it’s also a shift from economy to culture. “Dynamic” is where you hold regional trade shows and build ships. “Sparkling” is where you open an office on the 35th floor and go shopping for international luxury goods. But inspiration comes from genuine experiences: delicious meals, pop stars you adore, good friends, mountain Buddhist retreats, the Boryeong Mud Festival.

For the first time in the modern era, Korea appears to be confident that it has something unique to offer the world, something worthwhile. South Korea has developed personality.

As we approach Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I thought I’d share some extraordinary music, sung by some of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

I recall a moment that made clear to me just how much that movement changed America. At a Noah’s Bagels in Mountain View, California, my father cast a nostalgic glance at a large-format photograph of a packed Coney Island beach from the 1950s, when he was young. I looked at it too. “No black people,” I said.

My father hadn’t noticed. He is not a racist — in fact, he and my mother marched in Civil Rights rallies in the 1960s — but he grew up in a world where segregation was normal. He learned that segregation was wrong, and he fought to wipe it away, but it’s what the world of his childhood looked like. He once told me that the residents of Parkchester, where he grew up in the Bronx, were all white, while the help were all black, and no one thought anything about that.

I didn’t grow up in such a world. Though racism is still a profound problem in many ways in America, that should not take away from the extraordinary achievements of those who fought and too often bled for civil rights in the fifties and sixties and beyond. Because of them, because of their bravery and sacrifice, America is different and better.

I work with people of every skin color and background. I date interracially. My president is biracial, and my mayor is in a marriage that would have been illegal in most states when my father was a boy. These changes did not come by magic. They came with the blood, sweat and tears of heroic ordinary people who said Enough.

And maybe this will even inspire us all to think about those things in our world where we will say Enough, where we will stand for the change that we know in our bones, in our very souls, must come.

There’s a concept known as the bamboo ceiling, a set of cultural expectations that prevent Asians from reaching the highest levels of American corporate life. But what about the bamboo elevator?

In Slate, Philip Guo has an article about silent technical privilege: the ways that looking like a programmer, which in this case just means being an Asian guy, enabled him to fake his way into becoming an actual programmer. He was given opportunities based on the way he looked, and he made the most of them. The bamboo elevator lifted him up into positions he might otherwise not have reached.

In general, it makes sense to make the most of all the opportunities that come your way (barring those that involve genuine moral compromise, like the opportunity to get a job by lying or to win a deal through bribery). The aspects of our lives that are beyond our control — gender, age, race, appearance — affect how people perceive us, and the effects are likely to be varied: sometimes good, sometimes bad. I say use the good ones.

But be conscious of it. Understand what’s happening, and when you can, work to mitigate those arbitrary differences. You’ll be working to create a fairer, more diverse world, with more Asian athletes, more African-American mathletes, more women executives, etc. That might mean a diminishment of opportunity in certain areas for you personally, but hopefully it will lead to more and better opportunities for all of us.

1. Create a Facebook page as an artist who works in words: Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, Basho.

2. Post the artist’s works as status updates.

3. Collect the text from the ads that appear.

4. Create a Facebook page as the artist’s ads.

5. Post the ad texts as status updates.

6. Collect the text from the ads that appear.

7. Create a Facebook page as the ads’ ads.

8. Post the ad texts as status updates.

9. Repeat until the ads and statuses reach equilibrium.

The invaluable DramaFever.com has posted a very interesting set of infographics created by a Chinese artist living in Germany. They purport to show the differences between German and Chinese (and, by extension, Western and Eastern) culture.

As with all such things, these are generalizations, but they help to capture something that I’ve been thinking about, which is concrete examples of differences between Western and Eastern cultures. Have you had such experiences, where the differences were brought vividly to life? What were they?

In a Korean bookstore in Flushing today, I ran a very interesting book: 죽기전에 한번은 유대인을 만나라 (Meet a Jew Once Before You Die), a Korean translation of Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Book of Jewish Values: A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living. The Korean cover is graced with the question, “유대인은 어떻게 원하는 것을 얻는가?” which could be translated as “How do Jews get what they want?”

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I can translate my life experience into a curriculum — how I might be able to share my passion for teaching and mentoring, particularly within an East Asian  context. What do I have to offer that stands out from every other consultant with a professional enrichment seminar?

Until now, I’d seen two things. First, there’s my experience at Google, a name brand with cachet. Second, there’s my role as an outsider — a non-Asian — who has a deep and serious understanding of Asian culture.

But it hadn’t occurred to me to bring my Jewish heritage into the mix. I’ve talked to Koreans about how my outsider status enables me to see things about Korean society that Koreans simply overlook. Now I realize that I’d been similarly blind to my own culture.

In fact, my Jewishness is at the core of my interest in Asia. I grew up apart from the mainstream California culture around me, observing strange rituals and each year going through the cycle of the Torah, reading stories about tents, flocks of sheep, idols, wives and handmaidens and going down to Egypt. These stories took place in an exotic world that was not my own, but These are your people, I was told. I suppose that was the beginning of wanting to go east. When I chose a place to travel after college, I didn’t choose Israel, a land run by European Jews much like my own family, but India, where people still wear turbans and there are still idol shops — where you can feel some surviving sense of the polytheistic world in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob founded their clan. Our clan.

More prosaically, it was the Jewish emphasis on education that pushed me to excel at school and gave me a home life where we read encyclopedia entries at the dinner table. Everyone in my family had at least a college education, and most of them had post-graduate degrees. Doing well in school was simply what one did. (But not through excessive hard work — that’s where we differ from Asians.) And my outsider’s perspective to my own American culture has perhaps made it easier for me to understand the Asian immigrant experience, and also to pull myself free of American society and go elsewhere.

And here we come to the darker experience of Judaism: living with a suspicion that everyone secretly hates you for being a Jew. The very thing that has given me access to the world could also be described as rootless cosmopolitanism, a slur that the Soviets threw at the Jews to accuse them of a lack of patriotism. Jewish success can be a source of pride, but there’s always the anxiety that discussion of individual Jewish triumphs will devolve into theories of collective Jewish control over industries, economies, countries — theories that make the Jewish people sound a lot like the Elders of Zion. Indeed, at the Korean bookstore today, along with the first book about Jewish values, was a more worrying text: 유대인 이야기: 그들은 어떻게 부의 역사를 만들었는가 (Jewish Story: How They Created the History of Wealth), with an English title of Jewish Economic History. I don’t think that the Koreans who produce such books have any anti-Semitic feelings — quite the contrary — but Jewish history has had the perverse effect of turning collective compliments into collective threats.

There are also more personal reasons why I haven’t promoted Judaism as my calling card. As I became an adult, I turned away from the Chassidic Judaism my parents had embraced as I was growing up. I live in New York City, where secular Jewish culture is in the air, and I have never denied my identification with it. But I haven’t wanted to make it the focus either. People make assumptions. Just this morning I had to explain over dimsum to an old friend that despite her intuitions, I actually do eat pork. And then I feel awkward with the idea of being a pork-eating representative of Judaism.

Awkwardness, I suppose, is very Jewish. Woody Allen and Joseph Roth turned it into high art. And this recognition of Korean interest in my hidden, uncomfortable not-quite-faith arrives just as I’ve begun to delve into shamanism, Korea’s own embarrassing, mostly secret bundle of traditions, superstitions, rituals and half-believed spiritual truths. I suppose that if I want Koreans to share their deep culture with me — the part of it that history has taught them not to show to outsiders — then I ought to step up and do the same. And if every Korean should meet a Jew before dying, I suppose there’s no reason why I can’t be that Jew. And no reason I can’t charge for the experience either — after all, we Jews created the history of wealth, and we know how to get what we want.

You are now going to learn something you didn’t know about North Korea, and also something you didn’t know about Korean shamanism.

Young-il Kim, Executive Director of PSCORE

This evening at Columbia University I heard a talk from Mr. Young-il Kim, a North Korean defector and the executive director of PSCORE, a non-profit, non-partisan NGO that works on North Korean human rights, defector education and Korean reunification.

After his talk, I asked him an unusual question: Had he ever met any mudangs (Korean shamans) or anyone who practiced traditional Korean religion in North Korea?

His answer, to my surprise, was a definitive yes. He didn’t know mudangs, per se, but he said that fortune tellers were quite common, and that many of them were imbued with shin (신), meaning divinity or god — not merely people who read astrological charts, but genuine mystics.

But how, I asked, could they survive the communism of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il, where religion was forbidden?

Mr. Kim explained that the elite have personal problems just like everyone else, so they need fortune tellers too. And because they need them, they protect them.

So there you have it. Like so many of the doors that have opened to me recently, this one is only open a crack, but what little I can see beyond is fascinating.

In his primer Korean Shamanism-Muism, Dr. Kim Tae-kon describes the symptoms of shinbyeong, the illness that afflicts Korean shamans (at least the non-hereditary ones) before they accept the spirit and transition into their spiritual roles. He then goes on to compare these symptoms with those experienced by shamans in other cultures (pp. 49-52).

“The shamans of the Yakut tribe in Siberia experience their limbs and body parts being dismembered … by an iron pick,” he explains, while the ancestor-spirits in the Tungus tribe “pierce the shaman-to-be’s body with arrows until he loses consciousness … Then flesh from his/her body is ripped out and taken away.” Again, “Shamans of the Buryat tribe … are tortured by their ancestor spirits and their body is cut into pieces.”

Moving on from Siberia, he reports that “American shamans also experience being killed by ancestor spirits. They also experience having the eyes and teeth ripped apart, while walking through fire … While the shaman-to-be gets tortured … his physical body lies still and stiff on the ground (as if it is dead) and is covered by a mat.” And so it goes, all dismemberment and torment from the ancestors, in Africa and Indonesia as well. In many accounts, the head is cut off or the skull is opened.

Kim ends this litany by declaring that “the fact that the motif of dismembering limbs and the motif of cutting open a body to put in a ‘power of sorcery’ are not found in ‘civilized’ regions such as Korea and Japan, is because the original, primitive and intense experiences (of shamans in primitive ethnic groups) have been filtered out as more ‘civilized’ concepts are added.” I am not so sure.

What comes to mind, as I read these accounts of shamans-to-be, is the story of the Passion of the Christ. Let’s look at what happens to Jesus, according to John. First Jesus is flogged, and a crown of thorns is placed on his head (John 19:1-2). Then, “carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull … There they crucified him” (19:18-19). In both Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Considering that God is his Father, this plaint resembles the shaman-to-be’s experience of torment at the hands of the ancestors. Jesus then dies and is entombed, much like the Native American who is covered by a mat. When he reemerges, he is now addressed as “Rabboni,” teacher: his status has changed (20:16). He is now able to dispense the Holy Spirit, much as a shaman, after his/her illness passes, is able to heal with the power of the god.

Another story that comes to mind is that of Muhammad’s first revelation. Muhammad had been troubled for some time, escaping society for contemplation. According to the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari 1:1:3, the angel Jibreel held Muhammad three times in a tight embrace, similar to the “suffocating feeling” that Kim reports as a symptom of shinbyeong (48). I also think of Jonah, pursued by a revelation that he does not want to give, and of Moses, confronted by fire and forced to take on his vocation.

These Semitic stories are not, of course, exactly the same as shamanism. But they are similar enough to suggest that the boundaries between shamanism and God-centered, revealed religion are not quite so firm as scholars sometimes imagine. There seem to be certain themes to revelation or encounters with the spirit realm, and these have a continuity that is broken more by the cultural context and explanatory machinery than by the nature of the experiences themselves.

In studying Korean shamanism, you don’t get very far before you run into a problem of terminology. What exactly is shamanism? If you define it as a spiritual or religious practice in which a practitioner goes into a trance and communicates with spirits, that’s all well and good, but it’s not particularly Korean. Shamans do that sort of thing the world over. In some contexts it might be useful to connect the spiritual practices of Koreans, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Pacific islanders, but at this point you’re using a pretty broad brush. It would be like lumping all the Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans together under a unifying term for religious practices that focus on prophets, revelations, texts and salvation (soterialism?).

The simplest solution is to go narrow. Instead of shamanism, we can say that we’re studying Mugyo (무교), the Korean term for the traditional practices that typically get lumped into Korean shamanism. A common English term is Muism, which lacks poetry but more or less works.

Except that now we’ve drawn too small a circle. Muism, as it happens, looks a lot like the indigenous (or at least non-Buddhist, non-Catholic, non-Confucian, non-Communist, non-anything else) religious practices of Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and probably a few other places in the neighborhood (Shinto comes to mind, though that’s a vexed topic). East Asian shamanism? Maybe. But then the focus on the practitioner and the practice, the trance and the channeling, overlooks a larger universe of religious confluences and similarities.

For now, I suppose I’ll make due with “Asian shamanism” for the more general, Muism for the strictly Korean. But I wish there were a better term out there for the interwoven traditions of the region.