Category: East Asian Diaspora

Studying Sociology with Simu Liu!

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes. Sources: WBur, Mimi Thian on Unsplash (cropped).

I went on a date through Bumble recently. Yes, even I manage to pull that off sometimes. And no, don’t worry—this post is about Simu Liu.

You see, for the benefit of those blessed without ever having used dating apps, most give you the option of using prompts to get conversations going with nervous matches. You can come up with your own, or use one of the app’s suggestions. My suitress chose one of the latter—”What’s the last thing that made you smile?”. Commence instant mad pacing of my apartment. How to sound smart, sexy, and sincere in response, and all in just the one initial paragraph Bumble allows before—if—you get a reply?

Then it hit me—she’d recently lived in Canada for a number of years. I was 1/3rd into Liu’s autobiography, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story (2022) for a bookclub meeting soon. That was the connection. I could say how, never having watched any of his work, nor particularly wanting to, I hadn’t been all that enthused about the club’s choice. Only then, that the story of his parents falling in love and moving to Canada was just so damned wholesome and nice, that I couldn’t help but smile while reading it. That I was seriously annoyed at how much I was enjoying it.

I know, right—seducing by just being yourself, and saying the actual truth? And it worked? Who’d have thought?!

Little did I know, the next few pages would begin to outline the ‘Tiger Parenting’ he received, which was really just plain emotional neglect and physical abuse. And, in the first of two excerpts from the book I want to share with you, I especially remembered what he wrote at about the period his parents “graduated from spanking to full-on hitting” when he was 12. Which was also when his hormones were appearing, he was a Chinese boy growing up in Canada, and he needed emotional support more than ever (Chapter 9, pp. 104-5):

“I came out of the whole experience [of my crush] with a lot of anger…at myself for being completely ill-equipped to deal with my feelings, and at my parents, who I felt had trapped me into a life I no longer wanted. They had given me neither the emotional maturity nor the social wherewithal to have any shot with girls.”

“And then, of course, there was the total mindfuck that came with growing up Asian and male, in a society that saw us as nothing more than a bunch of derogatory stereotypes. Asian men were frequently depicted in Western media as awkward, nerdy and completely undatable—pretty much exactly what my parents were trying to make me into. I know this is a lot of really heavy stuff to put into the psyche of a twelve-year-old, but it definitely affected me, and it definitely affected every Asian boy that grew up in a Western country. The double whammy of being teased on the playground with ching-chong noises and then seeing ourselves ridiculed on the screen robbed us of our natural confidence. Without proper guidance from our parents, who were not terribly concerned with our self-confidence, most of us grew up feeling like we weren’t worthy to be loved or desired; like whatever we were was not enough.”

“Disillusioned and embittered, I began to pull away from my parents, my upbringing and my heritage. I started acting out, talking back and refusing to do homework. I didn’t want to be a math genius, or a scientist, or a sidekick—I wanted to be Thomas MacDonald, the mediocre-yet-charming leading man who got B-minuses and called his parents by their first names. I didn’t want to be Jackie Chan or Jet Li—I wanted to be hot stuff like Justin Timberlake, the kind of guy that dated Britney Spears and had bras thrown at him onstage.”

“Obviously, my parents were not down with my newfound rebelliousness.”

“‘Look at everything we’ve invested in you,’ they spat. ‘You’re a spoiled brat who’s squandering all of our effort and money, and wasting time on useless things. You’re nothing but a loser!'”

“’Fuck you! I don’t want any of it.'”

“WHAP!”

Update: It’s a point made many times before. But just two days later, its continuing relevance was demonstrated to me by blog mentor  Jae-Ha Kim 김재하, who covered a very similar same issue in the post “Does Racist Vintage Art Get a Pass?” on her SubStack K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim. I’ll post two images from that to demonstrate what I mean, and encourage you to read the (non-)controversy in full:

Source: K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim.

Next, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, let me pass on what the second excerpt from We Were Dreamers immediately reminded of before I give Simu Liu’s words themselves: this paragraph from “Dropping Out” by Daniel Pinchbeck, (pp.102-3), in the autobiographical story collection Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of Twenty Young Writers, edited by Thomas Beller (image source: Amazon):

“For one Wesleyan history class, I read the works of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. Bourdieu wrote about the concept of ‘cultural capital’—how cultural experiences acted as a boundary between the elite and the lower classes. I saw how the high price of the Wesleyan degree was a prime example of ‘cultural capital.’ The purpose of Wesleyan and other, similar colleges is not education so much as it is a way of signifying one’s membership in a certain class. An elite liberal arts degree is an indoctrination in high expectations, not hard actualities. I still maintain a sharp awareness of how the machinery of privilege works, how certain universities create an elite that reinforces itself through school connections, and the alumni’s shared, smug belief in their own entitlement.”

I first provide that because, unlike when I read the following by Liu, in the cold light of day it feels I was projecting to a certain extent, and a little unfair to connect his classmates with it when they were guilty of no more being driven and ambitious whereas Liu (and I!) were not. But no matter. If it provides an opportunity to pass on where I first learned what cultural capital was, a concept that has been very helpful to me over the last nearly 30 years (sigh) and so am very happy to share, then I’ll gladly take advantage (Chapter 14, pp. 160-161):

“On my first day of classes I could immediately tell that I was dealing with a vastly different breed of student. Incumbent Ivey [School of Business] kids were not at all like the dumb, borderline illiterate eighteen-year-olds that I’d wiped the floor with during my freshman year—these guys read the Wall Street Journal every morning and monitored the stock market religiously. They were alphas, who strode around campus with the absolute conviction that they were the literal white knights at the vanguard of a capitalist society just ready to be exploited for all it was worth, and they were ready to make it go their way. Most of them came from considerable wealth—some were scions of multibillion-dollar corporations.”

“You could mock their American Psycho–level douchery and harp on their arrogance, but there was no denying that these were men and women with goals. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about me.”

Thank you Liu! And I will watch your stuff now!

Related Posts:

If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

How “Cast Away” Helped Me Better Understand “The Girl with Seven Names” and Potential Survivorship Bias in North Korean Escapee Stories. No, Really.

Smart people tend to make more logical, more directly-related parallels and connections between the news and the pop culture they consume. So, my niche has to be providing the wilder and more bizarre ones instead.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Image sources: University of Minnesota Retirees Association and Amblin.

Last week, our Busan Book Club covered The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee (2014—The StoryGraph, LibraryThing, GoodReads). A tale of her escape from North to South Korea via a decade spent in China, and later her returning to the border to help her mother and brother also escape, generally we found it very informative and moving. But, we were also struck by her incredible naivety, and sheer luck. In particular, without her family’s high status within North Korea, and without being able to rely on wealthy connections and generous benefactors at the last moments, there would have been no story to tell at all.

The smart takeaway is how, by coincidence, those last two points dovetailed with one about North Korean representation made a few days later by my Donsgeo University colleague, B. R. Myers, as part of a presentation he gave at Seoul City Hall at the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights 2024. From his blog, Sthele Press:

“….This brings me to the escapee issue. These days talk of the grim punishment awaiting repatriated escapees is often contradicted in the same breath by reference to how so-and-so just saved up enough money for a second escape. The sum needed just before the pandemic—if my sources are correct—was over $5000, and let’s face it, that’s more than the average American has in the bank, so I worry that if we continue to present these people as representative, we’ll be creating confusion about what living standards in North Korea are really like. I’m not downplaying the ordeals that they all go through, especially the women who are trafficked across the river, but it’s time, I believe, that we concentrated on the great mass of people inside North Korea.”

“That goes also for the issue of North Korean workers in China and Russia. If you spread the blame between three regimes, Kim gets off lightly. Just how bad are conditions at home, that people compete to get treated like slaves in foreign countries? I think that’s what we should focus on.”

Read the rest of Myers’s presentation there. While my own thoughts may seem flippant by comparison, especially given the gravity of those conditions in North Korea, that is absolutely not my intention. Rather, I feel they only help underline his point about representation all the more.

Specifically, reflecting on Lee’s incredible run of good luck while I was reading her book, I couldn’t help but constantly be immediately reminded of a free-talking activity I’ve been using for the last 20+ years with my ESL students, about what supplies to prioritize in the event of a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean. (I call it Cast Away after the 2000 movie, but these days most students have never heard of it.). Which I grant does indeed sound bizarre, but the connection is there:

You see, most students, and me too if I didn’t already know better, rank obvious things like the fishing line and hooks very highly. Only, as I think it was the US Coast Guard that explained things in the version I originally got this from, in fact both those and 12 other things on this list are completely useless.

The reason being, quite unlike in movies like Cast Away, where the main character quickly paddles to a deserted island to survive on, in most oceans 99 per cent of plane crash survivors simply wouldn’t. So, unless they were found within 2-3 days, they’d die of thirst and sun exposure.

Which generally doesn’t make for riveting viewing.

That means we only get movies about the 1 per cent that do make it to land instead. Leading my students to prioritize hooks, matches, and so on. Whereas really, the only genuinely useful things are the flare gun to help rescuers find you, and the bottles of water to give them an extra day or so to do so while you’re still capable of firing it:

(Let me know if you’d like a copy of my PPT, and the rationale behind the specific ranking).

Wisely, I spared the other book club members this huge segue in our meeting in the coffee shop. But, now that I’ve put pen to paper here, I am indeed intrigued at how this—unfortunately named—’survivorship bias‘ potentially colors narratives about North Korean and its escapees.

And also intrigued whether Lee is asked about her incredible luck in this 1.5 hour interview. I’ll let you know!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

Maverick Film Reviewer Confirms all my Biases about the Orientalism in Past Lives (2023). Is He Right?

“There’s a word in Korean—inyeon (인연). It means providence, or fate.” Well so what?

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Image source: Naver.

To be clear, I haven’t actually seen Past Lives yet. In most of the world, everyone was able to watch it last summer; in Korea, it’s only finally coming out this March. But that opening line in the trailer is a huge red flag:

I realize I’m completely projecting, my title necessarily provocative. It’s just one line, devoid of context. I don’t know if its Orientalist undertone is the exception, or if it suffuses the whole film. But ugh.

Because why say something like that at all, if not to then stress some fundamental difference between the English and Korean concepts? It already feels like right up there with gatekeeping, essentializing discussions of how han, or jeong, or nunchi are timeless, immutable, untranslatable qualities that define all Koreans, which Westerners just could never fully understand:

Source left: Absolutely not going to give this book any traffic. Source right: @RachelMinhee.
Source: Stolen from a Korean Facebook friend.

And definitely make sure to read about how the concept of “saving face” is a complete Western invention, and Minsoo Kang’s “The problem with ‘han’ 한 恨” article at Aeon:

Some people insist that han is a uniquely Korean idea that only Koreans can truly grasp. Yet it is about as useful at explaining everything Korean as the term ‘rugged individualism’ is at explaining everything American or the ‘Samurai’ is in capturing all that is Japanese. It is true that all the calamities and traumas of the modern era have provided Koreans with a great well of powerful emotional experiences from which to draw. But intense emotionality is hardly unique to Korean narratives, and the notion of a specific kind of sorrow/regret/frustration/rage that only Koreans can feel is absurd.

Despite the film’s almost universal acclaim then, and smart overseas friends’ glowing reviews, I was already feeling ambivalent about eventually watching it. I have to admit I’m just a natural contrarian too, especially when it comes to Korean and Korea-related films. Not at all because I think I know better than everyone somehow, but because it seems the more people that sing their praises, the more likely those films are to tick various boxes that turn me off. And, once I do voice any negativity, that my friends will become completely insufferable too, writing me off as a plebeian rather than admit their latest bestest film ever might be anything less than perfect.

Elaine knows exactly what I mean:

So, not going to lie, I felt vindicated over the winter as more and more Asian-American friends in particular also expressed their misgivings about the film. Then, finally, one linked to maverick Ian Wang‘s provocatively-titled “The Critics Are Wrong About ‘Past Lives” at ArtReview, its introduction alone confirming all my suspicions:

You’re watching a contemporary drama about East Asians who’ve immigrated to the West. The narrative can vary, but often depicts a conflict between an older first generation (stern, repressed) and a younger second generation (independent, rebellious). Its characters are honourable and decent. Despite their disagreements, you get the sense that the film doesn’t want you to think any of them have done anything wrong. In fact, they can feel less like real people and more like proxies for certain ‘types’: the tiger mother, the Westernised child. Peppered throughout are glib ethnic signifiers: lingering shots of kimchi-jjigae or jiaozi, a hackneyed reference to not wearing shoes in the house. You can feel the director ticking off boxes as they go, soliciting high relatability with low effort. It is a polite, earnest film, one that will surely receive awards attention. And yet you can’t help but walk away feeling dissatisfied – this was sold to you as a complex, nuanced story about immigration, so why does its view of immigrant life feel so shallow?

I’m tempted to say I rest my case. But on the contrary—unlike most of my film snob, probably soon to be ex-friends, I’m not going to dismiss anyone’s continued love for this film as some irredeemable intellectual failing on their part. So, whether you want to send me a rant or a rave, thanks in advance to those of you who have seen the film and who do take the time to share their thoughts on Yang’s critique. For who knows? I’m already inclined to see the film anyway, just to make up my own mind about it—and being able to debate you afterwards may be all the final persuasion I need!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

How my boyfriend CHEATED with another Asian girl

Finally, this segment of her show gives me just the excuse I need to let The Grand Narrative readers about my favorite Chinese-Australian comedian Jenny Tian!

Especially when you realize “Alex” is probably the same guy she mentions in her interview at Being Asian Australian, about Yellow Fever and dating as an Asian-Australian woman…

Not going to lie—I’m especially fond of her because much of her humor is Australia-related, which resonates because I lived in Australia and New Zealand for 13 years, but might be off-putting for you. But never fear, non-Antipodeans! As you’ll quickly realize from her Instagram, most of her content is universal, and particularly funny to East Asian diaspora anywhere:

Enjoy!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)