Books, books, books….

Read Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires. Have to say, it was an entertaining read. Read the whole thing–500 something pages–in a day. I don’t have much to say about the book, though, and am not sure if I’ll ever want to write on it or teach it. The main question of the novel for me is the protagonist Casey Han’s line after realizing that she’s made final cut for employment at the leading consulting firm and after looking around the room at her co-internees who have not been offered a job:

“Back in her office, the happy faces outnumbered the upset ones. It was obscene that it had to be this way. Why couldn’t losing be a private affair? At least two of the ones who didn’t get offers were men who had worked alongside her nearly every weekend. One of them had a baby. What was he going to do? She could hardly face them. Would they have worried about her, however, if she’d been booted? The world was cruel with its rations. Who didn’t know that? A disappointment–that’s what it was, but it was hardly the end, right? None of them would ever starve, her refugee father would’ve said quickly. Americans were goddamn lucky. The United States was a rich country. You had to work, but at the very least, you would eat. Here, they fed you even if you didn’t work, he’d say. A professional failure was zilch compared with your family lost behind the 38th parallel. Casey peeked at Scott, the guy who’d just had the baby. He was trying to be brave–be a fucking good sport about it. Her father was wrong, she thought. Suffering was that–it sucked not to get what you want. No one wanted to fail publicly, and tragedies came in an assortment of sizes.”

Suffering is suffering, and tragedies come in all shapes and sizes. So don’t judge. Nice.

The interesting passage in the novel for me is the passage that describes the meeting of Casey Han and Joseph McReed, an old widowed owner of a rare bookstore.

“And your dress. My, my. Tremendous.” His voice filled with pleasure.
Casey glanced down at her ivory flapper-style dress. It had two crimson lines flowing vertically across the front and back, and draped over her shoulders was a cranberry-colored silk cardigan from a thrift store. On the weekends, her fanciful clothes resembled period costumes nearly.
“Daisy Buchanan,” he said, referring to the coldhearted girl from The Great Gatsby.
“Yes, I guess so,” she answered. His comment was like a private wink. She hadn’t been aware of it, but he was right. Her hat and dress were things that a character like Daisy might wear. When Casey made up hats, she never thought of herself, but imagined a more interesting woman. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d dressed like a character from a story. “Well, if she were Korean, that is,” she said, feeling self-conscious.
He looked at her quizically. “Her ethnicity would hardly matter,” he remarked sternly, as though he wouldn’t back down on this point. “No doubt there must be many Korean Daisys or Beatrices or Juliets.”

A lesson on muticulturalism from a kind-hearted old, white man. How nice. Not to be snarky, no. But the racial sensibility presented here is definitely and markedly postrace. It stands out for me especially since it contrasts so markedly with the mid-twentieth-century accounts of two writers I’m working on for my chapter now. Erik Erikson mentions, in the section on black identity in Childhood and Society, the black boy who stops indulging in Red Rider when he realizes the racial difference between himself and Red Rider. Maxine Hong Kingston, in interviews here and there, mentions her experience reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She loved the book when she was young and imagined herself as one of the March girls. But then she said she realized this part where a character in the novel marries a chinaman. And the chinaman was described funny. With a long pigtail. Inhuman. Kingston says she realized she was not one of the girls in the novel but the chinaman when she read this.
But Joseph McReed says in 2007 that there can be a Chinese Jo March. The March girl’s ethnicity doesn’t matter. Makes me wonder where we are in terms of the race question in the U.S. I think the multicultural sensibility delivered through McReed is in line with what Nathan Glazer says in We Are All Multiculturalists Now. He says that we’ve achieved equal opportunities for minorities in the U.S. Hence the title, we are all multiculturalists now. The one exception to this is African Americans. The black exception. Despite Casey’s insecurities about her sexual identity as an Asian woman now and then, the novel’s racial sensibility on the whole seems postrace. That race is no longer a central issue in one’s sense of self and the social dynamics one finds oneself in.

If I ever teach this book, the only way I can think of teaching it is to put it in the context of the social realism of the nineteenth-century English novels. The novel’s ambition is to draw a parallel between itself and the books of the “great tradition” (Leavis) such as Middlemarch and Jane Eyre. I’d try and think about the breadth and depth of the social realism of the Victorian novels, and ask the question of whether such a social realism is applicable to Lee’s novel.

I also read Nam Le’s debut collection of short stories, The Boat. The short story collection self-consciously asks the interesting question of the identity of an ethnic writer as well as the identity of his writing. No easy answer to that question. My favorite short story was the eponymous story at the very end.

Memories of My Ghost Brother

Finally… some rain and a little bit of drop in temperature… It’s still very humid, but at least it’s not as hot and humid as before. I took a break yesterday and watched movies and read for fun. In addition to being lazy and eating lots of sugar. Well, most of that is what I do everyday anyway, but I decided to call it a break.

I read Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother. For fun. (This is why my boyfriend makes fun of me for not being able to distinguish work from play. But it was fun. And I skimmed parts of the book. So it’s not work.) Except for the part about the ghost brother, which seemed contrived, and the parts where there is just too much explanation–I already know what Panmunjum is like; I don’t need a three-page description of it–I enjoyed it. It’s categorized as a novel, but it seems heavily based on autobiography. I mean, the main character’s name is “Insu/Heinz.” What more do you need?

It was sad reading the book. It’s a sad book. People get disfigured, maimed, sell themselves, kill themselves, and hurt other people. Post-Korean war Korea was a sad place to be in. While the book has numerous sad, horrific events in it, it didn’t come across as sensational. The main character is born between a former-prostitute-turned-black marketeer Korean mother and a German American GI father. The maternal family, or what’s left of them, depends on the market formed around the U.S. Army. Goods and people are mixed up in this market, of course. The best selling and the largest profit-making item on the market is women. Some women like Gannan, the young country relative mother brought and introduced to the army club, can’t take it and commit suicide when her naive hope to marry the GI who impregnated her is blown up. But the book doesn’t portray women as victims. Some women are active agents in their pursuit of economic well-being through securing a GI husband. The US army posts in Korea are little Americas and America is where the wealth is. As the mother says, “the streets in America are gold or something. I used to think every American was a millionaire and everyone owned his own house and had a car and drank Coca-Cola instead of water and had meat for every meal.” In a country with no manufacturing industry, the goods from the army PX are worshiped.

Dependency and resentment are thoroughly interwoven in the lives of the people who don’t have yet want. “This must have been how Gannan felt when she first met the yellow-haired GI bastard at the NCO Club,” says the narrator on his first day of American school, eyes fixed on the floor and unable to look up. He resents having to be with the “military brats” speaking English yet loves the amenities provided by the Army shops. I mean, if the other military brats can enjoy them, why can’t he? Because his mom’s Korean and the half of him which is less than the other half is dominant in his life? But Insu doesn’t think about these things. He takes what he can take and loves the people around him, damaged and damaging as they may be.

I may return to James’s story in the book. James is a childhood friend of Insu, half-black and half-Korean. Two mixed-race children with Korean mothers, they were close friends in American school. Having lost touch with James, Insu overhears the story of his death when Changmi’s mother comes to ask advice from his mother about how to keep a GI. Insu later tries to talk to his Hyongbu, his philanderer of an uncle, about this troubling story. Hyongbu tells him more than he would maybe like to know:

“Think about it,” he said. “You’re a dungwhore and you catch yourself a GI by getting pregnant with is brat, but then he goes off to Vietnam and gets himself killed. That leaves you with benefits from the great Emperor of America, but now you have a Black brat to feed, and it’s not enough money. So now you want another GI husband to start things over–maybe a white guy with a higher rank, ungh?–but who would marry a whore with a Black kid?”

My head hung lower and lower until I was staring glumly at the undissolved sugar at the bottom of my mug. Finally, Hyungbu said, “Maybe she was trying to scrub the color off and she held his face down in the washbasin too long.”

Through the tragic death of his half-black friend and the suggested role of his mother in his death, Insu understands the bitter, hateful economy of racial prejudices and the women’s manipulation of these prejudices in postwar Korea. “I would learn that women–even seemingly devoted mothers–will traffic in their children for the mythic promise of America.” Like his own mother.

The book made me think that it’s only been 50 years since all this. How much do we remember of those poverty-ridden, desperate postwar years? And how much of it still influences us and to what extent?

Crossing the Line

is a documentary on James Joseph Dresnok, “a US army private who in 1962 stunned the world by walking across the violently contested DMZ that cuts Korea in two and defecting to the communist North” (from the DVD jacket). It was good. Not all documentaries on North Korea are. I picked it up with mixed feelings of obligation and curiosity and was pleasantly surprised by its balanced portrayal of the defectors and the North Korean society. The director, Daniel Gordon, is English, and in the interview with the director, he said that having grown up in a society where there is really no parading of patriotism (?), he could approach both North Korea and the U.S. with their heavy flaunting of patriotism as a neutral observer. There’s this great scene in the documentary where a scene of the Kim Il Sung statue is succeeded by a scene of the Abraham Lincoln statue in Richmond, Virginia, Dresnok’s hometown. Their poses are strikingly similar with an outstretched hand symbolically beckoning the herd to follow their lead.

I remember reading the Jenkins story in Time a few years back. Jenkins was also a US soldier stationed in South Korea who defected to the North. He married a Japanese woman who had been abducted by the North Koreans. (Twenty years his junior!) The woman was able to get back to Japan decades after she was abducted, and decided to stay in Japan instead of going back to the North where her husband and two daughters are. Jenkins, because he’s a deserter, would face extradition and a court martial followed by imprisonment if he went to Japan. After some political orchestration, actively engaged in by the Japanese sympathizers of the Jenkins family, the family did end up together two years later. Jenkins, in exchange for a lenient treatment by the US army, did an exclusive interview on his life in North Korea with a journalist. He regretted the choice he made to defect and criticizes the North Korean society as a tyrannical society that grants no individual freedom. He also criticized one of his fellow defectors, Dresnok, for bullying and beating him.

Crossing the Line was in the making when all this happened. Dresnok, who seems to be happy with his life in North Korea, calls Jenkins a liar and contradicts most of what he says.

Around the time when Dresnok defected, at the height of the Cold War, four US army soldiers crossed the DMZ from the South to the North. Their motivations, while speculated about, remain partly mysterious to the end. The director says that in the case of Dresnok, he probably had a better life in North Korea then he would have had he not defected. He became a kind of minor celebrity in the North because the North Korean government made the four American defectors star in a propaganda movie which became popular in the North. They played the Americans in the movie.

I grew up at a time when everything North Korean was demonized in the South. Even in the democratic South, I grew up amidst heavy propagandas and government-guided “mental education projects”. While information about North Korea is scarce now, it was even scarcer back in the 80s, and I never had a good sense of what North Korea is like. I watched this TV documentary that aired this summer when I was visiting home, “Crossing the Border of Paradise.” It’s about North Korean refugees who cross the North Korean/Chinese border and later cross multiple borders in Southeast Asia in search of a legally recognized refugee status. There was this one scene that really caught my eye between two sisters, one living in South Korea now and one still living in the North. One of the two sisters had crossed the border and ultimately made her way to South Korea. She wanted to get her sister out of North Korea to join her in the South. So she smuggled her sister out. And they’re talking, face-to-face, in a motel room in the border town. The younger sister refuses to leave North Korea. Why don’t you want to leave? The older sister asks her. Mom’s dead, dad’s dead, it’s not like you have relatives in the North. People are starving to death. Why don’t you want to leave? The younger sister protests. You have to stick it out especially when the times are bad. These are bad times, but they will pass. You have to endure and persevere. Then times will change. The older sister finally gives up. The reporter asks the younger sister again at the end of the sisters’ conversation, “Why don’t you want to leave?” The girl sighs and says in a low voice, “됴국이지요” . . .  It’s the motherland.

I don’t know why that scene hit me so hard. Because the girl’s stubborn adherence to her land of birth, her loyalty and affection to all that she’s known for her entire life, seem to go against the utilitarian and pragmatic understanding of economic migration? And against the celebration of transnationalism and a borderless world nowadays in the academy?

The tedious task of putting together a chapter

I’ve kind of known this all along. But there’s a lot of tedious work you have to do when you put together an essay or a chapter. I’m working on my second chapter now on Kingston and Viramontes. I’m reading the bilingual child in each text in the context of the flourishing of child psychology in the postwar era. Erik Erikson’s Chilhood and Society might be one book I look closely at in terms of how cultural differences were viewed and understood in relation to human development. I have various strands of ideas and bits and pieces of interesting information and passages, but I’m not sure how to piece everything together as of now.

One of the most tedious work, I’m finding out is what we usually call “literature review” where we go through all the existing scholarship on the topic of the text. When it comes to an author like Kingston and a book like The Woman Warrior, there’s a lot to go through. I do come across interesting and pertinent criticism and analyses, but then there’s a lot that’s not immediately relevant. I’m learning to be more patient in doing research. It helps that I’m very interested in the topic and love the writers and the texts I work on.

Wrapping up the visit

I thought this trip would be about my sister’s wedding. It was. But it was also about witnessing the anti-US beef protests. The size and scope were truly amazing. The anti-US beef protests, in brief, stem from the present government’s decision to open up the beef market to US beef as a part of the KorUS FTA. I don’t know that much about the details of how the state-of-affairs developed, but the government’s decision to open the beef market came by as a surprise to the populace at large. The president took the matter into his own hands without sufficiently paying attention to what the people wanted and went ahead and signed the deal. Lee’s concession has been taken as a sign of his “kowtowing” to the U.S. Right after the treaty was signed, a Korean TV program of the investigative journalism sort did a piece on how unsafe US beef is and how it possibly spreads mad cow disease. Condensed into one sentence, the main message of the program became ” if you eat US beef gleaned from cattle more than 30 yrs old, you’ll contract mad cow disease.” This, of course, generated huge fear among Koreans and added fuel to their mounting anger. They’ve been out on the streets since, and yesterday, the 21st anniversary of the 6.10 protest, marked the largest protest with 700,000 participants (this is not a conservative estimate) of the month.

The protests first started out as candlelight vigils, but then quickly developed into protests and became violent and illegal in part. Huge numbers of riot police were called out to contain the protests. In deterring the protesters from marching to the Blue House and in getting the protesters off the streets (occupying the streets, instead of the pedestrian walks, is illegal), the riot police exercised brutality here and there. As the cause of the protests changed drastically from opposing US beef to bringing down Lee from office, the level of confrontation between the police and the protesters mounted. And both sides saw a lot of injuries.

I spent hours and hours looking up related articles and editorials on the internet and was glued to the TV when the protests were broadcast. I still have a hard time understanding the protests. They’re taken as a righteous expression of disappointment and anger by the progressive organizations and people. Maybe it’s because I haven’t followed politics and social issues in Korea very closely, but I have a hard time taking up the same position. The other side, the politically conservative, is really not an option, since their view can more or less be summarized in 1) look at those Satan’s crowd trying to bring down the country and 2) stop the protests right now; KorUS FTA is the way to go! It feels like you have to endorse the protests if you’re politically progressive, but I find that hard to do because these protests are different from the ones I used to know. I mean, what’s so fascinating about these protests is that they brought together people from all ages and groups. You have elementary-school kids out with their mothers as well as middle-school and high-school kids marching with signs that say they’re too young to die.

American expatriates in Korea seem more or less alienated by the “unreasonable” character of the protests. Some of them think it’s ridiculous that the Korean protesters think that US beef will bring mad cow disease. Not just Americans but a lot of Koreans think the same. The media reportage of mad cow disease through US beef falls more in line with yellow journalism than responsible journalism. It’s easy to dismiss the outrage of the protesters as unreasonable and overly emotional. But what’s happening now is just too big and too forceful to be dismissed.

Personally, watching the protests has made me think long and hard about the nebulous concept of the people, the meaning of democracy, and neoliberalism. While marveling at the power of the people being demonstrated, I found it hard to simply agree with the cries for the right to be heard in democracy. The protesters identify as citizens in democracy. Didn’t the same citizens elect Lee as president, though? Aren’t there also responsibilities in democracy as well as freedom? (OMG, I fucking sound like Edmund Burke.) What puzzles me is that the same Koreans who view the beef agreement as “national humiliation” are those who send their kids abroad to be educated in English-speaking countries and those who want college classes to be in English. Or are they not the same Koreans? I’ve heard South Korea described as a country that aggressively embraces neoliberalism. Who’s the agent in this aggressive embrace? The government? The industries? The choe-bul? Or the people?

In refusing to renegotiate the beef trade with the U.S. (which is something the protesters are asking for), President Lee said that we need to think what would really help our national interest. He said that renegotiation will only negatively effect Korea’s terms of trade with the U.S. (which is true; the democratic party is more severe than the republican party on this and democratic nominee Obama has repeatedly said that he will renegotiate the KorUS FTA to protect the US automobile industry). He also added that Korea’s status in the world today is such that other countries will not sympathize with Korea’s attempt to renegotiate. While Lee is a neoliberal, what he said, I think, accurately reflects South Korea’s place in the world at the moment. Having been a corporate manager for a long time, Lee knows Korea’s economic status well. South Korea has made strides in economic development in the past decades (a large part of it due to the U.S.’s strategic cultivating of Korea into a US trading partner and market after WWII), and is an economic powerhouse in the Asia-Pacific now. It can even be viewed as a sub-imperial country in the Asia-Pacific. And yet, not many Koreans seem to think of “national interest” in relation to such geopolitical issues as the above. Frankly, that seems selfish.

People’s power can be revolutionary exactly because it is unbridled and comes from below. A lot of intellectuals of leftist inclination romanticize people’s power. But in orthodox Marxism revolutions are necessarily violent. The archetype of revolutions, the French Revolution, was bloody and chaotic. I think I witnessed a glimpse of both the force and the disorder of people’s power in the protests. As Nak-cheong Paik, one of my favorite Korean intellectuals, noted, the problem with the progressive camp in Korea is that it has no unifying agenda. Will the protests provide an opportunity for the progressives to come together? A last add on: the sycophantic politicians who came out to the rallies and protests when they realized that this is where the people are and loudly claimed to oppose the beef treaty made me sick at heart.

The NYTimes article that summarizes the anti-US beef protests.

Never Forever

Finally watched Gina Kim’s _Never Forever_(2007). I lucked out. I don’t think it’s been released on DVD yet, but the movie was released in the theaters in Korea last June (and such movies are easier to get in Korea than in the U.S.). It premiered at the 2007 Sundance film festival and was screened at various Asian American film festivals in the U.S. I wanted to see it when it was screened in NYC as a part of the city’s Asian American film festival last year, but didn’t get around to it.

Gina Kim is an interesting feminist film maker. Her takes on female sexuality and the body don’t always sit well with me, but I like her movies nonetheless. _Never Forever_ is a melodrama through and through. It was fresh to see Vera Farmiga paired up with Jung-woo Ha. The pairing, despite its initial awkwardness, grew on me. The genre of the melodrama helps me suspend disbelief and just go with the flow of the budding love affair. Gina Kim talked about influences in a couple of interviews. She suggests that she brings to the movie the melodramatic traditions of both the U.S. and Korea, represented by Douglas Sirk and the 60s Korean melodramas (The Houseguest and My Mother; gee, that made me chuckle).

I was reminded of Susan Choi’s novels, _The Foreign Student_ and _A Person of Interest_ when I was watching the movie. The fantasy around interracial romance in these works intrigue me. All three works feature romance between Asian men and white women. Kim talks about how she came up with the idea of exploring a love affair between a wealthy, married white woman and a poor, working class, illegal immigrant as a way of challenging the stereotypes of Asian men in the U.S. Choi kind of does the same in her debut novel, _The Foreign Student_, as gives interiority to an alien and “humanizes” him (to borrow from what one of my classmates had said when we read the novel in a class). What’s somewhat disturbing to me in the premise of these romances is that the white woman is always and inevitably a social misfit. In other words, they are women who are uncomfortable in their own skin. Nothing wrong with sensitive and unsure women engaging in romance for self-fulfillment (and aren’t we all flawed in our own ways anyway?), but the equation of the romance asks the foreigner fill in the white woman’s desire for security in love if not in society. Is it really that impossible to imagine a socially well adapted white woman falling in love with an Asian alien? This is a rhetorical question.

The Martyr on stage

I saw what I assume to be the world premiere stage production of Richard E. Kim’s _The Martyr_ last night. Saying that it’s the world premiere is kind of fancy, but what I mean by that is that I was surprised (and glad) that someone thought to adapt the novel for stage. Richard E. Kim is a first generation Korean American writer who wrote and published in the 60s and 70s. One of his novels was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I think it was the Martyr. He quickly faded out, though, and since his works are set in Korea and not in the U.S., he is only marginally regarded as an Asian American writer. I read him in my advisor’s class where she was trying to rethink the canon of Asian American literature.

The play was good if not mind blowing. The sets were great, the acting was good. Some scenes, though, relied too much on lengthy dialogues. Overall, I think it was a decent adaptation for the stage. One interesting change in this play was that they changed a young man in the novel into a young woman. I wonder what they were trying to do. The young man (Park) in the novel is an atheist deeply skeptical of his father’s (one of the martyred ministers) faith. By turning this man into a woman, I wonder if the play didn’t try to soften the father-son conflict and introduce a gender dynamic. It worked out well for the play.

It seems like there’s a growing interest in the Korean War among Asian Americanists. My advisor’s work on the Pacific wars touches on that; Daniel Kim seems to be working on it; and one of the incoming graduate students expresses interest in it too. Maybe it’s about time that the Korean War is studied and analyzed not just from a historical perspective but also from a cultural perspecitve. I welcome that, you know. Otherwise known as the forgotten war, the Korean War has much to offer in terms of exploring the dynamics of democracy and neoliberalism. I hope, though, that American academics who work on this also look at the Korean representations and studies of the war.

So many MPs out on the streets near Gwanghwamun last night. The anti-FTA protests are much bigger than I thought. Maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but I feel like there’s a lot of social unrest in the Asia Pacifi right now.

Break

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. The past two months have been, ahem, a break from work and a headlong plunge into what may be the beginning of a relationship. So wish me luck on this front if you read this; it’s been a while since I met someone to whom I can feel emotionally close. In a romantic relationship, I mean.

I have to pick up on work, though, and being in Seoul for my sister’s wedding doesn’t help with that very much. The reading I brought over is remotely related to the dissertation. The plan was to read volume one of Capital during the trip and put in some light (?) reading to supplement that. So far, I’ve only gone through the commodity chapter. Heh.

Scattered and spacy as I have been, I’ve started stringing together some interesting pieces for the second chapter. The department is handing out some small summer research fellowships this year, and although I don’t think I have a strong case for that fellowship–since my research doesn’t exactly require travel and the grant prioritizes such projects–I’ve stilled submitted something based on the research for the second chapter. I’m looking at bilingual and migrant children in the second chapter of the dissertation (literary texts are Kingston’s _The Woman Warrior_ and Viramontes’s _Under the Feet of Jesus_), and I’ve designed a research project titled “The Cult of the Child and the Culture of Pathologies, 1960s-1990s”. Even if the grant application doesn’t go through, I think I’ll be pursuing this line of inquiry. The pathology part stems out of my interest in frenectomies in Korea for the sake of English acquisition. This is not a domestic situation, but when you think of the tongue-cutting scene in Kingston’s text, the echo is definitely, if eerily, there. My hypothesis regarding this is that what happened to the language minority children in the U.S. in the postwar era has global implications. And if I push this a little bit, I’d say that the fate of language minority children in postwar U.S. prefigures the pressure on East Asian kids’ tongues contemporarily.

Being in Seoul is giving me a chance to look at this from a Korean angle. I watched the 2003 movie _If You Were Me_ that has a short on frenectomy on a child. The movie has been commissioned by the South Korean Human Rights Commission, and each of the six shorts portrays an instance of human right abuse in Korea. The short shows how the operation is done, and believe me, I had to turn my eyes. It’s really visceral. I’m not sure about the extent of this operation–I do think this is an extreme measure even among the education-crazed Korean parents–but it’s sure true that Korean parents’ obsession with English approximates zealotry. If it is a pathology, it is most certainly a social pathology of compressed modernization and neoliberalism.

I wonder if there’s a way of smoothly going back and forth between the U.S. and Korea. I admit there’s some perks in being able to go back and forth. I get to see some performances and exhibitions I wouldn’t get to see otherwise. And I also get to have a dual perspective on how things are changing. But despite all the perks, it’s still not easy. Not at all.   

Andrea Smith talk

I went to a talk by Andrea Smith yesterday. It was an event organized by an undergraduate group interested in Native American issues, and the talk evolved around Smith’s recent Amnesty International commissioned report on violence against Native American women, Maze of Injustice (?). I got note of the event at the last minute and decided to go because I wanted to hear Smith talk. With the recent uproar regarding her tenure case at the U of Michigan, I wanted to know more about this scholar cum activist.

I’m glad I went, although it kind of broke into my evening schedule. The way she approached the issue of violence against Native American women, through a grassroots organizing mode rather than through a resort to the criminal justice system, made me rethink what I said about what the Korean government should do about the Vietnamese women in Korea. (I still think the government should do something, but now I see more clearly that that’s not enough.) What she said about non-profit organizations also brought to light the limits of community work funded by federal or multinational corporate dollars. With her list of publications and record of scholarship, I’m surprised she didn’t get tenure at Michigan. As many people have noted, it’s even more surprising that it’s the women’s studies program that reviewed her negatively for tenure. (She holds a joint appointment between American Culture and Women’s Studies.) Who knows what’s going on internally when it comes to these things. I hope all works out well for her.

Vietnamese women in Korea

I don’t understand how a man who beat his wife to death and broke 18 ribs in her body managed to get away with a 12 year sentence. How is this possible? I mean, you’d probably have to beat someone hard for a very long time to break fucking 18 ribs in the body. Another woman dies of domestic violence. Brokerage of international marriages that prey on the poverty of certain parts of Southeast Asia is nothing but human trafficking in disguise. It’s about time that women’s organizations in Korea press the government to fucking scrutinize these human trafficking agencies and raise the bar for the establishment of these agencies. If there is no way to stop them from operating, then make it so that they provide adequate information to the women they’re selling into bondage (oops, is it marriage?), have them provide classes on cultural adjustment and language, and allow the women to be able to get a divorce if they find themselves unhappy in these marriages. These marriage brokering agencies probably make use of the recent popularity of Korean pop culture in Southeast Asia to lure young women into marrying men much older than them. Believe me, the men they marry are nothing like the actors in K-dramas, and the life they lead are not even remotely close to the fantastic lives depicted in K-dramas.

This is an ongoing problem that has been around for quite a while now. I remember hearing from a friend who is a district attorney at a regional court of her cases of abused Vietnamese women. These women often suffer from extreme degrees of abuse because they are usually isolated in rural areas where there is virtually no support system in place and because they have no means of reaching out for help in a country and in a language foreign to them. I can’t believe that the district court would worry about this murder ruining Korea’s image in Vietnam. What they should be worrying about instead if how to protect the rights of these women whose access to the legal and social system is very limited. Korea really needs to attend to the plights of foreign laborers and brides who have ended up in Korea not because Korea is a great country to live in but because Korea has now become a country comparably wealthier to these people’s countries of origin. And because of its economic ascent, Korea has now become an aggressor in labor exploitation and abuse on a world scale. Instead of taking a defensive stance–what about the poor in Korea? how can Korea be an aggressor when Korea’s so dependent on the U.S.?–which fails to identify this issue as a structural and systemic issue of late capitalism and focuses on where to turn the blame, it’s about time more Koreans think seriously about the society’s responsibility toward the disenfranchised foreigners in Korea. Sometimes when I encounter discriminatory remarks toward foreign laborers in Korea, I’m so struck by the lapse of historical memory. Only recently Korea was a country that exported labor and women for marriage overseas. Whoever can be prejudiced toward foreign laborers in Korea only needs to remember that he was the person he is looking down on now thirty years ago. Damn, I hate to be so moralistic, but I’m so angry I can’t help myself.