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.

Being Sleazy . . .

I’m at a professor’s apartment petsitting for a couple of days while she attends a conference. Her place is so nice (and so clean, OMG, so clean) it makes me have fantasies of getting a job. I’m not sure if all assistant professors can afford such a nice place, though. It’s really nice to pretend like I have pets for a change.

I’m sifting through references for the second chapter. My draft of the first chapter still has to make the round of the committee, but my advisor suggested I start reading for the second chapter. Most likely, I’ll be revising the first chapter as I glean comments and questions from my readers and reading for the second chapter at the same time. I’m writing on Maxine Hong Kingston and Helena Maria Viramontes in the second chapter, and I’ve just started going over the critical stuff on Kingston. So many essays and books . . . I need to take a break.

Which makes my mind wander back to last night when I, after reading Inhoon Choi’s novel The Square (something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but have only just gotten around to), realized that I made the most embarrassing mistake a human being can possibly make. I mean, this is a novel I’m interested in. How can I make such a mistake? Basically what I did is I made a factual error in writing a conference paper proposal on The Square and another text. While I need to put in more work on the dissertation, I for some reason thought that I’d be able to write this essay that I want to write on two books I’m really interested in if I made myself write a conference paper to begin with. The conference was a pretty prestigious one, and my proposal didn’t make it in, which didn’t upset me. But the thing is I know one of the conference organizers who would probably have read my proposal and thought that I was the sleaziest reader in the history of mankind.

The protagonist of the novel, a Korean War POW, opts to be repatriated to a “third country” over either the South or the North. At the time of narration, the protagonist is on board the ship that is taking him and a bunch of other POWs to India. And I said he was on his way to Hong Kong. The ship stops by Hong Kong and Macao on its way to India. But Hong Kong instead of India! Next time I run into this conference organizer, if I ever do, I’m definitely going to duck.

Anyway, it’s interesting reading a Korean novel that I read probably sometime in high school again. It reads very differently. I don’t know why I’m suddenly developing an interest in Korean writers. There was this lady who worked with my mom a little bit a while ago whose husband (who recently passed, RIP) was a renowned literary critic (well-known enough that you’d know who he is if I mentioned the name). When I first met her in Seoul where she was visiting for a conference and which was right before I left to study abroad, she asked me why I didn’t do Korean literature. And I’m pretty sure she said it in a way that clearly conveyed  her puzzlement as to why I would want a doctorate in English. I guess it didn’t quite enter her mind that her husband’s primary works were in English literature and not in American literature. They’re the same, right? The Anglo-American continuum.

She’s a nice lady, and I know that she was just puzzled and not judging. But it did make me think of why I’m not doing Korean literature. Frankly, I didn’t like twentieth-century Korean literature at the time. Depressing, depressing, depressing. The colonial period is about subjugation, exploitation, occasionally struggle for liberation; between Independence and the Korean War is about taut ideological battles; nation-reconstruction after the War is about the strenuous fight for democracy and for workers’ and citizens’ rights, about modernization which entails poor folks leaving the countryside and pouring into Seoul, about urban consumerism and those who get excluded from that. The impression I then had about Korean literature was that it was dark, gloomy, and full of hardship. Back then, I wanted none of it. Little did I know that I’d develop an interest in modern Korean literature as I got to understand what criticism meant. Better than never, I guess.

Radical scholarship?

The introduction to the most recent issue of Social Text helped me organize some thoughts I had about the academic climate now and what kind of scholarship I want to do. This issue of Social Text comes out of the Duke LaCrosse players incident. The way this case evolved–from an alleged rape investigation to a case of wrongful criminalization of the innocent–had raised for me a number of complex questions around race, gender, ligitation, and advocacy work. Apart from the issue of what is true and what is not, I found fascinating the contestation of narratives in this case. Is this a story of a woman of color sexually exploited and violated? Is this a story of innocence plagued by ungrounded accusation? Is this a story of civil rights advocacy gone awry? Or, is this a story of protecting individual rights under the law?

Truth be told, I had to hold my breath for a bit when it so turned out that the allegation was proved ungrounded. And I have to say I first thought of the professors and the community activists at Duke who spoke up against the university’s shortcomings on dealing with race and gender. How would I deal with such an outcome if I was in that situation? The self-indulgent me had to put myself in that place.

I appreciated the Social Text introduction because the writers made it very clear that the problem, framed mainly in the media as a problem of this one individual case, is actually much larger. That this one case grows out of a complex matrix of structural problems around race, gender, and class that institutions (not just Duke) need to address. Situtating the problem in terms of the larger history of how certain disciplines were established after the Civil Rights movement and how now there’s a comprehensive backlash against the so-called politicization of knowledge production just made this case much more comprehensible without being reductive. And through instances like this, I come to understand that I will most likely be a leftist academic. Probably with stronger leftist sentiments than most. And while this may sound lame, I don’t see this as a matter of choice. I don’t choose to be a leftist academic. I just am one.

Buttons and T-shirts

A funny teaching episode. We were reading Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Wilshire Bus” and “A Fire in Fontana.” I had asked the students to come to class with a passage they would like to discuss and also a brief explanation of what they found significant about the passage. I first had the students go around and say what passage in “Wilshire Bus” they picked and discovered that the majority of them wanted to talk about the passage where Esther Kuroiwa, as she distances herself from the Chinese woman sitting next to her being harassed, recollects the pain of seeing a Korean man with a “I AM KOREAN” button right after she left camp.

Intrigued that so many students were piqued by this passage, I asked: “Any of you heard of these buttons, “I AM  CHINESE,” “I AM KOREAN” buttons before?” None of them had. But then a girl raised her hand and said, “One of my friends has a I AM KOREAN  T-shirt.”

In the age we live in ethnicity is fashion.