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.