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.
