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.

Women of Color conference at Ann Arbor

This looks like an interesting conference. Despite the rapid institutionalization of ethnic studies, it seems like there’s still a lot of tension and dissension when it comes to issues of evaluating academic performance–for one, tenure issues–by scholars of color.

On the one hand, ethnic studies in general is coming under critique for becoming mainstreamed and losing its critical edge (e.g. George Lipsitz’s critique that “ethnic studies seem to be doing pretty well whereas ethnic peoples around the world are faring worse and worse” is a good example). On the other hand, the critique is somewhat premature when one considers that ethnic studies never gained the legitimacy given the more traditional and established, political-interest-free (? what?) disciplines such as history, political science, and what not. I guess in a situation like this, you need to do both however contradictory that may seem. Point out the complacency of institutional ethnic studies, but attend to and support the excellent scholarship that comes out of the field. Is that enough, though?

Conference on South Korea’s Education Exodus

This is way out of my field, but it does remind me of a sentence I read in the preface of a book written by a Korean anthropologist who had done fieldwork in the American South. He started the preface by saying how Koreans had to learn Japanese in the colonial period and how now they have to learn English.  The South Korean education exodus is a symptom of aggressive neoliberalization and an embrace of globalization as the conference description states below. But I think it also needs to be looked at within a larger and longer history of imperialism.

South Korea’s Education Exodus: Risks, Realities, and Challenges
March 27-28, 2008

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Conference Website: http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/EducationExodus/index.html

E-mail: aasp@uiuc.edu

South Korean “early study abroad” students – namely those young people who exit South Korea for study prior to college – are literally changing the face of Korean diasporic communities across the U.S. and other English-speaking nations. Early study abroad is a rapidly escalating market in South Korea: a $550 million industry in the first quarter of 2004, doubling the 2002 figures. Remarkably, a recent South Korean survey revealed that if given the opportunity, 1 out of 4 parents would like to emigrate for their children’s education. The conference will ask large questions about South Korea’s particular globalization embrace, cosmopolitan desires, and education system; and about the changing face and social reality of Korean America with the arrival of these new immigrants. In doing so, the conference will take up both the macro-level context and consequences and the U.S. realities of this growing “immigrant” population.

Ruins . . .

As I was agonizing over whether I had sent in the wrong amount for my tax return and whether I was going to jail for tax fraud this morning, my sister informed me over IM that there was a fire on Namdaemun. I first thought she was referring to the Namdaemun market, which is a big market district in Seoul and often referred to as just Namdaemun, and asked after casualties. How many casualties? One, apparently. Not the market but the actual gate had been set on fire. The number one national treasure whose picture adorns history textbooks across grades is burnt to ashes.

Pictures fromhere

It’s  so sad . . . The gate has been around for 600 years. Think about all the historical turmoils it survived, including the Japanese colonial era and the Korean War. And now it’s dead . . . It’s heartbreaking. I wonder who did this and why . . . The police is said to be investigating the arson around those who have previous records of setting historical sites and properties on fire. They’re also looking into if the homeless around Seoul station, close to the burnt gate, are involved. Let’s hope there’s no abuse of police force during investigation and that this doesn’t lead into criminalzing the homeless.

There’s something really sad about seeing a historic monument in ruins. Koreans are mourning the loss of the gate with white chrysanthemums. The loss will be remembered.

Split Tongue

Big Hominid made an image for this blog, and I really like it. I think it captures the spirit of the blog well:)

It also reminds me of my, uh, dissertation. I’m working on bilingualism/bilingual subjects in Asian American literature and Latino literature in the postwar era, 1960s-1990s to be more precise. I first got interested in the topic because of the way bilingualism has been medicalized and pathologized in the U.S. People thought that bilingualism induced retardation (i.e. it messes up your cognitive development) and speech pathologies. It has to do mostly with the immigration history and the racialization of certain immigrant groups, because bilingualism, although it is not qualified, refers to immigrant bilingualism (as opposed to elite bilingualism).

So I’m interested in all aspects of language and psychology: language loyalties, language maintenance, language disavowal, loss of language, language “families”, the racialization and medicalization of bilingualism, translation, cultural brokering, etc.

Word on the street has that the noted scholar on Hemispheric studies, Kirsten Silva-Gruez is working on an exciting new book on the history of the Spanish language in the U.S. I think my interest in postwar bilingual education overlaps with part of what she’s doing. Another noted scholar on Asian American studies and comparative ethnic studies, Mae Ngai is also working on language, education, and assimilation in a somewhat different context. She came for a workshop today (paper available here: it is a draft and she asks that it not be circulated or cited). The title of the papers is “Brokering Inclusion,” and she looks at this one particular Chinese family in the late nineteenth century in California who were civil rights advocates and also engaged in some shady brokering business that made them take advantage of Chinese immigrants less acculturated than themselves. I love the way she challenges the standardized narrative of ethnic succession, which argues for greater inclusion for successive generations of immigrants, and tries to look at how exclusion and inclusion work together in this case. The implications of her argument, I think, go well beyond this paper.

The day didn’t start out so well, though. I broke a cup that I really like:(
Friends have told me that this happens when you embark on your dissertation, but I’ve been feeling pretty lonely lately. I don’t know why. So I end up hanging out with people more than I ever used to. While being bugged by the thought that I should be working . . . . And yes, I’m going to see the movie 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days tomorrow.

The Diplomatic-Industrial Complex

I’m struck by Parag Khanna’s prescription that the U.S. (already a waning empire) build a “diplomatic-industrial complex” if it wants to stay afloat in the changing world order (where U.S. hegemony is being replaced by a China-EU-U.S. dynamic) in his recent cover essay for the New York Time Magazine. Because the argument that he makes so closely resembles one of the rationales for advocating bilingual education in the 1960s. As I go over the congressional recordings of the Bilingual Education Act (1967), I keep noticing how repairing U.S. relations with South American countries and preparing a pool of bilinguals to work for U.S. diplomacy and business was a key justification for bilingual education. Hector Garcia, founder of the GI Forum and an expert witness at the congressional hearings, went so far as to say that “Texas and the Southwest United States may well be the training grounds for American diplomacy in Latin America.”

The aspiration of the Bilingual Education Act was to take care of social justice and the national interest in education at the same time. It tried to destigmatize the bilingualism of the Spanish-speaking children in schools and in doing so, made the case that the liability that bilingualism has become can be turned into a national asset. Most notably through the national Defense Education Act (1958), the U.S. was at this time trying to invest more in foreign language instruction. (Of course, these educational measures and acts were very much in line with the Cold War ideology of the time.) Investing in bilingual children who already had Spanish, instead of trying to beat Spanish out of these children, seemed like a good way of boosting the country’s level of foreign-language instruction. In the words of another expert witness at the hearing, “there [was] something sadly paradoxical about the schools’ well-meaning effort to make the Mexican-American child “talk American”–to eradicate his Spanish. For they are at the same time working strenuously to teach Spanish to the Anglo-American students, acclaiming the advantage of being able to communicate fluently in a language other than one’s own.”

While this is only a part of the story, pitching bilingual education in terms of how it can contribute to the national interest readily subjects bilingual education, probably the most representative example of multiculturalism in education, to the standard Marxist critique of multiculturalism. That multiculturalism is the social logic of capitalism.

What is so interesting for me in Khanna’s argument is to see a return to the idea that the U.S. needs to fortify its diplomatic, business sector by making it more global after the change in federal attitude toward bilingual education since the 1980s and the overall retrenchment in bilingual education. It raises interesting questions about multiculturalism and capitalism. Does this mean that multiculturalism really profits from capitalism and vice versa? How would one advocate multiculturalism outside of a capitalist frame of reference? Persuasively. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be picking up Khanna’s book when it comes out in March . . .

What about transnationalism in Asian American studies?

After having been to a rather bizarre talk on the figuration of the Chinese (or the Mandarin) in Western modernist literature which ended with the speaker’s little spiel on the state of transnationalism in Asian American studies, I’m struck by how progressive scholars these days all alike seem to say that scholars in Asian American studies should not only work on Asian “American” texts, histories, and issues but also on “Asian” texts, histories, and issues. I understand that this exhortation is coming from a strong and considered critique of American exceptionalism, but I still find that nudge somewhat bewildering.

Mostly because I’m not sure why the onus is on scholars in Asian American studies to take up the study of Asia. I mean, sure, Asian American history intersects with the history of U.S. military interventions and commerce in Asia, and it makes a lot of sense to look at both China and Chinese America if you were working on the Chinese diaspora (like Ong did in one of her books). But I find something unsettling and uncomfortable about the argument that you need to read both Asian American texts and Asian texts to avoid your project being “too American.” Maybe I’m not getting this because I’m not American.

In addition to not being able to see how working on both Asian American texts and Asian texts alone makes your work less U.S.-centered, I’m also somewhat cautious of  the sudden demand that scholars in Asian American studies avail themselves of Asian texts. For example, there is this passage in one of Sau-ling Wong’s essays where she discusses her experience in a graduate class. She had her graduate class read some Chinese writers. She thought they had to be read in the tradition of Chinese literary history and criticism. However, her graduate students (ain’t going to name names…) showed her how the Chinese writers can actually be read with some well-known Asian American writers. Wong ends the passage with a very generous reflection on the kinds of innovative readings that reading the Chinese writers through Asian American writers allow.

Which is all good and fine. I like such reading practices that create new rubrics of comparison.  But then I can’t help but think of what would be “lost” if such readings ignore the place of the Chinese writer in Chinese history and the ways in which the writer has been discussed in Chinese literary criticism. I can’t help it if I sound a bit old fashioned here. Although I should make it clear that what concerns me is not so much what constitutes good scholarship as who gets to read which writers in what ways. And with what authority. Or maybe I’m just being finicky.

The speaker last night ended his little spiel on the sorry state of transnationalism  on Asian American studies by pointing to the “language problem” of scholars in Asian American studies. They don’t have the languages to read Asian texts. (The speaker himself had spent some years in Beijing and seemed to speak Mandarin.) I understood what he was saying, but then really disagreed with his casting the lack of attention to Asian texts in Asian American studies as a “language problem.” While language can be one of the many reasons why Asian texts are never given the proper scholarly attention that is given to Western classics, it is by no means the most prominent reason. Rey Chow in one of her works mentions that the unequal relations of the East and West will only change when we read Asian literature with the same attention and interest we extend to Western literature. If Asian classics have the same place in modernity as Western classics do, then students would be clamoring to learn Asian languages. The problem is that’s not the case. Compared to Western literature, Asian literature is undervalued, and students and researchers go for the prestigious, well established fields within literary and cultural studies. Which is never East Asian studies. (Just think about the prestige of Shakespeare studies in English.)

Having said all this, I concur with the speaker that it’d be awesome if everybody in English had a language other than English. Like really had a language other than English. Instead of just doing enough to pass the required foreign language exam which is more or less a joke. And having laid out all my complaints about scholars in Asian American studies trying to make it into East Asian studies, I actually am very excited by works by scholars such as Viet Nguyen and Naoki Sakai who bring interesting and innovative insights into reading the literature of the Asian diaspora. I hope more solid scholarship in this area makes me realize how ungrounded and foolish my complaints and concerns are.

The Shadow of Arms

I just finished Suk-young Hwang’s The Shadow of Arms (1985) where the author (a renowned South Korean writer) presents a story of South Korean involvement in the Vietnam War through a Korean army officer who tracks down the black market, the point of convergence for the U.S. army, the Korean army, the South Vietnamese army, and even the NFL. It was really good. I can’t vouch for the English translation (since I haven’t looked at it), but an English translation has been issued by Cornell UP. I had decided to read this and another Korean author’s work on Vietnam (Hyun-suk Bang’s two short stories in Time to Eat Lobsters) after hearing a professor’s talk on comparing the U.S. and Japanese and Korean representations of the Vietnam War a couple of months ago. Finally got around to it this winter. Here’s a good article on Hwang’s novel at Japan Focus if you’re interested. I think the article does a persuasive reading of the (im)possibility of a revolutionary subject in the ascending order of the postwar empire which fosters neocolonialism and subimperialism.

I’m a little heavy hearted since I haven’t yet started on the first chapter yet. But I’ll get around to it. Soon. I’m also grading an undergraduate class on law and literature this semester. It’s taught by someone on my committee and the class partly speaks to my dissertation interests, so it’ll be good.