Hasty and sketchy

Seems like all I ever get around to these days are notes for future entries which never appear, so here they are in handy bullet-point format.

• Friday night was a surprising success: a housewarming for a geeky young coworker of monshu's that I thought we'd spend all of an hour at. monshu left after ten; I stayed around until 12:30.
• Saturday afternoon we made a trip to Gethsemane only to find that most of their spring stock of herbs doesn't seem to be out yet. There were two kinds of mint, neither of which (chocolate and mojito) I'm interested in, and only pot of sweet woodruff!
• The evening we attended a Korean poetry reading at a gallery in River North, a fundraiser for the Sejong Cultural Society. People were incredibly welcoming and I gained new insights into a poetic form I've admired since I was an undergraduate.
• Nothing could've been nicer after that than to share a leisurely drink with the GWO on the back porch, but I'd promised a friend to meet him at the Wild Pug. I went expecting to stay for an hour or so...and you guessed it, I was there until after 1 a.m. Who thought I'd see bears dancing outside of Mem Day Weekend?
• Today we got our domestic priorities in order. Just as important, I reaffirmed that people aren't as sucky as I often make them out to be.

My whey-face privilege, let me show it to you

My interest in foreign cultures and foreign language is so strong, I probably would've developed it no matter what. But it's questionable whether I'd've devoted quite so much energy if I hadn't reaped such rewards in the form of encouragement, praise, and even free food.

I had a formative lesson in the power of just a few words when my father took me to a Greek restaurant in my early teens. I'd learned one or two phrases from a phrasebook and I deployed them shamelessly, greeting the arrival of every dish with "ευχαριστώ". The shy smile of the retiring older woman who brought them to our table would've been gratification enough for the insecure precocious youth I was, so I was veritably swept off my feet by what happened as we left. The Zorba-esque proprietor of the place hailed me and asked, "You know Greek? Where'd you learn?" I humbly confessed that I'd picked up only a few words. "You wanna practice, you come here any time you like. You don't even have to order; I'll give you some tea." Afterwards, Dad expressed his admiration and envy. I had only to show a modicum of interest in this man's culture, he pointed out, and he was "ready to give you the restaurant".

It's an understandable dynamic, but one that relies on a certain inequality in footing between a willing immigrant to a powerful nation and one of that nation's native sons. After all, there's nothing particularly validating about the interest of someone whose culture you consider inferior or even merely equal to your own. When I began to travel abroad, I took for granted an interest in American culture even from those most vociferous in their rejection of it. Love it or hate it, the one thing no one could do was ignore it. I rapidly came to view only an especially intimate acquaintance with American customs and lingo as worthy of notice.

Never do I feel this power imbalance more keenly than with East Asians. The Mainland Chinese in particular seem obsessed with the question of how the richest and more powerful empire in the premodern world could've fallen so far behind the West in general and the USA in particular. The lingering sense of inferiority at such a dramatic reversal is the only explanation I can find for why the Chinese I meet typically greet any display of acquaintance with their history and culture on the part of a Westerner with showers of appreciation rather than the cool contempt that such superficial knowledge of this tremendous component of human heritage really merits.

And if the Chinese feel awed by the West, just imagine what it's like for the Koreans, whose civilisation matured under their long, deep shadow--a shadow only removed by the glare of the Rising Sun. At least the Japanese are buoyed by having bested at their own game each of the hegemons who drew them into their orbit; the (South) Koreans have only truly been masters of their own fate for a few turbulent decades, and even that they owe directly to US intervention. This puts me--simply by virtue of being an American with a more than passing interest in Korean culture--in a position of considerable privilege. (Privilege I shamelessly abuse every week to help myself to homemade delicacies at the expense of struggling shopkeepers.)