Bones, Borders, Korea and Korean Literature. Being Part Two.

So you get to Korea and you notice something odd. Everything social/political/national/ethnic is demarcated. There are sides, and if you are on a side it is your social responsibility to take that side and take it hard. Koreans are, the classic “one handed economist” that Harrry S. Truman prayed for. And associated with all these borders, like train tracks in the Sierras, are ecotones (a lovely word given to me by James Turnbull down in Busan – from whose "Grand Narrative" I have also stolen the picture/text format for this thing) and the skulls one associates with them.

This is an obvious thing to say politically. The 38th parallel lurks above Seoul as the ultimate proof that even the most homogenous country in the world cannot be unified. Beyond that, Korea sees all of its enemies and allies as, well, enemies.

When I took the tour of Cheogdeokgung it was a tour for English speakers. The guide quickly ascertained that no on among us spoke Japanese and we spent the next hour and twenty minutes listening to a reassuring (for we older anglos) series of attacks on the evils of the imperialist Japanese.

I was reassured for about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, in a break in her presentation, I wondered what the Japanese tour would sound like. I guessed it would be quite similar – beginning with a conspiratorial inquiry that we were all Japanese and then a quite different tour, perhaps focusing on China’s depredations on Korea. Sadly, the temple substantially predated United States’ involvement so Korea’s biggest straw man could not be poked at. Perhaps, somehow, Mad Cows could be brought to bear?

Korea is homogenous, xenophobic, neo-Confucian, or racist, depending on whom you ask. As I note the xenophobia of Koreans, I’m not trying to blame them for it. Instead I’d point out that Koreans have every good reason in the world (and are skilled at inventing bad ones) to distrust the rest of the world. A short primer on history suggests why this might be so. Historically, besides China now and then, Korea has had nothing but enemies.

So there is an enormous and continually defended border, constructed in law, attitude, and culture, against the other. Koreans believe themselves to be just plain, well, different (by which a Korean usually means superior, or more refined). There is an amusing and perceptive, but somewhat alarming, passage in Shawn Matthews’ book, “Korea, Life, Blog.” Shawn lands at his Hagwon and is instructed in, among other things, how to sit down..

“I … followed Mr. Kim to the living room. “Sit here,” he said, pointing to
the green vinyl sofa. Incredibly, he demonstrated how to sit down and stand
up.
“I’m from America,” I said. “Not the moon.”
“TV,” he continued, ignoring me. He turned it on and off several times with
the remote control. ….
“On, off, on, off.” He handed me the remote. I set it down. He picked it
back up.
“He wants you to try,” said Mrs. Kim.
“But it’s in English.”
“On, off,” repeated Mr. Kim.

I can’t say for certain, but I imagine that if a Korean adopted this kind of approach with another Korean, it would be considered daft or insulting. I’ve had similar experiences with the most friendly, and in at least two cases brilliant, Koreans assuming that I was utterly helpless in the face of Korean society/reality. In these two cases I also know that this was an absolutely heartfelt desire to make sure that I could navigate Korea. Similarly, if you do manage to do something that Koreans believe can only be accomplished by a Korean, you become one of two things: You are either “almost Korean” or “more than Korean.” This is the reverse of the frog ecotone on the railroad tracks – Instead of being trapped inside narrow boundaries you can never exactly land within them. The boundary is 3d with super-repulso power. ;-)

Part of this reflects a reality. I won’t ever be “100% Korean,” whatever that might mean, because I will never know the language well and have to the land far too late. Nor do I aspire to being “fully Korean.” But the phrase “fully Korean” is one loaded with borders of race, culture, skin color (which does not always work entirely as you might expect), education level, age, religion and language. To which I might add the comment that I know ethnic Koreans in the United States who are “fully American” and would be thought of as such in most of the United States (I’m not naive enough to think that people and areas would be resistant to any Asian being “American”)

With all of these Korean borders you’re going to find your metaphorical ecotones and skulls. In the next couple of weeks, as I discursively follow this, I’ll talk about some of those skulls. Expatriates, Mad Cows, and I swear, down the line, how this affects Korean literature and its translation.

Or not.

I’m a fickle bitch. ;-)

NOTE: And as I type this some yahoo at the WAPO actually says, proving racial essentialism and stupidity are no foreigners to the United States, this about Obama (whose father fought in WWII):

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won
American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically -- and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century -- there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are.
But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

I hereby invoke Godwin (and it's "loser" corrolary) on this crazy biatch... and note that the "last century" she so nostalgically invokes is just 8 years past. And, hey, them Injuns should be running things if it's all about the longest bloodlines... Absolute stupidity and insanity...

I hate everyone.....

Double Godwin - that first word in that Korean advert is, in fact "Hitler."
Text is "Even Hitler could not take over the East and the West at the same time."

Collecting Bones, Korea and Korean Literature. Being Part One.

First, I have to admit that this computer teases me. Old number 10 at the PC Bang always starts up trying to load its "Hamachi adapter."

But it always fails and the sushi is never mine!

O cruel fate...

Anyway.. here's the beginning of a 1 to 5 part thing on borders, korea and its literature. 1 is if I get bored. or distracted..

Hey, is that Rain?

OH...
-----------------------------------

Dokdo
(From Korea.net)

Somewhere in “Snow Crash” Neal Stephenson notes that, “interesting things happen along borders – transitions – not in the middle where everything is the same.”

Which is, of course, why I am in Korea.

Many years ago I collected skulls.

This began when my mother and sister moved far up into some ridiculous mountains for which they should have been issued lisps, stalks to chew on and banjos to play whilst contemplating the sodomization of lost flatlanders. I would visit, and on one visit – lo and behold – I found the skull of something.

As a suburban lad I was shocked and secretly pleased. I grabbed a stick and used it to carry the skull, which was not entirely cleaned by nature, back to my mother’s house.

People shrugged.

Sheep skull.

Sheep were herded in the meadow I had travelled. At the spot where, beginning to walk up the surrounding slopes, I had found the skull, ecologies collided. Wolves skulked in the trees and any sheep unlucky enough to wander out of the meadow risked a brief and lethal interaction.

Food chain.

Still, I was obscurely proud of having found the skull and began collecting animal bones.

I have also always been a fan of trains. I’ve ridden them, legally and illegally, for years and as an inveterate walker have worked out that they work as something like trails. In even the most rural or urban environments you might expect to find some train tracks to walk on. And so I do. I would find the most interesting things there. The tracks in Soda Springs often contained, between them, the creosote-covered bodies of dead frogs. I never quite figured this one out. I guessed the frogs got between the tracks (there were safe watery havens on each side of the raised tracks) and then, in the mid-day heat, could not quite navigate their ways back out. How they got creosoted is still a mystery to me. It had to have something to do with the trains that passed above their corpses, but I could never tease out the exact thing. Possibly, they were quite aware of the tracks they had to hop and were optimistic about how the whole thing would turn out. Right up til that unfortunate moment the… (“whatever”)…. creosoted them.

I wish I could get some kind of grant to explore this phenomenon.

It occurred to me that the railroad tracks were a condensed microcosm of the meadow and the hills and that what I was seeing was the interactions of the borderlands. On the train-tracks, ecosystems collided on a razor-thin border. Train tracks being one ecology, the three yards on either side of them being the next ecology, and then the “normal” world beyond.
In the big city, where I primarily lived, dogs and cats would die, or be disposed of, on the tracks. Occasionally a school child or drunk would be harvested by trains, but I was never allowed to get close enough to this event to win a skull.

Still, I thought “border” and, less charitably, “food chain.”

When I lived in Newark California I frequently found dead chickens on the tracks. This was a different kind of border. These chickens were losers (Other than the “SuperChicken” animated comic of my youth, I am at a loss to point to many times chickens have been winners). Hispanics in the neighborhood had cock-fights and knew they couldn’t toss chickens out in their garbage or they’d be turned in. So they looked for the next ecosystem and tossed their loser chickens there. Once I found some fish that had been tossed out and had resolved to nothing but their cartilagineous and bony cores. I still have on of those fish on a kind of art-thing that I put on the mantle of any home I inhabit. I think everyone should have a little “Yorick” thing in their homes. Just a reminder.

Then I moved to Korea and found the mother of all borders. A land that had no land – it was all borders.
(continued Monday)