I just reread Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things and was struck by how the interviewee above, like many people, is attached to seemingly useless junk as a way of external memory storage. Her collection of movie theater soda cups is her memory of films shared and seen with her husband. The fear of forgetting or erasure is powerful, imbuing even the most insignificant scraps of paper with meaning. (Don’t ask me about my cardboard boxes full of college lecture notes!)
Hawaii friends say that hoarding tendencies are amplified here by memories of the 3-month-long shipping strike in the 1970s and general ambient Asian/local Japanese thriftiness (see Kam Swap Meet and the popularity of church rummage sales).
Walking downstairs in heels is easier if you have a boyfriend for balance
As a rule, Korean American women of my acquaintance have shorter stints in Korea than Korean American men. Not only are we bad at being Korean in Korea, we’re also bad at being women in Korea. Every day is a series of reminders that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you speak Korean like a gangster or a grandma instead of a bubbly TV host. Maybe you wear gyopo makeup or no makeup at all. Or maybe your tank top is scandalous (I didn’t know spaghetti strap tanks hadn’t made it to Seoul in 1995) or your skirt is unfashionable (look, micro-minis are for teenagers with legs impervious to cold). Maybe you’re over 30 and unmarried.
A Korean American friend had to practically write a treatise on why she wanted to buy Ugg boots (2 years out of style) during the dead of a Seoul winter. And once her Korean shopping partner stopped trying to foist stiletto boots on her, they still had to convince the saleswoman that it was morally acceptable to sell untrendy boots.
I’m not troubled by doing femininity wrong in America. There’s more variety for one (indie vs. glam, San Francisco pigtails vs. Los Angeles coif). And visible effort like plastic surgery or a 1-hour morning makeup regimen is still not normal (I think?). But I figure the main reason I’m untroubled by my intermittent obedience to accepted norms of American womanhood is that I have absolutely no desire to resemble any actress on any magazine cover. Being Asian has given me inborn immunity via marginalization.*
But I take it personally in Korea.
Someone in Korea once drunkenly asked me “why don’t you make friends with the pretty girls?” Offense was taken by many. In retrospect, the underlying problem was that I took personal offense every time I saw a college girl running up the hill to class in her stiletto boots. Or a 15-person girl band that apparently had shared the same plastic surgeon, resulting in everyone having identically shaped noses. What seemed far away and irrelevant in America suddenly became very very personal in Korea.
* For the record, I picked my bridesmaid dress because it was worn by an Asian model and seemed “most like me.”
Lagos, Nigeria
Talk radio is for nations with crappy traffic.* This is the only way I can explain Rush Limbaugh in America — people must be longing for a scapegoat for their road rage. But a happier convergence of gridlock and radio is Wazobia FM. The people of Lagos, Nigeria (population ~8 million) have embraced their local pidgin English radio stations with a vengeance. I wonder if Nigerian pidgin was/is discouraged in the school system, if comedians are reclaiming pidgin, or if writers have made their dialogue bounce off the page with pidgin. You know, all the things that pidgin do.
The diversity of Englishes that populate the world make me salivate. Even the varietals I am familiar with like the milquetoast mildness of Middle America newscaster English are strange and awful to Brits outraged by American English innovations. Ooh and don’t get me started on my fetish for corporate contortionist language.
If colonialism gave the globe anything good in addition to flavor in Britain (anyone would start a maritime empire if their national food was that bland) and coffee in Southeast Asia, I think it is the ingeniousness with which colonized & post-colonized people have adapted the English language.
*Seoul also has terrible traffic but I mostly took the subway which was crammed full of people napping, primping, and studying their English vocabulary flash cards. My Korean might be better if I had stayed within earshot of a radio for all my crosstown commutes.
Libraries are the new X. Wendy MacNaughton did an illustrated ode to the people of the SF Main Branch. The New York City Public Library did a one-night scavenger hunt/lock-in* and in case you needed more proof— even superheroes know you need a library card.
*Confession #36: being locked in a library all night has been a longstanding fantasy, ever since childhood favorite The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler got muddled up with teenage stories of classmates who snuck into the school library for all night debauchery. I don’t recall if the plot of Party Girl featured any late night library shenanigans but I bet it was responsible for the spike in sexy librarian fetishes.
(Source: nerdluv)
A few weeks back, the new permanent exhibit “Pidgin: How was.. how stay” opened at Plantation Village Museum in Waipahu. I confirmed that a home-study course consisting of several hours of Rap Reiplinger (despite the organizers’ acknowledgment that local humorists had helped spread respect for Pidgin) did not make me even a beginning-level speaker. One look at the “Pidgin 100 Test” and I humbly walked my mainland legs back to get more lumpia. Had no clue where to start with questions like “wat da difference between ‘kapalu’ and ‘hamajang’ and ‘kapakahi’…” or “in da sentence ‘… da keiki mai popo stay opa around, as her ratoon crop dat…’, wat da keiki going be to me?” At some point, I’ll pick myself up a copy of Da Kine Dictionary, with community-generated entries so it didn’t only reflect the local usages of one compiler.
I also got introduced to palaka through several asides about Arakawa’s and the executive director’s “Got Palaka” shirt.
The pattern made it’s way in the late 1900′s when Americans ordered tons of checkered-patterned thick cloth from England to make the uniforms for the field workers. Originally a pattern type in England for the sailors, it was seen as plain and therefore cheap. The cloth of Nelson’s navy and Yankeedom’s clipper wasn’t known by any name until the Hawaiians and Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) named it after the Hawaiian work for ‘frock’ which was also a mistranslation for “checkered.”
One of the many awesome things about Hawaii is how audio and visual markers of working class/plantation culture are celebrated. Especially awesome after spending so many years in Korea, where most everyone seems to be chasing after “yangban” status or at least the modern-day equivalent with brandname baubles. I need to do some reading on local labor history I think.
I hate shrimp. I hate their beady little eyes. I hate their mongrove destroying ways. I hate their hot crustacean band and most of all I hate how much they resemble my insect tormentors.
We once figured out that my 1984-style Room 101 of terror would consist of a dodgeball game in which I was subjected to a barrage of shrimp and crayfish.
* Top image via Weird Sea Monsters.
Fine, I can admit that certain sociological concepts are handy. Emotional labor is part of most service industry occupations and often gendered. Reviews on Yelp rate poorly for grumpy waitresses. We expect “service with a smile.” Even if I am technically just buying a shot of whisky, I’m semi-consciously wanting to buy an improved mood. “Make me feel better” is also part of the transaction. “Make me feel insignificant” is not. When I worked retail, my chatty helpfulness was surprisingly often mistaken for flirtation— my being nice to you is suddenly transformed into my being interested in you.
The documentary The Great Happiness Space lets us look into a gender-reversed version of emotional labor. The fancy-haired hosts at Stylish Club Rakkyo entice the post-work crowd with “Do you want to play for an hour. Are you tired from work?” and then once the women* are upstairs, “heal them with sweet conversation.” “I have to compliment girls all the time, it’s quite stressful.”
On the customers’ part, they are under few illusions but seem bespelled nonetheless, dropping anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a few drinks to $5000 and up for a series of champagne calls where all the hosts swarm around one woman. “Since I have such a great time, I don’t feel like I’m wasting my money… Yes I’m satisfied. Even it’s happiness I bought with money.”
* Many of the host club customers work in the nightlife industry at cabarets or hostess clubs or as prostitutes. “And I regret having sold my body again. But when I get paid, I think I can get anything I want. I can buy anything. But I think really hard about how to spend the money. And I think I really want to smile… So I decide to take the money to Rakkyo.” Another woman who works at a soap land said, “Even though the general public looks down us, we’re their livelihood, so the hosts don’t look down on us. I think that’s why we all go to the clubs.”
[Via Slate, a map drawn by artist Alexander Calder]
My father writes the most meticulous directions. He uses street names, number of stoplights, and landmarks. I always took it to be a symptom of his engineer training and a need to build-in redundancy. After living in Seoul for five years and struggling with the general non-usage of street names (we navigate by subway stop exits and landmarks, sometimes ones that no longer exist like how I told cab drivers to drop me off at the “old district office”), I decided that his triple-threat directions were just a merger of American and Korean directional structures.
So as much as I appreciate Google Maps in all its satellite glory, I really adore the spatial oddities collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association.
It’s a situation we are all acquainted with: planning to visit friends in an unfamiliar part of the city, you draw yourself a rudimentary map with detailed directions. In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder
A Youtube flurry led to the discussion that hip-hop videos are all about place. Biggie Smalls, Nas, ok pretty much any New York rapper has shot a music video of a saunter through the neighborhoods of his youth.
Go West Coast, and although Tupac hops into the convertible by the third frame, the camera is still moving along iconic vistas of Los Angeles institutions, strip-malls, and palm trees.
This idea of urban placeness, a fierceness of home in spite of decay or danger (or sometimes as a result of those difficulties) comes up in the introduction to The New American Ghetto, a ginormous book of photography and musings on the semi-abandoned neighborhoods of the American city by Camilo Jose Vergara.
Cora Moody, the president of the tenants’ association at the Hayes Homes in the Central Ward of Newark, lived for ten years in a now-derelict building, part of the Hayes development, that she calls “a piece of my history.” Contrasting with what remains — the stinking vacant structure, with its broken windows and its entrance full of garbage and excrement — is the vital community that the building once anchored: “I was pregnant with my fifth child when I moved in there. I can see my kids playing hopscotch, I can hear them outside my window, calling up for money.” Pointing to a littered, overgrown spot on the grounds, she says: “There used to be a shower there. My kids would use it at all times during the summer, even at midnight, and I would not be worried. There were public telephones in here; you could use them. You could wait, you did not have to get your own phone right away. We did not have to worry about people hurting us. There was a community in there of people you could trust and got along with. ” Cora explains why she sees the ruined building with so much affection, saying: “You cannot shift memories to another place. These are my greatest memories. They took all that away from us when they closed the building.” The present is inscribed on a wall nearby: “Shahonna Tovheedah in the motherfucking house. If you don’t like it kiss my ass.”
I think I love cities so much because there are so many memories soaked into every street. I want to do for Seoul what Historypin is trying to do for every city. Or what Vergara did for one storefront in Harlem…
