Dan had gotten into China via kung fu. We all get there in our own ways, of course (like unhappy families), so nothing about the route he took was in and of itself risible. What was a bit silly, though, was that, as the semester wore on, it became clear that Dan was much more interested in a kung fu than most Chinese people were, and that this was a source of continual disappointment to him. Rather than move through kung fu, that is, to other things Chinese—food, people, culture, whatever—Dan really stayed stuck in kung fu. And the fact that people weren’t kung fu fighting in the streets (despite the claims of that one pop song) made him feel like maybe he wasn’t that interested in China after all. By December, Dan was eating every single meal at our local McDonald’s, and had gone from intending to get a master’s degree in Chinese to intending to drop the major.
This is a sad story, one of many. Another is that of the disappointed Chinese American, whose attempt to return to his or her roots via a trip to China becomes instead an occasion for racial shame. The cultural differences between those well-meaning college students and the Chinese—especially, and unfortunately, as they related to issues of wealth and bourgeois manners—produced embarrassment rather than affiliation, disgust rather than love. These emotions are all the stronger, as they were for Dan, because of the hope initially invested in the experience. Perhaps the best way to experience going abroad is to have no expectations at all.
These “bad” stories collide with the ideal of the true traveler, a person who probably exists only in fiction and whose blasé acceptance of cultural difference is supposed to shame the rest of us who, like Emily, occasionally reach our limits. You will think the Chinese are all talking about you, one such person told a group of American college students during an orientation. But that is your narcissism talking; they are not talking about you at all. But of course that’s silly—sometimes the Chinese are talking about you; in fact it’s something that many people in China like to do. (My favorite: on an especially hot day my friend Bob took a set on some stone steps and opened a bottle of water. An old man walking by him turned to his wife and said, “Lao wai hen shufu!” [that foreigner looks comfortable!], which is of course a great thing to say.) In any case the point is that the ideally behaved traveler is a fantasy, and that the pride people have in being one is often the result of self-delusion.
Another, more pressing, example: I got into a huge argument with a Chinese teacher in the early days about gender and language. His position was that an really learning Chinese required one to take on the assumptions its language bore (I can no longer remember what I was complaining about). My claim was that the politics of feminism trumped linguistic perfection. If the way I talked made some Chinese people uncomfortable, I argued, well, that was just too bad and maybe they should learn to be less sexist.
At some level this is another version of the arguments about cultural relativism: does respecting cultural difference mean respecting the whole kit and caboodle, or can you just take the kit, and leave the caboodle behind? My position is more the latter than the former: when I speak a foreign language, or am speaking to foreigners generally, I am aware of wearing my American difference (and my personal ones) on the outside, of being unwilling to bend so far as to compromise what I feel to be crucial features of my being. It’s good for those other folks, I think, to be confronted with my difference, just as it’s good for me to be confronted with them.
For me it all comes back to Walter Benjamin and translation. The point, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t to turn whatever I am (in the U.S., in English) into whatever I would be (in France, in China, in whatever language) had I been raised there. Rather the point is to dislocate, wherever I go, both myself and the culture to which I belong, to render it and perform it as slightly foreign, both to myself and to others, in order to stay open and to live that openness, and in order to exemplify that mode of ethical living (and I do think it is an ethical way to live) to others. The best part about this project is that it can take place monoculturally and monolingually: this is not something I do only when abroad, but something I try to do at home (and to home) as much as I can.
Three cheers, therefore, for Emily’s inability to smile and thank the person who told her she was working too hard. Sad, maybe, that this kindly old man experienced her as rude, but good that he was confronted, however briefly, with a woman who was not, in his cultural terms, womanly enough (either in her exercising or her response to him). And good, also, that she was confronted with his difference, which in galling her taught her a lesson about the differences of the world (I assume) that should not simply be reduced to a question of cultural superiority. Respecting the other is not about kneeling at its feet, Kojin Karatani once wrote. It’s about discoursing with it as an equal, which means being willing to disagree, to be disagreed with, and, on occasion, for good reasons, to be disagreable.
That's basically what I would say too, that you should be yourself wherever you go, and if you are an American in China, give the lucky Chinese who meet you an opportunity to see how Americans act without themselves having to travel. We like to shake hands and put our feet up on the table!
To take it up one notch though, it's worth mentioning that one's view about individualism versus conformity is itself cultural, and that it seems to be breaking in obvious ways here along the East-West axis.
Personally, I feel that one's leaning towards individualism or conformity is more than cultural. Generation, personality, and upbringing definitely plays a part.
Personally, I'm a mix of the two. I feel that conforming when necessary is important during times when conformity is called for. Other times, being an individual is not a bad idea. Hence during my 3 years of law school in the US, I refuse to spell “American”, keeping my “Canadian” spelling whenever I can. If only to drive my roommates crazy.
That seems to me an excellent example of a time when conformity is called for.
The belief that one's leanings are more than cultural is the definition of individualism. It is the belief of an individualistic culture. Upbringing is a means of transmission of culture, rather than a non-cultural factor.
I agree with S Shirazi that one’s view about individuality vs. conformity is to some extent cultural. But I guess one of the points I wanted to make with my post was that we all slide back and forth on this spectrum, and that it isn’t so easy to say how or why we choose to participate in whatever milieu we’re in in the ways we do. I too enjoy being disobedient sometimes, but it takes something — power, or status, or a sense of moral superiority — to be disobedient and dislikable. I don’t know you, E Hayot, but I picture you in my little imagination as a First Worlder, highly educated, articulate, having your own sources of income, able to stand in China and assert your own sense of how the world should be with few repercussions. Not everyone is so lucky. I can choose to opt in and opt out here to some degree because I can always leave, or demand 100 bucks an hour to teach these children English, or hold onto the fact that my country can crush your country with its military and political power. But for many people rotting away with me in the immigration office who are from Africa or Southeast Asia and who need to be here for financial or political or whatever reason, that is not the case. And let’s not forget that not all senses of morality or behavior are so welcome in the U.S. these days either.
I guess it is your last image that upsets me. 1. Am I kneeling at Korea’s feet to participate? Perhaps my sense of my own subjectivity is less bounded, but I don’t tell off my mom every time I disagree with her, because she has a right to her own opinions and they don’t have to be the same as my own. I don’t think if it as surrender to treat others with empathy and respect, especially if I know that to some extent my intervention will not accomplish much. 2. Is asserting my view of the world to discourse with others as equals? You seem to say (correct me if I misunderstand) that having other people be uncomfortable will be good for them — will teach them something about the world. Then it sounds to me like that is not an equal relationship, to put someone in the student’s seat who didn’t ask to be there and probably won’t understand what you’re getting at. If the idea is to teach, or to dislocate, is this the best way to do it?
3. The other issue that disturbs me, in general, is this: how can an outsider separate the kit and caboodle? I have problems with status here; to speak Korean to always to acknowledge differences in status between people. You can choose, I suppose, to speak to everyone in formal language, but without actively participating for a time in “normal” modes of conversation, I’m not sure you would really be able to appreciate the subtlety of how status molds social life and senses of community here. In my mind it is the same difference between people who create all the time and people who only critique. You have to try your hand at it to begin to understand the complexity of the problem.
I’m not try to say that we should all morph mindlessly into whatever — I don’t think it is possible or preferable. But to engage in any kind of productive conversation with other people is to require a kind of on-the-spot negotiation with the different parts of one’s subjectivity — including desire, intention, mood, baggage, deal-breakers, etc. The water is muddy, yeah. But you can still swim.
I guess for me it's not about making people uncomfortable for its own sake, but about being willing to live with certain kinds of cultural discomfort — being able to live, that is, with creating it (sometimes inadvertently) for others and, perhaps more importantly, being able to accept it when it happens to us. That this feeling of discomfort is good and not to be minimized or avoided, because it's an encounter with the otherness of the world.
Yes, every decision one makes balances a relation to that discomfort that includes conditions of empathy and respect, as well as desire, intention, mood, and the like. The point isn't to make people uncomfortable for its own sake. But I wanted to recognize the moment of non-compromise as a moment that is potentially filled with good, both for us and for the others who face it. Likewise when we meet the moment of non-compromise in others. (And of course those moments may change--my line in the sand today may become my favorite local habit tomorrow.) The point is not that we should delight in being jerks but that the fault lines are precisely how we articulate our values. All cultures need changing, including our own--no reason to be ashamed of making others uncomfortable, I think, when it matters or even if you've just had a bad or tiring day. And no reason to resent being made to feel uncomfortable, either — better to seek it out.
Of course at some level my privileging of discomfort and not fitting in is cultural. But just as I will be made uncomfortable by someone whose culture has taught them that fitting in is more important than disagreeing, so too will I make them feel uncomfortable. Since there is no right answer to how to behave, I would rather see the differences and discomforts celebrated. Perhaps if my encounter with the person who values (for whatever cultural reason) agreement and fitting in over disagreement teaches me to change my mind, I will also change my position. For now it seemed better--and more consistent with the position I'm articulating--to celebrate the ability to tolerate and enjoy those cultural differences.
Yes, this is uncomfortable for everyone (and it is a discomfort that we should all seek out). And it should be equally distributed and shared (it's not that I make everyone uncomfortable while I stay comfortable, but rather that we engage in the discomfort of a genuine encounter with otherness, and that we are brave enough to continue to do so even when we'd rather be eating McDonald's all day). And if this is good for us to do to ourselves, I think it's also good to do to other people, deliberately or not, and whether it will do good or not, because sometimes the good it does is to the self, who benefits (more cultural bias here) from the simple assertion that “I am here and I am not you.”
I agree with everything Yunmay says in the last paragraph, and think we're much closer on this that her response suggests. Perhaps just a question of emphasis. As for the rest of it, your imagination of my position is quite accurate, which does not meant that my position is self-serving. I would argue that people waiting in immigration offices would benefit, too, if more people in the U.S. were willing to acccept the discomfort of their differences — up to and including, paradoxically, the ones that would suggest that they shouldn't.
I don’t think we’re very far apart on this either, I just get nervous about the images of submitting and of an assumed equality. I think we agree that what is at stake is not defending the boundaries of some narcissistic sense of Self but a question of how to turn a life/experience spent in the cracks and fissures between two cultures into a meaningful and productive engagement for both sides. I think we agree that to be in that position is to have a special kind of power — a power to, in a sense, represent one to the other (U.S. to Korea/China and Korea/China to the U.S.) and also a power to put the idea of difference onto the table (because anyone you or I interact with will have “difference” somewhere in his or her subconscious mind).
If you want to be revolutionary and are called a Revolutionary, people will interpret the idiosyncratic things you do as if they are in the name of revolution. If you want to be a disobedient multicultural and question categories of class or gender, though, how do you do it? The worry I have is that, by being “an American” any disagreeable gesture you make will not be taken as an invitation to mediate on power relationships or categories, but just get you dismissed into the dustbin of the “ugly American abroad” thereby hardening the border rather than making it more permeable.
Having grown up feeling like a less-than-desirable category in the U.S., my tendency is to try adjustment and compromise first. I don’t like to be disagreeable. Perhaps that is the child-of-immigrant-who-grew-up-in-the-70sand80s part of me, who unconsciously feels that if you can’t melt in the “melting pot” you have failed. That is not to say that I wouldn’t burn a bra or a draft card to make a statement. But in general, in my life here, I find that I have to woo people a little with my empathy and inhuman strength before I can make headway with anything else. Then again, the category of “American” doesn’t have the same kind of authoritative, attractive sheen that it used to.
What is so sad about learning you aren’t interested in another culture? I had the same experience in Germany watching a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Kierkegaard said was the highest aesthetic experience possible. For me it was the moment when I realized it was time to go home.
If one had no expectations going abroad, one would have no motivation to go.
I think it’s unfair and even rude to assume E Hayot’s confidence comes from a privileged background which somehow disqualifies him. Confidence can come from having high status in a status society but it can also come from disregarding status as artificial.
The fact that women are the intellectual equals of men is something that many people in the world are blinded to by their culture. I don’t know how much respect that culture deserves in the name of politeness.
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