Back during our Mungyeong days, the Flying Yangban once told me that rural Korea and the American South had quite a bit in common. Taking a good look around me and seeing no pickup trucks with shotgun racks, I tended to regard the Flying Yangban’s claims with a fair amount of incredulity. However, Far Outliers points to this excerpt from Korean anthropologist Choong Soon Kim’s book One Anthropologist, Two Worlds: Three Decades of Reflexive Fieldwork in North America and Asia that may prove my initial doubts unfounded:
As I live longer in the South, the more I like the region…. My comfort in living in the South does not necessarily stem from my lengthy sojourn in the South; rather it reflects my rural background during my childhood in Korea. The American South and Asia have some similarities. As John Shelton Reed once said, “Somebody once called Charlestonians [meaning southerners] ‘America’s Japanese,’ referring to their habits of eating rice and worshipping their ancestors, and the Southern concern with kin in general is indeed well known.” Nowadays, if I travel outside the South, I become uncomfortable and worried, and have culture shock. My feeling of marginality is even more severe when I go to Korea than when I am in the South. This has become more the case now that I have made a deeper commitment to the South and have three southerners in my family–two sons who were born, grew up, and were educated partly in the South, and a daughter-in-law who is a white, native southerner. All these factors lead me to think that my living in the American South is not a historical accident. It feels more and more like karma.
Jesus, I guess the Yangban wasn’t so full of shit after all.
PS: I’d love to get my hands of some of Kim’s work - we’ve all read tons of Western anthropological studies of Korean and other East Asian societies, so wouldn’t it be cool to read a little of what East Asians have to say about American society for a change?
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Recently, I told a Southerner that McDonald’s in Korea was seving pan cakes for breakfast. In all seriousness, he replied “When are they gonna have grits?”
Enough said.
Len
First, I’d like to point out to most people from outside the region, the South I grew up in is not the society my mother grew up in.
Having put up that disclaimer, I’ve often remarked that what I call the “mind-block” issues I encountered in Korea —- like Korean adults using examples of crimes by GIs (where soldiers were found guilty in a Korean court) to justify their statement that one reason anti-Americanism in Korea was high was because “GIs commit many terrible crimes each year, but just fly away to America because of the SOFA!” remind me of a few people I knew in high school and beyond who would regularly say something bad about “black people” but had a few close black friends they hung out with. ????
It makes no sense, but I guess its human.
PING:
TITLE: South Korea and the South
BLOG NAME: Flying Yangban
Here are some quotes from a resent Washington Post Article: There’s so much to get wrong here, and so many people who feel they’ve been done wrong. Or: “No one can comfortably dismiss the past [there],” says Ferris. “It lives