Everybody’s Doing It: KONY 2012

Yesterday I watched “Kony 2012”, the short film which has “gone viral” (to quote BBC and NPR, which frankly they’ve taken all the joy out of that expression with their overuse of it) on the web this past week. Created by the same filmmakers (headed by Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell) who produced the hour-long original “Invisible Children” film and started the awareness-raising campaign of the same name, the video has been seen several million times and has almost quadrupled the number of followers they have on [insert disparaging adjective here] facebook. Almost immediately after watching it, I turned on the radio to hear BBC discussing their opinions of “Kony 2012”.

The title of the film is meant to remind you of a candidate in a political campaign (Bush 2004, Obama 2008), but Joseph Kony isn’t running for any kind of office (well, not in the near-future anyway, but who knows?); actually, Kony is rather obscure despite (what he would call) his accomplishments. The folks from Invisible Children chose the name because they want him to become one of the most famous people in the world this year– or more accurately, the most notorious. He is one of the Ugandan warlords who abducts children, rapes them, tortures them, forces them to kill their own parents, and ultimately turns them into child soldiers and sex slaves. “Kony 2012” is the campaign to make Kony and his crimes against humanity so well-known that world powers will have no choice but to act and get this guy charged and on trial at the International Criminal Court. According to Jason Russell, who is also the film’s narrator, all this has to happen this year, because…er, for reasons unbeknownst to us. Their “deadline” is never actually explained to viewers. (Maybe because the possibility exists that Obama won’t be president, and there’s not a chance in hell that a Republican president will give a #%$ about atrocities in Africa?)

Since yesterday afternoon, I have been thinking quite a lot about this…short-film-meets-documentary-meets-visual-personal-essay. My initial reaction upon watching it was very similar to how I felt after watching the original “Invisible Children” film in college: deep sadness, empathy, anger. Which is how the filmmakers want you to feel after viewing either film. The difference between the two films is that “IC” was more of an educational, awareness-raising piece, whereas “Kony 2012” has an actual, spelled-out political agenda. And what they appear to be banking on is that you will either forget the nidus which produced these films, or you will already be on their side so it doesn’t matter if you know, anyway. If that sounds enigmatic, let me explain…:

When I first saw the original “Invisible Children”, I was sitting in a church. I had been invited by a number of acquaintances from a student group on campus, Spartan Christian Fellowship. No one had told me what the movie was about (before I watched it I was actually under the impression it was a fictional story), and most of the few dozen people who came also seemed oblivious to its content. So I was quite surprised when it turned out to be a homemade documentary about the plight of child soldiers in Uganda (and also a fund-raising program).

I recall that during and after the film, we (the “Christian fellowship”) were deeply touched; many of us cried. At that time I was also a professed and somewhat outspoken Christian, though I had little in common with the ultraconservatives who attended this particular group. What we did agree on, however, was that it was our Christian duty to bring God’s love and justice to the people in Uganda– love for the child soldiers and justice for their torturers. Then we sang some songs, had a group prayer session, and went home.

As the next few weeks passed, I was struck by how suddenly everyone seemed to have Invisible Children apparel, bracelets, DVDs, stickers, and so forth. Even now, I see IC’s scheme to bring to light the suffering of a voiceless, marginalized group of people as a positive: people who had never heard of child soldiers (or of Uganda, for that matter) were suddenly deeply, almost personally invested in helping them. The commercialized, commodified treatment of the plight of child soldiers did nag at me, however. I didn’t buy any shirts nor did I choose to donate money to the IC.

This is not the most widely circulated critique of the video. The BBC’s main complaint about “Kony 2012” is that it is reductionist, oversimplifying what is in reality an extremely complex conflict. Their point is well-taken: “Kony 2012” makes understanding the “main bullet points” of the Kony dilemma so simple that even a five year old can understand them. Literally. Gavin, the film director’s (I’m guessing five year old?) son, is given a very boiled-down, easy-to-understand lecture on who Kony is and what he does, wherein their family friend Jacob (one of the children featured in the original “IC”) is positioned as the “good guy” and Kony is positioned as the “bad guy”. It is the film’s way of presenting and explaining this Ugandan conflict.

Is this an insult to the average adult’s intelligence? I think most people would probably say so, but then again most people who are watching this film aren’t, in fact, adults. This film has mostly “gone viral” with young adults, teens, pre-teens… The facebook generation, that is. What the film sets out to do is not to give people an in-depth (or even broad) understanding of Ugandan politics of conflict; indeed, we hardly even learn anything about Kony, whom the film is supposedly about. IC was also one of the organizations criticized by Foreign Affairs for “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” The purpose of the film, in my opinion, is to create some hype and appeal to people’s emotions in order to further the agenda of the IC.

Before I get into what I believe that agenda might include, let’s look into this “emotional appeal” aspect of “Kony 2012”. There is a scene in the film that is actually taken from the first “IC” film, in which creator Jason Russell is talking with the young Jacob. Jacob has just described how he would rather die than continue his present existence, which Russell seems astounded to hear. Jacob explains that it would be better to meet his brother in heaven than to live in constant fear of being abducted and killed– a reality that hits too close to home for Jacob, whose older brother was violently murdered when he tried to run away from LRA soldiers. Jacob breaks down and cries; it becomes clear that perhaps he does not truly wish to die– he just wants a respite from the terror and agony he feels every day. Watch this part of the film and tell me you don’t get choked up, and I’ll call you a heartless bastard. Like I said, this film does an aces job at striking an emotional nerve.

This is where the film takes a pivotal turn. Russell, perhaps in a desperate bid to ease his own helplessness, tells Jacob, “I promise you we are going to stop them.” He repeats this promise over and over, asking Jacob, “Do you hear me?” Jacob nods and says yes, but seems entirely unconvinced. Actually, he looks even more hopeless than before he shared the story of his brother.

The crisis counselor and the feminist in me at this point exchanged knowing glances. “Well he certainly botched that, didn’t he?” they said with a sad shake of the head. Let me see if I can get them to explain exactly what they thought was botched… Crisis counselor: “Well, he probably thought he was making Jacob feel better by trying to ‘fix the problem’. Unfortunately, Jacob reacts to this by stopping crying and receding– we see him almost physically withdraw, into himself, away from all those feelings he just put out there. It was a huge, brave risk Jacob took, sharing those deep, vulnerable parts of himself, but he didn’t receive any empathy, support, or validation. Instead, Russell tries to make Jacob ‘feel better’– in reality he’s probably just trying to make himself feel better, suppressing his own strong emotions– by promising to solve the problem. This is problematic in multiple ways. First off, there is simply no way to fix ‘the problem’ of Jacob’s brother’s death. It is an unsolvable situation. Secondly, it’s both unempathetic and counterproductive to try to ‘solve’ another person’s problems; we only disempower them to help themselves, and even possibly create a situation in which they keep coming back to us to fix their problems. Lastly, possibly most importantly, we should never presume to know how to fix another’s problems…Whose to say that we won’t exacerbate the situation? It’s awfully arrogant to take such a presumptuous position as ‘problem solver’.” Okay, let’s have the feminist weigh in on this: “Agreed, it is not only presumptuous, but also masculist. Assuming the role of ‘problem solver’, even– especially!– in the face of an unsolvable issue, is a classic patriarchal reaction. Talking about emotions, even revealing emotions, is counterproductive to the masculist: what good does talking about feelings do if it doesn’t fix the problem? Moreover, sharing feelings earnestly is a ‘symptom’ of the feminine: weak, pathetic, deplorable. Contrast this with the stereotypical associations with the masculine: strong, assertive, corrective. ‘Boys don’t cry’, after all, but women cry and complain, and what good does that do them? Russell’s declaration that ‘we are going to stop them’ is also neocolonialist; the white Westerner needs to intervene in the chaos of Africa in order to set things straight. His racist moral high ground figures the ‘we’ he refers to not as himself and Jacob, but as himself and others like him. He is not talking with Jacob, but at him.”

Those two can sometimes get a little reductionist, themselves, not to mention they have a bit of a superiority complex, but their points are well-taken in examining the underlying sociocultural (subconscious?) motives at work.

I want to consider these points as we expand our investigation to include not just the IC films but the organization of IC, itself. IC posts its finances on its website for all to see, so we know how the money is used, but where does it come from? Purportedly a large number of IC’s donations (not to mention moral support) come from their Christian following. Considering the context in which I was first exposed to IC, I am not surprised. But what are the ramifications of this?

Between now and May, there will be IC film screenings at over 150 Christian churches all over America (average of about 3 screenings a day). That’s a lot of support coming from a single sector, which doesn’t include screenings at Christian-affiliated schools, colleges, or other institutions. Clearly there is a bit of hype about IC among Christian Americans. Even if it is not IC’s explicit directive to portray their organization or their mission as Christian, the Christians are doing it for them. At the events I attended during college, it was made clear that we had a divine imperative to “save” these folks (mainly the Ugandan children) because of our God-given duties as Christians and Americans. For it is not for Americans alone to enjoy the glory of Jesus, but we cannot rest until “every ear has heard”. (But quite frankly, my impression of the people participating in these events/film screenings/etc. was mostly that it was just “a cool thing to do”.)

In that vein, I take issue with how IC’s media-oriented strategy seems to focus on and portray only two groups of people: victimized, powerless Ugandans and salvation-carrying, white, largely Christian Americans. (And I’m not the only one whose irritated by this portrayal.) It appears as a retelling of the old classic, the Great White West moves in to save the neoprimitive savages. IC’s activist campaigns and photographs of the movement (which can be seen on their websites) are full of young, fist-pumping white folks, often wearing IC apparel. There is even a section where these folks are called “The Rescue”; perhaps they romantically believe they really are just “helping”, but any time you get together a bunch of people and put them in uniform, you should really question whether or not the participants truly understand the various levels of ideology at work. Another interesting feature of the website are the photographs and descriptions of all their staff. IC staff is strikingly gender-balance, and is also equally proportionate in the number of Americans and Ugandans, though the Americans are almost entirely white. For some reason the Board of IC is listed last: it is comprised entirely of white male Americans.

“But Lee, what are you saying, that white Americans can’t or shouldn’t help Africans?” I’m so glad you asked. Why, not at all, but to unquestioningly and uncritically accept the fantasy of the GWW “saving” black Africa is to ignore deeper, perhaps not-so-entirely altruistic motives subjacent to the movement we see on the surface. I would never say helping another person is bad, in and of itself, regardless of either person’s position in the Universe (e.g. as racialized, genderfied, etc. entities). However, would you accept the help of a person who not only desires to “help” you, but also to fulfill what they perceive as a mandate of their god? Would you accept the help of a person who is primarily helping you because they see you, consciously or unconsciously, as inferior? Would you accept the help of a person who does not see themselves as helping you, an individual, but as helping “correct” a system– a system which perhaps is the culture you live in? These aren’t questions with simple answers, and that’s entirely the point. To reiterate the BBC, “It’s a bit more complicated than the IC films make it out to be.” And simply put, I do not believe this is so simple as some white travelers to Africa trying to make themselves feel better about what they’ve seen there.

I’ll shut up now, but p.s. IC is calling on your (American) government to deploy forces to aid Uganda’s army in capturing Kony, and they’ve already been partly successful. But the Ugandan army has been called out by human rights groups as being guilty of war crimes, themselves, including the mass rapes of women and murders of refugees, not to mention the Ugandan government has also violated the human rights of their people.

p.s.s. For other people’s critical perspectives on IC, check out Visible Children, who links to some other resources of information.

DEATH TO BRAS

In the States, I don’t wear bras. I stopped wearing them just after graduating college. Sometimes I can’t believe I wore them for 21 years without question. Maybe I’d have continued wearing them for the rest of my life if I hadn’t started spending more time with a “different” crowd of folks, not to mention reading bell hooks. (Okay, not really, bell hooks to my knowledge has never advocated against the wearing of bras– she probably wears them, herself.) I’m referring to feminist-forward thinking, anyhow.

In Cambodia, however, I “have to” wear them. There’s a lot of things I “have to” do here that I stopped doing back home. I guess I still feel obligated to “respect” or at least adhere to certain cultural standards, since I am a “guest” of this culture.

In this regard, I somewhat agreed with Peace Corps’ approach to “cultural integration”. Wait, let me back up: Peace Corps’ conception of culture is basically absurd, in my view. That’s the nice way to put it. There’s too much to go into in this post about that particular subject, so I’ll save it for later. What I did agree with, however, was Peace Corps’ idea about “difference”; one of their reasons for “cultural integration” (ah, I cringe to think of it) was that if we are not “alike” enough, then how we are different in a “positive” ways (the relativists are freaking out right now) will be dismissed, overlooked, or possibly idolized but still viewed as unattainable. PC told us that we need to be “like” them enough so that they could see a possibility for change; otherwise our differences would be passed off as unreachable by Cambodians. To some degree, I feel this is true because of my experience with people (especially women) saying, “Yes, that is true/possible for you, because you are American.” In other words, I am fundamentally other– freedom to pursue my own interests as a woman is possible for me because I am American; ability to go to college is possible because I am American; choosing for myself instead of allowing my parents to choose for me is possible because I am American. This is the “I so regret” side of the difference-distance argument.

The other is the optimist, or “It is my culture” side of the argument– also known as “TIC” (This Is Cambodia), which I’m fairly certain was coined by my boyfriend: every time I raise a point, suggestion, idea, theory, example, conception, whatever, that doesn’t particularly match his worldview, he states, “This Is Cambodia.” (Well, I just imagine that all the words are capitalized when he says that.) And this is sufficient to show me why I don’t understand, am misguided, or just wrong. Most of the times I have heard people say “It is my culture” has been in situations where they are apologizing, but do not regret, some aspect of their worldview or behavior, or where they are explaining for the silly barangs who don’t understand “Khmer culture”, or where they are justifying their behavior. This latter reason is one that most concerns me, because it is often used to justify the subjugation of women. Although, for instance, my boyfriend can acknowledge that it is not fair his younger sister’s life is choiceless and predetermined, he justifies the situation by saying “TIC” or “it is their habit for a long time already”. He really believes it’s too late for the situation to change. If that were me, it would effectively mean my life is over: I have two children and my husband does not allow me to leave the house; I have to ask permission before making decisions for myself; even though I am very intelligent and possibly the most creative thinker and diligent worker of all my siblings, I wasn’t allowed to finish high school ’cause I had to get married, and though I still want to study, I am not allowed to. Yes, if that were me… Well, it isn’t me. And his younger sister sighs and groans and looks sad and occasionally confides her anxieties to me, but ultimately she puts her head down. And she never EVER complains to her husband or her family. She appears downright stoic about it.

The other concern I have about the TIC perspective is that I have read quotes in the papers from rapists literally saying, “It is my culture”. I saved one particularly unbelievable article quoting a child rapist excusing himself because of his “culture”, which I’ll post at a later date.

So I give some credit to PC for recognizing that extreme “difference” encourages Cambodians to see their volunteers as Other– in this case, it is an unattainable Otherness, either expressed as regret or reality.

This is why I wear bras here.

And let me just say… I HATE IT.

I hate bras. What a useless, uncomfortable, ridiculous accessory. I have never heard one good reason for using a bra. I will make one exception for sports bras, which some particularly large-breasted women have told me helps them enjoy sports more and eases strain on their backs. But for someone like me, there is absolutely not one sound reason why I would ever need a bra.

If you think this is an overreaction, you are probably not sitting in 95 degree heat with a constantly feeling of itchiness. Even sports bras are uncomfortable in this weather. But the real kicker is that there is just no good reason why culture should require me to wear one.

I have heard lots of reasons which explain the necessity of bras. They make your breasts look bigger. I’ll let you guess what I think of that reason. They provide “support” for older, sagging breasts. Then why are old women so less likely to wear bras than their younger counterparts? They are sexy, as are other kinds of lingerie, and enhance your “appeal”. I suppose, if that’s what you’re into. They disguise a woman’s nipples. Well, we can scratch that off as a disgustingly sexist hypersexualization and fetishization of the female body. I’m sure I’m missing some, but those are ones I most often hear.

Any reason that has to do with fetishizing the female body is completely invalid in my view, but these are reasons oft-cited. The normalcy of viewing and treating females like dress-up dolls, inanimate works of art, and fuck objects is still pervasive the world over. For this reason alone I advocate the end to bra-wearing. No, you don’t have to burn them, but have you ever burned something you despise? It’s pretty satisfying.

I feel better having ranted about bras, but…I’m still wearing one. Should I just apologize to Cambodia and take it off? Should I wait ’til I get home? Who I am really respecting by wearing this damnable invention, anyway?

Confronting Racism

Since “race” isn’t real I will take the liberty of defining it and “racism” in order to best suit my needs. For the purposes of this essay, let “race” mean a category of people defined by ethnocultural, linguistic, and geographic similarities. Let “racism” mean the classification of these groups of people within a hierarchy of peoples, wherein those groups are typified by certain traits or characteristics which are then applied to all individuals within that group, and moreover that the rank of a given group with the hierarchy implies what sort of value that group has. Therefore, some groups are better than others. All of this, as well as the subscription to and promotion of this thought system, I call “racism”.

I readily admit that I have harbored racist sentiments in the past. In fact I still do, though such sentiments hold significantly less power because I recognize them now for what they are, and actively work to eradicate them. This isn’t always easy to do, I’ve discovered.

South Koreans are one group of people against whom I have been biased. My experience with native South Koreans is limited; mostly I have known the children of Korean immigrants, who to my mind are virtually indistinguishable from “typical” Americans. That is to say, they are typical Americans, and therefore aren’t “Korean” in my imagination. “Korean” has remained foreign, Other, something I don’t understand. What does it mean to be Korean? What is Korean culture? Who are Koreans?

My few experiences with “off the boat” (is that considered derogatory? I’ve never thought so, but is it? Though I suppose today “off the plane” would be more accurate…) Koreans has been distancing at best, and negative at worst. Michigan State University has recently a huge influx of South Korean students, so one would think I would have many Korean friends and know a lot about Korea and Korean culture.

I didn’t have a single friend from South Korea. Actually, I didn’t know a single person from South Korea, that I can recall, save for acquaintances in passing. Probably because of that I didn’t (and didn’t bother to) learn anything about Korea.

What I learned about South Koreans at MSU was from observation. It had long been noticed and discussed that the Korean students would flood certain establishments around East Lansing at certain times, often in groups of ten people or more. At first I felt ambivalent, at times positive, about this: they were just meeting up with their friends for coffee and chit chat, and what could be bad about that? After I time I began to be annoyed by the crowds of Koreans who would take up all the tables and chairs at my favourite coffee shop. It seemed like they had no regard for anyone else, as if the rest of the patrons were invisible. They wouldn’t even ask me before borrowing a chair off my table, though sometimes I would have to ask for it back because I was saving it for someone. It occurred to me that maybe they were shy about speaking English with me, for I only ever heard them talking in Korean. Ultimately that didn’t make sense, though, since they were attending school at an all-English language university. Their English must have been perfect. What’s more, when they left the coffee shop, they would never rearrange the tables and chairs as they’d found them, and often they wouldn’t throw away their trash. They would also throw their cigarette butts all over the ground on our patio, which really baffled me. This behavior was only matched by the drunks who would stumble in at 4 a.m. (and in fact the drunks were often apologetic). Ironically I ended up working at that very same coffee shop, to be endlessly frustrated by the waves of Koreans who would come in, order together (often the very same drink as all their other friends), clump all the tables together, be exceedingly loud, and then leave. I would be left to hurriedly pick up the mess before more patrons showed up. Needless to say, this wore on my sympathies. My conclusion about the Korean students was that they didn’t respect their surroundings or other people.

I once asked, very carefully, a friend of mine who is Korean American about this phenomenon. I “didn’t want to sound racist” (how that expression so amuses and irritates me now, since it didn’t sound racist, it was racist), but I had to know: why did would Korean students rarely show up individually to a place (coffee shops and bubble tea places, most noticeably), but would often show up in groups? And why did they always go to the same places?

“Most of them when they get here, they don’t know their way around, they aren’t confident about going out on their own and speaking English– they want to stick with what’s familiar,” he explained to me. “So when their friend who has been here a year already takes them to a certain coffee shop, they will keep going back to that place again and again. They will probably take their friends there, too, when they come here to study from Korea.” This even seemed to account for why they often ordered identical drinks.

This made a lot of sense to me, though I still disdained their apparent lack of adventurousness.

Then I went to Cambodia.

In our Kampong Cham village, my fellow volunteers and I would buy coffee from the exact same place at the exact same time every day. We would take up every table in the small seller’s shop, grouping them all together and using up every chair so we could sit around and have loud, boisterous conversations purely in English. When we left, we didn’t clean up after ourselves.

Thinking about this now, I am…at a loss for words, I suppose. No, I’m just deeply embarrassed. My Korean American friend’s reasoning had seem to come round full circle, and it seemed absolutely true. I suddenly felt a lot more empathy for all the foreign students, not just the ones from Korea, who traveled to America to study. It was a scales-falling-off-one’s-eyes kind of experience. [Note: this isn't to say that my behavior and therefore the behavior of the Korean students back home wasn't entirely rude and self-centered-- most definitely I still think it is. Welcome to culturocentricism.]

After living here for a year and a half, I more or less “do as the Romans do”. Since I’m on my own with no “fellow Americans” for company save for a rare visit from a village Volunteer, I have lost a lot of my training village habits. I’m no longer restricted to a certain area or establishment, I no longer have a routine that is dictated by a desire for a sense of normalcy. Things are more flexible, and now that the culture shock has worn off a good deal, I have a lot more freedom. I can try out many different coffee shops if I want to, and then I can go back to the ones I like the best. I can experiment with venders at the market to see who will rip me off the least, and don’t feel obligated to keep returning to the same one– or too scared to try something different. Through trial and error, I also have a better sense of what is rude, what is polite, what is expected of me, and what people assume that I expect of them. It helps to have a sense of humor about all this (which I cannot say I have every day, especially not during hot season).

Although, my experience here doesn’t shed much light on another encounter I had with a Korean back home, which was quite different and on a more personal level. For a while I was tutoring a Korean man in his fifties, but after several lessons it became apparent that he wanted more than a tutor. Unsure what to do about it, I continued to teach him, but the situation only became more and more uncomfortable. Finally I stopped teaching him and told him he’d have to find a different tutor, though I didn’t confront him about his inappropriate behavior. In the back of my mind, I thought that maybe “in Korea it would be appropriate.” So I let it go at that.

Recently I gave English lessons to a Korean missionary who lives not far from me. He already speaks decent English, but he says he wants to study in order to “speak like an American”. And my “old complaints” started to resurface– same old acquaintance, but in new clothes.

At first I shrugged off his racist and sexist remarks (about Cambodians and about me), because this was a strictly teacher-student relationship. It wasn’t supposed to matter to me what his bigoted mindset was. After teaching several lessons, it was evident that he was very lonely and probably wanted a friend. I never felt at any point that we had much in common, but I invited him to lunch one day with an American and some Khmer friends. I wasn’t paying very close attention to the exchange of dialogue, but evidently he insulted my Khmer friends by making a show of his wealth and then comparing that with their relatively not wealthy state. This was just one in a long line of offensive behaviors, unfortunately. “You should grow your hair out. Korean men find short hair unattractive,” he said to me quite plainly one day. Apart from his dazzlingly enlightened opinions on women (“Women who choose to wait until they are older to have children are selfish. Women who choose not to have children are also selfish.” “A woman should not travel alone; it is not safe.” etc.), he often expounded upon his views of Khmer people and Cambodian society, in general. “Cambodians think foreigners are stupid; they think foreigners are under their boots.” “Cambodians always want something from us, because we’re foreigners. They are always asking me for things.” (Yes, he would say “us”: me and him, versus the Others.) He said he’d left his expensive watch back in South Korea because so many people had tried to ask for it during his previous trip to Cambodia, and he had felt pressured to give it to them.

I explained to him that this was not my experience, that yes perhaps some Cambodians take advantage of foreign charity (but foreign charity is most assuredly taking advantage of them, so I call that mutual reciprocity), but in general I didn’t know what he was talking about. Cambodians had never asked me for anything of my own, as a general rule. Beggars, of course, have asked me for money and/or food and I have often given that to them, but “beggars” and “Cambodians” are not one and the same. In any case, I do the same thing in my own country. Once there was a rather coy ninth grade girl in my old village who asked me if I ever thought of selling my computer, and if I had how much would that be? But she never, ever asked me to give it to her.

Thinking my experience was just a fluke, I asked a couple of my American friends from the villages what their thoughts were. One was a man, and he said that yes, he’d been asked for things and it hadn’t been a joking-around situation. People had asked for things off his person, though not obviously expensive things. The other was a woman and she said that she had been asked for things as well, though rarely and never something on the rank of an expensive watch.

I wondered, why had our experiences been so different? I don’t look obviously less poor than they do; I’m white and by default that means I’m rich, oftentimes. I don’t think it has anything to do with appearances. Rather, once people know why you are here, I think that is more likely to determine if they seek to gain from you or not. Both of my friends are Volunteers, and my Korean pupil is a missionary, and everybody knows this about them. I imagine this plays a major factor in the “making gain off them” scheme. But that has just not been my experience.

To realign from that major tangent…

Said Korean student also expounded on his philosophy of Japanese and American culture– or rather, their lack thereof. I listened to all he said: “Japanese people hate Koreans because they have no culture of their own. Their culture, and their blood, came from Korean.” “Japan used to be part of Korea, and some day we will get it back.” “Americans are similar to the Japanese, because they have no original culture. Their culture comes from England.” I was sorely tempted to laugh at this last statement, because he, himself, had previously told me that “American culture and Korean culture are the same,” to explain why he felt so comfortable during a visit to the States. But in the end, I wasn’t left feeling sardonically amused, or academically challenged (what would be the use in suggesting my definition of culture to this person who believes “culture” is something some people have and others dont’?). I just felt depressed.

This one Korean student had recalled all my negative feelings about Korean socioculture as a whole. Now really, that’s just unacceptable; we can’t just leave it at that.

Recently I had an epiphany (late in coming, I’m sure) that if I want to see something with “unscaled eyes”, I may just have to go to that place and meet those people. The source of most racism is ignorance, which can be cured by learning.

There was a time where Cambodians were Other for me; that is no longer true. They’re not just illustrations in a storybook, alien and unknowable– they’re my friends, my neighbors, my students, my teachers, my sisters and my brothers. These people are my community. Though I often still feel like I am not their community. I am still barang to all but my closest friends.

The moral of the story, though, is that I may just have to go to South Korea. I hate basing everything I know of Korea off of a handful of people: I would never want Cambodians (or anyone else, for that matter) to base their opinion of Americans off a small number of encounters they have had with tourists. If that were the case, they may well think that it’s normal for Americans to yell belligerently at tuk tuk drivers who are only trying to offer them a ride, or to pick up prostitutes. And really, it can and does get lower than that.

In addition to South Korea, I may need to visit Australia, South Africa, and China. You don’t even want to hear the bigoted opinions I hold of those places.