Hey team! Sorry I’ve been so silent lately. A pile of deadlines, report cards and couch surfers have kept me away from my SuperForest. And in nine hours I’m heading to Osaka and Kyoto. So, to give ya’ll some love, here’s a magazine column I wrote a few weeks back:
During a routine Sunday walk I came upon a signature Seoul sight: a crowd of apartment buildings hiking up a mountain.
“If I lived in one of those, I wouldn’t feel individual at all,” my girlfriend said, biting her lip, “but that’s what they want.”
Such a realization conjures up a mixture of antipathy and appreciation. As an expat, I’m a legacy of Western individualistic inquiry, washed ashore to teach English in the Hermit Kingdom. Upon arriving, I did not understand why a face must be saved, or why even in nouveau chic Hongdae, everyone dressed the same.
As an American, clearly what I thought was right and what they thought was wrong — until I realized that I had no right to such chauvinism. To hold the possibility of only one truth is an Anglophone trait not present in East Asia. So a goal was set: to stop emphasizing the I and consider the we, to see if one culture’s homogeny is another’s harmony.
Ever-eager to curtail my ego, the aforementioned lady later handed me Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. The book unravels many East/West relation riddles. Nisbett writes that “East Asians live in an interdependent world in which the self is a part of a larger whole; Westerners live in a world in which the self is a unitary free agent.” A Japanese wishes to belong to a group, a Briton seeks to be himself. A Korean gathers context, an American focuses. These conflicting worldviews manifest every day, in conversations and in contracts.
To gain individual counsel in a collective, I rang Mr. Nisbett. He said that newcomers must recognize the indirectness of East Asian communication. “Americans are often annoyed by what they see as evasiveness or even dishonesty; that when he says maybe, he probably means no.” This is because Asians are much more concerned with a broader context, beyond a given interaction.
“(Westerners) are focused on one particular goal and how to achieve it,” the professor said, “but because effective action in Asia depends much more coordination on with other people, people can be confused about exactly why they’re having a different perception of a situation.”
East Asians are responding to a wider range of signals. Saving face is not so much to placate you, but to consider group cohesion, to maintain a larger system.
Getting off the phone, I am reminded of Synecdoche, New York, Andy Kaufman’s sprawling postmodern masterpiece. Near the end, an aged Philip Seymour Hoffman calls out, “There are nearly 6.5 billion people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories.” Perhaps the director should have halved that claim. Westerners are leads in their autobiography, while Asians are part of a grander production: The nation, the family, the whole.
So now, looking up at Lotte’s latest squadron of cement sentinels, I appreciate the double feature: the dae-han-min-guk opera, forever in harmony, and my waeguk adventure story, alone against the world.
Recent Comments