Lost in transit

Kde Domov Muj?

When I moved to Japan in the late ‘80s, a certain part of that decision had to do with a serious case of post-graduate dissatisfaction with the U.S. I wanted to teach most of all, but underneath that was a real desire to be somewhere different, to shake myself up in general, and specifically to shake off that culture with which I was so disaffected.

Of course, part of living away from a place is learning to appreciate it anew. For me, I never really understood what there was to love about the country of my birth until I saw what there was to miss. The ability to walk down the street without being stared at, conversations drenched in cultural references, peanut butter.

I missed those things, and I went back to California, had a true Thomas Wolfe moment, and scurried off to the Czech Republic, where I instantly felt more “at home” than I had ever felt anywhere before. So I stayed here. My metaphorical hat has been hung for ten years now. I’m over my intense dislike of the U.S. now: it’s a good country, with a lot of really great parts. I just don’t want to live there anymore.

Probably one of the hardest things for me in living out of the United States is being expected to explain it. In Japan, the level and type of students I was teaching meant mainly explaining Americans as one would explain Martians, if one were a Martian, and most people’s exposure was celluloid based. Yes, most of us wear underpants. No, we don’t all carry guns. Actually, I’m average-sized: most movie stars are thinner than average. No, I haven’t met Michael Jackson.

The questions are harder here, and they’ve been harder lately. Partly this is because I’m dealing with a more foreign-aware public, partly this is because I’m older and no longer find questions that start “Why does the United States…” to have easy answers. Who am I to say what a country of nearly 300 million people thinks? I’m not sure anyone has a right to sentences that start “The American people…”; I am sure that I am unable start a sentence that way and be certain I’ve finished it truthfully.

However challenging these questions are for me, though, they are even more of a challenge for my son. He was born here, and has lived his whole seven years here (albeit with annual visits to the grandparents in California). However, we speak English together, and he carries a U.S. passport. Somehow, people take this to mean that he’s able to comfortably and knowledgably answer questions about the United States for them. “How do Americans celebrate Easter?” “How often do the teachers give grades in the United States?” “Sing the national anthem for us!” “Why does Bush like war?”

So… I don’t know what to do. Seven seems a little early to be getting coaching on one’s sense of national identity. And what is a “national identity” anyway? He’s a U.S. citizen because I am, and I don’t think it’s something he should be proud (or, conversely, ashamed) of, any more than he should be proud for having inherited my blue eyes. I don’t know how to help him prepare for questions I often find myself unable to answer, though, not to mention that a seven-year-old sounds a little funny saying, “The United States has a very diverse population, and questions such as yours cannot be answered without taking into consideration the history,….”. I’ve been prepping him for the questions I can anticipate (like the Easter one), and telling him to tell people, “You have to ask my mom,” for the harder ones. It feels like a weak solution, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment.

I did give the national anthem a shot, though, but let’s face it: Nobody can get past the “rocket’s red glare” part. I taught him the first verse of “This Land is Your Land” instead. I wrote a note to his teacher explaining that it’s not the national anthem, but it’s something a kid can sing. She had requested it when they learned the Czech national anthem. Which is called “Kde domov muj?” [Where is my home?], by the way. He’ll probably be singing that by request when we next go stateside, and people start asking him how the Czech Republic feels about joining the EU.

New Day Dawning

Been a long time since I posted here (I'm a bad bad man), but I thought folks might be interested in this. Please forgive the cross-post from my own site.

--------

The general election here in Korea has come and gone, and the results are being characterized as a democratic victory for the left, the first one since, well, ever. As is usually the case when people resort to such sledgehammer thud-dullard simpletongue™ words as 'left' and 'right' or 'conservative' and 'liberal', though, that's a simplification that does as much to obscure as it does to illuminate. The Uri ('Our') Party has won a clear majority, and as the presumptive representative of the young, the disenfranchized and the reform-minded, it may represent the first significant shift in the political landscape in Korea since the initial stumbling steps towards real democracy 16 years ago. It gives me some hope for the future.

The final numbers of parliamentary seats, of 299 total, are :

• Uri Party:152


• GNP (Grand National Party) :121


• MDP (Millenium Democratic Party):9


• DLP (Democratic Labor Party):10


• Others:7

The Uri Party, formed in November 2003 by a band of breakaway MDP legislators after months of the kind of factional infighting that has paralyzed Korean politics since there was such a thing, is the party Noh Moo Hyun said he would join, and for which he publically expressed his support a couple of months back. This infraction of election laws -- public servants and elected officials are (somewhat inexplicably) barred from expressing support for a political party -- led, along with charges of corruption from the mind-bogglingly corrupt GNP, who held a majority in the assembly, to his impeachment last month. A ruling on that impeachment by the Constitutional court is still pending, but the disgust felt by the vast majority of the population at the hypocrisy of the impeachment, made clear in pre-election polls, has been hammered home by yesterday's election results. Few outside the oligarchy took kindly to the Lord of the Flies stink of the impeachment, and most who are not locked in to that corporate-sponsored network of bribery and kickbacks -- sometimes hyperbolically referred to as the Korean Disease -- had any interest in seeing it rewarded.

But the story is deeper, I think, than mere political bullshittery. It's a story of young against old, of modernity against tradition, of the emergence of a wired netizenry and an unwired elite, and most of all, of a culture rooted in a neo-Confucian world-view that is simply not acceptable to a majority of the population that understands that the strict vertical hierarchy of such a world-view serves only the old, the male, and the wealthy, while rightly cherishing the elements of the ideology (made the state ideology more than 500 years ago, during the Choseon Dynasty) that support the fading communitarian underpinnings of the Korean spirit. Korea is widely held to be the most orthodox Confucian nation in the world, and for good reason.

In an essay on Confucianism and Korean communitarianism, Professor Park Hyo-chong writes :

What Professor Park does not mention, perhaps because it militates against his thesis (or merely because it's tangential to it) is that this definition of self in terms of relationships with others has a dark side as well. In today's urbanized Korea, if there is no readily identifiable relationship between one person and another, that other is summarily ignored, or merely disregarded as a sort of speed bump in the road of daily life. Not to say that Koreans won't struggle mightily to establish some sort of relationship, no matter how tenuous, if they wish to interact with you (the seemingly overpersonal questions about age, marital status, religion and so on that so annoy newly arrived foreigners are examples of this in action) -- they do, and will. But if there is no reason to do so, the default mode of interaction with strangers often seems to be brusqueness to the point of derision. Rude by the standards of an overly-sensitive Canadian like myself, but not so much impolite as simply a way of managing one's way through life while buried in a complex, dense web of relationships, relationships through which one defines oneself.

This dependance on a web of relationships and the tendency to simply ignore those with whom there is no first-order relationship through blood or money or alma mater creates an ever-thicker wall between the haves and the have-nots. This is one of the things that has helped empty the countryside of young people, as they seek both fortune and contacts in Seoul, and has made a good part of an entire generation of young adults simply give up if they did not gain acceptance to one of the 'good schools'. It actually is about who you know here, in a very real and destiny-defining sense.

But this is far from the worst of what Confucian values have wrought, despite the communitarian benefits they have sown.

For those not entirely hip to the Confucian two-step, I wrote a little bullet-point summary of some of the underlying human taxonomy it requires in an old piece on linguistic relativism.

Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships (although of course there is much, much more to the system of thought) :

1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend

All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last.

The implication is clear, I should think, and for anyone with any knowledge or experience of the differences between the old and new guard in Korea, it should be easy to divine the pattern : man over woman, old over young, teacher over student, ruler over subject.

It is this structuring of duty and fealty, of dominance and willing submission, that underpins a great deal of day-to-day life in Korea, and, I believe, has been one of the guiding forces in the evolution of Korean politics, just as it has been in all things here. It's a force that is fading, or more accurately, being transformed, but it still has deep and mostly unquestioned influence in the relationships between Korean people in both the personal and the public spheres.

The one constant in Korea, as the cliché goes, is change, though. One of the alarm bells that anyone who was paying attention might cite was a UNICEF poll back in 2001, that showed that among Asian 17 nations surveyed, Korean young people had the lowest levels of respect for their elders.

When the mostly old, mostly male politicians and teachers are unfailingly corrupt and obviously unworthy of respect or fealty, and when the very foundation ethos of the cultural history that they cling to demands that that respect be paid, things start to fracture.

Beatings of students by teachers, like this one captured on a camera phone recently, are not the exception, and only go part of the way to an explanation of the disgust and anger most young people and many of their elders feel with the state of things. Although it's little discussed in English, for example, it is standard procedure for public school teachers to accept bribes and gifts from parents in order to 'do a better job', or pay special attention to their children. Arbitrary exercise of power, corruption, and disregard for rule of law are everywhere.

And young people today, thanks to penetration of broadband internet into upwrds of 80% of households in Korea, know that that's not the way it needs to be. They're angry that the moneyed elite, all of whom, with very few exceptions, graduated from one of the Top 5 universities in Seoul, have developed an insular network that locks out anyone from the wrong class, or the wrong province. They're angry at the university entrance examination system, which theoretically offers a level playing field, but like the continuation of the old yang-ban government service exams that created a small de facto nobility and a vast population of peasants and outright slaves during the Choseon Dynasty that it is, they realize that the game is rigged against them. They know that if they don't jump through the hoops presented to them by an archaic and entirely anachronistic education system, in which they can only excel by putting in 18 hours days throughout their entire public school careers, greased by the liberal application of their parents' money, they have little to no opportunity to rise to the top. They know that anything can be bought, and everything is, and they're sick of it.

Then, last year, when a man who had not attended university, who came from a peasant background, who spoke plainly, whose background was as a human rights lawyer (and to rise to that level, he had to repeatedly retake his qualifying examinations), when this most unlikely of people to actually be put forward as a candidate for president of Korea, when this totally unexpected watermelon seed suddenly squirted out of the scrum -- well the young and the disenfranchized elders voted for him in droves. For better or worse, he represented the truly revolutionary idea that you might not need to be part of the oligarchy to succeed.

And when, after being blocked and bullied at every opportunity by the bought-and-paid-for money men who held the majority of the seats in the assembly, after wobbling from crisis to crisis, he was impeached in what was clearly a power grab, ostensibly for the kind of corruption of which it was abundantly clear so many the impeachers were equally guilty, the outrage went ballistic.

All countries are well-stocked with corrupt politicians, of course. Korea may be cursed with an overabundance of them, but ordinary people, especially the young, are clearly not willing to bow down for them much longer, as the watch the scions of the tiny overclass ride blithely past so much abject poverty, safe behind the tinted glass of their Chairman sedans.

It is entirely possible the Uri Party will end up being as mired in corruption as the others, and equally possible that the chaebols like LG, Samsung, Daewoo and Hyundai that own the country and its politicians outright will buy up the new power brokers in short order as well. It is likely that the bickering and internecine backstabbing that has been the hallmark of Korean politics since they were occupied by the Japanese (and further back than that, of course) will cancel any forward momentum. The young, who, while idealistic, are also fatter, lazier, more selfish and less driven than their parents and grandparents, may continue to think of the evil bastards up in Pyongyang with a misguided, romanticized fondness right up until bombs start to fall.

Will it mean that the education system will be reformed? Probably not. Will it limit the power of the oligarchic chaebols and their rentboys in the assembly? Doubtful. Will it bring about greater rule of law, and more respect for individual rights? I'm not going to hold my breath. Will it break the strangehold on money, power and the future of the latter-day Gangnam yangban? Hell, no.

On the other hand, this deliberate break from a rule by corrupt corporate whores, this disgust with a perpetuation of the status quo that weakens Korea and its people in every measure but the monetary, this understanding of the power of democracy a decade and a half after the country became democratic in name if not nature -- perhaps this means a new day is dawning. It's the first real step in the right direction of this magnitude that I've seen in 8 years here, and it will, I hope, mean that the transformation of this society, massive and rapid as it has been, has only begun.

Now let's just hope as more pegs are knocked out from under the rotten superstructure that there are people with the energy and ideas to build on the traditions, the drive, and the indomitable spirit that has brought Korea to where it is today.

And that Kim Jong Il doesn't get any bright ideas.

An explosion of beggars

The 8 April International Herald Tribune (which I finally got around to reading last Friday) has an article below the fold on the front page with the headline, "An explosion of beggars in China." At first glance, it sounded like a collective noun -- school of fish, murder of crows, donut shop of policemen: explosion of beggars.

Because I had read the article, I was looking for beggars when I strolled through Vienna later that evening. China has no monopoly on beggars -- I saw at least an explosion of them.

If you've got to be begging, you could do worse than Vienna last Friday evening. It was sunny and mild, and the sunset filled the alleys with orange and purple and blue light. The cobblestone streets looked centuries old, which of course they were.

I've been here, off and on, for more than twenty years, so the city usually has a familiar feel to me. But that evening, I suddenly noticed how much had changed. Walking into town from Schwedenplatz, I saw that police still patrolled the sidewalk in front of the synagogue (across the street from a vodka bar where I went vodka-tasting with a young Russian fellow nearly 10 years ago, and it still gives me a headache to remember that night) but further up the street, two heavily tattooed young men flirted with a middle-aged blonde woman in the street in front of a tattoo parlor I'd never seen before.

Everywhere I looked, the streets were livelier with more young people than I remembered, and more shops, and bars and restaurants. I need to get out more.

Then, on the corner, the first beggar. We've talked about this type here before: he kneels silently, hands held cupped in front of him in supplication, gaze downcast. Sometimes they remain motionless, sometimes they rock back and forth.

Further along, on the Kärntnerstrasse, I saw the next: a tiny old woman hobbling along with a crutch under one armpit, a tin cup jingling with change in her other hand. The street was full of people and she wasn't going very fast and it took forever to get around her without attracting her attention; I hate to attract the attention of beggars because that just makes it harder not to give them anything, when they strike up a conversation with you, you know? Although conversations with beggars can be rewarding. I had a talk with an old fortune-teller once; she was trying to scam me, but it ended up doing me as much good as a successful therapy session.

There were several mutilated Gypsies about as well. An old man in a wheelchair, a young boy of about twelve on crutches, and further up the street another wheelchair held a teenaged girl. All three of them appeared to be visiting from further East, and all three had their pantlegs (or in the case of the girl, skirt) hiked up to display amputations.

It was sort of a relief to be hit up for change by a young Austrian panhandler near the State Opera, on the corner by the Starbucks. A panhandler, maybe because I'm used to them, is my favorite beggar. It's a clear transaction: they ask you for some change, you give them some. They don't expect you to feel sorry for them, nor do they usually pretend they're going to spend the money on food.

A few years ago, I met a man who took panhandling a bit further. He asked me for a certain amount of money, the equivalent of about eight dollars, for a schnitzel and a beer, he said. I figured the story would come in handy some day (and look: it finally has) so I gave him the money. Also, he was blocking my way, and he was about two meters tall and I wasn't, and he weighed about three hundred and thirty pounds, and I didn't.

It was almost like being robbed, but it wasn't. He carried the whole thing off with a sort of drunken Viennese charm.

Besides the beggars, we also have the scavengers. Several times a year, hordes of small cars or vans, pulling beat up trailers, all with Hungarian license plates, swarm across the Eastern part of Austria picking up bulky garbage. Several times a year, you see, every town sets a date for people to put old sofas and bicycles and anything else too big to toss in the normal garbage, and then special garbage trucks drive around picking it up, if the Hungarian scavengers don't get it first. They somehow know the pick up dates in advance.

Yesterday, I was out in my backyard working on the garden. I heard a car stop and some man asking my daughter something. I walked over to where he could see me, trying to look tough and threatening with a spray of spiraea in my hand. He wanted furniture, bicycles or shoes. We said, sorry. No problem, he said, an drove off up the street. His trailer was full of bicycles.

Connecting with People in Japan

I was talking with two Japanese men not long ago and told them in my limited Japanese that I want to connect with people. I want my Japanese to improve enough so that I can talk about things that are important "from the heart." Talking "heart to heart" is an image that communicates clearly in Japanese. Anyway, one of them said that what he wants from others is that they leave him alone. He didn't say this to counter my statement but just as an honest expression.

What he said is a reality in Japanese culture. There is a tremendous reserve, expressed through images like "building walls," "wearing masks" or just "hiding inside." This aspect of Japanese culture (or at least what I've learned of it so far) seems to contradict a strong value that I have. But I know that Japanese people really value relationships, including "heart to heart" relationships based on honesty and trust. I've seen the evidence, heard from my wife, and I hope to learn this from experience.

It's taken two years of hard work and frustration, but now I know enough Japanese to talk about some of those important things. I'm a bit dangerous. That is, I could...

...say something really offensive without knowing it, I'm sure. But people are gracious with me. I've been meeting every Saturday with a friend who I met in Starbucks. We speak for a 1/2 hour in English and 1/2 hour in Japanese. The best part is that I'm getting to know him as a friend and not just a language partner. I've also just started meeting with one of the young women who works at Starbucks for a language exchange. Her English is much more limited but we connected well in our first meeting.

This week after meeting with her (the worker at Starbucks), I rode my bicycle home (about 10 minutes away). As I was going down a narrow street I had to get way to the side to let some guy driving a low rider get by. This was a real low rider -- a Ford of some sort, I think. He bounced it a bit with his hydraulics just to impress the American (me). I ride a big mountain bike. As I moved to the side an older woman was walking toward me. She jumped back a bit when she saw the (big) bicycle with the (big) foreigner coming toward her. I slowed way down, and I saw her giving me a blank stare.

Normally, and especially in the past, I would have translated her expression to mean something like: "yuck...a big, dangerous foreigner, I hope he doesn't run me over." But I was in a good mood and ready to assume the best, so as I passed I quietly said, "Weird car, huh?" Her face broke instantly into a nice, familiar smile as she nodded and said, "Neeeh" (Yeah). I thought about that moment the rest of the way home. A few words in Japanese broke through a wall that I thought was ten feet thick. The walls may be more permeable than meets the eye. Imagine when I learn a few more words!

Last Easter, I gave you my...egg

It's Easter this weekend. Yay, for chocolate and eggs!

This is a story about what we did last Easter. Well we were proper Czechs, is what we were, even though we mostly spoke English and hold the wrong passports. My parents came to visit and the weather did what it never does when we have visitors, which was SPARKLE: gorgeous, sunny, but not too hot, perfect weather. We went to Rousinov, where my former boss and current friend lives on weekends (with her husband, son, daughter, and dog. Plus the daughter’s boyfriend and many other neighborhood youth popping in and out… what a cast!) Rousinov is a small town, a village really, and the house where they live is the one where my friend’s grandmother lived, and it is a crumbling beauty of a place. One visitor said it was painful because it was so beautiful and so crumbly. And it is exactly that. It is like a museum, a wonderful abandoned museum. Full of creaky wooden wagons, festively painted kitchen furniture, piles of dusty, crumbling books from the early 1800s, bell-jarred Catholic icons, some great-grandmother’s childhood dolls forgotten in the dust on the floor. Lovely and painful. It reminds me of a “before” picture, you just want to get in there with a comb and some tea tree oil and get it all sorted out. But of course half of the magic of the place is its very crumble.
So we went. It’s a 30 minute bus ride, and we got there around noon, my mother hauling many chocolate and other sweet goodies from the states (they DO have sweets here, but sometimes she forgets), me holding a jar of pickled beet eggs (it’s my mother’s favorite Easter thing, and I have until this year considered it pretty but vile, but in trying to perfect the recipe I got a bit of a taste for them, so I guess I’m over calling them “Mom’s nasty egg things”), and the men/boys holding switches. Cause that’s Easter here—the boys use sticks made from willow branches and whack at the girls, and the girls hand them eggs. I’ve been here for 10 years, but I still cannot get over this one, this “Yes, come at me with that rapidly undulating/wagging thing and I will hand you my ov—I mean, an egg!” but then sometimes you like the holidays served primitive. And the guys at Rousinov weren’t really hitting all that hard. Slovaks dump water on you, so we got some of that, too. And also I really liked making them eat the freakish purple pickled things right after. A girl’s gotta have her weapons at hand, and there’s nothing like a strangely colored egg being popped in your mouth to make a person keep his distance.
So. We did the stick and egg thing. We did the disgusting amounts of eating (always in Czech houses, always in Rousinov, always on holidays, so it was a triple whammy of gorge and fun, cheese spreads and chicken and potatoes (for those of us who eat of the chicken) and hot peppers (Tonja, being Macedonian, understands the love of spicy, yay) and lots of buns and cakes and nummy nummies. And brownies. And eggs.
And slivovice (Czech moonshine), which wasn’t really slivovice because it wasn’t made from plums, but from 1. apples and then later 2. pears. Na zdravi, na zdravi, na zdravi, na zzzdravi, naaaa zzzzdravvvvvii.
And then we were well fed and talked out and sleepy and happy and all of that end-of-the-holiday bash stuff, so we went home (some of us handled the standing-room only bus better than others, let’s say).
And that was Easter last year. Surprisingly, my parents remember having had so much fun that they’re coming again this year. Go figure.

Architecture to drool over

Whenever I go travelling the first thing that usually catches my eye is the architecture. My recent trip to Denmark was no exception.

Me and my Significant Other spent a week in splendid isolation - - a remote holiday home 14km south of Skagen, a fishing port on the northern most tip of Jutland.

I had been advised that Skagen was a magical place, that the light there was special, somehow brighter and more vibrant as it reflected off two main bodies of water - - the North Sea to the west and the Baltic to the east. I had expected everything to be bathed in a wonderous golden glow. And I wasn't disappointed.

But what I didn't expect was the gorgeous, gorgeous architecture.

All the homes had a distinctive Skagen "look". The majority of them were painted yellow and had red-tiled roofs. The more detailed buildings had pretty white lacework. Everything was exquisitely well-maintained so that the entire town looked neat and uniform. There was narray a lick of paint or a blade of grass out of place.

In most other places this would appear sterile, perhaps artificial, something like the fake town in Peter Weir's film The Truman Show. But this wasn't the case in Skagen. There was a distinctly lived in feel about the place and, despite it being the off-season, there were plenty of locals wandering around - - most of them on bicycles - - that lent it a carefree air.

Along with the yellow buildings, there was a pleasant mix of pink ones and red brick ones. I'm told that you can work out the age of each building depending on its colour, and that because the original buildings were built on large plots of land it's not uncommon for newer buildings to be built right alongside older ones. It all added up to an incredibly picturesque, photogenic mix.

Sometimes I think it's not the people who make a place, but the buildings.