Korea: More confusion than China.
Confusion
“world of averages” - composite images culled from thousands of individual portraits resulting in symmetrical average faces.
this was too cool not to reblog
I can see why people can’t pin down where in Asia I’m from
I’m pleased by my vague resemblance to Average Korean Actor.
CHOREOGRAPHER HERMES PAN INSTRUCTING NANCY KWAN DURING THE FILMING OF THE “I ENJOY BEING A GIRL” NUMBER IN THE MOVIE MUSICAL “FLOWER DRUM SONG” (1961).
ourlightsinvain replied to your post: sometimes when i encounter people on the internet…i remember my second-grade classmates making fun of the hanbok on my korean “culture doll” i made as a school project where we had to make dolls representing our backgrounds. i glanced enviously at the british ones.
that’s the fucking thing, isn’t it, because you remember that shit, and all the asian jokes your fucking friends and classmates make pile up and then, THEN you have the anglophile phase because being asian is opening yourself up to mockery simply by being asian, and when you get over it and look back, you realize one of the reasons why you had it and you just feel kind of queasy and sick. but if you tell anybody, even people you know and like, there’s a 90 percent chance you’re gonna get told that you’re being overdramatic or overreacting, or making shit up that wasn’t there, making shit up about your own feelings and experiences.
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of microaggressions. :\ I’m really sorry you had to go through that. I’m really sorry any of us had to go through that. And then you hit the point in your teens when all of a sudden all the cool kids are eating the Pocky they made fun of you for bringing to school as a child and you have a hard time explaining why you snort cynically at many of your white friends’ participation in Well-Meaning Fandom Diversity and… yeah. I’ve got nothing deep or insightful to add here, just: that sucks. I see you and I hear you. I know it’s true.
Yeah, some other people have commented with their own experiences. I’m just going to post them without commentary. Explaining these things to Well-Meaning Friends is especially exhausting, because they are trying, and you know they’re trying, but sometimes you just want to tell them to shut the fuck up because you’ve had enough about hearing how your taking them to a pho restaurant or whatever “expands their horizons” or how they’ve microanaylzed the diversity in Thing You Both Like because they just don’t get it, not really, and you have no way of explaining it to them without sounding like an ass.
lol yeah. Their clueless John Cho gifsets and meta. The innocent way they marvel the first time they see dolsot bibimbap and report back to their friends like a wide-eyed young anthropologist on their first field mission. It’s not even malicious, it’s just… wearisome. And impossible to explain.
ourlightsinvain replied to your post: sometimes when i encounter people on the internet…i remember my second-grade classmates making fun of the hanbok on my korean “culture doll” i made as a school project where we had to make dolls representing our backgrounds. i glanced enviously at the british ones.
that’s the fucking thing, isn’t it, because you remember that shit, and all the asian jokes your fucking friends and classmates make pile up and then, THEN you have the anglophile phase because being asian is opening yourself up to mockery simply by being asian, and when you get over it and look back, you realize one of the reasons why you had it and you just feel kind of queasy and sick. but if you tell anybody, even people you know and like, there’s a 90 percent chance you’re gonna get told that you’re being overdramatic or overreacting, or making shit up that wasn’t there, making shit up about your own feelings and experiences.
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of microaggressions. :\ I’m really sorry you had to go through that. I’m really sorry any of us had to go through that. And then you hit the point in your teens when all of a sudden all the cool kids are eating the Pocky they made fun of you for bringing to school as a child and you have a hard time explaining why you snort cynically at many of your white friends’ participation in Well-Meaning Fandom Diversity and… yeah. I’ve got nothing deep or insightful to add here, just: that sucks. I see you and I hear you. I know it’s true.
I literally do not understand white people’s need to talk about authenticity of other people’s food.
Do you know when you’re shitting on ~fake~ ‘ethnic’ food, you are shitting on food created by people of color in this country? It’s not like a secret white man sitting in the back of the kitchen yelling at Chinese people to defrost that sweet and sour sauce faster.
Like I’m glad that making and selling food that follows more of some of the “Chinese” culinary heritages than the “Chinese American” heritage is becoming more economically viable for some Chinese people (and, lbr, more white chefs starting ‘fusion’ restaurants), but it also definitely seems racist to me how white people can fawn over ~authenticity~. It definitely seems racist to me how dim sum and then banh mi and then whatever it is now (Korean BBQ?) passes through the hands of white people like the artifacts of the colonized, to be admired and cooed over and consumed. To be preserved into a museum because the cultures of color are not living things enacted by living people who contradict each other and themselves, but historical oddities.
You know what is authentic? A Korean man bringing his wife and his parents to the United States to raise a family in a country where he believes there are more chances for his children. He studied electrical engineering in Korea but knows that he cannot take time off in the U.S. to finish his education and find an engineering job. Instead, he works twenty years in a market preparing chop suey and egg rolls and explains how he doesn’t really make friends with his neighbors because he doesn’t think he speaks English well enough. He’s happy his son and daughter are in college and have diverse friends and his son skateboards, but they can’t really understand. He asks me about my parents and where they are from (Hong Kong) and he says, “Go ask your mother and your father.”
I got all this from a twenty-minute conversation. And it’s already more real than your white asses trying to pretend to culture because your ancestors spent enough time stomping it out.
as someone whose father went into the restaurant business making general tso’s chicken and chicken teriyaki for white people to earn a living because his chinese civil engineering degree was worthless in america, i sympathize a lot with this
Grumbling
Randomly stumbled across a post that made the claim that a lot of East Asian languages stemmed from the same language and shared cognates, just like European Romance languages! This post was specifically a critical response to the Cho Chang video that made the mistake of assuming “Cho” and “Chang” are only family names in Korean. Funny how both things trigger my “someone is Wrong on the Internet!” response.
I like this rant!
Tangential personal note: my surname is neither the Korean 조 (duh, ‘cos I’m not Korean) nor the Chinese 趙, but 曹, pronounced Chao in Mandarin. (曹操的曹, as we used to say in Chinese school!)
I assume it’s been transliterated as Cho because that is how you pronounce it in Hakka — but I do not know because I do not speak or understand Hakka, despite being Hakka on both sides of the family. (Peranakan Hokkien 4eva!)
I cannot better Wikipedia’s description of Handsome Asian Ko Un.
Ko Un is a South Korean poet. His works have been translated and published in more than 15 countries and he has been imprisoned many times.
#koreankidproblems
“Young [Surname] has added you to [some LinkedIn thing you don’t check]”
- *frysquint* not sure if mom, uncle, other uncle, or aunt
- the fact that your relatives add you on LinkedIn, not Facebook
Handsome Asian Michelle Yeoh is an actress, erstwhile Bond girl and Datuk. She probably doesn’t approve of smoking, but that picture of her with the cigar is still quite cool.
