The Other Is I

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so."--Artemus Ward

Caveat Lector: This is (again) somewhat personal.

In one of my narrative writing classes at college, I had a conference with the professor on my writing. The professor, while lukewarm about science fiction and fantasy, was an excellent workshop instructor; I don't regret the time I spent in that class.

There's one thing for which I haven't forgiven him. As the conference wound to a close, he mentioned that the (Caucasian) son of a friend was getting married to a Korean girl whose parents refused to support the marriage. Presumably the professor brought this up because I am ethnically¹ Korean. As he spoke, it became clear that he was outraged over the behavior of the girls' parents.

I'm not sure what he thought I could do about people I had never met (and still haven't, to my knowledge). At last, because some response on my part seemed to be required, I ventured that it might be because of traditionalist Koreans' strong nationalism, the result of an ancient cultural heritage and a reaction to the humiliation of the Japanese occupation. Anyone who knows me well realizes that I am not a traditionalist Korean.

As strongly as I disagree with these Korean parents' insularity--I'm married to a German-American² myself--I understand where the attitude could come from. After all, I had encountered it in a traditionalist Korean-American classmate who asserted that he would only marry another Korean. (I believe that was the Philosophy of Religion discussion wherein I asserted that my parents would be happy if I brought home a three-legged mule. This did not prove necessary.) I sympathized, as well, with the professor's frustration.

His response was to turn on me and say, "I can't believe anyone would do that to their child," and then condemn me for trying to tell him about Korean history and attitudes. I wasn't the one who brought up the subject. I could have told him about collaborationists and Korean taxi drivers (notorious among Seoul Foreign School students for their nationalist lectures), the Hermit Kingdom and pathologies of the Korean psyche of which I've run afoul myself...but no, he was only interested in a target, and that target was me, because of my Korean name and Korean face.

Faced with such incidents, some people become political activists and some people go into education. (Well, I was in education, but the most political statement I've had any opportunity to make in my teachings of math was to note how Alan Turing was driven to suicide because he was homosexual.) Some people don't see a problem. And I? I write science fiction and fantasy.

Why sf/f specifically? Because both genres, at their best, deal with Now through the lens of Other. I used to read the Sweet Valley Twins series when I was in middle school--because Sweet Valley, with its obsessive popularity contests and upper-to-middle-class Caucasian cast, was as alien to me as Majipoor or Middle-Earth. The Other may be a never-past or a never-future, but the salient point is its departure from Now in order to comment, by triangulation, upon that Now. As Eric Walker notes in his Apologia, "The Great Unwashed seem to think that SF&F is about things that are very other: aliens, far-future civilizations, magicians, the usual suspects. The truth...is just the opposite: SF&F comments on us, here, now."

One of the two recurrent themes in my writing is war, due to my family's history. The other is the Other, the alien, the foreigner without and the outsider within.

I was talking to a former classmate, also Korean-American and a writer, about (what else?) writing. The question of culture and ethnicity came up, and she noted that, at one point, "I wondered why all my characters were Caucasian." It was a tendency that I fell prey to as well. Take a look around next time you're in a U.S. airport, folks. Hate it or love it, it's here; it's one thing I love about the U.S.

In 4th grade, our English teacher exposed us to what was probably a well-balanced diet of reading at the time. We read A Door in the Wall, set in Europe's Middle Ages; Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes' American Revolution coming-of-age novel; The Secret Garden, about a British girl who had grown up in India; and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which chronicles the struggles of a fictional black family in the South.

The demographic of the class was perhaps 18% Caucasian American or European, 80% Asian-American, dominated by Koreans, and 2% other. This was at Seoul Foreign Elementary School--yes, in South Korea. Take a look at the cultural demographics represented by the books we read and do the math.

I have no objections to any of the books individually. I loved those books, and still do. But the teacher was a Caucasian woman, and I have to wonder: did she just transplant a U.S. reading curriculum wholesale without looking at who her students were? Would it have been so painful to include, say, Kim Soweol's poetry, or a few Chinese folktales?

As I said, I fell prey to the "we're all white or black" syndrome because that's what I was exposed to until late in high school. (Depressingly, I would encounter it again in some classes at Stanford's teacher education program.) World Literature IBH was a misnomer, given that the bulk of our readings came from Europe, but given that the International Baccalaureate is a European institution, I can't complain much. Even there, we read some Korean short stories in translation, strange, unsettling tales that the (Caucasian) teacher left us to flounder with, as opposed to his lengthy discussions of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Heritage is not easily escaped; in some sense it may never be escaped. When I transferred from Seoul Foreign Elementary School to an elementary school in Houston, one of the first things they did was to put me through an English competency test, no matter what SFS' records said about my academics. I was confused because the test was too easy. Distinguish between "cat" and "bat"? I was reading Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in 4th grade on my own initiative, though I won't claim deep comprehension. What the hell? This after I was accelerated in English by the U.S. Department of Defense schools I attended from kindergarten to 2nd grade. Needless to say, I massacred the test and escaped English as a Second Language (though Korean was my first tongue and English, indeed, my second). I ended that year by sweeping the 5th grade English awards.

I've had people speak to me as if I'm not only incompetent in English, but stupid, because I don't wear a Caucasian face. I am aware that competency in English does not correlate with intelligence. My mother's spoken English is halting, as opposed to my father's near-perfect fluency, but she is one of the most intelligent people I know.

I remember that the people who ran Palm Court Apartments in Houston treated her like a "dumb foreigner" when she made the arrangements for us to leave for Korea in the coming summer. This is the woman who remembered how to derive the lateral surface area of a cone from scratch despite having been out of college--as a humanities major, at that--for a good 15 years. This is the woman who taught me Latin American geography, who explained Korean etymology to me. This is the woman who taught me how to read English before I went to kindergarten, and I continue to read English more quickly than almost anyone I've met but my sister. (You may guess who taught my sister to read; it wasn't me.)

It didn't matter: to them, she was a "dumb foreigner" because of her appearance and her accent.

I was too young to speak out against the people running Palm Court. (I don't know if the place is still under that management; I haven't been back to Houston in over 10 years.) I can tell you, though, that I've started looking at the power structures implicit in my choices of setting and milieu, even of names. I am American, writing in English, and my stories reflect this; but I am also Korean; I have had friends and classmates from the Netherlands, Yemen, Greece, Italy, Thailand, Poland, Malaysia, Great Britain, Mexico, Taiwan, Canada, Germany, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Japan, Kenya, China, Oman, Israel, Singapore, and Egypt; students from Haiti, Brazil, Tibet, Albania, and the Philippines; and my stories should reflect this, too.

My writing is not a crusade for recognition of diversity per se. Other writers in sf/f have done that better than I ever will. However, when I write of Sharadon Kendra shedding her insularity or a mathemagician in exile from her homeland, I remember that all my life I have been caught in the interface between Us and Other. But the Other is I; there is no escape for me, whether in life or writing, my lens upon life. Perhaps, for the space of a few words, that lens can be yours, too.

footnotes

¹ It irritates me to have to insert "ethnically" so people don't assume that I am a Korean rather than U.S. citizen, but them's the breaks; and to be fair, the terminology of such introductions can get clunky. [ back ]

² His name is Joseph Charles Betzwieser; as per Korean tradition, I have kept my own "last" (or family) name. A family friend once asked, in confusion, "Half-Korean and half-German?" and I had to clarify, "Half-generic-Caucasian and half-German." The term Joe and his mom use for the first half is "mutt." [ back ]

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