More Margaret

Margaret Cho and Portrayals of Asians in Media

What would this blog be without Margaret Cho? Margaret Cho is queen of the gays. I said it. If you are not familiar with her work, I suggest you acquaint yourself. Most of it is about being comfortable with yourself. I think I first saw her around 2003 during her Notorious C.H.O. tour. Her work deals with issues of sexuality, being the child of immigrant parents, and how her childhood experiences have influenced her into adulthood.

What makes Cho so interesting however is the kind of dark side to her career. In the 90's, she starred for a season in her own sitcom on one of the major networks, All American Girl. There were numerous problems with this show: producers thought that she was not thin or Asian enough. The result was bringing in coaches to teach her to be Asian and Cho starving herself. The show was later cancelled while Cho developed kidney failure and became addicted to drugs.

While this period was before I became familiar with her material, Cho later recovered and the experience has become an important part of her acts. I best know Cho for the above clip, in which Cho plays her mother and deals with issues of her sexuality and being the child of immigrants. Her later works have included burlesque performance and a new obsession with tattooing, as you can see in more recent pictures of her. For me she has always been a role model and a reminder that things get better when you stop trying to be who other people want you to be and start being yourself.

Spaces

I've been waiting for the right time to do a blog post on this but I have just not been able to come up with a single topic I have wanted to discuss. This semester I have attended a number of meetings of KiUM, essentially a club that discusses some sort of Korean issue each week. What makes the club interesting is that it is mostly attended by Korean international students, so the perspective given is often about the differences between the US and South Korea. Topics have included stereotypes, education, and sexualization of the media. The format consists of someone giving a presentation each week followed by group discussion.

I find myself very interested with the idea of spaces ever since my friend took me to a noraebang she was working at. It was the first time I have ever been in a space that was not predominately white nor was English the predominate language. I am not sure how to put the experience into words because it was uncomfortable but it made me change the way I feel about diversity. Sure at a place like Michigan we get to meet people from many different cultures but it is still a strictly American and very white space. I think the only thing I can relate it to is being in a very queer space(especially when your local gay bar makes a decent Negroni). It's a place that you can be in without everyone and everything around you reminding you how different you are from everyone else.

I love how spaces exist that let nearly anyone find a place to feel at home.

Film Adventure

Today I went to see The Chaser. I actually expected it to be different. First however it is very unsettling, as I find a lot of the violence in Korean cinema is. The film begins with a prostitute going to see a customer on a day she is sick. She leaves her daughter at home to meet the guy only to have this guy trying to bash her head in with a hammer and chisel. Apparently his thing was killing people like this and cutting up the bodies. It does not help we see him, chisel pressed up against a woman's skull, only to to slip about three times before doing this again.

But what I really expected from this film was more a commentary on violence and murder in Korea. This film was based on a real serial killer, Yoo Young-chul, who killed 21 people and ate some of them. This is not the first Korean film about a real Korean serial killer either, as Memories of Murder was based on a series of killings from 1986-91. I'm curious to know how Koreans deal with incidents such as these, as in the United States, serial killers such as Ted Bundy and BTK have enjoyed a form of infamous celebrity from the media.

Korean Dramas

I've been trying to get into Korean historical dramas for about the past week. Notice the trying to. I figured I would pick something related to what I am supposed to be studying, so I picked "Queen Seondeok" (선덕여왕) due to its time period (it is supposed to be set in Silla, or at least what TV producers believed Silla was like). Unfortunately this has not been working out.

First is the fact that like anything on television, it takes liberties with reality. I think I got through one episode before realizing I was too bored to pay attention long enough to what was happening. I imagine there are some cultural differences I am not picking up on in the subtitles and my year of studying Korean did not exactly equip me to notice intricacies the subtitles happened to have missed.

I guess I could switch to modern day dramas about young people falling in love and living in the city. This is if I can get passed screaming about the patriarchal heteronormativity.

I picked the two pieces of artwork on the right for their similar setup. The first is a propaganda print of the Boston Massacre where the British forces are firing on colonial civilians in Boston. The second is a piece by Picasso titled Massacre in Korea. Picasso allegedly produced this response to the Sinchon Massacre.

Yesterday I finally got to hear Bruce Cummings lecture after waiting almost a year since it had been rescheduled. It was kind of what I expected for his lecture topic of the forgotten Korean War. Cummings mostly talked about the 20th century style total war and its impact upon the Korean population.

Overall it was not anything I had not heard before. North Korea's power structure is still built around the same people who were around during the war. The US probably prolonged the war effort in an attempt to make a point to nations of the world thinking of going Communist.

The question for today however is how do we confront this ghosts of the past? There has been a large body of revisionist history that has set out as of late to examine these issues. I think Cummings made a good point however when he said that everyone needs to be able to tell their story. This has been a part of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has done.

Hello World

I needed a place holder here. Eventually I will come up with a better name but the URL will remain the same.