Photo
One thing I find amusing is how a lot of people find Asian cultures so different from Western ones. The following picture is from around 1970 of my mother and her brother. The funny part is that the background and traditional clothes they’re wearing are all just for the picture – essentially the Korean equivalent of those places you can go where you dress up in old cowboy/western costumes and they take pictures with fake backgrounds and print them in sepia tones.
Jane’s hybridity
One thing I find very fascinating while reading Ozeki’s novel is how Jane describes herself as a hybrid. I think this racial “middle” somewhat defines her personality. She seems almost disjointed at times, like when she takes the job at My American Wife! She wants to be taken seriously as a documentarian, but deludes herself into thinking that it’s more than what it seems. Until contact with Akiko, Jane doesn’t even consider her Japanese audience, but only with her own vision of directing. She never even realizes that people were in fact affected by the show. I can see how she calls herself a “cultural pimp” since she really does in a way exploit her biracialism to earn a living.
She fits into neither world – in Japan, she embraced her differentness, but as soon as she went back to the states, everyone else was just as different as her. Yet she was still an outsider; Americans asked where she was from, Kenji tells her she’s not Japanese. Jane’s own hyphenated name illustrates the almost tug-of-war-like dichotomy of her race. She belongs to both and neither at the same time.
On page 176, Jane talks about “doubling,” the juggling of wanting to care about each individual Wife and seeing it just as a job. Then she talks about how she was “born doubled,” “halved.” Jane says she can speak “out of both sides” of her mouth. She is the living ghost of the Japanese tale she tells – she is the one that’s “neither here nor there” (176). It seems ironic that this woman who is floating between worlds is working with a Japanese crew, finding the “All-American” woman for these shows. I also found it interesting that Jane is the one who gave Mr. Ueno his nickname “John,” Americanizing him a tiny bit.
Thoughts on Hagedorn
I’m brining up points from a few of the posts and comments, but one thing that really intrigues me about Hagedorn’s novel is the complexities she weaves through having so many characters and stories involved. I love seeing how she subtly connects them to each other through blood and money ties. I appreciate Hagedorn for giving such a wide spectrum of characters to really paint a vivid picture of life in the Philippines – she doesn’t focus on one social group or one family, but rather gives a much more realistic view into a world not too many are familiar with. I myself did not know how prevalent Spanish was in the Philippines and had to immediately google the country to figure out why so many names sounded Spanish.
As for the shock value of the novel – I don’t find anything particularly different in Hagedorn’s book than in many other narratives. I actually think that this grittier portrait in a way actually forces readers to realize that foreign countries like the Philippines are neither completely heathen nor are they completely exotic and otherworldly; Hagedorn denounces Orientalism.
And finally, I still find the conversation in class about the short synopsis on the back of the book to be quite interesting. The further I read, the more it seems ludicrous that the book would advertise the story as an almost feel-good growing up story about a “feisty schoolgirl,” especially when you compare it to the cover of the novel which in itself is definitely a hot topic.
Gender traditions.
One thing I think is really hard to grasp is how ingrained into culture certain practices are. Going back to the foot-binding tradition, I think it’s hard, especially for us, to realize that that was a cultural norm, something that the Chinese culture found to be beautiful, no matter how strange and unusual it may seem now. I thought the high heel being a slight parallel was interesting because very few people in Western cultures seem to notice that things like this are also just a way of molding women into our ideals of beauty.
My freshman year, I read Feng Jicai’s “Three-Inch Golden Lotus,” which was about foot binding. The main character in Jicai’s novel actually stood up for the practice of foot binding during the 20th century. I feel that while we can talk about the negative repercussions of such harmful traditions, it is very difficult to separate our opinions from those who willingly participated in it, because there will be those who did not think that it was a negative practice.
The same goes with preferential male treatment. As someone brought up in class, as horrible as it may sound, it was seen as self-preservation by many Chinese who felt that they had no other option. My mother is Korean, and her parents had five daughters before they had a son. They had to continue having that many children because the family would not be complete until they had a son. I know that this is a very strange concept to many other cultures, but it’s so pervasive in Asian cultures, that even now (as seen in modern China) it is a mindset very hard to change.
Essentially, I hold the opinion that while some traditions may seem almost barbaric, it’s hard to judge those who practiced them because those traditions were all that they knew.
