jungsoo's Open Salon Blog

Thank You Lydia Davis

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:12:41 -0500

My sister and I used to call it Barnes & Nobles. If it was Barne's, it only seemed fair that it should be Noble's too - or perhaps it was just a slight ESL hiccup. I still slip into the possessive on occasion, as does my sister, but now we have Amazon - a simple easy-to-read tri-syllable.

I used to love to read. As a Korean kid growing up in LI and northern NJ, I was as studious as my classmates were scrappy. They had baseball fields and soccer pitches, I had chocolate factories and giant peaches. I chose Choose Your Own Adventure in lieu of actual adventures, that is if any were to be had in my uniformly drab suburb. Later as a middle school misfit, Salinger and Vonnegut were appropriately sarcastic proxies for my emerging pathos. But by the time high school rolled around, the only kind of book I opened had matches in it and a striking surface on its cover. Distractions multiplied. No point could remain peripheral, everything demanded simultaneous focus. The pace of the world seemed incompatible with sitting still. The only book I've endeavored since middle school is 100 Years of Solitude, which felt like it took a good part of a century to complete.

I dub the Aughts "The Age of Abbreviation". Shorter=better. BTW, if this was a tweet, I would hit the 140 character limit right about...

SMS, GPS, HD, PSP, WTF?!

Reading a book is an exercise in patience. Nothing but words on the page to engage you. No links down the side, no tabs across the top, there's only one bookmark and you can't sync it with your iPhone. For most of my early 20's, something electronic invariably came between me and information. Bach via MP3, Bergman via DVD, blogs via TXT - each medium providing a reassuring means of instant flight - the skip button, chapter next, back browse. Books are tyrannically sequential, the only action to anticipate is an anticlimactic page turn. Since my rendezvous with Marquez, I've been literarily celibate. That is until a couple of months ago.

Books I read this winter: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, The Year of Magical Thinking, Play It as It Lays, Speedboat, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand and the World She Made and every Malcolm Gladwell. I came to notice that everything I was reading had one thing in common. All the authors are women (the latter being the only exception, and the rumors about him are not true).

Film directors are rarely women, something I've always found puzzling. Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) was one of the best movies I Netflix'd this year. It's just as gut-wrenching as its ostensible predecessor, De Sica's Umberto D (1952), but chooses to devastate in a manner that is more patient and exacting. Fragments of misery are lovingly gleaned, instead of heaped. The same could be said for De Sica's contemporary Antonioni, his Y chromosome notwithstanding. Antonioni's perspective is a decidedly feminine one. His L'eclisse (1962) gives its female lead, Monica Vitti, a cool complexity commonly absent from male-directed romances. This unique respect he gives his characters, both male and female, makes L'eclisse a love story rooted in reality - one we can see ourselves in, experiencing the crushing absence and loss in colors as vivid as monochrome celluloid permits.

This difference between male and female (or female-minded) directors is, I believe, one that can also be found in authors. My affinity for the feminine, left wanting in film, is fulfilled by literature. I loved every book I read this winter. In fact, the act of reading itself, sitting sedately with this non-digital rectangular solid, has become its own joy. Lydia Davis' short stories are small masterpieces (if anyone missed her beautifully poignant Christmas story on the Times Od-Ed page this week, I highly recommend it). Joan Didion's voice is resonant in its nakedness, humble revelations set forth from an abyss. Renata Adler is brilliant, her wit sharp, her flow spasmodic. And Ms. Rand, well, any description, objective or otherwise, deserves its own post - let's just say that the 1,100+ pages of Atlas Shrugged were a grueling test of patience, but worth it. Another woman deserves a mention - who also happens to be a writer and recommended three of the books I read - my sister.

Next on my reading list is Alice Munro's new collection - the hardcover, not the Kindle edition. Or if I'm in Union Square, I'll just pick it up at the Barnes & Nobles. LOL.

Investing in Inches

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:12:55 -0500

"Parents would rather add 10 centimeters to their children’s stature than bequeath them one billion won,” said Dr. Shin Dong-gil, a Hamsoa doctor, invoking a figure in Korean currency equal to about $850,000.

From A1 of today's New York Times - on South Korean "growth clinics" where children receive hormone shots, acupuncture treatments, and other remedies for the vertically challenged. Along with folded eyelids and flat noses, Asians are increasingly shedding their yellow skin - now by breaking from their history of middling height. The latest in a trend of what amounts to a determined mimicry of the occident - where crania reach into higher strata, if only literally.

10 centimeters. That's almost 4 inches - as a Korean-American myself, I'd be fine with 2 - but at over $200,000/inch I'm not sure it's worth it. Or is it?

A correlation between height and personal income is well documented, and not just in the U.S. An added inch of height amounts to about 2% of added annual income - making height even more of a decisive factor in pay than gender. For the average American, a 4 inch height advantage translates to an extra few hundred thousand dollars by retirement. But that's still a long way from making any significant gains from a near million dollar investment.

It may be that the returns are not financial but emotional. Taller people, on average, report happier feelings than shorter people. Maybe it's simply glee over what lives of comfort their height-earned dollars afford them. But we all know what money can't buy. So does height=$=: )? Or is it some other causal permutation?

Perhaps relative height is less important than a sort of "magic height" - which for men, seems to be between 6' and 6' 2". Obama is 6' 2", McCain is 5' 7" (60% of the time, the taller Presidential candidate wins the popular vote). In 2005, the average height of a Fortune 500 CEO was 6 feet, with a whopping 30% over 6' 2" (compared with 3.9% in the general population). That year, one of these fortunate executives could expect an average of $12.7 million in compensation. I wonder if Dr. Shin is taking appointments.

We, The Yellow

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:12:16 -0500

Some drink and become merry, others are of a merriless kind. Which can be a bummer in December. I have a glass of wine, and histamine hysteria ensues, followed by a cat nap. When I'm not nodding off, I can be stubborn, aggressive (but passive) - as confrontational as bubble tea (lychee, mostly). I'm a superstitious sort; insofar as a fast-spinning fan fills me, inexplicably with asphyxiating dread. You won't find me sleeping in a room with one, I wouldn't be caught dead. My carbohydrate of choice, and possible source of elusive merriment, is white and dome-like and comes in a bowl. My eyes - venetian blinds into my soul.

Type "Asian American men are" into Google and it will helpfully complete your search by adding "...the least preferred mate of Caucasian women". This thoroughly forgone conclusion was one reached by a 2008 UCI case study that codified stated racial preferences of 6,000 Yahoo! Personals users. I think I went to high school with the sample set.

We, the yellow - masters of the manicure, purveyors of fine dry-cleaning - are not amused, and if we were, you wouldn't be able to tell for our Great Wall of granite expression (if Mount Rushmore were made of yellow stone). The mostly tame rhetoric surrounding the issue ranges from the usual claims of poor or inadequate portrayals of Asian men in Western media to a tough but vaguely wounded "we don't care if white chicks dig us". I beg to differ.

But what if Asian chicks don't either?

Damn Gina! (She's what I like to call a "disgrasian")

The average Asian man (urban Chinese, South Koreans, Japanese) is 5' 7 ²⁄₃", making him 3" shorter than his white American counterpart. The stereotype that Asian men are lacking in height is evidently true (the other one about a certain male organ is more difficult to verify). It's no secret that women respond to height - Asian women, like our friend Gina, not excluded. She and others are fleeing the chinkin' coop - for taller fowl. But the UCI study found that white women who state a racial preference are about 20% less likely to exclude Hispanic men than Asian men. With the average height of Hispanic men a few straight black hairs under at around 5' 7", it appears height is less a factor than we like to think. I'll return to Asian superficials further down the page, but first - a white man making full use of his height advantage:

Asian stereotypes in general, and of men in particular, are in part a legacy of WWII era phobias - the so-called Yellow Peril. De facto ambassadors of the Asian person were found in as decidedly craven characters as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, both highly intelligent men of dubious maleness. Displays of male aggression in American men are seen as macho and even heroic, whereas in Asians they're seen as dishonorable, crafty or simply insane. There exists a castration of the Asian male essence into a hormone-neutral state. Captain America vs. The Yellow Eunuch! Puzzlingly, this emasculation of the enemy seemed not to apply to the erect, well-uniformed Nazi. Americans fought man-to-mensch with the European fascists, while the Japanese, though none less assertive in their might, were perceived as effete and impotent. Underlying this obvious difference in perception is a more subtle difference in culture: that East and West have fundamentally opposed paradigms regarding male gender roles.

American boys play cowboys and indians. Asian boys play samurai and...well, other samurai. While it may seem like the samurai is the Eastern analog of the cowboy - Hollywood thought so - Technicolor fails to capture the shades of gray. They're both strong, silent warriors - in short, badass - but what's up with the harakiri? A cowboy is a maverick, all defiance and swagger. He's ultimately self-preserving, whereas the defining feature of a samurai is his self-sacrificing loyalty. If a cowboy is brought to shame, he gets on his horse, kicks up vengeful clouds of dust, and blows six holes into the offending party. A samurai simply disembowels himself. Enjoy:

Across the Pacific, aggression, in fact, all emotion, is often turned inward. The spate of extreme Asian horror movies over the past decade seem to depict an inordinate number of stomach-turning acts of self-harm (warning: this link is not for the faint of heart). Rebellion in American teens manifests in an "acting out" and for Asians a "shutting in". Technology helps to facilitate this reclusive tendency by allowing for solitary modes of companionship - emotional self-sufficiency. Hence girlfriend avatars that are forever nubile and grown men in love with their pillows. But fans of Korean soap operas know that Asian anal-retentiveness has its limits, and when those limits are breached, the ensuing torrent is eyebrow-raising to say the least. This underscores the all-or-nothing approach to Eastern emotionality - one that is at stark odds with Western expectations of social behavior where emotions are slightly better calibrated.

Well-intentioned reformers of the Asian male image have surfaced, but seem mainly to post photos of hot Asian men as if to say "Exhibit A, your honor". Ideas about Asian beauty need a complete overhaul. Behind the yellow curtain, occidental mimicry is the modus operandi. Cosmetic surgery aids in transplanting valleyed features onto our open-plained faces. Noses are bridged, eyelids are creased. Meanwhile, Asian pop culture trends toward a High School Musical mindset. Asian tweens bop to K-Pop's own Justin and Britney (meanwhile Miley Cyrus remains Hannah Montana-non-grata). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we Asians are a sincere bunch.

This aesthetic conversion is part of a greater effort to finally gain that golden ticket into the American mainstream, currently an Asian Siberia. But behind the apparent lack of Asians represented on TV and radio, I feel, is a weakness in numbers. A show that attracts 100% of the Asian-American audience has garnered less than 5% of total market share - a Nielsen nightmare. Studio heads and casting agents therefore take cautious half-measures when introducing slanty eyes to the TV screen, usually in the form of half-Asian actors in familiar model minority roles (eg. doctor, scientist) and of course the token walk-on. Not that I don't feel a glimmer of vindicating pride when someone like Tim Kang or Daniel Henney comes along. Perhaps these chiseled yellow crusaders will carve out an interacial-sex-filled future for my yet-to-be-born children - but it would ostensibly be toward their advantage if their mother were white.

But a rehabilitation of the Asian male image is not served by fleeting wherever-you-can-get-it validations. It's an ultimately unfruitful approach made up of desultory increments. We long to close the height gap, an inch at a time - an elongation. We hunger for a beefier frame, one rep at a time - a slow invigoration. We think we can bench-press our way to fecundity. Body-build a brand new robustness. What the Yellow Eunuch needs is his own eureka moment. I will forgo trite proclamations of ethnic pride, and offer instead an equally trite American adage. If you don't like the rules, don't play the game. If the rules preclude a valid Asian mode of masculinity, I will refrain from play in this particular game. Instead, I improvise my own revision. Asian Male 2.0 has pheromones that are time-release, testosterone without the ostentation, a subtler swagger, tenacity, temperance. These are innate virtues, not handicaps in need of adjustment. My view is, after a century of immigration, the Asian-American is coming of age. Our historically jaundiced narrative is headed for a grayscale twist.

Perhaps we're drawing the wrong conclusion from the UCI study. It may not be so much that Asian-Americans, per se, are the least preferred mates of Caucasian women - we might rather say "Other races are the least preferred mates of Caucasian women". Of the 73% of women who stated a racial preference, 64% indicated, in a Jim Crow sort of way, "Whites only". 93% excluded Asians in particular, bookended by African-Americans with 90% and Middle-Easterners with 95%. Most notable about the study, is its chosen locations. The researchers culled data from four metropolitan areas - NY, LA, Chicago and Atlanta. NY and LA have the highest Asian populations of any U.S. city. This is alarming on one hand - one would assume ethnic diversity would foster greater acceptance, and we fear what this implies for areas with less heterogeneous demography. On the other hand, urban areas are the only even semi-reliable measure of racial preferences among daters, after all, how can you expect someone to indicate a preference for Asians, if she's never seen one.

But one important consideration is the predictive power of the sample set, writ large over the preferences of the greater urban community. These are online daters we're talking about, and ones who use Yahoo!. Yahoo! Personals boasts one of the highest numbers of singles among competing sites, but that may be part of the problem. In the opinion of this Asian, the masses are afflicted not so much with racist mores, but more with taste that is impeccably poor. In other words, I do care - in principle - if white chicks dig Asian men, but less if 93% of 73% of Yahoo! Personals users don't.

Change in race perceptions is generational in pace. The UCI study, caveats aside, can be discouraging, but is just part of a familiar arc - fear-marginalization-acceptance - that all minority groups move thru. Understanding this progression helps temper our collective insecurities, develop less reactionary identity politics, and forge a healthy Asian/American balance. Let's drink a toast our yellow brethren! Now it's time for a nap (keep that fan away from me).

If Barbie Had a Brain

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:12:20 -0500

The problem with 34 x 25 x 36 is its lack of a fourth number. Bust, waist, hips, IQ?

Let's face it, the cute can't do calculus. They turn heads, yes, but not the gears within them. At the intersection of the pulchritudinous and the perspicacious - what we have is a pitifully null set. So this begs the question - why are models dumb? Furthermore, why do the brainy prefer radio?

Ugly children get less positive feedback than their photogenic brethren. Understandable perhaps, although less so if it's from their own parents. The unfortunate little squirt quickly learns the currency of comeliness and becomes ruefully aware of his apparent poverty. This awareness engenders a deficit in confidence, an oft-stated and crucial ingredient of attractiveness. Something as simple as height generates the requisite quality of feedback to foster CEO-level confidence. There are other factors at play here of course, height, and beauty for that matter, could be less a result of an esteem building environment as it is of wealth. Superior healthcare and nutrition set the conditions for a maximizing of one's physical potential. But this explanation falls somewhat short, just look at the preponderance of Eastern European models.

Americans like winners. The beautiful are born with genes of gold. All that kicking in utero? Warming up for the victory lap. Thankfully, our meritocracy allows for backroads to high self-esteem. One may compensate for a repellent physique with an amusing sense of humor, or by owning large amounts of real estate. But the currency that comes closest to besting beauty? Brains.

And so, said squirt hits the books.

Ugly folks become smart in order to tap the limited resource of others' attention that lovely people receive by default. This may leave hotties cognitively complacent. Before they know it the first and last thing they read is a modeling contract.

Of course, the automatic attention toward the attractive is often bestowed via envy, a sin as deadly as it is profitable. The envious are legion, and they subscribe to US Weekly. What they seek is vicarious escape from mediocrity, the schadenfreude-laden thrill of spotting a fatal chink in the armor of the alluring elite. But as we all know "there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Those of us of middling appearance are incentivized to smarten up.

This isn't to say brains and banality are necessarily correlated. A causal relationship may hold true in that a significant majority of intelligent people happen to be plain, and I argue that intelligence is, in part, a result of plainness. This precludes its reverse - most plain-looking people are intelligent. Anyone who's ever been to a post office can attest to that. The same holds true on the other end - a significant majority of beautiful people are of average or below-average intelligence (for an inevitable list of outliers, see comments), but it doesn't follow that all dumb people are beautiful.

But perhaps we're using the wrong metric. Is being a fashion model still a reliable measure of attractiveness in the classic sense? As the market for beauty diversifies, haute couture has become more art than commerce. The vulgar do Playboy and extra-terrestrials do Vogue. So where are the honeys that we speak of? Hollywood, no dice. Across the Atlantic, getting warmer.

Whatever the means of doing so, we believe intelligence to be something we can objectively measure - these days, the IQ test is the dominant method (although I, among others, am doubtful of its predictiveness). It turns out beauty is also quantifiable using criteria such as facial shape and symmetry, ratios of distances between facial features, and of course, height, weight and body mass index.

I'm of average height, I'm fit, I cycle, but my face is thoroughly asymmetrical. Let's just say when I meet dentists, they reach for their business cards. I had a consultation for orthognathic surgery but the $6,000 co-pay and the year-long commitment put me off. My misaligned jaw had always been a bane, second only to my eyes. Early on, emasculated stereotypes of the Asian American male helped carve out my low-rung social status. I sought a way up with the aggressive vindication of a guy who's 5' 3" in the NBA. I gained the confidence I needed by way of what my brain contained, not the number of golden ratios extant on my form. Two years ago, after a sufficiently jilted adolescence and beyond, I got married...to a model. Her measurements: 34 x 25 x 36 x 140.

Why French Playboy is Better

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:12:55 -0500

" There's no accounting for taste" the Frenchman said to the American. Or is there? We Americans have long been derided for our exceptionally poor taste. What we call culture is met overseas with a collective shake of the head. There, refinement reigns in place of the coarse, the paper to our plastic. How did this disparity arise? After all, aren't we mostly Europeans too, just ones who've happened to live abroad for the last 200 years? How can we account for our beloved Lindsey Lohan or the delightful iPhone app that farts on command?

Mme. Juliette Binoche - Oscar winning actress, accomplished dancer and now Playboy cover girl. The November 2007 issue of French Playboy featured the then 43 year old comedienne " sans interdit". Meanwhile, the issue hitting newsstands Stateside featured another actress of sorts, dancer and Playboy cover girl - Kim Kardashian. They have Carla Bruni, we have Sarah Palin. They have Avedon-esque black and white photos of the first lady and former model, "sans interdit" as well from the early '90's, we have Nailin' Palin. To be fair, Europe is not all bidets and fine wines, they have Dancing with the Stars too (although it's conspicuously absent in France), but by most measurements, we seem to have come out at the bottom of the culture heap.

In America, the market has spoken loud and clear - we will pay good money for trash. A sort of grey goo of tastelessness has been unleashed as purveyors of media manically compete for a share of this insatiable demand. Boobs got bigger, blondes got blonder. What we're seeing is the democratization of Culture, and although it's most certainly bell-shaped, with things like PBS and museums on either end, the bulge in the middle is what I'm concerned with.

There were four main waves of European immigration into the early United States, the largest and last of which took place throughout the 18th century up until the Revolutionary War. These early settlers were poor families fleeing the newly founded United Kingdom with its political unrest, ecclesiastical dogmas and resultant uprisings and rebellions. It's been argued that character traits of these four groups can be traced to those of present day regional Americans, even these many generations later. Could it be that we inherited our philistine nature from these early settlers? The problem with the poor is education. One who's never seen a Vermeer or heard a Bach cello suite has a fundamentally handicapped set of aesthetic values. These early settlers arrived in a culturally barren land, leaving behind a mecca but brought none of it with them. American culture was grown in a virtual vacuum, one where the newly transplanted peasantry were left to map the trajectory.

Europe has its own historical shadow, namely centuries of governments alternating between monarchies and dictatorships. This legacy of monolithic power, combined with the generally socialist slant extant in a post-fascist Europe helps to explain its undemocratic treatment of taste and culture. French Playboy will continue to put sophisticated women on its cover, even if the masses in the countryside demand more plebeian fare (which we remain awash in, thanks Tiger). Although it seems, in time, they just might get their wish. With McDonald's and Jeff Koons coming to the Louvre, and the EU's ramped up role in the global economy, Europe is trading in its cultural integrity for economic power. Beware the grey goo!

But it's not the end of the world. There are some who argue that globalization is in fact a good thing, as it enables free cultural trade between countries according to their respective demands. France is getting a McDonald's in the Louvre because as it turns out, they quite like McDonald's. And maybe they actually like Jeff Koons too, after all, there's still no accounting for taste.