Bessie Loves Culture

culture that's inspiring me @bessiec

[bessielovesculture]

Jia Tolentino on the Internet's Culture of Deception

Jia Tolentino joins the program to discuss the Internet's culture of self-deception.

Such an important talk on the internet and our generation: Jia Tolentino joins the program to discuss the Internet's culture of self-deception.

[bessielovesculture]

I’m Taiwanese American. Here’s Why I Stand by Hong Kong.

After Taiwanese American Eric Tsai offered to co-host a workplace discussion on the protests in Hong Kong, a disgruntled co-worker wrote in a separate WeChat of over 300 Chinese American employees:…

I got a super nationalistic Taiwanese tattoo (I can show it to people in real life sometime) earlier this year on Remote Year group tattoo day in addition to our group travel tattoo. After a year on the road and spending a lot of time in Asia, it's three parts tribute to the values it represents: Nationalism, Democracy, and Welfare of the people, the five constants of 仁義禮智信/human benevolence, justice, propriety, knowledge, integrity and because it predates the ROC in Taiwan, it is a small tribute to the complicated history of 外省人 and my grandparents who served the army and government for better or worse.

Third I guess is I felt a certain kind of way after living out of a suitcase for a year around the world and watching these protests from Latin America. I'm going to write and share a lot of things in the next few months, but one thing that's deeply left an impression on me is that the history of humanity and even today's human conditions are that tyranny, oppression, and the lack of freedoms for everyday people are the norm, not the exception. It's also clear is that freedoms people do have in freer nations is not a guaranteed and to quote the great late Toni Morrison who just passed, "When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

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"Then a coworker posted about my message in a separate WeChat (China’s chat system) group of over 300 coworkers, many of whom are from China. To them, that a Taiwanese person had advocated for Hong Kong fundamentally challenged their ideas that (1) both absolutely belonged to China, and (2) any deviation from this was a threat to Chinese national identity. As a result, what I had done was unacceptable to them. Knowing this would be an issue, this man fanned a flame that cannot be quelled.

He wrote:

“What does everyone think of the current situation in HK? Or does anyone care? Eric Tsai, the guy from Taiwan, is holding a QA panel tmr and thinks he is in the position to explain the current situation. Refer to #nonework-activism for more details for those who cares.”

6 hours later, a few members in the group chat decided to file an HR ticket with the aim to get me fired. I started to write an email to explain the situation when a new message was sent to the group:

“Let’s just spend some money and hire thugs to go after him.”

When HR reached out, they assured me that the company should and will be a place that allows employees to hold conversations and discuss dissenting opinions. However, these threats and attacks are unacceptable. This level of bullying and threat isn’t new. This type of nationalistic bullying has occurred at multiple levels, from celebrities being demanded to apologize for holding the flag of Taiwan to student union vice president petitioned to resign (but didn’t) and threatened to death for being Tibetan.

While I put on a strong face as I tell this story, I am scared. When in the office, whenever someone who looks like they might be Chinese glances in my direction, I can’t help but wonder, “Was this one of the people who tried to fire me? Was this one of the people who bear such hatred towards me for my thoughts?” I know not all Chinese people in America are like this. If anything, these are among the extremely few with radical beliefs in Chinese nationalism (or so I thought.) During this experience, a few Chinese people have also come up to me to warn me of these incidents, or come to have an open discussion about the situation. But while the group of few people hiding behind their keyboards and stirring up hatred seem largely anonymous and digital, it’s hard to truly assess their scale. These may be the opinions of the minority, but they’re shared with many.

It wasn’t until I stood facing over a hundred people shouting profanities in my face that I realized, there’s a good number of people who genuinely hate us."

[bessielovesculture]

Ms. Miller writes: “I am not Brock Turner’s victim. I am not his anything. I don’t belong to him. I am also half Chinese. My Chinese name is Zhang Xiao Xia, which translates to Little Summer.” In naming herself, Ms. Miller takes control of the narrative on her own terms and opens up more space for others who choose to do so. She is no longer anonymous, and the power of this specificity lies in its creation of an even stronger sense of solidarity.

Why It Matters That ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case Is Asian-American

[bessielovesculture]

We can change this culture. Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing. Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama. And we can make productive choices about the terms of the debate: Conflicts about coalition-building, supporting candidates or policies are a routine and desirable feature of a pluralistic democracy.

I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.

[chopsmusic]

View this post on Instagram

Not fair that @va_cnote can rap, sing, and do this too. New music coming! Find him on Spotify etc., search C.Note https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZHRROnRGv/?igshid=10csqg5p6mz3w

[bessielovesculture]

"Sunday’s tweets felt different to me. They were too dangerous to go unchallenged, the path from words to action too well trodden. There’s the assumed association with the countries of the congresswomen’s ancestry, a trope that has been used to question the loyalties of immigrants throughout American history. There’s the us-versus-them delineation in the language around “our government.” There’s the reproach to get out. On Sunday, I searched Nexis, a newspaper database, for variants of “go back to your country” and “murder” or “attack.” Some of what I found: On February 22, 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was having drinks after work with his best friend, Alok Madasani, at Austin Bar & Grill, in Olathe, Kansas. Kuchibhotla and Madasani both worked as engineers at Garmin, the G.P.S.-technology firm. Austin was a regular spot for them after work. A white man approached and demanded to know their immigration status. His name was Adam W. Purinton. He was fifty-one, a Navy veteran, and a regular at Austin. He continued to heckle the two friends and hurl ethnic slurs before other patrons intervened and escorted him from the premises. A short while later, he returned with a gun and opened fire, killing Kuchibhotla and wounding Madasani, as well as a bystander who chased after Purinton. Witnesses said that before Purinton started shooting, he yelled, at the men, “Get out of my country.” In July, 2018, Rodolfo Rodriguez, a ninety-one-year-old resident of Willowbrook, a neighborhood south of downtown Los Angeles, was going for a walk when he passed a woman and a child on the sidewalk and suddenly found himself being beaten with a concrete brick. A witness said that she heard the woman, who was later identified as Laquisha Jones, shout, at Rodriguez, “Go back to your country. Go back to Mexico.” In February, in Indianapolis, Mustafa Ayoubi, a thirty-three-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan, was shot to death by a man named Dustin Passarelli. Witnesses alleged that Passarelli yelled slurs about Islam and told Ayoubi, “Go back to your . . . country.” (Passarelli disputed the account.)"

Michael Luo’s piece on Trump’s Racist Tweets and Who Belongs in America

I've been around the world this year and felt safer and more welcomed than I have traveling in many states and cities in the US, where I was born, because people have been raised on this poison. And it's gotten less safe and less welcoming in the last few years because White nationalists and their sympathizers feel empowered.

Ironically, I also can't help but notice how much the world has improved while US has stagnated and declined (Did you know Medellin has one of the world's most innovative transit systems? That Portugal has one of the most successful public policies on drug abuse treatment vs the War on Drugs? That pretty much any nation that has the money to has figured out public healthcare? That generous maternity and paternity leave are normal thing in Germany?) because of racist voters blockading process for everyone. 

[bessielovesculture]

“It’s become very easy to create a software company that creates a lot of wealth,” he said. “A lot of the Valley has gotten wrapped up in that. They’ve forgotten their roots. They used to make really hard things that took time.”

Start-Ups Hoping to Fight Climate Change Struggle as Other Tech Firms Cash In

[bessielovesculture]

The critical difference with China lies not in the wiring of chips or lines of code, but in history, culture and scale. By custom, Americans trust that the contents of their snail-mail letters are protected by the Fourth Amendment; government access requires a judge to issue a warrant. American tech firms routinely stand up to the United States government. Apple, for example, has developed default iOS encryptions that shield user activity from the company itself, to the frustration of the F.B.I. An iPhone user in Iran or Belarus benefits from Silicon Valley’s civil libertarianism. China is different. The People’s Republic has always reserved the right to open its citizens’ mail at any time, for any reason; there is no basis to believe its basic approach will differ because the technology is new. Ironically, the internet, which Western techno-utopians prophesied would liberalize China, may instead allow the party to indulge previously impossible fantasies of mass control. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are the first in human history to fully experience the downside of China’s illiberal innovation. They are unlikely to be the last.

Will China Export its Illiberal Innovation?

[bessielovesculture]

Speaking of this question of sentimental humanism, I’ve noticed that much of the critical response to your work relies on stock language that’s used to talk about the work of “minority” writers, and you’ve been very resistant to this. The construction “giving voice to the voiceless,” for instance, is something you’ve pushed back on. I was struck by this line in the introduction to The Displaced: “Many of the voiceless are actually talking all the time. They are loud, if you get close enough to hear them, if you are capable of listening.” In an essay for the New York Times, you wrote on this same subject: “That’s the problem with being called a voice for the voiceless . . . we would rather deal with a solo voice than a chorus, or cacophony, of voices.” Do you ever have doubts or fears that people read your work as a stand-in for actually engaging with these communities? Yes, of course. It occupies my mind because I think it’s still very prevalent, unfortunately. The means of literary production and representation are out of the hands of any one writer, including myself, and that means we are subjected to all kinds of easy, sentimental, stereotypical ways of reading our work and our being, which includes that whole trope of being “the voice for the voiceless.” And so there has to be a constant, exhausting effort at pushing back against these notions—and it’s constant and it’s exhausting because we don’t own the means of representation. The machinery of literary production will keep on rolling on and publishing bestsellers and selling them under the same tropes, and of course there’s a marketing mechanism built especially for so-called minority or underrepresented writers. For me, there’s two ways of dealing with that. One is to continue to bring up these kinds of issues in my nonfiction voice, through interviews and essays. It’s also necessary to try to do this through fiction, to make sure that readers get it, that they’re at least confronted with an awareness of how representation is working, how it’s a mechanism of power. In The Sympathizer, there are some very deliberate chapters where I draw attention to the mechanism of representation. Fiction that doesn’t draw attention to these issues, no matter how powerful it is at the level of drama and identification, can be very easily consumed by readers who are not very self-conscious about these issues of representation and inequality and reading books from writers who talk about cultures these people don’t know about, treating these writers as if they are voices for the voiceless, as if representation was a transparent act. It’s just a huge battle. It’s a constant fight until the day that we actually own the means of production, which is a very, very long way off.

An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen

[bessielovesculture]

I'm personally not opposed to someone opening an inauthentic Chinese restaurant that serves cauliflower fried rice. I'm personally not opposed to people cooking the food of a culture to which they don’t belong. I am, however, opposed to labeling the entire cuisine of a sprawling, diverse country as “unhealthy” and suggesting that the half-million people of Chinese descent living in New York have all been waddling around, bloated and puffy-eyed, waiting for a white wellness savior. And I'm definitely opposed to cherry-picking the parts of a culture that you like and may profit from without listening to the concerns of the people who belong to that culture. If Ms. Haspel had played things slightly differently, she still may not have gotten many Chinese customers—then again, this concept was never for us—but she also wouldn’t be getting Instagram comments like, “My ancestors will haunt your restaurant.” Regardless of what Ms. Haspel thinks about the healthiness of Chinese food, literal billions of people—some of them hale enough to invent such things as the magnetic compass and paper currency—have managed to do just fine for centuries. And as any New Yorker knows, those aunties doing tai chi in the park at dawn are fit as hell, schlepping grocery bags of fresh produce up six flights of stairs to cook a delicious, nourishing lunch for their families just like my Aunt Meng Tao. To eat her food? You should be so lucky.

We Don't Need a White Wellness Savior to 'Fix' Chinese Food

There are real problems with Lucky Lee's framing of an entire cuisine as “unhealthy.”

[bessielovesculture]

I recently took a Taiko lesson with Taiko drum group Shien of the Wadaiko Education Center at Kyoto University of Art and Design, which was an amazing experience. I remembered this great performance San Jose Taiko did combining The Bangerz “Robot Remains”. One of the things I love most about the US is the cultural fusion, not just of simple East/West but subcultures on subcultures.

[bessielovesculture]

Noisy doc on Trap Music Southwest China and Higher Brothers. Check out their tracks Made in China, WeChat, and Gong Xi Fa Cai. 

[bessielovesculture]

“I met my youngest aunt when I was seven. I called her Xiao Gugu—“little aunt”—but it was obvious that she was different. She had pale skin unmarked by the sun, smelled faintly of scented soap, and had a soft-spoken manner that made my other two aunts seem coarse. Xiao Gugu never hid her connection to the Fan family, but, three decades on, she had grown into a person with new allegiances that she refused to hide. She didn’t consider herself part of the clan, and saw no reason to observe the rituals of filial piety, such as visiting the ancestral home on holidays and kowtowing to my grandmother. My aunts and uncles felt slighted by her indifference to the family bond: perhaps she’d been spoiled by her life of plenty and lacked the moral fibre that tougher lives had bred in them. We mainlanders had a similar reaction to the Hong Kong that we saw in the movies and music videos of the eighties. A life so pampered, while enviable and thrilling, was also morally suspect, reeking of bourgeois individualism and other Western frivolities, such as democracy. In the decades since the handover, mainlanders who once eagerly anticipated the return of Hong Kong have visited this other China and been shunned the moment they open their mouths. The long-lost relatives have been reunited only to find that they have little in common.”

Lots of feels reading this article, even as a Taiwanese person vehemently against Mainland Chinese incursion: Denise Ho Confronts Hong Kong’s New Political Reality

[bessielovesculture]

The Best a Man Can Get Is Not For Men

The less cynical take: I remember at Advertising Week in 2014 musing on the theme that “advertising can change culture” for the better by normalizing values, the particular success cited that solved the huge public health crisis in the US was making smoking not cool. Many men want to be better and want to raise better boys but don’t know how and are probably afraid if they ask people will yell at them on the internet. Media like this starts to show them how. 

The more cynical take: This ad isn’t for men. I’ve worked in advertising for the better part of the last decade and women determine most consumer spending on household goods, anywhere between 70-90% depending on the metrics. This ad is for women because they’ll be the ones driving up sales of Gillette that now happen with all this brand conversation even if Gillette might still be a problematic brand.

[bessielovesculture]

"Going back to your question, though: history hangs so heavily over these stories, and all of the adults in these stories carry with them the scars of history. They lived through over a decade of essentially a genocidal, tyrannical, authoritarian regime where they saw or did or knew of people who did unspeakable, unforgivable things. These parents carry that trauma, and no matter how much they try to keep it to themselves—or, in some cases, don’t try—it leaks onto the children, these people who they love and are around them. For these girls, the idea of China is just that, an idea, and they’re around their parents who’re talking about things that happened in a country they’ve never been to or don’t remember and so they feel a lot of resentment: I don’t want to know this. But at the same time, they have no history in the United States. No one before them had a life in America. They’re like, I can’t be connected to your past because I’m trying to making a life for myself in America—but it’s hard because they come from families that haven’t really dealt with their past. I mean, even now, the Communist Party of China has never really been like: HEY, so about what happened in 1955-1976… There’s not been a national reckoning. Some people go to their graves knowing they turned in family members who died or tortured someone to death. That’s the kind of nationwide level of trauma people of that generation carry. You can’t be free of the past if you don’t talk about it, and these families are constantly trying not to process the past and in trying not to they end up just vomiting it. Rumpus: In a way, their refusal to deal with the past mirrors the government’s refusal to do so. Zhang: That’s the problem—it’s not the individual’s responsibility to reckon with historic events that marred an entire country and people, but it’s the individual who carries these scars. Getting out of poverty is framed as an individual thing. Getting over assault or other trauma is framed as an individual thing. When actually, there’s a collective responsibility of institutions or the government that is never fulfilled and leaves these people who are wounded and maimed just wandering the earth. That’s another specter that looms over these stories. It’s just not possible for an individual to overcome an entire system or structure of things that cause pain." "Cristina and her family are very poor for much of the first few years of their life in America, so that means they live in neighborhoods where they’re in close proximity to black and brown people—plus her father works at a failing public school. And, well, they’re not white, and they’re not black, and, in America, if you’re not either of those things, our cultural imagination doesn’t quite know what to do. America has a very hard time conceiving of anything other, much less talking with great nuance or understanding of anything other. And I have a hard time talking about it because I don’t even know how to." "The girls in these stories are caught between the two kinds of loving—part of them wants to know why their parents love can feel like they’re binding them or chaining them inside a room, and another part is comforted by that kind of love. Ultimately, that’s the kind of love they expect, so they have a hard time going out into the world in America and realizing that’s not the kind of love they’re going to find easily from someone other than their parents. They’re very ambivalent, and I’m also very ambivalent, about the shackles of love."

IN BETWEEN THE IN-BETWEEN: TALKING WITH JENNY ZHANG

[bessielovesculture]

"This is a valuable lesson that Los Angeles teaches us, if we are willing to learn it. In a city full of so many different communities, we can’t be the main characters in every story, all the time. The city is our home, but everyone has their own piece of it. You can peer in the window but it’s up to them to open the door. It’s something you might learn if you spend a lot of time in the non-white parts of Los Angeles. It’s something you don’t understand if you only stay in the same three zip codes. Here, I don’t think I don’t think I’ll ever find a bar like the one in Cheers. But I think Los Angeles offers something so much better. It gives immigrants from all over the world come here a chance to make spaces for themselves, rather than some diluted mainstream. And if we mind our manners, spend some money and treat everyone respectfully, we can visit a dozen different countries without leaving the city’s borders. This is a badly needed lesson in a country where every Halloween we have to argue about the right to wear each other’s cultures as literal costumes. Where it’s common for white chefs to make more money off of a culture’s food than the people from that culture. Where we are struggling, in so many ways, to figure out how to get along. Los Angeles offers us a start. It can wean us from our desire to possess and trumpet our connections to other cultures. It can teach us the joy of simply participating. I’ll never be a regular at OB Bear, and I’m starting to be ok with that. All I want is a seat at the bar."

I’ll Never Be a Regular at OB Bear

I love this, LA, and OB Bear even though LA feels less and less like home to me (to be completely honest) the longer I live in NY, but it's still where I get my roots and sentiments from, especially non-White Los Angeles, which is so unapologetic about it in a vibe I haven't really been able to find on the East Coast and one that I still draw from.

[bessielovesculture]

I’m probably not the target demo for these films, but I’ve really enjoyed the way Taylor Sherdian’s approaches to the “modern frontier” that shows its existence without romanization or some sort of pedantic tone to sucker in city folk.