No!

No!

One thing I forgot to mention about the Sues' textbook.

They discuss the concept of high-low context cultures, an idea that originates in the work of Edward T. Hall. I hadn't heard of this before, but I could recognize the phenomenon in my day to day life.

High context communication relies on...you guessed it, context. In these cultures, words rely on the speaker's physical presence to fully convey their meaning. In these cultures, message itself is not as important as the way in which it is conveyed.

The authors give the example of the word "no," as it is usually said by (presumably White) US Americans would be taken to mean "yes" by an Arabic speaker. Usually, when saying "no" Arabic speakers give the word greater verbal emphasis and accompany it with hand movements.

Perhaps this has happened to me in situations where I've felt misunderstood.

If it had been ten years earlier, bad taste would not have been the only crime committed here

In 1967, the supreme court ruled against antimiscegenation laws.
It's so easy to forget.

A Mythic Being

Here's something fun! In the introduction to Projects, Russel Ferguson mentions a tradition I'd among artists working in the USA that I'd never heard of before. He cites Adrian Piper's work as an example of this tradition.

Until reading the introduction, I had never heard of Piper's work. Here is the artist in a still from a 1975 street performance in Cambridge Massachusetts titled The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women.

This still of Piper's holds a special place in my heart, as it is taken in front of what is now Au Bon Pain, home of the most convenient public restroom in Harvard Square.

Wow. Cruising White Women right by the Harvard campus. The Cambridge cops must have given him a hard time. Think of what they did to Skip Gates! And he was just walking into his house!

The 70's...what a wild time. This cat was an artist. An ar-tiste! People used to take risk back then! They lived on the edge. Rent control was in full effect in Cambridge. You could live for nothing. There were no yuppie bars or chain stores in Harvard Square. There were radicals living life to the last drop!

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being is kicking the awesome science:

...Here the mythic being is again, ready to deprogram and reprogram. This revolution will not be televised. No siree!

Here's a more contemporary picture of Piper:

What? Adrian Piper is a White lady????

Here's a video clip from School of the Art Institute of Chicago's video data bank where she discusses her awakening as an artist. On the website, we this description of Piper's work:

As a black woman who can 'pass' and a Professor of Philosophy who leads a double life as an avant-garde artist, Piper has understandably focused on self-analysis and social boundaries. Over the years her work in performance, texts, newspaper, unannounced street events, videos, and photographs has developed an increasingly politicized and universalized image of what the self can mean.”—Lucy Lippard, Issue: Social Strategies for Women Artists (London: ICA, 1980)

What? Adrian Piper isn't a White lady???

She's in costume! Nikki Lee is carrying on in this same tradition. The ideas behind her work are different, but the two artists' work share one thing in common: they use this odd construct of race as a canvas. This is so much fun to watch.

Above, she's doing performance art photography. Here she is in action.

Two more facts about Adrian Piper.

1. She started out doing acid art in high school.

2. She was terminated from her position as a professor at Wellesley college because she refused to fly back to the US after being put on a TSA watch list.

Am I the last person to find out about Adrian Piper? This is great stuff and it makes me enjoy being alive. I hope you like it too.

On Nikki S. Lee

Okay, I'm not going to lie to you. I've hit a bit of a wall. I have a few more interesting (I hope) things to say about Counseling The Culturally Diverse, but I'm very frustrated by the text. Handbook of Multicultural Counseling leaves me cold as well. It's 926 pages, it has an authoritative tone, but I can't help but feel it's constantly stating the obvious. It's as if it were written by a computer or a very large group of people who bickered over every detail.

So, as I said in my last blog post, I'll revisit the work of Nikki S. Lee.

I own a copy of Projects and I read it from time to time. I first became aware of the text when I was in college. Some of the photographs of Lee have really stayed in my mind. They act almost as memories. For the past ten years, I've been associating things in my own life to the photos.

The photo of Lee on cover of the book reminds me so much of a woman that used to hang out near the building where I once worked in Lawrence. She was Latina, but everyone talked about how 'China' she looked. Yup. She was a nice enough lady, and I enjoyed talking to her a few times. She was Dominican, or Puerto Rican, and she looked kind of Asian, so everyone called her (in Spanish) 'La China.' Nothing too deep here. That's about it.

The photo of Lee in a doorway in the Ohio Project section has stayed with me as well. I've never thought of why they stayed in my head, but I can guess. It seems that in either photo, Lee is commenting on the gestures, postures, clothing and facial features of the women around her. She's not really saying anything specific about the people who surround her. She's just assimilating herself into their group and seeing what happens.

These comments she's made about Latinas and White women have stuck with me, but really, they can't be put into words. If you want to know what I'm talking about when I think of the photos, look at them yourself.

That's kind of a frustrating thing to say, I guess, but I when I looked at Lee's photos for the first time in a few months, I was frustrated as well. I could say something about race being fluid (obvious if you look at the photo) or the fact that context seems to accentuate the presence of Lee's identity while simultaneously obscuring it (just look at the photo, and this is completely obvious too.)

I had never before been so aware that Lee's work consisted of snapshots and how although the people in them were posed and the text of the photograph was composed as well, more than anything, the pictures attempt to recreate the style of photos taken by people who don't know how to take photos or care too much about composition. So here, her work resists interpretation, or discussion. You look at the photo, and although it communicates something, it does so in a way that does not draw too much attention to technique.

There's something almost opaque about the photos, particularly those in the yuppie series.

The interview Lee gives with Gilberto Vicario in Projects motivates a lot of these new feelings I have about Lee's work. Remarking on the fashion world, she mentions this interplay I've been beginning to notice between the 'snapshot' way of creating a photograph and the 'artistic' way of creating a photograph:

“...the one thing I respect is its shallowness: it's so deep---it's so serious! It can be hard to get that kind of shallowness because of its depth and seriousness. It's very tricky!” (99).

Okay, the photos aren't just snapshots. I think I went too far there when I said that. Really, the book cover, is very much a composed photo suitable for the cover of a book. She has a contemplative look on her face. She's not in the exact center of the picture (I remember in high school photo class being told never to put your subject in the center---this, I have always believed to be the difference between 'art photography' and snapshots. Here, we see the value of this lesson---these are not just snapshots) her body arches, you've got the space between the stairs sort of...adding composition and variety (two words a friend of mine in who went to art school would often use when doing impressions of people in his critiques---but I think I'm using them responsibly.)

In the 'yuppie project' photograph above, she does something interesting with depth, using the diagonal line created desk on her right to play off a similar line created by the florescent lights above her. She's off to one side with a roomful of men around her. She looks as tired as the men on her left, but she can't let her body go as they do. The one guy in the white shirt has a gut. If Lee's character became this overweight at her corporate job, she'd be fired. Yuppie Lee looks trapped. The lines created by the desk and florescent lights suggest a prison or cage holding her in.

Later in the interview, Vicario steers the conversation back toward the issue of 'depth' in Lee's photographs:

“A lot of people have been provoked by your work, or questioned the validity of it. You know, 'Okay, so she's going into these different communities. That's great, but I want it to go deeper' ” (102).

She responds:

People do come up to me, asking 'why don't you go deeper' as you said.

"But it's not about Nan Goldin's work, you know, going from bathroom to bedroom.

Go to your house and look at your snapshot album. You don't have pictures of sex scenes. Most people only have snapshots when they go travelling. They don't really take a look at the details." 103

What kind of depth do people want from Lee? What do they want from a photograph? Do they want her getting close ups of people smoking crack in their houses while their kids are in the home? When Projects was published, Brenda Ann Kenneally was doing just that! Look!

Say what you want about Kenneally's work, love it or hate it, but one fact remains: this is just not what Nikki S. Lee is trying to do! She does not aspire for the same kind of 'depth' as Kenneally. What do people want when they someone to go “deep” into a community? Do they want sex and drugs? Do they want tears and abuse? Lee is taking a different direction, and her lack of “depth” is not paired with a lack of substance.

She goes on to tell Vicario: “If people think it's boring, that's fine. But somehow it is emotional, because I do have an attachment with those people, although I never force it. I don't usually get really close to anyone's personal issues, but I don't consciously maintain a distance. I just open up to people, and if they come, I accept it. I don't force anyone to be close to me” (103)

She has a distinct relationship with her subjects. She does not become completely 'enveloped' in their community. She does something else. She is subtly playing with ideas of race and representation. Look at this photograph from The Schoolgirl Project:

The three students around Lee seem to feel awkward in her presence. She is smiling much more than they are. She seems to be deliberately posing with this group.

Here, we see a similar effect. The woman with the 'Wilson' t-shirt in the middle of the photograph seems uneasy next to Lee. You can tell by her facial expression and the way she is holding her shoulders. The woman on the far right side of the photograph seems to be of the same attitude. Her arms are crossed and her fists are balled up. You can see tension in her flexed right shoulder blade. The other two people in the background of the photo seem to be deliberately avoiding the photographer's gaze to prevent from laughing.

Does that say something distinctive about her own Asian identity? NO! That would be too simple! Lee is not just 'blending' into the photos. She's not just doing a trick to impress her audience. In this last photo, she seems to be almost showing herself of as a kind of oddity. She's playing with the idea of race. 'Playing' with the idea of photography. Lee's viewers are not just given cheap thrills. There is something much more subtle going on. The 'depth' that her critics desire of her work would only come along with the sacrifice of these careful, subtle details. We don't see this subtle attention to mood and nuance in Kenneally's work, do we?

She provides further insight into how she wants to be interpreted later in the interview when she tells Vicaro “this thing about identity in the West is all about the individual” – Vicaro asks Lee to clarify, and wonders if she means to say that “one's self is always understood in relation to that which surrounds you” (100). Lee agrees and tells him “the underlying concept” in her work is that “other people make me a certain kind of person” (100). It's about inner relationship and how those really address the idea of identity.” This is something Lee draws our attention to---that there is a greater meaning in her work. She's tells us she thinks that being labelled “a chameleon...” is “ a cliché” and that people are too lazy to invent new words,” but she forgives them (100).

I remember a friend of mine in college saying how the Lee's photos were a commentary about the fluidity of Asian identity. I remember this comment made my twenty year old self get a bit agitated (it wasn't hard to do those days). While I do agree that's a part of what Lee is doing, more than anything, she is having fun. She is playing with our ideas and just kind of being a jester. Look at this odd social construction we have in this country. Let's see where it is. I think I can learn a lot more from this kind of spirited play than by reading Multicultural Counseling.

On Counseling The Culturally Diverse

I believe I have read all that I needed to of Dearald & David Sue's Counseling The Culturally Diverse It's one of those therapy/social work books that just winds up stating the obvious in spite of its pages and pages of charts theories. I got the feeling that the book was very clearly articulating some ideas to somebody who was interested in what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, that somebody wasn't me. Where to start...It’s hard, because while I didn’t agree with everything in the book, it never really aroused an emotional response in me. (2003).

For entertainment’s sake, I’ll start an interesting two sentences taken out of context.

“Mass murders committed over the years have been traced to Chinese juvenile gangs operating in Chinatowns and recent news reports show this trend to be on the increase.”

(Sue & Sue, 2003, p.329).

What? This book goes out of its way to cite sources, and here, without saying where these “juvenile gangs” are, which chinatowns they are taking over, or which “mass murders” they are committing! Did this happen in the Chinatown in Boston where I go for dim sum and dumplings? Are there hidden mass graves inside the Big Dig tunnels? I’m not going to write off the entire text because of this one error, but it still says something about the authors’ way of looking of the world and their intended audience.

I did learn a few interesting things from the text:

●According to research by D. S. Sandu, the poverty rate of certain Southeast Asian groups is “five times higher than that of the general population.” (cited in Sue & Sue, 2003, p.328)

●Southeast Asians are three times more likely to be on welfare than is the general population.” (cited in Sue & Sue, 2003, p.328). These facts illustrate a larger problem that comes up when discussing Asian Americans---there is tremendous variety in race, ethnicity, culture and standards of living within Asia.

For example, Korea is a country roughly the size of Indiana with a population of around 48 million. Technology arrives in Seoul before it is released in the US. Cambodia is country the size of Oklahoma and has a population of 14.8 million. It is still recovering from genocide. Some of the main players in this genocide are currently working in the Cambodian government. Somehow these totally different cultures share something in common. To an untrained eye, Cambodians and Koreans look similar. Aside from this, what do they share? There may be some commonalities, and I’m really interested in seeing where they come from historically. This will be the topic of a later post.

It seems that more than any kind of training of the art of empathy or “therapeutic technique,” to engage in successful “multicultural counseling,” people need to get lessons in history and geography. Ties between cultures can be better forged by concrete knowledge than abstract technique.

I believe in the richness of human experience. Regardless of intention, writing like we see in the Sues’ text only serves to solidify stereotypes:

“The father maintains an authoritative and distant role and is generally not emotionally demonstrative or involved with his children. His role is to provide for the economic and physcail needs of the family. Shame and guilt are used to control and train the children. Mothers are more responsive to the children but use less nurturance and more verbal and physical punishments than do Euro-American mothers (Kelly & Tseng, 1993).”

Rather than simply accept this portrayal of Asian fathers as the truth, it is more helpful to Asian American clients to find out more about their complex interior lives. How would Asian fathers explain this way of acting? They must have reasons for acting the way they do. In their own words, what are these reasons?

In this recent article in the New York Times about a training program for Korean fathers, we see participants make real changes in the way they act towards their families. I'm curious as to what it is that these men actually experienced while going through these changes. The best way to get a better idea of these men’s lives is by forming close relationships with people in Korean families or reading Korean literature. Books like the Sues’ don’t seem to be too helpful.

In their chapter on Culturally Appropriate Intervention Strategies, the authors present a diagram titled “Communication Style Differences (Overt Activity Dimension-Nonverbal/Verbal)

Here is a reproduction of the first line of the table:

American Indians	Asian Americans and Hispanics	Whites	Blacks
1.Speak softly/slower	1. Speak softly	1. Speak loud/fast to control listener	1. Speak with affect.

(Sue & Sue, 2003, p.143)

Regardless of whether or not these characterizations are accurate, how can a counselor utilize this sort of information in his or her practice? I've noticed some of these traits of speech in my own personal life by being around different kinds of people. If you need a chart to explain these differences in speech, you probably lack perception and shouldn't be a counselor.

As I've said: you can learn about people by being physically around them or by finding a way to immerse yourself in their worlds. The Sues' textbook does not help you do either of these things. By presenting its information in official, authoritative, almost scientific sounding language, it promotes the illusion that it may be a substitute for actual learning.

In order to try to find better ways of becoming close to cultures other than my own, I will try reading Morrisson's essay on Moby Dick, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey & The Language of Discourse and analyzing the photos of Nikki S. Lee. It's a gamble, but I have a hunch that I will learn something valuable.

Banchan

Before I begin to read Counseling The Culturally Diverse, I'd like to mention a few disparate interesting things about Asian American identity. Please comment or email if you know anything about these topics.

1. Is there a theme of feeling displaced in Asian American literature? I haven't read enough of it to know, but I have noticed this phenomenon in the Asian American people I know. When you are being treated as a foreigner in your own country, when your parents speak a different language, when the place your parents have come from has changed so much in the past 50 years, it is hard not to feel somewhat out of place. How does this manifest itself in the way Asian Americans think of themselves and of the world?

2. I feel that Asian food, specifically Korean food has some magic powers that most of the food that I ate while growing up doesn't have. Korean food seems to communicate some kind of deep messages between generations. It has subtle flavors that add balance to a meal. The banchan add variety and set the slow pace. When meat is cooked at the table, it demands complete attention from all of the people at the table. I like my mom's meatloaf, but it just can't compare. When this food is commercialized and marketed towards non-Asian consumers, all of the messages contained within it are lost.

3. Is there any such thing as a pan-Asian-American culture? What similarities exist between Asian American groups within the US? Historically, where do these similarities come from? Why does Sue's mother remind me of the Thai women that I used to work with at my last job? Is it my own innate tendency to find commonalities within similar experiences, or is it because of China's influence on both Thailand and Korea?

4. White people like Asians, but at the same time, we think they are different. The blog-turned-book, Stuff White People Like has an ironic chapter on this. I read this and I hate how we can take this kind of difference and use it to separate people from one another. This kind of humor actually encourages white people to stick to dating their own race. If you date an Asian woman, you are doing so because you are 'that kind of white person who dates Asian women,' not because you like her.

People have a right to be seen as individuals. I'm just as guilty of making fun of the concept of Asian/White couples as the authors of Stuff White People Like, but I really think it should stop. I'm curious as to how long white people have exoticized Asians. Where did this start? Why does it continue?

Okay, time to start reading Counseling The Culturally Diverse. Stay tuned to see what the book has to teach us.

Isn't Yellow The New White?

Hey, Sam---why study Asian Americans. ....They're almost the same as white people! They make more money than us, we think they're hot, and they are better than us at everything!

This is ridiculous. I won't even address the complexities involved in forming the social construction of whiteness---that's too tricky for right now.

I guess people say this because statistically, it can seem as if Asians are making more money than white people in the US. Whether or not Asians are actually doing so is irrelevant. To me, even if Asians are making more money, the values embedded in "whiteness" are so strong that despite achieving the same level of material comfort as white people, Asians are still not white. American ideals of beauty are based on white women's features. While white women do get plastic surgery, do they ever do so in order to look like another race? Asian women do it! Look!

If a white woman were to get surgery to deliberately take on Asian features, she'd be considered a freak and put on the cover of the Weekly World News!

What's deeply ironic to me is that I can never seem to wrap my mind around what exactly goes on during Asian eyelid surgery.

Some Asian peoples' eyelids seem to retract a bit more into the eye socket than white peoples'. I never really noticed this until I was told like ten times. I still can't quite name the difference from the before and after photos. The Asian men and women who get this surgery are conscious of white ideals of beauty on a much deeper level than I can ever achieve. To me, there are Asian eyes and white eyes. Changing the lids doesn't seem to have an effect. I'm just not aware of race on the same level. What a privilege!

I never really have to worry about being singled out because of my race. I never have to worry about being made an example of. That's not say it never happens. I've been in many situations where I am the only white person and people make an example out of me and single me out. This has never caused me a bit of worry. As soon as I'm out of the place where I'm the white guy being singled out (which I really like, apparently), I'm back in the white world.

Even if I permanently live in a place where I'm the only white person and I'm constantly singled out, somehow I still carry within me this deep unshakable confidence that deep down inside they're wrong and that I'm OK or perhaps even a little better than everyone else. I wouldn't really say this is because of my own individual psychology. History has created a great identity for me. Even if I'm a foreigner in Ecuador or Namibia, I will always be able to act like I own the place because at one point, white people kind of did own the places, and on some level, we still do.

If you look at the concept of identity---it's kind of a strange thing. Somehow, over the years, we've constructed it. Five hundred years ago, people weren't conscious of their identity in the same way were are now. Ten thousand years ago, it seems that people just were. Studying Asian Americans will give me a good way to see what exactly identity is. Strange how a group that is supposedly so successful is still, in America, seen as somehow foreign or different. There is good difference and bad difference. Everyone's different, and that's great. Without this kind of difference, we'd all be really bored. There's also a bad difference, one that isolates people and makes them feel bad. As an Asian American, you are more likely to feel this kind of difference than you are as a white American.

What's That Naemsae?

The state of Massachusetts and Goddard College tell me I have to learn about the social and cultural foundations of psychology. I'm supposed to "examine social forces as they influence individual, family, and group dynamics" by focusing on "social norms and institutions and the ramifications these have for psychological functioning." That's my goal, here, really.

In order to achieve this goal, first, I'll read Counseling The Culturally Diverse, which seems to be somewhat canonical in the field---I get this feeling by talking to my adviser, and looking on Amazon. As I read this text, I'll comment on it here in my blog and relate it to all sorts of fascinating things I read about Asian American identity on my own. Once I finish up with that text, I'll apply what I've learned to scholarly texts about Asian American identity.

Along the way, I'll contrast what I learn about being Asian American about what I know and discover about being Irish American.

What will make this particularly interesting is Sue. She's my girlfriend and she's Korean American. I wouldn't say I was completely naive about Asian American stuff prior to meeting her, but she has certainly had an enormous impact on my thinking. She's made me think about things I never would have thought of before. I have no doubt she'll kick my ass if I write something stupid on this blog. I'm sure I will write something stupid, by the way. Feel free to point this out whenever it occurs.