Friday, July 06, 2007

The most American woman in the world

Living in the Land of Extremes has done a great post on this paranoid Korean adoptee, who claims that her Korean culture was "literally raped from her" and that white Americans take one look at her and expect her to yield to them when they get on and off elevators

The thing that gets me about her is that it is impossible to look at such a person as anything but an American. The quest for identity, the identification with something that she knows nothing about in opposition to the place where she comes from, which she characterizes as an uneducated family. It's textbook, but for some reason people as a species suffer from a chronic inability to look at themselves in such terms unless exceptionally trained or otherwise forced to. Looking at her is like watching a flailing mixed-up machine malfunction, except, you know, we're the same kind of machines.

Incidentally, like most Americans, she has an incredibly poorly informed concept of what international adoption is and how nations interact. For a person getting a masters and leaving America for ever to live in Korea with her people, she has an almost comically misinformed perspective on the country, seemingly derived from a single session of factoid spouting and anger venting by some angry Korean she knows. Korea is a small victim country and America raped it for its resource, adorable babies, so that Americans could selfishly make themselves feel good by raising said babies.
The fact that a person like this is getting a masters indicates to me that America has a serious glut of universities.

1 comment:

Jeff said...

I've thought about this before. If Carol and I were to adopt a foreign baby, would we have any responsibility to teach the child his or her nationality's culture? But culture is not inborn. A black American born in my home town has a better chance of being raised a NASCAR-loving hick than a lover of hip hop.