[Editor's Note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my old stuff. This one didn't get a lot of attention, but it did get a fair number of reads and seemed well received.]
I tend to tune in Current TV in the morning. In between my wife's intense study of the Weather Channel and leaving for work, I switch on Current TV. Good mix of news and culture in a short attention span theater format. Often something particularly good will be on.
This morning I saw an interesting segment on the difficulty of an Asian/African-American interracial relationship [1]. A Korean daughter runs into trouble with her parents when her mother discovers that she is dating a black man. Her mother freaks out, leading to an ongoing harangue trying to convince her daughter that she is betraying her race and doing something unnatural, while her daughter tries to convince her mother than 2006 in America is different than living in homogenous Korea.
Neither mother nor daughter dare tell the father what's going on. Presumably he doesn't watch Current TV, unless this is her way of telling him.
The segment ends with the statement that the daughter still hopes for understanding from her parents because she loves them.
Racism is universal. I can't say anywhere I have been seemed to be completely free of racism. How race is defined varies. The percentage of tolerant people in the culture varies. But there is always a core group of people who finds ways of defining "us" vs. "them" and who will be horrified every time one of "us" falls in love with one of "them."
This Current TV segment, well worth watching in iteslf, also reminded me of someone I knew in Japan, someone who found his way across some of the most rigid barriers I can imagine.
He was a black man from Harlem. He spent his childhood among other blacks from Harlem. In college he found himself sitting at a table with other black men, having the same conversations they had always had. One day he had an epiphany and wondered what the hell he was doing in college if all he ever did and thought about was the same thing he had always done. So he started branching out, looking to meet and learn about people who weren't black men from Harlem.
One day he decided to teach English in Japan.
If you want to live in Japan, this is an easy way to do it. I met many English teachers the year I lived in Japan working in a lab at Kyoto University. The vast majority of them (mainly those who lived outside Tokyo) loved it. This black man from Harlem was one of them.
Japan is a nation I love. But I gotta say, they are among the more racist people I have met. Japanese despise Koreans and blacks most of all, from all I can tell. They seem to have a particular fondness for the British and a deep respect for Americans. But Koreans and blacks they mostly despise. That is the environment that this black man from Harlem chose to immerse himself in.
And he DID immerse himself. He became beyond fluent. I became functional in Japanese. He became fluent to a degree that was astonishing. He immersed himself in the culture, learning the game Go and learning to sing in a very traditional style of Japanese music, not unlike old style lounge singing, called Enka. He became so good at Enka that he was featured on Japanese television.
He fell in love with a Japanese woman and married her. But within that sentence was years of difficulty as her family fought tooth and nail to stop their relationship. Rumor had it that they had even considered hiring Yaku-za thugs to convince him by whatever means necessary to give up the idea of marrying their daughter. In the end love won out and her parents accepted, however grudgingly, their marriage.
I watched this black man from Harlem win over some of the toughest of Japanese. I traveled with him and a very multi-cultural group to a traditional Japanese inn (a ryokan). Wonderful trip. One of the features of these inns is that you have dinner in a private room served by a private server. Our server was a sour faced, middle aged Japanese woman who served us impeccably, but would not crack a smile. She had a particularly scathing way of looking at the black man from Harlem.
But we were drunk and having fun. The black man from Harlem was in particularly good form. He started acting out an entire samurai drama, with a lord chastising a samurai. He played both parts in flawless Japanese. Our sour-faced server was not amused. His performance segued into a samurai courting a lady...with sour-face as the target of his wooing. On bended knee, black man from Harlem acted out a traditional Japanese romance scene. Sour-face glared. He wooed. Sour-face looked haughty. He wooed. Suddenly, sour-face broke into a huge smile and blushed.
He had won her over. From that moment on, the entire ryokan staff adored him. Before they had been friendly to all of us...but disdainful of him. Now he was their favorite.
Now THAT takes balls.
I never forgot black man from Harlem. He broke out of his own small world to meet the wider world, and despite sour faces and even threats, he made that wider world his own.
I wish the Korean couple portrayed on that Current TV segment the same success that black man from Harlem had.
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