Here Comes Reverse Culture Shock

Some weeks ago, friends of mine might have seen a facebook status update noting my shock at the number of people in Memphis who have tattoos.  This might be a Memphis thing.  The average resident of WASP-y Western Springs, where my parents live and the wife and I cooled our heels a week before moving to Memphis, still has the same amount of ink, i.e. none.

Whether or not the tattoo thing is new or old, region or national, it doesn't really bother me. But there are some things that haven't changed, or perhaps have, that have shock me anew, as one having recently moved from a Korean University to an American one.  Let me treat you to a list.

1. Captive Audience Pricing.  A simple sandwich - two pieces of bread, lettuce, cheese, mustard, meat - and a coke in the building housing the English Department costs about six dollars.  If you change the coke for something fancier like a bottled Starbucks drink, some juice, or something from the coffee bar, the total is somewhere towards ten.  And if you add candy, a bagel, or some kind of dessert/snack for later, you are going to be over ten, for sure.  At my university in Korea, I once bought lunch for myself and two students for less then ten dollars and food isn't that much cheaper in Korea (in fact, it's much more expensive in grocery stores - even most kinds of rice!).

To aid my point, two more facts. First, my students in Korea frequently complained about how expensive the university was.  Second, a bucket of popcorn and two sodas at the movies (another captive audience situation) costs about the same in both countries.

At the movies, for sure, I grudgingly accept.  I don't have to have popcorn or soda.  But if I want to, my gracious hosts will make them available to me for a price that is 'convenient' to them.  This kind of pricing is what let's you know that you are in all senses a customer rather than a guest, a means by which the business enriches itself.  And that is absolutely fine, when it happens at a business.  It is still shocking to me, however, that such is happening more and more at universities, which, since the invention of the thing, have derived legitimacy from being specifically not a business.

I am dreading the day when universities start asking their 'patrons' to pay for on-campus internet access.  Why continue to charge tuition if you are going to nickel and dime everywhere else too?

2. Constant Soda Consumption.  I guess an off the cuff 'ermahgerd' would be enough.  Ermahgerd!  But no, there's more to say. The soda aisle in our neighborhood Kroger takes up more space than all bottled beverages put together in a Korean grocery store of a similar size.  In Korea, one will find Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero.  In the US: Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Caffeine-Free Coke, Caffeine-Free (but sugar, please!) Coke, Coke Zero, and depending on the place Diet Coke with Lemon and maybe also Diet Coke with Lime.  I can remember a time when various varieties of Vanilla Coke were also available.  This does not even scratch the surface; I've said nothing of the vast nation of fruit-flavored colored sodas.  I had an evening class once, back in Korea, in which the students made fun of my because I showed up with a bottle of coke most weeks.  Let me just say, this would not be possible here in the US.


3. Students Never Come to Class.  Big surprise, right?  To be honest, I don't care on any emotional level if my students come to class or not.  Those who do, do, those who don't usually pay for it in some way.  But what is interesting to me here is the way students miss class.  At my Korean university, each student would miss one or two classes.  The vast majority of students would contact me before missing class and would show up at the next class meeting with some kind of documentation of the reason for their absence.  In turn, students also had an expectation that I would excuse them, regardless of the reason, due simply to the fact that they had documentation.  ("So you see that I had to miss class.  How could you penalize me for that?")  It was even common, sanctioned practice (my department chair instructed us foreign professors in this matter) that students would be excused from long portions of the semester (for internships, extracurricular events, extended field trips for other classes) with no harm to their grade.  The expectation was that I would generate alternative assignments for the student to complete outside of class.  All the same, attendance was usually at 85 to 90% from week to week.

In the US, on the other hand, students come and go as they please, with very little notice and 'you gotta believe me' types of explanations when they return.  Lest I sound like some kind of #getoffmylawn curmudgeon, I actually don't blame students for this.  In the Korean context, the university experience is still sacrosanct.  It may get paused, jumbled up, or strategically altered, but when a student is in college, they are only in college.  In the US, on the other hand, students have to work themselves through college - the wages of this battle are well documented.  But as a result, college is becoming more like a health club membership: you pay your dues and get in when you can, but as expensive and fancy as it may be, other, more pressing 'real world' matters take priority.

When I was a kid, my mom, brother, and I would take long trips to Arkansas during the summers.  When we came back to our house in Western Springs, Illinois, I was always struck by the smell of it.  I didn't smell bad, not at all.  It was just a shock: my house suddenly had a smell.  This is why I've mentioned the above three things.  When you go away from home for awhile, you can come back to a shock.  The shock is also an opportunity, though, as you can use the shock to compare the home as it is in your mind, as you want it to be, and as the shock distorts it.  Which one is real?  And which one is ideal?

Sit still, be quiet, and get your wife a visa...

So, it's been a few months since my last post.  And I've missed a lot of opportunities to blog:
*I feverishly read Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life while on a ferry between Estonia and Finland
*I attended an intellectually stimulating conference (also in Estonia) of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.
*I've done a lot of reading and research on stuff I'll be working on as a PhD student.

So what's my excuse?  I'm gonna blame the government.  Governments, actually.  The long, drawn out process of getting a visa for my wifely-doo was sucking my will to live from early May until just a few days ago.  That's a bit much, actually, but it was taking a lot of my time and mental energy - and the record does reflect that something was sucking away my will to blog, if nothing else.  Again, I blame the governments of the USA and ROK and perhaps bureaucracy in general.  Let me explain the process and hopefully you will sympathize rather than empathize...I don't want you to stop reading due to the soul-crushing tedium.

1st Period: Winter 2011
This was before I was married.  I had to declare, in various ways, to both the Korean Government and the US Embassy that I would be getting married.  This cost somewhere around $100, if memory serves.  In my simple little brain I assumed this meant that both governments would be able to draw the logic conclusions.  Well: Korea did but the US most decidedly did not.  This leads to the second period.

2nd Period: Winter/Spring 2012
For some reason, I had to declare - to a different part of the US Embassy - that the woman I had married was now my 'Alien Relative.'  I honestly don't see how I could marry a Korean and not have said spouse as an 'Alien Relative.'  It seems that some column in some government spreadsheet somewhere should've reflected the forms filed in the 1st period.  Charles Robinson: Married to Alien/Alien Relative --> YES  Something like that.  But no.  I had to fill out a form virtually identical to the the declaration of marriage form and pay another $300 dollars or so.  And this process was simply to make my wife eligible to apply for an immigration visa.

3rd Period Spring/Summer 2012
About a week after we filed the 'Alien Relative' declaration, my wife received an email with 'instructions' on how to apply for the visa.  They reminded me of those matrix puzzles we sometimes did in math classes in elementary and junior high school. ("John hates spaghetti and can't work on Tuesday evenings"; "Sally hates that John hates spaghetti and refuses to work any shift John doesnt't work"; "Mary wants to work on Wednesday mornings and paints pictures of unicorns in her spare time.")  And this is where our woes actually began in earnest.

The first problem was the medical stuff, which got drawn out and expensive-ized when the doctor mistook my wife's recent cough/cold/bronchitis for "possibly TB or Pneumonia."

As this drama progressed, the government also expressed vague distaste for my lack of (US) tax documents accurately reflecting my income.  It turns out that if I had concealed my Korean income completely, everything would be fine.  But since I 'declared' my Korean income with a document that the visa officer could read but couldn't accept, and since said officer couldn't 'unsee' the 'unacceptable' document, I had to spend about $400 dollars on a tax expert to sort out the tax issue.

But finally, we have the visa in hand and we will be on our way to the US in about a week .  I hope to blog more frequently as my graduate student life (re)commences, but we shall see.  Another thing to look for in the future is a new blog I may be starting with my friends from University of Chicago, but it is a little to soon to give any substantial details.

Until next time!

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
(click here for author website)
Edition: Penguin, 2010 (and Kindle)

From the title, one can guess right away that this will be a polemic.  The most interesting, perhaps, is that the polemic is decidedly not anti-capitalist.  Professor Chang, in fact, is famous as a 'heterodox economist'--meaning many things but chief among them the fact that he still views himself as a 'capitalist.'

The book  is really, really well organized.  In addition to the conventional table of contents it has an alternative list of 'ways to read this book' which makes selection from the 23 chapters to focus a reading around a question or conviction.  For example:

"Way 1. If you are not even sure what capitalism is, read: 
Things 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 16, 19, 20, and 22
Way 2.  If you think politics is a waste of time, read: Things 1, 5, 7, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, and 23"

Six such alternatives are listed and the useful organizational tactics continue in the chapters ("things") themselves.

Each chapter begins with "What they tell you"--an introductory segment that explains the received wisdom about contemporary capitalism with clarity, precision, and honesty.  Immediately following this is "What they don't tell you," in other words, Chang's response contradicting the received wisdom.  Chang's claims are then substantiated with whirlwind tours of 19th century economic history, contemporary case studies (rendered rhetorical palatable for the general reader), and no-nonsense explanations of the logical composition and economic consequences (actual and potential) of each chapter's point/counterpoint conflict.

At bottom, Chang's book believes, and would have readers believe, in the perfectable nature of capitalism.  Those who know me well know that I am not necessarily in that camp.   But, I can go along with the rest of Chang's project: to recognize the call for open education of the history, theory, and practice of capitalist political economy.  Chang wants to confirm our suspicions about the superficial advantages of capitalism and expose some of the hidden (more often not-so-hidden) disadvantages of capitalism.  The goal, in the end, is moderate-progressive: once we understand the history and the basic concepts, we will be much more capable of weighing in on the 'right' side of contemporary economic policy debates which is, for Chang, a sort of post-national, regional, protectionism.

Surely, this is over-simplifying his views, but a clear theme of the book is the hastiness of contemporary ideas (and the policies that follow from them) about globalization, post-industrialism, technological revolutions, and international capital.  Chang would have us sit still and quietly consider that we all--laborers, capitalists, producers, and consumers alike--still live, act, and think in this or that locality and hence economies should be conceived, nurtured, and protected accordingly.

If you don't have time for the book right now, check out this video to get the essence of chapter 1, "There is no such thing as a free market."