some context into my worldview
lemme give some context into my worldview.
i was adopted as a baby into a culturally hostile place that had me wildin out as a kid. i have memories of standing in front of the mirror for like an hour, trying to reconcile how i looked with how i aspired to look in my imagination: white. This is an experience that's so prevalent among the asian diaspora that to go any further would be trite. but it certainly informs much of the passion I have today.
it wasn't until i realized that asian people wouldn't mistreat me based on provincial and racist assumptions about my humanity that i opened my heart to diving deeper into korea and japan. their soft power rises in the 80s-00s started to inform alternate models in my mind about how 'my people' could be 'cool' (from whose perspective?)
i remember thinking to myself, shamefully in retrospect, "thank god I'm not from one of those poor asian countries like china or vietnam."
i effectively let white peoples' racism put me in a position where i was willing to make value judgements on cultures whose members would be 100x more welcoming and accepting than the average american.
i realize now that whether a country is 'cool' or not is not a reflection of something proprietary that that particular culture has to offer. rather, the notion of a place exporting 'cool stuff' is a symbol of geopolitical status in alignment with 'the west'.
i look at all of the countries that are poor, which are rich, and their political histories and alignments. i look to the history of rich countries, and i see how their meddling killed millions of people. some people are detached enough from the humanity of others that they see atrocities in aggregate relative to the sorts of 'economic gains' that countries like korea have as some sort of retrospective relief at the current results in quantitative terms.
at the end of the day, a country being considered cool or not in american pop culture is merely how much they have bought into the economic system that western corporations enforce through american military and foreign policy. these same parties just market these imports well. i'm not a dummy.
i'm not even going to begin to touch how much deeper my life and love has become establishing a deeper connection to asia as a nebulous whole in opposition to what I've lived in the west.
but what i will say is that… i had a hostility and condescension toward people that both american individuals and american institutions would lump me in with as soon as anything barely approaches geopolitically hitting the fan. my own internal racism and sinophobia was effectively informed by state propaganda; not propaganda in the ham-fisted 'obey' sense, but what successes in other countries are excluded from the average persons' awareness? how does that contribute to social manifestations of how my humanity is evaluated like a fucking stock depending on how geopolitical shit is going?
i encourage everyone to explore this, and to not feel guilty about killing these impulses in your mind.