Category Archives for South Korea

Three new works of Asian American fiction

One great perk of the Association for Asian American Studies conference so far has been the ability to meet some up-and-coming Asian American writers (and get free copies of their books!). At the Penguin Books reception yesterday, Catherine Chung (Forgotten Country), Alex Gilvarry (From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant), and Krys Lee (Drifting House) mingled with the crowd, signed books, and read from their books.

I haven’t had a chance to read any of these yet, but here are some videos to give you an idea of what they are about. (Since when did books have trailers?)

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Chinese families rushing to get US education; Koreans not so sure anymore

Swarthmore College in spring.

Somehow three different articles on Asian international students in the US came to my attention in the last 24 hours. Helen Gao writes for the Atlantic about how China’s nouveaux riches are flocking to send their children to expensive US private schools, which they think will better prepare them for expensive US private universities:

Four years of private American high school education can cost around $200,000, a considerable sum for American families, and even more for a family from China, where average wealth is about one fifth as in the U.S. However, China’s many newly minted millionaires see it as a worthy investment and a reliable path to an even higher goal: Ivy League colleges. In fact, the phenomenon reflects more than just the rising economic prowess of China’s middle class. It is also a lens into their complicated and often conflicting psychology: increasingly ambitious and outward-looking, at once sophisticated and perhaps a bit naive, they seem driven by a combination of faith in China’s future and distrust of its present; a belief that education abroad will translate into success at home.

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Chinatown Wal-Mart, Vietnam-Korea connections, new AAS books

Sorry for the lack of new posts lately! Between studying for finals, writing proposals, and showing prospective graduate students around Los Angeles, I haven’t had time to sit and think about anything non-academic for a while. But spring break is coming up soon, so there will be tons of exciting new stuff then!

Say NO to the Wal-Mart in Los Angeles’ Chinatown

Retail giant Wal-Mart is planning to open a grocery store below a retirement home in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. I’ve written before on how this would negatively affect the local small businesses that are at the heart of the Chinatown community. Local activists met on Tuesday to discuss how to organize against Wal-Mart, and a social media campaign has come out of this:

Campaign Tumblr: http://nowalmartinchinatown.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @NoWalMartinCT

Vietnam-Korea connections

Viet Thanh Nguyen for Diacritics: Korea’s Viet Nam, Viet Nam’s Korea

The stretch of coast from Hue to Hoi An, the Vietnamese Riviera, seems to be entirely dominated by Korean-built resorts and golf courses, with even more under construction, at least when I drove the length of Highway 1 in the summer of 2010. Ironically, this is the same area where Korean troops fought and earned a reputation among the Vietnamese as a very scary bunch. Both Le Ly Hayslip, in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and Truong Nhu Tang, in A Vietcong Memoir, note that the Vietnamese were more terrified of the Koreans than they were of the Americans.

New York Times: For Some in Vietnam, Prosperity Is a South Korean Son-in-Law

The couple, like many others in the Vietnamese countryside, had prospered in recent years, thanks to daughters who, driven by dreams of better lives for themselves and Confucian filial piety for their parents, had emigrated to marry South Korean men. The money they and others earned in South Korea, wired regularly to small towns in Vietnam like Quang Yen, often manifested itself in telltale new homes, though the wealth paled in comparison with the Lexus S.U.V.’s favored by businessmen in Hanoi, about 100 miles west of here.

I wrote about Vietnamese brides in Korea earlier this year.

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