Appropriate Appropriation

It was nighttime in Bangkok as I walked down a busy street alone, probably Sukhumvit, the large boulevard running through the center of the city. Most of the details elude me, but I do recall an old woman sitting on the street. She might have been behind a rug of belts she was selling, she might have been begging, or she might just have been sitting talking with some friends. I just remember she was talking loudly in Thai, and I thought everything about her was seemed an inscrutable mystery to me. Our lives could not be more different.

But as I stared at her longer, the old Bangkok lady began resembling the woman who raised me, whom I affectionately call Auntie. Auntie is in her 70s, born in Macau during World War II. At the time, I was living in Hong Kong and often passed by old woman on the streets late at night, many of them pushing carts of garbage for income. I couldn't help but feel pity, thinking that in a different life this woman could be my Auntie. This forced me to stop and talk, and occasionally I helped push their carts.  One time I found myself pushing a cart, from the Sheung Wan MTR all the way past Western Street, listening to an old woman's life for 20+ minutes. She had no family and had lived alone in a small Sai Ying Pun flat for the past 40 years and had used to work in a garment factory. Our lives were super different, but not inscrutably so, and we were able to connect.

Back in Sukhumvit, these thoughts were all rushing through my (likely not sober) head. This nameless Thai woman wasn't really some unfathomable enigma - we just didn't have a common language. In a different life, I could easily be listening to her tell me about all the changes Bangkok has seen in the last 50 years. In a different life, I could be her. The language barrier is this impassable barrier, until it isn't. I started wondering, "Do white people see the cart pushers of Hong Kong the way I had been seeing this Thai woman? Do they see all Asians with whom they can't talk to like that?" Without the anchor of a close figure like my Auntie, are they unable to establish that real empathetic connection?

My experience is mostly yes. A lot of people around this globe don't get it. They are not truly "culturally woke." It is one thing to read about different customs around the world, to learn about the issues facing different groups, but it is another to embrace your existence as simply one of many in the world. Too many people spend their days imparting their truth upon others, without realizing it is just a relative truth. Whether someone actually grasps this concept is at the heart of a lot of major cultural battles I see today. Essentially, it's why I dislike Wes Anderson, am ambivalent towards Keziah Daum (the Utah cheongsam prom dress wearer) and love Anthony Bourdain.

Wes Anderson's latest movie is the stop-motion animated film Isle of Dogs. I am not super familiar with Anderson's body of work, but I generally accept that he is a fantastic film director. And Isle of Dogs is a magnificent piece of work, which makes his use of Japan all the more disappointing. The film is set in a semi-dystopian future in Japan, but it becomes pretty apparent that this is not Japan, but Wes Anderson's understanding of Japan. As Allison Willmore of Buzzfeed summarized, Anderson throws a:

hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan — taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!)... This all has more to do with the (no doubt intricately designed and decorated) insides of Anderson's brain than it does any actual place. It’s Japan purely as an aesthetic — and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination. 

I quote Willmore because I had literally written a "hodgepodge of free association" before finding this article and decided not to reinvent the wheel. Anyway, it is super clear that to Wes Anderson, Japan is this fascinating alien kingdom, and not a nation state home to 120 million people. I mean the main character is named "Atari" and the city "Megasaki." He wasn't even trying. His choice to have the dogs cast by well known American actors and actresses and speak in English while the human characters speak in unsubtitled Japanese is somewhat clever, but it pits Japanese people as the other and assumes that the audience is not supposed to understand Japanese. Greta Gerwig's American exchange student/white savior is the back-breaking straw. It is clearly the work of a white American man like Wes Anderson who has never seen Japan without a white American in the frame. He is only capable of imagining the story of an American in Japan, not the epic dramas that have occurred and still occur in Japan without any foreign involvement. Anderson's priors in The Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel do not grant him the benefit of the doubt.

Anderson gets specific call-out because he should know better. He's this highly successful filmmaker who has clearly traveled the world and associated with a cosmopolitan crew. He lives in Paris and dates Lebanese writer Juman Malouf.  Yet his worldliness seems only to have armed him with a larger arsenal of imagery, not perspectives. A good chunk of my life has been spent hanging out with white Americans abroad, and very few of them display the sort of cultural closed-mindedness of Wes Anderson. But of course, his films are so good. Is the cultural appropriate egregious enough to wage a boycott? No, I saw it, enjoy it, then bitched about the aspects I didn't like in a blog post.

Using a country as a backdrop because it looks cool is one thing. What about wearing a dress from another country because it looks cool? The considerably lower stakes should be taken into account, but is the underlying issue the same? To a certain extent, I think yes. If you're not familiar with the specifics of the cheongsam prom dress case, take 5 and Google it. In essence though, it features a white high school senior from Utah who saw a Cheongsam (or Qipiao) in a store, thought it looked cool, and wore it to her prom and took a large photo with her friends all doing the Thai Wai. It's certainly not a look that shows deep cultural understanding. For some Asian Americans who grew up having their food and clothes mocked and now see white Americans "discover" them, it was a deeply infuriating fashion choice.

For some more context, the Asian American community have gotten pretty woke on cultural appropriation over the years. I remember the "Pho is the new ramen" incident inciting a fury, and ever since then many Asian Americans have become quick spotters of cultural idiocy. Chopsticks in hair, kimonos, even Chinese tattoos - these all provoke a visceral reaction in me when in a visibly non-Asian context.

You know how many old white guys won't eat street food in Yangon?

However, in the case of the Utah high schooler, I think it's important to relieve the viscera. Should that senior know better? Certainly not! I'd be stunned if a 17 year old white girl from Utah was aware of these Asian American grievances. Her clothing was not meant in bad taste, and now she knows better.

Lastly, we have the late Anthony Bourdain. I never closely followed Bourdain's show or career, and never really talked about him with other people. Given that, I was a little surprised that when he sadly passed away, so many people were moved. His loss was particularly felt among hyphenated Americans. As someone who loves to travel and eat street food, I admit when I learned about Bourdain and his traveling cooking show, I had my guard raised. Most travel shows either cater towards the rich and luxury-seeking, or exaggerate the exoticness of a location. But I quickly saw that Bourdain was a genuine and humble guy who wanted to share the food of the world with a wider audience. He never acted like he "discovered" a dish, he spoke out for minority chefs and against cuisine stereotypes in America, and sat down at the same cheap and dirty restaurants that regular people (cough me) enjoy in Myanmar, Vietnam and Hong Kong. He seems like he'd never describe a dish exotic, because he knew that what was exotic to him was normal to someone else. He will be missed.

The ability to empathize with people of different backgrounds may the most important soft skill in a global society. And though it may come easily to those of us who grew up straddling cultures, it can be very difficult for other people to gain. People like Anthony Bourdain stand out because they are so rare. People like Wes Anderson are the ones who seem to run the world. It's important for people of color to empathize and understand the degree of difficulty in connecting with an old woman on the other side of the planet. And it's important for everyone to go out and talk to as many different people as possible to stretch each other's empathetic ranges, so that people like Keziah Daum grow up more woke and lead the world in a better direction.