Pygmalionism

Pygmalionism. The state of being in love with an object of one's own making. Edward Said's "Orientalism" is, among other things, but also essentially, about the way Westerners see Easterners through the veil of their own interpretations i.e. prejudices and biases. In other words, a Westerner can never fully understand Eastern culture because any attempt to do so will unavoidably be from their own perspective, a Western perspective, so all judgments and impressions will forever remain, no matter how grounded they may be in experience or empathy, distorted by the cultural filter through which they must inevitably pass.

And yet, how much of our own culture do we ever really fully understand? We are often so taken by the exotic that visitors to our societies can with only minor effort seem to surpass us. I'm thinking in particular of my French college roommate, a brilliant future geneticist with encyclopedic knowledge of American history and pop culture. Then I'm reminded of when I was in Japan, and how disappointing it was that so few Japanese had ever heard of or knew anything about so many of the things that caught my interest there.

I was often frustrated while making statements about Japan when friends would ask a nearby Japanese person if what I was saying were true, as if by virtue of their DNA or the extra experience their opinion would be definitive. True, certain layers of the onion remain obscure to outsiders, especially in some cliquish societies like those of East Asia, but it's not impossible to peel the layers back. Learning to speak the language helps. But it's the question of whether foreigners can ever grasp a culture as well as the native born that I find absurd.

To a large extent there is a certain framework Westerners work with that prevents them from experiencing Eastern culture in the same way as Easterners, and vice versa, but this doesn't necessarily denote an inferior understanding any more than a feminine perspective on male-dominated society denotes inferior understanding. Are Asians therefore somehow less capable of grasping even the subtlest shades of a Shakespearrean sonnet? Maybe I'm not really going anywhere with this, but I think a lot of foreigners love what they perceive to be the countries they inhabit without ever really seeing the thing itself...

In Korea especially, too many foreigners exist in bubbles, mostly eating Western food with Western friends and never learning more than survival Korean, they are utterly isolated and while this sphere of existence is no less real and remains uniquely Korean (however foreign it may feeel, there's no place like Itaewon anywhere else in the world), in another sense the Korea they love isn't exactly the one Koreans think of when they think of Korea. They are separate worlds. But Said was wrong. It's not impossible to step out of that sphere.

In too many cases, the construction of one's own making with which we are in love is not a false perception of some culture, but a false sense of arcane status, as though only a few, selected by race or nationality, are capable of insight. Living in Korea, I just find it an endless task trying to determine which of the two applies and when. Perhaps that's the difference. I feel more acutely the need to sniff around, whereas I think when something is yours, it's more likely you'll take understanding it for granted, and therefore possibly understand it less. Maybe.