Yesterday felt like summer for a change. While standing on 13th street, I ran into a friend from college who was visiting from Boston. We walked over to the the Czech café on Perry St. and drank watermelon juice.

We talked about: Japanese and Korean love suicides, whether Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author or an international author, the appearance of the city of Boston in Banana Yoshimoto's second novel, the static nature of Japanese storytelling, and Noh theatre.

This reminded me of college.

I took an East Asian Lit class in my first semester. For a while, the professor was also my advisor. She was tiny, had a dove white bob, and had been trained at Yale. She also smoked, even though she must have been about over fifty. I hadn't handed in my final paper in the course; I was starting my protracted hike towards eventual academic probation several years down the road.

The woman had me in for an advisor meeting. Her eyes were tired but concerned. If I recall, she had her own troubles with her own children. I sat in the wood chair next to her desk and looked morose. She observed, "I think you are acting self-destructively."

This is the beginning of the final paper I eventually wrote for her:

My Korean mother says Chinese people are dirty and rude. She also says that the Japanese are opportunistic and shallow. She reflects the attitude of most Koreans: their neighbors to their left are uncouth, while their neighbors to the right are parasitic. “Those people are so different from me,” they think, and of course, different usually means inferior.

My mother is speaking from one culture, looking at two other cultures which, though they may seem similar from a Western standpoint, are completely dissimilar. These outer differences lead my mother to assume that the people are inherently different as well. In the same fashion, it is easy to be staggered by differences when reading works from different cultures.

The Story of the Stone and The Tale of Genji come from very different authors with very distinct agendas, who existed in completely different nations and time periods, and operated under unique value systems. As representatives of their culture, the one and the other are as different as night and day, or at least seem so. Yet were these two citizens of different lands to take a good look at each other, they would see a familiar face.

Do you guys remember the word “inherently”? Ha ha haaaa.