Gift Culture/Theft Culture

Before I write my closing post (and since I have missed a few), I wanted to talk about Jane Jeong Trenka’s piece, Fugitive Visions, first. I think that was probably one of the most interesting reads of the quarter for me because it so creatively confronts a lot of the issues we’ve been talking about by bringing to the forefront their relationship to identity and transnational adoption.

Trenka shows how global politics, power structures, and the Korean War impact the lives of Koreans now, from reproducing something as systematic and life-altering as transnational adoption to perpetuating racism and cultural appropriation.

It’s difficult to focus on any one topic because she writes about so much: alienation via language, culture, race, and gender; (un)belonging to a community; being torn from her origins, forced to assimilate into a new culture and not have the chance to even acknowledge that divide; fetishization by her (white) ex-husband; sexual violence, and more that I am probably forgetting. One thing that is always a backdrop to all of this, though, is the relations between Korea and the U. S. Trenka names them as “gift culture” and “theft culture,” respectively (76). I was thinking of how apt this description is—and not just in the Korean context—because the U.S. has such strong ties to the colonial project of stealing from and exploiting other countries for gain, while those places must constantly relinquish their own culture, politics, and people in order to even survive. 

I was thinking of the ways we (the U.S.) have, among other things, unrightfully pillaged colonized countries for artifacts that we now display in museums for American viewing pleasure, how we appropriate bits of cultures, transforming them and caricaturing the people they belong to for our own entertainment or profit, and still we and our culture are thriving, while colonized countries have gradually been forced to give up more and more (esp. language) in order to assimilate into a system we have forced onto them. This is as big as having to compete in global economics to as personal as internalizing racism and white superiority.

Trenka leaves reminders of these dynamics throughout her piece, particularly when it comes to race, language, and even food. But it’s easy to tie to the camptowns and the ways that Korean women have been a part of this theft. It reminded me of the documentary we watched, The Women Outside, and how these women have had to give up nearly everything to Americans in order to make a living. The scene showing the classes that teach Korean women how to be American housewives, in particular, is a perfect example of identity erasure and assimilation into something consumable by American men. It is colonist thievery and violence that tears these women away from their culture both physically and socially. But the misnomer of “gift culture” is a tragic reminder that this is not really an act of willful giving, but of taking that is so normalized that those on the receiving end feel entitled to it and have the power to demand it, so that giving becomes the only option, as if it was always only a charitable act of gifting from the beginning.