In-Group Insularity

Someone explain to me what’s going on in this video. I’m at a loss.

I should explain my odd, uncharacteristic pro-Korean thing in my last post. What it is is, I’m more against in-group insularity than I let on. I don’t know anything about ethnic/cultural studies, so that might not even be a valid term, but that’s what I’m going to call it – in-group insularity.

So you know, minority rights activists get all pissy when the majority is ignorant about minority issues. I kind of jive with that, but my standards aren’t as high as theirs. It seems kind of ridiculous to me to expect people in the majority to be knowledgeable about all minority issues, which is sometimes the attitude I see (“You don’t know the culinary norms of the Gujar people? What is wrong with you???”). My thing is just, it’s good just to know that there is more than your experience. That’s it. Not that you have to know what everyone else’s experience is like, but just to know that there’s more out there.

So for example, it does bother me when people assume that all Asian people are Chinese. You don’t have to know what I am, or even what Korean is, just know that there’s more than just Chinese out there. Growing up, when I faced that, it bothered me.

But the weird thing is, the Chinese people sometimes did the same thing. At least in the part of the Bay Area where I grew up, there were far more Chinese than Koreans. And some of them just kind of assumed that I was Chinese, or that I had the shared common Chinese experience, which I didn’t. Which always struck me as odd, because there’s so much diversity in what is Chinese-American that I’d think they’d be even more aware of differences, but yeah. I even faced some of that last weekend. Met these Chinese couples in Chinese-dominant contexts, and they talked assuming that I was Chinese, and that I was familiar with what every Chinese-American in the area is familiar with (e.g. the House Of Christ Chinese churches in the area).

So yeah, any time there’s this in-group insularity, it makes me uncomfortable. In Cupertino Village, when waiters repeatedly talk to us in Chinese even after we’ve said we’re Korean, it makes me uncomfortable. Parts of SoCal that are Korean-dominated, where you don’t ever have to go to a place that doesn’t speak Korean, that makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s an unfair thing to expect. When you grow up a minority, and what’s more, a minority within a minority group, you can’t help but understand that there’s more than your experience. But yeah, when that doesn’t happen, I feel a little odd about it.