Speaking of Asians (or Skipping the First Step and the Wonders of We Got Married)

The last month, month and a half, have seen a spike in my anxiety. I've been on the fringe of graduating, moving jobs, losing my two best friends to NYC (because of this YHTALMM is now a bi-coastal operation), inserting the Nuva Ring into my daily life, and moonlighting (because of this YHTALMM has a direct relationship with food service). My appetite has decreased twofold, and my nocturnal consumptions have barely stirred.

"Why serial killers?"

I get hungry much later in the day, and since I'm stuck behind a cash register when my appetite is aroused, I've been eating when I am not hungry at all in order to preempt late-afternoon hunger pangs. This is frustrating for me because eating is my primary drive for living. Life is merely a symptom of eating food. When one desire isn't being satisfied the psyche tends to shop for a substitute desire or pleasure as a coping mechanism. I've been filling my hunger-void with television. I watched the entire First Person series in two afternoons and have watched Gene Kelly's special appearance on The Muppet Show more times that I've watched Singin' In The Rain- which is a lot. My favorite show to surfeit on, the acme of my replacement enjoyment, is a Korean reality show called We Got Married. The only way I've been able to avoid binge watching TV shows, or Paul Newman interviews (I always end up with a face covered in tears), is by accident- when the food I ate as a plug is miraculously what I was truly hungry for. For instance, last week I stuffed a Kaiser roll into my bag then stole butter from my bookstore's adjoining coffee shop and stuffed it in my face before my next shift. I was accidentally satisfied. The Kaiser roll and butter were exactly what I needed, except I didn't recognize this until after they were consumed, which brings us back (thankfully), to We Got Married.

It's like my childhood made this for my adulthood!

My co-worker said it best, "You have to watch We Got Married with an open heart." That's the only advice you'll never need regarding the watchability of WGM. However, I do have a mouthful (pun intended) to comment on why I love this program as much as I do.

First a brief synopsis of WGM: South Korean celebrities are paired up in four sets and agree to live together in an assimilated marriage. The entertainment is not where you'd expect: in the States the show would be something of a parred down Surreal Life, where two marginally famous assholes are trapped in a house together and the camera would ensnare their senses of entitlement and overall dumbness. Don't get me wrong, I would watch the show I just described, but WGM operates above this. The celebrities chosen, although spoiled, are not rotting in the fame. They are all polite, thoughtful, and optimistic.

Andy Oppa made Solbi a princess bed.

What a show like this does to a Western audience is jarring. Reality shows are so boring, and the people who watch them are so bored, that the only residual enjoyment to be had in them is the factor of immediate kitch and intentional low-browing. WGM reinvests my interest in sincerity since I am watching it for its intended purpose. Though three of the paired couples are clearly going through the motions of the program, making the most of their uncomfortable situation with tepid chemistry, there is one pair (Andy and Solbi) whose faux marriage has struck a romantic chord in each of them. The function of the show, the nature of its setup, is what sparked an otherwise latent interest in a love affair. What WGM does, or did, to Andy and Solbi is swaddle them into a situation where each party is justifiably entitled to certain things (outing together, back rubs, home cooked meals, and comfort), whereas in Real romantic onsets both sides are often plagued by the discomfort of wanting to want something from the other party, and/or are confused by what they are to one another.

WGM did all the work for Andy and Solbi. They are husband and wife, or at least have to preform as so, and are expected to familiarize each other with the quirks of their personalities for the camera. It's not, however, the quirks that have sparked the flame between the two, but the performance of them. Much akin to how Lacan points out the "performative" aspect of being a king in Hamlet (the king is charismatic and loved because he is treated as so, not the other way around), Andy and Solbi are drawn to each other by how they themselves are forced to treat the other person.

Not the first or the last time YHTALMM uses this image

They have skipped the most treacherous step of falling in love- the beginning. And are able to enjoy the joy of initiation (first kisses, etc) without the unbearable remainder of questioning reciprocity (after all they are married). Or fake-married, but to do a good job at their job (preforming in the television show) they must act in love. The situation is a win-win. Anxiety over behaving too enamored is wiped away, for the sake of the program, for the sake of the audience. Much like how I am only happy with what I eat if it's no longer premeditated, Andy and Solbi are in the midst of finding love because they were not seeking it. In fact both parties were probably questing for little more than money, or more notoriety, but what they've garnered in the end is much greater, and is also what the watching audience is hoping for.

An Eye Most Apt in Gelatines and Jupes

Everyone, in my experience, is aware of two ways to eat at a Chinese restaurant. The first involves every member of the dining party ordering a different dish from the menu. When the dishes arrive the entire party eats small helpings of every dish that has been ordered. If you happen to dislike something one of the dining party members ordered you deal with it privately; chances are someone resents you for your choice as well. This first method, I suppose, could be considered the “family style” method.

The second method is wrong.

For a long time this has been my de facto test of potential friends and sexual partners. If when the dishes arrive at the table the acquaintance pulls their ordered dish toward him/herself and removes the oversized serving spoon (an obvious sign of the superiority of the “family style”) I understand that the relationship will not advance from the table. From that point on I have the freedom to treat the meal like a farewell luncheon. I ask my failing acquaintance long-term questions about the direction s/he thinks his/her life might go. When we split the bill not into equal parts but instead pay individually for every dish ordered I am reminded of why I am letting this person disappear into the ether of my consciousness.

Fuck you, Time magazine

I do not read the introductions of books until I have finished the book that is being introduced. Generally this is so I can better ridicule the introducer. Usually the book will be introduced by a scholar with a chair in some prestigious east coast university. S/he will use his/her advanced biographical knowledge of the author s/he has attached him/herself to like a lamprey eel in order to illuminate the more obscure autobiographical notes of the text. Usually these observations can simply be summed up as “wrong,” or, as is often the case, “laughably wrong.” Occasionally a work of fiction will be introduced by a contemporary author judged to be similar to the master whose work demands introduction. Such is the case of the piece by John Updike which grows like a malignant tumor off the front end of the Complete Works of Franz Kafka. Updike has nothing to say about Kafka, and yet says it for nearly forty pages. If I were to sum up all the useful information a reader of Kafka could glean from reading Updike’s introduction, I would have to do it thusly:

“ .”

Conceal/Reveal

John V. Smyth, the author of The Habit of Lying, is fond of an example which in his estimation illustrates the extent to which deception naturally permeates and mediates human behavior. The example is clothing. It’s simple to understand, really: we choose our clothing as a means of disguising and defining ourselves. When the body is revealed as the clothing is removed, the viewer of the exposed body is treated (presumably) to the unveiling of a closely kept secret. Hence the historical ugliness associated with sharing your secret with too many people: once everyone knows about it it’s not much of a secret.

The problem with this example is that I’m convinced it’s completely ironic. Clothing is not the “natural” sign of man’s tendency towards deception—it’s the body itself. While the sloughing off of clothes is an easy way to illustrate the conceal/reveal move to power that dictates Foucault’s system of “confession,” it is an inherently false construction. Exposing your body only exposes the many different ways you are concealing anything and everything you do; it illustrates that human deception runs so deep it can only be sloughed off in the realm of the symbolic, dictated by the authority we all bow to when engaging in this erotic ritual. In this way, natural human deception is not mediated through dressing oneself, but by feeding oneself.

Deception mediates feline society as well.

I finished reading Enjoy Your Symptom! without reading the introduction (as usual). I was intrigued by any introduction to a Zizek work. Would Zizek allow a completely wrong introduction to preface his book? Or would he get one of the many brilliant people who are on a first-name basis with him (e.g. Judith Butler) to expose his many ironies? As I began reading it I was convinced of the former. The introduction writer begins by explaining how he hates the “family style” of eating Chinese food, “insist[ing on] finishing [his] plate alone.” Then he talks about the proposed psychoanalysis of this preference: a tablemate suggests that the introduction writer conceals his fear of sharing sexual partners with his “repulsion” towards sharing Chinese food dishes. The introduction writer then turns the haphazard psychoanalytical suggestion around by claiming that it would be more likely that one would insist on sharing sexual partners in order to disguise one’s hatred of sharing Chinese food. This kind of game is very cute and Zizekian but it ultimately left me wondering who this knob was that wrote the terrible introduction.

Of course it was Zizek.



The inherent question this all poses is, where is the act of concealing in sleep-eating? Is it the sleeping, or the eating? Furthermore, to what depths does the answer to the previous question suggest that human deception runs? How far do we go to deceive ourselves? And, lastly, is the sexual act always disguised by some other act (sharing Chinese food, etc.), or—as Nabokov once suggested—is it really always the other way around?