Year: 2013

by Chris Bodenner

Some pushback on the thread:

Your reader’s story about the flight to Adelaide was completely underwhelming. Who hasn’t seen oldish folks, of many nationalities, out of their element on airplanes and at airports? How would your reader like it if their first experience with air travel occurred when they were 50, and was conducted in a language they had no understanding of? A bus load of camera clicking tourists is a pain no matter where they’re from. Yes, the Chinese, being new to travel, may be a little worse, but it’s no different than the standards of behavior they follow in their own country. They’ll get better as they gain experience of the wider world. But all this bashing is unseemly and a tad bit offensive. Get a grip people, and try to be a little understanding. Chinese standards of personal space are different from Americans’. If you’ve ever been to Beijing rail station, you know this.

See above. Coincidentally, I had set aside that video a few months ago because it was so striking, not knowing if we could ever use it for a post … but wait long enough and a Dish reader will bring up any obscure, interesting point. Another writes:

The story about the Adelaide trip left a really bad taste in my mouth, because it exhibits exactly the sort of empathetic closure that often underscores unconsciously racist attitudes.  First off, full disclosure – I’m ethnically Chinese, but I’m not from the PRC, and as you might have surmised by now, I’m a native writer/speaker of English. And I do agree with many of the comments about Chinese tourists, especially if they are in tour groups. I ought to know; my native country is a favourite tourist and immigration destination for Chinese nationals. In London, if I see a cluster of Chinese tourists coming down the road, I head for the pedestrian crossings.

In the Lake District, I would immediately take another path. In fact I am often angrier at them even than my white friends, because I am caught in a double bind – just as I would avoid those tourists, I am myself faced with suspicion when I go around Britain, despite being perfectly conversant in English. The flip side of “Chinese tourists having a bad reputation”, it turns out, is that a tourist can be guilty of nothing more than being or looking Chinese.

But I digress. That supposedly amusing story sent in by your reader, about the parents visiting their child in Adelaide and getting things all mixed up, is a very different situation from those group tourists who have not learned, or do not care, to respect the culture they happen to have travelled to. The reader himself indicates that when he says at the end that this was probably the first time that couple has been outside China; yet he does not consider the implications of that.

In a country where vast swathes of the population are still quite poor, and where simultaneously the rich generally have no compunction about showing off their wealth by jetting about, it is very clear to me which group the clueless couple belong to. If they have not been overseas before, and yet have a son who is studying in Adelaide, consider the efforts they must have made for their child to make it there. The skill of knowing airports, air travel and customs work, or to know how to navigate unfamiliar terrain, is not a skill these two hapless people chose not to learn despite having disposable income to fling on overseas trips; it was a sacrifice they made so they could now visit their kid who made good in Adelaide. Your reader, who claims to know a lot about East Asian cultures, curiously seems to have completely missed this point about filial piety and parental love.

Do we really expect, in the context of the previous post about the lack of a guidebook culture, or the general lack of cross-cultural knowledge, that a middle-aged Chinese couple – a middle aged couple from anywhere – would have known perfectly how to get about and handle themselves in a foreign country, after a long flight, when they know no one (and their son had yet to arrive) and do not speak the language? That is in no way amusing. Comedy works best when it kicks upwards – against rude, privileged Chinese tourists who defecate in heritage sites and talk at full volume all the time. I’m completely fine with mocking those people. But to kick downwards as your reader does, from their privileged position (since they “get around” and have ample opportunity to be irritated by Chinese travellers), is not amusing at all.

For some reason I suspect that if that Chinese couple spoke the same language as your reader, or were visibly from the same culture, then they might have been better disposed to them, or to consider them for what they are, ie. clueless and uninformed from inexperienced, as one might be expected to be – rather than judging them simply by what they do or look like, ie. ridiculous and worthy of mockery. Clearly, if the reader has seen fit to post this “amusing incident” even after knowing the facts about the Chinese couple’s situation, I’m not sure such empathy is much in evidence.

On a semi-related point, given the long-standing awareness of how the Chinese tourist market is large and continuously growing, I have to wonder why it seems abnormal that the Chinese tourists could not speak English, but very normal that none of the flight crew know how to speak Chinese. In the ’80s and ’90s, certainly, there was no shortage of enthusiasm about putting up signs in Japanese for the benefit of similarly English-challenged tourists. Admittedly, Japanese tourists are generally better behaved than the Chinese; but I don’t remember that snobbery is a key tenet of capitalism (or democracy, or indeed any universal conception of social forms or rights). Once again, I know the complaints, and I agree with them; but just as English speakers mock the French for their arrogance and refusal to budge on their Frenchness, how is it not sheer arrogance to mock the Chinese without making any effort to come closer to their culture and language, if only to tell them to speak a little more softly?

Thank you for your attention, and I do apologise for this rant.

by Chris Bodenner

A knowledgeable reader of the Bible counters the conservative Christian trying to argue away the existence of trans people:

Moore’s deflection about epistemology vs. ontology is disingenuous; the trans question is inherently epidemiological. This isn’t about whether “man” and “woman” exist, but how you categorize someone as man or woman. Do you use genitals, genetics, brain structure (which science is finding is also sexed)? And what do you do with ambiguous characteristics? And people with both male and female characteristics?

What science is finding is that brain structure is the strongest, most resilient marker of sex. That makes sense, when you think about it. A man who loses his penis and testes doesn’t become a woman. A woman who has a mastectomy and hysterectomy doesn’t become a man. And people with ambiguous bodily characteristics still have brain structures that correlate with other men and women, and identify as such. The conclusion is that the strongest way to categorize a person’s sex is through neural analysis. Or, conversely, simply ask them what their sex is. That’s what trans activism is about. Medical transition, anti-discrimination laws – all that is aimed at correcting cases where sex was wrongly categorized. This isn’t “changing” someone’s sex, it’s confirming it.

None of this contradicts Mathew, Mark, Genesis, or Genesis. The Bible argues that the sexes exist, and are created by God, but gives no indication of how to categorize them.

In fact, in Genesis 2.19, God tells Adam “whatever [he] called each living creature, that was its name”. (Tantalizingly, the next verse is the Bible’s first reference to ‘Adam’, implying that he also ‘named’ himself.) And, as Jonathan Merritt pointed out, the brain is just as natural and God given as the rest of the body. Other than that, its condemned by neither Leviticus or Lot, and in Isaiah 56, God promises ‘eunuchs’ who keep the Sabbath and the covenant:

to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.

Incidentally, Isaiah 56 is called “Salvation for Others”. There is simply no Biblical case to be made against trans rights. Both Orthodox and Conservative Jewish leaders, who also follow Genesis regard homosexuality as a “transgression”, have ruled in favor of medical transition, and changing sex designation. For the trans question, while foreign to many, the theology is cut and dry about its status as sin.

The shame is that trans issues do raise a lot of interesting theological questions. (For example, what does this say about the relationship between brain, mind, and soul?) But that’s by comparing trans people to Legion, or by saying that trans people inherently disrupt the categories of male and female.

Ironically, Russell Moore is right; someone’s sex “can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife.” He’s just wrong about what side of the issue that puts him on.

Update from a reader on another version of the Bible:

Your knowledgeable reader writes “In fact, in Genesis 2.19, God tells Adam “whatever [he] called each living creature, that was its name”. (Tantalizingly, the next verse is the Bible’s first reference to ‘Adam’, implying that he also ‘named’ himself.)” Not true. Adam is named earlier; or rather, he is never named. In the Hebrew text he is always referred to simply as “the man” (Ha-adam). For some reason (perhaps the reason suggested by your reader) the King James Version starts calling him Adam at this point. What is interesting is that it is right after he runs out and names all the animals that he realises he needs a wife – and the first thing he does is to give her a name. (And, pace the KJ version, he doesn’t name her after himself.)

Another reader:

On the discussion of gendering and Christianity, I wonder if the following might not be a helpful tool for (or against) the conservative. In his essay “For You May Touch Them Not: Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in First World War Poetry,” James S. Campbell uses a quote by Emmanuel Levinas as an epigraph:

Perhaps … all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being. Could this be the meaning of the enigmatic verse of Genesis 1:27: “male and female created He them”?

by Matt Sitman

NPR interviews Patrick Flanery about the backdrop to his new novel, Fallen Land, a thriller that “plays out in a half-built subdivision where construction ground to a halt during the housing crisis”:

I came to thinking about the housing crisis as the natural setting for the story that I wanted to tell. Because I had this vision of somebody who was in a house that was no longer theirs. And it seemed logical to set it against the backdrop of the housing crisis and think about how that was affecting very different kinds of people and the very different situations they find themselves in after foreclosure auctions and things like that…

I wanted the book to speak to a kind of crisis in neighborliness, and thinking about the ways in which people are becoming so inward-looking, and the ways in which it’s incredibly easy — I think in part because of technology — not to think about what’s happening around us. And that’s not just thinking about security but thinking about who needs help. So it’s almost about a crisis of empathy with the people that we should be looking out for but who we fail to look out for in fairly fundamental ways.

Matt Hartman finds the political and social context of the novel an occasional liability. He observes that, in the first couple pages, the book touches upon “the prison-industrial complex, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the prevalence of fast food, industrial farming, and obesity”:

Fallen Land is a sprawling novel about a sprawling house, built in an unnamed state in America’s heartland, and the three generations who owned the land the house sits upon. The novel is unquestionably a novel of the housing crisis, intently focused on the places we make our homes, the machinations that keep us there or force us out against our will, and the connections to the land we’ve gained and lost in the process.

The problem with Fallen Land is that Flanery takes these issues to be novel, as though by speaking of them at all he is “revealing new surfaces for growth.” His everyman character, Nathaniel Noailles, works for a private security firm that concocts ways to increase the profits from their prison labor system. Though this is certainly a crucial issue for America, Flanery approaches the topic without the irony someone like Don DeLillo has used to such great effect, and as a result his earnestness becomes heavy-handed, especially early in the work.