Studying Sociology with Simu Liu!
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes. Sources: WBur, Mimi Thian on Unsplash (cropped). I went on a date through Bumble recently. Yes, even I manage to pull that off sometimes. And no, don’t worry—this post is about Simu Liu.
You see, for the benefit of those blessed without ever having used dating apps, most give you the option of using prompts to get conversations going with nervous matches. You can come up with your own, or use one of the app’s suggestions. My suitress chose one of the latter—”What’s the last thing that made you smile?”. Commence instant mad pacing of my apartment. How to sound smart, sexy, and sincere in response, and all in just the one initial paragraph Bumble allows before—if—you get a reply?
Then it hit me—she’d recently lived in Canada for a number of years. I was 1/3rd into Liu’s autobiography, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story (2022) for a bookclub meeting soon. That was the connection. I could say how, never having watched any of his work, nor particularly wanting to, I hadn’t been all that enthused about the club’s choice. Only then, that the story of his parents falling in love and moving to Canada was just so damned wholesome and nice, that I couldn’t help but smile while reading it. That I was seriously annoyed at how much I was enjoying it.
I know, right—seducing by just being yourself, and saying the actual truth? And it worked? Who’d have thought?!
Little did I know, the next few pages would begin to outline the ‘Tiger Parenting’ he received, which was really just plain emotional neglect and physical abuse. And, in the first of two excerpts from the book I want to share with you, I especially remembered what he wrote at about the period his parents “graduated from spanking to full-on hitting” when he was 12. Which was also when his hormones were appearing, he was a Chinese boy growing up in Canada, and he needed emotional support more than ever (Chapter 9, pp. 104-5):
“I came out of the whole experience [of my crush] with a lot of anger…at myself for being completely ill-equipped to deal with my feelings, and at my parents, who I felt had trapped me into a life I no longer wanted. They had given me neither the emotional maturity nor the social wherewithal to have any shot with girls.”
“And then, of course, there was the total mindfuck that came with growing up Asian and male, in a society that saw us as nothing more than a bunch of derogatory stereotypes. Asian men were frequently depicted in Western media as awkward, nerdy and completely undatable—pretty much exactly what my parents were trying to make me into. I know this is a lot of really heavy stuff to put into the psyche of a twelve-year-old, but it definitely affected me, and it definitely affected every Asian boy that grew up in a Western country. The double whammy of being teased on the playground with ching-chong noises and then seeing ourselves ridiculed on the screen robbed us of our natural confidence. Without proper guidance from our parents, who were not terribly concerned with our self-confidence, most of us grew up feeling like we weren’t worthy to be loved or desired; like whatever we were was not enough.”
“Disillusioned and embittered, I began to pull away from my parents, my upbringing and my heritage. I started acting out, talking back and refusing to do homework. I didn’t want to be a math genius, or a scientist, or a sidekick—I wanted to be Thomas MacDonald, the mediocre-yet-charming leading man who got B-minuses and called his parents by their first names. I didn’t want to be Jackie Chan or Jet Li—I wanted to be hot stuff like Justin Timberlake, the kind of guy that dated Britney Spears and had bras thrown at him onstage.”
“Obviously, my parents were not down with my newfound rebelliousness.”
“‘Look at everything we’ve invested in you,’ they spat. ‘You’re a spoiled brat who’s squandering all of our effort and money, and wasting time on useless things. You’re nothing but a loser!'”
“’Fuck you! I don’t want any of it.'”
“WHAP!”
Update: It’s a point made many times before. But just two days later, its continuing relevance was demonstrated to me by blog mentor Jae-Ha Kim 김재하, who covered a very similar same issue in the post “Does Racist Vintage Art Get a Pass?” on her SubStack K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim. I’ll post two images from that to demonstrate what I mean, and encourage you to read the (non-)controversy in full:
Source: K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim. Next, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, let me pass on what the second excerpt from We Were Dreamers immediately reminded of before I give Simu Liu’s words themselves: this paragraph from “Dropping Out” by Daniel Pinchbeck, (pp.102-3), in the autobiographical story collection Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of Twenty Young Writers, edited by Thomas Beller (image source: Amazon):
“For one Wesleyan history class, I read the works of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. Bourdieu wrote about the concept of ‘cultural capital’—how cultural experiences acted as a boundary between the elite and the lower classes. I saw how the high price of the Wesleyan degree was a prime example of ‘cultural capital.’ The purpose of Wesleyan and other, similar colleges is not education so much as it is a way of signifying one’s membership in a certain class. An elite liberal arts degree is an indoctrination in high expectations, not hard actualities. I still maintain a sharp awareness of how the machinery of privilege works, how certain universities create an elite that reinforces itself through school connections, and the alumni’s shared, smug belief in their own entitlement.”
I first provide that because, unlike when I read the following by Liu, in the cold light of day it feels I was projecting to a certain extent, and a little unfair to connect his classmates with it when they were guilty of no more being driven and ambitious whereas Liu (and I!) were not. But no matter. If it provides an opportunity to pass on where I first learned what cultural capital was, a concept that has been very helpful to me over the last nearly 30 years (sigh) and so am very happy to share, then I’ll gladly take advantage (Chapter 14, pp. 160-161):
“On my first day of classes I could immediately tell that I was dealing with a vastly different breed of student. Incumbent Ivey [School of Business] kids were not at all like the dumb, borderline illiterate eighteen-year-olds that I’d wiped the floor with during my freshman year—these guys read the Wall Street Journal every morning and monitored the stock market religiously. They were alphas, who strode around campus with the absolute conviction that they were the literal white knights at the vanguard of a capitalist society just ready to be exploited for all it was worth, and they were ready to make it go their way. Most of them came from considerable wealth—some were scions of multibillion-dollar corporations.”
“You could mock their American Psycho–level douchery and harp on their arrogance, but there was no denying that these were men and women with goals. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about me.”
Thank you Liu! And I will watch your stuff now!
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- BUY THIS BOOK—”Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise” by Monica Liu (2022)
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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
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Originally posted on: https://thegrandnarrative.com/2024/07/22/sociology-simu-liu-cultural-capital-racism/