No Gift Is Free, In Some Cultures More Than Others

(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)

I heard this from a Japanese professor in Tokyo during a wonderful sashimi dinner where I was the guest as a visiting lecturer. The dinner was, for me, free. But the mild implication was that there was now a web of obligation in which I was caught. I haven’t yet had the chance to repay that hospitality. But what the professor said has always remained with me, as it’s probably true. At least in some cases.

The material above is from a "Goodreads" feature in which Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a bit of explication for his novel "The Sympathizer," set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. 

The question of whether a gift of one sort or another is truly free is an issue I deal with near the end of my novella, "Manhattan Morning" and as you can see from reading the excerpt below, it is not surprising that this question apparently first arose in Nguyen's mind during a stay in Japan.

From "Manhattan Morning:"

The woman took a sip of the tea, put it down and pushed it slightly away.  Pretty dreadful, Dan thought.  Probably the water in the cup wasn’t piping hot and in any event, she clearly hadn’t let it steep long enough. 

She pulled her briefcase up and began prowling around in it.  Dan tried hard not to look.

      “Shit!”

 Dan couldn’t believe his ears. 

     “Oh, shit!” 

Fork in midair, he looked at her, hesitated slightly, and then asked what was wrong.

      “I can’t pay for my lunch.  I don’t have enough cash and I don’t have my credit card with me.  I must have left it at home this morning.  What a nightmare!” She was staring at the briefcase with a distraught look on her face. 

     “Don’t worry about it.  I’ll pay for it.  It looks like … what, about ten bucks? Including the tip? I mean it’s nothing.  I’d be happy to.” 

     “No, no, I can’t let you do that.” 

They looked at each other and Dan smiled. 

     “Come on, what’s ten dollars? I mean it’s just nothing.  And what’s the alternative? My guess is this place doesn’t run tabs and I can’t exactly see you washing dishes here.” 

She laughed. 

     “I guess not.  Well … I feel totally ridiculous … how could this happen? … How can I let a complete stranger buy my lunch? … Only if I can pay you back.  You have to promise.” 

     “Sure, but I don’t care if you forget.  Really, it’s a ridiculously small amount.”

      “It’s the principle.” 

Dan knew what she meant from his days in Japan.  If she didn’t pay him back, it would hang over her.  The Japanese often refused help from strangers, even in rather dire circumstances, and by the same token, people sometimes walked past a person in need, unwilling to help.  As soon as one did something for someone, a debt was incurred.  The problem was, there was never any way to pay it off exactly, to square the account.  So one tended to overpay so as not to have doubled the burden through what might be perceived as ingratitude.  But over payment simply shifted the obligation to the other side, presenting the same dilemma there.  The two parties were now linked like two small children on a seesaw that refused to balance in the middle. 

Americans were better able to shrug it off and move on, but in a way, once a person enters your life in this fashion, they never really leave.  Just a ghost in most cases, but people did make friends – even enemies – through such circumstances.  Dan suddenly felt sorry for his companion.  She seemed busy.  She didn’t need complications in her life. 

     “Here, write your name and address on this piece of paper,” the woman said, handing Dan one of the white tablets and a ballpoint pen.  She had turned over many pages before finding one that was blank. 

As Dan took the materials, the woman looked at him rather intently, afraid he might refuse?

      “Sure,” Dan said, and wrote it out.

(Martin, Fowler. Manhattan Morning: A Novella (pp. 111-113). Kindle Edition.)

Metropolitan Museum Evokes "1984," "The Sympathizer"

The latest development at New York's Metropolitan Museum brings to mind books like George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and the equally grim tale "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In both stories, the chief protagonist runs afoul of an authoritarian regime and as part of his punishment, must make confessions.

On Nov. 26, 2020, the New York Times ran an article in its art section that the Met had appointed its first Chief Diversity Officer, Lavita McMath Turner, a Black woman with experience in such matters, most recently at the City University of New York.  That's not a big surprise.  Many major U.S. cultural institutions have recently taken a similar step.  Moreover, as the NYT article pointed out, the NY city government informed its cultural institutions that if they didn't take steps to diversify their staffs, they might lose some of their public funding. 

What most interested me was an element of confession associated with the Met's announcement.  It came at least in part as a result of a staff letter five months ago, the NYT said, that urged the museum's leaders to acknowledge "a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution."

The notions of white supremacy and systemic racism are key phrases and concepts in the current movement that sometimes go as far as attempting to "cancel culture" in bringing about change, much of which is arguably overdue. If one doesn't decry "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" in those terms, however, one is insufficiently "woke" and, well, might suffer the fate of Orwell's Winston Smith or Nguyen's anonymous narrator -- periods of punishment and correction.

While those advocating such a reconsideration of the very basis of U.S. society tend to paint it in terms of a moral awakening and reckoning, is also purely and simply a power struggle.

The Met's President and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Direct Max Hollein stopped short of repeating the key phrases -- "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" -- in the institution's July 6, 2020 mea culpa. But the document made it clear that a confession along such lines is in the offing.

"Our government, policies, systems, and institutions have all contributed to perpetuating racism and injustice, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art must reflect on its past and aspire to be an agent of change," the July 6 statement said.

Along with promised reforms and new initiatives on various fronts -- hiring, staffing, collecting, exhibitions, etc. -- substantive change "will also require that we understand our past and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as a necessary part of the process of learning and reconciliation."  

In other words, forward-looking reforms are not enough. 

"A set of commitments to anti-racism cannot begin without an honest assessment of an institution’s own history and present practices. This process will require that we investigate our own history and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as an essential element of healing and reconciliation. We will begin this work in the coming year through an institution-wide initiative and produce a public report."

That was number one on the list of steps the Museum said it planned to take.

In writing this, I don't mean to beat up on the Met per se.  It's just that these developments are an excellent example of the nature of the culture war in which the U.S. is currently engulfed, and particularly in the arena of high-culture arts and that of academia. 

But at the same time, they give rise to an interesting question: if the Met's forthcoming self-examination concludes that the institution and thus its leadership have been complicit in preserving white supremacy and that the Met is part of systemic racism, can Weiss survive as president and CEO? It's hard to have it both ways.

 

U.S. Minorities Seen Needing Control Over Production

Viet Than Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer" and not an uncontroversial character based on what I have previously written about him, has expressed a somewhat Marxist view of what U.S. non-white minorities need to do to get their stories told.

They need to acquire control over "the means of production," he told the Los Angeles Times.

“If you come from a so-called minority, let’s say me as an Asian American, you live in a condition of narrative scarcity: almost none of the stories are about you. ... If Black people and other people of color and other minorities don’t control, or don’t have control, over the means of production, they really don’t control their stories. They are subject to the whims and mercies of people more powerful from them — the producers and the owners — who can dictate what kinds of stories are told,” Nguyen said.

The author appeared to be talking mainly about film and other expensive forms of story telling as opposed to writing, but his point is nonetheless in the tenor of the times: a perceived need to end "white privilege" and to even "cancel" the culture associated with it.

But it seems a little behind the curve. There doesn't seem to be a pronounced shortage of stories involving or about minorities at present. Rather, perhaps all too belatedly, there seems to be a determined push toward greater diversity with respect both to the nature of the stories being told and who is telling them. For evidence of that, consult the arts sections of major American newspapers and magazines on regular basis.

Just one example: the leading candidate for this year's Tony award for the best play on Broadway (before theaters closed for the pandemic) is "Slave Play" by Black playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

Nugyen Should Reconsider What Thanksgiving Is For

In the wake of his 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Sympathizer," Viet Thanh Nugyen has donned the cloak of public intellectual, becoming a prominent voice in the intensifying U.S. culture wars. I previously wrote about his condemnation of alleged white-male domination of writers' workshops here.

But why stop there? Why not reform the Thanksgiving holiday as well?

In a recent piece in The New York Times, Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam, asks: "What is wrong with saying that Thanksgiving is about genocide as much as it is about gratitude?" That, in fact, is what he has been teaching his now four-year-old biracial son.

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is NOT "Us"

Those old enough to remember the cartoon strip "Pogo" (my personal all-time favorite) know that the headline of this post is a paraphrase of one of Walt Kelly's most famous lines and it came to mind most recently when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's piece "Your Writing Tools Aren't Mine" in the April 30, 2017, New York Times Sunday Book Review section.

"The Sympathizer:" A Perspective on the Vietnam War

Much has already been written about "The Sympathizer," a Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen that takes a different slant on the Vietnam war.

It wasn't on my reading list, but it was given to me and I was going on a trip that promised long waits in airport lounges and long hours on airplanes so I thought, why not?