Uncultured Lines

Xanh Tran
ASA 02 - A01
Reflection #8: Korean American Youth and Transnational Flows of Popular Culture Across the Pacific

Uncultured Lines

I never realized before that the widely distributed definition of "culture" was so outdated, nor had I noticed any of the obvious contradictions of the definition all around me, especially in my life as a 2.5 generation Asian American. Even when learning about hybridity and multiplicity, I didn't connect it to how I saw my culture, or what my culture was. Not Vietnamese, not American, but somewhere within the hyphen of this concept of a Vietnamese-American. Not an American-Vietnamese, or an American-born Vietnamese, but a Vietnamese-American. 

Like the readings from last week said, popular culture plays a huge role in the cultural identities of modern Asian American youth. Instead of the violent mix of action films from multiple Asian media industries the Vietnamese American youth were exposed to after the tragedy of the Vietnam War, Korean American youth looked to their homeland to learn about their culture. So my question is, how do youth from different ethnic communities reconnect to their homelands, and how does their desire to do so vary across these groups? 

A PC bang