Alex the Konfused Ko-Am (haha.... korny)

After having established the fact that the book was convoluted, frustrating, noisy and consistently inconsistent in it's form, I felt, like everyone else, exhausted and off-set by the end of the book. It was not until Kim's article that I began to realize that the book is not meant to be an isolated text. One person reading the book just once is not enough to understand and appreciate what Cha is offering out to us. Now, being Korean American may seem as if I have a slight upperhand in grasping some of the highly specific cultural subject matter better than others, possibly even some of the historical background of some of the events mentioned in the text. But the truth is, personally, I don't. Even if I did, I would still feel excluded from other aspects of the book (the French poetry, Daoist text...) and, in fact, everyone should feel excluded in some way. This exclusive feature of the text is significant to the understanding of what the text is representing.

In the post that started my directed discourse, the question was raised whether this exclusion of the reader "in a book that finally gives the experience representation" works against the "specific and very under-represented" experience. (The female Korean-American experience is how I am reading this) From what Kim has to say about the fluidity of identity/boundaries and my own personal exploration of identity, I reaize the book does give an accurate representation of a specific and very under-represented experience by being all of the things that frustrate us readers - the exclusivity, fragmentation, erratic form etc. I would like to go even further by claiming that the form of the text is an accurate representation of all other identities, experiences that we each associate with - how multi-layered and blended our own identities seem to be at times. The text then requires of the reader to not simply ignore and never think about the seemingly noisy and unnecessary filler pages but engage in active pursuit and conversation with others and other texts to uncover the deeper meanings and expose different layers

Most of this, however, was touched upon in class but I wanted to restate it in case some thoughts were lost in translation. A fresh idea that I'd like to conclude my blog with is the personal affect the text, along the subsequent critiques and conversations, had on me.
I can relate very closely to Kim's previous struggle of how to define and claim my Korean American identity. I felt that there should be clear cut answers to the exact ways in which one is Korean, Korean-American. Lately, I've realized the blending and fluid nature of my identity and that it never stops changing. The way in which the text embodied this perspective on identity and how I could share and understand this message somehow connected me with Cha. This link, moreover, can then potentially be made between all sorts of supposedly exclusive groups and identities. Maybe this last thought is too optimistic and unrealistic in our lives today but the experience of the text, nevertheless inspired and empowered me to believe its an idea not worth giving up on... yet.