Aiden's A-Pop Blog

“Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity” is a book I’m using as a source to bolster my final essay. A big part of my paper is about how fathers help to give us our identity and set the tone for our lives by guiding us in our early experiences. The author Guy Corneau asserts that the last few generations may have had a hard time connecting with their fathers because the fathers were so busy surviving for most of their lives that they never developed much emotional intelligence or the ability to be emotionally vulnerable. The newer generations growing up with more safety and security now rise in Abraham Maslow’s famed “Hierarchy of Needs” to needing love, belonging, self-esteem; things the last generation was arguably not paying as much attention to.

Many people that I know have a hard time connecting with their fathers, usually for similar reasons. As of right now I’m not sure how quantifiable this theory is, but I’m hoping that this book can provide me with some answers. The book presents an interesting theory and I haven’t done enough digging in the book to quite get at Corneau’s full thesis, but I found it to be startlingly close to the points I’m trying to touch in my own writing so I think diving deeper will be worth my time.

Dark Blue Suit is not “about” sex. It is much more a memoir of sorts, telling detailed stories from the life of “Buddy” a 2nd generation Filipino-American growing up in the heart of urban Seattle. Buddy lives in a community made up of mostly poor racial minorities, who have a hard time finding jobs often because of their skin color. Opportunity among his friends and relatives for upward mobility is scarce and families are often broken and scattered across the west coast. Buddy himself grows up knowing, even at the age of five, that he has other siblings that he may not be aware of due to his father’s almost openly promiscuous behavior. This seems to be the case for almost all of Buddy’s older male role models; most haven’t formerly “settled down” with a mate but even those that have carry on affairs on a regular basis, and are aware that they have far more biological children than the ones that actually live under their roofs.

Many of Buddy’s contemporaries in the book are told that they have no future other than the military or manual labor by teachers and counselors in the high schools they attend. Often times this bleak counsel is internalized and so the youth of Buddy’s community seek means of escape which often come in the form of fighting, drinking, drugs, and sex. Throughout the book women are discussed in regards to how many of them a man has been capable of sleeping with and how capable they are of using their sex as a means of survival. One of Buddy’s half sisters, Sonia, for example survives on the streets as a hooker and a stripper having been run out of the house by Buddy’s parents decades prior.

The young men obviously look up to their older role models, Buddy’s dad in particular is noted as having a lot of influence among the members of the community, and so in turn the young men begin to follow the pattern set before them by the previous generation. The men hunt women, sleep with as many as possible, and inevitably end up having many children and a string of broken relationships that one could argue damage their sexuality and ability to maintain healthy relationships. In Buddy’s own life we see his inability to hold a steady long-term relationship, he’s had at least two divorces by the end of the book with hints that he’s had several other relationships that ended poorly as well.

It’s unclear what Buddy’s romantic goals are, it almost seems as if he’s just going with the flow, but I’d hazard a guess that because his father modeled a pattern of womanizing to him Buddy has normalized his dad’s promiscuous behavior and it has now crippled him. I wonder if Buddy’s dad had been faithful to his mother how much of the pain in these short stories could have been avoided, I think that it goes to show how big of a role our parents play in our lives and the price of poor leadership.

Forgotten Country paints an incredibly realistic picture of a family dealing with trauma. The most fascinating part of this book to me was the dynamic between the protagonist, Jeehyun, and her father. Jeehyun and her father share an interesting relationship; Jeehyun feels a filial obligation to please her father and earn his love while the father loves her unconditionally but because of his personality and cultural background, sometimes doesn’t show his affection.

So much of the family conflict in this book, which made up the brunt of the plot, I thought could have been avoided if the family simply communicated better. The aunt feels resentment toward the father for not living up to her expectations and towards the mother for not pushing the father to achieve more,  the sisters resent each other because of their own perceptions of what the other has that the other doesn’t, Jeehyun assumes that she isn’t loved by her parents because of their insistence on her being responsible for her sister and their seeming lack of sympathy and so on.

The author also draws our attention to some of the cultural reasons for way the members of the family, especially the elders, act this way towards each other. When the family returns to their homeland of Korea the sisters meet other relatives who act in similar ways: not discussing hard emotional issues even if they are painfully obvious or acting out displays of false or exaggerated concern or passion because that’s what they were taught was expected of someone of their place in a family. After the father dies for example the aunt wails and cries and “makes a scene”, the author makes a note to the reader that the aunt feels that that is what she is expected to do as the sister of the deceased person and a woman. It’s this sort of disingenuous behavior that almost every member of the family exhibits at some point in the book that seems to lead to their lack of vulnerability and, therefore, their inability to express their true feelings to each other.

At the end of the story, Jeehyun realizes that her father’s goal was really just to have the family together and to be happy as a unit, living in their homeland, in the last months of his life. Her father also displays affection for her that she didn’t think existed up until that point. When her father loses the ability to speak, there is a scene where he kisses her face tenderly, Jeehyun notes that she doesn’t think that he’s kissed her since she was seven years old.

It is a heartbreaking thing to think that Jeehyun only realized her father’s true love for her in the last year of his life, having always doubted before because of his detached and formal tendencies. Fathers that struggle with being emotionally intimate is something that I believe many people today face, this story just goes to show that a little can go a long way for a soul starving for affection and affirmation. That being said remember to tell someone that you love them today!

For my final project I touch on how music from popular anime shows influenced the music that I play and listen to. To me there is no better example of a cultural crosscurrent in anime music than “Battlecry” written by Japanese artist “Nujabes” for the 2004 anime “Samurai Champloo” (from director of “Cowboy Bebop” Shinichiro Watanabe). This Japanese language show, set in a fictional feudal japan, nakedly and without apology combines American hiphop music, break-dancing, and samurai to make one of the coolest and most unique shows I’ve ever seen.

I used to listen to anime “openings”(basically theme songs that play at the beginning of anime episodes) on repeat when I was younger, and Battlercry was one of my favorites. The track has a classic hip-hop backtrack and features Japanese-American artist Shing02 rapping in English. This song was one of the first things I thought of when I chose my topic for the paper; a perfect blend of cultures to create something altogether “other” and more special for it!