2.9 status stories

Real or imagined

Women in a Korean workplace. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I was watching yet another Korean drama on Netflix where one of the central issues is the status divide between one character and her coworkers.

The lower-status character hasn’t gone to college. She’s a high school graduate from a poor family who has worked a variety of unskilled jobs, but with self-study has been able to pass entrance exams for a bank, and now works as a teller. The other tellers are college graduates, and I get the sense that they all expect to be moved into other parts of the bank at some point. The teller job is entry-level, and college graduates will rotate through this area, but eventually they move into other parts of the bank as they progress up the corporate ladder.

The high school graduate, however, has been there for a long time, and the consensus among her colleagues is that a “mere” high school graduate will be stuck as a teller forever, even though she is technically qualified for promotion. Accordingly, she’s sensitive about her status as a “mere” high school graduate, and assumes that friendly overtures from others are based either on pity or a sense of their inherent superiority over her (and thus they feel “good” about themselves when they are kind to her).

This particular trope is played up over and over again in Korean dramas, and as a novelist I know that audiences have preferred storylines that we writers lean on. Marriage of convenience. “Just one bed.” Love triangle. Enemies to lovers. Friends to lovers. Girl next door.

I wonder whether the status conflict is still a real thing in our modern world. In Pride and Prejudice we know that the status issue was real at the time, but it was also convenient for Jane Austen, a tool that she could use to explore other social questions. Do we still have Darcy-Elizabeth status divides today? What does it mean to spectators that Prince Harry married Meghan Markle—does anyone seriously feel that their difference in “status” is an issue, or at least a lens through which we can look at society?

Looking back on my own life with an Asian immigrant parent, my mother’s perceptions of status affected everything, but I didn’t realize it at the time. As an American kid growing up in the 1970s, it never occurred to me that my personal family background might get in the way of anything I wanted to do. My dad didn’t make much money, and my mother’s lack of English meant that she only occasionally had paying work, but I didn’t see why that should prevent me from going to college or pursuing professional jobs.

My mother was willing to work if she didn’t have to learn English. But the fact was, over time fewer and fewer situations could accommodate her lack of English. When my mother arrived in Hawaii in the early sixties, there were plenty of second-generation Japanese-Americans around, and while they were often not fluent in Japanese, they could speak and understand enough to talk to my mother. Some of them, such as my Japanese school teacher and my Japanese dance teacher, had even spent part of World War II in Japan, “trapped” there because they happened to be visiting family or studying when war broke out. They could speak quite good Japanese, as it was years before they made it back to Hawaii.

The third generation of Japanese Americans is where the language skills tended to fall off. Many of my friends were in that generation, and some were in the fourth generation. None of them could hold a conversation in even simple Japanese, despite years of Japanese school every day after American school.

By the time I was in high school, my mother couldn’t find any work that she felt “qualified” for in a Japanese-language space, and my dad’s meager income was all there was. I remember feeling quite shocked when I saw my dad’s salary written out in black and white on the financial aid forms he filled out for me to go to college. My parents weren’t even able to contribute the small amount the college requested. I had to come up with it from my part-time job earnings. If we’d had a second income, we would have been in a much better state. But if you insisted on an all-Japanese-language workplace, it was getting more and more difficult to find one as we progressed through the 1980s.

The one exception was in retail. In Hawaii there were many Japanese tourists, and stores needed clerks who spoke Japanese. In fact, I myself worked several jobs in Waikiki where I spent my days (and nights!) speaking more Japanese than English. My mother could easily have picked up one of those jobs. There were also a couple of Japanese department stores, some Japanese-language bookshops, and even some gift shops and specialty shops that imported specific items such as dolls and ceramics from Japan.

But this is where the status issue made things difficult. My mother was afraid that her interrupted wartime high school education had put her in the category of “uneducated” and therefore she was unsuitable for any kind of work where you had to be “educated.” She would only work as a domestic, period.

Whenever she said this, I accepted it, but in my head it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. For one thing, this was America, not Japan—if my own background didn’t limit me, why should hers? Who would have any idea of what kind of Japanese high school education you’d had? For another, my mother was the smartest person I knew. She was far brighter than any of the Japanese speakers I worked with in Waikiki. She was brighter than most of my high school teachers. She read voraciously and argued like a prosecutor when she was angry. She often complained when radio announcers and tv interviewers were less than erudite. Her standards for smarts were very high, and most people didn’t meet them (including me, I often felt!). She was excellent at math, and read very difficult and complex books, including medical encyclopedias and prize-winning literary fiction.

It was difficult for me to square this image of my mother with her self-perception as someone who wasn’t “educated” enough to be a shop clerk. Yes, it was partly her lack of English (and I suppose her related anger toward my father that she had to live in the U.S. at all), but it was also her sense of not having the right background to speak politely with customers. It seemed Victorian—like one of the north-country maids on Downton Abbey trying to get a job in London in an office or a shop.

Honorific Japanese is a bear, I will concede that. And I didn’t learn it at home, I learned it at school and from watching dramas, as well as from the couple of trips I took to Japan where I had trouble understanding what the shop clerks were saying to me because of the excessively polite phrasing. When I talked to customers in Waikiki, I had to parrot phrases and grammar constructions that I had memorized. My mother occasionally said that people from “good families” used more refined language than she did. But it seemed pretty strange to me that my mother, an actual Japanese, felt she wasn’t classy enough to interact with the exact people that I was talking to in my definitely-not-fluent Japanese.

Maybe she thought my half-Japanese face was enough of an excuse and that people would forgive me when I messed up, but that it would be unforgivable if she did. Maybe she didn’t want to have to explain to people that instead of finishing high school she’d been sent to a factory to make gas masks. Maybe she didn’t want to endure slights that I’m watching this hard-working young Korean bank teller endure right now on Netflix.

There’s so much about social status that confuses me. I don’t know how much of the tension is real, and I don’t know how much is simply an easy explanation for complicated social situations. It might also be the fall-back for television writers who have no fresh ideas; maybe it’s not actually a real thing in the twenty-first century. Or maybe this is all about my particular mom, her feelings about not living in Japan and raising these American kids who mystified her at every turn.

I don’t know if it’s legitimate to base my conclusions on Netflix dramas plus my mother’s insistence that she was too “uneducated” to mingle with customers at a store, in an office, or at a school. But I have so many perplexing questions, and the Asian web comics where the chaebol heir’s family won’t accept the housekeeper’s daughter as his wife keep me wondering. When the status trope is present in all the Korean dramas on Netflix, it seems as if it can’t NOT be a thing. But is it only a thing in Asia? Is it not a thing here in the U.S.? And by status, I don’t necessarily mean economic—I suppose I can kind of understand if you’re concerned when your kid marries someone who won’t or can’t hold down a job. I mean the kind of status that is empty, where an otherwise smart person like my mom won’t apply for a certain kind of job, because she hasn’t gone to the right school or doesn’t have the right accent or vocabulary.

Maybe I’m too American. Maybe I’m just dense. But my mother brought over some ideas about all of this from Japan that still confuse me. I am not a great believer in the “American dream,” as I don’t think all Americans have an equal shot at a good life. But I don’t feel that anyone is automatically disqualified from participation in society by the type of family they were born into.

There’s another part of this story that I will save for a future newsletter. But I learned very recently that my mother’s family in Japan was not at all what I had thought, and it makes this question even more interesting, if confusing.

p.s. the Netflix show is In the Interest of Love. I haven’t decided yet whether I like it. It’s “research” for my novels. LOL