What South Korea taught me about Mississippi and the world.
Moving from Mississippi to Korea, I began a personal project as a way for me to connect the two places and more broadly, expand and question how I think about (and compare) places around the globe. I came from the Mississippi/Alabama American Southland, and here I had found myself in another South - South Korea.
The "Southland" idea for me connotes images of eclecticism, quirkiness, and unexpected situations. Like, the things that make you say "oh, only in Mississippi!" Maybe the slower pace, the friendly attitude, sweaty nights, tractors going down the road, crawfish boils, pig roasts, fried chicken and sweet tea. But now I've been seeing more and have decided that this sort of characterization, perpetuated by media, is fraught. Not only does it shelter outsiders from a fuller picture, it distorts the realit(ies) of place by reducing what a place can be or become to a seemingly fixed set of particular images.
Regardless, I took the "Southland" idea with me to South Korea, where I quickly was surprised by things that seemed so unique to here (to Asia). For example, old people playing radios with old Korean music while hiking or exercising. Or seeing a painted giant poop emoji on the ground leading to the toilets. Finding fish heads in peanut snacks. And counting towering rows of apartment blocks. Like, these are things I had never seen before in my life. So I threw them into the "southland" bucket. Here was unusualness, peculiarness. But as the year went by I realized that the "southland" idea was really not about meaningful differences between certain places in general, but more about just pointing at the things that are remarkable to each place for whichever particular viewer.
Why isn't there a "northland"? Because the south has always been countered to that which is considered normal, in the global north. The south is exotic. It's intoxicating to westerners/northerners. It's poor. Places in the global south are historically known as those that lack - lacking infrastructure, knowledge, capacity to change. It's where you would see something shocking like a man with rotted teeth in West Virginia: "The man is only 32, but when he opened his mouth he turned into one of Macbeth’s witches." Cases of hookworm. Voting for Trump!! (wait, is that even America??)
I remember one of my own more typical "southland" moments. My mom was driving us through levee country along the Mississippi river in a desolate Louisiana, outside St. Francisville. There were no other cars around. We passed into some forest after driving on the levee, and as the car whizzed by I saw tiers of blue tarps and lines of opossums, raccoons, and other small creatures all hanging upside down from clothes lines. No people, just blurred visions of fur. Another strange moment was coming home after work in Jackson to a pants-less (absolutely bare) wailing woman on my neighbor's front porch. And lastly, driving through a small town in Wilkinson county and just being stared at, really glared at. These moments made me feel uncomfortable. Maybe they show me things I didn't really expect to exist in the world. They disgusted me.
You know, Los Angeles is also called a "southland." From Gizmodo, novelist "Wallace Stegner once quipped that California is like the rest of America—only more so." And as much as LA has been hailed as a triumph of American ingenuity and engineering, the southern US has not. Though both have been equally described as real America. As Richard Grant, writer of Dispatches from Pluto says, the Mississippi Delta is "the most American place on Earth.” Yet, as he continues, "Nowhere else is so poorly understood by outsiders, so unfairly maligned, so surreal and peculiar, so charming and maddening."
So, we simultaneously don't understand, yet should understand Mississippi? Because, it is the most American, by being one of the fattest, poorest, most illiterate, and prematurely pregnant states? And, places like LA, they too, as beacons of progress, are also the most American? Is this perhaps some comment about America in general?
And, as a friend of Grant's put it, the Mississippi Delta is also "the Third World right in the middle of America. Crime is bad, corruption is bad. Whole towns are basically caving in and rotting away." (emphasis added)
Yeah that's the confusing part about these "southland" moments. There's no consistent narrative about what makes a place or an idea a "southland." They simultaneously inspire both admiration and shock, and maybe even nostalgia. Lest we forget John C. Cobb's famous words that the Delta is "the most Southern place on earth," inescapably tied to its racist roots. Yes we have to own the atrocities that have and continue to happen. But how does this narrative guide improvement and change? What's it to offer for a new Mississippi? In what ways does it shape our understanding of the place?
"Mississi-issippiss"
I have used my own "southland" caricature as a way to process Korea's scenes that make me go "wow." That shock. Like seeing North Korea from Panmunjom. Or over the course of a couple weeks watching a pumpkin progressively grow bigger on top of a tree branch as it gently pressured and pushed the branch with its weight. Seeing dog meat, pig hearts, and cow lungs for sale. Getting to watch my chosen fish be slaughtered for sashimi. Seeing very elderly ajummas push heavy carts piled with cardboard they'd collected from trash piles from around the city. Gawking at a violinmaker's workshop in a nondescript tower next to my bank. And ginseng roots fermenting in liquor.
What is the "southland" really for then? Hate? Disgust? Fear? Wonder? For me, for now, a "southland" caricature is seemingly meaningless. South Korea is how it is, just as the Southern United States is. In the process of trying to compare the two places with a shallow hashtag, I've only mystified them further. Southern or not, they are lands in their own right. And hashtags or simplified narratives aren't aides for understanding them, or to change them. That requires living them.
See more photos from my southland project at #southlandkorea.
