Teach Me How To Speak Stephen Gradiz  Chris Rivera
I was hoofing it through the misty grounds of my graduate school when I heard it in the distance: the urgent, synthetic sound that revved up and down the chromatic scale, paired with a muffled 4/4 beat. Though it was just an errant eruption from some distant undergrad’s laptop, the music bounced off the facades of the buildings around me, gaining more and more volume with each leap. The words crept through the fog, syllable after wretched syllable. Gun yuk bo da sa sa ngi ul tung bul tu ngan sa na ye.

As he enters the building housing the School of Management at Boston University (BU), 19-year old Park Jae-sang looks up at the weird, corporate art sculpture in the middle of the huge lobby – which is all glossed up like a bowling alley – and suddenly feels as vulnerable as a white, wobbly pin. He has all the looks and desire of an overripe peach. Back in South Korea, his steadfast father is waiting to hand him the reins to the family business, DI Corporation. His future lies in semiconductors, in his father’s boardrooms. It isn’t what he wants, though the sheer selfishness of the thought makes his stomach turn. But this is America at its economic and cultural height, and the radio waves are pregnant with possibility. This is the year of the Macarena. He turns around and exits the building.
In Blacksburg, VA, another business and management major, Cho Seung-hui, picks up a pen and writes song lyrics on the wall of his freshman dorm room. “Teach me how to speak./ Teach me how to share./ Teach me where to go.” This is the year of William Hung. He sits in his rocking chair and stares down at the quad.
“Gangnam Style” is a single from PSY’s sixth studio album, PSY 6 (Six Rules), Part 1. If not for the video for this track, PSY may as well have never existed as far as the world outside of Korea was concerned, despite his ample body of work. In a matter of days, “Gangnam Style” permeated the Internet hive-mind with the speed and completeness of the Blob. Numerous factors contributed to the song’s potency: its cellphone chime-like musical qualities; the West’s fledgling interest in Korean pop music, or K-pop; a confounding official music video; and PSY’s pitch-perfect rendition of Asian comic relief. In the video, PSY, a chunky everyman in a tuxedo, raps and performs a succession of ironically bad dances in the playgrounds of the Korean upper class: an equestrian arena, an outdoor yoga class, a tour bus filled with middle-aged women, and an enclosed tennis court, to name just a few.

In August of 1996, the cultural combine known as American Hegemony whittled, threshed, and polished a flamenco song by a Spanish lounge duo into the whitest dance track on Earth. Not unlike many modern sexually transmitted diseases, the song’s sparks began to turn into flames at the harbors of North America, swarming from the decks of cruise ships returning home to roost. Soon, everyone was doing the Macarena: wedding parties! The Animaniacs! Entire proms! Al Gore! The WASP American zeitgeist reacted to the sudden eruption of a Latin@ middle class in their midst by doing the Macarena all over the place, proudly demonstrating the inevitability of whiteness with their very bodies. For them, the Macarena tapped into visions of a mass defanging in a world where lynching was illegal, for the most part.
Before he officially transfers to the Berklee College of Music, Park moves to New York and blows his BU tuition money on weed, electronic keyboards, and CDs. Tupac and N.W.A. politicize him the way that a childhood spent in Seoul’s ritzy Gangnam district could never approach. Fuck management; he’s a goddamned poet in the making. His parents don’t find out about his new artistic direction for at least another year.
You’d have to have been living under a rock on Pluto to avoid hearing about William Hung. While the American pop culture landscape is littered with the nameless corpses of failed reality show contestants, his failure continues to prevail in our imagination. Hung, a civil engineering student at UC Berkeley at the time of his American Idol audition, kept the nation enraptured by his painfully bad rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs.” During the audition, his voice shakes with obvious anxiety, and his body executes awkward jerking movements to a beat. With his greased-down hair part, loud shirt, and buck teeth, he is more than a man: he’s what we think they think we are. Many Asian Americans that I know were afraid of him and what he would mean for us. We began to practice in our mirrors: “No, I’m nothing like him. I’m nothing like him.”
“As a Korean, I apologize,” a Korean American man told The New York Times. “When the news media said it was an Asian, we prayed, we prayed, ‘Not Korean, not Korean.’” The New York Times published an article titled, “Korean-Americans Brace for Problems in Wake of Killings,” three days after Cho Seung-hui shot and killed 33 people at his school, including himself. Unfortunately, the reporter does not question the assumption that harassment by whites would be inevitable, and that Koreans and Korean Americans would have to engage in public self-flagellation to remain in white people’s good graces. Instead, she draws the reader’s attention to data that shows higher incidences of mental disorders among American-born Asian Americans and blames their cultures for stigmatizing mental illness. If only his community were more forgiving and realistic toward its son, the data seems to say. Like we would be. And then the apologies start to make sense.

On December 21, 2012, the music video for “Gangnam Style” hit one billion views on YouTube. After a certain point in a viral video’s existence, it becomes unclear whether or not one is watching it out of interest or inevitability. Like a dead whale at the bottom of the sea, its very presence facilitates the growth and development of unique ecosystems and life forms. For instance, legions of thrill-seekers and robots have formed their own self-contained, primordial society in the video’s comment section. Anonymous users record their impressions of the lithe South Korean women in the video, while others beg the swarm for a nanosecond of attention for their own projects.
The hurricane of press releases and committee papers that follow the Virginia Tech massacre revealed that in eighth grade, Cho was diagnosed with selective mutism. After therapy, medication, bad grades, and bullying failed to change his behavior, his parents had apparently turned to prayer.
In the middle of his classes at Berklee, Park drops everything and goes back home to pursue his music career in more familiar surroundings. Later, when he gives a talk at Oxford University as PSY, he will explain that he was lonely, and that trying to speak English has always given him headaches. By the time he drops out of school for good, he will have only spoken English five times, choosing to remain silent instead of admitting his difficulty with the language.
According to the A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia, selective mutism is a condition wherein a child who can speak, won’t. Though recent immigrants may exhibit similar symptoms and anxieties, medical professionals see their difficulties as cultural, rather than psychological.
Cho Seung-hui writes, “?” on his class’s attendance sheet. When the classmate in front of him looks at the sheet, then looks back at him, he says nothing. Soon, the rest of the class, then others, begin to call him “Question Mark Guy.” Rather than insisting that people call him by his given name, he adopts the moniker, adding it to his silence the way a beaver builds a dam with so many minute twigs.
In C# 2.0, a computer programming language, the question mark denotes a NULL value. While one would assume that ? and 0 would be equivalent, an integer marked with ? is actually considered to be even less of nothing than 0 because it exists outside of the number system. Unlike a 0, ? can’t be reintroduced into polite society via simple arithmetic. Truly empty, the integer branded with ? floats in the programmer’s code, detached from the codependent bonds of normal integers.

During his sophomore year at Virginia Tech, multiple women report Cho to campus authorities for stalking. Among other things, they’re frightened by his flat affect, insistent instant messages, and tendency to introduce himself as “Question Mark.” Part of the evidence for his last stalking case is a Shakespearean message left on a woman’s whiteboard: “By a name,/ I know not how to tell who I am./ My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,/ because it is an enemy to thee./ Had I it written, I would tear the word.” He signed it, “?”
“It takes a lot more effort for an Asian guy to get noticed,” my cousin An, who is like a brother to me, tells me over the phone. “But even then, I feel so Americanized – I feel like a Twinkie, you know?” Even though An grew up in the middle of Illinois farm country, hints of his parents’ Vietnamese accents come through when he speaks to me.
“I think the general consensus is that white people like Asian people, since we’re becoming more in the household.” I urge him to explain that as I scribble a spidery transcript on a piece of scrap paper. “We’re making progress. We’re becoming more…” He pauses, then laughs. “More white.”
Once, while walking back to my apartment from my college campus, I was accosted by a group of white men in an army-green pickup truck. They shouted out the window, “She bangs! She bangs! Oh baby!” and threw a half-empty beer can at my feet.
25-year old PSY, in a whirling blur of red sequins and gold paint, takes the stage during a South Korean music video contest, lifts a cardboard-and-plastic replica of a tank above his head, and smashes it to bits as a Korean nu metal band wails in the background. You can barely hear the crunch of the tank over the rapturous screams of the mostly teenaged audience. They remember Hyo-sun and Mi-seon, the two dead 14-year olds who would never get justice from the U.S. military, and shriek and whoop like they’re channeling spirits at a Pentecostal revival meeting. After he finishes flattening the tank with the base of a microphone stand, PSY, sweating bullets and anti-aircraft missiles and nukes, rips the mike off and raps about bullies and the law of the jungle. In 10 years, he will apologize to an America that can only accept him while he smiles.
These were the last words that Vincent Chin heard before he was attacked in 1982: "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work!" People say that his killers, a white superintendent at the local Chrysler factory and his stepson, were riled up because the increasing dominance of Japanese automakers led to downsizing in American automobile plants. But the man whom they pulled away from his bachelor party, whom they called both a “chink” and a “nip,” and whose head they split open like a ripe melon with baseball bats wasn’t Japanese. His killers were eventually acquitted of all charges.
These were the last words that Vincent Chin spoke before he died four days later: “It’s not fair.”
My cousin An says, “You know, I really don’t like hanging out with other Asian people – I just feel uncomfortable when I see a group of a buncha Asians. I see them and think, look, it’s some matheletes and FOBs! I wouldn’t wanna get caught up in that.” Instead, my cousin says, his friends are mostly white and he chooses to date white women exclusively.
Contemporary American culture presents Asian and Asian American men with two choices: to be harmless or to be a threat. The only alternative seems to be non-existence: the question mark. Most men are realistic about the state of things here and opt for the first option, even though this country has never really wanted or valued them: not since the Rock Springs massacre, not since the Chinese Exclusion Act, not since Katsu Goto, not since the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, not since the Vietnam War, not since David Kao, not since Minghui Yu, not since the latest person killed or maimed in the name of Yellow Peril. How many voices were buried with those bodies? How many are buried within the bodies of my brothers?


A commercial that aired during Super Bowl XLVII features PSY, in a green variation on his famous tuxedo, dancing with anthropomorphized pistachios. My friend asks, “On a scale of 1 to PSY, how much do you hate your life?”