Let's talk about "Asian American culture" as it stands apart from "Asian culture." I'll stick with the topics I know well: Koreans, and booze. So - let's talk about the green bottle soju.
Objectively, the green bottle soju is terrible shit. The ingredients for green bottle soju is distilled tapioca ethyl alcohol, cut with water and made drinkable through aspartame. And it is not at all traditional; it didn't exist until the 70s.
Why does this thing even exist? Answer: the dictatorship era. The Park Chung-hee dictatorship heavily regulated alcohol industry, which was a lucrative source of tax revenue. Moonshine was also a health concern. But how to push out moonshine? By mass producing cheap alcohol.
Green bottle soju, quite literally, exists as the cheapest possible drinkable spirit. It serves no aesthetic purpose; its sole purpose is intoxication. Koreans who care about the quality of their drinks know this - but importantly, not all Koreans do. In fact, most Koreans don't.
Now, consider how the green bottle soju is received among Korean Americans, who are divorced from all this context. First, they spent an outrageous amount of money for it, considering its purpose as the cheapest alcohol that doesn't kill you.
But not just that - Korean Ams make themselves believe that green bottle soju is actually GOOD. And it's TRADITIONAL. And it's KOREAN. They turn the green bottle soju into an totem of Korean-ness, and elevate it beyond what its objective quality and history could justify.
Pay careful attention to what I'm saying here. I'm not saying only the original home country has the exclusive ownership of culture. Like I said, many Koreans in Korea also don't know the history and drink green bottle soju all the time. A lot of people even romanticize it.
In fact, Korean Ams' romanticization of green bottle soju is derivative of Koreans' own romanticization of green bottle soju. This is the connection thru which Korean Ams could ignore their own sense of taste and pretend that green bottle soju is actually "good".
I'm also not saying that Korean Ams cannot have their own culture, or that culture does not evolve.

What I *am* saying is a cultural device comes with a level of discernible quality - high, low, sophisticated, vulgar - and when the cultural device travels to US, this gets lost.
Yes, Korean Ams can have their own culture that stands apart from Korean culture. But you would want that culture to be at a high level. You want it to achieve a greater level of sophistication. But because Korean Ams romanticize artifacts of Korean-ness, they disarm themselves.
As they drink green bottle soju, they suspend their judgment about what is high quality and what is not, and end up elevating a thing that is explicitly designed to be barely drinkable through the delusion of authenticity.
In Korea in the 90s, the richest kids would throw birthday parties at McDonald's. The special event for the birthday boy was to cook his own burger. For the delusion of authenticity, the rich kid got to flip a burger at McDonald's. It's like that, but in reverse.
Lots of people get upset at this because they think this is an attack, but it's not. It's observation of reality that gets repeated over and over again, especially in a country like the United States which is built through successive waves of immigration.
I can get really granular with Korean stuff because that's what I know, but it's not hard to find examples like this with other immigrant groups. Most of what passes for culture in US is corny and derivative because they all go through this filter.
So glad you mentioned Goose and Belvedere, because those are exactly the examples of Americans elevating shitty products.

And you could stand to be more precise. Korean Ams may not think green bottle soju is top shelf, but they do think it's worth $17 a bottle. https://twitter.com/soosahn/status/1382042271521079302
Not when it's $1.50 in Korea because that's what green bottle soju is supposed to be - the cheapest possible alcohol that doesn't kill you.

For $17 a bottle in the US, you can get a real high performance red wine from Rhone, for example. https://twitter.com/soosahn/status/1382045502255022082
This is what I mean when I said this other day: don't ACT Korean, BE Korean. Don't suspend your judgment about what's good and what's bad. Don't import bad artifacts of Korean culture and pretend it's good because you feel like adopting that artifact makes you feel more Korean.
You can follow @AskAKorean.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: