Unlike New York City where people are always briskly walking on the streets, Los Angeles is a city where you need to drive in order to go somewhere. Perhaps that is why LA freeways frequently suffer heavy traffic congestions and why people say the city lacks a warm human touch.
I was in LA last week with two distinguished Korean novelists, Bae Su-ah and Cheon Myeong-kwan, for a series of promotion events for their books just published in the States: Bae’s “Nowhere to be Found” by Amazon Crossing and Cheon’s “Modern Family” by White Pine Press.
While interviewing the two writers, Colin Marshall referred to LA as a city of cars and machines, lacking warm human interaction. “We’re locked away in a car every day,” he said rather cynically. “So we’re always behind this machine and glass without any direct contact with people.”
The Hollywood movie, “Crash,” too, begins in a similar vein, with a blisteringly ironic monologue delivered by an LA police detective whose vehicle is hit by a tailgating car driven by an aggressive middle-aged Korean American woman: “In LA, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.” People who live in LA seem to lament the situation that diverse races do not have the chance to truly interact; they just pass by one another in their cars, “behind this metal and glass.”
When we visited UCLA for a literary event, professor Chris Hanscom also complained about the same situation. Worried about the small audience, he told me, “Students commute by car so they just drive back home as soon as classes are over.” Indeed, when you drive, you are behind the wheel, looking through the windshield, losing direct contact with people.
Nevertheless, I met so many nice and friendly people at UCLA and even on the streets during my sojourn in the City of Angels. Contrary to their worry, I could feel LA’s warmth at different spots in the city: at the hotel we stayed, the stores we shopped in and at the restaurants where we dined. The fact that they lamented the lack of warm human touch meant that they were ready to interact with others at any time. Indeed, I got the impression that the people of LA were capable of embracing others despite cultural or ethnic differences.
At UC Irvine, I met Victoria Jones, assistant vice chancellor of the university. She told me that American mothers might seem rather cold while training their children, but they are, in fact, warm-hearted; they just want their children to be independent. “When American mothers teach their child how to ride a bike,” she said, “they encourage the child, and keep saying ‘Come on, you can do it.’ When the child falls or flips, they encourage the kid to get up by himself and try again.”
Listening to her, I came to realize that American mothers do not lack a warm human touch, but rather simply want their children to learn to stand on their own without any parental assistance. It occurred to me that had it been a Korean mother, she would have rushed to the child to pick him up and hug him when he fell to the ground. “The same goes for swimming lessons,” Jones continued. “American mothers keep encouraging their children to swim little by little, while at the same time staying alert in case they needed help.”
For some reason, Koreans tend to think that, unlike LA, Korea is a society full of warm human touches. When I boarded the plane bound for Seoul, however, I learned that it was no longer true. The television news disclosed that due to the recent outbreak of MERS, the Korean people had become suspicious of each other and started to avoid contact, as if everyone was a potential germ carrier. I saw on TV that the immigration officers at Incheon Airport were wearing thick masks. Perhaps it was a necessary precaution, and yet it scared me nonetheless.
It will surely be scary if you cannot trust anyone and thus lose human warmth. It is as if the “aliens are among us” and we do not know who they are. I shudder at the thought that fundamental distrust will prevail in our society until the endemic disease is terminated permanently.
The reporter said that when and if someone sneezed or coughed in public, people immediately stared at him as though he were a germ carrier. The situation reminded me of what Leslie Fiedler wrote when he described the disappearance of warmth between white Americans and African-Americans as they grew up into adults: “Eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch even by accident.”
So, as I was leaving the City of Angels, I realized that it was Seoul, not LA, that was quickly losing its human touch.
By Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. ― Ed.
