Cultural Differences In Our Stories

The Location of Love Stories

I watched a movie and read a book last week. It just so happened that both are about people escaping from the big cities and finding love in small towns in the Midwest or North Carolina. I can’t help thinking that small town love stories can very well be its own genre of romantic books or movies.

I wonder if small-town-love-story is uniquely American or ubiquitous everywhere. It can be either. Whatever it is, I can see the cultural differences in the location of love stories. In America, the popular location of love stories can be small towns, which are portrayed almost like somewhere outside of the capitalist world with none of the usual social problems, like loneliness, indifference, cutthroat competition, high property tax etc.

The Asian love stories, on the other hand, are often placed in a historical time. This happens a lot in Japanese, Korean, Chinese or other Asian dramas, in which a heroic figure or two are dramatized or fictionalized in an ancient period, swords can be used whenever the plot becomes stagnant, and death is easily introduced to get rid of inconvenient love rivals. A lot of the time, the modern heroine would give up her soulless modern life to go back in time to an era with candles for the night, swords for warfare, horses for transportation, brushes for writing.

Food And Cooking

Another cultural difference is that a lot of American women don’t cook in these stories, which is the most admirable thing about America. Women who hate cooking should not be forced to cook, for example my own mother and a lot of other women I know.

I think most American women either don’t cook or cook very simply, like unsealing a package to throw into the oven. This is such a wonderful thing. I admire this particular point of Western culture more than anything else. When I first encountered this, I was very surprised. I even did a calculation on how much money they would save by washing, chopping, stir frying themselves. It was much later that I realized that I had not appreciated the greatness that was revealed before my eyes, like a man living in the Renaissance who didn’t appreciate Da Vinci’s painting when he saw one.

I think this part of American culture should be spread to every corner of the world, be it through Hollywood movies or Hip Hop songs or whatever. In particular, it should be spread to those corners of the world where cooking takes hours after hours of preparation, extracting every last bit of energy and time from the life of a busy mother (or wife).

Balance Of Characters

I am almost done reading a book by a popular author who is so afraid of upsetting the conservative people that she provides a good balance of characters. For example, the heroine doesn’t cook, doesn’t shed tears, doesn’t have kids, doesn’t date, only focus on her career–not an uncommon picture of a modern woman. Since the author wants to stay popular, she has to provide a character–her sister–who cooks, cries often, with husband and three kids, without a career. The same kind of balance happens to her male characters as well. Actually, in my heart of hearts, I guessed that the author was trying to portray the hero as an androgynous book lover, who would have been my favorite male character. However the author is afraid to express herself so conspicuously that she will lose her popularity. So she painstakingly add one trait after another, one gesture after another to drag the hero away from the beautiful image of androgyny she has created.

Keeping the balance of the characters is manifested differently in the K-Drama or fake K-Drama I have watched. The authors (or movie directors or script writers etc.) don’t have to balance one character with another. The only requirement is that the hero has to be the most shining sought-after person who is beloved by the heroine. Other characters can be as bad as possible, which means it is OK to describe the whole world as bad and the hero is the only bright spot.

Actually I have observed other cultural differences too such as eccentricity, reality, unreality, physical or non-physical elements of comedy, but it is not so easy to organize them into cohesive passages. I can only say one or two lines here and there. I still need some time to think about them so that I can present them in an acceptable format.

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