Review: Entertaining and Sincere
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 19, 2012
It was a bit ironic that the day I started reading this "novelette" length journey in South Korea and the author's first experiences with its culture and foods, especially kimchi, I had just journeyed almost three hours there and back to a special Asian shop where I live in Berlin which has the best kimchi bar what my Korean amah of sorts used to make. I love kimchi. It's the one food that I actually crave in the world, so I was quite interested in the author's perspective. I agree: it's an acquired taste.I started the book expecting to read of the biases, stereotypes and generalizations so many Americans traveling to foreign countries tend express. Sometimes they don't even seem to realize they are doing it, and I kept expecting to have those biases, some of them understandable, at least be mitigated as the author learned more about another culture, which for me should lead to respect of some level if one has an open-mind. The American ethnocentric mindset is one I encounter all too frequently and find tiresome, yet to be honest, other nationalities do it also.Nothing was ever uninteresting but I had a mild problem regarding editing errors and continuity, and not just because it is a collection of flash memoirs and different events that happened. You might read one entry, for example, just beginning at the first year when he spoke little or no Korean, yet in the next he was fluently or nearly so, then back again. You had an entry where he says he doesn't want to get involved with anyone, yet the next, it begins with him having sex without any explanation between them or within the entry itself. I felt the continuity of the work, even with the flash memoir type pieces, could have been better were there some kind of explanation between them, or they might have been put into a different order."Eating Kimchi And Nodding Politely...etc." is an entertaining account of an American traveling abroad from his own country, with all the idiosyncrasies that might entail. As an American myself, an American Indian, who has traveled extensively around and world and currently lives in Germany, I could recognize some of the critical perceptions yet surprising insight those can provide both into a different people and ourselves.<...>