Connected, but Not One—Global Pandemic, Disintegrating East Asia, and New Challenges
Young Kyun Oh, Arizona State University
The pandemic has brought another set of prejudices to the surface in addition to those we already are facing, i.e., the latent enmities among East Asian countries, which are inherited partly from the historical baggage and partly from the cold-war memories. This intra-East Asian alienation presents a new challenge in our teaching of East Asia. East Asia is no longer one entity that was once a romantic mystery but rather a ball of diverse realities, geopolitically or socio-culturally, which complicates our teaching with multiple variables and focal points. This makes us revisit the old question, “Why and how do we teach East Asia?” If we are to teach and study East Asia as if it is something of one cultural unity, what do we have to interconnect its subsuming cultures and communities that have become so disintegrated? This talk is an attempt to bring this new reality to the attention of the educators of East Asian humanities.