There was an attempt at diversity, but it was a little… well, there were just these little instances. Like, they had a black kid among the characters in the book, but guess which school club he was in? That’s right, the sports club. Girls still wanted to be teachers, and boys still aspired to the medical profession. A girl who said she wanted to be a nurse was edited (by me) into wanting to be a doctor, and then she was promptly turned into a boy. Funnily enough, mothers were always the ones request help with the housework, and thanking children profusely for their help — with the exception of one father who “sometimes cooks dinner.” And discussions of culture ended up focusing on dinner table etiquette, especially supposedly unusual foreign dinner table etiquette — burping and making noise while eating (both common enough in public eateries in Korea, in my experience) being prominently mentioned as normal in Japan and among the Inuit.

The thing is, I can’t be that negative, because I got the sense that the people who wrote that book were really trying to make the thing hip, cool, liberated, and diverse. It was just, well… it made me think of that recent lecture I failed to attend, where someone described North Korean propaganda as something that fascists would produce if they were trying to produce something that looked like Red propaganda but didn’t really grasp Red mentality. This was like that — it was kind of trying to be multicultural and liberal, but there was a lot of guessing and a few surprising blind spots remained.

Still, I gotta give people points for trying.

I maybe exaggerate how much of a concern the issue in the post is to me, I just thought it was interesting how Alice would very excitedly say “아기” and point if she saw a white baby in a picture, but barely even notice if she saw a black baby. Actually, since I wrote that post she’s been saying “아기” non-stop, even though she can’t see any!

I’m sure she’ll have no problem becoming friends and/or having relationships with people of other nationalities and cultures later (why does that sound so cliched?) once she gets the opportunity to actually meet them, just like I had no problem as an 11 year-old hanging out with Maori and Pacific-Island neighbours when my family moved from the UK to New Zealand. I suppose that in my post I was really just lamenting that i wished that those opportunities would come a little sooner. But she’s mixed-race herself, so I’m sure I have nothing to worry about.