Blogging Social Difference in L.A: Week 7

Gushi (picture from www.ilovegushi.com/)

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             On Thursday evening, I decided to eat at a place I’ve heard good reviews on, but never had a chance to visit. That place is called “Gushi”. Gushi is located in Westwood Village, around the corner of Gayley and Weyburn Avenues along other casual dining places around. Gushi was established in 1999 and run its business until now.  They sell Korean food in affordable price; they sell the most famous known Korean food like kalbi, bulgogi, kimchi fried rice, spicy squid, and much more. In addition, they also sell other Asian food that is familiar to us, like beef and chicken teriyaki, fried rice, udon, ramen, and more. 

The line to order

             As you see in the picture, this dining place is very small. There are about 20 seats in a small patio, which is connected to their small indoor counter and kitchen. On the evening I’ve visited, all the seats were full of students, doctors, and other people who seem to come to enjoy gushi’s food. When my friend and I got the seats, we were ready to eat the food we’ve ordered. While eating, I’ve paid attention to the atmosphere and the people who were eating in the dining place. 

The food that my friend and I ordered

One of the reasons why I chose to go to Gushi was to observe people. I thought it is a great place to do so because it is near my school and near the UCLA hospital, so many people with different ethnicity come to eat here. In fact, there were lots of students from my school, people working at the hospital, couples, and others.  What made it even better to do my observation was the dining place size. Since Gushi is a small place, I could see people more closely with more details. This allowed me to observe the cultural signifiers, which is part of the cultural approach of race when we talk about the axis of difference due to race. 

“Race is a floating signifier,” said Stuart Hall. He believed that race is not related to some foundational thing, but he believed it could change from time to time with geographical aspect within it, becoming the reality of our life. Examples of cultural signifiers are accent, hairstyle, voice tone, body markings, makeup, gestures, and clothes. During my dinner at Gushi, I concentrated on ‘gestures’ and ‘accent’. I could see that most of the people had no accent while talking regardless of their skin color or physical appearance. This then made me to think that cultural aspect is very important, sometimes more than biological aspect, because you learn from the environment that you are surrounded. For instance, there are two groups of Asian students. One group speaks English with an accent, and the other speaks with no accent. This is due to where they’ve spend their life when they were younger because the first group may start learning English as they were older, but the second group may start learning English as they were born or as a child. According to Stuart Hall, this shows how people are changing over time regardless of biological aspects. 
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Another interesting point was ‘gesture’. Although it was a place where people eat, they also are engaged in a conversation. I could see people with diverse hand or body motions with different face expression. Again, this could not tell that all the white people’s gesture was looking like ‘white people’, black people with their gesture, Asians, with their gesture, nor Latinos with their gesture. But, it was depend on the culture they were exposed to. Through that, I could definitely see that the difference due to race cannot be explained just by biological aspects, but in some levels, it is related to cultural aspects. This explains that race changes from time to time and place to place. Our cultural symbols show that race is a story of individuals, communities, and so on. Meaning that race is a part of our lives, which giving meanings to our lives.