The Unlikely Expat

Korean Women and Western/White Men: a Complicated and Troubled Relationship

2012-01-19T01:20:00.000-08:00

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the heavily gendered imbalance of power within Korean society. Check that out for more of the backstory on the world that Korean women live in.

After a few months of living in Korea I realized that there was a stock set of questions that many people would ask me. Introductions usually involved questions about my nationality, hometown, marital status, age, religion, college major, etc. Other than the “Why aren’t you married yet?” questions, that all seemed like pretty much what I expected.

And sometimes people would also ask, with a sly grin, what I thought about Korean girls. I’m a white American guy, so the general assumption in Korea is that I must be insanely drawn to Korean women. Several middle-aged Korean businessmen even went so far as to loudly and proudly proclaim their belief that Korean women are the most beautiful in the world, and then turned to me to ask me if I did not agree. They seemed to really want some validation, of some kind. This line of questions made me deeply uncomfortable. I told them that I think there are beautiful women everywhere in the world, which is true.

I thought that the idea that women, as people, can be divided up and ranked by nationalities was pretty twisted, but I heard this more than a few times. That whole situation also kind of falls into the whole Korean illogical nationalism meme. Koreans are intensely proud of anything Korean, and love to expound upon this ardent belief. I did find it surprising, however, that this included a male Korean pride in the beauty of Korean women. I can’t imagine telling anyone that I think American girls are somehow “better” than women from anywhere else…

The whole scenario also made me uncomfortable because I didn’t like being stereotyped as another yellow-fever skirt-chasing white guy living recklessly and hedonistically in Korea. Xenophobic Korean political groups like Anti-English Spectrum love to publicize propaganda about how white men come here to corrupt and take advantage of Korean women, and how “90% of the white men in Korea are villainous human garbage.”

There is a long tradition of Koreans being embarrassed and upset about relationships between Korean women and Western men. This goes back to painful memories of the Korean War. In the 1950’s the country was destroyed and many people were starving. Some Korean women sold themselves to American soldiers as a way to survive. The stigma of that commonly seen spectacle has only recently begun to lift in Korean culture, and still many older Koreans get upset when they see Korean girls with Western guys. I have a Vietnamese-American friend who lives in Seoul, and many people assume that she is Korean, because she looks Asian. When we go places together I find myself met by hostile stares on the subway, walking down the street, and when we go into shops. Despite the fact that we speak only English together, and that she sounds quite American, us just spending time together makes people really angry. And we are just friends; it’s not like we make out on the sidewalk. Nevertheless, Korean people really think that I am another “bad” foreigner here to help myself to Korean women. And they are pissed.

It is true that there are lots of young Western guys in Korea that are interested in Korean women. And there is nothing wrong with that, in general. Love often blossoms across national, cultural, and racial lines, and that in of itself is a beautiful thing. It is expected and healthy to come to a foreign culture with a curiosity about its people, and part of that curiosity might be an interest in dating someone from another culture. Personally, I’m a white American guy, and my girlfriend is ethnically South Asian, with parents from Pakistan. (She’s Canadian.) I am a big believer in multiculturalism, and getting to know people outside of your own group. The world would be a better place if we all tried to learn more about each other. And, as an American, I firmly believe that the diversity of my country is among its greatest cultural assets. Learning about other cultures, and meeting people who don’t look like you is profoundly enriching.

But what has always troubled me here is the shallowness of lots of the relationships that I see going on between Western men and Korean women. There is also a really troubling imbalance of power going on – one that Western guys, quite frankly, take advantage of too often.

Now this is a broad generalization, and so is dangerous. Obviously not everyone is like this, but I am writing about what I see every day, and this is a big part of expat life in South Korea.

If you come to Korea as a white Western man, you bring with you various forms of social, cultural, economic, and political power. First of all, you speak English fluently – which is an obsessively sought-after status symbol in Korea. Koreans would kill for your English, because if they could speak English like you they could have everything they want in life. That in of itself is incredibly intimidating to many people. Also, you bring with you all the power of whiteness. This power is so vast, and complicated, and operates in such pervasive and subtle ways that it is almost hard to describe. White people grow up knowing that people who look and sound and live like them run the world. Our culture is incredibly dominant. Companies and governments and organizations that were built and are run by white people control most of the money and power in the world. Whiteness is also almost always the standard of beauty in almost all cultures. Millions of people around the world put damaging creams on their skin, and poisonous chemicals on their hair, because they are desperate to appear more European-looking. And chances are, if you’re a Westerner your country has a lot more power and respect in the world than South Korea. This is especially true for Americans. Basically you come from the most powerful group in the most powerful society in the entire world. Your presence is inherently commanding and connected to lots of viscerally powerful things in the global political economy, whether you realize it or not.

And if you are a white Western guy in Korea that wants to date Korean women, then you are going after the most stepped on group in society in a very oppressive culture, in a country that has not much power in the world. There is a HUGE imbalance of power there.

Of course Korean women have some say-so in who they want to date. Lots of Korean women want to date a foreign guy. They see Westerners as having a lot of things they want in life: good English, knowledge about the West, possibly more money, a culture that allows them a lot more freedom. And it also helps that they have been watching movies and TV shows and looking at magazines their whole lives that are filled with good-looking Western celebrities. It’s exciting for Asian people to meet white people sometimes, simply because they are used to only seeing us on TV. When Americans go to China people take their pictures at bus stops, because they are such a curiosity. Many young Korean people also wish they could be more like us, because we seem to have a lot more freedom and happiness in life. Plus they feel insecure about their bodies, and wish they looked more like us. Witness the vast industry in double-eyelid plastic surgery and other painful attempts to create white-looking features on Asian bodies.

Westerners, especially Americans, are raised to be confident and to speak boldly about their opinions and their desires in life. Korean women, on the other hand, are traditionally raised to be demure, polite, submissive, obedient, and respectful. Of course, I know Korean women – some of the best friends I have made here – that are very independent and outspoken. But they are bucking the trend, and refusing to submit to a traditional Korean marriage. And they are hated on and judged by lots of people. They also probably have huge fights with their families about not living an “acceptable” life.

Lots of things come out of all this. For one thing, mediocre-looking, or downright fugly white guys – most of whom work in sub-professional English teaching jobs - are able to come to Korea and date women who are attractive, successful, and way out of their league. This is a legit phenomenon, and one that every Westerner living in Korea has observed firsthand. So many Western guys come here and really wanna date Korean women that the expat ladies have a really hard time dating. Some of them get really depressed about it, and compare themselves to super-thin impeccably-dressed Korean chicks that they couldn’t possibly look like. I have a few close female American friends that are having a terrible time meeting guys, because so many of them are off trying to date a million Korean girls.

But to me what is most profound and disturbing about the whole Korean-girls-Western-dudes thing is the power imbalance. The white guys just have SO much power, and they enjoy it way too much. It seems like they get way too much of whatever they want. They gloat it in. They are fawned over, and sought after, and they feel like gods here. I know a Canadian guy whose relationships back home in Toronto were all disasters, and who was too insecure to get laid. But in Korea he is dating an attractive marketing professional, and has hooked up with tons of willing Korean chicks, and now he never wants to go home – where he would just be another average guy. That is really sad to me, because all these relationships are pretty shallow. With the language/culture barrier in place, I just see him having a bunch of physical encounters that don't seem to mean much.

Many Westerners in Korea have also watched their foreign male friends date Korean women, and get away with crazy shit that no woman would put up with back in their own countries. Right now I know a Canadian guy who has been married to a really nice Korean woman for a few years. And he treats her like total shit. He insults her, and embarrasses her, and condescends to her constantly. Basically he is just a really insecure dude, and I think he enjoys feeling superior to his wife way too much. He talks shit to her about Korea, jokes about how white people run the world, lords his mastery of English over her, and totally dominates their home. (Note that English is his first and only language, while his Korean wife speaks three.) Now that is some deep racial shit, as well as being bound up in the tortured manifestations of gender and international political inequality.

And simply put, this is what has always bothered me about a lot of the white guys in Korea. I have watched really lame guys come here, guys I would never wanna hang out with, and basically take their pick of women. Many Koreans assume that Korean girls are only using them for free English lessons, and maybe some are. But it really turns my stomach to see these insecure, lame, emotionally messed up dudes, capitalizing on, exploiting their status as white Western men. Plus lots of them are just assholes to their girlfriends and wives, who are generally better-looking and often smarter than them. After all, their relationships take place almost exclusively within the bounds of the English language. To be completely honest, ever since I came to Korea I have had a hard time making male friends. Lots of the guys here just rub me the wrong way, or seem dull, or seem arrogant, or are insecure and jealous. They seem to be here for all the wrong reasons.

So what is it that attracts insecure emotionally troubled white men to Korea? The answer to that question lies in the ways that Westerners often view Asian people, Asian cultures, and Asian bodies. Asian chicks are fawned over in the West because they are thin, cute, and assumed to be submissive.

I never wanted to date submissive women, because I like hanging out with funny confident chicks that have interesting opinions, so this psychology is really alien to me. But generally, it seems to me that lots of Western guys who are deeply insecure about their masculinity seek out relationships with Korean women because they want a woman who they think will be weak and passive. I see lots of Western guys here bullying, dominating, insulting, and generally treating Korean girlfriends in really shitty ways emotionally. But because of the language barrier, and because Koreans are not taught to speak up for themselves – girls especially, most of the time they don’t get called out for being shitty boyfriends.

I have to say, watching this shit go down really turns my stomach. It’s also embarrassing to me. Because I am a white guy, and I look like these douchebags, and I am tired of being assumed to be one of them.

I also feel sorry for Korean women who wanna date outside their culture, and who may not know what they are getting into when they start dating a controlling and insecure white guy. Our cultures are so different that Koreans have a hard time understanding Western people’s personalities sometimes. Plus, Korean women are being chased by all these weirdos that want them to be symbols of passivity, rather than real people. As so often sadly happens to Asian American women in the West, I fear that many of them get into relationships with men that fetishize and abuse them. And that is just inhuman.

I never came to Korea to look for a submissive wife, or to chase Asian girls, or relive my adolescence, or exploit the power of whiteness. I just wanted to live overseas, meet new kinds of people, learn about the world, and teach English, and have a decent job. But these guys make me look like shit. And no one calls them out on it.

I gotta say it white dudes in Korea - it is really time to step it up.

Sexism and Patriarchy in Korea

2012-01-18T23:14:00.000-08:00

Korean and American culture are extremely different – in many ways they are quite opposite. Americans believe in equality and a high-degree of personal freedom, and Koreans live in an ancient society governed by deeply conservative Confucian rules. One of the ways that Korean culture is really different is that it is very patriarchal. Not that sexism and patriarchy don't exist in the West; we have a long way to go. But shit is a lot more extreme here...

Americans, like most people in Western countries, enjoy a great deal of cultural freedom. When we are still pretty young, most Americans live with a great deal of independence. College kids in the US often get their own apartments, and live their own lives. They are (relatively) free to date whoever they like. Their parents might not like the person they end up with, or marry, but generally kids get to choose their own partners. In Korea however, young people – commonly into their late 20’s, or until they get married – almost always live with their parents. Korean parents also stay very involved with their kids’ lives. At an age when most Americans are no longer asking parents for permission to do things, Koreans still have to ask for permission to travel, to date someone, to choose where they go to school and what classes they take, to have the career they want, to marry, and to do lots of other things. When I go out on a Saturday night with one of my Korean friends, a chick who is almost thirty, her parents call her and demand that she come home around 11:00 or 12:00. She is 29 and she has a curfew. They usually send her brother to come pick her up, because they don’t trust her to find her own way home safely.

Korean culture is very, very patriarchal. Korean men are the undisputed kings of the family, and masters of the household. They are the breadwinners, and make most – if not all - of the important decisions. And they often expect to be cooked and cleaned for without doing much in return. Actually, the middle-aged Korean guys that came to the hagwon I worked at shocked me, by telling me that housework was “women’s work” and not important. And these were educated guys! A Korean Canadian friend once told me that he wanted to marry soon, and “wanted to find a wife who will be submissive and do a good job raising the kids.” The flat unabashed sexism of this statement really shocked me, not least because the friend in question is my age - under 30, and because he has been a Canadian citizen since he was a child. Sexism and male dominance are really serious issues in Asian culture.

Politeness and proper action are very important in traditional Confucian culture. The ancient Chinese-derived belief system prescribes everyone a station in life, with obligations that they must adhere to in order to be morally virtuous. And women, not surprisingly, fall rather low on the totem pole. Girls are to be the property of their parents until marriage, and after marriage they are expected to be obedient wives to their husbands. Arranged marriages were the norm in Korea until only a few decades ago, and many young Koreans still don’t really feel free to choose their own partner. Parental influence and control still has lots of sway. Simply put, Korean kids don’t have much freedom – and things are twice as hard for girls.

Speaking of marriage, under Korean law, men still have almost all the legal power. If a Korean women divorces her husband she will find herself homeless, since all the property is always in the husband’s name. She will have no assets, since the husband owns everything. She will be destitute, and if she has kids she could also easily lose all custody rights to her children, since the father is considered more important. Men control the whole ball of wax, and the whole thing is rigged to keep women dependant and submissive.

Korean women joined the workforce en masse a few decades ago. However, for many years the only jobs available were occupations like being a secretary. Women were hired to be young, pretty, obedient, and to make coffee. There was no opportunity for advancement, and they were expected to get married and quit working before they hit 30. Many Korean women still feel this kind of pressure at work, and some marry because they see no other way to achieve financial security. There is still a serious paucity of good jobs for Korean women, and many still have trouble really living independently. Just like in the West, although more extreme in degree, Korean women are paid less, expected to work more, discriminated against, and generally taken advantage of at work.

Korean culture is pervaded with entrenched sexism and gender inequality. The whole notion of equality, I should point out, is very new and foreign - very Western. Confucianism advocates proper action and harmony - between people who are seen as inherently unequal. Equality has nothing to do with it. Rather, the sacred harmony of Confucianism is achieved when everyone in society knows their place, and sticks to it. Women are submissive to men, children to parents, workers to their bosses, and subjects are subserviant to rulers.

All this places women near the bottom of society. Korean women are raised to accept as inevitable many things that Western women would find appalling. Domineering husbands, insulting boyfriends, overbearing bosses, you name it. Workplace sexual harassment lawsuits are unheard of in patriarchal Korea, and there are lots of stories about groping and sexual-advance-making executives, especially during the mandatory after-work heavy drinking sessions with the office crew (hwaesik in Korean). Women who are not considered attractive will have a terrible time in life, since they will be openly discriminated against and told that they are not pretty enough during job interviews. None of this is illegal or frowned up in Korea. And if that is what flies in the workplace, then imagine what life is like here in the private sphere.

Most Korean men have no idea how to cook anything, and do not want to learn. Recently, a Western friend of mine told me a story about how a (foreign) friend and his Korean wife had a dinner party. They invited a bunch of Korean friends over, and the husband was busily helping his wife prepare and clean up during and after the meal. Apparently the Korean guys were pissed, because this foreigner was coming into their lives and showing their wives an example that made them look terrible.

The last example I want to give about Korean patriarchy is the way Korean culture deals with some of patriarchy’s most serious manifestations – physical violence against women. Many Korean women fear being sexually assaulted, and for good reason. Almost all sexual assaults in Korea go unreported, and women who have been raped or sexually assaulted are expected to keep quiet about it. Otherwise they will bring shame to their families. Women fear being disowned as a punishment for talking about something like that. Actually, there is a fair amount of unreported and not-talked about domestic abuse in Korea. My last roommate was an emotionally troubled Korean girl who suffered a lot of physical abuse from her violent alcoholic dad, and a brother who grew up to be the same way. I personally have seen domineering Korean guys pushing their girlfriends around in pretty rough ways. And many, many Western men living in Korea have stories about watching in horror as a Korean guy beats up his girlfriend in public - while bystanders watch and do nothing. There are also lots of related stories about foreign men trying to intervene in such situations, and then finding themselves arrested and blamed for the whole incident.

Patriarchy really is a bitch to live with. And in Korean culture, as in Asian cultures in general, men run the show. Always, and everywhere. And they can be fairly relentless in ensuring that their dominance of everything is not threatened. I see a lot of symbolic violence in Korean culture that seems like a manifestation of the need many Korean men feel to police the boundaries of their control over the culture.

In my next post I will be talking about how the profound gender inequality of Korean culture has serious implications for the Western guys that come here and date Korean women – something I have been personally confronted with lately in pretty dramatic ways.

Random Photo of the Day: Confusing Graffiti

2012-01-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

And a big prize goes to whoever can tell me what the hell this is about...

From Street Art

A Very Korean Christmas

2011-12-29T19:07:00.000-08:00

Recently a Western friend of mine asked me, “What is Christmas like in Korea?” “Well” I said, “it’s kind of like what happens when you feed plastic army men to a pet duck.” Then I realized that explanation made absolutely no sense, so I wrote this blog post.

Korea spent the past several eons rotating in the near orbit of Chinese Civilization, with all the Confucianism and rice wine that entailed. Then in the 1950’s, the Korean War broke out and South Korea ended up being invaded and basically taken over by the American military. This led to a sharp cultural turn towards the West, which included Western holidays, religions, food, clothes, and an intense frenzy to learn the English language.

The big holidays in Korea traditionally come from Chinese holidays. Lunar New Year, Seolnal (설날) in Korean, is a big deal, and usually happens a month or two after the New Year that Westerners associate with the Roman calendar that we use. There’s also Chuseok (추석), a big harvest festival in the fall, which involves a lot of solemn bowing to the graves of your ancestors. These holidays are very ancient; Christmas, in contrast, is quite new. (A similar story seems to be unfolding in the recent Chinese embrace of Christmas, in which it is seen as a consumer-driven Western cultural import. The Atlantic ran a really interesting article about Christmas in China last week. I highly recommend it.)

Because Christmas is a really new holiday, Koreans don’t really celebrate it with their families. Korean culture is changing really quickly, so there is a huge generation gap, and this is part of it. Young people have embraced Christmas in recent decades, but older people don’t usually get into it. This is a generalization, however. After about a century of American missionary activity, South Korea is one of the most Christian nations in Asia, with about 40% of the country claiming Christianity as their religion. There are also large numbers of Buddhists and atheists. Korean Christians definitely do celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, and have special church services. But they probably don’t celebrate with family dinners and presents the way most Westerners do. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as foreign to Koreans as Korea’s long tradition of savoring pork that comes from pigs raised on human poop is to Westerners. Many Korean people may not celebrate Christmas at all.

I live in Hongdae, a hip campus neighborhood known for its entertainment, nightlife, and restaurants. I was curious about what I would see on Christmas, since last year I lived in a more typical neighborhood and didn’t see much going on at all. Although there were lots of young couples at the shopping center, it seemed like just another day - filled with stooped-over ajummas peddling onions on the sidewalk and taxi drivers swerving maniacally through the crowded streets.

In Hongdae I saw huge crowds of young people out on Christmas. Korea is fairly obsessed with couple-dom, and Christmas is mostly about couple dates in Korea. When I asked my Korean coworkers if they had plans for Christmas, they all signed and said no, denoting how sad they are to be tragically single. Since being single is horrible in Korea. The minute you get off your plane in Seoul, people will start asking you if you are dating someone or married yet, and why not if you are single. “Don’t worry, you’ll meet someone soon.” a conversation student of mine told me when I smiled and explained that I didn’t have a girlfriend.

Many young Korean couples celebrate their anniversaries by dressing in matching outfits called “couple sets.” Restaurants also sell matching food for couples in couple sets, and this whole phenomenon is pretty pervasive. So, in Korea, Christmas is a holiday for couples going on dates, wearing matching clothes, and going out to mob shopping and entertainment areas. Restaurants are booked up, and shopping centers are filled to capacity. A Korean coworker of mine said she went to Myeongdong on Christmas Day, and the streets – filled with Adidas outlets and Korean clothing stores with names like Shirt and Tie Coordination – were so packed with people that it was hard to walk. She ended up going home in disgust.

From Hongdae

In Korea Christmas is less about family traditions, and more about friends, dates, and shopping. Hordes of young Koreans go out on the town to celebrate Christmas with their significant other, many dressing in matching outfits.

From Hongdae

Unlike in the West, where most businesses are closed on Christmas, in Korea everything is open. I bought some coffee at Café Bean, to counteract the fact that I had woken up at 7 am to call my dad during the family Christmas party. (13-hour time differences are a bitch!) Café Bean seemed to be getting into the spirit of things.

From Hongdae

Walking around, I also saw lots of young Korean chicks dressed in red scarves and coats, some of them wearing red plastic reindeer antlers. I like the weird face this guy is making. He looks like he just injured his genitals somehow.

From Hongdae

I went and ate some Korean barbecue with a French Canadian friend, and Korean chick he knows. The restaurant was packed. They had some Christmas lights hanging up, creating a somewhat festive mood. I saw Christmas lights in restaurants a lot, but no one puts them on their houses in Korea. Which, as a trashy American, I really think is a shame. Imagine how much better Korea would be if people covered their entire homes with garish displays of lights, plywood cutouts, and inflatable decorations, so that people could go out of their way to gawk at it all like children attending a freak show. I know such spectacles are at the center of some of my favorite Christmas memories.

From Hongdae

The ubiquitous costume characters in the streets that promote makeup shops and cafes got into the spirit. This Garfield looked really dirty though for some reason. Given that he was grimy, loafing on the street, and wearing a Santa hat, I assumed he was the Korean equivalent of the homeless alcoholic men that America has traditionally employed to play Santa Claus at our Christmas festivities.

From Hongdae

Christmas Eve I also saw a huge party happening in Hongik Park, near the University. Silent Disco, a regular event at the park, was in full force - with dozens of kids dancing to headphone music that no one else could hear. Many of them were dressed in Christmas garb as they bobbed en masse. I actually saw more people in Santa costumes on Saturday night than I could count. Korean kids think it’s fun to go out dressed as Santa and get wasted with their friends. Who am I to argue with them?

From Hongdae

I ended the night, like most expats in Korea, and I suspect many Koreans, at a bar in Hongdae. Club FF was having a special Christmas show. An indie band played a set of Korean indie tunes to a crowd of admiring young female Korean fans, who were all dressed up and wearing makeup. They stood and watched the show in quiet adoration, as though they were desperately hoping the guys onstage would notice them and suddenly sweep them off their feet. Then they all left, a different crowd took over the bar, and an energetic chick band got up and worked through a set of Christmas tunes. They were dressed pretty Christmassy, and not bad at all. My French Canadian friend loved them immediately because he thought they were cute.

From Hongdae

Even rock stars giggle demurely behind their hands in Korea.

From Hongdae

The girl band’s repertoire included, of course, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.” I have no idea why Dynamic Korea has chosen to singularly latch onto this early 90’s American pop hit, but Koreans seem pretty obsessed with it. I actually came to hate the song last winter, because I heard it constantly blared from stores and restaurants everywhere I went for about six weeks. When I taught English at BCM Language Academy last year, I had to work on Christmas Day. (Our hagwon owner was a tightfisted businessman, if there ever was one.) The Korean teacher working in the classroom across the hall from mine spent an entire hour teaching the lyrics to this song to her class, playing a cassette recording of it and pausing the tape after each line to explain it to the students.

So in a nutshell, that’s Christmas in Korea. Weird, tacky, loud, fun, bizarre, drunken, and filled with people dressing up together in matching costumes to go out and get wasted and fall down in the street. Which is pretty much how most things work…

Kim Jong Il Croaked. So What Now?

2011-12-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

News outlets around the world were all abuzz yesterday with the news that North Korea’s Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, had finally expired. Nobody really knows the truth about when and how he died, since the North is one of the world’s most secretive and closed states. However, the international community speculates that he finally crashed after suffering a stroke a few years back.

News of his death was announced by this crying old lady, dressed in a black traditional hanbok, on state tv:

North Korea has been in a tailspin for the past decade or so. The state-controlled economy is totally breaking down, with food and basic commodities becoming more and more scarce. Things seem more unstable than ever for the nutjob regime. This could be a critical moment.

Americans are jubilant about Kim Jong Il’s demise, because they hated the old bastard. Seoul saw public celebrations filled with old men who were veterans of the war against his father’s army. Meanwhile, most leaders in Asia are worried that some major shit is about to go down. When the news broke yesterday that the Dear Leader was no more, South Korean corporate execs and government officials all headed to huge meetings to plan for the worst. American military officials worked with South Korean leaders to beef up security at the border. Anything could happen. The Wall Street Journal wonders, tongue in cheek, if the famous "Kim Jong Il looking at things" blog will survive. PBS ran a video about Pyongyang's massive state mourning display:

So what was my reaction? As an American expat living in Seoul?

“OH FUCK! I really hope that North Korea doesn’t collapse overnight, and cause mass chaos that makes my South Korean paycheck totally worthless.”

Note that this is something that South Koreans have been worried about for years. No one really knows how North Korea has managed to avoid total collapse for so long; all rational observers have predicted it for decades. But if it all comes crashing down one night, like the Berlin Wall, a huge humanitarian crisis will be one of the inevitable results. And that, my friends, will be very, very expensive.

South Korea doesn’t really have the resources to deal with that. And, while division was very painful for the older generation, nowadays many South Koreans don’t even want reunification. It would mean dumping all of their money for decades into building basic infrastructure, schools, roads, and everything else that the impoverished North does not have.

North Korea is not as abysmally poor as say, Somalia, but things are pretty bleak there. They do have factories and power plants, but – other than Kim Jong Il’s famous nuclear plans – time basically stopped in the 50’s. Vice magazine said that going to Pyongyang a few years back was like visiting Stalinist Russia. It would also take a ton of time and money to retrain – on a deep psychological level – North Koreans to live in the same world that the rest of the world does. A world run by capitalism, with totally different rules, and where half the things they have been taught their whole lives are totally wrong. Starting with the famous myth that Kim Jong Il is immortal, and so great that he neverpoops.

The best comparison for Korean reunification is that of former East and West Germany after the end of the Cold War. East Germany was communist for decades, and despite lots of development money from the German government, that region remains a lot poorer. If you follow Germany in the news, you have probably been reading about neo-nazi gangs of young, unemployed kids wreaking havoc. Most of them are from what used to be East Germany. Communism’s dysfunctional culture, and its problems, doesn’t just go away overnight.

And East Germany is way more developed than North Korea. The comparison pretty much falls down when you realize the incredibly disparities between the Korean North and South. In the South kids are growing up playing Wii, learning English at school from people like my expat friends, and eating hamburgers at Burger King. While in the North, people are freezing and starving and wishing that they could have half the things we do.

American are hopeful that Kim Jong-Il’s death will usher in a new era of freedom and peace. But that seems unlikely. North Korea is incredibly alienated from the world, but it does have one powerful buddy: China. And China’s power is on the rise. China props up most of the North’s terminally ill economy, and that is the only thing keeping it from collapsing overnight.

South Koreans know this, and many of them claim that China only does all this for its own pragmatic benefit. If North Korea fell apart, lots of refugees would be streaming over all the borders. And that means millions of desperate North Koreans would be headed into Chinese Manchuria. This would be a big mess. So China sends lots of money and food to their friends in Pyongyang. The North Korean state is on life support, but all the big players are scared of change.

As this Reuters article argues, North Korea may not change as much as many Americans have been led to expect.

Kim Jong Il’s Cinematic Opus! - Or, How Be an Evil Dictator and Make Monster Movies

2011-12-19T18:38:00.000-08:00

Despite passionately hating America and Hollywood, Kim Jong Il was actually a big movie buff. Not a lot of people know this, but – in addition to being one of the world’s most evil dictators - he actually wrote and directed his own films. (Rumor has it that Kim Jong Il was also obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and that he owned like 20,000 movies.)

The most famous movie the Dear Leader made is called Pulgasari, and it’s a schlocktastic monster movie with heavy Communist overtones. The movie's hero and namesake is a Godzilla rip-off, who starts out as a doll, and then magically comes to life and grows into a huge monster after coming into contact with human blood. Pulgasari eats iron, and helps lead old-school Korean peasants to overthrow their corrupt king. Some heavy camp and propaganda, indeed.

The movie is famous for being incredibly awful. But it is more famous for having been made by a total wackjob dictator. But what is really interesting – and much weirder - is the back story of how the movie was made:

In the 1960’s and 70’s a guy named Shin Sang-ok was one of the most popular movie directors in South Korea. The Guardian likens him to a Korean Orson Welles. For a while Shin was married to an actress named Choi Eun-hee, who was also pretty famous in Korea. The couple got divorced in 1978. Shortly thereafter, Choi Eun-hee went to away to Hong Kong on a trip. And while she was there, she was unexpectedly kidnapped by North Korean spies. Nobody back home knew what had happened or why she had disappeared. So her ex-husband, Shin Sang-ok, went to Hong Kong to look for her. He soon found himself kidnapped by North Koreans as well, and then thrown into a car with a bag over his head. He was drugged into unconsciousness, and woke up in a North Korean jail. Shin and Choi realized they were in some really deep shit. They had no idea why they were there. They were separated, and they didn’t see each other for years.

Shin tried to escape to several times, and was sent to a North Korean prison camp for 4 years. He ate mostly grass, and could only wonder why the hell he was being held captive. He thought that Choi Eun-hee, his ex-wife, was dead. Then, one day, Shin was brought to a fancy party for high Party officials, where he was introduced to Kim Jong Il. Choi Eun-hee was there too. He was shocked to see her alive, and they were even more shocked when Kim Jong Il told the couple that they would be making movies for him now. The Dear Leader had lots of money to produce them, since he personally owned an entire country. Kim Jong Il complained that the Party-controlled filmmaking he supervised in Pyongyang had produced only mediocre results. This was why they had been mysteriously kidnapped. And so a succession of terrible North Korean films went into production.The world has always thought they were unbelievably horrible, and North Korea has always been proud of them. The most famous was Pulgasari.

After a few years, Shin began to be allowed to travel abroad, for film events and location shooting. An escape plan began to form in his mind. In 1986, after producing Pulgasari , he was allowed to fly to Vienna, Austria to set up a distribution deal for the film. Shin traveled fairly often at the time, but was always closely followed by North Korean agents. He took Choi Eun-hee to Vienna, and they fled to the American embassy in a taxi, with North Korean spies in hot pursuit in a second taxi. He made it into the embassy, was granted asylum, and never had to go back to Pyongyang. Shin lived in the US for a while, where in the 90's he directed such amazing movies as 3 Ninjas Kick Back and High Noon: 3 Ninjas at Mega Mountain. Shin Sang-ok died of liver problems in 2004.

Pulgasari is a famously terrible movie. But the strange and very true story of Shin Sang-ok would make a far, far better movie. I hope someday an ambitious filmmaker takes on the story. Read the full Guardian article about the case if you want more bizarre and sordid details.

And now you can watch Pulgasari, in all its blood-red Commie glory:

Random Konglish Photo of the Day

2011-12-15T16:53:00.000-08:00

Who doesn't want some infection to go with their PC Bang? Boring people, that's what I say!

From Konglish

Random Photo of the Day

2011-12-01T23:48:00.000-08:00

Nuns strolling past the Canadian Embassy, near Deoksugung

From Street Photography

Restaurant Pick: Cheap Eats: Noodle Box

2011-11-28T01:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a good place in Hongdae for some cheap eats.

This place has great Southeast Asian food for a good price. It's called Noodle Box:

From Restaurants/Food Porn

As you can see in the menu, the fare is as based around noodle dishes and fried rice. It's basic, and inexpensive, but flavorful and robust.

From Restaurants/Food Porn

This meal for two - pad thai and pho bao - cost about W12,000. (around $10 American)

From Restaurants/Food Porn

My pho bao was scrumptious, and filled with bean sprouts, onions, and assorted veggies. Not too spicy, but not a bad meal at all. It had a few mussels and some soy sauce going on. It could have been a bit spicier, but it's not shabby at all for the price. I was totally happy.

From Restaurants/Food Porn

The menu only has 8 items, and 2 side dishes. So choices are basic. But everything is flavorful and satisfying. And you can't beat these prices for pan-Asian cuisine. Which there is still not a whole lot of in Korea. It's cheaper than Western fast food, and probably less unhealthy:

From Restaurants/Food Porn

So, if you happen to be in Hongdae and are looking for a cheap and hearty meal, or some good ethnic/foreign food, give Noodle Box a shot. I've never been disappointed. I recommend the pho bao or the mi goreng. Only 6,000 won for a box of delicious noodley goodness.

From Restaurants/Food Porn

Noodle Box is at the end of a short alley, just off the main street that runs into Hongik U. main gate. From Hongik Station, exit 9, take a left at the first big intersection, then go straight for 3 blocks. Pass the Starbucks and the tourist info kiosk. Make a left turn at the corner where KB Bank is, and then take a sharp left at Toronto coffee. Then turn left immediately afterwards down a short alley. It's the third building on the left, next to some cheap jewelry shops.

Here's a google map, or you can dig the Naver street view here.

View Restaurant & Cafe Picks in a larger map

And if you are brave [or smart] enough to navigate Korean websites, you can read the Noodle Box website here. They have locations at about 5 places around the city, including Itaewon, Gangnam, and Sinchon.

Random Photo of the Day

2011-11-26T00:21:00.000-08:00

a view over Seogyo-dong, near Hongdae

From Street Photography

Tear Gas in the National Assembly: A Quick Look at What’s Happening Now in Korean Politics

2011-11-25T00:28:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago I happened to be strolling around downtown, and noticed a political protest happening across the street from City Hall, in front of Deoksugung. It was a protest against a US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement that has been in the works for about 5 years.

I talked to one of the guys in this pictures, a middle-aged union activist. He told me the older lady on the left was on hungre strike, and had not eaten for a month.

From Street Photography

The President and the FTA

The FTA has been controversial in Korea, where it is strongly opposed by unions, student groups, and Korean farmers, who fear being run out of business by cheaper (federally subsidized) US agribusiness commodities. (This is what essentially happened to small farmers in Mexico after NAFTA was enacted under Clinton.)

Some Koreans also fear that the US-Korea FTA will damage Korea’s national healthcare system - should American healthcare interests be allowed wade into that economic sector. One frequent complaint about now-wildly-unpopular Korean President Lee Myung-bak is that he wants to restructure Korea’s healthcare program along American lines. Koreans hate this idea, since they have heard about how messed up and overpriced and inaccessible healthcare is for Americans. (Note: around 40% of Americans can’t afford health care.) Lee also wants to privatize the national pension system - an idea George W. Bush was promoting a few years back in the U.S. When I moved to Korea in early 2010 I found that most of the people who attended my adult EFL classes had plenty to say about President Lee, and often referred to him as the Korean equivalent of George W. And right now he’s about as popular as Bush was in 2009.

Since about 40% of South Korea lives in Seoul, the office of mayor in the capital is one of the most important political offices in the nation. Politicians, including President Lee, have been able to ascend to the presidency after becoming mayor in the capital city. Lee Myung-bak was the last mayor, and under his administration millions of dollars were spent building a new corridor park downtown known as Cheonggyecheon, and rehabbing the aging City Hall, which was built by the Japanese during the brutal colonial era. (The City Hall renovation is pretty hideous.) Many of Lee’s detractors claim that he spent far too much public money on these projects, while ignoring glaring and growing social issues. (Like the expanding population of really poor senior citizens.) Many Koreans see such projects as simply monuments that their politicians have built to themselves. There is also widespread resentment of Lee’s close ties with Korea’s huge chaebol corporations. Many Koreans believe that Lee cut too many deals with his buddies, and this reminds them all too much of Korean politics’ ugly and dirty past.

The Ugly Past

For over 40 years South Korea was controlled by brutal military dictatorships that were funded and supported by the US. There was no freedom of the press, no free elections, unions were outlawed, questioning or criticizing the regime was quite dangerous, and all citizens were required to be in their houses before 11:00 every night. If you were outside beyond those hours you were required to carry a pass to show the police. People suspected of committing crime or causing trouble were rounded up and beaten, tortured, or killed. By the late 80’s Korea was no longer poor, and the Korean people had had enough. Hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets, fought cops and soldiers, and many were arrested and killed. It was a long and violent struggle, and is remembered vividly by many Koreans who are now in their 50’s.

The regimes that ran Korea during the long dark night of dictatorship were not just heavy-handed, they were also often pretty crooked. Park Chung-hee, who ran the show during basically all the 60’s and 70’s, built the Korean economy based on the Japanese model. Huge companies, chaebols, were developed and supported by sweetheart deals from the government, generous loan terms, and lots of wide-open nepotism. Money and power flowed back and forth openly and frequently between the government and the big corporations.

Many Koreans believe that President Lee has effectively turned the clock back several decades with his policies. Before he became the Korean President he was the CEO of Hyundai construction, and his massive Four Rivers Project was both strongly unpopular and very profitable for his friends in the construction business. Many people also believe that freedom of the press has been curtailed by President Lee, and the government of South Korea does definitely control some major newspapers, as well as censor the internet. But along with all these grievances, President Lee is also hated for being seen as a faithful lapdog to American political muscle. Understanding this is crucial. The U.S. wanted this Free Trade Agreement, and those who oppose it in South Korea believe that it will be generally good for Americans and bad for Koreans. When Korean citizens see Korean politicians jumping to attention in front of demanding American leaders, their blood boils. Because they fought long and hard to end American-controlled regimes that abused them and denied them freedom.

Seoul's Radical New Mayor

Earlier this year, the conservative mayor of Seoul resigned after a big fight over his plan to cut in on the subsidized lunches that poor kids get at school. An election was held, and last month a liberal activist named Park Won-soon emerged victorious. Mayor Park has never held office before, and was not even a member of an established political party. One of the first things he did was to get rid of the corporate exec vibe in his office. He called in a used bookstore owner to do a makeover of the place, and make it look more like a friendly library. Mayor Park is scaling back on his predecessors’ grandiose projects, and wants to focus more on programs for social welfare. Park Won-soon’s surprising election was largely seen as a referendum on how unpopular President Lee and his party are. Some are even linking his victory to the global Occupy Movement, and calling Mayor Park the first successful OWS politician.

The Ratifying of the FTA

This week the FTA finally made it through the Korean National Assembly, and scuffles and skirmishes broke out along the way. The New York Times reports that the conservative Grand National Party called a surprise plenary session to railroad the measure through. The opposition was caught unawares, though aids smashed doors to try to get in, and the issue passed. M.P. Kim Sung-dong, of the Democratic Labor Party, tried to disrupt proceedings by lobbing a tear gas canister into the middle of the voting. He said that since the GNP was going to make the Korean people cry, he was going to make politicians cry too.

A History of Violence

For Westerners, the image of nationally-prominent professional politicians fighting each other with office furniture, starting violent donnybrooks on the floor of the parliament, and lobbing tear gas at each other may seem strange and absurd. I grew up watching British Members of Parliament shout at each other on CNN, and the U.S. Congress can be a bit tense, but we really have nothing that compares with this. Most of the Koreans I’ve talked to about such spectacles say they find it all tiresome and embarrassing. But it cannot be denied that both violence and tear gas have long figured prominently in Korean politics. During the late 80’s the mass of Korean students found their universities frequently closed, and spent weeks fighting guys dressed like this in streets – all so they could enjoy the right to vote.

These guys are not Darth Vader wannabes, they are old-school Korean riot police. And what was their favorite weapon for crowd control? You guessed it - tear gas.

Cool WSJ Video

Dig this video Evan Ramstead did for a Wall Street Journal article. The headline tellingly, in the context of Korean politicians kowtowing to American demands, is "Korean Lawmakers Apologize for Trade Pact Drama."

Yay! Go watch Korean movies!

2011-11-23T00:44:00.000-08:00

Nowadays, Korean movies are a big deal. They are gaining international fans left and right. But, chances are if you’re reading this you already know that. When I moved to South Korea in 2010, I really wanted to watch Korean movies, but I couldn’t speak Korean. Then I read a buncha articles in newspapers about how the government was getting big movie theater chains in Seoul to show Korean movies with English subtitles for foreigners. But sadly, The Korea Times was lying its stupid, badly-written face off. (And so began my mistrust of The Korea Times.) My guess is that the government told the CGV theater chain to show movies with English subtitles, they said they would, and it never really happened. (There is a long tradition of empty sloganeering in Korean politics…) I got really excited, and I went to a handful of CGV theaters looking for these Korean movies with English subtitles. Where no one knew was I was talking about, or had any information. I was actually at the CGV in Myeongdong a few months ago, and they flatly told me that they simply did know show any Korean movies with English subtitles. So, screw CGV, I say. The only movies they show in English are always terrible anyways. (The last time I was there I paid about 10,000 won to see the Hollywood travesty Contagion. I still want my two hours back from that misadventure.)

But fear not, loyal readers. There are other ways:

Here’s a hot link to a recent article about the Top 6 Art Cinemas in Seoul.

Personally, I think Indieplus in Gangnam is the coolest one I’ve tried so far. Right now they are screening an animated Korean movie about childhood bullying (and also perhaps, allegorically, some larger issues in Korean society.) The film, The King of Pigs (돼지의 왕), is also playing at Sangsang Madang in Hongdae, but Indieplus has English subtitles! Yay!

I do also wanna check out the Seoul Art Cinema (mentioned in the article) in Nakwon Arcade, as I saw posters there for a festival of older Korean movies the last time I went to Insadong. Which sounds really cool.

The article I linked to has addresses and directions but, as always, things can get pretty hairy when you are a foreigner and looking for stuff in Korea. Since Seoul does not (yet) use a Western style street address system, it’s best to look for landmarks and try to get directions beforehand.

**Note: if you go to Gangnam looking for Indieplus – which I highly recommend – know that there is a different name on the building. The cinema is easy to find, only about four doors away from exit 1 at Sinsa subway station, but the name on the building is Broadway Cinema. To get there, just take the subway to Sinsa station, walk out of exit 1, and go straight ahead for about 100 meters. It's huge and on the right. Here’s a link to the Naver street view so you cansee it yourself.

Now, go watch some movies!!

The English Language Further Explained (in cartoons)

2011-11-22T22:41:00.000-08:00

Random Photo of the Day

2011-11-19T00:43:00.001-08:00

For some reason this middle-aged guy pondering unhealthy snack choices at Family Mart caught my eye...

From Hongdae

The Sighting of a Mythical Creature!

2011-11-17T05:57:00.000-08:00

Okay...so not a creature, per se. But mythical, mos def.

One of the mysteries of expat life in Korea, is that you never know where the hell to throw your trash. Not like in a restaurant, or a coffee shop, or even a bank. They have trash receptacles like normal places in the West. But when you walk down the street, there are literally NO garbage cans. And Seoul is a very pedestrian place. You are basically always taking a bus, taking the subway, and walking everywhere. There is also a lot of street food, and people tend to buy coffee and snacks from the ubiquitous convenience stores, and walk around with them. Or at least I do...Also, drinking in public is perfectly legal - and widely practiced. Koreans love hanging out outside with friends and eating food and drinking. I firmly believe that Hongik Park, at the center of Hongdae, is one of the best (and cheapest) drinking spots in the city.

But then after you have your hot-dog-on-a-stick, or your canned coffee beverage, or your soju, or finish doing whatever activity you are doing - what the hell do you do with the trash?

There are trash cans in the subways stations, but only at the platforms. And occasionally outside the station entrance. But other than that, I would be hard pressed to really name a place where you can find a trash can in public space.

So, this is what ends up happening: massive piles of trash everywhere in the street. People just throw trash on the ground all over the place. And then the city pays an army of people to constantly sweep it up and cart it away. It's honestly kinda weird. And gross, for the capital city of a now-developed nation. Having been raised not to litter, I actually had to try hard to get used to not feeling guilty about just throwing my trash on top of the pre-established trash pile on the sidewalk. But that is basically what you end up doing...

From Street Photography

But - wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles - this could perchance be changing. The city fathers seem to be fairly obsessed, as of late, with trying to make Seoul look more impressive to international visitors. Seoul is becoming a global city for really the first time, and stuff is changing.

Last week when I was walking to work, I saw this. I had never seen it before, and I have walked past this corner a thousand times. And I cannot remember the last time I saw one of these. But they seem to be appearing in places around Hongdae. Perhaps a new wind is blowing in public waste disposal:

From Street Photography

Random Photo of the Day

2011-11-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

From Hongdae

North Koreans who can't go home

2011-11-14T22:13:00.000-08:00

Fareed Zakaria is running an article right now on CNN’s website about the interesting plight of several hundred North Korean doctors and nurses who are stranded in North Africa. Kim Jong Il sent them there to earn desperately-needed hard cash for his ailing and kleptocratic regime, working for the similarly iniquitous government of the late Muamar Gaddafi. Then Gaddafi’s people got fed up with how evil he was, overturned his government, and killed him. The Arab Spring leveled him, and left his North Korean medical staff high and dry.

And Kim Jong Il, being one of the world’s most notorious despots, doesn’t really know how to feel about all this. There is a good chance that the estimated 200 North Korean medical professionals he was renting to Gaddafi will never get to go home. They just know too much. North Koreans are among the world’s most isolated and mis-educated people. They are fed an endless diet of untruths and propaganda for their entire lives by the Kim family dynasty’s media monopoly. They are given very, very little information about the outside world. So basically, no one there knows the Arab Spring has happened. And if the Dear Leader – as the rotund Kim Jong Il is known to his starving people – let the doctors and nurses come home, they would start talking. They have been forever tainted by having breached North Korea’s hermitic seal.

Last week UNICEF also announced that over$20 million in food aid is urgently needed by North Korean civilians, who suffer from a wide range of malnutrition-related diseases. UNICEF says 88,000 kids there are about to die or be sick for the rest of their protracted lives if immediate food aid is not forthcoming.

Random Photo of the Day: Konglish

2011-11-14T21:58:00.000-08:00

Seen recently in Seoul:

From Konglish

Students and Suicide

2011-11-14T21:47:00.000-08:00

Al Jazeera recently ran this story about Korea's ballooning suicide rate among students and teens. Currently, South Korea has the highest rate of suicide among all developed nations. Only in impoverished post-Soviet Latvia do more people take their own lives. Around 40 South Koreans each and every day of the year die at their own hand.

In South Korea, teen suicide has risen by over one-third in the past ten years. AJ notes that the intense, almost-single-minded, drive for academic and then subsequent professional success is a big part of the problem. Certainly, other issues are at work too. But all too many younger South Koreans have (had) a friend, classmate, or acquaintance who committed suicide because they felt they just couldn't compete in this oh-so-competitive of cultures. The competition for entrance into the nation's top universities is truly brutal. Entrance to these schools, unlike in the West - where a variety of factors are weighed during the admissions process, is determined almost solely by students' performance on the big scary national university entrance exam. Which the entire country is subjected to.

One test. One day. Your whole future rides on it, and the hopes and pressures of your entire family are all wrapped up in it. Unlike in Western countries, virtually all students feel pressured to shoot for a limited number of spots at the top few schools. (Koreans usually talk about S.K.Y. schools - an acronym for Seoul National, Korea U., and Yonsei U.) Rejection by these elite schools is inevitable for most students, but the shame of not being successful is so burdensome that many students can see no way to go on if they bomb the one big test that determines the entire outcome of their lives.

Many expats living in South Korea were greatly shocked to hear President Obama recently praise Korea's educational system as a model for failing American schools. Korean schools have a lot of very serious problems - the biggest one being that kids are often pretty miserable. And this is most conspicuous fallout:

Random Photo of the Day

2011-11-13T05:46:00.000-08:00

Near The Design Museum...

From Hongdae

Random Photo of the Day

2011-11-13T05:38:00.000-08:00

Friday night I was walking around in Hongdae near the park and some of the clubs, and caught this shot in front of Cocoon.

Note the insane amount of trash and litter in the street, a common feature of entertainment areas in Seoul...

From Hongdae

Cafe Pick: The Design Museum

2011-11-13T04:24:00.000-08:00

One of the most notable features of the urban landscape in Seoul is the abundance of coffee shops and cafes. They are literally everywhere. Some blocks in popular areas have a half-dozen coffee shops all within spitting distance of one another. There are lots of popular chains, both American (Starbucks, Cafe Bean) and Korean (Angel-In-Us, Beans Bins). And there are also some funky independent places.

Today's spotlight is one of the coolest - and most beautiful places - to enjoy a caffeinated beverage here in the capital of Dynamic Korea. It's called The Design Museum.

From Hongdae

The owner is a lifelong collector of antique and designer furniture. And the interior is, simply put, incredibly artistic. The building is basically a huge concrete shell, but it is graced with striking imported antique architectural features. Huge French doors, modernist Scandinavian tables, early-20th-century leather armchairs. All the pieces of furniture in the place are actually collector's items. Everything, from the chair you sit in to the light fixtures overhead, are objects of fascination. Given how obviously antique, real, and expensive some of the chairs were, I was actually surprised the cafe allows the general public to lounge in them.

From Hongdae

The Design Museum is also a furniture store, and sells reproductions of artistic and modernist furniture much like what the cafe houses. According to the Design Museum's website, there are actually several shops within the building specializing in Scandinavian, Bauhaus, modern vintage, and books on architecture and design.

The cafe is open 12 p.m. - 12 a.m. Monday - Sunday. It' a great place to linger, chill, and gaze. Coffee is about 6,000 won, and my green tea latte was around 8,000.

From Hongdae

To get there, walk out Exit 9 of Hongik U. station, take a left at the first big intersection, and then a right two blocks later, across from the Starbucks. This will put you onto a narrow, mostly pedestrian street known among local expats as Parking Lot Street (since lots of cars park in the middle of it). Walk down Parking Lot Street for a few minutes, and cross a busy two-lane street. A block later take a left at an intersection with a Buy the Way on the left, and Joe's Sandwich and Coffee on the right. Take the first right and The Design Museum will be halfway down the block on the right. Sadly, Google Street View does not yet exist in Korea, but you can click here to use an interactive street view map from Naver (a Korean search engine).

And here's my google map of cool stuff I write about in Hongdae:

View Restaurant & Cafe Picks in a larger map

Random Photo of the Day: Surgical Bandages on the Street

2011-11-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

From Hongdae

This guy just had the ever-popular 'double-eyelid' surgery. After this eye heals, he'll go back to get the other eyelid done. Tons and tons of young Koreans get the procedure, and this is not an uncommon sight.

Halloween Newsdump: Social Crises in Korea

2011-10-31T00:43:00.000-07:00

Several weeks back, while hanging out in Seoul, I met a young Korean soldier on furlough from his mandatory military service. He was wearing a hoodie pulled up over his head the entire evening, from which protruded long bangs. I thought he was just a trendy kid. Later in the evening, however, a friend of his outed him for wearing a wig. He explained, embarrassedly, that he bought the wig because he hates his military haircut and wanted to look cool during his time off in Seoul. (Never underestimate the importance of appearances in Korean culture!) And apparently many other Koreans are following suit. Arirang reports that the Korean wig industry is really taking off. The latest new fad. So, that’s kinda weird…

In other news, the Korean national government just toughened up laws against people who abuse the disabled, following the massive outcry when a recent film portrayed the story of deaf children who being abused by their teachers and principals. Traditionally, there has been little legal protection for the disabled in Korean culture. They were cared for by families, and society felt few obligations toward them. However in the wake of The Crucible and the sad tale of the children who attended the now-closed Inhwa School, people are demanding change.

And Al Jazeera is running a whole series of articles and bits about population issues around the world. The human population just hit a new milestone, 7 billion according to the UN. But that growth is not happening everywhere, or happening evenly. 30 nations in Europe and Asia face a future with far too many aging people, and far too few young people.

South Korea, in fact, has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. This poses dangers for the nation’s future, as in a few decades a huge proportion of the country will be aging people who will be too old to work. And, since Korea is becoming more and more Americanized, most Korean kids don’t plan on – or want to – support their aging parents. Traditionally, families in East Asia put all their money into their kids’ education. And then the kids were expected to follow suit by devoting themselves with great care to their parents during their sunset years. But things are changing…and sadly many seniors in Korea are left to fend for themselves, living in miserable poverty. This is one the biggest issues on Korea’s horizon, and while the citizens clamor for a plan, there seems to be pretty much nothing in the way of preparedness coming down the pipeline from national leaders. Dig this Al Jazeera video, with some eye-opening footage of how the Other Half lives in Seoul:

The looming Korean population crisis has a variety of causes. Lots of young Korean women don’t want to get married anymore, since they don’t want to give up their [perceived] freedom and become [obedient] housewives. Also, families are shrinking in size dramatically as people focus more on their careers and delay child-rearing, or pass on it altogether. South Korea is also the world’s biggest exporter of babies, an institutionalized legacy of the painful postwar era - when they were many homeless orphans. The Korean adoption industry has sent millions of Korean babies abroad to waiting adoption parents. This is one unique feature of the Korean diaspora. Another problem is that during the 70’s and 80’s many Korean couples really wanted boys, rather than girls. They asked doctors to tell them the sex of their unborn baby, and many parents terminated pregnancy, or made other arrangements, if the fetus was female. Thus, there is a whole generation of young men for whom there are not enough women. Many blue-collar Korean men seek foreign brides, since they are expected to marry. A whole industry of marriage brokers has emerged to provide what amount to mail-order brides from Vietnam, the Philippines, and other poorer nations in Asia. However, such marriages often go awry, and bring their own set of problems. Foreign brides report being abused, culture shocked, unable to communicate with their spouses and families because of language barriers, and generally having a pretty rough time of it. Check out this article about their plight from Asian Correspondent.

Rapercussion: Dancing in the Streets!

2011-10-30T05:32:00.001-07:00

Here are a few photos I snapped of Rapercussion (라퍼커션), an all-Korean Afro-Brazilian percussion ensemble that performs samba, funk, and maracatu in the streets of Seoul. They have a parade through Hongdae on an every-month-or-so-basis, and they are AMAZING!

You can find them on facebook, although their page is written almost exclusively in Korean. They also have a page on Cyworld (Korea's version of facebook.) Rapercussion does post news on their facebook page about happenings and performances, but I struggle with keeping up with it since my Korean is weak.

A Portuguese-speaking Korean friend of mine first turned me onto the group, and she told me to try to catch them this weekend. But honestly I just caught them randomly because I was strolling through the area where they happened to be movin' and groovin.' So if you are in Hongdae on a Saturday night, keep a look out for Rapercussion. They usually parade from the subway station to Hongik Park, and they put on a mean show!

The crowd surged around the performers, who were decked out in Halloween costumes and seemed to number something around ten or fifteen musicians, along with several very talented dancers. Nowadays, Korea is famous for its B-boy scene, and Korean break-dancers are among the finest in Asia. These kids were rad as hell:

If you wanna hear Rapercussion for yourself, check out this super funked-out jam session they had with a brass ensemble last April!

And here is another video someone posted of Rapercussion performing at Hongik Park this July. If you are looking for them in the streets, this is the sound you should keep an ear out for:

Street Art in Hongdae!

2011-10-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons to love Hongdae: great restaurants, myriad clubs, live music. It's Seoul's most vibrant entertainment area. And since the neighborhood's namesake, Hongik University, is Korea's most prominent art school, it also boasts a pretty cool arts scene. Creative types of all stripes flock to the area. Hongdae is a mecca for students, artists, musicians, and the like. Street art, being a Western import, is new to Korea. But it seems to be catching on strong. Lots of Korean kids are throwing up tags and making their marks.

The street art I see around Hongdae is always changing, and pretty damn good as well. There is a lot of really cool painting, murals abound, and there is some pretty impressive stencil work. Huge murals are painted up on the sides of buildings, with new ones every month, to advertise events. It's an ever-changing kaleidoscope of creative outpour. The exterior of the public bathroom in Hongik Park is repainted by local artists on a regular basis, like every month or two. I see graffiti in Hongdae that is beautiful, funny, smart, and everything else good that art should be.

Here are some photos I snapped recently.

From Street Art

Mural for a recent marathon sponsored by Nike.

From Street Art

The buildings in Hongik Park are constantly being repainted by local artists.

From Street Art

"Stephen Jobs, please don't die!"

From Street Art

"average = 14 centimeters. and yours?"

From Street Art

Dig the Kim Jong Il stencil!

From Street Art

More photos coming soon!!

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-28T01:40:00.000-07:00

Most expats living in South Korea are English teachers. And if you have ever taught English as a Foreign/Second Language you will totally appreciate this.

Because there are lots of moments when students will ask, "But why!?" And you, the all-knowing teacher, just have to say, "Because."

Confusing spellings, riotously irregular verbs, endlessly bewildering syntax, rules that apply sometimes but not always, and boundless exceptions to each and every rule. Not to mention a syntactic flexibility and gargantuan and ever-expanding vocabulary, all of which makes learning English a real challenge for Korean students.

English really is a bastard [of a] language...

Random Photo of the Day: Cool Satellite Pictures

2011-10-27T21:34:00.001-07:00

If you've trolled the internets, you've probably seen this, a satellite picture of the Earth at night. Which is pretty cool. It's amazing to see the differences between places that are rich and poor, overpopulated cities and empty rural areas.

Some national borders and big cities also really stand out. Look how clearly you can see the outline of India and Pakistan. Check out London and Sao Paulo/Rio in Brazil. Johannesburg is the only big bright spot in all of Africa, save the North African coast. Look how much more densely populated the Eastern US is than the West.

Japan, Europe, and North America are lit up a Christmas light display. While most of Africa, Australia, and the vast Amazon Basin are pitch dark. Ditto Western China. Click to make it bigger, or use the link above:

But something really interesting to look at more closely is the Korean peninsula. Check out the difference between North and South Korea!

You can barely even see the capital, Pyongyang. It's a total blackout. While the South looks is all lit up like fireworks. In this US military image Seoul is a huge cluster of nocturnal brightness. You can clearly see what an economic miracle South Korea is today, up from nothing in just 3 generations.

Restaurant Pick: Seven Springs Buffet!

2011-10-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

Today I had lunch at an awesome spot called Seven Springs. It's a faux American [Korean] chain, and the food was amazing!

They had the best salad bar I have seen in Korea! There were tons of fresh veggies. Salmon sashimi! Mouth-watering quesadillas! Delicious green tea cake! Everything was so flavorful and fresh!

Korean food is great, but can be a little short on the veggies. And a good salad is downright hard to find. This is my new favorite place for both!

The dining room is nice and sunny, and commodious:

Dig this classy and artful SALAD BAR!! Spring greens, the BEST tomatoes I have had in years, homemade dressings...

I was really happy about ^ that minestrone soup!

Other attractive options:

All this food was so good! This is a most scrumptious frittata. Also, baked sweet potato with cheese, pasta with mussels, saffron fried rice, and the most amazing quesadilla I have had in a long time. And check it out expats - green beans! (Which are hard to find in Korea.) And I snuck some really good yogurt - which tasted like whole milk organic - and granola. They have a whole yogurt station!

The dessert bar is rad too! Ice cream, cake, brownies, and super badass green tea cake!

Admittedly, this place is not cheap. I paid about W18,000 for the lunch buffet (about $16 US). But it is TOTALLY WORTH IT!

To get there just look for the restaurant directly in front of you as you exit Hongdae Station, exit 8. The restaurant is up on stilts, with parking at ground level. The big green sign is hard to miss.

View Restaurant Picks in a larger map

Random Photo of the Day

2011-10-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are unfamiliar with signage, t-shirt designs, and other forms of the printed word in South Korea, things are usually in English. (It’s actually hard to buy a t-shirt in Seoul that is printed in Korean.) Well, almost English. Things are often a bit skewed – linguistically speaking. Somewhere between English and Korean, but not really sounding quite right in either.

Americans grow up hearing lots of Spanglish. (Expressions like finito and por serioso are about as Spanish as a Taco Bell menu. Note that Taco Bell’s gordita means roughly “little fat chick” in Spanish.) Asia has its own versions of mutilated and mutated English: Japan has Jinglish, in China there is Chinglish, Vietnam has its Vietlish, and the Singaporeans – while being an English-speaking nation – have Singlish.

And in Korea we have Konglish. It’s everywhere. On signs, trucks, billboards, shirts, hats, restaurant wallpaper, pizza boxes. You name it. It’s weird, and often funny to native speakers. More photos to follow in the coming weeks.

This is a sign at the entrance to a bar in Hongdae, Seoul’s premier artsy/entertainment area. The bar is called Ho Bar II, and if you ever come to Hongdae you may notice thumping dance music pouring from a number of Ho Bars, which are numbered sequentially and scattered around the city’s campus areas.

And remember: "be crazy in ho2"!

Newsdump.

2011-10-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

Several bits of news concerning the growing multicultural push in South Korea:

Today South Korea welcomed its 100,000^th naturalized citizen, a college professor who was born in India and has been living in Korea since 1980. Roy Alok Kumar came here on scholar ship, stuck around, married a Korean chick, and now they have a couple kids. But he had to wait 31 years for Korean citizenship, because Korea didn’t allow dual citizens until this year. The growing numbers of naturalized citizens represent big changes in Korean society. In 2000 only 34 people became naturalized Koreans; now there are over 9,800 a year. As the Chosun Ilbo notes, “Most of them are ethnic Koreans from China and foreign women who married Korean men.” Additionally they note that “79,163 women from China, 9,207 from Vietnam, 5,233 from the Philippines, 2,093 from Taiwan, and 785 women from Mongolia have gained Korean citizenship through marriage.” The article goes on to plead for allowing skilled immigrants to move to Korea for the simple purpose of helping the economy, and prevent the looming demographic collapse that so often worries Korean leaders. Since no one in Korea is producing enough babies, and lots of young Korean women are saying “Fuck You!” to traditional Korean marriage. Female "foreign" spouses outnumber "foreign" male spouses by 7 to 1.

The South Korean military has just also changed its pledge of allegiance. For decades new recruits doing their mandatory 2-year-plus stint in the ROK military had to swear "utmost loyalty to the nation and the race as a soldier of the Republic of Korea." They changed it to use the term “citizen” instead. The change will go into effect this April. In South Korea all young men are required to serve in the military. But until this January young men from multinational families [read: not pure Korean blood] were exempted from service. That rule has also been done away with, and now young men are serving who have parents – usually mothers – who were not born ethnic Koreans.

Koreans usually use the term “foreigner” for anyone who was not born ethnically Korean, which is traditionally believed to be derived from having ‘pure’ Korean blood. Thus, people who move to Korea and live here for decades, learn the Korean language, and marry locals, are often still viewed as “foreign.” Which traditionally carries a negative connotation. Xenophobia has been a big issue in Korea, which is still coming out of centuries of isolationist rule. And then the fascist colonial era, and the oppressive military dictatorship, yada yada yada…

That is why this group is surprising. Last August the first K-pop group to include bi-racial members was launched by Paramount Music. They are called Chocolat and the bubblegum group includes 3 girls who are half Caucasian – all with Korean moms and American fathers, along with 2 Korean chicks. They seem to have been moderately successful, although finding acceptance within mainstream Korean society may prove difficult. I saw them recently on Arirang (Korea’s tv station for foreigners about Korea). Like most K-pop stars, who work in an industry dominated by demanding corporate masters and heavily produced music and dance routines, they are all teenagers. They have been training intensively for several years, and the youngest member is 14.

Organizations for foreigners and immigrants in Korea are selling multiculturalism hard. And often with a female face. Whether or not this strategy will work remains to be seen. The Chosun Ilbo has this article about the first Miss Multicultural Society Pageant.

Oh yeah, and some pervy old Korean dudes in charge of a beauty pageant tried to pressure the contestants for sexual favors. Amy Willerton (some white chick) who was the former Miss Asia Pacific (somehow) claimed that they were also not given enough food or beds, and that beauty contestants were constantly sexually harassed during the contest. Which basically sounds like what happens when my female blond Western friends walk down the street and pervy dudes stare at them all creepy and say weird shit to them. So there is that…

High Expectations Asian Father

2011-10-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

So here's a something fun for those of you who are Asian, have been to Asia, or have met Asian people. Specifically East Asian. (If you're from Kazakhstan this may not apply to you.)

According to Meme Generator, the whole High Expectations Asian Father thing was started by two guys in March 2010. Now it is all over the interwebs.

I could say a buncha deep stuff about how these entertaining jabs at common and frustrating stereotypes of first-generation immigrant Asian parents among Asian American kids represent deep cultural differences between Western and Eastern cultures. But instead I'll just post a bunch of pictures I stole from the High Expectations Asian Father website.

"Bad artists imitate. Great artists steal."

- Picasso

Word of the Day

2011-10-20T20:06:00.001-07:00

fecund (adjective)

1 : fruitful in offspring or vegetation

2 : intellectually productive or inventive to a marked degree

first used: 15^th century

etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, Latin fecundus

It would take a fecund imagination to believe that kimchi actually prevents bird flu.

Oh, my people…

2011-10-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

In August 2009 a firm called Taylor Bean & Whitaker, one of the US’ largest private mortgage lenders, collapsed in Florida. 2,000 employees lost their jobs overnight, and 6 wealthy executives were arrested on fraud charges. Investigators uncovered they had been part of a 3-billion-dollar corporate rip-off scheme. The collapse of Taylor Bean subsequently caused the collapse of a bank in Alabama called Colonial Bank, which had bought a lot of their shady financial products. It was the sixth-largest bank collapse in US history. Last July a U.S. district judge sentenced Taylor Bean’s former CEO, Paul R. Allen, to 3 years in prison.

In 2007 a homeless guy named Roy Brown went into a bank in Shreveport, Louisiana and pretended he had a gun by sticking his finger in his jacket. He asked for money. As they are trained to, the teller gave him big stacks of $100 bills. Roy took just one of the $100 bills. He was hungry, homeless, and broke, and needed money to pay to stay in the drug and alcohol detox program he was in. The next day he felt bad about what he had done, so he turned himself into the cops. Five months after Taylor Bean collapsed from out-of-control greed, he was given a 15-year sentence for first degree robbery. Oh yeah, did I mention he was a black dude?

God Bless America.

Racism at the Bathhouse

2011-10-18T23:06:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal is running an article about how a racist Korean bathhouse owner refused entry to a woman, a naturalized Korean citizen from Uzbekistan, because of her skin color. The bathhouse owner said he didn’t want to let her in since, “foreigners might make the water dirty and might drive off customers [because they] might pass on AIDS.” The woman went to the local authorities, who told her she should go to another bathhouse, since there are no laws on the books in Korea against racial discrimination. A complaint has been filed with Korea's National Human Rights Commission, but the case is still pending. A huge change in the Korean legal framework surrounding such cases - which consists of nothing - is fairly unlikely.

This is what happens when generations of people are taught by a national school system that they are the most homogenous race on earth, that they are bound together by a single blood line, that this is what makes them strong as a nation, and that their blood must be kept pure.

Korea is being dragged kicking and screaming into multiculturalism, but society is fighting it hard. How can Korea become a real player in the global economy, much less earn the respect it craves from the West, when treating people this way is viewed with cultural tolerance and political apathy?

Word of the Day

2011-10-18T22:42:00.001-07:00

pulchritude (noun, noncount)

formal: physical attractiveness; prettiness

(adjective form: pulchritudinous)

first noted: 15th century

etymology: Middle English, from Latin pulchritudin-, pulchritudo, frompulchr-, pulcher beautiful

“Your pulchritude is quite disarming, my dear.”

"The Crucible"

2011-10-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Within the past decade Korean media has taken the world by storm. People all over Asia, and increasingly Europe as well, love the catchy bubblegum sweetness of K-pop music and adore the good-looking stars of Korean dramas. Personally I am more into Korean film. In a culture where dissent and criticism is often stifled, Korean filmmakers manage to produce works of cinema that examine complex issues within Korean society - which is both very complex and rapidly changing. Their films also speak artistically to larger topics universal to the human condition.

Pullitzer-Prize-winning journalist Choe Sang-hun just penned a New York Times article entitled “Film Underscores Koreans’ Growing Anger Over Sex Crimes.” For the past few years a growing wave of media reports in South Korea has exposed a series of horrific sex crimes. In March 2010 the murdered body of a missing 13-year-old girl was found in Busan. She had been raped repeatedly, strangled to death, put in a black plastic bag, and dumped in an abandoned water tank. Authorities only found her after she had been missing for 11 days. Her killer, a 33-year-old man named Kim Kil-tae, confessed to the child’s abduction and subsequent killing soon after being apprehended by police. ROK Drop notes: “This case is an eerie reminder of when two girls were snatched in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, on Christmas Day in 2008 and killed by a 39-year-old man.” As a result of such crimes, and their prominence in Korean news outlets, many Korean parents are pretty freaked out. After the 2010 case, parents across the country made a mad dash to buy GPS tracking devices and attach them to their kids’ book bags. So that they could monitor their whereabouts should any children go missing. If you talk to Koreans on the street, many people complain about the growing sense of danger the perceived crime wave has created. Many feel as though an inexplicable rash of terrifying crimes has cropped up, and they don’t know what to do, or understand why this is happening in their society.

Cho Sang-hun’s recent New York Times article examines the blockbuster popularity of the recent film The Crucible (도가니) which is based on real events that occured at a school for deaf children in Gwangju, the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired. School administrators, teachers, and a principal had all been sexually abusing deaf and developmentally disabled children. The principal had also been taking bribes. When the case came to light, some of the accused received no punishment at all, while the harshest verdict came with only a year sentence. Massive public outcry was the result. Koreans were infuriated by the lack of meaningful justice their justice system appeared to deliver. Cho Sang-hun explains, “The head of the Supreme Court admitted that “society is simmering with resentment” toward a legal system long criticized as … “not guilty for the rich, guilty for the poor.”

The case surrounding the Inwha School, which was closed after the story broke, also ties into a number of major and controversial issues in Korean society. First of all, the victims were handicapped children, in a society notorious for not giving a tinker’s damn about the rights of the disabled. As Cho notes, “disregard for the disabled is so entrenched that the subway authorities began installing elevators for wheelchair access only in recent years following protests by the handicapped in which they chained themselves to the tracks with signs that read, “We want to use the subway too.”

Then there is the issue of child abuse. Which has not really received the level of attention that it has in the US. Sex crimes are also usually swept under the rug. Most rapes and sexual assaults in South Korea are never reported, since they carry a stigma of deep shame. The Korean government estimates that less than 10% are reported. Girls who are sexually assaulted fear telling anyone, lest they be judged and attacked themselves. Families feel that their daughters have dishonored them if they make such matters public. Police are perceived as incompetent and untrustworthy. Korean society is also deeply patriarchal, and women are expected to be submissive and obedient. Speaking out about being raped is not part of this prescribed role.

And then there is yet another elephant in the room, the one that reporter Cho focuses on, and the one which Koreans are most likely to actually be able to talk about – the growing inequity in Korean society. As in the West, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Traditionally, Korean culture is bound together by deep sentiments of national identity, duty, and unity. Koreans feel deep obligations to help one another in times of trouble, and have survived centuries of living precariously surrounded by deleterious, large, and powerful empires because they have maintained a strong and united sense of national identity. But there is another stream that runs just as deep in the opposite direction: the clear hierarchy of Confucianism. Noblemen are over peasants, men over women, the old are over the young, and parents are over children. Everyone has a clear place and a clear set of obligations, according to their rank, class, station, gender, age, and occupation. This worked well to create stability in an agrarian monarchy. But in a hyper-capitalist modern nation, the powerful have far more power and money than ever before, and those at the bottom are very, very vulnerable – which many Koreans find utterly reprehensible.

The rich and well-connected in Korea are widely seen as enjoying privileges not extended to ordinary citizens, in addition to being corrupt and increasingly arrogant. They are seen to behave with total almost impudence towards laws that everyone else must obey. The New York Times’ Cho references a 2010 case in which, “Chey Cheol-won, 41, a trucking company owner and cousin of one of the country’s richest men, was convicted of hitting a 52-year-old former union activist 13 times with an aluminum baseball bat while his executives watched. He then wrote out a 20 million won check on a company account and threw it in the victim’s face. Mr. Chey received a suspended sentence.”

In a society where such things are possible, the most defenseless are rendered even more so: the poor, the disabled, the elderly, students, and – though they are not often mentioned explicitly – women. Koreans know this, and are voicing ever greater frustration and anxiety about how unequal things seem to be, and how much power the ruling elite seems to wield. When current president Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2008, many perceived the election as unfair and undemocratic. He is widely unpopular today, and most attribute his victory on Election Day to the fact that he has powerful friends among the Korean elite residing both physically and symbolically in Seoul’s Gangnam district. Many Seoul residents hate Gangnam outright because of what it represents to them. President Lee is seen as a crook, a Korean version of George Bush, and a representation of all that is enragingly unfair within Korea’s ever-bifurcating society.

Korean film seems to be most important media outlet for engaging in debate and examination of such issues. As Korea continues to grow and develop, society will only become more and more convoluted. And Koreans will continue to search for meanings and answers in a rapidly changing world.

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-18T19:23:00.001-07:00

NATURE'S TOOTHBRUSH!!!

brought to you by the fervent efforts of the Good people at Failblog.

Word of the Day

2011-10-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

supine (adjective)

1.formal: lying on one’s back with one’s face upward

- She was lying supine on the floor.

2. disapproving: easily controlled by others: weak or passive

- a supine man who was afraid to take action

first noted: 15^th century

etymology: Middle English suppyne, from Latin supinus

“In 2008 many Koreans were enraged that President Lee Myung-bak was being so supine in the face of US demands, and decided he was a spineless twat.”

American politics explained, mostly

2011-10-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a very helpful and illustrative...er, illustration from the Information is Beautiful infographics blog. Things are getting more and more polarized, and apparently look more like a diamond in real life. But this is at least how things are as the media presents them in binary, and how most Americans think of things. Click to make it big, so you can actually read it:

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

Know what's way more badass than your smartphone? This:

Music from Dr. Ralph

2011-10-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

In 2000 American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen released their smash hit movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? The plot was inspired by the Odyssey, and the title references the 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels. However the movie is perhaps best described as an aesthetically finely-honed comedic romp through a body of significant myths, music, and meanings in the American past. It was the first film to be entirely color-corrected via digital technology. The movie's color was all adjusted to nostalgic sepia tones, and the film is rich with allusions to much of America’s folk heritage.

Set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film follows a trio of adventurers as they break out of prison and head off into the landscape of legends, magic, and memory. Along the way they meet larger-than-life characters, and encounter symbolic icons that figure prominently in American folklore and traditional music: boxcar-riding hobos, banjos, hound dogs, a crooked Bible salesman (a Flannery O’Conner reference), chain gangs, the Mississippi state penal system's notorious Parchman Farm, churchgoers being baptized in a river, the TVA, sharecroppers, cotton fields, the Klu Klux Klan, famous bank robber Baby Face Nelson, a blind fortune teller, a bluesman who sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads (a la the famous myth about Robert Johnson), the ruins of antebellum plantations, and the backdrop of the Great Depression spreading out across the tapestry of the fictionalized rural South. It is a rich and heady brew.

The film was both critically acclaimed, and a great success at the box office – earning over $45 million. American roots music is an integral part of the film, and it touched off a major revival. O Brother features work from traditional blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, and folk performers. The Coen Brothers have often worked with music producer T-Bone Burnett, and the film’s soundtrack is one of his most beloved accomplishments. The music from the film was so wildly popular that an entire tour of the featured musicians was organized, as well as several albums of related music. I myself caught the Down from the Mountain tour around 2002 and it was a thrilling experience to see Del McCoury, Emmylou Harris, Norman Blake, and Allison Kraus all onstage together.

One performer who enjoyed a major rejuvenation of his career was veteran bluegrass performer Ralph Stanley. Ralph, who is now 84 years old, was born in Southwest Virginia near the Kentucky and Tennessee border and has spent the bulk of his life there in the heart of Appalachia. His music is an expression of that rich and unique heritage, and he is a living legend as such. Ralph and his brother Carter performed as the Stanley Brothers and formed several early bluegrass bands. Ralph learned to play clawhammer banjo from his mother, who came from a family with 11 children, all of whom learned the instrument at home. The Stanley’s music drew from the rich local traditions of Southwest Virginia, which included the work of the Carter Family, who lived nearby, and the minor-key singing style of the Primitive Baptist Universalist Church.

The Carter Family, seminal roots music performers, from an appearance on the Grand Ole Opry

By 1949 The Stanley Brothers were recording for Columbia, and they helped to popularize the sound epitomized by the “father of bluegrass,” Bill Monroe. In the late 50’s they cut records with the King label in Cincinnati, which was also launching the career of an up-and-coming James Brown at the same time.

Ralph’s touring entourage has included such noted and talented musicians as Larry Sparks, Charlie Sizemore, and Ricky Skaggs, all of whom have gone on to have successful careers of their own. Ralph holds an honorary doctorate from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, and often bills himself as Dr. Ralph Stanley. In 2002 he won a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. Here is Ralph’s appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series.

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-14T20:21:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking this for some time….

What Does English Sound Like to People Who Can't Speak English?

2011-10-14T20:12:00.001-07:00

Chances are, if you are reading this, you speak English. And you may speak a second language as well. Or a third if you are really snazzy. But you probably don't speak like all the languages in the world. Because no one but Chuck Norris can do that.

But if you hear people speaking German or Italian or Arabic, you might be able to guess what language it is. Because you have some idea what it sounds like.

Here is a cool video that went all viral on the interwebs, made by an Italian comedian who cannot speak English. But who made this catchy song in fake English instead:

And here is a short film called Skwer, also in fake English. Check out Matador, where I found [stole] it for interesting articles about traveling the world and learning languages and stufff.

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

Is YOUR workplace velociraptor free?

Ryugyong: North Korea's Hotel of Doom!

2011-10-13T23:38:00.001-07:00

Guess which country is constructing The Most Horrible Building in the World? You guessed it! North Korea!! Wooooooo!

Pyongyang really is the Paris of North Korea. It really has a lot in common with Paris: they are both capital cities, both have people living in them, and both have large buildings. Also, they both have concentration camps. So it is entirely fitting that Pyongyang should have an impressive landmark building that celebrates its status as a center of romance, cuisine, and despotism. Just like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. How can you not just fall in love with a city that looks this fucking beautiful:

And so, doubtless with Paris in mind, North Korea began building the Ryugyong Hotel, a massively ill-conceived edifice in 1987. Originally the regime announced it would be completed by 1989. But of course, that didn’t work out…since they have no FOOD. Esquire called it “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind.” Many people have also nicknamed it “The Hotel of Doom,” which I think has kind of a fun ring.

Nobody could ever really explain why the leaders of North Korea so desperately want to build a huge, ugly, weird-looking 3,000 room pyramidal hotel. Since no one is ALLOWED to visit North Korea. And their tourism industry has about the same economic might as a village of Peruvian basket weavers. But somebody decided this would be a good monument to…something. And so its 105 stories have been towering ominously over the stunted communist ugliness of Pyongyang for 24 years.

Construction has proceeded slower than leaders wanted, and was halted altogether in 1992 when the USSR collapsed and stopped giving North Korea basically everything it needed. The North Korean government poured about 2% of the national budget into this hideous monster, but found it unable to complete the Hotel of Doom. In 2009 the BBC wondered if it could ever be finished.

For years Western websites have speculated about whether the monstrosity would – or could – ever be completed. Some Korea-watchers and architecture geeks claimed that it had been improperly designed and could not actually be finished. Others made fun videos that reduced the whole project to a surreal abstract exercise in fantasy building dreaming. (Which is not too far off the mark, given how surreally fucked-up North Korea is.)

2012 is a big deal for North Korea, since it marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the nation’s founding despot, the “eternal president” Kim Il-sung. They are pushing hard for a big national celebration, and for showpiece projects. Which has gotta be rough going, given the state of general malnutrition and misery the government enforces.

In 2011 the exterior work on Ryugyong was completed, and now they are finishing off the undoubtedly harrowing interior. No one really knows exactly when the place will open, or who would or could go there if it was open, or why it exists in general. But the builder, an Egyptian firm called Orascom, says they have no deadline and don’t really know when the project will be finished.

This is how the project is looking now:

According to The Telegraph, Rygyong will open... next April? So, for those of you who enjoy summering in lovely Pyongyang this should be a major boon to your travel plans. Just don’t plan on going there anytime soon. Or bring a camera. Or any literature from the West. Or want to have fun on vacation.

Korean Reunification

2011-10-13T21:38:00.000-07:00

Aging South Koreans grew up in a Third World country marked by war and hunger. They remember hard years of deprivation, and childhoods filled with envy for those who had things like books, shoes, and radios. Many old Koreans are permanently disfigured, with agonizingly crooked spines because of malnutrition during their childhoods. Meanwhile, kids in South Korea live in a world filled with video games, designer clothes, American fast food chains, and dreams of studying at prestigious Western universities.

North Korea was actually ahead of South Korea economically during the 50’s and 60’s. They had most of the industrial plant within the peninsula - until the South embarked on a breakneck drive at development and construction projects. But decades of abysmal central state planning, shortage ridden autarky, and doomed isolationism have reduced North Korea to a pauper state. Kim Jong Il’s regime is proudly defiant and obsessed with maintaining a policy of absolutely no interaction with the wider world, yet totally dependent on the charity of other nations for continued survival. The only thing keeping the Hermit Dictatorship alive is life support economic aid from China.

For decades Koreans have been debating the possibility of reunification. It pains many Koreans very deeply that the countries are divided. Older Koreans have siblings and relatives in the North that they have not spoken to for a half-century. They wonder if they are still alive. It is also worth noting that the decision to separate Korea - a proud and previously united people with thousands of years distinct culture and history - along an arbitrary line drawn at the 38^th parallel was made entirely by Westerners. Principally American military leaders, most of whom were almost wholly ignorant of Korean culture, history, and politics. That decision has been deeply resented for decades.

Many in South Korea point to the post-Cold War German example as a potential model. communist East Germany and democratic West Germany were successfully reunited after decades of division by the Iron Curtain and Soviet intervention. The reign of terror so brilliantly captured in The Lives of Others finally came crashing down with the Berlin Wall.

The same thing could happen here. But Korea and Germany are very, very different. For starters, Germany was already a rich and developed nation before the division. Germany was the biggest steelmaker in the world in the Victorian era. Nothing like this was ever true in Korea, which was a small and isolated agrarian monarchy at the same time that Germany was busy colonizing Southwest Africa and exporting state-of-the-art naval vessels.

Nowadays some Koreans don’t even think reunification should be attempted, because it would be such an incredible drain on the economy to build all the infrastructure that North Korea never had: schools, roads, an electrical grid, etc. Plus there would be the massive task of attempting to bring a surreally mis-educated and very uniquely culturally isolated people into the global world. North Koreans would have to be re-trained for a life where people work for actual wages, and then buy food with their paychecks. Being part of a productive economy, and the demands that it entails would blow their minds. Much less having any semblance of a voice in public affairs and collective decision making.

Here is an insightful video from Al Jazeera that does a fairly good job explaining the basic quandaries that South Koreans are grappling with as they try to plan for a future in which the North Korean state may simply cease to be.

North Korea, Al Jazeera, and other Strange Creatures

2011-10-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

In 1964 Bob Dylan released a hit song called "The Times They Are A-changin'". And, for Bob and his generation, indeed they were. Kids were dropping acid in the park, refusing to obey their prim and neatly [re]pressed parental units, protesting the Vietnam War, and a sea change was taking the American cultural landscape by storm. In that decade we encountered the Sexual Revolution, the birth of Second Wave Feminism, a genesis of the Environmental Movement, the emergence of Gay Rights, and acquired our deep and visceral mistrust of government, establishment, authority figures, and formal organizations. It was the beginning of the end of Modernism, and the forced ideological homogeneity it was predicated on.

And today the US stands at another similar crossroads in its history, albeit a much more painful one. Our power on the global stage is waning. For the first time in our history, which we have traditionally conceived of as being characterized by a “manifest destiny” of limitless expansionism, things are visibly contracting all around us. People around the world can already feel it in their daily lives; Koreans tell me that they can feel it pretty noticeably. Consequently, we Americans have absolutely no idea what to do. This has never happened before. Physicists constructed the Second Law of Thermodynamics to illustrate the point that perpetual motion machines are an impossibility, and that someday entropy shall claim us all. What goes up must come down, and so goes the American Empire. We are in a state of collective shock. And, characteristically for a people so famed for our propensity towards belligerence, we are also angry. People are joining protests in the streets, but without any real demands or even a sense of what demands we could possible make.

Our economy is in tatters. Our college grads can’t find work. Our endless wars are bankrupting us. Our healthcare system leaves 40% of America uninsured. Parents can’t afford to give their kids education. Things are bad for everyone, but for minorities the picture is even grimmer: unemployment is nearing 17% among Black Americans. Entire neighborhoods of unoccupied and unsalable homes sit vacant and vandalized. Suburbia is giving birth to new forms of ghetto. Ford just ceased production on the last American sedan.

The American Dream, that oh-so-twentieth-century construct, seems to be waving goodbye to us in the rear view mirror of human history. For Apocalypse-obsessed Americans it seems like the End Times of our preeminence. But viewed in another [more Eastern?] paradigm, the End of one epoch only means that an older system is giving way to a new one. The 20^th Century was, indisputably, the American Century. And many believe that the 21^st shall be the Asian Century. Perhaps it already is, and America just doesn’t believe it yet.

The whole “America is Doomed and Dying” meme has, admittedly, become fairly cliché and shopworn. Both among philosophizing academic theorists and print journalists. But it continues to be a profitable idea because Americans are both fascinated by the novelty of all this as well as deeply anxious. We have no idea how to cope with our collective eclipse.

Al-Jazeera has been selling this whole concept, and selling it hard, for years. The organization seems to exist largely to criticize the hell out of the American World Order, and to vocalize ideas that Americans find highly provocative. AJ loves being a fly in the ointment. And that is exactly why people who live in the US (except those in Washington DC) are almost totally unable to find Al-Jazeera among the hundreds of cable channel offerings they can choose from. It’s a virtual media blackout.

Right now AJ is running an article that pretty much runs in the same direction, calling America a failing power with a myopic vision. Blah blah blah, yadda yadda. What caught my eye, however, is their analysis of Northeast Asia.

The article points to several REALLY interesting developments on the Korean peninsula. After decades of living in a constant state of war, marked by threatening rhetoric and occasional border skirmishes on both sides, in 2007 North and South Korea agreed to re-open a rail line that crosses the border. This was part of an joint project known as the Kaesong Industrial Complex. The complex sits just 6 miles north of the DMZ, within North Korea. It was built by South Korean money and opened in 2002. The complex employs 45,000 North Koreans making manufactured goods for South Korean companies. The workers earn about $50 a month, which is actually paid to the North Korean regime. So in actuality they probably earn far less. Bernie Sanders, the sole Socialist member of the US Congress, opposed the recent South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, by pointing out that some of the goods America will now be importing tarrif-free contain components made by North Koreans – whose working conditions are only marginally better than slave labor.

The Kaesong Industrial Complex has been up and running for years. But North Korea is now planning other projects as well. At a small city in the northeast, on the border with both China and Russia sits the smallish city of Rason. In 2010 it was reclassified as a special administrative region within North Korea, and there are plans in the works to build a project called the Rajin-Sonbong Economic Zone. They are going to use it to attract foreign investment, in a scheme likely to be similar to the Kaesong project. It is noteworthy that the Special Economic Zone idea was also used the Red China to pilot free market policies in select areas before they opened Pandora’s Box entirely. This could be a path towards much-needed economic reforms. Cuba is moving steadily in the same direction, allowing people to buy and sell houses for the first time in generations. (Such comparisons are, admittedly, not that useful though, since North Korea is a million times more insane than Cuba.)

Al Jazeera also points to plans to build a natural gas pipeline across North Korea. South Korea is one of the world’s biggest importers of natural gas, and Russia is one of the world’s largest exporters of it. The only thing standing between them – literally speaking – is North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s regime stands to make a bundle off the project, if it is allowed to get off the ground. It should be noted that he is also in his 80’s now, and is suffering from cancer. His days are numbered. (Note further parallels with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.) He has to hand off power to someone, sometime soon. And when he does reforms could happen. They need to. Because North Korean people are on the verge of starvation as a result of his asinine economic policies. Daily civilian rations in North Korea are now at about 200 grams per person. That is about 1/3 the amount of food the average adult human needs to eat in order to remain healthy.

AJ also mentions the possibility of reopening the rail lines that once linked the Korean peninsula together. Before the communists sealed off North Korea in its own hermetically sealed politico-economic coffin, it was possible to board a train in Busan and ride across Korea, into Russia and board the trans-Siberian railroad at Vladivostok. From which one could ride all the way into Europe. Imagine traveling from Seoul to Paris by rail. People used to do it. Nowadays, of course, most of us would rather fly. But re-opening rail lines for freight would be a huge cost-cutter for Korean industries. Which must pay much more to import goods from China by sea and air than they could be paying to ship by rail. These developments may be coming soon.

And, lest we forget, although AJ is determined not to let us, the realization of any of these dreams will only further strengethen East Asia as the world’s economic powerhouse, while the US slides further into planetary irrelevancy while quibbling over health care, and red herrings like gay marriage and flag burning.

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

Last week there was this:

And now there is this:

What is the world coming to?

Learn Korean For Real, FOR FREE

2011-10-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

Most Westerners who live in Korea cannot speak Korean. This really fucks with their perception and understanding of Korean culture. How much would Americans know about the UK and their weird royal family and their pop stars and odd comedy if we didn’t have a language in common? Do we know jack shit about the Dutch or Spanish or Thai or Saudi or Japanese or Swedish royal families? Hell no! Do most North Americans even know that all those countries have royal families – and thus elaborate royal weddings? Fuck no. Why? We cannot understand what the hell they are saying. Ever. Because we don’t speak their languages.

Lost of foreigners come to Korea, and then realize they should learn Korean. Some come here with that goal from the outset. Tons of international students come to South Korea nowadays. Most of them study at university programs, of which there are several well-known choices.

I myself studied at the Yonsei University Korean Language Institute, which has an evening program. I did that for a summer basically, and then decided their quarterly tuition fee of W750,000 (around $700) was kinda pricey. I also found it rather academic, and the first class mostly emphasized really formal grammar that is almost never heard in normal conversation. My Korean friends were constantly correcting me for using the awkwardly formal grammar tense that I was being taught at school.

There are also well-respected programs at Hongik University, Sogang University, Chosun University, Konkuk University, and most of the other big ones. Basically if you google “Korean language” and a major university here, you will probably find stuff. Most programs are designed for international students and hold classes in the morning. I did Yonsei because I work a 9-5 job, and it was available in the evening.

And there are hagwons (little private academies). Ganada is the most well-known and is popular with Japanese students who are learning Korean in Seoul. They have a location in Hongdae near the subway station. I tried to sign up there, but most classes are – once again – only offered during business hours. I do have a friend from Texas studying there now who seems to like it. They claim on their website to offer evening classes, but when I talked to them in spring 2011 no such classes were scheduled due to lack of interest with that time slot. They also have a Saturday morning class, but it starts at 9:30 a.m. and I hate the morning, so I wasn’t into that. I tried, but after the second week I really just wanted to sleep in. Especially since I was working a lot at the time.

The best-kept secret is the FREE CLASSES that the Seoul metropolitan government is funding through its Global Village Centers. There are programs for foreigners working in Seoul available at 5 locations around the city.

The center in Itaewon is popular, as many foreigners live nearby. I have been attending the evening class at the Yeonnam center in Mapo-gu, and it seems pretty awesome so far. Especially since unlike all the other options mentioned above IT IS FREE. The class I attend uses the Sogang U. textbook, which is cool since that program is among the best-regarded and is heavily focused on practical speaking.

So if you live in or near Seoul and you wanna learn REAL Korean that you can use in REAL LIFE and learn it for FREE then check out the Global Village Center nearest you. Enrollment just ended for the winter term. The next term starts in December, but you can at least get a head start on that.

Why pay more, when you could pay nothing?

FREE SHIT = WIN

White Man's Big Nose

2011-10-13T00:02:00.000-07:00

In case you haven’t already figured this out, The Korea Times English-language material is really, really terrible. As Ask A Korean intelligently points out, this is because their audience of potential readers is tiny. And most of the people who read it are Koreans who are reading it to learn English; most of their readers are not trying to get news. Which they could do easily in the language spoken fluently by about 98% of the people who live in Korea.

Here’s a gem of an editorial cartoon they ran in 2010. I remember seeing this in the hagwon where I worked at the time, and being surprised by its pithiness:

One. Many people familiar with Asian cultures know that “big nose” is a common slur for, and stereotype about, Westerners. That is part of what is going on here. That dude’s nose is like 50 feet long.

Two. The cartoon also depicts a white man “sticking his nose in” i.e. interfering with other peoples’ business. And, as many clueless Americans were surprised to learn on September 11, 2001, we are widely resented around the world for our foreign policy. We prop up evil dictators, assassinate the democratically elected leaders of other countries when we don't like them , and manipulate foreign elections to make sure that guys we like end up in charge. Oh, and we invade oil-rich countries to “spread democracy.” We spent billions of dollars each year ensuring that “American interests” are secure around the world. Which generally means “stuff American companies make tons of money off of.”

Thus the cartoon white guy’s nose is also an American penny. The smallest unit of currency issued by the US Treasury. Which has, for the past half-century, been printing the most valuable and important money in the world. American money is an international icon for economic power. When the US dollar dips slightly in value, international recessions take the world by storm. When bankers on Wall Street make bad calls on corporate finance portfolios, food riots break out in Cairo and Lagos.

Three. Specifically the cartoon refers to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the iconic picture of the lone student facing down a column of PRC tanks in April 1989. The image represents everything Americans hold near and dear: heroic individualism, freedom of speech, and the right to stand up to a bullying government.

Americans know all about this picture, because it was really really played up in Western media as an example of the horrors of Chinese Communism and the political repression that America defines itself as being stridently opposed to.

Four. But in the cartoon the student is not alone. The white man’s long money-festooned nose is standing between him and the tanks. Not only this, but the white man has scaled a ladder in order to get over the wall that was ostensibly built to keep him out. (Note that the Chinese have a tradition of building walls to keep foreigners out. As in The Great Wall of China.) The white man is interfering in a conflict that should be between a citizen and his government. And his real motivation – money – is plain to see.

A scathing indictment of the dubious motivations of US international relations if I have ever seen one. But this is just one man’s visual reading.

(Thanks to What the Kimchi? where I found this image again, and for an interesting discussion about it.)

So, the moral of the story is this: if you have a giant 50-foot long nose, and you are a cartoon character, and your nose has a huge penny on it for some reason, AND there is a famous political protest happening in Beijing, DEFINITELY don’t get a ladder and lean on a wall so you can stick your giant penny nose in Chinese national business. Or otherwise badly written English-language Korean newspapers will mock you with slightly locally famous cartoons that mildly offend Western English teachers living in Seoul who blog about their unexciting lives as a way to pass the time.

Rock on Giant Penny-nose Dude.

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

Yep.

Korea and Multiculturalism

2011-10-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

North Americans are raised to believe that diversity is an asset. And that multiculturalism makes our societies strong. We believe that people of mixed heritage are beautiful, and we proudly celebrate our own mixed ancestry with a firm belief that the process of amalgamating peoples together is an absolute good. We also believe having a society composed of diverse peoples who think and live in different ways drives the innovation that is central to our economic might. Many Westerners love the idea of being able to live in places filled with lots of different kinds of people and cultures. Simply put, we think diversity is beautiful. In East Asia, however, this logic is stood on its head. Korean and Japanese people have fervently believed the exact opposite for centuries.

This is why both Korea and Japan have long histories of completely closing their countries to outsiders, and viewing foreigners as threatening and despicable. In Northeast Asia outsiders are traditionally seen as a mortal danger to the nation. Foreigners must be kept at bay, and if they cannot be kept out entirely all contact with them must be carefully limited. The presence of outsiders is a necessary evil at best. Their stay can only be temporary, and if at all possible they must be contained within a tightly segregated area. Foreigners are traditionally viewed as inherently dirty, barbaric, and criminal. Nothing good can come from their alien presence. They threaten the purity of the national essence. For centuries, great thinkers in East Asian societies have promulgated the logic that national purity and homogeneity must be protected, emphasized, and enforced.

Korea is rapidly entering the global world, and quickly becoming a multicultural society. But many Korea-watchers and expats agree that Korean society is really not ready for this. Korea has been a very inward-looking and Korea-centric culture for basically forever. The gap in consciousness between this mindset, and that of more open and global societies can only be described as enormous. Much clumsiness is often the result. Expats in Korea are also often very conscious that nasty racial incidents are not altogether uncommon. Blatant racism and xenophobia have been openly encouraged in this part of the world for many generations. That is changing, but perhaps only very slowly. People in Seoul are accustomed to seeing, if not necessarily interacting with, foreigners. But if I travel outside the capital things are very, very different.

My Korean friends who hold education degrees tell me that Korean public schools now attempt to teach lessons about tolerance and diversity to school kids, but that only limited headway is being made. Since the kids often learn the exact opposite at home, and take little of the multicultural message to heart. When I taught English in an after-school setting to 5^th and 6^th graders in 2009 I used a textbook that was designed for immigrant kids in the US. It featured lots of black and brown kids, and some Asian kids as well. And my students delighted in pointing to the illustrations of African and Latino kids and shouting “Dirty! Dirty! Ughhhhhh!” God knows what they would have said had they possessed a better grasp of English…

Here’s a fun commentary, from the ongoing debate thread at Dave’s ESL entitled “Why Korea should not become multicultural”. There are a lot of attitudes like this writer’s floating around in this part of the world, but Westerners usually hear them voiced in very clumsy English. It is easy to belittle the logic of deep-seated xenophobia when it is delivered in bad English that only makes it sound more illogical, unintelligible, strange, and ignorant. This writer, however, is impressively well-spoken:

(I added the stuff in bold for emphasis, and the translation at the bottom)

This is so disturbing. Approximately 30% of the marriages in South Jeolla province are multiracial and the government is allowing this to happen! What will Korea become in the future? A multiracial garbage bin like the US.

Doesn't the Korean government understand that racial and cultural homogeneity is one of the main strengths of Korea? The Korean government is killing its own people, and dividing Korea even further. Soon there will be no Koreans left in Korea, and they will all be Korean-Filipino, Vietnamese, Chinese, blacks, whites, etc.

Korea does NOT have the capacity for immigration like the US, Germany and the UK. Korea is just not developed enough for that and it will essentially kill any idea of racial and cultural homogeneity. This is dangerous. Incidences of crime will skyrocket, because most foreigners commit more crimes than Koreans. I'm not trying to be racist, but this is the truth. More foreigners = more crimes = recession. This has been witnessed in countries like Germany and Sweden, where so many foreigners commit sexual assaults and robbery. For example, in Sweden, women in many areas now have to wear anti-rape belts due to increased sexual assaults by foreigners.

Similar cases have been reported in Korea recently. Indian men were found to touch a Korean boy's penis. Their excuse was that it was the normal way of greeting people in India. In another recent case, there have been four foreigners (from Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh) who sexually assaulted Korean women at a beach.

Korea's GDP growth rate hasn't benefited from immigration. Quite the contrary actually. Korea achieved the highest economic growth when it was the most homogeneous. Now there are foreigners, the GDP growth rate has slowed significantly in recent years. Therefore the myth that immigration boosts the economy is false.

Mail-order brides need to be banned in Korea. It is severely degrading the image of Korea. Reports by western media reports that Korean men with mental and physical disabilities buy, abuse, and murder foreign wives. The Korean mail-order bride industry is clearly illegal and should be banned according to the law. The introduction of biracial kids in Korea is the biggest problem. Not only will it pose a security threat to Korea, it will cause recessions due to increased welfare spending on these filthy mixed race children.

Foreigners are nothing but parasites to the Korean welfare system. They commit crimes such as sexual assault, robberies and child molestation, yet they also get the highest portion of the Korean welfare system. Korea needs to change its immigration policies ASAP. Ban mail-order brides and if that isn't possible, restrict them as much as they can. Mail-order brides are a plague that will destroy Korea.

국제결혼 = 한국의 사망

(International Marriage = Death of Korea)

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Americans!

Random [stolen] Photo of the Day

2011-10-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Just so you know...

Mr. Pizza explains that pizza, also, is a Korean invention

2011-10-10T23:49:00.001-07:00

If you live in Korea, chances are you’ve seen a Mr. Pizza. There are hundreds of them. According to Wikipedia, they also have about a dozen stores in Vietnam, and one in the US. Their slogan is "Love for Women," which is a bit awkward in English. But makes more sense in Korean, and refers to the fact that their pizzas are designed to be low calorie, and therefore are targeted at female consumers. Personally I find Mr. Pizza's offerings slightly pricey, and have only been there once. (Their pizzas tend to cost something around W20,000 [twenty bucks American].) But to each his own.

Also, if you live in Korea, you have probably also heard lots of rabidly nationalistic statements that fly in the face of logic, and sometimes seemingly obvious fact. Like people extorting with an unsettling fierceness in their eyes that, “Korea is the best country in the world!” Everything Korean is the best. Period. Oranges, cars, you name it. There is no arguing with the mentality. It simply is. And it has become – at least in the minds of radically differently educated Westerners working and living in Korea – what Monster Island aptly terms "a meme of Koreans as irrational nationalists.”

(Here is a stunning example, which I found at the The Grand Narrative. In this Korea Times article, a staff reporter uncovers the global conspiracy that Christmas trees are really from Korea. And the shocker is that Korea gets no credit for this, and so they must seek damages and royalties from other nations.)

So this is really an amazing spoof commercial. The CEO of Mr. Pizza explains how pizza was really invented in Korea, lampooning common features of Koreans' sometimes bent logic. It’s a pretty brilliant bit of satire, and that makes me happy. Since satire is exceedingly rare in Korea. Especially satire about anything related to Koreans’ fierce and dogmatic national pride.

Enjoy. And you're welcome.