Roboseyo

Weekly Round-up: Links from the Radio Show, and Something Funny

2012-01-27T12:28:00.001+09:00

Every Thursday, at 8:30AM, I present a short piece called "Blog Buzz" on TBS English radio 101.3's morning show. In it, I discuss the stories that have been generating buzz, or just catching my interest as something unique, interesting, or worthwhile, on the Korea blogs, during the last (approximate) week.

Here are some of the things I shared this week:

My Two Favorite accounts of Seollal this year were Xweing, a Chinese Malaysian who lives in Busan, reflects on the differences between Lunar new year in Malaysia, and in Korea -- because I'm from a culture that doesn't celebrate Lunar New Year, Korean New Year is basically a family thing, where in Malaysia, there are street parties, decorations and fireworks -- it's a much more public event.

http://xweing.blogspot.com/2012/01/celebrating-cny-in-korea.html

There's a wistfulness here, kind of like the writings Western expats have when they write about Korean Christmas, that you don't get from Western writers talking about Korean New Year, and it's very interesting. Western expats write about Korean Lunar New Year with more curiosity, because it's new to us, so Xweing's perspective is refreshing.

If I Had A Minute To Spare has a New Years account that seems more familiar to western expats, about visting his wife's family in Gangwon-do.

Ask A Korean continued his series on Suicide in Korea with part four: worth reading, and a reminder that saying "Korea has a suicide culture" and leaving it at that is an intellectually lazy cop-out: observing a cultural phenomenon insists we ask, "How did the culture get this way?" --there's still work to be done. Especially in Korea's case, where in the early '80s, Korea's suicide rate was one of the world's lowest.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/01/suicide-in-korea-series-iv-how-suicide.html

What should you do this weekend?

If I had to choose only one thing Chris in South Korea has ever made, to be linked, spread, and shared, this would be it. The entertaining and helpful flowchart "What to do this weekend?" (a polished final version of one he made a little while ago) asks a bunch of simple questions that guide you towards a host of sights and activities to try or see all around Korea. Good weather? Bad weather? Flush with cash? Broke? Wanna live it up? Wanna take it easy? Tired of palaces and temples? There's something for you. It's Seoul-centric -- Going to Daegu or Busan are options on the "Get out of town" side, but it's interesting, and if you try to do every single activity on the list, you'll have a frantic year (or two) in Korea, but come away having had a pretty darn good experience of the country.

Give it a look! Bookmark it, link it, share it, and refer to it.

Last One:

Finally, we didn't have time to cover it on air, last week or this, but I'd like to send you to check out Charles Montgomery's great piece on the problems (he's had) with Korean self-study. It's an entertaining account of the circular "new book/tail off/forget what I've learned" cycle. The article ends with a good argument for getting into formal classes.

Interestingly, it's hosted as a guest post on the blog of Hanguk Drama, whose author is a self-taught Korean speaker, and has managed to find a method or motivation Mr. Monty didn't. Go read it here.

A couple more:
These weren't on the radio, of course, but Stephen Colbert's interview of "Where The Wild Things Are" author Maurice Sendak is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Part 1:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Part 2:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Source

And... I've been on a Tom Waits kick lately. He's probably my favorite singer... and that's some rare air up there... and he's made about ten albums I'll listen to without even thinking about hitting the "Skip" button... and that's hard to do. Offhand, I can only think of two or three other artists who have made more than two albums during which I'd never hit "Skip"

Maybe some day I'll blog a list of albums I listen to without ever hitting "Skip," but not today.

Today, here's a list of Tom Waits' albums, ranked from worst to best, and I'd recommend any of the top ten to you, if you love music that takes you on a journey, and a well-written song.

Baby News!

2012-01-25T15:00:00.000+09:00

Not mine, though. Go to Ms. Lee To Be's blog and congratulate her on the arrival of her little one.

While you're there, browse her archives for some very insightful posts on the Korean pediatric hospital/doctor/care system.

YAY!

The Deal with 떡 (Ddeok): Korea's Weird Rice Cake

2012-01-22T03:29:00.002+09:00

This stuff.

(Image source)

There's a ddeok shop not too far from where I live, that sells the best ddeok I've ever eaten. And I've eaten my share: a former home of mine was near Nakwon Sangga, also known as that huge building that sells tons of musical instruments (and features a movie theater best known for [perhaps formerly] being a gay hook-up spot), and at one end of the pass where the road goes under that building, there are two shops, across the street from each other, that sell really good ddeok.

What is ddeok? If you live in Korea, and interact with Koreans, you've probably had this experience: a Korean says "Hey there (your name): I'd like to give you a traditional Korean snack. It's really delicious!" The degree of enthusiasm might vary, but a whole lot of Koreans like ddeok, some enough to make overstated claims about its deliciousness. Then they give you a round thing that's perhaps the size of a mini-muffin, half a piece of pound cake, or a large piece of candy or toffee. You put it in your mouth... and it's this weird, heavy, dense, C-H-EEEEE-W-Y rice-tasting thing that's mildly sweet at best, and perhaps covered in powders that make it the experience of eating it similar to putting a spoonful of flour in your mouth with a hunk of unflavored, unsweetened toffee (that doesn't get softer in your mouth), or gummy peanut butter (that doesn't taste like peanuts). To be polite, because of the very expectant look on your Korean friend's face, you say "oh yeah. It's good." But your mind is racing, going "can I spit this out without being noticed?" and "What the HELL is this?"

You decline a second piece, and avoid it in the future.

There are three main ways people encounter ddeok: in soup (ddeok guk - a traditional new year's meal), in spicy sauce (ddeokbokki, a very popular street food), and as a snack, in little slabs or balls.

If we must assign everything in Korea a western/international parallel, then ddeok is Korea's Christmas Cake: heavy, popular holiday gift, really filling, acquired taste (to say the least), many varieties, REALLY well-loved by those who like it, but those who don't like it really, really don't get what the fuss is about... and the subject of a disproportionate number of situations where somebody has to pretend they like a holiday gift more than they actually do.

Image source

I won't say ddeok is my favorite Korean food, but if you put it in front of me, I'll try it. As with most foods, I don't usually like foods per se -- I like good food. Crappy food is crappy, and a crappy version of my "favorite" food is still crappy, while good food is good, and a good version of a food I usually don't like, is still good. I've had maeuntang (usually a dish I REALLY dislike) that I loved this year. And I've had spaghetti (which is my favorite dish, cooked properly) that I hated.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm always startled by how strong, and negative, the response is when I ask, offer, or discuss ddeok with an expat -- it's not the most accessible of Korean foods, I know, but the reaction, it seems to me, is out of proportion... especially considering that many people I know who hate ddeok as a snack, still happily eat ddeokbokki (ddeok in spicy sauce). In this post, I'm talking about the snacks, which are packable, so they're often encountered on picnics and field trips.

As always, after thinking about this a little too much, I've cooked up a personal hypothesis as to why ddeok gets such a negative response.

Problem 1: As with Kimchi, Korean Koreans have grown up around other Ko-Ko's, so they don't have outside reference points who haven't grown up eating the same foods, to provide an outside view and inform them, "Hey there. Chapchae's a very accessible food for people who don't know anything about Korean food. So is bulgogi. You might want to hold off on juk (bland rice porridge) and nurungji (bland scorched rice) soup and not build people's expectations for soju or kimchi too high, because at best they're acquired tastes, and don't taste as good to people who didn't drink their way through university/grow up with them." The same echo chamber/cultural pride double-whammy that leads (the kind of) Koreans (who offer to show new FOB expats around) to believe every foreigner in Korea wants nothing more than to see palaces palaces palaces (when I got here, the first three Koreans who wanted to show me around Seoul all, independently brought me to Gyeongbokgung) contributes to a lack of self-awareness about which foods non-Koreans will take to more easily, and which require some briefing on what to expect.

As Joe Zenkimchi has been telling us, in his sexy way, for years now, many Koreans simply have no idea which Korean foods are appealing to non-Koreans. To the detriment of Korean food promotions, and the successful introduction of new arrivals to Korean foods. I've seen this some people around me as well: yes, dwenjang is a representative Korean food... it's also really strong-smelling and tasting, and takes a few tries to get used to. It's a great pick for someone inquisitive who's been here three months, but not for someone who only has a week here.

Problem 2: there's really no snack similar to ddeok in the west. Even the rice most westerners eat isn't the sticky variety they like in Korea. Most chewy snacks in the west are very sweet (think salt-water toffee, skittles or the various brands of fruit-flavored chewy snacks). Most bland-tasting snacks are salted and/or quite crunchy (think corn chips, shortbread cookies, or plain popcorn), and often/usually taken with flavorings or garnishes (butter, salsa, dips). Foods that are somewhat similar to familiar foods are easier for people to like, because we can categorize it more easily - that's why genre movies and musicians are easier to promote than genre-defying films and musicians. Which radio station do you put Florence and the Machine onto? Rock? Pop? Chamber? Folk? Twee-folk? Aw screw it. Because there's no readily available snack category I could recognize and assign ddeok to, I don't know how to respond to it.

Problem 3: It's often one of the first Korean snacks a Korean sticks under the nose of new expats... or at least introduce far too early in the Korea experience. Ddeok is good in its own way, especially when it's fresh (it's like croissants that way: don't even bother eating a croissant that's more than 24 hours old. Ditto for a good ddeok. The best time to eat it is when it's fresh out of the steamer.) But it's a very Korean type of snack, and as such, people new to the cuisine would be better prepared to enjoy it for what it is, and compare it to other reference points within Korean cuisine (in which context it makes more sense), if they already have a solid grounding in the variety of tastes and textures that are common to Korean meals and snacks.

Problem 4: The ddeok expats are given is often not the best example of ddeok. I've had some good ddeok, and I've had some bad ddeok, and the stuff wrapped in plastic the you can pick up as an afterthought next to the cash register at the Ministop on your way to meet that new Canadian teacher who you're going to show around Gyeongbok palace? Not the best. That's like talking up Canada's beer culture (microbrew. mmm) and then introducing it with a can of warm Molson Canadian (Canada's Hite).

I think more expats in Korea would like ddeok if they were given good ddeok, and were prepared for it, both by having had a variety of Korean foods and snacks beforehand, and with a little warning about what's to come, and being alerted that many find it an acquired taste. I'm kind of a fan now... if it's good, but it took me a while to get there.

Wikipedia is going dark to protest SOPA. So Did I.

2012-01-19T14:13:00.000+09:00

Why am I against SOPA?

A South Korean parallel: South Korea has laws protecting the nation from North Korean spies, that were written in the Cold War (that is: harsh and a little reactionary, because that was the political climate at the time). Problem is, now that South Korea’s a democracy, those laws still haven’t been updated to account for the fact South Koreans have way more freedoms now than they did in the ‘70s, when thousands of journalists and critics of the government were arrested and/or had their reputations or careers ruined.

And the reason it makes me nervous to come across laws that cast such a wide net is this:

First: It’s impossible to monitor ALL online activity that might be North Korea friendly/threatening to the stability of the South Korean government. In the same way, it's impossible to block ALL content that might be pirated.

Next: If we can’t monitor ALL activity, we must ask by what principle people decide who to monitor, and who to ignore: when to exercise the law and bring someone in for interrogation, and when to let it slide. When to move to shut down or block their website, and when to let it slide.

But: All too often, the way decisions are made on who to scrutinize, aren’t so much on who’s actually most North Korea friendly, but who’s pissed off the government currently in power the most -- simply because they're the ones who got the government's attention

So: The law amounts to free license for people with power to hound those who piss them off, by pulling on a pretty-much unrelated hook that almost EVERYBODY has in their cheek, which will, regardless that it’s not really connected to the offense they committed, still put them in a really bad position. If we make farting illegal, then I have a blank slate to accuse anyone I dislike of farting and thus get them out of my hair on a

There’s just too much danger of selective application of this law to become a lever that the moneyed businesses in power use to bully the little guy, and control what the little guy sees and reads. When this guy's podcast got too popular, there was a convenient way available to shut him up without having to look at the legality of prosecuting him over his podcast. And they did it.

3. The people trying to protect copyright online are fighting a losing battle, and whether this law gets passed or not, will find themselves needing to find a new revenue stream anyway. Even the SOPA will only delay the inevitable, which is this: record companies become irrelevant, because technology's reached a point where anybody can cut an album with some instruments and a computer, and digitally distribute it and become famous in their musical genre, if they're good. And it's good for music that it's so easy to make music.

Here are the two best posts I've found explaining SOPA. Go read them. If you're an American, write your local congressperson. Do it.

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/the-stop-online-piracy-act-sopa-and-the-protect-ip-act-pipa-explained-with-profanity-.php

The video at the beginning of this post is a great explanation of why EVERYBODY (not just Americans) should care about this:

http://lifehacker.com/5860205/all-about-sopa-the-bill-thats-going-to-cripple-your-internet

Korea Heaven for Cyclists? The Country, Maybe; Seoul, Hell No

2012-01-13T16:15:00.000+09:00

This big sign in a subway station kind of bothers me. It's about bike trails... clearly out of the city. It looks pretty; I'd like to bike there. I've had some great experiences biking around towns and countrysides outside of Seoul.

See, it's all well and good for Korea to be working on increasing and improving biking trails. I love that, actually, and as soon as I'm out of Seoul, renting a bike to explore the area I've landed, is one of my favorite things to do with Wifeoseyo.

But there's a problem with calling Korea (and especially Seoul) a biking mecca (and I'm not saying anybody has: this is a bit of a straw man, but I have a point to make, so bear with me here.)

Honestly, I'm not the guy to talk about bike trekking across the entire nation: I've never tried it, though I'm sure a country that's 70% mountainous would present challenges. Small towns often have some nice places to bike near their tourist spots, and many I've visited have bike rentals available: AWESOME.

And Seoul is an AWESOME place for recreational biking. Awesome awesome awesome. The Han River Park, the streams that go all the way up to Uijeongbu and down to Bundang, Cheonggyecheon and its off-shoot up to Hansung University station, the Olympic Park and Seoul Forest, the area around World Cup Stadium, and I'm sure there's a bunch I'm missing there: Seoul is a great place for recreational biking.

In fact, all the pictures on this post except one or two were taken on the same amazing (exhausting) day in October.

But here's the problem with advertising Seoul as a biker's haven:

It just ain't. Unless you're doing it for your health. If you're biking to work? You're taking your life into your hands.

Along Hongje Stream.

There are almost no biking lanes, almost anywhere in the city. Those right hand lanes where people usually bike? You're in danger of getting clipped by a taxi, or having the tar scared out of you by a bus, at any time. Sidewalks? Korean people's habit (and this is by no means exclusively Korean: every culture has people who lack spacial awareness or consideration) of walking three abreast, shoulder-to-shoulder, or with smartphones and headphones, means that you're gonna need a hell of a bell, and even then, the occasional dumbarse will just stare at you and not figure out that you're ringing the bell because they're the one in the way. So... road biking is scary and dangerous, and sidewalk biking is barely faster than walking at times.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Dumbass pedestrian.

Chicken or the egg: are Koreans terrible at sharing the sidewalk with bikes because nobody bikes on sidewalks here, or does nobody bike on sidewalks here because Koreans are terrible at sharing the sidewalk with bikes?

Near Hansung University.

Here's another one: do very few Koreans under 60 use bikes to get around because Korean drivers are terrible at sharing the road with them, or are Koreans terrible at sharing the road with bikers because so few people under sixty use bikes to get around?

Why is this a problem? Utter. Bike lane. Fail. This is the bike lane in front of Gyeongbok Palace.

See how the only thing separating the bike lane from the driving lane is a white painted line? Well buddy, cars can drive over paint very easily. So can motorbikes, buses (I've seen it repeatedly happen), and taxis seem to enjoy driving over white paint lines.

And that's where there's a bike lane at all. If I worked in the downtown core, I'd be terrified to bike there. I'd wear two helmets, and a padded suit that looked like this:

The really funny thing about the Gwanghwamun bike lane fail is that right down in Mangwon, they've figured out how to do it right:

Those metal guards tell drivers, "Bikes only... or we'll wreck your car up"... and I bet it works!

Along the Hongje Stream, on the way towards World Cup Stadium, near the Hilton Hotel.

And... sorry to pull this into the discussion, but it's true...

Japan completely, totally, absolutely obliterates Korea, in terms of making the roads bike friendly.

Look what I randomly stumbled across in Kyoto when I was there with Wifeoseyo: a bike parking garage! It was beautiful. I saw people riding bikes in business attire there. I saw stylish people riding bikes there. I loved it.

Look how many bikes it can store, in how much smaller a space than a car parking lot! You know how everybody complains that there's no parking in downtown Seoul? Well...

My own theories as to why Seoul is ass for commuter cyclists?
1. Seoul is too hilly.
2. Bikes are for poor people. Korea is not far enough removed from its impoverished past to have lived down this stigma and notice how much cheaper, and how much more space efficient bikes are than ~~penises~~ ~~status symbols~~ cars.
3. Bikes are for kids. It's undignified to ride a kid's toy to work. And heaven forbid I sweat on the way to or home from work!

So nobody takes bikes to work... so nobody agitates to make Seoul more bike friendly outside of park space... the fact Seoul has lots of recreational biking options means that city planners can point at them and ignore the fact Seoul is terrifying to traverse, and horribly set up for bike commuters, and Seoul drivers are dreadfully unable to share the road with bikers, because they never have to.

Next time you're stuck in a Seoul traffic jam, though, I want you to think of this picture.
(source)

Will it always be this way? Probably not. Seoulites will figure it out. Eventually. The amount of recreational biking in Seoul has increased a lot lately, so that might be a good sign for the future of bike lanes and heedful drivers. Maybe when somebody brings more expensive bike brands into the country, so that people can use their bike brand like a North Face coat, and still compete for prestige while cycling, we'll see a change. Anyway, the pretend bike lane in front of Gyeongbok Palace annoys me, and I had to get that off my chest.

Rant over.

Kids React to Kpop Hatefest!

2012-01-12T12:41:00.001+09:00

Update: Babyseyo came home from the hospital on Tuesday...
and is in fine form again.

But Kpop hate?

I first spotted this at Foreign/er Joy... since January 8, this video's grabbed around 800 000 Youtube hits, spawned a huge number of angry, defensive, or simply butthurt responses from Kpop fans, and given us a little more grist for the discussion of whether Kpop would ever make it, "big time" (whatever that means) in America.

As I've spent a lot of time talking about Kpop lately, I feel duty-bound to post this, and host a discussion about it.

My own thoughts:
1. the kid in the striped shirt has clearly had somebody (maybe his dad, maybe an older cousin) training him to have contempt for modern pop in general - not just K-pop. And likes attention and drama.
2. The girl who says, if the group is all arranged and planned by a manager... "if I even liked one of them, I would pretty much be liking the person that trained them" is bang on, as is the kid who says, "So they basically make them to be their puppets...I hope they get paid well."

So... watch the video. It's an interesting view of the differences in the way American kids that age are trained to appreciate art and creativity, and what young Koreans are trained to appreciate and admire... sprinkled with a little hate here and there.

In response to that hate, the K-pop shock troops have responded with hate of their own. Responses have been bitter and defensive in large part....
Check here and here and here and here (for a longer response)... and over 3000(!) comments on AllKpop.

Best post I've seen on it so far (linked in the comments) is this thoughtful talk about orientalism, exoticism, and who is asking these kids questions/editing the video, at "Adventures in the 4077th" It also uses the word "Koreaboos" which is a word I would love to see, read and hear more often.

One thing I'll say for sure about these fine brothers (makers of the video): my hat's off to them. Kpop fans were certainly ripe to be trolled, and they're clearly reaping the benefits in hits and notoriety, in the proud tradition of Stephen Colbert.

What say you, readers?

My life these days... in photos

2012-01-11T13:46:00.000+09:00

So here's why I no longer wear my good clothes around the house...

(take note, Black Out Korea: baby vomit's cuter and funnier than adult vomit)

If you parse this photo carefully, you can see most of the story of my year:
1. My brand new glasses! Getting my health check for a new job, I was surprised at how much better my right eye could see than my left, so l went in for an eye check and it turns out my left eye is doubled up with both myopia and astigmatism. This is a fairly recent development: I blame my ipod touch.

2. Retainer. My braces are off, but I still have to wear that retainer. Between getting glasses and needing a retainer, you'd expect my life's biggest stress to be how close to the "cool" table I get to sit in the middle school cafeteria... but
3. the mobile behind my shoulder, and the traces of baby barf on the collar of my shirt (if you look carefully) are signs that I have other things to worry about than all but the most promiscuous (or uneducated about prophylactics) of middle-school kids.

I think this was in the Euljiro underground shopping center. Cindelela indeed.

If you look carefully in my basket of coffee paraphernalia, you'll notice evidence that an ajumma now lives with us (Wifeoseyo's mom is here helping with the baby)... hand-drip stuff, beans, and...

le sigh.

A few more:
Took a hike to Guknyeongsa with a few expat buddies... it was great, and I took these pictures. (Here's what to look for on your map/mountain guide -- it's along the Bukhan Mountain ridgeline)

go down this lane:

And you'll get to this big buddha statue, which overlooks the valley across from the peak of Bukhansan. It's a very nice hike if you know how to find it. The mirrored panes enclose shelves holding thousands of little buddha statues.

That buddha is HUGE!

Sick Babyseyo

2012-01-08T19:01:00.003+09:00

Warning: the final picture in this post contains chest hair.

Babyseyo and Roboseyo.

You may notice the newest addition to my family: Spectcloseyo.
Yes. I have joined the ranks of the bespectacled, glasses-wearing four-eyes. And to all of my friends on whose glasses I at some point put a fingerprint as a prank: I'm sorry. I'm a jerk.

So Babyseyo got a cough last week. On Wednesday, we brought him to the pediatric clinic near our home; they gave him a two-days' worth prescription, and said, "If this doesn't set him right, bring him to a real hospital."

On Friday, he was worse than Wednesday, if anything, his crying had acquired a ragged buzz-saw edge to it that he didn't usually have, and he wasn't smiling: just looking around with big, "You can help me with this, right?" eyes.

So... here's peaceful babyseyo (he folds his arms like a buddha when he's really at peace)

OK ok. Or a mad villain concocting evil schemes (if the light is right)

They looked at him and said "We'd like to check him in, please." And he looked like this.

Bronchopneumonia.

Call Rudolph: the baby hospital's horning in on his turf. The gadget that measures his blood oxygen saturation and pulse has made his toe glow. Wifeoseyo did not find my shiny toe jokes funny... and I'm pretty shiny toes don't run in her side of the family, so I'll have to ask my dad about my side.

But readers...
I don't know how to describe what it is to see your own baby like that. It'd be like describing sex to a virgin, or red to a blind person - meaningless platitudes, or words that seem to fall far below the act... but every parent will nod their head and know. It's the final step in bonding with your kid, I think: seeing your little one sick takes all the deep roots of love that have been building, and suddenly reveals them to you, like a flash of lightning outlining the tree in your yard, all at once, in an instant, in every staggering detail.

He's been in the hospital since Friday, as my twitter and facebook people will know. He's better: eating more and smiling again, but it was only today that the doctors finally told us just how bad he was doing on Friday, because they didn't want to upset us then. Not that you had to tell us he was in a bad way.

We're getting good care at the hospital, but anyway... that's baby's first sick. So if you've been waiting for me to answer an e-mail or comment at Roboseyo, please bear with me. And if you're the praying type, say a short one for Babyseyo.

'cause I love this kid.

Shakespeare vs. Sir Francis Bacon, and why @Holterbarbour is a Twitter Genius

2012-01-04T13:34:00.002+09:00

@HolterBarbour and I have been trading barbs, wisecracks and puns for a while now on twitter: he's one of my favorite twitterheads/tweeps/whatever they're called these days.

Recently, he's been asking some of his twitter pals for topics, and writing limericks about them. And they're hilarious. I asked him for a topic, and gave him "having snow fights with dirty snow in the city."

He wrote this:
Before you start tossing 'round snow,
The levels of that which you throw
should at least be commensurate
to the layer of expectorate
horked up by old men on the go

And gave me a hella hard topic (especially for an old humanities major): "The relationship between capacitance and capacitive resistance as represented in a sine curve"

I sent him this:
In capacitors of parallel plates

as we search for resistance in rates,

capacitive reactance
goes up with more distance

while capacitance drops with more space

And figured I'd earned the right to toss him a tough topic, too. He got this: "Prove that Sir Francis Bacon was not the author of Shakespeare's oeuvre in a limerick". Here's what he sent me:

On the Authorship of The Works of William Shakespeare (in Limerick)

Baconian Theorists propose
That Shakespeare's poems and prose
Were Sir Bacon's works
And their telltale quirks
Prove by whom they had been composed

The first to submit this conjecture
Was a teacher, who, when not in lecture
Would bend every ear
(Whether it wanted to hear)
And soon, her folly had wrecked her

(Incidentally, her name too was "Bacon",
But his family she had no stake in
Not heir to his fame
Nor his praise, nor acclaim
Nor a penny of what he had raked in.)

In others this notion took root
And in droves they soon followed suit:
With Smith, Bruce and Spedding,
Pott and Wigston getting
Nietzsche's attention, to boot!

One idea the Theorists prefer
Is the use of bi-literal cipher
In Bacon's known pieces
Alas, such caprices
In Shakespeare's named works don't occur

It's thought that since he was selected
As an Attorney General respected
To be known as a bard
Would have harmed his regard
And he wished such attention deflected

When Bacon began that profession
So started the Shakespeare recession
In which output decreased
To the point where it ceased
Law trumping artistic digression

Also, the Theorists conclude,
Is that Henry VIII may allude
To his dishonorable discharge
But that text was at large
Near five years before that ensued

Analyses of both of their styles
And Bacon's intellect and wiles
Hint that a real William S.
Would be a dumb rube at best
And was a creation of Francis B.'s guiles

But who wrote the Shakespearean oeuvre?
And if patent or pseudonymous maneuver?
My role as appraiser
Is to use Occam's Razor
And insist that a Theorist be prover.

So... try and top that, humorous poem-writers!

And for posterity:

Here are some others we've exchanged:

I asked him for one about the average Korean's dislike of cilantro:

The average Korean's aversion
And proclivity for casting aspersions
Against herbs like cilantro
is not something he'll outgrow...
since it's a 한요리 규칙 perversion

He asked me to write a limerick about writing a Your limerick [a five line poem] topic is: "Writing a haiku [a three line poem] about writing a clerihew [a four-line, usually humorous poem]"

I sent him:

The limerick, clarihew, and the haiku
Have five lines, four lines, three, and now two.

and then:

As briefer poems comically come off the shelf
soon a zero-line zinger will swallow itself.

He wrote (I can't find it now: twitter error?) something like this:

As length reaches zero singularity
The humor approaches infinite hilarity.

I answered,

as smaller thug crimes
need bigger brass knuckles
the shorter the rhyme
the bigger the chuckle

He said,

I'll ask my next victim
Whether your dictum
holds true as I'm kicking his crotch...
If so then then your theorem
Will act like truth serum
And he'll laugh as I steal his gold watch

I said,

If so sure of my tip it could lead you to clip
some hapless mugg-ee just to test it
I'll add an addendum
so you seek someone random
to watch you get fully un-vested

I asked for: A limerick that outlines the aesthetic and artistic philosophy of K-pop video producers.

In all K-Pop MVs throughout
With aegyo and lips in a pout
The girls look demure
but their movements ensure
that male viewers at home rub one out.

He asked for one on the abuse of CGI and 3D technology in modern cinema.

In the seventies, auteur directors
used nudity as male erectors
to cover weak stories
we now have the glories
Of digital 3-D projectors!

So... did I just try to use my skill with a limerick to prove my coolness?

By limerick to prove one's non-lameness
Risks choosing criteria baseless.
It seems to all of us
To be analogous
To gangsta raps on my urbane-ness.

And that's all I can handle for now.

Stay laughing, readers.

Hyuna the Stripper and Ajosshi Fans

2012-01-03T16:20:00.000+09:00

Eat Your Kimchi ripped Hyuna's video, Troublemaker Troublemaker, to pieces, for Hyuna's one-dimensional sexiness.

Tumblrite Briana, at Noonaneomuhomo, took issue with Simon and Martina's review.
Simon and Martina responded with an explanation of what they were trying to say about Hyuna.

I'm No Picasso added a response to it, with an interesting post about the way women in Kpop videos these days are taking on the Male Gaze directly - with Hyuna as a prime example of that - rather than pretending it isn't there.

It's been an interesting conversation, but I'd like to tie it in with one other thing:

James on The Grand Narrative has been writing about "Ajosshi Fandom" or "Uncle Fans." Read up here.

Basically, here's the rundown:
K-pop girl bands started targeting males in their 30s and 40s. All well and good... those guys have money to burn! The problem is, especially when the performers in these girl groups are underage, it gets kind of uncomfortable for older men to be leering at videos of underage girls in short skirts shaking their asses, now, doesn't it?

To get around this, the discourse of the "ajosshi fan" was invented. Ajosshi fans, or uncle fans, claim their feeling toward the girls' is like a friendly uncle’s feelings toward his niece - a little paternal, a little protective, but most of all, innocent and de-sexualized. This is a convenient justification, because by claiming to be an “uncle fan” a guy can pretend he hasn’t noticed that these band members are chosen and the videos are designed for sex appeal. By throwing up his hands and shouting "Uncle" he gets to ogle underage girls, but the "Uncle fan" explanation lets him off the hook without feeling like a creep. Kind of like the creepy uncle who tries to look down his niece's shirt while going on about how she's growing up. I'm sure my female readers could comment on how NOT benign such affection is... even though sometimes it probably is meant in all innocence.

To be fair: not every “uncle fan” is a creep, but if we acknowledge that sexual interest IS part of the K-pop girl group package, we can start discussing things like guidelines for the appropriate use of underage girls in k-pop groups. And we can recognize that the "uncle fan" explanation may be true for some men who claim to have "paternal feelings"... but the number of men who truly have only "uncle-ish" feelings is probably fewer than the number of men who claim that's why they're avid followers of K-pop girl groups.

And let's just call bullshit on that anyway... because if I saw any of my nieces dressed in the kinds of uniforms k-pop girls wear, dancing that way, and saw thousands of men my age staring at the videos, I wouldn't be proud and paternal. I wouldn't want to give her a squeeze around the shoulders, a chuck on the chin, and say "nice job, niece." I'd be shocked and upset and want to stand in front of the TV to block it, not to watch it again, if it were my niece. If we could ask every "Uncle fan" who watches these videos, "How'd you feel if it was your daughter up there, dressed like that," I think we'd find the "Uncle fan" fiction doesn't hold water. (Hell, I bet we could just ask them how many of the words to the songs they know to find out which ones don't give a damn about the girls, and just like looking.)

If we aren’t honest enough to admit that K-pop is selling sex, then I think it’s dishonest to act like there’s nothing sexual about dressing a young girl up in the uniforms they wear in K-pop videos.

Skirts that show panties - this costume led to... either the costume or the song, or the video being banned. Can't be bothered to check. Girls' day: "Twinkle Twinkle" and buddy, if you're watching this video for the music... you're lying. (discussed here and here)

But whether Hyuna is successful at projecting the kind of sexuality she wants to project or not (which is the point of Eat Your Kimchi's beef), here's what videos like hers do:

When the girls are, as INP says, looking directly at the camera, acting like adults instead of little girls, they're confronting the male gaze that ogles them in their videos. If the girls are using aegyo, I'm an uncle watching a video that's telling a cute story about girls acting like children and being cute... that happens to be sexy (oh, but that's not why I'm watching it: I'm watching it because I like those cute childish faces and that funny fairy tale storyline that involves licking oversized prop lollipops bwahaha).

Videos like this give me that "out"

But with Hyuna, I'm watching a sexy video that's a sexy video because it's a sexy video that happens to be a sexy video, and there's no pretending about it. I'm not attracted to the childish costumes, and I can't pretend that's why I watch, because there AREN'T childish costumes and baby-faces. They pull the rug on the "Uncle fans" and say, "You're going to watch the video because it's sexy, and we're not giving you any short-cut or justification. Because we're f$&#ing sexy, and that's that."

Brown Eyed Girls is making videos like this. (mentioned by Eat Your Kimchi in their Troublemaker review)

You can't pretend that's anything other than a sexy video.

So now, let's actually talk about sexiness in Kpop videos, instead of inventing fictions, justifications, and fishy discourses that excuse ourselves from having to admit what the video, and these kpop bands' sculpted images, are really about.

Talking about it is good.

2011 Look Back: Music and Favorites

2012-01-03T01:54:00.001+09:00

Two more things I like to talk about at year-ends: Music and Blawrgs.

I haven't seen enough movies in the cinema to really talk about 2011's films, and I don't pay enough attention to the movies playing when they're on my computer, to really talk about them.

But the best thing I watched this year was "Avatar: The Last Airbender," the Nickelodeon TV series. Don't even mention the movie, which compares to the TV series kind of like if you were expecting a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, and instead got a box of turkey poo: Aang is, far and away the most likeable protagonist I've seen in an animated series: he's human, he's funny, he's a hero, he learns, but he's also totally a kid - fun-loving and mischievous, even when he has to save the world. His journey is authentic and the choices he faces are smart, challenging, and, when you see what he chooses, satisfying. So go watch it.

I briefly mentioned what I love about December -- year-end lists -- so I thought I'd throw down a few of my favorite bands and albums from the year, and ended off with the blogs that have newly come onto my radar this year.

My favorite music - not all of it's from 2011, but I found it in 2011.

Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues - everybody loves these guys.

Vampire Weekend - Contra - if Phoenix listened to more of Paul Simon's "Graceland" they'd make this album.

Aphex Twin: Hangable Light Bulb - Electronica helped me study for grad school, and this was the most interesting of what I found this spring.

Tom Waits: Bad as Me - any time Tom Waits has a new album, I'm in. This is a solid album, though like Beck's recent album, "Modern Guilt" which, for the first (or at worst second) was a Beck album that sounded like a beck album (that is, which revisited places Beck had been before rather than looking somewhere new), this is a Tom Waits album that sounds like a Tom Waits album, rather than an album of Tom Waits going somewhere new. That said, this is a lean, taut Tom Waits album that demonstrates the kind of curt brevity required by the MP3 downloading "skip" generation.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver - I liked "Skinny love" on his last album. I like this one from top to bottom.

EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints - this would have been my favorite album ever for a while if I'd discovered it when I was 24. As it is, it's very nice, and EMA manages to move across a surprising range of sounds, all holding onto her center.

The Field: Looping State of Mind - surprisingly stirring for electronic music.

The Flaming Lips: At War with the Mystics - an older one, but I finally started to "get" older Flaming Lips this year. And the first two tracks are something else.

Fucked Up: David Comes to Life - a very rude, random e-mail informed me that Hardcore is totally different than death metal, last time I wrote about Fucked Up. And if all fans of hardcore and/or death metal are as rude as dear Stan (appropriate choice of name) I'm glad I have no plans to get into the genre as a genre. Then again... I know that I'd certainly write an e-mail deriding a stranger, if a blogger I read ever confused instrumental minimalist post-rock twee-folk with freestyle acoustic shoegaze tone-poetry. But who ever gets instrumental minimalist post-rock twee-folk confused with freestyle acoustic shoegaze tone-poetry? Good thing they don't! However, whatever "David Comes To Life" is, it's awesome. 20 minutes too long, though. I prefer things in a tight package, over things that sprawl.

Leonard Cohen: Live in London - give it some time. It'll grow on you. Leonard Cohen's about 130 years old by now, and still delivers a concert that is graceful, lovely, and touched with moments of real feeling, both in the songs, and between him and his audience.

Suckers: Wild Smile - if Sunset Rubdown listened to more David Bowie, this is what would happen.

The Tallest Man on Earth - Sometimes The Blues is Just a Passing Bird - the guy's voice is annoying and nasal... but the songs just work.

TuneYards - Whokill - so out of the blue. So, so, so good, I have no idea what to do with it, because I can't play any other music before or after I play this.

The Weeknd - Echoes of Silence - New singer, new addition to the list, I'm still breaking in this one, but I like how The Weeknd delivers his music so far. A LOT.

Micah P Hinson - ...And the Pioneer Saboteurs - more mediative and atmospheric than his earlier stuff (I adore his first album) - but it suits his voice and his feel.

Hope you like some of that. If you don't... I never promised you would.

NEXT: BLOGS!

Here are the blogs that caught my attention this year:
Burndog is fun.
Korean Kontext is a podcast that's scored some great guests, but not much buzz
The Dokdo Times picks up the torch as Dokdo Is Ours hangs up its pen.
Stupid Ugly Foreigner is, in my opinion, neither stupid nor ugly.
Ajumma's Journal - well-sourced, at its best when talking about how to enjoy nature in Korea
The Diplomat - it covers all of asia, but it's a fantastic source.
Alien's Day Out - bloggy, but wins points for discussing being a vegetarian in Seoul
If I Had A Minute To Spare, who hates top 10 lists.

2011: Another Year of Blogoseyo

2012-01-02T15:56:00.001+09:00

Happy New Year, folks. It's time to look back a little at 2011, for the year it was.

But first: North Korea wishes you a Happy New Year: (seriously: video uploaded January 1) From twitter account @PourMeCoffee

Anybody willing to post the lyrics in the comments?
Do you know any other countries that still use images of factories to project the image of a powerful, wealthy nation?

Back to the retrospective:

(aliens day out also has a 2011 best-of post)

It was an awesome year personally -

Highlights included a trip to the south sea, around Yeosu, with my wife and parents in-law in the spring, a one-year anniversary party in Niagara Falls, to celebrate our wedding with my Korean and Canadian families together, and, you know, baby. Who's laughing now. If you make motorboat sounds.

Among other things going on, in November I started going on air at TBS radio in the morning, and on Friday I did a year-end look back at 2011 in blogs. It's only from where I stand, but here are the blog topics and trends that caught my attention:

Cribbed from my notes for the TBS Radio segment (which can be found here - the 11/12/30 episode), though live radio never goes exactly according to script then, and thanks to the facebook ant twitter friends who reminded me of some of these stories:

Biggest Blog Stories in 2011

Not necessarily the biggest news stories, because I'm sure news websites are covering that... here are the blog stories that have caught my attention, and the attention of the other bloggers I've been reading:

Kim Jong Il's Death

The no-brainer. Of course, how this plays out will continue to be discussed over the course of 2012.

Itaewon FreedomThis video, featuring JYP, the creative force behind The Wondergirls and Rain, probably made the biggest K-blog splash of any musical video since "Kickin' It In GeumCheon"

(runner-up Korea-themed Youtube song: P00lman's "The Subway Song"

darn impressive for a one-person show.

Blackout Korea

The discovery of the "Blackout Korea" blog by Korean Netizens, followed by the opening of a "anti-Blackout" blog and enough angry comments at Blackout Korea to prompt the writer to take it offline, led to some interesting discussions. Interestingly: Blackout Korea is back online. With some rules for how things'll be run 'round here.

I wrote about Blackout Korea here, here. On Bloggers getting bullied into silence:

A post I liked about the issue of anonymity and blogs catching static, was written by The Bobster, about "Jake" the writer of Expat Hell. A blog that's had its own trouble with defensive nationalists (who don't actually live in Korea)

Kpop invades the “other” blogs.
For a long time, Kpop blogs have been their own ecosystem that don't cross over into the "other" k-blogs much. This year, with shows liek "Superstar K" and "I am a Singer" I've been following, and interested, in Kpop more than ever before, and some very cool blogs I like have been responding to what they're reading on the K-pop blogs, with some neat discussions. Do these count as Kpop? Maybe not... but the expat bloggers I follow have been taking more interest in Korean music (other than to scoff at plagiarism scandals) this year.

“See these rocks”
You know what I'm talking about. This was also my most commented blog post of the year. That post has links to most of the other blogs who wrote about the topic.

Tee hee.

SMOE cutting budget
-Because a lot of bloggers are English teachers, English teaching topics always attract a lot of talk.

Newcomers

It's hard to tag "newcomers" in a blog discussion, because the year a blog gains attention is usually not the same year it started posting, so I'm using "newcomers" in a very loose fashion, as you'll see. The three new(er) sites that have probably added most to the discussions I follow are The Three Wise Monkeys, who have run pieces by the former British Ambassador to Korea, Martin Uden (who has a blog himself), top North Korea expert Andrei Lankov, and ran an expose of a crooked travel agent that led to an arrest. I also featured them as Korea Blog of the Month at 10 Magazine this month (January 2010).

[A small parenthetical: Why Roboseyo Probably Shouldn't Write Angry:Many of my readers will remember that in the spring, I lashed out pretty angrily at 3WM over the series they wrote about ATEK (culminating in this one). I'll be honest: after that series, I was well prepared to thoroughly hate 3WM and everything they did. Hell, I wanted to... but what they did was turn out interesting and generally well-written pieces from a variety of voices that often don't get play in the English media about Korea, and I'd be foolish to deny that. I'm still not wild about the ATEK piece, especially since ATEK has been pretty much silent since then, and I haven't seen anything rise to prominence that (attempts to) perform similar services for English teachers. However, since that series, 3WM has done good work - its best work we've seen so far, in my opinion, so, good job on them.
And if adding a new, interesting voice to the English expat Korea media happened every time I ate my words, I'd do it more often... but this time, I was incorrect in my dismissal of that site, and I'm happy to say so.
(a previous instance when I wrote while angrily also led to an apology post this year.)]

CNNGo has been running travel-tip and hot-spot-type pieces that have sometimes led to good info, and have at other times caused frustrated backlashes from bloggers who thought their advice was off the mark.

My other favorite newish blog is “I’m No Picasso,” who’s not completely new, but who continues to write interesting things as a public school teacher with a really thoughtful and wise approach to life in Korea, and cultural issues.

2011 Blog Trends

Multimedia
2011 was, I think, marked by the rise of Korea multimedia. Youtube channels like Eat Your Kimchi, who blazed the trail... but also Steve the Qi ranger, Poolman, also known as Michael (whose subway video linked above went modestly viral in the Korean language internet), and a bunch of photography blogs, my favorite being DayvMattt [spelling corrected] and Hermit Hideaways, and the photo blog run by RJ Koehler - webmaster of The Marmot’s Hole, have come onto the radar this year.

I feel like I'm missing at least four or six important or awesome photography blogs about Korea, so if you know one, please please link it in the comments.

The SeoulPodcast was somewhat active, 10 Magazine started a podcast, and Korean Kontext - keia.podbean.com - has scored some really great guests, though it hasn't gotten much attention yet.

Rise of the tumblr blogs

The number and variety of Tumblr blogs has really exploded in 2011 - Tumblr’s a kind of different format, that makes it really conversation-intensive but a little harder to follow if you’re not used to it, but there are tons of discussions there that are really interesting, along with pictures of Kpop stars.

Diversification
It’s harder these days to point to a handful of blogs and say they’ve the “major” ones who totally dominate the discussions - which was possible in 2006 and probably in 2009. These days, not so much.

We’ve seen a diversification in the people blogging - it used to be mostly english teachers or people working in the English language media here - newspapers and magazines - and the types of blogs are becoming more varied. Newer blogs are giving me views into Korean corporate culture and other areas. I hope to hear more from them.

2012 Forecast

I foresee more multimedia - there’s a gap in podcasts, with only a handful making much noise. I predict more will come along.

Even more diversity Domination of blogs by (male, Seoul-based) English teachers will come to an end. This year, I hope to see student, office worker, and other blogs catch more attention. My dream? Some interesting blogs from Korea residents who originate in non-first-world countries writing interesting blogs in English - I’d love to see blogs from people living here from India, the Philippines or Malaysia, for example.

This restrospective is by no means definitive... but here are some ways to look back at the year of Blogoseyo:

Roboseyo's most visited (new) blog posts of 2011 (this will of course favor early posts which have had longer to accumulate pageviews). My "Best of Blogoseyo" one got the most non-home-page hits. Individual posts:
1. Nice Galaxy Tab Ad
2. Slutwalk
3. How to Avoid Getting Forced to Drink in Korea
4. Hyun Bin Psy, and why you can't skip your military service.
5. The "Ni-ga/See These Rocks" post.
6. I am A Singer
7. 12 Actually Useful Tips for Live in Korea
8. Nobody Owns Arirang (related: Who owns a culture)
9. On Netizens Finding Blackout Korea
10. Ten Things about The Last Godfather

All of my top five most commented pieces are also on the top ten most viewed list, except this one: (sexism in the K-blogosphere) so I'm not going to bother with a separate list.

Most interesting observation: none of my writings about English education and English teachers made the list, and almost all of them were analytical pieces on current news stories, or living in Korea tips. So... more of them, I suppose.

Other notable non-2011 posts getting a lot of views
Corporal punishment in Korea's schools
My review of "My Sassy Girl" (hated it)
and most of the pieces linked on the "best of blogoseyo" page. Which I'll need to update with pieces from 2011.

So... what top stories, awesome new photography blogs, podcasts, or general blogs, did I miss, readers?

2012 Will Be the Year of K-Pop. Forget the Mayans.

2011-12-29T15:20:00.000+09:00

I had a long talk with my wife about which K-pop group could make it in America, if any. Two years ago, I would have said probably not. Now... I'm starting to believe. I read an article this year suggesting that, with the rise of K-pop, this is the first time in a long time, that South Korea is attracting more of the world's attention than North Korea with its military brinksmanship, and I think I agree.

In previous conversations, the reasons I posited that K-pop hadn't made it so far were as follows:

1. To make it in America, as a person from a different culture, a number of things have to converge. You have to have most, preferably all of these features...

Be fluent in English and/or cool enough to come across in an English interview (see this post)
OR have some transcendent/singular ability in some area (Ricky Martin's dancing talent, Shakira's ass-shake, Gloria Estefan's stunning voice to draw examples from the latin invasion)
There (probably) needs to be a star - an individual at the center of it (sorry SNSD: too many, too indistinguishable.)
That star needs to have an attitude that appeals to American audiences -- some sass and color. (This is one of the main places where Boa fell short - the "kid works really hard and makes good" narrative goes over well in Asia... to make it in America, more is needed. The Mickey Mouse Club graduates who never established their own persona have evaporated. Without the nude photo leaks, nobody'd remember Vanessa Hudgens, and Justin Timberlake really established his own uniqueness as a star not with the Mickey Mouse club or his solo work (good as some of it is) but with "Dick In A Box" which was something we hadn't seen a popstar do before.
You need a sound, and maybe also a look, that's not like something else... or you need to take the sounds that are out there and do them better than anyone else.
You need a really, really great song for your debut. I think this is where Boa fell short -- she's an amazing dancer, and a decent singer, but "I'll Eat You Up" just wasn't there.

2. You need to work to make it in America -- my last post talked about BNL touring 300 nights a year, for years, to build up a following ready to spread the word once they had that really great radio song ready (even they needed a really, really great song to finally catch on).

But my stance on this one is changing... because of YouTube, which is basically achieving the same thing bands used to gain with those endless tours: establishing a fanbase ready to buy tickets next time you're in town.

The crucial question is simple: is YouTube (even with its dedicated Kpop channel) enough to get people out of their chairs and buying concert tickets, ordering CDs, posters, and t-shirts? I don't know if it is -- it's certainly less likely to do so than a friend excited about the show they went to, burning me a copy of their CD, or inviting me to join them at the concert, next time the band's in town.

On the other hand... Hyuna's video for "Bubble Pop" has 23 million views on YouTube, as of this writing. And you know what else? Justin Bieber got there mostly on strength of his YouTube channel. I'm not sure how many video views equals the threshhold these days to say "OK. Time for this singer to tour America and try to consolidate those YouTube views into a real fanbase" -- and maybe (as with Bieber), YouTube only works with stuff targeting tweens. Who knows? But I'm asking these questions now, where I used to sniff contemptuously at K-pop's chances of making it in America.

3. You need An American Producer/Promoter With Clout and Connections IN AMERICA to get your foot in the RIGHT doors.

This MIGHT be why the Wondergirls never quite took America by storm (though they might yet). Hero, as good as it was on its own (and hot on the coattails of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), also got a big boost when Quentin Tarantino, with all his credibility among film lovers, stuck his name on it. Somebody from America - who knows that well what sells there - needs to invite Kpop to America, saying "Hey. I think you're going to sell here. And I'm gonna help." With all his YouTube fans, Bieber still needed an agent to agree with his YouTube fans about his talent.

Also, this just in:

Will.I.Am (of The Black Eyed Peas) is bringing 2NE1 to America.

4. As a scene, K-pop is too narrow, and not robust enough to generate world-class talent.

When K-pop was all just lines of boys or girls dancing in step and singing songs written by Swedish songsters (or plagiarized by Korean songsters), under one of three all-powerful labels -around 2009- I'd have agreed with you... but strangely enough, the audition shows and the survival shows -- Superstar K and "I Am A Singer" have brought actual singers and musicians into the forefront over the last two years, in a way that makes me believe that Korea's media is approaching a point where real talent will find a space that will let it find an audience, and grow. Older singers, and raw-talented ones, are finding the stage they needed, and kids who didn't pass the JYP audition are getting "Korea's Got Talent" love and "Superstar K" love, and radio play. And concert tours. I feel a lot better about the scene now, that it'd capable of generating sustainable talent, and letting real talent rise.

Who's tried to make it so far?

Wondergirls didn't have one star for people to latch onto, and "Nobody" was almost there - the retro look was cool, but anybody in America would spot it as being copped from "Dreamgirls" - so much for "something we haven't seen before." I also don't think their English songs were different enough from what else was out there for them to make a splash... add to that the language limitations (and how their pronunciation and intonation sounded a touch off when singing in English)...

Boa is extremely talented, but didn't stand out from the crowd enough, and (worst of all) her song and video didn't. WonderGirls made more noise, partly by zeroing in on an audience (Tweens, by opening for the Jonas Bros.), and having a more distinct look.

Rain's English wasn't good enough, despite getting a lot of help from Stephen Colbert. And he's too old now to lead the next stage of the Korean Wave.

Who has the best shot?

So what now?

If Lee Hyori were 23 right now, and had just two ounces more sass, I'd pin my hopes on her. She came along eight years too early, or she'd be the clear choice.

If Wondergirls were going to catch on, they probably already would have. As it is, they'll probably be remembered as a good second try (after Rain) but not quite the charm.

Girls' Generation has too many members, and the aegyo will never play outside of Asia, and Asian fetish circles (who, rest assured, will find their YouTube videos without a US Tour's support)

Hyuna

Her song "Bubble Pop" was named by Spin Magazine as the ninth best song of 2011, and as I mentioned before, the video for that song has 23 million views right now. And the guy who wrote the article wasn't Korean. She also made it onto the SPIN staff's mixtape.

Honestly, as handicapping goes, she can 'pop' well - the ass-shaking dancing move in the video "Bubble Pop" - but Shakira, Beyonce, and a few other performers who are also great dancers simply...um... have more to pop (sorry). Hyori's stomach was closer to being a unique selling point than Hyuna's popping will ever be. Meanwhile, I don't hear enough from her musically to set her apart, and she simply isn't charismatic enough in her videos (Hyori was), to convince me that she has a real shot. I like what she's doing for K-pop in Korea (more about that later), but I don't think she'll be the flag-carrier to bring K-pop abroad.

The artists I think have a legitimate shot at making it in the west?

The aforementioned 2NE1 might be on their way - Will.I.Am joining the 2NE1 brigade certainly won't hurt.

Seoul Sidewalks: Two Great Videos

2011-12-29T13:39:00.001+09:00

Got a few bigger, more interesting posts coming down the line... and when I can find other people to hold the baby, I'll finish them... till then, two great videos about the pedestrian experience:

One of these is a little old: "Defensive Walking in Seoul" is a hoot, though, and worth re-watching.

This one I just saw today, on a facebook friend's status: a great way to deal with slow walkers. It's a Japanese video, but I bet it'd work here, too.

The needed tool can be found for 6-10000 won.

A Little More Kim JongIlia

2011-12-25T17:33:00.000+09:00

a funny Chinese commercial that riffs on Kim Jong-il/North Korea's totalitarian state and mass games:

One of the most important Korea blog posts out there:
"How to Disarm Kim Jong-Il (Kim Jong-eun too, I suppose) Without Bombing Him"

also: more about information leaking out of North Korea

Some reading Material...

2011-12-23T16:00:00.000+09:00

My Life! Teaching in a Korean University has a post I think you should read if you're thinking about teaching in a Korean university, titled "Ten Tips for Newbies to the Korean University Teaching Experience"

Also,

One of my favorite things about December/January is the year-end listifying. I don't have enough time to keep up on the numerous websides I'd have to keep up on, to really be on top of the best new music being made... but at the end of the year, every music website and writer makes these wonderful year-end lists that allow me to skim the cream of the year's reviews, and give me tune jollies all December and January. Spin.com's list is linked above. So far, the two I've liked best (that I hadn't already found during the year) are two albums ridiculously outside my normal range of musical preferences: electronica(!) and hardcore metal(!!!) To make it more (or maybe less) surprising, both were also follow-ups to previous albums I'd loved... and found on year-end best of lists. "Looping State of Mind," by The Field - a follow-up to their similarly amazing "From Here We Go To Sublime" (aka the most unexpected bliss-out I've ever had) -best track off that one: "Silent"

You don't have to like it... but I assure you, over a 50 minute album, these loops become something else entirely.

And... yep. Death Metal. the band Fucked Up impressed me a few years ago with "The Chemistry of Modern Life" -- by creating the most uplifting death metal I'd ever listened to, and have done it again with the sprawling (and about 15 minutes too long) "David Comes To Life" Here's the lead-in to the album -- the slow builds pile up into moments of transformation, and the band has a great knack for knowing exactly when to mix things up with a shift in the sound, pace, or feel.

Next:
I got into a little back and forth with John F Power on Twitter about this story:
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/toy-signs-changed-after-hamleys-accused-of-sexism-2961669.html A feminist blogger complained to a toy store about sorting their toys by "Boy's Toys" and "Girls' Toys." John thought the feminists were nitpicking, and trying to limit free speech for the sake of political correctness (which is something people like to complain about when it's not their group being marginalized with casual talk)

I say things like that ARE important... sometimes for subtle reasons. I think this comic explains why quite elegantly.

Source. There's more to it than that, and hopefully parents are playing an active role in helping their kids not feel limited by the gender expectations created by toys... but that's a good conversation starter at least, that.

Alien Teachers Korea has a post worth reading in response to the Native English stuff: "Why Korea Needs Native English Teachers, Now More Than Ever"

"If I Had a Minute To Spare" has a three-part "On Becoming a Writer in Korea" that, if you are, or want to be a writer in Korea, is worth reading.
Part 1
Part 2 (with links on where to submit stuff)
Part 3

And last but not least... go read this. Just... read it. Maybe I'll write about it more later. I have three other blog posts coming down the pipeline that I'd like to finish first, as well as a family thingy for Christmas/New Year.
"Who Is Korean? Migration, Immigration and the Challenge of Multiculturalism in Homogeneous Societies"

Annual "Don't Let Your Pipes Freeze" Post

2011-12-23T11:25:00.002+09:00

Put some insulation over the water pipes that are exposed in your front or rear verandah at your house tonight, if you live in Korea. 'Cause it's hella cold.

Or this might happen. (HT Brian in Jeollanam-do)

The older your building is, the more important it is to follow this advice. Leave your tap adrip overnight, so that the water doesn't sit still in your pipes, and run the chance of freezing. And maybe flush your toilet twice when you wake up in the morning.

Kim Jong-Il is Dead... What Now?

2011-12-19T14:00:00.000+09:00

[Update: More links]
Andrei Lankov's analysis is the one I trust the most. I've listened to him talk about North Korea in person, and he grew up in ~~Stalinist~~ [Correction:] Communist Russia, so he knows a thing or two about how these kinds of countries are run.
Two Posts from the Marmot's Hole with tons of links to coverage to other places.
AsiaPundits includes pictures and video clips.
I like Kushibo's analysis a lot.
LA Times
Toward a Kim Jong-il Reading List (from a Marmot's Hole commenter)

Before we get into speculation, here is something that every article about North Korea should include:

North Korea still operates concentration camps. There is only one limit on how shocking the scale of the human rights crisis in North Korea is: how much information we have on it. The fact Camp 22 exists, and has done so more or less quietly, is a damning repudiation of whatever lessons we were supposed to have learned in Auschwitz, and on every Human Rights organization in East Asia.

A documentary/presentation about a North Korean refugee who grew up in a North Korean gulag.

Get started at LiNK - Liberty in North Korea

More on North Korean death camps.

Come back to this post for updates as I'm able to write them:
I'll post some (pure) speculation on what might happen next, with my own (only somewhat informed) thoughts on how likely it's going to happen:

So... hit refresh and stuff.

From Kimchee GI via The Marmot's Hole: The Announcement on North Korean News: (warning: watching this might make you a traitor to the South Korean government)

Links
The Diplomat on "What Next?"
Foreign Policy doesn't pedict a Pyongyang Spring.
English Chosun predicts a possible power struggle.
Blog: North Korea Leadership Watch "Kim Jong Il has Passed Away"
Wall Street Journal's KJI Announcement plus Analysis
A piece of analysis I like:
Ask A Korean! on why North Korea's ONLY priority is, and must be, regime survival.
Open thread at ROK Drop - new links and revelations might pop up here in the comments.

[Update: don't bother with the Marmot's Hole. The commenters there are being even more asinine than usual on this occasion.] The Marmot's Hole - new links and revelations are highly likely to pop up here in the comments.

In my opinion, The absolutely crucial factor in what happens next is simply this: how well has Kim Jong-il's heir, Kim Jong-un, had consolidated power before Kim Jong-il died -- if he hasn't, all bets are off, and we could have civil war in North Korea by Christmas. If he has, then a lot will depend on what North Korean civilians do with the news bombshell, and how the government/military reacts.

The Key Variables:

The level of loyalty North Korean civilians have toward the Kim dynasty (fed by propaganda), balanced against self-interest.
The level of loyalty North Korea's military has toward the Kim dynasty, balanced against its loyalty toward its own military leadership - which could change drastically depending on how Kim Jong-un treats that military leadership.
The North Korean military's available resources, and whether they have the ability to quell an angry village here and there without losing grip on other areas.
The amount of residual anger that remains, after the failed currency reform (shorter summary here), and the level of conviction among North Korean citizens that the underground market system will take care of them better than the Kim dynasty has.
The true amount of influence China has in the region... which might be a lot more than we expect, but which might also be a lot less.
China's long-term strategy for North Korea, which, given that China's the only country North Korea's had serious contact with over the last decade, will influence events here more than any other nation.

Whether Kim Jong-un has or hasn't consolidated power, here are some things I predict either way:

1. More bluster and tough talk. When has anything in North Korea ever NOT led to more bluster and tough talk from the leaders?

2. Some shit will happen at the border, or in the disputed waters near the border, of the South. Some shots will be fires, some sabers will rattle, some fur will bristle.

3. There will be an increase in defectors across the northern, and probably also the southern border.

4. Information will flow into North Korea faster than ever before. Either because Kim Jong-un is busy consolidating power, or because he sees this as a good time to become more open, or because he's distracted making sure things are stable around Pyongyang, the borders will become even more porous than before.

5. Once information pours into North Korea faster than ever before, it will continue becoming harder and harder to govern the nation.

6. Groups in South Korea and China that have been working with refugees, or with getting information into North Korea, will benefit from global attention (if the world media gives any damn at all about the people, and has any follow-up at all... so I might have to put this one under "maybe")

7. North Korea connections, spies, and Nork friendly useful idiots in the south will also be active trying to intimidate or silence those groups, or minimize their actions.

8. There will be renewed talk about trying to get aid into North Korea, and North Korea will try to get as much aid as possible without making any meaningful concessions... or maybe even WITH concessions.

9. USA and South Korea will both make plays for more influence in North Korea, but will be frustrated to find that, because of their confrontational or silent policies in recent times, they will only get as much influence as China wants them to have... without offering more than they want to offer, or on terms they would consider unacceptable.

10. Some act of belligerence will happen, probably at the border. If North Korea gets away with it, the leader, or those gunning for leadership, will try to take credit for it. If North Korea doesn't get away with it, those same people will be blaming their rivals for power for the botch.

11. If there's a power struggle, and even if there isn't, the new leader (presumably Kim Jong-eun) will be executing a few former high-ranking officials and administrators, to be sure he has no rivals to power, and people loyal to him surround him.

12. Reunification will not happen in the next three years. It will not happen until South Korea has a viable long-term reunification plan, if South Korea wants it then. It is more likely North Korea will be absorbed into China than into South Korea in the next three years, or slog through trying to make it on its own, with help from both South Korea and China.

13. Some useful idiots will suggest expelling all South Korea's foreign workers and replacing them with North Koreans to do DDD jobs. And here's why that won't work.

If Kim Jong-un hasn't consolidated power...

1. The military, and probably a few other people, will make a run for leadership.

2. If there's a struggle for leadership, the losers will be executed.

3. If the struggle for leadership becomes long and drawn-out, the chance of a "Pyongyang Spring" and a grass-roots revolution will increase.

4. If Kim Jong-un dies during the "Game of Thrones," the chance of a peoples' revolution skyrockets, limited only by North Korean civilians' ability to communicate with eachother (better than the military's lines of communication)

5. The candidate who has China's backing will almost certainly prevail, except (but then, maybe even) in the eventuality of an all-out civil war.

6. I would be utterly unsurprised to see a puppet government installed by China at the end of this. I don't think any other country in the world is prepared, or has enough influence in North Korea, to have a realistic shot at this.

7. China won't, however, want to do a naked takeover move, because it would lead to a standoff between China and North Korea, and South Korea and USA (and probably Japan). Given how enmeshed those economies are with each other, China is probably more likely to shut down the North Korean border, tell refugees to flood south, and allow North Korea to lapse into anarchy, than to risk actions that will lead to enough alienation between China and its main trading partners, to actually damage that trade.

8. Signs of weakness or instability in North Korea's leadership will lead to a resurrection of the black market system in North Korea, and a flood of refugees heading north and/or south.

9. Seoul/South Korea will be utterly unprepared for that flood of refugees, and once world headlines stop covering it, will mostly be left to their own devices to deal with them.

If Kim Jong-un HAS consolidated power...

1. Like a new departmental manager, changing things needlessly just to show he's boss, he's going to do a few things to leave his mark on the new state -- including the possibility of another act of aggression toward South Korea, like the Cheonan sinking or the Yangpeyong Island bombing, and subsequent propaganda campaigns, and also including the possibility of economic or military or foreign policy reforms that will have to make him appear strong, while also making political sense for his relationship with the two biggest influences on his ability to rule North Korea: China and the Nork Military.

1.1 If these changes go well, who knows how much longer we'll see a totalitarian regime in North Korea?
1.2 If these changes go poorly, like the failed currency reform, the people might not be far from taking to the streets... but that's hard to tell, because we know so little about North Korea.

2. His survival depends on how well his father's administrative structure was designed -- if he has any ropes still to learn, things could get ugly.

3. His rule and authority depends, most of all, probably, on continuing to limit his citizens' access to information -- once civilians can communicate freely with civilians in other villages and towns, all bets are off, unless they take to him real well... but it's hard to know how he'll be able to make life better for average North Korean citizens, without opening the borders to more trade and aid, and having more news and information get in as well: information which might destabilize his regime, and turn people against him.

What I'd like to See...
I'd like to see Kim Jong-un come in, and take power peacefully.
I'd like to see more food aid, overseen by international human rights organizations, so that it isn't diverted to the Military.
I'd like to see the black market flourish, and turn into a trade infrastructure by which most North Koreans can provide for themselves.
I'd like to see the border get more porous, but slowly enough that there's a transition, not a bloody revolution.

(Ding Dong) Kim Jong Il is Dead

2011-12-19T12:30:00.002+09:00

The post I'm updating with links and speculation/predictions is here.

I'll be updating as more news comes available, and as I have time to add more thoughts between baby feedings and diaper changes.

Yonhap News is reporting that Kim Jong Il died of fatigue on a train at 8:30AM on December 17. That seems to be all we've got so far. And since North Korea's official news outlet is blocked on the South Korean internet, readers abroad will be able to read his hagiographies sooner, or more easily, than I will.

I have never felt less inclined to say "Rest in Peace" in fact, if the afterlife really is, as TV makes it out to be, a world of ironic punishments, then he'll be reborn as a political prisoner in Camp 22.

The big question is, "What's next" and while I'm hitting "Publish" right now, check back at this blog very soon for a following post with some thoughts and links on what's happening in North Korea, and what I think will happen.

Carping on about Christmas Music...

2011-12-17T17:47:00.002+09:00

Every year I rant and whine a little bit about Christmas music -- because the songs are overplayed, and come back like zombies year after year, instead of disappearing after a reasonable amount of radio play. But this year, I've had a realization that changes everything... but first, a quick recap of my old ramblings about Christmas music:

five artists that shouldn't, and five artists that need to make a Christmas album
(anything yet from Neko Case, Regina Spektor, Jack White, Alicia Keys, The Flaming Lips, or Tom Waits? I mean, we had one from Justin Bieber this year)
one Christmas song I liked
Tim Minchin's Post-Christian Christmas song
Sufjan Stevens' fabulous Christmas albums

And, good enough to rate re-posting: the funniest Christmas Music youtube video (in my opinion)

OK then...

I can't believe I haven't looked more into Christmas music by Jazz artists before.

Why? Because my problem with Christmas music summarizes thusly:

Christmas music always either reinterprets a classic song, or composes a new song.
If you reinterpret a classic song, your version probably won't stand up to a version done previously by another artist... and the classics have been done to death. If you write an original song, given that Christmas classics are some of the prettiest, most majestic, and enduring songs ever written in Western music, your new song probably won't stand up to the sheer songwriting featured in other christmas songs. You can't win.

But jazz is a no-brainer, really. Why? Because the whole thing many jazz artists do is reinterpret "standards." What does that mean? Taking a song that's been sung many times before, and bringing something new, unique, and special to it. And that was exactly the problem I described with Christmas music.

How many artists have sung "Mack the Knife," "Cry Me A River" or "My Funny Valentine"? Tons. And more will. And jazz artists work to take something that's been done before, and bring something new to it, to make it fresh again. Some artists have done especially memorable versions of some of those songs, but there's always room (if you're a good jazz musician) for another stab at it. So... starting with Verve and Blue Note records I'll be giving Jazz Christmas music a try.

One more thing:
Added to my list of artists who need to make a Christmas album:
Jamie Cullum

Adele

Jazz artist Avishai Cohen, from Israel... is invited to do some excellent Hanukkah music, if he prefers.

Portishead shouldn't make a whole Christmas album, but they'd make the saddest Christmas song ever made, and that would be worth it.

Stars should, too.

First Smile, and...

2011-12-16T15:15:00.000+09:00

This video was taken the day Babyseyo did his first smile -- before this, there's been smile-like expressions, but always followed by puke. Sunday was his first smile that was clearly a response to my talking to him.

But as you'll see... I don't think he likes baby talk.

North Koreans instead of Migrant Foreign Workers? Why Not?

2011-12-15T16:04:00.000+09:00

This is a cut-and-paste from a comment discussion I had here with a commenter who was convinced South Korea's labor shortage (aging population) could be solved by expelling foreign migrant workers currently manning South Korea's assembly lines, and replacing them with North Koreans.

I think you're being a little naive if you think that North Koreans will happily be imported to work as South Korea's labor force, and happily swallow, en masse, the second-class treatment DDD workers and tradespeople receive here.

Meanwhile, a group of people who have been raised and educated under such a vastly different ideology than the South, have been regularly instructed on why the South is inferior, and why they should hate or mistrust South Koreans, and whose lack of proper nutrition during childhood have left many physically or mentally stunted... do you really think it'll take any less work and cost integrating them into Korean society, or changing Korean society to accomodate them, than it has to bring South-Asians into South Korea? I don't. Perhaps more... with extra frustration, because while Korean society's dealing with their challenges, both sides will also be dealing with disillusionment: "I thought reunification would be easier than this" where with immigrants, at least everybody on either side already recognizes it won't always be a smooth ride.

Will North Korean workers have the skills and training to fill the needed roles? Or wil NK electricians be lost on any system with technology newer than 1982? Will enough of them have the capacity (poor nutrition = stunted mental capacity) to be trained/retrained? And if there are Indonesian or Filipino electricians with their tradesmen's cards in hand, wanting to immigrate, who are excited enough to come to Korea that they've already completed a survival level Korean course? Why would we turn that guy away in favor of a North Korean who may or may not be able to complete the training?

Finally, have you read much about how North Korean refugees are treated in South Korea? It's kinda shitty. Why do you think that would change if more came... and if enough came to, say, occupy Gwanghwamun square for a protest, what makes you think they wouldn't, and disturb shit in a host of other ways? --and the South wouldn't be able to deport them easily, the way they do with south-asians who demand collective bargaining rights.

The "because we're one blood" anodyne just won't cut it here, and everybody'll get to say that just once to delay actually dealing with the issues, before people get upset at not having their grievances addressed. I'm one blood with my sister, but we used to fight like cats and dogs.

You Can Never Go Home

2011-12-15T13:42:00.001+09:00

Soundtrack: hit play and start reading.
Tom Waits: "Pony"
Tom Waits sings about home like a man who's been lost a long time.

"I lived on nothin' but dreams and train smoke
Somehow my watch and chain
Got lost...

I hope my Pony, I hope my pony knows the way back home"

-Tom Waits 'Pony'

"I remember that time you told me, you said, 'love is touching souls'
Surely you touched mine,
'Cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time"
-Joni Mitchell, 'A Case of You'

I mentioned earlier that at 8:15 (or so) every Friday morning, I'm on TBS radio (101.3), yamming about the topics that have been catching blog column-space, and commenter love (where applicable). This week, as Christmas approaches, maybe it's appropriate to talk about home: December's the month I always feel the most homesick, the month I hanker hard for the foods and friends I left behind me in Canada, and the last Christmas I had in Canada was the hardest, but most intimate and intense Christmas my family experienced, or likely ever will: the first one after Mom had received a terminal prognosis for her stomach cancer.

This week, Chris in South Korea had a guest post from "Gone Seoul Searching" about reverse culture shock, and Bathhouse Ballads talked about why he dreads going back to his home in England. Gone Seoul Searching writes about missing trips to Daiso and kimbap, and the accidental "got back from Korea" blunders, where you refill your friend's drink with two hands, or bow when you meet someone, ultimately seeking out Koreatown: "anything Korean felt like home to me in a strange world that was not my own." Gone Seoul Searching clearly still has one foot in Korea, planning to return perhaps, and reaching out to her former students through facebook and email. Meanwhile, Bathhouse Ballads talks about the comfort and ease of living in Korea, and does not look forward to going to a country where restaurants and taxis are way more expensive, and the streets simply feel less safe: "Going back to the UK is a massive step down in terms of lifestyle, cultural opportunities and quality of life and even the massive hike in terms of pay can’t compensate for living in an expensive, insular little enclave surrounded by a cultural wilderness," he writes.

I have experienced this myself, most powerfully when I spent seven months in Canada taking care of my sick mom: I craved the jimjilbang (I have no idea what it says about me that I missed opportunities for public nudity so poignantly), and spicy food - I once went to a Thai restaurant and ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, just to remember. My heart still races to remember that meal. When I first got back, or when I vacation in Canada, I find myself being far too chatty with waiters and store clerks, because they can speak English! or being sullen and non-communicative, as is my habit here, so I don't have to tax the clerks' English ability, or their ability to understand poorly-pronounced Korean (and my ability to form it). My hand reaches for the not-present kimchi dish several times a meal, and when I am out socially, I fall into the habit of starting every third sentence with "You know, in Korea..." as my own, world-traveller version of "This one time... at band camp..."

The smell of world travel doesn't leave me, or other people. I can spot, in some odd way, people who have lived outside their home cultures, and those who haven't. This is also true of the Koreans I meet: the ones who have lived abroad speak (and I don't mean pronunciation) and think differently, for the most part, than the Korean Koreans I meet. They bring back interests and knowledge that simply don't arrive in Korea through the usual channels - their favorite western artists are Fleet Foxes and Frightened Rabbit, rather than Abba and Beyonce.

And maybe not everybody who goes overseas experiences this personal shift: maybe there are people who manage to live here (or elsewhere), tottering, without ever planting a foot here, by hunkering in expat enclaves, avoiding the activities and foods and places that would make Korea a part of them. Perhaps that is possible. I've met a few who tried, but I'm not sure how it turned out for them, because I didn't seek out their company, once I saw that they'd hit the reject button, and were utterly uninterested in hearing about my attempts to engage with the culture and people here. I don't know how I'd relate to such people anymore, even if I once could, or wanted to.

And this is what it is like to live with one foot in two different cultures. Does it make me better, smarter, and wiser? Not than other people (how could I compare?) but perhaps than myself when I was the product of only one culture, and lacked the self-awareness to spot what of my beliefs were the prejudices of my upbringing, and what were actually my earned and owned self. Travel is certainly not the only way to identify those distinctions, though I might have trouble understanding the journey of someone who had done it through some other route.

On the other hand, the sacrifice I must make is that I never quite belong anywhere, except perhaps with others who have feet planted in more than one place: other long-term expats, whose roots stretch entirely across oceans. Koreans all ask me about Canada, though it's been nine years since I lived there, and I can't relate to a lot of the things my Canadian friends want to tell me about anymore, unless I ask them for tiresome explanations, and I can't explain things without that same long-winded background.

This is why I say that you can never go home: part stays behind, and part hankers for pieces of that other place. You have reference points that you didn't have before, and will always have them.

So, readers, in Korea or Canada or elsewhere, where have you lived, and what footprints have those places left on you? What did you miss of the place you went to, once you came back home, and is it possible to come home again?

How to make EBS's Racism Video Mean Something

2011-12-10T14:16:00.000+09:00

Update: for two great views on this topic, please read these pieces side by side:

The Metropolitician: "Be White"
Adeel "Taking the Metropolitician Challenge"

You've seen this video, if you read the K-blogs. It's been discussed elsewhere...

1. This video is from May -- which pleases me. This video was made by Koreans, for Koreans -- unlike "banning" dog meat during the olympics, this video isn't a performance for a foreign audience. It's Koreans trying to start an earnest discussion. We expat bloggers and viewers didn't figure into it at all. I like that Koreans are deciding to start these kinds of conversations.

2. It's only two guys, and a 5 minute video: who knows what story the original footage told. I'd be surprised if the narrative was as clean as it's presented to be.

It's impossible to make a general statement about whether Koreans are racist or not, just from this. Absolutely impossible. (Though the youtube commenters have been quick to do exactly that.)

So...

Here's a research proposal of sorts: How to Make This Experiment Actually Tell Us Something About Racism in Korea.

(soundtrack: Mashup-Germany - Top of the Pops, 2011. Love these year-end mashup things.)

A. Count the number of passersby in the full hour of filming, or film until a set number of pedestrians pass by. Or until the subject of the experiment (the white guy, or the SEAsian guy) has approached and spoken to a set number of people (say 200, or 500). Send them out so they spend an equal amount of time approaching strangers on the weekend, the daytime, the afternoon, the evening, and lunch break.

B. Make a few categories of responses, say:

1. stops longer than ten seconds and helps
2. gives less than ten seconds of help
3. passive negative response - averts eyes, moves to other side of sidewalk, walks faster, etc.
4. active negative response - says "no" or responds with hostility
and maybe
5. does not notice

Log the responses from video footage, so that different subjects can be compared in terms of their rate of the different types of responses.

C. Train the subjects to use the exact same wording and body language in their approaches. If you have the budget, have one set of subjects being more direct, and another set being less direct... in the exact same way, with the same wordings and gestures, as much as possible.

D. Ensure there are equal numbers of male and female, good-looking and unattractive, tall and short subjects in each group.

E. Find that variety of subjects across more than two races: South-east Asian, South-Asian, Middle-Eastern, North-African, Central-African, Caucasian, Latino/Hispanic, and East-Asian.

F. Repeat the experiment using similar groups, similarly trained, or the same group in:
1. a residential area
2. a busy downtown area
3. a popular tourist area

or/and in

1. a big city
2. a medium-sized city
3. a tourist town/area

G. If possible, have an equal number of subjects approaching people speaking Korean (the local language) and English (a commonly spoken cosmopolitain language).

H. Repeat the exact same experiment, as closely as possible, in several major cities on each continent, or in a big city, a medium-sized city, and a tourst town/area in several countries on each continent/region of the world.

Gather statistics. Crunch numbers. Compare.

IF, across all those factors, Koreans still treat the white guy more favorably than the dark guy, TO A GREATER EXTENT THAN the average of all the groups of people, from all the places, in all the data we've gathered... and far enough above the average that it can't be accounted for with the margin of error inherent in gathering statistics...

we can say that this video shows Koreans are more racist than other countries.

SMOE to Phase Out Native English Teachers: Turnover, Gatekeepers, and Alternate Sources

2011-12-09T10:34:00.001+09:00

Long post, so... SOUNDTRACK TIME!
Hit play and start reading: Suckers: "2 Eyes 2 C"

So SMOE is talking about getting rid of its high school English teachers, which has, of course, sparked outrage and shock in all the familiar places. Talking about education in Korea is always a sure way to get tongues (or keyboard fingers) wagging, and the K-blogosphere has been true to form, with every bit of grist flying off the mill in every direction (try here, for starters). Much of what's being said now has been said before (some just a few days before) so I'd like to tie together what happened on one blog post, with some of the talk about the new SMOE decision, and toss a few ideas out there for the sake of discussion.

The Context

On Tumblr, a blog post titled (at the time) "What do Koreans Really Think About Native English Teachers" asked one Korean. A new title helps the post make more sense, but it kicked off a storm of 80+ comments: Girl and the World probably didn't expect this. She's been conscientious about responding to comments on and off her blog (here, for example), and clearly underestimated the hornet's nest she'd stirred up. So go easy on her.

I linked this comment on her piece, which tells a story I've heard too often: awesome, dedicated, well-liked teacher... leaving Korea. There are different reasons: bureaucracy, coworker crap, people in the street giving the stank-eye, curriculum insultingly beneath their training, coteachers embarrassingly unprepared to work with an NET, age discrimination, gender discrimination, race discrimination, a terribly low ceiling for advancement and pay increase, and even education office foreigner-handlers treating them like backpackers, idiots and criminals... bottom line: great teachers are leaving Korea. Too many great teachers are leaving Korea. And Korean education policy makers need to figure out why, and stanch the bleeding.

The Tumblr link prompted a conversation between Burndog (Korea's most famous blogger, and an indefatigable dragon-slayer in his own right) and a few others, which you can read here, here, and here. (It's a little hard to keep track of Tumblr conversations if you're not used to the format. It might be hard or confusing for all you wordpress users. Hint: scroll down.)

The Commentary

This Chosun English article has been linked the most, and it cites the cost-benefit of NETs. That article mentions a survey: "A survey conducted for us showed that Korean teachers with outstanding English and teaching skills are more effective in the long term." If that survey is this survey... "Parents prefer 'Capable Korean Teachers' over Native Speakers" Burndog rightfully points out, no shit, sherlock. Anybody'll take an awesome capable teacher, all things being equal... but are the Korean teachers who'd replace NET's the English teachers described in the survey? Not necessarily. I want to know the wording of their description of a Native Teacher. Meanwhile, this report on that same survey gives contradictory results -- "60 percent of students were happy with native speakers' lessons, compared to 55.3 percent said for Korean English teachers" -- so while people would like to have those mythical high-fluency, well-trained, proficient and awesome Korean English teachers... that's not who they seem to be getting.

Forming educational policy based on surveys make me uncomfortable... especially surveys that have possibly loaded questions like "Would you rather have a capable, highly fluent Korean teacher or a foreigner who knows fuck-all about teaching in your class?" -- which probably isn't exactly how the question was phrased, but I'd nevertheless appreciate some transparency on how that survey was worded, if SMOE is going to make a radical decision like phasing out native teachers in high schools, based on it.

And really, I'd rather educational policy were developed in consultation with education experts, through analysis and research, not through populism and polls of people who know nothing about pedagogy and language learning, or who are thinking about the College Entrance Exam rather than the global marketplace, when they state their preference for Korean teachers.

January Wedding: by The Avett Brothers. I like this one. It's sweet.

The Turnover

I want to highlight I'm No Picasso's post in response to Girl And The World's interview, because most of it totally fits this topic as well. The first seven paragraphs pertain more to the "Girl and the World" interview, so if you're not invested in that, skip it. But once INP gets into it, she's makes her point beautifully, and I recommend you go read her whole post, "On Being a Foreign Teacher"

Here are some of her best parts, but you really should go read the whole thing:

But the part that I just really cannot abide is this notion that foreign English teachers are pointless. I am so sick of hearing that, from both sides. I'm so sick of hearing foreign English teachers talk about how they are made useless in their classrooms, and I'm sick of hearing it out of the Korean media...

Take any teacher in the world in their first year of real live classroom experience. No matter their qualifications or degrees or certificates. Observe the mistakes they make, and how utterly inefficient they are bound to be at times. Now, take a group of teachers who primarily exist within that realm, and judge them by that reputation. What does that end up looking like?

If fully qualified, 100% fluent Korean English teachers were rotated in and out as quickly as foreign English teachers are, the entire system would probably be in shambles.

And it would be so amazing if Korea could afford to just kick out every inefficient foreign teacher in the mix, and carry on with some kind of imaginary abundance of grade A educators. It would also be amazing to see a lot of the terrible Korean teachers I've worked with get the boot, as well. But it's not going to happen. Because this world has more students than it does good teachers.

...come sit in on my class sometime, and I'll show you what I really do. Until then, I don't want to hear what you have to say about it anymore.

If the average Native English teacher in Korea stays less than two years, it's no surprise Native English Teaching is a mess: the first two years, and especially the first year of teaching are where people take their lumps and learn from their mistakes. Obviously, if the system is not paying enough to hire teachers with experience away from their teaching jobs elsewhere, or keeping them here once they come, we're going to get that revolving door of incompetence, near-competence, finally-competent-but-about-to-leave-and-be-replaced-by-another-incompetent.

Would paying a little more and offering full teacher status, rather than assistant teacher status, and a little job security, and maybe opportunity for promotion, really ultimately cost the system more than the recruiting and training of a constant flow of new teachers does? Hard to say. Has that possibility even been looked into?

My Questions

From here we can talk in circles for a long time (and have), here are my questions, and then my solution:

I apologize for using "Korea" here as if all Koreans and Korean bureaucrats were a monolithic, one-minded mass.

1. What are Korea's goals for having Native Teachers in high school - or any - classrooms?
(note this quote: "Personally, I think Korean teachers are more helpful in preparing for exams" - if that's their purpose, fire whitey. They'll never compare with Koreans for teaching the test.)

2. Is Korea willing to pay market value for the competitive teachers they seem to want in classrooms, and complain about not having? Enough to lure them away from their teaching jobs in other countries? I bet Saudi Arabia has some great English teachers, and keeps them for as long as those teachers are willing to live overseas, because the pay is off the hook there. So far Korea seems content to settle for warm bodies who are willing to teach for the lowest of lowballs they can offer.

3. Who are the gatekeepers choosing cheaper, less experienced and qualified teachers? Who is holding them accountable, or why are they not being held accountable? As Teachacrajy says, on NET's being blamed for ruining Korean education with their unqualifiediness: "Who the hell hired us?"

Feist: Gatekeeper

4. If native teachers disappear from high schools, how will SMOE and the Seoul government help less-advantaged kids, who can't afford hagwons (which will doubtless pick up the slack here) get exposure to native speakers of English, and the benefits that come from exposure to other cultures? Because the underprivileged are going to be the ones missing out on the Native Teacher experience (if we agree that the native teacher experience is an inherently valuable experience).

I mean, if they don't care about those benefits, just be honest enough to admit it.

My general assessment: not enough culpability is put on the gatekeepers, and in general, with English native instructors in Korea, as with anything, you get what you pay for.

My Solution (Pie in the Sky)

And finally, my solution... hold onto your hat. And to qualify: I've never taught in a public school... so you're welcome to ignore everything I say. I'll even kick off the comments to that effect.

Yes, Korea should work to retain the kickass teachers that are in the system. And incentivize teaching in such a way that it's worth it for good teachers to stay -- that they can imagine having a career, and even a family, and have a respected role in Korean society, through teaching in public schools, as Korean teachers do. Make it rigorous to qualify for that stream (it is for Korean teachers)... but make it worth the rigors. Right now, many people find the just visa rigmarole too much trouble to bother staying longer, much less think of building a life here.

Expats and native speakers should be put in charge of the curriculum native teachers have to teach, and native teachers should be training the other native teachers. What they do shouldn't be on the CSAT test, and Native English class time should be sacrosanct: you can't steal the English class to practice the school concert or do extra test prep. That there's never again a "training seminar" where a Korean bureaucrat with poor pronunciation a manual out loud, word for word, to a room full of teachers who vary from completely new to years-veteran. That part of the curriculum should be kept separate from the test stuff the Korean English teacher is doing.

And (sorry, guys, but...) yeah. Get rid of the marginal teachers. The ones who were hired because SMOE, or GEPIK, or whoever, needs to fill a quota of warm bodies. Send them back home, or into the hagwon system. If they don't have training in English, Linguistics, TESL, or Education, if they can't even spell the word "pedagogy" and they've never taught a class before, if they can't pick an intransitive verb out of a list or spot a comma splice, they have no place in Korea's public schools sullying the reputation of the teachers who are good at what they do, and give a damn.

And to fill those spaces?

Bring in trained, native speaking TESL educators from the Phillipines, from India, from the Middle-East, from English speaking countries in Africa, and other non-first-world countries. The hagwons and the demanding moms will make sure that whitey always has his/her place in Korean English education, but the variety of skin colors and accents in public schools will give kids a perspective on English as a global language that nobody in Korea gets right now, without traveling abroad. They'll probably take less pay - maybe quite a bit less - than the marginal native teachers they're replacing, and still be doing way better than the job they'd have had in the Phillipines, or India, or Nigeria (all countries with generations of first-language native English speakers), as well as teaching better than some greenear with no background in language or education... and probably act a little less entitled to boot, which I'm sure would suit the school administrators just fine. Have them be trained and managed by the kickass teachers three paragraphs ago, who'd have the power to decide that this or that school doesn't get a native instructor next year, if they start pulling funny stuff on those teachers. Rotate teachers among schools, so that students get a year of an Indian accent, a year of a Scottish accent, and a year of a Farsi accent during middle school. And make the benefits, promotions and pay available to Western teachers for being awesome, and staying, available to those teachers, too. For the same pay, once you become a manager... the system will flood with EXTREMELY good educators from those countries, pitching for that kind of a position.

Kids get the qualified teachers they want, administrators save in the budget, Korean students get a totally new look at what it really means for English to be a world language, teachers get trained and managed by people who understand their issues, and have a reason to stay longer, so that native English classes aren't so often a gong-show of first-year mistakes. Everybody wins.

And to any Ministry of Education officials who read this: you have my permission to steal my idea and take credit for it, which, as we all know, is the last element missing from this plan, in order to actually get it implemented.

63 Years On - Screening on Sunday

2011-12-03T07:39:00.001+09:00

I got an e-mail from a buddy named Shannon, who's a heck of a lady, and who's associated with the "House of Sharing" home for comfort women.

On Sunday, December 4, from 2-4pm in the theatre of Jogye Temple, one street over from Insadong, there's going to be a screening of a documentary film about the lives of these women, which I think you should go and see.

The poster: (click for full size)

the Facebook event page.

The press release ('coz I'm lazy)

‘Comfort women’ tell their story in a documentary film

The documentary film “63 Years On” will be shown at a free screening at Jogyesa Temple Theatre on Sunday, December 4th 2011.

This is an opportunity for both the Korean and International communities to further engage with the ‘Comfort women’ issue and to support the continuing fight for justice.

A brief Question & Answer session will take place after the film, an opportunity for those who wish to share their thoughts on the film and ask any questions to members of the House of Sharing’s International Outreach Team.

In this film, award-winning Korean director Kim Dong Won presents the harrowing experiences of 5 international survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery during World War II. The very personal telling of their experiences is supported by excellent research and archival footage to create a powerfully honest, determined, and often heartbreaking documentary. While this gripping film may evoke great sadness and anger, the bravery displayed will truly inspire all who see it.The House of Sharing’s International Outreach Team works to raise awareness of the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II and to support the survivors, called Halmoni, in their on-going struggle for historical reconciliation and justice. The team is composed of both foreign and local volunteers who lead English tours to the House of Sharing and the onsite Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military.

The House of Sharing’s International Outreach Team also works to highlight continuing crimes against humanity, including the form of sexual violence during war and international sexual trafficking, that women and children across the world continue to experience on a daily basis.This screening provides a window to an episode of Asian and International history which has been willfully ignored by so many for more than 63 years. You are invited to join the House of Sharing and show your support to the survivors who continue the fight for justice.

Two Quick Bits: Crazy Tow Truck and Othering

2011-12-03T01:57:00.001+09:00

This video of a towtruck driver trying to be the first to the accident site (and thereby winning the tow) is pretty shocking. It's making the rounds right now.

THe thing that bugs me most about it is the illegal siren: I've seen REAL ambulances caught in a snare of cars that won't pull over, because so many tow trucks and veterinarian hospital house visit vans have illegal sirens on them, that nobody trusts a siren to actually indicate a pull-over-worthy emergency...and that puts people in danger.

Second:
The Three Wise Monkeys, who have been putting out good stuff lately, has a really interesting article about "otherness" -- a topic I've been thinking about lately, and plan to write about soon.

Go read it.

Post 1100: You Are Awesome

2011-11-26T11:35:00.001+09:00

Here's the first post I put up when I started Roboseyo (other than the useless "here's my new blog" one that I disappeared while ago). Since then, I've seen family and friends start blogs, been to a bunch of places in Korea and around Asia, made a bunch of friends, and lost some to repatriation. And somewhere in there, I got hitched and had a baby with wifeoseyo. My blog statistics say I've hit 1100 posts, and that's a lot.

So how did I hang on so long? Because I've been cited and published in some places, I've been invited to some events and things? And been approached by people and organizations looking to reach out to others? Because I even met some famous people? No. That's cool, I guess, but if you said to me "Hey Rob. If you spend 3000 hours writing random thoughts about Korea for free, you'll get to shake Lee Myung-bak's hand." I'd say no. Even if it was Lee Hyori's hand, I'd say no. Or the nine left thighs of Girls' Generation. Tom Waits (his hand, not his thigh)? Even then, probably not. Still not worth the amount of time. And fame? Being Korea's most famous K-blogger is like being Denmark's best lasso twirler. I know that.

Outside of Scandanavian lasso-twirling circles... not... well... known.

And I'm not the most famous English Korea blogger, anyway. That's Burndog, now that The Stallion, Mr. Wonderful has retired. I'm New Zealand's fourth most popular folk-parody duo. At best. Not the first.

But here's why I've hung on so long - here's what's in it for me:

1. I have met some seriously, seriously awesome people, whom I'm happy, and even proud, to have in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Good for a beer, or a hike, or a walk, or a fantastic facebook chat or e-mail conversation. Especially in Korea, where people keep going home, that's really important. The people I've met have been smart, talented, thoughtful, funny, intriguing, entertaining, challenging, and even (from time to time) really, really, ridiculously good looking. They're also invested enough in Korea I can count on most of them regularly gravitating back here, so that I get to keep in touch, rather than drifting apart when they leave Korea for good.

2. I have learned so friggin' much from my commenters, from other bloggers, from the people who disagree with me, and from the people who point me towards sources for better information than I have yet.

3. Because what popularity my blog has found lets me imagine that my writing, and the information or thoughts I share here, have helped to enrich the Korea experiences of a bunch of people. I mean... maybe I'm wrong, and you read Roboseyo to scoff at a fool dressing in smart-people clothes (I know I frequent a few blogs for that reason.) But perhaps I flatter myself to think that's not why most of you visit.

So a little reader appreciation today:

For the entire life of my blog, near the top of the page, I've had these words from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame IT, blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place." (from "Letters to a Young Poet" translated by Stephen Mitchell) I still passionately believe that a person's experience of Korea, or anywhere, depends more on what one brings to it, than what's already there: that's why two people can live in the same neighborhood, and one will find their life endlessly fascinating, and the other will find it dull as flour paste. And by looking around for things to report back to you, my readers, you have helped me to call forth Korea's riches, and love my life here, rather than getting caught in a rut of apartment blocks, class bells and Itaewon piss-ups. Thank you for giving me a reason to dig deeper.

There are more blogs in Korea than ever before, which makes me all the more grateful to the readers I have: that somehow you found this blog in the noise, and found something here worth coming back for.

So readers: you are awesome! Here's possibly the favorite video I've ever posted at Roboseyo, introduced to me by my friend Tamie. Watch it. Because you are awesome, too.

Love:
Roboseyo

Mini-Rant on the Radio: Multiculturalism: You're doing it wrong

2011-11-24T10:34:00.001+09:00

Well, Roboseyo's back on the radio...

I'm doing a piece called "Blog Buzz" on TBS Efm, where I get to highlight different pieces that are on the blogs, and talk about the issues they raise, and what the expat bloggers are saying about Korea.

Last week I talked about EatYourKimchi's piece, "Are you a fat and ugly foreigner"

and this week - tomorrow at 8:15 AM - I'll be talking about this piece, which as prompted an interesting conversation so far:

Asian Correspondent reports on a piece about Seoul opening the first high school for mixed race students...

and I'm a bit bugged by that. Because taking the multicultural kids OUT of regular Korean schools won't make Korea a multicultural society -- teaching multicultural kids' classmates what it means to have a multicultural classmate, and that they're no different than the rest of them, will. In my opinion.

So far, Korean policy-makers seem to have a lot of problems understanding what multiculturalism actually is.

So...

What do you think about this multicultural high school, and other such efforts?

A Response to Chris in SK on Embracing Un-Koreanness

2011-11-20T23:40:00.001+09:00

**Please note the Update added to this post, in response to comments**
**Update 2: "Adventures in the 4077th" offers a bit of advice to Chris in their post "Un-Koreanness and White Whine"**
Update 3: Scroozle adds his two bits.

So Chris in South Korea put a piece on his blog called "Embracing My Un-Korean-ness"

And I disagree with it. I wish nothing but the best to Chris himself... but I disagree with him from time to time. Like now.

His article starts off saying that he's not Korean... and follows that statement with the assertion that "Not after...even a lifetime of living in Korea will this country fully accept me." He shares examples of ways that various Koreans have given him "the foreigner treatment:" shouting "hello" out of car windows or using him as a walking dictionary. From there, here are a few of the juiciest tidbits:

Even if you’ve spent 40 years in Korea, married to a local, speak perfect Korean, don’t be too surprised when some ajosshi goes out of his way to shoulder-bump you as you come up the subway steps. It DOES NOT MATTER....In the minds of many native Koreans, even a gyopo isn’t a full-fledged Korean....As a source of relief we find our fellow foreigner. We meet up at [expat] bars... and read [expat] magazines... both of which separate us from the natives....
If there is one fair indictment of foreigners, it’s that learning-Korean part. A few noble exceptions notwithstanding, not too many waygooks pick up any more Korean than necessary. Why bother? ...At best, we’re patronized; at worst, we’re excluded from the rest of the story.
....It is quite possible, however, to live in Korea on your terms, learn about the culture, and embrace a new lifestyle. Just don’t expect the ‘open-arms’ treatment from the locals.

Now, the main problem I have with this article is very simple: It seems like Chris wants to have his cake and eat it too. He seems to want to be welcomed to Korea with open arms (or wants us to feel his pain and disappointment that he is not) while wanting to "do Korea" on his own terms... without learning the language ("why bother,") and without even letting go of the numerous stereotypes of Koreans he trots out in the course of the article (ajumma elbows, rude ajosshis, kids shouting hello, people asking inane questions, vomit-stained doorways). Do those stereotypes exist for a reason? Sure. That's always the first line of defens(iveness spoken). Are my chances of finding a real connection with a member of ANY group going to improve, if I hold onto the stereotypes of that group? Nope. And if I'm not even willing to meet them somewhere in the middle -- if it has to be on my terms? Strong nope.

Perhaps if Chris tried to meet Korea somewhere in the middle, and offered up more of the benefit of the doubt, he'd discover, as I'd venture some of us have, that Korea contains all types, including bigoted jerks who shove people on the stairs because they're foreigners, run-of-the-mill jerks who shove people on the stairs because they're in the way, people who say excuse me, people who don't want a non-Korean for an in-law, and people who would become a loyal friend (and buddy, Koreans are loyal to their friends until death), and even people who would happily become an in-law, to the right non-Korean. Perhaps Chris has discovered that (let's hope so!), but it didn't fit to say so in this article.

And finally... when he says "Not after...even a lifetime of living in Korea will this country fully accept me," I think Chris's attitude is a little defeatist - deciding not to meet Korea in the middle, or on its own terms, and then feeling alienated because Koreans don't accept one, therefore hunkering down and leaning into the expat enclave, is kind of a chicken-egg vicious cycle. I also think his expectations are a little unreasonable... especially in a country whose leaders used a one-blood myth to get the nation on board during the economic growth of the 60s and 70s, that didn't see a significant incursion of non-Koreans (other than GIs) until the English teaching boom of the 1990s and 2000s... and a country that's made tons of effort (not always in the right direction, but...) to accomodate the expats living here, since I came in 2003.

I don't know exactly what Chris means when he asks Korea to welcome him with open arms... though many Koreans might think that approaching him and asking him if he can eat spicy food, where he's from, and if he likes Korea (sorry, "rikes Korea" - because Koreans talk like Scooby Doo) does qualify as welcoming him -- contrast an approach, a smile, and some inane and utterly expected questions with refusing him service, abusing him on the bus, and ushering him out of the dance club if he approaches a Korean woman... which sometimes happens to expats in Korea, if they're brown. ~~Not if they're white.~~ *Update* Enough less, if they're white, that I'd be embarrassed to complain about the way Koreans treat me, in front of a South-Asian migrant worker. Go read the second last paragraph of this article by Bonojit Hussain. *End Update*

In my opinion, Chris doesn't fully account for how much learning Korean improves the Korea experience, and it appears his experience here has suffered because of it. My Korean's no great shakes, but the responses I get for trying to speak Korean are way better than when I tried to "waygook" my way through situations, and I'm having more fun, too. My friend who's fluent in Korean? She gets so much love from the Koreans around her it's not even funny. Every Korean in her neighborhood seems to know her name sometimes. You wanna bet she's enjoying living there more than Chris is enjoying living in his neighborhood?

I don't ask Korea, as a nation in its entirety, to accept me. I don't know what that would look like, anyway, and my house isn't big enough for 50 million Christmas cards, and I don't need every Korean to shake my hand... I don't want every Korean to shake my hand. I'd settle for an open-arms welcome from my wife and her family, from enough friends to busy my Friday nights and give me quality company, from my boss and colleagues, and then for a continuation of efforts by policy makers and businesses to become more accommodating to expats and multicultural families, and their needs and their funny ID numbers and non-conventional documentation, and then for the rest of Korea to be OK enough with expats living in Korea that they leave me alone, and don't have a problem with their kids playing with my kid, don't have a problem with me living my own life in Korea. I'm not sure how much more would be fair to ask of a country.

So... that's my beef with Chris's post. I also agree with much of what Bobster says in his comment.
Hope he doesn't mind my response.

Some other issues were raised - particularly in the comments of Chris's post - about otherness, and about the way "other" often gathers into enclaves... but I'll deal with that in another post.

Handful of Links

2011-11-19T11:15:00.001+09:00

1. Most important first:
Down in Gyeongsan Province (around Busan) there's someone who needs a liver transplant, as well as O negative blood (kinda rare).

Brian in Jeollanamdo has more, including links to Waygook.org, and information about giving blood in Korea.

2. There are a handful of other great blog posts on the Suneung, Korea's high school exam.
The Korean has translated part of it, so that you can test yourself.
The test was easier this year, reports The Seoul Patch. More on that from Seoul Patch.
Bathhouse Ballads writes about the Suneung.
Stupid Ugly Foreigner Weighs In

3. This is a year old, but it deserves to be brought up again: It's a cartoon series on Flickr called "The Successful Life" drawn (if I remember correctly) by an actual Korean student, about how the Korean hagwon (rearranged into "Nowgah" in the article) turns kids into drones.

4. And from Youtube: a very cute shot in the arm for the test-writers, from 2AM and 2PM, two of K-pop's top boy bands.

In Defense of The 수능 (Sunneung) the Korean College Entrance Exam, and other Really Hard Tests

2011-11-15T23:51:00.001+09:00

(all images from memegenerator.net and http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/)

The 수능 happened last Thursday: Korea's much-maligned College Entrance Exam. Flight paths were diverted, parents stuck toffee on the gates of schools... and students, politicians and officials, and University presidents talked about how much they hate the test... yet it carries on.

BBC had this to say about Korea's big test. The always-worth-reading Tom Coyner wrote this about Korea's hyper-competitive atmosphere.

And on blogs, and around bar tables, the expats who teach love to rip on Korea's test culture. Heard around the echo chamber:
1. All the smart peepuhl isn't good at do the test.
2. Multiple choice questions test memorization, not umberstanding.
3. Teaching toward the test makes a education the one-dimensional.
4. Students focused on test scores and rankings don't develop teh creativitys
blah blah blah.

As for the social implications:
1. Tests make teh suicide because pressure, bad score, and TEST, you know, right?
2. Studying all the tests wastes years of Korea's young people's time, robbing society of other contributions they could be making.
3. It makes Korea at hyper-competitive! Hurr durr.
4. It are make the advantage to the wealthy, who can afford to send their kids to private schools.
5. Its because credential society, man! Eberybody's just want the statuses and the prestiges!
6. They don't want to be happy! Just to make their mom get all teh bragging rights.
7. Korean moms is psycho, man. My kid Jaehee? His mom? Let me tell you...

Yes, I'm making fun of these memes. Not because they aren't partially true, but because they're been bled right to death on the blogosphere (my own blog included), and around every foreigner bar table in Korea.

Koreans know the system isn't perfect: even the President is talking about how we need to stop discriminating against non-college graduates. Success is too narrowly defined here. Everybody agrees that it should become socially acceptable to be a plumber or a welder or a mason or a sushi chef...

But for now, when people say that, what they mean is it should totally be OK for somebody else's kid to be a welder or a mason or a sushi chef. My own kid? Well, he has lots of options, too: a doctor from SNU... or a lawyer from SNU... or a doctor from Korea University. Or a lawyer from Korea U. Or a doctor from Yonsei University. Or a lawyer from Yonsei. As you can see, the possibilities are multivariate!

And that seems to be where we're stuck right now.

Further reading: (Korea Herald series on "Credential Society") -Education-elitism -Need for equal opportunities. -Privatize universities? -I honestly found these essays dissatisfying, but they'll familiarize you with the "credentialism" territory.

What's the Sunneung's role in this? (Warning: broad brushes ahead. I'm not an idiot, you're not an idiot, your mileage may vary, and all the usual qualifiers here. Reread paragraph five. Duh.)

Well, The Joshing Gnome, one of my favorite no-longer-publishing bloggers, wrote this a while ago about the tests.

Here are the most relevant paragraphs:

The Korean preoccupation with testing to me seems to serve one function first and foremost, before even its stated function of enabling meritocracy. The test serves as a (theoretically) objective measuring stick by which people can gauge one another’s worth. The system must necessarily be open.... Korean students spend the bulk of their educational career through high school studying for the suneung. The test is designed in such a way that its fairness is as unquestionable as possible. Needless to say that expensive private lessons are necessary to make top scores on the exam, although there is the potential for anyone, even the poorest student, to perform as well as their talent and studies permit them. Thus the exam is accepted as ‘fair’ on some level by the bulk of society.

Multiple choice exams (though it's not all multiple choice now, is it?) have this going for them: you can run it through a scantron and no human needs to make a judgement call (which is then open to being disputed or questioned) at any point. That makes it "fair" insofar as it can be objectively proven that X correct answers is better than X correct answers minus one. And if everybody takes the test, and if everybody agrees on its importance and fairness, we can use it to rank people from highest to lowest.

(Side note: the multiple choice exam I took this spring for my MacroEconomics course has left me assured that a multiple choice question can be as hard as, even harder than, an essay question. Y'all who think multiple choice is necessarily only memorization have simply never come across a really devious multiple-choice question artist. Some multiple choice exams are purely memorizing... but they certainly don't have to be.)

More Joshing Gnome:

After the suneung is over the grades come out. ...the vast majority of students score what they expected to score. These scores determine what universities the students will be accepted to, which determines much of the rest of their lives. Most of these students, even those who are disappointed with their scores, will admit that they are primarily to blame for their scores. They didn’t study enough, or well enough, or the right things. Maybe they’ll blame their family’s financial circumstances to a certain degree, but there will always be some fishing village boy with a widowed mother who ends up at Seoul National because of his outstanding suneung score to prove that the test is not the problem, you are.

For the most part, working harder will result in a better score, and greater raw intelligence, amplified by more hard work, will result in a better score: the students going to Seoul National University are many of the smartest kids in Korea. I used to forget that during my mad rants. Some intelligences are harder to measure with a scantron than others, yes; some kids fall through the cracks (I probably would have)... but the scantron does measure intelligence plus diligence, and those who score well do deserve to go to a good university. Meanwhile, universities are adjusting their admission and recruiting criteria to reflect the fact tests aren't the only way to measure talent.

Yet the test sticks around, and others like it: the Korean Bar Exam, the Korean Civil Service Exam, and Public School Teacher Exam are other tests that feature incredibly low success rates, but continue to attract staggering numbers of applicants. They're once-a-year tests and people dedicate entire years of their lives studying for them, only to once again not be the one in forty-five, or sixty-five, or ninety, who passes.

So why haven't these tests been abolished? Couldn't we just do that?

Korea has a very long tradition of Very Important Tests that might determine your entire future, but I'm not accepting sheer inertia for why they keep them around. Not in a country that has totally, cataclysmically reinvented itself about five times since 1890. Not in the country where people donated ten tons of personal possessions made of gold, in two fucking days, to help pay down its IMF debt. Not in the country that butted its way into the world's top fifteen economies after being a third world shithole as recently as 1960. If this country, with these people, decided they'd had enough of the tests, buddy, they'd be gone. I really believe that. So why are people keeping them around?

They must serve a purpose.

Here's my theory as to that purpose:

The tests are part of the system that enables Korean society to be rigidly hierarchical, yet egalitarian, at the same time. And it's important to be both in South Korea - Korea's hierarchical: from verb endings to drinking culture, from the first five questions people ask when they meet someone, to who pays for lunch, to who lights their cigarette first at the table, to the brands of handbag, shoe, and phone you have, from top to bottom Korean life is cluttered with big and small negotiations for, and deferences to, status.

Yet because (South) Korea's a democracy now, it must have equal opportunities (or at least the appearance of equal opportunities) for people to determine their own place on the ladder of who pulls rank on whom. And if people get locked into an icky rung of society, the fact it's rigid, yet also egalitarian, means that people will allow the system to perpetuate, hoping on the off-chance that their kid will make good, and swing the upward mobility they themselves never managed, and get pegged in a rigid high circle, rather than a rigid low circle (at which point the parents' status improves by association). Without at least the illusion of upward mobility, without that teasing hope that their kid just might do well enough on the sunneung to qualify for SNU's Law School, there'd be another revolution. WITH the hope their kid will be the one who games the system, people are willing to tolerate the system.

The Korean, of Ask A Korean! writes about the sheer viciousness of competitive society in Korea -- the ruthless dogfight for success. But that success becomes harder to measure if there aren't absolute, universally recognized signifiers of success, and the test helps to set those benchmarks of status.

A ferrari is better than a porsche, which is better than a mercedes, which is better than a BMW, which is better than an Equus, which is better than a Chairman, which is better than an Audi, which is better than a KIA. Ask any Korean to name Korea's top three universities. Or top ten. Or seven best jobs. Or seven best restaurant chains. Ask ten Canadians, "What's a better job? Dental hygienist or flight attendant?" and you might get six of one, four of the other. Ask ten Koreans, you'll find a lot less variation. "What's a better job? Electrician or bank teller?"

If there is debate about what comes above and below what else, it becomes harder to flaunt my success. Or to brag about my kid's success, and lord my kids' success over my friends.

How bad is this jockeying for status? Did you know some Korean companies have been asking for applicants parents' jobs, to get a better grip of how to rank the person against other applicants? (Or perhaps to open the door for further nepotism and cronyism?)

Doctor, Lawyer, Professor, Diplomat.
are better than
Civil Servant, Public School Teacher, Chaebol employee, perhaps banker, Business owner
are better than
Medium or small sized company employee, small business owner
are better than
you get the picture...

These tests, and the status conferred by holding elite jobs that can only be procured through these impossibly hard tests, helps strengthen the matrix of status in which everyone fits somewhere.

But the genius of these tests is this:

because they're tests, anybody can take them, and anybody could be the one who passes. We don't talk about that a lot in the expat bars, but that's good.

The wealthy have more opportunity to take a year off and just study, but if you can find me a society where the wealthy don't have an advantage, I'll eat my hat. The test comes as close as you can get to eliminating the advantage the wealthy have in every other area, because even Chaebol Jr. has to take the test, sitting next to a Hayseed... or a Riceseed, I guess, from the rice paddy in Buttfuck Jeollado. And Riceseed might even beat out Chaebol Jr. -- the test is probably the only arena where those two are ever even remotely on a level playing field.

Chaebol Jr. could get streamlined into a sweet Chaebol gig, while young Riceseed's school, family, and connections would find him cut, but there's still prestige and honor to be had, if he can kick ass on a test.

(image source) No space on here for "do you know who my father is?"

If civil servant positions were chosen by interview and reference, I fear hiring practices would start resembling other sectors - 4:1 men to women being hired. But women are passing that test in equal, or higher numbers, than men. By sheer force of numbers, eventually that's going to change things in this country. Same with entry-level positions at law firms, where the bar exam, being gender-blind, gives women a fighting chance, and women are vastly outnumbering men on public school teaching jobs, which are nearly impossible to lose once you have one. Becoming a civil servant or public school teacher is one of the only careers a woman can have, where maternity leave is actually generous in Korea. And those jobs are highly respected in society. So if the Chaebol's still only hiring well-connected, handsome (did I mention the mandatory photo on job applications yet?) men who went to prestigious schools... to the study room!

The test ain't easy... but it creates a meritocracy, or at least the illusion of upward mobility, that there's a corner of Korean society where the rich and privileged can't change the rules to suit themselves and their heirs (at least not completely).

And that matters.

So the hierarchy stays in place, enabled by the supposed egalitarianism of the test system, so that everyone knows the rules to the system, so that Korean moms can compare everybody more easily, and so that even if I didn't achieve that upward mobility myself... I can dream that my kid might, and then I get to lord it over everybody in my sewing/screen golf circle. But I can only use those bragging privileges if the rigid hierarchy is in place, so they can't pull the rug on me by saying, "yeah, it's nice that your kid's an office drone in a world-class company... but have you seen the beautiful cabinets my son builds? I bet your son couldn't do that."

This is my hypothesis for now... it's untested, and in large part anecdotal - armchair anthropology at (its) best... so I'm looking forward to reading what people have to say in response to it. Tell me I'm wrong, but give me reasons I can think about.

Seoul/Korea: Pluses and Minuses

2011-11-12T13:29:00.001+09:00

I've got a longer post on the Sunneung in the works... that would have been timely the day I started it, but, you know, baby.

In the meantime, here's a great post "If I Had A Minute To Spare" wrote, asking if Seoul belongs on the list of "best Asian cities for expats." The article looks at the good and bad, and, in my opinion, is worth your time, as is the blog.

Mosquitoes: In Case You Forgot the World Sucks Sometimes

2011-11-09T20:10:00.000+09:00

So...

Heres' the face Babyseyo made today when I kissed him on the cheek.

and you thought my blog would get cuter now that I had a baby.

But here's the reason for the title of this post: See those red dots?

No, he's not getting acne 13 years early. Those are mosquito bites, on my little baby's face. Wifeoseyo was muttering about 나쁜 모기 all morning that day. Mosquitoes are evil, friends. I am convinced that they were the first thing to come out of Pandora's box, that the first mosquito eggs dropped into a bit of stagnant water after Eve ate the forbidden fruit. And while it's wrong and cruel to kill some, perhaps many critters, I am convinced that mosquitoes exist outside of karma, and you're allowed to kill them without coming back as one in your next life.

The Dalai Lama told me so in a text message.

After spending a morning chasing a mosquito like Bill Murray and his gopher in Caddyshack, here's what I did:

I went to the old-style market nearest my house, and found the most cluttered-looking houseware shop -- the kind of place where you can buy dozens of containers and lids that don't match with any other container in your whole house.

Drew a picture of it, and got one of these.

Since then, I've been chasing mosquitoes around the house, swinging my magic battery operated bug zapper like Rafael Nadal, plus murder, and killing mosquitoes has never been so easy, or so fun. That electric crack when you know you got one? So, so, so satisfying.

4000 won without batteries. 6000 won with, and hours of useful fun.

Turns out burnt mosquitoes smell like burnt hair. Who knew.

Links here and there... and gross.

2011-11-05T21:05:00.000+09:00

The discussion on sexism in the blogs was really interesting... I'll have more to say about it in another post -- I actually learned (or at least realized) some stuff from it.

Here are a few other links I've come by this week, and liked.

Once again, Stupid Ugly Foreigner has written a great post, this time about turning from a fresh-faced expat to a grizzled long-termer. How did I go so long before I found this blog?

The Diplomat on North Korea's Clumsy Assassins: They sure don't make Nork assassins like they used to.

Which is a great excuse to post this old propaganda video of North Korean army training. I've got to say, I love the clipped accents and cadences of North Koreans speaking English.

After Ms. Lee to Be's post about Konglish, and how English buzzwords get mangled into Korean business speak, because it sounds awesome sand, Yujin Is Huge has this post about the overdone bombast that is often the other way Korean self-important people (who might understand English, but don't understand how English is used) express themselves... in a way that uses our language, but into which we don't actually figure at all. Title: A world-class provider of world-leading pioneer technology that will remain competitive through fundamental adaptation to the paradigm shift.

And... (warning: the following paragraphs contain opinion. If you are constitutionally opposed to the occasional gut reaction, do not read on. Look at this instead. Whoa.)

I went to Costco twice this week, once to get stuff, and once to return some of it... and I came across something that, honestly, grossed me out... as much as anything I've seen in my time in Korea.

As much as pigeons pecking at street pizza, as much as old men hocking loogies in the street... as much as middle-school girls hocking loogies in the street... I hadn't paid enough attention to notice it the last times I went to Costco, because I usually don't use the Costco restaurant, but on Monday I learned of the Costco Salad Bar.

What is the Costco Salad Bar?

Leave your dignity in your shopping cart.
Take a paper plate.
Go to the condiment table.
Grind the free onions into a small mountain in the middle of the plate.
Squirt a whole bunch of mustard on top of the onions.
Squirt between a little and a whole bunch of ketchup on there, too.
If you really feel fancy, squirt some of the sugar syrup meant for the coffee drinks on there, too.
If you ordered a hot dog, squeeze the pickle relish package in there, too.
Mix until it looks like chunky baby poop.
With fork, eat alongside whatever else you ordered.
Discard the uneaten 2/3, creating a disgusting mountain of wasted onions and mustard in the bottom of the compost can.
Ignore Costco employees watching you and performing facepalm after facepalm.
Leave dining area.
Collect dignity from shopping cart.
Resume ordinary life.

Image stolen from Zenkimchi.

Zenkimchi writes about it here: turns out this is not an isolated thing here in Korea. At the Costco I went to, about 30-55% of the tables had a Costco salad on one of the plates.

Normally, I just avoid the stuff I don't like or think is gross. I won't tell people not to eat this or that animal, or salad swimming in dressing, or the shredded cabbage/ketchup/mayonnaise gunk that was a side dish to the fantastic spit-roasted chicken at this place I used to go to. Avert the eyes, don't eat it, no sweat. but at least it was clear that's how you're supposed to eat the mayonnaise ketchup stuff, where Costco Salad reeks of "Hey! Free stuff!" (see also the equally classy Salad Bar Tower) -- both expressions of the same impulse that leads old ladies to bring ziplock bags to buffets, and stuff free plastic forks in their purse, and bend and twist the intended uses of things, just to maximize their exploitation of somebody's generosity in providing it for free.

Zenkimchi even posits an explanation, and manages to applaud the creativity -- fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Koreans gotta have banchan, and will find a way, you know. Intellectually, I acknowledge this, but it was still just too much for me. Next time I need a Costco hotdog, I'm bringing a blindfold.

Maybe because it looked like the baby poo that's become a major part of my life rhythm? Anyway, I'm willing to look for the reason and sense behind most things, to seek out a perspective and a context. But this one just grossed me out, still does, and I'll be setting up a mental block instead. Yech.

Pick one: Healthy or Foreign. A Korean Food Lament

2011-11-04T02:12:00.001+09:00

So...

not long ago, to my dismay, a product began to vanish from my ken. It's not a big deal, cosmically speaking, but it had brought a lot of happiness to me.

Soy ice cream. Of the Purely Decadent kind. (image from linked page)

First it was available at a health food store near my old home by Anguk Station. Then I found it at Lotte Department Store, and for a few glorious years, I could get it at Family Mart, but recently it's vanished from all three places.

Why was this a loss? Because I'm allergic to milk, so I can't eat regular ice cream... unless I want to be very unpopular, in a Pumbaa sort of way.

And this has gotten me thinking: one of the funny puzzles of living, and eating in Korea, is the Korean attitude toward healthy, and foreign, food... as if the two were mutually exclusive. Wherever it came from, and exactly how overblown this attitude is, is up for debate, but there's a funny thing that happens when non-Korean foods come to Korea.

Paragraph 5:
And just to assure any readers that I'm not a ranting furriner making wild and unsupported generalizations... I'm well aware these are generalizations, they are not true in every case, or of every Korean, and it is certainly, certainly true, that the attitudes/paradoxes I discuss here are much less universal, and/or much less extreme than they used to be. So un-jerk that kneejerk. I'm not trying to be a straight hater, but now that I've made my qualifications, please take this paragraph and apply it to the whole article: the hedging and qualifying statements get tiresome. So if you get upset about generalizations, kindly substitute "some Koreans" or "many Koreans" wherever I say "Koreans" (or name any other group) and settle down.

Koreans like to take a lot of pride in how healthy Korean food is. We all know this: my first year in Korea, it became a running joke among me and my friends that every Korean food was either "healthy" or "good for man" because my boss in particular, and also a whole bunch of other proud Korea promoters made those claims, again and again and again.

And perhaps the "Korean food is healthy" boast is kind of like "Korea has four seasons," in that all thinking Koreans realize that Korean is not the only cuisine in the world with healthful properties (or the whole world would either eat it, or have slowly died out/succumbed to the healthier, stronger Korean/Korean food-eating invaders, at some point in history), it just seems like Koreans think Korean is the only healthy Korean food, because they haven't really been instructed on the health benefits of other cuisines, have no reason to talk about that with foreigners anyway (let's not forget that many of the conversations Anglophones have with Koreans are colored, at least a little, by an intent to represent Korean culture positively to the non-Koreans), and have reinforced images of other cuisines formed by focusing on the least healthful aspects of those cuisines (in order to contrast with Korean food and make Korean food look better). I've heard so many times from my Korean friends and colleagues that Chinese food is too greasy, and it is... if you choose to focus on the greasy Chinese foods. If you focus on grilled meat, barbeque chicken and pig skins, Korean food comes across pretty greasy too.

Pig skin. Lookin' healthy.

Japanese is bland, sez some Koreans. You know what else is bland? Juk. And nurungji. If you contrast ssamjjang with sushi, yeah, Japanese is bland. If you contrast teriyaki or yakitori with clam jjuk, Korean food sure is bland, isn't it?

So let's just acknowledge that every cuisine in the world can be healthy or unhealthy, greasy or plain, savory or bland, depending on your choices. Green salads and sandwiches made with whole grain breads? American food is healthy. Big Mac sets and deep dish pizza? American food is unhealthy. Soups, bibimbaps, seasonal fruits and vegetables? Korean food is healthy. Barbequed and/or deep-fried animal parts with soju and a side of ddeokbokki ramen? Korean food is unhealthy. Let's not be simple-minded.

One of the things that's puzzled me the most about Korean preferences in food is, for a country and a people so interested and concerned about the healthful properties of their native cuisine, how unhealthy, and sometimes just awful their taste in foreign foods are. And not only are the tastes in non-Korean food awful and quite unhealthy, the real baffler is that there often seems to be little to no interest in even knowing about the healthier alternatives. (go reread paragraph 5)

For example: my soy ice cream. It's hella good stuff. In fact, it's almost as good as real ice cream... but it tastes only a little less rich, while having waaaay less fat and fewer calories. For a country where I've watched people pay eighty dollars for a medium sized box of mushrooms because they're the healthiest kind, for a country where one of the most famous duty free must-buy items is boxes of super-expensive red ginseng, famed for its health properties, you'd think soy ice cream would be a no-brainer to catch on!

But it's disappeared instead.

For another one: what about soy milk in coffee drinks? (tipping my milk allergy bias here) It's less fatty, has fewer calories, and (if you use the right kind of soy milk), doesn't make the drink taste like beans (warning: don't try using any old supermarket soy milk in your macchiato. Some of them make for weird tasting lattes). But especially in Asia, where there are a lot of lactose intolerant people, it seems really odd that Starbucks is the only chain I've found that offers soy as a substitute in milkish drinks.

This post was prompted by my disappointing visit to coldstone creamery, which used to have raspberry and lemon sorbets among the flavor choices: two things I could eat, and now they are off the menu. Argue that it's the simple realities of supply and demand, but that simply reiterates the vital question: why is the demand so low?

In the country where your mother-in-law will nearly force-feed you foul tasting side dishes because they're healthy, and pay sky-high prices for ingredients or medicines that are healthy...

(Songi mushrooms: can be costly)

Why aren't really good (more healthful) breads more popular in Korea? I mean, they're more popular now than ever before, and it's miles better than 2003 when I got here, when the choices were wonderbread, wonderbread, and imitation wonderbread, but Korean sandwich places like Joe Sandwich and Isaac Toast still don't even offer a whole grain option, and you'd think that healthy option would go over well here.

Why aren't low-fat drinks, ice creams and soy substitutes more popular, and more available, in a country that gives so very many damns about looking good, and where being thin is so important?

My theory? When Koreans are looking for healthy food, they go Korean. And because Korean is always the go-to healthy choice, notKorean is what people go for when they're not interested in healthy - perhaps to treat themselves, or try something exotic, or to get a stopgap snack between real meals. And if you're looking to get through to dinnertime, or to sample strange flavors, or to feel a little luxurious, the healthy option is moot.

And that's too bad, simply because a good sandwich on a real substantial bread, for example, is a real treat, and once Koreans get a taste for it, I think it'll catch on (as is happening now). What's available in Itaewon now is better than has ever been before, and what's available outside of Itaewon is better than ever before.

What it means is we have our little "chicken-and-egg" vicious cycle, though, where (as in music) the foreign foods that catch on here are almost invariably the sweetest, least healthy ones (belgian waffles, anyone? Abba?)... and then just to make sure everybody's clear it's "Western" food, any possible healthful aspect of the food is removed -- how many brunch places in Seoul have whole wheat, or multigrain pancakes? Or how many of the "brunch" places have museli on the menu (which was on almost every breakfast menu when I traveled around china: even some of the smaller towns), but Museli is far too healthy to convince people they're living it up like the sex and the city girls. So people develop that image of Western food in their minds, and then only go for Western food when that's what they want -- meaning the market only demands it, so providers only provide it, so that image of Western food further crystalizes.

(Museli picture source)

And that's where sweet garlic bread comes from, boys and girls (either that, or it came free with the original pizza, I guess). And innocent-looking bread products stuffed with whipping cream.

And will Koreans ever turn their noses up to things like sweet garlic bread, sandwiches with shredded cabbage on them, and truly unexpected pizza toppings? Perhaps. Given the fondness here for foreign cars, clothes, handbags, and everything other than products that directly compete with Samsung, it's a reasonable prediction that the trend will continue, for more authentic, or just better quality, foreign products to keep growing in popularity (see: vast improvements in the breads, beers, coffees, cheeses, organic foods and home cooking materials available here) -- and even that eventually, people will develop a nose for quality, and not just look at the price tag (whiskey). If Korea can go from coffee straws to hand-drips from 2006 to 2011, I won't put it past Korea to move beyond sugar garlic bread, Isaac Toast, and Joe Sandwich as well.

And you know what? As long as I can get a good sandwich on real bread, I don't really care if other people like their Joe Sandwich and their sugar garlic bread -- it doesn't take long to figure out which restaurants and shops are serving the real deal and which aren't.

My Halloween Costume

2011-11-01T09:52:00.001+09:00

It was a laid back Halloween this year for me.

Having a new baby will do that. Other than seeing a kid dressed up as a cow, and, during a trip around town, seeing about 4000 young people dressed as K-pop stars (though that might have just been their ordinary daily dress), I celebrated Halloween at home with my family.

Babyseyo and I dressed up as each other.

My babyseyo mask didn't fit all that well, and babyseyo had trouble drinking from a bottle through the Roboseyo mask, so he didn't wear it for very long. But still...

It was awesome.

2011-10-27T10:53:00.001+09:00

You absolutely need to check out this series of photos from the Andong Mask Dance festival, by Tom Coyner, taken during the Royal Asiatic Society tour.

Also, on Facebook: volunteers (and attendees) wanted for a Halloween event for North Korean defectors on Saturday in Seoul.

Becoming a Teacher, Abusing 9/11, and the sexist K-blogosphere

2011-10-25T18:08:00.000+09:00

Three great links to articles which I think you should read:

1. Stupid Ugly Foreigner has a long but thoughtful, and frankly, beautifully written, post on the character changes, and the new talents and skills developing, that comprise the process of becoming a teacher. A must-read, seriously.

2. The Bobster, who doesn't update all that frequently compared to other blogs, but whose posts are always well worth the wait, has written a thoughtful piece on how America has changed since 9/11, and looks at a 9/11 coloring book as a springboard to ask, what are appropriate and inappropriate ways to remember 9/11, and who gets to make that call?

3. Dating in Korea, congratulations on your two year anniversary. Dating in Korea's two year post reflects on the fact that when she started, there were very few blogs by female writers - a topic I've discussed before, especially at The Hub Of Sparkle before it disappeared. Things have improved: there are a lot of female Kblogs now, if you know where to look for them, but some of the longest-running, most popular or well-known sites or blogs can remain female unfriendly: if not because of the writers, often from the comments that are allowed to stand.

(source)

Dating In Korea reflects on a few of the old stereotypes (western women are fat and ugly, western women can't find a boyfriend in Korea, because Korean women are X, Y, Z, and Western women are A, B, and C and so forth...) that have long sent female readers fleeing from K-blogs and K-forums in disgust -- tropes that are asinine, sexist, unfair, and deserve to be called out every. single. time. they appear, until the sexists making those comments, and not expat women, are the ones that feel unwelcome in K-pat forums.

No, the K-blogosphere isn't the only place on the Internet that's littered with latent or open sexism or hostility toward women. But those other places need to work on it, too.

Dating in Korea reflects on the unfairness of lumping all the lady-k-bloggers, or all the dating bloggers, into one group.

(source)

Any blogosphere can become more a series of loosely connected confirmation bias-spheres than an entire blogosphere of its own - there are too many blogs around now to characterize them all in a few swoops. There are lots of female voices now, once you start looking. But I also see less cross-pollination between the female voices and the male-dominated circles, than I'd like.

For contrast/context: Yes, the K-blogosphere (or at least some parts of it) sometimes smells a bit like a sausage-fest or an old-boys club; however, this article about the rife, latent or simply unchallenged sexism in the male-dominated Magic: The Gathering world, framed as an open letter to the author's future daughter, calls out the community in the way only an insider could.

Some of the themes in this article - male entitlement, unacknowledged sexism, and men's inflated image of their own worth - remind me of some of the uglier aspects of the interactions between western males and western females in Korea quite a bit. I read the article to the end because of it.

(source)

Anyway, I'd like to pass this topic on to my female readers, in the comments, and my female co-bloggers, on their own blogs: why do you think the K-blogosphere sometimes feels like a sausage party? Is there anything to be done about it? Does there need to be? I mean, who cares if Dave's is a sausage party, as long as the tumblrettes have their own circle, right? Or not?

Got some Notbaby Stuff Coming Down the Pipeline...

2011-10-25T10:05:00.001+09:00

Got some notbaby stuff coming down the pipeline - but I realized I forgot to post this video on the baby announcement post.

What is your Favorite Blog Poll Results

2011-10-21T12:04:00.001+09:00

10 Magazine recently ran a poll for "Who is your favorite Korea blogger" and I placed tenth.

Thanks for the votes, readers and fans, and thanks for running the poll, 10 Magazine.

I had trouble logging onto the site, and couldn't access the voting area, so I ended up not promoting the poll this time, which makes me feel more honored and surprised to place tenth this year than last year, when I placed fourth... through vigorously pushing my readers and facebook and twitter friends to vote for me. These polls generally reflect who sends their readers to vote for them most energetically, so I'm very pleased to have placed despite not pushing my readers to vote at all. It makes me feel awesome.

In other news, I just passed 200 followers.

So thanks Roboseyo fans! You make it worthwhile.

The First Glow; Father-in-Law

2011-10-20T13:37:00.000+09:00

So... I promised to control myself, and only post the absolute best 416 pictures I've taken of babyseyo so far...

Nah, just kidding. Babies are beautiful, but many/most don't photograph well, because the cuteness isn't in a freeze frame, it's in the little squeaks, squirms, and mewlings, in the same way my friend from Busan, who is willowy, and graceful, and a stunner to meet in person, seems awkward in photos, because pictures don't show how graceful she is. He's usually wrapped up tight, but if you unwrap him, Babyseyo sprawls in every direction, and throws his arms as far up as they go. And it's not cute to take a picture of it or to tell it, but if it's your own kid, that little stuff is great.

Meanwhile, my in-laws came to town for a while. I've spent a few spells with my in-laws this year: first down in the south coast of Korea, Namhae and Yeosu, during parents' day weekend, where we traveled Korean-style, and tried to hit every well-known spot in the region in three days.

Here are perhaps the three best pictures:

We also went to Niagara Falls and Toronto with them for a week in July, and had a wonderful time. Here are perhaps the three best pictures from that trip.

(as you can see, I'm not wild about putting over-many pictures of my family members up on the blog... it's my blog, not theirs, so...)

That gorgeous lady in the background there is my cousin, though. She's awesome.

Well, the Roboseyo and his In-Laws saga continues as Babyseyo polishes off his first week (with a burp and a surprisingly rumble-y fart for his size, as usual).

An interesting feature of this week has been Roboseyo's occasion to hang out around the house with only Roboseyo's mom and dad-in-law around (read: nobody who speaks Englis to throw Roboseyo a rope). This has been a stretching but satisfying experience: there are times I bluff, or shrug and make the "blank face..." but I'm getting more and more, and finding myself able to say more and more, as time goes by. This is immensely satisfying: the light of understanding in my father-in-law's eyes is WAY better than sentence forms in a textbook, as study incentives/goals go.

Well, one thing we did in Canada was try out some Canadian beer, which my father-in-law liked a lot: his favorite was the Sleeman's Honey Brown Poposeyo had in his basement fridge, but we also tried a few brews near the distillery district in Toronto. Hyangju has been encouraging me to take Popinlawseyo to my favorite neighborhood watering hole - a little place within walking distance of my house, that has a modest but extremely well-chosen selection of beers, including imports from Japan, Germany, America, Belgium, Canada, England and more. It's a great place, and the owners know me there, and sometimes stop by the table and chat. Most of my friends and connections who have met up with me in my neighborhood have been invited to meet me there. I'd put it on google maps, but instead I'll force you to invite me out to buy me a beer, to find out where it is.

So we went there and had some London Pride, some Samuel Adams, some Alley Kat, and some Anderson Valley microbrew.

Now, for old Roboseyo, the question is not how much can you drink, but how fast can you drink. Even back before my body made me pay more on Saturday than it was worth to get right sloshed on Friday night, I could drink a ton... as long as I got to choose my pace... and if I couldn't choose my pace, I'd probably end up barfing somewhere (and then getting back on the horse for more) or making a bad decision (and piling my sobbing self into a taxi).

With my friends, generally we get our chat on, and because I only invite very interesting people to drink with me, we usually have no problem filling up the spaces between sips with enough engaging conversation that the question of pace is pretty much moot. Not so with Popinlawoseyo, because my Korean chops, while improving, are not up to snuff yet, and Popinlawoseyo's English consists of about seven phrases (while Mominlawoseyo's English consists of saying "Why can't we just get popinlawoseyo to say it?" in Korean).

Meaning we were drinking at about triple our normal pace of consumption, simply because there wasn't a whole lot else to do. The liquid courage effect helped me to speak a little more as the tipple made me tipsy, but not enough to offset fifteen minutes a bottle, when my normal pace is forty or forty-five.

(proud grandpa)

I got home, and had a very funny conversation on the phone (in Korean, so that the in-laws could laugh along at my storytelling) with Wifeoseyo, and a playful broken chat with the inlaws, while teasing our two dogs (who have been quite lonely while Wifeoseyo is in the 조리원).

My in-laws are great people, and I love them. They do their best, they are learning to simplify for me (though the Daegu dialect still throws me sometimes), and even though they can't understand what I'm saying, I think they get me, and they see that Wifeoseyo and I pretty much love the hell out of each other.

Final side note: I love the simplicity of many Korean sayings and phrases: instead of some weird idiom like "He's good with babies" or something, the comment people were making, upon seeing me holding Babyseyo, was simply "애기 잘해" which might literally translate as "he babies well"

So... I'll be off babying. Everybody enjoy the fall colors, and see you again, soon.

Babyseyo! Babyseyo! Babyseyo!

2011-10-16T10:36:00.000+09:00

Suddenly, Everything Has Changed - by The Flaming Lips. Press play.

Because suddenly everything has changed.

(lyrics to the song "Suddenly Everything Has Changed"):

Putting all the vegetables away
That you bought at the grocery store today
And it goes fast
You think of the past
Suddenly everything has changed

Driving home, the sky accelerates
And the clouds all form a geometric shape
And it goes fast
You think of the past
Suddenly everything has changed

Putting all the clothes you’ve washed away
And as you’re folding up the shirts you hesitate
Then it goes fast
You think of the past
And suddenly everything has changed

Random Weird Pictures

2011-10-12T18:27:00.000+09:00

Been meaning to publish these for a long time... I took these pictures of a big poster in a subway station a long time ago, and still can't get over how suggestive they are.heh heh heh. problem is, with a photo like this, the jokes are way too easy, so I've got nothing to say.So... do you think APM did it on purpose? Rather... do you think they'd admit to doing it on purpose?and a couple of random "sand" konglish pictures for good measure.

World Mental Health Day: October 10

2011-10-12T14:35:00.002+09:00

It's a few days late, but October 10, according to someone I love very much, was World Mental Health day. I'm not linking, because my friend wrote an intensely personal, private account of her own journey with mental health issues, that doesn't need a bunch of strangers reading it, but here's a quote she posted on her website that is germane to mental health issues anywhere, especially in Korea, where the stigma against mental illness is really strong:

The very reason these illnesses are so stigmatized is because no one shares their battle. No one who is "normal" (which I actually, even through all of this, think I am!) ever tells people, "Hey, I've battled that problem, and I'm okay! I have a kid, and a job, and a marriage, and guess what!? I am not going to lose ANY OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS by sharing the fact that the GABA, Norepinepherine, and Serotonin neurotransmitters in my brain are not properly hitting the synapses of my Cerebral Cortex.

Some people go through life with a limp, because of a sports injury. And nobody thinks anything less of them. It's a shame that those who go through life with a gimpy brain-chemical-regulator, rather than a gimpy ankle, are subject to so many fears, prejudices, and other general crappinesses in life.That's all for now.Rob

Making the Most of Korea's Festivals

2011-10-11T18:23:00.000+09:00

It's festival season here in Korea, and while Korea's festivals are awesome, and one of my favorite things about the country, I have, at times, had a terrible time at a festival, because I didn't follow these simple rules. These rules are generally not unique to Korean festivals, but useful nonetheless.

You can find out which festivals are going on here.

Interspersed in this article are pictures from the "rape and cosmos festival" in Guri, near Seoul. That's rape and cosmos the flowers, not rape and cosmos as in Kobe Bryant and Carl Sagan.

1. Scout, Research, Plan, Reserve

These festivals don't always happen in one place, and if you zig, instead of zag, you might miss the best parts, and come away from a festival thinking "weak sauce" instead of "wowza."

The best thing is to go with someone who's been before - even better if it's someone who knows enough Korean to get around, read the schedule or (glory of glories) research it online in Korean (there's always more info in Korean than in English).

However, most festivals these days have websites... and even websites with (some manner of) English on them. Don't count on that -- the English part might not have been updated since 2008, but it can't hurt to try. Use Internet Explorer, and turn off your popup blocker.

Before you show up, have an idea of what you want to do, or at least the most important bases to touch. If you just show up and wander around, you're going to catch the butt end of the fun.

If you don't have a car, know the transportation available. Know the phone number for the local taxi company, and/or the tourist help number for that region. If you do have a car, know where parking is, and how far it is from the venues. Whenever you can, get a bead on the nearest bike rental place, and use bikes to get around. Bike rentals are available in many towns around Korea, and they're an awesome way to get around.

Make hotel reservations. Well ahead of time, if at all possible, or you might find yourself up a creek, knocking on lodging establishment doors at 2am, sleeping in an elevator in a jimjilbang (a friend even got turned away from the local jimjilbang, because it was all full up, once), or having to stay out all night. The smaller the town where the festival is located, the less likely they'll actually have enough hotel space to accommodate the entire festival crowd during peak times.

(in Guri, people were digging holes in the flowers to get those cute "face in the middle of flowers" pictures.)

2. Have your gear ready
The best way to have a terrible time at a Korean (or any) festival, is to show up empty-handed, only to discover everyone but you knew that the toilets wouldn't have tissues, or that water wouldn't be available on the premises, or that the nearest non-cotton-candy food was a 30 minute walk away, or that there was no. shade. anywhere., or that the cash machine you passed on the way out of the train station was the last chance for a 30 minute bus-ride in every direction, and they don't take cards here. Some festival locales are nearly barren the rest of the year - the cosmos festival is just a park for most of the year, with public park amenities, not major festival amenities, so some of these festival grounds won't be equipped for a whole lot.

To be prepared: bring these items:
-Enough cash to taxi around, and not need to visit an ATM.
-An extra layer (best of all if it is wind/waterproof, especially if it's a spring/autumn festival: the temperature really drops at night).
-Enough liquids to survive a sunny afternoon.
-A package of napkins that can double as toilet paper in a pinch.
-Trail mix, health bars, or something in case there's no food other than cotton candy and stale churros on site.
-Sun protection (I always bring a hat when I'm at a festival).
-A fold-out mat to sit on the ground

At the train or bus terminal, find a tourist information center, and get the map/brochure they're handing out. The person at the tourist information center might be the last person with (somewhat) competent English you come across, if your festival is in the countryside, and if the festival brochure has the word "Traditional" somewhere on the front page.

(I love taking pictures of people taking pictures. Don't know why. Silly photographer poses have got to be one of the reasons, though.)

3. Be Ready for Crowds, And Ready to Wait

One of my more recent "least favorite things about Korea" is that, while there's lots of cool stuff to see and do in Korea, anything that you can see or do that is even remotely seasonal (festivals with a time frame, natural phenomena that have a time limit, like spring blossoms or fall colors) is subject to an absolute rush of people wanting to enjoy that same ephemera, at the same time, as you.

So... there are tons of cool things to see and do... but you'll share most of them with a million other people also wishing to see or do the same things. This is especially acute for famous festivals, festivals near urban centers, and festivals celebrating seasonal things, (flowers blossoming, leaves changing, butterflies mating). So be ready to wait in line, to get jostled, to wade through crowds, and to nearly lose your travel buddies a few times. Be mentally prepared for it, too, because if you're expecting to get away from it all, but discover the "it all" you wanted to get away from is waiting for you at the festival site, the unexpected stress of crowds is a lot tougher to manage than the expected stress of crowds.

(A double rainbow pose! What does it mean?)

4. Have the Right Travel Partner

My mother-in-law likes to travel old-school Korean style: with a checklist and four destinations before lunch. I like to throw the plans out the window and spontaneously take a nap under a nice tree, because it's there. Be sure you're traveling with someone who has the same travel style.

(The classic "proposal" photographer's pose.)

5. Know Where to Be... and Know that Everybody Else will want to be there at the same time

Here's where a little research is handy. The highlights of the festival will be at certain times and certain places - the Andong Mask Festival's fireworks are something you'll remember for your whole life... if you know when and where they are.

The thing is, those other million people who came to the festival? They also want to be there for that, so be ready to show up at or near your vital locations enough ahead of time that you don't miss them while waiting for a bus that isn't packed like sardines. As I said: some of these places don't have the transit infrastructure to conveniently transport the full number of visitors, because the festival crowd is double the busiest day they ever have during the rest of the year. So be ready to move early, or by a different route than others take (if you know the area), or to fight and claw for a taxi.

My wife always teases me because she knows all the different types of flowers, and my flower vocabulary goes like this: "The pink one. The pale blue one."

I've had great times at festivals; I've also had horrible times at festivals in Korea, because wifeoseyo (girlfriendoseyo) and I were unprepared, or had faulty expectations, or under/overestimated distances, crowds, or prices. If you're cool with flying by the seat of your pants, do it, but at least know where you're sleeping, and where and when the bus leaves, or you might spend most of your trip wandering around aimlessly, trying to find a way out of a neighborhood where there's not much to do.

and one sunset photo from a birthday party I went to on Friday.

Ha ha. Here's a fun one: I'm so Korean...

2011-10-11T13:23:00.002+09:00

You know "yo mama jokes" that start with "Yo mama's so [adjective]"?Well at my buddy Yujin's blog, somebody left a comment, "I'm so Korean, my genealogy's all in Hangul, even before Hangul was invented." and then a few more you can see here: "I’m so Korean, our family kimchi recipe includes the line “bury and age for 500 years”"I’m so Korean, when somebody breaks into my house, I sigh and think 'Whatever. It’s happened 5000 times before'.'"and so forth.So, readers, what's your best "I'm so Korean..." boast? Put them in the comments. Winner gets a toaster!I'll start things out..."I'm so Korean, my side dishes have side dishes.""I'm so Korean, if I see a tiger in the wild, I offer it a pipe.""I'm so Korean, my mother-in-law asks ME for my dwenjang-jigae recipe."

Kpop Can't Take Over America. Neither Can Anybody

2011-10-10T02:47:00.002+09:00

SeoulBeats has an interesting article that got facebook-posted and twitter'd at me all day today:

It discusses the way Kpop has been facing an increased demand in different countries of the world... a topic sure to get the we'll-repost-every-Korea-article-from-any-foreign-news-source Korea Promotion-type people all hot and bothered.

As you can see from these four videos, K-pop has swept the entire world and every human on the planet now loves Dongbangshinki and Shinee and 2NE1 and Girls' Generation.
Sydney

France

Peru

and Geneva

and the crowds are no longer just overseas Koreans. See that white girl in the corner of the Geneva video? The one who doesn't really know the dance?

But sarcasm aside, the article brings up some of the usual complaints about the way often the management companies themselves are bunging up the delivery of a great product ...

and K-pop is a great product. It's not art (though there are Korean musical artists to be found if you know where to look) but as performance goes, it's a highly polished act that they've nearly got down to a science. Actually, down to a business model is probably the more apt phrase.

The article also suggests that these days, thanks to YouTube and stuff like that, K-pop has found enough overseas fans that they don't need to try to "convert the masses" the way JYP tried to do, booking The Wonder Girls with the Jonas Brothers: Kpop already has fans in all kinds of places, and they'll do a great job of selling out all kinds of venues... so long as their bookings are in keeping with the size of the fan community in their target cities (but who are we kidding? Ambition will win out. Wembley Stadium cancellation, here we come).

Some people might be a little disappointed if Kpop chooses to cater to that smaller niche, rather than aiming to hit the mainstream...

I'm not. And you know why?

Barenaked Ladies. That's why. And no, that's not a reference to the new look I hope SNSD takes on.

Barenaked Ladies (or BNL) is famous for that one song that gets stuck in your head. The chickity china one. You know it. They've had a handful of hit singles in America. That one catchy song was in 1999. What many people don't know is that in Canada, they first broke out in 1993, with this song:

They got some measure of success in Canada, but to get big in the USA, they toured, hard for a long time. Basically, from 1993 until 1999 when "One Week" broke through, they were releasing albums and achieving slowly increasing levels of fame around the USA, so that by the time the did have a radio hit, they also had a polished act, a solid back catalogue to fill out a full length show, great stage banter, a pre-existing fan base who could act as their missionaries to those who thought they were one-hit-wonders, and live favorites that new fans could get into, while old fans could sing along.

And if a Korean band really wants to make it in the USA, they're probably going to have to do the same. This whole "hitch our wagon to the Jonas Brothers" thing won't quite do it, and here's why:

He tries to crack up the audience, but his delivery is twelve kinds of "off." It's kind of cute to see him fall on his face, but it's not a speech that will set another million tweens' hearts aflutter, the way the Beatles were charming and cheeky and funny in their moptop era interviews.

In Robotics, they talk about the "Uncanny Valley" - when robots begin to resemble humans, humans feel more empathy towards them. We empathise with R2D2 more than Robbie The Robot because R2D2 looks and acts a little more human than Robbie does.

We connect more with Mr. Incredible than with Rodney Copperbottom, because he's more human-looking... but then something strange happens.

Call it the Polar Express effect. There's a point where the imitation gets close enough that it becomes weird instead of more and more charming. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was so lifelike... that it freaked everybody out. It was so similar to human that the small differences became the focus, instead of the big similarities.

And Korean stars trying to act the way American popstars act will fall into the uncanny valley - that "almost there, but not quite" zone, that will win over those niche audiences, and people who are willing to take Kpop, its awkward English its aegyoish stylings, and its boys wearing eye makeup on its own terms. It won't win over "the mainstream" in the way that would make the Kimcheerleaders feel validated. (Then again... jimmying music chart results for a meaningless number one single (see here) validates them, so maybe it would).

See, Rain's video up there-- he tries to make a joke - a simple pun - and bombs completely. Because rehearsing softball interview questions is not the same as actually appearing cool enough during a live appearance/interview/whatever, that a teenybopper (they're the audience for Kpop) would go "I want to make THAT person my idol." Making a joke that's culturally acceptable, and delivering it in a way that's funny to a widespread audience, is a very, very culturally specific performance, and you can't traipse across an ocean and expect to be the coolest kid in the class when you don't even speak the language. And that's the level of cultural acclimatization that would be necessary to reach "the mainstream." Lady Gaga knows the culture well enough that she can turn it inside out and play off defying its conventions, but you have to know it to subvert it.

(that uncanny valley goes the other way, too: the two mixed-race girls in Chocolat freak me out because their not-quite-Korean faces look really really weird to me in Korean kpop makeup, Korean kpop fashion, doing Korean kpop dances and aegyo. Big noses and aegyo are like apricot jam and pizza to me: both alright, but not together. Don't ask me why specifically - the whole thing about the uncanny valley is that you can't quite put your finger on it - but it's weird to me.)

Oh yeah: Unless you can do this (Shakira), or something like it.
In which case the rest is kinda moot. (Thanks, Youtube)

That may still not be entirely true: Shakira backs up her talent to back it up, with a really strong stage show, and she was a proven performer in Spanish (and had support from that fan base) before she tackled the VMA's.

But the other rub is this:

There's just no such thing as a mainstream anymore. When the Beatles came across the pond in 1964, the average TV owner had something like three or six channels to choose from, period. It's a lot easier to get astounding tv ratings when you're twenty five percent of all that's available! Even in the days of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," there were few enough methods of media distribution, that probably every person in America had heard "Billy Jean" on the radio, and could hum along. These days, thanks to Youtube, Amazon's long tail and iTunes and online personalized specialty radio stations, you can have an album or song hit number one in the charts, with vast swaths of America's population still saying "Justin Whober?" or "Whoby Keith?" or "Isn't M&M a candy?" Arcade Fire had some good chart results, and they still got the Who the Hell is Arcade Fire? backlash when they won Album of the Year. Modest freaking Mouse had a number one album...because in 2007, that's possible. Wouldn't have happened to the Pixies in the '80s.

That's good for music, because it means anybody can find their niche, and it's good for me, because I don't have to wait through radio crap to find songs I like and buy their albums.

Stornoway. Courtesy of a facebook status update. Song: Fuel Up.

But that same diversity in music means that you can't sweep America, or take America, or the world, or Europe, by storm. At very best, you can take one country, or one demographic by storm - like Justin Bieber did, setting youtube and twitter records while people older than me have NO idea who he is, and couldn't be bothered (at the same time as those tweeners really can't be bothered about Arcade Fire and The National). You could be an indie sensation, or a country sensation, or a teeny-bop sensation, or a CCM supadupastar. If you've got the chops.

And that'd be a pretty impressive accomplishment. But you can't take over America anymore. There's just too much ground, and too diverse, with too many pockets of people looking for something too specific, to be taken. What was the last album that took North America by storm? Has anything since Jagged Little Pill had the same impact across demographics?

The group that has the best chance at it will have every member good enough at English that they can do unscripted stuff, and come off cool. They will be legitimately talented, and also very hard-working, and they'll pay their dues: they won't whisk into L.A. from Seoul, book Staples Center, and sell it out because "The Whole World is Being Swept By the Korean Wave." They'll make it the way BNL made it in America. 200 cities a year, for five years. And then suddenly they'll appear out of nowhere.

The way Bobby Kim did in Korea: by being really poor for a while.

So that's what I think. Now go read the article at SeoulBeats.

So... I'm Dumb. You should go to the KOTESOL Conference

2011-10-09T20:31:00.000+09:00

I accidentally linked the wrong Kotesol conference in my last post.

So here's the correct link: you should go to the KOTESOL conference next weekend.

Here's the facebook page.

I was there for one of the days last year, and they had good sandwiches.

EVERYTHING is Happening

2011-10-08T12:52:00.000+09:00

I've received a whole bunch of notices I'd like to tell you all about...

1. The Kotesol Conference...
I strongly encourage English teachers in Korea to do something with their year or two in Korea (other than the usual having fun/see the world things), because otherwise it can be a bit of a black hole on your resume. KOTESOL is a great organization to get involved with, to sharpen your tools as a teacher, and to demonstrate a commitment to your profession that will help you with employers, and in the classroom.

60 presentations. Go visit the KOTESOL site for more information.

2. As seen on Popular Gusts:

On the evening of Tuesday October 11, 19:00, Mr. Devolin and Senator Martin will host a dinner reception for Canadian English teachers in Seoul at Maple Tree House, Jongno-gu, Samchung-dong 31-1 (02-730-7461) for a casual exchange of ideas and open discussion on a range of issues over (free) Korean BBQ. What we would ask of you is to spread the word (quickly) among your friends/colleagues/acquaintances who are Canadian English teachers interested in the idea of having a meaningful discussion on Korea-related topics or issues of concern to English teachers in Korea. Of course, all of you may attend this event as well. As solid attendence would help their event to be a success (first 50 to RSVP), your cooperation in inviting contacts is much appreciated.

RSVP: eslreception@gmail.com
Attendees: First 50 to reply
Cost: Free
Time: Oct. 11, 19:00-21:00
Location: Maple Tree House (Samchung-dong)

Guest-Posted! Jonoseyo, Peter Nimble, and Welcome, readers of The Scop

2011-10-06T11:39:00.001+09:00

Welcome, readers of The Scop, who may have come here after reading my guest-post on Jonathan Auxier's blog. If you're a fan of Jonathan Auxier, because you're a fan of Peter Nimble, and you're younger than age fifteen or so, I have to warn you that sometimes this blog uses big words, and sometimes it uses bad words like the "h" word or the "d" word (and I don't mean "happy" and "dinosaur")... but I'll make sure this post is squeaky-clean, or warn you.

And hello, my regular readers. I'm excited to tell you about this...

Jonathan Auxier was my very best male friend in university: we participated in comedy improv together, we got all pretentious together (both English lit majors) and generated a huge network of interrelated and absurdist inside jokes with surprising speed. Jonathan is the best yo-yo-er I've ever (knowingly) met, the second best player of "Zip-Bong" (a game I still play when I'm teaching kids) and I'm not sure why, but when I'm talking to him, I'm somehow better with words than I am at any other time. Being around him just helps me turn a phrase.

After graduating, Jon went to Carnegie-Mellon University for a masters' in Fine Arts in writing, and I came to Korea. We kinda drifted apart. But thankfully we re-connected recently.

Jonathan invited me to write a guest-post at his blog after we had a discussion there (also check my long comment) about Harry Potter, and why I felt let down by Harry Potter's performance as a hero: I love the Harry Potter books - really love them - but found that Harry's final victory left me cold. In the meantime, I've discovered my new favorite hero journey: Aang's journey, in Nickelodeon's "Avatar: The Last Airbender" So go read my post at The Scop about why. Aang might be the most likable protagonist I've ever seen (he matches Harry Potter in the first three books in likability - before Harry gets all sullen and resentful of...everything), but Aang has a resolution that's way more satisfying to me than Harry's.

Jonathan and I both dreamed of writing books back in our glorious, handsome, long-armed days of youth, and part of the reason he's started his website, "The Scop" (Scop is an old word for storyteller) is because Abrams just published his debut novel, "Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes."

(book trailer - did you know books had trailers?)

Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is a great debut novel. Peter is a blind thief - the world's greatest thief - and a ten-year-old boy, who breaks into a mysterious haberdasher's wagon, and steals a box which he discovers to contain three pairs of magical eyes. When he puts the first pair of eyes in his empty sockets, he is magically swept off to a mysterious place, and has high, swashbuckling adventures that are full of revelations, surprises, sly references to other children's classics (Peter Pan's Lost Boys, meet The Missing Ones). For your token Korea reference of the day (because this is a Korea blog), there is an evil king whom Peter eventually must confront, and he uses a surprisingly similar method of controlling his enslaved population as North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and his propaganda machine: force-feeding his people lies about how happy they are under his rule until they believe them.

The book includes Jonathan Auxier's own drawings (as does his blog: if you do something really awesome, sometimes he draws a picture for/of you) and the whole story is presented by a winking narrator who is never funnier than when (he?) directly addresses his audience... one of my very few gripes about the book, which I think is an absolute winner, is that I wish I could have heard more of the narrator's hilarious/witty/unexpected thoughts on topics. The action was exciting, but other books also have action... I kept waiting for the totally unique narrator's voice to throw that one extra layer of self-referential fun on top of the action, like the rug that ties the room together. (Warning: this video clip includes a Very Bad Word that your parents don't want you to say... so don't click on the link if you don't want to hear it.) Sometimes I got the gently-tossed narrator's bulls-eyes I hoped for, and sometimes I didn't. Part of the reason I wanted the book to go on longer, was so that I could hang out more with that narrator.

(image source)

Take that single gripe with a grain of salt in the exact shape of this fact: Jon is a friend of mine from of old, so perhaps I simply miss his voice because he's my friend, and I'm reading this book partly as a friend of Mr. Auxier's, and not purely as a reader of books. Maybe his editor disagrees with me. Or twelve-year-old readers. Maybe most readers wouldn't go "More of Jonathan Auxier! Less of that Peter Nimble fellow" in a book about Peter Nimble... but I did, strange as that is.

(image from Jonathan's own website: looks like the friend I remember)

However, I'll say unequivocally that Jonathan Auxier has grown to become quite an excellent writer, and it is clear that he has worked extremely hard on crafting a book that is quite nearly perfect, and that doesn't show off how hard he must have worked on it (because that's the greatest trick good writers can do: a good writer can spend hours getting a sentence just perfect, but when you read it, it seems like it just popped into their head. The hardest working writers make their effort invisible.)

Now that I have his readers and friends attention for this one post, I'm going to dish up one juicy story from his past: at one point, Jonathan decided to start reading the dictionary, from cover to cover, in order to find all those lovely, delicious words that are fun to say, or that perfectly describe something that's difficult to describe, but aren't very common. Well, he'd started on that task when he handed me a manuscript he wanted me to critique. The story was good... but it was loaded, loaded with very obscure words that, while they perfectly described their various situations, needed to be looked up in a dictionary. The funny thing is, because Jonathan had just started his quest to read the dictionary from cover to cover, the obscure and wonderful words in the story all started with "A," "B," or "C"!

(clearly we influenced each other at some point)

Jonathan Auxier's book, "Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes" is an abomasal book, and if you visit the website for the book: http://www.peternimble.com/, you can see that Peter Nimble will answer your questions, but you will also see (events) that if you decide to study "Peter Nimble" with your class before next February, you can have a free skype visit with the author, Jonathan Auxier. Some of my regular readers may teach young students who are middle-school-level readers, who might just LOVE this book (Jonathan describes it as the book he wished somebody'd handed him when he was in middle school)... and it'd be fun making Jon stay up late to skype-visit a class of students in Korea.

One last thing: another benefit of re-connecting with Jonathan is that his writing on The Scop (which often discusses being a teller and lover of stories) led me to discover Cockeyed Caravan, which is a blog by a writer named Matt Bird, that should be read by anybody who dreams of telling stories for a living, whether that's books, televeision, or screen. I know Korea's expat scene is loaded with people working on their novel or screenplay, so go subscribe to him, too.

Disclosure: I received no compensation of any kind for the guest-post I wrote, or for writing this glowingly positive post, for Mr. Auxier. Other than the short thank-you e-mail he sent me.

One reason it's nice to be a boy...

2011-10-03T23:27:00.002+09:00

One tiny little reason...

If you do one Festival This Year...

2011-09-29T17:34:00.000+09:00

If you do one festival this year, do the Andong Mask Dance Festival.

Here's more information about the festival.

The Official Website

And some (pretty rough) videos from my 2008 and 2009 trips:

The Must-See Fireworks: (read about them at my original andong blog write-up)

Mask-dancey things.

The (UNESCO World Heritage site) folk village where some of the festival happens:

Hopefully the music is better than in 2008...

My boy Evan:

Appeared in Newsweek Korea: On Ajummas and Knee-jerks

2011-09-29T15:39:00.000+09:00

So... back in June (i'm terrible at writing these kinds of posts on time) I was translated into Korean and featured for the second time in Korean Newsweek Magazine, in the section titled "Seoul Serenade." The article was a riff on this post I wrote a few years ago. So... enjoy it.

Too quick to judge?

Even when expats don’t speak any Korean, some Korean words creep into our vocabularies, especially words that can indicate something specifically Korean.

One example of this is the words “ajumma” and “ajosshi.” The dictionary says “ajumma” and “ajosshi” mean older woman and man, but everybody knows that in different kinds of conversations, those words have extra, added meanings. When my university-age (Korean) female student had a bad experience with an ajumma one day, she came into class looking upset. When I asked, “what’s wrong?” she said the word “ajumma” with a face, and a voice, that told a whole story in one word. We could all imagine the kind of situation that had happened.

These kinds of stereotypes can come to mind for foreigners, too: we also have stories about ajummas and ajeosshis waiting in line, or at the department store, in a drinking neighborhood. Everybody has a story or a joke about those kinds of situations.

I also have an “ajumma story.” I was on the Seoul subway, at a stop. When the doors closed, I heard a commotion: somebody had fallen through the sliding doors as they closed.

An ungenerous thought came into my mind: “It was probably some rude ajumma throwing her purse to catch the train before it goes” -- Koreans and foreigners all know about that stereotype. I thought, “well, if she got caught in the door and fell, and if she got embarrassed, she deserves it for being so pushy and impatient.”

With that righteous attitude, I turned to look more closely, and maybe to feel some ugly satisfaction at seeing the rude ajumma’s embarrassment...

but it wasn’t the scene I imagined. Three people lifted somebody to her feet, but it was a tiny, thin, white-haired grandmother, with her spine curved like a question mark, so old her feet were unsteady, even with three people holding her. Limping on one leg, there’s no chance she could have sprinted, as I imagined, to catch the subway: she had probably been unable to move her slow, uncertain feet quickly and carefully onto the subway car, and tripped and fell as the doors closed.

Immediately I felt ashamed for judging a stranger without even thinking about her situation, without even bothering to see who she was, before deciding, in my mind, that she deserved to fall on the subway. The old lady apologized to the people around her in a low voice, and the strangers helped her sit in one of the end seats of the subway, reserved for seniors.

I thought about my own attitude: it is easy to dehumanize strangers: I don’t know the name or history of the driver who cuts me off in traffic, I don’t know the family situation of the bureaucrat who gives me more paperwork at the city office, and I don’t know the life experiences that led the shouting drunk in the street to make his life choices. Because I don’t know them, it’s easy to have no compassion, and assume the worst about them.

Because of the language barrier, many expats cannot even speak to the Koreans around them as humans, so the tool that can lead to human connection is not always available. Without connection, it’s harder to develop compassion, and it becomes easy to turn someone into a bad guy, or a scapegoat, and forget they are human beings, just like I am.

As I thought about it, I realized that kind of judgement goes in both directions:

Expats in Korea know that not all ajummas act like the ugly stereotype, and most of us also have lovely stories about friendly, warm, hospitable, sweet, and funny older Koreans we have met. In fact, my mother and father in law are a perfect example of a wonderful ajumma and ajeosshi who show all the great virtues of Korea’s older generation.

And if you ask around, many people met a foreigner during a trip, or in a class, or at an event, who was sweet and kind, who made a human connection. But because of language barriers and cultural differences, those connections can be difficult. Some find it easier to build up an image based on a few ugly stories in the newspaper.

However, it’s unfair for me to take the worst ajumma story I can remember, and use it to judge every ajumma I see (as I did on the subway that day), and it’s unfair to judge the individual expats living on your street, and teaching your children, according to the most shocking story you saw on TV.

I can’t say if one side judges the other side more often, or more harshly: I’m sad to say I’ve seen judgement go in both directions, but that’s not the point, anyway... I CAN try to change myself, and remember to think about the humanity in people who are different than me. I try to do that every day, so that my Seoul is a city of humans, not strangers.

Kurry: The Media Mashup Project

2011-09-27T23:11:00.001+09:00

Kurry: the Media Mashup Project.

A number of Thursdays ago, I was invited by the fearless and mighty Cynthia Yoo, the nigh-superhuman juggernaut behind Nanoomi.net, and Tatter and Media’s connections with English language blogs, to attend an introduction of a new “media mashup project” between Yonhap News and Tatter & Media. Personally, I think this is a really cool project.

(what's a mash-up? Originally, it was two songs that seem dissimilar, combined by a clever DJ, in a way that just really, really works, despite the dissimilarity.. that's a mash-up. Mash-up is starting to stretch its meanings to include things other than songs, it seems.)

Outkast vs. Queen

Tatter & Media is a huge network of blogs and bloggers in Korea, and Yonhap News is a news wire that sends Korean news around the world: Korea's Reuters, if you will. Now, these days, both of those groups face challenges in meaningfully introducing issues and events to the world: bloggers, because blogging is a new media which doesn’t carry a lot of clout or credibility in many circles: phone an embassy for a comment and tell them you’re a famous blogger, and then phone them again and tell them you’re from the Washington Post, Reuters, or Yonhap News... you’ll see what I mean.

Yonhap news, and many traditional news media also have a problem: while they have the name recognition to get that interview or comment, reporters at such places often have to complete several article write-ups per day, which means that even if they’d like to, often they don’t have the time to go into depth, and call all those sources that would deepen their reports, or write in a way that includes perspective or background knowledge of the underlying issues, even if they do know about them. And issues drive news stories, not events - news stories that tap into important issues spread, and ones that don’t drop like a tree in the forest.

To worsen that inability to go deep, traditional media also find themselves wildly outnumbered and unable to compete with the immediacy of bloggers, twitter users and the like. By the sheer law of averages, a few twitterers will be right where the news is happening, as it happens: beat reporters still have that dispatch time-lag. Thanks to things like twitter and tumblr, some kinds of breaking news have been pulled, unceremoniously, right out of the hands of those trying to report it. For example: I learned of Michael Jackson’s death and the Japan tsunami through twitter, and the suicide of ex-president Roh Moo-hyun through blogs, and the pictures of the Seoul floods that knocked my socks off weren’t the ones from any news source, but the ones people retweeted from instagram, tumblr, ACME tweet-a-photo, and Facebook status update links.

(the borg/Naver ship: you will be assimilated)

Another problem lies in the nature of the Korean Internet climate: if you follow Korea tech news even a little, you’ll know how Naver and Daum, the two biggest portals in Korea, utterly dominate the Korean Internet experience. They have recently been blasted for this - one Korean blogger took the portals to task for some of their manipulation of search results, and actually encouraged Koreans switch to Google, and try to break the Korean internet monoculture. Korean portals have been taken to task by others - one example.

One of the accusations against these portals is that they direct people to news articles that have been cut and pasted (perhaps without accreditation) onto pages hosted by the portals, rather than directing readers to the original articles hosted outside the portal’s network. By doing this, the portals keep readers inside their network, and get more eyeballs looking at ads in their own ad network. (By dishonestly (illegally?) copying content.) Previous efforts to get blogs and news gathered into one place has usually involved either bloggers copying content from news sources, or news sources copying content from blogs...often without permission from the other. Neither is an ideal situation.

Enter news Kurry (거리)

(one kind of kurry/geori-this is the picture on the top banner of my blog)

A 거리 is (see the note at the end of the post), if I’ve got this right, the streets or the marketplace, in the sense of English idioms like “He knows the streets” or “Word on the streets...” It can also indicate a street that has a concentration of some one product - the office furniture street (Euljiro 4-ga) or the ddeokbokki street (Shindang) - so the title of the project-- Kurry (I’m not wild about the transliteration, but...) evokes a marketplace for media, news, and insights. The Kurry Project is a collaboration between the many bloggers on TNM, and the journalists at Yonhap News, which will ideally bring the best of both sides into one project:

Bloggers will be able to grab a Yonhap story (legally) and highlight the issues or background that make the story compelling, and Yonhap will be able to (legally) pick up that more in-depth report from the blogger and circulate it (legally) along the Yonhap news wire as a follow-up. Meanwhile, Yonhap gains from the immediacy and depth bloggers and social network news can provide, while bloggers involved in the project have a chance of being picked up by an international news wire, and will be able to introduce themselves, when digging for a story, as “from Yonhap news” instead of “from JennyTheKittyLover on TiStory”... big credibility jump there. Some bloggers will be the “curators” drawing out stories that could be improved with some knowledge or expertise from the combined knowledge of the bloggers involved.

Sounds good, right?

So keep this one on your radar... I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

(read about it in Korean here!)

[UPDATE]
One of my buddies who's closer to the Kurry Media project just contacted me with a little more to say about the name, to clear up some confusion we've had in the comments, and a bit more about the goal of the project:

Turns out the Kurry is meant to be a kind of a triple-play on words: Kurry can refer to the 거리 - the marketplace of ideas etc., as I described it above; it can also refer to 카래 - Curry, the Indian food, which is a mix of different flavors coming together in harmony, OR the main meaning, as a transliteration of 꺼리, a verb-modifying tag which is used in Korean like this: 읽을꺼리 means something to read, 볼꺼리 means something to see, 말꺼리, something to talk about, etc.. -- the Kurry project is meant to give people something to see, to read, to talk about, or to think about, that is keyed to their interests, rather than just the stuff newswires tell them to be interested in.

So, I hope that clears things up.

Korean Propaganda: North and South

2011-09-23T08:50:00.001+09:00

Adeel, from "And With Your Help I'll Get That Chicken" has an interesting post comparing North and South Korean propaganda posters.

So go read it.

The comparison between the heavy-handed way the government talks to its people in the north, and in the south, serves to remind us both that South and North Korea aren't really that far removed, timewise, from being the same country (sixty or seventy years isn't a whole lot in geopolitical terms), and the real point of divergence might have only been as recent as 1987 or 1993, with South Korea's first democratic election, or South Korea's first election of a civilian president.

Though it's definitely different now... listen how similar the song is in this (admittedly old) North Korean tourism ad, to the music your taxi driver listens to, or to the music tracks playing in the background at a noraebang (karaoke room).

Some south Korea Trot music.

Yes, South Korean tourism advertising is better than that...

But the fact South Korea's tourism promotions have all been upstaged by some random tourist who happens to be a good video editor? Not good news.

Seriously, they should just hire this guy.

In general, I've observed that sentiment towards North Korea is mostly generational -- as South and North Korea have become less similar over time, those with less memory of times when North and South were similar feel less reason to hold onto the connections that remain. People under thirty seem to spend more time talking about the staggering economic burden North Korea would be as a province of South Korea, absorbed and needing support, while people over forty have bought into the "one people" thing comparatively more.

One of my students once dropped the interesting thesis that Western technology companies dread Korean unification, because North Korea's cheap labor combined with South Korea's technology know-how would enable South Korea's technology companies to dominate the world markets by undercutting the prices through reduced manufacturing costs.

Meanwhile, a left-leaning, Nork-friendly student I once had argued that if South and North Korea reunited, South Korea would become a nuclear capable nation, which it isn't right now, thanks to North Korea's nuke program, and that would raise Korea's status in the world. Although I suspect this might have been a prepared argument used to justify being North-friendly, as I've since heard that exact same argument, to the letter (or at least to the talking point) from a few other north-friendly people who were smart enough to know their "one blood, one people" stuff had run out of gas with anybody under forty, and perhaps they needed a different line.

Ain't No Party Like a Pyongyang Party' Cause a Pyongyang Party is Absolutely Mandatory!

2011-09-22T17:44:00.004+09:00

This remix of North Korean promotional footage, set to a party track, is pure genius.

Wish I'd thought of it.

Mark Zuckerberg is My Crack Dealer

2011-09-21T16:58:00.000+09:00

I'm tired of the bimonthly Zuckerberg Hatedown that occurs whenever anything about Facebook changes. That's all.

It takes 48 hours for everyone to get used to the new layout, and then we all whine again when it changes again.

If my drug dealer decides to stand in front of the Baskin Robbins instead of in front of the Subway, I'M still the one addicted to the product, aren't I? Why waste time whining "Hey dude. I had to wait thirty seconds for that crosswalk. Didn't used to have to do that. So... can I have a dime?"

That is all.

OK one more: Google plus never quite made it. I don't think it will.

And here's why:
Because with google behind it, it never got a chance to make its mistakes in obscurity.

Google didn't do a huge buildup to google docs, but just made it available, and waited for people to discover it was an awesome service. By the time a lot of people were discovering it, it had already worked out many of its initial glitches. With Google's last few social forays, it created a big buzz that a not-completely-finished product simply couldn't live up to.

Plus, Google will never again have that "outsider" cool that helped it in the beginning, that helped Facebook and Twitter get going.

Not to mention:
the SNS market's saturated. Supersaturated.
I don't want to sign up to another linkedin hi5 facebook myspace twitter WHATEVER the heck, have another place to log in, have another login and password to remember, and another place that might get hacked, and wade through overlapping services anyway.

So... until somebody invents the combinator that lets me click on ONE button, and be updated on my facebook, twitter, kakao, linkedin etc. services without having to visit five different places, I'm in. Call it FacebLinKakaoWitteReddit

Until then, I'm happy with what I have.

And no, I'm not signing up for reddit.

Abortion in Korea

2011-09-19T12:38:00.002+09:00

My mom was a hard-core anti-abortion activist: she worked, and volunteered, for my town's "Right To Life" and unplanned pregnancy organizations, and a few times, we even took a few young, pregnant ladies who needed a place to stay into our home a few times. She even brought my little brother to the picket lines a few times. I can't think of an issue where I more clearly see, and sympathise with, both sides of the issue, than this one. Frankly, writing this post, this way, might upset some people who are very dear to me, who remain strongly opposed to abortion.

James Turnbull, of The Grand Narrative has a fascinating account of a Korean university student's attempt to procure an abortion in Korea. It includes being lectured about her loose lifestyle by a doctor (I've been told women buying birth control pills at a pharmacy sometimes also get "don't be such a floozy" lectures from pharmacists). It also discusses how the price has gotten way higher in Korea, because government officials think fighting to bring down Korea's high abortion rate (by persecuting doctors who perform abortions) is a good way to bring up the birthrate.

Which is about as wrong-minded as thinking that we can solve the traffic jam problem in Kangnam every day by raising the speed limits on the main roads, instead of by widening roads, improving bus lanes, discouraging the use of cars, encouraging development of telecommuting options, introducing congestion taxes in downtown areas, and building more subway lines. -- Abortions in Korea are a symptom of a larger problem, and fighting the symptoms doesn't solve the problem.

It's a complex topic, but here, in my opinion, is the choice:

Either:
1. Make pregnancy prevention education easily available, and make it easy (and non-humiliating) to obtain pregnancy prevention devices (birth control pills, prophylactics, etc.). This training should be for young men and women. Make birth control and morning-after pills over-the-counter. And fine pharmacists who receive a complaint for lecturing a woman on her lifestyle. Make the fine double for every repeat offense. He's a pharmacist, not a priest.

OR
2. Make abortion affordable and accessible -- if you're not going to teach people how to avoid pregnancy, give them a way out of it.

OR
3. Create/improve working social programs, daycare centers, and maternity protection laws, etc, that make sure that parents, and especially single mothers, no longer feel like having a baby will be the death of all her future career/education prospects.

Or maybe all three. Or at least one and three, so that if the religious right really does insist on banning ~~adoption~~ abortion, fewer women end up on that road by accident, and those who do end up on that road, have options.

... or we could go back to exporting unwanted babies, like back in the '80s when Korea was one of the world's largest sources of overseas adoptees. Did you know back in 1998 Kim Dae Jung actually apologized to Korean overseas adoptees. (more about Korean overseas adoption here)

Somebody I love a lot is currently in the process of getting a masters' degree in Canada as a single mother. And I LOVE that in Canada, it's possible for a single mother to aim at a masters' degree, rather than inevitably resigning herself to a career waiting tables. Until single (and married) women in Korea feel like they will still have options even after a baby is born, the abortion rate will continue to be high, and the birth rate will continue to be low.

But go read the story of getting an abortion in Korea. It's a little bit heartbreaking.

Update:
In the comments, somebody asked me to link this blog, which is an account of a "foreigner" getting an abortion in Korea.

It's a single-post blog, and it includes the line "I will only list one abortion provider in the Seoul area, because I believe he is worth the travel time" ...I'm sure there are other clinics where one could find similarly compassionate, and English-capable help, to say nothing of those who do not live around Seoul. Condoms break in Busan, too.

If anyone has a link or reference for doctors in other parts of the country, or others in Seoul, or wishes to put some kind of contact information into the comments on this post, so that people can contact them for a recommendation, feel free.

Jesa Pizza

2011-09-16T15:41:00.000+09:00

You should all go read Ms. Lee To Be's thoughtful blog post about tradition, in light of the picture of a pizza on a jesa table, that made the rounds on Korea's internet recently:

the main gist: we preserve dead things. To make preservation (rather than practice) a goal is also, in part, to surrender the belief that tradition remains relevant to our lives.

The Korean from Ask a Korean! wrote about how to do a Jesa a while ago, and has a (short) response to the pizza jesa here.

I wrote about Jesa once, a long time ago, too, upon reflecting on my mother's death of cancer.

Chuseok Weekend, Gae-eun Park, Meetups and A Scare

2011-09-15T16:04:00.001+09:00

Music soundtrack: EMA - Anteroom. If Elliot Smith were reincarnated as an emo girl, here's what it would sound like: Hit play, and then start reading.

Did a few things over the weekend.

Among them:

Ate at Table 34 in the Grand Intercontinental Hotel at Coex with wifeoseyo... and that food was obscenely good.

Met some lovely lovely people on Tuesday, and had a few drinks and a nice walk and talk, near my home. Included in that crew were some of my favorite former coworkers, a few bloggers who shall go unnamed, and one irascible scoundrel who shall not be named, but whose face shall be shown here for the internet to see his shame.

Now that the baby's coming soon, I have a feeling a lot of my hangout events will likely be somewhere near home, like this one was. Fortunately, I live somewhere AWESOME.

Met some OTHER lovely lovely people on Sunday night and had a picnic on an overpass. And some OTHER other lovely people on Friday night.

Ever meet a person who's just a cool-person magnet? Some people, somehow, always have lots of very smart, or interesting, or funny people around them. My best friend Matt, who left Korea, was like that, too -- you could count on people recommended by him, to be worth the time to get to know them. I'm happy to say I know another person like that.

But I won't tell you who, or you'll all want to hang out with him/her too, and then s/he won't have time to hang out with ME.

Another weekend highlight, though, was visiting 개운산공원 - Gae-eun Mountain Park - on the smallish mountain behind Korea University. It's a park that's not that easy to reach, shows evidence of being fairly recently built, or at least improved, and has a lot of open spaces where you can see some great views of the city, or let your kid run, without losing sight of them.

Spacious. Nice view. Not crowded. Noice.

Because it's not that easy to reach, it isn't crowded, either, the way Han River park, or the Cheonggyecheon always are when the weather's nice, and because there are trees on the mountainsides all around the park (as well as some trails through woods), despite being in the middle of the city, the air's fresher than you find in most places.

There's not quite enough there for an entire date, but it'd be a decent place to take the kids, or bring your camera, or just to chill with your buds. Maybe bring some bottles of wine and get talky. It's big and sprawling enough that a decent game of capture the flag could probably be played. Or, bring picnic materials, a frisbee, a soccer ball/football and badminton rackets and a very, very nice time could be had.

By foot: Go to Korea University subway station, exit 2. Go straight until you pass the GS 칼텍스 gas station, and take your first right. Head down that road until you see a a fork in the road, with one fork going up the hill. Follow road up hill around a bunch of curves until you reach a three way intersection. Go right, and you can't miss the park area. It'll about 35-30 minutes by foot, unless you're slow.

Or (if Daum Maps isn't lying), once you pass the gas station, across the street from the corner where you should turn right, take the small green bus "성북 20" and get off at "개운중학교" stop, and backtrack a little to find the three-way intersection that leads to the park.

The park has most of the trappings of other parks where seniors are fond of hanging out - and the demographic there definitely skewed older - so there are exercise machines (including some fairly new, and quite nice equipment in one corner - I tried it), but because it's up a hill, again, it's not as crowded with the seniors as Jongmyo Park is.

Instead, it looked like this: even on the Saturday of a Chuseok holiday.

There was also a health center, but I didn't really explore that.

Wifeoseyo was very impressed with big rocks that had beautiful Korean poetry carved into them: they're some of her favorite poems, she says.

One little corner of the park even had a little book booth.

The books are multipurpose.

Either this sign indicates there are speed bumps ahead, or there's a suntanning area nearby, too.

This was not the view from Gaeeun Park. It's the view from Bukak Skyway's little lookout point.

But I went there, too, and it was nice.

I also climbed a mountain with a group of people, and had a bit of a scare. I had a crappy breakfast, didn't do warmup stretches, and went too fast at the beginning, leading to a lightheaded spell the likes of which I haven't had before. The other hikers were kind enough to wait for me, and once I took it a little easier, I was OK for the rest of the hike... but that's never happened to me before, and it put a mini-scare into me. After all, when the zombies come, I want to be sure I have the endurance to protect my family, and keep going until they've all been beheaded, you know? A sharp machete is important, but so is a good cardio regimen.

As I pushed, and then passed 30 years old, I discovered that I can maintain the level of health/body type that I had in the 20s (which was pretty low-effort when I was in my 20s)... but it just takes me a little more work each year than it did the year before, and a hardcore dizzy spell on the entry slopes of Bukhan Mountain was a pretty clear sign it's time for me to put a little cardio into my regular routine. And that I'm not 22 anymore.

Dammit!

But other than that little scare, I had a great weekend. How about you?

Nice Galaxy Tab Ad...I Mean, Nice Patronizing Stereotype-filled "Visit Korea" ad...

2011-09-05T16:53:00.005+09:00

Warning: there is one slightly NSFW image in this post. It's down where I'm talking about the Netherlands.

So there's this new ad that has been spotted in places like CNN.

Yeah. Soak it in.

I have a few problems with this ad:

First, it looks more like an ad for the Galaxy Tab (if that's what the guy's carrying) than an ad for Korea. Seriously. In fact, it would make more sense as a Galaxy Tab ad - "Samsung is supplying the whole world with tablet technology...um...except Germany" In that context, the ad would have made more sense.

Next, very few people wear their nation's traditional dress when traveling abroad. Even Texans usually leave their horses at home. And maybe even their Segways.

Also, who the hell asks THESE kinds of questions (in their own language) of a random stranger on the street? "Is it true that you're the 7th largest exporter?" (I don't know how google works.)

Anyway, what would Koreans do if somebody approached them, dressed like Napoleon,

and asked them a question in French?

Here's what they'd do:

(an ad aimed at Koreans - "don't act QUITE so scared when you see a foreigner, or they'll know Korean hospitality is only for non-strangers")

The ad ends with a whole line-up of stereotypes walking towards the camera in some sort of a xenophobe's nightmare.

I've got Dutch background, so should I be upset that there isn't someone dressed like this in the ad?

Should I dress like that (or at least the boy version) when I travel abroad?

Or maybe, like the Arabian belly dancer on the far right at the end of the ad (who almost certainly doesn't even dress that way on the street in her own blessed country)...

I should dress like one of the Netherlands' other famous identifiers. (the source)

Or a Canadian mountie -- after all, one of the Queen's Guard is there.

Other screen shots from the ad, in case it gets pulled from youtube:

Key message: "Even though we think you're all cowboys, we want you to visit our country, Americans."

To their credit, at least the cowboy doesn't have a Russian accent, like those "American" teachers in some of those trashy scapegoaty TV shows.

I wonder how many cowboys know what bibimbap is.

Yes. In some middle-easternern countries, people do dress this way every day. When they travel abroad? Perhaps.

Seems a little elaborate for a travel outfit... then again, I passed a pair of harajuku girls on a street in Hongdae a few saturday nights ago.

"Excuse me. I got lost on the way to the ballroom."

"Galaxy Tab: all the information you need to help random, oddly-dressed strangers"

Here's the whole crew of them in Gwanghwamun Square.

Including Connor MacLeod

A Hopak dancer (I think)

A flamenco dancer. (correct me if I'm wrong on any of these)

A... shaolin monk, perhaps? Because Koreans wear Taekwondo uniforms when they travel abroad.

Oh. And a tall African wearing a brightly-colored toga. He's in the back row, so I can't tell whether he's carrying a spear, or if there's a bone in his nose. (we've seen worse, but still...)

A mexican with a sombrero. (At least they couldn't find anyone who was mexican, or looked mexican, and was shameless enough to wear a sombrero for the camera)

By the way, the Cowboy's name...

is cowboy.

This brazilian lady was busy: she had to go straight from the parade float to the airport.

I can't quite tell who this guy's supposed to be.

Thankfully, the American Indian (complete with feather, facepaint and buckskin pants) DID end up on the cutting room floor. Barely.

(image source)

Rest in peace, Iron Eyes Cody.

I think that if everybody else is wearing their national stereotyped clothes, they should put the Korean guy in a hanbok, or at least a taekwondo uniform, for one thing. I don't know how this ad is going to impress anyone enough to decide to come to Korea, when one of the messages it seems to communicate is "Hey. We don't know anything except the broadest stereotypes of your country. So why don't you broaden your horizons by coming to a country where our ad implies that people will expect you to wear a sombrero if you're from mexico." And if this ad were to reflect the actual flows of tourists to Korea, then the elephant in the room is, "Why so few South and Southeast Asian outfits?" Not even an Indian sari? Or one of those fantastic Thai headdresses?

There are other ways to have communicated that these people are from other countries, than dressing them like friggin' Napoleon - flags on backpacks, or you could even have a flag show up on the corner of the screen, or floating above their head like the character info on an online role play game, without diving into this "let's dress foreigners in silly costumes" mess.

I don't know if it quite heads into straight-up offensive territory, but it is definitely, definitely tone deaf. And if my sources are correct, and I'm pretty sure they are, the producers were told this ad was wrong-minded, patronizing and maybe a little racist, on no uncertain terms, and they ran it anyway. So... I guess they were keeping those westerners around to make their office feel international, and not because the people promoting Korea actually care what foreigners think about their "visit Korea" ads.

and yeah, this ad, seen by Koreans, will do a good job of making Koreans feel good about Korea.

But that's not the point of international Korean tourism promotions, is it? And it hardly requires buying ad space on CNN, when KBS or MBC will reach more Koreans anyway. Hell, why not just have the narration in Korean?

Self-Deprecatoseyo!

2011-09-03T20:56:00.000+09:00

Nothing like a joke at my own expense to end my week.

Mutual facebook friends will recognize the source by the photo next to it, the rest of you will just have to ask, "Who was that masked man?"

and I can only answer this:

Climbed Dobong Monain. Killed My Legs.

2011-09-02T16:27:00.000+09:00

Turns out Dobong Mountain is a steep bastard of a mountain to climb. I was out of practice, so it took days before I could do things like stairs again.

But once you get to the top it's crunking beautiful.

Here's a panorama I took last wednesday. Click on the image for a full-size picture.

Don't be a Dick

2011-09-02T00:43:00.002+09:00

This came to my attention earlier this week... I think somebody linked it on twitter. Anyway, Phil Plait is a skeptic, but the stuff he says about the ways people try to persuade other people on the internet, are worth a good hard look. Especially if one often finds oneself butting heads with other people.

Summary, and these are as close to the "golden rules of internet commenting" as you can find:

1. it's not what you say, it's how you say it
2. don't be a dick -- back in my "complaining expats" days, I once wrote that "when you talk so harshly, even when you're right, you're wrong, and even if you win the argument, you still lose"

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Best line: "Is your goal to score cheap points, or is your goal to win the damn game?"

Update on Babyseyo

2011-09-01T23:49:00.001+09:00

last friday we went into the hospital for a pregnancy update, and...

that's right. We saw a gochu.

And along the way, I've figured out that, at least in my opinion, there is one situation in which it's perfectly OK and non-controversial to show people a close-up picture of your son's willie:

when it's an ultrasound. Once that baby's out of his mom, it just ain't kosher anymore. (Sorry, Borat. No, I'm not including a link to the picture.)

Random: Two Bots in Conversation

2011-08-30T18:45:00.000+09:00

Somebody put two chatbots (computers that are programmed to chat online and attempt to simulate a human's chat responses) into a conversation with each other.

It's awesome -- it almost hangs together, but not quite. Kind of like listening to a four-year-old tell jokes.

What did that Korean Call Me? 니가 and "nigga" - a PSA.

2011-08-29T12:23:00.014+09:00

[updated/added text in [brackets and italics]]

Yes. I used a word in the title there that I never use in real life. One of only about two I never use. Maybe I'm throwing a rock at a hornet's nest, but I hope not. I'm not an expert on this specific set of race issues, and would never pretend to be one.

But this video came to my attention through The Marmot's Hole. Korean article. And I think it's good to have this topic google-able, so I'm throwing this out there. The Metropolitician says his piece.
Views from Burndog, I'm No Picasso (who suggests 니가 is altogether too familiar for strangers on a bus), David Wills, and Eve (who doesn't seem to like me).

[update: a late addition is The Bobster, whose satire of the whole thing hit exactly the right note.]

In the video, a (probably, from the accent and mannerisms) American with (probably) African ethnic background is shouting at an old Korean guy.

According to the Marmot's Hole's initial summary of the article, the old guy says he said

"니가 여기 앉아" to the man, which means "you sit here" - he was offering him a seat.

But phonetically, it sounds like this: "nigga, yogi anjah"

Which [by some accounts] led to the scene you can see at the bottom of the Korean article. Or here.

The accuracy of this initial account is being questioned now... but the potential confusion still stands, so this post still stands.

Here's the PSA part:

Folks... in Korean, "niga" (니가) means "you" - "니" (ni) means you, and "가" is a tag that indicates "you" are the subject of this sentence.

When you hear the word "니가" it's not necessarily somebody trying to insult anyone, or trying to sound like a gangster. Many of the Koreans I hear swear are tossing out a word they don't really understand, but heard in a movie, just to see what happens (as when middle school students say "fuck you" or flip the middle finger at foreigners, kind of the way I used to poke at cats with a stick). People are not necessarily trying to be as insulting as the fella in this video took them to be doing. (not to say Koreans are always not trying to make racist insults, but...)

Here's a song that one of my African-American Korea friends thought was a racist blunder by a Korean popstar. It isn't, any more than Clint Eastwood was trying to insult the Hmong kid when he gave it a pat on the head in Gran Torino. The song is "Champion" by Psy.

It's common to hear people talk about Korea's racism problem, and it is common to encounter people trying out words whose meaning they don't fully understand... but those aren't always direct attempts to insult, or start trouble, the way it would be if somebody in North America approached this guy and called him that word on the bus [if that's how the incident unfolded]. Maybe this guy was having a bad day, maybe it was the third time that day something had happened to him that he attributed to racism in Korea, and maybe he was right about some or all of them. But if The Marmot's account is correct, this one was a misunderstanding that's now getting play on Korea's internet, and is now reinforcing some negative stereotypes Koreans have of African-Americans, and others with African ethnic background. And that's too bad.

It serves us expats in Korea well to offer up the benefit of the doubt where we can.

So here's the takeaway: Ni-ga --- not necessarily intended to be an insult.

[added August 30] I'm aware there's a lot more going on here that I'm not really qualified to comment on, either through personal experience or through careful study -- I don't want to be the guy pictured below...

but I think my readers are sharp enough to know I'm not using the word in the title to insult or marginalize anyone, and to see that I haven't spoken on behalf of anyone who didn't ask me to speak of their experiences.

[Update:] Please check the updates below the original post at The Marmot's Hole, for more (still foggy) details on the bus incident.

[Update August 30 Afternoon] The fellow on the bus speaks.

Learning Korean in Korea

2011-08-28T16:03:00.000+09:00

Well, when I was with ATEK, one of the things I wanted to do was create an useful guide to Korea.

But that didn't happen.

So if you go to the top of my page and click where it says "Expat Life" you can see a (still in progress) page with some of the links I think are most useful to somebody trying to get themselves sorted in Korea.

One section I like is my "places to learn Korean" link list.

Learn Korean
Hangul (writing system)
Comparative reviews of "Study Korean" books
Learn Korean Online
Korean Class 101's Youtube Channel
Sogang's online Korean Course comes highly recommended
Recommended by I'm No Picasso: Learn Korean Now
Recommended by Roboseyo: Korean Class 101
More complete list of learning Korean resources

For the rest... if you run/know about a page you think deserves a link on my page, send me an e-mail at roboseyo at gmail, or put a link in the comment.

To the guy who's been getting his comments deleted: no. Links on where people can find an Indian wife (prefaced by a paragraph of shit-talking about western and Korean women) don't qualify.

10 Magazine Reboot

2011-08-23T18:01:00.000+09:00

10 Magazine has been providing one of the best events calendars out there, and they're trying to reinvent their website so that users can submit their own events, which is really useful. Especially if there's a curator to be sure that "Dylan's birthday party" doesn't quite make it in (that's what facebook groups are for)...

to pay for reinventing their website, and making it more useful for you, the readers, they're trying to raise $3000. I like 10 Magazine: they're good people, and between 10 and Groove Magazine, we're on our way to defying Bethell's Law, which makes me happy.

Bethell's Law:

the foreign community in Korea has always been much too fragmented, transient and diverse to broadly support any publications that fail to hew closely and safely to the proverbial lowest common denominator. That is as true today as it was a hundred years ago, if not more so.

So... go forth. Support. They're two thirds of the way to their goal as of this writing, and you can get stuff if you help out.

Korea's Got Talent and Korea's Susan Boyle

2011-08-23T12:01:00.001+09:00

So, Korea's Susan Boyle (I think he's Korea's Paul Potts) got second place in "Korea's got talent" (hat tip: I Am Koream)

Here's his emotionally manipulative original viral thingy:

He was beaten by this amazing popper: Ju Min Jeong.
I'm very impressed by her, frankly.

Congratulations to both.
However, Choi Sang-bong has his own English wikipedia page. Ju Min-jeong doesn't. As of this writing. So who's the real winner?

And Korea's Susan Boyle joins the list of "Korea's X" things, along with... (these are from Brian in Jeollanamdo)

* Korea's Madonna - Uhm Jung-hwa
*Korea's Madonna - Gwangyang's own Chae-yeon
* Korea's Madonna - Bada
* Korea's Usher - Rain
* Korea's Justin Timberlake - Rain
* Korea's Beyonce - Gwangyang's own Kim Ok-bin
* Korea's Michael Jackson - Seo Taiji
* Korea's Angelina Jolie - Kim Hye-soo
* Korea's Naples - Tongyeong
* Korea's Hawaii - Jeju
* Korea's Manhattan - Yeouido
* Korea's Grand Canyon - Bulyeongsa Valley (LMFAO, thanks Michael).
* Korean Alps - mountains in Gangwon-do
* Korea's 9/11 - The Namdaemun arson
* Korea's Bangalore - Daejeon
* Korean Harry Potter - Woochi
* Korea's Lady Gaga - CL
* Korea's Moses Red Sea Miracle - Jindo Sea-Parting Festival
* Korea's Gandhi - Cho Man-sik
* Korea's Mariah Carey - Lena Park
* Korea's Barbie Doll - Han Chae-young

And let's not forget:

Korea's Susan Boyle - Choi Sang-bong.
Korea's times square - uh... Yeongdeungpo Times Square
Korea's NYC Central Park - Ttukseom Seoul Forest
Korea's Seine/Thames River (another) (Han river)
Korean Opera - pansoori
Korean Pizza - Jeon
Korea's Manhattan - Yeouido
Korea's Hawaii - Jeju Island

Additions from readers and contacts:
Korea's Silicon Valley - Daejeon
but upon googling "Korea's silicon valley" it turns out
Korea's Silicon Valley - is ALSO Bundang
Korea's Naples - Tongyeong - confirmed by another person.
Korea's Grand Canyon - Buleyongsa

Korea's butthole - Gumi (this one might have been a joke, though ㅋㅋㅋ)

I know there are many more... please tell me who/what/where I've missed in the comments. Bonus points for links.

As you may have gathered, I'm not a huge fan of comparing everything in Korea to something more famous somewhere else. It just makes Dream Forest look like a pale imitation, to compare it to somewhere more famous, and maybe better, from somewhere else.

However, I'll also say this: I went to Toronto's Eaton Center while I was in Canada this summer, and there are at least four shopping centers in Seoul alone that smack that mall like a chubby bunny.

Star City - Keondae
Yeongdeungpo Times Square - Yeongdeungpo
Enter 6 - Wangshimni
Lotte World + Lotte Adventure - Jamsil
And the mother of them all: Coex - Samseong

and once it gets going and the areas around it fill with apartments and the mall fills with shops, Garden 5 in Songpa will beat out Eaton Center, too. Unless Eaton Center had a jimjilbang I missed.

So Eaton Center Toronto, you are henceforward to be known as Toronto's Korea's Times Square. Or Toronto's Korea's Mall of America. You choose.

Maybe Choi Sung Bong will get his own star on Korea's Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Cicadas

2011-08-22T21:25:00.000+09:00

This is the sound of August in Korea.

Simon and Martina sum up my feelings about the cicadas pretty well.