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:
one expat's life in Korea
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Appeared in Newsweek Korea: On Ajummas and Knee-jerks
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Kurry: The Media Mashup Project
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
(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.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Korean Propaganda: North and South
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.
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.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ain't No Party Like a Pyongyang Party' Cause a Pyongyang Party is Absolutely Mandatory!
This remix of North Korean promotional footage, set to a party track, is pure genius.
Wish I'd thought of it.
Wish I'd thought of it.
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