Violence in Itaewon; Important Message To Koreans about "외국인, 이태원에서 한국 노인 폭행 '논란'"

So Hi Expat continues to pull out interesting stuff: this time it's a video of someone who seems to be an American GI ("I fought in Iraq for six years!"), punching an old Korean man in the head.  Warning: the video includes swearing and violence.  It's pretty shocking.



It's up on Naver, blurred and stuff, and collecting hits.  (see also daum TV)






This video, and the old lady attacking the young girl earlier this week (see here)








These two videos, in the same week, make me think:

1. Holy COW!  What the hell is happening?  Why is violence breaking out on video, all over Korea?

2. I hope other Korean seniors planning on picking on youngsters see these two videos, and choose to pick on a younger Korean instead of a younger foreigner... because many foreigners haven't been trained from birth that abuse from a senior must be borne silently.

3. The young guy throwing punches at a senior citizen's head: this guy shouts that he has been in Iraq for six years, so he may be dealing with much bigger things, personally, than an annoying old guy who won't back off -- I don't know the story about the old guy, or what led up to this incident...



However, I'd like to take this moment to address any of my Korean readers, who finds this blog post after getting upset about foreign (alleged) soldiers punching Korean seniors in the head:


Important Message:

Hey everybody.  In the comments about this video, a lot of people will say a lot of nasty things about foreigners, Americans, and especially American GI's.  I hope that somebody out there puts in a word for us foreigners living in Korea.  Many of us can't speak or write Korean, so we can't speak for ourselves very well in Korean internet comments.

See, there's a stereotype of foreigners who criticize or mock Korea, who live here, but talk as if we hate it, but really, most of the foreigners who hate Korea leave.  The foreigners who DO live here?  Most of us like Korea a lot.  Most of us are shocked and upset by a video like this young GI or ex-GI, punching an old Korean man in the head.  Most of us are peaceful people who like and respect Korea, and who find healthier ways to deal with our frustrations.

Moreover: we are not responsible for this guy's behavior, and we don't approve of it.  We wish this guy would have stayed home and gotten drunk with his friends at home, instead of going out and making an ass of himself in public, and around strangers.

So please do not think that "all foreigners are like this guy" -- all the rest of the foreigners in Korea would like you to know that almost all of us are not like this guy.

And finally, think of the worst night of your life.  Think of the night when you did something really stupid: something you regretted for a long time.  Now imagine that stupid mistake you once made when you were young, and imagine that someone filmed you having your ugliest moment, and put the video on the internet.  Now imagine that everyone in America is watching that video and saying, "All Koreans are exactly like this person in the video.  All Koreans have the same ugly character as this person in the video."

That judgement of YOUR character would be wrong, wouldn't it?  After all, it was the worst night of your life, and the worst mistake of your life.  And judging EVERY person in Korea by that one video would be even more wrong, wouldn't it?

Please don't judge all foreigners, all Americans, or all GI's by this one video.  That would be wrong.

Sincerely
Roboseyo

p.s.: any reader is welcome to translate my message into Korean, and post it on the comment boards where people are discussing this video.  In fact, you're invited to.  I'd like you to.  I'd love you to.  Just give me credit, and a link, and I'm happy.


Update: Marmot's Hole reports, the old guy was willing to forgive the young guy, and the young guy was not a GI.  He WAS thirty one, an age at which there remains no excuse for behavior like that.

They found the Arsonist.

You can read about it at The Marmot Hole, so I won't reprint the whole thing here, but basically, they caught the guy who torched "National Treasure Number 1". His reason? He was upset because a contractor paid him a lower price than he asked when they built apartments on his land.

Even worse, last year he ALREADY tried to burn another cultural heritage site, to draw attention to his grievance. It seems he went for National Treasure Number 1 because he was further miffed about having to pay fines for trying to burn down buildings in Changgyeonggung palace.

He apologized, and made the "it could be worse" defense, saying, "I was thinking about attacking a subway station, but chose a national treasure instead," which is like a wife beater saying, "you should be thankful: I only hit you with an open hand! Vern next door uses his fist on Marcie!"

Now here's the thing.

It seems like the old forms of protest aren't enough for the crazies anymore.

I mean, back in the good old days, if you had no other options and nobody was listening to your complaints, most people simply participated in self-destructive behaviour -- get drunk, ramble onerously about "The Man" for a while, say bad things about whichever scapegoat you've chosen to bear the blame for your own disappointments, and get on with life. Maybe throw in some passive aggressive law-breaking -- "Ha! I never wear my seat belt, because, damn the man!" "I call police officers 'pig' behind their backs" "I don't declare all my extra income." "I litter. . . mwahahahahaaaa"

But in our hypersaturated information age, that stuff just isn't enough anymore. People want a stage. In feudal Japan, seppuku, or ritual suicide, was a very honourable way to add gravity to one's protest, or to avoid shame in death, in the case of being captured or defeated in battle. Nowadays, a suicide doesn't even make it into a big city's newspaper pages, unless it's a particularly heartbreaking case, and probably one that also happens to fit the political agenda of the right (or wrong) political commentator/journalist/moralist/loudmouth.

So what do the crazies do? The ones that want a stage? I mean, to regain a few moments of power, in the face of all the powerlessness, what do the disenfranchised have to do these days, for someone to validate their complaint, to vent their rage and impotence?

(warning: this is a clip from fight club. it's kinda graphically bloody)


Destroy something beautiful.

Destroy something priceless, something precious. It's not enough anymore for me to drink myself into oblivion and drown in my self-pity. Now, I have to get revenge at the world. Columbine, Virginia Tech, WTC, burning Korea's National Treasure -- finally, they know they exist, I guess. They got their names in the newspaper.

And how many of these kinds of unnecessary, wanton tragedies could have been prevented, if people had listened to those on the margins, and how many of them were the inevitable acts of deeply disturbed minds who were completely out of touch with reality? I don't know. I don't know the role of mental disease in these cases, I don't know if each of these people could have turned a corner, if the right words, or the right kind of compassion, had come along at the right time. I don't know which of these were simply the outward expression of an intense, black hole of hate inside somebody's soul, and I certainly don't know how those deep black holes got there in the first place, and (this is the hardest part) I don't know which disenfranchised group will be the next to lash out. Nobody does -- that's the scary thing. While everybody's trying to reach out to The Muslims, there could well be an abandoned and ostracized Vietnam Vet polishing his rifle; while we're thinking of Cho Seung-hui (Virginia Tech shooter) and trying to reach out to maladjusted immigrants, some member of the uneducated, working poor, helpless to stanch the bleeding of his credit card debt on his mortgage-crippled sub-sustenance-level income, or some salaryman whose health insurance company won't give him a friggin' break, buys a cannister of gasoline and a lighter, and heads for the nearest administrative building. Who's to say?

And a lot of these things CAN'T be prevented. You'll never eradicate school bullying. Racism will continue to be felt (whether imagined or not) and victim mentalities will continue to fester, as long as there are groups of people who look different, or act different, or talk differently, from other groups. The powerful will always prey on the powerless, and the powerless will grow angry (the only prerogative left to them).

Now I'm not some kind of communist, but I do think that the measure of a society, and, I suppose, of our entire race in the end, is not the level of opulence the rich enjoy, but the degree to which our most powerless are respected as humans (all these bartletts regulars seem to concur). Dostoevsky's (possibly apocryphal) quote states that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

Who knows. Maybe the revolution is coming. Maybe things will mostly stay the way they are, and maybe there are some people who will never be satisfied, who will always find excuses to feed their anger, instead of trying to live beyond it. Maybe such people will always want to take something with them when they go, and for all they care, having their name and face in the newspaper for a day, having everybody know exactly WHY they in particular are angry, is more important than any other person's life or treasure.

If that's true, there's nothing we can do to stop those kinds of crazies from continuing to appear out of nowhere, and making the world suck for a day, or a week, or a two-term presidency and maybe more (thanks, for that, Osama. You dick.) For my part, I just hope I can treat the people I encounter as humans, and as worthy of dignity, so that even if I can't stop the helpless/angry/crazies, I'll know I'm not helping to make more of them.

A Three-Fer of Ridiculousity

OK. I like to be positive, as much as I can, but this just begs to be mocked.

Protests played an important part in social change in Korea: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of important protests shook off their military dictator's shackles and opened the way for a legitimate democracy. Before a student protest in 1978 that was surpressed with gunfire (and started the ball rolling toward a true democracy), it was illegal, and dangerous, to protest the government. Protests were also an important part of Koreans' opposition to Japanese colonial rule. This young woman's another national hero in Korea. Since the '80s, as civil liberties increase, it seems that many Koreans choose to celebrate their civil liberties by protesting pretty much anything: every weekend, you can walk around the downtown and find a protest either by city hall, by the parliament buildings, or in front of the US or Japanese Embassy. Sometimes, it seems that people join a protest just for the fun of getting angry about something -- one blogger called these "I like crowds" protests.

Today, I came across the protest of the weekend, and, well, sure, citizens are within their rights to protest things, and it can be an important way of exercising (the hell out of) one's freedom, but if you're putting yourself out there for something like this, I am also well within my civil rights to mock you.

They were marching, and I decided to look at the signs to see what they were marching about. As I moved up from the back of the line toward the front, while only able to read the signs with English on them, and sound out/recognize a very few Korean words, I spotted just about every cause I know:

FTA (free trade agreement with US), GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual) rights, Iraq War, Skyrocketing Housing Prices in Seoul, Poverty/Social Welfare, Something about Samsung, Korea's largest conglomerate, currently involved in a corruption scandal, and also responsible for the error that led to an oil spill off Korea's West coast, Mistreatment of Migrant Workers, and, of course, a picture of Che Guevera. Because there always has to be a picture of Che.
--all in a single protest!



This baffled me, so I sped up to get to the front of the march-line, and the sign the union members held as they chanted, said, "A dream for a new world. A world without Poverty, FTA, War, Discrimination"

Basically, it was the white elephant table of protests -- if you're on the protestor's mailing list (of which I am certain there is one), meet at noon at City Hall (or wherever it is these things always muster), bring your favourite sign, and make sure you're dressed warmly and ready to shout!

If you like shouting, it's more fun than joining a swimming club! AND, you can lord it over your friends on the beer league soccer team that YOU'RE a social activist, and all THEY do with their weekends is play meaningless games.

Now there's nothing wrong with protesting in itself, but you know, when you flag ALL your e-mails as "High Priority," everybody ignores it, and on the weekend you really DO need a quick reply, you're still shuffled into the "read later" file. If you protest about every darn thing, every weekend, it just becomes a dull hum, chalked up to "one of the drags of being a Korean politician" - it loses its impact. I wonder if these people press for social change in any other way (organizing boycotts, giving money or time to social change organizations, changing their consumption habits, going on letter writing drives, publishing circulars and writing letters to the editor) or if they figure chanting slogans on Saturday acquits them of their other social responsibilities, plus, they get to meet their protest pals and get sloshed later! (Which sometimes seems to be the final stage of EVERY activity involving more than two Koreans -- once I told my students I climb mountains for my health, and one said to me, "But it's not healthy to get drunk the way mountain-climbers do" -- not all hikers, friend. Not all.)

Finally, I have my own opinions about celebrity gossip, but THIS has got to be the best story EVER.

Na Hoon-A is a star of the Trot musical style I discussed in an earlier post. He went AWOL for a little while, and the press cooked up a doozy of a story to explain his absence (you'd hope they could have produced a doctor's note). According to the rumor mill, Mr. Na had knobbed the wrong female popstar: one who had caught the eye of a big-time Yakuza (Japanese answer to the Mafia) boss; in response, as a way of saying, "I don't care if you're famous, nobody f***s with my lady," he had this guy kidnapped and castrated.

Well, Na Hoon-A is back on the radar, ready to tell anybody who listens that he is fine, and his manhood is intact. In fact, he was ready to share it with the press. (He doesn't actually do it, but when he climbs up on the table, everybody gets a little nervous, that "is this actually happening?" feeling when you witness a car accident. And listen to the camera shutters click.)



If you look at a picture of him, this is a dude not to be messed about with -- I wouldn't want to be the reporter who cooked up this story, stuck alone in a room with this guy.



And in case you doubt his manhood, here he is in full swagger, (pop and drop apparently) intact.


PS: how to win a swordfight:

from "Sweetmeats" by Andrew Bird:

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides
And who's going to decide its true location?
cause it's a question for the centuries
from communion to mad cow disease
but is it worthy of a song - all life's location?

I like him. More with each album.

I'm going to a "writers in Seoul" meeting today at 3pm. Hope it goes well.



The day Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary (the US electoral system gets more confusing to me everytime I learn something new about it), they had THIS picture on the front page of EVERY newspaper.



Which is an awesome, but mostly just terrifying picture.

Having THAT on every paper in the newsstand made me think of this scene from "Being John Malkovich", one of the best weird movies I've seen.


I don't know why, but creepy pictures make me smile.


(from the cover of "I care because you do" an electronica CD by Aphex Twin -- really good artist, but creepy album covers.)

Here's another. . . look twice, and then you notice, YIKES!



(one of his videos from this album also mocks the objectification of women in music)

November 25th 2006: More sad news and a long-awaited update.

Hi everybody. Thanks so much for continuing to care and hear about me. One of my other friends, who writes updates, kindly gave her readers an opt-out clause. I never have before, but here you go. If you don't read these anyway, or if you don't want them, or never liked me in the first place (ha ha ha), please feel free to reply, and ask me to take you off the list. I'm not a great correspondent, so being off this list doesn't mean I'll immediately start writing you personal e-mails -- this update is intended to keep people I care about in the loop, despite my bad record at keeping in touch. But that said, if you don't want the letters, feel free to opt out. I won't give you any grief if you're too busy, or if you feel like your life has moved on.


Since my last e-mail, things have been hectic, beginning with...


A trip to Shanghai -- fantastic city! Interesting regions, lots of french architecture, because it was originally built up by the
French. Huge difference between rich and poor there, but a fantastically engineered skyline and some really, really, really great food. Also, the internationals there (though maybe this was just because I moved around in the tourist areas) were a lot more varied than in Korea, it seemed. In Korea, most internationals are English speaking teachers or soldiers, or German-speaking tourists (to be really general). I heard snatches of all kinds of languages in Shanghai, and faces that looked like they came from all kinds of places.

My longtime coworker Heather had a baby! They're all healthy, and her husband Caleb Overstreet (you know him, Cheryl) is so cute when he talks about being a daddy. Suddenly he turned about five times softer and sweeter. My brother once told me about one of his friends seeing his first child for the first time, saying "a whole new section of my heart opened up", and I've seen Caleb change once that new section opened in his heart. It's amazing. It's difficult for me to wax eloquent about such a thing because I've only seen the effect and not experienced it, except to say that anybody I've ever asked about it (including a
brand-new grandfather) still steadfastly tells me that seeing your own kids for the first time is one of the most transformative events in your life. Maybe sometime I'll get a chance to experience that. (Now don't everybody think I'm dropping hints or fixing to settle down by that -- this is just to say that I've been seriously touched by this parenthood thing.) Having seen how parenthood (or coming parenthood) has changed a handful of my friends (and more every year), it's a beautiful thing, the way their roots suddenly, so effortlessly deepen, and their lives suddenly have another meaning added to it, and a meaning that comes completely out of love. It also helps me understand how some of the parents I deal with in the preschool have so little perspective on their kids -- "Well, he's really a good boy -- he just has a little problem hitting his classmates and stealing their toys and ripping pages out of books for attention and whining when he's punished -- but he has a sweet heart inside."

As Heather's due date approached, the doctor's order for her to stop teaching and rest added a whole new wrinkle to the whole
work situation. Our boss didn't manage to find a replacement on time, so first I had to teach overtime to fill in for some of her classes, and then the replacement he did find. . .

None of the teachers at the school got a good feeling about the e-mails she sent, but we didn't really do much about it at the time. Then, she arrived. Her name was Angi. She was older than the rest of us, and an extremely intense person. We'd have a beer together and she'd want to have more, go to another place, go to the clubbing district, and go until six AM. Somehow, every time she talked to my boss, it turned into a shouting, crying fit -- I've never seen a relationship get to explosive so quickly before. She made unreasonable demands that were outside the contract's parameters, she lost the receipt for her airplane ticket, when my boss had sent her money to buy it. If she didn't get what she wanted, right away, she'd blow up, and turn extremely rude. Meanwhile, she showed up late for work regularly, smoked in our building (which is against the law), and basically made the workplace very stressful.

She got herself fired in only three weeks, which is remarkable. Really remarkable. Considering how expensive it is to get a western teacher out to Korea, to have Mr. Kim willing to cut his losses and get her out of the school community after such a short time shows how negative her influence was on the school, in just about every way.

So, I was back to teaching overtime until we could find another replacement. Meanwhile, the school's new academic supervisor
had her first September, which is the beginning of a new semester, and she had to learn the ropes while juggling new classes, new books, and hundreds of phone calls from parents who wanted their kids in a higher level. As she was busy, she passed the SLP Speech Contest completely over to me. So, I was working overtime, organizing a schoolwide contest, and trying to hold together a preschool program with a new teacher, and a missing teacher. My roommate Antony was a champ for filling in for as long as he did, working twelve hour days without complaining. Finally, Lorraine came, and she's worked out really well, and my schedule, since the Speech Contest finished (on my birthday), has returned to normal just in time for next year's preschool recruiting season.

All that to say, I've been busy. It's been an adventurous time. Melissa, my old roommate, left, and her replacement is great. I like Amy quite a bit. We miss Melissa, of course, but Amy's nice too.

Since mid-August, if you asked me about my life, I'd tell you that I was too busy to do the things I loved in life.

Too busy to see friends, too busy to spend huge tracts of time alone in coffee shops, too busy to take long walks, do yoga, and write poetry.

Then I'd tell you about the bright spot in my life:

When Melissa left, she introduced me to a family she knew. The two daughters were Sally and Lisa, and Sally is a certifiable genius. She taught herself English, and now she speaks it, and writes it, better than most native speakers her age. She's nine, and she reads books written for 12-15 year-olds.

here's a video clip from a movie I saw (one of my favorites) about a Korean girl who signs up for English lessons. Sally
appears in it. Wait for the clip to upload, and then skip to about the 8:20 mark, and you can see her. The movie was made in 2003, so she's a bit older now, but you get the idea.

[the video has been taken down, due to copyright violations]

That's Sally saying "Your English is terrible."

She's sweet and smart and awesome. Her tutor is teaching her advanced writing -- formal writing in particular -- because her mom wants her to score perfect on the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) also known as the test whose score will determine whether second-language English speakers can qualify for North American Universities. She scored nearly perfect on the TOEIC (Test Of English for International Communication), which is business focussed, rather than academic, and will earn you a job, rather than a spot in a university.

The first day we met, Lisa (the younger sister) was going through a book, and we were reading about Camels, and talking about Kiwi, and the phrase "Kiwi the Camel" came up. We thought that would be a good name for a character in a children's story. We decided to write a story about Kiwi the Camel -- I said "If you write me a story about Kiwi the Camel, I'll write one for you."

Next time I saw them, Lisa (the seven year old) told me a short story. Sally gave me a five-page long first chapter for a book about Kiwi the Camel! I agreed to write the second chapter, she wrote the third, I wrote the fourth, and so we'll go until we finish the story. Sally's funny, bright, inquisitive, and she soaks up everything I can tell her, and teaches ME stuff on the way. She's one of the three coolest ten-year-olds I've ever met. Maybe the number one!

Her younger sister Lisa was the funniest little thing. Seven years old, she earned the nickname Giggles in no time, and made me laugh out loud. She also liked storytelling, and we'd get into silly little tangents about one thing and another, and she'd draw little pictures in her or get into teasing, tickling fights with her sister. I was utterly charmed. See the attached pictures of Sally and Lisa.

Then, last Tuesday, I went to a Sauna with Caleb, and when I came out, I had two missed calls from Sally. I called back, and her grandmother answered the phone, didn't speak English, so passed the phone to Sally.

"Hi Sally how are you?"
"Not so good."
"Oh. Well what's up?"
"Guess where Lisa went." (Sally always has a roundabout
way of giving news.)
"To Thailand?" (I always give silly answers first when Sally
says, "guess what?")
"This is serious, Rob." (That was when I noticed her sad, tired voice.)
"Is she OK? Did she go to the hospital?"
"Rob, there was an accident with a bus. Lisa went to heaven."

A seven-year-old I know got killed by a careless bus driver! The family is absolutely devastated. On Wednesday I arrived at their house at my usual time, armed with a present for Sally, a card, and a lot of spaghetti sauce, for days when they don't feel like cooking. Everybody looked pretty rough, Mom and sister especially. I'll go back again next Wednesday, and then the challenge is to figure out how much a goofy Canadian can do in this situation.

Because I'm older, and not a long-time acquaintance, it changes what I can and can't do, but I've been through the wringer of loss just recently, so at least I know what not to do, and I know how cloying it is when people say "I can help you." I guess I'll take most of my signals from Sally, and if she wants to talk, I'll do my best to listen kindly, and if she doesn't, I'll just be around, and be steady. Steady's nice, too.

It's sad that a kid as young as Sally has to go through such a loss, and even worse that a kid like Lisa can be taken away so young. The random, arbitrariness by which some people die young and other live out their lives, by which some people's lives are just loaded up with death and others never lose anybody (I knew a girl named Erin who lost her brothers to malaria at age 10, and lost her parents in a plane crash at age 20), makes it difficult to make any sense of things that happen. Maybe that's the idea -- maybe we aren't supposed to make sense of it. Maybe it's just too big, too mysterious for us to say anything about it at all. Maybe the thing we learn from most deaths is simply that everybody dies.

I have a friend who stopped believing in God not long ago, and she said the main difference in her life (other than her Sunday routine) is that now she's afraid of dying.

Another of my dear friends just found out her dear step-father has terminal cancer.

And I just can't think of anything else to say.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind lately.

My father spent two days in the hospital: there was some bleeding somewhere in his body, but it's healed up. I hope he'll be OK.

Take care, everyone.

love: Rob
(look for cute student stories and Engrish follies below)


Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
-Rainer Maria Rilke-
Ninth Elegy






(here is the cute students section of the letter. I wanted
to put a clear break between this and the rest. I almost
wanted to put them in a separate e-mail)


"David, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
"A scientist."
"What kind of scientist? An animal scientist? A rock
scientist? A dinosaur scientist?"
"I want to be a make yummy food and chocolate scientist."
"You want to be a food scientist."
"Yes. Food scientist."
"Well maybe you can give me some of your yummy food!"
"No teacher. You can buy in the store."

"My daddy has a Christmas car. It's a Santa Fe"

Ten plus five is fifteen. Ten plus six is sixteen. Ten plus Ryan is Ryanteen!

Instead of activity book, my kid said "Get out your captivity book." -- and he actually knew what captivity was! He made that joke on purpose!

I taught them "silly billy". Next time I was giving silly answers to questions instead of straight answers, my kid reprimanded me saying, "Teacher, don't say a billy silly!"


and my favorite wasn't from a student. It was at the Chinese Circus I saw in Shanghai. There were signs around the auditorium saying "please turn off your cellphone and don't bring bombs" (maybe they meant flashbulbs)

It made me laugh: why haven't US airlines thought of this? Just put up a sign and that'll end all danger on flights! You could put it next to the seatbelt sign and the "no smoking" sign that never turns off.

Imagine the dialogues.
Head Attendant: "Excuse me, sir, I'll have to ask you to
return to your chair and stop threatening the flight attendants.
You'll notice that the 'No Terrorism' light is still on in the cabin."
Terrorist: "Oh. Oops. My bad." (Returns to chair, embarrassed.)


Here are pictures of Sally, and Lisa, who was killed.