I Lost My Talk: Poem

After that post last week about Jeju Island's dialect disappearing, here's a lovely, touching poem that my sister sent to me, about Canadian first nations groups losing their languages.

I think the writer is correct that power is inextricably linked to language: the language I choose to speak with you sets the terms for our interaction, especially when one of us speaks the language better than the other.

Put simply: If I argue with my wife in Korean, she wins.

Writ large: the language people speak, or study in school is one of the clearest expressions of which group in a mixed society/world holds (or is believed to hold) the keys to opportunity.

Lost My Talk by Rita Joe

I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
The scrambled ballad, about my world.

Two ways I talk
Both ways I say,
Your way is more powerful.

So gently I offer my hand and ask,
Let me find my talk
So I can teach you about me.

Canadian Museum of Civilization

First Peoples of Canada Online Exhibit

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/fp/fpz4c03e.shtml

Happy New Year! Is Korean Seollal Changing?

Happy new year, readers.

It's a good day, the weather's finally not so bone-chilling, and the wife is away on vacation.

Not that I'm up to any mischief... I wouldn't be here blogging if I were, now, would I?

Since I've come to Korea, one of the things I've noticed is a big change in how the Korean traditional holidays (that is, Seollal/Lunar New Year) and Chuseok (Harvest festival) are practiced.

The typical/normative Korean Traditional Holiday^(tm) experience remains that of going to the grandparents' house, having a ritual for the ancestors that involves big tables full of traditional foods that take a long time to prepare and clean up, the women spending hours in the kitchen, the men playing cards or games in the other room, and the consuming of chapchae, ddeokkuk (new year) and songpyeon (chuseok).  Grandparents give money to the children, and the children bow to the living ancestors (parents, uncles, especially grandparents) and some or all of the family goes up the mountain to trim the grass and perform maintenance on the family gravesite.  And the children wear really cute Hanbok.

Frankly, I'm not the guy to describe all those ceremonies.  The Korean does an admirable job of it.

I'm interested in the way the holiday's changed: my first year in Korea, Seoul was a ghost town during the new year celebration.  The usual complaints were raised: traffic is a pain, it's impossible to get tickets,  the women do all the work, it's boring sitting around at your grandparents' house all day.

Meanwhile, this year Seoul's museums are staying open, and a lot of the palaces and plazas are featuring cultural events, displays and performances this Seollal.  People are traveling overseas instead of visiting the family.  Meanwhile, a recent survey reports that only one in five Koreans consider their grandparents part of their family.

Tonight's topic on TBS eFM is the ways we celebrate Seollal/Lunar New Year: what do you do, and is it different than it used to be?  It's a holiday, so we're picking a happy topic, and I'd love to hear from readers, how do YOU celebrate the new year?  Have travel concerns changed the way you celebrate? Have you spent holidays away from family? Why?  Have you ever attended the cultural events instead?Whether you're Korean or not, we'd love to hear what you get up to on Korea's traditional holidays.

The Evening Show Fun, plus: Korean Soccer

Yes, readers, I finished one week at The Evening Show.  Every night, I do a segment that's about 15 minutes long, and it's called "The Bigger Picture."

It's a call-in show where listeners call and share their opinions.  Last week went really well, but because it's a call-in show, the show's only as good as the callers.  So, readers, follow me on Twitter, and friend me on Facebook (yep, it's a verb now) and follow my tweets and status updates.

Question of the day today: how will Team Korea do now that Park Jisung has retired from international play?  He'll no longer be representing Korea in competitions like the Asia Cup, or World Cup qualifiers...

on the other hand, he's had a pretty good run, with he and Lee Young-pyo being the only remaining players who were part of the 2002 World Cup team that went to the semi-finals.

Are you a soccer fan?  Are you a Team Korea fan?  Who's going to take Park Jisung's place, are there young guns ready to fill his shoes?

Leave a comment, or shoot me an e-mail if you want to call into the show.

Greetings from... BE?

I got a message on Twitter saying "Greetings from BE" but I'm not entirely sure what BE stands for...

The Acronym finder is helping me, but I'm still not sure:

My top prospects are...
British Empire
Belgium
Battlefield Earth
Barium Enema
Bern
Bachelor of Engineering
Blizzard Entertainment (makers of Warcraft and Starcraft... why not name your next game "Awesomecraft" or get meta, and make a videogame design simulator called "Craftcraft")
Breast Expansion
Bachelor of Education
British English
or
Back End

any other suggestions?

funniest one wins.

I'm sold! Boa's Dance Movie Will Have a Plot!

I liked this post from PopSeoul about Boa's upcoming dance movie.

The real kicker: according to reports, this movie will not only have dancing, but also a plot, which will differentiate it from all those other dance movies.

The film directed by “Step Up” Duane Adler hopes to spice up things up, compared to “other” dance moves by focusing on both plot and choreography, instead of a plot that doesn’t end working.

Fair enough...

a plot would also set it apart from other Korean filmmakers' and Korean stars' forays into Hollywood.

Eventually one of Korea's talented people will turn this trend around... there are tons of Koreans doing well in television (unfortunately, other than Kim Yunjin, I couldn't tell you who those are, because I don't watch much TV)...

Though I think it's awesome that one of the top Korean-American actors is John Cho, because the movie that made his name (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) was all about weed, which means that, unlike most cases, where Koreans are happy to claim anyone with a tenuous connection to Korea as their own, there's very little talk of John Cho as one of Hollywood's top (Korean) stars, outside of KO-Am circles. I have never heard "Do you know John Cho?" as a conversation opener.

[and as a side note, I love that the one Nobel-Prize-Winning author who wrote about Korea, also has a name that's REALLY hard for Koreans to pronounce. "Teacher? Do you know Fall S. Fuck?" "Huh?" "The Good Earth." "Oh. Do you mean Pearl S. Buck?" "Yes. Fall S. Fuck." that actually happened.]

Also... it's a testament to just how bad a movie Blood: The Last Vampire was, that even in Korea, where some people will even defend The Last Godfather and D-Wars, Blood: The Last Vampire came and went without mention, and nobody will defend it, or talk about it at all.

(By the way: my favorite evisceration of The Last Godfather so far is this one, which, among other things, gives us a new one to add to Brian's list of "Korea's X" equivalents:

Shim Hyung-rae is Korea's Uwe Boll)

... and stop the presses: this old release, from back when The Last Godfather got the greenlight, says that originally, they were planning on digitally re-animating the late Marlon Brando's Don Corleone, to play the Godfather, before Harvey Keitel signed on.  I'm partly relieved they didn't do that... but then, what a lost opportunity to absolutely shatter the scale of unintentional comedy!  If they'd tried it, they might have even topped William Shatner's Rocketman on the "So bad it's awesome" scale.