I'm knee-deep in geekdom

February 28, 2002 / / No Comments

I’m knee-deep in geekdom, grinning like a rocket-powered lemur, fiddling with code. Sure and it’s a heap of fun, laddie. So rather than write something new, I thought I’d cheat and whack up this explanation from my Metafilter profile of where the StavrosTheWonderChicken thing came from…
In the winter of 1992 (I think), Rick and I had just finished the Mumbles Walk. This is the pub crawl along a seaside stretch of watering holes in Wales, near Swansea, that apparently used to be a regular night out for Dylan Thomas. I’d like to say we were appropriately reverant, but we were just shambolically pissed, basically.
At some point, we stumbled by a phone booth that looked out over the mud flats and dejected-looking rowboats that had been stranded by the outgoing tide, and decided it was a simply great time to give our buddy Derek, back in Vancouver, a collect call. When the operator asked for a name to give for the call (this was back in the last century, before this stuff was automated), the name “Stavros The Wonder Chicken” just bubbled to the top of my brain, with no precedent whatsoever. The operator balked, but we begged, and when we overheard her telling James, his roommate, that she had a collect call from “Stavros the Wonder Chicken”, we laughed like the drunken poets we were.
A few minutes after his roommate James accepted the call, we found out that Derek had returned to his hometown because he’d found out that day that his father had died.
We went back to drinking.

Ah-yup? comments.

Welcome to the new digs

February 27, 2002 / / No Comments
Welcome to the new pad! Looks pretty much like the old one, I know, but I’ve got Big Plans. While I unpack some of the crates, please help yourself to some delicious beverages and yummy cucumber sandwiches.
Thanks go in great profusion to the BurningBird and the Bearman for helping me out, and all the cool folks out there in blogspace who inspire me every day to do better.
Disclaimer : No actual offer of delicious beverages and yummy cucumber sandwiches is being made or implied. Sorry.

Community and all that

February 25, 2002 / / No Comments
I was reading Jonathan’s post about comments systems and how they have implications he’d not thought about, and it dovetailed so well with some thinking I’ve been doing lately that I left a long comment there, that I want to expand on a bit more here, if he doesn’t mind. (Tangent : Who ‘owns’ the comments you leave on someone else’s blog? You or the person who writes the blog, or if the comments are offsite (like mine), the owner of the offsite system? Damned if I know.)
I’ve been a Metafilter addict (Tap, tap, squeal – “Uh, is this thing on? My name is Stav, and I’m a Metaholic.”), sometimes more, sometimes less, for a year and a half or so, and for me it has always been about the conversations in the threads, foremost. The concept of Metafilter, married so neatly as it is with the useability design, appeals to me immensely. Although I do follow many of the links that are posted to the front page, I have often been guilty of just reading the comments threads behind the posts. Although there has been much (justified) wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth (not to mention the occasional bestial roar of anguish) recently about the decline of the level of discourse around the place, it’s a rare day that there aren’t at least a couple of threads where Very Smart People talk about things that I have, compared to them, a tenuous grasp on, and that I find fascinating and informative. I’ve learned a lot there over the last 18 months or so, sharpened my writing skills (to a small degree, ok, fair enough), and feel as if I am part of a well-defined but very diverse community, a group of brainy folks who, most of the time, are good fun to be around. Although many of the ‘old guard’ are more inclined to believe that a well-crafted post to the front page, with interesting links, is the key factor in what makes MeFi great (in perhaps much the same way that it has been argued in some places that the focus of a ‘real’ weblog should be linkage), I tend to lean towards the discussion that a great link, or even a crap one, can generate.
Now, I wrote a piece for Waeguk when I had had a few beers one night last month about how important I thought comments systems on blogs really are, but never posted it, because it was more laced with invective than usual, even for me. I believe I went as far as to say make references to cowardly lions. And identical cheese hostesses. (I told you I’d had a few beers at that point…) Later it was gently pointed out to me in a discussion thread in the comments system at BurningBird that some people prefer not to engage in the two-way, not to open themselves up to criticism and so on, and this is just fine with me. Reading that, I was actually glad I’d never posted the aforementioned drunken screed. Each to their own, I say, gosh darn it, but I still think keeping the communication flow one-way cripples the power of the medium.
The non-sequiteurs collide here : I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit…I feel what may be happening is like a metastasizing of the Metafilter concept (‘a community blog’) into an overlapping network of distributed micro-metafilters, organically growing, based around virtual peer groups like the ones that I belong to (out along various axes like BurningBird and KeepTrying and Metafilter and 1142 so on and so on and on – different axes, different circles, for different people, variously overlapping). If Metafilter is a community blog focussed on a single site, then the distributed micro-metafilter (Meta-MetaFilter?) equivalent of the ‘front page posts’ are the things that each of us write on our own blogs, and for me the real gold, the real community, the discussion and exchange and ferment and chaos comes from the rolling, cross-blog, intricately-threaded discussions that flare up and die down in the various comments systems we’ve implemented. These thoughts and colloquies are then reflected in our blog posts, and the process becomes auto-catalytic, feeding itself, and growing with each iteration!
And I think it’s happening everywhere, throughout blogspace, in pockets where people have come together for whatever reason and banded into blogtribes, centred around interests or styles or strong personalities or whatever, and where some critical mass of them have enabled comments systems and are using them to talk….it’s endlessly fascinating to me.
Or am I just talking crap again? I have a tendency to do that.


Meta-comments? comments.

John Ralston Saul

February 22, 2002 / / 1 Comment

The Disinfo dossier on Canadian John Ralston Saul is a pleasant find, for me. Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards, The Unconscious Civilization and Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century all had profound influence on the way I thought about …stuff… in my 20s, and are intricately woven into the way I think about the world today (rants like the one below notwithstanding). [via wood s lot] “Recently Saul has been feeling the heat of the Canadian political landscape: he is the husband of the current Governor General of Canada. Saul has been intensely criticized for his newest book On Equilibrium (New York: The Free Press, 2002), in which Saul contends that the West must assume some responsibility for the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks.”
Saul’s thoughts on globalization and democracy from a talk he gave in Australia in 1999 are very much worth reading (and listening to), as well.

Comments? comments.

Wrangling The Flatfish

February 19, 2002 / / No Comments

Ah, all around me in my virtual neighbourhood people are conversing in the hushed whispers of high seriousness, and I’ve been talking about poop. The Wonderchicken : Going Off On Tangents Since 1965™.
So, how about we talk death a bit? (Gotcha!) And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. As well as discussion of disappearing up one’s own butt (and a nastier death would be hard to imagine, unless it might be disappearing up someone else‘s butt), there has been some talk of death lately in my virtual neighbourhood, from Mike and Shelley and Jonathon and Kalilily (who lives one block over) and others, and the talk has been stirring up some sediment at the bottom of my brain, down deep where those weird-ass flat fish live. The grey rubbery ones with both eyes on the same side of their heads. You don’t want to mess with those bastards — they have sharp teeth.
But I have years of experience in wrangling the f–kers, so I’m going to poke a stick down there and see what comes up. Not a response, but a riff. This may well be more than you care to know about me, and if so, just skip it.
I remember, unclearly, the first two of the many deaths that have molded what’s left of my small family. One night when I was about 4 years old, I think, and sleeping the sleep of the just and the play-exhausted, I heard a commotion downstairs. It was, by my reckoning, the middle of the night, but that could easily have been anytime from 9 pm to 5 am. I had been awakened from a dream in which my father had carried me down to the landing that was about a third of the way from the top, and told me that I would need to take care of my mother. I remember it as a pleasant dream, and, if a little distressing, not as much frightening as it was confusing. The noise downstairs escalated quickly from whispers and murmuring voices to sobs and wails. I snuck down to the landing on which I’d been sitting moments before in my dream and peeked through the railings. There was a policeman, and my mother’s sister and her husband, my uncle. There’d been an accident. Drinking was involved. Fallen asleep at the wheel. He didn’t make it. I don’t recall anything after that, for quite a long time.
I remember much more clearly, two or three years later, the next accident. My mother had remarried. She’d accepted the proposal of one of my father’s coworkers at the TH&B Railroad. If I struggle, I can remember the new bicycle sitting on the porch on the morning of my birthday that year, and how I overheard much later that it had been a deciding factor in her decision. My new step-father had moved the family out west, in a bid to shake off the oppressive presence of his own family, most of whom he disliked, for his own reasons. We’d ended up in a small northern town in British Columbia, and although the streets saw race-related violence between native indians, Pakistani immigrants, and Euros, and the first winter brought 6 or 7 metres of snow — more than I’d ever dreamt of, let alone seen — and the water smelled rotten-egg funny, it was a clean and beautiful place. My new dad had bought a riverboat, which we kept at a marina on the river, and took out onto the lake on weekends, to fish and just wander around looking at things. I have happy sunburnt memories of cruising along on glass-flat dark water, trailing a hand alongside, just smelling the air, watching the wall of spruce and pine trees wind by.
We all wore lifejackets, conscientiously. We took as much care as people did back in the early ’70s, which wasn’t nearly enough. One late summer afternoon, when we were returning from a day on the water, we were moving our gear along the floating dock, back to the truck. My stepfather was ashore, I was nearing the water’s edge, my mother a few metres behind me, and my brother, who was a couple of years younger than I, was just getting out of the boat, carrying a fishing pole. He’d taken off his lifejacket, and nobody’d noticed. God knows why.
I heard a splash, and turned to see the circle of disturbed water sliding downstream in the strong current. My mother let out a bellow, ran, and dived in. My father raced past me, and I followed, pelting up the dock to where my mother had dived into the river. We pulled her out. The current was too strong.
The next thing I remember is a couple of teenage girls comforting me as I leant against the back of the truck, hoarsely screaming ‘someone help my brother!’, and the next thing after that was a numb, silent ride to the hospital.
We spent weeks, months, riding up and down the river, searching for my brother, with various people from the town who took us under their wings. They never did find the body.
Other people in my family have died over the years – all my grandparents, great-aunts and uncles and so on. My stepfather too, a decade ago now, almost.
This is probably the first time I’ve written about those times, that I can recall, although I’ve told the stories many times since they first came rushing back when I was in my early twenties. The deaths in my family, coming for the most part as they did early in my life, may have given me a slightly different perspective on it than some. Although I love life, with a great, chest-thumping passion, I am… matter-of-fact about dying. I understand the grief and loss that people feel, but I simply can’t get terribly worked up over it, anymore. This comes not from being hard-hearted, as some have assumed over the years — old friends will attest that I’m nothing if not self-indulgently sentimental — but from a baked-in awareness, not so much burned into my brain as sewn into my gut, that death is at the end of the road for all of us, each and every one, and what is, is good.
I’ve tried to live as many lives as possible in the time allotted to me, however long that time may be, and I think this awareness of an End is one of the things that has driven me out onto the Road most of my adult life.
To regard the death of those you know and love as a natural thing, to turn the painful experience of their loss into something that enriches and strengthens your own life (because, face it, they ain’t got one anymore) – that’s the mostly truly reverant eulogy and memorial one can make. Which is trite, perhaps, but people seem to forget it, again and again.

Thoughts? comments.

Whew.

February 18, 2002 / / No Comments
Whew. /me wipes sweat from brow. Spent the evening reworking the blogdesigns for my old buddy, the mighty mighty bearman and for our longstanding blogversation… Pretty happy with ’em so far, but they are a bit heavy on the grey. Ah well…

Edit : Borrowing very heavily indeed from thebluerobot, of course!

Migrant Workers

February 16, 2002 / / 11 Comments
World New York has morphed into the ABC Electric Journal, so I’m going to mirror for the sake of posterity this article I wrote for Grant a few months ago, which was the last thing ever posted there. Oh dear. Hope that wasn’t my fault.
In a monoculture, it’s difficult to blend in when you look different. In Korea, if you look different and have the additional bad luck of not looking like a businessman or an English teacher, the chances are good that you’ll be either ostracized or ignored. Koreans are proud of their ethnically homogeneous society, and the outsider is generally tolerated as a necessary evil, or viewed with mixed amusement and pity that they were not born Korean. Suspicion of the foreigner, and sometimes outright racism, for cultural and historical reasons, are deeply ingrained, and even respectable publications are sometimes to blame for perpetuating negative stereotypes, doing things like referring to a Muslim missionary as a ‘bright-eyed chimp of a man.’ In this strictly Confucian society, there is no real tradition of respect for the factory worker, the ‘heroic proletariat’. And in the post-9/11 world, sadly, there is a deep suspicion of Muslim people. The convergence of these facts makes for a grim existence for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Korea, many of whom are Islamic.
For the illegal foreign workers of Korea in particular, the situation is often one of desperation and a deep, angry sense of alienation. They come to Korea in hopes that they can make more money, any money, to send back home to their families, and sometimes, if they’re lucky, they can. But the life is a hard one, with 12-18 hour days on a 7 day basis, hazardous and toxic workplaces, substandard housing, dishonest employers, and nonexistent safety regulation, in many cases.
According to the Korean Ministry of Justice, there were 217,690 migrant workers in Korea as of January 2000. Of these, 138,049 were ‘undocumented workers’ who were brought in as technical trainees, but later overstayed their contract periods.
The Industrial Technical Trainee Program was introduced in 1991, with the ostensible goal of providing visas to foreigners employed by the overseas subsidiaries of Korean companies. Migrant workers began to arrive soon thereafter. The program was created to allow the chaebols, the enormous conglomerates that loom over the Korean economy and colour every deal, like Samsung, Daewoo and LG, to bring in employees from overseas branches to receive training. Very quickly, though, the program became a way for small- and medium-sized businesses to import cheap labour. The program also helped circumvent backlash against perceived opening of the domestic labor market to foreigners, always a touchy subject in Korea. At the time, Pusan, the second biggest city in Korea, was fading in its importance as the ‘sneaker capital of the world’, at least in terms of fabrication, with thousands of jobs being moved to Nike and Reebok production facilities in places where the average wage was even lower, like China or the Philippines. Most Koreans would not take low-paying factory jobs, given a choice, and some source of labour was required.
Small and medium-sized business lobbied the government to allow them access to cheap foreign labour, mostly from China and Southeast Asian countries. In 1993, the Korea Federation of Small Businesses (KFSB) was given the authority to operate a revised ”trainee” program to bring in unskilled migrant workers in order to ease the shortage of manpower in the 3-D industries (dirty, difficult, dangerous).
There are, by the best estimates of the government, more than 220,000 people of the Muslim faith residing in South Korea. An estimated 200,000 of those are foreign, and a significant proportion of those people are working illegally. They come from all over Southeast and Central Asia. They belong to invisible communities which are largely ignored and shunned by mainstream society, making pittances to send home to their families and living in constant fear of deportation. Every morning I walk through a factory district to the University where I teach, and see groups of these folks on their way to work. Their story is one of the myriad untold stories about this country.
Most Koreans are unwilling to take what are called the ‘3-D jobs.’ As a result, factory work often falls to the poorest Koreans, or to legal or illegal migrant workers. Factory owners are happy to employ non-Koreans, both because it’s standard practice to pay those migrants considerably less, and because they have little to no legal rights under Korean law. Human rights activists deplore the ”glaring cases of human rights abuses” against these foreign workers and lobby the government to stop turning a blind eye to their treatment, and although things are changing, it’s a very slow process.
According to the Korea Herald, there have been 809 cases of human rights abuses directed against migrant workers in Korea prosecuted in the past 20 months, including more than 450 cases of the deliberate withholding of wages, instances of withholding compensation for industrial accidents, and incidents of violent attack and sexual abuse. Of these cases, the prosecution has arrested 134 employers, while 675 more have been indicted without detention. (source: Korea Herald, November 12 2001). These few prosecutions come from a pool of 85,000 foreign worker complaints at 1,222 factories in Korea reporting unpaid wages for periods ranging between one month and three years, according to a report by the Joint Committee of Migrant Workers in Korea, as reported by the Asia Times .
The Asia Times goes on to describe a typical story of an illegal worker who has three months of wages unpaid, but says that he would not dare demand payment, for fear that his employer will simply report him to the nearest immigration office, and he will be summarily deported. His monthly wage is 340,000 won (US$269), but he actually receives only 152,000 won (US$120), because the balance is held by his boss as ‘guarantee money’, should he disappear or be swept up in an immigration raid. The chance that he or any of the other workers in a similar situation will ever see their ‘guarantee money’ is effectively nil. The silence of workers put into this position is not surprising. Should they come to the attention of immigration authorities, they will be immediately deported, without seeing their money. In fact, periodic immigration sweeps of factory areas for illegal immigrants regularly result in deportations.
The outcry that came as a result of the backlash against people of Middle-Eastern descent in America and elsewhere after the events of September 11 2001 was, of course, justified. But while the lives of immigrants to America (or Canada, or Australia, or other ‘western’ countries) can certainly be difficult, and sometimes fraught with discrimination, it may be worth considering the desperate lives that are led by those, who for whatever reason, cannot make their way to more multicultural, tolerant nations, and must take what they can get.


Anything to add? comments.

I'm remembering

February 16, 2002 / / No Comments

I’m remembering tonight (after the requisite beer and the appropriate musical prodding) the first time I saw the Southern Cross, sitting in the cockpit of Elmo’s Fire, a kinda-stolen 71-foot sailboat, two in the morning off the Pacific coast of Mexico, the great chromed wheel in my hand, whales surfacing alongside with their comical wheezes and puffs, squid boats off on the horizon bearing spidery armatures of brilliant white lights pointed straight down into the water. Tight blue shadows, starlight like the light of day, but simpler and somehow cleaner. I remember how sanctified it felt to be out there on the quiet sea, sails luffing gently, sweating out the alcohol, wondering where the hell my life was going to take me, but certain that I’d remember that moment that my skipper pointed out the constellation to me, just above the horizon, for the rest of my life.
This memory doesn’t belong here, but I don’t know what the hell to do with it.

Comments? comments.

Currently experiencing technical difficulties

February 15, 2002 / / No Comments
Currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please do not adjust your set. You may, however, think about getting up and going outside for a walk. It’ll make you feel better. Probably. Unless you live in Korea, in which case it may annoy the snot out of you. Just sayin’.
Update : Fixed, sorta.

Statute of Limitations

February 14, 2002 / / No Comments
I’m finding my self-imposed format here a little limiting, these days, and don’t quite know what to do. I want to continue talking about Korea, of course, and I have my blogversation to engage in mindless link propagation and boozy nostalgia with my old friend the Bearman, but I feel I could profitably add my 1.7 bits to the conversations that David Weinberger and Mike Sanders and Mike Golby and Chris Locke and AKMA and Tom Matrullo (and so on and so forth)(Update : Add OnePotMeal to the menu – the things he’s talking about at the moment are very much in line with thoughts I’ve been having as well.) are engaging in. I don’t think this is the right place to do it – there are some folks who come here for the Korea bits, even though there are also some who have written to tell me that they enjoy the occasional non-Korea-related rant or monologue more than the cross-cultural schtick. I’m wondering if I should start a meta-blog, or just post more meta (ie colourfully-boxed) stuff here, or what…
/me tugs beard, looks thoughtful.


Any advice gratefully accepted… comments.

Folk Villages

February 14, 2002 / / No Comments
We went to the Korean Folk Village in Suwon today. A beautiful, peaceful place, nestled in a heavily-treed valley, hidden from any sign of the concrete wasteland surrounding it.
The bus ride from Suwon station takes you through the nightmarish urban landscape that rapid industrialization has wrought – human-beehives as far as the eye can see, garbage flung haphazardly everywhere, choking diesel fumes, and a brownish pall across even the clearest of blue skies. It’s the sort of dystopian vision of the future that science fiction writers were conjuring up 50 years ago, made real.
The bus pulls into a massive parking lot, shadowed by yet more of the beehive apartment buildings, the surrounding hills actually covered in trees. After you pay the entrance fee and pass through the massive wooden gates A traditional thatch-roofed house.(a grandfatherly ticket collector welcomed me in English, which was a pleasant surprise), you step into a world ably and lovingly preserved, free of the kind of kitschy disneylanditis that characterizes these sorts of places elsewhere in the world. Other than some modern sun-yellow and fire-engine-red plastic crap being hawked at a few of the ‘market’ stalls, the illusion is marvellous. The Folk Village is actually populated full time by artisans, farmers, performers, brewers and so on. It is truly idyllic, particularly in contrast to the unpleasant urban realities outside.
Interestingly, though, the idyll that it preserves, that of Korea of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, was not a golden age for anyone but the elite yangban class (about 10% of the population for most of the era). Commoners (sang-in or yangmin), which made up about 50% of the population – farmers, merchants (generally considered to be the dregs of non-slave society, oddly enough, considering the intensely mercantile nature of modern Korea), craftsmen – were forbidden by law to use the language of the yangban. Peasants were, by law, forbidden from leaving their land, and required to carry identity papers at all times. The lowborn, chonmin, were those born to hereditary professions like tanning and butchery, gravedigging, bark-peelers and basketmakers, and also included entertainers, shamans and kisaeng, the Korean equivalent of the Japanese geisha.
All non-yangban men were required to perform forced labour as well as military service. It is estimated that during the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), approximately 1/3 of the Korean population were slaves, either privately- or government-owned. Slaves did not have surnames, and lowborn women frequently were not even granted a forename. Torture as punitive punishment for infractions of the law was de riguer. Life was not pleasant for the vast majority of the population, a reality not surprisingly ignored by the multilingual signs posted around the village. (There was, however, a photograph of a man being tortured above the entrance to the recreated jail. Koreans seem to have different feelings will regard to cruelty and violence than I am accustomed to – this is something I’m still trying to figure out.)
The Folk Village was lovely, and relaxing, but even with the perpetual haze, the endless waves of concrete, the hell-bent bus drivers and their demonic taxi offsiders, even with the corruption and sexism of today’s Korea, it’s a better place out in the city than it was in the carefully preserved Good Old Days.
But we all love a little nostalgia for what never was, don’t we?


Comments? comments.

Lunar New Year's

February 11, 2002 / / No Comments

Suh-lal – Lunar New Year’s has rolled around again, and as always, it signals the largest exodus of Koreans of the year. It’s a tradition to return at this time of the year to your hometown, both to visit and pay respects to family and pay homage to your ancestors, echoing old animist practices. The government estimates that 33.4 million South Koreans will be on the move this weekend – this is out of a total population of 44 million!

Happy New Year! comments.

Anti-American

February 9, 2002 / / 8 Comments

(I’ve talked about related issues here and here and here, if you want the full story through the eyes of the wonderchicken…)
Anti-American sentiments are on the rise in Korea once again, on the heels of the ‘axis of evil’ script read recently by The Little President That Could. There is a real and legitimate fear that the ill-considered bad-cop posturings of the American speechwriters could push the peninsula into another war. These fears are not ameliorated by reports that the Pentagon believes that the most likely spot for a large-scale regional war in the near future is outside my window. (Aside : Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, isn’t it? Considering the inroads made towards lasting detente, if not outright peace, by President Kim in the last 4 years, gains that have been systematically knocked back by the antics of W, it’s interesting that this report has been released now. By ‘interesting’, I mean interesting in the sense of manipulative, pernicious and propagandistic, of course.)
Anti-American protests have been a feature of the political landscape for about 20 years here. The first real wave of them occurred in 1980 and lasted for over a decade, as a result of the widespread belief that the American government backed General Chun Doo Hwan in his military coup and in the massacre of civilians at Kwangju. Despite the clear need for such a presence, protests have also focussed around the presence of the 37,000 American troops stationed here, and more recently, new revelations from a BBC documentary eye-catchingly entitled “Kill ’em All : American War Crimes in Korea” about the incidents at Nogun-Ri during the Korean War, one occasion (at this point 61 separate incidents involving the killing of civilians by US forces have been registered with the South Korean government) on which American troops were ordered by their commanding officers to open fire on unarmed refugees. A quote from that report :

“There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ’em all,” recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman, “I didn’t know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all.”

Coming at the same time as Shrubya’s lumbering, hamhanded comments recently, which have already stirred up resentment about America’s role in matters key to Korea’s very survival, this new BBC documentary has not helped matters much.
So the man in the street here in Korea is angry about what he sees as the American government arbitrarily derailing more than 4 years of work toward peace and reunification by President Kim, for which (I reiterate again for the benefit of the new-to-Waeguk) he was given the Nobel Peace prize in 2000, believing the motivation to be Bushy self-aggrandizement mixed with an unhealthy swath of darker, more colonial purposes. This resentment dovetails nicely with the anger Koreans feel at outside interference in their internal matters of state and culture, and the flames are being fanned by things like the recent controversies over dogmeat and the new revelations about Nogun-Ri. (I talked about the roots of that resentment in the context of the dog-meat ‘controversy’ here – long story short : Japanese occupation and more than 900 invasions in Korea’s recorded history).
Signs of hope are there, though. The North Koreans are reacting cautiously, and seem to be willing to resume dialog. Interestingly, during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics today, when the president of the Salt Lake committee mentioned at beginning of his speech the ‘9-year old boy in Seoul, Korea’, that was the only part of the speech which was not simultaneously subtitled in Korean. It would seem to be have been a last minute addition, a small, politically-motivated olive branch perhaps, but a charmingly American one, for what it’s worth.

Puking up a hairball

February 8, 2002 / / No Comments

After puking up a hairball about how little value I place in links without commentary, I exercise my right to be annoyingly inconsistent : I have nothing more to say about this.
Update : Or this – “If there were to be a war on the Korean peninsula, we would win but at a horrendous cost. It would be a classic pyrrhic victory. We could devastate North Korea, but we would lose hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese allies in the first few days.”

Young Korean Men

February 8, 2002 / / 4 Comments

One of the dominant facts in a young Korean man’s life, perhaps the biggest one, is the inevitability of military service. All able-bodied young men (although exceptions are sometimes made for those with enough money, or the right connections, as with everything else here) are required to do a minimum of 26 months of military service (ranging up to thirty months in the Air Force). The callup usually comes about midway through university.
I often wonder if this single fact goes a long way toward explaining some of the enormous differences in attitudes between Korean men and, for example, us Canucks, as much as culture and language and other factors. I’ve talked before about the infantilization of the youth here. Almost every 20-year-old I meet here seems to have the emotional maturity of, say, a 15 year-old in the west. This despite (or perhaps as a result of) the fact that during their high school years, they are driven to succeed, with students who hope to go on to university often sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night or less for years on end, and attending private evening schools for every subject they study, including english, after the normal school day. This kind of grinding 7 am to midnight schedule is the only way, they believe (or more significantly, their parents believe), for them to score reasonably well on the national university entrance exam. Their performance on that exam will decide the caliber of university they attend (at least if their parents are not wealthy, or do not know the right people), and thus the shape of the remainders of their lives. Not attending one of the first-rank (in name if not nature) universities guarantees that you will never reach the top of your chosen profession. The doors will simply not be open to you.
By the time young people reach university age, they may have had very little contact with the opposite sex, as single-gender schools are still very common for teenages, and the long hours they put in preclude much in the way of socialization. With the boys in particular (and boys they still are), the culture has molded them, their mothers have explicity taught and trained them, that they are the absolute center of the universe, and everything is secondary to their will and whim, and amongst other things, that throwing a tantrum is a perfectly acceptable way to react to being thwarted. A first-born male is the shining, much-beloved center of any family, and this is communicated (both to the boy and to his female siblings if any) throughout their young lives.
Suddenly, though, these spoiled, pampered young men are required to join the military. Stories that Korean friends have told me indicate that the treatment of new recruits is uniformly brutal by their ‘seniors’, The DMZ and random beatings and abuse are the norm. It is, by all accounts, a hellish experience, made more so by the fact that it requires a fundamental shift in how these young men must view their world. It is during military service that most young men start the serious drinking and smoking that characterizes so many Korean men, and during this time as well that most of them lose both their virginity and their innocence. Any pretence they held about equality and fairness is systematically stripped from them, and they are taught that the rules for adult life can be summed up adequately by the phrase ‘f–k or be f–ked’. This, it often seems, becomes the mantra that they carry with them into business dealings in later life.
So I sympathize to an extent with Yoo Seung-jun, a singer who recently took full US citizenship, primarily to avoid the draft. He has been barred from re-entering Korea, and there’s a fair bit of controversy swirling around this decision. At this point, though, with Bush-created fears of a new war on the peninsula running higher than in recent memory, there is little sympathy amongst the general population, and little concern about the interesting precendent that this government decision has created.
What would you do if your country were demand military service, or institute a wartime draft? I’m still not certain, but then I haven’t really lived there for more than a decade…

Comments? comments.

Voices Sweet to My Eye

February 8, 2002 / / No Comments
I’ve been scratching my head, not so much due to insect infestation or any of my collection of amusingly rare skin conditions, no – I’ve been doing it all afternoon because I was in Deep Thought about how I could somehow tangentially, tenously tie the stuff that I’ve been pondering to the self-proclaimed theme of this blog, which is, in case you hadn’t noticed :

Why I Love Korea Even Though It Turns Me Apoplectic With Fury
or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

At this task, I have failed miserably. Thus the lovely background to this post. Entirely too many colored rectangles around here lately, which means that either I’d better start exercising a little self-restraint, or I’d better start thinking about moving the goddamn goalposts. I put ’em up in the first place, after all.
Plato! So my little screed for today came to me whilst I was doing my almost daily rounds. There’s a list of blogs (over there to the right, you see ’em? The ones labelled ‘Voices sweet to my eye’ are the ones I’m talking about here, although there are also a goodly number amongst the Metafilter gang and the Blogrolling list further down) that, after I finish reading, I’ve either had a good laugh, or feel like a marginally better person, or feel like ‘Damn – there’s what I oughta be shooting for here’, or some combination of the three.
The rare ones are the ones that give me the Full Treatment. And this is the point of my little sermon today. You see, I’ve found that I most enjoy reading people, at least in blogland, that I feel like I could be friends with. This is hardly a world-shattering revelation, I know, but bear with me. Some of the Voices Sweet To My Eye are serious. Urbane. Frighteningly intelligent. They give the impression that they will brook no silliness, not from a wonderchicken, not from nobody! I come away from their blogs feeling like a better person. I’ve learned something. Spent some time with someone who knows a helluva lot more than me about quite a few things, and can synthesize entirely new ways of looking at those things while having a crap. There are others in the list who make me laugh, make me smile, make me feel that I’m having a virtual drink or two with them, and the cares of the day pale to insignificance. There are still others that, through their elegance and light touch, through the way they deftly and apparently effortlessly turn a phrase, make me want to work harder at this writing thing, or at design, or coding, or whatever. I love all these folks, and I am grateful each and every day for the existence of this medium that has allowed me to share in their creativity and passion.Groucho!
But there are very few, and this is the crux of my point, that combine those qualities. What I mean to say is that I am a firm believer in both the value of granular analysis of semantics, for example, and in the ineluctable modality of the fart joke, for another. Preferably simultaneously. And I find that the people I enjoy most in real life are able to exist, and in fact revel in living on both of these planes simultaneously. It’s these madcap philosophers to which I am most drawn. This may be in large part because I try to be that very thing, and of course we often love that in our friends which most closely mirrors what we perceive ourselves to be. Which is why most of my pals are inveterate boozers and reprobates.
I’m not going to list the few voices I’ve found in my travels that give me that ‘Here’s a person I wish I knew in real life’ feeling, which at the end of the day, all the crap I was talking above is about. People who challenge me, educate me, make me laugh until I involuntarily pee – who can do all of those things. I can’t and won’t list them, because you always end up leaving someone out, and besides, there are more out there I haven’t found yet. There are a lot out there, though, and one of the great joys of recent months for me is that some of them, even in this rarefied bloggy air, are talking back to me.
Although it’s slightly embarrassing to do so, I offer you this obvious snippet of good ol’ Jack Kerouac as a coda of sorts :

“…and I shambled after them as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”

Afterthought : You can infer how impressed I am by the idea that the most important thing about a weblog is the links. Pfft. They merely add torque to the engine of the brain behind the words.


Talk to me! comments.

New! Improved! Less taste, more filling!

February 7, 2002 / / No Comments

New! Improved! Less taste, more filling! I’ve decided to flag meta-posts (ie stuff that’s not about life in Korea) with a nice colorful box, and a pretty dashed line, ’cause I’m nothing if not flavour-of-the-moment. Starting now. Offer may be terminated without notice. Void where prohibited by good sense.

Do any of my loyal readers (all three of you!) have any recommendations for cheap-ass hosting? Something with a bit of space to host some images, something that I can maybe run Moveable Type on, or just continue with Blogger – the usual. Any assistance and advice would be most graciously accepted. Still pondering a domain name…


Let me know…and thanks. comments.

Pretzelboy

February 6, 2002 / / No Comments

A couple of evil-doughers. Pretzelboy, in his State of the Union address last week, named North Korea as part of his fanciful ‘axis of evil’. This has gotten the government here worried enough that the president has publicly announced “We should not let our 70 million people face the threat of war…We should ease the tension through dialogue with North Korea, and we should keep [the United States and the North] from drumming up a war atmosphere.” Living, as I do, less than 100 km from the DMZ, this concerns me a bit. I’ve talked about this before, but this ‘axis of evil’ thing takes it to a new level, and the sheer white hot rage of a thousand suns that I feel when I contemplate the things that the American government is doing prevents me at this moment from commenting cogently (not that anyone who frequents this place expects cogent commentary from me, I know).
I will note, however, that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is quoted in the above Korea Times article referring to the North as “the world’s number one merchant for ballistic missiles.” To that I would reply that in the year 2000, the US was responsible for more than 50% of global arms trading, and the wackjob up in Pyongyang was responsible for 0.4%.
‘World’s #1 merchant’ indeed.
Update : This “Critical Analysis of the 2002 State of the Union Address” was helpful to me in fine-tuning my fury.

Comments? comments.