Emptybottle.org

Jesus Saves! comments.

A conversation over dinner with a few of my Korean colleagues a couple of nights ago. In and of itself a little odd, that, conversing over dinner. Koreans tend to get the business of nourishment fully completed before chewing the fat, but a couple of these folks were Korean-Americans, and a couple others well-versed in the oddball ways of us hairy barbarians, and cut the requisite slack, as it was a ‘western’ meal : massive slabs of pizza and long styrofoam trays of gleaming, oily chicken thighs.
Predictably, it was about America, and the outrage upon outrage that the American government is perceived to be heaping on Korea and the rest of the world. The talk turned to the latest : North Korea as one of countries on the List, one of the countries where contingency plans to use nuclear weapons – in case of ‘surprising military developments’ – were being discussed.
A sense of outrage is building in this country. One of my colleagues said “They are talking about using nukes against North Korea, if necessary. I have family there. My father came from Pyongyang during the war.” Another nodded and said “Mine too. I have family in North Korea, a lot of family.” Heads nodded around the table. Almost everyone at the table, it seemed, had some relatives north of the border, close or distant, most of whom they’d never met. “We’re an occupied country,” said one of the men at the table, a Korean-American in his forties, “we have been for 50 years!”
I had to agree with him. It’s quite clear that the presence of US Forces may have staved off another invasion by the North, but the fact remains that South Korea has been a puppet for all these years, willing or otherwise, and the pumped-up, football field cheerleading that Pretzelboy and his cronies are spewing is doing nothing to ease the anger, the fear, and the rage that is bubbling to the surface. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anti-US sentiment is crystallizing everywhere – and this in a country that is ostensibly a ‘staunch ally’ of America. Set aside f–king Olympic medals, we have ‘axis of evil’ rhetoric, threats of nuclear strikes on family members, unilateral, illegal steel tariffs, Jay Leno making lame jokes about dog-eating, and Nogun-f–king-Ri, to name a few things that have pissed people off in the last month alone. Even my new freshman students, uncomfortable and standoffish in the early days of this semester, have warmed to me visibly when they found out that I’m not American.
America is making itself many, many enemies around the world recently. Far more, far more widespread, and far angrier, perhaps, than the scattered few that took down the Twin Towers in New York. Shrub and his cohort are stoking the fires of resentment and hatred all around the planet, and it’s the ordinary goddamn American on the street, in New York or in Paris, in Washington or Manila, that will lose their lives as a result, when next the next bomb goes off, the next airplane crashes into a building.
It astonishes and saddens me daily, with each new outrage delivered deadpan by the Resident and his handlers, that the American people are allowing their government – a leadership not even clearly mandated by an election – destroy what good is left there, and throttle what goodwill still remains in pockets amongst the peoples of the nations of the world. Dark days, my friends. Dark days.

Comments? comments.

Anything to add? 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 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.

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’, 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.

Image : Cartoon dog, yapping viciously, running at the source of its frustration, all a-slaver, until – glurk! – it’s hauled up by the tether it forgot about, and sails into the air, landing on its back with a mighty whoomp! Little birdies commence to tweet around its head, in circles.
It’s a novel and fascinating facet of this new medium (to me at least) that people can immediately call you on your sh-t, either with kindness or rancour, and force you to think more carefully about your offhanded rants and screeds. I called the guy I linked to in my last post a ‘cretin’ and opined that he represented the worst of what his country has to offer. Joanne sent me an email and asked a few good questions about why I said those things, and I’ll try to respond in public, at a little more length.
Joanne points out that the main thrust of the professor’s article is that Koreans should not be ashamed of eating dog, and that criticism from the west shouldn’t make Koreans feel ashamed of their culture, and that these points, based on things I’ve said before, are very much in line with the wonderchicken take on the whole issue.
True.
She also says, in my opinion correctly, that every culture has things of which to be proud and things of which to be ashamed, and that eating dog meat is neither, if one ignores the cruelty that is often employed in their slaughter. In this I also agree with Joanne, but the last point is an important one, which I’ll touch on in a minute.
So where do I get off calling the professor such horrible names? It actually has little to do with the point he’s arguing. I tend to agree with him that Koreans should eat what they wish, and let the west take care of their own backyard. I believe my suggestion to Koreans was to say “Kiss our hairy asses!”. My primary problem with the good professor’s essay lies in the politicizing of the issue, something that not only annoys the hell out of me, but happens constantly in Korea, for complicated historical reasons. He pulls out old chestnuts like the sovereignity and submissiveness ones quoted below, like (to paraphrase) “it’s a conspiracy against to Korea to make us import beef”, like “the attitude of feeling shame by eating dog meat, of humbly lowering ourselves, shifts the cause of the problem and only hinders the solution, spoiling our pride“, and “in many ways, Korea is historically and culturally among the top in the world, but it lacks not only in a firm pride and belief in a traditional culture, but also in a strong will to make it known worldwide” to quote a few examples.
It may well be because I have heard things like this about “Korea’s magnificent culture” so many times that each further repetition becomes an annoyance. When people tell me (as they do, all the damn time) that Korea is unique in that it has four seasons, I nod sagely. When I’m told that kimchi (which I love) is the greatest health food ever invented, I smile in wonderment. When someone insists that Hangul (the Korean alphabet, which may truly be one of Korea’s greatest achievements, I admit) is the greatest alphabet ever created, I agree that that may be possible. When a colleague insists that Cheju island is more beautiful than Hawaii and Tahiti combined, I murmur my amazement quietly to myself.
I understand, as much as it is possible for a waeguk-in to grasp, perhaps, that the Japanese colonial occupation in the first half of this century was one of the cruelest things done to a people, ever. The Korean language was banned, Koreans (for whom family ties are perhaps the single most significant things in their lives) were forced to take and use Japanese surnames, cultural treasures and temples were destroyed wholesale, tens of thousands of young women were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers, the litany of evil goes on and on. I understand how that, coupled with the devastation and horror of the Korean war, a scant few years after the Japanese were driven out, has resulted in a people that, considering they were dubbed the Hermit Kingdom before any of this happened, are still painfully sensitive about both domination and cultural meddling from outside. I understand that the slightly pathetic assertions of Korea’s uniqueness and marvellousness, perennially overplayed as they are, come at least in part from the pathologies that grew from the rape of the country at the hands of outsiders like myself.
But it’s time to let that go. Korea and its people are truly one of the wonders of this age, and talking Korea up in a whiny, wheedling voice like this professor does, smacks of the same tired, masturbatory self-justification that has allowed all that is bad about Korea to poison all that is good. The country is being held back by people like him, and it annoys me.
The last point I feel like I need to make is that every time on Metafilter or Plastic or even gotta-love-em lowbrow Fark that the dogmeat issue comes up, it is invariably the consensus that “Koreans should eat whatever they want,” with the proviso that the preference would be for the practice of beating the dogs to death to end. Now.
Koreans like this professor entirely miss the point here. The vast majority of people in the west don’t care much about the issue, except when it comes to outright cruelty. By glossing this, and by defending the entire practice of eating dog, which I and many others are fine with, he is implicity defending the abhorrent and evil practice of beating animals to death before cooking them. This practice, where it occurs, happens because the belief that the adrenaline released into the flesh of the fear-crazed animal as it is beaten to death tenderizes and adds more of the mysterious healthful properties the meat is said to possess.
This I can’t accept. And I can’t accept that all the defenders of dogmeat in Korea so far miss the point so badly – that this cruelty is the only thing most people in the West object to.
Comments?

OK, so I switch on the TV this morning as I’m drinking my morning coffee. I usually don’t bother, but I woke up before the alarm. There are women parading around in their underwear on the Shopping Channel, which must have been where SK left it when she came to bed last night.
The models are mostly Korean, which in and of itself is interesting, because 5 years ago, and still to a large extent today, you would never see a Korean woman modelling underwear, in catalogues or on TV. That sort of slutty thing was for foreign women to do – no self-respecting Korean woman would allow herself to be photographed almost! naked!, and certainly no advertiser would presume to ask. Tantamount to pornography, that. Imagine how her family would feel. Ruin her chances for marriage, it would. So, if you did see women in Korea modelling underwear, in catalogues or on posters in department stores, it would always be western women, or Russians.
I watched for a few minutes, for, uh, edification, and soon realized that this wasn’t actually a bra-and-panty ad I was watching. The girls would model-strut forward, smile wide and vacant as if they were gazing on the Face of God, and hold up to the camera these flesh-coloured, plastic, crescent-shaped objects. They’d shift their weight to the other leg, cock the other hip, switch hands, and then grin some more, all the while holding this thing towards the camera like an offering at a shrine.
I thought at first that the crescent-shaped things were falsie-related. There’s a huge market here for padded bras and other non-surgical breast ‘enhancements’. But after a few minutes of, uh, cultural research, a brief computer animation revealed what these things were actually (my Korean’s not good enough yet, sadly) Vibrators. Breast-vibrators. Under the breast, crescent-shaped, vibrators. I can only assume from the animations that the theory is that vibrating the boob at a high frequency somehow stimulates breast expansion.
Yeah, right.
Well, at least judging by the glazed, pseudo-orgasmic grins on the faces of the models, it feels pretty nice.
I’m sure I didn’t dream it…

As promised : I was in the toilet, from whence many of my best thoughts seem to emanate, and the phrase ‘cultural cargo cult‘ sprang, fully formed, into my mind. It was early in the morning, and I see no real connection with my dream about the Irish Monk who required that I bring him the largest lettuce leaf I could in order for him to fashion a cloak from it, for me. The leaf I managed somehow to unwrap from a perfectly normal head of lettuce was not only purple, but approximately the size of a bedsheet. After fastening it to a headpiece made from a piece of furry animal hide, I went to meet my destiny, which, it was understood, due to the enormous size of that lettuce leaf, was necessarily regal.
What was I talking about?
I’ve been struggling for months to come up with a way to describe the way that Korea, and to a much lesser extent these days, Japan, hijack those elements of western (tangentially, in other words, adolescent-targetted) popular culture, twist them just the amount that seems appropriate, and amplify to the point of parody, but with a straight face and boundless enthusiasm. At the same time, they either negligently or deliberately strip the imagery, sounds and ritual of any of the meaning, the historicity from which they originally sprang. It is a ‘cultural cargo cult’, where it is assumed that, for example, with the correct combination of haircut, clothing and sampled guitar riffs, a song so saccharine that Anne Murray would gag is transformed into an anthem bristling with street credibility.
Of course, you can’t blame the entertainment factories here. When manufactured entertainment like The Backstreet Boys or The Spice Girls or the latest soulless piece of cinematic sh-t by Jerry Bruckheimer sweeps the planet and takes the trailer parks by storm, dollarsigns sparkle in the eyes of greedy morons the world over. Korea is no different. The product is tailored to make the most money.
Perhaps it’s just that with examples like the three I mention above, I feel sure they know that what they’re doing is pointless, all-about-the-dollars pap, and that there is such a thing as pop-culture art, or at least authentic feeling and experience filtered though the lens of popular culture relics. Here, I can sense no such subtext. The latest Korean boy-group seems to be uncomplicatedly serious about their fame, and everyone takes them seriously. Art? Not even an issue. ‘They’re cute, they’re personable, they’re guaranteed drug-free, they sing well enough once you add enough digital processing in, that’s enough’
But they never seem to have made a deal with the devil, or feel that they’ve given up their integrity to sing cheesy pop songs to 13 year old girls, and no one seems to have considered that there might have been another path, a path that isn’t a ‘sell-out’. Integrity isn’t on the agenda, nor is (in this case) music’s role as catharsis.
And the thing that weirds me out is that Korean pop groups absolutely rule China and Japan and Taiwan. There are schools that teach Beijing hopefuls how to dance like Koreans! It’s puzzling, and a little depressing.
Am I being an elitist? Perhaps I need to think about this some more. There are some (very few) real rock groups here : The Yoon Do Hyun Band, for example.
As always, I welcome your comments. I’m trying to sort this out in my mind a bit….
What do you think?