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.

Bush Seeks To Restrict Probes

February 24, 2002 / / No Comments

Bush Seeks To Restrict Probes Of Sept. 11
Time for another distraction, deflect some attention, get the fist-in-the-air brigade worked up again…Anyone want to give me odds on how soon the bombs starting falling somewhere new? He promised they weren’t going to invade North Korea. That’s good enough for me, damn it!
Interlude :
I try to steer my way clear of politics. I try to, and for the last dozen years or so, I’ve claimed to be ‘apolitical’. Just wanted out of it. I remember now why I deliberately chose to be so. It’s exhausting, when you start to dig, start to work up that red-orange glow of indignation, start to think carefully about the manipulative pap that we’re fed by our leaders (elected or otherwise) and their lapdogs. Indignation turns to fury, and you slowly begin to turn into one of those people that sit at Metafilter, obsessively hitting Refresh on any political thread, keen to tear down anyone who disagrees with them, while their marriage falls apart and the pizza box in the corner sprouts new life forms not previously found in any taxonomy or textbook. Not to name any names, of course.
Disclaimer : My relationships are just fine, thank you, and I rarely get to have pizza these days.
Not only is it exhausting to be in a state of near-perpetual anger, but it’s unhealthy, and it annoys other people. There are old friends of mine that I no longer speak to, in part because of their one-note perpetual politicizing of Every Damn Thing. All The Time. It’s grating, and unnecessary, and reduces your life to a constant protest, usually against things over which you have no influence whatsoever. I’d rather have my life be a celebration, a paean.
This excerpt from the Tao Te Ching (recently quoted by Richard at Notes From A Life In Progress) is perhaps appropriate here :

Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
Tao te Ching : 29
trans. Stephen Mitchell

But there comes a point, when it feels necessary to speak out, even if no one hears your voice. At least your conscience will be clear, and if someone does hear you, and agrees, perhaps you’ve done some good. Some days, lately, I feel like I am somehow failing myself if I don’t point out the latest falsehood, the latest manipulative rewrite of the facts, the most recent evil perpetrated on the world by the Evil Empire. Other days, I just feel like pointing to Ethel. I’m funny like that, and I make no excuses.
Everyone loves to quote this one, too, but that’s not gonna stop me : “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
Interlude Ends.
Back to the Bombing The Innocent Sweepstakes : well-timed little gems like this would seem to make their intentions pretty clear, to me at least…
Edit : This is good. Laugh, cry, rinse, repeat.

Odds? 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.

I promised myself…

February 22, 2002 / / No Comments

I promised myself I wasn’t going to talk about the visit of a certain lying, half-wit sack of dung to Korea recently, as my temper might get the best of me, and I might accidentally let slip pejoratives like ‘lying‘ and ‘half-wit‘ and ‘sack of dung‘.
But I was just listening to Radio Canada International, and even they are toeing the line of bullsh-t that the American propaganda machine is spewing out. I just heard “President Bonobo (bit of static there, I think that’s what they said) will ask Jiang Ze Min to speak to Kim Jong Il about returning to the negotiating table.” What egregious, infuriating nonsense. The Americans were the ones who walked away, they are the ones playing games of brinkmanship and provoking the North Koreans, they are the ones who are most responsible for the ‘proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’.
The last time I talked about this, I linked to these two articles from the local English-language media, both of which made it quite clear that the North, weeks ago, were indicating their willingness to sit down and talk. But acknowledging that fact would get in the way of Pretzelboy’s scripted bluster about the ‘axis of evil’, now, wouldn’t it? History is being rewritten at the very moment it happens, these days.
f–k. I know he’s just reading a script – I know. I shouldn’t get upset about it. But what do they think – that no one’s watching? Are they so certain that they can just go about their merry way and no one will catch them in the lies? Has this game degenerated to such an extent that there’s no longer anything any of us can actually do, other than piss and moan, while these bastards flush us all down the toilet?
Update : This is classic. Laughing, crying, it’s all the same sometimes. Watch this (Warning : Realvideo file), and tell me this Resident knows what he’s doing. He says, to the Japanese Diet – “My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific.”

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.

Have a yen…

February 18, 2002 / / No Comments

Have a yen for some public defecation, coprophagia, bestiality, and a peppy soundtrack? The wonderchicken is happy to comply. Is it the latest from stileproject or one of the other net.cesspools? Nope, it’s a new Korean flash cartoon – cute, but somewhat disturbing. (Warning : don’t go there if you’re easily offended.) I think it’s kind of amusing, in a twisted way, but then I’m evil incarnate, me. Almost as much poop-oriented fun as this good old standby : Chil-la – The Ass Shooter Game (which I originally marvelled at here.)
The mind would boggle if it weren’t taking a year off.

That is odd, isn’t it? 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.

The shock of recognition

February 10, 2002 / / No Comments
Sometimes in my wanderings, in life and on this here inTaRweB, I get that shock of recognition, that feeling when, no matter how many times we’ve realized it before and promptly forgotten about it, we suddenly understand that there are other people out there who have lived through the same things as we have. They tell us stories that are intended to be about themselves, but after we hear them, they are tales about our selves too. Thanks, Jonathon.


Re-cognition… 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.