Object lesson in cultural differences

January 12, 2002 / / No Comments

Object lesson in cultural differences : on the subway today, I attempted to give up my seat to a woman who appeared to be more or less in my age bracket, plus perhaps five or ten years. She gave me an incredibly sour look of annoyance, and waved me back down, while casting quick glances left and right to check whether anyone had noticed our little interaction. I was confused, a bit, as I frequently am, and wrote it off to some kind of weird manifestation of xenophobia, which I usually do.
Turns out that I had offended her. It seems that in this strictly Confucian society, one gets up to offer one’s seat to the elderly. Only. In other places I’ve lived, I have pretty much always had a habit of mock-chivalrously doing the same for women, of whatever age, as that’s the way I was brought up. That’s not the way it works if you’re brought up in Korea, though, and by offering this woman who may have been 40 to 45 years old, I had implied that she was, or at least that she looked, an old biddy.
Ooops. Another success for international relations, courtesy of the wonderchicken.
Get outta my seat…

After reading the mewlings

January 11, 2002 / / No Comments

After reading the mewlings of at least half the participants in a discussion at Fark (a site where I consciously don’t bother with reading the discussions, as they are too often dominated by flailing adolescents and bumptious booby-seeking yahoos for my taste, and it just pisses me off) about the link I propagated below, I got to thinking a bit about how utterly different matters of gender are here, compared to the West.
An example : the over-riding desire for male children, particularly as a first born, coupled with a focus on children, a cult of reproduction, so fervent that women are often addressed not by their given name but as “Mother-of-child’s name” after they’ve squeezed out their first progeny, has created the necessity for some fairly unique legislation.
In the mid-80’s, as mass-produced ultrasound machines became freely available, doctors would naturally inform expectant mothers of the gender of the fetus, once it became distinguishable. This led to a fairly common, but not-discussed, practice of aborting female fetuses, particularly if they were to be the first-born, and ‘trying again’. This led in turn to the government decreeing that, by law, doctors would not be allowed to disclose the gender of a fetus. Many still do, of course, and the number of male births in Korea has outnumbered those of female by considerably more than the natural 106/100 ratio. This will have deep consequences when these boys come of age over the next decade or two.
Those in power would do well to learn from history:

“During the 19th century, the Chinese province of Huai-Pei suffered devastating natural disasters including floods, droughts, famines, and locust invasions nearly every three or four years. The peasants in this province, who were dependent on the land and the crops, did the only thing they could think of to survive under these conditions–they killed their female babies.
Male babies were valued as potential food providers and contributors to the family income while females were another mouth to feed and could only be married off at great expense to the family. In this time of desperation, reducing liabilities, such as female children, was seen as a viable survival technique. As a result, during this century there was an average of 129 men for every 100 women in Huai-Pei.
This skewed sex ratio became a problem when the men were ready to marry. Because of the lack of females, many men had no hope of marrying, raising a family, or supporting themselves; consequently, they grouped together and began small-scale banditry throughout the province to steal and provide for their families. Eventually, nearly 100,000 of these men, known as the Nian, led a rebellion on the Chinese emperor from 1851 to 1863 that contributed to the fall of the empire.”

A mainstream media article

January 10, 2002 / / No Comments

A mainstream media article about Korea, this time talking about ‘booking clubs’. More or less accurate, except for the utterly ridiculous translations of quotes into Amurrican slang. “How’s it going, bro?” reads one such message sent to Mr. Park on a Monday night. “Come quick. It’s a complete girls’ bathtub tonight. Hurry and make your pick.”
 This is meant to be an SMS message from a waiter at a club to a patron? Not a chance in hell.
Interesting phenomenon, though.
Book me, big boy…

A 'Paris Baguette' bakery franchise

January 9, 2002 / / No Comments

A ‘Paris Baguette’ bakery franchise opened up in our determinedly-crappy-but-slowly-upscaling neighbourhood today. As is the tradition* in Korea, there was a trio of young women out front, gyrating to painfully loud disco music. It is bitterly cold today, so the artificial grins that they are required to wear were perhaps a little more forced than is usual. These girls must dance, non-stop, for anywhere up to 10 hours or so, while exhorting patrons to come and enjoy whatever wares the newly opened shop is flogging. They come from an agency of some kind. Mr. Kim, the proud owner of a new boshintang restaurant, will ring up and say “Yeah, I need three girls tomorrow. No, dancing girls, you idiot. Yeah, all day. Thanks”, and they magically appear with their uberdisco sound system the next day, rain or shine.
The really amusing thing (there’s always more than one amusing thing in my World of Anecdotes, sucka!) though, was they didn’t have a single f–king baguette in the place. At least we got a free bread knife.
*tradition being anything that’s been done for five years or more. ‘Or more’ may extend to a couple of thousand years, but who can tell?

As promised

January 7, 2002 / / No Comments

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?

Schoolgirl Howl Machines

January 6, 2002 / / No Comments

After you get over the initial fear, loathing and ‘stop poking at my ego-balloon’ sensivity of the first few months of culture shock, it’s amazing how many little things you begin to take in stride, things that friends or family would pick up on instantly if they were to come and visit.
One that struck me as we were lazing around watching one of the infinitude of ‘variety’ shows on Korean TV last night (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you’re curious and have a fast net connection : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily…) is the ‘schoolgirl howl’.
This is a sound, that, whiskey-ravaged as I am, I cannot for the life of me reproduce. It is reminiscent of the kind of pre-orgasmic squeals that teenyboppers in the early 60’s would emit when faced with the Beatles, or Elvis, and I suppose, in a deliberately more chaste fashion, that’s what it’s modelled on. It sounds a bit like a very high-pitched : ‘ooo-WOOOO-OOoo!”. The thing is, though, that it’s delivered with clockwork regularity every 10 or 15 seconds, when anyone does or says anything even remotely interesting.
“Oh my goodness I am uncontrollably excited in a non-sexual fashion by the fact that that dog just jumped through a hoop!” is the message, it would seem.
To add an extra layer of weirdness (which I almost never notice these days, having become accustomed to it), this schoolgirl howl is also omnipresent on prerecorded segments! It would seem that they have invented, parallel to the cretinous laughtrack machines in the West, Schoolgirl Howl Machines here (good name for a band!). I imagine the guy in the booth, bored look on his face, cigarette dangling from his lip, pushing the lever for another howl, and twiddling a knob if it needs an extra bit of oomph because the current howl-ee is a member of g.o.d or something.
Practice your schoolgirl howls here…

Lengthy hangover?

January 5, 2002 / / No Comments

Lengthy hangover? Run down like the foreign dog that he is by a sleep-deprived taxidriver? Felled cedarlike by an especially nasty virus? Composing word by word the ultimate post that will drive women and wonderchicken-loving men to previously unreached heights of lexically-ecstatic mental fibrillations?
Nah. Fightin’ with the Mrs.

Meta New Year

January 2, 2002 / / No Comments

This is a post that’s explicitly about me, rather than my take on something, which I try to avoid here. Apologies. Ignore it if you wish.
So here it is. Another arbitrary milestone, but sucker that I am, I find it hard to ignore those little markers beside the road, arbitrary or not. For me, 2001 was one of those years of reinventing myself, ones that seem to come in more or less three-year cycles. I decided that, for the moment at least, the IT industry was not where I wanted to be, even if Australia was.
Throwing heart and soul into a project that I believed deeply in and having it sh-tcanned because of arbitrary, ego-driven political bullsh-t (I will never forget it, Mr. Bastard, and when you least expect it I will leap from the cover of darkness and rip your f–king black heart out and feed it to you, still pulsing) gave me pause, and triggered some re-evaluation of what I need as core in my livelihood, to keep my sanity. I’ve always needed friendships (if at arms length, perhaps, and on my terms, arrogant control-freak that I am) to sustain me, coupled with plenty of time to sit alone and think and drink. The first was possible in Sydney, the second, not.
Serendipitously, this university teaching job came to my attention at almost precisely the same time that I was re-evaluating how rewarding (in any but a monetary sense) the IT work and my role at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com was to me, and precisely how much sh-t I’d have to eat to fit in with the new corporate regime. I’ve been called naive, and foolish, and perhaps I am, but teaching has always seemed to me to be a noble calling. In the right situation, a teacher, a good one, can see how they have done some measurable good in the world. It’s a lot harder to see that result in the software biz, particularly when the results of a year’s labour is a piece of ‘groupware’ which ends up getting shelved, anyway.
Happily, since I’m nothing if not skilled in uprooting myself and flinging my sorry ass halfway across the planet at the drop of a hat (and happily, since SK is cool with that), the move back to Korea wasn’t the potentially shattering thing it could have been. I made (and renewed) some good friends in Australia, and I hope we’ll go back, sometime. I took a 60% cut in my gross salary, and that is a price that I gladly pay to be free from feeling coerced to lick corporate ass, to have the time to write, and read, and think, and drink, to teach again, and have my efforts appreciated, and to give the woman I love a chance to live in her own country again. I’ve made (and renewed) some friendships here, and as ever, all my friends that I can keep in touch with through this amazing InTArWeb thing sustain me, every day.
2001 was a stressful year, as my Years of Reinvention always are, but I think there is a chance that I’ll be a better man because of the hard decisions I made. And at the end of the day, at the close of another year, that’s all I can really strive for.
Peace, friends.
Call me a fool for love…

It's New Year's Eve

January 1, 2002 / / No Comments

It’s New Year’s Eve, and we are off to the Opera. That sounds mind-wobblingly odd to me, but such is life. Cho Su Mi, who is apparently Korea’s most famous diva, will be singing. Joining her on stage will be a friend/student, Chung Ho Yoon, who is Korea’s most promising up-and-coming young male tenor. It will be interesting, and a novel experience for me.
Gives me an excuse to wear that ridiculously expensive suit I bought last summer, too.
Since this will be my last post of the year, before we head into the first palindromic year of the millenium, I wish all who have visited and all who will visit my meagre efforts here a most happy, fulfilling and peaceful New Year (even the guy who crapped all over the comment thread from yesterday) .
Wish me a Happy New Year, or curse me, as you wish…

The new train station

December 31, 2001 / / No Comments

The new train station nearest to our apartment beehive is about 75% percent finished, and you now go through the spiffy new electronic ticket checkers in the new building. The new signs, in standard yellow and black, are up, and are predictably loose with their interpretation of English. Not terribly amusing are the ones that have been put up here at Bugok and everywhere else as well, saying “Seoul Thorough”, which I assume is meant to mean something along the lines of “Seoul Direct” or “Seoul Express”.
The one that gave me a laugh today, and made people stare at me more than usual, was the sign that was clearly meant to say “Bugok Rolling Stock Yards” but somehow came out “Bugok Roiling Stork Yards”. I don’t know why I found this one so funny, but I’ve been laughing since I came out of the station. A very “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” flavour to that one : “Roiling Stork, Bubbly Lemur” …

Interesting, and quite odd.

December 30, 2001 / / No Comments

Interesting, and quite odd. The usual, in other words.
Elementary school students in Busan and other parts of South Gyeongsang province are reportedly singing the praises of Osama bin Laden. School authorities in the province said they are working to discourage children from singing what they called a “Bin Laden worship song.”….The song, reportedly sung to the tune of the theme song of a popular cartoon, goes something like this: “Osama bin Laden, the person I admire most. I also want to be a terrorist when I grow up. President Bush, the person I detest most. I’m going to blow up the 63 building.”
This is very much cut from the same cloth as “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, Mussolini broke his weinie…” or a raft of other schoolkid songs we half-remember from childhood. The interesting thing to me is that “the Busan Police Agency and the city’s education office on Dec. 7 ordered schools to stop students from singing the song, calling it ‘potentially dangerous‘”. I imagine the scene at the local constabulary…
Corporal Kim is on the sh-t list for not meeting his quota of traffic tickets for the month. The Chief calls him in to his office, yells at him and whacks him over the head a few times with a rolled-up newspaper, then puts him on Elementary School Duty. “If you hear any kids singing that Osama song, Corporal, you bring ’em in, you hear me? Screw this up, and you’ll be hosing down drunks in the back room for the rest of your life!”
Update : Related, tangentially and less amusingly, was the stink over the astonishingly stupid “Hitler Bar” in Taegu a while back.
Comments?

Korean Contradictions

December 28, 2001 / / 2 Comments

Korean folks : devote themselves slavishly to their families but will spend 12 or 14 hours a dayat work. Somehow reconcile grand operatic displays of emotional intensity with a finely-honed sense of social etiquette. Are xenophobic, but extremely hospitable. Appear incompetent but achieve incredible successes. Are Confucian, but have disarming instinct for participating in ad-hoc relationships. Are collectivist but are arguably the most individualistic of North-East Asian societies. Are puritanical in public, but earthily sexual in private. Are, when older, serious, self-important and rigid in their public faces, but are free as schoolchildren when drinking with their contemporaries. Relentlessly pursue title and status and wealth, but regard them when achieved as guides for behaviour rather than measures of intrinsic worth. Can be deliberately ignorant of the squalor of their surroundings while acutely conscious of the fine gradations of their relationships with the people around them. Are deeply sentimental but vigorously pragmatic. Believe in the indwelling spirit of all things and put aside that belief when it’s inconvenient. Care deeply for people, but only people that are part of their circle. Believe in romantic love, when it’s convenient. Are sloppily sentimental, but ruthless in business.
Oh, they are fascinating to me. Walking contradictions. And never boring, which, for me, is key. I love these people. That’s why I’m here, again, much as I complain.
Comments?

Lia says this

December 28, 2001 / / No Comments

Lia says this about the Philippines, her home : “I wish we would learn from our mistakes already and start moving forward.” I hope and pray that there are young Koreans saying things as clear and rational about their own country. In Korean, in English, I don’t care. If there are, tell me.
Comments?

Christmas Bondaeggi

December 26, 2001 / / No Comments

A fine, blue, almost smogless Christmas day here in Seoul, and we took the opportunity to go to Seoul Grand Park, or more accurately, the Museum of Contemporary Art therein. But, of course, those of you who know me know that that’s not the real story : the interesting bit is that I had bondaeggi for the first time while sober, and quite enjoyed it. Bondaeggi is, of course, boiled, seasoned silkworm larvae, ladled into a paper cup from a big cauldron by one of the the ‘bondaegii ladies’ that squat every 10 metres or so along the concourse leading to Gwacheon subway station, and chant ‘bondaeggi bondaeggi bondaeggi’ until they’re hoarse.
It’s really quite yummy stuff, if slightly odd in texture. Leaves a bit of a nasty aftertaste too, but I suspect that’s as much from the grimy looking cauldron as it is from the bugs themselves.
Mmmm…it’s just not Xmas without some boiled grubs, I always say!
Comments?

Hot! Hot! Korean! Sexx0ring!

December 25, 2001 / / 1 Comment

It must be the Xmas season (don’t get me started) but I’m getting all soft and goopy. After calling the pr0n seekers ‘too dumb to live’ there last night, I actually felt a little bad when I found this in my referrer logs this morning. The poor guy clicked on the search result, hoping to find Hot! Hot! Korean! Sexx0ring!, and instead got insulted.
Ah, the power of the IntArWeb thing.

An Xmas present

December 24, 2001 / / No Comments

An Xmas present to all you folks who wearily click the link to come here regularly, in hopes that you’ll find something insightful, amusing or just plain goofy that you can tell your significant other over dinner, and equally (well OK not equally, ’cause you sad random bastards that showed up here looking for nekkid pictures are too dumb to live, really) the folks that showed up here via some of the oddball search engine queries I see in my referrer logs : this is a funny and well-written travelogue thingo about Korea (that I didn’t write, ensuring a much lower smart-ass quotient). Enjoy!
(Next week I start with the all porn format)

Found this scan

December 24, 2001 / / No Comments

Found this scan this evening. Apparently the Philippines is another country that has some history of chowing down on the puppies. Poor guy – he was just trying to run his restaurant…

(I wonder if it was the dogflesh that gave him his Freakishly Large Head.)

Next up on the hit-parade

December 23, 2001 / / No Comments

Next up on the hit-parade : an item a couple of days ago on MBC News talked about a new trend amongst the parents of elementary school children – forcing them to undergo a surgerical procedure which severs some bits of muscle that control the tongue, thus apparently ‘lengthening’ it. You might well wonder why a longer tongue would be such an valuable asset. I certainly did.
Well, it seems there’s a widespread belief that us foreign dogs have much longer tongues than the average Korean, and this evolutionary quirk gives us the ability to pronounce English (and presumably other languages) with more facility. A little radical body mod on the kids will stand them in good stead for pronouncing English, is the thinking.
I don’t really need to rant about this, do I?
I will note though, that almost without fail, throughout their entire elementary, middle and high-school careers, Korean kids are taught completely incorrect phonemes to approximate sounds that exist in English and other Euro languages, but not in Korean. By the time they reach adulthood, if they continue to study English, their pronunciation is so deeply and permanently mangled that it’s very difficult indeed for them to correct it. This is perpetuated by the universal habit of using a whole host of Konglish words written in Hangul script on television and elsewhere (like ‘news’ which in Korean is ´ºÁî, which is pronounced ‘nyoo-juh’), which forces and perpetuates mispronounciation, and annoys the crap out of me.
A decent education system, with well-trained teachers, and practice, will improve kids’ pronunciation of English and other foreign languages, not surgery. Grrrr.
Comments?