With thanks to Lia, the Queen of Manila, these two cool things :
Friend snarkout goes off all erudite and produces a fine and fascinating essay about Korea and brainwashing America’s understanding of the war that puts me to shame.
“The Ultimate and Authoritative Guide to Life in Korea, as Gleaned from About a Dozen Recent Popular Movies.”
skallas seemed downhearted that there wasn’t a link, so I’ve written up Ten Things You Should Never Say To A Korean Girl (if you’re, you know, pursuing her). Note that I have said all of these things to Korean women at one time or another, basically because I am a Big Dummy.
*drumroll please*
#10. Your parents really suck.
#9. I’ve had quite a few girlfriends..
#8. You’re crazy.
#7. Drugs? Well, I’ve tried a few.
#6. Do your friends know about us?
#5. I’d rather be happy and broke than rich and miserable.
#4. Do you like dog meat?
#3. I think I prefer Japan to Korea.
#2. I don’t like children.
#1. Is that a padded bra?
Edit : big white guy has a more serious, but semi-related, story of his experiences here. It’s really nice to hear about the similar-but-different experiences of other waeguk-in/gaijin/gwi-lo once in a while.
Edit the second : Also, Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha.
I feel bad about disappointing Jonathon and Fishrush with my lack of Worldy Cuppy Updates from ball-kicking ground zero, but I really haven’t come across anything that was sufficiently out there enough for me to report (Me, not journalist be!) in the last couple of days.
Until the Korea-Poland game tonight, which was quite handily won by Korea. It was Korea’s first-ever World Cup win, and so a deeply emotional moment for the million or more middle-aged Korean women who have been instantly and miraculously transformed into rabid soccer fans, and will continue to be so until the Korean team is knocked out of the running, at which time they will spit and turn, with disgust and resignation writ large on their faces, back to their large plastic tubs of kimchi, muttering imprecations about how that foreigner coach Hiddink failed them.
But right now, the fever is up, and there are literally millions of women-of-a-certain-age in this country who would slip ol’ Coach Hiddink the tongue in a split second in an instant if they thought it would help The Team, butter-smell or no butter-smell.
The little bit of Korea-insider intelligence I thought I’d pass on this evening is this : it’s been reported that in the wee wee hours of this morning, outside the hotel at Haeundae Beach in Busan where the Polish team is staying, a large crowd gathered. A large crowd of Korean fans. They proceeded to make a large noise. In order to deliberately deprive the Polish team of their beauty sleep.
I’m not sure if this is standard procedure or not, for the supporters of the home teams in host countries to try to disturb the sleep of competitors in hopes of a small advantage for the home team. I don’t follow this soccer stuff very much.
Congratulations to the Korean team. They looked pretty well-rested out there.
I’m not terribly interested in soccer, but I might just mention some of the other stuff around the edges that you might find amusing (thanks fishrush!) and that you might not otherwise see. This does not make me a journalist. Heh.
[found at the ‘pile]
A Spanish TV reporter, in a burst of inspiration apparently untempered by any inconvenient pretense of journalistic detachment, has purchased one of the meat-puppies on sale at a market in Ulsan and given him to the Spanish World Cup Team, who have made the pooch team mascot. This would seem to indicate that he will not end up on the dinner table. I will be surprised if the dog is actually taken with the team when they leave Korea.
Nonetheless, cleverly done.
Bum firmly socketed into sofa cushion, I was having one of my occasional ‘flip around the multitude of Korean-language TV channels none of which I can understand to any degree’ sessions when I stopped on one of the 3 or 4 Home Shopping Network-type stations.
These, I find, are often good for some shadenfreude-laden amusement. It is one of my guilty pleasures, watching the human mannequins go through the self-conscious motions of simulating a life that is almost unbearably joyful, enhanced as it is almost to the point of bursting by whatever product is currently being hawked. You can almost hear, watching their avidly gleeful faces, the exhortations of the stage manager to look more joyful. Watching for a while allows me to feel superior and self-righteous in my chosen role as a singularly poor consumer.
The food porn, which is so obscenely fixated on wetness and bubbling, on glistening surfaces and suddenly-exposed textures, can be depended upon to make me a little nauseous, and since I can afford to lose a couple of pounds, losing my appetite for a while isn’t such a bad thing. It must be said that these food porn producers have their job down to a fine art. They are incredibly skilled at eroticizing foodstuffs : so much so that I sometimes worry that I’ll wake up mid-sleepwalk one night in flagrante delicto with our store of kimchi.
The models tend to be on the sexy side of the street, too, which is certainly not a bad thing.
As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself : the screen at this particular moment was occupied by a pair of hands, turning and displaying a live crab, which was waving its legs about in dismay. Understandably. You’d be distressed too. With no warning, to the jaunty retro-pop harmonies of the title song from the mostly harmless Tom Hanks vehicle, ‘That Thing You Do’, the hands proceeded to rip open the shell of the soon-to-be-not-so-live crab, as its little legs went into spastic ‘oh-my-god-I’m-being-dismembered‘ gyrations, and expose its glistening, wet guts to the camera, which dutifully zoomed in. It was a weird combination of the usual food-porn with sudden, unexpected violent death, and it left me a little… discombobulated.
It’s been a fair while since I lived in the west (if less than a year since I lived in Oz), and so I might well be wrong, but I’m pretty damn sure this sort of thing would not go over well outside Asia. It was yet another of the hundred daily reminders I get of difference, and I thought I’d share.
Some of the funniest things you will never hear in Korea (latest in a long series) :
Via a conversation at Shelley’s, I found the weblog of another waeguk-in here in Seoul. And what’s more, he’s already written a piece on hangul (the Korean system of writing), like the one I was threatening to write (and predictably have been too lazy to actually do). It is perhaps a little more learned than anything I might have come up with, and more about Chinese characters than Korean ones. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course.
He does, however, manage to work in an arrogant crack about english professors :
…but since I’ve often said the same sorts of things myself, I’ll let it slide. (Edit : On second thought, f–k letting it slide : I wonder if he includes in his blanket condemnation english professors, who, like a certain Poulet Magnifique that shall go nameless, were recently extremely well-paid (noted because of what would seem to be evidence of an unhealthy preoccupation with money in his blog posts) technologists, but found the profession so filled with lucre-obsessed soul-destroying clones, that they voluntarily gave it up and came back to teaching because they actually love it, and to Korea, because much as they love to complain, they love the people here? Or that actually do speak some Korean, despite the fact that they “don’t need to lift a finger”? And speak Spanish, French and German too? And can tie a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue? Judge all you want, my presumptuous friend, but you may find that not everyone fits into your facile, smug little categories.)
It’s another manifestation of the Expat Status Games of which I am so terribly knob-chafingly bored. I am unpleasantly bemused to find it in blogland as well.
This Metafilter thread is good medicine if you’re keen to work up a head of righteous steam and then go smite the hell out of the first person who annoys you. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about… one of the many fascinating links out of that thread is to this : The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the ’90’s. And down near the bottom of that list I found :
It would appear that some of the chaebols (the huge corporations that own this country outright) were attempting to buy themselves a president or two in America back in the last decade. I wonder if it was one of the Shrubs, or Slick Willy who was their rent-boy…
Good piece on how expats in Japan rank each other in the unspoken pecking orders. The author’s observations apply quite well for waeguk-in in Korea, too, except for the fact that there are effectively no jobs at all for a foreigner here who isn’t either an english teacher, working in the local branch office of a foreign corporation, or an exploited migrant factory worker.
It’s always a quandary – what to do on those rare occasions that you do see a foreign (read ‘caucasian’) face. Being the big friendly galoot that I am (provided I’m not having a Grumpy Day), I generally nod and smile conspiratorially. Due either to some deficiency in my powers of charm, or the fact that most foreigners here spend a great deal of their time having their very own Grumpy Days, at least 60% of the time my friendly mugging is met with a blank stare. That’s OK by me, as it helps me to realize that it’s not the majority of Korean people that I dislike, it’s the majority of people in general. It’s important to keep your misanthropy honed to a keen edge.
‘On being a gaijin’, from the same writer, hits very close to home as well.
At the moment, all the TV networks are running a pre-World Cup ad campaign whose basic message is : “If you’re approached by a foreigner, don’t squeal and run away, or shoo them off like a great dairy-product-reeking beast, be nice to them! If they come up to you, babbling incoherently in their long-tongued, incomprehensible gutterspeak, brandishing a map, try to help them! Strange as they look and outlandishly as they may behave, they won’t bite, usually.”
The fact that the government finds it necessary to run these ads on heavy rotation speaks volumes about this place. Not for nothing was Korea once called the ‘Hermit Nation’.
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, one who would condone the spraypainting of graffitti. Even the ‘urban art’ thing. Give the bastards some brushes and cleaning solution, and make ’em do something useful for a change. Pay ’em to do it, even. If they spray paint even one word, arrest the little bastards, and put ’em to work.
Now, despite this aversion to defacement I feel, this image (popup, 16k) from Page 3 of today’s Korea Times annoys the hell out of me, because it speaks so eloquently of Koreans’ endless ability to either blame their problems on other people, or shine the light of disapproval on the Outsider, while ignoring their own failings. The mote in your brother’s eye, and all that crap. Find this halfwit Cedric and his hydrocephalic girlfriend Andrea and make them scrub the throat-oysters off subway platforms for a while, sure, but don’t turn a blind eye to the endless acts of incivility and filthmongering your own people do, every goddamn day, you sanctimonious, self-important bastards!
(Whew. That feels better.)
If you’ve been following the Korea-related rantings of the wonderchicken for any length of time at all, you know how I feel about the filth and pollution that a city dweller here in Korea must wallow through. I really wish I had that digital camera I want to buy, just so I could show you some of the refuse-handiwork around my neighbourhood, by way of comparison. Later, maybe.
Via Lia, these more-than-slightly-surreal photos of the so-called Arirang Festival in North Korea at the moment.
Isn’t it just amazing sometimes the stupid stuff people do? I mean, at least once a day I mutter to myself about things South Korean : “What the hell can they be thinking?”
But even the most oddball of behaviours here in the South (today’s example was the environmental Green Festival posters plastered pell-mell across every non-moving surface, vertical or horizontal, at the university, literally hundreds of them, printed on paper that will dollars-to-donuts not be recycled…) are peanuts compared to what would to all intents and purposes appear to be some sort of weird consensual hallucination (possibly triggered by the predilection (seemingly limited to Koreans and Ukrainian grandmothers) for mixing swaths of pastel pink and green wherever possible) north of the DMZ.
(My, I’m parenthetical today, aren’t I? Must be the vitamin B.)
Korea is not a nation known for it’s consumption of dairy, although people here are eating a lot more of it in recent years. These days, I only have to travel about 40 minutes on the subway to buy some actual cheddar cheese, imported from Australia.
There’s still a racially-based prejudice that Koreans have, expressed in the commonly-known, accepted-wisdom phrase (transcribed into roman characters for your delectation) used to describe the smell of euro-descended people : buttah nemseh. The ‘buttah’ part of this phrase means, as you might expect, ‘butter’. ‘Nemseh’ means ‘smells of’, or ‘stinks like’. The idea is that westerners stink of butter, and the assumption is that this is because we (the generalized monkey mass of ‘we’) eat so much dairy. Whether the difference in odor one experiences in a crowd of Koreans as opposed to westerners (although it must be noted that a diet heavy in kimchi creates its own set of quite pungent scents : early morning elevator rides can be trying) is due to diet, or the oft-repeated claim that there are enzymatic differences in the sweat of those of Asian descent, I have no idea, and am unqualified to guess.
This butter thing would apparently be the norm in Japan as well. Fujiko, a Japanese porn starlet, is quoted in this article at NYPress.com (of all places, and I have no idea why I remembered it, but the piece is well worth reading) in which Jonathan Ames is invited to be a porn director-for-a-day :
Fujiko and her colleagues, I would think, are perhaps uniquely qualified to evaluate the differences in scent between men, at least, of different nations. Of necessity, she obviously gets more up close and personal than, say, your average secretary or computer programmer might, and has a larger sample group from which to draw her comparisons.
Maybe there is something to the phrase, and the preconception. I have never really imagined myself smelling ‘buttery’, though. My wife claims that I am veritable chameleon of scent, which is perhaps mildly reassuring.
What is true, and may have something to do with the attitude towards dairy products here, is that milk in Korea stinks! No, seriously – every morning when I make coffee (which is the only time I use milk), I take a sniff of the milk carton, out of sheer habit, and I am struck once again (as I was just before I sat down to type this) how bad that stuff smells, more than in any of the other couple of dozen countries in which I’ve drunk it.
At the risk of sounding like a bad standup comic, what’s up with that?
The waeguk-in (foreigners) (other than the migrant workers, about whom I’ve written an essay elsewhere in the archives), the human flotsam that wash up on the shores of Korea are a motley lot, and they tend to fall into three or four broad, hairy, buttah-nemseh categories. (Tangentially, I’ve always wondered how flotsam is differentiated from jetsam…)
There are the young ‘uns have just finished university in Canada or the States, with a fresh and sparkly new degree in Interpretive Kinaesthetics or Theatre or Information Technology or some damn newfangled thing, and they can’t find a job to save their souls back home, wherever that may be. It doesn’t take them too long to discover that in Korea you can make pretty good bucks babysitting children or having a chat with university students, and they’ll take anybody. Anybody who managed to drink their way to a whateva cum laude, that is. A prospect that’s a damn sight better than sitting in your parent’s basement trying to roll joints out of old roaches and collecting pogey… getting paid to live abroad – damn, that sounds good! Over they come, in droves. Some last a month or two, or even six, before the psychotic boozer that is their ‘Academic Director’ drives them over the brink, and they bug out. Some make it to the end of their contract, but are emotionally scarred for life. In a weird parallel to hostage syndrome, some come to actually like the abuse, and sign up for another Tour of Duty.
A number of these become the long-termers, mostly men, mostly of a certain age (ahem), many of whom have had the great good fortune (in most cases) to fall in love with a Korean woman. They are the ones who’ve been here for years, or the ones that ricochet all over the damn place, but inevitably seem to boomerang back to Korea, just because once they reach a certain mellow, equitable, detached attitude about how f–ked-up everything tends to be, through sheer weariness if nothing else, well, it becomes clear that Korea can be a remarkable easy and occasionally pleasant place to live. There’s also a subset of these long-termers that I think of as ‘the predators’ – they are single and towards the younger end of the scale, and they are here for the women, who very frequently are very lovely.
There is also a large contingent who simply don’t, or can’t fit in anywhere else. Why these folks would decide that coming to Korea, of all places, where they are virtually certain to be ostracized by the vast majority of the population, overtly or otherwise, is a Great Idea™, after failing completely to make themselves part any tribe back in their homeland, is inexplicable to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that the multitudes of bottom-rung private schools will literally take anyone with a heartbeat and a North American accent. It’s an adventure going to a bar here and chatting with whoever ends up on the barstool beside you. A scary adventure, that sometimes ends in violence, as were are led to believe the best adventures do. There are some very odd foreigners floating around this country, and I’m a connoisseur of odd. Which is why I do most of my tippling at home, these days.
The reason I tell you about all of this is to set a bit of background to an anecdote about this certain new arrival I met about 4 years ago, whom I’ll call Chuckles. A Canadian, he showed up to teach at the school where I was Head English Teacher, and it fell to me to orient him (pun intended) a bit. After a week or two, I was pretty sure he’d be a washout – he just didn’t seem to have the slightest ability to build a rapport with anyone, never mind his students. A few months later, I left for Australia, and he was still there.
Well, he’s still here, apparently. Since my return to Korea, I’ve been regaled with a few amusing stories about him from a mutual aquaintance, but the latest one has got to be the topper.
It seems Chuckles recently applied for a teaching job in Japan, and was shortlisted, since he’s been teaching, if not well, at least steadily, for almost 4 years here. The school in Japan said that rather than flying over for an interview, he could send them a video tape.
I know, you can see this coming, can’t you?
It seems Chuckles made the sample lesson tape, but he neglected to erase the part after the lesson was done, encoded on which was a rather long segment of him in Laos, ‘chasing the dragon’.
Yes, as part of the interview process, he sent a video of himself bogarting a massive pipe full of opium, while someone off camera apparently urged him to ‘Be careful – that’s the first time you’ve smoked opium, man!’
I haven’t heard yet whether he got the job or not.
Although in my experience, Koreans often seem to be skilled beyond measure at cheapening and vulgarizing just about anything to which they lay their hands, owing perhaps to the mercantilism-at-any-cost modernization of recent decades, Sorak San National Park, and the countryside around it, were a pleasant revelation to me.
An astonishingly beautiful place, organized and modern. The air is clean, the water’s clean, and I was surprised and bemused to observe that, as far as I could tell, at least, the 
Koreans seem to be better stewards of their forest resources than my fellow Canadians. I saw nothing that could compare with the vast, brutal areas of clearcut in British Columbia. In a tiny little country, with 49 million people crammed into it, there’s more of what appears to be virgin forest in the 275 kilometres or so between there and the smoke-shrouded urban hell that is here than I had ever expected.
We spent some time at Naksan Sa, one of the Buddhist temples in the region. The temple buildings and gardens perch amid fragrant pines on a bluff beside the sea. It is a testament to the upheavals of Korean history that it has been rebuilt no less than eight times in the fourteen centuries since it was first constructed. 
The entire coast in the region is lined with a three-metre fence, topped with razor-wire, a legacy of the latest upheaval 50 years ago. Sokcho and Sorak National park are disconcertingly close to the North Korean border. Soldiers patrol the beaches, along the inside of the fence. North Korean spies are kept out, but the people who live along the coast are kept in. It was surreal to see a gun emplacement, draped with camouflage netting, hidden in the rocks beneath the hermitage at the temple.
Sorak San itself (‘san’ means ‘mountain’, and derives from the Chinese character 
) is as beautiful as any place I’ve ever seen, although even in the shoulder season, it’s mobbed by huge crowds. The day we spent there, bushwalking and generally wandering about, there were literally thousands of high school and middle school students, in enormous groups, repeatedly shouting “hello!” at me, which is always something I enjoy immensely, in much the same sense that I enjoy having my nipples sandpapered.
But it takes more than boisterous schoolkids to ruin my ki-buen. We spent the days in the mountains, and the evenings at the hot springs/waterpark/public bath near our condo, which was incredibly clean, modern, well-designed and well-built. A testament to what Korea could be like with a little more attention to detail, a little more pride in workmanship, a little less focus on the short term. A preview of what Korea will hopefully be, in a decade or two.
Our brief holiday was an unqualified success, and I look forward to going back and spending some more time there when this semester finishes.
We’re home. Korea’s a pretty goddamn nice place, after all.
It’s got to be the fifth circle of hell for those who appreciate the fine art and science of architecture, though. If I see one more mock-St. Peter’s onion dome or one more Castle-Auuuuuughh-esque turret on one more purple-painted f–k-hotel, I’m going to run screaming just over there near the couch, then run screaming back.
Not that you folks would actual hear my screams of aesthetic dismay, but I’d tell you about them later.
That’s what the web’s all about, right?
(Note to self : explain the f–k-hotel reference, and the fact that we did not in fact stay in any of those over the last couple of nights…)
In the Chosun Ilbo newspaper this morning : around a hundred North Korean refugees were rounded up by North Korean agents in China recently. “Rounded up” is the appropriate phrase to use, as not only were these people, amongst whom were children and grandparents, bound hand and foot with wire, but holes were punched through their septums and rings inserted, like cattle, to lead them back to the f–king fatherland.
Is this front page propaganda, or did it really happen?
Who knows any more? Recent experiments by the scum in power in America have shown pretty conclusively that propaganda doesn’t need to be subtle to be effective, just emotive. And the image of these poor, hungry people, strung together via iron rings passed through their noses, blood dripping down their upper lips as they are led back to the living hell that is North Korea, is certainly emotive.
But this comes a week before more visits between separated families are scheduled to happen, and not long after the South Korean envoy returned from an extended and fruitful visit to the North, so it seems unlikely that the report is sheer propagandizing, perhaps.
My vote is that it did happen, and the Chinese allowed it to happen. Aren’t people great? Don’t you just love them? Sweetness and light, beauty and peace, follow us all the days of our lives, don’t they?
Like f–k they do.
How weird is this new linked-up world we live in? (Answer : uh, pretty a lot, Mr Chicken!) This place is a nondescript little second-floor barbecued pork restaurant in Sanbon, way out in the ‘burbs of Seoul, the place I mentioned a couple of posts ago when I said we were having lunch and yadda yadda.
I just this minute remembered the URL on the window and how funny I thought ‘iporky.com’ was…
So we’re having lunch, and one of my Canadian co-workers, who has a tendency to talk more than his fair share of sh-t, is yammering on about how half of the women in Korean prisons are there for adultery. I’m about to call ‘bullsh-t’ when one of our Korean colleagues chimes in and verifies what he’s saying. The laws still regard adultery as a jailable offence, but the only people being prosecuted, for most part, are women.
Apparently it’s commonplace, when a wife in this country is discovered to be cuckolding a husband, for said husband to press charges, and for the wife to be prosecuted and sent to jail. This in a place where there is an omnipresent, enormous, but largely invisible sex industry, and where men are almost expected to take a mistress when they reach that magic socio-economic stratum where simple whores are no longer de riguer. Or at least not in front of the guys.
I just start getting a handle on this place, and then something comes along to make me realize how deeply I don’t get it.
Some more proof that Korea is changing. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Of course, I suspect that I wouldn’t have seen the ad for it on the subway this afternoon if more people actually knew what ‘vagina’ means in english.
I also quite like the fact that the first heading on the site’s top navigation bar is ‘Vagina’, with sub-entries ‘intro’, ‘synopsis’ and ‘original’. Sophomoric, I know, but hey, anything for a giggle.
[It will be amusing in a slightly depressing way to see the Googlehits I get after posting the words ‘vagina’ and ‘Korea’ in such close proximity.]