Separated At Birth?
South Korea’s Flag
Not South Korea’s Flag
South Korea’s Flag
Not South Korea’s Flag
South Korea’s Flag
Not South Korea’s Flag
Not For Dinner
A quarter-page ad on page 3 of today’s Korea Herald. Because it’s too hard to read in my scan, I note that the return address for the coupon is in Kent, England.
It’s time once again to pull out my by-now-standard response :
“How about a nice steaming cup of shut the f–k up?”
Ah, that felt good.
I'm writing Japanese, I think I'm writing Japanese, I really think so!
Many thanks to Jonathon for a fascinating essay on writing and reading in Japanese. In tribute, though my corresponding knowledge of the Korean language is dwarfed by his knowledge of Japanese, I hope to offer a mini-essay on the simple elegance of the Korean alphabet. Soon.
I find it revealing (although perhaps because it seems so obvious, it’s also facile and misleading) to contrast the Byzantine complexities of written Japanese with the simplicity and directness of Korean, and muse on the corresponding characters of the peoples.
More on this later.
Japanese Women Walking
Via Visible Darkness, an interesting mental journey, begun, as it were, with a single step, as all journeys are. Worth your time, whether or not you’ve any abiding interest in gender equality issues, or Japanese women, or their shoes.
“Can one assume that the mostly domestic position of Japanese women in their society influences the way they walk? Maybe, since the political unconscious is precisely that, unconscious, when Japanese women walk with their feet pointing to the inside – to uchi – they are marking with their bodies the space of the traditional Japan –the time when the men went out and the women stayed in. Of course, there is no proof that such time ever existed. Most likely, someone can object, what I am trying to do here is orientalize the Japanese, and find in the feet of the women, in the way they walk, a kind of last bastion of old Japan, a sign of the exotic. And yet, it is possible to suspect that, since the traditional Japan – whether it ever existed, or has just been imagined–is becoming more and more distant from the actual conditions of daily life of the majority of the people, the position of women’s feet may also be marking a renewed choice for pleasures located before, beneath, or beyond the regulations of the cutthroat corporate world occupied by men.” [more…]
Buddy, can ya spare 500 Won?
I realized this evening, for no readily apparent reason, that I was quite accustomed to being asked for money, with wildly varying degrees of aggression and/or supplication, anywhere from 3 to 10 times a day, on my short walk from our apartment in Surrey Hills to Town Hall House, the headquarters of OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet, when I lived in Sydney.
I have not once been approached here in Korea. Not once in 8 months.
Why do you reckon that is?
Magic. Painful magic, but magic.
When I got home from the university this afternoon, I could barely walk. The chronic pain that I’ve been experiencing in my feet (achilles tendonitis, for about 10 years, on and off, and I suspect a touch of arthritis, which runs in the family) flared up today, and I was hobbling, grimacing, cursing under my breath, and figuratively shaking a fist at the sky and hurling imprecations at any deity that might be looking at the moment.
I hadn’t been to the acupuncturist in about 5 days – my longest stretch in a month.
I just wanted to sit on the sofa and watch the National Geographic channel, but my ladylove cajoled me out the door, and off I staggered, my copy of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in hand.
It’s about two hours later now, and I feel so much better, it is astonishing. Night and day. I mean, it still hurts, but it’s gone from a 5-alarm fire to a hibachi. Night and freaking day.
This sh-t really works.
Reuters : Garbage trucks
Reuters :
Garbage trucks in the south Taiwan city of Tainan will soon broadcast English lessons from loudspeakers to educate citizens as they haul away the rubbish.
“Even grandmothers and grandfathers will be able to speak the most basic conversational English after listening for a few dozen times,” the United Daily News newspaper quoted Tainan mayor Hsu Tain-tsair as saying.
“Even grandmothers and grandfathers will be able to speak the most basic conversational English after listening for a few dozen times,” the United Daily News newspaper quoted Tainan mayor Hsu Tain-tsair as saying.
If only they’d start something like this here. Not only would it make my job easier, but all the piles of refuse on the street would become a wistful memory. Of course first they’d actually have to buy some garbage trucks….
Worst Job In Korea
This guy has got to have one of the worst jobs in Korea, I thought to myself.
I woke up this morning full of the vigour and optimism of youth. Happens to me once in a while, unexpectedly. The light of morning seems energizing, rather than withering. I look forward to the day ahead, and the morning cup is a sacrament rather than just a stimulant.
This was the mood in which I left the house. Even the chronic pain in my achilles tendons was barely noticeable, thanks perhaps to my recent acupuncture treatments. I was downright jaunty, and those who know me know that ‘jaunty’ isn’t an adjective that often pops up in descriptions of me. Although the sun was filtering through brownish clouds of toxic haze, there was at least some sun, and it was already fairly high in the sky, and warming me pleasantly on my way to the subway station. Zip-a-dee doo-dah, motherf–ker.
The usual reeking pile of garbage in front of the next apartment building — whose parking lot I normally cut through as a minor shortcut — did little to diminish my jaunty outlook. There was a slight breeze, and I neatly managed to avoid the worst of the stink. I accidentally stepped in a little of it, but it wasn’t terribly viscous, and didn’t adhere to my shoe.
Naturally, the dawn chorus was in full throat, the old sniff-backhaul-and-hork orchestra all around me, tuning up for another day of mucous mining. This annoyed me mildly, as it always does, but I skipped lightly through the multitudes of already-deposited oysters, treating it as a game. Although the scent of the flowering trees that had somehow struggled up through the broken pavement every few blocks was masked by the cloud of diesel fumes from the buses and dump trucks, the colour and shape of them was undeniably appealing.
Outside the station, I was nearly run down by a utility vehicle. It was being driven by a fellow who had perhaps overindulged in the soju last night, judging by the rosiness of his cheeks and eyes as he swivelled to stare at me, bug-eyed and expressionless. I forgave him, as I too have survived many a hangover, even if I may not often have operated motor vehicles under their influence, or nearly run down briefcase-toting professors in the street as a result. My mood was still quite bouyant at this point, inexplicably, perhaps.
As I sat on one of the broken plastic benches on the train platform, trying in vain to see the nearest mountain through the photochemical haze, an old man in coveralls shuffled up, and began pulling the refuse from the garbage can beside me. I actually was quite pleased about this, as more often than not, the very few garbage cans one actually sees for public use are overflowing, and with the warm weather approaching, this means more Stench Zones to avoid on the urban hazard course. Then, with a shudder, I remembered that one of the primary uses for those garbage cans was as throat-oyster receptacles for the smallish percentage of men in my neighbourhood who have apparently been well-brought up, and rather than deposit their little glistening bundles of goo on the train platform, instead wander over and let them dangle and drop into the cans. There are no bags in these cans. This guy’s job was to bend over, reach in, and pull out the slime-coated trash within.
Poor bastard.
The air went out of my balloon. And it wasn’t even 8:00 am yet.
Comments? (old offsite) comments.
''Better to die"
”Better to die than to live like this,” Jang Gil Su, now 17, writes of a public firing-squad execution he saw in North Korea. By adulthood, many North Koreans have witnessed one; sometimes the charge is as minor as stealing food.
Fresh fruit is a rarity to most North Koreans; electric fences surround some orchards. At 15, Jang saw a couple be electrocuted while trying to steal some grapes. ”We never get a chance to taste an apple or grapes,” Jang explains.
Captions from a slideshow of drawings made by a young North Korean refugee, whose family was given safe haven in South Korea last summer after escaping from the north and taking refuge in U.N. offices in Beijing. Here. [Thanks again, Lia!]
Red Sky All Day
“Experts warned that the dust storms carry harmful chemicals, such as sulfate, as well as compounds containing cadmium, aluminum, lead, nickel, copper and arsenic. To protect themselves from the sandy winds, people are advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed, especially the elderly and children. While outdoors, they should carry umbrellas, and after returning home, they must wash themselves and gargle, because the particles in the wind could trigger irritations in the eyes, skin and respiratory organs.”
Seoul is enshrouded, enfolded, entombed, in a choking cloud of dust from the growing deserts of Northern China, the Hoang-sa, the Yellow Sand. This, to put it bluntly, sucks major ass. As if the clouds of reeking industrial effluent weren’t enough, now we’re left squinting through veils of yellowish dust to boot. Elementary and middle schools are closed, parents are being warned to keep their children in the house, old people are being advised not to breathe for a few days. My nose, as I sit here, is streaming, as it has been all day, my eyes red, throat afire. If the swirling clouds weren’t so irritating to my mucous membranes, I might enjoy them, in the same shivery, mock-fearful way that I enjoyed fog banks as a child, staring into them, alive to the potential mystery and the sheer strange wonder of it all.
But I’m old, and cranky, and I just want it to go away. Now. But at least my students were amused when I stopped at 15 minute intervals in most of my classes today, shook a mock-tragic, operatic Shatnerian fist at the sky, and roundly cursed China for even existing.
They just said on MBC news that’s it’s going to be worse tomorrow. Thrillsville, daddy-o.
THIS IS THE FUTURE
Ah Korea…
Ah Korea. Even though the constant parade of Really Weird sh-t™ continues apace, I find that I’m so inured to it that any response rarely reaches the level in my mind of being consciously noticed. My mental DJ, enjoying his perpetual party up there in the locked-off booth at the top of my skull, is usually busy playing a Mojo Nixon song, or some half-remembered one hit wonder from the 80’s, drowning out the hacksaw sniff-backhaul-and-hork of the Throat Oyster Launchers, like some nauseating avian mating cry call-and-response, that surrounds me as I walk the dirty streets to the University and back.
I really need an mp3 player.
One thing that did stick with me yesterday was a new advertising campaign on the subway. Korea, you see, is owned, lock-stock-and-two-horking-barrels, by the chaebols (similar in some ways to the Japanese keiretsu). Samsung, LG, Daewoo, Hyundai and perhaps a score of others own everything. I live in an LG apartment building. Our TV is a Samsung. LG makes the blank CD’s on my desk, here, and the soap that my wife is currently using in the shower, as well as the grocery store where we buy our food. Subsidiaries are responsible for the production and distribution of that food. Daewoo made the elevators in my building, and the steel comes from Hyundai steelworks. The huge new apartment beehive going up next door is a Daewoo buidling, and is being built by Daewoo Construction, with Hyundai machinery, mostly. All the cars and buses on the streets are Korean-made, of course, by one of the chaebol. Electronics are sold in LG shops, or Samsung shops, depending on who made them. Pretty much everything you touch or see during your day was either grown, processed, created, built, shipped, imported, sold or in some other way touched by one or more of the chaebol. Each chaebol also has an array of banking interests, and a staggering array of credit cards on offer to the public. When I say that they own this country, I actually mean that literally. It could be forgiven to think that they own the people, as well, but this might be arguable. There are pockets of dissent.
So, me, on the subway. A shiny new plastic proto-banner-ad above my head is touting the Samsung Christian Card. Big black letters emblazoned across a golden Visa card, bigger even than the Samsung logo, saying “CHRISTIAN“. In the soft-focus panorama, the card lies beside a wooden crucifix, atop an open Bible. The tableau is somehow as erotically charged as the close-up food-porn fried chicken ad beside it.
Now, even though I do groove on their funky metaphors of death and rebirth and all that, I’m not especially Xian. Still, that ad struck me as deeply f–ked up. Like hardcore porn performed by people in full clown make-up, complete with big red noses and fright wigs. Like the voice of Henry Kissinger coming out of my wife’s mouth : “Richart, Richart, you’re drahnk agayn.” Like a Friday evening without any delicious beverages at all. Just plain wrong.
Somehow brings to mind one of my responses back in University to the ‘Jesus saves!’ grafitti that was everywhere around Vancouver at the time : ‘Buddha spends!’
I really need an mp3 player.
One thing that did stick with me yesterday was a new advertising campaign on the subway. Korea, you see, is owned, lock-stock-and-two-horking-barrels, by the chaebols (similar in some ways to the Japanese keiretsu). Samsung, LG, Daewoo, Hyundai and perhaps a score of others own everything. I live in an LG apartment building. Our TV is a Samsung. LG makes the blank CD’s on my desk, here, and the soap that my wife is currently using in the shower, as well as the grocery store where we buy our food. Subsidiaries are responsible for the production and distribution of that food. Daewoo made the elevators in my building, and the steel comes from Hyundai steelworks. The huge new apartment beehive going up next door is a Daewoo buidling, and is being built by Daewoo Construction, with Hyundai machinery, mostly. All the cars and buses on the streets are Korean-made, of course, by one of the chaebol. Electronics are sold in LG shops, or Samsung shops, depending on who made them. Pretty much everything you touch or see during your day was either grown, processed, created, built, shipped, imported, sold or in some other way touched by one or more of the chaebol. Each chaebol also has an array of banking interests, and a staggering array of credit cards on offer to the public. When I say that they own this country, I actually mean that literally. It could be forgiven to think that they own the people, as well, but this might be arguable. There are pockets of dissent.
So, me, on the subway. A shiny new plastic proto-banner-ad above my head is touting the Samsung Christian Card. Big black letters emblazoned across a golden Visa card, bigger even than the Samsung logo, saying “CHRISTIAN“. In the soft-focus panorama, the card lies beside a wooden crucifix, atop an open Bible. The tableau is somehow as erotically charged as the close-up food-porn fried chicken ad beside it.
Now, even though I do groove on their funky metaphors of death and rebirth and all that, I’m not especially Xian. Still, that ad struck me as deeply f–ked up. Like hardcore porn performed by people in full clown make-up, complete with big red noses and fright wigs. Like the voice of Henry Kissinger coming out of my wife’s mouth : “Richart, Richart, you’re drahnk agayn.” Like a Friday evening without any delicious beverages at all. Just plain wrong.
Somehow brings to mind one of my responses back in University to the ‘Jesus saves!’ grafitti that was everywhere around Vancouver at the time : ‘Buddha spends!’
A conversation over dinner
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.
Hookers!
Having a look at the referrers log, I found that someone had Googled here scant minutes earlier on the faery wings of the search string ‘where+are+the+brothels+in+pusan‘. I find this amusing as hell. The answer, my horny, pathetic friend, is
a) near Camp Hialeah (the US Army loves its hookers and drugs),
b) ‘Texas Street’, a nasty little area with equally nasty Russian ladies catering to the appetites of the Russian sailors, and
c) a place called ‘Green Street’,
the latter two of which are odd in a city without street names, but any taxi driver will know that of which you speak.
I’ve never been, myself, but I make it a point to know these kinds of things.
You’re welcome.
It’s all part of the service here at the Empty Bottle… comments.
What I Have Gleaned
What I Have Gleaned From My First Two Days Back In Front of A Class
‘Cognitive dissonance’ presumes the existence of cognition.
Spring semester starts this morning,
Spring semester starts this morning, so it’s back into TeachMode™.
We apologize for the last couple of days of sophomoric humour. Those responsible have been sacked.
–The Management.
At the local grocery store
At the local grocery store today :
Lady Sense More
Vaginal Wipe Wet Towels
I think the big selling point for these things, though, is in the pretty blue Konglish at the bottom of the box :
Attractive Acacia Smelling
Note : This is not some sort of tangential whacked-out wonderchicken response to the recent genesis of the blogsisters, honest. I just thought it was silly, in a typically Korean way. Not unlike the breast-vibrator thing I talked about a while ago.
Migrant Workers
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 youâll 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 âbright-eyed chimp of a man.â In this strictly Confucian society, there is no real tradition of respect for the factory worker, the âheroic proletariatâ. 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 âundocumented workersâ 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 âsneaker capital of the worldâ, 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 itâs 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, itâs 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 âguarantee moneyâ, 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 âguarantee moneyâ 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 âwesternâ 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.
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 youâll 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 âbright-eyed chimp of a man.â In this strictly Confucian society, there is no real tradition of respect for the factory worker, the âheroic proletariatâ. 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 âundocumented workersâ 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 âsneaker capital of the worldâ, 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 itâs 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, itâs 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 âguarantee moneyâ, 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 âguarantee moneyâ 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 âwesternâ 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.
Folk Villages
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?
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?
Lunar New Year's
Suh-lal – Lunar New Year’s has rolled around again, and as always, it signals the largest exodus of Koreans of the year. It’s a tradition to return at this time of the year to your hometown, both to visit and pay respects to family and pay homage to your ancestors, echoing old animist practices. The government estimates that 33.4 million South Koreans will be on the move this weekend – this is out of a total population of 44 million!
Happy New Year! comments.
Anti-American
(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.