Emptybottle.org

“Culture shock, then, is thought to be a form of anxiety that results from the loss of commonly perceived and understood signs and symbols of social intercourse. The individual undergoing culture shock reflects his anxiety and nervousness with cultural differences through any number of defense mechanisms : repression, regression, isolation and rejection. These defensive attitudes speak, in behavioural terms, of a basic underlying insecurity which may encompass loneliness, anger, frustration and self-questioning of competence. With the familiar props, cues, and clues of cultural understanding removed, the individual becomes disoriented, afraid of, and alienated from the things he knows and understands.”
-Peter Adler
I recognize that I’ve been overwhelmingly negative-sounding in the last while when I speak of Korea, and I know why. In time, with a few more non-smoggy days, I’ll get better.

It’s interesting how the Korean laser-like focus on appearances, frequently at the cost of much interest in substance, manifests itself in some areas of life and not others. People are generally fastidious about their personal appearance. The face they present to the world must be as affluent as possible. Women are still almost universally obsessed with potions and pomades to regain youthfulness, despite the enviably graceful way that they tend to age. (Although it must be noted that chain-smoking, soju-swilling men tend to age fairly badly). The surface appearances of appropriated western or Japanese cultural items are mimicked rigorously, but the meaning behind it is almost entirely lost, or deliberately subverted. A stage performance of heavy, industrial Nine-Inch-Nails-like music by a pvc-clad singer is backed up by a troupe of dancers.
But this careful attention to surface appearances diverges radically when it comes to your surroundings here. Piles of garbage are everywhere, as are puddles of vomit, even in residential areas, that attest to the excesses of the night before. Construction is slipshod, somehow temporary in appearance. Windows, even on shops that have opned that very day (such as the 3rd generation wireless mobile shop at the subway station where I live, which opened last night) are streaked and dirty, and left that way. Litter abounds, and people casually throw more atop it. Men hork and spit great nasty oysters of mucous on the sidewalks, everywhere, which makes it not only traditional, but downright mandatory to take your shoes off when entering someone’s house. Industrial filth and noise back onto residential beehive towers at random. Streets are unnamed, and addresses as we are accustomed to in the west simply do not exist. Traffic rules tend to be a matter of ‘whatever feels right’ rather than any enforceable set of regulations.
So why is this? Why is there this enormous gap between the attention paid to detail and appearance at one end of the spectrum, and what would seem to be a complete lack of it at the other? And why is it so obviously different than the (perhaps cliched) approach of the Japanese, who ostensibly have a greater focus on harmony and order in their surroundings?
I don’t f–king know.

Posted this to the SA forums, in response to a question about how the Germans and Japanese portray WWII in their history books. Mirror just for the hell of it. Me = drunx0red.

Interesting thoughts on Japanese ‘inner wildness’. To an extent, a similar kind of thing applies here in Korea, but there is a greater tendency to act out here, and emotional displays and public sentimentality are de rigeur. Value is placed on honesty of feeling, and directness of expression of that feeling, but only between peers. The Confucian vertical striation of society, built into the language and the socialization as it is, means that most of the time in people’s lives outside their homes, they must behave in the manner expected.
Ahh f–k it. Lecture mode.
Koreans love to drink – they are called by some the ‘Irish of Asia’. Part of the reason for that is that emotional connections are vitally important here, but often, thanks to the rigours of behavioural expectation, those connections can only happen with the lubrication of alcohol.
That’s cool with me.

North [Korea]’s totalitarian regime has given the title of hero to a woman who gave birth to eight children, a woman who donated 500 pigs to military units over 20 years and soldiers who supposedly jumped into a fire to save a portrait of the nation’s late founder, Kim Il Sung….Last week, the country named a 15-ton pneumatic hammer as a national hero for “producing many parts necessary for railway transportation and the industrialization of the country,” according to state-run media.
There’s f–ked-up, and then there’s just silly.

Just to prove that I’m not always a snarky bastard when it comes to stuff Korean, here’s some interesting art-flash pieces by Chang Young-Hae.

Minor, mildly amusing fragments :
At Carrefour today (the French Costco, near as I can tell. God knows why they’re here in K-land), noticed some condoms (from Japan, as all condoms sold here are) whose brand name was ‘Long Time’. Given the whole ‘Love you longtime, GI’ Asian whore meme that seems to be everywhere, perhaps not the wisest choice.
Two related notes – it’s enormously gratifying (pun intended) to find that ALL Japanese condoms (that I’ve seen anyway) are teeny-tiny and not really big enough to fit on even my stolidly average-length knob.
Carrefour in Korean characters is pronounced Cah Ruh Poo. I would find that funny.

Hanguk-mahl (the Korean language) isn’t as hard as Japanese, I don’t think, but it’s certainly no picnic.

On the subway : Ad, apparently for lipstick, with the large logo at the bottom, underneath the pursed-mouthed hottie – Brown Love Letter. Kinda-tarot card in the background with a sad woman holding what looks like a giant turd. A tagline in the upper right corner exhorts : Be Pretty, Girls!
No further comment.

“The wisdom of the Korean people can be seen in salted shrimp” – Geo Korea, on Arirang Network.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
*grins, drinks, burps, eats a salted shrimp*

A little anecdote that illustrates, I hope, how differently some things we take for granted are approached here. I was standing at the University Shuttle Bus stop a couple of mornings ago, which is in front of the local equivalent of a 7-11.
Piled on the edge of the curb was a mountain of garbage. This presumably was the detritus for a number of shops and f–k-hotels and restaurants and such in the immediate vicinity over the last day or two. Garbage collection here is not funded by taxes or anything of the kind – it’s user-paid. In order to have your garbage collected, you have to buy extremely expensive garbage bags which you then stuff to their absolute limit, and put on the street for some poor bastards to pick up. There are no dumpsters.
So, I was standing there, and the garbage truck pulled up. Not unlike what one might see in Canada or America or Australia, with the requisite couple of guys with wiry, ropy-veined forearms hanging off the back.Where it diverged from the expected is that they didn’t just hurl the bags into the back, they sorted it! They made sure all the cans went into can bags, and *shudder* organic stuff into the organic bags, and so on. After it had all been sorted, the driver came over with a large whisk broom, swept the leftover detritus into the gutter, and off they went, presumably to the next reeking pile.
Labor is very very cheap here. And there’s not a lot of room for landfills chockablock with random crap. It makes sense, but it’s just….that….different enough to make you think twice.

Watching the news in Korean this evening, and managed to decipher a piece on the proliferation of middle-school and high-school girls selling their bodies on the streets lately. Another of the ‘bad things’ from Japan that they’ve picked up here. Next it’ll be the used panties from the vending machines. Now if there was ever a victimless crime, buying used schoolgirl panties would hafta be it.
In other news, I signed my contract today, and one of the clauses stated that I must not perform any unlawful, unethical or immortal acts during my tenure at the University, within or outside the campus. And here I was planning to live forever : now I’ve signed a contract explicitly forbidding me to do so. Craptastic.

(from offline period – August 28 2001)
William Gibson, I think, talks about japan as a palimpsest – eruptions of the ancient, or the merely old, through the veneer of the new. He mentions details like the anti-radiation voodoo charms dangling from everyone’s mobile phone antennas, and the usual cast of ‘amusing from an outsider’s perspective’ things like Pocari sweat. Now, I’m not one to dis’ Mr Gibson – he is after all, the man – but I wonder how he’d react here in Korea.
There are so many of the things that The Reverend Mr Gibson picks up in Japan, but turned up to 11, and twisted sideways while viewed through very thick beer goggles. Pure chaos, at least from a waeguk’s perspective…I’d forgotten the purely fractal nature of disorder here, self-resembling from the tiny to the immense, from the haphazard piles of goods in the corner shop, to the seemingly random layout of buldings and streets, to the wild tangle of the subway system and so on up (and down). It’s daunting, by christ.
Having spent the day cleaning the thick layer of black air-pollution dust from everything in the new apart’, I have Tom Waits playing and and feeling contemplative (and exhausted). Somehow niggling at my brain is this apartment as a metaphor for the Korean Way of Doing Things. It’s a wonder of good design, this place. Looking around a couple of days ago (we’ve been crashing here waiting for the bureacracy at the Uni to confirm that yes, we could actually live here), every time I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be useful if…’ there the useful thing would be. The descending-from-the-ceiling clothes drying rack on the balcony, and the tap out there with the spraygun attached for hosing away the Black Dust and watering your plants. The incredibly ample storage space incorporated into the wall cabinets in the kitchen. And so on. Cleverness and efficient use of space at every turn.
But so badly put together as to be laughable. I was told that Bill, who lives in the next building, has had a number of problems that required maintenance, and the general consensus was that the building was badly built. You can see it everywhere – misaligned fixtures, streaks of paint and caulking everywhere, wows and cracks in the walls and ceiling, and more.
So – great design, but truly abysmal construction. Why should this be so? sh-t, I dunno…I have a whole bunch of theories, any one of which might be partly true. Rampant alcoholism amongst contruction workers? The incredibly powerful urge amongst pretty much every Korean I’ve every met to go for the cheap solution before the right one? The headlong rush into the future that says ‘build it, forget it, go on the next one’? There’s a long history of things falling down and apart here (mentioned in one of the first posts here, a cut and paste from circa ’97 when I was living in Pusan) due to shoddy, cheap materials…. Some kind of subconscious ‘f–k it’ attitude in expectation of the next war coming along and everything getting knocked to hell anyway?
I dunno.
But it’s so odd that 100 metres from our brand new, if badly built, still groovy apartment beehive, the main street to the station is, by my standards, straight out of Slumland. Filthy, chaotic, reeking and third-worldy. I’m still trying to get my head around it, and this is all just brain dump, so should be taken as just that. I’ve still got a lot of love for Korea, and I’m glad we’re here.
When it comes down to it, I have said ‘those goddamn (-blank-)’ about so many nationalities now, including Canadians, that it’s clear to me at least that I’m not a nationalist or a racist – I’m pure misanthrope, with enough scorn to go around for all of humanity. At the same time, love love love. It’s weird being me.
Anyway, I’ve got an unopened bottle of duty-free bourbon waiting patiently for me, so I’m gonna go get myself loose, jjjjjj-ack!

We’ve landed safely, and I’m once again at the center of the maelstrom. More updates will come, at length, when I have the opportunity – soonish.

Going to a place (Korea) where I feel so conspicuously out of place somehow feels like going home. Buried in that fact is probably the explanation not only behind my years of wandering, but also a host of other Boscovian behavioural idiosyncracies. I’m too f–king tired to pursue the thought, though, so I’ll just drop it and let it lay where it falls.
In other news that isn’t, Metafilter is back from hiatus after Matt’s trip to Oz. Offered to buy him a drink when he was here, but no scheduling joy, sadly. Either that, or the fact that he only had an idea of who I was by my usually three-quarters-pissed comments at MeFi led him to believe that I might kill him and eat his liver (with fava beans and a dinner-table bottle of Hahn Premium)…

Dateline Sydney : A call to Korea this morning by SeokKyung has allayed my fears of having to scramble for gainful employment. The English Department at {deleted} University has assured us that the visa issues have been ironed out and the paperwork will be on its way to us tomorrow. The job is mine, apparently, which takes a huge weight of stress of my shoulders. It’s the 16th today, and our tickets are for the 23rd, and as of yesterday I still didn’t know if I had a job!
This is one of those things that happens a lot when you’re doing business in Korea, and not, as people who’ve had difficulty dealing with Koreans tend to claim, because Koreans are ‘intrinsically disorganized’ or anything of the kind. It’s something that took me a long while to understand, and still find hard to trust, surrounded here in Sydney as I have been for a few years by lying, prevaricating pricks and prickettes – when a Korean tells you something in good faith, their word is their bond. A verbal agreement can hold more weight than, or even entirely supercede, a written one. When I was told weeks ago, in what seemed like an offhand way, that I had the job, I should have just trusted in that, rather than spinning out into stressmonkeyland. I’ve been re-trained by my experiences over the last few years at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet* to never fully trust what is said to me. I look forward to shedding that layer of skin as quickly as possible.
* I reckon I’ll refer to my Australian employer as OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet. In this and any rants about the place in the future, any resemblance to companies living or dead is purely a coincidence.