Author: Josh Philip Ross

It was three years ago today that Jenny and I were married. I suppose this is a reasonable occasion to note that my time with Jenny — which really began in the spring, summer or fall of 2001, depending on how you count — has been the happiest and most successful period of my life.

When Jenny and I first hooked up, our lives were in disarray. Jenny had been laid off from her dot-com job and would soon move back in with her parents in LA while she tried to work out some way to leave the country for a while. Meanwhile, I had been planning to move to Seattle with my previous girlfriend, and somehow it was obvious to neither of us that we needed to change this plan now that we’d broken up, she’d fallen in love with a new guy who happened to live in Seattle, and I’d fallen in love with our soon-to-be ex-roommate. So when Jenny left town, I had nebulous plans to start life over again in Seattle, she had plans to go teach English maybe in Latin America somewhere, and we sort of hoped we’d meet again in a couple of years.

And then one day it dawned on me that rather than moving to Seattle to help my ex-girlfriend set up a lovenest for herself and her new man, I could instead follow Jenny to whatever odd corner of the earth she was headed for.

It’s a cliché, but at that moment I felt a tremendous weight lifting, as if someone took away a vast burden I hadn’t realized I was carrying. Deciding to go away with Jenny was a big step, transforming our relationship from a tenuous what-if to a decidedly major commitment. But I knew Jenny would say yes when I asked if she wanted me along, and I knew it would work out. Going abroad with Jenny instead of moving to Seattle with my ex-girlfriend is the single cleverest idea I’ve ever had.

The weight that lifted that day has never returned. Life has had its ups and downs — indeed, life with shy, quiet li’l Jenny is quite the roller-coaster ride — but no matter what has happened, I’ve always been sure that at least one big part of my life is exactly right.

I love you, Jenny. Thank you for the best years of my life and for the promise of many more. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m just enormously pleased that it’s gonna keep happening. This marriage thing is one hell of a deal!

I finally found a decent-quality video of the complete Stephen Colbert appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, at which he savaged the president to his face before moving on to a brutal assault on the press, all delivered in his trademark faux-O’Reilly style. It’s beautiful in its way. Enjoy. (Via Slate.)

The BBC reports today on a Korean protester who has covered himself in 187,000 live bees to represent the 187,000 square meters of disputed oceanic rock known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese. “The honeybee dares to abandon its life when enemies are attempting to attack, to protect its own home,” explains Ahn Sang-Gyu, who is known for beekeeping stunts. “From now on, I hope these bees will contribute to protect our Dokdo.” This may be even weirder than simply cutting off your finger in protest, although it’s ultimately less drastic.

Visit Wkipedia to find out more than you ever wanted to know about the Liancourt Rocks (the most neutral name available for the disputed islets) and the rival claims to them. As to why people care enough to put themselves through serious personal harm over the issue, though, I just can’t work it out.

Our favorite pint-sized rapper from the UK, Lady Sovereign, has some new material up in the VIP section of her website. I highly recommend the videos for “Blah Blah,” “Hoodie” and “9 to 5,” not to mention the live audio of “Public Warning.” And to provide a little help in parsing her rapid-fire council housing patois, this SOV lyrics page is handy.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Korean Language in Culture and Society, a collection of essays on various aspects of the Korean language, from its elaborate system of status-based politesse to slang and proverbs.

A couple of early gems are the idiomatic phrases kkori-ch’ida (꼬리치다), literally “tail-wiggle,” meaning “to seduce,” and obŏ-hada (오버하다), literally “to overdo,” which means what it sounds like. My colleague Young-ae gave me an example of the latter: When her sister told her three-year-old daughter to take off his pants, he took off all his clothes. “Obŏ-haeyo (오버해요)!” she scolded — “You overdid it!”

But what I really love is this: when North Korea decided to purge the counterrevolutionary Chinese, Japanese and English loan-words from its language in favor of native Korean neologisms (or occasionally Russian loan-words), the term p’ama (파마), or “perm,” became unacceptable. Instead, what the Dear Leader has atop his head, now mercifully free of bourgeois taint, is pokkŭm mŏri (볶음 머리), which literally means “fried hair.”

North Korea: bringing dignity to the Korean people since 1945.

Will Ban Ki-moon be the next secretary-general of the United Nations?

The foreign minister of the Republic of Korea is running hard to be Kofi Annan’s replacement, and Korea Focus is calling him a favorite. Two early candidates, Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai and Sri Lankan peace negotiator Jayantha Dhanapala, have stumbled, leaving Ban as the most obvious Asian choice. And according to the informal rotation system, it’s Asia’s turn. America’s ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said early on that the rotation formula could be scrapped if no viable candidate emerged, but that’s quite different from saying it must be scrapped, and Korea Focus seems to think Bolton’s recent meeting with Minister Ban went well.

Still, the United Nations has tended to settle on dark-horse compromise candidates in the past, and chances are good that the next Secretary-General will be a name as familiar as Kofi Annan’s in 1996. Outside of the Korean press, the only source I can find that touts Minister Ban as the likely next SG is The American Spectator, which I generally think is wrong about everything.

When South Korea promotes itself as “the hub of Asia,” it’s an aspiration rather than a description. Hub cities — central locales within vast networks of trade — are by their nature multiethnic, multilingual and at least moderately tolerant: think of ancient Rome, imperial Vienna and London, New York and Hong Kong and Bangkok today. Seoul is so bereft of anyone other than non-Koreans that even in the heart of it’s business district, white faces were enough to make me turn around for a second look. (South Asians and Africans, also conspicuous, turned up primarily in the large markets and in Itaewon, a district popular with GIs, and we noticed a few Peruvians here and there.)

If proof is needed that Korea is not ready to face the reality of its hub fantasy, look at the way it treats those of its people who are of mixed race. In an article in Korea Focus, novelist Kim Jae-young details the ways in which mixed-race Koreans are excluded from society: sent to special schools, exempted from military service, discriminated against by employers and generally treated like non-citizens.

About the best notion Koreans seem able to come up with to deal with these issues is further segragation: separate schools and even villages have been proposed to shield mixed-race families from the pain of exclusion and discrimination. The problem, of course, is that the children of mixed-race couples will still grow up to face a hostile Korea that doesn’t want them, while ethnic Koreans will continue to be raised in mono-ethnic schools and communities, never confronting the challenges raised by the presence of minorities. The mixed-race Koreans will remain strangers to their brethren, and the cycle of discrimination will continue.

Today, more than 10 percent of marriages in Korea are mixed-race, while Koreans in America and elsewhere outside of the Peninsula are presumably intermarrying at least as often. In a nation of just 49 million people, there are 200,000 mixed marriages already. It is thus inevitable that over the next couple of decades, Koreans will be forced to confront much more seriously the issue of mixed-race children. Segregation, as Americans know, cannot be sustained for a minority population approaching 10 percent of the population. Korea cannot create a separate but equal state within a state for half-bloods. This approach failed American blacks miserably. Similar efforts are failing for Muslim minorities in Europe, though they are rooted in liberal thinking and free of the taint of historical slavery. Separate but equal isn’t.

South Korea needs an immediate, massive effort to reshape public opinion. Multicultural education is needed at every level, from kindergarden through university and beyond. Public outreach campaigns should blanket the country. Only a complete reversal of current racial attitudes and a radical rethinking of what it means to be Korean can save Korea from the nightmare of a permanent underclass, living in impoverished ghettos, disaffected and angry, and with nothing to lose.

Unless Korea wants its own banlieu riots in 20 years, it had better get its act together, and fast. Sadly, I doubt that it will.

Funky Dholi by Ajay

Tu Meri Jaan Hai by Kailash Kher

Tong Yi Ge Shi Jie (Same World) by 5566

Straight Out of Canton by The Notorious MSG

I watch the bad, bad music videos so you don’t have to: this week, a little ham and cheese culled from MTV Desi and MTV Chi, in the form of music videos from their top-ten voting pages.

We start with a bangin’ bit of bhangra from rising UK star Ajay, whose “Funky Dholi” blends the huge pounding racket of Punjabi music with a smoother UK club beat.

Next up is “Tu Meri Jaan Hai,” a sweet love song (as far as I can tell) whose sound derives from the ghazal tradition. The video is shot in and around Fahtepur Sikri, the lavish Mughal capital built by Emperor Akbar and then abandoned for lack of water.

Turning to China, we’ve got the Taiwanese boy band 5566, with a video that appears to be at once a kung-fu movie, a Beijing Olympics ad and the most overproduced promo ever created by the Taiwan tourism council.

And finally, there’s The Notorious MSG, essentially a Chinese-American Sambo act out of New York’s Chinatown. Claiming to be three Chinese restaurant workers, the group is an obvious parody of African-American gangsta rap, and they appear to have faked the murder of former member Funky Buddha, a.k.a. Benson Lam, and even suckered local news station NY1 with the story. (Here’s a Gothamist interview that takes a pretty tongue-in-cheek approach to the issue.) So they’re making fun of both Chinese immigrants and hip-hop, while at the same time making the point that Chinese restaurant work can be hard and even dangerous (in the interview, they mention five specific murders of Chinese delivery guys since 1998 just in the New York area).

Is it racist? I think you’d have to say it is, though how problematically so, I’m just not sure. Is it funny? Yeah. Take a look, see what you think.

Good news for Nepal: the Maoist rebels have declared a three-month truce and lifted the blockade of the capital. The politicians now have to try to get control of the police and army, while the Maoists are demanding elections for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. But at least there’s a bit of breathing space for the beleaguered country.

Jenny and I moved to Brooklyn because we had friends there, but what really clinched Carroll Gardens for us was the asiago on the cheese plate from Paninoteca — not to mention their panino with hardwood smoked bacon, tomato, red onion mayonnaise and arugula.

I have been saying for years that northwest Brooklyn has the best restaurants in the world, and now New York Magazine agrees with me. Or at least they agree that Brooklyn has developed a whole cultural milieu in the last few years, which they profile in their Brooklyn Style issue, and food plays a big part.

Beyond the classic red-sauce Italian, pizza and delis, and beyond the endless variety of low-cost immigrant eats, Brooklyn has developed a new high style, based on a couple of Manhattan haute cuisine restaurants and ultimately rooted in Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse revolution. New York calls it the New Brooklyn Cuisine, or NBC for short, and lists their top 15 favorite purveyors of the stuff.

The fine Frankies 457 Spuntino, just up the street from us, takes second place. We’ve eaten there a couple of times, but it can be hard to get a table on weekends. At number 5 is The Grocery, where Jenny and I had the tasting menu and agree that it was one of the finest dining experiences of our lives. Convivium Osteria, in Park Slope, takes eighth place for its rustic Italian fare; it’s where I first tried rabbit. And in 12th place is Chestnut, another Smith Street establishment where the food is always fresh and creative.

As for the others, I haven’t tried them. Yet. And the list leaves out plenty of other contenders, like the sophisticated Crave. But it makes its point: these days, Brooklyn is a delicious and even inspiring place to eat.

Update: Brooklyn food is about to get better. According to Curbed, the owners of Fairway say the Red Hook store is all set to open within a week to ten days after city inspectors approve the place. So it’s coming soon! Yay!