Category: East Asia

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[in space, no one can hear you stink]

When Korea’s first astronaut, Ko San, is launched into space by the Russians, he will have his kimchi with him. According to the New York Times:

Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.

The latter may have been the greater challenge, and I wonder whether it will be adopted by Korean expats.

And then there’s this:

Ordinary kimchi is teeming with microbes, like lactic acid bacteria, which help fermentation. On Earth they are harmless, but scientists feared they could turn dangerous in space if cosmic rays and other radiation cause them to mutate.

Mutant kimchi! The South Korean government was actually worried about mutant kimchi! For some reason this fills me with glee.

Update: BoingBoing noticed it too.

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[reconciliation in korea]

It’s a long time since their civil war, but Koreans still have a hard time talking about it. Indeed, I have often felt that the vehemence of Koreans’ resentment of Japan is a kind of displacement of their deep shame, guilt and anger over what they did to each other — to themselves — during the dreadful period of warfare that tore their country apart.

Yesterday the New York Times ran a fascinating story on reconciliation efforts in the Southern Korean village of Kurim, noting that even as recently as 2006, people rarely spoke of wartime killings.

Sooner or later, Korea will have to look squarely at their own past, and Koreans are good at doing what needs to be done. It will not be an easy process, but it’s good to see it beginning, and beginning at the grass-roots level rather than as a top-down government project.

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[crossing the border]

It has been a curious fact of my life that leaving a full-time job has generally meant leaving the country. My first real job out of college was a proofreading gig with a graphic design firm, the whole point of which was to save up money for my four-month trip to India and Nepal. My next permanent job was with DoubleClick, which I left in 2001 to go to Korea. From there, once my year of teaching was up, I was only too glad to hop on a plane and head for Kathmandu.

One could even argue that I crossed a national boundary to take my current job, as speech writer for the South Korean Mission to the UN, which I will be leaving at the end of work today. I work on Korean territory, under Korean law, with Korean colleagues, and saying goodbye feels a lot like leaving Korea did, right down to the inscrutable calculations that have gone into my final paycheck. Once again, I find myself wondering whether I will ever see most of these people again, what role my Korean experience will play in my future, and what it will be like to readjust to the American workplace.

My final week here has been punctuated by overeating at lunch and back strain in the evenings. On Monday I was taken to an Italian restaurant, Tuesday was Japanese, Wednesday was a final visit to the Delegates Dining Room inside the UN and its dangerously tempting buffet (why not have a second dessert?), and yesterday was Greek seafood. I think I’m actually going to wind up buying my own lunch today, but there’s some sort of party in the afternoon.

The back strain is a result of three and a half years of hoarding: a ridiculous number of books, including a pair of Korean-English dictionaries with terrifying heft, along with extensive paperwork, notebooks, a pair of dress shoes, a space heater, my STV mug, posters, two spoons, a cell charger, headphones, CDs, etc. I’ve twice filled a small suitcase, and a couple of time hauled home an overstuffed backpack — last night was two bottles of wine destined for regifting. I was a little disappointed when someone came into my office today to return a book I had lent him long ago, and also to give me a new one: two more to carry home tonight.

The amount of junk I’d accumulated is to some extent a symbol of how much at home I’d come to feel here. I have never been happier at a job or more reluctant to leave it. One of my colleagues asked me if I was going to go out and party tonight, and I told him that I am, in fact, planning to have a study session with my Korean conversation partner. I am not so much rejecting the old as welcoming the new.

As far as that goes, I think it’ll be good for me to come home again to an American workplace, and to be surrounded by colleagues who are genuinely my peers. Where will it take me? Who knows? If past history is any guide, probably to some other country.

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[giving thanks]

This year has been a very, very difficult one for me, but there is still a great deal I have to be thankful for. I am thankful for my friends, old and new, who have helped me through the crisis. I am thankful that I have a home and a job and a loving family. I am thankful for hope, even in great sadness.

There is more — much more — for which I am thankful, but that I don’t want to talk about here.

Instead, it’s time for my annual reposting of I Am Thankful for my Wear: Celebrating Thanksgiving with Korean Kids.

Yesterday for reasons having nothing to do with Thanksgiving and everything to do with inept management, Jenny and I had middle school classes for which the lesson was not pages from a textbook, as usual, but “ACTIVITY.” When I asked our boss, Yu-jin, what the ACTIVITY was, she sort of laughed and said, “You make.” So among other things to fill the hour, Jenny and I decided to teach our kids about Thanksgiving and have them write what they are thankful for. It ain’t as good as eating turkey and stuffing, but reading the results was good fun, and here are the best of them.

In the category of family relations:

I’m thankful for mother.
I’m thankful for father.
I’m thankful for brother.
I’m thankful for sister.
I am thankful for my cousins
I’m thankful for uncle’s son here.
I’m thankful for my dog here.
I am thankful for my parents because they help me for grow up and they care of me.

In the category of the religious:

I’m thankful for GOD.
I am thankful that I can go to church
I’m thankful for God Almighty.
I am thankful for my zezus.

In the category of the undeniably useful:

I’m thankful for my pen.
I am thankful that I can buy things.
I’m thankful for oxygen.
I am thankful that I can walk
I am thankful that I can eat
I am thankful that I wear clothes.
I am thankful that I can speak Korean
I am thankful for house
I’m thanksful for my air
I am thankful that I can learn
I am thankful for weather forecast
I am thankful that I was born, I have family and I live in Korea.
I am thankful that I can take a shower.

In the category of things yummy:

I am thankful for foods.
I’m thankful for eat many food.
I’m thankful for I eat past food.
I’m thankful for chicken.
I’m thankful for pizza.
I’m thankful for ice-cream.
I’m thankful for cookies.

In the category of the (accidentally?) poetic:

I’m thankful for my favorite thing.
I’m thankful for my hate thing.
I’m thankful for moon
I thankful for my life
I thankful for earth.
I thankful for many scientist.
I’m thankful for HOT.
I’m thankful for many trees and many rivers.
I’m thankful for mountins.
I’m thankful for earth.
I’m thankful for windy.
I’m thankful for a red sky.

In the category of fun:

I’m thankful that have good time
I am thankful that I can see B.S.B.
I am thankful that I can watch TV.
I am thankful that I can play computer games
I am thankful that I can run.
I am thankful that read a books.
I am thankful that I talk with my friends
I am thankful that I can listen to music
I am thankful that I can play the piano.
I am thankful that I can go to the beach
I am thankful that I can swam in the ocean
I’m thankful for Christmas.
I’m thankful for my birthday.
I don’t thanful that I have to do my homework

In the category of things that warm a teacher’s heart:

I am thankful that I study English
I’m thankful for go to the academy.
I am thankful for that my teachers are give a knowledge
I am thankful that my English teacher are teach me.
I am thankful that I can study
I am thankful that I have to do my homework
I’m thankful for Josh teacher

And in the category of silly English, which reminds me how much work there is to do:

I am thankful that I can see anythings
I’m thankful for many money.
I’m thankful for born in 1990.
I’m thankful for my wear.
I’m thankful for car, because we ride a car, we go fast.
I’m thankful for shoes, because we don’t wear shoes, we hurt our feet
I’m thankfor for telephone, because we say hello for our freinds for telephone
I am thankful that pencil because write a English and Korean letter
Because I learned a lot with they.
Because I can see anything.
Because I learn at books.
I’m thankful for air, rice, head, eye, computer, clothe, money, my house, Korean, pencil, brother, glasses.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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[korea? i hardly know ya!]

Last week was a hectic one here at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the UN. A quiet lull, during which most of our staff seemed to be out at JFK to meet Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, gave way to an unusual burst of activity, as I spent the better part of a week going back and forth with the Minister’s team as we revised and refined his statement to the General Assembly, as well as his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. At one point, I was even invited to a breakfast meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Whether all this work resulted in anything worthwhile, I leave it for you to judge (PDF/webcast), but I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of it.

Now that the Foreign Minister has gone home, things have settled down considerably, though there’s still plenty of work to be done. Tonight, though, we’ll have our annual reception in honor of Dangun, the legendary founder of the Korean people, whose heroic act is mysteriously commemorated according to the Gregorian calendar. What this means for me is free hors d’oeuvres tonight, as well as an opportunity to check out a bunch of ladies in hanbok, and then the day off tomorrow for what is officially termed National Foundation Day.

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[swastika hysteria]

Fashion house Zara has gotten itself into trouble by accidentally selling purses with swastikas on them in the UK. Denis Fernando, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, responded forcefully: “Fascism and racist symbols are sometimes legitimised in popular culture, this is one of those times.”

Except it’s not. As a nice Jewish boy with a swastika on my living room wall, I’d like to explain.

Like most people in the West, I grew up associating the swastika strictly with the Nazis, and I was appalled by any display of it, in any form. It had a kind of radioactive power that compelled disgust — an entirely appropriate response to any attempted glorification of Nazism, however crude. When my German-descended high school classmate drew them on his desk (in pencil, crookedly and backwards), I took it as a personal insult, and that’s how it was intended.

It was my trip to India in 1997, just after college, that changed my perspective on the swastika. Again and again during my four months in the Subcontinent, concepts I had never thought to question turned out to be completely contingent on cultural context, and swastikas were no exception. In Nepal, I was amused to find that the swastika was included with the hammer and sickle in a pro-communist graffito, a juxtaposition unimaginable in the West. In India, I saw swastikas branded on camel’s butts, put on goofy stickers for kids, painted on people’s faces. I even saw snacks arranged into swastikas. Three years later, in Korea, I became even more used to the ubiquity of swastikas, which tended to mark Buddhist gathering places or shamanistic fortune tellers’ shops in otherwise nondescript streets of three-story brick suburbia.

The swastika on my wall is on the palm of the Hindu god Ganesh, in one of four extraordinarily beautiful posters I picked up for a few dollars on the street in Mumbai back in 1998. It’s a symbol that can mean death, horror and destruction, but also means welcome and good luck to millions upon millions of people in our world. (In this respect, it’s not unlike the cross or the crescent.) Ganesh’s swastika is not the Nazi black outline on a white circle in a red field. It’s red, trimmed with gold, hand-painted with affection. Likewise, the Zara swastikas were a cheerful green, enclosed in a red sunburst.

What interests me in all this is the way this fundamental shibboleth of Western culture makes absolutely no sense in the context of a globalized world. This won’t be the last time some Asian swastika sneaks its way into the West. At the same time, the whole Danish-Muhammad-cartoon crisis makes it clear that these kinds of misunderstanding can run in every direction. What is necessary on all sides is a ratcheting down of the knee-jerk rhetoric, a consideration of context before the declarations of outrage.

I recognize that this won’t be easy. Some jackass is always willing to scream bloody murder just to get attention. But we should remember that any symbol sent from one culture to another is in need of translation. A swastika from India is no more an obscenity than a Vietnamese person named Phuc.

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[happy birthday, america]

Yesterday, as I stepped out of my office, I ran into Lt. Col. Kim, our military attaché. “Happy birthday!” he said, flashing a grin.

“What do you mean?” I asked — my birthday, after all, isn’t until September 8. Then I caught on: “Oh, for my country. Yes, thank you!”

Another Fourth of July story: Allen and I often go to lunch together at the UN cafeteria. Yesterday we ran into First Secretary Lim Jung-taek, who joined us and at some point asked for verification that Macy’s was really sponsoring the fireworks today. “In my country, the government would pay for such thing,” he said. I think that’s probably true in most countries, and as far as I can tell, it’s true for our fireworks on the National Mall in Washington, DC. But here in New York, it’s always Macy’s, and other municipalities, it’s other sponsors (Liberty Mutual in Boston, Sunoco in Philadelphia, ClearChannel in San Francisco; but I couldn’t find a sponsor for Chicago, interestingly). Do any other countries do this sort of thing on their national days? Is this something great about America, or something ominous, or maybe a touch of both?

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[going bananas for k-pop]

Humming Urban Stereo: Banana Shake (YouTube)

Spooky Banana: Mr. Firefighter (YouTube)

Humming Urban Stereo is DJ Jeereen, a Korean who seems to be among the first of his countrymen to grasp the poker-faced kitsch approach to pop music that makes certain Japanese bands so hip. “Banana Shake” is a ridiculously charming ditty that seems to be about exactly what you’d think. You can find more Hus music at their MySpace page and at this fan MySpace page, and you can read a bio at KBS World.

“Mr. Firefighter” is a rare glimmer of hope for the continued existence of one of our favorite Korean bands, Spooky Banana, whose CD we picked up in a cool record store on Daehagno (College Street) in Seoul based entirely on how much we dug the name of the band. Apparently the song has found its way onto a recent arcade release of the video game Pump It Up, which is a Korean knock-off of Dance Dance Revolution.

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[a year of korean]

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my current self-guided Korean language study program.

On March 6, 2006, I began Lesson 1 of Integrated Korean: Beginning Level 1. Since then, apart from the occasional hiatus between textbooks or while vacationing, I have been studying steadily. My goal is to work my way through all 10 semesters, to High Advanced Level 2, plus the associated readers and Chinese-character study guide, within five years.

At the end of my first 12 months, I am already well into Lesson 3 of Intermediate 1, which is pretty much where I should be. And I am certainly far more proficient with this fascinating, ornery language than I was at the beginning. But this is a long journey, and there is still far more of it ahead of me than behind.

Of course, I wouldn’t have made nearly so much progress without the diligent, thoughtful efforts of my teacher, Yi Young-ae, who has had the patience to answer my many questions, sit through my halting efforts at my verbal exercises and correct lesson after lesson full of fumbled Korean spelling (청수하다, 텐니스, 각도기) and grammar.