Category: Personal

Nepal is one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world, which is why many of its people seek opportunities in other lands. Among Nepalis I met, becoming a Gurkha — essentially a mercenary in the British military — was considered a fantastically good opportunity. Others take the more prosaic route of crossing into India in search of work, or sometimes get sold into prostitution there. In Seoul, we found two Nepali restaurants near the massive Dongdaemun market, catering to the growing population of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who have come to South Korea to participate in the textile and garment trade.

More recently, Nepalis have been heading to Iraq to seek work in the reconstruction. According to ABCNEWS.com,

William Saletan has an excellent piece in Slate that asks what exactly Bush has done that can be called “heroic.” Definitely worth a read, even if you’re already anti-Bush.

Yesterday I stepped out of work and heard the sound of sirens — lots of them, and not the steady wail of emergency vehicles trying to cut through traffic in a hurry, but staccato whoops, as if no one was quite sure where the emergency was. Coming up to the corner of 45th Street and Second Avenue, I saw a line of police vans stretching down much of the north-south block to 44th, as well as one or two police trucks with penned-in flatbeds. It looked, I thought, like the sort of squad you send out to deal with a riot.

It turns out to have been an illegal protest march that began at the United Nations and cut across Midtown at rush hour to finish up at Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention is being held. The protesters apparently negotiated on the spot with the police, who decided to let them march; sadly, things seem to have turned ugly at the end, with one protester attacking a plainclothes police officer and hurting him pretty badly, which I personally think sucks.

The city doesn’t feel right. There’s a negative charge in the air. Cops are everywhere, even out in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which happens to be near a major Muslim community. Buildings are barricaded. The subways are weirdly empty, and while the week before Labor Day is always quiet, this year it feels like people have fled. I’m looking forward to this whole thing being over.

On Sunday, I took part in what the New York Times is calling “New York City’s biggest protest in decades, and the most emphatic at any national political convention since Democrats and demonstrators turned against each other in fury over Vietnam in Chicago in 1968.”

I really hope I don’t have to keep doing this sort of things for the next four years.

Sunday was hot. Stupid hot. The kind of hot where you try to put on sunscreen and you just end up smearing it around all the sweat. And it takes an awfully long time for 150,000, or 250,000, or 500,00 people to wend their way up Seventh Avenue. We started at Seventh and 18th Street at around 11:30 a.m. and finally made it past Madison Square Garden at 3.

On the way, we mingled with a wide range of protesters: out-of-towners, locals, old-timers (not only did I spot a McGovern pin, but I also marched past a contingent of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, which fought in the Spanish Civil war[!]), kids, families. Lots of the signs were witty, some were incomprehensible. At one point a guy behind me broke out in a raucous chant of “Viva Chavez!” We walked past the giant papier-mache dragon float that was later set on fire, leading to some of the only arrests at the main protest. The incident took place not far behind us, and a man came up shouting, “People are being arrested behind you! Turn back if you care!” We thought about it, but figured that the other 100,000 people heading that way would do whatever needed to be done.

From my admittedly limited perspective, the police behaved themselves, and so did the protesters. No one attempted to pen the protesters in, so people could use the sidewalks and pop into local stores to buy drinks and snacks and film. The protest only became unnerving as we approached Madison Square Garden itself, flanked by a giant ad for the Nissan Titan SUV (“MASSIVE TRANSIT”) and a big Fox News sign that elicited chants of “Fox News sucks!” And it was strange and upsetting to see the public grounds of Penn Station so heavily barricaded and crawling with security guys in suits, who are much scarier than regular cops with identifying badges. I’m bothered that our government feels the need to wall off its nominating convention from its own citizens, and also bothered by having my public spaces occupied.

But I did come away reassured in many important ways. It was good to see that a couple hundred thousand people can gather in public to curse the sitting government without being shot; this is by no means the case in much of the world. Likewise, it was good to see that so many Americans consider the political disruptions of the last four years — which are, by world standards, relatively mild — are more than enough to generate tremendous anger and action. The Bush administration may be awful, but America still works, and no small credit is due to the Americans who work hard to make sure that stays true.

Whenever modern political powers start bringing up ancient history, look out. Whether it’s Greek claims to Macedonia, Serbian calls for revenge over 600-year-old defeats, or Israeli references to real estate deals mentioned in the Bible, it usually boils down to intellectual cover for a land grab.

So when I read that South Korea and China are in fierce dispute over the nature of the ancient Koguryo kingdom, which collapsed in 668 A.D., I suspected that there must be a more modern geographical issue at hand.

To summarize the dispute, South Korean scholars have long claimed, I believe accurately, that the borders of Koguryo extended well into modern China (and also failed to control the southern tip of the Korean peninsula). China has now erased Koguryo from its official recounting of Korean history, claiming instead that the kingdom was no more than a vassal state of the Chinese emperor. What makes this argument more complicated is that Chinese imperial power reached over enormous distances and brought an incredibly wide array of powers into its system of tribute-for-protection. If every power that ever submitted to imperial rule was to be considered part of China, we would have to include places like Vietnam and Japan. Nor has China been anything like a unified political or cultural entity throughout history. At times it fragmented into warring statelets, was taken over by Mongols, or otherwise fluctuated. (I’m not all that good on Chinese history, so I hope anyone out there with superior knowledge will correct any errors I’ve made here.)

China’s real concern, of course, has nothing to do with historical semantics about the nature of East Asian feudalism. What has Beijing worried is the large population of ethnic Koreans living north of the Yalu and Tumen rivers, which demarcate the contemporary boundary of North Korea.

I don’t think that China is worried about North Korean expansionism into Chinese territory. Indeed, North Korea relies on China for emergency aid, and the land North Korea really wants is to the south, across the DMZ. Instead, my read on this situation is that China is concerned about the potential expansionism of a reunified Korea.

Like many Korea watchers, the Chinese are probably convinced that reunification is fairly likely in the longer term, especially now that North Korea has begun to emulate China’s gradualist approach to economic liberalization. For now, the Chinese role as mediator and role model gives it great sway over North Korea, which considers Communist China a close ally. But these same processes may one day lead to a reunified Korea that would be both more powerful and more volatile than today’s South Korea. And let’s not forget that if North Korea keeps its nuclear weapons until reunification, then the new Korea will be a nuclear power. (I expect that this would push Japan into acquiring nuclear weapons, but that’s a different question.)

Already South Korea is working hard to gain more power in the region — they’re mounting a bid, for example, to get elected to the UN Security Council for 2007-2008. What China fears is that a unified Korea will demand that ethnically Korean regions currently in China be handed over to the new Korean nation. In a worst-case scenario, a unified Korea could sponsor separatist insurgents in northeastern China, creating a situation akin to Kashmir in which a large and a small power, both with nuclear weapons, are fighting a guerilla war for disputed territory. While I find this scenario unlikely, it just might be what the Chinese are afraid of. And with separatist movements in Xinkiang, Tibet, Taiwan and arguably Hong Kong, the Chinese have gotten a bit paranoid about fragmentation and collapse.

And so China has decided to be proactive in trying to erase any ancient Korean claims to territories north of the Yalu and Tumen. But the Chinese effort seems to have backfired. Rather than erasing ancient claims, it has suddenly made them a contemporary issue. If this dispute grows into a claim by a resurgent Korea for Koguryo’s territory, the Chinese may perhaps look back and discover that they themselves planted the seed.

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been adjusting to my new job at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations (about which more soon). But all is well.In the meantime, enjoy this electoral vote predictor, which pools state polls into readable formats so you can see just how the candidates are actually doing. (Via Talking Points Memo)

August is a rich time for Korean movies in New York. The Korean Film Festival is coming to town, running from August 13 to 19 at The ImaginAsian on East 59th Street between Second and Third avenues, and continuing at BAM in Brooklyn from August 20 to 22. Meanwhile, from August 2 to 13, the Korean Cultural Service is holding a Classic Korean Film Week, followed by a Korean Horror Movie Week.

While there are a lot of films to choose from, a couple caught my eye as being especially of interest. The documentary Moodang explores the world of Korean shamanism. Memories of Murder, the story of Korea’s first recorded serial killer, may sound like just another grizzly East Asian gorefest, but it’s directed by Bong Joon-ho, the same guy who directed the ingenious Barking Dogs Never Bite.

The Palaverist makes it into The Black Table! (Scroll down to “PERFECT STORMS” to read my li’l rant.)

CORRECTION: It was Martha Angell in the New York Review of Books who used the phrase “perfect storm” in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, not the meticulously edited New Yorker. And Ms. Angell was quoting a big pharma flak, not writing in her own words.

From a Reuters story on the gay-marriage amendment: