중매결혼

Taking a break from crafting my latest presentation for my Korean class.  We’re supposed to present on something that we haven’t written a paper about, which is (to me), ridiculous; if I cared about something enough to write 2+ pages on it in a language that I don’t speak particularly well, then it ought to follow that it should be something that I would present well/would inspire heated discussion and debate amongst myself and my peers (who, in this case, happen to be three undergraduate boys, two of whom are 교포 – I swear, nobody bothers learning Korean at the advanced level).  Alas, I’ve already written about my two favorite things to talk about in Korean (the K-pop industry and plastic surgery), so I had to come up with something else.  I spent hours and hours about 15 minutes racking my brain to think of something in line with my interests that wouldn’t totally bore my classmates to tears (while also simultaneously downloading some new music to listen to while writing the damn thing [here are the songs I chose – a wonderfully disparate collection, and yeah, I know the addition of that wacky 2008 JeTiHyun collaboration “오빠 나빠” is an odd choice, but I was feeling nostalgic for my first summer in Korea; consider Lena Park to be the redeeming factor]) and I finally came up with something that has boggled and continues to boggle me: arranged marriage in Korea.

I have no statistics to offer about how many couples today are the product of arranged marriages; judging by my Korean friends and their families, it SEEMS to have been more popular with the previous generation than it is with mine, but is by no means extinct today.  Also, distinctions between what constitutes and does not constitute an arranged marriage are by no means hard and fast.  It really depends on whether or not you view 선 보는 것 (best translated as “a blind date with a view towards marriage”; in other words, kind of an expedited dating process, wherein the two parties are in agreement before they meet that if it seems like they mutually suit each others’ wants and needs, then a marriage will take place) as a “truly” arranged marriage; given that the participants generally have a say in the matter (as in, if he/she truly hates the person that he/she was matched up with by their parents/the matchmaker, they don’t have to marry said person), it’s difficult to equate that with, say, my great-grandmother getting off the boat from Italy and meeting her betrothed in the shipyard.  I guess “arranged marriage” is, essentially, a blurry and mutable concept; personally, I would place marriages by 선 under the umbrella of arranged marriages; 소개팅/미팅 couples, not so much.

I remember when I first found out about these sorts of arranged marriages, I was in absolute disbelief.  I was all, “OMG that’s soooo stoopidddd why would any educated, liberal female (or male) decide to dooooo thatttt?!”  Given that my college roommate’s parents’ arranged marriage appeared to have been set up by a completely incompetent matchmaker (read: they couldn’t stand each other), I wrote the practice off as not only antiquated, but ridiculously snooty (the way my roommate told it, many elite families from the upper echelons of Korean society opted to arrange marriages for their children so that they could ensure the selection of a spouse with a suitable pedigree; then again, this was the same roommate who seemed convinced that she couldn’t loan me her designer clothes because my lack of a “suitable pedigree” would ensure that I would dirty them or, at the very least, depreciate their overall value, so I would take anything she says with a grain of salt).  I still think it is, but having seen some success stories (JM’s parents squeal squeal omg they are unbelievably cuuuute) has led me to somewhat soften my opinion on the matter.

What HASN’T quite softened, though, is my general disdain for the societal pressure that leads most young people to seek out arranged marriages.  While I’m sure quite a few of these arranged marriages are still made with family connections/breeding in mind (and boy, do Koreans hate non-purebreeds – the word for “mutt” is 똥개, which literally translates to “poop dog”), I’m willing to be that more than a fair amount are the result of a bunch of single women and men in their early 30s who (along with their families) are completely freaking out that they haven’t followed the Trajectory of Successful Koreanhood and have yet to marry or birth/sire a son.  And while I acknowledge the fact that that sentence was a sweeping generalization (included mostly for comic effect), you get the general idea.  There does exist an intense societal pressure on young people (particularly women) to marry and have children before/around the age of 30, and a failure to do so can be viewed as some sort of negative aberration, and it can result in people doing some relatively outlandish things in order to fit the mold.  Case in point: I met an unni (I’ll call her HM here) in July 2009, and the one thing I clearly remember about her from that time is that she was literally obsessed with getting married.  She was probably 28 or 29 then.  In the scant two months that I spent with her that summer, she went on a bunch of different blind dates and (much to her dismay) still had no boyfriend by the time I went back to the US in late August.  Before I left, she asked me if I thought that getting plastic surgery would improve her chances at finding a man, a question to which I truthfully responded, “No, probably not.”  But I returned to Korea again in late May 2010 to find that, sometime in the space of the 8 months that I’d been gone, HM unni had (a) gotten double eyelid surgery, (b) done 선 (recall that this is blind dating that is intended to result in marriage), and (c) gotten engaged.  This scenario, along with this absurdly short timeline, would almost never happen in the United States (except in extenuating circumstances that might induce couples to marry quickly, like pregnancies or military service, etc).  It is now November 2011 and HM unni is pregnant with her first child.  I guess she must be either 30 or 31 now.  Well done!  Societal success!

It would be foolish of me to come down too hard on arranged marriages; the problem is not the idea itself, but the societal trends and pressures that make it seem like the only compelling option for young Koreans who, for whatever reason, have scared their parents into thinking that they’ll never have grandchildren by not marrying in their 20s.  Difficult to say what, if anything, can be done to reverse the course beyond the expiration of the current generation of conservative old people – kidding, kidding.  I don’t have reliable statistics for Korea to back it up (I’m sure I could LOOK it up, but I’m too lazy at the moment), but I’m willing to bet that the average age at which people are choosing to marry is rising, which could indicate a reversal in social views towards marriage/a shift in the priorities of young people.  In any case, I’m heartened greatly by many of my unmarried, late-20s/early 30s teachers from Sogang who have embraced their freedom, moved out of their parents’ homes (still relatively unheard of for unmarried women in Korea), gotten PhDs, traveled the word, etc.  May many other women break free from societal constraints and embrace their untethered single lives!  Let’s all go to Italy, drink a shitton of wine, and eat gelato until we throw up on the tricolored marble of the Fiorentine Duomo!

 

지금은 소녀시대?

First of all, please excuse the fact that I have (again) neglected this blog horrifically.  Believe me, I would much rather be posting my thoughts various and sundry than sitting in seminar and arguing with some incredibly post-modernist hipsters about whether the paradigm of colonial modernity in understanding the Japanese colonization of Korea is a useful one (I don’t really know where I come down on this one; I’d say it is, as with all paradigms, simultaneously contextually useful and pretty limited).  Sadly, I think the fact that I’m no longer in Korea has cut down on the total amount of interesting stuff that I have to say, but I’m in the process of concocting a plan to get back there soon.  Thought about going this winter, but I might not have the Benjamins necessary for that, so I’ll probably be looking for a summer internship.  If anyone is willing to hire an incredibly poor master’s student with kind-of-okay Korean and pretty much no direction in life, please let me know.

The “pretty much no direction in life” thing has actually been stressing me out to an absurd degree – which is funny, because when I left Korea, I was full of naive confidence about where I could take myself.  The one thing I’m still completely committed to is Korean and Korean studies, but being here has raised more questions than it has provided answers.  This is probably a good (or great) thing, but when it is 4am and you’re overwhelmed with feelings of total inadequacy and piles of undone homework, it can be a bit of a downer.  Anyway, the dilemmas, to which I have previously alluded:

1) I’ve only been here as a master’s student for 2 months, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about what will happen when Harvard (god willing) hands me my degree.  Should I end there and look for a job?  If so, where?  Or should I go for a PhD?  If so, where?

2) And if I go for a PhD, in what department should I pursue it??  My current program has a heavy emphasis on history (and technically acts as something of a stepping-stone for the PhD here in East Asian Languages and Civilizations), but I am starting to realize that (as necessary as I think a background in history is to fully understanding both North and South Korea), it might not be what I want to devote the next 8 years of my life to.

The hilarious and unspoken truth is that I should probably stop pretending that I have any interest in Korea academically and acknowledge that all I care about is pop culture.  Well, no, obviously that is an exaggeration; I have plenty of “academic” interest in Korea, but ever since I began taking classes at Harvard, it has become increasingly obvious that I am far more intrigued by current sociocultural trends in Korea than I am in, say, forestation polices in the late Joseon Dynasty (this is actually one of my friend’s dissertation topics.  No joke).

Where to go, then?  Sociology?  Anthropology?  History with a socioanthropological focus (is that really not a real word?  Is that even a thing?)?  And once I figure out where to go, what do I do there?  Can I really write a dissertation on Korean pop music?  Is that even kind of academically valid?

Here is where I must give credit to James Turnbull of “The Grand Narrative,” whose completely brilliant blog is absolute proof that the study of trends in Korean popular culture is worthwhile and necessary.  I find myself nodding along with nearly everything he writes.  I think what he’s doing is awesome, groundbreaking, and completely understudied.  In fact, I feel that way about a lot of scholarship in Korea – the same tropes get slammed from every possible academic angle time and time again, but fields that are rich with possibility are consistently ignored of brushed to the side.  Pretty much everyone here thinks I am some sort of airhead 날라리 because I devote such a large portion of my time to the K-pop phenomenon – but why shouldn’t I?  Watch it become some sort of post-post-post-modern trope for analyzing colonialism or something.  And my paltry 6 comments on various SeoulBeats posts have garnered a collective 52 “Likes,” so clearly I AM ON TO SOMETHING.

Why are Koreanists so afraid of pop culture?  Why are scholars IN GENERAL so reluctant to involve themselves in the analysis of soft power?  As Mr. Turnbull’s blog demonstrates, there is far more to K-pop than sparkly shorts and aegyo; there is a world reflective of myriad social and cultural trends in Korean society that likely have far more historical (and in some cases, even political or economic) roots.  Why be afraid to go out there and dig them up?  Is it because analyzing mud hut dwellers in Joseon Korea will get you more brownie points with the big wigs in academia (this is also a real thesis topic, no joke)?

I don’t know where I’m headed.  But I know what I like, and I know that what I like has academic merit.  Why, JUST RIGHT NOW I am in the process of writing a paper (IN KOREAN) on the impact of Korean girl groups on the societal image of women, and it’s probably more fun than I’ve had all semester except for all of those occasions during which I was mercifully drunk and in pleasant company.  Given that I’m writing it in my limited Korean, I’m probably not getting all of my ideas across properly, and I’ve liberally drawn from Mr. Turnbull’s many observations (including that awesome translated article on depraved oppas – don’t worry, Mr. T, I’m citing everything properly and giving you all the credit, I even talked about your blog IN CLASS the other day!), but at least I’m dipping my toes in Korean sociocultural waters (even if it is only 2 pages hahahahah).  And I’m finding that I like it.

Maybe I’ll post the finished paper, after I’ve coerced JM Unni into editing it ^_~

Trouble is, I still have to survive this two-year history program – and manage to convince my advisor that I’m not as stupid as I’m pretty sure he thinks I am, and that I somehow deserve admission to the PhD program here .  To do this, it is essential that I not have a nervous breakdown and stop eating 14 pounds of dark chocolate a day.  To that end, if I can POSSIBLY fit it into my already disturbingly-packed schedule, I’ll be taking any recommendations (in addition to those I’ve already received) for books and articles that look beyond the giltz of K-pop and find the substance therein, please don’t hold back.

And seriously.  Hire me for an internship.  잘 부탁드립니다 정말…

 

ㅋㅋ신기하다

Late night KakaoTalk with the much-missed 김혜연 쌤:

D: 선생님은요?  재미있는 얘기 없나요?
KHY: 시험과 발표의 연속.  재미있죠?
D: ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ재미있죠.
KHY: 하루하루가 스릴 넘쳐요…….하하하.

—

D: What about you?  Any fun stories?
KHY: Consecutive test and presentation.  Isn’t it fun?
D: Hahahaha.  Yes, of course.
KHY: Yes, every day is just spine tingling.  Haha.

I have had many a conversation with a Korean, but this is the first time anyone I’ve ever heard anyone actively employ sarcasm.  My Korean friends seem to have no trouble with the concept of sarcasm when they speak in English, but for some reason, it’s just rarely used in Korean.

15 minutes later, I’m still laughing.  Best part about this whole thing is that even though KakaoTalk doesn’t convey emotion well, I can totally see her deadpanning this whole exchange.  Jesus, I miss you, KHY Ssaem.

 

The Girls and “The Boys”

B-BRING THE BOYS OUT!

Another post of little substance, but SNSD has finally released their highly-anticipated 3rd album “The Boys” (which is, to my extreme displeasure, not yet available on iTunes for some reason) and I have to comment on it.

The music video – well, it’s gorgeous.  I am so enamored with the music they used for the first minute or so before the actual song begins.  I almost wish that had been the basis for the song itself.  But alas, it is not.  So on to the song.

First off, I have a love-hate relationship with the chorus of this song.  On the one hand, it gets stuck in your head and makes you want to shout it at every given opportunity in which it might be kind of appropriate (i.e. whenever someone mentions, or does not mention, SNSD).  On the other hand, WTF is it doing in this song?  It kind of interrupts the flow.  Actually, the whole song is a bit discordant, to be honest.  Or maybe that’s just because fake-rapping in K-pop is kind of unnecessary, and I was always fairly grateful that SNSD had strayed away from this trend (with the exception of a few spoken lines in “Run Devil Run”)  The last minute and 30 seconds are, however, quite redeeming.  Taeyeon and Jessica really brought it for this song.

To return to the rapping, the most baffling thing about this song (at least, to me) was that My Homegirl And Secret Girl Crush Tiffany, of all members, was rapping instead of singing.  I mean, I figured if they were going to have members rap, it would be the members who are obviously less vocally talented doing it (Sooyoung, Yoona, Yuri, Hyoyeon) – but for some odd reason, in addition to her rapping, Yoona has a singing part – and Tiffany DOES NOT?!  What the sam hell is this?  Yoona is one of the worst singers not just in SNSD, but in the entire Korean music industry.  Not that Tiffany is some kind of vocal prodigy, but I would say she’s in the upper tier of singers in SNSD; she’s at least as good, if not better, than Seohyun, who is all over the damn place in this song.  My only possible explanation as to why Tiffany does not sing is because she sings a lot in the English version of the song (which I cannot verify, because I Absolutely Refuse To Listen To It).  And anyway, that kind of doesn’t make sense because Jessica sings like, 40% of the Korean version, and I’m sure she sings just as much in the English version.

EDIT, 12:08AM EST.  Well, I finally watched the English version in full AND listened again to the iTunes audio, and WTF – Yoona’s singing part in the MV is unmistakably sung by Tiffany in the iTunes audio version.  As an enormous Tiffany fangirl, believe me, I can recognize her vocals.  It’s all clear to me now.  Jesus.  Fuck you, SM Town.  Cutting out Tiffany’s part in the MV just so that Yoona, who is ALREADY THE DAMN FOCUS, could have another 15 seconds of camera time?  That’s just shameful.  Tiffany SPEAKS ENGLISH.  Tiffany, call me.  I’ll be your manager.  I’m serious.

The English version.  Well.  I listened to the 1.5 minute preview on iTunes, and let me just say this right here and right now: Girls’ Generation, I love you and you are currently my desktop background, my ringtone, my message tone, and my wake up alarm, but you will NEVER EVER make it in the US.  Your pronunciation is obviously foreign and the lyrics are trite.  You can stop paying exorbitant fees for Teddy Riley, because it doesn’t matter who produces your stuff.  It is never, ever going to sell in the US, so please just stop.  As I’ve already stated, translating a bunch of your songs and teaching your idols passable English has already been proven a thousand times over (Wonder Girls, Se7ven, BoA, JYJ) to be a HORRIBLE METHOD of moving your music to the US.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.  ENOUGH.  If you really want to have a chance at the US market, then hire me immediately ditch every single member except for Jessica and Tiffany and maybe Taeyeon because she actually can sing with minimal accent and then try again.

All in all, though, the more I listen, the more I like.  That’s always the case with SNSD, and not because they’re my favorite K-pop group – they just produce catchy music.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to the rest of the tracks yet (it is, after all, a full-length album) and likely won’t until they’re available on iTunes, but I hope for good things.  S♥NE 4 LYFE !!!

p.s. I can’t wait for SM Town Live.  I am gonna fangirl so hard.

p.p.s. No matter how critical I am of SNSD, this is more or less how I react whenever I see them on television – just ignore the date on top and imagine SNSD accepting an award instead of SHINee (credit to SeoulBeats):

 

생일 축하해

I’ve done an absolutely abysmal job of updating this blog recently, for which I am incredibly apologetic.  But I can’t say that I didn’t expect that posting would slow down once I’d really gotten into the swing of graduate school; I anticipated that I would be absurdly busy, and I was right.  So far, graduate school has been simultaneously enlightening, disappointing, encouraging, discouraging, and incredibly humbling.  I spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about the present and the future, which is sometimes productive but more often just panic-inducing.  I am torn about whether I’d like to pursue a PhD, and if so, what sort of PhD (current internal debate: history vs. anthropology/sociology.  History would require me to learn Japanese ASAP, and would thus also require me to forfeit my chance to return to Korea next summer in favor of me taking a crash course in Japanese here in Cambridge; anthro/sociology would require me to pick up a new discipline entirely.  Decisions, decisions).

But one thing I’ve learned here is that an inability to roll with the punches is more debilitating than is any academic or linguistic shortcoming.  Graduate school has now become the second thing in my life that has actively tried to kill me (the first being shrimp, which once caused my body to go into anaphylactic shock and landed me promptly in the ER for 5 hours), and learning how to fight against my own misgivings and feelings of inadequacy has probably been that which has served me best here so far.  Many nights sobbing into the ears of various friends and unnies has prompted the realization that there is little I can do to alter what has already been done, so it’s best to look to the future with an eye on making myself the very best person/potential PhD candidate/friend/sister/daughter/etc that I could be.

Perhaps I am feeling a little more reflective tonight because I am a scant 3.5 hours away from turning 23, an age that signifies the rapidly-approaching end of my early 20s.  I don’t know what I expect out of my 23rd year, but I know I’m looking forward to it.

I’m indebted to my new friends at Harvard for welcoming me, my old friends for never forgetting me, and my family both here and in Korea for being so incredibly supportive.  I love you all.

I hope to post an entry of real substance soon.  In any case, SNSD is making a comeback in just a week (new album on the 19th y’alllll!) and I’m headed to NY for SM Town Live next weekend!  Some things never change.

 

BEG 팬걸

For whatever reason, a lot of K-pop songs tend not to strike me on the first listen.  They often don’t fare too well on the second listen, either; instead, I’ll wait until the songs have been grossly played out, are no longer being promoted, and have since been completely replaced by the next cycle of comebacks before I start liking them with gusto.  It has seriously taken me the better part of the year to fully comprehend the awesomeness that are  뱅! (“Bang!”) by After School and Hurricane Venus by BoA (seriously, how badass are the first 20 seconds of that song?!).  Something similar happened with pretty much every song f(x) released after 뉴예삐오 (and I’m still not sold by “Hot Summer”).

I thought that Brown Eyed Girls’ last hit, “Abracadabra,” was a sweaty, slutty mess when I first saw the live performance, but the song grew on me after awhile.  I wonder if the same will happen with BEG’s newest single, “Sixth Sense,” which I’m still having a little trouble wrapping my mind around (partially because, like “Abracadabra,” the video is a sweaty, slutty mess – but Ga-In looks fucking amazing, and I have the hugest girlcrush ever):

SNSD is making a comeback (!!!!!) in 2 weeks with an album that is apparently “good enough to debut in the US,” which is, quite frankly, bullshit; SNSD, as much as I love them, will not enjoy success in the US with the plan of assault attack they have on the Korean entertainment industry.  They don’t have enough talent (or umph) to make it and would likely flop worse than did the Wonder Girls.  But in conversation with a professor the other day about which K-pop idols were equipped to “make it” in the US, my answer was unequivocally Brown Eyed Girls.  And I hadn’t even seen that comeback performance yet.

Why BEG?  A few reasons:

• Vocals.  I mean, Miryo arguably is less talented in the vocals department, but Narsha, Ga-In, and especially Jea definitely deserve the title of “singers.”  When I watch miss A perform and hear their passable vocals, I’m all, “Oh, hey!  No one is off key in this song!  Brava!  This is an excellent performance!”  But with BEG, it’s not even a question of them being on key – it’s a question of them belting out a high note that miss A’s Suzy couldn’t even dream of hitting on her best day.  BEG’s vocals make a total mockery out of the mediocre standards K-pop fans usually apply to performances, considering it a miracle if at least 60% of the song is sung live.  The best part?  BEG does it while keeping up with insanely hot choreography, which is often the excuse less talented singers proffer when they come under fire (“I WANTED to sing well, but it was too hard to sing and dance at the same tiiiiiiiiime!”).
• Stage presence.  Do I really need to comment here?  Did you watch that performance?  They OWN that stage.   Own it.
• Brown Eyed Girls are SASHA FIERCE.  They’re not 14 years old and waving around lollipops, nor are there an absurd number of them (sorry, SNSD.  I still love you.  And at least most of you were under 20 when you put that crap out).  The American public is not going to be captivated by a bunch of Asian Barbie dolls prancing around on stage while whining out lyrics about how much they love oppa (and doing a crap singing job while they’re at it).  But I think Americans could get down with the above performance.  It beats the shit out of Wonder Girls’ “Nobody,” at any rate, which broadcast on “So You Think You Can Dance” to abysmal reviews (seriously.  One of my cousins called me after the show and literally asked, “What the fuck was that?”).
• These girls (well, Jea and Miryo, at any rate) are legitimate musicians who are in the music industry for (I hope, or at least, in this case I believe) the sake of music.  And you could make the argument that BEG, whose members all went under the knife post-debut due to lack of popularity, are thus the same as all other image-obsessed idol groups, but I would disagree.  I would say that BEG went under the knife because they valued their music (not their fame) and wanted it to reach more people – but understanding the (absurd) practicalities and realities of the Korean entertainment industry, realized that their music would go nowhere if their faces didn’t or couldn’t back it up.  Of course, I don’t know any of BEG personally (but GA-IN, CALL ME!  I could totally switch teams!), but that is how I would explain it, at any rate.
• They are kind of okay at English?  Well, Ga-In for sure needs some work on the L/R thing (I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t chuckle through like, the entirety of the video below, despite its incredibly somber nature), but I see potential.

In short, 한류 means almost nothing if it doesn’t have the potential to reach a market as vast and diverse as that of the American music industry – but K-pop seems not to understand what breaking into the American music industry in an effective manner would entail.  You cannot just coach your idols on English and translate a bunch of their hit songs – YOU HAVE TO TEACH THEM TO SING FIRST.  You have to realize that the idol group trend is long gone (how long has it been since ‘NSYNC and the Spice Girls promoted?) and that Americans are not going to be in the least bit impressed by some kitschy choreography and mediocre vocals.  You need a group like Brown Eyed Girls, who possess the talent, pizzazz, and musical know-how to craft a solid in-road into the American market.  I personally think they can do it and that I should totally be their manager.  Ga-In, CALL ME), and if they did, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least.  They are, I would say, the Korean Wave’s greatest hope of expansion out of Asia.

[But SNSD, I still <3 you].

 

북한

Re-blogged from The Marmot’s Hole: a fascinating look into North Korea, as depicted through photographs taken by The Boston Globe.  In an effort to bring in foreign investment, North Korea has been granting greater freedoms to visiting journalists.  A lot of the pictures, though, appear to be from Rajin/Rason, NK’s free economic zone (whatever that means in NK, I really have no idea, but it is, as I understand it, a means by which the folks running the show in Pyongyang get hard currency) – and to me, letting journalists take more pictures in a city where people are allowed to openly engage in capitalist enterprise is not that great of a leap.  After reading Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, I’d really like to see some pictures of Chongjin.

North Korea alternately fascinates and horrifies me.  Perhaps if the cost wasn’t so prohibitive, I’d venture to go, but I am pretty sure that if a North Korean sniper didn’t take me down in Pyongyang, my father would have my head as soon as I got back home.  Also, I’m terrified of the prospect of flying Koryo Air, the world’s only one-star airline (whose fleet is comprised almost entirely, I hear, of Soviet-era planes.  Exotic!).

A less fascinating look into ancient SK and NK awaits me in the form of 200+ pages of reading due tomorrow, but I can’t bring myself to do it until I’ve been properly fed.  I have a package of pre-cooked curry and rice ready to go, but I apparently have to wait until the 7 or so Chinese kids (most of whom I’ve never seen on this floor or in this building) have finished making what appears to be an extraordinarily large dinner.  Some variation of this happens nearly every night.  I need an aspirin.

 

The Greatest News Ever in History

Grad school is destroying me.  I have become a coffee drinker.  It’s like, 80 degrees here today, but I’m one-shotting a mid-afternoon (hot) salted caramel mocha espresso (because I don’t like iced coffee) like a boss.  I feel like without a daily dose of caffeine, I am going to become a miserable human being who snaps at everyone.  Poor JM.  Maybe she should stop calling me before noon…

Anyway, this post is not about coffee.  This post is about the Greatest News that Dana in SoKo will ever report, ever.  It’s even greater than the time I saw SNSD in concert that one time in May.

I, Dana (in SoKo), have managed to snag tickets to SM TOWN Live in New York.  Which means I will be seeing SNSD, Super Junior, DBSK, f(x), BoA, ShinEE, and Kangta at Madison Square Garden on October 23, 2011.

[INSERT LONGEST AND HIGHEST-PITCHED FANGIRL SQUEAL EVER HERE]

Okay, so my seats are total crap (think nosebleed section on top of nosebleed section), and the show is a Sunday night, so I’m going to have to miss a very lucrative shift of work at my Sunday morning job and take a 5am train back to Cambridge on Monday morning, but all of that is completely and utterly irrelevant because I AM GOING TO SM TOWN LIVE, BITCHES.

This is the first time SM Town has ever done something like this on the east coast (they’ve done it before in LA), and I’m super excited (in case you couldn’t already tell) that I’ll be there.  Actually, I think that K-pop is one of the only things keeping me grounded in some semblance of sanity right now.  I have been listening to SNSD, 박정현, and miss A nonstop for about the past 4 hours.  I still don’t have many close friends here, but SNSD will ALWAYS BE THERE FOR ME, so haters to the left, y’all.

Maybe it might seem childish and silly to be so worked up about a concert and K-pop idol stars (the concert falls one week to the day after my 23rd birthday), but we all need our silly little pursuits, I think.  In any case, check out this article for a nice summary of what a concert like this can mean to people.  Well said.  Now, tell me how you managed to snag a bag of VIP goodies.

I’m gonna finish chugging my coffee and get started on the last 250 pages of a book on the Japanese colonization of Korea that I have to have finished reading by…like, now. But I think looking forward to this concert will give me strength to survive until at least mid-fall.  Oh, SNSD.  Clearly, you girls make my life complete:

많은 시간을 따라 변하겠지만
두 손 놓지 않기를
Just For love 영원토록 마지막일 사랑
그대길 바래요

 

The Official Dana in SoKo Position on English Teachers

I really enjoy getting comments from readers, especially from readers who have no obligation by bonds of friendship or blood to act like they care what I have to say.  As someone who will only comment on another’s blog when I absolutely feel like what I have to say will not embarrass me or have some hater all up in my grill (internet argument LOLZ!), I can’t say how much I truly appreciate it when someone takes the time to offer me some of the thoughts they might have while reading my writing.  It’s always nice when readers offer words of praise, but I wouldn’t mind being challenged, either.

I was delighted to receive an incredibly flattering comment a week or so ago from an English teacher still working and living in Korea.  But somewhere in the middle of praising me for learning Korean, the commenter mentioned how [s]he knows that I don’t like English teachers.  Which…didn’t offend me, per se, but got me thinking.  Is that the tone of this blog?

I actually ran a search through my blog posts for the phrase “English teacher,” because I honest-to-god couldn’t remember berating English teachers in print – save for the recent post on the “black dude on the bus” incident, which – well, that really had less to do with him being an English teacher and more to do with him being a total fucking douche.  What came up were mostly posts related to JM, since she and I worked on her English together so much this past summer, and the disclaimer on the “Where to Go Guide” in which I cautioned that I wasn’t an English teacher and therefore ex-pats in that station might find some of the advice of little use.  Perhaps it was wrong of me to assume that English teachers can’t speak good Korean, but I was more thinking about my own blog in comparison to other blogs run by English teachers that offer mostly English-language resources in Korea to foreigners.

Anyway.  After rereading all that, I concluded that what I’d written was actually pretty tame as compared to how hard I could have ridden English teachers.  And truthfully, I like and respect those of my friends who are/were English teachers – a couple of my friends from Sogang taught on the side to fund their Sogang experience, and one dude in my program at Harvard fell in love with Korea after teaching English there and taught himself excellent Korean.  But it’s true that while I was in Korea, I specifically tried to avoid places where English teachers/other expats congregated, and tried to disassociate myself with English teachers as much as possible.  Why?

There are a few reasons I can come up with to explain (not defend) my attitude – which I will readily admit right here and now is based primarily on stereotyping and heuristics, something which people should try to avoid, but alas.  And I will take full responsibility for my attitude, and hope sincerely that people understand them to be not points based on research or fact, but my own personal experience.

1) I really do not like the hakwon system.  I dislike it so much that I wrote my senior thesis in fulfillment of my undergraduate degree on the nasty politics of hakwons.  Private English education is a trillion-fucking-dollar industry that favors the rich and entitled and perpetuates a glass ceiling society in which the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.  It is for this reason that I swore up and down that I’d never get sucked into the hakwon industry, even if I was desperate for money; if the fancy ever struck to teach English in SK, I’d much prefer to teach in a public school.  Unfortunately, I recognize that the fact that English teachers in hakwons make mad bank in comparison to those in public schools means that foreigners more invested in themselves than they are in helping students will choose the hakwon 9/10 times – and I can’t necessarily fault them for that, except…

2) Teaching is NOT supposed to be a selfishly motivated profession.  I feel like it easily becomes so in SK, because it’s only too easy to make buckets of money doing it.  And you barely need a college diploma to start exploiting it purely for your own profit, which seems to have encouraged the idea of, “Hey, if you’re broke all you need to do is come here for a year, teach a bunch of rich, spoiled brats the ABCs, make a truckload of green, and then bust!”  Which in turn has encouraged a…

3) Guest-like mentality among many, many English teachers.  In other words, because they know their time in SK is limited and their station impermanent, they don’t bother to engage much with the local culture or language.  And while I totally get that it’s really hard to teach full time or even part time while devoting sufficient energy to Korean language study, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make some attempt to learn at least a little bit – a little Korean goes a LONG way in Korea.  If bus hooligan had learned a little Korean beyond 개새끼야, maybe he wouldn’t have thought that the old man was insulting him on the basis of race (speaking of which, if you haven’t watched this video, do so immediately.  It is everything I wanted to say, right down to implicitly acknowledging Korea’s racism, but also realizing that since we can’t take responsibility for that, we have to accept and work with it).  In any case, I met one English teacher in a bar who’d been in Korea for years and could only say, “영어를 어떻게 할 줄 아십니까?” which is an incredibly awkward way of asking if someone speaks/understands English.  Come on, dude.  Don’t you realize how bad this makes foreigners look?  Like a bunch of societal moochers who have no respect for Korea, Koreans, or the cultural heritage of the country whose money they are currently pocketing.  And again, this is obviously not all English teachers, but it’s enough to have created a stereotype that many Koreans buy into.  And with all the shit that goes on in Itaewon, with drunk foreigners (English teachers, military goons, etc) causing a fucking ruckus left and right, I don’t think I can blame them – because in my own experience, the stereotype has been right far more than it’s been wrong.

And then – and then!!  As though it wasn’t bad enough to be arrogant and disrespectful of Korean language and culture, many expats have the nerves to bitch about how mean Koreans treat them like guests.  I already talked about this in my post about bus dude, so I don’t need to stress it, but seriously – if you don’t want to be treated like a guest, stop acting like one.  And also, even if you acknowledge that you ARE a guest and DON’T plan to stay for long, think about how you would behave were you a guest in someone else’s house – would you completely ignore their preferences and manner of doing things?  Do you go to your friend’s house and act as though it is your domain in which to do whatever you fucking please, regardless of the rules your friend/friend’s family might have set?

4) Finally, the bottom line for me is that – and there is no exaggeration whatsoever here – every time I have ever felt threatened or afraid or vulnerable in Korea, it has not been because of Koreans, but because of foreigners in Korea making trouble.  I am actually not lying.  Contrary to what blogs like The Metropolitician (man, I hate that blog) would have you believe, Koreans are not hiding behind mailboxes waiting for a foreigner to walk by so they can shank them.  I lived in Sinchon, on a hill full of love motels – generally acknowledged to be a slightly sketchy area – and cannot tell you the number of times that I stumbled home at 4am, drunk as could be, and generally completely vulnerable to attack.  But I can tell you how many times I was harassed or made to feel threatened by a Korean – zero.  Zero.  Absolutely never.  I do not count the odd drunk dude (or even girl) shouting “Hello!  Hello!” at me – this is harmless and I always understood it to be so.  But I will never forget the first time I actually felt threatened in Korea, and it was the minute I emerged from Exit 1 out of Itaewon subway station, and some foreign dude loitering in front of the Hamilton Hotel leered at me, licked his lips, and made a suggestive motion.  I remember once waiting in front of the Hamilton for 15 minutes – 15 minutes, that’s all – for some friends to arrive, and in that short time-span, not one, but two fucking idiots – both foreign – approached me and harassed me.  The number of times this shit has happened in Itaewon – whether it’s a crowd of rowdy drunk English teachers shouting obscenities at me on the street, soldiers at bars talking to me but staring directly at my chest, etc – is disgraceful and maddening.  I developed a horrible, horrible fear and dislike of Itaewon, and it remains to this day the only place in Korea where I absolutely will not go on my own – and if my friends want to go there, they usually have to wheedle and plead with me to get me to come out.

I already put it out there that my disinclination towards rolling with a crowd of English teachers was based on heuristics, but let me summarize briefly: I don’t like hakwons and I don’t like that the arrogance and “guest mentality” of many English teachers has contributed to a general stereotype of foreigners that many Koreans accept, which in turn makes me and all other foreigners look bad and perpetuates a lot of assumptions any Korean may have about me before they even know me.  Secondly, foreigners in Korea have not helped the situation by proving (to me, anyway) that they are a greater threat to me than are Koreans.  Of the number of (civilian) foreigners living and working in Korea, probably a grand majority are English teachers.  This all boils down to me generally feeling distaste whenever the subject of English teachers is brought up.

Do I, then, hate English teachers?  No, but not enough English teachers have proved to me that my heuristic assumptions are horribly off the mark – and so I’m generally wary of them.  If some of them would start challenging my preconceived notions about English teachers, their motivations, and their understanding of their position in Korean society, then I would respond in kind and adjust my horrible attitude.  But as of yet, very few people have managed to do that.

To speak directly to the commenter who inspired this blog post, I hope that you are not discouraged by my words, but encouraged – as I have been by seeing your efforts in Korean.  I won’t pretend that you were wrong by saying that I don’t particularly like English teachers, but I also won’t pretend that people like you have the potential to change my – and Koreans’ – opinions about foreigners in their country.  I sincerely wish you the best of luck, and thank you for reading.

 

친하지말자

My Korean class is kind of a disaster schedule-wise.  The like, five people who are interested in taking the class have not one single 2-hour scheduling block in common with each other, and thus we’ve had to shift class from T/Th 2-4 to a ridiculous schedule of Tues 8:30-10 (IN THE MORNING) and Thurs 8:30-10 and again from 3-4.  Obviously, I could expend an extraordinary number of words whining about bureaucratic nonsense and how this scenario would be completely unimaginable if one was dealing with any other subject but Korean language, but I won’t (although you know I’m right – no student in his or her right mind would dare try this “accommodate me, I have a scheduling conflict and I only want to take this class because I’m Korean and it’s an easy A” shit with a  Chinese professor).

Originally, it looked as though we’d be able to have afternoon class, until some stinking Korean American freshman with an enormous backpack decided at the eleventh hour that she wanted to enroll, ruining it for the rest of us.  I already had a secret vendetta against her before she even walked in the door, but I decided to try to be nice and make conversation anyway – I mean, we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other, so we should be friends.

While packing up our bags after class, I said, “I’m really excited – tickets for SM Town Live go on sale tomorrow!”

“Oh,” she said, “is that a band?”

You know what?  We’re not going to be friends.