So True

Miss Jiwaku and I happened to be around a TV when some woman was talking onscreen about the ridiculously-named Bucheon World Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo going on in Bucheon right now. The woman talking didn’t look Korean (she seemed more Southeast Asian, to me, but I’m told she is Japanese), but she was speaking in Korean.

“Is she Korean?” I asked, just as the camera shifted to some white woman with curly hair who seemed to have worse Korean pronunciation than anyone I’ve heard before, and speaks the language with a tone of voice just like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“No, no,” Miss Jiwaku says. “They’re those fucking stupid idiot TV girls.”

“Ah, Misuda?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s it,” she said, and we changed the channel.

So there you go. Not all Koreans like that crap.

Meanwhile, I’m told there’s good food and okay shows at the abovementioned Cultural Heritage Expo. I’ll be trying to get over there tomorrow evening, if I continue to feel better… a cold hit me hard yesterday, but I’m not so bad now.

And as an update: one reason the show makes them looks so fucking stupid and idiotic is that much of what they say is scripted, as widely discussed. At least one or two have had interesting things to say outside of the context of the show. Or, if not interesting, then not really wrong. I don’t see how anything in the book discussed here is actually controversial… none of it seems like an unrealistic picture of Korea to me! (Maybe a little tin-eared, maybe a little whiney, but does any of it sound wildly wrong, or fabricated? Mice packed into a small space does sound evocative of the subway to me, for example, though I’d go with sardines in a can myself.)

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