A few weeks after arriving in Korea, I was accused of being a sex maniac and a tempter because I was having a conversation with a female Korean bartender, who was explaining the names of the various bar snacks to me.

Which says a lot about the idiot who was saying that to me, much more than it says about me. Most human societies are obsessed with sex in some way. North American society is sex-obsessed in a way that it’s kind of unspeakable, but visibly everpresent. I find in Korea, it’s more invisibly everpresent. Euphemism covers up for overt sexual displays. You can’t kiss on the street, but a huge chunk of the economy is still, even now, tied up with the sex trade.

As a result, I find that Korean society is sex-obsessed in the same way (some?) parents of teenagers are sex-obsessed. All such parents seem to think about is their kids having sex — they think about it more than the teenagers themselves do, at least until teenagers get interested in that. There’s a lot of worry about what kind of sex is being had by whom, where, in what circumstances, and frankly, there’s a lot of worry about miscegenation. In Korean society, race matters in every area of life, so it’s bound to matter more when it comes to such a touchy subject (!) as sexuality.

When you’re brainwashed to think that race, on a moral level, signifies more than the arbitrary genetic pool you happened to be born into — and there are people everywhere who think that way — then you’re bound to worry about miscegenation. The fact that race-consciousness brainwashing has long been a part of the primary school system here, and is a basic element of culture, means it’s going to be even more widespread. We don’t brainwash people in, say, Canadian public schools to think this way, and we still have a racist problem. How much bigger a problem do you get when you have a school system convincing the young and impressionable that race means so much and is so important?

But you can’t worry about miscegenation unless you’re also a misogynist. You can’t worry that some woman of your race is led astray by a man of another race unless you assume she’s a vulnerable, gullible idiot. People who respect women are much less capable of worrying about miscegenation. It’s a simple, sensible fact.

And here’s my thought: if Korean society integrated respect for women more in general, the issue of the sex going on between individual Korean women and foreigners would be of no interest at all, except perhaps vague passing curiosity of the universal kind.

Which is not to say they’d not care about foreigner teachers and younger females, but really, Michael’s post pretty firmly points out why that is in fact a non-issue. I’ve never even heard of anything between a foreigner and an underage school girl. Really, the films about adult men fetishizing over teenaged girls are coming out of Korea, not Hollywood; this does betray something about the society in which such films succeed. Personally, I find such plots disturbing.

In any case, my disjointed rambling aside, Michael’s post is worth reading. Go for it!

UPDATED: I’ve clarified a few of my thoughts, and I’m hoping this is more sensible and clear for the effort.

If I had more time, I would grab some audio and post it. Maybe tomorrow. They’ve been practicing for hours every evening and I’m sure they won’t suddenly stop tomorrow.

I’m not complaining, by the way. I can always put music on, and it basically drowns it all out. But it is quite amazing how singlemindedly dedicated the practice regimens can be. I imagine this particular ensemble is practicing specifically for some event or other. The odd time, when practice sessions intrude on a headache, I mind; but usually, it’s no big deal to me.

Well, it turned out to be a cappella music concert. You know, where vocal groups sing without instrumental accompaniment (aside from a little beatbox work by some of the guys in the ensembles, and that’s still not really instrumental). Now, it may seem strange to those of you who think of groups like Boyz 2 Men when you hear mention of a cappella music, and I know that there is a long, long tradition in African-American music of singing unaccompanied — but this wasn’t that kind of a cappella music. The closest these kids got to anything not white was the very suburban “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.

Suburban was really the word of the evening. I’d say about 60% of the songs were in English, and were either old jazz or contemporary pop, by which I mean white popstars’ songs. For those of you who were at all involved in music in high school, you will remember your vocal jazz choir often performed a mix of jazz standards and vocal arrangements of contemporary pop songs. This was like that.

Which made me wonder why it always seems to be the white-American-suburban culture that makes inroads here. I don’t see why singing in the style of Manhattan Transfer would be more of an appeal than, say, singing in the style of Boyz 2 Men or Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Especially the latter seems to have a kind of power to it that manages to blend all kinds of emotions, where groups like Manhattan Transfer have always seemed to me the epitome of the “vocal jazz ensemble” genre — that the songs must be relatively innocuous and inconsequential. To be honest, I always found the whole genre to be rather shallow and, well, somewhat pointless, beside the point of smiling pretty, bobbing to the beat in a group, and making nice little harmonies that don’t add up to much effect. Disposable music as a genre, I suppose.

But this isn’t a criticism of the kids’ singing. They very obviously worked hard for a long time, and they did well. And actually, I did get a few chills down my spine, believe it or not. I think I finally really understand how some of the Broadway songwriters were geniuses… because so many of their little throwaway songs are so innocuous, so inane, and yet they express the poignancy and commonness of so many human emotions that we so often try to hide or keep inside ourselves. And I think that’s what is missing in a lot of the other stuff — the modern popsong arrangements especially. And I think that in all of my serious writing, my attempts at satire have failed mostly because I’ve never been able to pull off that kind of poignant honesty in a way that doesn’t teeter over into fromage.

Anyway, as for my student, I happily got to see her perform in two songs before I had to dash off to class. She even had a short solo, and she performed it admirably, even if I could still see her shyness. Good for her, doubly so when she’s so self-conscious. Very nice kid. I always enjoy seeing my students when they’re outside of my classroom and, in some way or other, in their own element.

Hmmmmmm. I wonder if these kids have heard that all-vocal Bjork album.

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot to mention, there was a guest ensemble, who seem to be some kind of pro- or semi-pro Korean a cappella ensemble. Some of their songs reminded me of Manhattan Transfer, but they did do one very striking piece in which the beatbox guys (2 of them) went back and forth between loping bass lines and simulating the sound of traditional Korean percussion instruments, and the singers slipped back and forth between normal voices and voice-sounds approximating pansori vocalists, and the sounds of solo and duo haegum playing mournful melodies from the old days, as it were. The band goes by the name Maytree, and at least one of their CDs is available at YesAsia.

(via Weird is Relative)

But I also ran into a wall because, well, frankly, I am a foreign white male teacher.

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There’s the student who thought that an assignment I gave the class, in which I said, “Write a recipe,” meant “Go and copy a recipe from the internet, alter it slightly, don’t append any indication of the source, and hand it in with your name on it.” Yeah, because, you know, having people write up a list of ingredients and cooking method in-class, using classtime, is really just a warmup to the much more difficult task of select-all, control-c, control-v. This student also has been frantic to contact me and make sure that there’s not been any serious misunderstanding. I replied that I would try not to hold it against the student, but that the explanation given was flimsy and that the F for the (essentially, in the grand scheme, irrelevant) assignment was non-negotiable.

There’s the student who managed to score a second F in a week, and to really piss me off by claiming he hadn’t ever plagiarised before, and that he hadn’t done it in any other class at the University. This, after he’d handed in two completely plagiarised assignments from two completely different classes.

There’s the other guy who left his cheat sheet on the floor of the class, at the back of the room. I just happened to stumble upon it, and noticed that the text on it was almost exactly the same as what he’d written in his exam. I asked him to be honest, and not be scared. He admitted that he had kept his practice-essays in his dictionary case, and when he took out his dictionary to check spellings, he saw the sheet and gave in to his self-doubt and cheated. I thanked him for his honesty, gave him and F, and told him that if he did it again he’d be out of the class. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that — I feel like I should have found out whether I could eject him from class summarily, on the basis of exam-cheating. (I kind of doubt it’s common practice, though, and I am not sure I want to start doing it if nobody else does it.)

And finally, there’s the student who for some reason decided to plagiarise several lines on skin care in the season of the Yellow Dust from China and stick them, word-for-word, into an in-class exam. Bang! F. That’s 20 minutes work you’ve spared me; thanks, kiddo. Cheaters don’t get comments on their writing: they get printed webpage sources and a red F on the front.

Now: how to deal with cheating in general? I’ve been thinking, and this thinking has, interestingly, been fueled by the comments many students chose to make about cheating on exams. The topic was one of the choices available in my best writing class, and about half of the students actually wrote railing exposes on department-mates or the student population in general: cheating methods, addiction to cheating, the bad effects of cheating, and instructional how-to essays on how to wean yourself off a cheat-sheet dependency. (One student went in the opposite direction and wrote a mournful lament on his own foolishness and guilt for having cheated on an exam just the day before he wrote my exam. His plea was temporary insanity.) My students’ most interesting observation was on the “economics” of cheating. They pointed out that the commonness of cheating among their classmates is what convinces so many otherwise good, trustworthy, and sincere students to stoop to cheating.

I think, finally, that next semester I’m going to warn students at the beginning of semester, and before the first major project, that any plagiarism will be publicly disclosed to the class. I want them to recognize that they’re screwing over not just themselves, and the system, and insulting the teacher, but actively trying to screw over their classmates when they do this crap. If the risk of embarrassment isn’t enough to scare them off cheating, then maybe the real embarrassment from getting caught once and having the whole class know about it will turn them off cheating. But I would never do something like that if it weren’t announced form the beginning of semester, as part of the “contract” of the course.

The interesting thing is how diverse the views were on certain topics, such as the Yellow Dust phenomenon, and how shockingly homogenous the arguments were about a topic like Dog Soup. Given the fact that around 50% of Koreans don’t eat dog, and a significant number of that group also disapprove of it being practiced by others, I would have expected at least one essay that was a simple, funny explanation that, “Hey, I might be Korean, but I don’t eat dog.” Nope. I found that almost every essay on the topic seemed to follow something close to the same train of thought. And given that there was so much homogeneity in the argument, I began to get the sense that someone on the faculty is teaching a very clear, direct, and specific argument with regards to this subject; I saw it unfold too many times this evening not to believe that someone recently lectured on this subject. That, or there’s been some kind of move in education or the media recently to promote a specific argument in the defense of dog-eating, because the specific argument was almost universal, even among students who I am 100% did not prepare together for the exam.

The gist of it was as follows: it began with a simple and straightforward assertion that not all Koreans like dogs. Some people then moved on to the question of whether dogs are slaughtered brutally or not. Most of the time, they asserted that, yeah, dogs may be slaughtered in inhumane ways, but then again, describe bullfighting or your average chicken farm without using the word “inhumane” and you’re a liar. One girl, though, claimed that nobody ever slaughters dogs inhumanely, and I took the risk of responding to her that, despite the fact I actually enjoy dog soup when I (these days only very occasionally) have it, I don’t believe her claim that dogs aren’t slaughtered in inhumane ways — because I know people who’ve actually seen it themselves, and not just once.

How did the argument proceed from there? Let’s see… ah, yes. Culture is relative, anyway. We cannot judge a culture as good or bad, or a cultural practice as good or bad. I responded to some statements to this effect that it was perhaps an overtstatement of the fact that some cultural differences are not a matter of good or bad, but just difference. For one student — the same one who claimed dogs aren’t slaughtered inhumanely — I responded that I suspected we could probably find some cultural practices in cultures foreign to both of us which we would agree were wrong; such as cannibalism, perhaps, or witch-burning.

There were two shocks. One was when a student, who of course shall remain nameless, ended a beautiful if somewhat logically shaky tirade on the subject of dog meat soup with the prediction, “Korea will not remain separate.” She’d just been explaining how people from outside Korea ought not to just, but to respect foreign culture — something that I agree with, to the degree that respect is warranted — I refuse to respect a witch-burning society in withc-burning mode, or a colonizing society’s colonizing mode, or whatever — and then she ended with a brief, and to me completely opaque, pronouncement on the necessity of reunification of Korea.

I sat staring at the page, dumbfounded. I had no idea what to respond to that, except, “I’m sorry, but I see no connection between this and the essay that came before it. Could you explain?” Was it just a kind of reflexive regurgitation of some other hammered-away-at lesson of yore that flopped out onto the page on the tail of the well-rehearsed argument about Dog Soup? Was there some kind of cryptic Utopian idealism founded on the mistaken idea that, if only the rest of the world respected Korea, then North and South would finally reunify? I have no idea.

(And, of course, the other essay that this same young woman wrote was a brilliant environmentalist piece that didn’t rant, but read almost like an occasionally clumsy, brokenhearted dirge to the planet on its deathbed.)

There was one other thing that came up; it was the caricatured foreigner. This was something that was hard for me to read. It was not a universal figure, thank goodness; several students wrote wonderful essays on racism and their own experience of it, their own feelings about racism in Korean society, a notion that only a generation ago probably wouldn’t have been clearly parseable to most people here, I think. One guy wrote an essay warning his classmates not to assume that the only racism in the world existed in Western countries, and discussed his own sense of racism in Korea. But there was that caricature in some students’ essays; it would pop up sometimes as a mad Frenchwoman (maybe it was Brigitte Bardot, but nobody named her directly, unlike students a half a decade older than they are, who normally remember the identity of the Frenchwoman who made pronouncements about the barbarity of Korean dog-eating). At other times, it was a more generalized kind of “the outside world”. One student claimed that Korean dog-eating is a hot topic abroad. I responded, “I hate to burst your bubble, but most people outside Korea, even if they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of dog-eating, don’t discuss Korean’s dietary habits as a ‘hot topic’. Most people don’t care about what people on the other side of the world are eating.”

All I can say is that I hope the fact that I noted that I in fact have eaten dog and don’t have a problem with dog consumption helps some of the people to whose essays I responded honestly see that I’m not a judgmental foreigner looking down on them, but rather a serious teacher trying to probe at the received argument that they’re offering to see just how strong and valid it actually is. But once again, I am aware of just how weighted and freighted the issue of race sometimes is in my life, by necessity. My questioning the form of these arguments as a white foreign man is completely different from the significance that would arise if a Korean professor questioned them, at least I suspect that’s the case for the majority of my students.

And that reminds me of some thoughts about that novel concept “Poppy”, of which I have drafted the first fifty pages or so, and a small installment of which I plan on working on at Clarion West this summer (in a form that will make it at once a workable installment and a saleable short story, if possible), and about the limitations of using a white male protagonist in a story that deals head-on with race and the political ramifications of race. But more about that tomorrow, once I’ve actually finished my marking and am free to read, relax a little, and do some more story prep.

The other night I had a horrifying dream that I was in a hot apartment, and sleeping, and awoke to see a huge — I’d say four-foot legspan, tip-to-tip — spider descending on a thick line from the ceiling. No possible way it could have gotten into this room that I was dreaming, but I yelped in horror and it ascended and escaped. Then, in dream-time, what felt like about twenty minutes later, another spider descended. This one was furry and striped black and white, and I tried to kill it with a big wooden box. I hit it, but I couldn’t kill it. It had come kind of hard carapce under the fur. It was downright horrifying, and I woke with a start.

I think it’s the marking that gave me this dream.

Some student writing is wonderful. You want to go to the student and personally say, “Thank you for sharing your wonderful ideas. You have renewed my faith in the ability for young people of your generation to actually think critically and say something worthwhile. I salute you.” There are students for whom all you can do is print out the websites they plagiarized from and shae your head sternly at them. And then there are the many in between, who write, well, passably well, but not in any way that inspires you. Of course, you still have to give them worthwhile feedback, and you still have to read everything they write.

I have finished the marking for one of my two exams, plus a stack of essays. I have another stack of essays, another set of exams already-written, plus a big pile of recipes from two classes of students. The recipes are exercises in using two types of lists… lists of items (ingredients) and lists of sequence in a process (the instructions for the recipe). Tomorrow evening, another pile of exams will come to me, and then the next morning, yet another pile. Luckily, in my Public Speaking class, there are no written exams, so that will be the end of the incoming work for the week. My writing classes for the rest of the week will have fun, and in my Media English class, I’ll be refocusing the course to give students more control over what media we watch, and more responsibility for finding ways of presenting it. (I think Tuesdays, each week, a pair of partners will present on some piece of media — an article, a TV show, a pop song, or whatever they choose. Thursdays I’ll be responsible for the class, and I’ll have a few backup exercises for the Tuesdays, in case some pair of students shirk their duty.)

Anyway, the muttering sound out behind the stack of papers covered in red ink? That’s me.

Muttering. I was muttering last night, too. Lime was working a 24-hour shift in the ER, and I decided to bring her some coffee. I did this after picking up some groceries, and I had a horridly heavy backpack plus a plastic bag. After we met briefly and I have her the coffee, I went to find a cab. Now, normally I can catch a cab right in front of the hospital, but at night they’re much rarer, so I made my way down to the street out in front of the hospital.

I swear I waited and waited. A bunch of schoolgirls came and stole a cab half a block down, acting as if they didn’t realize I was waiting for one. Then as a cab pulled up to me, a gang of housewives tried to push past me to make their way in. (This incosiderateness is something I’m rather used to now, but it still grates on me. How can people so easily ignore others?) Having had quite enough of waiting and waiting, I ignored them and put my bags in the cab, and sat down. I told the cab driver my destination and he informed me that this was in “the other direction”.

“Okay,” I said, “Sorry. I didn’t know which way it was. Just go ahead, ok?”

“But you need to catch a cab on the other side of the street,” he says.

“What?” Here I am, looking out the window at this pack of impolite housewives, glancing at my huge and heavy bags of groceries, and thinking, Surely you can do a U-turn on this empty street, man. “Just go ahead, it’s okay,” I say. “Please.”

“No, you need to catch a cab on the other side of the street. You need to go over there now.”

“I need to what?”

“Go to that side of the street,” he says, apologetically.

It doesn’t make sense. The drive would have been maybe five minutes for him. The street was not so big that he would be likely caught for doing a U-Turn. And I wish I could say that the only explanation I could think of was that the housewives looked like a more lucrative fare, but, in fact, I’ve had this happen before. Small, empty road and a long wait; catch a cab; driver informs you that you caught a cab on the wrong side of the road, and you have to get out and cross the street and catch a different cab.

What is with this? It’s one of the most infuriating things I’ve encountered in taxicabs in Korea. Worse than the rare smoking cabbies, or the cabbies who try to preach at you without the benefit of a word of English. Why can they not just turn around for a short drive? What’s the deal? I mean, if a cabbie’s willing to drive from Seoul to Bucheon, as the one I rode with on Friday night was, then why not the 15 blocks to my home?

And the cabbie on Friday, by the way, he was totally from the year 2035. He was sci-fi embodied, man. He didn’t know the destination, so he called some service, and then mounted his cell phone on the dashboard. It asked him where he was going, he responded verbally, and then his damned phone guided him. It tracked him by GPS and told him when turns were coming up, and when to take them. This little arrow and a distance meter gauged how far to the turn, too. It was almost as good as the cab driving itself, really. Amazing.

And it’s only then that he realizes body language isn’t going to suffice — you’d think he might have considered that before the wedding! — and goes off back to Korea to add her to the faily register so she can get a visa.

Now, if you’re me, you’re thinking, “Aha! Mail Order Brides are basically just cheap labour. Buy a wife, and she has to not only sleep with you and raise your kids but also do just about any other work you give her, since for her it represents an escape from ginding poverty.She’ll be dependent on him for a residency visa, and likely have few if any connections with a community she can’t communicate with and who, likely, will perpetually view her as an outsider anyway. This labour will be unpaid, of course — many wives’ labour is, yes, but the difference is that most waives, I would hope, are not married in order to provide labour. While it seems ironic that he’s jobless, perhaps it isn’t: buying a bride you never have to pay, whom you only have to clothe and feed, is going to be much cheaper in the long run than hiring a care service provider to help your mother.

And that’s when it hits me why the Mail Order Bride business is such a booming one: it’s because I think, as conservative as many of them are, the fact is that most Korean women probably wouldn’t enter into this kind of a nuptial situation willingly.

The answer to increasingly liberal social values and demands among women is, on some mens’ part anyway, a seeking-out of women from societies that remain comfortably conservative compared to modern Korea; there’s the added advantage that these women will live in isolation, in dependency, and will not realistically be able to remain in Korea after a breakup, but also realistically will not be able to return to life in their homelands unchanged. They seem, to me, well-and-truly stuck, and it’s sad.

But more important for Korea in the future will be the half-Korean offspring. The mixed-race issue has been a big one for a while, and has been gaining interest among young people for a while. My students were writing about for some time before Hines Ward visited, and rightfully so: Korea is going to have to come to terms with the fact that Korean nationality and fullblooded Koreanness are already well on the way to becoming two distinct things in the space of a generation. I do hope they go the way of acceptance, and not the way of the kind of veiled exclusionism I saw in Germans who all agreed that the Vietnamese-German among them — who’d grown up in Germany the same as them — was not “really” German.

I’m not going to get into my opinions of the specific case, but just say that I’ve been frustrated with the kind of thinking that runs behind this. Young guys, mostly, who like to think themselves political, strong, militant, and so they get all vocal about racial issues without thinking, without reasoning, without seeing that what they themselves have adopted is racism.

I think people have a right to be angry, of course, but I also think that when one oversteps the boundaries of proportion, anger becomes self-caricature. When anger blinds one to context — leading one to use Asian-American political references when discussing a wholly other context, like life in an Asian country — one has given up on something crucial to useful political thought: rigorousness. This is the equivalent of giving up mathematics and just focusing on the science… it cannot be done with the expectation that anything worthwhile will be produced.

This is one of the reasons I skim, at best, the comment sections of most Korea-related blogs these days. Marmot’s, Asia Pages, and so bring me to mind of the book I’m reading these days, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which has what looks like it’s going to turn into a pretty damning critique of ideological purity, of unrigorous rhetoric, and the rest. For the book isn’t only about the Black Experience in America, like some people have suggested to me: it’s about a particular kind of political awakening, yes, one in a specifically black-American mid-twentieth-century context, yes; but that’s not all one should see in the book.

When I see young white guys ignorantly disparaging this country which has given them better-paying jobs than they’ll ever get back home, I feel angry. They don’t really know what racism is, not really; racism would be more like the social isolation of living as a white in Korea, PLUS poverty… the lack of the relatively decent jobs they came here for in the first place. That would give them a better picture of racism. Yes, there is a carefulness that more intelligent whites cultivate when living in Korea, a guardedness and a secrecy that becomes necessary in the face of occasionally rapid, rabid, and hypocritcal judgment. But I have never heard of a white person in Korea living in conditions like those of the people in the rude old houses we see near the beginning of Invisible Man. The society of White-Expats-in-Korea isn’t as warped as what we see through the narrator’s eyes of Bledsoe and the Trustees. I’ve never had to fight in a battle royale to get an education, and I think I wouldn’t even if I enrolled in school here now.

However, when I see young Asian-Americans who are pretending to critique racism, and at the same time spewing racist filth like there’s no tomorrow, then I am put into mind of the black “Brothers” in the Brotherhood who, sadly, fail to grasp that they’re contradicting themselves by kowtowing to the white Brothers in order to ensure equality later on down the line. Not thinking things through, replicating racism for racism, letting such a negative reaction to perceived racism determine so much of a person’s point of view… it’s sad. It’s sad because, frankly, I don’t think Asian Americans have it all that bad compared to several other groups in America — blacks, Mexican and Latin American immigrants in general, and Native Americans all seem to have a much shorter end of the stick. Whining about racial politics in mainstream media seems a lot more futile when you think about the people on Cree reservations who don’t have indoor plumbing, or the gays who get lynched — yes, let’s use that word, lynched — on the streets.

It’s all so saddening, and it makes me skip comment sections all the more readily. More time for me to finish this book. (And I should note, I haven’t yet finished the novel. I may have a different opinion of the relationship between it and the other stuff I discussed above once I read the end. But it’s an excellent, excellent book so far…)

And don’t forget, white people have it relatively good as far as minorities in Korea. But I still relate to this post.

sigh

This is one of those inconsiderate idiots I rant about from time to time, the kind of person who walks around as if nobody else in the world even exists. She took her dog onto the subway and when I crapped on the floor, she didn’t make a move to clean it up; instead, she apparently acted as if nothing was amiss.

Annoyed passengers gawked, and someone took a picture of this disgrace a camera-phone and uploaded it to the net asking if anyone recognized her. Of course, someone did, and posted her name, and the insults began.

Now, up to this point, I am totally unsympathetic to her. Honestly, it’d be better if someone had told her off in person; but the way Korea works, you cannot do that: people don’t get told off in public, unless they’re really monstrously nasty. So I can understand why someone would have exasperatedly gone and taken the picture and posted it. This allows a mass number of people to chastise the Dog Poop Girl instead of one having to do it alone on that subway train, and be “different”. As Lime pointed out to me once again, “different” can have such a bad connotation in Korean that being called “unique” can annoy or even disturb a child.

But what followed, it’s a bit scary. People didn’t just ask for her name, they asked for more. Information about her family, her address, her life. They didn’t stop with public ridicule. They revelled in the public destruction of her reputation. Here’s where I begin to wonder if it might be a bit much. I mean, I don’t know: there are people I know whom I think deserve this kind of treatment, believe me, and you know, being as inconsiderate as she was, maybe this girl is one of those people.

Or maybe she was downright mortified at her dog’s mishap and, lacking a packet of tissues, she just acted as if she hadn’t noticed. People have told me stories of events like this, where they have faked conditions of ignorance because of their absolute mortification — recently, one student told a story in class about how she faked passing out on a train, and kept faking it till a nice man took her to a hospital and a nurse was about to inject her with something.

I don’t know. The Netizens don’t know. Only Dog Poop Girl knows. What scares me is that these are the same netizens who a year ago voted in favor of nationalist nanny-state censorship in the form of the Ministry of Internet Communications. There’s a reason that the title of the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds brings a smirk to the face of the educated person: it’s because we know that, yeah, crowds can be popularly deluded and downright mad. Given the degree of the reaction, and the degree of shame this girl has accrued — she’s apparently dropped out of school, though, depending on the University she was attending, that might be good for her and her family — I have to say the backlash was unfortunately too severe.

But I’m not with those who think such backlashes are inherently bad. One of the main complaints foreigners in Korea make is that tons of people act in inconsiderate ways. When they express that complaint to Koreans, they privately commiserate, and often share their own similar frustration. A means of shaming those who behave badly isn’t such a bad thing in a society where so many people act without consideration of others, and I cannot imagine that, on a social scale, the outcome would be all negative, but rather, if it were to successfully shame enough people to a reasonable degree, it might achieve some more consideration in public; but what’s needed is some kind of limitation on the degree of damage that can be done. Someone shouldn’t be shamed into quitting work or school for being a minor jerk like Dog Poop Girl. On the other hand, teachers caught on video beating students in class should get more than a slap on the wrist — they should be unable to ever work in their field again, and I think they deserve some commensurate jail time, too.

The problem is, how to guage the right degree of humiliation? And how to organize damage control? Hm. Perhaps a set of classes of offense needs to be outlined, and the appropriate degree of humiliation to be doled out? I’m not sure it’s viable, but… this is an interesting look at the kinds of conceptual problems looming out there in our societies’ futures.

Via A Glimpse of the World.

For one thing, Korean netizens came out shockingly in favour of censorship during the blog ban a few summers ago, despite the fact that censorship violates a civil right that people only a generation before were fighting to wrest from the country’s dictators; personal security doesn’t seem to have been enough of a concern among Korean Internet firms, either, considering the recent news that over 60% of Korean net subscribers’ information has been illegally sold and redistributed.

I am not one of those people who thinks that absolutely everything in Korea is slapped together with chewing gum and a prayer, though some programs here obviously are. But on the other hand, I’m leery at this point of any nation that decides to go ahead and start implementing “smart robot” applications for its military. Anyone who knows anything about AI would be unnerved by the idea, because they know that right now, AI is very dumb. We’re lucky to get AI that can make a proper patty-cake with robot arms.

And what’s scary about that is the notion that the country is “in a hurry” to make real life more like SF. SF is just as full of cautionary tales as it is of celebratory visions of the future. There is as much risk of dystopia and there is of utopia. Koreans’ adoption of the cell phone is one thing — telephones had been around a long time, and that was a long-tested technology when it arrived in Korea. But home robots? Or, scarier, the robots the military is talking about building to guard the DMZ?

As for putting robots in every home by 2010: uh, yeah, good luck. Functional, interactive robots? That understand speech input? And perform tasks safely? Gooood luck.

And as for robots teaching English — haha. Show me a computer that teaches better than a person. To teach, one must understand the students’ thinking processes and the problems a particular student is having with particular materials. Robots won’t be well equipped to do that till they have something that emulates human consciousness enough to model the minds and thinking processes of students — which I guess will probably be a big part of building AI consciousness, and which I guess is still all a long, long way away.

Make no mistake — robots will probably soon be able to do what the village hunjang used to do: make kids recite stock phrases from memory over and over. And after years of that, some bewildered parents will wonder why their kids still can’t speak English. Language acquisition is not a solitary activity: you need other people, and you need to use the language in some way, not just recite the stock phrases.

So until robots have AI or telepresence connections to human operators, don’t bank on them displacing the military or the armies of English teachers — Korean and foreign alike — in Korea. That’s not science-fiction, it’s science fantasy.

Hm. I think I may write up a letter to the Choson Ilbo and even work with someone to translate it, as spreading about pipe dreams really cannot do anyone much good.

Then I was allowed to apply at another place, and told I would be getting a card, and then I was told at the last minute that, oh, no, sorry, we can’t give you one and we can’t tell you why either.

But then a friend of mine told me I could get one easily through Korea Exchange Bank — that they have them set up exactly for people like me, working here but from another country. Easy, I was told. No problem, I was told.

And if I’d applied a few weeks ago there, I would probably have that card by now. But I just got a call explaining that, as the representative put it, “Some foreign professors got a card and then left the country without paying it off, and so this other team within our organization changed the regulations so that only people on multiple-year contracts can have a card. It’s a stupid regulation, and my team is working on getting it changed again, but right now we can’t issue you a card.”

Now, the guy was very nice, and I appreciated him calling to explain, as well as the fact he gave me is direct number and asked me to call a month from now to see whether they’d gotten the regulation changed. But I was really annoyed, at the same time. In a country with as high a credit-card defaulting level as this one, where homeless people have credit cards and a massive number of people have ridiculous credit card debt, I would be very surprised if the average rate of unpaid credit-card debt of foreigners, on a ratio basis, even approached that of the average rate of unpaid credit-card debt for Korean citizens. It seems to me this wouldn’t even be considered, though: it’s as if, “Oh, some more foreigners didn’t pay their credit cards off, let’s ban them for all new foreigner applicants.” But it’s not the same when, say, a few construction workers, or unemployed housewives default on their credit card payments. No, then it’s just, “Oh, boy. We have a problem! Um, want another credit card? And by the way, your unemployed college student offspring can have one too, if you like, in your name!”

I am at the point where it’s no longer insulting, though. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I see through the personal insult that so many see in it, to the point that it’s just a symptom of a narrowminded society. I’ve chosen to live in that narrowminded society, to deal with that as part of my daily life, so as a grownup the only thing I can do is either find a way around it, or just accept it.

Ah well, there’s still Samsung to approach — several people I know have gotten cards via Samsung — and if that fails, Lime was talking about issuing a card to me under her name, since she has a card. Ad it’s not that I can’t get access to a credit card now, since she has one, but it’s more a desire to be responsible for the payment and for my own spending and so on… I don’t want always to have to depend on her to pay things for me, even if I always pay her back. That’s the same reason I don’t want to have her as a guarantor for a card issued to me, or to have to make all my phone account arrangements through someone else. The phone, at least, was doable, though almost everyone I asked spouted their personal, ignorant opinion that it wasn’t. Maybe the card will be doable, too, soon, or elsewhere.

In the meantime, I am astonished at how much patience I have for crap like this. Much more than I used to even a year ago.

Well, I finally got Synaptic Package Manager working. I have no idea how, but my hostname was erased from my hostname and hosts file, I think as part of the process that installed the otherwise wonderful EasyUbuntu package that fixed endless numbers of problems with my installation. Well, from the root directory I managed to edit the files and add in the missing info, as per advice I found on the forums.

There’s a sense in which using Linux is somewhat like being a pioneer on the prairie. It’s like roughing it on the electronic bush, or at least that’s the impression I get. Not that I’m roughing it with Ubuntu. For the most part, I still know very very little about Linux, but the little bit of work I’ve had to do at the command line to get this thng running properly has really driven home how really, I don’t know, piecemeal the whole thing is. It’s like the very old days, where you had to, you know, rip out of a piece of wall to put in a newfangled gas pipe, and then another piece of wall for the newfangled indoor plumbing. When these new things start behaving strangely, you can’t just sort of guess what’s wrong with them… you have to ride into town and consult with other people t see what the heck it might be. And it is might be, mind: whatever problems you’re experiencing may well express similar symptoms to others’, but be rooted in a rather different problem. So you ride back out of town, and check the septic tank, but it’s okay. You go back into town, someone says it’s mice in the walls, so you go home and check that, and it’s not mice, it’s a disconnected pipe. So you fix it.

And then something else starts creaking.

I’m not complaining, though. It may sound like I am, but I’m not. It’s kind of fun, actually, and I get now, a little bit, why Neal Stephenson was so emphatic about it in that (by his own description) dated essay of his, “In the Beginning was the Command Line”. You feel like you have your own hands in the guts of the computation you’re doing, as if you’re intervening directly in the processes by which your computer does what, if you stop and think about it for a moment, are some pretty amazing tasks. You can personalize, customize, and alter all kinds of things, as long as you’re willing to go back and fix the messes you create for yourself.

Granted, this is something that’s not going to be popular among any majority, and Koreans are no exception. The reason I think Ubuntu won’t catch on in Korea isn’t that I think more Koreans would prefer to have all the settings created for them, though I find that in general Korean internet communities very, very comfortable with just using web services with very little customization available. There’s a level on which I can even appreciate that, whether I encounter it in Korea or elsewhere: after all, if the content is the most important thing, who cares about layout?

Well, you see, I do. I want layout to be easy, I want to be able to work with it, to change it. Maybe I wont do it for months at a time, but I like to have the freedom.

But that’s not what I think would keep people in Korea from adopting Ubuntu or some other form of Linux as their main OS. It’s not the learning curve, since after all Ubuntu will probably, in a couple of releases, be even easier to install than Windows XP.

What I think will prevent people from switching to Linux here is that nobody else will do it. Now, wait a minute before you get on my case about this, let me explain myself.

A lot of people like to be used to the platform they’re working on. For me, the switch to the Ubuntu desktop was almost no change at all. It’s a GUI, essentially like any other decent GUI, and the change wasn’t a big deal. I had more trouble switching to the Mac GUI, but only because some of the shortcut keys weren’t intuitive for me, that’s all. But I think a lot of people would express annoyance if a PC-Bang switched over to Ubuntu, simply because it’s unfamiliar, and that aura of unfamiliarity would turn people off before they even got started.
Comfort and usefulness for the broadest base of users isn’t just an administrative issue in Korea: it’s an issue of profit. One of the biggest computer industries here is the public-use service provider, the PC-Bang, known in the West as the Internet Cafe. And unfortunately for Ubuntu, most of the use in these places is multi-user gaming, not basic internet and word processing. While Linux is amazingly stable, very smooth, and fast as all get-out, running games programmed for Windows under Win emulation is not only going to be slower, it’s going to be costly, as people will abandon the that PC-Bang for one that runs Windows games in their native environment. So there’s a market incentive not to change, one that doesn’t quite exist in North America right now.
The last problem is standards. Firefox is the main browser in Ubuntu Linux, and while I think it’s wonderful — I get this awfully annoyed feeling whenever I’m in Internet Explorer and forced to open twenty little windows for my various tasks — there is the fact that a lot of people code pages to specifically work in IE; some of those pages, in addition, ONLY work in IE, under Windows. Lime tested out Firefox last night using the Naver page and services, and said that while Firefox in Ubuntu was better than Firefox under Windows — it loaded Naver’s services better — there were still problems with the way it handled the pages. I also noted that some of the feedback Firefox provided was less intuitive for her, though for me it wasn’t quite contra-intuitive (suggesting it was a particular user issue, not a general issue, or else suggesting that I’m a bigger GUI geek than she is). But while I find that a lot of Western service providers try to serve up web pages that work fine in any browser or platform, Korean ones simply tend to assume you’re going to be accessing their pages in IE. There are Flash sequences that don’t work no matter how many times you install a recent version of Flash; these flash sequences are the only way to access certain things. There are pages that load messed up, or don’t let you follow links, or that load with important links not displayed.

Perhaps I just haven’t optimised the way my installation of Ubuntu handles webpages, but I have a feeling the real issue is standards. These pages apparently work completely fine under IE running in Windows.

If you suddenly require people to emulate Windows to access the websites they care about, and make it harder for them to use the applications they want to run (games designed to run in Windows), you’ve suddenly destroyed most of the usefulness of an OS to that population. And games are a huge part of why computers are so popular in Korea, and Korean-specific web services (like Naver’s and Daum’s, which again, seem to work much more smoothly in IE) make up almost the bulk of the remainder of desktop computer use. So while Ubuntu is wonderful and cool to my mind, I can see why it has a very, very long way to go before it will make any inroads among regular users in Korea.

Or, and the real last reason:

While I feel qualms about Windows, about pirating it and having to hack in the update function and all, and I’m not willing to buy it, and consider the fact that Ubuntu is both free and legal

an attraction, I think it’s safe to say that most younger Koreans don’t really make a strong distinction between legally free computer content, and illegally free computer content.

When I mentioned to students in my Media English class last night that I was compiling a list of sites where they could download free, legal English media content, they laughed and some of them repeated the word “legal” to me questioningly… not because they wondered what I meant, but because they wondered why I bothered to make the distinction.

The fact that you don’t have to steal Linux to run it free hardly matters when nobody you know has paid for his or her installation of Windows, either. It could hardly matter less, and sadly, I take this as a confirmation of Professor Lessig’s argument toward the end of Free Culture that if piracy becomes a normative behaviour, a common means of fighting back against increasingly oppressive media conglomerates and their insane crusade to control all content, then all societies involved in that mode of fighting back will emerge with a radically degraded sense of law, justice, and fair use.

To which I, as a content-creator myself, add: the rapacious destruction of fair use by greed conglomerates results in the resultant mutual destruction of concern for fair use by users; but are we naive enough to think that when the conglomerates are finally struck down by the multitudes of Davids and their P2P slings, those Davids will be happy to drop their slings and start paying a fair rate for the content and software that they choose to use?

I don’t think so. And so I think it will be that much harder for the establishment of whatI see as optimal, a cottage-industry of creative-commons content-providers made possible by all that computers open up to us. I think we’ve set that back many years by not electing to steal, instead of forcing the media conglomerates to barter with us, while, after all, we do have the upper hand. We could, after all, refuse to pay unfair rates, and we could just consume other media.

What we need is a major industry to embrace this, and to make money off it, and to be honest and forthcoming about it, for the others to take notice. An industry that isn’t completely tied up in the Western one, an industry that is already taking a loss on the long-term distribution through already-established rampant piracy. Say… Bollywood? (Maybe Ritu could confirm this, I don’t know.)

I am sure that Bollywood could put together a world-download film industry; a year after release, films go to downloadable status. Charge the ruppee equivalent of a buck per film downloaded, one-use-onlys (two bucks more for the right to download again at some point), high quality, and legal. They wouldn’t even have to compete with Hollywood; all they’d have to do was get filthy rich on it, and Hollywood would sit up and take notice. And best of all, they would simply be matching the pirate fees, since pirated DVDs usually cost a buck anyway. And no wasted plastic on the physical DVD, unless the user chose to back up the file. I mean, this is win-win, right?

And yes, I know that a massive number of people who use the pirated films don’t have PCs to download the movies. We don’t need to get everyone, just enough people to cut into the culture of piracy in an exemplary way. And I know that big, long downloads would be jeopardized somewhat with the commonality of powercuts in places like India and surrounding nations where Bollywood films aremost popular, but (a) we’re not just targeting people in India, but people in countries where such powercuts are unheard of, (b) it’d be possible to create an engine that allowed tracked, resumable downloads for those who aren’t able to keep their power running for long once the power cuts, and (c) remember that the rest of the cinema infrastructure is still in place: the big profits in the cinemas would continue, and whatever profits from production of the original for-sale DVDs would still be in place for the first year or so (which, I’d wager, is when the bulk of the profits would be in place). The added advantage to both consumer and seller would be the effect of the Long Tail (see also this Wired article), which made otherwise unavailable content available to potential buyers at a reasonable price on the one hand, and allowed copyright owners to continue to make profits, however relatively small, on content that otherwise would simply be completely unavailable and unprofitable.

Hmmmmm.

And from the comment section of the post where I got the above, this one is sorta funny too. I can’t speak for dating culture in North America, but most of the interiracial couples in Korea are definitely between Korean women and white men, and I think that while it’s not so simple as the video suggests — parental expectations, and the relative expectations of women and men in relationships push the trend massively toward white-man-Korean-woman couples, and away from Korean-man-white-woman couples, and of course the fact that the majority of foreigners are men helps, I also think that in Korea, women are more assertive about relationships than guys; I think a lot of Korean women are pursuing foreign men in a way that Korean men aren’t, for whatever reason, pursuing foreign women.

Linked via Brain Farts.

Hollywood doesn’t trust its audience. It doesn’t trust its audience to understand the standard themes of a future fascist-dystopian story, so it has to spell out every little thing.

Now, I haven’t seen it, yet, as I’ve been too busy, but I’ve been seeing V for Vendetta posters all over the place here. (Actually, over here in Korea, “Bwee po Bwendettuh” — the fact that there’s no V in Korean makes the title funny on a few levels, but someone very cleverly redesigned the V to include the ㅂ(bi-eup) character on at least one of the posters I’ve seen, which matches the way people pronounce V as Bwee here in Korea.)

The thing is, like many very interesting comic books, V for Vendetta has never been translated into Korean… or, so claims one of my students. Maus, you can get in Korean. Superman, yes. But The Watchmen, he said, no. Hellboy, no. V for Vendetta, no. And yet these movies enjoy major theatrical release here. Okay, they also flop in a week because nobody gets it about them, and nobody’s really interested in this stuff.

What’s weird is that enough people still keep showing up at these films that they keep getting theatrical release. I remember seeing the faces of people at the end of Star Wars III: The Phantom Muckup. They weren’t just kickign themselves for wasting cash on that crap, like me: they were perplexed. “Here we are at the end of a trilogy, and the child-hero has just become an evil asthmatic monster. WTF?”

Yes, plenty of people watched the new Star Wars trilogy in complete ignorance of the original Trilogy. I can honestly say I’ve seen the original trilogy for rent exactly once here, and out for purchase exactly once as well. Yet Star Wars films, they were in the theater a LONG time here. People went. They went in droves, even though for the majority of them, the very thinly drawn characters and all didn’t even have the little bit of weight lent by memory of the first trilogy (as it did for most Western viewers).

So I have to wonder if Hollywood is underestimating its audiences, or estimating them quite well. I have this weird feeling that people are, in general, very happy to go to films that cut out the thinking bits of the books they’re based on and replace them with kung-fu. I have a feeling it’s exactly what a lot of people want.

And I have a feeling V himself would be quite anxious about this state of affairs, too. Anyway, I have to see the movie sometime soon; but more urgently, I need to get to class. Off I go!
(UPDATE 24 March 2006): Poking around at the schedules section of CGV Korea’s website, I noticed I’d gotten the Koreanization of the title wrong. Apparently when you Koreanize the letter V, it’s Bwee, but when you Koreanize a word beginning with the sound v, you can just turn it into a B-sound. Actually, this is how people with strong accents pronounce English, so I should perhaps have known it; when I saw it, it made sense. But I forgot about that until now.

By the way, I found a copy of that image I mentioned, the remodeled V into a ㅂ… actually, it’s a 브, and I think it’s quite cleverly done.