It reminded me of a funny thing an ex-student in Beijing told me — this blog is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Not sure exactly which post, though there are probably a few. But it is a compliment, really.

Busy writing my paper, so here’s some other quality content for ya:

• Tony Smith, of the excellent podcast Starship Sofa, has put together an anthology of stories from the first 100 episodes of the podcast. The anthology includes stories by people like Michael Moorcock, Peter Watts, Michael Bishop, Ruth Nestvold, Jeffrey Ford, Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear… and me! You can buy the anthology in a number of POD (print on demand) formats, and/or download a free PDF, and/or view it online for free and donate if you feel thus moved. I got a kick out of all that retro art in it, and I just feel badly posting about it so late! (And discussion here by the folks who put it together!)
• Zombieland trailer. I’m kinda tired of the hyperpopularity of the zombie these days, but this film looks fun just the same.
• Paul Jessup with some good advice for newbie writers (via a twitter from Shawn Scarber).
• Darwin blogging The Voyage of the Beagle. (via Ken MacLeod)
• More Americans believe in UFOs than oppose the kind of health care reforms sought by the Democrats. No, really. As Chris Harris notes, “[i]t speaks volumes about the status of the health care debate among the public when it is more mainstream to believe aliens are flying around in spaceships than to oppose the public option.” Indeed.
• Gogo Star (a Korean indie group):
• 로빈이 토끼란 사실을 알고 있었나 (Did You Know That [a] Robin is [a] Rabbit?):

(How she stays on top of music in Korea is something everyone paying attention is amazed by, considering she’s not actually in Korea. Such is the power of the internet… and strong passions.)

Now, this is going to be delicate. See, there’s such a thing as genre-media-inspired music in the West. It’s called filk, and it generally has a kind of, well, hmmm. It has a reputation, let’s put it that way. One of the most diplomatic SF writers I know, in terms of professional comportment, twisted her face into a mask of horror when she saw some filkers and said, “There’s NO &%*$^#! excuse for filk!!!” or something like that. It was as if it were as offensive as, well, pick your disgusting crime against humanity.

I’m less horrified by the notion of filk, but then, for me it’s mostly an abstract concept at the moment. I haven’t run across much of it. I’m not mostly into so much of the media being drawn upon, and anyway, I’ve only been to two cons in my life. The one time I did hear filk, it was a guy playing the Star Wars theme on an accordion. So I can’t say I’m into it, or hate it. I do kind of cringe at the notion.

So believe me when I say that I was shocked by how very good a number of the tracks on this thing are, considering it’s a Korean Star Wars filk album. Maybe the filk tradition isn’t big in Korea? Given the size of SF fandom here, I wouldn’t expect it to be. And lots of these people sound like people who came to filk after really getting their chops up in music — they learned to play not just to do filk, but to play rock or whatever else they’re playing.

It’s a pretty good album, in my books, with a few tracks that make it worth buying. The standout song for me at the moment is a very cute, weird little tune about Yoda and Green tea. Which makes sense because, you know, Yoda’s green.

I’m smiling as I type this.

Here’s a rough translation of the lyrics (with the original pasted under the cut). I’ll just note that the original is trilingual, with the italicized lines in English, and the rest of the English in Korean. The non-English is Japanese phoneticized from the Korean representation of the Japanese. Oh, and there’s a sample available below, I promise! (At the end of the review, the link.)

Green Tea Please

Yoda, with a green face
Really likes to drink green tea
So when he went to Japan,
He went into a tea shop

“Green Tea Please!”
Yoda only spoke English
“How do I order a green tea?”
Shall we learn together?

Rokucha, rokucha: “Green tea, Green tea”!
“Please”: kudasai kudasai!
Rokucha kudasai!
Rokucha kudasai!
“It’s really really delicious”:
Oishi honttoni desseune

Yoda, having tasted this tea,
Went off to live in Japan;
Went to a tea shop in Osaka
And sat there everyday!
“Green Tea Please!”:
Rokucha kudasai
“It’s really really delicious”:
Oishi honttoni desseune

Rokucha rokucha: “Green tea, green tea”
“Please”: kudasai kudasai
Rokucha kudasai
Rokucha kudasai
“If I collect 10 stamps [on this club card],
Will I get a cup for free?”

The track itself is as wonderful and innocent as you would imagine for lyrics like that.

And that’s not the only wonderful track on the album. The very next song is a lovesong to Chewbacca, ostensibly from the POV of Han Solo (from what I can tell, anyway, though it’s not exactly “slash”, again, from what I can figure out). There’s another tune which sounds very somewhat like it’s in the old-fashioned Korean karaoke style (as impeccably lampooned by Flight of the Conchords here, though slightly less old-fashioned than that example) which is titled “My Name’s Chewbacca the Galactic Blaster.” There’s a song that fuses traditional pansori style (like this) with guitar blues, and it’s about R2D2.

There’s a also punky song called “I Am Your Father,” another titled something that would translate approximately as “Yoda’s Everyday [Routine]” and a song that I think is about The Dark Side which is titled 끝없는 어두움, which I’ll render as “Endless Darkness.” There’s even a pretty wild appearance by Sato Yukie, Seoul’s leading avantgarde crazymusic guru, who contributed a wild track titled “Solo Improvisation for Starwars.”

Another song that gets stuck in my head is the one titled “Skywalker” — though I would probably smash the out-of-tune-recorder if I saw the song performed live. But my only complaint other than that recorder is that I didn’t quite get the theme-relatedness of the electronic songs at the end of disc 1. They’re alright, I just didn’t get the link. But over all, it’s quite listenable and quite K-indie-sounding, really, a bit eclectic and weird and quirky and fun. And if you listen to the lyrics and get much at all, it’s even weirder and more fun, even when the links are quite tenuous. Maybe even more when they’re tenuous, like with the Green Tea Please song…

If you’re hooked already, order the album here (among probably other places, though unfortunately I can’t find any sign of it on the sites where I assume people outside Korean usually buy K-indie, like MrKwang’s or Yesasia.com). If anyone out of country is desperate for a copy, let me know and I’ll try harder to find a place where you can order it. (Though if you don’t speak enough Korean to find it yourself, you may not get much out of it anyway!)

But if you would like to sample the complete album, it’s available in a javascript thingie on this page, a plugin for which I can’t seem to copy and paste the code here, so go there and try out those tunes. Just click on the blue jukeboxy widget thing in the middle of the post and it’ll pop open to reveal a listing of every track on the 2-disc album. The Yoda song with the lyrics above is the first track on the second CD, so the one marked 1. after 14 previous tracks (right after the track titled “krasch dance”).

Below the cut, the original Korean (/English/Japanese) lyrics for “Rokucha Kudasai.”

Now, those lyrics in the original to the Green Tea song, which I snagged from here:

이랑&진주조개잡이와 사람낚는어부 – 로쿠차 구다사이

하나 둘 셋 넷

요다는 녹색얼굴
녹차를 즐겨마셔요
요번에 일본에도 갔다왔어
녹차 전문점에 갔어

그린티 플리즈
요다는 영어밖에 못하는데
녹차를 어떻게 주문하나
함께 배워볼까요

로쿠차로쿠차 녹차녹차
구다사이 구다사이 주세요
로쿠차 구다사이
로쿠차 구다사이
너무너무 맛이 있어요
혼또니 오이시 데쓰네

요다는 그 맛에 반해서
일본에서 살기로했어
오사카에 녹차전문점에 가면
매일매일 앉아있어요
그린티 플리즈
로쿠차 구다사이
너무너무 맛이 있어요
혼또니 오이시 데쓰네

로쿠차로쿠차 녹차녹차
구다사이구다사이 주세요
로쿠차 구다사이
로쿠차 구다사이
도장 열 개 모으면
한 잔은 공짜로 주나요

Oh yeah: this is late notice, y’all, but…

Hwang Shin Hae Band is playing tonight. No idea if there are tickets available but I’ll be there a few hours early, trying to get one! Show’s at 8, and here’s a map to the venue — the Sang Sang Madang live hall…

So anyway — my content free post of…

Shiny Links!

Some stories by people you should know about:

• Tina Connolly’s “Hard Choices” at Brain Harvest (or play the game, made by Kaolin Fire, here)
• Caroline Yaochim’s “Tending the Mori Birds” at Fantasy Magazine
• Maura McHugh’s “The Diet” is available in this issue of Arkham Tales, free for download
• David Simons’ “Second String” at IGMS (but you gotta pay)
• T.F. Davenport’s “Penance” in the Futures column of Nature

Other neat stuff:

• The Snail on the Slope — a Youtube video that feels like a trip into the mind of Stanislaw Lem, sorta. Blogged by Bruce Sterling…
• The Soulless Victorian Dress-Up Doll… reminds me of what Maureen told me about Victorian laundry handling. Nightmarish…
• I’m trying to teach myself to play some basic guitar chords. This is handy, for a start…
• It’s amusing to see that when he can get his mind off pornography, this random Christian guy thinks sex with robots is bad… but he is much less pessimistic about its effect on humanity’s prospects for survival than the atheistic, scientistic, irreverent Charlie Stross, who (if my positronic brain isn’t malfunctioning) quipped somewhere about his novel Saturn’s Children that sex with robots contributed to the extinction of humanity…
• Aussie dust insanity. Now imagine a future clogged with days like this. Still don’t care about climate change?

For Writers:

• Have spacesuit? Will travel for research? Gulliver Travel Grant fast approaching!

Music Stuff

• Another Goddamn Music Blog — reviews and links for free online music
• k-indie: a neat livejournal community for getting the skinny and samples on new indie in Korea, especially useful if you’re not in-country
• The Far Eastern Audio Review. Just what the name suggests.

Korean Media Sugardump:

Yes, this video is utterly syrupy sweet. If you’re inclined to complain about such things (or cutesy amateur spoofmitations) don’t watch it.

If you daren’t risk that, than here’s some 장기하 와 얼굴들 singin’ his Cheap Coffee song, which was a huge thing last semester:

One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few days later — literally, just a few days later — Kim Sang Hoon (the Korean translator) and Dr. Q  (ie. Kim Kyu Hyun) were explaining to me the special sense of the word in a little more detail. It’s not precisely geekiness, but rather a kind of overtly childish mode of behaviour that at once comes across as vaguely put-on or conscious but also endearing. At least, that’s what I got from it. Dr. Q said he thought it should become a regular word in English, since Americans do it all the time — and he’d know better than me, he lives in the States. Sang Hoon Kim specifically mentioned the website of a famous Korean genre author and the discussion boards there in relation to being behaving like a 지찔이.

Anyway, there are tons of examples of this, but I’ll just recount one more that is pretty surprising: 오크. At least, I think this is how it is spelled. The word is the Koreanization of “orc,” a word Iimagine was, for most Koreans aside from online gamers and dedicated fans of fantasy literature and media, mostly unknown until 2002, when the first Lord of the Rings film was released here… just as it probably was unknown or forgotten for a large number of Westerners, for that matter. (I imagine most of my non-D&D-playing friends in high school might have encountered the word at some point, but wouldn’t remember what it wqas or, at least, wouldn’t ever have used it in conversation)

Well, my tutor used the word “orc” in passing while describing a nasty incident at the subway station, in the course of illustrating her agreement that our neighborhood is rough and weird and full of unsavory characters.

This guy wants your seat on the subway.

I said, “오크? 오크 뭐예요?” (Orc? What’s an orc?) She smiled and said, “Young people use that word to describe people who are soooooo ugly…” and then described the Korean version of being ugly as sin, based on the specific example: dark, dark brown skin like a farmer’s; tiny, nasty little beady eyes; a broad face; nasty hair; and — this took a little dictionary consultation — pock marks in the skin as if from a long-ago bout of smallpox.

The specifics of that aside — this definition of ugly itself is probably at least somewhat generational, because while fifty or sixty or a hundred years ago, before the age of sun creams, paleness might have been a sign of beauty, nonetheless for most I imagine relatively darker skin from working in the sun would have been the norm — it’s fascinating that a word like Orc has entered the Korean vocabulary in such a way that it can be used directly, as a kind of common metaphor one can assume one’s peers will understand without explanation.

(Another one I’ve sometimes heard is Zerg. Which I think are those little doggie-like creatures in the massively popular (in Korea) computer game Starcraft.)

Not because that’s particularly surprising, mind you: English words (and other foreign words) do this all the time, in Korean. (As they do in plenty of languages.) But the fact that foreign genre-related words can carry more popular resonance in a foreign language and (youth-)culture than in the culture of its origin is surprising and fascinating. Think about it: if you were in a pub in London or Toronto, and were complaining about some ugly jerk on the subway, would you call him an “orc”? And if you did, would your friends understand what you meant immediately, and use the word themselves? I can’t  quite imagine that happening in Canada or the US, somehow… at least not outside of an SF convention.

야! 야! 반대말 하지마라, 이 미친 놈아! 아이씨~~~!

(For comparison, most of the videos are like this:)

I love this show so much.

Not quite the cover on the version I picked up, but close.

Today, I happened to pick up a copy of the 1970 futurist classic Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. This being Korea, there’s never a shortage of Toffler books around: the author’s tenure as an advisor to Kim Dae Jung seems to have ensured an enduring reputation here. (The library where I work even has a Korean translation of the book! I wonder how faithful the translation was, as well as how some of the, er, cheesier and more culturally-specific concepts were translated.)

The book surely has the aura of the 1970s. One passage near the beginning of Chapter 1 waxes, er, gamut-ward in its examples of the “odd personalities” that accelerated social changes are “breeding”:

… children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at fifty are children of twelve. There are rich men who playact poverty, computer programers who turn on with LSD. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists whom beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zion Buddhists. We have pop… and op… and art cinéthique… There are Playboy Clubs and homosexual movie theaters… amphetamines and tranquilizers… anger, affluence, and oblivion. Much oblivion.

Just prior to this passage, Toffler refers to curious social flora–from psychedelic churches and ‘free universities’ to science cities in the Arctic and wife-swap clubs California, and this specifically struck me as quite analogous to Korea. (If I remember rightly, a wife-swapping club — or was it just a swingers’ club? — was busted recently in Busan, which is the closest thing Korea has to a California.) It makes perfect sense to me that the book was seen as relevant to Korea in the late 90s!

Outside of Korea, the  impact of the book Future Shock on our world is possibly inestimable, but its impact on the SF genre is still greater. As much as SF people love to trace their lineage back to  Frankenstein, or Lucian of Samasota, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, even, it seems to be that Toffler’s book was a deep, hard shot of heroin to the genre, eventually culminating in at least one of its major late-20th/early-21st century tropes: The Singularity.

(After all, for all that its best-selling (ostensible) nonfiction proponents, such as Ray Kurzweil and, though he calls its something else, Frank J. Tipler, like to prognosticate about The Technological Singularity, its central defining feature is its absolute incomprehensibility to human minds. The Technological Singularity is, as a literary trope, simply “future shock” raised to an exponent so high that the mathematics itself starts to break apart under the pressure.)

My old, hardback copy of Future Shock is somewhere in a box  in Canada. I bought it at a Symphony Booksale, I think, or, no, on second thought I believe I got it at the St. Thomas More college booksale. (The same place I bought my now-lost 1947 edition of the Vogue Book of Etiquette, which is about the most insane book I’ve ever read.) I only got around to reading it when I arrived in Montreal for graduate school.

The book was a revelation for me. For one thing, I’d just read Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire and was working my way through John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, and on reading Toffler I felt as if I’d stumbled upon the ur-text of post-1970 SF. Indeed, I was so struck by it that months later, I ended up using the book extensively in a paper I wrote for my Creative Writing workshop course.

My peers were mostly mainstream-fiction people, though there was a touch of genre-like stuff: a little hardboiled here, a little magical realism there, that sort of thing. But the responses to my work were often laced with what I took for discomfort with SF, puzzlement at why it would be taken seriously, and a certain degree of axiety at having to give feedback on work that simply didn’t seem to operate on the same lines as mainsteram fiction. (I was, at times, striving for beauty of prose, of course, but there was Adventure! and Science Stuff! and Overt, Unapololgetic Politics! To be fair, some classmates were cool with it from day one, and others got into the swing of things, and my own anxiety about being the only SF person in the bunch probably colored my reading of their critiques.)

Anyway, my paper focused on the use of “literary realism” in SF as a psychological trick, a kind of Trojan horse, as it were. I explained that many stories tended to begin with a situation that at once seemed to draw readers into the imaginary world immersively, while also slapping them in the face with its absolute, unarguable unreality. (This was my understanding, at the time, of Darko Suvin’s notion of Cognitive Estrangement.) I argued that not only was this experience one of the core pleasures of SF across subgenres, but also that this was one of the functional purposes of SF.

Functional because, I argued, besides being entertaining literature, and literature in the other senses we use the word, SF also can act as an vaccine — or at least as a cognitive-immunobooster — against the phenomenon of “future shock”… which was, as Toffler defined it, the reaction of human beings when they find their ability to adapt to change is too far outpaced by the rate of change going on in their world.

As I mentioned in a recent interview with Mary Robinette Kowal, SF really does appear to have an effect on how people deal with advances of science and technology. All the SF people I knew at the time that Dolly the Sheep was cloned shrugged their shoulders while so many others — including even lotsof supposedly-educated people who had spent time thinking about this stuff beforehand — seemed to be taken aback, and haunted by images of superhuman clone armies, blabbering about the “dehumanization of cloning” and so on.

SF people? Most of the ones I knew chuckled in response, saying things like, “Okay, so when can we start growing ourselves spare kidneys and hearts and limbs like in that novel by ______?” [You fill in the blank with your favorite author.] And whatever novel it was had already gone way beyond the cheeseball fantasy of The Island and the earlier film it was based upon, to imaginewhat kind of industry would come of this, what kinds of workarounds would be developed for the cheesy moral quandries of dumb-style cloning.They often pointed out that cloning wasn’t really a smart or efefctive way of developing superhuman armies, for a whole host of reasons from unhealthy homogeneity to the inefficiency of the method. (The clones would still have to grow up and learn all the skills of their original, and some would undoubtedly end up cognitively or idiosyncratically different,perhaps in ways that would jeopardize the whole project!

Anyway, that’s a passing glance at the first chunk of the book. I’ll be reading the whole thing again as part of my preparation for a paper I’ll be presenting on the topic of various forms of the The Singularity (and the possibility of a critical synthesis of them) for the “Posthumanism Today” panel at the M/MLA conference in St. Louis this November. (There’s a description of the panel in general under the heading “Science and Fiction: ‘Posthumanism Today‘” on that page.)

I may also post reflections on the the rest of the text, and the influence I see it having had on SF, over the next few months, if people show interest. Interest would be shown by commenting, but don’t feel obligated, folks. I may do it anyway.

I’ll probably only refer to Future Shock in passing in the actual paper, but it seems to me like the generative root of the notion of the SFnal, Vingean trope of the Singularity, in a sense. It is, after all, simply a type of Future Shock generated not by the pace of change, but by a fundamental change in the nature of change which itself proceeds from the accelerated change so important to Toffler.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, you can click over to this post at Odd Culture where you can see the 1972 film that was, er, “inspired” by Future Shock. I’m not saying it’s a good film, but you will probably get a kick out of it.

People survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without holding major festivals for specific deities, without holding big annual parties for imaginary constructions like nation-states. Nation states are all well and good, but the Earth is here, tangible, and absolutely necessary for our survival. It’s as close to sacred as one can be within a naturalistic viewpoint.

Those who complain that it makes people think they should consider the Earth for just one day a year may have a point, but I’d rather start with trying to get everyone to celebrate the planet itself for just one day a year instead of none; it’s a starting point, in other words, to a wider change in attitude that we should be trying to build, collectively, all of us who, to whatever degree, get it.

Because I think, just as snark is a psychological defense mechanism, so is holier-than-thou eco-politics. As much as I respect Theravada Buddhism more than Mahayana — from what (precious little) I know about each, the former’s intellectualism and philosophical bent attracts me more than the latter’s panoply of deities and folk myths and devotionalism and so on — there’s no way that the ascetic-environmentalist-activist equivalent of Theravada is ever going to attract enough people — let alone enough stable and sane people — to make the changes we need to make, unless there’s some kind of fascist green takeover.

What we need is environmental Mahayana: new technologies, sexy Green festivals, Greened education: more of the stuff that gets people who aren’t likely to start moving out into communes and donning hairshirts thinking about what they can (and need to) do. Maybe not everyone will get to the Pure Land that way, or maybe it will take longer, but if we don’t get as many people on board as possible, we’re not going anywhere except down the drain. That’s the fact that we need to face, and take to heart, and integrate into everything we say and so about the problems we’re faced with now.

It looks like the big celebration in Seoul was held on the weekend — and I was too sick to have gone, even if I’d been on the ball enough to remember that this happened last year too — so in lieu of that, I think I’ll try set aside some time to get to the mountain and appreciate it, thanking it in my way for the challenge it gives me every day that I climb it, and appreciating all those green plants that eat up my exhalations and shade my way as I journey among them.

(UPDATE: That’s precisely what I did: I hiked the mountain and thanked it for giving me a place to exercise. Stood there in the sunset light, my breath visible in the chill air, and listened to the branches rustle in the evening breeze. I even left an orange there for some small creature to find and feast on: a little sacrifice not so much to a San-shin [Mountain God] as to the little creatures who make the world such a vibrant place. Some squirrel got lucky last night, I’m thinking. It felt good to let loose with a little real, honest gratitude. It felt like spring.)

And finally, here’s a video my neighbours sent me when wishing me a Happy Earth Day. It’s another excellent video from TED, about the part of the earth most neglected by the “green” movement: our oceans.

The fact they used this song, and this celebrity, in this commerical, suggests one of these two possibilities:

1. They figured most people don’t know what “I like big butts” means. Which is maybe plausible, since I find most Koreans who aren’t really high-level in English translate whichever Korean word indicates both (is it 엉덩이? That’s the one I learned first and remembered because I heard it so often, so I assume it’s the most common) as “hip” to indicate both hips and butt. Or…
2. Korean culture really does have an extremely different sense of what “big butts” means. Sir Mix-A-Lot would probably be amused.

My guess is maybe both are true.

It’s telling that my main reaction to that video was when they do that chicken-leg move, about 17 seconds in, and I’m thinking, “Damn! How come I can’t do that stretch?” (Because it looks exactly like a leg stretch my swimming instructor taught me, but which I’ve never been able to do correctly.)

Bonus: the best ever renditions of that song (and yeah, I know I’ve posted them before, but…), the first brought to my attention by the estimable and wonderfully mad Tina Connolly:

And the latter being the scarily Vegas Richard Cheese:

Which brings me to this video, which I’ll definitely have to show my students:

Given how popular Friends is here and given how in my Media classes this year, we’ll touch on the formation and negotiation of genres at some point along the way. Show ‘em this video and ask, “What kind of TV show would you expect with this version of the theme song?”

And, okay, Richard Cheese and SF geekery? You probably have seen this, and I’m so not into Star Wars — really! — but one can’t help but be amused at the intricate fondue of all these varieties of cheese:

• Popeye (the cartoon)
• Batman (the live-action show)
• Spiderman (the cartoon)
• Hawaii 5-0
• Matlock
• Kojack (Yes, with Telly Savalas! Too bad the bald hairstyle never caught on here!)
• The Six Million Dollar Man (and I think, but I’m not sure about, The Bionic Woman)
• The Young and the Restless (which they simply called “Young and Restless”)

Kojack image in Paris, by Chusta Ai. Click the image to see its source page at Flickr.

An excellent book.

They also mentioned a few non-American shows, though they didn’t play the themes, including “Ultraman” and “Atom.” All in all, it was quite an interesting slice of broadcasting history, and another piece of a puzzle I first realized existed when I looked at a paper (by Michael Robinson) on the development of radio in Korea in Gi-Wook Shim and Michael Robinson’s Colonial Modernity in South Korea. I’d be very interested to know about how foreign genres impacted on the formation of genre in Korean TV since, as we all know, there are a few kinds of shows that seem, at least to me, to be relatively un-Western on Korean TV and other media… the over-the-top prime-time melodrama (screaming, ajumma fistfights, and leukemia) being just one.

While I’m on the subject,  It’s not the first time I’ve run across unusual things on Korean radio. One night, very late, I heard “The Stars of Track and Field” (or whatever that song by Belle and Sebastian is called).

Odder still, sometime within a few weeks of arriving in Korea for the first time, I heard a long chunk of the Jeff Wayne rock opera The War of the Worlds, based on the H.G. Wells novel of the same title, in the taxi to the office from downtown. I’d thought perhaps I was misremembering, given that I’d heard it for the first time ever not more than a week before I left for Korea — the guy at whose home I stayed in Vancouver while getting my visa processed had been shocked to hear that I’d never heard it before, and had insisted on playing it for me — but then my co-worker Kimberly wandered into the office singing the famous line, “Ul-la! Ul-la!” (which is the sound made by the Martians in both the novel and the rock opera). I was absolutely stunned, and said, “Did you just hear The War of the Worlds on the radio?”

She was surprised that I was surprised!

"Drawing by Henrique Alvim Corréa for the novel The War of the Worlds, showing a Martian fighting-machine battling with the warship Thunder Child." Click the link for the source of the picture and the quote.

The oddest thing I’ve ever heard on Korea radio, though, is call-in-karaoke. It’s one thing when people in the studio — radio DJs and announcers — insist on singing rather long chunks of songs that come up in conversation, but when you have people calling in on their cell phones and singing to karaoke tracks in the studio, it borders on unreal. But these shows stay on the radio, meaning, I suppose, that they must get enough ratings or approval or whatever to avoid being cut. Something keeps people tuning in, despite the fact that lots of callers are no better singers than average (and some are worse), despite the sound quality (great backgrounds accompanying a so-so voice on the cell phone), and so on. I guess some people really like hearing non-professionals sing karaoke tracks of famous, well-loved songs. That’s the only explanation I can find.

(Well, unless a lot of the people tuning also make up a lot of the people calling in. Hmmmmm. Not a theory, just idle musing.)

Anyway, it’s a reminder to me to tune into the radio a little more often. In this age of MP3s and podcasts, a little open-minded randomness might still pay off with interesting things. Now, if only I knew which radio station was the best to find this kind of thing on. (The TV retrospective, I mean.)

For the record, the station I heard the TV retrospective on is 95.1 FM. Which, according to this site, is TBS radio. And if you happen to be using Windows, you can even listen to that station online. (It crashed my Firefox in Linux, of course.)

Not that I’ve written much before this. I’ve never felt even the slightest bit moved to write fanfic, ever, but this scene, this weird neo-Saturday cinema serials thing, just popped into my head, very loosely based on this TV show I’ve been watching. Don’t click on the link: if you don’t know the show, the weirdness won’t hit you (though you should check out this program, it’s worth watching). And if you do know the show, the characters should be instantly recognizable.

“Mr. Draper,” he heard her cry out as the Pinto jounced over the still-writhing bodies. Thud, thus, crack, thud. Madison Avenue was… charred. A series of charred buildings, row on row of blackened nothingnesses, with the shadows of the ships above still flickering across the ruined streets and molten glass and steel. Invaders from outer space, and he was fleeing in a Pinto, of all things. With this one, he thought to himself.

“Don’t call me that,” he said, one eyebrow raised. As if it were obvious she shouldn’t.

“Then what should I call you?” she asked. Her voice was clear and blunt, but soft, as if she knew she ought to be careful, but couldn’t figure out just why or how.

He didn’t answer her right away. Eyes on the thickening pillars of smoke out in the suburbs, he slammed the accelerator down. Didn’t know why it felt right. The ships, the… invaders, they could just as easily be attracted by the faster motion, but his instincts told him that speed was the key to surviving this.

Eyes on the road, he spoke just loud enough for her to hear him over what passed for the roar of the engine in a Pinto. And what he said was, “Because I’m not going to be him anymore, and you’re not going to be Peggy. Not if you want to live through this. What you were, what I was, those people are dead. They could never live through this. They were cocoons, and we’ve left the cocoon. Time to fly away. It’s time to move forward.” He sighed, and then added, “Got a cigarette? Mine were in my jacket.”

She fished around in her oversized blue purse for a moment, and fetched out a pack of Luckys. “They’re not mine,” she said, as if worried, fending off judgment. “I only carried them because…”

“What makes you think I care?” he asked, turning his head for a moment to cast at her that deliberate, simple glance that had unarmed so many women before her. And she didn’t care how he looked at her. She didn’t give a damn, she thought to herself, as a flaming blue ray streaked out of the sky and through the roof of a church. Which church? She couldn’t remember.

“I just… I don’t know.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and a priest on fire flashed through her mind. “I just… well, you saved me.”

“No I didn’t,” he said. “You made yourself worth bringing along, that’s all. I’m not saving you. I’m saving myself.”

“I see,” she said. “And your wife?”

He furrowed his brow. “Why do you want to know?” And when she was silent too long, his face softened, and he said, softly and a little sadly, “The radio. They said… my neighborhood was incinerated first.”

A wave of panic washed over Peg… her. Nameless, worldless, unfamilied her. Her son was still in Brooklyn. She could save him, she realized. This son who didn’t know her name, her face. Who would never call her Mommy.

“Can we stop in Brooklyn?”

“No,” he said. “We have to leave the city.” And then, “Why?”

And out the window, a streaming ray of blue fire slammed across the landscape, melting concrete and splitting in half both a newspaper stand the the man inside. She was scared, now, that if she got out of the car, he would be gone when she came back. That she would burn with the rest of the city. Maternal instinct? What was that? She wanted to live. She searched inside herself for some stronger impulse, but she couldn’t find it. Anyway, she didn’t know where he lived now, with his new mommy and daddy.

“Never mind. Just get us out of New York,” she said, firmly, and for the first time in her life  she knew that she would never see her son again.

“Gladly,” he said, as nameless as she was, and shocked, but alive. He could make it like it had never happened. Like this life of his had never, ever been.  Of course he could. He’d done it before.

“There’s a bottle in the glove compartment,” he said. “Get it out.”
#

Real post coming tomorrow!

Instead:

• There’s some great fiction online that I need to link to. For now, just one story: the wonderfully nastyglee party that is Tina Connolly’s “A Day Out, with Stereoscopes” is up at Birkensnake. I’ve a copy of the zine, actually, and it’s lovely. You could do worse than to subscribe. Tina has a talent for mixing the cute with the horrifying.
• Ever heard of Drapetomania? It’s this disease that can be summed up as “longing to be free and a slave no more.” Yeah, they diagnosed runaway slaves with an illness, meant to explain their desire to run away. Which ought to make you think about, say, for example, ADD and the education system a little more.
• Courtesy of NPR, this is kind of depressing.
  Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

  Maybe I should tell my students to memorize everything beforehand after all, in debate class?

• Here’s the RSS feed for new SF books at Manybooks.net. Come on, you know you want it.
• MrChiCity3 on the advantages of a well-stocked kitchen. Hint, these advantages involve women’s nether parts, and suburban chicks fawning over Snapple.
• The purposeful miseducation of America as political strategy backfires: yes, the infection has spread to the political head. Long ago, but this is just, well… Crack a goddamned book, lady. I sure hope whoever’s elected make book-cracking part of a balanced life.
• Speaking of book-cracking: maybe fundamentalists ought to read the Bible sometime?
  

  American Idol, indeed. Two words for you: Bad Precedent.

  Yes, for you viewers at home, that is a golden calf bull (thanks, Charles), with people praying to it. To save the American Economy. More here. You’d think they might have actually read the Bible, sometime before trying to shove it down everyone else’s throat. What can an educated (or even just an intelligent) person do but snicker? (Via plenty of places, but especially Oltheros, who has a rockin’ LJ.)

• You’re young. That makes you suspicious. How could young people support the Republican party? Get out! That’s how to ensure your party is supported in the future, guys…
• James Van Pelt on how to scare a reader, Mike Brotherton on writing as a career vs. writing as a hobby (another reason I’m considering going back to grad school in the medium run), mlawski on the artificiality of “strong female characters” (as opposed to interesting ones –  for interesting, read: flawed, human female characters written the way we write any interesting male characters). Also, on io9, several authors give advice about writing good characters.
• Saw some good talks on TED lately, including this one wherein Steven Pinker argues what I’ve been saying for a while: yeah, humans are still a**holes, but we’re actually getting better… quantifiably so:
  

  More good stuff over at TED. I’m not really sold on Susan Blackmore’s notion of temes, discussed here, but it’s an interesting idea. And while I don’t think Ken Robinson is a truly great public speaker — he meanders so much I start to wonder whether he’s gotten lost — I agree with his argument wholeheartedly. And this 3 minute fairytale of emoticons was fun.

Lots more to post about, but no time, so end off the post, a little happy, cutesy Korean indie-pop by Taru:

Maybe I’d hate it if I were listening closely enough to understand the words, but I’m not, so I don’t. Though watching it I wonder if, being in Korea so long, I have just stopped being revolted by cutesiness? Hmm.

Clarkesworld, Oct. 2008

It feels so long ago, but I still think it’s worth a look back:

My article on the SFnal side of the anti-2MB protests that rocked Seoul this past summer, titled “How Candle Girl and V Took on 2MB”, is now up at the excellent Clarkesworld.

It touches on the political reception and adaptation of foreign SF, techno-protest culture, Korean politics and food-culture, and more. Not quite something for everyone, but lots of stuff swirling around the nexus there. The ending is a bit, well, dated — I wrote it back in August, and it sounds like the protests just died down last week or something — but with that contextualized, I stand by it wholly. Yay for Nick Mamatas, who bought it for Clarkesworld. (And nudged me to make it better!)

Supporting Materials:

• My Post series on the protests.
• Photos of several protests I managed to attend and photograph.

If this is your first visit here, please feel free to check out the sidebar for more stories, articles, and post-series that may interest you.

For those living in Seoul and interested in seeing SF films with other SF enthusiasts, editor/critic/translator Park Sang-Jun has teamed up with the proprietor of a newly-relocated cinema in Shinchon to put together Cinema Odyssey an SF & Fantasy film club that will meet periodically to view screenings of SF films. (That link is the Naver cafe, so you need to be logged into Naver to access it.) I met with Park on Friday just before the movie screening and discovered that besides his role at the SF imprint Omelas, he is none other than the proprietor of the Seoul SF Archive that put on the display of Korean-language SF books from the last century in 2007. And this was also the same person who edited the early edition (or editions?) of Fantastique. I’m getting the impression he’s a kind of one-man dynamo in terms of promoting SF in Korea, and he also happens to be a very interesting guy, so it was good to sit down and talk with him.

The first Cinema Odyssey screening was Altered States, which was fun — I’d never seen it before, in fact. At the screening, I met a Korean SF author named Park Sung Hwan (and his lovely wife). Mr. Park’s well-known short story “레디메이드 보살” (”Readymade Bodhisattva”) was included in this 2004 anthology of Korean short SF stories.

In addition, Mr. Park’s recent comment here on my site followed up a comment of his on Friday about remembering Crossroads having published English-language translations of its SF stories back in the old days. I’ve mentioned before Crossroads before, but I hadn’t come across the English versions of the stories, much to my chagrin… but, hey, believe it or not, they’re there! There’s a huge cache of Korean SF in translation there. I can’t vouch for quality, as I haven’t yet had a chance to look around, and for some reason it’s not clearly visible from the front page, but there’s a ton of it (multiple pages of links) accessible from here, including the very story I had long contemplated translating, 대리전 by Djuna. Here that story is, titled, in English, “Proxy War.” It’s notable for being set in what is very close to my neighborhood!

Some of the students claimed they were so shocked that teenaged American girls are so anxious about breast development, claiming adolescent Korean girls aren’t. (Lime calls bullshit on that, however.) Others admitted they were — and in a couple of cases, still are — anxious about it.

Morality Police Alert: Ceci n'est pas une femme. (It's marble.) Click image for source.

Others found the myths Ephron discusses amusing, like this one about her friend’s response to the failure of young Ms. Ephron’s breasts to appear:

“Don’t worry about it,” said my friend Libby some months later, when things had not improved. “You’ll get them after you’re married.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“When you get married,” Libby explained, “your husband will touch your a breasts, and rub them and kiss them and they’ll grow.”

They were like, “People actually believed that?” (No, I did not make a retort about Fan Death. I did, however, suggest they think back to middle school and all the silly things they heard other kids say, and briefly believed. Surely that’s universal.

(I remember hearing from classmates that if a classmate had big breasts, it meant she was sleeping around. I also remember hearing that if you swam in the North Saskatchewan River — which looks nice in this video, though I had the sense was toxic and polluted around the town I lived in, thanks to the pulp and paper mill nearby — your penis would shrink and fall off. Which was odd, since nobody ever swam in the river, so how did they know?)

Could a river this lovely actually make your weenie fall off? I think not!

The most stunning comment, for me, though, was what one young man said about being assigned the essay. He said he was surprised that I had chosen that essay for us to read and discuss in a university class. Not because it was too hard or too easy, but because it was about women’s issues.

An essay about women’s body images? In a classroom that’s 70% women? In a society where body image is a huge obsession? And where (in my experience) all too little frank and critical discussion of the insanity of that obsession is evident?

(Over the last couple of years, I’ve found my students to be quite articulate on the subject, but not nearly so critical. Most discussions I’ve witnessed have ended with some kind of impassioned defense of why women ought to be able to get plastic surgery if they want, and not just to “improve” their looks, but to enable them to can compete in the job market. Because yeah, your bust and your back end are really exactly what should determine hiring, and not, say, competence. But that’s for another discussion.)

So when I said to this guy, “Look around you! You’re outnumbered! This class is mostly women, right?” his response floored me.

Him: “Yeah, but we’re 30% men.”

Me: “So? Learning more about women is a bad thing?”

Him: “No, but, um…”

At first, I was (quietly, not aloud) all, “What the hell, man? Any presence of men in a classroom means we should just throw away all issues that might be labeled ‘woman’ issues?” There was this spiraling sense of annoyance at what I interpreted as a desire to marginalize women’s issues so we could focus on important (male) issues.

"The Periphery" (by The Foamy Green, from this stunning series...) Go check out this photographer.

And then I realized he was embarrassed to be reading an essay about breasts and discussing it with women. Which, yeah, is juvenile by my standards, now, but you know, by Korean socialization, probably is less so. I’m sure it’s the first time he’s had to do so in a classroom, at least, outside of the context of a stuffy sex-education class where technical terms were used, and even the teacher was feeling uptight about it.

This realization brought back memories of my own reaction to being assigned the essay back in Freshman English. But I would never have dared to protest my own embarrassment. I knew that my blushing at reading an essay that was not really about breasts, but about growing up in a society with a silly fixation on them, was quite silly. It seems, though, that for this guy — and a number of other students — the embarrassment was not only normal, but somewhat of a requirement for politeness, or decency, or whatever.

A Wounded Amazon, from The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click to see the source.

Poor students. Since I’m going to be asking them to write a personal response; not quite an essay, but something of a personal reaction to the Ephron essay that encompasses their own bewildering experience of the process of adolescent, puberty, and growing up.

I guess it’s only fair I write one for them about mine. It’s gonna be about the discovery of how teenager sweat is different from kid sweat. You know, in gym class, when you hit that age when you need deodorant (or, well, something to cut the smell of your armpits), but mom and dad haven’t quite figured it out yet? Or am I the only one who went through that? I’m pretty sure I’m not. Or maybe about shaving, and that weird transition from not needing to shave, to suddenly having ten whiskers on your chin, to having to shave every day. (And then not doing it, then doing it, then finally embracing the facial hair, and blessing that unknown genius who invented electric hair-clippers.)

That should be a fun essay. I think I’ll post a copy here when I’m done with it.

Click for source, yo.

As for me, I’m planning on working on a paper on the film and its political elements, somewhat expanding on my observations in the posts I’ve made here, and on the paper I’ll be presenting in a couple of weeks. I’ll be working on that sometime in the next couple of months, time permitting, and towards that goal, I’ll be listening to the [English-language] director’s commentary on the American release.

(I am absolutely not patient enough to listen to the Korean language commentary, not for now anyway, but if I hear anything interesting, I’ll be sure to mention it. As with many films, I’m sure a comparison of the directors’ commentary in the two languages would be quite interesting.)

Too bad it’s gonna take me a year or two to get around to it…

I’m really tempted to do up some fake, badly-translated about the racist Jedi who excluded applicants from the Space Blossom Peach Planet, fearing the encroachment of the Yellow Army into their ranks, and caused this whole mess, causing the Chinese to take the Imperial contract bid on the Death Star. (They skimped on the security plating, though, in their giant space factory. You just have to shoot this heat vent at the right angle and…)

I found the video, by chance, here.

Click on the image to visit the Korean-language website for the festival...

I promised a report on the micro-con I mentioned here and attended last weekend, but it’s taken me a little time to get the photos I wanted to post along with it. (This text was written on Monday, but I didn’t get through the photos until today.) The set I’ve uploaded to Flickr can be seen here.

I had a good time at this festival, which was organized by the JoySF fanclub. There were a number of events, including screenings, lectures, and hanging around in the dealer’s room. The Festival was held at the Seoul Animation Center, in Myeong-dong, in two rooms on the main floor. One room was the dealer’s room:

… which as you can see was full of figurines, tons of books (by major publishers and small presses alike) a few zines, game demonstration/trial spots, posters, and more. Oh, and the same giant monster movie fanclub that was present at the KOFA retrospective I blogged about here showed up with figurines in tow:

I picked up a few different books for Lime, along with a copy HAPPY SF Vol. 1, — which you can see the cover of just a few pictures up, and for which I’ve been searching for a while now — along with a copy of the two JOY SF zines that were available, a couple of seemingly easy-to-read Korean translations of Japanese SF manga (standalone type books), and two small-press collections by mirror.pe.kr: one with stories about vampires, the other one alien-themed. (My hopes aren’t too high — small press, after all, can sometimes be disappointing — but then again, there’s so little big press here that maybe this is where some of the good stuff ends up?)

There were screenings of a number of movies:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Contact
• 지구를 지켜라 (Save the Green Planet)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Star Trek: First Contact
• チャイナさんの憂鬱 (Spirit of Wonder — a very odd, and short, little anime film)
• The Twililght Zone (the episode “The Star” from the 80s color version of the TV series)

Those that are bolded were the ones I saw. (I missed the others because I’d seen them before, was tired, and ended up going home early on the Friday — too bad, as that was the night everyone went out together! — and missed the morning screening on the second day.)

The opening ceremony was brief, and somehow, in a way that mystified me, morphed into a demonstration of the Nintendo Wii. I’m not much for game demos, but I must say that the one game I stayed to see a bit of was interesting: some kind of zombie hunting thing. I would play that. Probably, I would play it too much.

There were also four seminars. Now, I’ve only been to one SF con before, and it was a big one: WorldCon ‘07 in Yokohama. I haven’t been to a smaller con, let alone something as small and close-knit as this one, so take this as caveated. I was surprised because there were seminars instead of panel discussions. Mostly, it was fans who took the helm, and as far as I could tell, local authors were not present or at least were not prominent in the proceedings, outside of hawking their goods in the dealer’s room, and except for a seminar by a prominent publisher/critic/editor. The con was very much a fan-led, fan-consumed thing. (Which leads me to wonder what the first few WorldCons were like. Was it comparable? I guess that’s a research topic for me, now. One imagines it might have been less so: a lot of fan interest here seems to be concentrated on foreign SF and SF in various non-literary media, so that it would be harder to have those creators come here.)

In any case, the seminars were as follows:

Kim Sun Wook gave a lecture on Ultraman, the Japanese SF spaceman/superhero character, tracing his history and explaining various aspects of the character and what I understood to be his cohort. People seemed quite amused at points. I was completely lost, unfortunately.

Park Sang Joon, an important critic, translator, editor and publisher of SF in Korea (who is in charge of the newish 오멜라스 (”Omelas,” yes, apparently named after the Ursula K. Le Guin story) publishing line that has been putting out the gorgeous editions of Lem that have popped up recently — here’s an interview with him about it, but it’s in Korean), discussed the Omelas and his interests and plans for the future.

His seminar was definitely the most crowded one of the weekend, as you can see in the picture below. I wish I could report exactly what he talked about, but the best I can do is sort of wave at it, as I didn’;t quite follow everything. From what I picked up, he was discussion how he wants to expand the horizons of SF in translation here beyond just American SF, to reflect the wider diversity that exists in the genre. For example, in addition to the Len translations he’s got on the market now, he mentioned Canadian Robert Sawyer’s End of an Era, an interest in British SF (including J.G. Ballard), Japanese — and I think, briefly Chinese –SF, and more. He discussed the SF Hall of Fame and other awards (Hugo and Nebula) and their relative merits in terms of the quality or importance of a book, at least I think that was what he was talking about. (I can’t say much beyond that I think he seemed to come down on the side of Hall of Fam as the most useful standard.) He talked about Heinlein’s future history and I think this was in terms of putting out a pocket paperback line of SF novels. (Most SF translations in Korea these days are in hardback or trade paper.) Other diversification being considered is a line of YA SF. He discussed the history of SF in Japan briefly, and noted that a long-ish tradition of SF existed there.

After his seminar, we talked a bit, and exchanged cards, so hopefully I’ll be able to find out more if we get a chance to talk again. One interesting tidbit that surprise Canadian SF fans is that while he lived in Toronto, he visited the famous Bakka Books shop, probably Canada’s longest-running and perhaps most-famous SF bookstore.

That was all I was around for on Friday, which by the way was the busier of the two days, probably because Friday was a holiday in Korea. On Saturday, I returned in time to Spirit of Wonder and the Twilight Zone episode screened.

Then, Jang Su Je (aka Hong In Su) gave a seminar on SFnal Imagined Disasters, a very suitable topic since his major is connected to the subject. He mentioned such classics as Hammer of God and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, Japan Sinks by Komatsu (which I happen to be reading right now!), Blood Music by Greg Bear, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, Crystal World by Ballard, and he showed us a clip from a a BBC documentary titled, I think, Super Volcano, about just how bad it would really be if Yellowstone went bang as hard as it could be. (I think this was in context of the discussion of the “comfortable catastrophe” we often see in SF, but I’m not sure that’s what he was getting at. He did present a taxaonomy of sorts for different kids of disasters, though: seemingly differentiating between natural ones, technological ones, and I’m not sure what else as my notes were scribbly in the middle.

Why he was talking about OTL (Original Time Line? a term from Alternate History fiction is the only thing I know of) I’m not sure… I shall have to ask him about it when we end up talking again. For talk we did: he mentioned that he is also a translator, in addition to being a grad student, and that his translation of — oh my God! — this book is on the way. Anyone who can translate that stuff into Korean, I have to respect a great deal. I’m looking forward to seeing him again. (Here’s his write-up on the festival, of course in Korean.)

After that, there was a screening of Star Trek: First Contact, which was fun though I’d seen it before.

Finally, Bae Yoon Ho gave a lecture on the taxonomy of “unknown species” — I’m going to maybe render that as “fantastical” creatures. While I didn’t quite grasp the taxonomic system in detail, it seemed to be based on the relative proximity of the creatures to humanity. (ie. Degrees and types of differences from humans.) He went through a wide variety of species, explaining how and why they fit into this or that category and what they had in common. What stood out most for me during his lecture was something I actually learned earlier on during the con, talking with him one-on-one: that is, that contemporary Korean fandom has a large contingent of gamers and that film versions of SF and video games are, if not interchangeable, then at least on a relatively equal footing — especially compared to in the West, where I’ve rarely heard an SF fan talk about video or computer games as deserving the kind of attention an SF movie deserves.

In addition, I noticed that his taxonomy wasn’t exclusively SFnal: there were elves, dwarves, Zergs, the Alien from the eponymous film series, The Great Old Ones (of Lovecraft’s stories) and many more different creatures from different media — games, films, books, comics, and more — all discussed together. It was more of a taxonomic bestiary of the fantastical, I thin, and I was struck by how friendly Mr. Bae, like Mr. Hong, was. He’d approached me on the first day and we’d spoken a few times, so I knew he was involved in the JoySF club and was a big SF fan. His excitement and friendliness was infectious.

Finally, there was a closing ceremony, where organizers and participants were thanked, and copies of the zines (with what appeared to be an honorarium or contest prize for fanfic appearing in the year’s zine) were give to contributors, plus translations of Japanese SF were handed on gratis to attendees. (I didn’t take one, of course, and when the organizers attempted to give me a copy of their zine, I told them I’d already bought it the day before. I hope they didn’t feel bad — I’m happier supporting the club.)

Anyway, all in all it was a positive experience, I met some cool people,and got a glimpse of what it seems a local fan culture — or at any rate a local Korean fan culture — looks like in its gestative stage. (I think there’s been an SF scene in Korea much longer than the last few years, but I don’t know how much of it has been face-to-face, or how far it has progressed from being enjoyment to “fandom” per se.) In any case, I was quite happy to have attended.

All the photos in this write-up are also on my Flickr feed, so if you want to see them at a larger size, just click the pic and you’ll arrive at the photo’s flickr page. Some of them have additional commentary there… Enjoy!

Though I have trawled through the books I’ve recently read for over a half an hour now, I cannot now find the passage that sticks out in my mind where an SF critic points out that American readings of Gojira, while they tend to correctly grasp the political subtext of the film — anxieties about nuclear weaponry, loss of colonial territory after the war, the threat of American power — miss out other, subtler aspects, such as the fact that the dynamic of “survivor’s guilt” could easily account for the fascination with a tremendously destructive monster attacking one’s homeland. (Another example of something Western viewers don’t always pick up is one Thomas Schnellbächer (cited above) notes about the tense push-and-pull of retrogressive and progressive notions of nation and identity and power in the film (34-35) — evident in the way the monster Gojira arises as a result of American nuclear testing, but also arises on an island from within the former Japanese empire, only one example of many in the film).

While The Host is accessible enough for non-Korean audiences to follow — and for Korean audiences to read only in a superficial way, if they like — there is a great deal more resonance to be explored in the film. A tiny example is the fact that Nam-Joo’s archery skills — intendedly or not — actually hearken back to the fact that — yes, just like elves in D&D — Koreans were — in Chinese sources — apparently renowned for their archery skills, at least according to one book of mine — a text with tons of historic photos, titled 사진으로 보는 朝鮮時代  [조선시대] 생활과 풍속 (Yi Dynasty through Pictures) Vol. I (Seomoondang: Seoul, 1988) which presented this picture along with the discussion of Korean archery (on page 119):

부인의 활쏘기: Women's [or <em>Ladies'</em>] Archery Practice

… and made the claim that Korean women were renowned for being outstanding archers:

활은무기이기도 했지만 여성과도 가까운 존재였당. 그러나 적어도 이만큼 활쏘기를 즐기려면 서만충아낙으로선 어림없는 일이었다.

I (with a little help) render this as:

Although archery involves deadly weapons, it was closely associated with ladies. However, it was usually difficult for women who were not of a certain degree of means to have the opportunity to enjoy such training.

That’s an interesting resonance which adds some depth of character to Nam-Joo’s character, and which is not available to Western viewers of the film. (Or, I should add, a number of Korean viewers. When I mentioned that I’d come across this claim, some of my [Korean] students were surprised to hear about any association between women and archery in Korea, or that the Chinese had claimed Koreans to have been good archers at all, though everyone was aware that archery is a big deal in the Korean sporting world.) It would probably be going too far to claim she emblematic of Korea, but it does help bolster the sense that her family — with her included — are more than just characters, that they stand for something greater than just any old family who happened to experience the bad luck of having their kid stolen away from them by a river monster.

But I’d like to turn to the river monster first, and try to tease out what that thing is all about, before looking too closely at the Park family.

The one singular characteristic of the monster is its relationship with the concept of transformation. After all, it is istelf a mutant: the dumping of chemicals into the river — on American orders, yes, but carried out by a Korean — is the origin of its transformation. This is driven home when, after the monster’s assault, Gang-Du is eating something from a can. On the side of the can, it says, “BAI-DING” or something like that, and this is a food product that I’ve seen plenty of times, but never bought myself — though we do have a tin of it in our cupboard! (Lime says she has plans for it, though not the usual kind: although a variety of uses are possible, these snails are commonly used for anju, meaning side dishes consumed whilst drinking alcohol.) When you see him eating it, it becomes apparent that this thing –  — is the normal form that mutated to become the monster we saw earlier –

I noted above that the director himself agreed about a degree of similarity between Gang-du and the monster, and this is one of them: Gang-du eats small snails, and in a strange reversal, a giant snail eats people (including his daughter). The similarties are otherwise rather numerous: he and the monster are both awkward, clumsy, and somehow not quite “right.”Gang-du seems mentally deficient, and not really responsible enough to run a confectionery stand –

– let alone father a child:

… a suspicion which is finally confirmed when Gang-du takes the wrong girl’s hand while fleeing from the monster:

and his daughter is captured by the horror:

Gang-du, of course, turns from a clown to a tragic figure when his daughter is presumed dead, and then becomes a heroic v(if still goofy) underdog when it turns out she is alive, and awaiting rescue. Still, if Gang-du were just an idiot, that would be relatively uninteresting. He isn’t, however: the identity between him and the monster actually go much deeper. We learn this when, frustrated by his siblings’ treatment of his eldest son, Gang-du’s father tells his other children a story.

Just just a story, a confession, and the story of how Gang-du became the way he is. It is a pathetic tale of neglect, both lightened and made more tragic by the fact that Gang-du’s siblings are soon sleeping instead of listening to the story of how their now-stupid elder brother was once a very clever little boy, left to fend for himself and “do seori” (let’s say, “borrow” in that sense that means never giving back) food from nearby farms. Just like the monster, Gang-du was transformed in his early life by a “toxic environment” — the broken family of hiw own childhood. And as his father said, “something broke” inside his head. The chaos we saw at the funeral:

… pays off as it becomes obvious that this family is already, irreparably, broken, even as they struggle to maintain the shreds of integrity they have and save their family’s most vulnerable member.

Now, far be it from me to push this too hard, as it’s really just a tangent, but I’ve seen a lot of broken families in the Korean short fiction I’ve read. One of the patterns I’ve seen — enough to feel like it’s some kind of literary convention — is the us of broken families to represent the division between North and South in Korea. I don’t think that’s what is going on in this story, mind you — any more than I think Yonggary — a giant dragon-like beast that rises out of the ocean — has anything to do with Japanese guilt about imperialism and conduct during the war. Rather, I’m just noting that broken families are one of those tropes that we see a lot in modern Korean literature — and film, for that matter — and that they seem to have accreted a kind of aura of significance and meaning, especially a political one.

The characters are very interestingly selected, by the way. Nam-Joo, played by Bae Doo-na, is quite decidedly not the sort of character who is usually tasked with being the heroine in a Korean film. That is to say, Nam-Joo is not a pretty woman. Not that we would say the same of Bae:

Nothing to sniff at, as I’m sure you’ll agree! Yet Bae’s character — who, albeit, goes from believing her neice is dead, to hunting the giant monsterthat had kidnapped the child — is most definitely made up to look unpretty — there’s a conscious, conspicuous effort put into it:

… and at times, one cannot help but wonder if what is being done here is some kind of hearkening back to a time before the media and fashion industries — so prominent today — had become as entrenched as they now are, and before female Korean stars were getting massive amounts of plastic surgery, dressing they way they do, and wearing enough makeup to make even a group of teenagers push the buttons of a surprisingly large number of adult men. Nam-Joo may well be not just be a refiguration of the female archers of old Korea, but also iconic of those women who somehow struggled to hold their lives together without falling back on their looks, or selling themselves as so many — enough to make the sex trade very nearly competitive with agriculture in this country — have ended up doing.

And by the way, Nam-joo is downright bad-ass, when she finally gets over her hesitation issues. She’s the family member I credit most with the death of the monster, simply because she is a stone [monster-]killer. Look at that expressionless face:

Nam-Joo’s brother, on the other hand, is camouflaged — he wears a suit at the beginning, and looks like he could pull off fitting in the corporate world of Korea much better — but he’s no real action hero, and indeed, he’s not very much of a man at the beginning of the story. Indeed, the first thing we see of him is not his face, but his hand, and in it, bottle of soju — the hard liquor that is, again, the emblematic Korean liquor:

The next thing we see is him guzzling the stuff as he approaches the photo of his supposedly dead neice:

While I have no doubt some guys do go and get hammered on soju when there’s a death in the family — just as some guys go get hammered on Wild Turkey or cheap vodka, depending on where they live — I think there’s more going on in this scene than just that, too.

As I’ve promised to explore in my (still ongoing, but backburnered) series on Gin Lane and Soju-Ro, soju is fascinating as an emblem of Korea — in this context especially so because it is also a beverage that has been completely redefined by the industrialization and modernization of the country. As Wikipedia notes (citing this article by Ines Cho):

From 1965 until 1991, in order to alleviate rice shortages, the Korean government prohibited the traditional direct distillation of soju from fermented grain. Instead, highly distilled ethanol from any source was mixed with water and flavorings to create diluted soju. Although the prohibition has now been lifted, cheap soju continues to be made this way.

Ethanol, of course, was an industrial byproduct. This is significant because the concern over rice shortages was nothing new: Cho notes periodic bans on soju-making during the Joseon Dynasty for similar reasons, but they were probably ineffective (just as the ban on using rice to make liquor was apparently ignored in the countryside in Korea from 1965-1991) and didn’t last. Notable also is the fact that soju was (effectively, through heavy taxation) banned by the Japanese colonial government — a ban that, again, did not last. Thepeople wanted their soju, and they would have it. The only change in 1965 was that soju could be had without using rice to make it: industrialization made that possible, because industrialization meant industrial byproducts, and that’s essentially what soju was (and I’m under the impression that, in many cases, despite the additives, the cheap stuff still is).

But I’ll save the finer discussions of history and booze for later posts in the series on soju and gin. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s simply important to note that soju is, and long has been, the drink favored especially by the working class (as opposed to CEOs who, as much as they may partake in soju-fests, tend to go drinking in expensive places and pay millions of won for bottles of foreign liquors like whiskey, as a function of status). Soju is, significantly, a drink that was transformed by industrialization and modernization, and to add one more startling transformation to our list in the film, the iconographic green soju bottle itself makes another startling transformation — to a weapon against the monster:

The fact that he is aided by an (obviously alcoholic) homeless man is only more reason to consider that soju, in the logic of this film, is iconographically a class marker, but what’s far more important about this tranformation of the soju bottle is that it also invokes poilitical history explicitly, visually. Nam-il was a member of the democracy movement, a protester back in the 1980s, and he speaks of his past as a sacrifice, as having given up his youth to bring Korean into the democratic era, a sacrifice he feels has not been rewarded. And in the end, his weapon fails, just as some would argue the democracy movement failed to truly transform the government.

Not that all demonstrators have lost out. Nam-il’s “friend,” a fellow ex-demonstrator who had gone corporate, gotten a job with a major telecom company, and tries to sell out Nam-il (and his sister) to the authorities for money, is a pretty strong satiric jab at the idea that the whole democracy movement was unimpeachable and well-intended, but at the same time, one cannot help but feel that Nam-il represents simultaneously the elements in the democracy movement who both (a) truly cared about democratization in Korea and (b) were used by all kinds of crooked types (like Nam-il’s friend) to catapult a few into positions of power and wealth quite comparable to their previous oppressors, the corporate and political elites who, under the dictators who came after the Korean War, ran the country with impunity.

Nam-il’s friend’s betrayal is, of course a cynically predictable, and relatively comic, moment, but it also signifies a great deal in a political sense, and it is also worth noting that this is a case of another transformation: a protester against the sysrem has become a (very eager) cog in the system.

Likewise, Nam-il’s failure to kill the monster with his last Molotov cocktail, which he drops to the ground, seems significant to me as an extension of the same political critique. The monster, then, really does resemble the establishment that, in his much younger days, he fought against, and which nobody quite managed to kill. For, after all, when democracy was ushered in, the old regime became a party, and the competition, over time, began to resemblethe party in ways that resonate powerfully with Nam-il’s friend and his decisions.

And that’s what I think needs saying about the monster: it is a transformed creature, but one surrounded in a sea (or, at least, a river) of transformations, and in a sense indeed springing from those transformations. Along with all the smaller but ubiquitous transformations mentioned above, we have a tyrannical dictatorship that has transformed into a less-tyrannical but no-less-corrupt (perhaps even more corrupt) and no-less-callous democratic government (with all of its trappings, the police and medical systems and under-the-thumb media, in tow). Our setting is in the posh area of a city that has been transformed from a third-world capital to a major metropolis, complete with a multiethnic population (featured much more prominently in those first scenes in Yeouido than I’ve ever seen in any Korean film before):

But at the same time that all this political critique is undeniably present in the film, the focus is, as so many have pointed out, on the story of a family. A broken family, with all the political resonance that seems to carry in Korean literary and cinematic culture… but a family nonetheless. Since nearly every character seems to be transformed in this film — including a few I haven’t yet discussed, but I’ll get to, I promise — we could ask ourselves: what transformation has the family itself gone through?

Well, its brokenness is nothing so spectacularly dramatic as in those (mostly less-recent) Korean stories I’m thinking of, where, during the Korean war, a husband and wife or brother and sister are separated by some strange turn of events that symbolizes the political division between North and South Korea — complete with the moving reunion of the pair at the end of the story as a poetical utopian evocation of Korean reunification. I’m fully aware that this might be a trope that ends up in works more commonly chosen for translation into English. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if this explicit political content were in fact part of the reason such works seem to win the awards that sometimes serve as the basis for selection for translation and publication. But the number of times I’ve seen the trope crop up suggests to me that the analogy between a broken family and a broken nation has become as natural to Korean readers (and film-goers) in the same way that the hackneyed metaphorical meaning of rain as “new beginnings” is obvious to literate anglophones.

Still, the broken family is not, in this case, one that can be repaired: Hyun-Seo’s mother seems to have just run off after having the baby, and never sees her daughter (or, we assume, Gang-du) again. The saying,”북녀남남” (Buk Nyeo Nam Nam — “Northern women, Southern men”) comes to mind — if Hyun-Seo’s mother is emblematic of North Korea, it is in the sense that she is pointedly absent, and utterly unwilling to reunite with Gang-du. She has abandoned the future, something we could easily argue North Korea also has done.

But there’s another way to look at this. If we also see Gang-du’s extended family, instead, as being already-transformed, as the product of a transformation that preceded the beginning of the film, we can see our way a little more clearly. And the transformation I’m talking about is the transformation of South Korea itself in the time since it was split apart from the North, a transformation that took place in the very lifetime of the characters depicted (though it was close to complete by the time Hyun-Seo would have been born).

The transformation I’m talking about is one that — significantly — is termed “The Miracle on the Han [River].” Which, as you probably know, is the river that runs through Seoul, and the river from which the monster in The Host emerges. It’s the economic and industrial modernization of Korea that happened from 1961 — the coup of Park Chung Hee — to the 1997 Asian financial crisis. In Korea, it’s called something quite similar: 한강의 기적 — “Hangangeui Kijeok” — and it essentially turned South Korea from an agrarian society into a modern, increasingly post-industrial society. That we should see a monster emerge from a river so rhetorically associated with transformation, in a film where transformations of all kinds flow thick and fast, suggests we should look at this bigger, more generation transformation for clues about how to read the movie.

(And, tangentially, while I play mental word associations with various words and names in the film, I find it interesting that the first syllable of Gang-du’s name is a homophone with the Korean word for “river”; likewise, Nam-joo and Nam-il’s names both contain the syllable Nam, which is a homophone with the Korean word for “south” — and both have been shown above to be emblematic of the South. Whether this is intentional is something I daren’t say, but it is tantalizing, and I’m sure more such things can be found. But then, one must also be skeptical of such fine-tuned readings. All I can say is that it is interesting to find such resonances even down to the characters’ names.)

The thing to notice is that the people in Gang-du’s family, had they been living a generation or (two or three) before, would likely have been peasant farmers living in a village in some random corner of the country, under the boot of Japan, or under the boot of the Joseon Dynasty’s local representative, depending on how far back you go. And I daresay that a lot of the things we see the Korean government doing in The Host — lying to its citizens and the international community, fabricating news, denying the basic human rights of citizens, ignoring their pleas for aid or even the freedom to take care of their own families, empowering thoroughly corrupt private business a staggering degree of power over the lives of citizens –like when Gang-du’s family must bribe a local businessman to get access to the riverside so they can search for Hyun-Seo:

– and enjoying themselves while their handiwork was being done by others — one thinks of the barbecue outside the trailer where Gang-du’s brain is being biopsied –

– then we can see that, whatever transformations have happened, the family is pretty much trying to stay in as close to one piece as possible.

Which brings us to the question of who the “bad guys” are. Certain commentators have repeatedly argued that, because of the opening of the film and its use of the (popularly exaggerated, and minor compared to relatively poorly-publicized incidents perpetrated by Koreans) dumping of formalyn into the sewage system by Koreans at the command of a civilian American mortuary worker. (You can read the whole rant here, if you like; it’s the one at ROKDRop that I linked it in part 1 of this post as well). Others have wholly dismissed the idea that the film (or these images) should be read as anti-American, noting that a great deal of harshness is handed out to all kinds of people — ex-democracy protesters, the Korean police, the Korean government, and so on. (Again, Michael’s previously-cited response can be read here.)

In my opinion, both of these readings are too simplistic. It’s futile to deny that many of the Americans are presented in a negative light. However, it’s also foolish to ignore than many of the Koreans in the film who occupy positions of power — that is, like the American military officers and medical experts who are, almost all, implicitly in positions of relative power in a Korean context — are presented in an even more negative light. Even more embarrassingly, a number of other Koreans are shown to stoop and fawn before both. Not just the Korean who obeys orders that the audience is encouraged to see as bad orders, at the beginning of the film, but also the doctors who make a show of being professional — they suddenly stop gossiping, switch on their equipment, and stand awkwardly at attention, reminiscent more than anything of little boys pretending to be real grown-up doctors — when a representative of the American CDC shows up in the trailer where Gang-du is being held:

And no, the token nice white dude who sacrifices his life to help save the lives of some Koreans doesn’t erase that many Americans look like bad guys in this film. Then again, Private Donald is dressed pretty much like any other [Korean] Yeouido visitor, and his relationship with his girlfriend seems, from the few moments we see of it, heartfelt. She pleads for him to not run into the monster’s vicinity, which is a hell of a step up from every [romantic] foreigner-Korean relationship I’ve ever seen in a Korean movie. (Usually, the girl is either a prostitute or a so-called “slut,” and seems sad or mentally mixed-up. Donald’s girlfriend seems pretty much like any average Korean girl of the same age, except that she seemingly (from her accent) speaks English fluently. Kudos to Director Bong for giving us what may be the first non-psycho Western/Korean couple in Korean film. May be, note. There might be an earlier case I’ve missed!)

And while I am discussing misinterpretations: it’s breathtaking how far off the mark ROKDrop is when he implies that the anti-Agent Yellow protesters are lionized for their actions. Yes, Agent Yellow is an obvious send-up of Agent Orange:

– and frankly a well-deserved one, considering the horrors that the US use of Agent Orange abroad led to. (And did you know the stuff as used in Korea in the late 60s, too? Yes, that nasty little secret’s been out for a few years now, I guess.) The histrionics about verbal attacks on America — so common among a small number of Americans here — are a distraction. Bickering about whether or not the film is anti-American is much less interesting than asking what the use of images of Americans means in this film.

While I’m at it, I’d also like to note that, in this film, it would be ridiculous to claim (as ROKDrop implies) that protesters are being praised. Not only has protest culture been scathingly criticized already in the form of the betrayal of Nam-il by a fellow ex-protestor, but most of the younger generation of anti-Agent Yellow protesters flee as soon as it comes to putting their own butts on the line: a massive crowd of protesters suddenly dwindles to a handful of souls just as Agent Yellow is released.

You would have to be outright searching for something to criticize, and would have to have left your sense of humor back at home on the base, not to find this both hilarious and scathing as a send-up of Korea’s so-called “tin pot culture” (heats up quickly, but cools off just as quickly). Bong isn’t praising protestors, he’s mocking them as viciously as he mocks almost everyone else, including Americans.

So if it’s less than useful to rant about — or to excuse — the depiction of this or that America in the film, how are we to make sense of the obvious cinematic rhetoric about American presence in Korea. Well, to me, the image I cited above is particularly relevant:

What we see here is the absolute nexus of real power in Korea as many Koreans of Gang-du’s class and background would perceive it: Americans in military uniform, and Koreans in suits. These two groups are, in their purest sense — as in this image — distilled into types, into vague, unparticularized forms, because they are not characters, in the sense that Donald is. They are emblems of a status quo that, indeed, existed in the past and still haunts Korea today, no matter how many Donalds there are, no matter how much time has passed.

You go on and get you brains drilled out, Gang-du. We’ll be out here barbecuing burgers and weiners and networking! Okay? Good.

The American characters in this film, aside from Donald, are not strictly speaking “American.” They’re rather an inextricable part of a complex web of figures — the foreign CDC man, the Korean cop, the foreign mortuary boss, the Korean mortuary worker, the crowd of suits and soldiers having a nice Sunday barbecue while Hyun-Seo starves in a monster’s lair in the sewers by the Han River — that emblematize the hermetically sealed relationships of power that comprised life for the Korean masses, powerful business owners, the Korean military, and the American military and government during the dictatorships under which the Miracle of the Han River occurred. Almost all American presence in the film is explicitly linked to Korean power — oppressive Korean power, specifically an oppressive, deceitful Korean government that fabricates a story about a virus, that doesn’t blanch at having citizens lobotomized for the sake of its lies, that in fact does everything it can to ruin the lives of Gang-du’s family for no good reason at all. These and all of the government’s other insanities all represent the two-faced nature of the governments which ruled Korea in those years: one face smiling out at the world, and the other staring impassively, blocking many people from even criticizing its very real, very important injustices, abuses, and inadequacies.

The barbecue scene, in other words, is a brief glimpse of the Old Boy’s Club of Power in South Korea, one that, however it may discomfit us, and no matter what justifications we may wish to offer, included or was linked to powerful Americans. Gang-du is not welcome there, and he does not linger, but he knows that even the transgression of fighting for his own life, and his daughter’s, is inexcusable in their eyes. (This is why he needs a hostage.)

Little wonder then, really, that the chase scene where the cop tries to stop the family from escaping the hospital went over so well with audiences:

… since there is, and has been, long-seething discontent with the arrogance, ineffectiveness, lack of compassion and respect given to citizens by the police in many parts of Korea — resentment less pronounced in the countryside and among older people, according to this survey, but resentment that, in public and online discussions has flared in certain instances to the point of a public relations disaster in which high level officials or, recently, the President, had to show up at the police station to remind people to do their goddamned jobs.

Resentment and — unsurprisingly — a strong sense of the police as linked to or part of the bureaucratic institutions of the government, rather than as upholders of the law and the peace in their local communities. This is yet another facet of the power structure that Bong is constantly attacking in the film, such that by the end, you’re left wondering whether it’s the Korean government and all of its tentacles — business, the medical system, the police — who comprise the real monster of the movie. And if you think Bong Joon-Ho has hammered it over your head already, perhaps it’s overkill for me to note that Yeouido, which the all-important Wonhyo Bridge near which the monster lives is located, is… well, I’ll let Wikipedia describe it for you:

Yeouido is a large island next to the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. It is Seoul’s main business and investment banking district. Its 8.4 square kilometers are home to some 30,988 people. The island is located in the Yeongdeungpo-gu district of Seoul, and largely corresponds to the precinct of Yeouido-dong. The island contains the National Assembly Building, where the National Assembly of South Korea meets, the huge Yoido Full Gospel Church, the 63 Building, and the headquarters of LG, KBS, and MBC, and the Korea Exchange Center.

Yeouido is, in other words, a site where power in Korea (governmental, religious, media, and corporate power alike) are concentrated. If you’re anything like me, there’s only one possible reading for the notion that a giant monster lives there, and it’s not flattering to any of the above.

And to say nothing about America, the government that after all supported the same dictatorships that ruled through the majority of the Miracle on the Han, would simply be remiss. Of course, those who see the movie as anti-American are likely to see America’s involvement in Korean history through rose-colored glasses, just as some Koreans are likely to see it through nightmare-tinted sunglasses. The truth is somewhere in between, with great dollops of both, but for society’s losers, the whole mess of it — American power, rich Koreans, military officials, cops, doctors — melds into one nasty, seething, toxic lump of oppressiveness. Toxic as the HanRiver is at the beginning of the film.

And society did have its losers. The so-called “Miracle on the Han,” of course, is primarily understood as an economic miracle. In any economic transformation, however, there are all kinds of other changes that must occur. For example, “From 1970 to 1990 the city’s population more than doubled to a panic-inducing 10 million“  — a transformation that, of course, should bring to mind the gargantuan size-change in the monster, as well as its propensity to consume people, mentioned above.

In every such environment-in-transformation, there are always winners and losers. The novels (or, rather, collections of linked short stories, which they both are) that I mentioned in part 1, which I am currently reading, A Distant and Beautiful Place (원미동 사람들) by Yang Kwi-Ja and The Dwarf (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공) by Cho Se-hui, very vivdly sketch the world of the losers and underdogs who fared less than well in the rapid transformations that made up the Miracle on the Han. A Distant and Beautiful Place depicts one of the suburbs they were driven into (the place where I live, which as I’ve mentioned before, some of my students have called “a slum”) as real estate and development in Seoul took its course, and The Dwarf depicts (among other things) the indignities they faced while being edged out, along with some of the horrid lengths to which some had to go to keep their lives from collapsing completely. I don’t know quite how badly-off they are, but all kinds of little hints show that Gang-du’s siblings aren’t doing much better than him: how his brother marvels at his (traitorous) protester buddy’s salary, and the way Nam-joo dresses. (She works for a government office, which means stability, but not much income: this all but screams lower-class woman clawing her way up to middle class. I know people who are basically in the same position as her.)

The family must struggle to maintain its unity, though. Obviously, they don’t live together: Gang-du’s father, Hie-bong, says as much to the photo of Hyun-Seo when her uncle comes to the funeral: “Because of you, we’re all together now!” he tells her. Nam-joo presumably lives in Suwon, where she works — which is a suburb of Seoul. Nam-il, one imagines, works in Seoul. Gang-du and his father and daughter perhaps don’t live in Yeouido, as it’s too ritzy for the likes of them, but may live in one of the lower-cost housing areas nearby, or perhaps in some cheap corner of the island.

This is the postmodern family, and none of them really quite fit into the Korea in which most of the audience lives: they’re far too much the underdogs, ground down by the very same Miracle on the Han that has bouyed up so many others. And for all the glittering lights on can see on the Han river in popular photos, what I the monster seems to represent –or literally to be — is the dark side of the Miracle on the Han, that which has been denied and suppressed. It is primarily a submarine creature, concealed beneath the surface; its lair is part of the modern infrastructure of the city’s sewage system, dark, underground. In this way — being relegated to the status of beneath contempt, beneath notice until they strike out, Gang-du’s family has a great deal in common with the monster they hunt.

When Hyun-Seo’s family hunts for her, what we see is a motage of images of tunnels underground that would almost not be out of place in a fantasy dungeon crawl, and the only characters we encounter there most of the time are others of society’s losers — like the homeless kids, one of whom Hyun-Seo ends up defending against the monster:

– and government agents seemingly more bent on maintaining control of the riverfront than on catching and killing the monster itself.

(The epitome of coldness follows this scene, where Gang-du simply cannot abandon his dead father, and for his trouble, the soldiers black-bag him and haul him off. It is a heartbreaking moment, but it’s not as if citizens weren’t hauled off — bags over their heads or not — during the historical period I discussed above. They were, and then they were tortured, and sometimes imprisoned. Which makes the scene even more horrifying and heartbreaking, another dark echo of the horrifying past.)

The character that shows the greatest chance of fitting into the world — of escaping from the powerlessness and poverty that traps her family — indeed, is young Hyun-Seo, who looks like any other kid in Seoul, who is smarter than her father, more together than her uncle, more confident than her aunt, but who also just wants a new cell phone. Hyun-Seo is not merely a vulnerable child, in this film: she’s the closest thing to a character that the audience can identify with as being like themselves. She’s the only really “normal” character in the film.

And thus, since this is a movie, Hyun-Seo is bound therefore to suffer… and suffer she does.

Hyun-Seo, like so many other children in older Korean monster movies, has a strong connection with — and direct experience of — the monster before almost anyone else, certainly before any of the other major characters. What’s different is that this experience is wholly and violently negative from the very start. She is neither fascinated by the monster, nor amused by it. It arises from the waters, seizes her, and hauls her away. After a brief experience of her as a normal teenaged kid, the audience sees her almost immediately hauled off to the beast’s lair, logically to become the monster’s food, but in terms of the narrative structure, to become a hostage whom the rest of her family must rescue.

Hyun-Seo’s superficial transformation seems quite horrific: she is immediately filthy, her clothes ruined, and yet an essential sweetness and decency shines in her eyes, making her transformation all the more horrifying — indeed, as she is familiar (a regular kid her age) and also the walking dead, a meal deferred (the unfamiliar, the awful), she pretty becomes a textbook definition of unhiemliche as Freud defined it.

But I’m not interested in talking Freud: I think lit people often take him to seriously anyway. What interests me is the deeper significance of Hyun-Seo going underground, going into the monster’s lair to be consumed. When I discussed this topic with my students, I used a powerpoint to present these ideas, and the picture above (or one like it, showing Hyun-Seo in the state she is in there) was contrasted with this one, an image by the famous Korean photographer Kim Ki-chan:

(This child was particularly striking to my students because she was photographed not far from the university where I teach, not many years before they were born. The area is big buildings — including some monstrous high-rises and department stores — and it’s hard to believe it ever looked like this, let alone having looked like this just a few decades ago.

The other picture I used on the slideshow was one rather like this one, which I believe is by Michael Hurt:

Which I think ruffled some feathers — as intended. I could as easily have used the movie poster for the film adaptation of The Dwarf, which I’ll include here again (it was also included in part 1 of this post):

The text on the side reads something like this: Mom, I am a grown-up and I can choose what to do with my body. I will withstand it, I will withstand it. Which makes me pretty sure the film is a much more salacious presentation of the plot in the novel where a young woman makes the best she can of a terrible dilemma.

I want to make it clear that my point is not to say that there is some sexual subtext to the monster’s capture of Hyun-Seo, even if the kidnapping does render her a kind of surrogate mother to the little boy she rescues. (Or, maybe, surrogate elder sister, which is just as weird as it means the monster “births” her a brother out of its mouth at the same time that it births out “death” in the form of the bones of its other victims — meaning the monster is some kind of surrogate mother, which is too weird even for me to consider getting into, even with Mari Kotani’s bizarre essay on the transformation of female forms in Japanese womens’ SF — mentioned here, and yes, it’s in Robot Ghosts… too — floating around in my brain.)

Rather, I’m interested in the prospects of a girl like Hyun-Seo a few years down the road after experiencing the “dark side” of the Miracle on the Han — that is, the stuff the monster represents, the instability of housing, the grinding poverty, the severely limited access to education and decent opportunities to work. Which, as far as I can figure out, are pretty much the kinds of long-term opportunities that the little village girl a couple of photos up had available to her: marrying and becoming dependent on her husband and/or in-laws, or making money whatever way she could.

Note: the size of the sex trade in Korea, and the reasons for women going into it here, are a pretty weird topic to discuss with anglophone Koreans, especially younger people. There’s either a great deal of embarrassment, or else a great deal of naivete about the subject. But even so, it’s difficult to deny that the sex trade has, in Korean society, been an important option for women who had no other way to support themselves, especially in a society so rapidly commercializing that it sometimes seems everything is being commodified — and even sex can be used to announce the grand opening of… a corner shop:

Which, as people like James keep pointing out, is bizarre for a society that just legalized miniskirts and hot pants a couple of years ago. (Or is it? Maybe it’s precisely what you would expect from such a society. You tell me.) My discussion with James focused on the cultural ambiguity of sexualizing teenagers in Korean pop culture today. Suffice it say that the fact that Hyun-Seo is a teenager doesn’t exclude her from this icky economic underworld: indeed, among all the characters in Korean SF I’ve encountered, she most resembles in age and attire the main character in the independent film Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakroh, about a teenaged prostitute who is killed in a university district, resurrected as a cyborg, and goes on a killing rampage. Trust SF to dive straight into anxieties that newspapers would prefer to euphemize as things like “compensated dating.” (For an excellent discussion of wonjo gyojae/”compensated dating” see this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, about another Korean film and its social context.)

What I’m suggesting here is not that Hyun-Seo would someday have become a prostitute, or even one of these dancing girls in front of a corner shop, but rather that countless girls in her position — essentially swallowed up whole by the dark side of the Miracle on the Han River — have in real life been confronted with the choice either to sell themselves in some form or another, or to go hungry. Either fate is a horror, and either fate has been faced by millions of women during the so-called Miracle on the Han River. Where was their miracle, pray tell? That’s the question I feel like the film is asking. Sometimes, the miracle is a monster.

What I’m talking about is the sexism and essential classism of the Miracle on the Han — its essential unfairness, in a society profoundly concerned with “fairness,” as Korean society has time and time again shown itself to be in matters pertaining to education and class. (See Michael J. Seth’s book Education Fever if you’d like a pile of examples of Korean society’s concern for fairness, and its concentration of the need for fairness on children and their futures.) Yet the fact that a great deal of the fallout is not up for public discussion. These young women, like Hyun-Seo in the monster’s lair, remain hidden, concealed, subterranean.

One might well even imagine a whole network of such lairs, in which the monster has stowed away other children and the bones of other victims. If the monster did not have such a thing, in time it would necessarily have developed it.

But Hyun-Seo is also, and we must not lose sight of this, a child. She dies in part because of the neglect of her father to save her from the beast by catching her hand at the crucial moment… a failure which is a result of his own father’s neglect, and which opens up a sort of sense of a whole legacy of neglect being passed down from ages past, and generations long forgotten. Yet there must be more to it than that, right?

Well, another element is that, very often in not just SF but even mainstream films and all kinds of literature, children represent the future. Hyun-Seo is such an interesting character because, more than anyone, she seems like a contemporary Korean. She seems like someone who could fit in, who could function well in society, who could perhaps climb up out of her bottom-class tier into comfort security, and a measure of happiness. But such potential is precarious, and the Han River is very broad, and the deep dark side is very powerful, and can tear away opportunity in a heartbeat.

And then we find that, at the end, Hyun-Seo dies. Now, it would be a mistake necessarily to read this specific ending wholly allegorically. I am not saying that Bong Joon-Ho has declared the lower class hopeless, or anything like that. Indeed, it would be a profound mistake to miss the fact mentioned by Charles in this comment that Korean audiences — or, at any rate, Korean filmmakers — seem to really go for tragic, melodramatic deaths. They’re just into that. Melodrama is a big thing here, and one should never underestimate the importance of culture on the media a society produces. Plenty of Korean movies end very, very sadly.

Although the tragedy is softened by the fact that Hyun-Seo died a hero, protecting a child who becomes the surrogate child for her father, it’s an immensely disappointing, painful moment when one realizes that, after all the struggle, despite all her brightness and promise and goodness — her essential normality — Hyun-Seo is actually, really, finally dead. Her screwed-up family weeps over her dead body as the monster struggles, and then, of course — because this is a monster movie and who else is going to do the monster in? — the survivng members of Hyun-Seo’s family each do their part to slaughter the beast before it can escape.

They failed to save Hyun-Seo, but in killing the beast, they succeed… just barely. They manage to kill the monster — this particular monster, though the ending shows continued vigilance, and the fear of more such monsters. Obviously, this is at least in part a case of leaving the door open for a sequel (in addition to the prequel due out in summer 2009), which not only from a fiscal standpoint is a very smart move by Bong.

But it also suggests that the victory against the monster is not only incomplete in that Hyun-Seo has died, but also in that the threat, the looming, hidden danger, still remains, has not dissipated, and affects many still. Gang-du, staring out over the Han River with his rifle in hand, his surrogate child asleep on the floor of his convenience stand in the depths of a winter storm, can easily be read as a potent symbol of the fact that many families today face the same instability — or even worse, in some cases — faced by those whse lives were disrupted by the dark side of the Miracle on the Han.

Actually, as the film ends, there is one more glimpse of a reversal we see. Gang-du and the homeless boy that Hyun-Seo saved sit down together to share a meal. I mentioned earlier (in part 1, I think) that almost every Korean movie I’ve seen includes one scene involving a meal. There are several in The Host: the one where Hyun-Seo’s family eats, and, thinking of her, we see her among them as they long for her and worry about how long she’s gone hungry. And there is this meal at the end, which Gang-du shares with his adopted son. But Bong Joon-Ho rightly points out that there are other “meal” scenes as well:

The first concept was born in June 2000, and in it the monster kept growing simply by eating fish. Then one day it finally tastes human flesh, and where would that come? From a poor fella committing suicide from one of the Han River bridges, obviously! So our Monster tastes the flesh, and starts thinking: “How could I ignore this delicious taste for so long! All that fish infesting the shitty waters of the Han River can’t even compare!”

But the last image in the film is a claustrophobic, ominous one. Rightly so: in Korea today, government policies — of the kind likely to hurt people like Gang-du’s family more than anyone — are being proposed at a dizzying rate. Though the recent protests (see here) have derailed many of them, the risk is far from over: like the fish that dropped from the side of the monster, there’s the constant potential for the Han River to produce more horrors as it continues to flow along its way. The threat of the dark side of the Miracle on the Han — the looming shadow beneath the waves that indeed begins the whole movie — still haunts many, even today.

UPDATE (10 Sept 2008): More on The Host here!