There was a very strange moment the other day that I meant to post about earlier, but forgot about because I was sidetracked into issues of foreign exchange students in Korea, especially Chinese ones. One of my students wrote a fascinating essay on the effect of Korean popular culture and Hallyu (the so-called “Korean Wave”) on Chinese society; her argument, essentially, was that many young, urban Chinese are absolutely crazy for Korean pop culture, and that this is a bad thing because they’re essentially jettisoning their own traditional culture and so on. I’m not sure whether it was alarmist or …
Month: May 2008
“Big Waves” Kill 9
Article here. There were kids around. Some of them saw their own parents swept out to sea. South Korea’s weather agency had forecast there would be strong winds and high waves in the area but did not issue any advisory… Er, did not bother, perhaps, might be a fairer description? What’s the point of having the tech and forecasting if you don’t put the word out? I mean, we even had hail advisories in my hometown, and we had hail, like, once every few years at most. I’m not saying Korea ought to be exactly like Canada. I’m saying it …
The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)
I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss in a moment.) I posted last week about the violence that broke out in Seoul among Chinese students at the Olympic Torch/Free-Tibet rally. As Brian in Jeollanam-do noted, the Korean government’s handling of the situation has been, in some cases, disappointing, for example declining to …
Pahwakhe Podcast is Up
The audio podcast of the first story I ever sold, “Pahwakhe,” is now online at PodCastle. It’s very flattering to have joined some pretty illustrious ranks in the Escape Pod/PseudoPod/PodCastle family. I’d like to offer a big thanks to Rachel Swirsky for giving the story a spot at PodCastle, to Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay at Fantasy Magazine for being the first to give the story a shot, and to C. G. Furst for his reading. When you have a quarter of an hour to spare, go check it out!
Seoul Demo, 2 May 2008
UPDATE (3 May 2008): The demonstration on the 3rd sucked. As usual for 21st century Korea, when something is good, the first thing that happens is microphones and a sound system are brought in, random yahoos blab into the microphones (or, worse, sing) for hours on end, and the crowds end up becoming an audience, not participants. I wandered off, disappointed, when some teenaged boy was onstage cussing out Lee Myung Bak, and snapped a few more shots of the crowds who turned out, but nothing too special. (I’ll upload them later.) Lime and I ended up going for dinner …