Category: KOREA

The Shin Kyung-Sook Plagiarism Scandal

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Given how rampant plagiarism is in many fields in South Korea—and it really, really is, despite some limited attempts to address it—I figured it was only a matter of time until some famous contemporary author here got accused of it… at least, on a stage public and prominent enough for it to make it into the English language news. Well, that finally happened earlier this year, in September… accusation, scandal, flubbed dismissals, and finally an apology… well, sort of. (Kind of a non-apology apology, of the sort that’s very fashionable these days everywhere.) It happened back in September, but I’ve been busy so I’m only posting …

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구름나그네

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So, a few days ago, I got my driver’s license in Daejeon. Just barely, but I got passed the exam, and was licensed to drive in South Korea. I could, in fact, have immediately gotten an International Driving Permit as well, if I’d known. This, of course, is terrifying. I hadn’t, until recently, driven a car in twenty years. But it’s a nice change: certainly, the expansion of our mobility is a huge help. Not that it wasn’t an entirely bizarre, baffling experience, getting the license—about which I’ll write more soon, I’m sure. But there’s perks to having it, like how, last night, we …

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Surviving in Trollworld

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So, Facebook’s buzzing over some idiotic opinion piece (don’t click on that link: trust me, you don’t need to read it) by one Choi Shi-yong that mostly amounts to “Korea=civilized; foreigner=uncivilized” as the theme that runs through the stream-of-consciousness drivel. There’s some particularly patronizing garbage about how sometimes they do after all… when they’re taught respect by Korean society: On the other hand, I saw a Canadian friend in a bus who has lived in Gwangju for over 10 years. He was willing to give his seat to the old lady after finding that she was standing right behind his seat. I thought that …

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A Short History of the Donghak Peasant Revolution by Soonchul Shin and Jinyoung Lee

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Note: I’ve appended an update to the end of this post, with information provided to me on Facebook. Read on for more.   Original Post: I’ve been reading up on Korean history—not just out of interest in filling in some blanks in my historical knowledge, but also, I’ll confess, because of an ongoing writing project, and because the library at work has a ton of materials to which I previously had no access—and the results have been interesting… for the most part, anyway. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. There’s hits and misses, and the book I’ll be discussing today is …

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Whilst Nature Was Busy Making Cabbages: The Woman in White

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Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting …

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