Category: KOREA

Flashback!

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I’ve been busy for a while now, sorting through things, getting writing done, and so on. I’ve wanted to post about the Sewol Ferry Disaster for a while, but finding an appropriate way of saying what I think about this horrifying and heartbreaking situation is hard work, and I’ve been busy with other very pressing things, including sorting through my “piles of crap.” Those “piles” are digital, mind you: hard drives of accumulated photos, files, and so on. (And that’s besides my writing, and work on the Daerijeon soundtrack, and getting some exercise, and so on). But I didn’t want …

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Three Questions About Western Historiography and Korea

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Another excerpt from Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea, and two three questions: Given the speed of change in modern Korea, it takes some mental effort to recall the conditions of diet, health, housing, education, and living standards that prevailed in Korea at the time of liberation. In the 1930s, for example, life expectancy was thirty-six years for men and thirty-eight years for women. Women were treated like chattel by their own relatives. They had little autonomy or even identity of their own. They were known as so-and-so’s mother or daughter or wife and their given names were so seldom …

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Jeonju — A Culinary Pilgrimage

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I’ve long promised a roundup of places in Jeonju that I’d recommend to people… or, rather, places that I make a point of going when I’m in Jeonju myself. For anyone not in (or going to) Korea, well… this might be of less interest to you, unless you love reading abut amazing restaurants that you’ll probably never visit.

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Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea

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I’ve mentioned Donald Clark’s book Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950 a few times lately (and it will certainly come up again), but I haven’t really summed up my thoughts on the book, something I’m trying to do a little more since falling out of the habit last year. Here are my thoughts… 

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The Really Intractable Thing: North Korea, Climate Change, and Why We’re Failing

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Over at The Week, a depressing piece on the horrors up North, titled “North Korea isn’t Nazi Germany — in some ways, it’s worse”: Unless North Korea invades or bombs another country, or China gives up its patronage of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s hard to see much concrete coming out of the report. Paul Whitefield at the Los Angeles Times remembers the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again,” then throws up his hands in resignation: So what should the world do? What can the world do? Must we accept that in North Korea, basic freedoms — even such a simple thing as the right not …

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Speed Skating and Death Threats

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Believe it or not, this is not a rant. If I were going to rant about anything related to the Sochi Olympics, it would be Russia’s headfirst leap back into the Middle Ages in terms of its homophobic legislation, and the disgusting way the IOC caved to the Russian state’s barbaric laws. But I’m not watching the Sochi Olympics, so it’s not so much on my radar. But the other day I had an interesting, somewhat frustrating discussion, but ultimately (maybe) helpful discussion with a student the other day about the recent twittermobbing and threatening of Scottish speed skater Elise …

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The Bloom Effect, Part 2: Tiger Mom Retcon, The Bloom Effect, “Middle 2 Syndrome”, and Resistance in Context

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series The Bloom Effect

This post is part of a series. I suggest you start at the beginning, to get the most out of it. Part 3: Hyperschooling and the Tiger Mom Retcon Last time, I talked about the idea of “Tiger Parenting” and how it’s primarily been discussed in the context of American education and upbringing. I talked about the importance of considering education and upbringing within a social context–how parenting is contextualized by society and education, how education is contextualized by parenting and society, and so on. The implications are enormous, of course: a mainstream Korean-styled upbringing in Korea is different from …

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The Bloom Effect, Part 1: Context, Context, and More Context

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series The Bloom Effect

This post is the promised follow-up to my earlier post titled “Two Disconcerting Trends: Korean Kids, School Systems, And Parental Appraisal.” I have split the follow-up into two parts, as 10,000 words seems too long for a single blog post. This is a sprawling essay discussing: The idea of the Tiger Mom, and some thoughts on Amy Chua’s book The importance of social context in determining the outcome of a given parenting style Hyperschooling and why it is a rasdically new thing in South Korea, and why nobody seems willing to admit it to their kids or themselves “The Bloom Effect” observed …

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Korean Fiction, For Free… (In a Limited Range of Editions)

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While I think Charles Montgomery at Korean Literature in Translation overstates things a little bit by calling it a “triumph,” it’s worth noting that LTI Korea has released a set of twenty early modern Korean texts for free. (That is, early 20th century texts: “early modern” begins much later in Korean lit than English lit, where it’s used to talk about Shakespeare.) The reason I think it’s an overstatement to call this a triumph has nothing to do with the translations–of which I’ve only read a little so far, though what I’ve seen looks good–but with the media in which …

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A Little Context Regarding Korean 먹방 (“Broadcast Eating”)

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So, the global news has been abuzz with the latest story about South Korea, which is that some Koreans are making vast piles of money by eating massive dinners on live broadcast online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCkUMIDcylM No, I’ve never tuned in. (I hate watching people eat with their mouths open, and that’s pretty common in Korea. So, uh, no thanks.) But yes, it’s real: where, in the west, strangers would only send that cam-girl above money if she took off her clothes online, Koreans send her money just to watch her eat.  There’s a context, though, that these the news stories seem constantly …

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