Category: KOREA

On Rich Young People Today…

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…for a value of today dating back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s tenure as a governess, and courtesy of Ruth Brandon’s book Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres: Mary found them quite uncultivated, with no topics of conversation other than dress, dogs and marriage. To which Mrs. Jiwaku immediately exclaimed: “It’s Korea!” Meaning South Korea, today. Except that in contemporary South Korea, it’s not just rich young people… not everyone is like this, but the middle class, and even the aspirational types in the lower class, are mostly precisely this way. Well, okay, dress, dogs, Kpop, and marriage. Which reminds …

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Review in Kyoto Journal #77

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New as of right now: my long-delayed review of B.R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters is out in the current issue of the Kyoto Journal (#77). Though the title is goofy — “Minjok Mama Madness! and Other Fairytales From North of the 49th Parallel” — the subject is serious, and the review is overall quite positive. My review isn’t in the online preview, though, so you’ll have to get a copy of this fine journal in order to read it. I’m enjoying my contributor’s copy, and can recommend the issue (and the journal) without …

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About that MBC Parody Video

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A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo. Then I got busy, and stayed busy. Then I left Korea. And here we are. But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned …

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Interview by Tate

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I only vaguely remember answering  these questions, for good reason: Tate’s ESL Travel Chronicle interviewed me last year but I must have missed when the interview was posted. Here it is, for the  curious. (Funny reading this, now that I’m no longer in Korea.) Since it’s mainly about my life in Korea, and not about my writing, I’m just posting it to the blog, and not to the interviews section of this… wait, that’s gone missing. Er… well, anyway.

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Korea in English-Language SF

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This entry is part 60 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Over at Gusts of Popular Feeling, everyone’s favorite archives-trawler Matt has a post about about “the first SF story involving Korea” and a few other such tales from the Galaxy/Amazing Stories era. I’ve left a comment clarifying that “the first SF story” should be qualified as “the first English-language SF story” and also noting that depending on how you define “SF,” one might consider Jack London’s Star Rover the first in the English language. As for the first Korean-language SF story, I don’t know what it was, though I’d argue that the amount of remixing that seems to have gone …

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The Case of Park Chorong-Chorong-Bitnari, and the Anthropomorphization of Humans

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Caveat: I’m going off some of Mrs. Jiwaku’s (perhaps hazy) memories, and my own (imperfect) reading of some articles online, through a language barrier. I welcome corrections, as therefore there may be some mistakes in my understanding, or misreadings, or details that are off… A few years ago, I began writing this post, though I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Now, I think I do know, and it unsettles me. The story is somewhat disturbing, though I don’t do “trigger warnings.”

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Horror and Culture: Anglo/American, Korean, and Japanese Perspectives

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Note: This is another post from last semester, when I was teaching a film class. I am not teaching now, but the thoughts seemed worth posting. (Because right now I’m too busy to write much new for the blog, but feel I should post more often than I have been.) The post is definitely not intended to be any definitive discussion, just interesting notes from a small class discussion.   I had an interesting discussion in my class today about horror across the three cultures represented in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film course: Korean, Japanese, and Anglophone.(1) We watched …

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Seoul Comics World Convention #114 (December 2012)

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This entry is part 59 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Note: This is a post from late December. I was too busy to finish writing it, so I’m posting it a bit late.  Those following my SF in South Korea series have no doubt been wondering why I haven’t posted anything new in a long time. The fact is, not much has happened as far as I’ve heard about. I do have some reviews of older SF movies that Miss Jiwaku and I have dug into–specifically, Half-Moon Mask (Mask Bandal) and Wooraemae–but I’d rather talk about those once I’ve seen the whole series, and in both cases, that’s a lot of …

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On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

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At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English.  (Unless one is …

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