Category: KOREA

The Suwon Revelation

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After spending seven of the past eleven years in the Yeokgok district of Bucheon City, not living there has been full of surprises. Even though I tried to resist it, I developed a habit of mind wherein I conflated Yeokgok with Korea generally, just as I conflate Seoul Subway Line 1 with the whole system. Well, like riding Line 6 for a while, staying in Suwon for a week has been a revelation. For one thing, people don’t look us up and down, or scowl nastily at us the way the used to in Yeokgok, or on Line 1. They …

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Seoul Cthulhu Festival of Film: 28 Feb 2012

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This entry is part 57 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

UPDATE (8 March 2013): This event was a huge success, selling out all the seats in the cinema to a very appreciative audience. We’re happy it was so well-received, and hope that it will inspire the organization of similar such events in future! I’ll post photos when I get the chance… ORIGINAL POST: Fans of H.P. Lovecraft in Seoul will not want to miss the upcoming Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul. The evening will feature three film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories: one Korean, one German, and one American. There will be subtitles for all films, to accommodate both Korean-speakers …

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Smooth? Are You Kidding?

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Okay, okay, I’m foolish. Fine. I was hoping out last couple of weeks on campus would be smooth sailing. Today, while in Seoul sorting out some paperwork, I encountered a really nice guy–a cabbie who was in his seventies, who was a real character. He was a cabbie who seemed to also fancy himself a comedian, with photos of all kinds in his cab. Some he used to communicate, some for comedic effect. I swear, he put on glasses with a fake nose just to make me laugh. He wasn’t that funny but his effort and friendliness were endearing. His last …

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“How My Mother Sees My Friends” and “How Others See ‘My Couple'”

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Found, by my wife, on a Korean website–and not the kind of site you might imagine. You can click the image to open the full-sized version, for a better look: This was uploaded, of all places, to a DIY website–a place where people  who do stuff like make soap, candles, and that kind of thing hang out. If you looked closely, I’m sure you caught the two disturbing things about it: first, that “How I see myself” is full of images of white people… but secondly, that image about “How my mother sees my friends” is… yep, a group of …

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Meditations on Junk, #1: Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans

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I’m flipping through Min Byoung-Chul’s Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans. (Which is, by the way, insanely overpriced on Amazon.com.) It’s a sort of typical book in Korea, basically intellectual junk crammed full of East vs. West generalizations and “explanations” by a Korean who doesn’t himself quite grasp what he’s taken upon himself to explain. (Also, to be frank, the first half of the book seems to be made up mainly of genuinely rude, disgusting, or dangerous behaviours common among Koreans, while the second half, supposedly balancing this, is full of very tame gestures and comments about how Americans are “impatient” with people …

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Normal Sadism, Weak Boundaries, and Social Unhappiness

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I was having a discussion with someone about life in Korea–someone who feels pretty much like I do about it–and something interesting crossed my mind. It’s the concept of “normal marital sadism” that was coined by the therapist David Schnarch to describe the very common form of emotional sadism that seems to develop in a lot–a lot–of marriages. He published an article on the concept back in May of this year, in Psychology Today: People who refuse to acknowledge their own hatred, vindictiveness, and punitiveness are the most pernicious people to those they love. You can’t learn to control hostile impulses you …

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Eleven Years…

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By the way, it’s been eleven years since I landed in Korea. Okay, really, I arrived on 30 December. It’s still 30 December in a lot of the world, so I’ll just ignore the fact I’m a few hours late on Korean time. Yeah, it’s been eleven years since I flew across the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arrived in Incheon International Airport, and took a bus down to Jeonju Iksan, to be met by someone I’d never met–but whom I’d heard about through my friend Joleen. Eleven years is a long, long time, considering that when I first …

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On that Stack of Essays I Got Through a Few Weeks Ago…

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Out of a small stack of essays, I gleaned the following interesting insight that I’d never thought of myself: It’s possible to argue that the main difference in the conception of the uncontrollable in Greek Mythology and Bible stories is that, for the Greeks, human problems were often a result of the gods and their machinations, while for the ancient Hebrews, humans were just as often responsible for getting themselves into a heap of trouble, out of which God would sometimes bail them, if they were good. That’s it. Hours of grading, and precisely one idea I’ve never seen before. …

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New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

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For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

My essay is titled “Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency,” and it deals not only with my own experience using RPG-like systems in language teaching, but also how RPG-like approaches to interaction might be just what’s needed to fix Korea’s utterly broken TEFL paradigm… and maybe to instill a deeper sense of agency in young people whose literature, education, and upbringing seem specifically to stifle that sense. But I’ll add that it’s just as much about my return to gaming as it is about the stuff mentioned in the title… and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in there, too.

The WyrdCon Companion ebook is free to download from here.

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If You Wanna Be My 형…

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Yeah, sung to the tune of that horrible Spice Girls song. Ugh. Miss Jiwaku and I talked after she got back from her film program meeting today, about her frustrations. To what do her frustrations mostly connect? Older people who insist on “respect” and special treatment on account of their age, regardless of incompetence, rudeness, or plain stupidity. There’s an older person in her film program who is particularly useless, who apparently was constantly rude to her, who finally warmed up to her… why? Because she poured him soju with two hands and used the magic “term of respect” address …

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