How to Mess Up Your Kid, or, Is There a Korean Kids Help Phone?

“How was your dinner?” the shop lady asked me. I sputtered, in Korean, “The food was good, but this crazy… crazy… this crazy b-i-t-c-h messed up my whole evening. You know, if this were Canada, I’d call the cops. And the cops would come, and it wouldn’t be easy for her. She would have a problem.” Because, obviously, the woman did have a problem. I hate the B-word. I use it very rarely. (And even less so in Korean, though I don’t know a good insulting but less-extreme word I could have used instead.) To understand why I went ahead …

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Woah!

Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …

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