Tag: expats

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 Side Order of Context

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  Something I find fascinating is how people talk and talk and talk about diversity as if it only means different races, and not different cultures–that different cultures and the frame of reference in which they operate ought to be transparent to anyone without the slightest bit of effort or context. For example, the above image has apparently started doing the rounds on Facebook… at least, I assume so. I’m not tracking the trends, but a friend shared it. Is it racism captured in a nutshell? I don’t think so… but I’m guessing a lot of Westerners would. Don’t get me wrong. I’m …

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Bev, Gandhi, and Chinese Drivers

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The other day, I posted this video on Facebook: The responses on Facebook were interesting: https://www.facebook.com/gord.sellar/posts/10152490693171070 Note that it was in the second response that the discussion suddenly focused on stupid things Koreans say to white people, like, “Wow, you can use chopsticks!” or “Please marry someone from your own country.” The second comment. It’s interesting because, as outsiders in a culture, people often tend to try fit their experiences into an understanding of that culture. Which, you know, is skewed by the fact that people tend to remember most clearly, the most offensive and idiotic exchanges they’ve experienced.1 In …

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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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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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Fair Coverage: Rude Canadians in Korea

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A funny memory hit me today, in the light of the comments to my post yesterday. I mentioned how there are rude people everywhere, but I feel I must give fair coverage to some Canadians I’ve known who were living as expats in Korea. It’s a memory from my first year in Korea. Now, that first year, I experienced a lot of strange, bizarre crap. Not all of it was from Koreans; in fact, most of the weirdness was from expats teaching in Iksan. One of the more interesting was seeing how young men who left Canada for Korea suddenly, …

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It Says Something…

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Miss Jiwaku told me about a news report regarding a Canadian who had murdered his girlfriend three years ago (but had pretended she’d drowned accidentally, pursuing a tennis ball), fled the country, gotten religion, but finally returned to Korea to turn himself in. He claimed he’d murdered her because he was afraid she was going to kill him. Okay, so…? “Do you know him?” she asked, and mentioned that he’d been in Korea from 2001 until the time of the murder (in 2009), and had worked as an instructor at “a university in Jeolla Province.” I arrived in Jeolla Province …

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So True

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Miss Jiwaku and I happened to be around a TV when some woman was talking onscreen about the ridiculously-named Bucheon World Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo going on in Bucheon right now. The woman talking didn’t look Korean (she seemed more Southeast Asian, to me, but I’m told she is Japanese), but she was speaking in Korean. “Is she Korean?” I asked, just as the camera shifted to some white woman with curly hair who seemed to have worse Korean pronunciation than anyone I’ve heard before, and speaks the language with a tone of voice just like the Wicked Witch of the …

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Seoul Crime Map, Race, Fantasy, and Politics

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This article pretty much says (with the exception of a little half-assed caveat at the end contradicting the rest of the article’s message) that the higher incidences of murder and rape in Yeongdeungpo and Guro can be explained, according to “experts,” by the increased presence of “foreigners” in those areas. Never mind: that these are relatively poorer areas. that poverty and lower education go hand in hand, and both go hand in hand with more violent crime. that these neighborhoods are (like most neighborhoods in Korea) saturated with places to get shitfaced drunk, in a cultural setting where getting drunk …

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I Don’t Get It Yet? Pal…

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Just before Chuseok I met this guy on the subway; I was in a bad mood, because I’d wasted a bunch of time (because not one but two institutions were completely and utterly disorganized and inconsiderate). I was on the way home from that, and this guy introduced himself to me on the train. I did not want to talk to him at first, but he was nice, so I explained my situation. Which was a rant I won’t inflict on you now, but involved the usual disorganization and short-sighted stupidity one comes to expect from the Kafkaesque bureaucracies so common …

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