This week in my Media English course, we’ve graduated beyond the critical discussion of advertisements to another set of categorization systems, namely, social hierarchies and stereotypes — both of which are completely inescapable in popular media, and both of which, I think, are universally present but interestingly different across lines of culture. We were supposed to have finished dealing with Chapter 10 of Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference, published as the bulk of his bookSame Difference and Other Stories. I’m taking the “nerd” as a kind of emblem of cultural difference, as a kind of symbol of the figure within …
Tag: KOREA
Happy Birthday in Korea…
I was reading one of my student bloggers’ comments about it being her birthday, and I thought back to the rendition I heard at a recent department party. As usual, people were singing and clapping and the rhythm of the clapping struck me as totally wrong, but in a vague way — mostly because I just never devoted brain power to figuring out why. Now I know. You see, Koreans are ardent clap-and-sing people. People love to clap along with the beat at concerts (even sometimes when it’s inappropriate, as I witnessed occasionally at the Jeonju Sori Festival), and when …
Horrid Little Amusements
Thank heaven for webpages containing lines like this: He is just a violent monster, a dead meat, a shame to his family and the country of South Korea. I wonder why this person “koreanvictim” hates this Mr. Bak so much. Anyway, check out the page while you can. It’s painful and borders on horrifying, but if you don’t wince too hard, and concentrate on the text itself, it’s like black comedy, a dreadfully funny hate-on, and I would even dare to suggest it might be a fictional work, the whole thing. Via The Party Pooper.
Subterranean Doctrine? Part 1
Jodi over at The Asia Pages recently (a few months ago) wrote about the complexities of dating someone from another culture while living in that other person’s culture. Actually, she writes about it fairly often, and I can see why, because it’s a really big thing in your life, in a relationship. Occasionally my criticisms of things Korean — cultural, governmental, traditional, or what have you — have led to some pretty hard arguments with my (Korean) girlfriend. It wasn’t because I wasn’t sensitive enough, it wasn’t because I wasn’t funny enough or even because of any basic disagreement; some …
Various Links of Interest
Links of interest found on the Lost Nomad‘s site: One BBC reporter’s diary of Bush’s Asian tour A judge with what seems like a proper appreciation of Gilbert & Sullivan (or at least their call to let the punishment fit the crime). And via peemil (first point also discussed by Lost Nomad): Do they want to rectify all misconceptions of Korea, or just the ones they don’t like? Take a wild guess… Damned cool jello sculptures. While he lacks the compassion uncritical praising content that most Koreans demand of their critics, usinkorea has a lot of interesting things to say, …