Tag: KOREA

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

gordsellar14 Comments

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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If You Wanna Be My 형…

gordsellar3 Comments

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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… In Which America Learns Something Interesting about Psy (and South Korea)

gordsellar7 Comments

After years of South Koreans asking me, “Are you American?” and then acting all relieved or happy when I tell them, no, I’m Canadian, I can’t help but be amused at the newest news report on Psy. Apparently some journalists in America have realized that he’s expressed raging bigotry in his songs performances in the past, to the tune of: 이라크 포로를 고문해 댄 씨발양년놈들과 고문 하라고 시킨 개 씨발 양년놈들에 딸래미 애미 며느리 애비 코쟁이 모두 죽여 아주 천천히 죽여 고통스럽게 죽여 Here’s a more representative translation of those lyrics, by the way: Kill those fucking Yankees who have been …

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The 정 Challenge

gordsellar37 Comments

This evening, Miss Jiwaku and I had a conversation with some of her relatives. These particular relatives are very nice and very decent people, good folks. But there was a line in the conversation that got me, where someone said, “But you know, as nice or polite as people in other countries might be to one another, Koreans have something unique… they have jeong.” If you haven’t run into this idea, jeong, well, then you apparently haven’t talked to many South Koreans. It gets translated variously as “harmony” or “coexistence” or all kinds of other things that sound, well, nice, but …

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New Term: “White Endorsement Monkey” and “White Defamation Monkey”

gordsellar17 Comments

Well, I’ve googled it and don’t see it out there, so I’m going to call dibs and coin this term: White Endorsement Monkey. What is a White Endorsement Monkey? Well, if you’re a white person living abroad, you might experience this. I certainly have experienced it in Korea. Don’t get me wrong: as stomach turning and ass-kissing as this book cover looks to me: … I’m not calling this author a White Endorsement Monkey, because I’m not actually talking about what foreigners themselves do — but rather to a pressure that is sometimes imposed on non-Koreans by some Koreans. That …

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