Next time someone throws around the stereotype about how Westerners in Korea are drunken sots who behave badly, remind them of that Korean guy who went drunk driving in Cambodia in July 2008, killed a family, and refused to tell his name to the cops (and anyway cannot speak English or Khmer). Ask them when was the last time a Westerner did that in Korea. Seriously, ask them. And don’t accept the thing about the tank and the two schoolgirls on the country road back in 2002: the drivers weren’t drunk, two girls is not a whole family, and it …
Tag: Korean Wave
Hanbok Beijing, T-Shirt-and-Jeans Seoul
There was a very strange moment the other day that I meant to post about earlier, but forgot about because I was sidetracked into issues of foreign exchange students in Korea, especially Chinese ones. One of my students wrote a fascinating essay on the effect of Korean popular culture and Hallyu (the so-called “Korean Wave”) on Chinese society; her argument, essentially, was that many young, urban Chinese are absolutely crazy for Korean pop culture, and that this is a bad thing because they’re essentially jettisoning their own traditional culture and so on. I’m not sure whether it was alarmist or …