Back to the Motherland

The Korean will be in the Motherland for a few weeks. There will be relatively few posts for the next few weeks, and the question-answering will be slower as well. He will have many stories to tell upon his return. See you in a few.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Cool video of the day in the life Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the United Nations:

Live Chat - 6/24/2011

Live Chat -- Friday at 10 p.m.

Sorry about the abrupt cut-off last time. Let's try again -- tomorrow at 10 p.m. EST. See you then.

Quick Hitters on Illegal Immigration

First of all, the Korean recommends everyone to read this remarkable story from Jose Antonio Vargas about how he found success in America even as an illegal immigrant. The article is long, but very much worth the read. Some highlights:

- Vargas' mother sent him away from the Philippines to his grandparents when he was 12 -- Vargas has never met his mother since. He came to America with forged documents. He did not realize his illegal status until he was 16, when he applied for his driver's license.

- He nearly did not go to college because he was not able to apply for financial aid. He managed to attend San Francisco State based on a scholarship that did not ask about citizenship status.

- Vargas is gay, which means he cannot marry into a citizenship.

- Vargas shared a Pulitzer Prize while working for the Washington Post.

Skimming through the comments to the article, however, the Korean noticed a few recurring themes of ignorance about illegal immigration. Here are some answers to illuminate those darkened minds.

*                 *                 *

"I am unemployed, and that's because illegal immigrants like Vargas take American jobs."

Because you can win a Pulitzer Prize if Jose Vargas didn't steal one from you? Vargas is better at his job than 95 percent of Americans are at theirs. He won his job over others fair and square. In fact, the game was rigged against Vargas, but he still won the game.

Even if we were speaking on the low-paying and volatile jobs that illegal immigrants generally take, have you considered, you know, studying hard during school so that you won't have to take those jobs? Or working harder than the guy next to you at your job? Surely, you are not saying you are in a worse position to compete with an illegal immigrant, who is faced with language barrier, cultural gap, poverty and constant persecution from immigration authorities? Even with all that, illegal immigrants apparently find jobs. What's your excuse?

Seriously, what entitles you to a job? Don't you generally belong to the political party that does not believe in giving free handouts to people?

(More after the jump)

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Ask a Korean! News: Korea is a Shining Example of Corruption-Busting. Wait, What?

Well, that's what the New York Times said, at least with respect to soccer:

“Zero tolerance” is the in phrase among sports officials these days.Sepp Blatter of FIFA and Jacques Rogge of the International Olympic Committee speak about it. South Korea practices it.

This past weekend, 10 Korean professional soccer players were banned for life from playing the game. The men, including one former national team player, Kim Dong-hyun, have yet to face criminal prosecution. But the Korea Football Association has banned them anyway.

“We made the decision determined that this would be the first and last match-fixing scandal in the league,” said Kwak Young-cheol, the head of the K-League disciplinary committee.

“Players must keep in mind that they will be kicked out of the sport permanently if they get caught committing wrongdoing.” The 10, and four other men accused of collaborating to fix the outcome of matches for betting purposes, could, if convicted in court, face seven years in jail.

The association, it seems, has concluded their guilt, though Kwak conceded that the life bans would be reviewed if they were cleared in criminal proceedings.

This, remember, is the Republic of Korea — not North Korea.

The K.F.A., the parent body to the 28-year-old K-League, has been built up through its past president, Chung Mong-joon, a leading lawmaker in the National Assembly in Seoul.

Chung was recently deposed as a vice president of FIFA, in part because his straight talk sat uncomfortably with some of the corrupt practices now being unraveled at the top of the world governing body of soccer.

Korea Shows Soccer How to Get Tough [New York times]

Interestingly, there recently was a massive audit of Korean bureaucracy, which uncovered tons of cases of ridiculous, outright corruption on the part of Korean bureaucracy involving money, gifts, alcohol, golf and prostitution from the affected corporations -- you know, the usual. It's nice to see at least some part of Korea being applauded for being tough on corruption.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

How do you make yourself attractive to Korean men?

Dear Korean,

What can I do to make myself more attractive to Koreans? I am currently learning how to speak Korean and I plan on abandoning English for the most part and making Korean my primary language when I have a good enough grasp of it. I have blonde hair and grey eyes; would it be better to dye my hair black? I heard Koreans are very racist and prefer snow white skin, is this true? Obviously this would make tanning of any kind unforgivable. I have seen some celebrity groups such as BIGBANG say they like caucasian women as much as korean but I know they do not speak for Korea as a whole. I am completely IN LOVE with this country and I want to do all I can to make myself into a good korean citzen, I do not want to seem ugly... I simply want to assimilate into South Korean society.

Sasuke Uchiha

Ugh. The Korean answered this type of question in a previous post, which is still the No. 1 post in all of AAK! history in terms of readership, but crap like this just does not stop flooding the Korean's inbox. Boys, let no one say that Asian men cannot get girls -- this blog is being carried by the ladies who are desperate for them. I mean, thinking about dyeing the hair black? Really?

So this time, the Korean went out and got help. Here is a perspective from a white American woman about dating a Korean man in Korea. Special to AAK!, the Korean presents the special guest blogger, I'm No Picasso -- after the jump.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Live chatters -- sorry, but there is a power outage in my area right before I put up the next song. I am writing this post with my phone. I will come back if the power comes back soon -- its about 10 20 pm now. Otherwise, we will try again next time. Sorry.

Live Chat - 6/16/2011

Live Chat -- Tonight at 10 p.m. EST

It's been a while, and tonight seems pretty open. Let's chat tonight! Visit the blog at 10 p.m. EST tonight. See you then.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

The Korean began moonlighting at Marmot's Hole, writing primarily about Korean politics. If you are interested about Korean politics, you can start from here.

Korean Father's Day Gift?

Dear Korean,

What do you get your Korean dad for Father’s Day? My Korean dad never lets me know what he needs or wants.

Elisa

The Korean is convinced that Korean men -- particularly in late 50s or above -- are the hardest people in the world to buy gifts for. In fact, it is somewhat sad when you consider why. Older Korean men, generally speaking, have worked in poverty all their lives. They did not have the money to develop a finer taste on anything, nor did they have the time to cultivate a meaningful hobby. Korea's traditional gift-giving culture be damned -- the very idea of gift-giving can be antithetical to these men, particularly when the gift is being given to them.

Taking after the Korean Father, who epitomizes Korean men in their late 50s, the Korean Family is totally devoid of sentimentality when it comes to gift giving. Prior to every gift-giving occasion, we ask each other what they want. Then we go out and get it. There is no thoughtful process, true, but there is no possibility of error either. It usually works nicely except when it comes to the Korean Father, who would rather not have anything. So, for Father's Day, the routine is for the Korean (and the Korean Brother) to ask the Korean Mother about what the Korean Father needs. (Needs, not wants. He never wants anything.) It usually ends up being some type of clothing, except this year the Korean Father was actually interested in iPad. This was the first time in 20 years when the Korean recalls the Korean Father wanting something for himself.

But there is something that Korean fathers do want -- their children's love and respect. No matter what you end up buying, do not let the material thing to be the substitute for your expression of love and respect. Make sure the gift is accompanied by a heartfelt card that you wrote. Korean fathers may not show their reaction outwardly, but they will surely smile in the inside.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Tremendous piece about Ichiro and Asian Americans by Jay Caspian Kang. A sample:

I believed I was witnessing the collapse of stereotypes about Asians. My letters back to the East Coast, which during the winter had alternated between a weird austerity and cloying anger, focused now on the importance of sports in a society: How a meritocracy like baseball offered anyone a chance to showcase the talents of a people.

...

When a group of Japanese students sitting in front of me passed around a red sign on which some indistinguishable Japanese slogan had been written, obscuring my view of the field, I could do nothing but sit back and mutter astonished, bitter words into the back of my hand. It finally occurred to me that I had been ignoring the elephantine irony of this happy scene: I was born in Korea to Korean parents, meaning the only history I share with Ichiro is that on several occasions over the past thousand years, his people have brutally occupied my home country. Rooting for a Japanese baseball player because he fit in the same constructed minority category was like if an Irish ex-pat began rooting for Manchester United because the good people of China couldn't distinguish between his accent and Wayne Rooney's. And in most ways, it was a lot worse than that. ... I could watch Ichiro stretching in the on-deck circle and conjure the image of Jackie Robinson sliding home in 1947, but that association never brought hope, but rather a wariness that both told me that the association was wrong and that the only reason why I was cheering for Ichiro was because someone, something else had lumped us together.

...

Roth languishes in the redemptive possibilities that a shared interest in baseball might offer people who are separated along other lines. Similarly, my own stake in baseball comes from the fact that I am the foreign-born child of Korean immigrants, and that sometimes finding acceptance in this country is as simple as shouting out in a crowded bar that you know who started each game of the 1986 World Series because you, like the rest of the people there, watched every game on TV and talked about it the next day at school.

Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro [Grantland.com]

The highlighted language, by the way, is part of the reason why the Korean embraced the Lakers and the Dodgers so wholeheartedly. As a 16-year-old immigrant to America, he found that no matter what you looked like, no matter what your accent was like, Americans liked talking with you, a total stranger, as long as you were talking about their home teams. The Korean was not even in the same continent as Kirk Gibson when Gibson hit the home run in the Game 1 of 1988 World Series, but he can tell the story as if he saw it. It's part of what it takes to live in America.

Diane Farr, who wrote a nice column for the New York Times regarding interracial dating (involving stories about her Korean American husband) gave a good interview about her new book, Kissing Outside the Lines. A quick sample:

What’s so funny is in this exact moment of time, Asians are having like a moment in the sun, between the Tiger Mom and the cover of New York Magazine, and they’re being portrayed as either Nazi-like parents who have no sense of humor or meek, short, sheltered cattle. It seems everything about being biracial in America is about black and white. Sometimes I even feel funny to say I’m in a biracial marriage because people are like, ‘Oh, he’s Asian?’ The subtext is, ‘Who cares?’ You didn’t marry a black person. No one’s paying any attention to you. So for the first moment that we’re paying attention to Asians, we’re putting them down.

...

I think so much of the time when parents are saying, no, I don’t want you to marry outside of your race, they’re worried about either the death of their own culture or what’s gonna happen to their kid because it’s out of their realm of knowledge. And if we can keep it in that idea that it’s from fear, it’s not from hate … yes, of course, it’s ignorance, but that people are acting from love or fear, it’s just one or the other.

Actress Diane Farr writes amazing book on interracial romance, Kissing Outside the Lines [tampabay.com]

Confucianism and Korea - Part VI: The Korean on Confucianism in Modern Korea

[Series Index]

Finally, here we are -- the last part of this series. This post will be about how Korea can capitalize its Confucian heritage better, or improve upon the Confucian heritage. Put differently, this post will identify areas of Korean society that can use more Confucianism, as well as the same that can use less Confucianism.

More Confucianism?

The Korean found some of the reactions to the last part of this series rather interesting. Some commenters said essentially that Confucianism has its share of problems, and pointed to the social ills suffered by China, Japan and Korea. The Korean would readily agree that a Confucian society will have their share of problems -- which is the whole point of having this part of the series. Undoubtedly, there are social ills in Korea that will be solved with having less Confucianism.

But as the Korean warned over and over again throughout this series, Confucianism is not the only mode of thought that guides Korean society. In fact, the Korean would say Confucius is not even the philosopher whose ideas guide modern Korea the most. Any guesses about who that philosopher might be? Buddha and Dharma, based on Korea's long Buddhist tradition? Lao Tzu and Zhang Tzu, the pillars of Taoism?

Would you have guessed... Thomas Hobbes? In his book Leviathan, the 17th century British philosopher described the state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes, "the war of all against all." In such state of nature, life of a person is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan

(Source)

Hobbes might as well have been speaking of the way Korea found itself as it began its venture as a modern nation in the 1940s, devastated by Japanese imperialism, World War II and Korean War. Just how ugly Korea was post-World War II is described in harrowing detail by a recent book, "Birth of the Modern Man." The book, which chronicles the history of Korea's public medicine, recounts the disastrous state of Korea's public health. Within one year of the liberation, 2.3 million Koreans from overseas (mostly from Japan and China) returned to Korea. During Korean War, 500,000 people escaped North Korea to come to the South. Cholera epidemic covered the country. Seoul, in particular, was a crowded sea of bodies, alive and dead. In 1950, there were 800,000 refugees in South Korea without a home. Out of the 440,000 infants born in 1948, 180,000 died before their first birthday. During Korean War, American medics reported that a surgery for a Korean soldier shot in the stomach usually entailed catching hundreds of parasites that were crawling out of the dying host.

(More after the jump)

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Drunk Last Night, Drunk the Night Before, Gonna Get Drunk Tonight Like I've Never Been Drunk Before

[TK:  The title of the post is from a song. The Korean will be very impressed if you knew the song. Don't Google!]

Dear Korean,

Why do Koreans turn their faces away when drinking in front of elderly ?

Anna

Dear Korean,

During a night of drinking with my boss and his colleagues, some of my elders (I'm 31, they're 40-45) told me that i don't have to turn my head away when drinking because i'm in the company of friends. does this mean that next time i go out with them i don't need to do that? i'm confused about this custom and how it works.

Ryan

Dear Questioners,

If you have had any contact with Korean culture, the Korean hardly needs to remind you that Korea has, among other things, a strong drinking culture. And visitors also find that with the strong drinking culture comes a set of rituals about drinking.

Any remote excuse is sufficient to post

the Korean's favorite stock picture for AAK!

Here are the basic rules of Korean drinking.

Rule 1 - Drink, but don't be a hero

At a place to drink, you are supposed to drink. You can refuse to drink by giving excuses like being sick, etc. (Roboseyo has a good list of clever ways to avoid drinking.) But preferably, you will drink. This, however, does not mean you have to be the best drinker of the crowd. Unless you like drinking that much and can handle it physically, there is no honor in being the best drinker. Don't be a hero -- pace yourself. Sip instead of knocking back. Or do what the Korean does -- don't drink at all, until the occasion calls for it. During the course of the night, there inevitably will be times where you will have to drink the contents of your glass, like when someone attempts to fill your glass (discussed below). Drink then.

For the uninitiated, Korean-style drinking can get out of hand really fast unless you remember this rule -- don't be a hero. Other people might encourage you to drink at first, but they will stop caring as the night goes on and they themselves get more drunk. If you have a particularly bad instigator in your party, get the instigator drunk first so that he won't notice that you are pacing yourself.

Rule 2 - No one pours him/herself

The implications of this rule are simple. Never pour yourself, and never let anyone's glass go empty. Going back to Rule 1, one of the surest way of pacing yourself is -- not drinking at all, until someone attempts to pour your glass. The Korean likes to drink exactly half of his soju glass, and simply sit on it until someone attempts to pour his glass. As noted in Roboseyo's post, being proactive about pouring others usually helps you pace yourself.

Rule 3 - The elder rules

There are just a few rules to remember about drinking with older people. When pouring, use two hands to pour. When receiving liquor, also hold your glass with two hands. When actually drinking the alcohol in front of an older person, turn your face away such that you don't show your neck going back. These are just polite things to do.

Rule 4 - Forget all the rules

Often, visitors to Korea get paralyzed by all these supposed rules, because they somehow have this vision of Korea where all the rules must be followed with mechanical precision, or they will be stoned to death in the streets. Relax! Always remember the Foreigner Rule -- Koreans do not expect foreigners to follow Korean custom. If you do not want to keep all these things in mind, don't.

Even forgetting the Foreigner Rule, remember that all the rules described above are dynamic and change depending on the circumstance -- particularly when the night is old and everyone is drunk. Similar to what Ryan described above, Koreans will let some of the rules go if they do not feel like following them. Go with the flow, and enjoy the night.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Well, this is something.

Approximately 1,000 French fans of K-pop conducted a flashmob demonstration in front of the Louvre, demanding that the visiting SM Town stars to extend their visit as the planned concert sold out in 15 minutes. Reports of this demonstration, and the popularity of K-pop in Europe, took up an entire Culture section page in Le Monde.

The Korean had thought that K-pop was reaching a saturation point, but he is glad to be wrong.

Interesting article about dog meat consumption in China and, like Korea, how people are starting to lose their minds when it comes to dogs.

The Korean's post on dog meat consumption in Korea and what the Korean thinks of it is here. Short version: all arguments against eating dogs are eventually reducible to either pure personal preference or bald cultural superiority. Neither is a good enough reason to dictate people's preference about what to eat.

Ask a Korean! News: Mr. Joo Seong-Ha on Kim Family Portrait Target Practice

[Index]

First of all, some background -- recently, North Korea threw a hissy fit over the fact that some platoons of South Korean army reserved used the pictures of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un as target practice. Mr. Joo Seong-Ha gives a nice insight to the reaction. Below is the translation.

*                     *                      *

Honestly, I was a bit surprised by North Korea's reaction over the fact that certain army reserve troops used the pictures of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un and target practice. Of course, such action would never be acceptable to North Korea -- it would be like the reaction by a religious cult that got a wind of the news that the face of the cult leader is being used as a target practice by believers of other religions. But the problem is the methodology of how to report the incident. 

In a society like North Korea, something like "the South Korean traitors have used Dear Leader's portrait as a target practice" just cannot be said. I wrote this previously on the blog, but there was an incident during the 1990s, in which a South Korean entrepreneur was visiting North Korea. While having dinner and drinks with North Koreans, he said the equivalent of: "Men of Jeonju Kim clan can screw like a horse." Kim Il-Sung belongs to the Jeonju Kim clan -- in other words, the South Korean essentially said Kim Jong-Il is an animal in bed. In North Korea, you cannot let this type of story pass when there are other people listening also. That is the straight course to being a reactionary. A report was made, and the National Security Bureau arrested this businessman.

(More after the jump)

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Great article by Prof. Peter Beck of Keio University of the benefit of the potential Korea-Japan alliance, and what Japan needs to do to make it happen:

While Tokyo continues to claim Dok-do, the average Japanese just doesn’t care. Most Japanese would not be able to find the island on a map. Indeed, I could not find a single public sign in Tokyo or any other of the seven major cities I have visited concerning ‘Takeshima’. ...

I told my Japanese audiences that if Tokyo renounced its hopeless claim, there would be a flood of Korean goodwill. Yet, many Japanese believe this would undermine Tokyo’s claim to the Northern Territories (even though Moscow shows no intention of even discussing what it calls the Kurile Islands). Keio University’s Soeya Yoshihide argues that the real issue is Japan’s domestic politics: the right-wingers must be placated. Japanese are crazy about Korean food, dramas and Girls’ Generation, not Dok-do! Given Korea’s military control of Dok-do, Tokyo’s claim should be ignored.

A Korea-Japan alliance? [East Asia Forum]

Parts of the article sounds awfully like the Korean's idea of a potential Godfather offer that Japan can make to instantly improve its relations with Korea. The Korean can't help but think he might be in the wrong gig.