The Future of KRD

The future of Korean Rum Diary is always in the air. I never really know what will happen. I came to Korea as an escape from a shitty life in Scotland with no job and I didn’t know what would happen next.

In Korea I fell in love, got rich and decided to stick around a while. No plans. Nothing certain. Will I be in Korea another year, five years, ten?

I’d always seen myself living in America. I spent a few months there in 2007, working on an organic farm, learning to build houses, and doing some occasional magazine and newspaper work. I liked it. I decided America was the place for me. Or rather, I decided California was the place for me.

The only problem was that anywhere I went I was asked where I came from. “Scotland,” I always truthfully replied.

Then I was always presented with one of three inevitable and embarrassing questions:

1) Oh my gad! Do you know John?

2) Wow! You speak real good English!

3) What do you guys do for Thanksgiving?

But idiocy aside, I really liked America and set it aside as that place to settle down, be it ten years from now or whenever.

But I ended up in Korea, and like so many of you I ended up getting kind of comfortable. Even in the bad days (read: angry blog posts) I was still more comfortable than in Scotland. There’s always something to like here, even when surrounded by crap.

Which leads me back to that first point: the future. Where next for Korean Rum Diary?

I’ve always had visions of myself getting lost here. Getting off at the wrong subway stop and trying to navigate my way back home, except that every street looks the same and no one wants to help a dirty foreigner. Years would pass and eventually I’d forget English, forget where it was I was trying to go, and start shuffling around, collecting cardboard, spitting, pissing and shitting where I please: becoming the White Korean. In time I’ll change my name to Kolean Lum Dialy.

That’s an alarming possibility. I don’t want to lie, but I seriously think many of you guys are in danger of this happening. (Especially the half-way-there old man at An Idiot’s Tale)

My contract is up in April and that’s not a long way away. Before then I have two weeks of vacation to claim, and I’m sure the time will fly by. So what shall I do? I love my girlfriend and our cats, I kind of like my job, but I’m still itching to go somewhere better than Korea. (Like I said, Korea’s comfortable but it still sucks.)

I’m not sure I want to go back into the real world, anyway. I like having shitpiles of money stacked up so I can sleep on them at night, or during the day, because I hardly work. I like being rich and I hate myself for it because money never used to mean shit to me…

But what good is Korea? These jobs lead nowhere. They’re deadends unless you want to teach ESL forever. Which is fine. Except that’s not what I want to do. I came here to write the Great Korean Novel and I fucking did it. I wrote two of them. Now I need to leave so I can edit them and get them published from the relative safety of any-fucking-where else.

And so I think I’m going to stick around until next September. I’ll swing by Scotland in April, extend my contract for a few more months, and then go to Australia to manage a bookstore.

Why a bookstore? Because I love books and I already own one.

Why Australia? Because Australia looks awesome and I have a long list of friends and family who’ve spent a lot of time there with only good things to report. Also, it’s easy as hell to get a visa.

And so there’s a limit to how long you’ll have to read my insane rants, and that limit is tentatively set at around ten months.

Don’t cry for me Korea… The truth is I’ve never loved you.

Ah! Fucking 추워!

It’s cold in Daegu. Winter came and autumn never showed, and now the temperatures are swinging too low for my liking. I didn’t leave Scotland for this. I thought: Asia, that sounds warm.

And it is was for a while. But one night the cold crept in and it won’t leave until April or May, around which time my contract will be finished and I’ll be heading briefly back to Scotland.

But it’s not just the cold. Sure, the cold drove me from Dundee to Daegu, but something made the freezing nights by the North Sea a little more bearable. Unlike me, most Scottish folk don’t bitch about the weather. It rains constantly, and it’s always a little windy, and even in the summer it’s still a little too cool to call warm.

But thousands of years seem to have hardened Scots to this inevitable climate. They don’t complain about the weather.

When cold hit Korea last winter I was astounded by how often the people thought it necessary to simply state that it was cold. I’d only recently learned the word ‘춥다’ when suddenly I was surrounded by people who would say it over and over and over beyond belief. It’s hard to overstate just how frequently Koreans say that cursed word.

Try to count how often your Korean co-worker or friend says, “추워!” It’s phenomenal. When I hear a word too often, it begins to make me go crazy. I could hardly believe when I asked my co-worker and he told me that in Korean it’s not a problem to use the same word over and over.

But he was right. They don’t like pronouns or allusions. If someone is talking about their grandmother, you’ll hear them say “할머니” maybe five or ten times in a short speech. It’s incredible.

Worst are the young women. The gossipy ones in short skirts who’re constantly on their phones. Their vocabulary consists of barely more than, “추워!” “진짜?” and “좋겠어!” all spoken in the whiniest of nasal tones…

So here’s a trick to warm up your winter, folks! Take a bottle of your favourite liquor and carry it about with you whenever you go outside. Every time someone says “추워!” more than once in a ten second timeframe, take a shot. Soon you’ll feel warm and fuzzy inside.

More on Daul Kim

Ever since Daul Kim killed herself, I’ve been reading her blog, which admittedly I’d never looked at prior to her death. It makes interesting reading. (I would try and link to individual posts for you, but the layout of the blog makes that difficult, so I’ll try and quote what is necessary.)

She certainly seems like a lost soul, and I feel so sad that no one was there to help her in the end. The signs were there for a long time that she was deeply unhappy.

There are a few posts that may be of interest to anyone who, like me, is interested and appalled by the problem of suicide in Korea. It seems like every major new source reported briefly on her death, with a cursory mention to Korea’s infamous suicide rates.

I don’t want to trivialise her death or to make an uniformed attempt at understanding the problems people deal with here, but I found certain posts and statements in her blog that I think some readers may be interested in reading, to understand a little of what makes a girl like her so unhappy, and which may shine a light on problems in Korea that need to be addressed.

…and some things that are just interesting to read as written by a Korean expat about her home country.

Netizens

Kim was obviously feeling conflicted about her identity, and was unhappy at the way she was treated by some Korean people. She wrote a post with the title, “say hi to korean bullies read this”:

seriously korean ppl
stop bullying me
because
u know what

i have a life

i dont owe you anything
and you dont own me

i dont mean harm, and im just happy to share
my point of views or what i like, its not to offend or to be punk


i respect korean culture as much as possible
im proud to be korean

sometimes i can be ab noxious i know,

but nudity in fashion can't be considered ab noxious

ok did i ever have a dirty scandal? no
did i ever slut around ? no
is i-D porn? no


do you guys bitch when you see a Caucasian model nude?
a japanese girl nude? a black girl nude?
and when its korean girl nude, you guys get mad angry
and i can be blonde, red, pink haired if i want. im not trying to be anything else
i have every right to do what i want. if a white girl colours her hair black, do u say "oh shes trying to be asian"?

its so silly to restrict korean girl has to be a certain way
this is superiority complex and complex is not .... flattering


its 2009 , it aint the 70's we dont have 11pm curfew and skirt length regulations

Korea is Korea. its not the world...

and before im korean,

IM ME.

dont be sad or mad because i change
people change! and move on! i grew. and i wont ask you to change
but i AM going to ask for your understandings.


im not gonna say sorry for living my life...

Societal Issues

In a poem called “say hi to tonight” Kim wrote:

people feel less lonely thinking they (sic) are others like themselves

...

perhaps that is why, communism was beautiful

perhaps that is why koreans are so fascist

a sense of belonging

under a

façade

It seems that if you look back through her posts, she was far happier about Korea back in 2007 and some of 2008. Later on, things got darker and more negative. She stopped writing posts about why Koreans are the greatest achievers in the world, and started writing things like the above, which suggest a dissatisfaction with the culture.

Perhaps this is due to some event in her personal life, or perhaps it is due to her exposure to other countries (highlighting problems in Korea). In 2008 she seemed to lament the loss of Korean culture in modern South Korea, but later she seemed effected by criticism from home, and began to question conservative values.

In a recent blog post she mused the possibility of suicide, saying she was depressed about both Korea and France. She said: “i havent been back to korea for like... 6 months i feel like everytime i dont want to face something”

Japan

But she did seem very proud of her Korean roots, and demonstrated support for Korea’s claim to Dokdo, as well as a dislike of racist Japanese people. Her arguments are a little more eloquent than we usually hear, and I am happy to read her problems with Japan over the insane rants of some commenters on my blog, or co-workers/taxi-drivers/students/netizens...

its really admirable but then seriously...stop bullying korean ppl...man... like stop this bull shit with changing our history and appologize to us and DOK DO is seriously korean island... are u kidding me.... come on seriously...

I understand that this example isn’t exactly eloquent, but before and after it she demonstrated some tact and logic that is usually missing in pro-Dokdo arguments.

Boring Culture

Kim talked about Korean history in its relation to the conservative nature of the country today. She claims that having parents who grew up under a dictatorship is the reason for people here being so easily offended.

people get offended when they see tattoo bleach hair....etc (i got both:P)
so all the celebrities/actors/musicians end up always playing things safe
and they all look the same... so boring!!!!!!

i think its good that mainstream group like bigbang or 2NE1 is like
trying some bold styling... hiring young ppl to do the styling etc...

She also wrote and posted photos of her time spent with “french gay boys”. It seems she was unhappy with the criticism she took from family and friends surrounding these photos. Interestingly, many Korean people asked her if her European friends had been giving her drugs…

She also said: “korea is crazy cos when im here i have no life and i work like a cow”

Racism

Obviously not in Korea… But when Kim was in other countries she experienced prejudice. There is one funny story about her reading Tolstoy and a dumb American girl tried to tell her her English was no good, because it’s called “Toy Story”…

Another time: “and i go take a taxi, the driver asks where im from i say "im korean” and he goes "well, korean japanese chinese samething"

Autumn Makes a Belated Appearance

Koreans seem strangely proud of the fact that their country has four seasons. Perhaps they might chastise me for saying such a thing without the word “distinct”. There should be no questioning the mighty Korean seasonal transition process.

But what has struck me as strange during my time here is the speed with which the seasons change (in Daegu, at least).

If someone were to ask me what the weather was like in Daegu, I’d reply, “It’s outrageously hot in Summer, and stupidly cold in Winter.” What about Spring and Autumn? “Blink and you’ll miss them.”

I remember last year being surprised when the weather shifted from shorts-and-t-shirt hot to hat-and-scarf cold overnight. This year was no different. When the temperature drops, it plummets fast.

This year was no different in that respect. I was half hoping for a nice cool Autumn to separate the extremes of Summer and Winter, but no luck. Winter came slamming into Daegu like an invading army.

It seems, though, that at some point during last night, Autumn belatedly showed up and whisked the leaves from the trees, covering all of my neighbourhood in a blanket of yellow. The entire season was crammed into one short night.

Daul Kim

By now you’ve probably all heard about the tragic death of Daul Kim, the 20 yr old model. Yesterday she hanged herself in Paris.

It seems like her death has captured the attention of many media outlets around the world, shining a light on two important issues: depression, and suicide in Korea.

Korea has an incredibly high suicide rate and there are many things that contribute to that. I’ve blogged about it before (after the death of Roh Moo-hyun). You can read that old post here.

But for a better look at the death of Daul Kim, with a little glance at suicide in Korea, you should read this article in the Independent (which is the best newspaper in the world and you should all read it every day…)

In a rushed paragraph, the report tries to summarize Korea’s suicide problem:

A report published by the South Korean government in 2006 concluded that the high suicide rate was a reflection of changing and conflicting gender roles, economic hardship and a rise in domestic violence. Others have pointed to the country's relatively undeveloped approach to treating mental illness, as well as the anxiety and social upheaval, especially among young people, caused by the country's fevered bid to emerge as an economic power.

Which I think misses the point a little… In collectivist societies, ideas like shame and face are big factors, and although they’re tied in with economic hardship and changing gender roles, I think should be stated on their own. Also, education has to be a massive influence. The pressures facing kids in Korea make me wonder why there aren’t more suicides.

@koreangov Joins Blogger

This is big news, people... @koreangov has joined Blogger! This guy or girl is the funniest damn person on Twitter right now, and I've been wanting to read more and more of their fantastic witticisms.

Half the stuff you read in the K-blogosphere these days comes from @koreangov's Twitter feed, as he/she seems to find all the funniest stuff first. Everyone else (myself included) seems to simply rehash @koreangov's observations.

I was always cautious of Twitter because I've always loved writing and reading, and I never thought anything important or funny could be said in 140 characters. But @koreangov changed that. Still, though, I sometimes wish we could read more...

And now I will! I'm adding @koreangov to my blogroll and waiting for it to blow up into the next big thing (the last big thing being An Idiot's Tale, which is still probably the best K-blog around).

Go check it out immediately: http://governmentofkorea.blogspot.com/

Also, check out French Fucker's blog - he posted an interesting breakdown of Korean society today that is worth reading and taking notes.

And, if you're on Twitter, go follow me @beatdom, @koreanrumdiary and @daegubooks. You can also follow Brian in Jeollanam-do @jeollanamdo and Chris in South Korea @chrisinseoulsk

Another Stupid Website

It’s no great secret that English in Korea can be, well, embarrassing. It stems from poor methods of education to an inflated national sense of pride. The former involves memorization as the key to learning English, resulting in weird sentences full of words the make sense in an order that doesn’t. The latter means that although foreigners are employed to teach English in Korea, often they aren’t asked to proofread important or expensive documents, signs or websites.

But you know this… There are thousands of blogs and pictures on the internet that prove this, and a quick Googling of any number of phrases relating to Korea and English will yield interesting or funny results.

So it was a little surprising when Korea launched their “Visit Korea Year: 2010-2013” campaign, which revolved more around a complete lack of logic or simply numerical awareness. Needless to say, that campaign died pretty quickly, to be replaced by “Visit Korea Years: 2010-2013”. Of course, they don’t seem to have changed the graphic… But I guess the roman alphabet is less an alphabet and more a graphic design gimmick in Korea.

Now another website has appeared that stems from good intentions and descends into the realm of laughable. Nay, laughable barely begins to describe how fucking stupid this new website is… Take a look for yourself: http://www.ifriendly.kr/e_main.html

The English is atrocious! I swear to ‘god’ that some of my high school students could write less retarded shit than that! Run together it sounds like a bad poem.

Some examples include:

"Internet guide of identical person acknowledgement on alien in Korea"

"Alien in Korea can confirm identical person through Internet easily with alien registration or passport."

"Making Republic of Korea where communication is available by digital"

"'Identical person acknowledgement is to confirm identical person on the Internet in order to settle using culture of sound internet"

“Entry alien”

"Citizens staying in a foreign country who are residing in Korea"

"Does identical person acknowledgement not work? Try to confirm the followings!"

Now, I feel it’s only fair to give credit where credit’s due, and there isn’t much point in me commenting negatively on this topic because it’s so obvious (and Brian and Chris seem to have already covered it pretty well; this is old news now)… But I have to say “Well done!” to whoever managed to avoid using the word “foreigner”. Seriously. It bugs me, because it’s used so frequently and so negatively that the word is almost becoming a racial slur. “Alien” sounds better. “Non-Korean person” would be nice, too. Or maybe “expat”.

Of course, this is all overlooking the copyright theft in their use of the Internet Explorer logo… But forget it. Copyright in Korea means nothing (unless you’re a ‘Good Downloader’). If we were to ask Microsoft what they thought, we may as well invite Michael Eisner over here, too.

A big hat tip to the wonderful Koreangov for bringing this hilarious story to my attention.

I am from Scotland! (지지지지지)

I teach some amazing kids. I teach two year olds and sixteen year olds; rich kids and poor kids. Some days I love teaching and other days I want to quit. But usually, on the good days, it’s the little weird things that make it all worthwhile and make me want to keep teaching.

Today I was teaching my six year olds. They don’t speak much English, but half of them are smart enough to pick things up quickly and half of them are just cute enough that they always seem to be behaving well, even though they’re a mischievous bunch.

I really like that class and I don’t particularly like the things we’re meant to teach them. Don’t get me wrong; our school is far better than most hagwons. We teach more relevant, age-specific material and I feel the kids benefit for it. But sometimes the material is too hard or too pointless, and I’m lucky to have the freedom to teach something different.

I realized recently that the kids are obsessed with geography, which was, until I turned, say, fifteen, my favourite subject at school. I remember looking at maps for hours as a kid, and then again in a resurgence of interest in my late teens.

So I take a big map into every class and spend ten minutes teaching geography in English. The kids never get bored and they seem to pick up the language very quickly – learning place names in English, as well as how to ask questions about places.

When I first took the class I taught them how to say “hello” and then “my name is…” After that I taught that “I am happy” and “It is sunny.” That has taken maybe three months.

Now I’m teaching them “I am from Korea!” and this has taken only a week. These are smart kids.

Last week they asked, “Where is teacher from?” and I said “I am from Scotland.” Obviously, they didn’t know Scotland, but we’d run over it on the map, and I told them “영국=Scotland” and they accepted that. They forget, but they know it.

Today they asked me again, “Where is teacher from?” and I said “I am from Scotland.”

One student stood up and said, “No, I am from Scotland!” and I burst out laughing. It was the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Another student did the same: “No, I am from Scotland!”

One more student repeated it and I gave them all stickers as a reward for their comic brilliance.

After that laughfest I taught the proper lesson – blending the letter ‘z’. Of course, I kept the into short because ‘z’ is a sound Korean students often have trouble with, and as mentioned in an earlier blog, I’ve found that be teaching kids pronunciation very early, you can actually completely overcome the whole ‘f’ ‘z’ ‘r’ ‘l’ problem.

I began by drawing a bee on the board and asking what sound it made. Then I told the kids to make the sound and hold it for a long time and I practiced ‘zzzzzzzzzz’ until they could all do it perfectly.

I personally think that’s a much better way of teaching ‘z’ than by having a Korean teacher write ‘지’ on the board.

The first word to say and spell was ‘zoo’ because it’s such a damn problem word. I used to laugh when I heard people say ‘I went to the jew’ or ‘I love the jew!’

Naturally, the kids saw my animal drawings and said ‘Jew! Jew!’ and I made them do the bee sound running into ‘zoo’ and they got it perfectly after a few seconds.

We did a few more words and their pronunciation was drastically improved, so we began working on spelling. They would offer me frantic guesses at words as I made it competitive, but they would always say, ‘Teacher! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!’ instead of ‘Teacher, zee!’

So I began teaching them that ‘Zee=zzzz’ and so forth. That inevitably resulted in the kids resorting back to their ‘지’ pronunciation. Before I had a chance to explain that ‘지’ actually sounds closer to ‘g’, on kid – named Mikhail Gorbachev! – stood up and began singing ‘지지지지지’…

똥파리

Last night I watched 똥파리, which means ‘shit fly’ in Korean. Of course, the English title of the movie is ‘Breathless’, which makes it sound like a Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford thriller from the mid-nineties, but 똥파리 is much more than that.
It’s hard to label it either a gangster film or a family drama, but 똥파리 falls somewhere between those categories. It’s certainly a brutally violent movie – highlighting the violence of gangs as well as domestic abuse.
The protagonist, Sang Hoon, is a ferociously violent man. His job is to collect money for a friend, and in doing soon he usually beats people half to death. On the street, too, he simply beats random people.
He meets Yeon Hee, a highschool student, when he spits on her in the street. When she asks him to say sorry he turns and punches her, and so begins a strange relationship.
Both Sang Hoon and Yeon Hee come from violent homes, and struggle through difficult lives. Their stories run together in some weird cyclical fashion, that is painful to watch.
똥파리 runs on a bit too long, and towards the starts to look like it was ripped from Carlito’s Way but it is nonetheless a great movie, that tackles some difficult themes.
Its representation of Korea seems pretty accurate, too. From setting damn near every scene in a galbi restaurant or a tiny winding street, the director manages to capture contemporary Korea.
It’s funny reading the subtitles and understanding a little Korean. An adult student of mine once told me something that really explains a lot of speech patterns here: that Koreans have no problem with the constant repetition of a single word or phrase. And in a movie like 또파리, that word is 씨발.
It’s interesting how sometimes the subtitle writers try and make the dialogue sound more natural for a Western viewer, and so it makes it weird to see Korean people speaking, say, ghetto English. In this case, however, with 씨발 being said literally several times a minute, the translations were amusing. “Wanker” was used frequently, as were “fucker” and “cunt”. Man, that’s got to be a fun job…

Another Shitty Kang Shin-who Article

The always trust-worthy and not-in-the-least-bit racist Kang Shin-who has authored another appalling article for the sickeningly bad Korea Times.
The article deals with the efforts of Andrea Vandom and ATEK in dealing with the racist hate group ‘Anti-English Spectrum’.
The Anti-English Spectrum is indefensible, and Vandom and ATEK are calling upon the owners of their web presence – Naver.com – to intervene, as their page violates company policy by being racist.
Yet, as usual, horse-copulator Kang gets his cheap shots in by referring to ATEK’s action as “unusual” and stating that the Anti-English Spectrum is merely focusing on “foreign teachers and their misbehavior”.
What’s unusual about wanting to protect your members from being stalked and insulted? Why is it necessary in an article like this to suggest that foreigners are doing what it is that these racist hate-mongers suggest?
It sounds like Kang had particular fun writing the following paragraph:

In particular, the group is taking issue with allegations that AIDS-infected foreign teachers are purposely spreading the disease, molesting children, raping women and consuming large quantities of narcotics. It also added that in some cases these accusations have been printed and distributed among the public.

He loves to drop insults into his article with the barest cover – pretending that the sentiments he has are those of the Anti-English Spectrum.

Seeing as you’ve already visited the Korea Times website, look at the right of the page and see their “Tips for getting high…” article. It’s not as good as it sounds. They also have an article that describes how snow is made, and why snow isn't always snow... And a photo of Kim Yuna after she won the World Shit Needle Championship. Ouch.