Hope for Korean Beer

Mungyeong Saejae is yet another example of a beautiful piece of Korea’s fascinating and demanding past ruined by the ajumma/ajeossi weekend tour bus crowd, hordes of neon-clothed boomers showing up by the thousands, if not tens of thousands, to shove and elbow their way down a path whose ancient ruggedness has been ruined by the perpetual urge to park-ify anything remotely challenging with flat, wide paths, drainage ditches, and vendors and advertising running all the way up into the forest.  How incredible it is to consider the long treks porters made up the old Yeongnam Daero with their 지게 A-frames, up the narrow valleys and over the surprisingly formidable mountains into Chungcheong, and how impossible it is to envison the road’s past importance amongst all those crowds.

However, even a despiser of progress as recalcitrant as myself couldn’t be upset with one of the many vendors hawking their wares outside the first gate.  They sold Mungyeong Omija Beer, and only W2500 per pint at that.

Actually, it’s omija (오미자) and apple together, both of which the Mungyeong area is well known for.  I will go out on a limb and say right now that this is the best beer I’ve had in Korea, period, either domestic (both name-brand and craft-brewed) or imported.  The omija lends a tart edge to it and the apple a tad of sweetness, making the taste very well rounded, especially for the fall weather.  But even beyond the fruit addition, the beer had good body to it.  I was, quite frankly, shocked at the quality.  Most craft brewers in the States would be well satisfied to have this beer as a part of their lineup, and for Korea to produce a beer of that quality is damn impressive.

If you’re in the Mungyeong area, find all the 문경 오미자사과 생맥주 that you can and drink it up.  The contact numbers are obvious in the above picture; it would be great to keep this fledgling experiment in brewing going, as the addition of the omija is a very Korean twist, it supports the local farmers, and the quality should be an example to the rest of the brewers here of what they should be striving for.

The Neighborhood

My neighborhood is a market.  There are no grandiose arcades with covered ceilings like some of the bigger ones; this is more of a street where all the local businesses congregate.  The market prides itself on a diverse array of offerings, but in truth there’s not much variety.  Businesses are either fruit and vegetable sellers, butchers, tofu and noodle makers, one of a whole host of fried chicken takeaways, phone stores, or hair salons.  Throw in the obligatory taekwondo academy and a couple two-room, top-floor churches and you’ve got a neighborhood that could be in any Korean city.  I do enjoy living here, in a perverted sense; it is dirty Korea at its finest.  There is nothing polished, high-tech, fake, or slickly-marketed about it.  There is only true Korea, how these people get on in their daily lives, lives that most of us would fear and recriminate ourselves for falling into.

Walking through the market, you get a feel for the different characters who inhabit the place.  There is the lazy 20-something guy at the discount mart.  He runs a cash register in theory, but really is glued to his smartphone most of the time.  You immediately gravitate to another register upon noticing this, which only reinforces his perception that he’s not needed.  He doesn’t stay behind the register, though.  He lazily wanders about near his station, bumps into things, takes lots of smoke breaks near the fresh produce outside, and in general keeps a sharp eye out for any work ethic sneaking up on him.  Another guy is like that, down the street a bit.  His haircut is ghastly: buzzed on one half, the long strands flopping over from the other side and forward.  His glasses are those enormous black, square-framed ones popular with both sexes here and which are surely a highly effective form of birth control.  This guy is always smoking, poking away at his own smartphone, while the girls in the butcher shop dutifully set up for the day.  Sometimes he starts up the motorbike to ride a mere hundred yards down the street to another store, smoking a cigarette all the way.

Another staple is the autistic guy who’s perpetually wheeling around on his bike.  I’ve never seen him off of it.  He’s got a half-dozen cable locks of different colors hanging from the handlebars.  He always wears gardening gloves, a collared shirt, and talks to himself most of the time.  He’s young, perhaps just out of high school, and one wonders what, if any, hope there is for him here.  Do his parents turn him out to ride around because they’re working all day?  Or because they don’t want to deal with him, the embarrassing autistic who will do nothing for the family name?

At one of the fried chicken places there’s a young woman who works alongside her father.  She’s a part of that strangely Korean phenomenon, the cute girl working an ordinary service job.  Never in America would you ask a girl behind a convenience store counter for her number, but you’d absolutely consider it in this country.  The girl’s father shows her the ropes of blasting the birds in boiling oil.  One time he had an enormous mug of beer and, after a gulp, shoved it over to her and told her to drink some.  She tried to refuse, but he kept jamming it in her face until she took a drink, all while flipping the frying chickens.

The old vegetable grandmas are a sight and are perhaps the starkest reminder of the roots of this country.  Burnt brown, the lines on their faces deeper than cigarette wrinkles, some of them are in their 70s or 80s.  They squat on the pavement, cabbage, roots, sweet potatos spread out on a blue tarp.  At the end of the day, they’ll put in all in an enormous bundle, drag it aboard the bus, and leave the bundle sitting in a aisle as they head back out to their farm on the outskirts of the city.  They are truly the old lost amongst the new.  They have seen their country go from under Japan’s heel to liberation to war with their brethren to military dictators and now prosperity unfathomable in their youth.  They grew up with wood fires and will die with LEDs.

The most sobering sight in all the market, though, is the cripples.  Harsh word, but here, that’s what they are.  Legs missing, always the legs.  There must be an unbelievable rate of workplace accidents here.  Strangely, I’ve never seen one of them with prosthetics.  Anyone who’s been down a street in Seoul has seen the ones rolling down the sidewalk on a cart, begging, but it’s more bothersome when they’re your neighbor, not even bothering for a handout.  One guy just sits in a wheelchair outside my alleyway somedays, both legs gone, smoking away, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes.

I see some real, honest-to-God bad shit like that where I live.  This ain’t news on TV or in a glossy National Geographic special.  This is the human price for progress combined with man’s eternal condition, in your face.  This is the dumping ground for the working class and the least fortunate of the petite bourgeois.  These people are on the losing end of the modern system.  They’re pinched for money, with food prices up, kindergartens, hagwons, and taekwondo for the kids, ridiculous sums for phones and other electronics that are ‘must-haves,’ and a culture which demands you look like who you wish people thought you were.

Want examples?  My neighboring apartment building has a pipe that vents waste water into the dying grass between their building and ours; the neighbors across the alley have jury rigged electrical wires running from the roof into their living room window; I’ve killed cockroaches in the street as they crawl across the road from one infested house to another; and my landlord leaves unbound bags of his personal trash outside my door.  Yet someone around me drives a new silver Hyundai Genesis.  He parks it right outside where people just pile their garbage and recycling (because there are no dumpsters) that waits for some grandma to pick through it at 3 a.m. in the hopes of finding a few won worth of scrap.  I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten keyed yet.  The pretension amidst the dirt, trash, cracked concrete, and pollution-blackened bricks is unbelievable.

My neighbor’s backyard sump.

That’s disappointing, but not heinous, though.  There are indeed worse things that take place.  I’ve seen domestic violence cases in the street outside.  The husband was arguing with his wife, screaming at her and shoving her around, right below my window.  In fact, everyone’s windows were open, I’m sure every family around heard it.  No one did or said anything.  Eventually the husband literally drags his wife off to their apartment.  A few days later, I saw a moving van packing up all their stuff.

The worst incident might have been the time my girlfriend and I found a guy, face smashed in, bleeding out of his nose, lying unconscious at the end of my alley in the full-on morning sun.  People just walked past.  When we called the police, the dispatcher chewed out my girlfriend, saying it wasn’t their problem to clean people up.  “He can go to a hospital, you know,” said the dispatcher.  Thankfully a benevolent policeman found out and came by to take care of the poor guy.  The horrific part was that the man had surely been laying there since the night before and yet no one, not even the owners of the cars that had been parked next to him, had done anything.

At times, the absurdity of the neighborhood can be amusing.  My girlfriend and I ran into a crazy woman who’d wandered away from her daughter’s house in the middle of the night.  She kept saying, “No Tae Woo (노태우) is killing my son!  Oh, he’s hitting my son in the face!”  I have no idea what made her think a former president jailed for anti-democratic excesses would have a vendetta against her son.  Maybe it was latent, suppressed fears from all those years ago finally worming their way to the surface.

Walking around, seeing the nice clothes people wear, the fancy electronics they tout, and yet the narrow artifice in which they reside and the unabashedly unfair and at times brutal events around them, reveals a different side to the Korea projected into the world.  The rest of Asia sees Girls Generation, Big Bang, and dramas full of gorgeous, successful people.  I see only stunted lives.  These people are not going to escape this shitty neighborhood.  The boom days of wild growth that lifted up Korea as a whole are done.  They are saddled with debt, so they can’t borrow their way to a better tomorrow.  Progress will be on the margins.  And these poor people will be stuck here, working ten, twelve, maybe fourteen hours a day, six (maybe seven) days a week, fifty-one weeks a year, hoping for a better tomorrow for their kids, but not seeing it pan out.

This is reality.  This is the hard fact that not everyone wins first draw in the lottery of life.  It’s fucking unfair, but it’s how it is.

I will leave this town knowing that fact forever.  Yet none of us can remember merely the bad; we inevitably find some good in every situation, even if it means inflating that good beyond its actual proportion to the bad.  I will always remember the small pleasantries that occurred here and there, in spite of the brokenness: the families strolling about; the hordes of schoolkids, always separated into boys and girls; the laughs and shouting; the music blaring from shopfronts into the street; the neon; the smell of fresh fish; even the reeking bags full of dirty toilet paper, tied up on the corner next to a fruit stand.  This is, through and through, Korea.

Digital Whisky

It is impossible at some levels for cultures as different as East and West to comprehend the real, true essence of each other.  We can approach a general understanding or gain a sense of it, but never can we actually understand what it is at heart.

One extremely obvious case of this is Westerners becoming very ‘into’ Buddhism.  They think they understand what it is, they categorize and define its aspects and principles, and find its spiritual practices ‘really, like, you know, revealing and inspiring, man.’  But as much as they try, they will never (and indeed cannot) actually reach a full understanding of what such things mean to a person.  For they have not grown up internalizing such understanding in their every waking moment.  I’m not talking about mere tenets or ideals or individual experience; I’m talking about how the whole messy thing of a religion plays out on a human and cultural scale.  They don’t get it because they can’t get it.  They might understand the cyclical nature of Buddhist thought, but unless their own worldview, their thoughts’ unconscious prism, is cyclical in nature, they will never really get at what Buddhism is.

In the same way, though I write occasionally about Confucian aspects of Korean society, I really have no idea what I’m talking about.  I have an idea of Confucianism, its Korean variant, and I can see it in action every day around me.  I can have a view into how it affects people’s thought and behavior, as I find out my girlfriend’s reactions to everyday occurrences or relationships with people.  Yet I will never know what it actually means because I am constantly forcing myself out of my own frame of thought, attempting to adopt that of another.  I may almost touch it, like Adam nearly touching the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I will never actually, completely know it.  For I do not understand the unspoken meaning of words here, the ideas intrinsic and unuttered, understood intuitively.

Yet in the same way, one can run into Eastern assumptions about the West.  They assume that values they assign to something would be reciprocated by Westerners.

What made me think of this?  A bottle of Johnny Walker.

I grabbed it off the shelf and only looked at the box when I got home.  ‘Limited Edition’ it said, though the price was no less than a normal bottle.  Basically they’re luring you in with a fancy box.  I took a look at the fancy box and saw this design:

Yes, that it the Striding Man silhouette, but done as a lit-up telecommunications network, glowing in all its technological glory.

Seriously?

The artist, though, was completely earnest.  “Ji Hoon Byun,” the box interior read, “has been seeking for the aesthetic value in digital media art.  He uses engineering technique like programming languages as his primary method to create his work.  His works that respond to the movement of the beholders and to the nature have been invited to many local overseas exhibitions.”

This artist clearly has no idea of the essence of this important Western artifact, whisky.  He’s doing up the Striding Man to represent how cool and cutting edge whisky is, how digital technology represents the same level of excellence, etc, ad nauseam.

Except that the point of whisky is that it’s not digital, dammit.  It’s not immediate, instantaneous, available on your smartphone.  You can’t make it better by making it faster or in larger quantities or with brushed aluminum paneling or by live tweeting.  It takes lots of time, nature, and tough men in cold, lonely places doing things in the exact damn way they have been for as long as anyone can remember.  Whisky is the enemy of innovation and the antichrist of efficiency.

But Ji Hoon Byun doesn’t understand that.  The Audi-driving Samsung Men who shell out bucks for this stuff don’t understand it.  They may understand part of the whisky culture, that sense of connoisseurship fostered by men with too much money and sense of self-worth.  But they confuse that with the reason why whisky is sought after, enjoyed: it is not easily made or readily available; it can only be made by a old and insular tradition; and its taste can only in a certain sense be appreciated when you understand the physical environment from which it comes.  Go north up the coast from the Clyde and set your feet in Oban and you can see how that town’s whisky has both the sea and the hills in its taste.

But they wouldn’t want it even if they tried.  Because those Korean whisky connoisseurs, like secular Westerners dabbling in Buddhism, don’t want to actually understand.  Because that might mean coming up against the possibility that one can’t fully understand.  No, they’re looking for their own perceptions to be confirmed, perceptions rooted in the identity they have but try to escape.  Koreans drink whisky because they think rich, successful Westerners drink whisky.  They drink not to appreciate, but to socially distinguish.  And to be distinguished in Korea is to be ensconced in their worship of technology — hence the digital Striding Man.  Similarly, Western dilettantes like Buddhism because it doesn’t judge them.  They’re not interested in wholeheartedly embracing a different worldview, a whole new set of eyes, a real religion that requires commitment.  No, they’re interested in a perceived refuge from the moral and existential demands of Judeo-Christian culture.  Embracing Buddhism, they will be different, yes, but not in any objective sense, only relative to what they were before.

No matter what they do the box, those well-intentioned but meddling Koreans can’t change what’s inside the bottle.  Pure gold, and it only got there one way, a way not even Samsung can reverse engineer.  That is the lesson for our very selves when we look in the mirror.

Paris on the Peninsula

The girl at the end of the table was smoking mojito-flavored cigarettes. “Bohem Cigar Mojito” was the name. The dual fans on the porch were blowing in her direction, whisking the smoke away and off into the Gangnam night, so I never got a chance to see what the smell was like.

There were four of them, girls, university friends who rarely cross paths these days. After the wedding of one of their close friends, we’d come here, to this cafe. Each one of them was interesting. The girl at the far end, smoking the mojito cigs, was a part-time model, with an intelligent and mysterious air about her. She looked exactly like one of my old professors. I considered telling her this, but then thought better of it when I remembered the professor was Japanese. Comparisons such as that are a minefield in this country.

The girl at the other end of the table, to my left, was a tattooist. She kicked her shoes off toward the end of the evening and revealed the wings she had tattooed on her feet. I could only think of the Greek god from the FTD florist signs back in the States (Hermes, perhaps). The girl in the middle, on the far side of the table, talked energetically, asked probing questions, and burned through nearly a whole pack of cigarettes. Perhaps it was all the coffee. Her claim to fame was that she once slept with a Japanese film star. They were all artists by training and temperament. They looked and acted the part.

The talk amongst the three girls and my girlfriend was difficult to follow at best. My brain was fried from the heat and the acidic caffeine of too many americanos that day. From this rooftop patio, I could see across across much of Gangnam. The red glow of the giant Kumkang sign reflected off of every shiny surface around. Looking to the right, northward, you could look over Sinsa. The HanSkin building had nearly every light on, making it look like a cheese grater with a lightbulb inside. Beyond it was the blinking red light of the radio tower array that stands just southeast of N Seoul Tower on Namsan.

For some reason, I imagined anti-aircraft fire puncturing the warm, glowing night over this part of town. That seems slightly ridiculous, but not because there’s no threat to the city. Rather, it’s ridiculous because the North Korean air force would never establish air superiority over the South. No, the likely explosions would not be from tracers arcing into the dark, but rather from rockets or shells falling to earth.

My mind looked to war because Seoul itself has often reminded me of a different place: Paris. Not the eternal Paris, though, the Paris of love, lights, pleasure, and ease, but pre-Great War Paris. A poor comparison, you might say, but consider a few general points. First, Seoul is a flourishing metropolis. There is great wealth spread among the elites, the benefits of which trickle down to the lower rungs, especially in infrastructure. There is a great awareness of and interest in the international scene; Korea senses that there is an important role to play, though it may not have clear and realistic vision of what that is. Korean culture is an export in and of itself, seen as sophisticated around Asia. These things do indeed resemble Belle Époque France. Still, one may argue that such traits could also have applied to other European cities at the time as well.

But the Paris comparison is just when considering that which looms over the horizon. Fin de siècle Paris had a great, foreboding sense of the end of its flourishing. The 19th century seemed to be bringing material prosperity and high culture to an apotheosis, yet the Parisians felt only malaise at this prospect. Korea does not feel that now, but there are signs that this Miracle on the Han River is failing in its greatest moment. There is a growing gap between the rich and poor, with many who teeter in the middle slipping to the lower rungs, while elites see their income rise sharply. The economy is heavily dependent on exports and will suffer in a second, deeper worldwide recession. With that, the already tight Korean job market will be even more severely pinched. The promise of affluence and a better future will be delayed further, especially for younger Koreans.

But the greatest salience is in the threat that lies over the DMZ. North Korea is the Imperial Germany to Seoul’s Paris. Both were threats faced once before, with unsatisfactory results and a permanent imprint on the national psyche. South Korea must inevitably reckon with this violent neighbor again, hopefully without bloodshed. Yet the structure of the world order seems to preclude any sort of boldly proactive approach. Orders are important: Europe saw relative peace when the Congress of Vienna consensus discouraged permanent alliances and attempted to localize conflicts. Similarly, our world sees security as intimately connected to markets — the benefits of trade discourage violent cataclysms that disturb the order. Yet this order works on the assumption that the actors are rational. I think we can all agree that North Korea is not rational. Imperial Germany was not either. Its culture saw war as a romantic way to transcend soul-stifling bourgeois values.

An order which less and less resembles reality will lead to misconceptions, confusion, and, given the chance, cataclysm. Something must be done to prevent a war, nay, a catastrophe, on this peninsula, but there is a fear of doing anything, for an equally great fear of the consequences. There is a lurking sense that the current age of constant growth and ever-increasing plenty cannot be sustained, but we cannot imagine how to replace the system that we already have or tame its destructive potential. So nothing is done. And the order entropies more quickly, leaving us in even more of a predicament, fearing even more the consequences of failure.

I left the girls to their conversation about cute guys and stood at the railing. I looked at the rooftop gardens, the countless cafes restaurants packed with couples, the slick skyscrapers, and the older buildings grimy with pollution. When Seoul fights its own Battle of the Marne, I wondered, will I be here? Will I look down to the street and see the soldiers on leave kissing their mini-skirted, high-heeled girlfriends goodbye, then piling into Hi Seoul taxis that speed them to the front somewhere near Pocheon? Will this neon city of ceaseless diversion see its lights going out, not to be relit again in my lifetime?

When I sat down again, I didn’t share my thoughts. The girls would not understand this, not because they are girls, but because they are Korean. They are always optimistic, in spite of the challenges their young lives face. They don’t think of failure or unraveling orders or anything of the sort. They think of life and how they are living it. I realized my Paris reference was right, but of the wrong era. If one day distant artillery fire does silhouette Kyobo Tower, they will repose here and watch the show, like Rick, Ilsa, and Sam of a different Paris, with each cigarette and americano echoing Sam: “This ought to take the sting out of bein’ occupied.”

Unfortunate and Sublime

In my time here, I’ve seen quite a few humorous typos, failed attempts at puns or plays on words, or just plain absurdity when it comes to Korean efforts in English.  Here are a few pictures of the best I’ve captured on my phone camera so far.

I can see how they were trying to be clever. “Rap” and “percussion,” fused to together to describe their musical style, yet making a play on words at the same time.  But that one missing “p” does it in. Ah, for want of a nail . . .

I found this endearing more than anything, but was equally impressed that it was grammatically correct.

If you look past the raised finger, you will see the lyrics to Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair,” sprayed on a bridge pylon. Proof that cultural detritus penetrates farther and faster than cultural masterpieces.

Desperate for a hip, foreign name, the proprietor of this restaurant must have gone to the library looking for inspiration from architecture-themed book titles.  He chose poorly.

Horrific images come to mind every time I see that juxtaposition.

Salty Affogato should be the name of a Chicago South Side bareknuckle boxer and not something that you would consider putting in your mouth.

I miss a priceless picture from time to time, usually because I don’t have my phone or I’m passing in a bus or taxi.  The one I regret the most was the sign for a women’s plastic surgery clinic.  The tiny door read: “She’s Bits.”  Never a truer name.

Old School

Down south in Jeollanam-do, there is an old Confucian school, a seodang, that has been rebuilt on the site of its predecessor. The proprietor, an elderly gentlemen who tends to repeat himself and measures time only in ‘later’ or ‘today,’ has a few rooms to let to travelers. I was fortunate enough to be able to stay there.

Seodangs were schools primarily for boys, going all the way back through Joseon to Goryeo. Chinese characters were used to write the Korean language and thus memorization of their complex forms was necessary. This did not promote literacy to extent one would expect, however, as the creation of hangeul demonstrates; a simpler system was needed for the average peasant. The reading of the characters as well as classical works was an important foundation for anyone who hoped to take the civil service exam and thus rise up to the level of at least semi-nobility.

Worn out from a day of hiking, we spread a blanket on the planks and played hwatu (화투) as the sun went down behind the mountains.

The surrounding country has lush greens and big blue skies. Green is common in Korea: in the summer, weed, vines, grasses, and trees seem to grow in tangled silence, like an unruly haircut. Blue skies with a trace of pollution, though, are rare in the capital area where I reside.

We were the only ones staying here, it turned out. Even the old proprietor went home and left us be. We swung the giant wooden gates shut and barred the doors: in for the night, free to explore the school at will.

This seodang is still used during the summer for its traditional activities. Witness the banner on the rear wall: “예절” means manners or etiquette.  In addition to such customs, student learn 한자 or Chinese characters. Calligraphy is the method for integrating them, for great patience and self-mastery is required to make the correct strokes. The calligraphy brushes sat in a rack next to mats on the floor. Back issues of “The Confucian News” hung from a peg near the door.

I had awakened every morning to the sound of the teacher scolding her students harshly, be it for lack of attention or haste in crafting the complex characters with but a brush on thin paper. I doubt that it would have been much different a hundred-odd years or more ago. Here, more than anywhere else I have been in Korea, the past ways are not only remembered but intrinsically a part of life. The correlation between cultural and physical distance, between the remote Confucian countryside and the globalized urban jungles, is no coincidence.

To open up a student practice book is to realize why it was only the rich who could afford education in the old days. A great deal of time is needed in order to read, let alone write, the basic thousand Chinese characters, and time is something that a working man does not have. Yet one can also see the roots of the Korean attitude toward education: time and dedication are essential to mastery and sacrifices must be made by the present generation for the sake of the next.

The students at this summer seodang were from the city. They came to absorb the deepest and most traditional aspects of their culture, their parents spending much money and time observing. My girlfriend said that this is no isolated incident; it happens in other places besides Jeolla.

Korea is indeed hurtling down a path of globalization, hellbent on achieving the system we have already created and found lacking. But whatever their immediate material desires, something in their instinct remains firmly rooted in what has come before. It is an identification with the past and its ways which has virtually no parallel in contemporary America. I find it hard to imagine families from New York, Chicago, or L.A. sending their kids to Kentucky for a month in order to read Jefferson, till land, and learn riflery. Such would be the equivalent for us. Yet we do not believe in the necessity of virtue, let alone the virtue of those who came before and lived harder lives than we. Koreans, though, intuit that such virtues, whatever one’s personal feeling about them is, are a part of themselves. They have inherited them, whether they like it or not, and it is their responsibility to know them well.

The night had a crescent moon, which a local taxi driver told us meant that ghosts were out and about. As I walked about the courtyard in the warm air, I wondered if I would see the apparitions of Confucians past, treading the grounds with me. Perhaps, despite my white skin, they would not haunt but welcome me as one who, though not born of their ways, nonetheless understands and defends them all the same.

And defend them I do. Their tradition is not mine and I disagree with it on many points. But we are men all the same, men seeking to live as Men, not as ‘progressive apes.’ Our ways are manifold and our disagreements inevitable; yet we find common cause in seeking the course of good through the human heart. Behind these shuttered doors, in this renewed part of the past, in this small town, that cause lives on against the irrational powers of this world.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bate, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

Street Food Argument

The old guy is a boaster, for sure.  You wouldn’t guess it because his food stand is actually a converted alleyway.  There is particle board hung from pipe framing for the roof, maybe some aluminum siding on that for water protection, and wooden matting, similar to rattan, on the walls.  It’s barely six feet wide, maybe less, but he’s crammed an industrial-size refrigator, gas burners, and who knows what else into the twenty foot-long space.  But, despite its shabbiness, he still goes on and on about how great his twikim is.  It’s so good, SBS filmed him on one of their food shows, he said.  And even with food prices going up, he still gives out large portions, he pointed out.

I don’t care much for his boasting, but it is indeed amazing food.  His fried stuffed peppers (고추튀김) are incredible.  They’re about six inches long, with a layer of fried goodness on the outside that’s light, not doughy.  He throws it in the fry pan for an extra minute just to make it extra crispy (and give it a nice greasy coating). Bite into the middle and it’s got julienned carrots and something that looks like feta cheese but doesn’t taste like it.  The inside is equally as light as the outside, surprisingly more enjoyable than chile rellenos I’ve eaten at home.

Two local guys waltz up out of the sprinkling rain and order some odaeng.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” asks the old guy.

The dude in the black polo trimmed with gold, punching on his smart phone, says, “Ah, she’s gone home.”

“Home?  Where’s that?”

The young guy says the name of a place that’s not familiar, but sounds like an island, given that it ends in “do.”

“What?  Where is that?” says the old guy.

“It’s an island.”

“Oh, she lives on an island.”

“Yeah, her mom is a haenyeo.”

The old guy seemed indignant.  “That can’t be.”

“Why? That’s what she is.”

“She can’t be a haenyo, not if she’s from there.  Haenyo are only on Jeju.”

“I’m telling you, she’s a haenyo.”

“Those women only live on Jeju!  Just because a woman fishes doesn’t make her a haenyo!”  The old guy seemed really bent out of shape over this.

“Really?  That’s what she said.”

“Well, she’s wrong.”

“I’m chatting on the phone with her right now.  Do you want to ask her father?”

“No, no, that’s fine.”

As the greasy food began to form a heavy lump in the pit of my stomach, I realized my Korean skills were better.  Whoa.

The Golden Age of Korean Boosterism

By now, word has gone ’round the world – Korea will host the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. It is indeed an honor and an acknowledgement of Korea’s new role in the world. The Seoul Olympics in 1988 were that of a very different Korea – an emerging industrial workshop that had only barely moved beyond the pale of a military dictator. The Olympic Korea of 2018 will be a very different one.

But despite Korea’s success, despite whatever merits it might have as an Olympic venue, the securing of the 2018 bid cannot be seen outside the lens of the immense tide of boosterism that has defined much of Korea to the rest of the world. The Korean Olympic bid effort was indeed a massive marketing campaign and well played in many ways. The charisma of gold medalist Kim Yuna may have been been a deciding factor, as may have the fact that no Winter Olympics has been held in Asia since Nagano in 1998. But many countries make a concerted propaganda effort to snag an Olympic bid for themselves. Others, especially the European countries who have the longest tradition of and most invested in winter sports, undoubtedly have more experience at this than Korea.

What we must realize is that the Pyeongchang bid was never a completely independent campaign. It was an intrinsic part of the rest of the Korean booster efforts. The manufactured buzz and excitement over the G20 last year, the Korean F1 Grand Prix in a country with no racing legacy, the efforts to brand makgeolli and ddeokbokki as signature Korean foodstuffs, to promote every region of Korea as a shining opportunity for both investment and tourism – all are one and the same. They are a concerted effort to sell not just Korean products or services to the world, but to sell Korea to the world. It is an attempt to establish the blue-chip credibility of the country itself. And what better way than for the world to come to your shores and be awed at your ability to put on a spectacle as complex and dazzling as the Olympics? That is why the Pyeongchang bid was never a separate effort, but actually the pinnacle, the jewel in the crown, of Korean boosterism.

The world has thus been sold Korea. But this begs the question, what sort of product has Korea become? To convince a modern consumer to buy a product, the package and marketing must be slick and focused, all of the negative aspects hidden or minimized in appearance. Only the benefits must be emphasized and in particular the moment of thrill and excitement, of ecstasy when that product is finally taken and a new world or self revealed. To look at Korean boosterism is to see exactly that. Before I came to Korea, I had an image of the country as a land of traditional hanok houses on every corner, of exquisite and serene natural purity everywhere, and of traditional culture permeating everything.  I’d gotten those images from what little I could gather on TV or from tourism websites or any other normal form of marketing.  When I first arrived in Korea, I thought that I’d taken the wrong plane.  Those images may convey tiny corners of this country, but the truth is actually glaringly ugly.

Yet boosterism is how Korean government and business bring awareness and money to their country. Does it work well? Perhaps. What they haven’t considered is people’s reaction when the image does not match up to reality. In the consumer world, this usually means ditching whatever product failed to satisfy you and going in search of another one. So while Korea is prepared to do anything and everything to snag an ever-larger portion of the world’s pocketbook, what it doesn’t realize is the eventual backlash that will come. And this will have an even more damaging effect because Korea has not made its products an expression of itself, but its very self a product in order to sell goods.

The way this attitude perverts attitudes of Korean culture is palpable. Consider these two videos about the Korean music group 2NE1:

2NE1 was explicitly started as a music group to defy all of the other cookie-cutter, cutesy Korean girl groups out there. Their objective was not to appear coy, submissive, or aegyo (애교) as has been traditionally expected of Korean women. They were aggressive, assertive, independent women. Even though they were a contrived effort by an entertainment company, their music nonetheless stirred real reaction. When I have mentioned 2NE1 in a positive light, I’ve seen men make faces of disgust and pass them off with, “But they’re so ugly.” I also have heard women speak very positively about the quasi-feminist attitudes in the songs. 2NE1 has achieved some impact on Korea culture and their domestic success indicates that they could accomplish more.

But it should be evident from the videos that however grand and noble the intentions of their managers were in the beginning, they have been cast aside in favor of pure success. The very fact that Will.I.Am from the Black-Eyed Peas will produce their album, not for the sake of making a good album, but to specifically tap the world market, shows that international recognition is their new god. And if as a group 2NE1 is supposed to be for Korean women above all else, giving them an alternative model in popular culture, then why in the world is 2NE1 promoting a dance contest on iTunes, one which is for the whole world?  Are Korean women their focus or the world music charts?  I don’t think that this is the group members’ doing, but that of their entertainment company. What is clear, though, is that Koreans are increasingly prepared to sacrifice any sort of healthy cultural evolution to jump on the bandwagon of international recognition.

The very fact that Korea feels this desire to be recognized by the rest of the world indicates a deep-seated insecurity with itself. It is a far cry from the days of the Hermit Kingdom or even earlier days of Joseon, when Korea was content to be itself, keep outsiders beyond their borders, and manage its own affairs. Korea historically was never a conquering nor exploring power, concerned with what others were doing or new places. It looked inward and was content to know and evolve in its own way.

Perhaps it was the Japanese occupation, perhaps the Korean war, perhaps the long struggle with poverty. Whatever the cause, something made Korea believe that looking inward was no way to survive in a harsh world of trade and violent neighbors. It decided to move forward as quickly as possible, doing whatever it took in order that the nation might be strengthened. To look at Korea today is to see that it has achieved that goal in many ways. Yet when one ceases to look inward, one becomes concerned with outward appearances, with the approval of others. Thus, in the Korean mind of today, it is not enough for the world to buy Korean products so that the country might be rich. Only if those consumers know that a product is Korean, is an expression of being Korean, is only great because it is Korean, can the producers be satisfied. The reflection upon the body politic is a reflection upon the self.

Yet what happens when the aforementioned backlash comes? It will not appear merely as a rejection of an inferior product; it will be a rejection of Korean culture, of Koreanness. And what will Koreans do when the world does eventually leave them for something new? They will have prostituted their culture for the favor of outsiders, and when those outsiders are gone, what will they have left for themselves?

Koreans may think that with riches they have escaped their tragic past and are entering a new and better era. Yet that is not true. Tragedy is not an external event that befalls us. It is an internal flaw, which, given the right opportunity, turns into our undoing. Pyeongchang 2018 may represent the Golden Age of Korean Boosterism, but, like any golden age, its success obscures the truth about our very nature.

The Unwanted Ones

I’m not normally a booster for stuff that’s already been written or printed, but I will make an exception this time.  If you haven’t read this piece in the Los Angeles Times, it is definitely worth your time:

The drop box is attached to the side of a home in a ragged working-class neighborhood. It is lined with a soft pink and blue blanket, and has a bell that rings when the little door is opened.

Because this depository isn’t for books, it’s for babies — and not just any infants; these children are the unwanted ones, a burden many parents find too terrible to bear.

One is deaf, blind and paralyzed; another has a tiny misshapen head. There’s a baby with Down syndrome, another with cerebral palsy, still another who is quadriplegic, with permanent brain damage.

But to Pastor Lee Jong-rak, they are all perfect. And they have found a home here at the ad hoc orphanage he runs with his wife and small staff. It is the only private center for disabled children in South Korea.

“This is a facility for the protection of life,” reads a hand-scrawled sign outside the drop box. “If you can’t take care of your disabled babies, don’t throw them away or leave them on the street. Bring them here.”

I’ve run across some heartbreaking sights in Korea, but I’ve seen none more cruel than public attitudes toward the disabled.  Many times I’ve come across a group of disabled people, from young ages all the way up into adulthood, in public on an outing.  They do not comprehend the stares they receive from passersby, but I do, and I can tell you they are awful stares.  These are not unaware children gawking at a strange-acting or -looking person.  These are grown adults, looking at the disabled with what can only be described as looks of horror.  There is a legitimate, palpable sense of simultaneous fear and disgust in the onlookers’ eyes, as though these helpless creatures were some sort of plague visited upon their neat, trendy, beautiful world.  Mind you, that is not the attitude of all Koreans; I have seen older mothers and fathers dutifully caring for a middle-aged child who cannot take care of himself.  But the overall attitude of the society is not one of acceptance, of empathy, or even pity — it is of disgust.

There’s charity and then there’s charity.  We all have the duty to do what we can for those who suffer, but that doesn’t mean that all spending toward benevolent ends is equal.  But in this case, I think it’s clear to anyone who reads the whole article that every single won given to Lee Jong-rak will be used for good.

If you’re interested in making a donation to help out his efforts, below is contact and donation information for his church.

Give Out Love Church (JuSaRang Gongdongche Church)

646-151 Nangok-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul

Republic of Korea

Phone: 82-2-854-4505

8414503@hanmail.net

Name of the Bank	KOOKMIN BANK
Address of the Bank HQ	9th FL. Sewoo Bldg. 10, Yeouido-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, Korea
KOOKMIN  BANK  SWIFT CODE (B.I.C.)	CZNBKRSE
Bank Account Number	715301-01-258639
Name of the Account Holder	Give Out Love Church
Phone number	82-2-854-4505

Perfect Village

A few weeks ago I found what was to me the perfect Korean village.

What made the village particularly appealing was that everything old is adapted for contemporary use.  Hardly the way things work in most places I’ve been in the 삼성민국, but this is Gangwon-do.  This store is not only an ancient building itself, but the manner of selling is of a really old style.  In my understanding, “연쇄점” means a general store, in the sense of an old-school mercantile establishment, not a convenience shop.  The middle-aged man running the place said that it was over forty years old.  The building certainly appeared older than that.

The restaurant next door still listed a two-digit telephone number.  I wonder when those were still in use in rural Korea.

The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but this building was just about the oldest one I saw in the whole place.  No one inside or anywhere around to ask about it, though.

The kid on the bench in front of the little shop on the left sat there playing with his toy pellet gun.  He seemed to pay me no heed.  We walked inside to buy something to drink.  His grandmother seemed surprised that anyone would actually come into her place at all.  But she was still all smiles and even came to the door to give us a big wave as we walked away.  The kid still didn’t seem interested.  The very old and the very young, with a gulf in between — that’s Korea, in more ways than one.