Life is Unpleasant

Working in Gangnam and living in Bucheon, I have made it a ritual to get on Line 2’s Outer Circle Line (i.e. the clockwise line), take it to Sindorim station and transfer for the Line 1 express train to Dongincheon station and getting off at Bucheon station and take a bus home, typically leaving work between 6:30 and 7 and getting home about 80 minutes later.  I have made it a habit of avoiding high-traffic times and routes, but now I simply have no choice.  The trains that I take are packed with people, most of whom have had a long day at work and are on their way home.  Things like civility and manners, never incredibly strong here, go straight out the window, and it’s every man for himself.  One of the things keeping me sane is the music I listen to.  This week I leave work listening to the Arcade Fire and change to Belle and Sebastian when I transfer to Line 1.  Something about the driving beat of ‘Sleep the Clock Around’ that demands to be listened to above ground.

A note on these bands: I don’t know what you’ve heard, but they’re both great.  One of the greatest things about not living in your own culture is that you can enjoy things like music without being distracted by the hype, reputation, overkill and hyperbole that accompanies a topic so charged as personal taste in music.  I just get the songs without all the fame and fortune and everything that goes with it and that’s how I’ve always liked it.

Anyway, the squeezing in and scrumming off of subway cars has become a part of my life now.  I have finally abandoned the bars and handles and become an aisle man.  I roll on my heels to maintain balance during sudden lateral rocks and maintain a wide stance parallel with the train to deal with sudden braking and acceleration.  Everyone else is stewing in their own juices.  I’m surfing.

The last night I went out with some friends in Gangnam and came home along my usual route, leaving the Gang at 10 with my friend Jonas headed to Shinchon.  We both squeezed into the car,which was just as packed at 10 as it was at 7.  While we carried on an animated, slightly buzzed conversation, the people around us seemed to be annoyed by our loud English, as they are wont to do, but I didn’t bring it up to Jonas lest we lose our conversational momentum.  We were standing three people back from the subway doors.  The doors opened and people started pushing from all sides trying to make clear their intentions to get off.  I had people pushing towards me from the left, right and behind, and the guy in front of me clearly did not intend to make room for them to get off.  Mind you, Jonas and I are carrying on a conversation and I’m not giving this an incredible amount of thought, I’m just doing my best to let these people get out the door.  I push past the guy in front of me and out the door to let the people get out, and sort of without thinking about it at all I said to the guy ‘내리고 또 타시죠, 사람들 내리게!’ (’Why don’t you get off and then get on again, so people can get off!’)  Having said it, I looked and realized that I had just inadvertently addressed the entire packed train car, with easily 25 people looking straight at me.  Jonas is unaware, not having heard me.  The guy I was talking to said something quietly, and I asked ‘huh?’ So quietly that I had to read his lips he said ‘됐어요’, ‘It’s fine,’ ‘It’s done,’ ‘Whatever.’  There are a million ways to translate it, I’m not sure which one he would have preferred.

We get back on the train and Jonas starts telling a story.  I am distracted by the fact that there are three conversations going on around us about what I had just done, with the most quotable notable being that I spoke Korean with a Gyeongsang Province accent (not sure where that came from).  I let Jonas know what had happened, noting that the guy I called out, now extremely red-faced, kept looking back at me.  I thought he must be really angry to have been shamed like that.  At the next stop when the doors opened, literally everyone anywhere near the door got out and let those leaving get off before hopping back on.  I had apparently shamed everyone.

I find that shaming people is surprisingly effective in that I am a white, to all appearances (and in fact) American person and the people here have this sick special way of looking up to America.  For example, I had a ten minute conversation at work about why maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to refer to ‘the US and other advanced countries’ since the document was going out worldwide and maybe other countries aren’t as comfortable with ‘the advanced countries’ undoubted superiority as Korea is.  I will always take the opportunity to showily pick up litter and throw it out if I see large groups of people ignoring it.  I relish the chance to out-polite people and then rub it in, hoping that if I rub hard enough it’ll stick.

Call Me Crazy

But I have absolutely no interest in getting involved in the current brouhaha over American beef imports to Korea.  I am watching a news broadcast right now which consists of 10% Chinese earthquake footage and 90% anti-US beef stories.  I have nothing to say to those with feelings either way, I have no opinion that I feel compelled to share, other than the fact that I welcome US beef imports.  However, nothing about the prospect of wading into this minefield issue interests me.  If you don’t like US beef, don’t eat it.  If you don’t like your country’s foreign policy, protest it.  Thank you for not sharing your opinion with me.  I suspect that my lack of interest in this issue springs from the fact that people’s opinions on this are so muddled and emotional that there’s nothing to even attempt to latch onto conversation-wise.

White People and Grammar

Stuff White People Like has finally added grammar to its exhaustive catalog of priveleged liberal shibboleths.    Unfortunately they’ve completely missed the point of why white people love grammar.

White people love grammar because they enhabit a world in which there is no one defining attribute separating them from what the site calls ‘the bad kind of white people’.  They are a completely self-defined class of people  That means that they must gird their society with mental bulkheads and lock themselves behind them.  Good grammar is the last vestige of the old education system which once taught proper ways to do a lot of things.  It’s the last bastion of objective truth in a completely relativistic world, something that people can say for sure is right when the rest of it all is up for interpretation.    You can dress however you want, eat whatever you want, act however you want despite your education or income level but having good grammar is perceived to the the last true tip-off of where you stand in society.

That’s why I’ve always sensed a certain desperate social-climbiness in grammar ghouls who troll for semicolons and misplaced apostrophes.  It’s the patina of education that bespeaks true ignorance.  I liken it to my Korean students who quibble about the pronunciation of the word ‘the’ (thuh or thee?) but can’t actually speak English.  This is likely why there are so many urban legends about language, because there is a demand for factoids about language.  Here’s a list of some of the stupidest factoids about grammar and langauge that make the people who cite them feel great and the victims feel abashed.  The best one, and the most ridiculous in my estimation, is the claim that the word ‘hopefully’ is ungrammatical in sentences like ‘Hopefully John’s having a good time,’ because it means ‘full of hope’, and the intention of the sentence isn’t to imply that John is full of hope.

To sum up, white people (ie human beings) would like to appear as smart as they possibly can.

I Hope You’re Watching Battlestar Galactica

Because it is so very good.  There’s not much else to say, except that the fourth season episode ‘Escape Velocity’ has to be one of the best episodes ever.

There are those who wonder whether the show’s budget got cut because the latest episodes are extremely talky and light on the space opera.  I rather think that Ron Moore, faced with the last season of his show, is leaning heavy towards the true strong point of the show, its actors and writing.  There were things in this episode that had me gasping at their genius.  When the show is over I have no doubt it will go down as one of the greatest television series of all time.  I have dreams of some day locking my kids in the family room with the complete series and not letting them out until they’ve watched straight through.

Update: I kind of suspected it, but the episode was written by master writer and blogger Jane Espenson. Read about part of the process of writing the episode and how even she can’t resist calling it brilliant.

Best Show on Korean Television

Last year I referenced the show Famous Chil Princesses (소문난 칠공주) in my paean to everything great about living in Korea along with the Divorce Court-style reenactment show Bubu Clinic: Love and War.  Unfortunately I never got a chance to blog about Chil when it was on, because it really is to Korean TV what the Wire or Battlestar Galactica are to American cop and science fiction shows, respectively.  Chil takes the familiar tropes and stock characters of Korean dramas and imbues them with such depth and life that it’s ruined me for other dramas.

Chil Princesses revolved around a career military man, his wife and their daughters.  Each daughter’s name contained the syllable ‘chil’, hence the show’s name, which is a play on an old Korean fairy tale or something about seven princesses (chil gongju).  Anyway, while the setup is absolutely standard, the show goes places that Korean shows never dare.  The cute, stuck up princess on the show (above in the pink) undergoes a transformation, leaves her perfect husband, and goes off to a small town to be a nurse in a tiny doctor’s office.  She learns to be less self-centered and grows as a person into a fully developed, caring feeling human being.

When her mother finds out where she is and goes to see for herself, she finds her daughter in a nurse’s uniform, happily helping an old woman into a car.  She weeps with pity for her daughter, oblivious to her change for the better, and only wants her to go back to her vapid, well taken care of former self.  It is such a powerful scene, to see something that we’ve been led to believe is a good being perceived by another character whom we know to be a complex thinking human being as a tragedy.

Your average Korean drama consists of heroes and villains, tragic figures, cartoonish subhuman comic relief and Christ-like perennial victims.  Chil took characters who could have easily been played that way and explored their motivations in a way that I haven’t really seen done.

One of the daughters (front left, played by Kim Hye-seon, 김혜선) is working at a chicken hof with a divorced man, played by one of my favorite Korean actors, An Nae-sang (안내상).

An’s ex wife is played by another one of my all-time favorite actresses, Kim Hee-Jung (김희정)

Hee-jung plays a character who at first seems to be the same shrieking, money obsessed uber-bitch who populates most of the dramas in Korea.  She comes into the hof while Kim Hye-sun is working, demands money from the till, commands Hye-sun to serve her, and on and on.  Hye-sun eventually marries An Nae-sang and the two women clash over how to raise An’s children.  Eventually Hye-sun wins over the children, and Hee-jung is left out in the cold.  She is forced to confront the terrible person that she is and to undergo real and permanent change.  The trajectory that her character takes made Famous Chil Princesses one of the best shows I’d ever seen in Korea.  Not only that, but I originally know Kim Hee-jung from my other favorite Korean show, Bubu Clinic, in which she played some of the most deliciously evil characters of all time.

Now the creative team behind Famous Chil Princesses is back with the equally excellent although slightly less accessible First Wives Club (조강지처 클럽).  I say it’s less accessible because, as a foreigner, it’s hard to put up with a show in which the main character is a sneering, miserable ajumma who never has a kind word for anybody and goes through the world making that ‘You want to throw down?’ face that ajumma’s sometimes make and going ‘Ung?  Ung?’ (응? 응?) a lot.  I am talking about the character played by Kim Hye-sun, Han Boksu (for those of you who don’t speak Korean, her name means ‘Spite Revenge’).  Inexplicably (to me, who both doesn’t understand a good 10% of the show and hasn’t seen every episode), this scary fishmonger is married to a handsome doctor.

But eventually, after having two kids, they drift apart.  He falls in love with another woman and she eventually finds another man who’s more warm and caring than her husband.  She demands a divorce, which they get in secret.  His father found out about the divorce the other day and her mother found out last night.  Their reactions reminded me of the mother from Chil: They both thought their children should stay together, even though they were telling them that they wanted to get divorced and that it was for the best.  A theme runs through the two shows, that what’s best for people today is not necessarily what the older generation and society might think.

But actually that story failed to capture my attention at first, because of the shrieking, snarling Han Boksu character whom I have none of the engrained cultural tolerances necessary to put up with.  Again, the much more interesting story involved An Nae-sang and Kim Hee-jung.  An plays Han Won-su, Han Boksu’s brother.  This is the kind of role that Korean television occasionally offers up which allows well-known actors to essentially play human cartoon characters.  An essentially gets to play a role so hammy, so ridiculously over the top, that he practically leaps out of the television.  He waves his arms, he sneers in contempt, he threatens, he appears to be having an absolute ball and he gets most of the laughs.

Anyway, he’s married to Na Hwa-shin, played by the sort of boring O Hyun-jung.

Anyway, he cheats on her with none other than Kim Hee-jung

But whereas in the rest of Korean television typecasting is the norm, the creators of First Wives Club go in the opposite direction.  Kim’s character, Mo Ji-ran, is a sweet and loving girl who gives up everything for An.  He and his wife separate and he takes up with Hee-jung, which is fine until his wife’s boss, a handsome, charmingly bland rich guy, falls in love with her.

An’s reaction is explosive.  He can’t stand to see the woman that he cheated on with another man.  He starts to resent Hee-jung and curse his bad luck.  He wants his first wife back.  He blusters and threatens and freaks out.  Hee-jung is oblivious.

The brilliant thing about the show is that most shows would deal with this situation totally from the wife’s perspective: she was married to a terrible husband who cheated on her, and now she’s finally found happiness with a good man, but this evil lout is coming to drag her back down with him.  First Wives Club plays it both ways, leaving the audience conflicted and really thinking about other human beings’ emotions, instead of the standard fare which presents non-main characters as obstacles, objects and comic relief, which is sort of like how people view strangers in public places here.

Way To Conflate, Seoul Subway System

Take a look at the following banner ad currently running on Line One and Two of the Seoul Subway:

 

Sorry for the poor quality of the first picture.  On the left you see a man groping a shocked-looking woman while a nearby woman appears scandalized.  On the left you see a woman sitting on her boyfriend’s lap making out with him while a nearby man sits grumpily observing.

Put those two hypothetical occurrences in your mind.  Mull over the relationship between the one and the other.  Now here’s the copy:

Translation: Extreme physical contact makes everyone uncomfortable!

• Over-the-top public displays of affection make others grimace [in disgust].
• Intentional physical contact may even carry a legal penalty.

The ad goes on to label begging, peddling, holding the newspaper too widely and sitting with a wide stance to be other targeted behaviors, but unfortunately my photos’ quality is such that I cannot read exactly what the ad says.

Think about the message of this ad for a moment.  PDAs are the equivalent of sexual assault.  Seeing someone kiss is as bad as having someone grope you.  Not only that, but ‘intentional physical closeness’ may, just may, have some legal consequences.

Keep thinking about it.

Here’s A Tip

When someone is angry about a situation in which blame is difficult to apportion, never say that you’re sorry.  That person will feel justified in their anger and get more angry. At you.

Saying nothing will allow them to mull the idea that they are the cause of their problems.  They may very well end up apologizing to you.

Just a Juxtaposition

The Silver Jews - We Are Real:

I asked a painter why the roads are colored black,
He said ‘Steve, it’s because people leave and no highway will bring them back’

Clem Snide - Long Lost Twin:

The highway’s a ribbon, it makes a gift of everything

Who Feels Like Gettin’ Used for PR?

Check it out, all y’all pawns out there:

And don’t forget, dress code!!

Intellectual Attractive Nuisances

I take International Law at Yonsei with Professor Kim Joongi, a class that I really enjoy, largely because the professor’s technique of question and answer in which he elicits opinions from students and calls upon the rest of the class to either challenge or bolster them.

The phenomenon that got me thinking up this post is like so: The professor will ask a question, for example ‘What is the justification for extraterritoriality?’ and someone will say ‘Stateless people!’

Now, as you already know, stateless people are exceedingly rare, and typically entire systems aren’t designed to accommodate exceedingly rare things.  They are designed to handle common things and must be tweaked and touched up to handle little side issues like stateless people.

A few days later the professor asks ‘What is the difference between Humanitarian Law and Human Rights?’ and someone will say ‘Stateless people!’

Why?  Because it sounds good.  But not only does it sound good.  It’s that exception to the rule that captures the imagination, clouds one to the realities of the world.  Talking about it makes you sound smart.  Why didn’t I think to reference stateless people?  But talking about it won’t really get you anywhere, because it’s a sideshow.

I remember from my linguistics days that ergative languages and languages with Object-Verb-Subject word order were the big intellectual attractive nuisances around me.  Both are rare types of languages which can provide interesting research data by virtue of their being the exceptional type, but many confuse that with actual extra significance.  I know these exist in every field of knowledge, because that’s the way that human minds work.  We like the glitzy and the arcane, and what’s better than something both glitzy and arcane.  I’ve thought quite a bit about this, and here are some other intellectual attractive nuisances that I’ve come up with:

• Matriarchal societies
• Any kind of anachronous technology (ancient Mesopotamian batteries, Nazca hot air balloons, Stonehenge as an astrolabe)
• The Golden Ratio
• Fractals
• Putatively homosexual historical figures
• Freakonomics

It should also be noted that any statement made by a historical figure that seems to run counter to that person’s public persona is good for a few idle minutes of stabs in the dark and beard stroke-cogitating.

I have been talking about intellectual laziness for a while on this blog and in life and I am getting close to encapsulating these thoughts.  As strange as it may sound, I think the take-home lesson of all this thinking about thinking for me is basically 

Don’t talk seriously about things you don’t know much about.  By the way, you don’t know much about nearly every topic.  So almost never be serious.

I’m sure Kurt Vonnegut’s looking down on me approvingly right now.