North Korea Agrees To Stop Being North Korea

There was something very telling left out of this tentative agreement between North Korea and the United States. Although the last hope for peace, justice, and goodness on Earth insisted that the distribution of food be rigorously monitored “to ensure that the aid goes to the neediest”, there was no mention of the North’s internal propaganda apparatus, or whatever you want to call it.

The question is not will the North stop making nuclear weapons, or will the North stop diverting all of its food aid to the rich and the military, but will the North stop depicting the United States as the Great Satan, South Korea as a terrified capitalist puppet, and its own government as the only hope for the salvation of the Korean people?

Will the North stop being itself?

We have to look at the North’s other recent actions to determine if anything else dovetails with this recent announcement. Just yesterday they were threatening, like clockwork, to kill everybody; and for the last week there has been a modest protest movement in the South to prevent the repatriation (and certain death) of several North Korean refugees who were captured in China. This all sounds very much like the North Korea we have all come to know and love over the past six or seven decades of its glorious existence.

Now if North Korea had ignored the joint US-ROK military drills, and if the North had simply let those refugees go—as I don’t think the Chinese really want to give them up to the North’s concentration camps—then I think we would have something to talk about. But since they behaved as they usually do in these situations, it’s safe to assume that they’ll behave as they usually do in the case of food and nuclear weapons: they’ll take as much of the aid as they can, they’ll find a way to funnel it to the military and to the elite, and then as soon as they think they have enough they’ll expel the weapons inspectors and resume the development of their nuclear program.

So don’t hold your breath. It would be suicidal for the elite in North Korea to give up on their raison d’être—naturally! obviously!—which is that they are the true leaders of the Korean people, and that one day they will control the entire peninsula. To officially accept food aid in exchange for abandoning their nuclear weapons, and to announce these changes in a truthful fashion to the proletariat of the North, would be the equivalent of saying something to the effect of, that’s it, the jig is up, the game is over, we’re tired of this shit, let’s just surrender to the South and get it over with. It ain’t gonna happen. You’d have better luck getting Rick Santorum to admit that god is a superstition.

I just told my Korean wife about this. “North Korea said they’re going to stop making nuclear weapons. America is going to give them food.” “Huh,” she exclaimed, “Liars. Fucking liars.”

Corrupt Seoul Mayor Corrupt

Please stop investigating me! I've only been on the job for four months!

Is it even worth writing about this? I haven’t seen anything on the Korean-English news websites, but it would seem that the mayor of Seoul, Bak Won Soon, who started his new job three or four months ago after being catapulted to fame on the endorsement of Ahn Chul Soo (rich and famous for creating near-useless Korean Antivirus software while wearing a doctor’s labcoat), just got his son, Bak Joo Sheen, out of his mandatory military service as a result of a fraudulent MRI.

In a country where every able-bodied male is supposed to serve in the military for two years, and where the mayor of Seoul is (supposedly) the second most powerful man in Korea, this is kind of a big deal; although I used to believe that compulsory military service could unify a fractured society, in practice the rich will always find ways to exempt their children from danger, and most of the Korean guys you talk to here will complain about this problem. Flying particularly pregnant Korean mothers over the Pacific to give birth on American soil is one method of gaining exemption; bribing doctors is another.

Here’s how it went down. The mayor’s son graduated from college last year. He joined the military on August 29th, complained of leg pain, and went home four days later on September 2nd. His father was running for mayor at this time, and he said that his son had been seriously injured while playing soccer, a common past time in the Korean military (on the forums, or “cafes” that my wife frequents, women complain that their spouses never stop telling stories about playing soccer in the military).

Anyway, the son didn’t get any treatment because there was really nothing wrong with him. His father was elected on October 26th. The military called the son back into service on November 25th, but he didn’t go. Instead he visited a hospital in Seoul (in Jayong-dong) that has a reputation for giving exemptions to rich young men. He got his exemption, and rather than going through basic training, he began work as a public servant, which usually takes the form of napping, smoking, checking computers, and staring off into space at train stations or subway stops. Men with health or wealth problems usually do this for two years in lieu of compulsory military service.

Several months later, Kang Young Seok, a independent representative from Mapo-gu in Seoul with a very popular blog which is the source of most of the biased information in this post, somehow discovered what had happened, and accused the mayor of funny business. Kang added that he would resign if he was wrong. He demanded proof of the son’s health problems, said that the kid should be checked in public or by different doctors, and then tried and failed and then somehow succeeded in getting copies of the mayor’s son’s MRIs, which apparently belong to a rather obese individual.

The son, with facial hair, which means he is rich.

His MRI, which is apparently not really his MRI.

Kang Young Seok, who created this scandal and who has, at most, six months before he is mired in a corruption or bribery scandal of his own.

In response to these embarrassments, Mayor Bak Won Soon has refused to answer questions about his son, thereby proving his innocence.

Some decades ago a Korean presidential candidate named Lee Hoi Chang lost because his sons had not done their service, as they were either too short or too skinny to dodge bullets, which, as everyone knows, only strike the smallest and thinnest targets.

Bak Won Soon has tried to cast himself in the mold of the populist everyman, running as an independent in a country that at first glance would appear to be sick of its endemic corruption, though Koreans have been electing shamelessly corrupt politicians since the inception of modern democracy here, right before the Seoul Olympics in 1988 when the last dictator stepped down.

One of the best posts on the ever-popular Expat Hell essentially explains why the government is so corrupt: the chaebol, the huge Korean conglomerates (Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Daewoo, KT, etc.), own the country. They existed long before democracy ever did in this place—the chaebol era begins with the Great Dictator Bak Chung Hee—and as a result of a significant head start, it will probably take the people and the government years or even decades to get these monopolies under control, as it is currently completely impossible to live in Korea without forking over most of your income to chaebol supermarkets or chaebol real estate interests.

In America the rich use religion, homosexuality, and the threat of terrorism and Islam, to zombify the majority of the electorate, while here the specters of American economic interests, North Korean attacks, or territorial disputes with Japan, work fairly well in frightening Koreans into electing politicians who do not represent their interests in the slightest. Prices continue to rise, wages are stagnant, unemployment is officially around four percent (though it may be as high as twenty!), and you will not meet anyone anywhere who has confidence in the government, the economy, or the future. One cannot help but conclude (in a rather fascist way) that people are sometimes not worthy of democracy. Still, it beats the alternative.

Despite all of this, the trains still run on time. We met with our Chinese tutor this morning, and she seemed quite fond of Korea; she described it as a free society, which goes to show just how constraining things must be back in China.

The next round of legislative elections is just a few months away, and currently every last person working in the Korean government, from the president on down to the lowliest bomb-sniffing dog at the airport, is under investigation for corruption. Just last night on the news my wife and I got another good look at Mr. Happy Face, Bak Hee Tae (a more fitting name might be Bak Hee Hee!), the Speaker of the Parliament, who resigned last week after it was revealed that he had been forking over envelopes stuffed with cash to buy votes. He also sealed off the parliament during the debate over the recent Free Trade Agreement with the United States because South Korea only appears in the news around the world when politicians start throwing chairs or tear gas at each other, when a man marries a pillow, or when a baby starves to death after its parents get addicted to playing virtual online MMORPG baby simulators.

I'm doing my best to look sad here, but really I'm just waiting for this scandal to blow over so I can get back to bribing the shit out of everyone.

His party, Han Nala Dang, “One Country Party”, or “Great Country Party”, or “Korean Country Party”, or “Grand National Party”, or “Grudge Country Party”, depending on how you translate Han, a rough equivalent of the Republican Party back in the USSA, just changed its name to the Sae Nooli or “New World”, or “New Frontier”, party, since they have become associated with rampant levels of corruption in the public consciousness. The idea that they could somehow purify themselves of all wrong by a superficial alteration of this kind is very typically Korean (the government is obsessed with national branding, see “Korea Sparkling”, “Dynamic Busan”, etc., while the people themselves are obsessed with plastic surgery), and also completely idiotic.

The election for the presidency will come at the end of the year, about one month after Barack Obama is given a second term, but on April 11th Koreans will go to the polls to elect new representatives and officials across the country. The New World Party, or the Grudge Party, whatever the hell you want to call them, the conservatives, are widely expected to have their asses handed to them.

The equivalent of the Democratic Party, Minjoo Dang, or the “Democratic United Party”, will then take power and replace the conservatives as the ones being at the heart of every corruption scandal, while at the same time restarting negotiations with North Korea, meaning that the South will start paying the salaries of the North’s nuclear scientists and filling the bellies of hungry North Korean soldiers in exchange for the usual empty promises of disarmament and reconciliation.

Bak Gun Hey, the daughter of Park Chung Hee, a dictator who made Korea into the prosperous and corrupt country that it is today, is currently running for the presidency, and thanks to the inevitable scandals that are going to occur between now and the presidential election under the watch of the liberals I think her victory is a fairly safe bet. Her only significant opponent, Ahn Chul Soo, has taken a page out of Sarah Palin’s book (“Shooting Wolves From A Helicopter With Russia On The Horizon!: My Life” by Sarah Palin) and refused to declare his candidacy, although he is obviously running as an independent. He is remarkable for being the only Korean in existence who ever gave any money to charity—half of his vast fortune, in fact. Despite the complete uselessness of the software that made him rich, and the fact that Koreans buy it purely because it was made in Korea (and purely because most of them are still using Internet Explorer 6), this generosity gives me some pause.

My wife is planning to vote for Bak Gun Hey, and I would probably vote for her too, because although both parties totally suck, one gives money and food to North Korea, and one does not. Liberals and conservatives are essentially identical here except for that distinction. Both are equally corrupt. Both are safely, snugly in the pockets of the conglomerates, and they will continue to luxuriate there until the Korean public stops caring about Dokdo more than monopoly, corruption, and income inequality.

Most of the English teachers who come here are probably fairly convinced that Korea is a cheap place to live, because they don’t have to pay rent while the food and transportation is definitely very inexpensive in comparison with most western countries. But after you get married, after you get stuck here, after you have to start paying for rent and for diapers and baby formula, you start to see how ridiculous the prices are. Most consumer goods are sold at exorbitant prices as a result of the chaebol stranglehold and the Korean public’s complete ignorance of the fact that the same items are a lot cheaper in the rest of the world. A few days ago I tried to convince my wife to look for a textbook we wanted to get on amazon.com; in Korea the book costs $50, on amazon.com it will set you back $16. Similarly, an apartment that wouldn’t be fit for an American slum will set you back $200,000 in Korea.

Of course our argument became an issue of which country is better rather than which country has the better prices, so in a sense I think Koreans deserve these troubles—nationalism, the modern opiate of the masses, is off the charts here—and in another sense it would seem that, in a capitalist society, you can either have low prices and no jobs (as in America) or high prices and just barely enough jobs (as in Korea). You can’t have low prices and enough jobs, not without a heavy dose of socialism or communism, which as we all know, is the devil’s work. So long as people are working to produce and purchase unnecessary luxury items for only the richest among them, rather than teaming up to provide necessities for everyone, these problems will persist.

I am not sure if there are any prominent liberals in South Korea who are not likewise supporters of the fascist North Korean government, which might be appropriately described as a “concentration camp state“, or what would happen if the Nazis were still around, but stuck in an extremely small, poor country, in East Asia.

My wife and I first heard about this scandal on the radio yesterday while we were driving in a taxi toward a Buddhist restaurant that is worth the trip across the Pacific to experience; and last night at dinner with some of her relatives we both caught a few minutes of a bizarre documentary show highlighting the difficulties of Koreans who are just turning thirty (even though most of them are actually only around twenty-eight years old because people do not know how to count their ages in this part of the world). One young man was frustrated with the difficulties of learning English, and we were granted a brief glimpse of his tried-and-true Korean learning method: repeatedly taking tests which solely consist of multiple choice questions. He started crying, in describing how hard it is to learn English, and the camera watched him snort and wipe his tears away for a good quiet minute or so before switching to a musical montage which consisted of angsty sentimental karaoke-quality music combined with shots of ce pauvre type walking around some crummy Korean neighborhood at night.

If you think you can learn a language purely by answering multiple choice questions, you deserve everything you get.

The show then visited a young couple which was running some kind of internet shopping website out of its unbearably windowless closet-sized apartment. They mentioned their wedding plans, and spoke of how they planned to blow a hundred thousand dollars on the ceremony, which is very typical of this country. Together they had seven thousand dollars saved up. They hoped to borrow the rest. They were sad. They feared for the future. A different montage with a different track of angsty Korean frustration music started playing, to shots of hands wrapping up socks and hats for shipping.

If you blow a hundred thousand dollars on your wedding when you have almost no money to your name, you deserve everything you get.

Everything I’ve written about in this shamelessly long post is not purely the result of swindling politicians: it takes two to tango: when you care more about Dokdo than the monopolistic stranglehold on your country, when nationalism trumps common sense, you get exactly what you deserve.

It would have been impossible to write this post without the help of my wife, whose name I am withholding out of fear of the Korean Netizenry, which is famous for destroying the lives of anyone who steps out of line.

Edit: And so, as it all turned out, Kang Young Seok was wrong! The mayor’s son really did have some problem with his spine! It really was his x-ray! How embarrassing!

Paradigm Shift Sunday

I learned two incredibly important things today. One. Do not argue with women. It just makes them angrier. Instead, apologize for everything, agree with what they say, and do what they ask. If you’ve gotten your hands on a good one, she’ll come around to your point of view (if it is indeed the correct one) on her own eventually. It’s taken me about two years to figure this out. Life is just much more pleasant when you let women do whatever they want.

Two. I got this new Korean textbook, Intermediate College Korean by Clare You and Ensu Cho. It’s pretty awesome. After working my way through two lessons, and practicing a bit with A., I understood her today when she was speaking to her grandparents and used this crazy-ass verb conjugation that comes right in the middle of the sentence. She literally said:

Husband university at works because of university free so is.

When we translate the phrase with the help of a mirror, it becomes:

Because my husband works at the university, I can go for free.

That because of is a real doozy in Korean. I had been hearing it all the time for years without ever really getting it—the sound is usually something like ineeka, haneeka, or imneeka. If it comes at the end of a sentence, it means the person is asking a question; if it comes at the middle, it means the person is saying since or because of. Crazy. But I’m making progress. A. said ineeka in the middle of a sentence, and I understood her.

Jeremy Lin

A few days ago the internet was chattering with the most remarkable news: a stereotype was misbehaving! An Asian was cleaning up on multiple basketball courts, surrounded on all sides and at all times by gigantic, powerful black people—their muscles like pistons, their hearts threatening to burst, as they thundered back and forth along the court, as though each was John Henry reborn! What the hell was going on here? Had the gods of the races lost their minds? Would a man in a mustache and a sombrero put down his acoustic guitar, step away from his mariachi band, and form a Silicon Valley startup? Would a woman in a black beekeeper’s burka go on national television and ask how short skirts and bare cleavage equal female liberation, exactly? Would The Autobiography of Malcolm X slip out of Donald Trump’s business suit by accident? Would a man with dreadlocks finally formulate a proper theory of quantum gravity?

I have a confession to make. I try to care about sports. It is the artist’s duty to find the beauty in everything (even the nape of Rick Santorum’s succulent neck), regardless of how Sun Tzu (or apparently Frederick the Great) says that when you defend everything you defend nothing. But seriously. Even when everyone here was going apeshit over the world cup with Japan—if you sat by a quiet window on one of those summer nights, you could hear the entire city of Busan screaming from every building, every bar and restaurant, in unison, like a chanting choir in a church made of skyscrapers and high-rises—I would try to join in the festivities, and I would look at the giant green screen before me fraught with dashing soccer players, and I would just zone out. I couldn’t help it. Everyone else was jumping and shouting, but I was turning over something I’d read that day despite myself. I cannot escape who I am. I like playing, even though I suck, but watching bores me to tears.

I didn’t know too many Asians before I came to Korea, and though I counted (and continue to count) a half-Indian and an Iranian as my closest friends—each of us has a different heritage but we are all full-blooded Americans; we don’t really notice that we belong to different tribes, it doesn’t matter—I had never gotten too close to anyone whose ancestors were from China, Korea, or Japan. There was Wataru and someone else who was named something like Yoomoo in kindergarten, and Xi from high school, and a friend of a girl I was after in college, and a few people in the background, but nobody really too close. No one close enough to destroy the stereotype of the zealously hardworking Asian, the perfectly robotic, uncreative, uncharismatic, hopelessly single straight-A student who will never be in charge of anyone…

…no one, that is, except for my friend Jacqueline, who is Asian, though I honestly never noticed, anymore than 99% of my friends and acquaintances noticed that my father comes from a family of secular Jews…

But anyway, then I came to Korea, to Busan, and one day I found myself walking around in the subway station under the Sports Complex, one of several stadiums in the city where Asians of all stripes regularly play baseball and basketball before legions of adoring fans. On the walls in the station there were life-size pictures of many of the players. I’m not going to lie here, but when I saw those pictures, and when I saw those guys playing on TV, I disdained them, not necessarily because they were Asian, but because I thought (possibly correctly) that the best players would have left for America at the first opportunity. There were some black players mixed in among them, and you can bet that (as with nearly everyone who comes to Korea), this country was not their first choice.

I’m a snob. I disdain. I also disdained and continue to disdain the pop bands, the singers, most of the actors and filmmakers, all of the comedians (how many foreigners have even cracked so much as a smile when watching a Korean comedy show?), the politicians (each rotten and corrupt to the core), even the writers (like Kim Jong Il-loving Gong Ji Young) and poets, regardless of the fact that my wife just told someone on the phone that my level of Korean is somewhere between beginner and intermediate.

Always, I thought, if these people were really remarkable, they would be famous in America. Even the warriors and kings from the country’s history seemed mediocre to me. The guy who invented the Korean alphabet, Korea’s favorite king, a one Mister Sejong, achieved this feat roughly five centuries after two Byzantine scholars named Cyril and Methodius gave what we now know as Cyrillic to the Bulgarians. Yi Sun Shin’s naval achievements are definitely astounding, but how do they compare with Alexander or Hannibal or Napoleon?

Although the media here would have the locals believe that people like Kim Yeona, Rain, and the members of The Wondergirls are world-famous, and that every American child adores Pororo, and that every American mother is using a podaegi, the only Korean who has ever gained household prominence outside of this peninsula is named Kim Jong Il.

It seemed to me that the Koreans who adored these Korean celebrities would not really give a damn if they themselves were not Korean. The Korean Wave has made some of them famous throughout Asia, but answer me this: if Asians were regularly starring in TV shows and movies in America, if Asians were not being victimized by their stereotype, if they were playing basketball and baseball and singing and dancing and marching and signing bills into law just as much as whites or blacks or anyone else, do you really think the Korean Wave would stand a chance inside or outside this peninsula? I’m not saying that Rain can’t dance, but if the man had a twin brother in America, and if that twin managed to ascend to the very top of the American pecking order against the likes of the successors of Michael Jackson, who would be more famous? Rain would be in a silver suit and a pink tie, selling cell phones out on the sidewalk, no question about it. The Korean Wave exists because Asians do not have an attractive place in American popular culture. These “World Stars” are definitely talented, but, like me, not that talented.

There’s a lot of protectionism going on in this country. The currency is kept artificially low. Foreign cars and electronics have almost no hope of competing against Korean ones inside Korea. The same supposedly goes for celebrities. But Jeremy Lin may just be the first nail in the coffin of the Korean Wave—he represents Asians all over America, he is playing against the very best in the world, and as a result of what are apparently remarkable achievements, he is proving to even the most skeptical racists that Asians are individuals, like anyone else, and that it’s high time America stopped worrying about the Yellow Peril, and learned to embrace it.

The first Asian-American president is not so far away as everyone believes. In fact, he turned eight months old just over a week ago.

Movies

I feel as if I have just absorbed a great work of art. A. and I went to see There Will Be Blood at a nearby DVD Bang, a seedy but effective place (which one could say of the entirety of this country) where you pay about six or seven dollars per person to sit in your own dark little room, on a reasonably comfortable bed with plastic covers and plastic pillows and a thin zebra blanket, with a gigantic high definition television and some very decent speakers not four feet away from your outstretched legs.

The experience is better than most movie theaters, since you don’t have to deal with people on their cellphones, the blue-white glow of text messages, the ceaseless babbling of idiots; you can also spontaneously have sex or masturbate, if the inspiration strikes, as there is a convenient plastic sphere of toilet paper sitting behind you on the bedstead.

The selection at this place is barbarous, truly barbarous, but there are a few good films nestled in amongst the mountains of catalogued garbage and sublime Japanese pornography, and we managed to find a few.

As for the movie, the music is one of the most striking things about it—the synthesized humming ringing in the first shot says that this is something alien we are looking at here, something unnatural and cruel that does not belong to the world. But I think the film falters in its use of one of Brahms’ most famous songs, which it samples almost like a rap star, cutting here and there, fast-forwarding to the parts the movie needs—this song jerked me out of the movie both times I heard it; the first time it sounded like a last-minute addition, and at the very end the irony was so overwhelming a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses almost sprouted from my nose—the second time we hear the song it seems as if the director wants to let us know that yes, actually, he had been intending to use that little jig all along.

There Will Be Blood makes use of a song called “Fratres for Piano and Cello” by a wholly unknown (to me) Estonian composer named Arvo Part, who seems to have lifted every last note straight out of one of Bach’s greatest achievements; the violin music that was originally composed by Jonny Greenwood (from Radiohead) is better.

A. and I have found a way to ride out the rest of the winter. If we could afford to go every day, we would.

Yesterday we saw a Korean film called Dogani, or The Crucible, in English, a fairly bleak, black-and-white picture about child molestation in a school for deaf orphans—is it possible to get any bleaker? howabout robots raping blind-and-deaf puppies inside Auschwitz during The Holocaust?—but it’s based on true events, though I doubt the good guys in the real world were so perfectly good as they were in this film, and I doubt the bad guys were so horribly evil and soulless. The film is based on a novel written by one of Kim Jong Il’s long-distance admirers, whom I wrote about earlier, a woman who will never be famous in the outside world for anything other than her quirks, even if she claims that she will attain immortality when the government crucifies her; still, it was entertaining, and it jerked plenty of tears from the both of us, and its indictment of Korean society is far harsher than anything you’ll find coming out of the mouths of the disenchanted foreigners living here. To me it seemed as though a classroom full of deaf kids was probably the only such place in Korea where the teacher could hear himself think.

One of the more ridiculous things you see in this film is a $50,000 bribe delivered to the school principal from a teacher who wants to work there—it’s one of those commonplace Korean customs (according to A.) that makes absolutely no sense to me, since it seems to mean that there is no reason to get the job to begin with. I’ll pay you $50,000 now so you can pay me $20,000 a year while I work for you. Disgruntled foreigners occasionally refer to something called KLogic—this is KLogic.

Then there was something I watched on my own, called The Interrupters—I’m watching movies all the time now because I haven’t been able to watch movies for eight months (the boy slept from 9 to 7:30 without waking last night, hallelujah)—a movie great and remarkable for many reasons, one of the most notable being that it is full of black people, although unlike (ahem) most movies that are full of black people, it was clearly made for everyone to see. There’s nothing else I think I can say about it, or anything else, that hasn’t been said a million times before.

Amateur Language Study Adventures

Yesterday I came down with what was probably Swine Flu and shortly began thinking and speaking almost entirely in Korean, which did not help me a great deal when I happened to find myself listening to the pronouncements of a Korean doctor late that afternoon, hiding my gaping mouth (through which I was gasping, slack-jawed, like an inbred country boy) behind a hospital-provided medical mask; lucky for me this doctor spoke flawless English, which she revealed by translating my high temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit without being asked. I was running a fever of about a hundred and one.

A friend in Japan revealed to me some months ago that, surprise surprise, Akira is a lot better in Japanese. Having recently watched My Neighbor Totoro over the weekend with my son, who was sick with the same disease at the time (although it seems to be a very weak strain), I decided to find myself a version of the film that was not dubbed, and after I did so I started pausing the film to check up on vocabulary words with the help of google translate. If one of the girls said father, I would head on over to find out how the word is written in Japanese; I can remember without checking that the word is otosan, but I can’t even visualize the spelling (お父さん, apparently) on my own, though I do remember the right kanji character and I do remember the letters for ah and n. I would then write the words down once and continue watching the movie. As a result I think I’ve learned a few more hiragana characters as well as a couple of expressions. This was after an hour of studying; to have done so in a more traditional way, with a textbook and maybe a basic language movie or something, might have been more useful and more effective, but not as fun; being tutored by someone in person is always the most effective way to conquer a foreign tongue, but Japanese people are a lot harder to come by in Korea than you might imagine.

I hear Chinese outside on the street almost every time I go outside in Gyeongju (my wife and I even ran into some rich-looking students heading over to check out the university), I see Southrons from god knows where constantly (one in Busan was even arm-in-arm with an ajumma!), but I believe I have only heard Japanese spoken in Busan three times—twice on the subway (once between a pair of old nationalist-looking men who were videotaping their surroundings with a small camcorder and glaring at me with a very unique form of xenophobic hatred, with rectangle-shaped bloodshot eyes, with perhaps a drop of curry-flavored jaundice mixed in—not nearly so comfortable, wholesome, warm, and cozy as the I-really-have-nothing-better-to-do glares you get from random ajummas), once on the beach. You know it’s Japanese because it sounds just like Korean only you cannot understand a single word, rather than the occasional snatches you are used to.

I also spent a lot of time looking at a list of Chinese radicals on wikipedia, which cleared up one or two questions—邑, Eup, in Korean, which looks like a cat to me, but really means town, comes up a lot in Korean place names, and is usually written like a B or a beta, 阝, so back in Busan I was seeing it all the time without having any idea as to the meaning; ⻍ apparently means walk, but I always thought it resembled a dragon…whereas the character for dragon looks nothing like a dragon…

This morning the thing that got me out of bed after a long recuperation from my illness was the thought that I should start trying to read Madame Bovary in French, an idea that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind, tied up in the attic like a secret twin, forever. Here is the first line in French:

Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail.

And the translation in my old Modern Library edition:

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow”, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.

Even if you don’t speak a word of French—my credentials here are several months auditing a class at Mt. Holyoke—you can see that there is a major difference between the two of them, as Flaubert did not write any quotation marks. Upon closer inspection we learn that the nouveau is dressed “en bourgeois”, and that there is nothing about the school uniform; the word was perhaps Flaubert’s favorite, it has huge meaning for him, he once climbed the great pyramid in Egypt and left the business card of a Parisian upholsterer at the very top for his friend, Maxime du Camp, to find—this Maxime also took some of the first pictures of the Sphinx—but because bourgeois has a very strong Marxist sound in English it really cannot be used, because (I believe) Flaubert is trying to establish from the get-go that his nouveau is an idiot, not a communist. It’s not the translator’s fault. The passage could not be translated (without an annoying footnote).

Although I can speak Korean far better than any other language, especially if I am drunk or delirious, reading French or Spanish is still a lot easier because there are so many cognates. In the cases of Chinese and Japanese my status is utterly hopeless on all counts.

I will probably get nowhere with any of these endeavors, especially after I return to work after my unbelievably long vacation in a few weeks, and have less time to pursue these pursuits, but it’s still fun, and I can show off a little here. I should end now by saying that I still feel somewhat delusional and that my body is a bit hot, so if I have written anything that is seriously bizarre, that is my excuse.

Amor Fati (Learning To Love One’s Prison Bars)

Since moving to Korea two and a half, going on three years ago, I’ve treated my experience here as a temporary one, a first step on the way to something better, a necessary bother, and my goal had always been to get the hell out as soon as possible, and then never return, even after I married a Korean woman, and even after I found myself with a good job. I assumed consistently that almost anything else was better than the job security, family happiness, and general growing prosperity and progress I experienced here, and that it would be better to move back to America, or some other country, rather than deal with the garbage in Korea.

Until my wife, A., got pregnant, neither of us cared about money at all, but after this grand event A. began obsessing over the subject, scheming to her wit’s end whenever she had a spare moment, asking ceaselessly how she could get her hands on the kind of cashflow that would allow us a lifestyle of continuous or near-continuous travel. She settled on the traditional Korean answer to the question of how does one provide for oneself without working: property. Her plan was simple, and based on the success of some of her relatives: save up a lot of money, buy some apartments, and live off the rent.

After much argument and discussion over the preceding months, it seems to be the solution we’ve settled on, or really the only solution we can come up with; in spite of the garbage, Gyeongju is not such a bad place, and if A. got back to work as a nurse or an English teacher in a private school we would, perhaps, attain the goal of about $2000 a month in rent in about three years. The only alternative would appear to be saving for an eventual return to America, where we would never be able to escape the middle class, regardless of our talents or work ethic. Here in Korea, however, freedom from disagreeable labor (which should be the goal of every society, and every family, and every person) is readily within our grasp.

So my opinion of this place, and my place in it, has changed. I won’t stop despising the things I should rightfully despise (did I mention the garbage?), but to pretend that the situation is somehow better in America is no longer much of an interest for me, and that will continue to be the case so long as I sense that our prospects are good.

I Only Watch Good Movies

Kingdom of Heaven—Visually a perfect piece of cinema, its impossible hero, played by Mr. Mediocrity Orlando Bloom, wounds the film very deeply, and acts like an extra who accidentally wandered into the movie’s exquisite costumes and sets, all while there are several other actors (Jeremy Irons, Ghassan Massoud, Edward Norton) who are crying out to be the center of what could have been a masterpiece. Also, pretending that violence is bad when you yourself are making an incredibly violent movie is stupid. But I love it anyway.

My Neighbor Totoro—Flawless magic. The best part is when Totoro notices the sound of raindrops striking his umbrella, and then jumps up and down to get more of them to fall from a nearby tree. The attention to detail in the film, such as the way an old oven door slumps on its hinges after it is closed, is remarkable, and the fact that this is a good story without conflict or bad guys or anything in the way of cliches makes the film even more remarkable.

Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates)—Speaking of cliches, a movie that seeks to invent a new cinematic language, eschewing the camera’s movement, and even the third dimension, might have created a whole new set of cliches as well, if anyone had ever tried to make movies like Sergei Parajanov. The story is based on the life of a medieval Armenian poet, and draws its inspiration from medieval sculptures and illuminations, in addition to the metaphors from his poetry. The insane length of each shot, some of them continuing without interruption for several minutes, is almost too much to bear, since most of us have been raised on quick movements, quick cuts, and shots that never last more than three seconds at a time—but this great length is a gift, because it demands the viewer’s attention, forces him or her to examine everything in depth, while the onscreen metaphors likewise require viewers to examine them and wonder, at length, what the hell is going on. The film is challenging and very uncomfortable, but each shot is mesmerizing, beautiful, bizarre, and unlike anything you’ve seen before. If you have the time and the patience, you won’t regret watching it.

Slumdog Millionaire—Not as good on the second viewing, it left me feeling drained, and I was really disappointed by how the female lead is little better than a princess locked in a castle, waiting for her rescue by prince charming. She is not really a character so much as a pretty caricature, as is everyone else in this movie—we see lots of nice postcard shots, but nothing of the interior lives of the people wandering through them.

Ferberization (continued)

The happiest, the most content day of my life in something like sixteen, seventeen months. Not since before my then-girlfriend revealed to me that she was pregnant have I lived through such a day as this, one in which I dreaded nothing about the future, whether near or far. The baby went to sleep in five minutes.

Ferberization

Being Like Seriously Fucking Cute

For the last three nights the baby has been going to sleep at 9PM as a result of trying out the dreaded Ferber Method, which had been recommended to me months before Harry was even born by a friend living in China.

We had tried the method one or two times before without much dedication, and with all of the confidence for success on my side of the equation—Koreans, apparently, do not typically try this approach, and according to A. some of them are still co-sleeping with their kids after five years. But Harry was a little sick last week, barfing up almost whatever we gave him (but acting utterly nonchalant, as though spewing all over yourself and everyone around you was no different than burping), and growing even worse than usual in his sleeping habits.

The boy was quite a dictator, forcing us for months to play with him for hours, late into the night, often to eleven or twelve, even though he was exhausted and in no mood to do anything. He would require us to help him walk about the house to examine random objects, which would bore him after less than a minute. Then, after getting drunk on goat milk and falling asleep, he would scream for us two or three times a night, requiring further filler-uppers from an exhausted A., who would usually be sleeping alongside him.

It was an uncomfortable but not unbearable arrangement until Harry got sick and decided to go back to his old ways, that is, of sleeping for less than two hours at a time, all the time. At that point I decided enough was enough. For all our squeamishness about the boy’s deafening shrieking—I was wearing earplugs for most of the day, every day—we had to try a new approach. And so, after he got better, and after screaming at one another for an hour or so in what was easily our worst fight ever, A. and I ultimately decided to give it a try. Although she didn’t want to torture the wee lad, she admitted that she was tired of hauling him around on her back for an hour or two every night, waiting for him to pass out.

And so. He screamed for forty minutes the first night, and woke up two or three times, screaming for about thirty minutes each time. But we were firm, and eventually he passed out. All of us were exhausted the next day, and absolutely nothing comes close to the despair one feels in allowing one’s child to cry on and on, but on the second night the amount of screaming decreased drastically, never exceeding thirty minutes and usually terminating after just fifteen. We gained more confidence after we realized that the technique was working. And now on this third night he has gone to sleep after a mere fifteen minutes of blind animal rage. I have high hopes for tonight, because his behavior during the day has changed so drastically I considered the possibility that someone had switched him with a similarly beautiful child of mixed descent at daycare—one with far better manners. Pre-Ferber Harry and Post-Ferber Harry are almost unrecognizable in the way they approach the world.

I always complained about him here, and to anyone who would listen, and I’m sure a lot of people thought that I just didn’t have what it took to deal with babies, that I didn’t want to have one, or that my annoyance, my fury, my sadness, was due to anything except the personality of the baby himself. But seriously, guys, he is so much better now. Before he was unable to go for thirty minutes without shrieking violently at you to entertain him. Now he sits very contentedly, or writhes about on the floor, and I even caught him pulling himself up to a standing position with the help of the couch, an action that is somewhat advanced for his age (one week short of eight months). He seems so much happier, smiling and laughing far more often, and his baby babble has been growing slightly more complex. His attention span has increased. He even runs a little bit when I hold his hands to help him walk. He has become ten times easier to be with. He is fun. A pleasure. I do not feel so completely drained and exhausted after I have spent three hours alone with him. Even his screams are not so loud anymore. He barely protested while he was being dressed to go outside this afternoon—and he usually acts as though he is being taken out to be shot.

Mitt Romney is declaring victory in Florida, and I want to declare a far greater victory here—we’ve passed over the hump, it’s smooth sailing from now until I draw my last breath, and the universe ends.

A. and I know when the boy is going to sleep, which is the same thing as saying that we have something resembling our old lives back.