Natalie White, aka PumaShock, on Star King

I got the video link to this yesterday. Someone asked me if I knew about it. Outside of my first year in South Korea, I never got in the habit of watching Korean TV shows. Plus, when this was all getting stirred up I was getting ready to move and when she was on the show I was back in the States.

This is the background story. There is a San Francisco based singer songwriter who goes by the name of PumaShock. Her real name is Natalie White. She's also a black American. She started putting up videos of her singing some of her favorite Korean pop songs: Natalie's YouTube Channel. Koreans took notice. There was a scandal when Taeyeon from a group called Girls' Generation said something like Ms. White was pretty for a black girl. (video link) Oooops! I'm not even going to touch that because after years of living in it I will get angry if I dwell on it. Plus, it's hard to get into someone's head. Maybe it was an innocent faux pas or maybe she is a blockhead. Either way, Ms. White is the focus here.

Anyway, it worked out for Ms. White that she got on Star King and seems to be on a marvelous PR junket in Seoul. She's meeting people in entertainment and, since that's what she wants to do, I say good on her. Here are the videos of her appearance on Star King.

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Crap That I'll Miss: Hearty, Tasty and Inexpensive Food

I'm crazy busy, but the little and not so little things I'll miss and won't miss keep hitting me. When they do, I whip out the digital camera and snap a pic.

I'm working at my last English camp for awhile. Honestly, I've done them consistently for two reasons. If you get the right one, in terms of pay, it's worth the time you put in and I actually have fun changing the type of student that I teach from adults to kids. Kids are hilarious and have tons of fun energy.

But the schedules are almost always intense. That means when I get home, I just want to relax, goof-off on the Internet, and get ready for the next day. I don't want to cook, and, even though I have someone who helps me keep my apartment in order, I don't want to have dishes piling up.

Korean food is awesome. Now Koreans still have a mental block when it comes to the concept of non-Koreans liking, knowing and craving their food. That's one reason why you don't see as many Korean restaurants abroad as you do Chinese, Japanese or other Asian cuisines. That sucks. However, they are easy to find in areas where there is a Korean population nearby. When I'm home or just about anywhere in the world I can find Korean food when I crave it. One time that meant, wooden chopsticks and a bag of kimchi while walking around in Brussels and another time that meant noticing an Asian woman reading a book written in 한글, hangul, on the Metro in Paris and asking her where I needed to go for a good bowl of 김치찌개, kimchee jjiggae.

I'll miss being able to have a hearty, tasty and inexpensive meal for less than $5.00 (okay, with the current exchange rate, more like around $5.00 USD). Tonight I had a bowl of 국밥, literally "soup rice". The cost was 4,500 won. I'm glad my camera caught the steam rising up off of the soup. It's really cold right now and a warm bowl of soup and rice was just awesome. I'll miss that a lot.

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Crap That I Won't Miss: Korean Websites with "English" Pages

Usually, most Korean business websites have their main site in Korean. This is what all businesses do, so no complaints here. If you're doing business in Korea, of course, the language you're going to use is Korean. However, what's funny is usually their English sites are all investor information (and most of the time it's written so poorly and has so little detail that I seriously wonder who invests based on that scant information). On those pages the companies the products and services but very few companies actually bother to put in links for English speaking customers living in Korea. There are some exceptions. Last I checked, LG Telecom had both. An investor page but with a bit of consumer information which helps their English speaking customers here in Korea, including their foreign language help line, which is excellent. I think for most companies they think it's easier to just ignore the small number of English speaking customers they have in the country and only pay attention to people with money to invest. For the English speaking customers the attitude is let them find a Korean to help them out and be done with it.

After a certain amount of time, people learn enough of the language to meander through the Korean version of the site to find what they want. At least, that's been the case for me. However, it's still annoying. This morning I needed to download the HWP viewer for the Korean Word program (yes, it's a word processing program written and sold by Haansoft, a South Korean software company.) I started using a new desktop computer when I got back from vacation in late February. I'd not needed it until today.

I've done this many times before because I've had about three or four computers since I've lived here and I've had computers in my office. Sometimes those computers came preloaded with what I needed, but most of the time they didn't. The viewer is like Adobe Acrobat Reader. It allows you to read documents written with this software and that's key here. Lots of times the Korean writing the document doesn't even stop to think that you've got Microsoft Word and not Korean Word, so yeah...problem. But it's one that's easily solved once you know about this reader. However, the site with software and downloads is all in Korean. They don't even bother to subtitle the download link in English. I muddled through and found it. I also found a good blog link that explains where to find it. So those of you looking for it, here it is.

HWP viewer from Haansoft -- For reading documents in Hangeul

I finally found that hwp viewer again. I'd managed to find it about a year ago, but then the link went dead or just stopped working . . . it would download 3/4ths of the way and then just hang.

Now, here it is:

http://haansoft.com/index.jsp

Unfortunately, for those of you who cannot read Korean (Hangeul) the site has no English. Okay, not precisely true -- in fact they do have English on the website but they don't offer the download for their free viewer -- they only offer investor info. Also, as seems to be the rule in Korea, you cannot link directly to anything in Haansoft's website -- it's all smoke and mirrors using Adobe Flash. It did work for me in the Google Chrome browser however, which was a bit surprising.

Above you can see a screenshot of the website. Hover over the 'Download' button and then click on the 'Viewer' button then you'll see the name of the download with the small image of a floppy disk that you need to click to download -- it's about 50 MB -- worked fine on my Windows Vista.

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Cultural Dimwittedness

This happens with too much frequency in Seoul, but this time it happened in a place of business after I went there to indulge myself.

Today I finally got my new fillings put in today. Ouch!!! As a treat, I figured I'd go to treat myself to a high calorie meal. There is a place called the Smokey Saloon in the Itaewon district of Seoul that has great burgers. It's not even close to a saloon, but just a small and dark restaurant with a few seats and a great selection of gourmet style burgers. I actually don't eat burgers that much, but this place has a great one with avocado or guacamole. I can't recall which, I just recall it was great.

I get there and I notice it has the same facade as a place that just opened down the hill from where I live. Then I realize that new place is a new location of this restaurant. Okay, cool...great burgers are even closer now. I say something to the waiter in English. He looks at me, grumbles, pushes the menu my way and walks away. As he's walking away I can see him talking to the cook who is a Filipina. I ask her point blank "did he just walk away from me?" She explained that he didn't speak English and, I guess, that was supposed to be an excuse for acting like a jerk. I explained that even if he doesn't speak English it was extremely rude to stomp off like that and that I would respond in kind by walking out. This happens with a fair amount of frequency, but usually the person isn't rude. Even when they're not rude I find it presumptuous and irritating, but they're probably right in their assumption most of the time and I have to admit that much.

What's funny is this. I speak enough Korean to place a food order in Korean. I can even order over the phone for Korean delivery. I put that level of language skill at survival level as you've got to figure out what to say when you want to eat. However, this guy, being a dimwit simply assumed I couldn't speak his language at all and chose to be rude. Now I could have made a big deal about it, switched languages, made a scene and called him out on it but, I just didn't care too. I figured walking out and never going back would be the best option. What makes it funny is, like I said, this is in Itaewon. Itaewon is the foreign district of Seoul. Most people can speak at least a little English and, if they don't, they're, at least, nice about it.

So be careful if you go to the Smokey Saloon location in Itaewon early on a Tuesday evening. You might end up getting snubbed because the help simply assumes you don't speak Korean.

Now it's dinnertime. Instead I went to Ho Lee Chow where they're always nice to me and which is my favorite Chinese restaurant in Seoul.

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Something I Like About Korea: Peasant Egalitarianism

I heard that term for the first time in my International Political Economy course last semester. Now that I've graduated and revealed that I went to Ewha Womans University's GSIS program*, I can also reveal that it was taught by MIT educated Professor Byoung-joo Kim.

That was one great thing about Ewha's GSIS program. They were able to pull in professors with not only academic but also real world experience. Now this isn't a post touting the pluses of Ewha's GSIS program, but that was the strongest one for me because, believe me, the department also has its issues.

So let's get to the topic. I chose to use the term "peasant egalitarianism" because it covers the post-Korean War South Korean mentality. The country was decimated. It was also split and families are to this day still separated. The rich were poor and the poor were also poor. In a very fundamental way, South Korea had a rebuild from nothing. What weaved its way into that was egalitarianism.

This definition on Wiki sums it up more succiently than I can manage:

Egalitarianism (derived from the French word égal, meaning equal or level) is a political doctrine that holds that all people should be treated as equals from birth. Generally it applies to being held equal under the law, the church, and society at large. In actual practice, one may be considered an egalitarian in most areas listed above, even if not subscribing to equality in every possible area of individual difference.

Layer egalitarianism on a nation destroyed by war where everyone is poor and you've got your peasants.

On top of that South Korea, as we all know, has had the aid and support of the United States which is still here. The US shared technology, helped rebuild the infrastructure, opened its borders and schools to South Koreans and commited its military to the defense of the South Korea. Of course, the UN was here as well as other nations (so no need to comment to point that out...thanks.) I mention this aid because this is a crucial point because this is where South Korea was smart. You can easily see a society where the leaders would divert all that aid to benefit themselves. South Korea has had it's scandals but has been pretty lucky overall it seems in that respect. That money that would have otherwise been committed to its defense was spent on creating a vibrant economy. One thing that is essential to that is education and one thing that shocked and impressed me when I arrived here was the huge number of colleges and universities in small or remote areas. Koreans have an advantage when it comes to their language: hangul

Koreans call their alphabet Hangul. Like English, the letters of the Hangul alphabet represent individual sounds or phonemes. Hangul was invented by King Sejong of the Choson Dynasty, and introduced to the public in 1443 in Hun-Min-Jeong-Eum. King Sejong believed that Koreans needed an easy-to-learn system for writing their own language. Before King Sejong deigned the Hangul, Koreans had either written in the Chinese language or had written Korean using Chinese characters to represent the Korean sounds in a complex system, Idu. The alphabet originally contained 28 letters composed of 11 vowels and 17 consonants.

This means that anyone can read Korean. People don't believe me when I tell them it's easy to learn because they imagine it's like Chinese where the letter is based on a character. You know "this is a man sitting under a tree" and that means ..." Well, hangul isn't like that. It's an alphabet. It's just put together from different angles.

What that means is there is almost no illiteracy here. Mix into that a high respect for education, a society that was smart and actually channelled its resources into education and you get what I saw this morning.
I was en route to work on the subway and I got the coveted end of the row seat. In my car was a newspaper delevery man who had a hand trolley stacked full of papers to drop off to the kiosks you see on the streets here in Seoul. Clearly, taking advantage of his job perk: free papers. That man was standing there reading a paper.

A few seats away was a man dressed as if he was on his way to work was sitting down also reading a morning paper. Now I didn't stop and ask them about themselves. The man with the trolley could very well be one of the many highly trained workers that were displaced during the Asian Financial Crisis. I've met a few who are now taxi drivers or shop owners. That guy reading the paper could have been en route to yet another job interview. However, assuming I'm right about these two men. That's cool.

Of course, the big benefit to ethnically homogenious cultures is no ethnic problems. The problems that Koreans have are with other groups. Yes, there are problems within Korean society but they have an impressive sense of unity. That, along with Confucianism makes it easier for them to take one for the team. The massive economic development they've seen is definitely attributable in many ways to the group unity they have.

Now this struck me as great because there are only a few countries where I'd say education is truly accessible to all. This hits me so because my father was illiterate. The US at the time of his youth was still very much incredibly racist and economically divided not only in its beliefs but in its system and laws. In rural Georgia with a family with 12 other siblings he had to work. That's where economics factors in. I'd like to think that in the modern US a family that large would HAVE to send their children to school or home school them to the state's satisfaction. Going to school wasn't an option for my father.

I'd say race factors into it because it becomes an issue when the children not receiving an education are white but not so much when the children are black. Hence you have a poor family doing the best they can and using all they have at their disposal, including their children, to make ends meet. You can argue that the US still has tons of racial and economic issues. I'd agree, but I'm one generation from people who had it much worse than I'll ever have. To not acknowledge that would be disrespectful to them and to the people who worked so hard to make things better for me.

It also means that in a foreign culture I can see the similarities and differences from another point of view. I do think it's because I'm a minority in my home country as well as here. So certain things are the same and I know those things aren't the same for a good number of my co-workers and acquaintances here. In many ways, this is the first time ever they've dealt with being different or have faced overwhelmingly negative versus positive stereotypes. Now that's not the case for all, but I hope you get my point---it's general, there are always exceptions.

But to bring that generality home here is a story. This weekend I had a discussion with some other foreigners here over various cuts of meat. I said that the cuts of meats most definitely correlate to the struggle a group has had. Black and Koreans have had it hard. Therefore, in both soul food and Korean kitchens you've got animal intestines on the menu: chitterlings int the soul food restarants and 곱창, gobchang, in Korean ones. Now pointing out economic differences and how that factors into other aspects of life makes some people uncomfortable. It didn't surprise me when the white American woman at the table HAD to shot that down because, well, the French also eat intestines. I didn't have the energy to explain that bouchons is also working class food. Also, hello, the French Revolution was very much a class struggle! Hence the French and their motto "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité". The French also have their fair share of economic and class differences today. However, it was something not worth bringing up when you're faced with a white American not willing to acknowledge certain privileges. A friendly dinner is really not the time for a history lesson even when you know the person is wrong.

So, with that said, when I see these positive societal differences. I'm happy to see a nation where the blue collar workers read the paper just as the white collar workers do. Granted, South Korea has a way to go on many issues from women's rights to race and even religion, but when it comes to access to basic education it's pretty fair. For me, that's significant because if my dad knew what was in the paper it was because I or my mom read it to him.

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*Why? Let's just say I didn't blend in when running around campus. Now that I'm no longer running around campus if you're going to stalk me, well, you have to find me. With, at least, 7 or 8 international studies programs taught in English in or near Seoul someone was going to have to their work cut out for them.

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U.S. High-Schoolers Get First Anglo Teacher of Korean

This is a great story. L.A. has its first Anglo-American teaching Korean in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Not much else to add as the article covers the story well.

U.S. High-Schoolers Get First Anglo Teacher of Korean

David Hanes has become the first Anglo-American to teach Korean to Korean-American students at high school. He is to start teaching at Los Angeles High School.

Hanes passed the Korean teacher examination administered by the California state government last year. He arrived in Korea last week to attend a training Course for Korean language teachers in the U.S. co-hosted by the Foundation for Korean Language and Culture in the U.S.A, the International Korean Language Foundation and the Ewha Humanities Center at Ewha Womans University.

“I’m going to teach a class for second- to fourth-generation Koreans who can speak little Korean and hope to teach advanced Korean in the future,” Hanes told the Chosun Ilbo. “I’m a bit worried that Korean-American students will form a low opinion of me if my Korean’s not good.”

Hanes, who became interested in Korea when he lived in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, started learning the language at the Korean Cultural Center six years ago. Now he has a teacher’s certificate himself.

Ailee Moon, the president of the Foundation for Korean Language and Culture in Los Angeles, says, “The Korean teacher examination is so difficult that even Korean-Americans often fail. It’s really great that Hanes as a foreigner passed the examination.”

Hanes likes foreign languages. He majored in Russian at UC Santa Cruz and went on to get a Spanish teacher’s certificate. Ten years ago, he started learning Chinese, and now he also has a Chinese teacher’s certificate.

He is learning about contemporary Korean society by reading books and watching Korean soaps since teachers have to cover politics, economics, society and culture in Korean class at U.S. schools. “Lately I’ve been reading the Korean comic book ‘Kid Gang.’ I want to set an example for other foreign teachers as the first non-Korean teacher, and I hope many others will follow suit.”

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Kimchiman - Arirang Canada Guy

This is too funny...

A man who goes by the name of Kimchiman has uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube where he speaks and sings Arirang.

Now Koreans seem to think that foreigners just can't comprehend their culture, so when you speak two words of Korean you get "oh, you speak Korean very well." To which I say I don't. Then you go back and forth with the person because they say you do.

Anyway, here is some info lifted from Wikipedia on Arirang just in case you don't know what it is.

First, "Arirang is arguably the most popular and best-known Korean folk song, both inside and outside Korea."

And here are the lyrics:

Hangul (Korean)

아리랑, 아리랑, 아라리요...
아리랑 고개로 넘어간다.
나를 버리고 가시는 님은
십리도 못가서 발병난다.

Romanization

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo...
Arirang gogaero neomeoganda.
Nareul beorigo gasineun nimeun
Simnido motgaseo balbyeongnanda.

English

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo...
I am crossing over Arirang Pass.
The man/woman who abandoned me [here]
Will not walk even ten li before his/her feet hurt.

In the first one he just speaks Arirang:


In the second one, he speaks a bit and then sings a really bad version of it with his wife (not sure but probably wife since she addressed him as "yobo"/"여보" - the Korean equivalent of "honey" or "darling" which is used between marrieds):


Short translation by me -

Kimchiman: Hello. My name is Kimchiman. I am Canadian. I speak a little Korean. Therefore, I want to sing a Korean song. I will sing the song "Arirang"*

Kimchiman and woman sing Arirang (see above)

Kimchiman: Thank you!
Woman to Kimchiman: Thank you!
Kimchiman: You're welcome
Woman to Kimchiman: Honey!
They kiss...

*The last two lines of the part before the song I needed someone to verify if I was right or not (I was close, but not completely right). I'm so lame. Thanks Michael.

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Wanna Freak Out the Wagukin (외국인)?

Me a long, long time ago.

I was at the store today and told the lady that I had a craving for the high-fat, processed, canned food product that I was buying. Anyway, she said "아기?" or "baby?"

I thought that was code and she was asking me if I was pregnant.

Now I'm a huge commitmentphobe. That's not because of divorce or something tramatic, actually because of a fear of a divorce-induced weltschmerz because my parents had the PERFECT marriage 'till death did they part. (Yes, I know I'm deluding myself here and it certainly wasn't perfect, but Ozzie and Harriet-esqe it was and a phobia is a phobia.)

Anyway, I nearly had a heart attack, but explained that no, I wasn't pregnant. That was accompanied by flashes of matrimony, labor, stretch marks, post-partum depression, spit-up, and what will be a much needed breast lift.

She explained that her grandson likes the product that I was buying, so that's what she was trying to tell me. The cold sweat and steep rise in my blood pressure was all for naught.

It's just another silly moment while living abroad.

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Pack of Wolves Update: My Pen is Like New!

For those of you who tuned in a couple of weeks ago, you know I got quite upset when some ill-mannered cow busted my fountain pen.

I bought a new one and sent the old one in for a repair.

I got it back a few days ago and then took myself on a department store run in Shinsaegae Department Store. I know, bad, but I'd just been traumatized by the dumbest phone call in history. Shopping IS therapy.

Anyway, here it is, and it's just like new! It cost me a mere 27,000 won (around $25 USD) to get the nib replaced. I love my Waterman fountain pens.

It's a quirk. Deal with it.

The thing that was cool was I learned a new term this week.

I was talking to a Korean friend of mine and he asked me what the pen I was using is called in English. I told him that we call them fountain pens. This took a bit of clarification because he knows I use cartridges, so that whole bottle of ink and suction thing is lost. Anyway, once that was explained he told me that in Korean fountain pens are called 만년필, man nyon pen. "Man", 만, in Korean (from Chinese, btw) is 10,000 and, 년, "nyon" means year.

So it's literally "10,000 year pen." That makes sense because it means long living or long-lasting pen because you don't toss them when they're out of ink; you just add more ink.

Nice, eh?

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