Dissertation Excerpt: Age and Performance

Watching performances in Korea over many years, and being familiar with the CPPL [Cultural Property Protection Law] system I have long accepted that the performers will frequently be quite elderly. When I returned to Korea for my year of dissertation field research I was lucky to be supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship which offers a spousal stipend. My husband, a Tibetan performing artist, was therefore frequently dragged along to performances as my escort and as a cameraman. Because my research focuses on transmission of performing arts knowledge by individuals who are within the CPPL system, I rarely go to see shows by energetic twenty-somethings. In large group performances, such as mask dance dramas and pungmul, the performers have a large age range, but I can only think of three shows in the past year that did not include performers past forty and all three were outside the CPPL system but headlined by young performers from inside the system. In all these shows Karjam's largest and enduring criticism has been related to the age of the performers: how younger (and he sometimes also mentioned more beautiful/handsome) performers would have presented a much "better" performance.

            It is true that in high level dance companies around the world the leading performers are often fairly young: in the case of ballet it is infamous how early the careers of the dancers peak. When I picture older performers in the West, my mental rolodex supplies orchestra conductors, the occasional classical music soloist and opera singers; yet it is safe to say that all of these individuals intend to retire leaving their reputation for strong performances intact. East Asia with a foundational respect for age and experience, not to mention the teachings of Confucius, places more elderly people in the limelight in all sectors of society. In Korea the oldest and most experienced performer, often a National Human Treasure, will frequently be the star – drawing the audience, providing the focus for media coverage and receiving adoring standing ovations.

            I have seen performances by dancers so infirm I was afraid that when the choreography required them to kneel down they would not be able to rise again at the proscribed place in the music. Performances by dancers who pushed themselves off the stage floor using the hand drums and drum sticks they had knelt down to retrieve. Performances by dancers who have lost their balance and so quiver and sway as they stand on one foot. Performances by dancers whose hands were visibly shaking. Performances by dancers who walk out with a cane and pick it back up as soon as they've taken their bow for the walk off the stage. Performances by dancers who are led onto stage and helped off again at the end. Performances by dancers who had obviously abridged a dance in order to last through to the end of the performance. I even saw a performance by a dancer so beset by osteoporosis that she was bent over with a huge hump on her back. Sometimes an entire evening with seven to nine dances each between ten and fifteen minutes in length will be performed by dancers with an average age in the high seventies. I love these performances. In most of these cases I felt the dances were richer, deeper and more meaningful; I have been moved to tears. Yet there is no denying that a forty or fifty year old could have executed salpuri, seungmu or taepyeongmu after twenty-five or thirty years of training with the same technical proficiency and hopefully just as much emotional complexity as their elderly teacher: but with perfect balance and a straight back.

            What about Korea encourages the performance of elderly dancers?  I see three interlocking reasons for staging the elderly. First, there is the desire of the audience for the authentic, for the person trained in the village who is the embodied connection with a near-mythical past that has been lost in the urbanized modern age. Watching the performer who physically holds the 'old' knowledge and 'old' ways may be more rewarding (emotionally) than watching the young and beautiful dancer who after even two or three years of practice should  theoretically be able to perform the dance well. Second, there may be something about the aesthetic of specific Korean dances which cannot be successfully communicated by a lithe young dancer. Dances such as salpuri, the solo of Mundung in Goseong Ogwangdae or almost any of the old monk characters in the various mask dance dramas require a certain degree of heaviness or sorrow to be infused with the motions (c.f. Loken-Kim and Crump 1993, Loken-Kim 1983, Jeong BH 1997). This can be particularly hard for young dancers, although it is not impossible. If an audience expects flexibility, swiftness, precision and grace these older dancers may not perform as "beautifully" as younger dancers, but for an audience who expects the appropriate Korean aesthetic the performance of a weathered grandmother may be superior to that of a twenty-two year-old dance-college graduate with a Miss Korea face. Third the CPPL system itself may play a role here. By labeling a performer a National Human Treasure their performance has been given an added value, they are more of a "star," or a "brand" than the performers who have not yet attained this rank. Even though a National Human Treasure may be past their peak, even though their performance may be less captivating than it was five, ten or twenty years ago, the legitimizing effect of the law is strong. In addition within their group they are accorded the respect due their ability, knowledge, age and rank. This means that often they have right of first refusal on an opportunity to dance. Since the CPPL requires the National Human Treasure to perform, a performance opportunity may seem more like an obligation. If the performer too often declines performance opportunities they should retire to the sidelines and become an Honorary National Human Treasure (the non-stipended designation for former National Human Treasures who are too infirm to continue their activities). In some cases this may be a financially difficult decision to make, in other cases stubborn pride or a desire for the limelight may interfere. In practice Honorary National Human Treasures are almost always no longer physically able to leave their homes or a health-care facility. Talking with Imshil Pilbong Nongak isuja Yi Jonghui he agreed with my arguments but also said "I think they continue to perform because they want to. They still have the desire for the stage."[1] In a society and in front of an audience that accepts the performances of the elderly, there is nothing stopping them.[2]

            Obviously I have just laid out the active involvement in performance of elderly dancers, but what about the musicians? Do they push it so far? While watching a performance with Yu Sejeong, a daegeum player currently working on a MA in traditional music theory at the Korean National University of the Arts, I leaned over and asked her if musicians who now shake and quiver continue to perform.[3] Sejeong answered "When someone watches an old dancer it's obvious the dancer is old, and people are impressed that they can dance despite the physical difficulty. For the old musicians it isn't so obvious that they're old, it just starts to sound bad. The musicians retire when they feel they cannot perform at a high level anymore."  Racking my mental images of Korean performances I have seen, I only uncovered one case of a musician who was now shaking but as of fall 2010 still performing. Hwang Yongju, the National Human Treasure from Seonsori Santaryeong, dances and sings while beating the janggu. He is still leading his group despite his thinning voice and shaking hands, but he is also visibly old, not like the seated soloist or musician in the imagined ensemble in Sejeong's example. In some ways Hwang is the figurehead and mascot for the group while younger members take over a more substantial degree of the drumming and singing in each of the Seonsori Santaryeong performances I have seen in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Heo Juri, a gayageum player, had a similar opinion, pointing out that a few elderly performers continue into their seventies, but that it's unusual and only in the instruments that do not require an intense level of physical exertion.[4]

---

[1] Personal conversation, April 5^th, 2011 at the Imshil Pilbong Nongak Seoul Training Center.

[2] Korea is not the only location in which the performances of elderly artists are highly valued. The day I finished writing this article the International Herald Tribune (the international edition of the New York Times) ran an article about Tsuyako Ito, an 84-year-old Japanese geisha, the last one in the tsunami stricken town of Kamaishi who was preparing for a performance at the time that the tsunami struck, but had to be carried to higher ground by an admirer.

[3] Personal conversation, April 4^th, 2011 at KOUS.

[4] Personal conversation, April 5^th, 2011 at the Imshil Pilbong Nongak Seoul Training Center.

Thoughts on Bad Korean Writing

My Korean is not perfect. I know that. I sometimes say things that come out garbled because of poor word choice or grammar issues. Not ordinary everyday things, of course, but sometimes it happens when I try to express complex ideas. Or it happens just because I have bad habits with my Korean that my friends have been too gentle to point out. When I write in Korean I tend to keep my sentences fairly short, mostly because I'm confident in my ability to craft simple sentences and much less confident that I can make a long sentence error free. I can, however, read a newspaper without difficulty (although if it's on a topic I've never been interested in I might have to look up a couple key words in the dictionary). I can read academic articles and books, although I don't enjoy it, and search out the most important information for closer reading. I think this qualifies me to comment on the quality of Korean academic writing, although maybe you won't agree that I'm qualified. In Korea sometimes people are antagonistic to a non-Korean criticizing anything Korean—and I can understand that.

Today I want to vent a bit about bad Korean writing, specifically bad academic Korean writing. I have been forced to think a lot about this topic over the past few weeks because UCLA's Center for Korean Studies asked me to translate an article for publication in a journal. The article they asked me to translate was, they said, very close to my own research. I read the title and I was sold—it was about cultural policy and mask dance dramas! I was quite busy at the time that I agreed to do the translation, so I didn't start right away. I printed the article and I started reading it, but mostly for the big ideas. It was slow going, and I put it away and didn't take it back out until I'd made it through a couple of deadlines. It was when I tried to translate it into (academic) English that I began to appreciate just how bad this article was. My main arguments with his writing are:

1) He does not introduce concepts or organizations. For example, if you're going to talk about intangible cultural heritage policy in Korea, you should introduce the governmental bodies that oversee it (such as the Cultural Heritage Administration) and the law that governs it (the Cultural Property Protection Law). You can't just say "the governmental body that manages intangible heritage" and "intangible heritage policy" throughout your article. It just doesn't make sense. He will use a very technical term and not explain what it means. Including some theoretical terms he's apparently made up. In English I have to explain, for example, which established definition of transculturation I am referring to by clarifying that it is transculturation as used in Wallis and Malm (1993). Heck, I have to have a working definition of 'traditional' and 'culture' and a lot of other words you use all the time that you might not think of a definition for if you haven't had professors jump on you for using them without knowing just what you mean.

2) He does not use proper structure, simply speaking he does not: introduce an idea, support the idea with facts and reason and arguments, sum up. He doesn't use this on a paragraph by paragraph basis, and he doesn't do it for each section of the paper, either.

3) He doesn't believe in transition from one paragraph to another. You could almost reorder entire sections of his paper, just scramble the paragraphs. Ideas are introduced and one paragraph does not flow into the next, so it doesn't matter which order they come in.

4) He frequently neglects to clarify the subject of the sentence. In Korean writing the subject is not always necessary. If I asked you if you'd eaten, I'd just say "식사했어요?" (meal+did?), I wouldn't need to say "you" or anything else that might indicate who I was talking to (it's obvious if I'm speaking to you, isn't it?). However, in academic writing omission of the subject quickly becomes confusing.

5) Most of his paragraphs are three or four sentences long. Many sentences contain in excess of two lines (in a journal) of text, sometimes more than three, and Korean is denser than English. In others words he would take something the length of number (4) above and write one sentence. All with academic vocabulary.

Because I know someone will read this who doesn't believe me, here's a sample of his writing. Go ahead, I dare you to translate it into English in less than 15 minutes. Heck, take more than 15 minutes for these three sentences. Do you feel confident in your translation? If you do, post it in the comment section, I'd like to see how it matches up with what I'm going to submit. Yes, I know the last sentence isn't too bad.

Was I able to translate this by myself? No. At first, even though the limit of my previous translation work was making subtitles for Korean TV shows, I thought I'd be able to do it. After all, I felt like I understood his major points as I was reading. And it's about (more or less) the same topic I spend all day everyday thinking about. Mostly my friend Jisoo helped me. We sat together with multiple cups of coffee and talked through each sentence. Some sentences required 10 minutes before we had a decent translation! And frequently we just had to spend a few minutes blowing off steam about how bad his writing is. My friends Kyungjin and Hoijung also helped a bit, they both were shocked at how bad the writing was (considering that it had been chosen for publication).

The article I'm translating was already published in a journal. So how could it be so bad that Jisoo (post-MA, about to enter a US Ph.D. program), Kyungjin (post-MA, fluent in a gazillion languages and more than halfway through a JD) and Hoijung (post-MA, about to take her comp exams for her Ph.D. and a professional teacher of Korean) would all confirm that it was horribly written?

Possible Reasons Why Korean Is Written Poorly:

1) Languages need a long time to develop and get firm rules for writing: Korean was not the written language in Korea until the end of the 19th century. Even though the alphabet was invented in 1443 (promulgated in 1446), it was used mainly for communicating with/by the lower elements in society—it was used by women and merchants. –Educated—people (men) still used Chinese characters (although they were writing Korean) which required too much time to learn for any but the upper classes to learn well (everyone else was too busy working). There were publication projects usually sponsored by the government to translate important works into the Korean Alphabet (한글 Han'geul) but very little was produced in the alphabet. So many things were not standardized (for example where to put a space (like is it correct to write 할수있어요 or 할 수 있어요? Do you write 경진의 or 경진 의? Do you write 우리는냉이된장국먹었다 or 우리는 냉이 된장국 먹었다) until pretty recently.

2) Then Korea was taken over by the Japanese and the elite became educated in Japanese writing, not Korean writing (the best universities were in Tokyo, of course). Near the end of the occupation the use of Korean was even prohibited. So, in other words, academic works were rarely produced in the Korean alphabet until after liberation in 1945. How we write English was hardly developed over night. The rules of composition that clarify meaning were obviously different a few hundred years ago, and I'm just going to remind you—Shakespeare had darned inconsistent spelling.

3) I don’t know about during the past decades but since I've been in Korea it has been unusual for Korean universities to teach composition or academic writing. The assumption is that the students already know Korean. They're still required to take English in university even if they're in a two-year program to become a car mechanic, but they aren't required to work on their Korean writing skills. In fact, most Korean universities rely on tests and grade students primarily based on those. Even if they do have papers, they're more likely to be 'reports' than an exercise in academic writing. And perhaps the professors would rather just tick off presence and the quality of the major arguments than actually work with the students on how to improve how they presented their ideas. So when could the students ever actually be instructed in how to write? It's not in high school, either, where Korean language classes certainly don't require the teacher to correct the writing of his/her classes. (In the past Korean high school classes had 60 students in a class, by the time I came to Korea the lowering birth rate meant low 50s in a class, now it's often more like the mid 30s, however, if you assign writing to five classes of 30 students, you're still reading and correcting 150 papers, and that's a lot to ask).

4) I think one reason why they wouldn't have a concerted effort to teach Korean writing is because if they taught it then the other professors in the university might feel threatened that the students would now feel they were able to criticize the writing, if not the ideas, in their professors' published works.

5) In addition the legacy of an elite education based on Chinese philosophy is that obtuse writing is more academic. If your writing is impossible to understand it must be because you're smarter than the reader. Not because you don't know how to present your idea. I definitely see this in the preference for 75 cent vocabulary words. It would be easier to just use the super obscure vocab when you had a very specific point to make and 'big' didn't convey the size as accurately as 'humongous,' and use the lower score words the rest of the time. But it wouldn't make you look as smart as if every sentence was packed with those big, long, obscure words. Right?

6) Reputable US Journals require blind review, this means a graduate student can get published and a professor can be denied publication based on how well the ideas are presented. Of course in smaller fields it can be hard to get a truly blind review. I sent in an article on Korean performance to a journal recently. If they sent it for review to someone who works specifically on Korean performance, but is already in a tenured position, there are only about two dozen people in the English-speaking world they could have sent it to. And I'm probably at least in email contact with half of them, if not FB friends. Korean language academia is an even smaller pool than English language academia. A truly blind review is almost impossible here, and most Korean journals don't even bother. With Korea's Confucian values pressing on journal editors, age and length of service to Korean academia will be more likely to guarantee publication than anything else, regardless of how good/bad the writing is.

This only leaves me with one question: why was this article chosen for translation into English? Does someone, somewhere, truly think the ideas are that important? I'll admit he's got some good ideas (along with some not so good ones) but if presentation wasn't important, Korea wouldn't be in the middle of a plastic surgery epidemic.

Feel free to comment if you think I missed a major reason of if you think I'm wrong.

Coffee in Korea

February 19th, 2011
I worked on the computer all day. More or less bored out of my gourd but trying to stay on task.

February 20th, 2011
Spent most of the day on the computer.

At 3:30 I went to meet the friend who is transcribing the first part of my interviews, 소영 Soyeong, at a Starbucks in 강남 Gangnam. Maybe I suddenly feel loquacious but, let me explain that the saturation of Starbucks in Korea is insane. At one time Starbucks was about the only good coffee to get in Korea. In fact, when Starbucks opened in Korea in 2000 it was a shocker and an industry changer for the country.
Young Koreans don't know this, but at one time in Korea if you went to a coffee shop (and they were popular even back then), you really didn't go for the coffee. You either went to the type of coffee shop (especially in rural areas) that sort of doubles as a way to hook-up with a prostitute (or at least flirt with a pretty girl you could hook up with if you had the cash) or you went to a place that was all about renting a fancy looking (but ultimately not comfortable) seat in a "posh" and "western" atmosphere (think mis-matched grandmother stuffed furniture, doilies and really awful décor like plastic flowers). The coffee, you ask? It was beyond horrible. It was either that crystal stuff that comes in the jar and if it gets humid it all becomes one huge lump, or it was so instant it was already mixed in with the sugar and the creamer. Seriously. No one ordered anything but "black," "black with sugar," or "milk coffee" (which definitely had sugar). And if you didn't specify, you got milk coffee. In a regular sized cup but a serving the size you get from coffee vending machines in Korea (less than half a cup). In fact, the coffee didn't even taste as good a vending machine coffee (which isn't bad, surprisingly though it took me about five years to ever try it).

I remember in the late 90s a few real coffee shops opening up, but they were mostly abandoned and only did well in areas around a lot of dating couples (if they also served regular Korean style drinks). It wasn't until Starbucks came along that people began talking about bean origin, roast, espresso, and ordering fancy drinks with long names.

Although Starbucks might seem expensive to the foreigners newly arrived in Korea (What?!! Almost 5 bucks for a tall latte?!!) at the time it was shocking to Koreans that the same 5 bucks they'd dropped for less than half of a Starbucks 'short' made from instant coffee in a café that was realistically only open to your 30-60 minute conversation during a date was now enough to get a 'tall' made by one of the most famous coffee companies in the world in a café that welcomed you to stay all day (Starbucks even opened up near universities and installed long tables for studying with extension cables available for laptop). I have a friend I'm out of touch with these days who was doing her doctoral research on Starbucks in Korea, I remember her talking about how it recreated a Western space for those nostalgic for their days overseas. The décor, the chairs, the smell—it's all just like Starbucks in America. (Although I suspect Starbucks Korea has many more green tea drinks. Oh, and the baked goods are hoity-toity in Korea. Scones and muffins, sure, but tarts and tiramisu, too. There are no donuts or super frosted white cake- bananas, baked rice chips and 7 dollar organic fair trade chocolate bars are next to the cash register.)

So in Korea Starbucks was actually a –good- deal, especially considering the amount of coffee you got for your money and the long hours (they opened, shock, in the morning so you could get coffee on your way to work!) and openness to singletons and studiers was great, too. In fact, I felt proud to mention my long association with Starbucks (which really had mostly meant walking by Starbucks as a youngster in Seattle because I'd never had the disposable income for a coffee habit).

After Starbucks opened in Seoul friends and I would actually make a point that each time we went to Seoul (I was living in Daegu at the time) we would make a pilgrimage to Starbucks before we came home. Then when Starbucks opened in Daegu, well, I was ecstatic. Seriously you couldn't get good coffee before that. There were only a few in Daegu and shortly all the staff members learned that I was a regular and treated me very nicely. Swinging by Starbucks on my way from one end of the long rectangular city to the other seemed perfectly logical to me. So did have a crush on a barista (nothing ever came of it).

Things changed, particularly in the mid 2000s Starbucks Korea began to grow at a ridiculous rate, for awhile I was able to keep track of the location of every Starbucks in any area of Seoul I ever frequented, before long they became so thick on the ground it wasn't worth bothering. And other coffee shops started opening. The chain Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Seattle's Best Coffee (they didn't last) and then the Korean chains. By the time the TV drama "1st Shop of Coffee Prince" aired, understanding coffee was becoming something a cultured person should know about, just like wine. Baristas had to have training. By that I don't mean a couple weeks on the job, I mean baristas might need to go to foreign countries for months of training if they were to be a real barista. At the very least they needed to attend an academy inside Korea. Starbucks became just another shop, not unlike Angel-in-us, Holly's Coffee and Café Bene. The independent shops sprouted up and espresso took a back seat to "hand drip."


All of which does not change the fact that I had brewed coffee at home, then had an Americano at Starbucks with Soyeong (and while waiting for her and using the computer since she was late), then before I came home again (and while doing another 1.5 hours on the computer) I stopped at my local specialty shop- Chans Bros- for a nice hand drip.

Between meeting Soyeong and Chans Bros I engaged in retail therapy, running into 정현 Jeonghyeon from 봉산탈춤 Bongsan Talchum at Uniqlo where I managed to replenish my spring wardrobe and snatch some bargain bin deals and ate dinner. I invited a random stranger in the restaurant to sit with me (as we'd ordered at the same time), which was extremely un-Korean of me, and I grilled him on his knowledge of traditional culture (zip) and asked him what sort of Korean he was if he didn't know his own roots (I'm so mean—but I did say it with a grin).

Blog of a guy who REALLY knows coffee who used to live in Korea, he reviews a LOT of Korean coffee shops. Freshground.

Foreigner Only Taxis

Why do “Foreigner Only” taxis make me angry? [For the Korean translation by my friend, please follow this link.]

Okay, maybe angry is not the correct word choice here, but honestly every time I see one of the new taxi cabs running around Seoul that say boldly on their doors “Foreigners Only” with the word “English” prominently displayed I grit my teeth. Seriously, we already had the system by which the taxi driver could use his cell phone (yes, all taxi drivers have cell phones) to call for free translation in several different languages, day or night. So why do we need to now assert that certain taxis are off limits to regular Korean passengers?

What country are we in, anyway?

Right, the Republic of Korea. This place where people speak Korean. Which is not (by numbers of native speakers) a minor language. Not that that makes a difference, I’m just saying it’s not like learning the language recently discovered in India that all of about 800 people speak. It’s Korean. (Just in case you were curious, according to a widely disputed Wikipedia list of languages by number of native speakers worldwide, Korean is # 18). So, Korean. One of the most spoken languages in the world, in a vibrant country that by almost all measures is a first-world developed nation (despite the number of people who still seem to be hung up on calling it “developing”), yet because a few Western people come here on tours (a very very few) and a few Westerners live here in business, English teaching or military positions for the most part, Koreans suddenly think they need to bend over backwards to accommodate the English speakers (despite more Chinese and Japanese tourists and business people than all Westerners, English speaking or not, plus the increasingly large number of long-term residents from elsewhere in Asia including Vietnamese modern-day picture-brides).

Korea is really excited about becoming a “multicultural society” (it’s been a big buzz word/phrase the past couple years) yet they never seem to consider that many of their efforts towards multi-culturalism are efforts that defeat multi-culturalism. I have never seen in America anything like a “Foreigners Only” sign on a taxi. You can have a French language kindergarten, or Chinese immersion program in grade school (my friend has her daughter in one of these, they try to teach several subjects in Chinese) but you can’t deny children from any background enroll in them (my friend’s daughter is blue-eyed and blond-haired). The American government and employers don’t try to coerce their foreign employees into using those special set-ups (though of course companies probably tell their employees about all local schooling options). Yet in Korea they’re now trying to set up special schools to take half-Korean kids (the sons and daughters of the rural men who tend to marry women from less economically powerful parts of Asia when the Korean women all say “heck no” to living on a farm with rice and chili peppers and aging in-laws) and special pre-school and kindergarten classes for the children of the foreign professors at Seoul National University. Uh, hello. Do you really think you’ll defeat the prejudices and preconceptions of the “ethnically homogenous” Korean people by keeping Korean kids separated from the foreign and half-Korean kids? Multi-cultural means you allow people to interact and hopefully to learn that they're not so different from each other after all, not that you set them apart.

A million years ago I worked at a pre-school and kindergarten in Seattle that took half its kids from the at-risk and differently abled population (it was called Northwest Center for the Retarded, now it has dropped the end of the name), we had kids who lived in cars with their parents and kids with autism, cerebral palsy, etc. Each classroom had at least one aide who was high-functioning but disabled. I worked with the coolest guy, Randy. He was autistic and really into ferries, and since my hometown is an island… well, I was in with him from day one as we chatted about the car capacity, current run (ex. Vashon to Seattle or San Juans to Anacortes) and the year of commission and shipyard in which various ferries were built. But the point was that half the kids were totally “normal” and the center even had a waiting list and it had to use a lottery system to let kids in! And all those kids learned that people come in different stripes and they learned how to help and be compassionate and interact normally with each other. It was really inspiring. Dietary restrictions aside, they all shared the same snacks and nap times and games and went out on the playground at the same time.

If Korea really wanted to become a multicultural society, they’d learn to how to interact with different people without making a big production out of it (including their own disabled people most of whom are invisible as they’re too shameful to the families to go out, or kept in group homes because no one in their family wants to take care of them). They wouldn’t try to compartmentalize anyone who was sort of different into separate taxis or residences or schools.

Yesterday I was walking through downtown Daegu and I saw four middle-school girls in their awkward school uniforms. They were laughing and joking around excitedly in outdoor voices, one of them was a towering blond girl. They were all speaking Korean. Korea, that’s the future you should want. Even back in the day (50+ years ago) foreigners who were in Korea would enroll their kids in Korean schools. It's up to the parents to decide if they want to spend mass-bucks on the private schools the government seems so in favor of. The foreign schools in Korea are an option that seems most attractive to new arrivals (with kids a little too old to learn Korean by immersion) and rich Koreans (determined their children will have a leg up if they learn in a western atmosphere), but these schools do very little to promote multiculturalism.

And if you want to achieve it, stop bending over backwards to “help” foreigners feel comfortable in your country. Realize that most of the foreigners and somewhat foreign (like the half Koreans) in this country just want to go through their day with the least acknowledgement of their foreign-ness possible. Even if they can’t speak Korean well, they just want to go where they are going and do what they need to do without anyone acting uncomfortable to see a foreigner in front of them, without any children pointing or screaming “hi, hi, hi” until they get a response and they prefer the store clerk to use normal Korean manners instead of silently shoving a calculator with the price in their face. And try (I know it’s hard) to understand that you may see someone who looks foreign but doesn’t feel that they are a foreigner. There are many half-Korean people who in fact were raised in Korea or raised culturally Korean, and they definitely don’t want to be singled out in each interaction as a foreigner. Err on the side of assuming the person in front of you wants you to act the same way you acted to the previous guest in your restaurant, the last customer at your counter and how you act towards almost every other person you see on the street.

There are Pakistanis who have lived here 20 years, Germans who speak better Korean than most Korean college kids and academics who have devoted their life to studying Korea. Statistically speaking, unless you live near a military base most of the foreigners you see will be in the process of learning Korean (and if you're a foreigner in Korea and you're reading this and you think this isn't true, remember, not everyone is getting paid to teach English, there are many other foreigners). When in doubt, just pretend you already live in multicultural society, the multicultural society of Korea, where the language is Korean. Embrace multiculturalism and interact in no special way what-so-ever.




Want to Read More?
A few relevant writings on this theme, probably all better thought out that mine:
Jason Lim “When Our Children Don’t Look Korean”
So-Mang Yang “The Korean Way to Multiculturalism”
Peter Underwood (yes, that Underwood family): “Multiculturalism in Korea”
Korea.net’s “Policies Directions to Help Multicultural Families” [sic]
Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives website’s “Emergence of New Citizens and Discourse of Multiculturalism in Korea”
Roboseyo’s articles “Korean Multiculturalism: Putting them Furriners in their Place” and “Random Notes: Multiculturalism in Korea and Crowdsourced Translation”
Kosian’s blog “Korea Greets New Era of Multiculturalism”

Foreigners on Korean TV

I have been one of these foreigners, and I will be again. But I have a few things to say about the Korean practice of sticking foreigners on TV doing/enjoying Korean traditional things.

In the past Korea bought the whole idea of the West as superior (partially because of a belief that acceptance of Western culture, ideas and technology was a major reason why Japan was able to overpower Korea at the beginning of the 1900s). Koreans considered Western things advanced and superior (and the West agreed) and in an attempt to succeed (particularly after achieving independence) they swallowed the baby and the bathwater (to screw up a traditional saying) hook, line and sinker. In an effort to become economically advanced they also accepted Christianity, fell in love with Monet and decided to start sleeping in a bed. Not everyone, of course, but I guarantee you that use of beds (instead of sleeping on the floor) will be higher in Christian households. Seriously.

This also meant that Korean music was discounted in favor of “art music” (whoever came up with that term should be shot—shouldn’t all music be considered art?), the misconception that Korean 판소리 pansori would be better if staged like an opera or musical (창극), the assumption that Korean instruments should be adapted to use of a 7 note Western scale, etc. Parents discouraged their children from learning Korean traditional music, dance or drama and this only got worse as the years went on. (This is partially because making a living from Korean performance traditions has been difficult and actual economic success amongst those practicing traditional arts has been exceedingly rare, and partially because of the status (low) associated with performers in the traditional mindset). During the pro-Democracy movement the protestors utilized Korean performance traditions for two reasons 1) they could cloak themselves in Korean tradition, casting themselves as the true patriots 2) they could use performance to attract people with the cops helpless to stop them, then once they had a critical mass they could engage in political speech-making and so on until enough cops gathered to break up the gathering. However this brought a backlash, where some people thought of traditions (like 풍물 pungmul drumming) as something that was just for loud, aggressive protestors to use, not for enjoyment.

In the years since the pro-democracy movement associated surge, interest in Korean traditions has dropped off. Some performance forms have been more popular, some forms have even regenerated interest to some degree, but most have lapsed back into relative invisibility. Of course some people are really concerned about this and doing whatever they can to try to reverse this trend.

One tool that has been utilized to try to get people to look at Korean traditions again and perhaps become re-interested in them is to show (frequently) on TV or in other media how much foreigners love Korean traditions. Since I speak Korean and attend a lot of festivals and performances I have been interviewed countless times and been spotlighted on a lot of TV shows, too. In 2003 I’d had the same cell number for 6 years living in the same town. I got phone calls up the wazoo just from news reporters who wanted to make sure they could interview a foreigner at such-and-such event. Who knows how my contact info got around, but it was really out there. I was even asked to come to the inaugural “Talks with Beauties”(미녀들의 수다) (which I’m not, but neither are all the women on the show). I’m so glad I said no, that show is one of the most annoying and embarrassing things I’ve ever seen. This is a sort of mellow taste. I have seen clips from this show that make your hair stand up on end.

To get to the point, I’ve been used a lot by the Korean media to make traditions seem more attractive to Koreans. But since I actually believe Koreans should take another look at traditional arts and think about having their children learn 해금 haegeum instead of violin, or 공중무용 court dances instead of ballet, I figure they can use me, and I hope it works. They have their agenda, I have mine, but they are complimentary. However, as I’ve gotten older and wiser I’ve noticed how often they try to make foreigners on shows with a focus on traditions look like idiots. Or, to put it another way, I think they’re not comfortable with foreigners actually knowing too much about something Koreans might feel embarrassed to see a foreigner knowing more about than they know themselves. Temper the introduction of an aspect of Korean culture through the eyes of the enthusiastic foreigner with a little superiority (well, even I could do that! The viewer says as he watches the foreigner fumble his or her way through some task or another). But what the viewer might not know, and I certainly do, is how often these shows will spring something on you “You need to do this, it’ll be so interesting!”

Back in 2005 my friend Georgy and I were spotlighted on the same 10 minute slot in a TV program a couple of weeks apart from each other. She always made 김밥 kimbap and I always made 김치찌게 kimchi stew, but when she did her show they asked her to invite a Korean friend for lunch and make stew (she got the recipe from me) and when they came to my house (to film me making 김치 kimchi) they brought a bunch of kimbap makings from the market (like already cooked carrot strips) and insisted that I assemble the kimbap and take it to school to share with my friend. Even if I was going to make kimbap (which I almost never do), I would make it very differently, and with their ingredients I was making the most basic kimbap of all. It was SO FAKE. I didn’t even have a good kimbap rolling bamboo slat thing. But I hadn’t learned to be really assertive and direct with these TV people yet.

I have now learned my lesson, and I’m super direct. I will not be a performing monkey. I will not be made a fool of. I will not accept them filming something that’s not real, nor will I allow them to screw up my regular activities. I have to constantly re-assert these points, but it’s possible. I really believe it is.

There is just one thing that is holding me up this evening (and in recording the segment I started working on today): do I stay all academic and speak softly in my interview Q&A sections (which today meant I ended up getting all tangled up in the words I was using and really frustrated--I'd already had a day with over 5 hours of very careful use of Korean), or do I speak the way I normally speak Korean when I talk about protection of Korean traditional arts (directly, passionately and in a way that is kind of challenging in that it doesn’t mince words about how serious this situation is)?

Oh, and a last point in case you think being in the newspapers/magazines will make things easier—you get misquoted. Happens so often, I should seriously learn to keep my mouth shut. One time in 2005 or 2006 I found myself quoted as saying things that were back-ass wrong and offensive to a mask dance group I love. Jeez, that was hard to smooth over. I found this article by googling the search terms “mask dance” and “American” in Korean. It was the fifth result and you have to know that’s a pretty general search. My first time to see the article, and yes indeed, I am misquoted. It really pisses me off. I had a very sincere and important point, but they've basically taken my photo and put the words they want to make their point next to an image of me. I'm even quoted using a word I don't think I've ever spoken in my life.