“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945
As we were leaving the apartment yesterday my wife asked half-jokingly if I thought our hamsters would die if we forgot to turn the air conditioning off before going out. For a moment I thought she'd developed an overly high opinion of the machine's ability to freeze our one-room living space, but it turned out the perceived danger was 'fan death'. Fan death? Yes, it seems that leaving your aircon on, or even a simple fan, while you sleep in a sealed room can result in death from asphyxiation, poisoning, or... certainly something anyway.
I find there are times in Korea when I don't know whether to just laugh at the absurdity of some of the facts I am told, or just get angry and grind my teeth together as I dare to suggest that perhaps, just maybe, people here are not the arbiters of all that is true, and just because everyone believes something it doesn't make it right. I think in any country there's often a prevailing opinion, but in a more homogeneous society where the 'group' is more important than the individual, it becomes especially difficult to challenge established notions.
And what a notion it is, with the news media regularly updating the grim fan death statistics, and fan manufacturers careful to design auto shut-off timers into their products to avoid killing you. In fact, a forty-seven year old man died of fan death a couple of weeks ago - it's true - it was on KBS News. As Wikipedia's fan death page documents, some people go so far as to ensure they leave their car window slightly open when their vehicle's aircon is on to avoid the dreaded fan death (so why don't people die from the aircon in the sealed environment of aeroplanes?) The more you read, the funnier - or more infuriating - it gets.
So, and not for the first time, a lively debate between my wife and I followed as I attempted to find a diplomatic way of explaining that this apparent urban legend was possibly the silliest thing I'd heard all year, and the topic ended with me accepting the challenge to find evidence contrary to the accepted truth as propagated by the Korean media and society as a whole. Fortunately, this was not a task which proved particularly challenging.
But is my wife, a graduate from a fairly prestigious Korean university and the holder of a second degree from a British institution, really convinced? Naturally everything I found debunking the myth of fan death was from a non-Korean source, and herein lies another thing I've learnt while I've been here - if the rest of the world believes one thing, and Korea believes another, the people who are correct are...
8 comments:
I've had my Korean air conditioner on in my sealed Korean apartment for every night of the past 3 months. I'm not dead yet. Not only that, but before I came to Korea, I worked the graveyard shift for 4 years; to drown out the daytime sounds when I slept I always had my fan on (in a closed room). I'm still going strong.
Groupthink is a strange thing. Why don't people thing to look for evidence for unusual claims?
Every year this comes up in conversation in pubs and offices and on the blogs all over Korea - but I'm not sure if the cries of disbelief and ridicule have helped the situation any. I think the more people (i.e. "foreigners") try to debunk this myth, the more other people (you know, Koreans) stubbornly cling to the belief that fans kill sleeping people.
I appreciate your post (and I recently had a similar-but-nastier conversation with my husband who accused me of almost killing our sleeping daughter because I ... LEFT THE FAN ON) but I'm starting to wonder if we all shouldn't just stop talking about it! Maybe we're just fanning the fire :)
Or better yet, if we start a rumour that fan death was *really* discovered by American scientists and is quite prevalent in the U.S.A, then I bet after a few years Koreans would start becoming suspicious of the whole concept and start noticing that Koreans actually were *not* dying from fan death and thus are stronger than their Western friends.
Sigh. This comment is almost as long as your post, and I apologise, but I wanted to say also, in response to Lee who asked "Why don't people think to look for evidence for unusual claims?", that most Koreans (actually - like mostly everyone) tend to get 'evidence' and 'proof' from a) the news b) doctors and c) their mums and grandmothers. And Korea still has oodles of erroneous news reports, quacky docs and fan-natic devoted ajummas and halmonis. :)
It's a *crazy* place. But I've been here for almost 8 years - and sure do love it! It's fan-tastic!
Heh ...
Have a good weekend!~
Melissa, I think you might be on to something with that idea about suggesting that America scientists first discovered "fan death" ;-)
It also occurred to me that if a rumour got started in Korea that eating gimchi protects people from fan death that would probably gain some traction too.
I won't fan the flames too much either, but I can tell you guys where it all started: in the 1950s and '60s, there would be very brief one paragraph reports along the lines of "this guy was found dead in his apartment, all the windows were closed, a fan was on, the police are investigating". People put 2 and 2 together. Why they didn't stop to think, and why the belief has persisted so long, you've all mentioned.
Someone said that there was one a similar case in England. I'm not sure of the details, but I think it was in the early 1980s after a series of house fires in a village. One newspaper reporter noticed that in all of the pictures of the burned out teenagers' bedrooms there were Sex-Pistols posters on the walls. So he wrote a tounge in cheek article suggesting that the posters caused the fires!
Now why didn't that rumour take off? :)
For some reason I find this wildly frustrating as well. But I think the counter myth might work. Perhaps something like this...
"It (fan death) was first identified by an American, Dr. John Gorrie, in Apalachicola, Florida at the turn of the century. He was working on one of the first air conditioning systems for the treatment of malaria patients and noticed several of his patients died when they were left in rooms with closed windows equipped with his primitive fan driven air conditioning units. He published his findings in the Journal of Abnormal Pulmonary Phenomena in 1913. This article stimulated great discussion and research in the fan manufacturing community. Based on a series of elaborate experiments at GE research laboratories, a team of dedicated engineers and physicians were able to determine that fan death could be easily avoided by adjusting the angle of the fan blades approximately five degrees forward from the more traditional assembly. Inappropriate tilting of the blades generated low barometric pressures over time, which in turn caused diaphragm spasms and asphyxiation in vulnerable individuals.
Based on the results of this pioneering work, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standardized proper blade declination for all American manufactured fans from 1920 onward. Fan death has since been eradicated in most of the western world, but unfortunately South Korea remains the last stronghold for this easily prevented cause of death. In the post war years Korean manufacturers were in a rush to meet consumer demand for all sorts of household products and ignored many international standards of assembly. Unfortunately Korean fan companies and their manufacturers were unaware, both then and now, of the ground breaking American science that both discovered, and put an end to, fan death."
The kimchi is key in Korea and is king to the point it trumps all other myths. Tell everyone kimchi cures fan attacks and that is that.
Adam Savage of the Mythbusters has just asked if he should investigate fan death...
My wife left the fan on last night, and I'm still alive. Freezing, though.
Thanks for the heads up - hopefully he will, although I don't hold out much hope it will change anything!
Post a Comment