Under Siege: Dirty and Smelly and Fusion Babies

"I'm not just saying this because you’re related to me, but I used to think that all foreigners were dirty and smelly... but you're not." - a close relative who I am not permitted to name by title until the statute of limitations expires.

Does this mean I've pushed down the barriers of prejudice in Korea by just a little? Perhaps not, because this close relative went on to expand on that thought by adding "When I pass them in the street, I can smell their bad smell, they look unkempt and their clothes look years old. But you always look neat."

And apparently I don't smell that bad either. If only foreigners could smell as wonderful as Koreans.

Filed under 'accidental truths close Korean relatives tell you when they finally let their guard down after five years'.

The observant among my two remaining readers will have noticed that I don't often write this blog any more. This is a function of many things such as my work as a writer elsewhere, aching fingers, a bad keyboard, my hatred of the updated Blogger interface that often no longer lets me post comments on my own blog, and the increasing amount of time I spend with the underground railroad here in Busan.

It is also - as I have previously mentioned - in no small part connected with the extra work and frequent interruptions that come with having a 22-month-old child, who is, shall we say, high maintenance. For example, this morning the wireless landline phone handset in our apartment was nowhere to be found until I finally spotted it in our aquarium, which led to a couple of hours of disassembling, drying, cleaning and re-soldering (it was not disassembly-friendly). This is the tip of the iceberg.

All small children can be a challenge I'm sure, but one of our close relatives evidently arrived at the conclusion that my son represented significantly more of a challenge than any Korean child they had previously experienced, prompting them to pose the following philosophical question:

"Do you think his temperament is the way it is because he has mixed blood?

Under Siege: Get Out of My Taxi!

I remember that it was cold and raining very heavily that morning. So heavily, that when the taxi finally pulled up outside the the last station before I headed out into the wilderness towards Gijang, its windows were steamed up and I couldn’t see the driver. The wait had been so long that I’d begun to wonder if I was ever going to get to work, and I really didn’t rate the chances of the woman who’d arrived behind me to start a queue at the designated taxi point.

I got into the taxi and started to give the driver my destination in Korean as I always did. But before I could finish the driver, a woman probably in her 50s – who’d turned around and appeared to be looking at me in an odd way - thrust her arm out and suddenly I was staring at an outstretched hand being waved in front of my nose, accompanied by something in Korean I didn’t catch, followed by “No! No!”. Huh? Now she was pointing at the still open car door and while I might not have understood the accompanying Korean, when it comes down to it “Get out!” is a fairly universal concept in any language.

I got out slowly as if I were in a dream. What was happening? And why? Had her daughter dated a foreigner? Should I say it wasn’t me?

So I shut the car door and stood there back by the side of the road, in the now thoroughly appropriate pouring rain. The taxi with the steamed up windows stayed where it was, only adding to my sense of surreality. The woman who’d arrived behind me to form a queue stared at me and we shared a telepathic moment. “What was that?” “Beats the hell out of me.”

So the woman opened the passenger side door and started talking to the taxi driver. If body language told a story it began with confusion and ended with confusion, and the middle involved the woman gesturing towards me and asking what the problem was.

After she’d closed the door, we both resumed our spots by the side of the road, but not before the woman had given me a pitying look. After about 30 seconds, the taxi driver decided to leave.

I felt the woman had gone into bat for me but I was now late for work and I was only a few weeks into my new job, so I told her where I was going in Korean and asked her if she wanted to share the next taxi. But she wasn’t going my way.

When the next taxi came, the woman made a point of talking to the driver in a disgusted tone as I was getting and it was pretty obvious she was making sure he wasn’t going to refuse to take me as she explained where I was going.

I wish I could have told her it was unnecessary. I’d never been told to get out of a taxi before in Korea and statistically it hardly seemed likely to happen again immediately following my first time, and in fact I’d go on to make sure of it because after that I stopped taking taxis in Jangsan and opted for the bus instead.

In the brief time I’d begun my Civilisation to Gijang commute, I’d had one good notably good taxi experience and faced the minor frustration of watching taxis fly by me without stopping in the countryside. Now I’d had a notably bad experience, I wondered if it only evened things up, or whether it pushed Korea into negative territory with me. I settled on the latter, because the world should have a positive bias anyway, not a neutral one. When someone treats you badly, it can more than offset those random acts of kindness. I guess that psychology for you.

Anyway, if I was in any doubt those doubts were removed two days later. I’ll tell you that story next time.

Busan e-FM Week 36: Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery (Banned)

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

It took 36 weeks, but I finally had a script refused for broadcast. When I started doing my weekly segment with Busan e-FM, it was with the agreement that I could be honest about my experiences in Korea, but the question is, does Korea want to be honest about itself?

Ostensibly, the problem was that Love Hotels and Adultery – the main thrust of my piece – were “not appropriate subjects” for the radio. TBS eFM – an equivalent English-language radio station in Seoul had covered these subjects before – but that’s Seoul and this is Busan, which is generally much more socially conservative.

Exploring where these newly discovered boundaries lay, and whether they were strictly sexual, I asked - mindful that the 2011 Dog Meat Festival in Gyeonggi Province had recently been cancelled amidst protests – if the subject I was allegedly considering for the next week – that of dog meat in Korea – would be acceptable. I was of course, just screwing with them. I felt I saw a slightly pained look cross the face of my assigned handler. It was not really an acceptable subject either.

And so it was we reached the climax of our conversation. It was probably best to avoid ‘controversial subjects’. That was the spot I’d touched. The two people I knew that regularly listened to my segment – who for all I know were actually the only two people who listened at all - were surprised. Hadn’t the radio station really been listening to what I’d been talking about before now?

I’ve always found the foreigners who only tell Koreans what they want to hear for the sake of a quiet life somewhat soda-masochistic, even if we’ve all done it from time to time. So I escaped my temporary bondage and continued tackling controversial subjects in the weeks that followed, going on to reference attitudes to homosexuality in Korea, monoculture and corporate enslavement, racism and the often enforced dystopian existence of foreigners, consumer nationalism, chaebol media lies and the absence of critical thought, [stay tuned!] but I did it in my usual style – hopefully relatively gently, diplomatically, and with humour.

I’d like to think that if done sufficiently eloquently, it is possible to speak truth to power in Korea, but whether that’s because people here are truly prepared to have a light shone on certain subjects, or simply because they weren’t listening or didn’t understand, is the loaded question.

I include the script below as an example of the realities of Korean life and culture you can’t talk about on the radio in Busan in 2011.

Introduction – Love Hotels, Sex and Adultery

Last week I talked about ‘bangs’ - such as the ‘DVD bang’ couples go to. This week I’m talking about a related subject, that of ‘love hotels’ or ‘love motels’. I don’t quite know how to translate this because we don’t use the word ‘motel’ in British English, but I’ve seen them called both hotels and motels here.

I think this highlights an issue with the cultural development of language. A motel is described as a ‘hotel for motorists’, and it makes sense this word would emerge from American English because of the long road journeys people have to make in the United States. They don’t have to do this in England because the country is geographically small – so you can normally get to where you want to go in a day. But I understand that many American motels are dropping the word now because it’s seen as being ‘seedy’.

We still have slightly seedy hotels in England – we just call them ‘bed & breakfasts’. But there are no love hotels in England that I'm aware of.

Love Hotels

So I was surprised when I saw the love hotels here, although not totally shocked – Japan is famous for its love hotels and most people outside Japan have probably heard of them. To a Westerner like myself, there seem to be a lot of general cultural similarities between Japan and Korea, so it’s not a complete shock to discover love hotels here, but as I’ve said before, I really didn’t know that much about Korea before coming here, and I certainly didn’t realise how popular they are.

I took them as a sign of social restriction in Korea, in the same way that ‘DVD bang’ represent the same issue. They are both somewhere to go because so many young people live at home. Maybe ‘DVD bang’ are where they go to fool around, and when it gets more serious they graduate to love hotels. I find it funny though how people going there want privacy, but the buildings are usually so very visible and obvious because of their architectural tendency to employ large fake Roman columns, cupid statues, small windows and plenty of neon lighting.

Staying in a Love Hotel

I’ve actually stayed in a love hotel. The first time I went to Seoul it was just for an overnight trip, and my wife and I wanted to save money, so she said “love hotels are cheap... and usually have Internet connections.” I thought ‘why not?’ Anyway, if the word ‘cheap’ didn’t sell it for me, the word ‘Internet’ certainly did.

So we quickly came across a love hotel in some Seoul backstreet near the Blue House, although I’ve learned that in Korea love hotels certainly don’t feel compelled to hide themselves away. That said, they do try to maintain a certain air of privacy, with curtains at the entrance to the drive-in areas to avoid cars and perhaps car licence-plates being seen, which always gave me the impression that a lot of older people might be using the hotels given that younger people generally own fewer cars – and probably don’t care about that kind of privacy as much. This quickly led me to believe that love hotels are frequently the venue for affairs in Korea. But if that didn’t convince me, when we reached the counter it also had a curtain over it, our money went underneath and a hand comes back with a key. No faces are visible and it’s all quite seedy actually, which made me feel vaguely guilty. I felt like trying to look underneath the curtain to say “we’re married”, but then I suppose everyone feeling guilty says that.

Last week I talked about going to DVD bangs with two Korean women, which in retrospect – given the area we were in – looked bad. And in some ways I felt the same way at the love hotel – if the staff had seen my face it wasn’t going to do anything positive for the reputation of foreigners. Then again, love hotels don’t always do much with foreigners for the reputation of the Koreans who run them – last year there wasn’t enough hotel space at the inaugural Korean Grand Prix, so a number of journalists ended up staying in love hotels – perhaps unsuspectingly. Anyway, the main point it that they were charged $310 per night – in other words they were ripped off – which means that evidently the love hotel owners realised they were foreigners early into the transaction – curtains or not.

While it might be cheap – unless you happen to be an unsuspecting foreigner – it’s not necessarily easy to get a good night’s rest there, because my wife was worried about hidden cameras. I don’t know if this is just an urban legend or whether it actually happens – actually I suspect it probably does happen sometimes. So it’s all about undressing in a part of the room where you think the camera won’t see you, then hiding under the covers and sleeping. I don’t want to be famous on the Korean Internet.

So I guess the love hotels are still too much of a risk for some. I was up on Hwangryeong Mountain late one night in Busan taking shots of the city after dark, and there were a few cars parked along the road, spaced apart. There seemed to be some kind of activity in a couple of the cars, and one of them had the stereotypical steamed up windows, and the car was moving around. Given the executive and old fashioned nature of the car concerned, I imagined there had to be an older couple inside.

Adultery is a Criminal Offence in Korea

Of course, adultery is illegal in Korea, so people have to be careful. I was really shocked when I found out about this law, but perhaps it goes some way to explain some of the behaviour I’ve encountered. When my wife and I were at another love hotel, another couple happened to come out of the room at the same time as us, and as soon as they saw us they dashed back inside.

I don’t know what to think about the adultery law. On the one hand, adultery is a bad thing, but on the other hand, in my opinion it seems like the kind of law the Taliban would have, and not something you find in a modern country.

I think the law creates a bad impression of South Korea. Maybe it’s not fair expecting Korea to be socially liberal, but this country is very keen to attract foreign investment and foreign companies, but I imagine business executives in foreign companies look at Korean society as a whole before they decide to come here and think “what kind of country is this?”

What I can’t figure out about this law is that legislators are mainly men, and men are usually willing adulterers – in fact male politicians around the world are known for their affairs – so why did these men create and pass this law? Do they like living dangerously or were they really worried about their lives? [I left this question hanging but I’m convinced that men passed this law to control women in the traditionally misogynistic Korean court system, although more recently judges may have been a little more balanced in their judgements].

It’s also worth making some comparisons between South Korea and other countries. China is not known for being socially liberal, but adultery isn’t a criminal offence there. But then adultery is a criminal offence in the U.S. state of New Hampshire – it isn’t enforced and there are people trying to get it removed from the statute books.

I think the whole issue raises some fundamental questions about freedom and democracy in South Korea. Should the majority be able to dictate to – and criminalise – a minority that don’t meet their moral standards? For that matter, what right does the government have to legislate people’s sex lives?

It’s a dangerous road to go down in my opinion. Some Islamic countries have ‘moral police’ who enforce compliance with Sharia Law – is that really what the police should be doing in Korea? Last year, I read about an incident in Malaysia where the ‘morality police’ were knocking on people’s doors in a hotel, and they ended up arresting 52 unmarried couples. I suppose if the Korean police really wanted to enforce the law here they could just visit love hotels, check people’s marital status, and make arrests. To be fair, they don’t, but the fact that the law exists means that one day they could, or just choose to do it selectively to target certain individuals or groups, which is why bad laws should never be on the statute books. Anyway, as far as Korea is concerned, I think the people should be spending their time arresting motorcyclists who ride on the pavements [sidewalks], rather than getting involved in policing people’s relationships.

Korean Porn Movies

While I don’t worry about getting arrested in a love hotel, I do worry about the perceived issue of hidden cameras and ending up on the Internet, but I haven’t avoided Korea’s love hotels despite this. When we went to a funeral in Namhae we found ourselves in the countryside and it was quite isolated. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a proper hotel for miles, but there was a love hotel just up the road from the the funeral hall. So given that Korean funerals tend to be multi-day events, and given that we didn’t want to sleep in the funeral hall with a heaving mass of older Koreans, we had little choice but to stay in a love hotel once again.

This one was even less subtle because even if the building's fake Roman columns and cupid statues didn’t give the game away to the uninitiated, it had a large collection of pornographic videos outside the elevator on our floor - most appeared to be Korean-made. It also had a great looking Jacuzzi placed centrally within the room, but sadly we daren’t use it because of the potential for hidden cameras.

Korean Culture

Staying in a love hotel is an interesting experience. When it comes down to it, staying in hotels in England is often all the same, but Korean love hotels have character. At the risk of giving Korean newspapers even more reasons to hate us, I think it’s something every foreigner should try at least once. They are part of what Korea is, and part of the cultural experience here.

Planned air date: 2011-06-29 @ ~19:30

Footnote

Five weeks after the planned air date of this piece, South Korea's Constitutional Court overturned the provision in the Criminal Code imposing a maximum two-year prison sentence on adulterers, saying it was 'an infringement on the sphere of sexual life that society should maintain on its own' and that 'the state was excessively restricting a matter of personal decision.'

Busan e-FM Week 33: Humour/Humor, Satire and Ire

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

In retrospect, I can’t quite believe I got to make some of these points on the radio. I love humour - I'd much rather be watching an episode of Blackadder, Community, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory or Better Off Ted [which inexplicably nobody watched] than Saw 6. In fact I consider my life to be one long extended joke. So I wanted to talk about the subject of humour, but I also thought it would be nice if the next generation of Koreans that largely make up the Busan eFM audience could learn to lighten up. They won't of course, life in Korea is often an extremely serious, depressing and stressful experience, and anything I say on air is a drop in the ocean - an ocean in which everyone has long since drowned. But you know what? Never give up. Never surrender.

Introduction

Last week I talked about how the Expat Internet is hell. But foreigners can be funny too, and not just in a strange way. This week I’m covering expat humour in Korea.

What's so funny anyway?

Humour is a very funny thing. What one person finds amusing, another may not. Between foreigners, there’s a difference between British and American humour for example – even the words are spelt differently. I feel that British humour is more deadpan, darker, sometimes meaner, and more surreal. I think American humour is different, but still funny.

Babopalooza in Busan

I think there’s a huge difference between Korean humour and Western humour though. My first experience of this here came in the form of an expat comedy called ‘Babopalooza’ here in Busan back in 2006. It became quite a big issue in the foreign community.

This is my understanding of it: essentially a group put on a theatre performance which made fun of life in Korea. The targets for the humour were Koreans and Western foreigners. But one of the potential dangers with cultural comedy, especially here I think, is that Koreans only see Koreans being made fun of. In fact one of the co-writers actually said the ‘babo’ in Babopalooza were the foreigners. Anyway, apparently the police or immigration officials came to watch, and allegedly the upshot of it all was that people lost their jobs and had to leave Korea, while others had problems with visa renewals. So really, it was a comedy with a sad ending.

Babopalooza happened six weeks after I came to Korea for the first time. I appreciate that public comedy performances are really tough to pull off, but the reaction to the show made me think that however nicely people were treating me, beneath the surface this country might not be a very friendly place.

I’ve seen Korean performers on TV putting on ‘black faces’ [or masks] and pretending to be black or Africans. I guess that’s – apparently – OK here [it’s not], but you can’t do that in England because it would be racist. By our standards, that’s quite nasty – not funny at all – but it’s acceptable here, whereas Babopalooza was unacceptable.

So these examples made me think that Koreans can make fun of foreigners, but foreigners making fun of Koreans is unacceptable. I’m afraid that doesn’t create a good image of Korea or Koreans [some foreigners also lean towards the view that foreigners in Korea should keep their mouths shut and just do their jobs].

Anyway, while I gather there was a lot of creative energy here in Busan before Babopalooza, after what happened – for a while – foreigners were afraid to do any public performances. Busan wants to have art and culture to create a multicultural city, but it makes me think that what they want is the Korean version of multiculturalism, where everyone thinks like a Korean. [Bazinga!]

The Line

I don’t think Babopalooza went too far, but I’m not going to pretend that other expats haven’t crossed the line. Last year a foreigner started a blog [Blackout Korea] which others perhaps contributed to as well, that consisted of pictures of drunk, unconscious Koreans. I can see how that might seem funny for a couple of moments, but beyond that I don’t find it funny – instead it’s a rather sad reflection on all the pressures in Korean society which causes this.

Some drugs (like alcohol) [Korea likes to think of itself as ‘drug-free’ but that depends on your definition] are OK in moderation, but this kind of drug abuse seems a big problem in Korea, just like it is in my country – and it’s not funny there either. But obviously some foreigners found it funny, and this shows that the problem with humour is that it can easily be one-sided and insensitive, and that ultimately it can easily slip into racism. It doesn’t have to be like that though because I think there are better and genuinely funny blogs written by foreigners in Korea.

Humorous Expat Blogs... Or What Amuses Me

I’ll tell you how I feel about expat blogs here. There are the big name bloggers which everyone reads, and they’re churning out entries for their audience, but some of the lesser known blogs here such as Expat Hell and The Supplanter feature – to my mind – excellent writing which really attracts me, and they contain a lot of self-deprecating humour. I feel I make fun of myself quite often in my blog so I suppose I appreciate that style.

But then some of the expat blogs are written explicitly not as personal experiences of life in Korea, but more for the purpose of satire, which I find especially interesting.

Satire

The satirical blogs are different to the other expat blogs, which tend to cover daily life. Wikipedia defines satire as a format in which “vices, follies, abuses and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon.”

So people can find satire uncomfortable, and that was the problem with Babopalooza. In fact, the Wikipedia page on satire even mentions something that happened here in Korea to the foreign journalist Michael Breen, who wrote a satirical article in The Korea Times, which resulted in him being sued for $1 million by the chaebol he satirised [Samsung]. Mike Breen said the prosecutor in his case didn’t get his satirical article, telling him “It’s not funny if it’s not true.” [comment 24].

I gathered that apparently there’s no tradition of written satire in Korea, so writing satirical material can be a dangerous activity in Korea. And yet I think it’s important in today’s world because so many people are ignorant of the news. In fact, in America surveys show that presenters such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are the only way some people actually know what’s going on – even if it’s dressed up as satire.

The Yangpa, Dokdo Is Ours, and The Dokdo Times

I think the first satirical blog in Korea was The Yangpa, which presumably was inspired by the famous American satire site, The Onion. The Yangpa blog started before I came to Korea, and people talked about it back then but I must admit I rarely read it. The problem for me was highlighted by one early entry about a pop singer/actress who was guilty of plagiarism with her degree. When I first came here I didn’t understand enough about Korea to know who this was or why plagiarism was a good satirical subject, so the humour was lost on me. I think this illustrates why satire requires knowledge.

The Yangpa ended in 2008, then a site started called ‘Dokdo Is Ours’, and when the writer ended that last year, another new site started, this time called ‘The Dokdo Times’, which is essentially written in the style of a fake Korean newspaper. What I like about these sites is that they aren’t just aimed at satirising one group of people – but everyone, including foreigners. For example, the most popular ‘story’ on The Dokdo Times’ site is about a Korean woman who married a foreigner and then realised he’s actually an idiot. I think that’s something both Koreans and foreigners can relate to.

But What Do They Think?

I’m not sure what Koreans really make of this foreign humour. Despite what Mike Breen said about the prosecutor in his case, I believe from what I've read that some Koreans in Korea really find some of these satirical sites funny. [And at least one Korean comedian may be out there pushing the envelope as well]. They are a test of English as well – if you understand humour written in another language then you’ve really done well. Even when I’ve learnt Korean, I think it might still be some time before I understand Korean satire, assuming that exists.

‘Babopalooza’ was judged ‘not funny’ by the authorities, and sometimes Koreans get very angry at some foreign humour – either they don’t get it or the humour wasn’t funny in the first places and it just ended up being offensive. Comedy and satire can be very difficult things to pull off, especially in a foreign country.

Learning About Korea Through Humour

I’d say that I’m learning about Korea through humour. I read the Korean news but it’s easy to miss things or not really think about them deeply. For example, one of these recent satirical ‘news articles’ from The Dokdo Times detailed how people with three or more drunk driving convictions would be banned from working as bus and taxi drivers. It sounds like a joke but it’s actually really true, which to me is a serious issue which people should be thinking about more. Maybe if people did, the society we live in could become a better, more tolerant and less hypocritical place [or it might at least become safer].

Can Satire Change Attitudes in Korea?

I don’t know if satire can change attitudes in Korea though. Can anything change Korea? Recently I read that that Korea is the fifth ‘most socially tight’ country in the world [actually, the fifth among 33 countries surveyed, not that the Chosun Ilbo ever let a detail like that get in the way of a good headline], meaning there is a great deal of conformity here, and pressure to conform. Satire represents the opposite of conformity in many ways, because it points out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in society. There’s nothing wrong with conforming if that’s what you want to do, but humour and satire are good ways of encouraging you to think for yourself too.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-06-08 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 9: Christmas/Festivus

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Background

Oh the Christmas magic. I hadn’t originally planned to talk about this happy time of year, but as the day rapidly approached it seemed odd to be talking about my apartment experiences as originally intended on the 22nd December. So I volunteered to veer off course and tackle a topical subject. I wasn’t particularly well at the time though, so fed up as I was I seriously considered telling the listeners how I celebrated Festivus back home. But finally I decided that could be a bit mean, or maybe the Christmas spirit did finally get to me. I turned up at the station wearing a Santa hat with flashing lights, which nicely distracted everyone from the Meniere’s-related spaced out look in my eyes and inability to focus. Happy Christmas!

Introduction

Since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d talk about my Christmas experiences in Korea, and how they differ from Christmases back in England.

Giant dancing monster

I wasn’t expecting as much of a celebration of Christmas before I came to Korea, because I really didn’t associate it in my mind as a heavily Christian country, although yes, in reality a significant percentage of the population are Christians. But if nothing else, I should have realised that – like in England – Christmas is a commercial opportunity even without its religious element.

The first year I was here I saw a Christmas show on TV, but alongside the dancing Santa there was a dancing monster [OK – I said monster on the radio – let’s face it though, it was a giant dancing turd - no joke] and another dancer in a skeleton costume. I think it adds to the feeling that there might be a Christmas in Korea – it’s just not quite the Christmas you expect.

I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas

The weather in Korea at Christmas is quite different than in England. We get a reasonable amount of snow there because England has four seasons [see what I did there?] - so there’s at least a chance of having what we call a ‘White Christmas’ - snow falling on Christmas Day, or at least some snow on the ground. Even if we don’t get snow on the ground, it’s often could enough that when you wake up, the trees, the ground and the windows will be white with frost, so it feels more festive.

The problem with the weather in Busan is that it’s hardly ever snowed while I’ve been here, and there’s hardly ever any frost. Sometimes it’s cold enough to freeze water on the ground, but you usually don’t see the trees and everything else go white with the ice. It seems to snow a lot in the rest of the country - and certainly that’s to be expected further north – so maybe I’ve just been unlucky in the three Christmases I’ve already had here, or maybe this is the way it’s always going to be. But in my first year year – on Christmas Day – it was 15 degrees Celsius, so it really didn’t even feel like winter, let alone Christmas.

My first Korean Christmas

For my first Korean Christmas, we couldn’t find a tree to buy, but my wife found some Russian-made Christmas lights, and a bit of tinsel, and hung it around the apartment.

My wife’s uncle is a Christian pastor, and he insisted we visit his church for the Christmas Eve service. I was raised a Catholic although I don’t go to church any more, but I was so desperate to make things feel like Christmas I agreed. I didn’t get much out of it though, because it was all in Korean and I didn’t understand.

Then on Christmas Day we went out with my mother-in-law. She’s a Buddhist, so Christmas means nothing to her really, but she knew it was significant for me, and maybe a little for my wife as well because we always celebrated Christmas in England. So she took us out for a meal. I suppose you’d say that was my first Christmas lunch in Korea. Of course, it’s really a tradition in England to have a big lunch with your family.

Lunch was... mandu. So that really wasn’t like an English Christmas lunch, because in comparison it was quite basic. I guess Western Christmas lunches in general are very big affairs – turkey, potatoes, lots of vegetables and so on. A lot of fuss is made over it, so in a way it’s a bit like Chuseok dinners in Korea, including the tension.

I did enjoy the mandu, but I sort of felt a bit sad at the same time because it didn’t really feel like Christmas; we ate a a small shopping centre where the stores were open as though it were a normal day, and we shopped for clothes afterwards. There was one very lonely Christmas tree outside one of the shops, and a girl dancing in a Santa costume – well, the kind of costume Santa would wear if he dressed in mini-skirts anyway. In England all the stores are closed on Christmas Day – really everything is shut down – whereas in Korea it can feel like just another day.

Culture Shock

I suppose you could say it was a bit of a culture shock – I think as a foreigner who celebrates Christmas, it’s hard not to miss home on December 25th. In fact, it’s probably a little different for British people compared to Americans, because we don’t have Thanksgiving, so Christmas is our one big day of the year. It’s hard in a lot of ways – missing family, missing the snow and the Christmas food – but also because being a foreigner can make buying presents for people back home a lot more difficult.

I’ve tried to find Korean presents to send to people back home, but there’s only so much you can send through the post and the cost is so high I feel like I’m really giving the Korean Post Office the biggest present of Christmas. Last year I bought things from the Internet in England for my family rather than sending presents from Korea – but it’s very impersonal. Then there’s the huge problem of finding something to buy for people in Korea, especially my wife. I can’t really shop on the Internet because I don’t understand the language, and the stores aren’t much better. I find any kind of shopping in Korea completely overwhelming, and very stressful. Worrying about these things isn’t a great way to spend Christmas.

So that first Christmas felt like a bit of an empty experience, but I appreciated the effort my mother-in-law made. In the evening though we went to a café near us – it was called December and it had an all-year-round December theme – fake icicles, snow and so on – and that felt better.

Christmases since then have improved. The second year we planned things out a bit more, and went to Kosin University for the Christmas Tree Festival – that’s basically lots of trees lit up by Christmas lights, but it was nice – it made the day feel more special. There were some other cultural events going on in a theatre on the campus, such as Korean drumming and a religious show put on by some African students. And then we went to Nampodong, where we had a late Christmas lunch – pizza – but it had a hair baked into it so it wasn’t so nice. The streets were crowded with shoppers. I suppose I knew it would be like that with the stores open – but it was still a shock to see.

Christmas Day Shopping

Last year – my third Christmas here – I actually spent a large part of the day at Lotte Department Store. In fact, Nampodong has its Christmas Tree Culture Festival so we’d already been there to see that, and it was nice because it feels like shopping in the evening just before Christmas in England, with all the streets lit up by lights and trees. But the department store was hell – there were so many people you could hardly move sometimes. I’m not quite sure I’d do it again. And Christmas lunch that year was a Mexican tortilla.

This Year’s Plans

So this year I’ve put up our Christmas tree, but our Russian Christmas lights quickly stopped working. You know, having cheap Christmas lights stop working is very much part of the Western Christmas tradition so that reminded me of home. Anyway, I found that one of the wires had come loose, and it needs soldering. So I guess I’m going to have to learn the Korean for soldering iron and do some shopping. Other than that, I’m going to a Christmas party with friends tomorrow, but I don’t have any plans for Christmas Day yet. And now I have just over 24 hours left to find a present to buy my wife, which means even more Korean Christmas shopping pressure.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-22 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 8: Korean Food and Pizza

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

There’s no avoiding it – I’m finally going to talk about some of my food experiences in Korea. So today’s topic is Korean food... and pizza.

Pizza

While I’ve been here I might have eaten Korean food, but I’ve also been on a quest to find good pizza – and it’s difficult. Basically pizza is meant to be like the three colours of the Italian flag – white cheese, red sauce, and green herbs. Most of the pizzas I seem to get are just the white cheese with toppings – the sauce is this millimetre thick layer of watery liquid, if it exists at all, and forget about the herbs.

My wife explained to me that this is how Koreans like it, but it’s a shame for me. It’s like garlic bread from shops – it’s not really real garlic bread, but the Korean version of it – which is always sweet and surgery. I think for some foreigners like me pizza is quite important – it’s our equivalent of kimchi. Well, my equivalent anyway.

Kimchi

I’m going to be honest about this, even if they take my visa away. I don’t really like kimchi. I’ll tell you what it is. When I was really young, we had school dinners. Times were pretty hard – the UK had just had an IMF bailout and people were only working three days a week. So they fed us a lot of cabbage, which I guess was cheap. I got really sick of it, and the smell. Now I know that kimchi made with cabbage is only one type, but every time I see it, it reminds me of those awful lunches at school.

In fact I find Korean food smells radically different to what I’m used to in England. Sometimes I just hide in my room. The first time my wife bought kimchi back in England from a Korean store... well, I opened the fridge the next day and it just hit me – I was so shocked. I couldn’t believe anything could smell that strongly. That was my first introduction to Korean food. But I learned that, compared to food in England, people in Korea like strong smells and flavours.

Versus bland English food

English food is traditionally blander, but food in England has become quite multicultural, especially in the last thirty years. We have a lot of Italian influences in our diet such as pizza, pasta and risotto, Chinese food is very common, and the city where I grew up is famous for its curries because of the large South Asian population. Not all of it is bland, but often it’s about appreciating more subtle flavours.

I’ve found that when a lot of Koreans try that sort of food, they say it has no taste at all. I think that’s why almost every pizza restaurant I’ve ever been to in Korea feels the need to have Tobasco Sauce on their tables. I love ham and pineapple pizza, but when my brother-in-law tried it he said it had no taste. There are some Korean noodles in a packet, and they are just about the hottest things I can eat, but my brother-in-law says they aren’t hot or spicy at all.

Versus Mike

I eat some Korean food. I think that for me it’s an acquired taste, and I’m still acquiring it. But in one way Korean food is always going to be difficult for me, because I have a medical condition – Meniere’s Disease – which means I have to eat a low-sodium diet. In other words, I can’t really eat too many salty foods.

I just read in the 조선일보 [Chosun Ilbo] the other day that according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Koreans consume three times more salt in their diets than is recommended. Of course, you have to have some salt in your diet, but if I were eating that much, the chances are I’d be really unwell a lot of the time. So the reality is, I’ll never really have a typical Korean diet, if that means eating a lot of salt.

So what I eat here is a fusion of Western, Korean, Chinese and other food. When we go out I’ll usually eat at one of those large foreign restaurant chains, American fast-food places, Korean 식당 [small diners/restaurants] like Gimbab Nara, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, that sort of thing - but not so much those big Korean family restaurants, which serve more traditional food, because I still find those difficult.

Eating culture

The eating culture here is quite different from England. I was quite surprised at first by the shared dishes in the middle of the table, because it didn’t seem that hygienic. As a foreigner, I’m more used to just having my food on one plate in front of me. And I find there’s a lot of etiquette involved with food too. For example, once I made a terrible cultural mistake with chicken.

You see, English people really value chicken breasts – the darker meat on the legs and elsewhere is less valued. So when I was eating chicken with friends a few months after I came here, I kept picking out the legs thinking I was leaving the best meat for everyone else. Then, afterwards, I found out that it’s the other way round with Koreans. So there I was, taking all the best meat, which must have seemed very rude. It’s a shame I didn’t become a vegetarian before coming here, which I was thinking of, but it just seems impossible in Korea.

Fish heads and live food

I’m not really a big fan of eating meat these days, and like a lot of English people I don’t really like food that looks obviously dead either, and really not things that are so fresh they are still moving on the table. Actually, even if there are just fish-heads staring at me on the table, or a food smell I find unpleasant, I find it difficult to eat my own food, which is a problem here.

I find dead fish staring at me all the time – in the sink, in pans, in the freezer. Once I even found them in some nuts I was eating in the dark. I was pretty horrified that I’d been eating them. I thought now that we’ve got lots of pet fish it might be different, but when I asked my wife about the little dead fish on the dinner table and their similarity to the the contents of our aqariums she was horrified - “But this is food and those are pets!” she said. I’m kind of surprised at the ethical side of eating food here.

You see, a lot of people – like my wife and mother-in-law – are Buddhists. I suppose I was strong, but I always believed that meant not harming living things. But, for example, when my brother-in-law caught a big fish and brought it home, my mother-in-law was going to cook it alive, and I can’t understand that. As it happens, she eventually decided not to because she was going to a big temple the next day, so she just let it died in the bowl instead. I suppose that’s better, but it’s not what I expected of Buddhists when I came here. I see these fish and crabs packed into these little bowls or tanks on the street, and that makes me sad, although at least I’ve seen the crabs defend themselves.

The food fights back

I haven’t been the victim of an aggressive crab attack. But my mother-in-law had bought crabs so fresh that they were still moving in the sink as she was pulling them apart. Then she shouted for me in a panic – one of the crabs bit her finger and wouldn’t let go. I’m afraid I looked at her as if to say “Well, what do you expect me to do about it?”; I have no experience with crabs. She managed to get it off and the cut wasn’t too bad, but yes, I learned in Korea you have to be careful, because sometimes the food fights back...

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2010-12-15 @ ~19:30

Busan e-FM Week 4: Social Responsibilities

About 'Open Mike in Busan'
Listen to the segment on Koreabridge

Introduction

In the previous week at Busan e-FM, I talked about a few experiences I’d had living with my Korean parents-in-law. This week, I thought I’d expand on that, and talk about some of my experiences with families, and family responsibilities.

There can be a lot of social responsibilities in Korea

And I really wasn’t prepared for that. I work for myself and I like doing my own thing. So plugging myself into a society where I suddenly have a lot of formalised family obligations, and social responsibilities – well that’s difficult for me. Having said that, maybe a lot of foreigners living in Korea are the same, because I think if you really fit in well with your own society, what are you doing in Korea? But then it often seems to me that the type of foreigners who end up living here are exactly the type of people who really shouldn’t be living in a more socially ordered country like this.

So it’s true that I’ve experienced some serious culture clashes. Sometimes it’s little things. For example, when we first came to Korea my wife told me that we had to go to Namhae to visit her father’s parents to give them a ‘big bow’. The idea of travelling for an entire day, just to go and do the required ‘big bow’, in a place that sounded rather rural and remote, didn’t really appeal to me at all.

Big bows

I didn’t mind that as such, but back then I thought I was only going to be in Korea for a short period, and I still had my job to do, so I was racing against the clock to experience as much of Busan as possible, in what little free time I had. The idea of spending a day on a bus, just to bow in front of a couple of people because it was a form of social obligation – well it just made me wonder what else I’d have to do in Korea because other people demanded it.

Actually though, foreigners wrote about the ‘big bows’ last year on an Internet forum here in Korea, and I was shocked to learn that some of them actually refuse to do the ‘big bow’ - even to their parents-in-law. They say it’s dehumanising – demeaning. Well, I know I can be difficult sometimes, but maybe this means it’s nothing compared to some other foreigners.

So the grandparents got their ‘big bow’, and then there was a funeral

So I went to see my grandparents-in-law, and they got their big bow. And it’s just as well, because a few months later my wife’s grandmother died suddenly. Then of course, we had to go back for the funeral. That was when the whole family responsibility thing really shocked me, because it turns out that I’m sort of the eldest son of the eldest son, so I had to get involved and I ended up helping to carry the coffin.

There were a lot of rituals to go through – we were there for two days – and then there were more responsibilities afterwards, like going back for another ceremony on the 49th day after the death. My father-in-law had to move down to Namhae to help his father with the small farm he lives on, because apparently that was his responsibility, and that was a huge change – because it meant my mother-in-law was on her own then. So I really felt it was our responsibility to move in with her. Lots of things changed, and people didn’t seem to have a choice.

Do you take this country to be your lawfully wedded wife?

You know, I didn’t react so badly to all these sudden family responsibilities. I’d been here long enough by then to know that when you marry a Korean, you marry the culture, the traditions the attitude and of course, you definitely marry the family. But families are difficult things. I didn’t really agree to live with my brother-in-law, but he lost his job and came back home for a while. Each extra family member that lives with us feels like a bit more privacy and space lost for me, but what can you do?

I don’t talk with my brother-in-law, which is strange. He doesn’t speak any English, and I can’t really communicate in Korean. But the truth is, the job market isn’t good for him, so he hasn’t done much in the last year. If he spoke English we’d talk. Actually I’m a few years older than him so – according to my wife – if I were Korean I would have given him the talk by now, you know – get back up on your feet. It must be hard. He needs some sympathy and motivation, or maybe, in the Korean hierarchical system, he needs his older brother figure to put pressure on him.

The language barrier stops you living up to your social responsibilities

I can’t live up to my Korean social responsibilities because of the language barrier, but I’m not sorry about that. I don’t want to feel it’s my responsibility to kind of lecture people younger than myself.

Actually, he hasn’t visited his grandparents in a long time, and I couldn’t understand it until he said once “when will my job be good enough to visit them?” And that’s the problem isn’t it? It’s not only about showing respect fr your elders, but to go through that, you have to be happy with yourself first, because otherwise they are going to lecture you, and you feel bad enough as it is. To be honest, I understand that because I’ve got a similar problem with my Korean relatives – which is both job and language related.

But it doesn't stop you being on the receiving end of a lecture

There was a big family meal where I met some relatives for the first time. It didn’t start well because they demanded to look at my hands when we were introduced. Do you know what they said? “Soft”. In other words, I hadn’t worked hard enough in my life – I wasn’t one of them.

Then they criticised my lack of Korean language – I’d been here a year by that time - “it’s not good enough”, “you’re not working hard enough”, “this is typical of 미국 사람”, that sort of thing. Yes, I know I’m British, but in my experience, all 외국인 are Americans when we’re in trouble. My wife took this as long as she could, and then she turned to me and said “We’re leaving!” And I guess that was it – we stormed out.

And you can’t avoid them forever

Of course I have seen them since. You really can’t avoid it in Korea can you? But I’m used to family meals being a bit tense, because my family has a lot of differences between them – including religious differences. One of my aunts is a Buddhist fortune teller, and one of my uncles is a Christian pastor. They take their religion very seriously. Chuseok dinners can be... a little difficult. But people have to go because it’s their social obligation. Then again, I find responsibilities are everywhere in Korea, even with friends.

Social responsibility in friendship

We’d been out once in a group and several of us went back to a friend’s apartment for coffee. We ended up sitting in a circle playing this sort of number sequence game called Silent 007 – and if you make a mistake then you have to go into the centre of the circle to be beaten on the back.

We had this 9 year-old girl with us. So when she made a mistake... well, I wasn’t getting involved in hitting her – even if my wife called them ‘gentle poundings’ rather than ‘beatings’. So one of my friends really wasn’t happy about this, and he kind of told me off. “Everyone must take part in the beatings!” he said. And he really meant it. So you know, in the end, I really had to take part, even though I hated it. It was a social responsibility to participate – there was no choice.

Everyone must take part in the beatings

I’m not sure I’m learning to live with all these social responsibilities. As a Westerner – I’m not sure I’ll ever really get used to them. But I guess as long as I’m here, I have to remember what my friend said to me, and see it as good advice for living in Korea: “Everyone must take part in the beatings.”

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan
Koreabridge - Open Mike in Busan audio (MP3)

Air date: 2010-11-17 @ ~19:30

One Hundred Mornings

In England we have special days we mark down in our calendars, and when the day is done we move on, perhaps returning to remember them as annual anniversaries. But when I came to live in Busan, I learned that Koreans are counters of days. So whether it be 100 days after your first date, 100 days after your wedding, 49 days after the death of a loved one, 15 days after Seollal, or some other date of note, people are busy counting them off on a calendar, or perhaps more probably now, their iPhone apps. Maybe it’s this mentality which brought us Hadan’s ‘Five days market’, which being every five days essentially ensures that you never know when to go.

Sometimes the counting isn't indefinite though, because when it comes to personal relationships - as my wife so profoundly told me - "once you get married you tend not to celebrate any more."

The 100th day after a baby is born is a significant event in Korea. If it were not for all the other counting of dates, it might be sadly indicative of the historically high rates of infant mortality here, but as it is, it merely seems another manifestation of the need to mark certain intervals on a calendar. Photos must be taken, and much like with Buddhist offerings, it seems necessary to involve a good amount of food. I'd been busy with work, but had developed a suspicion beforehand that my wife was planning a little more than this, given the number of baby-related Internet browsing and phone calls she seemed to be making. Packages started to arrive.

So it was that by the time the 100th day came, the wall of our lounge was improbably covered with a large printed cloth banner featuring our son's name and face along with the legend "Happy 100th Day", surrounded by the entire world's supply of purple balloons. Our son was wedged in a sitting position on the couch, and the table in front of him was filled with fruit and a cake - into which three numeric candles '1' '0' and '0' were placed.

The photos were taken, but in that respect this was merely a warm-up for the big event that was to come.

It Could Happen to You

I have a psychic Korean aunt, who makes her living travelling around the country dispensing advice about peoples' futures and occasionally cleansing evil spirits using a special dance, along with her spirit guides - an old man and a small boy. I always liked Psychic Aunt because like me she's clearly slightly unhinged, but I didn't much care for her younger spirit guide - while we were back in England he insisted on taking a stuffed toy from our office that we'd been saving for our child. When you're having difficulty having a baby, and someone takes something you'd been saving for if it finally happens, it has an unhappy subtext, especially when that someone is supposed to be able to foretell the future. Perhaps you're entitled to be a bit of an ass when you're dead, but personally I think the dead should hold themselves up to higher standards.

Despite foretelling that I would live an extremely long life and become quite wealthy, neither of which seem very likely at this point, apparently Psychic Aunt is quite well known and very good at what she does. I suppose you'd say she has 'the gift' if you believe in such things. A lot of people in Korea do, and it supposedly runs in my wife's family, so Korean Mother and Korean Brother are both 'seers' too, but they didn't accept the calling when it came to them in an ancestral dream, as it does. I had an ancestral dream once when I was 14. It involved some recently deceased ancestors dressed as death chasing me round a running track, and while I gradually tired they didn't. So I suppose I saw my own future, but they didn't indicate whether it meant I could see other people's.

Their failure to take up the calling hasn't stopped the dreams and premonitions within my immediate Korean family. And to be fair, after about a year of trying, Korean Mother finally had a baby boy dream about two weeks before my wife became pregnant with our son. My background is in science, so while I'm generally dismissive of apparently superstitious nonsense I also try to remain somewhat open minded, and recent psychological research and developments in rather frightening reality-challenging cutting-edge theoretical physics suggest that in actual fact, foreseeing the future might not be quite as ridiculous as it first appears.

I have to admit to being slightly unnerved by some predictions which have been made within my Korean family, and things that have consequently happened over the years. Enough that I've become more open-minded than polite-cynicism would normally dictate. Perhaps it helps that along the way I developed Meniere's Disease, which has given me a more reality-challenging relationship with the concepts of space, time and gravity anyway.

That said, I am not so open-minded that when a conversation begins 'Mother has had a dream', that I don't feel a slight sinking feeling in my stomach at what will come next. Although sometimes that could be the Meniere's - you can never really tell. At the weekend the dream in question was fortuitous money dream which apparently ranked quite highly on the spooky-scale. So my wife bought lottery tickets. Now to me that seems like a leap of faith - who's to say that the dream wasn't telling us to rob an armoured car instead? After all, it wasn't specific about how this money would fortuitously come to us. But lottery tickets it was.

So it was with great faux-excitement that I read the numbers to my wife when she woke up Sunday morning and entered my office brandishing the tickets. But as I read out the first three numbers, and she ticked them off on one of her two tickets, I began to get that unnerving feeling again. And indeed, we'd won the lottery - a prize of 5,000 won. Does this keep Korean Mother's psychic track-record? Perhaps, but the tickets cost 10,000 won.

Apparently she had another dream overnight...

That Was the Year That Was

A few years ago the American company I worked for sent me on a management course which was a predictable exercise in the fascism of extroversion run by morally nihilistic extroverts telling me to be extroverted. I wrote software. Software writers are supposed to be introverts – otherwise we're really not going to be happy sat at our desk on our own all day. But I guess the course had some effect on me because that's when I realised I really wasn't happy about it. So I quit, which probably wasn't the result they were expecting, although perhaps it's just as well because later they sent my boss to jail. While extroverts might run the world but they can be as dumb as rocks in dealing with introverts. I'd set up an Introverts United support group to help raise awareness of our plight, except I wouldn't want to go to the meetings.

So I'm not really an extrovert at heart, but my life in Korea has often been more extroverted, and when Busan e-FM asked me to do a review of my year for the weekly segment I appear in on the station, I was reminded looking through this blog of just how much I got out in the first half of the year, and just how little in the second half due to my wife's advanced pregnancy and the subsequent birth of my son. Our social life inevitably collapsed, and until I met the small group of friends I belong to just before Christmas – yes, this is Korea and it really is a formal group with a name, its own homepage and message forums – I hadn't seen some of them for months.

Which means when I started thinking about what I would talk about on the radio last week, one of the many thoughts which occurred to me as I was forced through the process of putting the year into perspective was that my life had changed from that of a resident tourist eager to experience different places and events, to something more akin to that of a resident – working, commuting, and going out for functional rather than pleasurable reasons.

It's said that the first 100 days of a baby's life can be the toughest for the parents, and I believe I can attest to that. Our son was sick over the Christmas period turning an already difficult introduction to the world of parenting into a marathon sleep-deprived endurance test at a time when I was already very busy with other work. One of the things I never expected about writing a blog was the steady stream of email messages it would provoke. Unfortunately I've had to neglect them over the last week so I'm sorry to anyone who thought I was ignoring them.

This blog has inevitably suffered through a lack of time, and also because I've found that trying to write on five hours sleep a night with a baby screaming in the background is not particularly conducive to the writing process, for me at least.

I said on Busan e-FM on Wednesday that this might be my last year in Korea. My heart isn't really in the language studying process and while I'm putting some of the hours in I find I'm not absorbing it terribly well. Tim, the host of Inside Out Busan, told me that according to research Korean apparently requires around 4,000 hours to gain competency – that's around two years of treating it like a full-time job, an admittedly predictable statistic which I nevertheless find rather discouraging. And yet for me, studying Korean piecemeal – a little here and there – never develops its own momentum with the result that I don't feel like I'm seeing a return on my investment.

I don't want to end up being one of those foreigners who has been here for several years and still relies on their wife to do things, so as much as I actually like Korea, if I can't function independently here I think it's time to move on. In my life I've co-founded three businesses, been the elected representative of 9,000 people, and done work I found important that rewarded me in kind. None of it is terribly important to anyone else but it mattered to me. From that I've become a kind of non-person in Korea that struggles with something as simple as buying tea for a Christmas present in a department store boutique. When people talk about culture shock it's usually the food and the environment they are referring to, but to my mind there's a culture or psychological shock that comes with transitioning from being a highly organised problem solver to an environment where I am constantly the problem that others have to solve.

After the psyche-profile of my now annual Korean medical revealed some numerically high results, they wrote me a rather depressing letter telling me I was depressed, but not clinically so, which was nothing I couldn't have told them myself – it often goes with the territory when you have Meniere's Disease anyway. But given the high numbers of Koreans suffering from stress and unhappiness I took this as a rather positive sign that despite my language difficulties I am gradually becoming more integrated into Korean society. Perhaps things are already looking up.

I didn't write much on my blog last year because I was too busy. I'm still busy, but while I'm not a manic self-publicist and never really cared whether anyone read my blog or what anyone thought about me because of it, I do care about writing it, so as I looked back over it at the end of last year as necessitated by Busan e-FM's request, I was sad that I hadn't really kept it more up to date. I have a huge backlog of outline notes I've made over the months that I intended to write up as posts and never got around to. So this year I might write more. Certainly, I'm going to tackle some of those topics I never quite got around to, which means that the chronological narrative – if there ever truly was one – might be a little off. But I'm writing them anyway, because this is another year I intend to plough on regardless in the face of chaos, confusion and sheer indifference. That was the year that was, and this is the year that will be.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Having a baby in Korea can expose you to a great deal of culturally odd experiences. There are rules about staying in hospital, rules about keeping the rooms there at high temperatures, beliefs that new mothers shouldn't shower for a week, and when the fortune tellers get involved, the minefield of baby naming to navigate. Eventually, those first few weeks pass by and you're left with your newborn at home, and you think things might start to get a little less strange.

But when my wife came into our office and said "I need a picture of a chicken to hang upside down over the baby's bed", I was hardly even surprised even if I had no idea what the reasoning behind it was. Does there come a point where you've been in Korea so long that nothing surprises you any more?

In this case, it seems there an old belief which has its roots in the practices of Korean Shamanism, and the upshot of it is that if your baby is a bit of a handful, doesn't sleep at night - or at all - and generally cries a lot, you should hang a picture of a chicken (or technically I believe, a rooster), upside down over the baby's bed as this will - apparently - be a calming influence. The reasoning is that during pregnancy the baby generally sleeps during the day and is active at night, so the rooster picture is supposed to reverse the cycle, although it's important that the red part of the rooster's head (the 'comb' - really) is exaggerated, hence the reason why my wife extended it with a red colouring pencil.

Now, it occurs to me that several hundred years ago there wasn't an Internet to download chicken images from, and even having the kind of tools and paper around enabling a person to draw a fair representation of a chicken might have been rare, so I can't help wondering if this means that people back then used to hang real chickens - presumably dead ones - upside down over their babies beds. But I'm afraid to ask. When you can walk into your kitchen and find a pig's head staring at you unannounced from the kitchen table - and I have - anything is possible.

By the way, before you rush out to procure your own chicken, drawn or otherwise, I have to tell you that it doesn't work.

When the Smoke Clears

I really don't like mosquitoes, the dreaded Korean 'mogi'. Recently I related some of my mogi-chasing stories to someone here and she seemed to think it was more amusing than I did. When I got home, I asked my wife, "what's so funny about that?" She told me that Korean people don't usually bother enough about mosquitoes to spend an hour out of bed in the middle of the night chasing one with a newspaper. OK, that's fair enough, I may be a little crazy. But look at it this way - I'm a completer-finisher*. (*I wish - I'm actually a dangerously high scoring 'shaper').

But am I crazy enough to want to run trucks around crowded streets spraying insecticide at everyone? No - so who are the crazy ones now?

I didn't see this the first time I was here, but this summer one day I noticed a cloud of smoke in the distance. My first thought - that some old Hyundai Accent had finally reached its expiry point - proved incorrect.

It was, I was told, mosquito spraying. I'd heard about this, but thought it was a practice largely consigned to the past. Apparently not, it seemed, as the scene was repeated every couple of weeks thereafter.

It didn't look very healthy either, as the truck in our area dashed around the narrow streets spewing a chemical cloud behind it leaving people nowhere to hide.

Obviously, the insecticide is designed to kill mosquitoes rather than people, but I can't help thinking that it can't be particularly healthy, even if it won't kill you. And will this chemical concoction still be seen as safe in future? There was a time when people thought DDT was fine too.

But what I didn't expect, was to see one of these chemical spraying trucks do a circuit of the local school ground every two weeks, enveloping the children practising football in thick clouds of insecticide.



But perhaps this means if the Korean national team ever have to play a game in fog, they're bound to win.

Maybe it doesn't cause any lasting damage though. My wife used to run through the smoke chasing the trucks down the street because she said it was fun. That was when she was a child by the way, not recently - which would be more disturbing.

Now I'm a parent though, I watch that mosquito truck making its regular rounds of the local school, and think one day that could be my child enveloped in a chemical soup. I'm not really thrilled at the idea.

But does it work? Well, this summer was amazing for three months - I didn't see a single mosquito. But just as I was contemplating the notion that actually, it really does work, I read that the unusual weather this year meant that mosquito numbers were down significantly. However, as the autumn arrived they emerged with a vengeance. The mogi-trucks are still doing their rounds, I suppose they would argue that it would be worse if they didn't. But how can we know?

Horror Hospital

Recently I wrote about some of the problems my wife and I had experienced with the maternity hospital we were in, but things were going to turn out to be worse for other people in what seemed to me like a perfect storm of Korean cultural issues.

The first aspect of Korean culture which differs from my own country lies in the fundamental nature of the birth experience itself. In Korea, women can – within a period of around four weeks - choose when to give birth; they pick a date and then report to the hospital to be induced or – if this is their preferred option, to have a caesarian section to deliver the baby. Now add to this ability to schedule a birth to the Korean thanksgiving holiday of Chuseok, one of those extremely rare times of the year when family might not be out working 12-hours a day, apparently making it a good time to schedule said birth. Next add in the near total contempt some business owners demonstrate for their customers in Korea, nurtured through a pathological pursuit of profit that might even make a financial trader blush. Add a little of the legendary local construction quality on top, and mix all these things together to achieve predictable results.

So this is what happened. A large number of women checked themselves in to have their babies during the Chuseok holiday, and it was probably double what the hospital could cope with. Normally, the recovery area of the maternity hospital, the 'sanhujoriwon' (산후조리원), takes up three floors – over Chuseok, the hospital expanded it to six by commandeering other floors which were not designed for the purpose. Whereas my wife's room was solely for her with en-suite, a desk, a TV and double bed for the husband to sleep in, the Chuseok mothers ended up in shared rooms with four beds and little else. That makes it no better than a bad British experience, and possibly worse because the already seemingly understaffed Korean hospital had not employed extra personnel for the holiday rush. Crucially for the people here though, this was not what they are accustomed to expecting, and it certainly wasn't what they were sold in the brochure.

And it gets worse. I said the hospital hadn't employed any extra staff, but in fact they'd gone the other way. The cleaning staff had the week off. So you have these new mothers, packed into rooms kept at abnormally high temperatures because of the belief here that this is better for their 'shattered' bodies, there's a lot of sweating and a lot of clothes going in the hospital wash baskets. But now nobody is around to clean them, piles of smelly clothes are building up in the corridors, and mothers are running out of clean clothes to wear. You can imagine the situation with bedding, bearing in mind that many of these women have undergone operations or procedures and were still bleeding.

And then there was the woman in the room next to us. Like my wife, she had been lucky enough to have her baby just before Chuseok, so she had a room to herself as she was supposed to. But the bathroom had a drainage problem. It was fitted incorrectly with the drainage grate too high, so after showering water would just collect creating an indoor pool. The room isn't exactly new so presumably it's been like this since it was built two or three years ago. She complained to the Sanhujoriwon Director - he offered her a small tool to push the water uphill into the pipe. She'd just given birth and could hardly walk, but the Samhujoriwon Director apparently thought nothing of her bending over pushing water around the floor. She protested.

Was he embarrassed? Afraid? His response was “If you don't like it, I have plenty of other women who would gladly have your room.” And sadly he was probably right, because when you're packed into a small room with three other women with no facilities whatsoever, you'd certainly see a single room with an inch of standing water in the bathroom as an upgrade. This is not really a good excuse, and it reminds me of the time I found a long black hair baked into my pizza at an expensive restaurant in Busan, and when we complained, the manager looked at us incredulously and said “well, it's only one.” On the face of it, Korea often seems to have a positive customer service culture – but perhaps only because they want to sell you something – once the transactions is done, attitudes can rapidly change – not always, but often enough to make you feel like you're stepping into a minefield every time.

It must have been bad because the husbands got unionised and all went to see the Hospital Director to complain, and by this time you can probably guess how that went. 'If you don't like my hospital, pick another!' I understand that a private Internet forum for mothers in Busan is now buzzing with anger about it, so word of mouth may at least provide a little karmic retribution.

Given the appalling conditions in the lower decks it almost seems churlish to mention another area in which the experience fell below expectations, but I will for completeness. The 'samhujoriwon' experience is about recovery and education, with mothers attending various classes to help them transition from hospital to coping on their own with their babies. There were no classes during Chuseok which meant that of the ten days of activities promised, many women only got seven. It's understandable that this is just bad luck and while I would expect cleaning to continue during the holiday, educational classes are a bit much to ask for. But there certainly won't be any refunds for the women who were short changed in this and other ways during the holidays. By this time, I couldn't say I was surprised.

Can I name and shame the hospital here? Sadly, probably not. The way things seem to work here is that criticising companies in public can easily lead to lawsuits. And in a nutshell, this tells you a lot about reason why the Hospital Director all but laughed in the faces of his patients and their families.

The problems I detail above effected others far more than they effected my wife. We were lucky – if you can call it luck - to have our own room away from some of the horrors. But I asked my wife, in principle rather than with intention, what could we have done to formally complain about the hospital had we suffered like some others had suffered. I was curious. She really wasn't sure, because often it seems people really don't ask those kind of questions here. I had an idea that ultimately, hospitals had to be licensed, and medical companies that ask new mothers to crawl around the bathroom floors of understaffed hospitals in dirty clothes are probably not what the government have in mind when handing out those licenses. So one imagines there must be some mechanism for calling people who run institutions like this to account. But it's not really my problem and it's a given that the Koreans who suffered won't take action either. Nothing will change. Meanwhile the Korean Government will keep talking about their desire to promote medical tourism to Korea within the Asian region, with discounts for properly qualified plumbers, presumably.

Your Name Here

It's normal for Westerners to name their children once they are born - or even before. In fact, the traditional Catholic dogma of my upbringing almost demands it insofar as an unchristened babies are left in limbo, or at least they used to be until the infallible Church changed its mind three years ago. But leaving organised religion aside, it seems sensible that a baby should have a name, rather than simply being 'the baby' or any other range of personal pronouns.

This is not the traditional Korean way. The foetus is given a nickname which often sticks until a name is chosen two or more weeks after the baby is born, which is when the advice of a fortune-teller/Chinese character naming specialist is sought - they suggest the most fortuitous names, and how to write them in Chinese, based on the baby's date and time of birth, and the father's surname. You can't know some of these things until after the birth, ergo it is impossible to properly name the child beforehand.

Choosing a Surname

The first problem to be tackled was the thorny subject of the surname. Korean family names almost always one-syllable whereas my Irish one has four and consists of eight characters. This causes problems within Korea's bureaucracy because it doesn't always fit into databases which were designed exclusively for homogeneous domestic use. And if my son was to inherit my family name we feared it would really mark him out as a non-Korean, and only add to the problems he's likely to face growing up here. On the other hand we knew he was going to have to live with being different - it wasn't as though the surname was the only issue. An additional complication was that unlike the Western tradition, wives don't take on their husbands' surnames in Korea and neither did mine. So perhaps someone was going to feel left out one way or the other.

We made the decision to keep my surname, and choose a Korean first name. This condemns our son to having an impossibly long name by Korean standards, but on the plus side if he ever gets conscripted he probably won't be chosen for dangerous missions, because by the time they've called out his name the war will be over.

Choosing a First Name

I believed choosing the first name would be the easier decision. It wasn't, and not just because of the need to consult a fortune-teller/naming specialist whose decision we didn't want to be beholden to. We needed a name that my wife felt was a good Korean one, and which was relatively easy to pronounce for my relatives back home. It needed to be non-embarrassing if our son ever lives in the West, which ruled out a lot of 'hos' and 'suks' amongst others. It needed to be modern, which seemed to dash my hopes of naming my son after a famous Korean physicist on the principle that it was something more to aspire to than the usual bland meanings behind Korean names such as 'noble' or 'heroic'.

I tried to do some research but apparently Western websites mainly list Korean baby names which most Koreans have never heard of or find laughable. We spent six months before the birth gathering ideas but nothing leapt out at us and we had to wait for the naming specialist's suggestions anyway.

Korean Mother Comes Down From the Mountain

Then a few days after my wife gave birth I was sat at my desk when Korean Mother entered the room and announced a new name I hadn't heard before. I assumed it was just another idea but then she came back shortly afterwards with it written down. She repeated it verbally, pointing out while doing so the corresponding Korean characters which I was perfectly capable of reading on my own. It seemed to have come from Korean Father down in Namhae. The mood had changed. There was something serious about this. It was as though she'd just come from from Mount Sinai with the ten commandments on stone tablets and put them in front of me.

I didn't really know what she was getting at, but what irked me was that the name was written as my wife's Korean surname followed by the newly chosen first name. My surname was nowhere to be seen. I suddenly wondered whether to her, this was going to be his name, and this is what she'd be calling him, possibly along with everyone else. It's bad enough that my own identity is being eroded here, without watching my son's vanish before my eyes. I gave her my best "thanks but don't call us, we'll call you" look, and in return I got the "I find your lack of faith disturbing" face back. I texted my wife in hospital.

Our Plan Versus What Actually Happened

So here is what we planned to happen. When my wife finally escaped the hospital we would go see a fortune-teller, get a handful of suggestions based on the specifics of our baby's date and time of birth, and then we choose one of them, or something else entirely. It's the well-worn path a friend who has just given birth went down.

Here is what actually happened. Korean Father recruited an allegedly famous fortune-teller from his social network to do his thing and we got one name back - and only one - and this is the name that had landed on my desk. Through being a police officer, Korean Father knows some... interesting people, so, given that the name of our child is quite important, I just wanted to check how he knew the naming specialist. Well, yes, he had been in prison. OK, but at least tell me it wasn't for fraud I asked half-jokingly. Sure enough... But my wife liked the name anyway.

Several hours later two friends of ours visit the hospital and out of nowhere, and apparently on the spur of the moment while brainstorming, one of them suggested two names that I actually rather liked. In fact one of them seemed rather clever because it's a fusion of the Korean words for 'Korea' and 'England' and it's actually used as a real Korean name, although my wife feels it lacks the levity of the fortune-teller's option, and it might be a little old fashioned. Anyway, I'm in no position to decide on the suitability of a first name.

But we knew that if we chose the fortune-teller's singular suggestion then we'd always have the vague feeling that he named our baby, not us. If we didn't choose it, every time our son suffers a misfortune it's possible that my wife is going to think that somehow it might not have happened if we'd chosen the right name for him. In other words, the moment that name landed on my desk it was probably a done deal.

We decided to consult another naming specialist to try and break the spell, but I'm not sure this was entirely to Korean Mother's approval. An animated discussion on the subject took place in my wife's room at the hospital and although I didn't think Korean Mother was particularly happy I didn't read too much into it because honestly, Busan people can talk about what they had for lunch and make it sound like an international crisis. But here's the thing. I'd spent a lot of one-to-one time with Korean Mother since my wife went into hospital and we became something of a double act as we laughed our way from one attempt to communicate to the next. Walking home together after the hospital that night was no laughing matter, because it was in total silence.

The second naming specialist provided us with ten additional suggestions, and also told us that the name recommended by the first specialist was "no good". But predictably most of the new names could be immediately ruled out for incompatibility with English or English pronunciation. And my wife still liked the original name, so it stuck.

Although...

Just as we accepted our son's new name in our mind, it turned out that Korean Father had given the wrong time of birth to the first naming specialist, potentially changing the baby's fortune and rendering the name inappropriate. But Korean Father didn't want to contact him again to tell him because of the loss of face this would involve, which left us at an impasse. My wife eventually got in touch with the specialist to be told that the hour difference "didn't matter".

But somewhere quite far along the way it had also become apparent that the chosen name - and its 'flow' of strokes in Chinese characters, was in any case based on the incorrect premise of my son having my wife's Korean surname. Since this wouldn't be the case, it rendered the whole process suspect at best.

And that's the story of how I set out with aspirations of naming my son after a famous scientist and actually finished up having him named by a convicted fraudster.