Muninn

I am a bit sad to think I will be leaving this wonderful island in just over two weeks. I have really grown quite attached. I could easily stay here another 6 months or a year since I really feel like I have just barely scratched the surface here, both in terms of the people and culture as well as the materials that might potentially be useful to me in my dissertation research.

It is the little things about life here that really just make me smile. To give one little example, for the 3rd time in a row, as I walked home from the NTU library around 21:00, I saw a group of elderly residents of a neighborhood I pass through lounging in one of the many small parks and watching a Kung Fu movie on one of those large projector screens. The event doesn’t look very formal or organized, so I can only imagine that one of the locals dragged out the projector and large screen so the neighborhood could all watch it together.

I am no longer subscribing to the konrad.lawson.net website (though I am keeping the email at that domain) since it was an expensive and limited hosting deal that I started over ten years ago, when 5MB seemed like a lot for web space.¹ The quality of the hosting, the annoyances of not controlling the domain, and the fact many sites on this host dropped out of Google’s index convinced me to recently drop the web part of the account.

Muninn.net will be my primary home on the web. There are some pages on the old site that I will upload again when they have been redesigned here, including some old picture pages.

1. The oldest version cached on the Wayback Machine is from 2000 but I had it a few years before that, having transferred the site from my undergraduate web page, which I first created a few years before this earliest cached version found here in 1997. [↩]

My Fulbright in Korea has ended, as has a year of language study and dissertation research in Seoul. I moved to Taiwan on Monday and will be here in Taipei until the end of the summer. I’m quite fond of this island and look forward to shifting my research to Chinese language sources. I just moved into a new apartment today and am pretty much up and running in my new life here.

Spent the weekend in Kanghwa-do with a friend. I have never been one for the usual tourist destinations so many of the highlights of the island listed in tourist brochures went unseen. The highlight for me was the hike on the first day through some hills on a small country road in the south of the island, through some farmers’ fields and along the southern coast of the island to a popular beach. Since the island is so close to North Korea, the coastline was actually a military restricted area but we walked unmolested along most of it. A man on a bicycle passing by told us it was restricted but we learned from soldiers at the next checkpoint that he was a high ranking officer out on a bike ride. When we told the biker/officer we were trying to walk along the coast to the beach, he let the soldiers further down the path know that we were harmless and to let us through. The many empty checkpoints and observation boxes along the coast had human shaped plastic scarecrows that could be set up to look like people were manning the positions.

We ended up not climbing any of the hills on the island, which in any case average around 350 meters. I’m actually glad, the hordes of other climbers, all clad in standard Korean hiking uniforms and equipment reminded me of climbing on Halla-san in Cheju-do where we essentially stood in line to get up the mountain behind hundreds of people (including groups of women sweating through their heavy make-up). Much more enjoyable was the wonderful and quiet stroll along forested country roads we got on Saturday afternoon when a local told us how to get through the hills to the coast the fastest way by an older road not marked on many maps. I recommend these country strolls in Korea as a wonderful alternative to the industrial tourist staircase that is so much hiking in Korea. You can often find yourself behind so many mountaineers you might have guessed you were on a subway stairway at rush hour if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is wielding useless metal poles and carrying plastic mats to keep the rear of their expensive and fashionable hiking pants from getting any dirt on them when they sit down.

A few places that got saved on my GPS from the weekend:

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I haven’t had a chance to blog much about it but I made a trip of almost a week to Cheju-do. The original purpose was for a Fulbright researcher conference where all the junior researchers presented on the progress of their research but I went early with one of my fellow researchers because the conference was only a few days after April 3rd. This year is the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the April 3rd, 1948 uprising on Cheju island. We went early to participate in various memorial events, visit the Cheju 4.3 peace park, and the huge museum just opened in the park, and I was also able to attend an international conference on the uprising. I may blog more about Cheju 4.3 over at Frog in a Well - Korea but in the meantime, here is a quick google map mashup of places visited, something I was able to create quickly since I saved various locations on my GPS reader.

View Larger Map

I spent a few hours in the Shandong provincial library here in Jinan this morning to pass the time while I waited for an appointment with a professor at Shandong University. After spending less than ten minutes to get a one year library card for 15RMB (Using my Chinese name 林蜀道, American passport, writing down Harvard as my 单位, my parents’ Oklahoma address for my home address, and my Korean cellphone for my cellphone—it is so incredibly refreshing to be in a place where I can do this kind of thing without a citizen registration number or even a local address. Note: if you want to check out books you have leave them a 100RMB deposit.) I poked around the various reading rooms in order to see whether this might be a useful place to visit more often when I move to Shandong later this year.

In order to enter the “Shandong local materials” room on the fifth floor I had to sign in at the door. I like the fact that people I have met in China over the years are not often surprised to see that I can write Chinese characters, in stark contrast to the amazement this frequently generates if I write in the simple Korean writing system in Korea or the mix of writing systems used in Japan. However, around two thirds of the time, when Chinese people notice that I’m writing with my left hand they will express their surprise by telling me, “You write with your left hand!” I usually just smile, agree, nod, and keep writing instead of adding that, unlike many of my fellow lefties in places like China, I was not subject to abuse throughout my childhood that forced me to use my right hand.

Today however, there was an interesting addition to this common exchange when a cleaning lady who had come over to watch me sign in added her own observation.

Librarian: 你是用左手的！ You use your left hand!
Me: 对. Yup.
Cleaning Lady (with confidence): 对，他们都是用左手的！ Ya, they all use their left hand!

This weekend, I started a complete rewrite of my personal homepage, which is long overdue. I designed the last one back in 2000 and some of the text there still reflects this. Also, for a long time now, my homepage at konrad.lawson.net has not been showing up in the Google database at all, and I have confirmed that it is the host which is the problem.

Thus, together with a redesign of the webpage, I am moving it here to Muninn. Now if you go to Muninn.net top level page you will find my personal homepage and this blog can be found linked via the “Projects” page of the new homepage along with other online sites I have created. I will eventually forward konrad.lawson.net to the new home here at Muninn and phase that older site out.

The new site is a work in progress, but so was the last one—which it remained after seven years.

On my way back to Seoul after two weeks or so in the United States I looked through the past year’s worth of pictures, calendar events, diary entries, blog postings, audio recordings, and emails—the historical archive of my life in the year 2007. What kind of narrative can be constructed from the mountain of fragments of so recent a past? What failures and tragedies omitted? What triumphs will be glorified? What distortions will my own reflections produce?

The first five months of the year find me in Cambridge, MA for the Spring semester of the third year of my PhD program in history. I lived in an apartment some fifteen minutes walk from the university campus together with one of my best friends and fellow historians Fabian who, in addition to filling my dinners and evenings with the joys of wonderful and highly educational conversations, introduced me to the wonders that are balsamic vinegar and hummus. Not to be laughed at, these two new additions to my heavily bread-based diet provide me with two possible replacements for cheese when the environment (e.g. the USA and Korea) has little worthy of the name to offer.

The year opens with a bang as my fellow third year PhD students and I desperately assemble that prophetic document: the Dissertation Prospectus. The process of making third year students assemble a dissertation prospectus, as I came to understand it at the time, is designed to measure three important skills of the Academicus Novitius in the three following tasks.

• The first is the bread and butter of the institution: to demonstrate a mastery of the literature and expansive knowledge about a field which one has yet to master and has, as yet, little knowledge about. For this, the process of preparing for one’s oral examinations in the second year has provided ample training.
• Second, to ask an interesting and broad question related to one’s topic and explain in some detail what fascinating answers and claims such a question might lead to. The trick with this second task, apparently, is not to seem to know the answer already - since one has yet to begin one’s research into the question such a presumption would be deeply problematic - but also one must not seem like one has no answer to the question because this leaves open the terrifying dual possibility that either a) the answer is unattainable or at least beyond the reach of a humble graduate student or b) the answer is completely uninteresting.
• Finally, the prospectus is designed to measure the basic oracular proficiency of the graduate student. This is closely linked with the second task. The prospectus is essentially a prophetic document, wherein one predicts which books and archives will be found useful, what methodology will be found effective, and what structure and argument the as yet unwritten and un-researched dissertation will ultimately take. Unfortunately, one is not permitted to present the prospectus in Delphic riddles, which is a shame, since the preparation would probably be much more fun. I believe the entire ritual ought best be concluded with a ceremonial burying of the prospectus in a time capsule, perhaps under the floor of the history department’s lower library, where the prospectus conference is held. This might be combined with the digging up of the prospectuses of PhD candidates who have just submitted their dissertation. Those who wrote a dissertation remotely resembling their prospectus could get an award, perhaps the “Order of Delphi,” and the third year students could all look on in admiration.

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While descending some stairs into the Shinchon subway station here in Seoul, Korea this evening, I was stopped by a boy perhaps five or six years old. Blocking my path, he smiled brightly and said, “안녕하세요” (a Korean greeting). I waved to the kid and replied with the same, “안녕하세요.”

Hearing my reply, the boy suddenly assumed a scornful expression, widened his stance slightly and put his arms on his hips. I was then asked in an angry tone, without, I might add, any of the linguistic deference the Korean language usually dictates in the case of a child addressing someone of my age, “Why didn’t you say it in English?”

Taken aback, I realized I had completely failed to live up to my responsibilities as a blonde white foreigner in Korea, and quickly repented. I bowed deeply and gave him a very exaggerated English, “Hello!”

This appeared to satisfy the pretentious little punk. He gave me a very condescending nod of the head, accompanied with an audibly dismissive, “Hmmph,” before allowing me to pass and continuing his way up the stairs.

Though it made no difference to me, I hope that, as my young friend ages, someone will get the chance to tell him that English is not necessarily the default language of choice for all Caucasions in the world.

I must say though that, for some reason, this short exchange made my evening.

The first of January is a rather arbitrary time to talk about new beginnings, especially for students whose lives revolve around the academic year. However, the beginning and end of my academic year tend to be much busier so I suppose now is best time to reflect on all that has happened in the past dozen months.
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