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The Other Korean Wave

I mentioned in an earlier posting written while visiting Taiwan in 2005 that, in addition to media products such as Korean movies and dramas, there is another “Korean wave” out there.

As I mentioned in that posting, “Korean-style plastic surgery” (韓風整形) can be found advertised on the streets of Taipei. In this advertising we see a “before” and “after” shot indicating how a customer might be transformed into Bae Yong-jun:

On my recent trip to Shandong, I discovered that this was not limited to Taiwan but can also been seen in mainland China. In fact, the main shopping street of Jinan (which includes a Walmart and various famous brand clothing stores) was lined on both sides for several hundred meters with an illuminated advertisement for “Korean-style plastic surgery” (韓氏整形). This time, instead of Bae Yong-jun, they chose the image of a woman in a hanbok to give it an authentic look.

Code-Switching Spotting and Living Korean History

I spent the afternoon in a coffee shop mining footnotes of various secondary accounts of the violence in the autumn of 1946 (it is also known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, the October People’s Resistance, the October Riot Incident, the October Rebellion, and the Taegu Uprising) to see if I have been missing anything.

I thought to myself, you know, it is kind of depressing to see how little is actually available in Korean sources, as far as I have been able to find out so far, and especially when compared to the wealth of materials of widely varying quality coming out on the various violent uprisings in South Korea in 1948 (Yŏsu, Cheju-do, and so on). Though American military materials abound, in general, I been somewhat underwhelmed by the relative lack of accounts of the 1945-50 period on the Korean side. The explanation I hear everywhere is that the devastation of the Korean War of 1950-3 is much to blame.

Just as I was pondering this problem, two elderly men sat down next to me and carried on a conversation. Although the loud espresso machine in the background made it difficult, I overheard some of their conversation and could recognize my favorite linguistic phenomenon:

わざわざ…followed by some Korean
しがつはつか（四月二十日）완전히…more Korean
근대おれは…more Japanese
すまないな, 지난번…more Korean
あれはね、…followed by Korean sentence.

Some excellent code-switching going on. Sentences seemed to only switch completely into Korean when discussion got fast or emotional, but would switch back to Japanese at the beginning of a new topic with Korean words sprinkled in here and there in the middle of sentences, and the middle of Korean sentences throughout the conversation would get a Japanese word here and there, as if for emphasis.

This is something I have written about here at Muninn on several occasions (A code switching family in Seoul, code-switching in Taiwan, Japanese-Chinese code-switching couple in Taiwan, Chinese-English code switching in a Harvard campus coffee shop). It was something I saw on a number of occasions in Taiwan amongst older Taiwanese though, with the exception of older Koreans speaking to me in Japanese (such the Korean war stories I heard from this gentleman and this retired policeman) I have been looking forward to finding the same thing in Korea, where I know it happens.

After listening for a few minutes, I took advantage of a moment of silence between the two elderly friends and jumped in, using Japanese. A delightful conversation ensued, which eventually ended up in exactly the kind of code-switching between Korean and Japanese that was going on before I joined in, but now with some English thrown in (one of the two had worked 4 years in the US) here and there as well.

Both learnt their Japanese as children, having completed primary school during the colonial period. They were 13 and 14 when the colonial period ended, and were both a small minority in a good quality school made up of mostly Japanese students. “One day, our Japanese friends suddenly told us they had to go to Japan because they lost the war,” said one, “to which I replied, ‘Why do you have to go to Japan? Weren’t you born here?'” One was born and raised in Taegu, but was now living and still working in Japan, while the other grew up in Seoul. I asked the man from Taegu if he remembers anything about the violence in the autumn of 1946, he said someone told him about seeing the corpses of policemen being dragged by ropes through the streets, but he didn’t see anything himself.

I asked them about their Korean war experience. The man from Seoul says that he and his family were kidnapped by North Korean militia and taken to a town north of P’yŏngyang and put into a labor team, and that he was held for 100 days. He said every day was a nightmare there, his mother praying for their survival every day. He says he has almost blocked every memory of the experience out, “When I close my eyes all I can see is an image of the 태극기 flag.” He said that he escaped with his family when the US troops reached the area in the autumn of 1950. He then walked back to South Korea. His friend sitting across the table said, “I have never heard this story! Why do you tell this stranger but you’ve never told me this story?” He replied that this was a really painful (つらい) memory for him and he doesn’t want to recall it (思い出したくない).

I told them the biggest obstacle for people like me studying the period 1945-50 is the lack of materials. Even if the memories are painful, I encouraged them both to write down their stories, and like the boom of Japanese publishing their memoirs and diaries of wartime experiences in Japan in the last few decades has done, give historians and younger generations a chance to hear their stories. One of the guys answered, “いや、韓国は日本じゃない。ここでは、そういうような書く문화がない。” (Korea is not Japan. Here we don’t have that kind of culture of writing) Is that fair? Perhaps that generation just needs a bit more time and a bit more encouragement?

Protect the Environment, Save Bumf

With minor modifications, I think this has to be my favorite new slogan:

This sign can be found in the bathrooms of Jinan airport in China.¹ A loose translation of the Chinese might go something like this, “Support the protection of the environment, use only what [toilet] paper you need.” (or “be economical in your use of paper”) I had never heard the word bumf before so I thought it might be a misspelling but the closest word I could think of that made sense was “Bambi.”

Bumf is, in fact, a real word. I must have missed it during my GRE preparations. From the OED:

[Short for bum-fodder (see BUM n.1 4).]

Toilet-paper; hence, paper (esp. with contemptuous implication), documents collectively. Also attrib.

1889 BARRÈRE & LELAND Dict. Slang, Bumf (schoolboys), paper… A bumf-hunt is a paper-chase. 1912 V. WOOLF Let. 16 Nov. in Woolf & Strachey Lett. (1956) 46 Is this letter written upon Bumf? It looks like it. 1930 WYNDHAM LEWIS Apes of God (1932) v. 161 Low-lid fodder or high-brow bumph! 1930 E. RAYMOND Jesting Army I. vi. 90 The Brigadier pushed back the mess accounts to me and said, ‘You’ll keep all that bumf till next time, won’t you, padre?’ 1938 E. WAUGH Scoop II. iv. 211, I shall get a daily pile of bumf from the Ministry of Mines. 1957 M. K. JOSEPH I’ll soldier no More (1958) 21 Matthews is bringing the bumf… He says be sure and type it on Army Form A2.

bum-fodder, L. anitergium, hence, worthless literature.

The more I think about it, this slogan has many possible uses that go beyond bathroom walls. You know that US law which is designed to reduce paperwork? You can find reference to it at the bottom of many government documents in the small print. They could rename the law, “Protect the environment, reduce bumf!”

You know the kind of academic scholarship with a gargantuan theoretical superstructure which ultimately has absolutely nothing interesting to say? We could start a movement under the slogan, “Protect the environment, reduce bumf!”

The possibilities are nearly inexhaustible. The word bumf clearly deserves a period of renewal.

Apparently, I am not the only one on the internet who has noticed this sign. Another Konrad has posted a picture of the sign on flickr. Other references can be found here and there. [↩]

Library Glasses Department

I spent an hour or two on Shandong Normal University campus in Jinan and noticed an interesting addition to the services available at their university library.

The sign on the left reads:

Library Glasses Department (in red)
Accurate Eye Examination, Fast Delivery of Glasses (in blue)

Similar info on the vertical sign.

That the library would have its own optical department may be attributed to the fact that lights are often not bright enough (In Jinan metropolitan museum the day before I could barely see the paintings hung inside the exhibition room it was so dark) but it could be that the heavy reading loads the young students of Beijing Normal University must face make this a conveniently accessible service. Come to think of it, perhaps every large university library should consider this strategic addition?

Promoting Transparency in Dental Work

I was walking through the back streets of a neighborhood in northeastern Jinan the other day and, among the restaurants one can usually find on the street side, I found myself curiously watching a dentist perform his work while another patient (?) waited by the door.

Are You Korean?

I caught a taxi today to visit the Baotuquan（趵突泉）springs here in Jinan. I asked the driver what my chances were of catching a cab to the airport around 5:30 in the morning on Monday to get to Jinan airport to return to Korea and how long it would take from my hotel. After he answered, the driver went silent for a bit and then asked,

你是韩国人吗？ Are you Korean?

The question came across quite sincere. On the one hand it seems reasonable to ask someone who is “returning” to Korea if they are Korean. On the other hand, one might also say it is reflective of a kind of ignorance of the fact that the vast majority of Korean citizens are anything but blond caucasians. It is possible that this driver may not, like other Chinese I have met here, have been watching Korean dramas and may not know much at all about the people of that peninsula other than, perhaps, that China fought a war there to “resist America” (抗美战争）and its “aggression” against North Korea in the 1950s. Or perhaps the driver assumed, quite reasonably, that, like China with its dozens of recognized ethnic groups, Korea too had an ethnic minority of caucasian-looking people living somewhere up in the hills where we preserve our language and traditional costumes. However, this is the second time that a Chinese person I met (the other time was a student of around high school age I met in Beijing years ago who asked me, in the presence of some Japanese friends, if I was Japanese) who only used my race to put me into the category of “foreigner” when seeing me and not immediately assuming that I could not be a citizen of some other Asian country.

Another example of this kind of relatively rare experience suggests that this doesn’t have to be due to any kind of ignorance about the relative racial homogeneity that still prevails in places like Japan and Korea, despite recent immigration. Once when I was at Taipei airport in Taiwan returning to Japan, where I was living at the time, I met a Korean citizen who was born and raised in Japan (在日), spoke only Japanese and no Korean or much English. We met at the bus stop at the then “Chiang Kai-shek airport” and soon discovered we were both heading to Tokyo. Although she was traveling as a Korean, she told me she was actually right now in the process of getting Japanese citizenship, over the strong opposition of her grandparents in Japan. After a few sentences exchanged in Japanese, she asked me, “Are you Japanese?”

As someone who lived her entire life in Japan and who spoke no language but Japanese, her question, again completely serious, can’t be blamed on any ignorance of the racial makeup of Japan. Instead, perhaps because of her own situation, she didn’t immediately associate being Japanese, as many others who grew up in that country would, with belonging to any particular ethnic group or race. She asked the question as we might reasonably ask someone of any race, who spoke with an American accent, if they were American (though even in this case, racial minorities like Asian-Americans will often get the, “Where are you from from,” question to get them to answer where their non-caucasian immigrant ancestors came from).

Given the reality of immigration in places like Korea and Japan, the time may come, in a decade or two, when this question becomes more common and natural.

The Dangers of a Sample Size of One

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!

NYT is not blocked in China but CNN is

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the blog here at Muninn.net appears to be blocked in China. I have tried it from several internet cafes (网吧) here in Jinan and in addition to failing to load, on one occasion I was greeted with a scary alert box that told me I had tried to access a dangerous website. Clicking on the “OK” button shut down all my open browser windows in punishment.

Strangely, the New York Times is not blocked. CNN is, however, blocked. I’m not sure what mysterious logic is at work here, if any. Clearly CNN has made critical reports about China and it would seem to be in the interests of a totalitarian regime to make at least some minor effort to prevent its people from being exposed to it, unless they check into an expensive hotel and watch CNN on the hotel TVs that show it. However, why not also prevent them from seeing the series of highly critical NYT articles on China’s environment in the lead-up to the Olympics this summer? I was able to access all of these articles here in Jinan without the use of web proxies.

A Great Leap Towards Civilization

Interesting sign above the urinals in the bathroom at Jinan airport:

靠前一小步 Move forward a small step
文明一大步 Make a great stride towards civilization

The English translation provided on the sign itself was somewhat less inspirational and certainly more obscure:

To preceding half step, a civilized stride

Are you Satisfied with Your Immigration Officer?

I am writing this in Jinan, China where I’m visiting for just a few days to help prepare for a year of research in China next year and visiting Shandong University to meet a few professors. Since the blog here at Muninn.net has somehow angered the Chinese censors and is blocked, I’ll post this entry when I return to Korea.

Arriving at Jinan airport and standing in line to go through immigration the usual discomfort I feel in such a situation was significantly reduced when I saw how incredibly smiley and friendly the immigration officer was being to everyone in front of me. Even the super friendly immigration officers I have been fortunate enough to meet on occasion in other countries (especially in Taiwan and once in Japan) usually preserved their stern and gloomy look until after they opened my passport. This officer looked like she thought this was the best job ever. Perhaps this was her first day, I thought to myself.

When I reached the counter I couldn’t help noticing a machine there I have never had to use going through a country’s immigration proceedings. Was it the dreaded fingerprint reader or something similar? No, it was a control panel that looked like a little electronic calculator. It had four buttons, two in red and two in green: “Immigration was too slow” – “Unsatisfactory customer service” – “Satisfied” – “Greatly Satisfied”