Buddha, are you there? It’s me, Jeffrey.

One Saturday evening in December of 2001, my mother dropped a bombshell on my sister and me: she would be having a friend over the next afternoon.

Not just any friend (of which she has precious few already), but a white friend – her only white friend, a work colleague named Colleen.  And as my mother was likely Colleen’s only Asian friend, she decided to Chines-ify our house.  Supplementing the Christmas tree and the wreath on the front door, she placed on our coffee table a statue of a beaming, overweight Buddha, with miniature porcelain children climbing on the massive flabs of skin falling out over his robes.

I threw a tantrum very unbecoming of my twelve years of age.  Why did we have to welcome this strange woman into our house?  Why did we have to be so ostentatiously Chinese?  And why did my mother worship this … obese, slit-eyed giant?

My mother is a Buddhist, but growing up as a non-Buddhist, I had no conception of what Buddhism was.  My mother wasn’t particularly devout, either.  The only things she did were:

• burn incense for her ancestors at a temple once a year, when she lived in Hong Kong, and
• because once, she woke up terrified in the middle of the night unable to move – which she attributes to Buddha, in all his obese glory, sitting on and thereby pinning her torpid body to the bed – she made a promise to give up beef, so that Buddha would protect my sister and me.  I’ll grant you that it’s a sweet story and a very giving thing for a mother to do.  But, note that:
  • She thought this story was too frightening to tell us.  We – again, we were pre-teens and not Buddhist – we thought she was a little loopy.
  • She gave up beef, but was unable to give up beef stock.

We didn’t begrudge my mother her Buddhism.  What we did resent was his obesity.  Why would you believe in someone who chooses to be fat?  Obviously he’s not eating right, and therefore not a good role model.  Even my mother constantly judges fat Chinese kids.  Hypocrisy much?

Also, from a strictly linguistic perspective, why is there a silent ‘h’ in Buddha?  Obviously, Buddha did not respect phonics.

Fast forward ten years.  I’ve grown up, I’m in Korea for the summer, I’m much more open-minded, and my well-travelled Aunt Wendy has encouraged me to do a templestay, where one stays at a Buddhist temple for a period of time and participates in all of the activities that the monks typically would.  It wasn’t easy finding a temple that fit our requirements:

• we wanted a weekend program because Nic worked at an adoption agency during the week;
• the temple had to be close to Seoul, in order for Nic to get back to work, but …
• the temple had to be far enough away from Seoul, so that we could meditate in peace, instead of to the din of car honks and Hongdae revelers

Luckily, Nic found the Lotus Lantern International Meditation Centre (http://lotuslantern.net/emain.php), described by the TempleStay brochure (note the capitalization – TempleStay is an organization that coordinates templestay experiences all around South Korea) as being close to Incheon, the location of the international airport that serves Seoul.  Nic and I boarded an express bus directly from Ewha to Ganghwa Island early one Saturday afternoon, where the temple is actually located.  Ganghwa is beautiful and lush – and located just south of the maritime border that separates North and South Korea, this fifth-largest island in South Korea has an observatory from which you can look into the communist, highly-irreligious state.  Ironic that we were supposed to find tranquility and inner calm in this potentially highly-volatile environment.

Top: Nic and I getting off at the bus stop on Ganghwa Island. It looks like a scene from the 1970s.
Bottom: Girls obviously not from Ganghwa Island.

After disembarking, Nic and I hailed a taxi – a stressful experience that involved not knowing where the taxi stand was, which side of the street the taxi stand was, and then not realizing that there was a long line for taxis – we took a 5000 won ($5 USD) ride to Lotus Lantern.  The stores along the road started to disappear, and we drove off the main road into dense forest along the way.  Upon exiting the taxi, a rather plain woman welcomes us from an upstairs window.  We’re thirty minutes late for orientation.  When was the last time you were in trouble at a religious site?

Top: Waiting at the taxi stand … most were already occupied.
Bottom: The base of the Lotus Lantern International Meditation Centre.

But Lotus Lantern is actually a very, well, chill place.  Obviously, templestays are meant for tourists, and as such, they allow us to take pictures of our experience whenever – including during times of silence and even during meditation!  Moreover, the rather plain woman – Sang-Mi, as we soon find out – is a ‘worker’ at the temple, and is more than willing to take pictures for us, using our cameras, while we engage in a variety of activities.  And in Korea, nothing is more important than pictures, especially when they’re group pictures – because if there’s no picture, then it never happened:

Top: Group picture #1, taken on at least six of our cameras. Sang-Mi pressured us into doing the Asian fingers, for Korea’s sake.
Bottom: Group picture #2, with Hae-in in the centre. This was taken no more than 30 minutes after group picture #1.

Unlike at other Buddhist temples, pets are allowed at Lotus Lantern – two dogs, one named Lotus Lantern and the other Lotus + something I’ve forgotten, live here permanently.  Even though meals are supposed to be held in “noble silence,” whatever that means, even people affiliated with the temple talk during eating – and when old Korean women like to talk, they talk loudly.  Moreover, this is the only Templestay-participating temple that has an English name.  Lotus Lantern was founded as a place for Buddhist monks from foreign lands to train in the ways of Korean Buddhism, and as a result, it seems more lenient in its practices than other Buddhist temples.  Indeed, it’s the only temple that has an English name!

In addition to Sang-Mi, five monks live year-round at the temple: a head monk, whose name was never revealed to us, and four monks in training.  All four monks were recruited from Russia, where the late founder of Lotus Lantern once went to ‘teach’ Buddhism.  However, during our stay, three of the Russian monks had returned to Russia for their summer vacations, so only Hae-in – this name is also a guess, as Sang-Mi had a quiet voice – was there to facilitate our one-day Buddhist lifestyle.

Perhaps it’s part of Buddhism’s non-confrontational attitude, but Lotus Lantern does not make you pay the $50 USD fee when you register online – in other words, you can sign up for a spot without committing to use that spot.  We were supposed to be a busy weekend, with over twenty participants, but only thirteen of us came:

• Nic and me, students at schools in Boston studying in Seoul for the summer
• Marion and Aurélie, MBA students from France who, as part of their program, had taken short courses this summer in Rhode Island, Turkey, and Korea.  How short?  This was their only weekend in Korea.
• Yoan, Rie, Clare, Andrew, Robert, Damien, Philippa, and George, undergrads from France, Denmark, England, and Scotland, in either business or chemistry, studying at Konkuk University in Seoul for either a semester or a full year.
• And finally Younggeun, who graduated from Korea University, one of the top three universities in Korea, with a double major in French literature and psychology, and is now working in sales for Eli Lilly.  He was the only Korean in our group; I was the only other Asian.  None of the Korean girls in our program at Ewha had ever done a templestay before – it was something “only non-Koreans do.”
• (There was also Jaren from Florida, an English teacher in Seoul studying English as a Second Language instruction at another womans’ university, who was staying for a period of one week.  He had already become accustomed to daily procedures after one day – I mean, they’re the exact same day after day, and prayer and meditation happen at least three times per day – and so we rarely saw him.)

After orientation, we were assigned into rooms – Nic, Younggeun, and I all shared one at the end of the hall – then changed into ‘temple clothes,’ and finally set up our beds.  These were perhaps the most no-frills beds I have ever seen – you take a thin mattress or a rice pillow, pull a cover over it, and lay it down along with a thin blanket.  Not having to set up an IKEA bedframe makes life so easy:

Left: three beds, blankets, and rice-filled pillows in storage. Right: An assembled bed. The pillows were hella hard.

The schedule is repeated every weekend, as templestays occur throughout the year.  After orientation, and a break to get to know each other while we waited for Hae-in, Hae-in took us to the temple and gave us an introduction to Buddhism (I was tired and none of it really sunk in) and then showed us how to walk into the main temple hall (shoes off, back never facing the Buddha at the front of the temple, shuffle in, bow to Buddha, and then take your seat).  After some more free (tea) time, it was already time for dinner!

Note on the schedules: noble silence. What is that?

Before coming to the temple, I knew that Buddhist monks don’t eat meat.  I’m an omnivore, and while I don’t need meat to survive, a meal after 11 AM feels empty without it.  I can honestly say, though, that I have never had such delicious vegetarian food.  Sure, not everything was great.  Spicy pepper is vegetarian and too unpleasant for me, but the cucumber in light oil and the bok choy (or whatever Asian choy that is) were cooked deliciously, and the nuts, bound together with a slightly-sweet syrup, were incredibly addictive.  We ate well that night. 

From the top: Saturday dinner, Sunday breakfast, Sunday lunch, and Sang-Mi’s unsolicited but highly welcome group shot #3.
The nuts for dinner (apparently sent over from former American templestayers) and the bamboo for breakfast were absolutely to die for; in fact, that was by far the best bamboo I’ve ever had! Koreans still manage to make temple food extra-spicy. Note how they reuse leftover nuts and bamboo for lunch.

Monks are not allowed to prepare food, so Lotus Lantern ‘service club’ volunteers regularly donate their time to sustaining the monks.  Many live and work in Incheon, and come to the temple on weekends for spiritual relief.

There was also a volunteer who could really use a bra.

Furthermore, unlike regular restaurants, at the temple we have to clean our own dishes. So, if I have one piece of advice to all future Templestay participants – please wear your shoes inside the kitchen.  Your socks get wet and dirty really quickly otherwise.  Actually, even more importantly, please actually bring socks to the temple.  I hated wearing socks this summer, because the weather was either too hot or too wet (usually both) for them; it’s rude to enter a temple barefoot, however.

Knowing first-hand that we didn’t actually wash all the soap off from the utensils, I wonder how I still kept eating.

Chanting was next on the schedule.  We didn’t — actually, it was more like we couldn’t — chant, though.  While there were separate books for Korean worshippers (in Korean) and those who came for the templestay (in English), the chanted words themselves were still written in Hangeul script, which proceeded far too fast for us to read them à tempo.  Our only obligations were to bow when Hae-in bowed himself.  Although Hae-in led the prayers, the head monk also chanted – at his own pace – because the Jogyesa order truly believes that chanting and Buddhism are both ‘internal communions’ with Buddha.

From the top: Hae-in rining the prayer bell to summon us to the temple; prostrating imperfectly to the Buddha at the front of the temple, with one of the dogs (either Yeondeung, Lotus Lantern, or Yeonhwa, Lotus Flower); the founder of Lotus Lantern; and our thin English chanting book.

Meditation, while not necessarily an ‘internal communion’ with Buddha, is arguably far more difficult than chanting.  First of all, you have to get into the right position – the lotus position, where both feet are simultaneously placed on the opposite thighs.  Supposedly, this provides the most back support and prevents you from leaning in any one direction.  It sounds simple.  It’s not.

Then, you have to think the right thoughts.  According to Hae-in, we’re supposed to clear our mind of all thoughts, and count from one to ten over and over again.  While you’re counting, your mind will wander to all sorts of thoughts.  Then, you’re supposed to think about where those thoughts – these thoughts that you’re not supposed to be having – where those thoughts stem from.  And maybe along the way, you can have an epiphany!  This is actually my belated interpretation of what Hae-in said.  My first thirty-minute meditation session, which was ended with Hae-in’s iPhone alarm, involved counting from one to ten and then back down to one (more difficult than it had to be), and actively trying to have an epiphany – not the way to go.

And if you’re Nic and have a cat allergy – and apparently there are cats, invisible to us, prowling around the upper meditation hall – then meditation is downright torturous.

Top: The meditation mats. We would sit on the top cushion, and ‘rest’ our feet on the bottom one.
Middle: Sang-Mi’s (again unsolicited) picture #4. She’s good, eh?
Bottom: Yoan’s posture (third one on the left) is actually pretty representative of what we all eventually degenerated into.

After meditation, we retired back to the common room and had our first ‘official’ tea ceremony; we had had one earlier in the afternoon, but without Sang-Mi’s guidance, we had prepared the tea without filtering and disposing of certain ‘dirty’ liquids.  Sang-Mi told us about her life, and here is where things got philosophical.  She was originally from Boryeong, where we had gone for the mud festival several weeks earlier.   After working at General Motors there for several years, she realized that she was far too stressed-out (a lot of Koreans have this problem) and decided to seek refuge at Lotus Lantern for an indefinite period of time (most Koreans would never consider this as an option).

Top left: The yellow things? Dandelions!
Top right: Dandelion tea, served in a small china cup on a wooden saucer.
Bottom: Andrew, Rie, Philippa, and Sang-Mi talking deeply about life back home, life in Korea, and fanatical Christians.

Sang-Mi has been at Lotus Lantern for almost a year, helping to take care of the monks during the regular week (I believe she is allowed to cook food, as women cannot be monks in Jogyesa Buddhism) and the templestay visitors during the weekend.  In fact, the weekend is her busiest time, shepherding us from one activity to another, taking pictures on each of our cameras, explaining all of the various chants and ceremonies to us.  During the ‘workweek,’ Sang-Mi can simply read and meditate. 

Sang-Mi was a quiet, soft-spoken woman who seemed exhausted with ‘regular life.’  The only time she ever became upset was when Yoan killed mosquito after mosquito after mosquito.  Under normal circumstances, I couldn’t blame him – we were in the middle of a wild area, and the mosquitoes were both vicious and numerous.  However, Buddhists don’t kill, hence why they are vegetarian.   Sang-Mi would ask, quietly and as time went on, with more insistence, Yoan to not kill mosquitoes, eventually ending with the (relatively) stern: “That is enough.”  She never actively tried to stop him, though.  In his defense, Yoan didn’t know that Buddists do not kill until the next morning.

She also shared with us some stories about other templestay participants.  Even though you don’t have to be a Buddhist to participate, and even though Templestay is not designed as a conversion program, once, an Iranian guest made it clear that she could not let others know about her attendance, because she could be faced with the death penalty upon reentry into Iran.  Fanatical Muslims in Iran also have an equivalent in Korea: fanatical Christians, who I’ll describe in a later post.

Nine o’clock came, and suddenly it was bedtime.  Why so early?  Because we had to wake up the next morning at four to get ready to chant again.

Now, Buddhists say that your dreams are an extension of your conscious thoughts, so perhaps I should be worried that I dreamt about 2PM’s hit single “Hands Up.”  Perhaps it’s a sign that I need to go clubbing more often – something I haven’t done since the week before the templestay?  Nic, on the other hand, dreamt about the often-imposing and often-rotund sub-Saharan African women living in our dorms at Ewha, and how they approached him after swimming one day.  That’s weird.

Sang-Mi woke us up right at four the next morning, and soon we heard the tolling of the bells by the head monk, our signal to rush to the temple.  Scheduling changes led to the 108 prostrations – essentially 108 full-body bows to the ground, one after another – to be moved up from after breakfast to 4:30 AM.  It doesn’t sound so bad, right?  Each prostration is a fairly involved, but overall doable procedure – you go on your hands and knees, five points of your body (nose, forearms, and knees) touch the ground, you do a little clap thing while you’re down, and then you push up with your toes.  108 of them, though, leads to two of the Konkuk University exchange students giving up due to pre-existing weak knees and legs, and awkward sweating for the rest of us.

Top: We’re all just so awake at 4:10 in the morning.
Bottom: The Buddhas at the front of the temple. Korean Buddha went on a diet.

108 seems to be the magic number, because we also repeat a chant – the same eight words – 108 times.  These eight words – om ahmoga vairochana mahamudra manipadme juvara phurabharataya hum – take roughly eight seconds to say on their own.  Doing the math, that’s over 14 minutes of repeating the same eight nonsense words over and over again.  Which we would do again, later in the day at the ancestor ceremony.

Top: The chant. “Mahamudra” is actually pronounced “mahamudera” and “manipadme” is “manipadama.”
Bottom: We would chant from this book like it were a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story (those never handed happily for me). The 108-times chant is at the bottom of the right-hand page.

Ripppppppppppp is never the sound you want to hear, especially when it’s your own pants that have been torn.  In my haste to get dressed at 4 AM, I inadvertently put my pants on backwards.  Getting into the lotus position then stretched my pants in ways that they were not meant to be stretched in, and much of my pre-meditation time was spent agonizing over what would happen when I stood up again.  Luckily, though, the rip was barely noticeable – there was no hole – and apparently, these things happen all the time.  I hope Sang-Mi knows how to sew!

Even with the rip nagging at me, meditation was far easier the second time around.  I now knew to count from one to ten over and over again, instead of the whole up and down and back up thing.  I also let my brain empty itself out, and while I didn’t have any profound epiphanies, I opened my eyes feeling much clearer with regards to what I want out of my life — true story!  Several others, just like the night before, were still having trouble sitting in a reasonably comfortable position, and therefore gave up on any semblance of eyes-closed meditation.

After breakfast and our attempts at a fifteen-minute long nap, Hae-in took us for a walk around Lotus Lantern in the morning mist.  It was 7:30 and we had already been awake for three and a half hours.  Monuments abound, as does a dog farm – one that sells dogs for meat.  More incongruous juxtapositions in today’s Korea.

Suddenly, it was Hae-in’s turn to tell us about himself, again over tea.  After studying with the founder of Lotus Lantern, he and his twin brother both came to Ganghwa Island from Russia four years ago.  Not being able to handle it, his brother left after one year, but Hae-in remained.   Back in Russia, he also had a ‘real job’ as an electrical engineer, but he now seems to have found real peace at contentment at Lotus Lantern.  While he has been able to preserve some vestiges of his former life – mainly, the iPhone and a constant supply of chocolates – he has had to make a lot of vows and pledges.  One involves sex and therefore, I became involved in an awkward conversation:

Hae-in: “We cannot kill animals, we cannot eat meat, we must have normal sexual relations.”

Me: “Can you get married?”

Hae-in: “Jogyesa monks cannot get married.”  [Note that Japanese monks can get married, and because Japan colonized Korea in the first half of the 1900s, some Korean orders do allow married monks.  Anyways, …]

Me:  “So, what are normal sexual relations?”

Hae-in: “No sexual relations.”

If it hadn’t been so awkward, I would have asked about masturbation.

Calligraphy followed the tea ceremony.  Earlier, we had had a choice of calligraphy or lotus lantern-making, of which the latter sounded more artificial.  Essentially, it seemed as if you took a Dixie cup, attached fake petals to it, and used string to tie it together.  Calligraphy seemed much more ‘plausible’ as a Korean traditional art.  Unfortunately, the calligraphy was also somewhat artificial – the same text was written in Chinese (the traditional language of calligraphy), then Korean, and finally in oddly-drawn English.  I felt awkward tracing over the English characters, knowing that I could have done better, aesthetically, myself.

Also, for future Templestay participants, never overload your brush with ink – you can always add more ink, but you can never remove it once it’s been set to paper.

Top: Lotus Lanterns — the real kind, not the Dixie cup kind. How would you even bring this back in your suitcase?
Bottom-left: Tracing over the calligraphy templates.
Bottom-right: Which one is the original and which one is mine?

To finish off the pre-lunch activities, we took part in another mandatory 10:30 AM chanting session (by which time I was already exhausted and had to sit down during some of the prostrations), and then watched a special ancestor worship ceremony.  This part was particularly confusing – we were initially invited to participate, but because it was judged too difficult for us, we were shunted off to the back of the temple and given Korean chanting books in order to follow along.  However, the chants skipped around the book, making it impossible for us to follow along, until we finally got to the eight-word chant again.  It supposedly should have been repeated 108 times, but because there were so many descendants paying tribute to their ancestors, we chanted that particular segment for over twenty minutes.

Top four pictures: Lighting the ancestor-dedication papers on fire, and while chanting, gradually stoking the fire until everything was burnt to ashes.
Bottom: Me and the head monk. We never learned his name.

Sacrifices were brought for the ancestors, but – and I love this non-wasting quality of the Buddhas – because dead ancestors don’t actually eat anything, we brought all of the delicious food back down for our own lunches!

Different foods for offering to Buddha.

Rice cakes offered to Buddha at the temple (left) and to me at the kitchen (right).

This is a long blog post – give me a shout-out if you’ve made it this far – but hopefully, you can tell that I got a lot out of my experience.  Back at home, or even in Korea, I would always be so busy trying to get stuff done.  There’s always more to do, more to improve upon, new deadlines to be made, new projects to tackle.  At Lotus Lantern, though, I spent a total of one hour trying to think no thoughts, to do nothing.  When would I ever do that in the ‘real world?’

The monks aren’t prosperous – they don’t actually work, and they rely on volunteers (devout Buddhists who live in the real world) for financial support – but they’re still benevolent.  I also noticed myself taking smaller portions so that others behind me in line would be sure to have food, something that I can honestly say I do not do back in the States.  Their whole ‘non-violence’ deal towards other animals is also inspiring; I don’t have to kill bugs just because they annoy me, right?  I will kill them if they scare me, though.

Buddhism is such a tolerant religion.  Sure, there are rules, but they’re all interpreted according to the situation.  For instance, the preventative killing of animals is permitted if the animal is endangering others.  Also, followers are not necessarily worshipping a single Buddha (even though they bow to him innumerable times).  Instead, through a series of rites, they’re all trying to achieve enlightenment and become ‘Buddhas’ themselves.  Buddhism has strongly affected Korea’s history and present-day, being the official state ideology – there are debates as to whether Buddhism is a true religion or an ideology – until the late 1300s.  Although Buddhists were strongly persecuted during the most recent Joseon dynasty, often forced into remote regions of the country, they still comprise 23% of the current population.  People like Younggeun, who are looking for more meaning to their lives and connection to others in the rapidly-changing South Korea of today, have recently been ‘rediscovering’ Buddhism in large numbers.  He’s spent his whole life studying — he made his way from rustic Jeju Island, in the far south, speaking a similarly rustic dialect of the Korean language, all the way to a top school, and now he uses none of what he majored in while working in a — what I can only assume to be a — fairly unstimulating job.  No wonder he wants to find more meaning in his life.  Perhaps Buddhist ideals can also mesh with the large and influential Korean Christian population.

Praying, chanting, and eating with Sang-Mi and Hae-in made me wonder whether I could shut myself from the rest of the world and become a monk.  I felt so at home at Lotus Lantern.  Life was simple, but enjoyable.  I had time to read, to think about my life, to figure out what makes a good person.  It’s incredible how well you can get to know people in such a short period of time, if you only talk to them, free from the influence of other appointments to keep.  But I thought about my life at the temple, and what I want to do with it, and it takes me away from Lotus Lantern.  Sang-Mi, it seems to me, is seeking refuge there and hiding from the world.  I can’t live my life like that.  When I got back to Seoul after Lotus Lantern, I was ready to face Korea again and see what new things Seoul had to offer.

I’m still not a Buddhist, but after the Templestay experience, I have developed a new respect for the religion/ideology.   And besides, many Korean Buddhists are of a healthy BMI.  If someone could only explain the silent ‘h,’ …

 

One final thing:  It wasn’t really my Aunt Wendy, but my cousin who inadvertently convinced me to do a temple-stay:  http://worldtotable.com/2010/10/04/a-glimpse-at-korean-temple-cuisine/

Popping my sister’s K-pop dreams

In addition to eating all sorts of animal parts, growing up Cantonese means that you learn, to varying extents, the Cantonese language. I’m still somewhat functional in the language (the way a five-year-old child might be), while my sister’s more like a mute — she can understand what’s being spoken, but she can’t make any of the sounds herself. But then, she went off to university, and when she came back last Christmas, she knew more Korean than Cantonese.

You can blame that on K-pop. Suddenly, the rest of us were subjected to Youtube snippets of singing and dancing on Korean TV shows, which my sister would then try to emulate. And she’s not alone. What I thought was a weird obsession of hers that one day might need to be treated by a psychiatrist turns out to be why a lot of kids — Asian kids, primarily, and non-Korean Asian kids, in particular — study Korean. This certainly holds true for a lot of people in my summer program in Korea, who can name all the big idols and actors and their opuses (opi?) of work. Heck, my mom has been addicted to Korean dramas since I entered high school, getting less than 5 hours of sleep on weeknights because she wanted to watch another episode. Hallyu, the Korean wave, is more like a full-fledged tsunami.

I went to Korea not terribly interested in K-pop or hallyu. I don’t believe in listening to music that I can’t understand — sure, the melody might be catchy, but if the lyrics are total gibberish, then half of the story is missing. But we needed a topic for our documentary, and Margaret had a friend who was in the industry.

This wasn’t just any random friend. Paul Baek graduated from Harvard in 2008 and therefore had a wide variety of career options upon leaving. These are career options that would please Amy Chua — law, consulting, you name it. Instead, he chose to go off to Korea and become a pop singer.

This wasn’t just on a whim, either. Paul has talent. He was part of the Krokodiloes, Harvard’s oldest a cappella singing group. I don’t know whether I can repeat this — we had to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding our films, but I think that was only for the video content — but Paul’s application to Harvard even included his dreams of becoming a K-pop idol, which perhaps might be better served at an arts school. In fact, he and his parents made a deal: if Paul could get into and then graduate from Harvard, he could do whatever he wanted to, including going on a 24-hour plane ride to Korea in order to become a pop star.

The Korean name of Rain, the most popular Korean entertainer of all time (see below), also happens to be Jihoon.

(I should mention that I’ve never actually met Paul. Through the course of film-editing, though, I’ve watched his interview so many times that I can still quote them from memory, more than one month after we screened the final cut. He’s almost like my friend, even though I’m certainly not his)

Before his final year at Harvard, Paul was signed by an entertainment company in Korea, and he’s been ‘released’ to … relative obscurity. But at least he’s been released. In Korea, entertainment companies such as SM and JYP have complete control over not only their clients’ careers, but every aspect of their clients’ lives. These clients are called trainees and undergo apprenticeships. In North America, an apprenticeship is what tradespeople go through, as part of their training program, in order to become a full-fledged baker or carpenter. It’s somewhat low-status (or so my Chinese parents have led me to believe), but at least they’re paid and the path to a future career is not fraught with difficulties. In fact, there’s a lack of tradespeople in Alberta.

The situation is different for Korean entertainment trainees. Think of the sheer numbers — like actors in Hollywood, there are far more wannabe-idol trainees than actual idols. The traineeship process is long, too — in fact, it’s of ‘undefined’ length, but typically between two and ten years. You’re released only when the company says you’re ready. Training involves long days of acting, singing, and dancing lessons, in order to develop versatility and become that ‘triple threat’ — in fact, Paul is still registered in all three of these lessons.  They lessons are effective, as you can see in the high quality of the choreography in my examples below. Trainees also learn Chinese and English, which will allow them to communicate with their largest fan bases beyond Korea’s shores.

If you’re not deemed attractive enough — and here, enough is a relative word, because only those who are already eye-catching will be selected to become a trainee in the first place — if you’re not deemed attractive enough, then you will undergo plastic surgery. It won’t really be an option for you. Attitudes in Korea towards plastic surgery are — well, if a girl comes up to you and asks whether you notice anything different about her, and this does happen, you’re supposed to say yes. After all, what’s the point of spending all that money for a change that no one will notice?

Trainees are typically released as a group. In this way, the public is less likely to notice who each individual trainee is, keeping the balance of power on the entertainment company’s side. Rain, for instance, was released as a solo singer, and eventually struck off on his own, taking all of his fans with him — an entertainment company’s nightmare. The control doesn’t slacken once you’ve been released. Many stars aren’t allowed to have cell phones or romantic partners — even if they’re 24! See:

http://extrakorea.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/how-k-pop-trainees-are-mistreated/

My 39-year-old Korean language instructor taught us the word 비, which means ‘rain,’ by referring to this ‘handsome guy,’ not to the meteorological phenomenon.

Contracts give the entertainment companies this ultimate control, and coming from a less-educated background, trainees’ parents are not able to wisely negotiate or even understand these contracts. Think of how one-sided this must be: the huge entertainment company versus a rural family with a pretty kid (and pretty is the correct adjective for both girls and boys in Korea). According to Professor Jasper Kim, who works in the department at Ewha that hosted us, these contracts, in the West, would be deemed unconscionable and they would therefore be unenforceable, invalid. The Korean court system, however, is only now waking up to how unfair this is.

Moreover, trainees don’t receive the rigourous education that other Korean teenagers do. All this time spent on making them attractive and fun to watch leaves no time for science class, and no chance at going to a good university. Trainees who don’t make it have a hard time achieving the $20 000 USD benchmark of the ‘average’ Korean per capita income.

Even trainees who do make it are not financially secure. Less than 1% of the revenue from music sales goes to the idols. The real money is in commercials, which Koreans, a highly media-savvy citizenry who publicize class cancellations through text message, devour.

We interviewed a failed trainee, Koo Ja-chang. This was a particularly difficult interview, because unlike our other, well-educated, high-status interviewees, Koo Ja-chang wouldn’t look directly at the camera. He mumbled. His name was funny-sounding and evocative of someone uneducated. All of the girls thought he was ugly — think of the fish-shaped red bean-filled waffles that Koreans hawk on street corners — which might explain why he never made it in the industry. In fact, he was so ugly that the rest of my team decided not to use any of his clips in the final cut of our documentary.

Koo Ja-chang was lucky, as he was able to find a job in his passion — music. Unlike most of his friends, who now toil away at restaurants, he teaches singing at MBC Studios. There, the idols of tomorrow take all of their lessons today. Future flight attendants also train there — the faces of ‘successfully-trained’ flight attendants look down upon you from the walls of the lobby, on which jet planes are painted. Just imagine all of the competition that girls must go through in order to become flight attendants! American Airlines, take note.

The one attribute that Koo Ja-chang — I refer to him using his full name because it would be awkward calling him Koo, or Mr. Koo, or Ja-chang; even his name is ugly! — the one attribute that he saw, or rather, smelt, in common among all of his successful trainees (of which he’s had quite a few) was the smell of sweat. Singing, dancing, and acting are all skills, according to Koo Ja-chang, and those who work the hardest at it become the most successful at it as well.

So, who is successful? I was only in Korea for just over seven weeks, which is longer than the lifetime of many Korean pop songs. It’s the companies who control which groups release which song at what time. As a result, songs are really popular for a short while, and then quickly fade into music history class. While I was there this summer, the following bands were popular:

Boyfriend. This is the name of the group, and of their first album (which isn’t particularly uncommon), and also the name of their first song. The first lines sound like: “I’m not your boyfriend/I’m not your girlfriend” — well, they’d better not be your girlfriend. (Apparently, I misheard the lyrics and it’s actually a bunch of Korean words followed by boyfriend and girlfriend.) Jade, this — I believe the word might be bodacious — black girl from Wichita, Kansas, introduced me to Boyfriend rather forcefully, due to her intense devotion and physical attraction to them. Note, though, that five out of the six members are not of legal age. In fact, three of them are only 15. Jade is 22.

Definitely pretty, not handsome.

She’s also learned — and through hanging out with her, I’ve learned — the ‘Boyfriend airplane dance,’ where the six boys bob up and down with their hands looking as if they’re about to pray. At the end of the music video, the six boys hold up posters that, when put together, read: “♥ I’m your boyfriend ♥.” Boyfriend: the new synonym for emasculation.

f(x). Yes, Koreans are mathematically-literate enough to use mathematical notation in pop culture. These are five girls, only two of whom are originally from Korea; two others are from China, and one is Korean-American. I wonder how that last one is dealing with the hyper-controlling Korean environment.

Anyways, f(x) is responsible for the summer’s most overplayed song, “Hot Summer,” always heard as you walk past beauty shops — the girls in f(x) have good skin. Originally an English song sung by a group that won Popstars (remember Sugar Jones, Velvet Empire, and Eden’s Crush?) in Germany, this Korean version of “Hot Summer” apparently has nothing at all to do with the weather. The chorus, still sung in English, is: “It’s a hot summer, a hot, hot summer/A hot summer, a hot, hot, really, really [the last two words spoken in Korean]” repeated twice. As for their dance, the signature move is standing with one foot in front of the other, and then tilting forwards and backwards while pivoting on their back foot. They don’t actually move their feet.

I still can’t tell which ones are Korean, Chinese, and Korean-American

Miss A. They made a comeback this summer, which was all the rage on K-pop websites. But wait — they only came out in 2010! The Korean music industry is vicious. When we want to noraebang (essentially, Korean karaoke, which I’ll explain in a later blog post), some girls sang “Bad Girl Good Girl,” which reached #1 on some of the charts in 2010. Afterwards, they complained about how old the song was, as if they were too hip to sing it. Like f(x), this group is comprised of two girls from Korea and two girls from China.

2PM. From the original eleven-member group One Day, 2PM currently comprises only six members — one, a Korean-American, was kicked out due to Myspace posts he had made, while still a trainee, about his dislike of Korea, and four others were branched off to form the sister (brother?) group 2AM. No lie. This summer, at least, 2PM was the more successful group with its song “Hands Up.” It’s a really catchy song, even though the only words I understand are: “Everyone put your hands up/and get your drinks up/Now, put your hands up, put your hands up, put, put, put, put, put …” It reminds me of the Daft Punk song, appropriate titled “Put Your Hands Up In the Air.” I’ve now put my hands up to both of these songs, halfway across the world from home.

Paul Baek is not successful, not yet. He puts in long hours with no guarantee of success, but thankfully, he does have a tentative (high-status) plan for the future. Even though the industry is so rigidly controlled by entertainment companies, there are lots of areas in which things could be improved upon or made more efficient. For example, there are no standard, official music charts in South Korea. Competing charts could list several different #1 songs, all in the same week, all aiming to please different companies and producers. Paul has the background and ‘technical skill’ — the Harvard name helps, as he was a non-technical psychology major — to change that. That would be a perfect career, being able to fuse his passion and his training together.

As for my sister, she also harbours a dream of K-pop superstardom. Before I left, she asked me to bring her headshots (which she never even had taken) to SM or JYP Entertainment. This was impossible, because you can’t simply enter their offices at will — just imagine all the Korean fangirls! Bomyi and I tried gaining access to JYP one afternoon, and roughly thirty or forty girls (and one boy) were sitting in the Dunkin’ Donuts across from the building, waiting for 2PM to come out. Their manager had already asked them not to take pictures of 2PM when they left — and some of these girls had come from Thailand, just for the shot at this one encounter!

Top: JYP’s headquarters in Apgujeong, Seoul’s swanky designer-brands area. The doors are locked and can only be opened with either a card key or fingerprints. Apgujeong also happens to be the home of Seoul’s plastic surgery district — yes, it’s a district.
Bottom: K-pop fangirls. More were inside the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Either way, after learning about the industry, I would never recommend this career path to anyone. Industry executives that we interviewed would say the same thing — it’s like actors who don’t want their kids to go into show-business. Unlike Paul’s parents, my parents would never let her go off to Korea. She’ll just continue learning Korean and dancing embarrassingly in the living room. Or perhaps the word is foolishly (in Korean, baboya):

Margaret, Jenny, Bomyi, and I (our film-making group) might be the only four members of Paul Baek’s fan club — his Youtube videos have less than 1500 views each. Let’s (artificially) raise that by watching it over and over again! After all, I’d hate to have worked on a documentary about a failure story.

Wanna get dirrty: the Boryeong mud festival

The week before I left for South Korea, I, like any other English-speaking traveler who wanted to be completely prepared for his travels, purchased the Lonely Planet guide to South Korea. In the end, it wasn’t completely worth it. It’s hard to capture a country in just 440 pages (actually, two, because both North and South Korea were covered in this guidebook), and as a result, the coverage is pretty superficial.

However, the book did showcase the top five or ten things to do/see/eat in Korea in nice, glossy pages with colour-printing. Personally, I travel to learn about the lifestyle of the locals, primarily their culture and cuisine, so naturally I was interested in the top five Korean pop culture ‘items.’ Number 1 was the Boryeong Mud Festival — what could one possibly do a mud festival? — and fortuitously, it happened to take place in July.

Even more fortuitously, one of my Korean friends, Ji Yu, mentioned offhandedly that, in addition to a coupon for Smoothie King (almost as big as Starbucks over there), she had a coupon for the mud festival. If you got a group of 10 together, then it would only be 19 000 won per person, or approximately $19 USD, for round-trip transportation and admission to the festival. Guess who signed up immediately?

The plan was to leave Ewha at 6:30 AM, take the subway to City Hall station, get on a bus at 7, and finally take a 3-hour bus ride down to Boryeong, a small town of approximately 100 000 people on the seaside of Chungcheongnam-do province. (Oddly, there are two Chungcheong provinces in South Korea, North Chungcheong and South Chungcheong, North Chungcheong is not at all north of, but rather due east of South Chungcheong. And I thought Koreans were known for their intelligence …)

Of course, the best-laid plans often go awry. Our documentary-production group, three of whom (including myself) had purchased tickets for Boryeong, stayed up until 1:30 in the morning transcribing our recently-shot footage and putting together a story line. I have a problem being punctual, so I arrived at our meeting point at 6:33, by which time everyone else had already left. Everyone else, that is, except for Tae Yeon, who we couldn’t reach — not on her phone, not through her roommate (who didn’t even have a phone), not through her neighbours — and who eventually caught a cab from Ewha to City Hall station (3 stops away) for only $4.5 USD.

The Lonely Planet guidebook described Chungcheongnam-do as “not the most scintillating of provinces.” There’s Daejeon, the fifth-largest city in South Korea (yay!) and a bunch of old tombs and ruins from one of the Three Kingdoms of first-millenium Korean history (this particular kingdom was wiped out by one of the other Three Kingdoms). Boryeong itself is also not much to look at. After leaving the bus stop, you have to walk fifteen minutes, along a straight path, to actually get to the beach. Along the way, there’s a beach (and the ocean!) to your left, and restaurants, interspersed with a few ‘local specialty’ stores, all the way along the right. Boryeong feels like the Atlantic City of South Korea — except that the beach is actually clean, you can swim in the ocean, and the people look respectable (how do I say this — people in Atlantic City are the epitome of American white trash minus the rednecks).

When you finally arrive at the festival, it’s not initially very impressive. There’s a huge statue that’s probably only used for photo-ops, and a huge stage where kids perform traditional Korean acts without anybody watching them. There’s not even any mud! It’s when you pass through the admission gates, though, that you feel like you get your money’s worth.

At the front desk, young volunteer translators/guides speak perfect, unaccented English — how great is that? They give you an English guide to the festival, complete with a map and a schedule, and tell you to head over to the lockers. Unfortunately, the path to the lockers wasn’t obvious, even with the map — our group of ten got split up, and we ended up walking through both a set of public washrooms and the Tourism Information Centre (which was closed), instead of following the straight outdoors path to the lockers.

And the lockers? Free! You ask a volunteer translator for a 500 won (50 cent) coin, which you only need in order lock a locker. Every so often, the volunteers come in and retrieve the coins from trays at the bottom of the lockers to be reused. In the afternoon, there would eventually be so many visitors that lockers became sparse, but at 10:30 that morning, I had no problem grabbing an only slightly muddy locker to store my stuff in. I brought my SLR camera along — but the lack of pictures from when I was actually participating in the festival might be an indication of how plastered with mud I — and everyone else — got.

In fact, Ji Yu had asked us to bring a spare set of clothes, but, being unreliable with Facebook messages, I had neglected to bring anything extra. Luckily, there were both a FamilyMart and a 7-11 within the festival grounds, and with the advice of one of the cashiers, I purchased some clothes that I thought Korean males would wear to the beach: a T-shirt with funny writing, and shorts with a collegiate logo on them.

Even if I wanted to look Korean, I would never wear this. But, English proficiency does decrease the further you get from Seoul …

Then, six of us — actually, and completely randomly, the six with some Asian blood in us — ran straight for the mud festival, while the other four headed to the beach. To get yourself slightly muddy, the first station had a mud sink with brushes that you could use to apply the mud onto yourself. Volunteers would come around and pour more mud into the basin when levels were running low. Unfortunately, the mud was too watery to stick to our bodies, so while it was evaporating and thereby making us freeze, we started to line up for the ‘mud rides.’

I’m still pretty clean here.

After all of anticipation of, well, four weeks, we went on — one ride. We waited for thirty minutes, in which time I was able to engage some Indian workers at Samsung in awkward conversation and ask the organizers where the mud obstacle course was (a fifteen-minute taxi ride away, unfortunately). Then, we took our shoes off, and got in position to climb up the stairs on the back side of an inflatable slide. I almost fell off just as I reached the top and had to be helped up by a guy pointing a huge mud hose at me. And then I slid down, but — because the bottom of the slide wasn’t actually fully enclosed but had a human-sized orifice randomly placed halfway along the flat section — I was too busy braking and steering myself to enjoy the ride. There wasn’t even that much mud!

The white kids ended up mud-wrestling in an inflatable bounce shack. Jealous.

Top: the inflatable slide.
Middle: A mini-inflatable mud obstacle course. If it had been closer/directions a little bit more explicit, I would have tried the life-sized one!
Bottom: What was supposed to be a washing-off area turned into a huge muddy water-fight park.

Anyways, we decided that the beach would be much more fun, but it just ended up being really cold, and my sandals, which were already caked with mud, were now coated with a layer of sand. And then, we got separated — and nobody brings a phone with them when they’re muddying around. The first thing the phone rental company tells you is how they check for water damage, which they actually do when you return the phone back to them at the airport.

After finding each other again randomly, an event that had nothing to do with my repeated frantic, muddy-handed phone calls to the other nine of my travelmates, it was time for lunch! First, though, we had to clean up a little bit in order to look respectable and not get the restaurant’s lawn chairs completely filthy. In addition to a spare set of clothes, I had neglected to bring a towel, so I headed back to the FamilyMart and bought one for $4 USD (what a steal!), and then headed off to the communal showers. This confirmed what possibly-scientific studies have shown — South Korean males have the world’s smallest genitals. It’s particularly hard to wash mud off your hair, as evidenced by Jenny’s ajumma transition:

Like I mentioned earlier, I wanted to eat like a local — and being a village on the ocean, the Boryeong locals eat hoe (pronounced like ‘hway,’ or how old white people say ‘whey’). Hoe is, simplistically, the Korean version of sashimi — sometimes, it’s cooked, and the fish is generally meatier than the standard salmon and tuna sashimi, but at its core, hoe is just raw fish. Unlike the locals, who know where to get their hoe and probably cook it themselves, we went to a tourist-trap restaurant within walking distance of the mud festival. The hoe plate for 4 people was $80 USD, so I got the hoe bibimbap (hoe in rice with Korean vegetables) for only $8, which was delicious, if not entirely filling.

Top: The $80 USD hoe dish. Jenny was shocked and then freaked-out when the not-completely-dead-yet hoe started to writhe.
Bottom: My hoedeopbap, before stirring (left) and after stirring and the infusion of some red sauce (right).

We had to catch a bus back to Seoul at 4, so while my friends stayed at the open-air restaurant, I rushed back to the festival and wanted to get dirrty. Way dirrtier than Christina Aguilera ever got. In addition to the mud slides and mud wrestling, there was a mud prison. It’s a large carved-out rock with two sets of bars, which you walk behind with a throng of other festival-goers before volunteers take a bucket of mud — several buckets of mud — and fling it at you. The smart thing to do would be to face away from the outside, because that mud comes at you full-force. However, if you’re like me and wanted to get as muddy as possible in as little time as necessary, you stand immediately behind the bars and end up eating more mud than you ever wanted to.

Top: People, a lot of whom are already muddy and have probably already been through the mud prison, can’t wait to get inside.
Middle and bottom: Not one, but two volunteers fling mud at you repeatedly, until everyone is thoroughly covered. Best job ever!

All told, we spent six hours on the bus that Saturday and six hours actually in Boryeong (actually, less than six hours at the mud festival, because of the walking between the bus stop and the festival grounds). When we got home, the girls immediately washed their clothes, while I, thinking that it didn’t matter when I put the clothes in the laundry machine, waited.

That was incorrect.

Top: The outfit I bought. The words say: “Happy panda with you maxes pleasant memory.” At first, you might think it says ‘makes,’ but further inspection on the lower right-hand corner of the T-shirt shows that Koreans can’t distinguish their K’s and X’s.
Bottom: The stains, still present, after two washes.

Was all that buildup worth it? The mud festival itself was nothing spectacular — you could go on rides like that anywhere, and you can have hoe anywhere in South Korea. The organization, however, was impeccable:

• A busload of clean, comfortable buses, departing all in a row from City Hall Station. Everyone who had purchased a coupon was assigned to particular seats on each bus, making it easy to ensure that no one was left behind.
• The roadside service stations are nothing like what we have in North America. For starters, they’re clean. Inside, there are all sorts of different cuisines available — Korean, Chinese, Western, etc. — along with franchise convenience stores, donut stores, and stalls that sell traditional Korean snacks. You place your order, take a ticket, and wait for the old ladies at the counter to prepare your ramen for you. And these ladies are efficient. The food is of pretty high quality, and even at these joints, they still give you all the sidedishes.

Top: The Seosan Service Area, which we dropped by in the morning.
Bottom: Two difference (breakfast-ish) dishes. I ordered the one on the right, Chungju kimbap, which, I was informed, is not at all like regular kimbap.

• The foreign language-speaking volunteers — Koreans know that non-Koreans, as a general rule, don’t learn Korean, so they make a definite effort to facilitate foreigners’ stays in Korea. Speaking from personal experience, it works. You also can’t help but be buoyed by the Koreans’ natural politeness.
• Free lockers! Events in North America charge you through the nose for anything ‘not included’ in the price of admission, but at Boryeong, I could lock and relock as many times as I wanted. The only thing I ‘paid’ was the time it took to ask the attendant for a 500 won coin. I wonder how many coins he hands out each day …
• A cool theme. Who doesn’t want to go to a mud festival? At night, they also stage a variety of performances, including a mud beauty contest (some people look better covered up), a mud saxophone performance, and a rave.
• Good promotion. Not only is this festival highly publicised — coupons, all the tour books, etc. — its web presence is ginormous, both through its own webpage (http://www.mudfestival.or.kr/english/festival/festival1.php) and through the highly-centralized Tourism Korea website (http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=1058524).  In fact, Tourism Korea has a 24-hour hotline where you can talk to an agent — in English! — and ask all sort of arcane questions, like “Are museums in Pyeongchang open on Independence Day?”  I have experience. 

And finally, as you leave for home, you give the organizers your wristband and are redeemed with — free mud soap! How many times do you get free, usable souvenirs?

I think the tourism industry in Canada and the US could learn a lot from Tourism Korea. Tourism Korea even provides a map of all of country’s major festivals — http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/festival/eng/korea_festival.html?festival=0.  The Boryeong Mud Festival just so happens to be a Level 1 festival, but even some of the Level 5 festivals, like the “Gwangju World Kimchi Culture Festival,” the “Gagopa Chrysanthemum Festival,” and the “Sunchang Fermented Bean Festival” also sound pretty cool and worthy of a return visit to South Korea.  It’s events like this that make me particularly sad to be back in North America. 

Addendum: The sketchiest thing in my government-printed “Korea Travel Guide” was the page on ‘Medical Tourism.’ Here, I quote:

If you cannot afford the cost of medical treatment in your home country, come to Korea for highly reliable medical services at lower prices.

These had better be astronomical savings, because flying to Korea cost me $1800! I wonder how much medical treatment in the States cost …

It’s Friday, Friday, going to mosque on Friday …

This story really starts back in March of 2006, when I was thinking about trying to earn a trip to Iran the next summer for a physics competition. In addition to the academic stuff I had to prepare, I thought it’d be a good idea, culturally-speaking, to visit a mosque in Calgary. The only problem? I didn’t even know where to find one. I’d probably have to go to the more-ghetto northeast part of town, a place that my parents were quite afraid of and frequented essentially only because of the Chinese supermarket and the airport. They’d never take me to see a mosque. I don’t even think my mom knows what a mosque is.

So I asked my Muslim-Chinese friend, Moe (apparently, short for Mohammed). Being Muslim and Chinese was such a … well, honestly, unheard-of concept for me. Apparently they’re one of the largest ethnic groups in China, comprising 1% of the entire population (that’s 10 million people!), and perhaps because of just the right amount of inbreeding, Hui Chinese girls are considered to be among the prettiest in all of China. I needed Moe’s help, and the conversation went something along the lines of:

Me: Hey Moe, let’s go to a mosque. How often do you go?
Moe: Can’t help you, J-Mo, never been to one myself.

Seriously, Moe’s so useless, so 沒用.

In the end, I didn’t even try to go to Iran the next year, and while I passed a mosque on the way to my summer internship every morning that next August, I never had a chance to go inside. I don’t know what this says about Islamophobia in the US, but I can’t remember ever having seen a mosque in the States.

The Ahmadiyya Mosque in Calgary — I don’t think this is the one I passed everyday, though.

When the Seoul Central Mosque popped up in the highly-detailed tourbook of Seoul my friend bought for me, I knew I had to go. In fact, visiting the mosque was my only real reason for going to Itaewon (see my earlier blog post, Sucks to be you) — I mean, I didn’t come to Korea in order to hang out with foreigners and American soldiers. A bunch of my friends visited early Friday afternoon, after one of our program’s scheduled outings. I couldn’t go at that time, so I went alone later that same afternoon.

Getting to the mosque itself was a struggle. I knew I was in the right vicinity when I saw women with headscarves and Middle Eastern-looking men, but the mosque — even though it’s on the top of a hill — was hidden by densely-clustered buildings. After walking up the hill, which turned out to be the wrong hill, and overshooting the mosque, then walking back down what turned out to be a different, yet still wrong hill (but with a breathtaking view of Seoul), and along the way walking into a young, somewhat edgy Korean couple on a motorbike, I found my way to the entrance of the mosque.

The mosque itself was not visible from the entrance, which was essentially a driveway that takes you up yet another hill to the parking lot. The welcome sign asked you to grab long pants if you were wearing shorts — particularly important for, and in the end, only applicable to females.

The inside of the mosque was peaceful and calm, which is perhaps due to a combination of traditional Korean and Islamic virtues. In fact, the Korean way of saying “Hello” is “Annyeong haseyo?”, which literally means “Are you in peace?”, while the Arabic way is, depending on your particular dialect and method of Romanization, “Salam alaykum,” meaning “May peace be upon you.” It was a nice change from the bustling pace of Seoul and Itaewon, where cars and especially motorcycle-riding delivery men whiz by all the time.

There weren’t many people at the mosque that afternoon. An old Korean couple worked as parking lot attendants, which is a very menial job in the Korean psyche — it involves spending long hours under the sun, wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants in order to protect the skin (usually flower-print for women, vertical stripes for men), and taking turns dozing off on chairs placed underneath trees. A few families of Middle Eastern descent, everyone (kids included) dressed in traditional clothes from their home countries, roamed around the parking lot. While the adults were talking, the kids would ride small bikes and trikes around the parking lot, chasing after each other and falling down. Finally, like me, a few tourists walked around. Most of the tourists were girls, wearing miniskirts — because you have to be an absolute fool to wear jeans in the boiling and humid Seoul summer — and some even tried to enter the men’s prayer room up the impressive stairs of the mosque before being gently yelled at by workers and parishioners (can you call them that?). I, on the other hand, had no problem entering.

Early Friday afternoon is when the mosque is busiest. Apparently, the prayer held at roughly 1 or 2 PM, Seoul time, is one of Islam’s most important, and a lot of the faithful — in particular, the unemployed (i.e. immigrants from Muslim nations), self-employed, and those who are lucky enough to get time off from the long, hectic hours of the typical Korean office worker schedule — come at that time. Moreover, that’s when the mosque tries to encourage tourist activity, with the imam giving a lecture/discussion session on Islam after said prayer. Sometimes, there are so many people that there’s overflow, even though the prayer room is about 150-200 square metres in size.  Can you tell that I can’t figure out how to do superscripts in WordPress?

When I arrived, though, there were only four or five men reading various books (probably all Qu’ranic in nature) in the prayer room. I didn’t take any pictures — usually, my incomprehension of Korean signs (especially since many of them don’t have pictures associated with them!) makes me feel as though I have more leeway to snap photos in inappropriate locations, but it felt a little too inappropriate here. There was most definitely a sign (in English and Arabic, but not in Korean) asking men to turn off their cell phones, but this didn’t stop one of the faithful from taking a call. Not that this agitated any of the other supposedly-praying men, as at least two of the others were asleep, books resting on their chests. None of the men were of Korean descent, and none of the books were in Korean — most were in Arabic, some were in Central Asian languages (Uzbek, Kazakh, etc.), and a few were in English, but none were in Korean.

Moving back downstairs, and towards the main office, more Korean and English language signage started to appear. One was for a “Qu’ran education program for Muslim children.”

A few things to note:

• How many hours a week do kids need of Qu’ranic education? Eight hours seems like overkill to me, just saying — especially when considering all the homework and private tutoring that the Korean educational system piles on kids.
• Why are there different age requirements for boys and girls? In the West, Islam is considered to be a male-dominated religion, and Korea is certainly a male-dominated society. But if you want your kids to grow up to be good Muslims, then don’t both boys and girls need to learn the Qu’ran? Muslims in Korea probably don’t care about what the West things of overt sexism, but to a Westerner like myself, this stuff sticks out pretty blatantly.

This was definitely not the most shocking thing I saw, though. The mosque publishes a weekly newsletter, written in both Korean and, luckily for me, English. I should preface this by saying that I have absolutely no knowledge about Western religions and can’t honestly remember having ever read a passage from the Bible. Whether religiously-accurate or not, though, some quotes in the newsletter somewhat anti-Semitic:

Brothers and Sisters in Islam! We realized that Baitul-Maqdis was the first Qiblat for Muslims, and Al-Masjidul-Aqsa was the place that Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) comes to a stop for performing prayer to Allah (S.W.T.) on the way to Al-Mi’raj. But unfortunately, these holy places were cruelly attack (sic) by the Jews, hundred (sic) of civilians including children get hurt and die, this is a sorrowful and shameful one. …

These sorrowful and shameful are not only Arab Muslims and Arab governments, but all Muslims in this world are included. There is nothing to polish out this act of Jews except the Arab Muslims and the Muslims in this world must be unity (sic) and gather together their powers and their rizqi (subsistence), their wealth which Allah (S.W.T.) has granted them from their land and their sea to struggle the Jews to free the Baitul-Maqdis and Masjidul-Aqsa from them and make it real holy place as the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) told us, and the world will be real peace.

I next headed into the office. Four people, three men and a woman, were sitting behind desks facing each other, typing into computer screens. One, a Korean, was the imam. He beamed at me, shook my hand, and apologized for the fact that he, unfortunately, had to leave just then. Of the three who remained, the woman (whose ethnicity I couldn’t determine as half of her face was hidden behind a pink headscarf) and one of the men (whose ethnicity I also couldn’t determine, even though his face was not at all covered) didn’t speak English. The last man sighed and awkwardly led me to the sofas, where he began to answer my questions about the mosque. It can be so awkward sometimes, trying to be a good reporter/blogger/whatever you call this. 

The man, whose name I forget now, was originally from Turkey and majored in Korean language and literature when he went to university back in Turkey. Can you even major in Korean in most North American schools? He had started Korean because he wanted to try something different — as a member of Europe (which is a contentious issue at the moment), he said that most Turks knew English, and studied either French (because of its importance in the world) or German (because so many Turks live in Germany), but not many learned Asian languages. (I honestly doubt that Turks are so multilingual, but thought it was wise not to disagree for the time being.) Anyways, Korean and Turkish are thought to belong to the same language family, along with random other languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and perhaps Japanese, and because the grammar is kind of similar, he started Korean, became good at it, and then won a scholarship to study in Korea. He’s been here ever since, and now works at the mosque, publishing its weekly newsletter. Even more awkward, now, knowing where those passages came from.

As to why Islam became popular in Korea, he said it started during the Korean War in the 1950s, when Turkish soldiers fought alongside Western troops on the pro-democracy side. Korea was in a state of abject poverty at the time, and when Turkish soldiers saw starving kids, they felt compelled by the Qu’ran to share their food — “how can you live with yourself when your neighbour is hungry and you are full?” This man thought it was also very important to note that American and European forces did not share their food and were viewed by the Koreans as greedy. Anyways, young Korean kids (maybe orphans?) saw this kindness and as a result, began to become interested in Islam.

Fast forward to the 1970s, and the world was in the midst of an oil crisis. Korea, wanting to develop good relationships with OPEC countries through taking care of the Muslim residents (both Korean and non-Korean) inside its borders, somehow convinced several Middle Eastern countries to give Korea money so that they could build the Seoul Central Mosque. I’m not quite sure how the money transfers worked, but regardless, this large mosque was constructed in the 1970s, replacing a smaller Seoul mosque that was no longer adequate for the number of followers.

He then told me that nowadays, Koreans are really starting to embrace Islam. A lot of people (and he pointed to me as an example) come to the mosque because of its novelty factor — Koreans know all about Christianity and Buddhism, but Islam? And Korean women apparently just love Muslim men — they don’t drink, they don’t stay out late after work, they’re good providers, and they’re there for the children. I wonder if Korean women also love how Muslim men are stereotypically hairy.

The air of Islamic superiority was starting to make me uncomfortable, and as the Turkish man seemed like he’d rather be doing other things (which, it turned out later, meant offering to show someone else around the mosque), I decided to explore the mosque some more on my own. He also politely rejected my request to take a picture of him (“Is it necessary? If not, I’d rather …”). So awkward.

Walking outside, a man about my age stopped me and asked me, in English, where I came from. Do you realize how long it had been since I’ve had contact with someone who can speak English and isn’t in the program I’m taking here?! He was a regular at the mosque, helping to plan a lot of activities and programs there, and while I initially took him to be Korean and was mightily impressed by his English skills, it turns out that he was a Malaysian student who received a scholarship to study at Korea University. I don’t know how I messed that one up; apparently, all Asians still look the same to me.

Anyways, this is what I had been looking for — someone young who could really explain to me what this mosque was all about. After graduating high school and getting the scholarship, Khaled first took a year to learn Korean before enrolling at KU, and now he’s essentially fluent in the language. He’s an electrical engineering major (Samsung, anyone?), and has managed to make a lot of native Korean friends, and thereby somewhat integrate into society, through school. But, he still felt somewhat like an outsider in Korea. They’re very judgmental with regards to foreigners, and he really had to prove himself at KU (and probably eventually, will have to do so again in order to land that job at Samsung). He told me that Koreans aren’t blatantly racist, but it’s more of an attitude thing — you just feel as if you don’t belong. Only the white man — and he has to be both white and male — is looked at with some sort of admiration. Khaled wasn’t really angry, just observant.

I think Khaled is what Islam in Korea needs — young Muslims who are able to fit into Korean society, even if they are kept at the margins; who are willing and who want to do things that Korean Koreans do, like going clubbing and dancing on weekends, even if they don’t drink (and Koreans love to drink); and who understand that this isn’t really their land and that they’re the ones who have to adapt, because Korean society certainly won’t adapt to them. Khaled even uses Hangeul characters to express his name on his Facebook account!

Even though prayers at the mosque were about to start, Khaled walked with me back to Itaewon to grab some dinner and then took me to the subway station. I’ll probably never visit that mosque again, but I’m glad I went — wow, 5 weeks ago now. A Korean friend told me she had heard rumours of an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist cell close to the mosque. I honestly can’t imagine that being true, as the Orient never hit me as a prime target for terrorist attacks. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s a reflection of how Koreans view the world and unfamiliar things — speaking of which, why do Koreans believe that keeping fans on at night can kill them? Either way, with immigration to South Korea from Muslim nations increasing for the foreseeable future, the mosque’s role in Seoul society is likely to become more important.

And as first mosques go, the Seoul Central Mosque was not a bad choice.

Addendum:

East Asian parents have this reputation for being overtly racist, so if my parents are reading this: don’t worry, I have absolutely no intention of converting to Islam. In any case, I’m not the child you should be worrying about bringing home a brown boyfriend. Um … did I just put that down in writing?

And the backpacking starts … now!

The summer school program is officially over now — five weeks of film editing actually ended last Friday, and our Korean written and oral finals took place this Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.  After being in Seoul for six weeks, I’m finally ready to see the rest of Korea!

People always talk about backpacking around Europe.  I have this fantasy — perhaps in the not-so-distant future — of hopping from one small European country to the next one with a green Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack and a Tim Hortons mug.  In this fantasy, I meet a lot of quaint brunet(te)-haired Europeans tending to gardens and forests, and other Canadian tourists are friendly and generous to me because of the maple leaf patch on my backpack … and the Tim Hortons mug.  I also happen to be a brunet in this fantasy.  No lie.  I swear it’s the Tim Hortons commercials.  The particular one I’m thinking of is … not on Youtube.

Instead of France, Germany, and the Czech Republic, though, I’m going around South Korea.  I imagine that it’ll be somewhat different from a Eurotrip:

• First, the people here will be Asian.  Visually speaking, I think that’s a huge difference.
• I can’t hop around from country to country, even if I had the time and money too — South Korea’s only neighbour by land is North Korea, and you can’t exactly travel there on a whim.  You can take the ferry to China or Japan, but that’s not entirely convenient, either.  By the way, someone in the program paid $2700 for a tour of North Korea, the proceeds of which apparently go to alleviating the country’s major famine problems.
• Thus, instead of hopping from one small country to another, I’m hopping from province to province.  South Korea’s roughly 1.3 times the size of the Czech Republic, but only about 15% the size of France and 30% the size of Germany.  Luckily, the train and bus system is highly-refined and efficient, so getting around shouldn’t be a problem.  Getting from Seoul, in the northwest of the country, to Busan, in the absolute southeast, takes only two and a half hours.
• People outside of Seoul don’t really speak English — and people in Seoul don’t really speak English either, so I’m not expecting much.  This really makes it much more culturally-immersing, but during my six weeks here, I learned how to say things like “I am a boy,” “I go to the department store in order to buy banana milk,” “(As for) Susie, her major is biology,” and “Last night, I ate kimchi.“  I have not learned how to say things like “or,” “because,” and “I’m sorry.“  My vocabulary is limited to food, majors, simple adjectives that, for some reason, Koreans view as verbs, and simple verbs.  In other words, I’m incapable of any real conversation with a Korean.  One of the reasons I like to travel is that it gives you the opportunity to see how other people live and think, but it’s hard to do that when the communication barrier is essentially insurmountable.

The plan for now is to hit up Ulsan’s beaches tomorrow with friends from the program, though a typhoon is looming; then make my way over to Jinju, a city that is apparently quite boring every month except for October; hitch a ride with a friend up to Daejeon, home of Korea’s MIT; then stay a couple of nights with another friend in Suwon, where Samsung is headquartered; and then head back to Seoul and over to Incheon for a one-night templestay (thanks for the idea, Aunt Wendy!). 

After that, I have about three days before I fly back to North America, and by then two of my friends from Calgary will be in Seoul!  I’m also going to try to check out Pyeongchang, the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics, and perhaps cities closer to the North Korean border, several of which were actually on North Korean territory before the start of the Korean War.

One last thing — I’m sorry for the long delay between blog posts!  I’ve been sick this past week and haven’t really felt like doing much of anything, but all of these train and bus rides should hopefully give me plenty of time to write.

Big girl, you are beautiful – but maybe not in Korea

This summer, I’m studying at Ewha Womans University, which, naturally, is filled with Korean girls. Several things become readily apparent:

• Korean girls love to diet. Being skinny is both a stereotype of and the fervent desire of Korean (and probably all Asian) girls. I went to the FamilyMart convenience store outside Ewha two separate times, with two different Korean girls. Both times, they showed me the same two ‘uniquely Korean’ items: panana uyu, or banana milk (there’s also strawberry, caramel, blueberry, chocolate, and mocha-flavoured milks, but banana milk is the most popular), and digestive yogurt. I’ve seen digestive yogurt cans in T&T and Lambda (the Canadian and specifically Calgarian versions of the American Super 88, respectively) before, but until I came to Korea, I honestly had no idea it was yogurt. Apparently it helps your digestion. Korean girls are also quite open about their digestive issues — I’ve never heard a North American girl tell me they had indigestion before. Digestive yogurt can also be flavoured, as you can see with the peach, strawberry, apple, and grape varieties in the picture below. However, each small can is only 150 mL – perhaps it’s proportional to the size of Korean girls.And lest you think that these are two separate phenomena, there is also diet panana uyu. You can’t really buy flavoured milk in bulk — I haven’t seen jugs so far, and while the OrangeMart supermarket (which, completely non-fortuitously, closed up shop the first week we were here) sold them in 4-packs, convenience stores sell them individually. Each 240 mL of milk in the cool-shaped is approximately $1 — not much by North American standards, but kind of ridiculous when you think that a waffle with ice cream and syrup is only $2. Digestive yogurt is even more expensive at between $1.20 and $1.50.  Diet panana uyu costs the same as regular panana uyu, interestingly enough.
• Girls at Ewha — the students, not the professors — all have a very similar look to them. Take a look at the pictures below: Most girls have dyed hair. When you have black Asian hair, and still want to look somewhat respectable and professional, there aren’t really that many options for what the end results are: no matter what colouring you use, it turns a dark orange-chestnut sort of colour. How popular is this? Well, among the 12 Ewha girls in the program, 9 of them have the same dyed hair. It’s also not as if only a certain type of Ewha girl dyes their hair: girly girls, ‘tough’ (Korean for butch) girls, athletic girls, and artistic girls can all have dyed hair.  Also, the three in the program who have pure black locks don’t hang out with each other exclusively — dying your hair just seems … well, universal.
• The fashion — well, honestly, how can you expect me to judge female fashion?  Two broad categories stand out though: the professional look and the uber-Korean look.  The professional look would be pretty normal in North America — see the girl on the left in picture 2, and the girls in pictures 4 and 5.  Their tops and dresses are monochromatic and kind of standard.  The uber-Korean look, though, involves tops with bizarre pictures and/or English words that often don’t make sense.  Perhaps it’s more uber-Asian than uber-Korean, but I can’t separate the clothes from the faces, and the faces definitely scream out ‘Korea!’
• Finally, once girls grow up and enter professional (or perhaps not-so-professional careers), their entire face changes. Their hair becomes perfectly black again — the darker, the better. Their faces naturally age, but in an effort to remain cute and look young, they lather them with oils and creams. The older the woman, the oilier her skin will look. Here are four women, in what I believe is chronological order (the first two are pretty similar in age, though).  Sorry for the fuzzy quality of some of the images! A friend of mine called the transition from girl to woman the ajumma period, after the Korean term for a middle-aged woman often respectfully used for one who runs a restaurant or street stall. You can also see how the oldest has permed her hair: yet another Asian stereotype confirmed. The oldest is actually the Dean of the school that is hosting our program in Korea, and while she’s pushing 70, she is still desperate to stay cute and loveable. Her English is impeccable, probably the result of having grown up in Chicago for two years as a girl, and she seems to be a very well-respected professor at Ewha. But that doesn’t stop her from doing the Asian bunny fingers, nor drawing attention to herself and making jokes about how she’s lonely and needs more friends.  At our closing ceremonies, she also decked herself out in a sleeveless dress.  When was the last time your Asian grandma did that?

As one last note, as the best all-female university in South Korea, and as one of the top seven in the country, you would think that Ewha could make recruitment videos that accurately targeted what its potential students — young Korean girls — are looking to get from the university experience. But listen to the music starting at 1:40 — Mika’s Big Girl (You are Beautiful). Even though the album from which this song was released, Life in Cartoon Motion, was certified platinum in South Korea, I have this suspicion that Koreans don’t actually understand the lyrics. 

http://203.255.162.144/JWFlash/Ewha/Ewha2010_E.html

While you’re at it, watch the first minute and look at all the ajumma who appear — great skin, and only one (a film director, what a shocker) who has noticeably-dyed hair.  Granted, most of the female students it portrays also have jet-black hair, although I’d argue that

• this is the image that the Ewha administration, a rigid, censoring, and conservative group, tries to project to the rest of the world; and
• they’re probably graduate students halfway through the ajumma transition already, anyways.

By the way, ‘womans‘ isn’t even a word. Maybe Ewha’s administration should display the same strong English language skills that it requires its high school applicants to have.

Sucks to be you: being foreign in Korea

“Koreans are the most racist people on Earth.  It’s not because they’re inherently racist, it’s just that they don’t know anything other than themselves.” — Korean-American girl in the program

I grew up in a multicultural society — an officially multicultural society — and I’d like to think that I’ve benefited tremendously from it.  My parents were immigrants, and they’d be the first to say that Canada’s been good and welcoming to them.  It’s been good to me, too.  Even though I’m not white, I can do or be anything I want in the Great White North.

But Korea is not a multicultural society — in fact, it’s anything but.  Known as the “Hermit Kingdom” for most of its history, as a reflection of its unwillingness to accept outside influences or even the presence of foreigners, Korea is currently undergoing an ethnic revolution as immigrants from all areas of the world come to its shores in search of economic prosperity.

With rapid ethnic change comes multicultural growing pains.  Nowhere is this better exemplified than the Seoul district of Itaewon, described by my guidebook as “the heart of Seoul’s expatriate community,” having “a well-deserved reputation for rowdiness and seediness,” and a place that Koreans “used to avoid … like the plague.”

Now, there are several different types of ‘foreigners’ and ‘immigrants’ to Korea.  Those who are white — basically, white Americans — are treated with respect and almost a sort of deference by the native population.  Besides, most of them are only temporarily based in Seoul.  Everyone else, well … they’re the ones who get shunted to Itaewon. I didn’t know this before I went — I thought I’d chill with a bunch of English teachers in a cafe.  Didn’t happen.

In Itaewon, you have your Muslims, who open Indian restaurants that cater to the Koreans’ disposition towards spiciness even though most of the owners are Pakistani.  Then there are your Turks, who open bakeries and sell overpriced baklava, although all desserts in Korea are overpriced (apparently, sugar is a luxury here).  And then you have your Africans — mostly from Nigeria — who, as one of the girls in this program described, “are the reason I don’t like Itaewon.”  Not to be racist — and I have Nigerian friends — but I don’t blame her.

Finger Licking Good — so original.

 

Even foreigners have picked up on the Asian fingers.

 

One of the streets leading to the mosque was dominated by Nigerian-owned shops, primarily restaurants but also including tailors and money transfer joints. Of course — being the camera-happy tourist-cum-blogger that I am — I wanted to take a few pictures of black people in Korea. Whether you can photograph strangers without gaining their explicit permission is always iffy, but I thought that if they didn’t like it, then they’d tell me, I’d delete the picture, and we’d all move on.

But no. I’m not sure whether they disapproved — there was a lot of ambiguous non-verbal communication — but one man, the one on the right in the picture above, came out into the street and pointed at me. At first, I thought he was angry about the picture. But as he came closer — why is he coming closer? — he started pointing towards me, beckoning towards me, talking to me. I was scared, so I kept walking, going past the stall. And he keeps coming towards me. Leering at me. Motioning for me to come closer. The only thought running through my mind was: my camera’s kinda valuable, and still on loan from a friend who I haven’t paid yet, FML. I didn’t have to run away, but I was definitely ready to. Every store down that lane, I’d feel eyes on me.

I don’t want to pin the blame on economic immigrants, though. Native Koreans in Itaewon were also sketchy — maybe it goes hand-in-hand with Itaewon developing into an immigrant area. It was common to see people dress poorly here, in a way that normal, respectable — and Koreans are big on being respected by others — Koreans would never dress.

Compare the man on the right with the man in the centre.

As I tried to snap a picture of one old man carrying cardboard, he pointed at me and seemed to ask me not to snap his picture. So I put my camera down. But that wasn’t the end of it. He goes on a tirade, pointing at me — what’s with all this pointing?– and spewing out loads of Korean. I thought I had committed a major cultural gaffe. Luckily, though, the oid geezer was just crazy, because after he passes me, he chooses several other targets — young, female, native Korean targets — down the street. Another old man, this one managing a food cart, smiled nicely at me and chuckled a little, reassuring me for the time being. The point, though, is that if a large proportion of native, mainstream Koreans don’t want to go near Itaewon, how will foreigners ever feel welcome in Korea?

The American military also loves Itaewon. Now, as a Canadian, my views on the American military are naturally somewhat biased, so you might want to read this with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, soldiers have been noted for getting too drunk, making too much noise, and taking too many liberties in Itaewon (and elsewhere around Korea). I didn’t see many there during the daytime, but the ones I have met in other locations have been somewhat … rough around the edges.

Once, I was filming in Hongdae, where youth congregate on Friday and Saturday nights, and one Texan soldier interrupts me and asks how he can set off a firecracker in the middle of the street. No one else is setting off firecrackers here, buddy. Another time, I’m taking the subway home late Sunday afternoon, and three loud soldiers keep talking about their weekend (mis)adventures. They’re sitting across the subway cabin from one another, legs spread apart, and laughing and carrying open bottles of alcohol. And one thing I’ve learned about Seoul subways is that people like their silence and will passive-aggressively protect their right to it. They actually go up to you and ask you to be quiet.

Perhaps one of the weirder juxtapositions in Itaewon is the presence of Seoul Central Mosque — presumably a fairly conservative establishment — right about Homo Hill, where a profusion of gay clubs are located. Homo Hill was mentioned in my tour book. What was not mentioned, though, was the presence of a somewhat overweight woman with bright red hair of perhaps Eastern European descent, wearing a sleeveless black dress cut a little bit too short, smoking while sitting on a small crate (the type that holds milk cartons in North America) outside of an unlit storefront. Inside this unlit storefront: another woman, this one blonde, much skinnier, in the same type of dress (proportional to her size, of course). MY FIRST BROTHEL, wtf? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so sketchy. I was too sketched out to take a picture, and besides, taking pictures of women who prostitute themselves out for economic reasons halfway across the world from their home transcends even my ethics — it’d be as if they were a circus sideshow act.

It’s almost as if Itaewon was never cleaned up after the war.

And then, there’s this picture. I’m pretty sure “transgender” in Korea just means a drag queen show, and the Japanese words apparently say “karaoke.”

Questions? Yeah, I got a few …

I honestly don’t know that much about Korea’s multicultural policies, but people here don’t seem to be very tolerant of difference or even subcultures existing alongside mainstream Korean-ness. Studies have shown that Canada’s embracing of multiculturalism — how it helps immigrants learn an official language, find jobs, become citizens, feel welcomed — integrates them into society. I don’t think Korea does that yet (but see the addendum below).The situation is probably worse in the rural countryside to the south of the country. All of the girls have left the region, to find better marriage prospects in the cities. Farmers who are unable to find wives have therefore resorted to importing women from poorer southeast Asian countries — primarily Vietnam and the Philippines — to become their brides. Half of the weddings in these areas — half– are to foreign mail-order brides. They live in remote areas, making it difficult for them to get support from other immigrants or from the government. In addition, they’re often subject to domestic violence, and their children, while being completely fluent in Korean (and often not their mother’s native language), are discriminated against because they’re darker than typical Koreans. Bloodline is important in Korea.

A 2005 South Korean hit about two farmers from southeast South Korea who go on a “wedding campaign” in order to find ethnic Korean brides from Uzbekistan.

Professor Eun Mee Kim, the dean of the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at Ewha, which is hosting our trip here, has apparently said that she thinks the Canadian model is what Korea needs to study in order to adapt to its multicultural future. However, a large proportion of the students that are drawn into GSIS comes from poorer countries that Korea looks down upon — countries in central Asia, in Africa, in poorer parts of Latin America. They live in the same dorm as we do, but don’t have much real contact with native Koreans and even after several months of living here, some are incompetent in basic Korean — words like “thank you” or “excuse me.” I’m not sure how effective Dr. Kim is, even in her own school.

Most of the countries on this list — Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, Ghana, Peru — send graduate students to the Ewha Graduate School of International Studies. Koreans definitely look down on these people, though …

One last comparison is to Korea’s neighbour, Japan, which is, like Korea, a very homogeneous country. Looking at the players in the top three teams in each country’s 2010 soccer league (known as, appropriately, the J-League and the K-League), just under 16% in Japan are of foreign descent, while only 8% in Korea are — a factor of 2! This (what I think is a) brilliant experiment was definitely not conceived by me.

FC Seoul — the 2010 K-League Champions

But just when I was beginning to think that multiculturalism in Korea was a complete disaster, I walked into Jester’s in Itaewon for a late lunch. I went on its opening day, for which they hired three young, tightly-dressed, Korean rock violinists to blast out tunes to the streets. Ordering an Indian butter chicken-filled, Australian meat pie from native Koreans in the shadow of the largest mosque in the country, makes me think that maybe Koreans could warm up to the idea of multiculturalism or, at least, non-racism. Maybe it’ll all start with pho and kebabs.

Addendum: After I wrote this piece up, I found a recent article that told of four — what a large number! — immigrants that have been hired by the city government here in Seoul as support liaisons for other immigrants. How many other immigrants? Three hundred and sixty … thousand. The four are women from the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Mongolia. With the exception of the Chinese woman, the other three all married Korean fiancés, and it said that the Mongolian woman did so before coming to Korea. Not that I’m cynical or anything …