Month: August 2013

The idea that blood type is connected with personality is one I had never heard of before coming to Korea in 2009. It’s popular in East-Asia. I was interested. Koreans seem to mostly believe in this idea. Everyone knows all about it.

Here is how I understand it:

• Blood Type A: Careful and hardworking but shy; internally nervous and worried about others.
• Blood Type B: Fun-loving and charismatic, but unpredictable and can be rude, selfish, and/or lazy.
• Blood Type O: Sociable (can be over-sociable), optimistic, and a natural leader.
• Blood Type AB: Serious, smart and able, but aloof and eccentric.

I occasionally discuss this theory with students, and it’s always a winning strategy. They are “into” it.

This past week there was a speaking test, probably the last one I will give here. We had been studying “personalities” in the text-book, so I decided to make both the speaking and writing tests about personality. In the speaking test, I asked all ten students various questions, one of which was “what is your blood-type?” Because of this blood-type belief, everyone knows his or her own type. I then asked them to consider what Gandhi’s blood-type may have been (he was in the textbook), and explain why they thought so. I noted their answers. I thought this would, somehow, give me some kind of insight into Blood Type Theory. This little graphic I made shows the results:

Of course, it doesn’t matter what type Gandhi actually was. The point is that, given students who are aware that they are certain blood types and who are aware of Blood Type Personality Theory, the guess tells about the guesser.

Notes

• “Methodology”: I asked each student this question individually, as part of their speaking test, in a separate room. That is, they were each alone with me in the testing place, one by one. It was also a surprise question. There is no way they were influenced by other students’ answers to this “Gandhi question”.

• Student #3: [born Sept 2001] This is a girl who has spent a few months in California, and who sounds, sometimes, ever-so-slightly like a “Valley Girl”. She claimed to not know who Gandhi was. I said he was from India. She said “Really?!” She is AB. She was the only student who claimed to not be familiar with Gandhi, which fits in with the “eccentric” idea for AB people.

• Student #8: [born July 2001] This is a girl who attends an International School in China. She is back in Korea on summer vacation. She will leave soon, because vacation is ending. She reported that she was Type O, but she also said that she was “half B” (meaning her actual blood is O, but she has some B characteristics). This surprised me because I think she is a clear “A”, quiet and hardworking!

• Student #9: [born April 2001] This is the bright boy who is a fan of dinosaurs, whom I have written about before. He is the only student who thought Blood Type Personality Theory was wrong. He was insistent that it is not true, but even he was very aware of the ideas of it.

Summary of Results

• Students with blood type A thought that Gandhi was type O by a 2-to-1 margin.
• Students with blood type O thought that Gandhi was type A by a 5-to-0 or 4-to-1 margin (#8’s double-answer).
• Students with blood type ‘AB’, suitably to the stereotype, gave the only two oddball answers. That is to say, they gave the only two non-A, non-O responses. One girl said ‘B’, and the other was Student #3 (see above).

Simply:
A’s guessed “O”.
O’s guessed “A”.

I wonder what this means. There is clearly some following of cultural expectations going on. Maybe it means these kids don’t want to see themselves as “like Gandhi”, for some reason. People who see themselves as “O” may be playing-up Gandhi’s supposed nonviolence (“A” would be the least violent of any type). People who see themselves as “A” may want to play-up Gandhi’s leadership (an “O” trait). Maybe, then, in heroic figures, we look for what’s lacking in ourselves.

I’m open to better explanations.

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Related Posts
Post 64: “Refusing a Nickel“
Post 7: “Nobody Wants Robot Teachers”
Post 8: “Robot Supporter Demographics“

Writing post-121, about a Korean high school’s slogan (“Growing Hope and Pleasure”) made me realize something.

Korean School Names
The school’s name in post-121, Jung-Heung [중흥], translates as “the Center of Joy” (a name probably mocked regularly by its students). Jung means center, and heung means “interest, fun, pleasure, joy, amusement…”, according to my dictionary. Korean schools all seem to have names like this. They are either highly abstract, or tied directly to the local place. For example, there is a Songnae High School near, believe it or not, Songnae Train Station.

USA School Names
Naming schools after people or after specific (non-local) places of historical of “patriotic” interest is the way schools are named in the USA. At least, that’s true in the part of the USA in which I am most familiar with school names (Northern Virginia).

My home of Arlington, VA has three regular public high schools. The origins of their names:

• One is named “Yorktown”, an early colonial capital and later Revolutionary War battlefield, at which the British finally surrendered to George Washington.
• Another is named after George Washington and Robert E. Lee,
• The third is named after George Washington’s birthplace, “Wakefield“.

A Different Arlington
Actually, until now I hadn’t realized that all three Arlington high school names were tied to George Washington. I wonder if that was intentional when they were named in the early-mid 1900s. I doubt the people at the helm in today’s Arlington would do something like that. First of all, those places are all Virginia-centric. Arlington people don’t think of themselves as Southerners at all. Included in the mix is even General Lee, the very archetype of Old Southern gentility.

If the current leaders of Arlington had the task of naming new schools, I can only imagine what they’d come up with.

It reminds me of a line from Bonfire of the Vanities [1987]. The Mayor says:

“[The Black Episcopalian Bishop] coulda just as easy been a woman or a Sandinista. Or a lesbian. Or a lesbian Sandinista“!

There was a case in the 1990s when an Arlington school, named “Stonewall Jackson Elementary” (after the now-mythical general of the Civil War on the losing side) was renamed something boring and pitifully bland: “Arlington Traditional School”.  Robert E. Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s had slaves, so their military heroes are all definitely evil, was the cockamamie theory at work there, I think. Hey, guys, Washington and Jefferson and others also had slaves, right? Should we tear down their memorials? …..Anyway, Arlingtonians today don’t identify with at all with the South.

There was also a Page Elementary School, also renamed in the 1990s. I don’t know what ol’ Mr. Page, whoever he was, did to deserve his name being purged.

Here is a photo of the gate of Jung-Heung High School [중흥고], in Bucheon’s Jung-Dong neighborhood.

This school is within the “New City” area of Bucheon, where I live and work. The school opened its doors to students for the first time in March 1994 (according to its website), before which this site was presumably farmland. A lot of nearby land was still being used as farmland into the late ’90s, I’m told. (The apartment building I live in was built only in 2004, and the building I work in was built in 2002.)

“Growing Hope and Pleasure in Jung-Heung.”
[Jung-Heung is the school’s name]

They are using Chinese characters (“Hanja”) in this slogan. Motivational slogans like this, writing on Buddhist temples, and Chinese restaurants are about the only places I can think of where one still sees “Hanja”. Occasionally, a few select characters are used as abbreviations in some newspapers. For example, North Korea is referred to using the Chinese-character for “north”.

Written Korean, ever since the invention of the Korean script (“Hangul”) 600 years ago, has always been a mix of Hangul and Hanja, of Korean letters and Chinese letters, with wild variation in the shares of each in different eras. In the later centuries of the Chosun Dynasty (1700s, 1800s), I’ve read that it was fashionable among the educated to use only Chinese characters, and the native-Korean script was “for women and farmers”, or something. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese letters were still in heavy use, which is obvious from news-clippings and street photos from then.

I’m told that the government of General Park (1961-1979) led a deliberate campaign to get rid of Chinese characters in public life, which has succeeded. Most Koreans born after 1980 (or whenever) can read very few Chinese letters.

Translation Effort

• [Chinese Letters]: Hope (I ascertain this meaning only by process of elimination; I can’t read it)
• 과: and
• 기쁨: Pleasure, joy, delight
• 피어나: begin to bloom; begin to prosper; light up
• [Chinese Letters]: The name of the school, i.e. “Jung-Heung”
• 요람: Cradle, birthplace, as in “the cradle of civilization”

I think “Growing Hope and Pleasure in Jung-Heung” is a good translation.

Another could be “Where Hope and Joy Bloom”, or maybe “The Cradle From Which Hope and Joy Burst Forth”.

A Woman Driving a Taxi
11:40 PM last Sunday. I step off a bus at “Express Bus Terminal” in southern Seoul. I am returning from Jeonju.

A taxi is lurking nearby. It’s almost a rare sight in Seoul to not see a taxi. I get in. Surprise: The driver is a woman! She is in her late 30s or 40s, I think. Thin. She speaks quickly and enthusiastically. Her voice reminds me of my first boss’ voice, from Ilsan. She grips the wheel tightly, at ten o’clock and two o’clock. She drives quickly. She makes at least one obvious wrong turn, despite being led by GPS, and says some Korean equivalent to “Aw, damn!” (or worse).

I was surprised that the driver was a woman, of course. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen a woman taxi driver. I wonder about her. How did she get into that business? Why? When?

Why was I riding a taxi?
The intercity bus passengers, me included, mostly wanted to get into the miraculously-cheap subway network (the base adult fare for which is only 95 U.S. cents in 2013, at any time of day. My ride was longer, but I’d still get home for a delightful $1.25). The station-guard turned everyone back. We’d narrowly missed the last trains. — Okay. — No big problem — Just inconvenience. — I’d have to get a taxi to Seoul Station, and then get on a long-distance bus to my home in Bucheon. (Plan B, taxi and bus, would cost 8,000 Won for the taxi and 2,000 Won for the bus [bus travel time: 45 minutes, traveling on the highway, limited stops]. Total extra cost: $9.00.)

Male Grocery Store Cashier
At the nearby shopping center at which I buy a lot of my food (called “HomePlus”), there are twenty or thirty “checkout lanes”, places at which cashiers scan your groceries and you pay. At certain busy times, all the lanes are full. When that’s the case, there are always a couple of male cashiers. Otherwise, the job of supermarket-cashier is 100%-female in Korea, in my experience.

I have often noticed something strange, in these cases. When male cashier clerks are present, they always, always have the shortest lines. Few want to go into their lines. Koreans would rather choose a line with three people ahead and a woman cashier, than a line with one person ahead and a male cashier! It’s a waste of several minutes, which Koreans usually don’t tolerate. I also find myself doing this, that is, avoiding male cashiers. I can’t explain it.

Below is a picture I took inside Jinju Fortress [진주성], also called Jinju Castle. I visited in early August.

The fortress is huge; lots to see; a wonderful place; I thoroughly enjoyed my hours there, except for the cicada-cacophony. (If you put yourself in my place while taking this picture, you have to image an incessant, grinding, loud  cicada-humming).

Forground: Statue to a General Kim. (I know, I know: there must be hundreds of “General Kims” in Korean history.)
Background: North Gate (공북문).
Further background: The old city-center of Jinju, north of the river.

The Japanese invaded Korea in the 1590s. The general “enstatued” here is, according to the plaque, General Kim Shi-Min (김시민). He successfully defended the fortress against the Japanese in 1592. He died in the battle. The Japanese failed to take the city that year, but returned and won in 1593. Jinju-1592 in one of only three land-based Korean victories, the pamphlet said, during the Japan-Korea wars of the 1590s.

Admiral Yi
A  similar-looking statue, which I have walked past many times, stands at Gwanghawmun Plaza in the very heart of Seoul’s old center. That one depicts the greatest Korean military hero of them all, Admiral Yi Soon-Shin (이순신). In the same war against Japan (of the 1590s), Admiral Yi won a series of lopsided victories at sea, making up for the poor showing of Korean arms on land. People credit him with all-but single-handedly defeating Japan in that war.

Bafflingly, in the midst of Admiral Yi’s (undefeated) string of victories in the war, the leadership of Korea’s Chosun dynasty stabbed him in the back, and actually put him in prison (and nearly put him to death), in the most paranoid kind of Stalninesque purge. Sure enough, after Yi’s political-imprisonment, the tide of the war began to turn against Korea. The Japanese began winning victories at sea. Yi was released and saved the day, again.

(I learned all that from a biography of General Park Chung-Hee, South Korea’s military-ruler from 1961-1979. General Park viewed Korean political history surprisingly-negatively and he railed about it in essays. General Park’s words are almost too shocking to be believed: He wrote, “Our five thousand years of history was a continuation of degradation, crudity, and stagnation” in the essay “The Nation, the Revolution, and I” [“국가와 혁명과  나”,1961(?)], mentioning, among other things, that Korea’s indisputably-foremost military genius [Admiral Yi] was imprisoned, during a major war when the very fate of Korea was at stake[!], because of useless political squabbles and petty jealousy.)

“The Employee must give the Employer a written 45-day notice (July 30th, 2013) before renewal or non-renewal of the Employee’s current contract.”

On July 30, 2013, the night my vacation started, I sent the notification by email that I would not be staying, and Wednesday I left a paper copy on the desk of the supervisor. My last day will be September 13th.

I requested that the above be written into my contract when I signed it almost one year ago. It was one the points of unclarity I requested be made explicit. I wanted management to treat me fairly such as to resolve my employment situation in a reasonable timeframe. Last time, they delayed a lot.

[Removed]

The provision about giving 45 days’ notice:

Professionalism dictates, surely, that the matter should be settled long-enough before my visa runs out that I can make my next plans. I requested the date by which we should settle the matter be made explicit, and set to July 30. That way, there was a firm date which we can both clearly see, and, I hoped, they wouldn’t endlessly delay like last time.

“기차 타 볼래!!”

“I wanna try riding the train!!“

A Korean toddler taught me that phrase. I can’t forget it, having heard it several hundred times in quick succession.

On the bus going into Jinju City from the train station. In the seat in front of me: A mother. A small boy, small enough to still be held by its mother but old enough to speak (maybe age 3). He was mellow until the bus started rolling. Then the wailing. Loud. Embarrassing for all aboard. The mother did nothing, said nothing. The wailing continued, minute after minute. Some chuckles from other passengers. A pause; the boy catches his breath. More wailing. The same phrase. “I wanna try riding the train!! — I wanna try riding the train!!” (“기차 타 볼래!!”).

I presume the boy and his mother had just said goodbye to the baby’s father, who I presume was riding somewhere on business. The baby shouted“기차 타 볼래!!” because he saw his dad riding the train, and saw other strangers were riding it, and felt cheated that he was forbidden from riding the wonderful metallic monster, something he had never done. As the mind of a baby has it, shouting “I wanna ride!” enough times, loudly enough, is a winning strategy.

I tried to make sense of the toddler’s plea. I recognized “기차” (train) and “타” (ride), learned from my hundreds of rides on the subway. “볼래” I didn’t know. It t was explained to me later that it means “I wanna” ( informal).

After ten minutes or so, the mother finally spoke, and something I couldn’t understand except for the word “bus”. I presume, from her singsong baby-talk tone, that she was telling the small boy that “Hey, riding a bus is fun, too”. The boy must have found this convincing, because the wailing faded into whimpering. Still, he maintained an occasional “I wanna try riding the train” (“기차 타 볼래”) every now and then until we were in central Jinju and I got off the bus.

I returned late on Sunday, August 4th, from a trip to Jinju (진주) and Jeonju (전주), cities in southern Korea.

The trip reinforces a view I have held tentatively ever since my August 2009 trip to Daejeon [대전] (in which I snuck into a UN-Youth event that a friend from Europe was attending). Namely: Korea is a lot more pleasant outside the Seoul region. By pleasant, I mostly mean “authentic”, though what that means I cannot say.

I can say that in the southern provinces the food is much better, the people are much nicer, there is less pretentiousness, more willingness to engage foreigners, and an easier pace of life. The ‘southern’ accent, especially in Jinju, is livelier and really on the “sing-song-ey” side. I hadn’t realized how ‘straight’ (or perhaps ‘flat’) the Seoul accent really was, but hearing Korean spoken by natives of Gyeonsgang Province showed it starkly.

I don’t intend in these pages to write a full report of everything I did and saw. I do intend to post some bits and pieces of interest. For example: Jinju’s English signage editor, whoever he is, belongs to that generally-dominant school of thought in the field of English-signage writing in East-Asia that says “Make it off just enough to make native-speakers laugh”.  Example:

“Stop Smoking and Drinking”

Using the word “stop” sounds really like it’s advice being given by a doctor, or maybe advice from a concerned relative to a middle-aged man for health and/or vaguely-moral reasons. Or maybe a public-service campaign.

These signs are sponsored by the city government. I saw them at other tourist areas, as well.