Month: September 2014

At the end of the day Thursday, it came down to this, with five minutes left: “Write something about cultural differences between countries.” I like these kinds of assignments because they are “open”. This is what I came up with:

Korean Original, Written by Me [수업에서 쓴 글]
나라마다 문화가 다릅니다. 예를 들면, 한국에서는 많은 사람들이 자주 술을 마시지만 이슬람교의 나라에서 법으로 술을 마시면 안 됩니다. 기독교 국가에서는 술을 마셔도 되지만 보통 서양인들 중에서 자주 술을 마시는 사람이 적습니다.

Translation into English
Every nation’s culture is different. One example is that in Korea, lots of people drink alcohol frequently, but in Islamic countries drinking alcohol is not allowed by law. In Christian countries, people may drink alcohol, but in general there are few Westerners who frequently drink.

Comment on My Argument:
Forgive my inexact argumentation. Writing anything coherent in this language, in three minutes, is hard enough!

What I meant is this:

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Regular alcohol consumption, while it exists in the USA, is culturally discouraged, whereas in Korea it is rather culturally encouraged and in Korea regular drinking is common. The Korea Times reported a few years ago that72% of Korean men drink alcohol every day. Another report says that 9.5 million bottles of beer and 9 million bottles of soju (an awful drink similar to vodka) are consumed every day, in a country of only forty-some-million adults.

Comment on Mistakes / Teacher’s Corrections:
I’ve reached the point where I can crank out something like this consistently, steadily, but slowly, and inevitably with mistakes. In this case, Han Teacher corrected two mistakes. One was a small grammar point [마시도–>마셔도]; the other one was replacing the phrasing I used for “in Christian countries” [그리스도의 나라 –> 기독교 국가]. I was curious about why she suggested that other phrase. This may be a case of “it just sounds right”. Then I asked Ol’ Mr. Google: My phrase only appears on nine [9] pages; her phrase, 179,000! That’s why she’s the teacher. (She is active and fun in class but has a tendency to speak too quickly for me to follow at times. She has told us several times that she likes drinking alcohol, but now that she’s married with a baby she seldom does anymore. This is the kind of sidetrack that an American teacher would be much less willing to go down in front of students [see above].)

Thursday, September 18th 9:30 PM
Sauntering down the street in Incheon, I hear a raucous noise emanating from across the way. Food and drink. Seafood. Oh, okay. Wait. I’ve walked along here dozens of times. This restaurant has never been like that. On a Thursday? I detoured a few steps to peer in. Wouldn’t you have done the same? Yes; packed. Hmm. A mystery, but not for long: THAILAND. On one jacket; and another; on all their jackets. Mystery solved. They were athletes and coaches.

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And so began the “Asian Games” for me (I’d never heard of them, either; a kind of Asia-only Olympics) and are being held in Incheon, South Korea, the very city I am in as I write these words.

It is, actually, exciting to have 10,000 athletes from across Asia show up along with a substantial number of fans and hangers-on. Suddenly Incheon feels multicultural. There seems to be a rule that athletes must wear their team jackets anywhere they go. I was able to thus identify others on Friday night, and more on Sunday. Two with BANGLADESH emblazoned on their jackets were trying to finagle a taxi driver into going where they want to go,

The tickets are very cheap, at under $10 for most events, so I hope I can go to one or more. Interestingly, one of the sports at the Asian Games is baseball. One I was thinking about seeing — this is not a joke — was Pakistan versus Hong Kong. Yes, they have fielded baseball teams. China has also fielded a baseball team. These kinds of teams will all be clobbered by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Other big news is that the North Korean delegation is here and is competing. Oh, and today I learned that Palestine has an official team (even without an official country) while Israel has been banned from the Games for decades.

Scotland defeated secession; turnout was near 90% in most districts; unsurprisingly, the strongest “union” areas were those that voted most highly for the Conservative Party (maps of 2011 results).

I’m still trying to figure it out. Although nobody in the British press would ever discuss this without a hysterical tone, I still want to know how much “blood and soil” feeling actually animated the secessionists. Of the 45% who voted for independence, a lot of reasons were floating around but the “blood and soil” thing, it must’ve been high on the list. Would we imagine 45% of Scots were zealous supporters of the political program of Scottish National Party?

I’m actually thinking this: Both sides had very big undercurrents of “blood and soil feeling” animating their campaigns, all else notwithstanding, but conflicting visions thereof.

The British Isles’ 1,600-years-running Celtic vs. Germanic rivalry may be the key to understanding it.

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Germanic tribes invaded a weakened, post-Roman Britain in the 400s AD. (Famously, one tribe, called the Angles, lent its name to what became “England”.) The local Celts were pushed out of most of what became England, but held out strongly in the highlands of Scotland and Wales, and a kind of “meta-cultural Cold War” set in, thawing for centuries. The conflict has taken many different permutations. The whole Catholic vs. Protestant affair is a big, easily-identifiable one (my impression is that strongly-identified Protestants in Scotland will be strong unionists [as much as White American Southerners are Republican today] and Scotland’s Catholics more heavily secessionists, though Scotland is only 15% Catholic). Maybe the Scottish independence movement of recent years has represented an expression of the Celtic spirit. Maybe Scots voting for left-wing parties like Labour and the SNP [combined for 77% of the vote in 2011] may be also be a proxy for that kind of ethnic identity, as it was so long in the USA (and still is).

So to the extent it was an emotion-based vote, it may have been something like this: “Do you see Scotland as being best fit in the Anglo-Germanic World, or in the Celtic World?”

Some might accuse me of fanciful, romantic thinking; as if anything that happened 1,500 years ago could still matter! Hey, there are other examples, easy to see, and if you bother to look you’ll see them all over, in fact. One example: the eastern/northern border of the Roman Empire 2,000 years go aligns almost precisely to the Latin-Germanic linguistic/cultural boundary today.

Previous posts about Scotland:
#228 Scottish Independence
#229 Scotland’s Secession Vote / Reminiscences of a Scottish Friend
#232 Secession, In Principle

For many complex reasons, a lot of Scots will vote “Yes” and a lot’ll vote “No” on secession tomorrow (Sept. 18th). (See previously: post-228, Scottish Independence, and post-229, Scotland’s Secession and Reminiscences of a Scottish Friend.)

I am led to step back from the passions of this particular secession crisis and think about the principle at hand.

Imagine that you support secession, in principle. “If a group of people within a specific region of a larger state wants independence, it is their sacred right to pursue and achieve it.” Something like that. (Or, more eloquently, “[I]n the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”)

It is tempting to support this principle. Americans honor the words of 1776, which seem to endorse it, 1861-65 notwithstanding. The problem is, things get very complicated, very quickly. “Where does it end?”

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Say Scotland secedes from the UK. Then, a few years later, a group of disgruntled Western Scots have had enough of the tyrants in Edinburgh and whip up a new secession movement. Lacking the will to use force, Edinburgh allows them to go. A free and independent West Scotland is born, takes its seat in the UN, and so on. So Scotland splits in two. Soon, the Scottish Highlanders, likewise, decide that the lowland Scots are a gang of mismanaging bureaucrats and they, too, secede. “Scotland” has become three independent nations. And so on.

What would be the acceptable number of “nation states” within the territory of today’s Scotland?

More plausibly, should Spain split into six minor states, as its various (active) secessionists want?

Here is a map I find at the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper that vociferously opposes Scottish secession. (I haven’t looked at all their newspapers, but it seems the Guardian supports Scottish secession, perhaps simply because the ruling SNP is seen as far left; this strikes me as petty.)

They compare it to this map of Europe in the mid-1300s (not long after “Braveheart” was set [see post-228]:

If secession is allowed, encouraged, and essentially unrestrained, wouldn’t an area wind up, in the end, under the late Holy Roman Empire model (a loose, pathetically loose, union of hundreds of statelets in Central Europe)?

Imagine if the current EU, with its 28 states and 500 million people, devolved into, say, 1,000 totally-independent statelets of each around 500,000 people, all under the EU banner and the system more-or-less as it is today. Would this be bad? It would certainly make Europe much weaker. The belief now, of course, especially in Europe, is that we Westerners are past the point of needing a strong state, anyway. What are you, a fascist? Until you do need one. Then “fascists” might come back in vogue. It may, then, be too late. One after another, the statelets of this hypothetical Europe fall, by force of arms or otherwise, to a rising power from the south or east, that doesn’t put with all that.

Here is an essay I wrote in Korean class (with the teacher’s corrections). My English translation is below.

(Note: In these kinds of essay I write in Korean, I consciously try to copy the writing style of a Korean student of 7th-9th grades, of whom I’ve taught many and of whose essays (in English) I’ve read very many. I figure that copying their style can smooth things over as I attempt to write in a language that is notoriously difficult for us. / In other words, if a student wrote the below in English, I would have certain criticisms of it, but… / I put myself at your mercy!)

인터넷의 장점/단점[2014년9월]
인터넷을 사용하는 사람이 재미있게 시간을 지낼 수 있지만  단점도 있습니다.

첫 번째, 인터넷의 단점에 대해서  이야기하고 싶습니다. 인터넷에 뉴스, 게임, SNS, 등 정말 많습니다. 그래서 사람이 컴퓨터를 켜자마자 여러 웹사이트를 확인 하려면 시간이 많이 필요합니다. 날마다 인터넷을 많이 사용하는 사람은 친구를 직접 만날 수 없습니다. 인터넷을 하기만 하는  사람 중에 성격이 나쁜 산밤이 있습니다.

그렇지만 인터넷에 대해서 좋은 점도 있어서 여기부터 장점에 대해서  이야하고 싶습니다. 인터넷에서는 게임을 즐겁게 할 수 있습니다. 예를 들면 스타크래프트를 하고 싶으면 인터넷이 필요합니다. 게임 외에로 뉴스를 아주 쉽게  볼 수 있습니다. 또  페이스북이나 카카오톡을 하기 위해서 인터넷을 자주 사용합니다.

인터넷이 없으면 우리 생활은 많이 불편해질 겁니다. 그렇지만, 인터넷은 장점도 있고 단점도 있기 때문에 잘 사용해야 합니다. [끝]


English Translation:

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Internet Pros and Cons [Written: September 2014; translated from Korean original]
People who use the Internet can spend their days enjoyably, but there are also some drawbacks.

Firstly, I want to discuss a negative thing about the Internet. On the Internet, there are really a lot of news sites, games, and “social networking sites” [acronym in Korean: SNS]. Therefore, as soon as a person turns on the computer, he or she checks various websites and this take up a lot of time. Those who use the Internet very frequently won’t have the chance to meet friends face to face. Among those who are always on the Internet, many have bad personalities.

Nevertheless, there are also good points about the Internet and now I want to discuss one. On the Internet, we can enjoy playing games. For example, if a person wants to play “Starcraft”, he will need the Internet. Besides games, it is also very easy to read the news. In order to use Facebook or Kakao Talk [a Korean instant messenger program] we also use the Internet frequently.

Without the Internet, our daily lives will be (sic) much less comfortable. Be that as it may, because the Internet has both pros and cons, we should use it wisely. [End of Essay]


And the originals:

One of the Americans currently in North Korea was found guilty this week. His name is Matthew Miller.

I first heard the name Matthew Miller in April 2014 (when I was in the USA). I remember the official North Korean press release being terse and cryptic…

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Of course, NK official press releases are, usually, terse and cryptic. (But not always. They rev up the engines and soar to the heights of bombast when discoursing on the subject of the perfidious, nefarious eternal enemy, Yankee Imperialism. Flowery language is also used to mock the “South Korean puppet government” [they often use quotation marks around “government”]. See for yourself; all the NK official daily press releases are here in English: KCNA. [The site is blocked under the anti-sedition law in South Korea. I don’t blame them; if you’re gonna have an anti-sedition law, that site’d have to be the first to be banned].)

I now read the following from NKNews.org:

Miller is reported to be 24 years old. If he was working as a paid English teacher at age 20, he was almost certainly illegal. A prerequisite for even the most basic, bottom-of-the-barrel English-teaching job in South Korea is a college degree. If he didn’t have one, he could never have gotten a work visa (they are strict about his). He was illegal.

Some of the newspapers and TV news in South Korea occasionally run stories vilifying “illegal English teachers” as a menace to Korean society. I wonder what they would do if they figure out Miller was…one of those?

(This follows on from post-228: “Scottish Independence”).

Three days till the Scotland vote on secession from the UK.

I’ve known one true Scotsman in my life (and it’s no fallacy). Back in the interesting years of 2011-2012. I knew one who worked in a nearby institute to mine. His name was R.W. and he was truly interesting to talk to, even down to his dramatic last day in Korea, when fortune would have it that I was with him almost to the end.

I’ve lost contact with R.W., but all the same I’m quite sure of two things:

• He’ll support union,
• He’ll have had frequent arguments against secessionists about this issue, often involving alcohol.

This is the kind of thinker R.W. was: I imagine him reflecting on the “Scotland secession referendum” by going on about it being a sign of the UK’s long-running decline: The UK was the “global superpower” in 1914. By 2014, a short century later, it’s lost it all and reached a point of such weakness that the UK itself may dissolve.

Here are some pictures of “pro-secession” rallies (“Yes”) supporters (also more R.W. reminiscences below):

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As I put pen to paper here (so to speak), more comes back to me. I do remember that R.W. addressed the secession issue directly, once, after I brought it up. He spoke negatively about the left-wing Scottish National Party and its leader, whom he may have called a “communist”.

(The “oddest/cleverest demonstration sign” award goes to the boy in the middle, below:)

R.W. spoke with a classy “British” accent (nothing of the thick Scottish accent), and was a “Tory” supporter, a fact for which he was mocked by M.G., a coworker from England. According to M.G., himself quite left-wing, the Tory Party had almost no supporters in Scotland. [M.G. has this very year married his longtime girlfriend E.R. back in the UK..]

Sunday also had pro-Union demonstrations. Here is one in Edinburgh, led by the Protestant Orange Order:

Americans who know the Orange Order will remember it from Northern Ireland. It is a Protestant fraternal order, whose marches in Belfast and so on have often “incited” riots by Irish-Catholics.

Speaking of Northern Ireland, another article today says that police fear street fighting during and after the vote so much that they are deploying heavily. This is inevitably reminiscent of decades past in Northern Ireland, though also of the hallowed tradition of British soccer rioting. (Much of the soccer rioting was ‘nationalistic’, split along ethnic/religion lines, I’m told: Most famously Glasgow’s Rangers [Protestant] vs. Celtic [Catholic] football clubs.)

There is an American in my Korean class, L., from Texas. I asked him about the Scotland secession vote. He apparently hadn’t heard of it, which surprised me. He then started talking about the possibility of Texas secession. He says some people in Texas talk seriously about it but he is not for it at all “unless things got really bad with the USA”.

Maybe this is why the Scotland secession vote interests me: It may be a possibility down the road (again) in the USA.

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The SNP is on the left, even of British politics, I understand, and completely rejects “blood and soil” thinking. Its policies are actively against that strand of political thought.

Right. So then. These 40%+ (or maybe over 50%) who are expected to vote “Yes” in the SNP’s secession referendum: What is their motivation? Pro-social-democratic politics? Huh? Then why not just stay in the UK?

As I keep thinking about it, I come up with this: Might people vote for a party for reasons completely at odds with what that party believes? I think many do this in the USA. In other words, maybe lots of Scots were influenced by “Braveheart“, after all, to be implicit “Scottish nationalists” today yet they exist in a climate, today, in which “blood and soil nationalism” in the West is culturally relegated to something like the place devil worship would’ve had in the Middle Ages. The left-wing SNP and its drive for secession/independence allows people to express implicit “blood and soil” feeling without….stepping outside the bounds of social respectability.

About “Braveheart” specifically. I wondered how many of the voters in Scotland were young enough at the time to have been influenced by it as youth. This is what I come up with: Around 1.6 million of Scottish voters (37% of the voting pool)* were born after 1972, which means they were between ages 0 and 23 when Braveheart came out, young enough to have been profoundly moved/influenced by the movie during their youth if they saw it when it came out, or later on VHS, DVD, TV, etc., while still youth. Of course, some may never have seen it. Some would’ve seen it only much later, as full adults, so it may have made less of an impression. Others will not even be Scottish by ancestry (maybe of English ancestry living in Scotland [see here], and those of non-European ancestry outright). Of the hypothetical Scots who saw Braveheart in their youth and may have been influenced towards “implicit Scottish nationalism”, alas we’re probably only talking about one or two out of ten voters. This still may be enough to swing the referendum’s outcome, though.


(* – I calculate this as follows: Scotland has 5.3 million people, of whom around 1 million are under 18 or non-citizens. Of the 4.3 million voters, the average age is 41.5, meaning around 2.6 million on each side of that age. From the younger half, deduct the 1.0 million who are under-18 and foreigners, equals 1.6 million age 18-41.5).

(Note: There is a follow-on post to this one in post-229, “Scotland’s Secession Vote / Reminiscences of a Scottish Friend”).

Way back in April 2013 (post-36), I wrote about the new South Korean government’s proposed introduction of “substitute holidays”. Contrary to my expectation at the time, I have actually lived to see one (or will live to see one, if I survive to the coming Wednesday).

South Korea has two official “major holidays” (연휴), one in Fall and one in Winter. At these times, everything shuts down on the day of, and the days before and after, a three-day block. When the main day falls on Monday, it means Sunday is one of the block days, which is kind of a gip. This time, though, by national law, Wednesday is off, too. Korean employers often cavalierly break these kinds of laws relating to labor, but are much more hesitant to impinge on a “major holiday”.

The holiday that Koreans are currently observing is the East Asian Harvest Festival, called Chuseok [추석] in Korea and “Moon Festival” in other places, I’m told. Some Koreans call it “Korean Thanksgiving” as a two-word explanation of it to Americans. Its date changes each year in accordance with that other calendar they use.

By reputation, something like half the people in the Seoul region clear out and return to their hometowns at the major holidays, though especially the Winter one (what we call “Chinese New Year”). I myself will be visiting my friend J.A. in a city in the middle of the country, leaving Monday afternoon. We’ll see how much of a delay there is on the bus.

Below is an essay I wrote in Korean. It was originally written on paper in about twenty minutes. I have transcribed it here and added an English translation below.

건강을 지키기 위해서는 좋은 음식을 먹어야 하고 운동을 해야 합니다
요즘 사람들의 고민 중에서 건강을 제일 중요하게 생각하기 때문에 우리가 건강을 지키는 계획을 세워야 합니다. 그럼, 어떻게 건강을 지킬 수 있습니까? 첫 번째 건강에 좋은 음식을 먹어야 합니다. 두 번째 운동을 자주 해야 합니다. 이렇게 하면 우리의 건강이 좋아질 수 있습니다.

첫 번째, 무슨 음식을 먹는지에 대해서 이야기할 겁니다. 음식이 중요하니까 건강에 좋은 음식을 항상 먹으세요. 날마다 채소를 다섯 개 이상 먹어야 합니다. 왜 이렇게 먹어야 합니까? 채소에 있는 비타민이 중요하니까 채소를 많이 먹어야 합니다. 인간의 몸에 비타민이 없으면 죽을 수 있습니다. 그리고 초코릿하고 설탕이 우리 건강에 나쁩니다. 초코릿이나 사탕을 많이 먹으면 뚱뚱하질 수있습니다. 뚱뚱한 사람들이 예쁘지 않고 병에 자주 걸립니다. 뚱뚱한 사람도 운동에 나쁩니다.

그러니까 이제 운동에 대해서 더 이야기합시다. 날씬 사람들이 운동할 수 있지만 요즘 사는 사람들이 보통 운동을 싫어서 운동을 안 합니다. 그런데 운동이 건강에 중요합니다. 날마다 우리의 다리를 이용해서 튼튼한 다리로 쉬운 생활이 지낼 수 있습니다. 그리고 좋은 몸이 있는 사람은 일찍 안 죽습니다. 우리는 매주 세 번 이상 운동을 해야 합니다. [2014.9.4 인천부평에서 쓴 글입니다]

[My Translation of this essay:]

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Q. Write an essay of two paragraphs about the following subject: “What should we do in order to maintain our health?”

In Order to Maintain Health, We Have to Eat Good Food and Exercise
These days, “health” is the most important of people’s concerns, and so we need to make a plan to keep ourselves healthy. How, then, can we maintain our health? Firstly, we need to eat healthful foods. Secondly, we need to exercise frequently. If we do these things, our health can get better and better.

First of all, I will talk about what kind of foods we eat. Food is important for us, so we have to always eat healthful foods. We need to eat at least five servings of vegetables per day. Why should we eat like that? The vitamins in vegetables are important, so we need to eat a lot of them. Without vitamins in a human’s body, it can cause death. Also, chocolate and sugar are bad for our health.  If we eat a lot of chocolate or sugar, we can become fat. Fat people don’t look good and they often get sick. Fat people are also bad at physical activities.

Therefore, let’s now talk some more about physical activities. Thin people can exercise, but as people living today usually dislike exercising, they don’t do it. However, exercise is important for our health. We use our legs every day, so if we have strong legs, we can have an easier time in life. Also, people with strong bodies will not die early. We should exercise at least three times a week. [End of essay] [Essay written on Sept. 4th, 2014 in Incheon]

This essay was written in an unusually-quiet coffee shop in the Bupyeong neighborhood of the usually-noisy Seoul Megalopolis. Included here are some corrections for grammar by my Korean friend, H.J., the intrepid IT entrepreneur. I was helping him with an English thing at the time. He may soon work at one of the world’s most famous companies, the one which stole an obscure mathematics term and made it world-famous. You know the one I mean.


Update, September 12th: I didn’t realize it, but it turned out this essay was due to the teacher. Here is my final submitted essay. I received an above-average grade for the class, it seems, but the teacher marked many mistakes on it, anyway.

This summer, my friend Jared wrote the following:

Jared doesn’t say it directly, but TOEFL is a product of the USA, of the same company that makes the SAT, GRE, and AP exams. TEPS, on the other hand, is an exclusive product of Korea.

Experience leads me to conclude that this is, indeed, the “(East) Asian Way”.

I have been, now, on both “sides” of the classroom (as a teacher and as a student [teaching English; studying Korean]) in South Korea, and this kind of atmosphere prevailed in all the places I’ve been. I had one Korean teacher in particular who would run a typical teacher-centered class, but at a snail’s pace because she spent so much time seeming annoyed at the smallest of mistakes and stopping everything to unmercifully slam down on each and every mistake in front of the entire silently-onlooking class. This was really demotivating; people became afraid to say anything for fear of mistakes and public shaming. This is also something explicitly we were told not to do in our ESL teaching certificate program.

Back to TEPS. I never taught much TEPS, but I did teach TOEFL, usually as my main responsibility. Generally, native speakers were not assigned to TEPS classes. And thank God for it as TEPS classes were considered the worst:

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Now, I submit to you that even native English speakers will often be unsure of the answers to these kinds of questions.

In #1, (a) and (c) could both plausibly be correct. In #2, (b) and (c) might both be right. In the last question, the answer is certainly (c), but there are plausible situations in which even this sentence, as is, might be correct. Consider: “You were shouting really loudly after winning the tennis tournament! Are you really *so* glad you won?” “Definitely. I’m *that* glad I put in those extra hours at the gym!”

Another friend, J.A., who recently moved out of the Seoul area for the first time, has proposed a conspiracy theory: As multiple answers can be right, people with the right connections can be tipped off on which are just “right” and which as “really right”. In other words, it makes cheating easier. I don’t know about this, but I think it’s on the right track. These kinds of tests are perhaps equal parts competence in English and dedication to memorize enough to be able to predict which answers will be correct in certain types of questions. Again, it’s frustrating and seems a bit ridiculous.

Here is a TEPS story I can end with: Around the end of my first month in Korea, one evening back in 2009, the head teacher (who was disgruntled to begin with), teaching a particularly-badly-behaved TEPS class of ninth graders, lost control. The class, as I say, was nothing-but-lecturing about inane questions like the above, and the students were not interested at all. They’d been causing her problems for a long time. That night, after 9 PM, at one provocation, she began yelling; she really let them have it; it was so loud that we heard it far off in the teachers’ room. I think she cried during this episode, as well. Crying in front of students is crossing the Rubicon into serious loss of face. She quit that very night.

(A postscript is that this TEPS-induced abrupt quitting worked out well for me. The woman was replaced by a man., the first male teacher, besides me, at this small institute. This was my first Korean friend, Lee J.S., whom I have, regrettably, lost contact with.)