Author: Peter

bookmark_borderPost-287: “Tienanmen Square June 4, 1989” “I’ve Never Heard About That”

Posted on by Peter
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Tanks blocked by an unknown man at Tienanmen Square, Beijing, June 4 1989

I’ve met many more Chinese in the past ten months than I have in the rest of my life combined.

I met them studying Korean at a university in South Korea, one of the most prestigious in the country, at which a certain labor dispute occurred between the cleaning staff and the university administration beginning in December 2014. As far as I know, it is still unresolved as the new academic year approaches (beginning March 2nd, 2015).

During the January to February semester, I brought up the subject of these ongoing protests from time to time, either with our Korean teacher or other students.

One such time was around mid-February. I was with a Singaporean and a Chinese, both of whom have the initials Q.X. The one from China (Korean name’s initials: ㅊ우ㅅ) was born in 1990 and majored in physics in China. She is planning to study in South Korea for a Master’s degree. As we were walking along, for some reason I said something like, “The janitors’ protests are still going on”. The girl from China said, wistfully, “I wish people in China could protest like that”. (She said this in English to us. Using English was a sign that she was trying to make a serious point. Unimportant talk can be in Korean.) As she said this, my mind immediately jumped to images of 1989 Beijing. I decided to cautiously break the taboo.

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The story is well known to every even semi-educated Westerner, I think: In Spring 1989, weeks of protests in Beijing, China against the Communists ended abruptly with a shocking general massacre with an unknowable number of dead protestors. Most believe it was over 1,000 killed outright by the army on that day, with an unknowable but large number of surviving anti-communist protest ringleaders rounded up and executed in subsequent weeks.

I mentioned it, cautiously, something like “They tried that at Tienanmen Square and the result wasn’t good.” Q.X. from China got a puzzled look. I figured maybe she misunderstood my words: Beijing. 1989. Protests. I didn’t even mention the massacre part. Q.X. from China said “I’ve never heard about that. Maybe they never taught us about it.” She looked more confused than defensive. That was the end of that.

A few days later. The semester had ended. (Note: Of the original twelve students in our class, just two passed the exams outright [including Q.X. from China, though this was her second time taking the level], with two others failing narrowly such that they can take a re-test a week later; all others failed outright [including me] or didn’t even take the final exam). Most of those from our class who were still around gathered for dinner, several rounds of it at different places, as is the Korean custom.

At one point, during one of these “rounds”, the group got divided up and I was with the same two “Q.X.”s again. Spirits were high and we all trusted each other, so I decided to follow up on this Tienanmen Square business. The  Singaporean and I talked about the world-famous picture of the lone man standing in front of the tanks. I then looked up this photo on my phone, and showed the Chinese girl. “Have you ever seen this before?” The same confused look as before. It was clear that this was the first time she had ever seen the photo in her life.

I said it was my understanding that the lone protestor was killed that day. The Singaporean said this wasn’t the case, as the video shows him climbing the tanks after a while, not run over. We looked around online and found that his most likely fate was an executioner’s bullet to the head in the weeks after June 4th.

Curious and emboldened by the fact that the Singaporean and I were discussing the famous photograph (and video recording) so freely, the Chinese Q.X. found the Chinese Wikipedia entry on the event (I’d guess written by Taiwanese; the article is definitely blocked in China itself). She sat for five minutes, saying nothing, silently reading. I addressed her several times in her trance. She hardly responded and read on. She was highly interested and not about to answer any dumb comment from me at this time.

She was born in 1990. Her parents will remember this event. I’m surprised, that after nearly 25 years of life, she had never heard of the Tienanmen Square protests of June ’89. Schools are banned from teaching about it, okay, but her parents never bothered telling her? She never just happened to hear about it from somewhere?

So it is.

bookmark_borderPost-286: [Video] Ukraine Prisoners of War Interviewed

Posted on by Peter
See also #280 and #283 and #284 and #285.
One government position within the Debaltseve Pocket in the ongoing Ukraine Civil War produced at least sixty prisoners as the pocket collapsed this week. This group was soon paraded before Russian cameras, and a rebel commander gave a speech. This footage was run by Russian TV.

Some interviews were also done with POWs which I found interesting and have transcribed here. Some pro-Ukrainians have commented that parading POWs on film violates the Geneva Convention, but here it is:

Transcripts in English of the rebel commander’s speech and POW interviews are here:
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Translation from Russian (as provided by Youtube video uploader):

[On a snow-covered clearing, daytime, dozens of men are lined up, warmly dressed for the cold]
Rebel Commander: [heavyset, wearing a Soviet-style cap] Your army, your government, abandoned all of you from the beginning. From the very beginning, when you were sent here. They simply you threw you out here. They sent you to kill civilians, not us militia. [Ukraine government POWs are shown listening, many with heads down] Each of you will have the opportunity to return home. We will treat you with honor and dignity. We will feed, bathe, and provide a change of clothes for you. You should know that this is the beginning of our long way. We nevertheless take into account how you grimace and how you wish us ill. But I guarantee, as an army colonel, that no one will harm you or beat you. Understood?
POWs: [Weakly] Understood.

[An extended version of this footage shows several interviews.]

[Interview #1: A reporter interviews one of the Ukraine Government Army POWs. The prisoner looks to be over 30 years old, with a long nose and soft voice]
Reporter: What is your surname?
POW #1: Boreiko.
Reporter: Where are you from?
POW #1: I’m from Kherson.
Reporter: From Kherson?
POW #1: Yes.
Reporter: How did you get into the army?
POW #1: I was summoned (=conscripted)
[The POWs are told to begin to march and do so]
Reporter: Do your relatives know about your current status?
POW #1: No.
[He marches away and the reporter does not follow]

[Interview #2: This POW looks to be in his early or mid 20s and has blonde facial hair]
Reporter: How long have you been at Debaltsevo?
POW #2: Since December 22nd.
Reporter: Did your command inform you that your unit was encircled?
[The POW weakly smiles but hesitates to answer]
Reporter: What was your command telling you? What tasks were you given?
POW #2: They just told us to hold. Stay. We just — Well, guarded the territory.
Reporter: How were you captured?
POW #2: Our commander told us we were laying down our arms and leaving.
Reporter: Leaving with a fight, or were you going to —
POW #2: No. [Pause] The commander told us we were taking our personal belongings and leaving.

[Interview #3: This POW looks to be in his mid or late 20s, with dark eyes and a brown goatee and a blunt style of speaking. He punctuates his statements with emphasis. This interview takes place later, on a bus filled with POWs]
Reporter: Did your relatives tell you that you were encircled?
POW #3: Well, they told us recently. But what could I do? Go on the run? Where to?
Reporter: I see.
POW #3: I’m a private. I was under orders from my command.

bookmark_borderPost-285: Fog of War, at Debaltseve

Posted on by Peter
See also #280 and #283 and #284.

The term “fog of war” refers to information. War is something dynamic (situation always changing), emotionally charged, and subject to secrecy, disinformation, misinformation, and other forms of perceptional distortion, so nobody really knows what’s going on at any given time.

I was surprised to see the Prestige Media in the West (AP, New York Times, CNN, BBC, and so on) on Wednesday run headlines like “Ukrainian Army Retreats from Debaltseve”. All the sources I was following (mostly pro-Ukrainian) agreed that there was an encirclement (pocket), a seriously bad situation, and that this pocket finally caved in around Tuesday and early Wednesday of this week, with many government casualties. A major rebel victory within the scope of the war so far. The Western major media was simply copying Kiev press releases, I think.

What is the truth of what happened at the place called Debaltseve (Debaltsevo in Russian)? After weeks of inaction by the Ukraine side, a breakout attempt occurred but how organized it was is unclear. What is clear is the Debaltseve vicinity is now under uncontested rebel control. The Ukraine president claims he ordered a successful withdrawal. Rebel sources say the government lose major casualties including up to a thousand prisoners surrendered. Independent journalists seem to favor the rebels’ version of events:

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It was unclear Wednesday [Feb. 18th 2015] how many of the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers trapped in the eastern Ukrainian town [Debaltseve] had survived the hellish retreat under enemy fire and avoided capture. President Petro O. Poroshenko put the figure at 80 percent, but since the Ukrainian military has never commented on its troop strength, the final accounting may never be known.

By midday on Wednesday, as limping and exhausted soldiers began showing up in Ukraine-held territory, it became clear that the Ukrainian forces had suffered major losses, both in equipment and human life.

“Many trucks left, and only a few arrived,” said one soldier, who offered only his rank, sergeant, and first name, Volodomyr, as he knelt on the sidewalk smoking. “A third of us made it, at most.” [NY Times]
 

The information-saturated world of the mid-2010s is still subject to a fog of war. Huge amounts of information and its easy dissemination doesn’t actually change this.

In every war, on each side, we find hotheads and liars who seek to demonize the enemy (much worse than Kiev’s seemingly false claim of an orderly withdrawal– some government soldiers who escaped reportedly abandoned their equipment and flat-out ran for a few miles in the proper direction without stopping).

Certain people calling themselves journalists, sympathetic to the rebels, are now claiming to have discovered that “Ukraine government soldiers executed civilians” in the Debaltseve pocket. Why Ukraine government soldiers would arbitrarily “execute civilians” is beyond comprehension and not explained, but this is what’s being broadcast now over Russian media, with supposed photographic proof, and presumably many believe it. The Ukraine side, which I support, is also capable of these kinds of malicious lies (and I assume the claim of executions of civilians at Debaltseve is just one of those typical war lies, born in the fog of war, and almost always quietly abandoned when the fog lifts.)

bookmark_borderPost-284: Ukraine Civil War. Surrender at Debaltseve

Posted on by Peter
Encircled for almost ten days, thousands of Ukraine government soldiers, I read from the best sources, as I write are in the process of either surrendering to the pro-Russian rebels at Debaltseve, East Ukraine or attempting a breakout.

This closes up the “Debaltseve Pocket” which I wrote about in Post-#283 last week. The total loss was predicted as early as January 27th by a German military intelligence analyst writing under the alias Conflict Reporter, one of the best sources on the war. The end of the fighting at Debaltseve will free up many thousands of pro-Russian rebels for action elsewhere in the present Ukraine war.

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Journalists inspect a destroyed tank after the Debaltseve fighting

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Russian media is comparing the loss at Debaltseve to Stalingrad:
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(German Field Marshal von Paulus was commander of 250,000 Germans and allies at Stalingrad when the the Soviets sealed the encirclement of that place on November 23, 1942. Exhaustion, cold, sickness, constant fighting, and a frightening lack of food and all other supplies caused a nightmare in the “Stalingrad Pocket” in December and January, and air resupply couldn’t handle the burden. The pocket began to collapse in late January 1943, with 110,000 Germans and 20,000 allies surrendering (the rest of the original 250,000 had since perished). These 130,000 or so, now POWs, were sent to the Soviet gulags on a thousand-mile Bataan-Death-March-style ordeal in which tens of thousand died; most of the rest died while in the gulags. It was only twelve years later, in 1955, that the 5,000 or so of these men who were still living were finally repatriated to Germany.)

Rebel leaders in East Ukraine in 2014-15 have said that Ukraine Army prisoners taken in this war will be tasked with “rebuilding the ruined cities” in the warzone after independence, i.e. forced labor.

Stalin must’ve refused to release the Stalingrad prisoners all those years because they were symbolic of the greatest single Soviet victory in the war (Khruschev finally released them two years into his term as Soviet leader). Debaltseve is likewise a symbol of Russian superiority of arms, as they may see it, and perhaps of Ukraine’s inability to win the present war.

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One group of Ukraine Government Army POWs is marched out of the Debaltseve Pocket, Feb. 17 2015

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Ukraine Government Army soldiers inspected by rebel captors after Debaltseve surrender (from a Rebel Youtube video)

Another easy comment to make is: The Ukrainians here made the same mistake the Germans did at Stalingrad. Both refused to admit, early enough, that the situation was desperate. Surrender came after weeks of the generals whistling past the graveyard (German intelligence analyst Conflict Reporter and others often criticize them for aloofness).

Conspiracy Theories about the Ukraine Army Command
The most obvious explanation for the fall of Debaltseve is a combination of (a) the Ukrainian Army’s incompetence, (b) heavy Russian intervention plus (c) Russian determination to have their Stalingrad 2015. Depending on your point of view, which side you favor and/or oppose, it seems to me that one will emphasize one or the other of these. All may be valid and explain things well enough. There are also two “conspiracy theories” circulating among serious people.

(1) Mixed Loyalties, or, as some might call it, “treason”. The Kiev military hierarchy is full of old hands from the Soviet era with deep ties to Russian state security (the successor to the KGB), and perhaps vague personal loyalties to “Soviet identity” (an identity that persists strongly in places into the 2010s, as I learned from my time in Kazakhstan). Hundreds in the Ukraine Army have been arrested for spying in the past year. One high-placed officer was arrested two weeks ago for passing secret information on Ukrainian positions to the rebels, which was used to coordinate attacks. (If true, this seems to be blatant treason, no two ways about it, and in any nation at war would call for the firing squad, wouldn’t it?). In other words, this conspiracy theory has it that the Ukraine Army’s own general staff has elements in it that want Ukraine to not win the war as it exists at present — i.e. a war pitting Ukraine as a supposed NATO proxy against the Rebels as a supposed (definite) Russian proxy. These elements in the Ukraine Army, the conspiracy theory holds, subtly sabotage the war effort. This seems a wild theory but has believers in Ukraine itself.

Here is the story of a Ukraine Army Lieutenant Colonel arrested for spying on Feb. 4th, 2015:

[Recently-arrested Ukraine Army] Lt. Col. Mykhailo Chornobai had been at the center of an espionage ring in the capital and had passed military secrets directly to an agent of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, including the locations of volunteer regiments that were then used to pinpoint artillery attacks. […] Colonel Chornobai was among about 300 people working in the military sphere who had been arrested since the start of the conflict.

The arrest further deepened mistrust of the leadership in Kiev that is already pervasive among the poorly equipped rank-and-file soldiers and midlevel commanders fighting on the front line. And it reinforced a view prevalent on the battlefield that the military leadership cannot be trusted to manage any weapons delivered by Western allies because of their ties to the Russian military and security service, the F.S.B. […]

“Very often one cannot tell where the F.S.B. stops and one of our military units begins,” said Semyon Semenchenko, a pro-government paramilitary leader [of the Volunteer Donbas Battalion] and member of the Ukrainian Parliament, referring to the Russian successor to the K.G.B. […] [NYTimes]

(Conspiracy Theory #2) Debaltseve was “deliberately sacrificed to get Western support” by the Kiev generals. A one-time loss of thousands of soldiers days after a so-called ceasefire agreement might shock other European states into increasing support for Ukraine. This is too cynical to be true, one hopes.
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Ukraine government tank near the Debaltseve Pocket, mid-February 2015

Emperor’s New Clothes
It seems everyone knows that Russia is a defacto belligerent in this war, with constant flows of men and material to the rebels to include lots of shiny new equipment and alleged active-duty Russian soldiers. The big players (NATO, Western governments) and Putin himself don’t want to quite admit this, in a mutual Emperor’s New Clothes situation. Definitely a large majority of rebel fighters are actually from Russia, of course. Some are Middle Eastern (Caucauses) by appearance and others even East Asiatic, which is a dead giveaway that they are from Russia’s Far East.

Then again, the rebels’ entire point is that East Ukraine is majority-Russian, and the border is artificial, which is true.

Ukraine’s Volunteers
Meanwhile, the Ukraine’s volunteer units in this war (which were raised outside the purview of the Army during the crisis last year) it seems continue to have high morale relative to the hapless government soldiers.

I recently learned that an American citizen, age 55, a former U.S. Army Ranger, of Ukrainian heritage, and an early member of the pro-Ukraine Donbas Volunteer Battalion, was killed last August, just weeks after giving an interview with Canadian journalists (here it is on Youtube). His name was Mark Paslawsky, born in New Jersey but moved to Ukraine in the 1990s. He was one the 1,000 or so on the Ukrainian side killed in the disaster at Ilovaisk.

The best of the volunteer units is the Azov Volunteer Battalion, which continues to fight in the south.

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A platoon from the Azov Vol,unteer Regiment poses for a picture before deployment
at the frontline town of Shyrokyne, due to east of Mariupol, East Ukraine, Feb. 2015
The sign reads: “Shyrokyne, 1 [km to the right]”

A map of last week’s Azov offensive (blue: Ukraine-held; brown: Rebel-held; orange is the offensive’s gains).
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A huge inflow of resources and firepower from Russia followed the successful offensive, which had moved the front eastward 10 km. Azov reported that the town of Shyrokyne (Широкине) was subsequently subject to such an intense artillery bombardment from this new equipment that 70% of the buildings in that town of 1,400 people were destroyed. Azov has since lost control of the town and fighting continues.

An Azov Battalion tank in action at Shyrokyne:

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bookmark_borderPost-283: Ukraine Civil War — The Azov Battalion

Posted on by Peter
The Ukrainian Army is considered to be incompetent (see post-280). It is full of draftees (40% of its personnel were conscripts before the 2014 crisis; draft notices have a 70% ignore rate), and its leadership is considered poor.

It has just allowed 5,000 of its soldiers to be encircled by the pro-Russian rebels at a place called Debaltseve. The Ukraine government denies the encirclement, but informed observers are saying it’s true.

Looking at hasty ongoing Ukrainian efforts at this very moment, it seems not impossible that [the Ukraine Army] will be able to breach the de facto pocket [at Debaltseve], which holds since 15 hours [Feb 10], in the coming hours. However if it does so, using all its reserves in the area, it will only be a question of hours or days, before even stronger Russian army reinforcements will push back the Ukrainian army forces and re-close the pocket. […][Up to] 5,000 [Ukrainian] troops are besieged and the outlook is gloomy.  [Source]

The Ukrainian Regular Army has bitter experience with encirclement in this war. Last August, it allowed over 1,000 of its troops to be encircled at a place called Ilovaisk (due east of Donetsk City), with the shocking one-time loss of over 1,000 personnel killed and captured (some of these 1,000 were allegedly killed by rebels while under the white flag), and with only 97 escaping the encirclement alive and uncaptured, according to a government spokesman. This humiliating defeat may be about to be repeated on a larger scale at Debaltseve…
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Military Situation map published by the Ukraine government, February 2nd, 2015. [See larger version, 1.0mb, here]

I am following the developments at several places, which include translations from original Russian language sources:
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(1) Defence.pk : Civil War in Ukraine — forum, including many pro-Russian contributors.
(2) DefenceTalk.com : Ukraine Crisis — forum, including many translations of Russian sources; tending to professional-level analysis.
(3) ConflictReport.info Up-to-date news and commentary from a pro-Ukraine / pro-NATO perspective by a German conflict intelligence analyst. (This person does some professional-level “geolocating”, i.e. comparing actual locations in the vast amount of video footage released daily by both sides to Google Maps to confirm actual locations of the two sides, thereby slicing past disinformation by both sides about who controls what — he apparently “called” the fall of the Donetsk airport many days before the Kiev government admitted it, using this technique).
(4) Kyiv Post — English-language newspaper and very pro-Ukraine.

A disproportionate share of what military successes Ukraine has had are — this is amazing to me — due to the Azov Battalion (also called the Azov Regiment), a non-professional volunteer formation.

Azov is composed totally of non-(current-)military volunteers, including foreigners (Croatians, Finns, Norwegians, British, French, Italians are active in it). It grew up around Right Sector’s (see #197) armed political paramilitary group that existed before the war (see the screenshot in #197 #197)), dozens of whose members were killed in the February 2014 Kiev (see post-197), dozens of whose members were killed in the February 2014 Kiev streetfighting in February 2014 in Kiev that brought down the conniving pro-Russian government at the time., dozen, sostreetfighting that brought down the conniving pro-Russian government at the time.You can see some of these men pre-war in the screenshot in #197197#197. The video itself has been purged from Youtub
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Battalion Azov, Ukraine

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Azov insignia patch

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New recruits mustered into Battalion Azov / Jan. 2015, Kiev / [from an Azov website]

Its numbers are secret, but the Ukrainian government “approved” bringing this formation to 12,000 volunteers last year.

After a few weeks of steady losses for the Ukrainian side, here is what the Azov Battalion has done in the past 36 hours as of this writing:

[On February 10th, 2015,] Regiment Azov surprised virtually the whole world when it […] started a counteroffensive east and north east of Mariupol mostly along the coastline of the Azov Sea.

Within hours, it had pierced the thin Russian [i.e., “Novorossia” secessionist forces’] line of defense some 2-5 km east of the city and retook important towns like Pavlopil, Shyronkyne, and Kominternove.

At the same time, it took the smaller settlements of Lebedynske and Berdyanske, which over the last month were more than once the launching pads for Russian tank, mortar and artillery attacks on the Ukrainian front east of Mariupol.  [Source]

This means the pressure on the major regional city of Mariupol (pre-war population over 500,000), which in recent weeks looked like it would fall to the rebels, has been relieved — A major victory for Ukraine (which is why the report I quoted above from a pro-Ukraine German intelligence analyst was titled “A Glimmer of Hope“). Azov has announced the retaking of Novoazovsk as its goal.

The effectiveness of the Azov Battalion proves that morale and feeling of righteous purpose matter a lot, not just towards military effectiveness in a war, but probably towards any endeavor, any job, anything.

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Battalion Azov training, near Mariupol (Kyiv Post, Jan. 28th)

bookmark_borderPost-282: Chiang Kai Shek’s Dream

Posted on by Peter
A certain grammar point in Korean means “I’ve heard that_____; [Is that true?]” (____다던데 [정말 그래요]?). The Chinese next to me (B.B. Lee, born circa 1991) asked me a question about fast food. I asked him something that’s been on my mind for a while (see also post-#244): “I’ve heard that the Chinese dislike Chiang Kai Shek; is that true?“ (중국사람들은 [대만의 옛날 대통령] 장제스을 싫어하는 편이라던데 정말이에요?). I looked up this name in Chinese and showed him. Let me try to describe what he did: Half grin, half shrug, and a shake of the head. In words: “Ahh, No (that’s not the case).” I don’t make a point of asking people about this, but this happens to be the fourth Chinese who has independently told to me there was no ill will toward the man who was the biggest single enemy of Chinese Communism from the 1930s-1970s.

Another time, a certain female Chinese student (Y.J. Tang) asked me about famous American singers. In reply I asked “Who is best Chinese singer?” I asked this in English. (This Y.J. Tang is one of the only PRC Chinese who will use English.) Her answer was “Jay Zhou”.

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Chiang Kai Shek with his U.S.-educated wife and General Stilwell, U.S. Chief of Staff in China during WWII

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Who is Jay Zhou? I had no idea. It turns out he’s from Taiwan. The best “Chinese” singer is from Taiwan? I am wise enough to things to not pursue these things. You are never to mention the “Three T’s” — “Tiananmen, Taiwan, Tibet” — to a Chinese in China. I am not in China, but I am in a 90%-Chinese environment, so I follow the rule anyway.

There is an irony to this. Jay Zhou’s grandfather, from what I see online, fled to Taiwan from China in the 1940s, so Jay Zhou is likely one of the millions of descendants of anti-Communist refugees from China who took over Taiwan following the humiliating total defeat of U.S.-supported Chiang Kai Shek’s (inept and corrupt) forces in 1949 and the ascendancy of the original Maoists in China around Mao himself.

As far as  I know, General Chiang’s dream was of a capitalist or state-capitalist,Confucian, conservative, assertive China — an authoritarian system, but not one of wild social experiments like those of the reckless Chairman Mao and all other Maoists (e.g. 1970s Cambodia). As far as I know, Chiang opposed in principle multiparty liberal democracy — Taiwan was a one-party state as long as he lived and longer.

Mao’s grinning visage may be on their currency, their ruling party may call itself “Communist”, but you realize that China hasn’t been Maoist or even “Communist” much at all for decades. You realize that, ironically, the China that exists in the mid-2010s is much, much closer to Chiang’s dream than to Mao’s. It would be too difficult, cumbersome, inconvenient, and even self-defeating for PRC China to maintain some kind of anti-Chiang torch when it’s obviously his system that’s won the day. This can be an example of a people’s historical memory reversing itself totally over a period of thirty to forty years. I’m trying to think of a parallel in the West but I can’t.

bookmark_borderPost-281: Great Aunt Has Died

Posted on by Peter
My great aunt (my father’s mother’s sister), whose name was Beatrice, would’ve had her 95th birthday this Saturday, but after a brief illness last week she died As far as I know, she was my oldest living relative so few steps removed on either side. But there are a lot of relatives only hazily known to me in Iowa. She was born in Iowa in February of 1920 to parents both born in Norway.

My last strong memory of her is from July 2010 when I paid a visit with my uncle and aunt in Kansas (I was visiting with them briefly after a trip to the Grand Canyon at the time). Her husband requested my uncle and I try to install some new lightbulbs very high off the ground in a particular room. Following much commotion involving a ladder, I think we managed to do it. Beatrice was in the middle of her 90th year at that time. She seemed to me to be more spry and mentally alert than lots of people are at 60, even some at 50. I wondered what her secret to eternal youth might’ve been. She showed no signs I could see of anything bad either physically or mentally.

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My father in his retirement has made many trips to Kansas (not a short distance) in recent years, as Beatrice was the last “living link” to (as in, sister of) his own mother, who died in 2007 but whose last five or more years were affected by loss of memory. Come to think of it, that was the other impression I had of Beatrice in 2010: She was amazingly similar to her older sister, my grandmother, in appearance, in voice, in personality. To see her and to hear her speak was like stepping back into 1990s Iowa for me, a time I remember fondly.

To live and remain and alert into one’s mid-90s is a blessing. If I live that long, I’ll live to see the 2080s. That’s a lot of time left to get things done….

bookmark_borderPost-280: The Ukraine is a Hard Road to Travel (Or, Confederate East Ukraine)

Posted on by Peter
This month is the one year anniversary of the dramatic coup in Ukraine in which streetfighters toppled the corrupt government (see post-197; looking back at it, I note that my prediction that the Right Sector video would disappear was correct; so I’m glad I made the “textual transliteration”…)

Later in 2014, Russians in East Ukraine declared their intent to secede from the New Ukraine and form a new nation called Novorossiya, presumably to be a Russian satellite. Militias appeared and a secessionist war drags along which has killed thousands already. This sort of war was predicted by a professor I had in a class about the “Soviet Succession States”  in my final semester at university in 2008. He was in no way pro-Russian but he said the obvious solution was to rearrange borders in line with ethnic geographies, and that refusing to consider doing so was deeply foolish. The main example he used at the time was Ukraine, with its Russian-speaking majorities in many eastern areas.

I saw the BBC run a photo today of a position held by the secessionists in East Ukraine. The flag jumps out at me:

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Position of the secessionist militia (UAFN) in East Ukraine with its battle flag. January 2015

The flag bears a strong, striking resemblance to that of the Confederate States of America’s battle flag.[5][6] […] Gubarev has since stated that the inspiration for the flag came from “banners used by Cossacks who reclaimed the New Russian territories from Tatars and Turks for Russia in the 18th century”; however according to Alexey Eremenko of the Moscow Times, no Cossacks ever used a flag resembling the one chosen.[7]

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UAFN (United Armed Forces of Novorossiya) secessionist rebels’ Wikipedia page with Battle Flag

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Map of the war situation, late January 2015, East Ukraine

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The East Ukraine secessionists are doing surprisingly well against the Ukrainian federal army (or the Ukrainian “Union” army, we might say). It’s hard to imagine NATO and everybody allowing Ukraine to be partitioned, but if the federal army consistently fails to defeat the rebel militias, partition may come sooner or later. Will direct U.S. intervention come, like in the 1990s Balkan wars? That seems very unlikely because it is too close to Russia. Anyway, so far this “UAFN” rebel militia has stymied all attempts to defeat it.

The wavers of a very similar flag likewise did well in Virginia in 1861-64, famously defeating campaign after campaign by superior forces. This reminds me of a satirical song written in 1863 or 1864 called “Richmond is Hard Road”. The song was actually written by a Confederate but its narrator is supposed to be a Union soldier looking back on the six straight debacle-like failures to move against Richmond):

Richmond is a Hard Road to Travel
Would you like to hear my song? I’m afraid it’s rather long
Of the famous “On to Richmond” double trouble,
Of a half a dozen trips and half a dozen slips
And the very latest bursting of the bubble.
‘Tis pretty hard to sing and like a rolling ring
‘Tis a dreadful knotty puzzle to unravel.
Though all the papers swore, when we touched Virginia’s shore,
That Richmond was a hard road to travel!

First McDowell, bold and gay, set forth the shortest way
By Manassas in the pleasant summer weather,
But he unfortunately ran on a Stonewall, foolish man!
And had a rocky journey altogether. […]
It was clear beyond a doubt that he didn’t like the route,
And the second time would have to try another!

I find this song to be very clever. The last two lines there pun cleverly: “Route” (as in path) is pronounced by the singer as rawt, the same as “rout” (as in, a military defeat resulting in the temporary disintegration one an army and its retreat from a battlefield). There were two battles of Manassas, summer ’61 and summer ’62, both failures for the Union. Many of the other puns of this song require knowledge of the U.S. Civil War of more depth even than that, and I don’t get many of them.

Here is a performance of this song by the “2nd South Carolina String Band” (Lyrics):

There is something serene, to me, in a playful song like this about a war. This was only possible because in the old days there was a dignity and grace to war, which involved mutually-respected codes of ethics and set piece battles, not a war of all against all. (They say the Christmas Truce of 1914 in the West was the final act of this kind of “gentleman’s war”). There were almost no civilians killed in the U.S. Civil War. These days, if news reports are correct, the Ukrainian war is killing more civilians than combatants.

bookmark_borderPost-279: The President is Unpopular Again

Posted on by Peter
The President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, is not popular. She has surpassed 60% disapproval. Only 34.5% (+/- 2%) in a poll last week said they approve of her. 

I first wrote about this in post #10 (“Unpopular Leaders”). At the time, April 2013, I wrote the following (with [bracketed] explanations added), information I’d gotten from the newspaper:

Presidential Approval After One Month in Office  [according to the Korea Herald]
% Approval……………..President……………Year
……….71%……………..Kim Young-Sam…….1993 [centrist; first non-military president since 1961]
……….71%……………..Kim Dae-Jung………….1998 [left-wing; began Sunshine Policy with NK]
……….60%…………….Roh Moo-Hyun……..2003 [left-wing; elected during anti-U.S. hysteria of 2002]
……….52%…………….Lee Myung-Bak………2008 [right-wing freemarket type]
……….41%……………..Park Geun-Hye……….2013 [right-wing, daughter of 1960s-1970s strongman General Park]

[O]ne cannot help think that Koreans are getting more and more cynical about their leaders, as time goes on.

Park Geun-Hye’s popularity today (34.5%) has not much changed from its level of two years ago (41%). But people are more deeply annoyed now:
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40.3% of respondents “highly disapproved” of the president […] the first time the figure has exceeded 40%.

Koreans are prone to political overreactions (as I see it). Several former presidents and their staffs from 1980s through the present have faced legal prosecution after leaving office, and many actually did prison time (including two presidents), for alleged crimes they allegedly presided over. In other words, when the right-wing has gotten in power, they start an elaborate process of political trials against the former left-wing leaders who preceded them (and vice versa); heavy fines and jail terms are liberally handed out. I find this to be highly undignified, the worst kind of naked political prosecutions of political enemies when one has a temporary political advantage. This is a bad sort of political overreaction.

Another form of political overreaction, as I see it, may be to “disapprove” of a head of government for no particular reason. That’s what politics in a liberal democracy seems to be about, they may perceive.

They may have gotten this idea (“disapproval for no reason”) from the USA. Who is the last U.S. president who maintained consistent, comfortable-majority approval? Eisenhower? Majority-disapproval of a U.S. president has become all but expected in the USA.

President Park’s predecessor, Lee Myung-Bak (2008-2012), too, had dismal approval ratings for most of his presidency, often below 30% approval. Among other issues, the left (and the racialist center) accused Lee of cozying up to the Yankees [See #263 and #264]; he reallowed U.S. beef imports (banned in 2003), a major domestic political issue, and he negotiated a U.S.-Korea free trade agreement, and majorly toned down the anti-USFK rhetoric — By my first arrival in 2009, two years after Lee took office, the once-common “No Americans Allowed” on businesses were almost all gone.

So presidential disapproval will continue until…when? Will it be like this forever from now on?

Update:

bookmark_borderPost-278: Marxists to Lead a Government in Europe Again

Posted on by Peter
It’s Greece.

For the record, that was a long run of 25 years (1990-2014) of no Marxist governments in Europe.

The self-described “radical left” Syriza party (Syriza is a Greek acronym for “Coalition of the Radical Left“) got 36.3% of vote in Greece January 2015, which was first place. The Greek system gives an extra fifty seats to the party in first place (an interesting idea, though I’m not sure a good one) which gives them 149 seats of 300, two seats from a majority. They’ll bring in some minor partner and will govern Greece. Their leader, Tsipras, is already sworn in.

If the new government refuses outright to continue to pay Greece’s substantial debt to the (capitalist) foreign banks, as they probably will, they may be expelled from the EU, like Malaysia expelled Singapore in 1965.

Then what?

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Greece has lost something like 30% of its economy in the past decade to endless economic contraction; unemployment exceeds 25%; economic depression conditions.

This as: (1) an actual shooting war is going on in Europe (Ukraine), and (2) as a  low-level Islamic insurgency festers in the rich EU core, an insurgency mostly not organized (but insurgencies need not be)….

bookmark_borderPost-277: Encounter with a Retarded Young Man

Posted on by Peter
Bucheon, Korea, Evening of January 22nd. A mentally-retarded young man spotted me on a bus and began to follow me after we got off. He insisted I take a handful of coins he had. I politely rejected his offer of the coins. He didn’t accept my answer. He kept offering the coins, and kept following me.

At first he gestured towards a bakery-coffeeshop (I doubt his coins’ value were sufficient to buy anything there). After we passed it, he pointed to a nearby fruit seller. It seemed he wanted to eat together. The young man was literally and metaphorically extending his hand in a gesture of friendship.

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He couldn’t speak even his native language (Korean) well. Things came out garbled. His actions likewise were pushing the limits even of “odd”. His movements were jerky. He repeatedly scanned his transport card while waiting to get off the bus (you’re only supposed to do it once). His face had a tic. He was riding the bus alone and this alone is impressive.

His offer of his small handful of coins was pathetic, in the original sense of the word, “causing or evoking pity or sympathetic sadness”. I told him sorry one last time and ascended the stairs into the train station, leaving him behind. The last image I have of him is of him staring up sadly at me, not moving.

Korean coins are almost more an annoyance to me than anything. He couldn’t conceive that his would-be gift, the handful of coins, had little value to me. They were a big deal to him. It’s like the Bible story about the poor woman who donated two pennies. Jesus praises her because her relative donation exceeded that of all the chief priests.

This young man was my mental inferior by a wide margin (and actually the mental inferior of any normal person). Perhaps he, too, understood this at some level and was frustrated by it during our two minutes together. I imagine what it would be like to be in his place. Meeting hyper-intelligent extra-terrestrials, say. In that case, I would be the retarded(-seeming) one. (All things being relative.) Any attempt I might make to be friendly to such far-mental-superiors would be viewed at best condescendingly, like my own view of the retarded boy I’ve described above…

bookmark_borderPost-276: Low Five (Or, How We are Remembered)

Posted on by Peter
A huge majority of what we see, hear, and experience on a given day doesn’t create any lasting memory. Every day we impact others through words and deeds, and others impact us, but most of it is lost, sooner or later, in the foggy nether-regions of memory. We can’t choose which of our words or deeds will stick in another’s memory, creating a lasting impact. Nor can they choose what they do that ends up impacting us. You never know what it will be. It’s all kind of like a cosmic casino. It’s one reason life is interesting.

I had a student five years ago named J.G. Lee. I remember him as small and smiling, naive and optimistic, and humorous but polite. I think he was in 7th grade at the time. After four and a half years of no contact at all, I recently came to learn a primary memory he has of me, and was thereby moved to write these words:

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It so happens that I still am in semi-regular communication with the boss of the institute (whom I profiled in #48), my first job in Korea, where he was a student from 2009 till probably about 2012. This J.G. is now about to enter university, in March 2015, and in his waning days of high school here he paid a visit to his old English institute in Ilsan (many will tell you that it is these for-profit institutes, or hagwon, that are the main avenues of education in Korea, and perhaps elsewhere in East Asia. For many, the hagwon has more emotional attachment than the huge, impersonal, and poorly-run school).

Communicating using a phone-based instant messaging program during his visit, the boss wrote to me: “[J.G.] is here. Do you remember him?” I did. I said I remember an essay he wrote proposing making an alien a pet. I thought it was funny and clever and I kept the essay. He had no memory of this essay. Instead, he said he remembers “Low five”.

What is “low five”? It came back to me. Some of these boys at the hagwon in those days really liked doing “high five”. Don’t ask me why. I used their predilection towards high-fiving to introduce them to the world of playing with language. You know this one: “Give me five — Up high! — Down low!…Too slow!” It was amazing to be able to use this on kids who flatly didn’t see it coming at all. A variant of this was instead of “high five”, doing “low five”. I remember also doing things like “Give me four” (four fingers) instead of “five” and so on.

This may all seem very silly, I know. I was supposedly his English teacher. But that “Low Five” has stuck with him shows, we might say, that the impact I made on him was a positive one. From me, his mind more firmly grasped that English is a living language (which surprisingly-few East Asians in East Asia seem to truly understand; trained by their system to do so, they imagine English to be a form of mathematics, more or less). Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure these boys didn’t even understand what “high five” meant, they just knew it as a stock phrase, picked up from somewhere, treating it like Westerners might treat a Latin phrase, like “et cetera”. We know the function of “et cetera” as we use it in English, but we don’t actually understand it in its own language and we couldn’t manipulate it into some other form in Latin. (But, then, Latin is a dead language.) Likewise, “high five” had no meaning to the boys except as a substitute for the phrase “slap my hand” (as “etc.” is a substitute for “and so on”).  But if “Low Five” is possible, then English is a living language which can be played with!

bookmark_borderPost-275: Not So Much Water After All

Posted on by Peter
All the world’s water and air, to scale (from here):
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The sphere is  much smaller still if only counting fresh water.

Anyway, the lesson is that life is precarious and precious.

In times of plenty we get comfortable. We forget that life is actually terrifyingly precarious (see, e.g., #252 here).

Say that little sphere’s-worth of water is taken away. Then what? Then everything dies. It’s the end. Or can we manufacture artificial water by now?

bookmark_borderPost-274: Malaysia-Singapore-Korea Cookie Mystery

Posted on by Peter
Here is a mystery.

Currant Butter Cookies (600 calories) — White Castle — “Traditional Recipe”
Made in Penang, Malaysia
Imported by Singapore
Ended up in Incheon, South Korea, selling for 1,000 Won (=90 U.S. cents) in January 2015, where it was bought by me.

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The mystery is, how can anyone make a profit selling snacks shipped from so far away at such low prices? What kind of sense does that make?

These “White Castle” cookies were sold in what I’d describe as a “foreign snack mini-warehouse” in Incheon. I’ve seen similar places in Seoul and in Gwangju. Only foreign snacks are sold in these.

The “store” was strange. There was a makeshift, “questionably legal enterprise” feel to it, like a streetside pirated-DVD-selling operation. No proper shelves. Snacks for sale crammed in boxes on the floor or haphazardly sprawled out on shabby tables; prices scrawled on bits of cardboard with a black marker. No receipt given. No pleasantries from the girl at the cash register. Cash only. Don’t stick around. This is a lower standard of things that you’d find in much poorer countries; South Korea is among the world’s richest today.

I also got a large package of Oreo-type cookies called “Borneo”. It declares itself to be a “Crispy Cocoa Biscuit” snack with “Vanilla Flavoured Cream”. Borneo is an island, full of jungles I guess, divided between Malaysia and Indonesia. I got Borneo (780 calories) for 1,000 Won (90 U.S. cents) as well. I thought it was funny that Malaysia would make a snack using the name of its own wild jungle-filled island. But here is the funny part. “Borneo” is made in Turkey.

bookmark_borderPost-273: [Korean] Early Childhood Education in a Foreign Language

Posted on by Peter
I wrote, memorized, and delivered the following presentation in Korean this week. It probably reached five minutes in total with the question and answer period.
외국어조기교육
안녕하십니까? 저는 “외국어 조기 교육”에 대한 발표를 준비했고 지금부터 그 발표를 하겠습니다.

외국어조기교육이란 초등학교에 입학하기 전에 외국어를 배우는 것을 뜻합니다. 예를 들어, 영어를 가르치는 유치원들은 조기교육으로 볼 수 있습니다.

외국어조기교육은가르치는 방법에 따라 두 가지 종류로 나누어 볼 수 있습니다. 첫째는 외국어 유치원에서 공부하는 것이고, 둘째 집에 있을 때 텔레비전이나 컴퓨터를 봐 가면서 외국어를 배우는 것입니다. 그러니까 활동적인 방법도 있고 수동적인 방법도 있습니다.

외국어 조기 교육에 대해서 더 설명하겠습니다. 많은 한국인 부모님들은 영어를 일찍 배우는 것이 좋다고 생각합니다. 그러니까, 요즘 한국에 있는 영어를 가르치는 유치원이 많아졌다고 합니다. 그런 유치원 중에 한국인 아이들을 외국인 원어민 선생님이 가르치는 곳도 있습니다. 그 곳에서 한국인 아이들은 재미있게 놀아 가면서 영어를 배울 수 있습니다.

외국어조기교육에 찬성하는 사람도 있고 반대하는 사람도 있지만 이 발표에서 의견에 대해 이야기 못 합니다. 그래서, 이 것으로 제 발표를 모두 마치겠습니다. 질문이 있으면 꼭 물어보세요. 감사합니다.

Early Childhood Education in a Foreign Language
Hello. I have prepared a presentation about “early childhood education in a foreign language” and I’d like to deliver it now.

What do we mean when we talk about “early childhood education in a foreign language”? It means learning a foreign language before entering elementary school. We can see foreign-language kindergartens as an example.

We can divide foreign language learning in early childhood into two types, according to the method used. The first is kindergarten, and the second is learning through watching TV or something on the computer. Therefore both active and passive methods exist.

Let me explain some more about early childhood foreign language education. Many Korean parents believe that learning English at a young age is a good idea. Therefore, the number of English kindergartens has increased in recent times. Among these kindergartens, there are also those in which Korean children are taught by foreign native-speaker teachers. In these places, Korean children can learn English through having fun, playing games.

There are both supporters and opponents of this practice, but in this presentation I am not allowed to talk about opinions, and so with that my presentation ends. If you have any questions, please ask them now. Thank you.

This is what I wrote on the white board as I was going along:

___________________________
“Early Childhood Foreign Language Education”
Age 1 to 6 : Learning lang.

Kindergarten ……… TV / Computer
(Active) ……………………….(Passive)
______________________________
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I spoke slowly and I think everyone understood what I said. I knew the presentation went well because other students promptly asked me coherent and thoughtful questions:
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The sole Japanese said that back in Japan, too, “early childhood foreign language education” is now a popular thing. Then she asked about how popular it is in the USA. I said I thought it was very rare in the USA. Americans are usually not interested in foreign languages (at this point I couldn’t think quickly enough of how to say “low level of interest” so I did some sign language which got a laugh).

A Chinese student with whom I’d studied before, G.N., asked which form, active or passive, I thought was better. I said active was better but harder.

The teacher, who has a kindergarten-aged child asked a question. She asked if I supposed “English kindergartens” are worth it. I don’t really know, as I have no experience with them. (The youngest student I’ve ever taught was in 4th grade;mostly I’ve taught teenagers.) I muttered something about it being okay to start at any age.

bookmark_borderPost-272: What Happened to Standards of Decency?

Posted on by Peter
High-profile political killings in France last week.
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Twenty people were killed in several gun attacks. Three were police and three were the perpetrators (Muslims; all three born in France in the early 1980s to non-European parents). That leaves 14 “civilians” among the killed. Of these 14, six were Jews and one was a Muslim, leaving seven“Français de souche” (old-stock French) victims. (I found an essay entitled “French Lesson” by Dr. Peter Frost to be insightful in analyzing the attacks.)

The main group of victims was at a (so-called) “satirical magazine” which publishes tasteless, filthy, deliberately offensive “political” cartoons. The worst of the cartoons are definitely inflammatory and humiliating, up to and including depictions of the genitalia of Mohammed and Jesus and graphic sexual acts involving the same.

(At the risk of speaking ill of the deceased,) The people behind this magazine seem to have been deeply nihilistic and perhaps psychologically disturbed. It doesn’t mean they deserve to have died. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that people who published such things would’ve been under serious risk of being lynched by local European Christians for either blasphemy or degeneracy or both.

I have to ask: What happened to standards of decency in publishing? Are they all out the window in France? Why were cartoons so inflammatory and frankly indecent by (surely) anyone’s standard allowed to be published and sold?

France is totally committed to free speech, I’m told, no matter who may get offended. Yet that’s not the case: France is one of the countries that has a law imposing heavy fines and even jail sentences on Holocaust revisionists, for one. For another, a Black comedian called Dieudonne was prosecuted for “hate speech” for his comedy routines and certain political statements. The government has imposed a total television ban on him. (Here he is on a TV program defending himself from a critic before the lifetime ban was handed down.)

So I am left confused.

bookmark_borderPost-271: China’s Dream

Posted on by Peter
Is China going to take over as world superpower?  The question came up as we sat eating chicken one late December 2014 evening in Sinchon, Seoul. I sat with three South Koreans (by birth), male, born between the late 1970s and 1990, all of whom had lived extensively abroad.

One had lived half his life in England and had the air of a British intellectual about him. (He reminded me of my former coworker M.G. from England, despite the racial difference.) He said the “key question” was whether China would make moves towards being the “world police,” as the USA has been for something around about seventy years now.

I said I didn’t think China was interested in being world police. (This is not the same as saying China won’t be. I don’t think the USA was interested either in becoming a “world superpower” at all in, say, 1900 or 1910!)

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Another of the Koreans, who’d lived in China most of his life, did not address the issue directly but chose instead to tell us about a certain billboard campaign active in China right now. He said all over China you can see billboards on which are printed two large words. Those words are: “China’s Dream”. What’s that mean? It’s left unexplained. The two words stand alone. One interpretation, he said with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders, is that it means true world power, means China taking its proper place at the head of the world. My friend H.J. and I listened with interest.

I have gotten to know many young (almost all born after 1990) educated “PRC Chinese” in the past year. I don’t necessarily see in them a world-imperial ambition. On the other hand, it’s not so hard to imagine a global version of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (i.e., economic colonization).

bookmark_borderPost-270: Leading the English Orientation

Posted on by Peter
Every two months is a new semester here at the Korean Language program (at which I’ve studied a while at a university in the Seoul region), you see, so new students are always flowing in. On the last day of last semester, sometime in the days before Christmas, our teacher suddenly asked me if I would be okay to do the new student orientation. I said that’s fine. I was asked simply because I am now the highest-level returning native English speaker here (Level 4).

There is one White American girl I formerly studied with, only about 19 years old, I think (and a a full-time regular enrolled student here taking classes in Korean and taking intensive language classes on the side), who was recently promoted to Level5 (the highest level offered here; those who want to do level 6 have to go elsewhere). She is unable to do it because she is back in the USA for the long between-semester break (which is from before Christmas to March 2nd in Korea). There is also a Singaporean — whose name in English consists of the unlikely initials Q.X. (based on a Chinese spelling) and whose Korean name by which I know her is rendered in initials as T.S.S. She is just as much a native speaker as I am, I think. She will study filmmaking at a Korean university in 2015-2016. She may have been more qualified to do the orientation in one sense: She has lived in the dormitory a long time, which I never have. As it turned out, many students’ questions were about dormitory life.

Anyway, yes, besides T.S.S. and I, there are no returning students in Level 4 or Level 5 (the highest level); almost all Chinese. They asked me. I agreed. I will write a bit about how it went.

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The boss, the Chinese translator, and me all met three hours before the orientation started and ate lunch together and got a drink from the little campus coffee shop. The boss paid. (I decided this was no time for meekly asking for the cheapest drink, as I might usually do, and instead I got fresh strawberry juice, the most expensive of all.) Later I and the Chinese translator were given two textbooks for our new levels free as compensation (value: 40,000 Won or $36 USD). I still had to buy five others, total: 70,350 Won ($65).

This lunch and orientation practice were a particular honor in themselves, as I see it, because it is almost certainly the only chance I will ever have to have a conversation with the head boss. Being all in Korean, this was stressful for me. The Chinese translator, a bespectacled Chinese-Korean girl born in the early 1990s, said nothing at all; during lunch I tried to keep things moving conversation-wise, asking the boss questions (which I know is not the Asian way, but which the boss welcomed), though I know I used much wrong grammar.

The boss was a Korean woman in her 40s, characteristically (both) somewhat frantic and rather intimidating. She was more relaxed today, as we had all just come off two weeks’ Christmas and New Year’s vacation. I learned that she had lived in the USA for some years, I think she said from 2002 to 2006. The subject came up when she asked us, over lunch, what we thought of life in Korea. I said something like, “There’s a lot of English around”, and pointed at the walls of the cafeteria in which we were sitting, where slogans in English were printed: “Delicious Food”, “Eat Healthily” and this kind of thing. The boss impressed me by reading even the English slogan written in elaborate cursive.

We practiced the orientation, which consisted of us going through the text together for a while, then going off alone to “practice”. This was all pretty easy because it was just reading, so I thought. Soon we were in front of the room full of 25 or 30 new people. To my surprise (and she hadn’t warned us) during the orientation she went off-script, started saying other stuff, and told us to translate on the fly. This suddenly panicked me but I did alright. Then abruptly the all-together orientation ended and I was off with the English speakers to do a more detailed orientation with questions/answers in English alone.Many of them were not true English speakers but of various non-Chinese backgrounds. All non-Chinese are called “foreigners” in the Language Program community. There were about 15 new “foreigners”, and few were true native speakers. One was a woman born in the 1970s from Kazakhstan (Level 4). Besides her were various sorts of Asians, some Koreans from Abroad, and five Western Whites: two Norwegians (there are an inexplicably large number of Norwegian exchange students in South Korea), one Canadian, and two White-Americans (one of whom I’d met before, who is in Korea two years on a Fullbright something-or-other, teaching in a city down south; the other was a male born in 1993 who kept making sarcastic side comments or ‘suggestions’ during the English-only orientation — but that was fine and it livelied things up).

The English-only orientation, I resolved, was going to be fun, and it was. I remember my own, when I was a new student. The leader was of Chinese-Malaysian parents but who had lived a long part of her life in Australia. She just read entirely from the book. This orientation I tried to make light and fun, not strictly business. I kept asking people if they had questions, which many did. Of course they would; they’re new. I answered as best as I could, and those quesitons I couldn’t answer I asked if anyone else could in the room. One question was about the TOPIK exam (Test of Proficiency in Korean) and I hadn’t taken it; one of the two “Koreans Abroad” in that orientation had taken it and talked a little about it.

It was fun and active. I was proud of it. I went home. The next day I would be back in class, listening again. (The standard Korean for “attend class” is literally  “listen to class”). So it goes.

bookmark_borderPost-269: Hearing the Beatles in Korea (Or, the 1910s vs. the 1960s vs. the 2010s)

Posted on by Peter
Bucheon is a community nestled snugly in the Seoul Megalopolis. I lived and worked there two whole years and still go there frequently. One late Friday evening, around about August 2014, I found myself walking through Bucheon’s Central Park (부천중앙공원).

Would you believe what I heard?

I heard the Beatles.

Not the real Beatles. Not a recording. I heard clearly-recognizable renditions of Beatles songs, these being songs first released around fifty years earlier. Playing them, and rather well, was a lone Korean guy in his 30s or 40s. A small crowd was gathered around. He was asking for donations in the open guitar case but seemed to be playing more for the fun of it.

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He was playing only Beatles songs. Nothing else. He was singing in English. The crowd was full of people born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, yet they knew the songs and were into it.

Earlier that year (2014), when I was in the USA, I recall some fanfare around the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show (whatever that was) for the first time in February 1964. By my count, that is over fifty years ago. Beatles music is still very popular and recognizable even after fifty years, and across the world. I also recall the Beatles were very popular in Kazakhstan, with life size bronze statues of the four Beatles on a hill overlooking the city, erected sometime in the 2000s.

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Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, date unknown (found online)

As I walked away after hearing a few songs, I figured that this seemingly-odd experience, hearing an all-Beatles impromptu cover concert in Korea in 2014, was a sign that cultural change has slowed significantly. (I jotted this down as an idea to write about but never got around to it; here it is five months late.) Fifty years of time separates us from the Beatles’ heyday now, but they remain music staples. Consider that 1914 and 1964 are as equally distant in time as are 1964 and 2014. I may be wrong about this, but I think very near nobody was still interested in 1914’s pop music in 1964.

Actually — and to kind of contradict my own point — I do know some pop songs of the 1910s and I actually think they’re rather good in their simple and innocent way. One my grandfather sang (which was a song from before his time as he was born in the 1910s himself) is called “K-K-K-Katie” about a stuttering young American conscript who has to leave his sweetheart, Katie, behind, to go fight in France. Another 1910s song I know is “The Last Long Mile,” also about a conscript explaining to us, through the gracefulness of song, that army training isn’t so hard after all, except, that is, for the “last long mile” of the twenty mile training marches.

Here is “The Last Long Mile”:

Here is K-K-K-Katie (1918)

bookmark_borderPost-268: My Real Eighth Birthday (Or, a Tribute to Germany 2007)

Posted on by Peter
The year 2015 is here. January 1st of 2015 is my eighth birthday.

My real birthday is January 1st, 2007.

There are those who would say that my eighth birthday actually occurred many years ago. I concede that technically my body, a tiny version of it, entered the world many years ago, sometime back there in the 1980s, but to be honest I don’t remember that at all.

Let me tell you about the day my life began. It was 1/1/2007 and it was aboard an airplane. It lifted off from Dulles Airport in Virginia on 1/1/2007 with me on board. It was the first time I left the USA.

I was off to study a while in Germany. It was an overnight flight on which passengers were expected to sleep. How could I possibly sleep on my first day of life? Jesus. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep. I kept staring ahead at the little screen showing the airplane’s progress overlaid on a map. The plane inched along, it seemed. I kept staring ahead in the blackened airplane cabin. No one stirred. Time had slowed down to a crawl to me. Something eventful was underway, I knew.

What a glorious thing it is to have clear memories of the first day one’s life.

Nervous excitement filled those first hours on the plane, and the first awkward and dizzying day in Germany itself, before I moved in with the host family. The feeling was something like the hours before playing in a football game. I played football in high school a while. We were always nervous before games, like soldiers in war must be before battle. I remember. (Little did we know at the time that football didn’t really matter at all.)

I spent most of 2007 in Berlin, Germany. It was a good time. I studied German and other subjects (in English).

I knew a little German at the time of arrival but not enough to do anything, and finding my way on the first two days, suitcases in hand, was quite a misadventure in itself. I still remember clearly the exchanges I had with people. The woman of about 40 whom I asked “Could you please help me?” (“Können Sie mir helfen?”) — I was utterly lost and completely new and alone — to which she replied with a curt “Wieso?” which is a word that generally means “Why?” but can mean “How so?”. I must’ve been a sorry sight. Being a Berliner, she was on guard, not sure what I was up to.

Picture

Statue of Frederick the Great / central Berlin
A monument I passed by and inspected many times.

I stayed till April with a host family who spoke no English. Lucky me. I learned German pretty well. By the spring months, people occasionally thought I was a native German, as long as the conversation was very brief and to the point. At one point around about May 2007 I got my hair cut in Magdeburg at the cheapest barber around, as it turned out manned by two Iraqis. They were sure I was a native German. I didn’t dare tell them I was an American, of course. They asked lots of questions. I simply said “Ich bin hier zu Besuch”  (I’m here visiting) and that satisfied them. Later, the street-corner Marxist professor, a native German, whom I describe in post-#246 (see the section entitled “Communists and Anti-Communists in Berlin” in #246), as I recall, didn’t do a“You’re not from here, are you?” till well after several short exchanges.) 
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At some point I visited Poland for a week. I liked Poland despite its certain problems that would flummox a typical German who demands Ordentlichkeit (buses in Poland were reliably late; our Polish train broke down, forcing us all to deboard and stand around a few hours; a postcard to the USA took a full month to arrive). Poles have certain good qualities that I appreciated. They’re not so different from Germans, anyway, I concluded.

I met many good people and had many adventures. Two American friends (J.S. and G.S.) I met in Germany are still to this day close friends whom I see whenever possible. I traveled a fair amount around Germany (including an ambitious trip to the Bavarian Alps with another American friend, B.A., who sped down the Autobahn in our rented car). I made a point to stay towards the east, thinking the experience would be more authentic. It was all pleasant.

Later that year I (unexpectedly) ended up in Estonia for a while, also to study in a kind of short term student exchange thing with others from all over Europe. Estonia I often call “my favorite country,” but on reflection it was really a kind of extension of the time in Germany. German and Scandinavian influence in this region goes back to the era of the crusades or so, ending abruptly in 1940 with Stalin’s invasion, reinstated in summer 1941 with German liberation, and reimposed in late 1944 with the defeat of German arms in the east; considered by the Estonians, as I recall, as a national disaster. In the 1980s, the inherent pro-Germanic tendencies of the Estonians and Latvians (pro-Scandinavian, pro-German, and by extension pro-American/NATO now) came back to the fore, and independence came in ’91 after which Estonia dove back into the German sphere of influence, pegging its currency to the Deutsch Mark and all. The Estonia I knew felt not so different from Germany, just blonder, cheaper, with far fewer non-European foreigners than Germany but lots of Russians in the capital. The time in Estonia reinforced my positive attitude towards Germany and Europe as a whole.

Looking Back
Even at the time, I realized that my time in Germany completely changed my way of thinking. I became a different, more optimistic person. Life became full of possibility not something to be endured; adventure was there to be had for those brave enough to seize it; life became fun. The day it began, 1/1/2007, is thus my true birthday.

I reluctantly returned to the USA in mid-August 2007. In fall 2007 and through 2008 I finished up my university degree. I got almost all A’s in classes I took after my time in Europe. (My grades before that had been less good.) In 2008, I even took classes I didn’t need to take, just out of interest. I got a good job and earned what I then thought to be a lot of money in 2008. Then, in 2009, I left it and went off to Asia (for the first time) for reasons I couldn’t quite explain at the time and cannot explain even now. You might be able to vaguely understand if you read this post.

A new year is a time for reflection, people believe. As I look back over “my eight years of life”, all signs point to that first year of life, in Germany in 2007, as the happiest and best time of all. Ich danke Dir, Deutschland 2007, für alles das Du mir gegeben hast. Thank you, Germany 2007, for everything!