tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:38:24 +0000QuestionsNewsJapanannouncementKorea Japan RelationMilitaryUSFKcomfort womenguest bloggerBabo BudaeEast SeaEuropeEwhaExpatsFashionImjinInterracial RelationsJapaneseKorean LanguageKorean menKorean traditional clothesLanguageLunar New YearMoviesPre-modern KoreaPrime MinisterROKSea of JapanSebaeSebaedonSeolnalShinzo AbeValentine's Day. White DayYutnoriapologyatrocitieschocolatecrimedat nguyenddeokgookempressfamilyflowerfoodfood and drinksfootballfried chickenhanbokhistoryhouston rocketsjeoljesakorean fatherlanguage learninglanguage learning methodlos angeles dodgersmarinesmassacremedia coveragememorialmyeongseongnew yorknew york timesqueenracismrestaurantssportssuper bowlthe Mexicantortureunit 731world war IIAsk a Korean!Answering Questions Since 2006.noreply@blogger.com (T.K. (Ask a Korean!))Blogger1074125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-8767042690210493022Wed, 16 Jun 2021 03:51:00 +00002021-06-16T17:01:26.661-04:00Kim's Convenience, RIP<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="1024" height="436" src="; width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(<a href=";)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">It's been announced that the Canadian sitcom Kim's Convenience is ending after its fifth and latest season, but to me, the show ended around Season 3. TKWife and I dutifully carried on with the show through Season 4, but in truth, we both knew we were going through the motions for the sake of expressing solidarity with North America's Korean diaspora. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">How could we not carry on? TKWife's family is the real life version of Kim's Convenience. My in-laws have owned a liquor store in Washington DC for decades. The first episode of Kim's Convenience - the Gay Discount - had put us on the floor. In that episode, which was also the show's pilot, the patriarch of the family showed mild discomfort with gay people while working at the store. After the father Appa was called out for it, he institutes a "gay discount" during Pride in order to dispel any claim of bigotry.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">To us, this was not a sitcom but a documentary. My elderly in-laws are devout Evangelical Christians and they are certainly not comfortable around gay people. Yet Pride Parade is an unofficial holiday at the liquor store, because it is bar none the year's best sales week. Have you ever seen extremely conservative Korean elderly couple, grinning from ear to ear with genuine happiness upon seeing a battalion of gay men in risque clothing? It's high comedy, and now the world saw what we see each year.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The Gay Discount episode, to date, is among the most brilliant portrayals of the contradiction in our Korean diaspora lives that I have ever seen. We are coded as POC, and assumed to fit into the liberal side of the politics along with Blacks and Latinos. But our lives in reality don't map neatly onto the typical racial politics. When the expectations that our society has of us don't match our actual behavior, something's got to give to mend the rupture. Either we awkwardly change our behavior or the people around us awkwardly change their behavior, and hilarity ensures.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Unfortunately, the first episode was the peak of Kim's Convenience. None of the other episodes managed to capture the pilot's brilliance, while some were pockmarked with low moments. The character of Nayoung - the Kim family's cousin from Korea visiting Toronto - was genuinely offensive and racist. While Kim's Convenience broke new ground in the mainstream television by showing Korean Canadians as ordinary, everyday people, the Nayoung character from Korea was a grotesque <a href=";, with ridiculously dyed hair, high-pitched falsetto voice and jumpy mannerism. I saw more than a few Koreans in Korea quit the show immediately upon seeing the character: "So <i>that</i>'s how gyopos see us? They're normal and we're some kind of freaks?"</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Fueled by the good memory of the first episode, TKWife and I persevered. But doing so required turning off parts of our brains and deliberately overlooking things that would never happen in a Korean diaspora family in North America, like the first generation immigrant parents speaking English to each other and with their best friends who are Chinese and Indian. I know expectations are different between a lighthearted sitcom and an arthouse movie, but it still seems worth noting <i>Minari</i> won an Oscar with the movie being acted out almost entirely in Korean. Plus, there is an under-explored comedy gold mine in the way in which diaspora Koreans strategically deploy their home language and English. Why not push the envelope further?</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In fact, the show missed an even greater opportunity that could have pushed it to an entirely new level. Kim's Convenience could have built a whole season just based on the Kim family's church life, where the cross-currents are the fiercest between the Kims' POC status and their genteel Christian sensibilities. When Pastor Nina character appeared in episode nine, I had thought to myself - oh shit, they did it. They put a Black woman pastor at a Korean American church. I held my breath in anticipation: how will the Kims react? Where are they trying to take this? </p><p style="text-align: justify;">As it turned out, they didn't take it anywhere. Pastor Nina's race and gender never became a plot device, as if it was a perfectly common and everyday thing for a Black woman to be the lead pastor of a Korean church full of first generation immigrants. Why put Pastor Nina character there, if she was going to be treated like a pastor who is a Korean man? The show had five seasons to capitalize on the contradictions of desiring a safe space in a new land and the new land's demand for diversity and inclusion, and it never did.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">By Season 4, the show was a wreck that attempted to be the lesser version of <i>The Office</i> and <i>Friends.</i> going through the awful sitcom death spiral where everyone dates everyone simply because the showrunners ran out of ideas. The show meandered through the least interesting part of the Kim family's world, namely the rental car shop where the Kim family's son Jung works. The show is called Kim's Convenience, but nothing really happened at the convenience store anymore. There will be a <a href="; of Kim's Convenience based on the character of Shannon, the white love interest of Jung who also works at the rental car shop which only begs the question: why does the ground-breaking Korean Canadian show insist on going to the least Korean space within the show and focus on the least Korean character?</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Only recently did we come to <a href="; that none of the writers for the show was Korean, and the sole Korean Canadian presence Ins Choi, who originally created the concept for the show, was not very involved. The stars of the show are mad as hell at the way it ended. For my part, I'm mostly sad about the unrealized potential of the pilot.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at</i> askakorean@gmail.com.</p>2021/06/kims-convenience-rip.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (T.K. (Ask a Korean!))11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-6580711674831814702Wed, 24 Mar 2021 17:54:00 +00002021-03-24T20:19:47.052-04:00Asian America after the Atlanta Shooting<div style="text-align: justify;">Even though we were together, each member of my immigrant family—father, mother, me, and my younger brother—went through his or her own individual journey of immigrant life. Only recently have I come to appreciate how remarkable my mother’s journey was.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Born in 1952 and growing up in a small city in Korea, she faced the ambient sexism of the time that demanded that women be uneducated and obedient housewives. My mother overcame that prevailing current of her life with outstanding intellect and flinty determination. In a time when higher education was a pipe dream even for most Korean men, she left home and attended a teacher’s college on a full scholarship. There, she learned English, and won a grant that put her in a study abroad program in New Zealand, in all likelihood making her the first Korean woman who visited the country from her small town. Unlike most of her peers, she was college educated, internationally sophisticated, and had a successful professional career as a teacher at a prestigious private high school.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Our immigration was her idea. She saw that her two sons were chafing at the restrictive Korean school system, and wanted us to be in a freer atmosphere. She was unafraid to move to an entirely new country at 45 years old, well into her middle age. But our migration was ill-timed: the East Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, and our unscrupulous immigration attorney, wiped out much our family’s net worth. We lived in a series of crappy little houses in Southern California, dealing with nasty landlords who never fixed any broken thing. My brother and I would wait for a once-a-week special from the neighborhood McDonald’s, when it would sell ten hamburgers for 99 cents. For years, that was the only treat we could have, because cheeseburgers were too expensive.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Our run-down life deeply wounded my mother’s pride. In our early days in the US, she spent days in a cold-burning rage because a well-meaning neighbor lady suggested that my mother should find work, and the Korean supermarket nearby was hiring a cashier. <i>Cashier</i>, my mother spat the word with contempt, as if she was firing a spent chewing tobacco into a spittoon. <i>Do I look like a cashier?</i> When our fancy furniture and dinnerware finally arrived from Seoul after months of shipping, my mother made a point of serving tea to the neighborhood lady in our nicest tea set, just to make clear that despite her current conditions, she was simply not the type of person who worked at a supermarket.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Instead, my mother did what she does best: she studied to be a teacher, again. At age 48, she passed the exam to earn the teacher’s credential for the State of California. She began as a substitute teacher, then was hired as a full-time teacher, teaching Korean in high schools throughout the Los Angeles County. By the time she retired, she was teaching at the magnet high school in our town, the one for which my brother and I were too stupid to attend. We would joke that, in our immigration that was done for the sake of education, mom was the biggest winner of our family.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All this is to say: my remarkable immigrant mother would refuse to be associated with the Korean American masseuses who were killed in Atlanta last week.</div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">On March 16, a deranged racist attacked several Asian American owned spas in the Atlanta metro area, killing eight. Six were Asian American women. The killer claimed that he was a sex addict who wanted to “eliminate temptation”—a claim that’s not only disgusting but also bitterly ironic, because those spas were not brothels, nor were the murdered women sex workers. The four Korean American victims, who were masseuses and helps at the spas, were aged 74, 69, 63 and 51. The shooting served as a terrible allegory of the increasing amount of violence that Asian Americans have been facing in the past year: an act of violence occurring at a racialized space (an “Asian massage parlor”), targeted against the most vulnerable demographics, namely women and the elderly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">(More after the jump.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at</i> askakorean@gmail.com.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Reacting to the shocking killing, Asian American writers and thought leaders have been airing out the numerous different manners in which they were discriminated, reaching high and low, from all kinds of angles. Asian American <a href="; drew a throughline of violence against Asian Americans stretching back for 150 years, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act and going through the lynching of Chinese rail workers, the Japanese American Internment, the murder of Vincent Chin and the racist violence against South Asians post 9/11. Asian American foreign policy <a href="; said the US’s adversarial posture against China is contributing to anti-Asian American hate crimes. Congressman Andy Kim <a href="; a story in which the State Department pre-emptively denied him from an assignment regarding North Korea because of his Korean heritage. Connie Chung <a href="; that the media was “miserably late” in covering anti-Asian violence, because news rooms were not interested in Asian American stories.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Asian American women writers <a href="; out that racist violence against Asians often take on misogynistic forms, as the American image of Asians is sexualized. Several Asian American writers <a href="; that the police mangled the names of the Asian American victims, and the mainstream US society’s inability to deal with Asian names was another form of subtle violence. Pop culture writers connected the mainstream media’s stereotypical depiction of Asians—<a href="; K-pop superstars like BTS—with the American society’s continued treatment of Asian Americans as foreigners. Many Asian Americans shared their own story of racist violence and intimidation—slurs hurled at them, racist gestures made at them, or microaggressions like being mistaken for a different Asian person, reminding them that Americans did not see them as one of their own.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All fair points, and I personally experienced several of them. I know my Asian American history, I adopted a Christian name for the sake of easier pronunciation, and people at my workplace frequently assume I’m just visiting US from one of the Asia offices of my company. But even as I nod along in empathy at each rendition of these stories, I come away with a nagging feeling that these stories are inadequate. It’s good to have these stories out there. But it’s not good <i>enough</i>, when the stories we told have settled into the ground, and there we see eight dead bodies.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div> <br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Many have argued that the horrific tragedy of Atlanta shooting may give rise to a new and unified political consciousness for Asian Americans. I would like that result, but I’m not so sure if it will happen.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When the news of the shooting broke, I was revisiting what I consider the best <a href="; about migration into South Korea, titled Globalization Through the Eyes of Rural Areas by writer Im Myeong-muk. Im recalls that as he grew up in a small town in Korea, the first non-Koreans he met were migrant laborers and mail order brides from China, Vietnam, Pakistan and Central Asia who spoke survival level Korean. Then, as he was undergoing a doctorate at a prestigious university in Seoul, the composition of foreigners he met changed dramatically: they were usually white people from US, Canada or Europe, speaking exclusively English. Seeing this disparity, Im said Korea was undergoing two different types of globalization:</div><blockquote>The globalization is happening in two separate worlds: one inhabited by people who speak fluent English and travel to cities around the world, and the other inhabited by people who survive with physical labor, working in rural areas far outside of the capital city. … <br /><br />The gap between the two worlds will only continue to grow. Korea’s urban middle class will want to raise their children in an international atmosphere, and Seoul, the attractive metropolis, will continue to draw people from all over the world. Meanwhile, most of the rural areas will face extinction [because of population decline], and will increasingly rely on foreign migrant labor as the last resort. In this situation, I worry that the people of the “upper globalization” will not understand those in the “lower globalization.” </blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">South Korea is thousands of miles away from the United States, and its history of immigration is short compared to the United States’. Nonetheless, the description of the two globalizations struck at the heart of my discomfort. What if, instead of imagining “Asian America” as a unitary body traveling through history, we imagined it as a story of different streams of migrations, collecting eventually into two pools?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The discourse about Asian America rests on the two pillars of cliches. First, Asian Americans are the successful “model minority,” and second, Asian Americans are not a monolith. Asian Americans are more educated and disproportionately represented in the high-earning white-collar profession, but Asian Americans are simultaneously less educated and poor. This apparent contradiction is typically explained in terms of Asian Americans’ national origin: for example, Cambodians, Laos, Hmong and Vietnamese <a href="; to the US as war refugees, while Filipino nurses and Indian software engineers arrived at the US already as middle class.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But a story of Asian America based on “two globalizations” paints a more accurate picture than the one based on national origin. Some immigrants, and/or their children, have the wherewithal to plug themselves into the service industry that forms the upper crust of the US economy. Other immigrants, and/or their children, do not, and are swept into a different flow of migration that follows the demands for physical labor or, frequently among women, companionship with American men. (Of the six Asian American <a href="; slain in Atlanta, at least two—Xiaojie Tan and Yong Ae Yue—moved to the United States because they married an American man traveling their part of the country.) Even if we just focused on ethnic Koreans, tons of Korean Americans are doctors and lawyers and engineers, and tons of Korean Americans are manual laborers and sex workers and subsistence-level small business owners.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here, we are presented with the core of problem, a more granular look at the issue that is clumsily labeled with the cliché that Asian America is not a monolith. It would be enough to say that America is not a monolith. It would be enough to say that Asian Americans are divided in the same way Americans are divided, with bourgeois and professional-managerial class (PMC) on one hand and the labor class on the other. What distinguishes the division of Asian America is not the major fault lines, but the many factors that add to the severity of the division—the fact that Asian Americans come from different countries, different languages, different histories.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Im Myeong-muk wrote: “I worry that the people of the upper globalization will not understand those in the lower globalization.” As applied to Asian America, I have the same worry.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I empathize with the fact that Asian Americans are grieving, and airing out the litany of abuses we have taken—historical injustice, denial of career advancement, random racist slurs from the street—is a part of that mourning process. But as days go past, I worry that those mourning words, the intellectual expression of an outburst of grief, would solidify into a plan of action—and that plan, for all of its good intentions, will not be good enough. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if, as a result of this shooting, more people watched the PBS documentary on Asian American history, read Joy Luck Club, put another Asian face into the next big superhero movie, or even learn to pronounce the names of their Asian American colleagues correctly. But they are not <i>enough</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Seeing Asian America as two globalizations clarifies the fact that all this historicizing and intellectualizing are much more relevant to the members of the upper globalization: the Asian Americans who speak English, who work in a white-collar job, who can get their words printed on the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Obviously that includes me.) Too often, our historicizing and intellectualizing are articulated through the trite cliches of white liberalism, about how it is all about white supremacy, US imperialism, or misogyny. That may be, but that’s not nearly all of it. Failure to recognize this truth leads to a kind of trickle-down social justice theory—that if we made one more Asia-themed Marvel movie, spent one more hour of high school history class talking about Vincent Chin, or promote one more Asian American investment banker to being a managing director, that will stop the bullets directed at Asian American masseuses.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If there truly is to be solidarity among Asian Americans, more is required. The privileged members of the upper globalization must set their sights beyond their own racialized pain arising from slurs, microaggression, or delay in career advancement, and stare into the racialized pain that we are much less likely to experience. In our suburban homes and our drives to the office, we are much less likely to spend an extended amount of time in a racialized space (like Asian-owned massage shop), be exposed to police brutality (as was the <a href="; with Yang Song in New York), be under constant threat of deportation through this country’s appallingly inhumane immigration system, or just be poor and broke.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We must also recognize that pan-Asian solidarity is much easier to imagine when it only involves people like us, the members of the upper globalization. My mother is 69 years old, around the same age as three of the slain Korean women. You might think my mother would have an easy time empathizing with the spa workers, because they are all first-generation immigrants from the same country, speaking the same language, belonging to the same age group, even belonging to the same socioeconomic class within the United States. But no.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">My mother, like many other low-income first-generation immigrants, is not of the labor class; rather, she is a temporarily embarrassed PMC. She, and the vast swath of the Korean American community who think like her, will not find solidarity with whom they see as lower-class women who touch people for living. Young Asian Americans, look back to your parents and grandparents: how many of them were educated elites back in the home country, only to be relegated to low-income status in the US? Did they find solidarity with the poor people around them, or did they drive themselves and their children to be educated and get a white-collar job, and get out of that status as soon as possible? The vanilla expression that Korean Americans are dedicated to education covers up a sinister streak in our drive for success—that our parents did not want us to be like <i>those people</i>. My mother accomplished the incredible feat of becoming a white-collar professional in an entirely different country, language and system in her late middle age, because her entire life story is about elevating herself above being a housewife or a cashier.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is but one schism that exists within the Korean American community. Imagine this type of schism existing in dozens of different AAPI communities of all different national origins. Imagine the size of the gulf that exists between a third-generation medical doctor who is Indian American, and an illegal immigrant food delivery worker who arrived from Cambodia five years ago. Imagine the lives of Asian Americans whose news and media consumption is entirely outside of English, such that even as they live physically in the United States, their worldview and political orientation are still tracking along the patterns set in their home country in their first language, and their opinion about the United States and their current conditions are refracted through that lens. Imagine how irrelevant they would find the talking points in the upper globalization world, delivered through the jargons of white liberalism that make sense only to people in a specific social group. Why would we want to “defund the police”, they might wonder. “Don’t we need the police to prevent the assaults that are happening to us?” How will we bridge all these gaps?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is not a counsel of despair; rather, it is a call to be clear-eyed about the complex challenge that lies ahead of Asian Americans as we try to sublimate the deaths of eight in Atlanta. It is a call to those Asian Americans who are fortunate enough to have the time, energy, money and social capital to respond to this tragedy to look beyond ourselves and our own peculiar brand of pain. Stop making this about us, so that when this moment is in the past, we are not just left with more diversity training in the office and more cops in the streets who will only contribute to the bloated carceral state. It is fine to mourn, but when we are finished with the mourning and begin to act, I hope that our actions will be more about the concrete measures that improve the lives of Asian Americans who are the most exposed, like immigration reform, gun control, healthcare for the needy and protection from workplace abuse. It would be nice if the Karen in our office got our name right, but that’s not going to stop bullets.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at</i> askakorean@gmail.com.</div>2021/03/asian-america-after-atlanta-shooting.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (T.K. (Ask a Korean!))19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-1564648825697979884Tue, 01 Dec 2020 22:13:00 +00002020-12-01T17:41:38.037-05:00Rescuing Our Parents from the Conservative Brain Rot (and Introducing The Blue Roof)<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="349" height="640" src="; width="436" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />Diagram by "National Alliance for Tunnel Security", claiming to show <br />the configuration of North Korean tanks under the Gyeongbokgung Palace <br />in Seoul, infiltrated through a secret network of underground tunnels.<br />(<a href=";) <br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Dear Korean, </i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Help! I need a recommendation on people/show/clips or anything in Korean that can counter all the Fox News parroting Korean news that my mom watches all the time on YouTube. If they’re a Christian, that would be a bonus since most of the videos she watches are sent by church people and thus she thinks are truth. </i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Rim</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Dear Rim,</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I'm sorry to say I can't be very helpful. If I knew the solution, I would be consulting political parties around the world how to unscrew the people's minds warped by the conservative online media, which is more of a systemized disinformation campaign rather than journalism. To be sure, there are good and popular liberal Youtube channels and podcasts that cover Korean news. (<a href="; by Yu Si-min comes to mind.) But it would be pointless to recommend them, because your parents will never watch those commie channels. The problem is not the lack of good and rigorous material; the problem is the deliberate refusal to seek the truth.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I am writing this post primarily in order to let the world know that your problem is very common among younger Korean Americans. Virtually every day, I receive emails from people in your exact situation - asking for resource on how to reverse the brain damage caused by our parents' destructive Youtube habit. The rotting of our parents' minds in fact began much earlier, because Korea faced the problem of the conservatives' institutionalized disinformation campaign <a href="2018/03/koreas-nine-years-of-darkness-part-i.html">earlier</a> than the United States. Before any American could contemplate the possibility of Russians putting up fake Facebook posts to sway US voters, the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration from 2007 to 2012 was <a href="2018/04/koreas-nine-years-of-darkness-part-iii.html">using</a> Korea's spy agency to run a domestic psy op generating millions of message board replies and fake tweets. Among older Koreans, it is an accepted truth that President Moon Jae-in secretly hoarded a 1,000 tons of gold (to a point that an armed robber <a href="; Moon's office before he was the president, looking for the gold) and North Korea has 1,620 tanks <a href="; under Seoul through an elaborate network of tunnels.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The issue became much more visible recently as the disinformation campaign went international. A few years ago, I was bewildered that second generation Korean Americans, whose politics in the US was firmly within the mainstream, began parroting some wild-ass talking points about Korean politics - then I realized they were getting all the Korean politics news from their parents who were undergoing the brain rot. But in the past year or so, the second generation Korean Americans began noticing that something was off: even if they knew nothing about Korean politics, they could tell something was wrong their parents started saying COVID-19 was not real. This issue became more visible to the younger Korean Americans because South Korea's conservative Youtube channels would pick up the bullshit from US conservative media, such that the parents started spouting a more recognizable form of bullshit.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1085" data-original-width="991" height="640" src="; width="585" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">After getting hundreds of questions and requests similar to Rim's, I did come up with one response: with a team of like-minded people, I started a website/newsletter that focused on South Korean politics. If you follow me on Twitter (@askakorean), you probably already know about The Blue Roof: <a href=";. We started TBR for many reasons, but speaking for myself, one of the major reasons was because there needed to be some kind of a resource for Korean Americans who are dealing with their parents' Youtube habits. I have no grand hope that this will be the silver bullet; your parents likely will not be persuaded to read TBR's coverage of South Korean politics. But at the very least, you can have some frame of reference with which to gauge how far off course your parents have gone.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Again, I am sorry I cannot do more for this truly serious problem. But I can guarantee that our team at TBR is producing a high quality publication. The site only three months old, but we count among our subscribers virtually every international media outlets with a presence in Korea as well as many diplomats and academics. And atoning for my sin of very infrequent posting on this blog, I am committed to producing TBR every week without fail. It might not get your parents off the right-wing Youtube channels, but at least you will now be able to hold a conversation with them.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at</i> askakorean@gmail.com.</p>2020/12/rescuing-our-parents-from-conservative.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (T.K. (Ask a Korean!))8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-4811637337221196244Thu, 21 May 2020 21:45:00 +00002020-05-21T20:59:26.114-04:00The Hater's Guide to KBO<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="; imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1017" data-original-width="999" height="640" src="; width="628" /></a></td></tr>
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There are a number of different ways to win the Sid Meier’s Civilization game series. Commonly, people go for “conquest victory,” a straightforward military rampage through the adversaries’ territory. But sometimes, you might inadvertently land on the “culture victory” before you are quite finished with the conquest—because as the world is burning, your civilization is the only one putting out movies and live concerts. Even if your cultural products kinda suck in relative terms because you spent all your resources toward building up the military, you end up winning with culture just because you’re the only game in town.</div>
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That was the thought that came to my mind when I heard that ESPN began broadcasting KBO baseball. As a lifetime fan of Korea Baseball Organization, let me be straight with you: KBO baseball can be some sloppy shit. You’ve come to the wrong blog if you thought I was going to defend the quality of the KBO play just because it’s Korean. Is it entertaining? Most definitely. Are there some true top-shelf talent among the players? Absolutely. Can it produce some transcendental, sepia-colored sports movie stuff from time to time? For sure. </div>
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Does it also regularly feature some of the most rage-inducing, dumbass dropped balls that make you hold your breath every time there is a routine pop fly? The gifs don’t lie.</div>
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Yet you’re here, because you’re desperate. You’re so desperate for baseball that you’re up at 2 a.m. watching AAA-level baseball (that’s being generous) being played in an empty stadium. Because the rest of the world is on fire, and by having a competent response to the coronavirus pandemic, Korea is inadvertently on its way toward a culture victory.<br />
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But strike that—you’re not here because you miss baseball. Or at least, baseball <i>qua</i> baseball is not what you miss. What you miss is the baseball experience. What you miss is the experience of being a fan. The quality of the play on the field is secondary to the fact that you belong to a fandom, and have the sense of camaraderie arising from the shared interest. Above all, what you miss is the sweet, sweet taste of sports hate. <br />
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Therefore, with a hat tip toward Deadspin (RIP) and Drew Magary, Ask a Korean! presents: <b><u>The Hater’s Guide to the KBO</u></b>. Why pick your KBO team based on the dead metrics like number of championships, when the object of your true desire is another group of people who sports-hate the same way you do? Let the hate wash over you, and find the hate-vibe that fits yours, among these fine ten KBO teams.</div>
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(More after the jump.)</div>
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<i>Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at</i> askakorean@gmail.com.</div>
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<b><u>Incheon SK Wyverns</u></b></div>
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<b>Basics:</b> Founded in 2000 (8th team). Four championships (2007, 2008, 2010, 2018).<br />
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<b>The Hate Vibe:</b> Your team cranks out win after win in the postseason, but your fandom does not grow because your city is boring and your team wins in a boring way. Even your corporate sponsor is boring. Everyone knows Samsung and Hyundai because they make cell phones and cars. Even the lowly LG gets some name recognition with its refrigerator. What do you even buy from SK?<br />
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<b>US Comparables:</b> 1999-2008 San Antonio Spurs <br />
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<b>Totally Normie Reason to Love This Team:</b> Incheon’s Munhak Stadium has a “BBQ Zone.” They set up your group at a picnic table with grills available for rent. The seats are right in front of a convenience store that has meat and beer, and you can bring your own food as well.</div>
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<b>Bonus Hate Point:</b> Wyverns’ style used to be known as the “saltwater baseball,” because the team likes to go up 1-0 and squeeze out a win with its bullpen. (In fairness, Wyverns evolved more into a long ball hitting club in the past several years.)<br />
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<b><u>Suwon KT Wiz</u></b><br />
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<b>Basics:</b> Founded in 2013 (10th team). Never made postseason.<br />
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<b>The Hate Vibe:</b> No one gives a shit about an expansion team that started seven years ago, coming in at 10th – 10th – 10th – 9th – 6th in the past five seasons. The team used to play at a rented college baseball stadium with maybe 30 people in the stands (ok fine it was more like a few thousand but it feels like 30.) A major candidate for Gyeonggi-do governor seat <a href="; that he would run a marathon naked if the Wiz ever won a championship, secure in the knowledge that it will never happen in his lifetime.<br />
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<b>US Comparables:</b> 2005-2008 Washington Nationals<br />
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<b>Totally Normie Reason to Love This Team:</b> Get in on the ground floor, I guess? Also, the newly renovated stadium looks legitimately nice.<br />
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<b>Bonus Hate Point:</b> Expansion teams don’t get bonus anything.<br />
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<b><u>Daegu Samsung Lions</u></b><br />
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<b>Basics:</b> Founded in 1982 (Co-1st team; one of two KBO teams whose name, city and corporate sponsor never changed since KBO’s founding). Eight championships (1985, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014)<br />
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<b>The Hate Vibe:</b> You’re a rich asshole. Your corporate sponsor is the biggest sugar daddy in Korea. You love throwing money at good players and admiring your purchased championships that other teams couldn’t afford. Fans of other teams call you “Money-sung” [돈성], and the manager of other teams will <a href=" tell the media</a>: “Anyone would win with that much money.”<br />
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<b>US Comparables:</b> 1990s New York Yankees; Post-2010 Boston Red Sox<br />
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<b>Totally Normie Reason to Love This Team:</b> These guys win. Lions hold the KBO record for most number of wins, highest total winning percentage, highest winning percentage in a single season, and the most number of Korean Series appearances.<br />
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<b>Bonus Hate Point:</b> If you tell a Lions fan about how the team spends its way to championship, they will respond that the team isn’t all that rich any more since the Samsung Group changed its sponsorship policy. Which is seriously the most on-brand thing for a rich asshole.<br />
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<b><u>Changwon NC Dinos</u></b><br />
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