Books, blog and other blather
Friday, the brutal month-long heatwave finally broke, as temperatures dropped into the 20s and nearly all the pollution just disappeared. The result was some of the best weather I can recall in Seoul in ages. Just great for sitting outside or having a picnic or whatever. And Sunday night—bonus—a rainbow.
As Korean culture has grown more popular all over the world, there’s also been a rise in non-Koreans who want to join in the fun. No surprise there, I guess, but it has been pretty cool to watch — and it’s been doubly fun to have been a part of it, in my small way.
First came the rise of the Korean film scene, and foreigners flocked to the big film festivals. Then TV dramas and K-pop grew and spread all over the place, and so did bloggers and people who wanted to participate — K-pop even started having auditions all over the world. And while few non-Koreans made the cut (and almost no one who didn’t look Asian), still you find more and more people of all colors and countries looking to get in on the fun.
And now, I’m seeing more people from around the world writing stories set in Korea. My own novel, Young-Hee & the Pullocho, has been in the works for years, in one form or another, and when I started it, I never would have expected to have so much “competition” (although in writing, it’s not really competition, because one person’s popularity really does help everyone else and the overall scene). Still, it’s cool to see.
Christina Farley has written a Young Adult fantasy series called Gilded that is doing very well. She lived in Korea for a eight years, teaching English at the Seoul Foreign School in Yeonhui-dong, where teaching about mythology led her to growing interested in Korean traditional stories.
Gilded is the story of an American-raised teenager name Jae Hwa who moves back to Korea and soon finds herself struggling with an ancient family curse, pursued by a demi-god and, of course, trying to sort out her love life (this is YA, after all). Jae Hwa is a strong character, and the series has a real Buffy the Vampire feel.
Her first book, Gilded, came out in 2014, followed by Silvern later that year and the final book Brazen is due in September. If you check them out on Amazon or Goodreads, you’ll notice she’s gotten hundreds of votes and comments, so she’s really connected with a lot of readers.
I especially find Christina’s story fascinating because of all the similarities with my own. In both of our books, we have such creatures as Dokkaebi, Haechi, Samjogo and Blue Dragon (although our interpretations are pretty different for all of them).
There’s personal overlap, too. Christina lived in Yeonhui-dong, where I lived for a couple of years (a long, long time ago). Even today I live close to that neighborhood and often go walking through it.
Katie Stout’s Hello, I Love You takes a different approach than Christina or I did. Rather than looking at fantasy and folklore, Katie went to K-pop, imagining an American girl coming to Korea and signing up to become a star. But it’s still firmly YA (YA romance, I guess) … and to be honest, K-pop is probably more unreal than dokkaebi and blue dragons.
For recent “grown up” SFF fiction, you have Naomi Foyle (Seoul Survivors), Fiona Maazel (Woke Up Lonely) and my friend Gord Sellar (who has mostly written short stories thus far, but to no small acclaim, and with his wife has started translating Korean science fiction). And then there’s stuff like Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (a Pulitzer winner).
Exciting times. It’s hard to believe this is the same Korea I encountered nearly 20 years ago. But it’s great to see so many other people now beginning to “get it”.
Long wall of text coming. Sorry.
Anyhow, no, I’m not talking about the jam band. “Phish” as in trying to scam someone to get their personal information, like passwords or credit card details, usually so you can steal their money. Phishing is quite a problem in Korea, often turning up in news stories, but in the last week, two phishing incidents hit pretty close to home — some scammers tried to steal from a relative yesterday (let’s call her “F1”), and the friend of a friend actually lost 20 million won to another scammer earlier in the week (“F2”).
In each case, the method used was rather similar, so I wonder if this is a problem that’s getting worse, or if two incidents just happened to hit close to home. These phishing attacks are pretty devious. Like most grifts, they’re designed to take advantage of human nature and our personal blind spots.
The scam begins with a phone call. A guy claiming to be with the police says that you have been targeted in a bank fraud and identity theft. They’ve caught the guy, but there will be lawsuits and all sorts of legal hassles. They warn that not taking care of this right away could result in months of trouble and your bank accounts could be frozen for a time.
But then they offer a solution — if you go to the police’s website, you can register your information and protect yourself. Of course, the URL they mention is not “go.kr” and not the real Korean police website. It looks the same, but it is “.com”.
Throughout, they keep talking fast, trying to stop you from thinking, lulling you into a rhythm, taking advantage of most people’s tendency to want to please others and be respectful. They also know your name and same bits of personal information (easily bought on the black market), designed to make them sound official.
Luckily for F1, once they started saying they needed her to transfer them money, she got really suspicious. She said she needed to check their info and would call back, asking them for their names and departments so she could call them back. They said to use the number on her caller ID, but she said no, she’d call the main police switchboard and the operator could pass her along to them. They immediately hung up.
F2 was not so lucky, and sent a lot of money.
It’s easy to look down on people who get scammed, but grifters are smart at recognizing glitches in human nature, and “hacking” our behaviour, like how a computer hacker breaks into online networks. That said, there needs to be a lot more education in Korea about how to protect your personal information.
More annoying, though, was the response of the real police. F1 called the Mapo Cyber Police division, but their response was “If you didn’t lose any money, don’t worry about it.” They said they could do anything about it and weren’t interested in filing a report or gathering information. So lazy and amateurish (and, unfortunately, typical).
tl:dr — Don’t ever give away your personal information over the phone and be careful about online. Korea’s lack of information security is getting ever more dangerous.
Just a few pics from Changsin-dong, just to the north of Dongdaemun, in the park that runs along the wall.
And a little something from the Dongdaemun Design Plaza.
My typical view on the way to the subway in the morning.
The charming and insightful Colin Marshall, host of the website Notebook on Cities and Culture, recently traveled to Korea to turn his analytical eye here. He wrote several articles about Korea for The Guardian, and he also conducted a whole bunch of interviews with artists, thinkers, trendsetters, and, well, me.
You can listen to me here, going on about a whole bunch of Korea-related things, like pop culture, art, win and Pringles.
Many thanks to Colin for the fun afternoon. Sorry the audio wasn’t clearer, but we were talking at Mudaeruk — a great cafe, but it can be noisy.
I can remember when the first Starbucks opened in Korea — just outside of the front gate of Ehwa Womans University (sic). Reportedly, it was then the only Starbucks in the world with a smoking section.
Anyhow, I was looking for a Starbucks to meet someone for an interview, and this is what Shinchon/Hongdae looks like now:
And Jongno/downtown Seoul:
And all of Seoul:
Naver’s map service, in addition to offer a Google-like street view, offers something called “airplane view,” which is essentially these panoramic views of Korea from the air. I’ve known about it for a while, but never really thought much about it. I guess I just assumed they were just doing typical air routes for normal planes. I saw a nice one for Haeundae Beach in Busan, but for Seoul? Seoul typically is a nightmare for aerial filming (because of security regulations related to the North), so I just assumed you would not have anything interesting.
Dumb me, apparently.
I was looking for something in Hongdae on Naver Maps the other day, when I happened to hit the button for Airplane view, and, wow, there were some excellent views. Like this one, from over about Sangsu Subway Station, looking north:
And this is from Shinchon, looking south over Hongdae.
And here’s one looking north to Shinchon, with Yonsei University on the hil in the background:
The photos were apparently taken in 2009, so a few things have changed since then, but they still give you an interesting taste of my favorite Seoul neighborhood.
There’s a very fun story in the Korea JoongAng Daily about the movie The Attorney coming on Monday. I’m really looking forward to linking to it. But in the meantime, here are a few things I’ve found interesting recently:
Meanwhile, the weather outside is frightful. No, we’re not experiencing brutal cold or a winter snowstorm. But we are in the middle of a huge chemical fart from China. Thanks China for messing up the air!
From the KMA:
Strangely, if appropriately, the Korean website for those color maps of the pollution is called “Kaq“, for Korea Air Quality. But it sounds like “cack“, because that’s pretty much the air quality today.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote my first column for the JoongAng Sunday (a relative to the JoongAng Daily, where I work). It only ran in Korean, so, for those who might be interested, here it is in the original English:
Having recently returned to Korea after four years of living in Spain, I’ve been really enjoying being back. It’s like all the things I enjoy the most about Korea have gotten bigger and better, while the things I dislike have shrunk and grown less common.
When I first came to Korea in 1996, living in smaller cities outside of Seoul, Korea felt like a very different country. Back then, it was very hard to find variety and non-Korean things. Movie theaters were old and run-down, live music clubs were few, and not many supermarkets stocked imported goods. Day to day living was tough, but I really liked it.
Even then, there was definitely an energy to Korea that was very interesting, a sense that something special and powerful was brewing just underneath the surface. I can still remember the first time I saw Hwang Shin Hye Band live at a tiny club in Daejeon, I was so blow away. I can remember seeing movies like “The Gingko Bed” and “The Power of Kangwon Province” and being so impressed.
Once I moved to Seoul, especially in the Hongik University and Shinchon neighborhoods, things were even better, as I met all sorts of creative young people who were pushing so hard against the limits of the day, trying to make something new.
Over the years, Korea kept getting better, but, strangely, as it became easier for foreigners to live here, I could feel my attitude not always appreciating those changes. Sometimes I would fixate on the things I did not like — like pushy people on the subways or rude taxi drivers — and let petty problems annoy me.
Which is a big part of why I moved to Barcelona four years ago. I just needed a change of pace. Hong Kong or somewhere else in Asia would have been too similar. I needed something very different.
Indeed, living in the beautiful, historical Europe was a wonderful change. At first. But it wasn’t long before I began to notice all the ways Europe falls short, compared to what I liked about Korea. I quickly began to realize how many of my complaints about Korea were not about Korea at all. They were about life in general. Or about myself.
Over and over, Spain and Europe showed just how tired and boring they could be. Need a new pair of glasses? Come back in a week. Need your cable TV turned off? You need to submit a request in writing at least two weeks ahead of time. So many little things that Korea just does in minutes took days or weeks there.
It has now been more than five years since the Spanish economy crashed. I was living in Korea when the Asian economic crisis of 1997-8 hit, and the difference could not be bigger. In Korea, it was a terrible time, and the value of the won plummeted, companies went bankrupt and so many people lost their jobs. But Koreans rallied. They dug in, took action, and overcame the crisis in just a couple of years. Even though Korea can be a very divided place between left and right and other factions, in the face of a true crisis, the country rallied together and fixed the problem.
Spain, like all of Europe, however, continues to limp along, utterly without the political will to fix the problem (which is not a debt problem, but a fatally flawed currency that just does not work). Rather than address Spain’s real problems, the Catalans and other ethnic groups debate breaking away and forming new countries.
Korea, however, is faster than ever. There are at least three coffee shops within 100 meters of my apartment that are open all night, and that make excellent coffee and food. There is more variety with food, music, and all the cultural things that I so enjoy.
Of course, I’m not blind to Korea’s problems. The housing market is too expensive and full of inefficiencies. The endless left-right political squabbling helps no one. The lives of young people are packed with way too much school and not nearly enough education. And, dear god, it’s time to clean up the garbage on the streets.
But when it comes to day-to-day life, it’s amazing how Korea keeps getting better. I’m really excited to be back here, and I’m excited to see where Korea will go next.
Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music and Internet Culture (2nd edition) is the only English-language book to examine the whole of Korea's entertainment industry and how it became such a powerhouse over the past 20 years. With profiles of many of Korea's top stars (including Lee Byung-hun and Rain), Pop Goes Korea features chapters on movies, music, television, comic books, the Internet, and more.
On sale now at:
Amazon.com
Kobo eBooks
And hopefully more ebooks stores very soon.
The original edition of Pop Goes Korea is now out of print.
K-Pop Now! takes a fun look at Korea’s high-energy pop music, and is written for its growing legions of fans. It features all the famous groups and singers, and takes an insider’s look at how they have made it to the top.
You can buy at:
Amazon.com
Chapters Indigo
Tuttle (my publisher)
Kyobo Books (in Korea)
Goodreads (not for buying, but still a good link)
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