Unpleasant things of late
Oh, Jeju wind! It's beautiful to see the trees in wild motion and hear that dramatic moaning, but it is quite another thing to have a steady hooting noise haunt you through the night. Some nights it's hard to sleep for the sound of beating wind.
At about the time I got up to go to work this morning, the stray cats of the neighborhood had stopped shrieking piteously. They'd been going on since the middle of the night, in most harrowing chorus with the wind. I can't account for their noise, because it didn't quite sound like the cat sex I'd previously heard (though there may just be a different kind of cat here that makes a different sex noise), and if it wasn't that obviously nocturnal activity, why should they have stopped at 7 AM?
I'm growing increasingly disturbed by the attentions of teenage girls (by 'attentions', I mean mere riotous enthusiasm at the sight of a foreigner), real trauma having arisen due to a horrible interrogation as to my gender on the bus by a terribly oblivious, English-incompetent, LOUD girl yesterday (you see, she didn't quite understand I wanted her to shut up and leave me alone due to the language barrier). I can't quite categorize the girls' motivations for accosting Westerners (e.g. knocking loudly on the window as I pass by the girls' middle school, the knocking following my footsteps), because the pitch and amplitude of their enthusiastic 'HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!' is not the friendly kind. I rather think it's the equivalent of girls let loose in a store during a Barbie sale; EVERYONE WANTS ONE, and raucous and ceaseless greeting is a means by which to 'claim' a foreigner. Obviously, there's a two-way relationship of objectification here; I certainly came to Korea for materialistic reasons. However, the blatancy and consistency with which foreign people are objectified by (especially) young Jeju citizens is disconcerting in direct experience.
It is also irritating that the Hindi ghazal collection I downloaded is 90% sung by men. I personally prefer a woman's voice in that particular genre; I can't account for the rarity of female ghazal vocals though it seems linked to that unpleasant audience preference for males I find so inexplicable and frustrating in Bollywood films.
Finally, I can't stop fuming at people's dumb opinions of the Chinese. Everyone and their mother has some casually condescending, mind-bogglingly misinformed and mis-analyzed prejudice towards the Chinese. There are so many kinds! Just as I escaped Vancouver's range of ignorant anti-Chinese sentiment, I became surrounded by Korea's different but equally ignorant one. Yes, countries which neighbor each other spend a lot of time in relationships of hatred, but the tone of cultural (and culinary!!!!!!) superiority many Koreans regularly take over the Chinese is unfathomable. It is entirely based on China's current position as a cheap export horse for the world's conglomerates, and entirely ignores China's enormous cultural contribution to and influence on Korea itself. What is most irritating is the nonchalance of this sentiment, given a) China is ENORMOUS, and one cannot talk about it as a single, cohesive culture and b) the sentiment is never supported by actual travel/habitation in China (also, there is--at least in Jeju--no Chinese immigrant population to speak of).
Why, why, WHY?
At about the time I got up to go to work this morning, the stray cats of the neighborhood had stopped shrieking piteously. They'd been going on since the middle of the night, in most harrowing chorus with the wind. I can't account for their noise, because it didn't quite sound like the cat sex I'd previously heard (though there may just be a different kind of cat here that makes a different sex noise), and if it wasn't that obviously nocturnal activity, why should they have stopped at 7 AM?
I'm growing increasingly disturbed by the attentions of teenage girls (by 'attentions', I mean mere riotous enthusiasm at the sight of a foreigner), real trauma having arisen due to a horrible interrogation as to my gender on the bus by a terribly oblivious, English-incompetent, LOUD girl yesterday (you see, she didn't quite understand I wanted her to shut up and leave me alone due to the language barrier). I can't quite categorize the girls' motivations for accosting Westerners (e.g. knocking loudly on the window as I pass by the girls' middle school, the knocking following my footsteps), because the pitch and amplitude of their enthusiastic 'HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!' is not the friendly kind. I rather think it's the equivalent of girls let loose in a store during a Barbie sale; EVERYONE WANTS ONE, and raucous and ceaseless greeting is a means by which to 'claim' a foreigner. Obviously, there's a two-way relationship of objectification here; I certainly came to Korea for materialistic reasons. However, the blatancy and consistency with which foreign people are objectified by (especially) young Jeju citizens is disconcerting in direct experience.
It is also irritating that the Hindi ghazal collection I downloaded is 90% sung by men. I personally prefer a woman's voice in that particular genre; I can't account for the rarity of female ghazal vocals though it seems linked to that unpleasant audience preference for males I find so inexplicable and frustrating in Bollywood films.
Finally, I can't stop fuming at people's dumb opinions of the Chinese. Everyone and their mother has some casually condescending, mind-bogglingly misinformed and mis-analyzed prejudice towards the Chinese. There are so many kinds! Just as I escaped Vancouver's range of ignorant anti-Chinese sentiment, I became surrounded by Korea's different but equally ignorant one. Yes, countries which neighbor each other spend a lot of time in relationships of hatred, but the tone of cultural (and culinary!!!!!!) superiority many Koreans regularly take over the Chinese is unfathomable. It is entirely based on China's current position as a cheap export horse for the world's conglomerates, and entirely ignores China's enormous cultural contribution to and influence on Korea itself. What is most irritating is the nonchalance of this sentiment, given a) China is ENORMOUS, and one cannot talk about it as a single, cohesive culture and b) the sentiment is never supported by actual travel/habitation in China (also, there is--at least in Jeju--no Chinese immigrant population to speak of).
Why, why, WHY?