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Spring is for daffodils and demonstrations. 4.19 4.29 5.18 6.4 We work around the terminology of massacre and protest, riot and repression, with numbers and dates. The Human Rights Film Festival here in Seoul screened Burma VJs: Reporting from a Closed Country last weekend, the screen set up outside at Cheonggye Plaza in between the ( Read more... )

Two years ago because of someone else's thesis I thought a lot about Korean American identity and how it shifts and sometimes scatters upon contact with real! live! Korea! There are more of us now, diasporic Koreans, hyphenates coming to hang out with sourcelanders, enough so that yesterday someone from the Ministry of Justice ran me through a 15 ( Read more... )

Kim Dae Jung paying his respects to the widow (url courtesy of Mr. Free Jazz)


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I am a former carrier of GSF1 and remain infected by GSF4 I think.

Geek Social Fallacies
Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are EvilGSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the ( Read more... )

I'm not sure where the impulse originates, to post about Roh Moo-hyun's suicide. Not a Kilroy was here, or the pundit's sprint to be the first to a particularly shiny insight. Not even to marvel at how news spread, a text message to me, a stunned squawk on Skype, then Google-assisted text messages to friends in the U.S., then five chat windows. How ( Read more... )

I would like to "ruin" Korea's "brand image" by staging some violently communicative protests in downtown Seoul. I'm a pacifist, or at least, I never got past six weeks of judo, so perhaps some members of the Society for Creative Anachronism can come over to Korea to joust their way past all those riot buses. Actually, combining cosplay and mass ( Read more... )

One of my most memorable displays of ignorance occurred on a road trip down to Guje Island a few years back, when I exclaimed over the greenness of a lawn. Turns out it was a rice paddy, but hey, I only grew up with cornfields.

안병석


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so we all sortied into the spitting sky last night, a temporary mishmash of artists (gallery opening) and doctors (med-school friends). among the mix was a talented painter who bragged about his gold medal at the military olympics (Korean riflemen are better because they always had crap equipment and instead of the proper weapons Americans shoot ( Read more... )

137 boxes of the 100+ (collective and cumulative) years of my family's existence in America were shipped to Korea, I had insomnia, we found my diapers in one of the 137 boxes (who keeps their child's cloth diapers for over 30 years? --beat-- right, my parents.), some secret stuff happened, some other stuff got declassified, I tried murdering Miss ( Read more... )

As we were ricocheting around inside the van on our way inside the DMZ to visit some painted maples (get your demilitarized maple syrup here!), the employee and the professor were reminiscing about their stretch in the military. "Yeah, grenades are the most fun." "Especially when you use them to fish."