B-Boy, Korean Prosody, and Nationalism

Last Friday's field trip, brought to you by the Ewha International C0-Ed Summer School, was a trip to a trendy part of town to see a show called "Ballerina Loves a B-Boy," a romantic comedy largely presented through dance and starring some truly excellent B-Boys and B-Girls (B-boying = breakdancing) (the ballerinas weren't bad either). The dancing was incredible. I don't have any videos, but I did take a picture with one of them after the show.

The guy in the middle is the B-boy. He was sort of the comic relief/MC for the show - he wore a bunch of funny hats and was the token "fat guy" who turns out to bust some awesome moves. On the right is my friend Klaus, a student from Germany who's fluent in Korean (he's half) and has already been to Seoul like five times. I am jealous. Breakdancing is so hot in Korea and it's amazing how these dancers have appropriated and hybridized mostly-American styles of clothing and movement to create a very entertaining, skillful, and actually pretty masculine art form. It's creative, it requires only your own body and a stereo, and it's becoming a totally new and very Asian subculture. Also, this guy in the show put on a special helmet and spun on his head for like 3 minutes.

In other news, I recently rediscovered this incredibly hilarious YouTube video called "Korean History Channel" starring a couple of Asian guys who don't seem to know much Korean but can imitate and exaggerate the Korean accent perfectly.



Their vocal caricatures specifically illustrate a feature of Korean prosody which for the sake of being pretentious I will call the "Korean Prosodic Mordent." A mordent (link goes to Wikipedia entry) is a musical term for a kind of trill where only three notes are played - the original note, the note above/below, and then the original note again. Korean people tend to extend the final syllables of their sentences or single utterances by inflecting the pitch of the vowel so that it sounds like they're singing a mordent, especially when they're annoyed or want to get a particular point across. This strategy is a great way to add emotional content to spoken language, although it often makes non-Korean speakers remark that Koreans sound "whiny." It's much easier to do this in Korean than in English because Korean words end with vowels a lot more than English words do, and it's much harder to change the pitch of a consonant than a vowel, generally speaking. I think it's comparable to the way some English speakers - especially melodramatic teenage girls - extend and inflect the final "o" vowel in "oh my god" if they're saying it in response to something particularly exasperating ("my parents grounded me again ohmygawwwwwwwd"). The difference is that Korean people do this constantly, and not only when they're exasperated. My Korean language teacher does it a lot, especially when she's trying to emphasize something we said wrong or a particular sentence pattern we should pay attention to.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (Andrew Nevins, if you're reading this, I'm referring to you), check out Mike's post over at the Impatient Pudding on word-final character repetition in English and other languages that use the Roman alphabet. He did some ingenious original research on a fairly recent text-based phenomenon (especially prominent in internet messaging and other fairly informal internet-based text media) where people repeat the last letter of a word in order to add emphasis to its meaning. Example: if I say a guy's "hot," it's pretty standard, but if I say he's "hott" or especially "hottt," then whoever I'm talking to will demand pictures. The irony in this case is that although Korean people do this all the time in spoken language, the structure of the written language makes it very difficult to duplicate final letters and get the meaning across. Instead, you'll often see several "~" signs after sentence-final syllables, even on handwritten posters, which I think amounts to something similar. In all, I think the trend towards finding creative ways to inscribe prosody and emotional content (i.e. pitch inflection) into written language is really interesting and deserves more academic attention. This would have been unthinkable even a century or two ago when literacy, especially in Asian countries, was still fairly limited to the elite. The rise of mass literacy as well as the internet have produced an explosion of of non-formal written material which people require to carry the same emotional flavor and immediacy of spoken language (witness also the rise of emoticons :-P).

Another more sensitive issue that this video raises is the topic of Korean nationalism, even jingoism, and the subtle ways it's realized in Korean culture and language. Korea prides itself on being a "peaceful" nation, as the YouTube video guys emphasize - Korea does lie right in between China and Japan, two powerful countries who both have histories of invading and colonizing other peoples during the past thousand years or so. I think this fact - as well as Korea's long and venerable history of being invaded and colonized itself - lends the country as a whole a kind of martyred political high ground. I'm not saying that people in Seoul constantly comment about the history of imperialism in the world and how their slates are relatively clean in that regard, but I do think it's still an issue that factors into modern Korean culture and its export into other countries via television soap operas, pop music, etc (check out the Hallyu phenomenon I talked about last time for more information).

Holding this kind of moral high ground is extremely valuable in this day and age when many people (especially in Asia) continue to question and challenge Western cultural hegemony and military go-it-alone attitude (George W. Bush, that's aimed at you). However, it can also impede the development of international cooperation between Korea and other countries, especially Japan. The YouTube video specifically lampoons the Korean resentment of Japanese colonization from 1910-1945 and especially the World War II "comfort women" issue (many Korean women were forced into being sex slaves for the Japanese military during the war) when the two "historians" describe the (made-up) injustice of belligerent Japanese dinosaurs killing peaceful Korean dinosaurs. "They never say sorry!!" the two men cry, which is very similar to the outrage Koreans periodically express towards the Japanese government's inability to acknowledge the comfort women issue (see also this link) as well as the whitewashing of Japanese colonial atrocities in Korea in Japanese history textbooks. These are genuine problems from Korea and many other nations' points of view, but when is enough enough?

I will leave that question to my faithful readers and the world. In the meantime, I'm exhausted - I have class from 9:30am-5:50pm Mon-Thurs (with a few breaks) and then two hours of English tutoring in the evenings.

Funny Signs

English is everywhere in South Korea, especially in the cities. T-shirts, store signs, soda bottles, you name it. Most of the time the English text makes sense, but sometimes something gets, shall we say, "lost in translation." Check out the pictures here. I'll be taking more photos as time goes on. Maybe this will evoke happy memories in those of you who have visited Korea recently.

Funny Signs

I do feel kind of hypocritical criticizing Korean English when I had my first 3-hour Basic Korean language class today and found out I didn't know the basics of even really simple greetings. Basic level is a step above Beginner, which is where I would be if I didn't know how to read and write hangul, the indigenous Korean alphabet which Jared Diamond described as "elegant." I agree with him - it's pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it, and there are far fewer weird spelling conventions than English. Of course, the simplicity of the writing system is offset by the complexity of the language itself, which has several different registers of formality, lots of case endings that follow their own phonological (i.e. sound) rules, and a subject-object-verb sentence structure. I can barely make sentences that have an object in them - sentences with embedded phrases are way beyond me right now (i.e. "I wish ..." or "I think ..." or "It's true that ..." as opposed to "I like kimchi" or "It's raining"). The professor for the Basic class is great and clearly has had a lot of experience teaching beginners. There are only 17 people in my class, which is also helpful, although it's by far the largest of the classes I'm taking.

The other two classes I've picked are "Understanding Hallyu: Globalization and Nationalism" and Intro to Economics. Hallyu is the Korean name for the so-called Korean Wave, the catch-all term for the explosive recent spread of Korean popular culture to all of East Asia and beyond. My interest in this topic was ignited in particular by Professor Eckert's excellent history class "The Two Koreas" as well as Steven Colbert's televised "feud" with Korean pop singer Rain. Colbert, who is currently my favorite television personality, actually created his own K-pop music video to compete with Rain where he tries to dance b-boy (aka breakdance) style and actually sings in Korean (the video has subtitles). The video itself starts around 3:55.



There's an interesting article here on the Korean reaction to Colbert's video.

Lessons in Humility, or C. Kelly presents "Trapped in the Phone Booth"

Korean phone booths are very well made.

This was one of the major trains of thought running through my tired mind as I sat on the floor of a phone booth just outside my dorm at Ewha University, wondering how I'd found myself in such a cliched situation. There was no handle on the inside of the door and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to escape, since the door was one of those folding/sliding ones that opened inward into the booth. I went into the phone booth intending to call some of my relatives in Seoul and tell them I'm here and only discovered I couldn't leave after I discovered that the pay phone didn't take coins. Asian pay phones tend to take special cards that you load money onto, and of course I don't have one of those yet. I don't have a cell phone yet, either, and as my Korean vocabulary is very limited, I couldn't figure out how to call collect or what the emergency number was. Also my dorm is at the edge of campus and it was 9pm, so cars and passerby were few and far between. Thank god I had a lighter and some tissues. I ended up lighting a tissue on fire as a car approached and they stopped and let me out after I almost burned myself, dropped the flaming tissue, and stomped on it a few times. I hadn't been panicking, but after half an hour I was starting to resign myself to spending part or all of the night in a mint-green 4'x4' cubicle with a stupid useless pay phone for company.

It was definitely a "... And you go to Harvard?!" moment, but in my defense, I've only been in this country for 4 days and I can barely communicate in the language. It's been about half an hour since I was freed from my little cage, and I am definitely not attempting pay phone calling again. It's been at least a year since I've used a pay phone, and probably at least 5 years since I've used one in the States (last summer I went to Australia with my choir).

Moral of the story: always carry a lighter, or a cell phone, or both. Actually, just steer clear of phone booths, period.

No more philosophical thoughts tonight.

Golden Crowns and Shining Clay

First off, check out the new "Blogs I Read" box on the left, which currently contains Zak's blog Impatient Pudding and Jue's blog Orange Orange. Disregard the fact that I wrote the latest entry on IP - it was a guest blog, I swear. Anyway, give them a read, especially if you like science, web 2.0 culture, or any song with the word "remix" in the title.

The highlight of today was meeting a Korean master potter who makes replicas of pottery produced during the Shilla dynasty, which was around for a thousand years somewhere around 0 B.C. Ancient Koreans were apparently prolific potters in the Chinese tradition, and delicate green Korean celadon vases are still prized today. This guy insists on making pottery the Shilla way without fancy firing techniques or clay additives - it's all just mud, a wheel, and a wood-fired kiln dug into the side of a hill. The mud in this area (Gyeongju city, south of Seoul somewhere) apparently has a high silica content, which when exposed to temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius naturally melts or activates somehow and gives the finished piece a glossy sheen. This means Shilla-type pottery needs no glaze or varnish, and so the potter was keen on telling us that what he makes is not pottery but actually "clay figurines." I guess the strict definition of "pottery" involves glazes or something. Anyway, we got to watch him work, check out the inside of the kiln he uses, and even make our own pots on little wheels! It's been at least 10 years since I tried to make anything resembling pottery, especially on a wheel, and it was a marvelous experience. Good art (as well as good science, math, etc.) requires singlemindedness, and although what I produced didn't really resemble good art (as much as the potter guy helped me out), the intense clarity with which I saw myself manipulating my hands, the clay, and the tools as well as the speed with which the time flew made me feel like a real artist. A dazed but happy artist, anyway. We left all of our creations there to be fired by Mr. Potter Dude, who will ship them to Ewha after they're done so we can bring them home. With any luck, mine will be sitting on my desk or a shelf next year, hopefully all in one piece.

We also walked around a museum of artifacts from the Shilla dynasty, including beautiful golden crowns worn by some of the 50-odd kings and queens before the unification. Korea, like China, was a bunch of warring kingdoms sometime around 500 A.D. and then became unified under one dynasty, never to be split up again until 1945. The "headband crowns," as they are called, are masterpieces of metalwork and symbolic design. The crowns have vertical "branches" that are supposed to mimic tree branches or antlers, both of which symbolized the king's position as intermediary between heaven and earth. Some of the "branches" have a particular shape that is actually a Chinese character repeatedly stacked on top of itself; this character is "chu," which means "to exit" or "to go out," pointing to the king's widespread influence throughout the kingdom. The goldwork of these crowns is very delicate and precise, with little golden "spangles" attached to the branches and cashew-shaped pieces of jade hanging off of it (pictures to come). Although the material is the same, the style is extremely different from stereotypical Western crowns, which are traditionally heavy, inlaid with large gleaming stones, and don't have anything hanging off of them. Western crowns are meant to be purely visual status symbols, while Shilla crowns engage hearing as well because they jingled. This difference intrigues me. I wonder what Jared Diamond would have to say about it (proximal explanations include: the availability of facetable gemstones and the intimidation factor of jingling).

We also saw an ancient bell that supposedly was only successfully cast once a baby got mixed in with the molten metal and also found out that we have karaoke on our bus. Of course - Korea is nuts about karaoke. It was funny singing Bohemian Rhapsody while watching background montages of forest critters on our bus's plasma TV.

WTF moment of today: our tour guide was telling us about what we were going to have for dinner and described it as "Korean burritos." Then she jumped into an explanation of the history of this food that went something like this: "The story of this food is that sometimes if pretty Korean women are out alone at night, ugly old men might want to take them and so they would rape them with a plastic bag." No preparation for this pronouncement whatsoever. I was traumatized. I think the actual explanation is a little more nuanced, but I'm pretty mystified at this point.

I'm all over Korea like egg on bibimbap

The Korea blog has officially started operations! I'd like to say hi to my family, Harvard homies, Washington, D.C.-area peeps, Brooklinians, and anyone else I've met in my travels through life who has stumbled across this blog. I will be here until September 3rd, so hopefully there'll be interesting things to read about along the way.


I've officially been in the Motherland for over a day now - it's 9:45pm on the 20th and I got here around 5pm yesterday (after leaving Boston at 8am on the 18th). I got off the plane and collected my heavy but super stylin' luggage, then met my "PEACE buddy" Hyun-jin outside baggage claim. Hyun-jin is pretty, petite, and super fluent in English, which is awesome. We took a bus to Ewha University in Seoul and found out that I'm staying in this dorm at the other side of campus from the International Dorm (of Pancakes?), which is kind of lame. The Ewha campus is extremely hilly and all the girls wear high heels ... this must violate some law of physics. My room is small but adequate and I have a nice roommate named Michelle who goes to Smith. I went out to dinner at this small noodle place with Hyun-jin and then barely had time to take a shower and settle in before I was overcome with jetlag (or ennui from being such a world-class traveler? who knows.). Today about 35 of us in the Ewha International Summer Co-Ed Program set off in a bus and with some guides on a "pre-orientation" field trip. We walked around a Buddhist temple named Haeinsa and a museum featuring artifacts from the Daekaya dynasty/kingdom and had some delicious food: the infamous bibimbap and shabu-shabu (Korean hot pot). Then we walked around the commercial center of Daegu, the third-largest city in South Korea, and now we're at a hotel.


Seoul and Daegu are cool but kind of smelly. Seoul in particular is sort of a cross between midtown Manhattan, Boston, and Singapore. Also the ceilings everywhere are like 6.5' high, and the toilets, while Western-style, only come up to my knees. I feel so tall!

This hotel, the Daegu Grand, is freakin amazing. The breakfast buffet not only had all the traditional American breakfast delights plus kimchi and various kinds of porridge, but also smoked salmon and black caviar. The caviar in particular was delicious. I wish I had a sturgeon farm so I could have my own supply. The buffet area had ceiling-high windows that looked out onto a beautiful little waterfall that was probably 3 feet away from the side of the building. Zak, you would've liked the minibar in the room - two kinds of whiskey plus a can (yes, a can) of beef jerky.

Speaking of waterfalls, this country is gorgeous. The upstart hills and rocky streams may not be wheelchair-friendly, but they certainly make for amazing vistas. I think I'm in love. I'll post pictures once I'm back at Ewha and figure out how to get online via my laptop.

I have only seen one television in this country so far that wasn't a state-of-the-art flat panel high-def. Even the public buses have them. I am in awe.

Most of the others in the summer program are a) girls, and b) ethnically Korean but grew up in the States/Canada. Why are we all here? What are we collectively searching for? I don't think it's as simple as a place to belong or a new language to speak. I'll think about it and get back to you all.