Answering Questions Since 2006.
( source ) 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. How could we not carry on? TKWife's…
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. 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…
Diagram by "National Alliance for Tunnel Security", claiming to show the configuration of North Korean tanks under the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, infiltrated through a secret network of underground tunnels. ( source ) Dear Korean, 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…
Darius I is concerned that Persians are listening to K-pop. ( source ) 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…
[Spoiler Warning: This post discusses highly granular details of the movie Parasite , and it really wouldn’t make sense unless you watched the movie first.] I. Parasite is a story of three families. But if you tried to guess the plotline by reading thinkpieces and analyses about the movie without having watched the movie, you would never know it involved the third family. To remind ourselves, let…
(Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book.) The women’s national team for South Korean ice hockey had a problem: it sucked. As the host country for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, the Korean team could qualify automatically. But the team was embarrassingly bad: as of February 2011, South Korea’s all-time record in women’s hockey was 0-15, with the cumulative score of 242-4. In 2012,…
Alright - here is something that is only tangentially related to Korea, but a chance to do some good for a very good boy in his holiday season. Meet Hoya. Hoya is a four year old, 40 pound Jindo mix. Hoya is currently in Joondog Training Center at Chuncheon, Korea, receiving training to become adoptable both within Korea and abroad. He is neutered and received all the necessary vaccine shots…
Seo Taiji and Boys, c. 1993 ( source ) I. The 2010s is nearly over. What will the 2020s have in store for K-pop? Modern K-pop began around the late 1980s, fresh off South Korea’s transition into democracy in 1987 and the successful 1988 Seoul Olympics. This means at the year’s end in 2019, modern K-pop is finishing its third decade. Each decade of modern K-pop carried its own characteristics that…
I still need to finish the last part of the Nine Years of Darkness series. But hearing the news that Nancy Pelosi finally greenlighted an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, I thought it would be fitting to share an excerpt of writing by Cheon Gwan-yul [천관율]. Cheon, a journalist for a South Korean magazine SisaIn, has been the sharpest observer of the political landscape leading up to Park…
[ Series Index ] The ’65 System is dead—but Americans are slow to wake up to this fact. Much of the foreign policy circles in and around Washington DC still think South Korea and Japan can patch things up quickly and get on as they did before July 2019. They argue: it’s about point-scoring in the domestic politics by stoking the nationalistic passion. Moon Jae-in and Abe Shinzo are being childish…
[ Series Index ] The ’65 System was a flawed one, based on an imperfect set of treaties that papered over the fundamental disagreement between Japan and South Korea. Yet it continued to survive thanks to opportune alignments in the domestic politics of Japan and South Korea. The ’65 System was born when Park Chung-hee, a former officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, replaced the former…
[ Series Index ] The most hopeful case in favor of the '65 System can be stated as the following: it was the politics of the possible. No, the core historical issue of whether Japan's colonization was legitimate was never addressed—but it was not possible to resolve that issue in 1965 at any rate. Why not begin the bilateral relationship with Japan and South Korea, and build a strong tie based on…
[ Series Index ] For approximately 25 years, the ’65 System functioned exactly as intended. Japan and South Korea would build a close economic relationship, while the historical issue was in the backburner. For a time, this was possible because South Korea’s dictators Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan muzzled the victims of Japan’s imperialism. But starting in the 1990s, the ’65 System was showing…
[ Series Index ] After An Jung-geun shot Ito Hirobumi in 1909, An demanded he be treated as a prisoner of war, a soldier who carried out an asymmetrical warfare campaign against an enemy general. Imperial Japan ignored the request; An would be tried and executed like a common criminal of Japan. This would be the consistent theme for the next 100-plus years between Korea and Japan. Korea would…
[ Series Index ] Newspaper illustration showing An Jung-geun's arrest after shooting Ito Hirobumi ( source ) The first prime minister of modern Japan was Ito Hirobumi, who took office in 1885. Ito is remembered as one of modern Japan’s Founding Fathers. With an illustrious career that spanned four decades, Ito was the face of Japan to the contemporary world, similar to how late 19th century…
[ Series Index ] A. The Choi Soon-sil Scandal Given how well the Choi Soon-sil scandal came to be known around the world (with a little help from yours truly ,) only a brief summary of the scandal would suffice. Park Geun-hye turned out to be feeble in her mind, and outsourced much of her presidential duty to Choi Soon-sil, the daughter of a shaman Choi Tae-min who became close with Park because…
Young Korean girl with her brother on her back during the Korean War, c. 1951 ( source ) North Korea and South Korea were never not at war, practically speaking. Less than two years after two governments were officially established in the Korean Peninsula, the two Koreas began the internecine Korean War in 1950. The war technically never ended, as the armed conflict only ended in a cease-fire in…
I. “We created them, we taught them how to speak and think, and when they rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters.” - Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) This being the internet, I will state my conclusion first, in the vain hope that it would be impossible for the reader to miss the point of this post: the idea of cultural…
It was a big year for me, although you wouldn't know it from the blog. But in real life, my career made big strides and I produced more writing than ever. Oh, and there is now TKDaughter2 in addition to TKDaughter1. That seems important. Here's a look back at the most popular AAK! posts of 2018. Most Popular Posts of 2018 (All-Time Posts) 1. Counting in Sino-Korean [ Link ] 2. Becoming a Doctor in…
As long time readers may know, this humble blog has shared long time friendship with NK News , the finest source in English to get the news about North Korea. One of the proudest moments of running this blog was inspiring NK News to begin Ask a North Korean! , an honest and revealing look into the country that is so opaque from the outside. And now it's a book, written by former Economist…
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a good novel, fully deserving the rave reviews it has received thus far. But Pachinko is not merely good; it is important. Deep, literary exposition about Korea in English has only just begun in the last few years, but with books like Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Kim Young-ha's Your Republic is Calling You , there are now a solid stable of Korean novels in English that…
( source ) Here’s the story of my immigrant family. We came from Korea to the United States in late 1997. I was 16 years old, my brother 14. Immigrant life was hard. Our immigration lawyer was a crook, stealing most of our family’s money while leaving us with an uncertain immigration status. We lived in a succession of shitty little houses, dealing with nasty landlords who never repaired broken…
So—a lot happened since I posted last in late April! The U.S.-North Korea summit was on, then off, then on again. Now that the summit is back on, so is the familiar chorus singing: “we’ve seen this all before.” The chorus points out North Korea promised to denuclearize, then lied, cheated and reneged on the promises, repeatedly for the past 25 years. North Korea previously put on the show of…
International relations is supposed to be a high-minded discipline. It is politics at the highest level, as the world knows no higher power than a national sovereign. The politicians in the international relations are often elevated beyond the banalities of governance, having transcended the pedestrian worries about keeping the road free of potholes. They are considered “statesmen,” the titans of…
[ Series Index ] I. Early Resistance From the start, Park Geun-hye was not merely unpopular with South Korea’s liberals. Rather, her election was offensive . Regardless of Park’s fairly legitimate achievements as the conservative party leader, it was clear that most of her appeal derived from her dictator father Park Chung-hee. To Korea's liberals who cut their teeth in politics by fighting…