Answering Questions Since 2006.
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Read 11 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 5 years.
( 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…
