dagNotes: on privilege and white power in Korea

[from my tumblr blog, posted earlier today]

In my last post, I talked about the problem with white people coming to Korea and suddenly becoming conscious of race. Except, they don’t see white power and privilege, which is everywhere on display. They see racist Koreans.

Then, I received an anonymous ask shouting at me for being white and calling out white supremacists and racism. An obvious troll, but one who provides me with an opportunity to discuss why white people experiencing racism like the young woman in the former post are so misinformed.

I’m white. I argue I have a responsibility to betray my inherited privilege and unearned ambition. And not for any reward either. Simply because I, like everyone else, have an ethical obligation to fight the white power structure that constructs individuals as white subjects. White people don’t exist. Whiteness is constructed and protected and inherited. I may be able to benefit most from this racist ideological apparatus that shapes capitalist society, but I should reject it. It’s a moral obligation, in my opinion.

And as some folks are claiming, I’m not doing this to point the finger at white privilege. I’m actually trying to examine how it works for myself and in my life, and I’m writing about it. DagSeoul isn’t a “white people are privileged” blog. So, please stop sending me stupid shit in my ask-box about that.

***

I don’t go around claiming I’ve experienced racism in the manner most white people do. Most talk about angry black people, hateful hispanics, crazy Koreans—jealous others whose envy for power causes them to hate their whiteness so much that they act in a racist manner. Of course, that’s utter nonsense. It’s bullshit. That’s not racism. Yelling at whiteness, hating whiteness, having a problem with white people isn’t always racist. It’s a sign of white power. It’s a response to white supremacy.

I play football almost every Saturday in Korea. I live in a Korean neighborhood, so all my teammates are Koreans. They’re all men. They’re almost all younger than me. I’m bigger than all of them. Stronger than many. I’m not the most skilled footballer, but I’ve played since 1978. I’ve got skill. I can score. I’m fast. I know and love the game. And, I can run all day. When a bald (I shave my head) and bearded white guy is booking down the field with the ball, it’s intimidating. A lot of Korean guys are super-fit and strong, but smaller than me. When I run into them at full speed, I feel it, but they really feel it. And I play a much more physical style of football than Koreans do. Fans of the game will understand this. Most guys love it when I show up with my Korean teammates to play. They talk to me on the field. It’s fun. But it’s not always fun.

When I first arrived, a colleague took me around to meet various clubs in the area. Word got around rather quickly that there was a foreigner who wanted to play and he was good. I got asked to play by my team. I was invited. I considered myself lucky. I really figured I’d have to find foreigners to play with, but I wanted so much to play with Koreans. It’s one of the reasons I was excited about coming here. Anyway, I felt accepted. In a few months, I had twenty-five younger brothers. It was a wonderful feeling.

One of the teams we regularly played often got very mad at my teammates that I was playing so well. It appeared that way to me. I didn’t get it. I’ve since learned that some Korean players think its unfair that they should have to play a foreigner. I’m big and strong and can hurt them. I don’t hurt them, but we’re talking intimidation here. I had so intimidated a couple of players that they couldn’t contain their frustrations any longer. After a day of playing together, they confronted me and my team. We almost had a brawl. My teammates were standing up for me. I was pulling guys away from one another. And one player on the other team yelled, “Yankee, Go home!” Some of us laughed. Some of my teammates wanted to fight. The oldest players stepped in and yelled at everyone. My wife had showed up to watch. She was very upset.

Simple story, right? I play. I play with Koreans. I play well. A little physical, but nothing dirty. I score goals. My team wins a lot. The frustrated players on the other team blame the foreigner for fucking up the peace. One guy says something insulting. Many white people would call it racist. Dude’s a hater. It’s not even racist.

Once, I parked my scooter in front of a cafe and the owner told me to move it somewhere else. She didn’t want it in front of her shop. I told her it was legal. She yelled at me for being a spoiled foreigner. Many white people would call it racist. But. It’s not even racist.

I’ve been involved in pushy moments in the crowded subway where I’ve been yelled at in Korean, called out as a rude foreigner. Many white people would call it racist. But. It’s not even racist.

Koreans who call me out for doing things Koreans often do and explicitly scolding me as a foreigner are often referred to by white people in Korea as racist Koreans. They’re not racists.

White people love to see racism against them. And why not. White power works that way. White people are raised to feel precious and deserving of good treatment. They deserve respect. Why would anybody pick on them because of who they are?

Fact is, there are haters in Korea. The longer I live here, on the other hand, the more I recognize my white privilege is in full effect here. And the rudeness with which I’m treated at times simply requires a little patience and understanding. This might sound patronizing, but it’s not. After all, I was brought here and treated well because of who I am, treated well in a manner that the majority of Koreans will never experience.

I’m often asked, Why would you come to Korea? Koreans talk about their country being no bigger than a booger (우리나라는 코딱지 만큼…)  or no bigger than a palm (우리나라는 손바닥 만큼…). Why would I come to a place most Koreans can’t leave? Well, the answer is because I’m privileged. That’s the answer. The humiliating aspect of that answer is its correlation: I can leave whenever I want to. In other words, I can go home. I have a place to go other than here. I can return. That’s what Koreans see me as sometimes, but especially when they’re annoyed at me. They are confronted with privilege. And they sometimes take it out on me. It’s not racism. Try telling that to many white people in Korea, though.

I’d have to be a real dick to deny this privilege. That guy yelling “Yankee, go home” at me is reaching for something to say at all in the face of my belligerent presence in his life. He was being a dick, but he can’t speak English and he yelled the one insult in English he knew might hurt my feelings. The power he feels that oppresses him in a daily manner is a problem with Korean culture, centuries of oppression. Shit I don’t get. But I’ve added another element. Now he has to play soccer, on his day off, with a white guy who reminds him of a specific and painful lack of privilege and I’m going to knock him down, too. I’d be a dick not to expect some sort of response.

Disappearer

well, i have been writing and reading and working towards my short return to the states next year
when i'll attempt to defend my dissertation and wrap up my business at university of denver before returning to korea.
until then, posting here will be sparse.

i post daily on my dagseoul tumblr blog. i have a large community of readers there. if you're on tumblr, follow me.

i'll likely pick up posting on this blog when i return to writing about pedagogy and begin teaching again.

right now, i'm a jobless writer. writing.

DagSound: Burn Out Session, No5

DagSound: Burn Out Session, No5 
Download it or stream it after the jump.

Playlist:

• DJ Pantshead “The Good, the Bad, the Freak”
• Evolution Control Committee “No Time for Yes”
• Beastie Boys “Cooky Puss”
• UTFO “Split Personality”
• Jungle Brothers “Because I Got It Like That”
• Boogie Down Productions “My Philosophy”
• Erik B & Rakim “Follow the Leader”
• MC Lyte “Lyte as a Rock”
• 3rd Bass “The Gas Face (feat Zev Luv X)”
• A Tribe Called Quest “Excursions”
• De La Soul “Bitties in the BK Lounge”
• DJ Quick “Loked Out Hood”
• Biz Markie “Just a Friend”
• Big Daddy Kane “Smooth Operator”
• Steady B “I Got Cha”
• Salt N Peppa “My Mic Sounds Nice”
• UTFO “Roxanne Roxanne”
• Techmaster P.E.B. “Bassgasm”
• GZA “0% Finance”
• King Geedorah “Krazy World (Feat Gigan)”
• Mos Def “Mathematics”
• Wu-Tang Clan “Shame On a Nigga”
• Dalek “Blessed are they who bash your children’s heads against a rock”
• Dalek “No question”
• De La Soul “Stakes is High”
• DJ Pantshead “D’oh Yeah The Slurp”
• Evolution Control Committee “Star Spangled Bologna”

Social inequality worsening in South Korea

Social inequality worsening in South Korea

Ben McGrath's great article reminds us about Korea's a particularly cruel austerity measure for Korean workers called "job sharing" that, as it turns out, has done nothing to relieve unemployment problems here. It's not hurting corporate profits, though. Check it out.

Job sharing can be advantageous for employees. It's not hard to think of the reasons for it working well for certain kinds of workers and the challenges it presents a employers and employees. However, job sharing is not good for Korean workers. It's used here to produce increased profit in corporations during a weak economic cycle. Employee wages do not increase, employment apparently increases, productivity increases, profits increase. It's a way to make employees bear the burden of austerity on behalf of their employers who bear little if any at all.

Like American workers, South Korean workers have been forced to take on more and more debt due to declining wages. According to figures from the National Tax Service last August, per capita earnings for the lowest 20 percent of workers liable for general income tax decreased by 35 percent between 1999 and 2009.

In no small part, this decline in wages came from casualisation of employment. The number of irregular workers—workers without contracts—has risen sharply since 1998. Today, more than half of the workforce, or 17 million people, are considered irregular, earning an average of just 1.35 million won a month ($1,145), or 57 percent of the regular average wage. Irregular workers are also subjected to workplace discrimination and firing at the whim of employers.

The chief architect of this “labour flexibility” was Democrat President Kim Dae-jung, elected in 1998, who imposed the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund for a $10 billion bailout in the midst of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.

Kim’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued to develop the Democratic Party’s anti-working class policy, introducing the falsely named Irregular Worker Protection Act in 2007. Employers were required to offer contracts to workers who remained for two years. However, companies exploited loopholes that allowed them to fire their irregular workers before the completion of their two years. After Lee came to power in 2008, he maintained the loopholes.

The result has been a rapid expansion of cheap labour. International Labour Organisation statistics show that workers earning two-thirds less than median wage comprise 25.6 percent of the workforce, compared to 24.8 percent in the US and 15 percent in Japan.

The so-called “poor class”—defined by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as households earning less than 50 percent of the median income—increased to 3.52 million or over 20 percent of the total in 2009, double the OECD average of 10.6 percent. The so-called middle classes, earning 50-150 percent of the median income, declined from 60.4 percent in 2003 to 55.5 percent in 2009, according to Statistics Korea.

By sharp contrast, the top corporate executives—including President Lee, a former Hyundai CEO—have made extraordinary fortunes. The 2011 list of the 40 richest individuals in South Korea saw a record of 21 US dollar billionaires, up from 11 in 2010 and 5 in 2009. Last year, they added more than $20 billion to their collective wealth, now worth $65.6 billion.

Samsung’s Lee Kun-hee is No.1, with net wealth of $9.3 billion, ahead of Hyundai Motor’s Chung Mong-koo, whose fortune jumped 80 percent to $7.4 billion last year. That was not the most dramatic rise. Nexon online gaming owner Kim Jung-ju leapt 260 percent to $2.06 billion, while Mirae Asset Management Group’s Park Hyeon-joo tripled his worth to $1.5 billion.

Sections of the ruling elite are warning about the explosive consequences of this sharp polarisation between the powerful corporate elite and millions of poorly-paid workers. Former Premier Chung Un-chan warned in July that the gap between rich and poor had reached such a “grave level” that there was a “possibility of our society collapsing.” This was “a more serious matter than relations with North Korea,” he said.

dagSound: Burn Out Sessions, No4

I've just uploaded Burn Out No4: Bombed Out Lovers to dropbox. You can find it on my tumblr or on dagSound. Download it or stream it (if you have the most recent browsers.)

Enjoy And Play It Loud.

Something Rachel Maddow Doesn't Know

While talking about Korean President Lee Myung Bak, fucking Rachel Maddow said the Korean language is “written in the most part using Chinese characters" during the last segment of her show while making a stupid point about pronouncing the President's name.

Apparently, Maddow’s writers didn’t even bother typing “korean and language” into Google. Hangul Day was just last week, for crying out loud. 565 years ago, Korea created its own alphabet. Hangul should not be confused with Hanja, the Chinese characters Koreans use that Maddow seems to be thinking about but knows nothing about. Maybe she was thinking about 19th Century Korea when Chinese was still prevalent here? I don’t know. Maybe she was trying to refer to the fact that many Korean personal names are based on Hanja? I don’t know. She certainly wasn’t thinking about a good portion of the 20th Century when Japan occupied Korea and outlawed Hangukmal forcing Koreans to take Japanese names and to learn Japanese.

It doesn’t matter. Korean is most certainly not “written in the most part using Chinese characters.” It wouldn’t have taken more than a minute of work to figure this out so that Maddow could make her stupid point about how we spell his name, Lee, is not how we pronounce his name in Korea, “eee”.

FTW. Americans are such idiots when it comes to Korea. Maddow should know better because she’s got an army of fans that hang on her every word. We’re still engaged in war in Korea. We have had our American hands involved with shaping this peninsula for over 100 years, often causing intense suffering and harm because of our actions: turning our backs on Korea when Japan occupied, waging war in their country, turning our backs on democracy fighters in Gwangju in 1980. We should know about Korea.

If she wanted to say something cute, nerdy and interesting about the surname 이 (most commonly pronounced “Lee” in English and pronounced “eee” in Korean) she could have talked about all the variations Chinese and Korean immigrants used.  For example: Lee, Li, Yee, Yi, Rhee are all the same name.

Here's the segment:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pessimistic Whiteness: It's your privilege catching up to you

Life is getting hard for white people in the United States, and they’re not happy about it. The government is to blame, right? Not so fast.

What happens when white people become class conscious? In other words, what happens when a white family wakes up from the dream of upward mobility to find that they, like all the non-white families around them, aren’t quickly moving up the social ladder?

Apparently, they give up hope for a better life while their nonwhite neighbors believe, with a little time, they’ll be better off than they are today. In my opinion, what we see in this story is a desire for whites to hang on to their whiteness. In order to cling to whiteness, they give up their optimistic looking forward to wealth and general, social upward-mobility. They say, At least I’m white. That statement embodies white pessimism.

The research is proving Lillian Smith’s claim about the bargain poor whites make with wealthy whites about wealth and whiteness. She published Killers of the Dream in 1949. Guess it takes the popular culture 63 years or so to wake up to the reality that when white people realize they aren’t “getting rich,” they become satisfied with their social and economic status and begin relying on whiteness itself to provide its unique and unearned privileges. Others must look forward to the potential for upward mobility in spite of its difficult achievement because they aren’t born privileged, and they know it. They’ve didn’t inherit access to privilege and they realize they must work hard if they’re to have any opportunity to achieve. They can remain, or be seen to remain, hopeful. White people feel it’s owed to them. When they don’t get success, they become (get) pessimistic.

Check out this article from The Atlantic, “Why Whites Are More Pessimistic About Their Future Than Minorities”. The Atlantic doesn’t put it like I did above, but that’s not surprising. I think it’s an operation of white power: we’re encouraged to look at non-white families to see what’s different about white families. Such narratives provide us, as a culture, with the notion that we are integrated. Of course, white people are pessimistic. We are taught to expect (to inherit) privilege. I’m not saying The Atlantic article is racist, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just pointing out that an article (that examines white pessimism) is mostly written about non-white people. White is always in contrast with others. It’s always non-essential to the narratives that describe it. Dig?

Why do white people blame the government? Because the bargain they make with white privilege is that they will never blame wealthy white Capitalists, the actual culprits. SEE ALSO, crass libertarianism, capitalist libertarians, Ron Paul dittoheads. These people have a radical certainty that they, too, have a natural right to achieve the wealth rich folks merely inherit.

Ignore my crappy Hangukmal, but not my privilege.

I'm working hard at being a better Korean speaker and reader. I'm trying to learn. I'm in my fourth year here and I've lived in the same neighborhood for three years. I feel at home here.

I'm trying to learn. I'm in my fourth year. I've lived in my neighborhood for three years. It's very hard to go from knowing beginning Korean to knowing complex Korean--what we call intermediate Korean here. So difficult. Especially out of school. The learning curve for beginning Korean is not too high. If you speak Korean as often as possible and practice with friends, you can do well because Korean has strict rules that once learned and understood help instruct more than confuse. And the longer you live here, you learn to mask your foreign accent and sound a little more Korean. But once you've mastered small talk in Hangukmal, the learning curve becomes difficult.

I'm excited, though. Next year, I'll be in school full-time, five days a week at Sungkyunkwan University. I get a family discount on tuition--thanks wife!--and am going to take advantage of it while I'm unemployed. Goal is to be at a good level of spoken Korean next Summer. I want to be able to use Korean and resort to English. That's not as easy as it sounds.

It's hard because I feel super-guilty the longer I stay. I want to talk to my friends with more than small talk. It's my responsibility. I feel obligated. This obligation-feeling, the impulse to be obligated, is very Korean. It's not something we learn in the US. I feel obligated to the folks in my neighborhood to learn Korean. I could reject the obligation, as most of the foreigners who live here do. To be fair, most do try to learn survival Korean and some learn the next level, small-talk Korean. And many succeed. But it takes dedication to be good (intermediate,) even a little schooling. So, it takes investment and dedication.

I just went for a drink to the corner store and the clerk wanted to know why it's been a while since he saw me. I told him I've been studying. He asked where. I told him, no I'm writing at home. He then asked me what exactly I was doing. He didn't understand because I confused him. Studying at home? For what? Well, that's hard to explain because it's technical. And I can do it with Korean and English, which he can't understand because he can't use English. Now, I feel obligated to learn so I can tell him.

I'd never have felt this way in the US, for example, felt obligated to learn Spanish to speak with my neighbors in West Denver. I had twenty years to do that and not once did I say it with a sense of obligation, I should learn Spanish. And not one native English speaker would ever feel obligated. It's a choice. I wanted to learn Spanish, but I studied Latin. (Why the fuck did I study Latin. What a dork.)

That I still have the option to invest and dedicate myself to learning Korean language while living and working in Korea while my Korean neighbors are obligated to learn English is a sign of my privilege. And this is something many foreigners simply don't care to understand.

Annoying things white people do when they get to Korea

Arrive in Korea and insist they're an oppressed minority and discover prejudice, bigotry, exaggeration, hatred, and inequality everywhere around them. Fucking Korea!

Then, they start blogging about how bad Korea is: they post on ESL forums; they post on expat forums. The time spent is Korea becomes an examination of popular culture and media--the way Koreans see and represent foreigners. When you search for theses authors on the google, you will learn that their activism only developed after they arrived in Korea. And the ones who've left, well, they stopped their vital work informing against hate and oppression as soon as they got home.

White Power Douchebaggery, even in Korea. This shit is what I call the privilege of being able to leave minority status behind enables and emboldens thousands of privileged white mother-fuckers to speak out against non-white haters. It's Safe Activism: thousands of white people each year finding a place, like Korea, to displace their own privilege and to project their own guilt and shame.

dagSounds: Burn Out No3 "Live Fast Love Hard Die Young"

Just posted the latest Burn Out over on my Tumblr blog and dagSound. Check it out. Can download it from my Dropbox or stream it in your browser.

Burn Out No3 Playlist:

Eat “Communist Radio”
Classic Ruins “1+1<2”
Anti-Nowhere League “I Hate People”
Trodskids “Gueule d’Enfer”
Red Kross “Everyday There’s Someone New”
New Bomb Turks “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young”
The Cramps “The Crusher”
The Compulsive Gamblers “Pepper Spray Boogie”
April March & The Makers “I Just MIght Crack”
Thee Headcoats “I Don’t Like the Man I Am”
The Pretty Things “Buzz the Jerk”
Scientists “Human Jukebox”
The Birthday Party “Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)”
Foetus “The Throne of Agony”
Radio Birdman “Murder City Nights”
The Flamin Groovies “Teenage Head”
Elf Power “Drug Store” (live @ WFMU)
Neats “6”
Nick Lowe “So It Goes”
Kenny “I Don’t Miss You”
Smoke “My Friend Jack”
The Dirty Shames “I Don’t Care”
The Drones “I’m Down Today”
Elvis Ph’o’ng “Bai Ca Ngong” (The Crazy Song)
Dara Pusrita “To Love Somebody”
P.P. Arnold “God Only Knows”
펄 시스터즈  ”커피한잔” (The Pearl Sisters “A Cup of Coffee”)
산울림 - “나 어떡해” (Sanullim “What am I going to do?”)
Michel Polnareff “Time will Tell”
Mary Weiss with The Reigning Sound “Don’t Come Back”
The Equals “Baby Come Back”
The Equals “Police on My Back”
King Kahn & The Shrines “No Regrets”
The Ponys “Let’s Kill Ourselves”

Alien Registration Transformation & Changed My Address

Happily was E-2;
am now F-1.

It's good for two years and multi-entry.

Worth noting is that the old address system is not used by government offices any longer. Even though I gave the address I've used for three years, the one printed on the back of my ARC card corresponds to the new street name and building number. My villa number remains the same.

Last year Korea standardized addresses nationwide, affording each street a name. Before that, Koreans relied on building numbers assigned to places within neighborhoods, within districts, within cities to find people. It could be difficult. Blue street signs and blue building placards appeared almost overnight. It appears we can begin using them for official things like mail. Probably always could, but you never know.

So my address is now:

[Street Name]로26가길 70-0 B3호 (Street Name +Street# +Building# + Unit#)
관악구 (District)
서울특별시 (City)

It's simpler. I like it. Easy to find people anywhere in this maze of a city.

With an appointment and all the paperwork handy, the Visa process isn't too difficult here. I stress appointment. My replacement at my high school spent what sounds like a few hours at immigration without an appointment. And the school made him go the day all his fellow newbies to Korea were certain to show up with their new colleagues to wait. Bad idea.

Other great thing about this F-1. No testing. None.

On CISK

So, I hear somebody's raking in the points and publicly airing his dirty laundry. I'm not surprised;

I wonder if she got pissed that he made her sign a contract in triplicate.

Thee Dreaded Sojourn to Korean Immigration

This post is for anyone coming to or new to Korea.

I was fortunate to have a Vice Principal at my high school back in 2008 who had lived in Europe and Saudi Arabia prior to returning to Korea to work at my school before leaving again to work in Russia. He expected how I’d react to Korean bureaucracy and made sure to accompany me to immigration and teach me how to maneuver through the system. In addition, he foreshadowed many of the conflicts I’d have with Korean co-teachers, and though he was strict with me, he didn’t permit my stubborn colleagues to blame everything on me either.

What many foreigners fail to realize when working the immigration system—well, any Korean bureaucracy—is that to get what you want, especially if your request is at all different and/or strange, you must be pushy. In addition, you must have followed all the rules. If you miss a step, there’s no mercy and no help.

You really don’t have a choice. I have to admit that it took me a while to figure it out. Being pushy is not something I like doing as it was culturally drilled into my head to not be pushy because being pushy is always rude. It’s a necessity here. In fact, the more Hangukmal I learn, the more I realize that it often works to my benefit to be pushy in Hangukmal. In English, pushiness always sounds abusive. In Korean, it often sounds desperate. I think we can call it earnest pushiness. It’s more than demanding insistence. Earnest pushiness permits a speaker to share his or her frustration without blaming the listener(s).

And I’ve discovered that when I’m polite and pushy—in other words, desperate—I begin to receive sympathy from the Koreans who are tasked to help me and who work customer service. Hangukmal permits being polite and pushy at the same time. English doesn’t. Especially to Koreans who might not speak English well. Pushiness in English always sounds shrill and is always unwelcome.

So, you have to be pushy. In addition, you have to recognize when something begins to happen for you, when things start to go your way, it’s best to thank the person helping you and tell them you appreciate their working for you. Even if you’re annoyed at the help, thank them both for helping you and for understanding your confusion. It’s worth it.

Today, I had to go to immigration for two reasons. My annual visa is set to expire in less than 7 days. Because I will remain in Korea as an unemployed guest, my current alien registration ID is worthless. As of the 25th, I’d be here illegally without a new contract from my school or another educational institution. I needed to apply for an extension of stay, which gives me 30 additional days simply for showing up to apply. In addition, I needed to apply for a Visiting Spouse Visa, which will permit me to come and go from Korea at my leisure and for as long as my wife is employed here.

The first step is a common one for foreigners between jobs. With the most recent immigration regulations, Immigration expects me to show up at the end of my legal stay and request an extension. They’ll automatically give me 30 days for applying. The second request, however, is strange—not strange that I’m married and want to stay in Korea, but strange because my wife is a gyopo and American citizen and not a Korean citizen. Gyopos are one kind of persons with Korean ancestry who aren’t Korean citizens. My wife is a second generation American. Her parents left Korea in the late 70s. She gets special visa status in Korea that other people with Korean ancestry, say third generation Korean-Americans, would not get. My request is strange because most of the people requesting Visiting Spouse visas are not Americans married to Americans, they’re Americans married to Koreans.

As I explained above, strange requests lead to problems. It’s a rule. We spent an hour insisting that our request be processed and, in the end, it was. If we weren’t pushy, we would have left and would have had to return with unnecessary documents and our instructions from other agencies who’d have to have corrected the initial Immigration Officer’s mistake. But you simply cannot tell somebody they’re not correct without encountering problems.

Korean skepticism can be a tough nut to crack. The Immigration Officer we worked with was a kind, older man who was genuinely interested in solving what he thought was a real problem with my request, but the problem really was in his mind. He simply didn’t understand why we were making that specific request. When we got him to help us rather than attempt to brush us off, he lightened up in spite of all we had to do to convince him of our worthy and legal request.

First, we had to be pushy. Pushy to get the ball rolling on our request. Pushy to make sure he didn’t ignore our legal marriage certificate. Pushy to get him to understand my wife really is a Gyopo. There comes a time in these complex social situations in Korea, when the person one works with relents—not because he or she gives up or admits being incorrect but because one has proven genuine interest, concern and effort. When the Immigration Officer began working with us instead of trying to get us to go away, we knew everything would work out to our benefit.

This is similar to what happened when we worked with real estate agents to find an apartment to rent. The people we worked with insisted that we’d have to accept high fees and high prices for what we wanted. Basically, we were told we’d never find what we wanted. We insisted otherwise and politely debated for about fifteen minutes. We were insistent, then pushy, then demanding. We wanted to try, dammit. Amazingly, after the debate, we received many wonderful offers, eventually finding a new landlord who is kind to foreigners in a part of town without many foreign residents and at a very reasonable rent and deposit. If we were new to Korea, we’d never had made it that far. We’d have left and likely headed to the expat ghettos around Itaewon. Exactly where we didn’t want to live. You have to be pushy.

When the Immigration Officer sent my wife to pay the tax for my VISA request, I was elated. Having been to the office twice before, I knew this meant my request would be processed. I took advantage of time alone with him to insist that I apologize for my confusion and am grateful for his effort to successfully help us. I said it properly and in Korean, and even went so far to explain that I needed his help because I’m still new around here. Three years in Korea seems like a long time, but it isn’t. He was positively charmed and blew my apology off. He didn’t need it except he did. He smiled through the rest of the process, even filling out our paperwork. He asked about my hometown, my university, if we’re having children. I’d made a friend.

I hate this process. It’s stressful. And I often forget my role in it, getting unnecessarily anxious at the start of the process and then fulfilling my role both linguistically and socially. But if I’m unwilling to participate in it, I have a much more difficult time successfully navigating Korean bureaucracy. Last year, the process was easy: I had a new contract; I needed a new VISA. Pay my taxes. Get my VISA.

Korean Immigration can be difficult. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s best on your first visit to bring a Korean citizen along and preferrably one who works at your job and is your superior. The office treated me like gold when I was being ushered around with the Vice Principal of my school. We were in and out in twenty minutes.

Always go with a reservation. This means making a reservation maybe a two to four weeks prior, so you can get the time and day you want. When you have a reservation, you can simply step up the Online Reservation Window For Foreigners. There’s never a long wait. Walking in to Immigration is asking for stress you don’t need.

If you notice a free window and you have a question, go up and ask. You might get instant help. Step up and be pushy. Today, I arrived an hour early. My agent was not busy. I went to him, sat down, told him I had a reservation and was early and wanted to get the process over with. He helped me. There were several other foreigners looking helpless, waiting in the background, not sure what to do. That hesitance stresses Koreans out. Never assume that the Immigration Officers speak enough English and comfortably enough to approach you and ask if you need help. You have to ask. And you have to know how to ask. A Korean friend or coworker can write the requests down for you if you’re brand new. Simply give the written note to the Immigration Officer.

Have cash. 50,000 to 80,000 in manwon notes. You’ll have to pay taxes (30-50,000) and you may have to pay for delivery of documents and/or photos. You have to pay with cash at Immigration. They will not accept bank cards of any kind. Same goes for the Department of Motor Vehicles and when you want to get registration for a vehicle at a District Office. Business like this is always handled in cash.

If you’re alone, bring the instructions with you. If an Officer insists you don’t have proper paperwork, you can illustrate that you do.

PS: do not visit the ESL Cafes like Dave’s ESL to learn what to do in these difficult situations. Those forums are full of haters who will often mislead you because they are misinformed and have an agenda. If you’re reading this and need help, ask me. I’ll make sure you get accurate information and the help you need. And I won’t shit on Korea while doing it.

Recent Comments. Response Soon.

Sept 1 is almost here. I'll be writing from my flat in Sillim. No more teaching for a while. And back to blogging. Summers are always slow.

I noticed a couple of comments that I want to respond to. I'll get to them very soon. Thanks for reading.

dagSounds: BURN OUT Sessions

Burn Out No2: Other Mental Objects is now available on dagSound. Check it out.

Korean Wave is Corporate Corruption

I'm no fan of K-Pop. It's all shitty lyrics, stolen measures, awful samples, horrid dancing, insipid fashion, and happens to be strictly for children and pedophiles. I know, I hate it, right?!

Provocative rants aside, K-Pop is actually very Korean Wave, which is the idealized representation of nationalist sentiment in Korea as represented in the free market. If you could turn Korean culture into a transparent commodity that could be consumed by purchasing any object made in Korea to be distributed off-peninsula, then you'd have the ideal 한류 (Hallyu) Object. I'd say, K-Pop is an attempt at producing and distributing such an object. Korean Wave is stocked with corporations intent on exploiting markets, often via intentional and direct corruption of the market. In the music scene in Korea, it's called 증회. English speakers will know it as payola.

The Korean economy is often hailed by Koreans as strong as if by law they must say that it is strong. If we don't say it is strong, then it can't be strong. It's the thing I dislike most about life here. Sometimes it's as if there's no real world of consequence away from the peninsula. There's a grand delusional vision of The World that I don't understand in spite of witnessing its regulated distribution to citizens here. Although it's undoubtedly growing, the economy's strength is incredibly inflated. The fact is, much of its touted strengths are artificial and controlled. And part of that control exists in corruption.


I'm not going to delve into this too much, but it's rather obvious that the Korean government has its hands full regulating corporate corruption on the peninsula.

Here's a new story in The Economist:

Corruption in Korean pop music 

K-ola 

WITH its over-reliance on manufactured teen pop, and a leave-nothing-to-chance managerial style reminiscent of Phil Spector (minus the murder), there are obvious parallels between “K-Pop” and the American music industry of the 1950s and 60s. And perhaps now another box can be checked: the practice of bribing one’s way onto the charts. That's payola, or 증회 in Korean. 

Twenty-nine people, mainly radio and cable-TV staff, have been arrested on suspicion of accepting cash payments in return for airplay or fraudulent chart positions. New artists and their managers, keen to start their careers off with a hit, were the most frequent customers: Incheon Metropolitan Police believe that between April 2009 and May of this year, around a hundred wannabe singers paid a total of 150m won ($143,000) to several producers and the chairman of a cable-TV company. Such sums are dwarfed by the 400m won or so allegedly collected by the operator of a website that compiles a chart based on the number of radio plays each single receives. According to police, the unnamed 60-year-old took the money from singers and pop managers, promising six-month stays in his dubious top ten, for a price of 38m won each. (Read the rest of the article on The Economist's site.)

Don't get the wrong idea. I love it here. I hate nationalism. Even the left wing in Korea is awash in nationalist sentiment. I hate that. To be clear: K-Pop, for me, represents the pinnacle of corporate-driven, nationalist, commercial music--vacuous, meaningless, talentless, over-produced bullshit. In other words, all hype, all image. I'll shut up about it because it'll ruin my day. There's a ton of talent in Korea's various underground scenes and popular music history. You'd never know it, though.