http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6egKWHMpLc
“Real pansori singers practice so hard that they spit up blood,” my Korean teacher, who tended to be exceptionally interested and well versed in art and history, asserted in class one day last year.
Whether a statement of fact or just one of the many benign national myths that I have encountered escaping from the mouths of foreign-language instructors in various countries, it was certainly enough to get me interested in pansori. Ten points for my teacher.
Pansori, a homegrown Korean musical style that literally means “sounds of the pan,” an open space used for community gatherings, consists of a (presumably very intense) main singer, called a guangdae (광대) or simply soriggun (소리꾼), usually a woman, who sing-chants a dramatic story, along with the accompaniment of a drummer, or gosu (고수). Her performance integrates narration (아니리/aniri), movement (발림/ballim), and, of course, extremely demanding singing over a wide vocal range (소리/sori). The art first began appearing within guilds of traveling performers during the Choseon period (1392-1897), but documentation of its origins and traditions was not consistent. As such, many of its productions, including seven of what are considered to be a canon of twelve performances, have been lost. [1]
The remaining five productions comprise a range of historical and fictional themes, from war and poverty to romance and talking rabbits. Spoiler alert. Chunhyangga (春香歌/춘향가) or “song of Chunhyang,” weaves social and political commentary into a story about a marriage to a local magistrate. [2] Jeokbeokga (赤壁歌/적벽가), or “song of the red cliff,” details the battle of the red cliff as immortalized in the Yuan/Ming Dynasty Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义/San Guo Yan Yi) or samgukji (三國志/삼국지) as it is known in Korea. [3] This is an enduring and culturally important legend also recently depicted in the 2009 Chinese blockbuster Red Cliff (赤壁/Chìbì). Simcheongga (沈淸歌/심청가), or “song of Simcheong,” is a tragic story about the familial love between an impoverished girl Simcheong and her blind father. [4] Heungboga (興甫歌/흥보가), or “Heungbo’s song,” is a series of tales about a common man and his many children, encompassing the very famous story of the kind-hearted but poor eponymous younger brother Heungbo and his greedy rich older brother Nolbu [5], whose impact on modern Korean culture can be seen in the many restaurants whose names ironically include his signifier (놀부). Finally, Sugungga (水宮歌/수궁가), or “song of the water palace,” is a satirical tale about a rabbit outsmarting a dragon king and his tortoise minister. [6]
Even if the stories behind pansori performances might be at once timeless and historically relevant, how can anyone sit and listen to one person alternately talking and singing for the three, five, even eight hours that one performance might take? one might wonder. They might then write off pansori as rigid, stuffy art for rigid, stuffy people with the time, patience, and refinement needed to sit in a dark theater listening for hours on end to abstruse configurations of words woven into tunes that are often not pleasant to the untrained ear, without even the benefit of elaborate scenery, costumes, pyrotechnics, and exciting orchestral music offered by European opera. Just a wailing woman in a white dress. And a guy beating on a drum. For half a workday.
But such a train of thought would belie the inappropriate assumption that older forms of performance art were always enjoyed in a way similar to that which they are today: In quiet, enclosed environments of minimal distraction, commanding the nearly complete focus of the audience. This, however, is not the case.
Just like the long, plodding, and highly stylized productions of Peking Opera (京剧/jingju) [7] and its cousins in China, Japanese traditional dances (日本舞踊/nihon buyu or にちぶ/nichibu) [3] and other stage performances in Japan, and myriad other forms of performance art that, at first glance, appear too inaccessible to stomach for five minutes, let alone five hours, pansori was originally enjoyed in settings in which it was perfectly acceptable for audience members to come and go at will and even talk and eat during performances. In fact, the “pan” in “pansori” derives from the fact that this art was first developed at local festivals on fairgrounds called noripan (노리판) where spectators freely moved from one attraction to another while enjoying the company and conversation of friends. Furthermore, performances are meant to be interactive, with audience members shouting out chuimsae (추임새), or words of encouragement like “jota (j좋다/good)!” and “eolshigu (얼씨구/hooray)!”, alongside the gosu (고수). [1]
So don’t be intimidated by the length of pansori performances, initial obscurity of their style, and, er, potential laryngeal ejaculations of blood from the performers. Do a search on YouTube, listen to a CD, or check out a live performance and take these musical dramatizations of our shared concerns as a human species as they were meant to be—-casually, with a sense of fun, and as a respite from the stress, grind, and ennui of daily life.
Non-Linked References[7] Goldstein, J. (2003). From Teahouse to Playhouse: Theaters as Social Texts in Early-Twentieth-Century China. The Journal of Asian Studies 62(3): 753-779.
[8] Klens-Bigman, D. (Spring 1999). Nihon Buyo Happyokai. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism:139-148.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
It’s Not Taekwondo: The Real Korean Martial Art
[embed]http://youtu.be/j-X5AVw3Ksw[/embed]
What would you say if I told you that there was a martial art more authentically Korean than Taekwondo?
That it is the only martial art officially recognized by the Korean government as one of the nation’s Important Intangible Cultural Assets (重要無形文化財/중요무형문화재)?
That, despite its many centuries of local Korean history and current and growing fame, was quickly overtaken by the Japanese-influenced TKD soon after World War II because only a handful of masters were left at the time? [1]
If you were anything like me before I began researching this article, ignorant head filled with visions of overseas
dojang (道场/도장) trumpeting “Korean TKD,” “Korean Taekwondo,” or just “Taekwondo” next to a logo inevitably emblazoned with Korea’s signature blue-and-red taeguk; students at universities all over Korea donning dobok (道服/도복) and kicking their way to innumerable gold medals every year; or crowds of cheering Korean spectators celebrating the induction of TKD into the pantheon of Olympic sports in 1988, you might get angry at me for telling you such an absurd and insulting lie.
But you, dear reader, would be wrong.
Indeed, Korea does have a martial art with a longer and more native Korean history than Taekwondo. In fact, TKD was not developed until the 1950’s—that’s right, after most of your grandmas were born—after a profusion of Japanese-taught Korean martial artists finally shed the yoke of their Japanese occupiers and began applying their newfound freedom to adapting personal skills largely based on Shotokan Karate into something more distinctly Korean [1]. Hence the martial art that the world mistakenly equates with Korea, a sport that only saw its official founding in the very significant year 1945 with the opening of an academy in Seoul [2].
But don’t despair! There exists a non-Taekwondo, and more wholly Korean, martial art named Taekkyeon (택견), a name that nonetheless sounds similar enough to its more well-known love child with karate to be mildly confusing. In fact, when I was first told the topic of this article I mistakenly assumed that “Taekkyeon” was just a local moniker for Taekwondo and started gearing up to integrate some historical research with personal experience into an informative article for the fellow martial arts enthusiast.
But I, dear reader, was wrong.
Taekkyeon is about as far from Taekwondo as Krav Maga is from Chinese Nanquan. It is more like performance Capoeira, with its soft, swift movements and non-emphasis on damaging contact, than the harder and more kung fu-like TKD, applied to hard-hitting and painful contact sparring and stylized, powerful forms. But unlike most manifestations of Capoeira, it is a fully contact sport, generally applied not to impressive performances but direct competition between two fighters striving to best each other with inflicting the minimum possible damage.
In fact, as suggested by the instructor in our video, losing control and accidentally hitting one’s competitor with anything more intrusive than a feathery touch, or interacting in an illegal way like grabbing clothes, is grounds for lost points or even expulsion from a match. Given the great lengths to which practitioners must then go to avoid these penalties, Taekkyeon might be considered an uncommonly peaceful art, more peaceful than even strictly performative wushu, in which group sparring sets are, in theory, executed with the utmost control and thus minimum danger, but contact is still a common and painful reality (just ask my former college Wushu team—our forearms looked like neglected bananas for five weeks a year as we practiced for our biggest annual campus demo).
And yet a closer glance at this sport might leave one questioning whether it is really all that pacifistic. After all, it was reportedly taught to the armies of Silla with the intent to give them an edge against Japanese pirates [2]. Moreover, while the largest proportion of a Taekkyeon competition seems devoted to ominous circling and dance-like feints, a quick Internet Youtube search in either Korean or English will provide ample footage (har, har) of belted competitors landing swift kicks on each other’s legs, ribs, or even heads [3], or some significant degree of aggressive grappling with the hands [4]. As with any sport or art, then, it seems fair to say that the character of the Taekkyeon depends on the will and skill of those executing it.
International wushu superstar Li Lianjie, known to most as Jet Li, once said, “The best, best martial art is a smile.” [5] But even when a smile fails and one doesn’t quite feel up to escalating to full-on blows, training in the swift, agile, and highly controlled Taekkyeon might just come in handy—if only to bluff, skip, and leap out of a bad situation. Or just deliver a swift kick to the face.
Non-Linked References[1] Randall, K. Modern and Traditional Korean Games and Sports. USA: Hollym International, 2011.
[5] Li Lianjie. “IMUSE North American Campus Tour Opening Ceremony.” Harvard University. Loeb Theater, Cambridge, MA. 2008. Keynote address.
What would you say if I told you that there was a martial art more authentically Korean than Taekwondo?
That it is the only martial art officially recognized by the Korean government as one of the nation’s Important Intangible Cultural Assets (重要無形文化財/중요무형문화재)?
That, despite its many centuries of local Korean history and current and growing fame, was quickly overtaken by the Japanese-influenced TKD soon after World War II because only a handful of masters were left at the time? [1]
If you were anything like me before I began researching this article, ignorant head filled with visions of overseas
dojang (道场/도장) trumpeting “Korean TKD,” “Korean Taekwondo,” or just “Taekwondo” next to a logo inevitably emblazoned with Korea’s signature blue-and-red taeguk; students at universities all over Korea donning dobok (道服/도복) and kicking their way to innumerable gold medals every year; or crowds of cheering Korean spectators celebrating the induction of TKD into the pantheon of Olympic sports in 1988, you might get angry at me for telling you such an absurd and insulting lie.
But you, dear reader, would be wrong.
Indeed, Korea does have a martial art with a longer and more native Korean history than Taekwondo. In fact, TKD was not developed until the 1950’s—that’s right, after most of your grandmas were born—after a profusion of Japanese-taught Korean martial artists finally shed the yoke of their Japanese occupiers and began applying their newfound freedom to adapting personal skills largely based on Shotokan Karate into something more distinctly Korean [1]. Hence the martial art that the world mistakenly equates with Korea, a sport that only saw its official founding in the very significant year 1945 with the opening of an academy in Seoul [2].
But don’t despair! There exists a non-Taekwondo, and more wholly Korean, martial art named Taekkyeon (택견), a name that nonetheless sounds similar enough to its more well-known love child with karate to be mildly confusing. In fact, when I was first told the topic of this article I mistakenly assumed that “Taekkyeon” was just a local moniker for Taekwondo and started gearing up to integrate some historical research with personal experience into an informative article for the fellow martial arts enthusiast.
But I, dear reader, was wrong.
Taekkyeon is about as far from Taekwondo as Krav Maga is from Chinese Nanquan. It is more like performance Capoeira, with its soft, swift movements and non-emphasis on damaging contact, than the harder and more kung fu-like TKD, applied to hard-hitting and painful contact sparring and stylized, powerful forms. But unlike most manifestations of Capoeira, it is a fully contact sport, generally applied not to impressive performances but direct competition between two fighters striving to best each other with inflicting the minimum possible damage.
In fact, as suggested by the instructor in our video, losing control and accidentally hitting one’s competitor with anything more intrusive than a feathery touch, or interacting in an illegal way like grabbing clothes, is grounds for lost points or even expulsion from a match. Given the great lengths to which practitioners must then go to avoid these penalties, Taekkyeon might be considered an uncommonly peaceful art, more peaceful than even strictly performative wushu, in which group sparring sets are, in theory, executed with the utmost control and thus minimum danger, but contact is still a common and painful reality (just ask my former college Wushu team—our forearms looked like neglected bananas for five weeks a year as we practiced for our biggest annual campus demo).
And yet a closer glance at this sport might leave one questioning whether it is really all that pacifistic. After all, it was reportedly taught to the armies of Silla with the intent to give them an edge against Japanese pirates [2]. Moreover, while the largest proportion of a Taekkyeon competition seems devoted to ominous circling and dance-like feints, a quick Internet Youtube search in either Korean or English will provide ample footage (har, har) of belted competitors landing swift kicks on each other’s legs, ribs, or even heads [3], or some significant degree of aggressive grappling with the hands [4]. As with any sport or art, then, it seems fair to say that the character of the Taekkyeon depends on the will and skill of those executing it.
International wushu superstar Li Lianjie, known to most as Jet Li, once said, “The best, best martial art is a smile.” [5] But even when a smile fails and one doesn’t quite feel up to escalating to full-on blows, training in the swift, agile, and highly controlled Taekkyeon might just come in handy—if only to bluff, skip, and leap out of a bad situation. Or just deliver a swift kick to the face.
Non-Linked References[1] Randall, K. Modern and Traditional Korean Games and Sports. USA: Hollym International, 2011.
[5] Li Lianjie. “IMUSE North American Campus Tour Opening Ceremony.” Harvard University. Loeb Theater, Cambridge, MA. 2008. Keynote address.
Gangnam, COEX Style
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCgd5bOdj_Y
On Saturday I took a rare trip to Gangnam with my boyfriend for a leisurely stroll around COEX Mall, the largest underground mall in the world—nope, sorry, just Asia (darn you, Canada). Short for COnvention Centers and EXhibition Halls, both of which populate its higher floors, COEX also boasts an aquarium, a movie theater, a Hyundai Department Store—with all the food court goodness it implies, as you, dear reader, shall soon see—and a kimchi museum.
Every time I muster up the energy to take the long subway voyage down to COEX (which is not often, given the high density of great shopping and, more importantly, food, elsewhere in Seoul), I swallow a laugh as I remember my first visit to the mall last summer. Mistakenly believing that it was “the largest mall in Asia” and (in)conveniently failing to realize that it was underground, I spent an hour wandering around outside Samsung Station wondering why all I could see were a bunch of hotels, some statues, and an exhibition hall. A shameful peek at my tablet confirmed my folly—and the importance of at least Googling a place before you (try to) go there.
We entered from Samsung Station on Line 2, following the throngs of people marching steadily through the labyrinthine tunnels between the subway and the mall proper. Along the way we passed several signs apologizing for the current construction, which had begun last summer. According to a large display near the mall entrance, the building is being remodeled to make it more environmentally sustainable, a process that apparently involves the installation of large, swooping skylights over much of its area. I imagine that these windows are somehow layered and glazed to provide “sustainable” insulation, but the display did not offer that kind of important detail.
Our first stop was Bandi and Luni’s (반디앤루니스) bookstore, a sprawling maze of literature that (almost) gives the Kyobo Mungo (교보문고) in Gwanghwamun a run for its money. I had just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and was looking to escape the empty lost-friend feeling that comes from leaving the world of an incredible story, so I wandered over to the fiction section and picked up 노르웨이의 숲 (Norwegian Wood) and 스푸트니크의 연인 (Sputnik Sweetheart). Even though the latter was a locally published paperback it still cost over 10,000 won. I had forgotten just how expensive some stores in COEX can be, I mused as I sadly put the book back on the shelf.
Outside the bookstore was a small exposition on new games for the Nintendo DS, complete with several rows of consoles loaded with games for trial by the public as well as a large display of Luigi’s Castle trailers being presented by two women with microphones. I tried out a game called 동물의 숲 (Animal Forest), which, at least for me, involved a lot of running through different buildings and hitting townspeople with a butterfly net. Then I played through a level of Mario Brothers 2 DS, with graphics that were almost depressingly better than the original despite being run from a computer about a tenth the size. After a while the swarm of children, mostly boys, pushing and shoving around me started to jostle my activation energy of annoyance, so I managed to tear my boyfriend away from what was apparently a life-or-death match of Mario Tennis and be on our way.
We started to get a bit hungry, so we strolled over to a sign that promised 中国料理 (Chinese food) at a stand-alone restaurant not seemingly attached to any food courts. Surprised at the 6000-won 짜장면 and similarly inexpensive boiled and fried dumplings (水饺/물만구 and 煎饺/구운 만두, respectively) my boyfriend and I took a booth and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup (牛肉汤面/우육탕면) and dumplings. The beef soup was standard—big slices of meat with scallions and mushrooms, salty, tangy base, noodles cut from dough. The fried dumplings were nothing like the ones I had seen during my nearly three years in Beijing–larger, crispier, and more reminiscent of deep-fried American-Cantonese crab rangoon than the lightly pan-fried Northern fare to which I am accustomed—but still delicious. The food came out with kimchi, pickled daikon, and a bottle of cold water. One of the downsides to eating Chinese food in Korea is that it lacked both China’s complementary looseleaf teas and Korea’s generally extensive banchan services.
After lunch we wandered through rows of small brand-name clothing shops, looking but not thinking to purchase anything. I remembered my dad storming out of a Great Outdoors in COEX the summer before after having seen the 120,000-won price tag on a spandex shirt that could have cost anywhere from $20 to $60 in the United States (and, admittedly, elsewhere in Seoul). The prices in the mall were really hit-or-miss; you could easily be put off by $11 paperbacks and $100+ undershirts, but then, the two of us had just enjoyed a delicious and filling $15 lunch at a clean and comfortable restaurant.
At one point we found ourselves inside Asem Hobby (아셈하비), a hobby store selling puzzles, action figures, and all manner of wooden and diecast model. I curled my lip at a few $50 puzzles, played a bit with a set of (really cool) predatory animal action figures outfitted as some kind of fantasy MMORPG-esque warriors, and marveled at the predesigned do-it-yourself (sort of) model cars, planes, boats, and buildings—and at the swarms of boys, slightly older than the Nintendo DS crowd but still male in depressing proportions, inspecting the merchandise. I thought back to my own childhood days building popsicle stick boats and scrap wood dollhouses in the basement and wondered whether hobby shops in the United States saw a similarly homogeneous demographic.
We wandered a bit more, finding ourselves back at the other end of the bookstore (it really was huge, with multiple entrance points) looking at various non-book items. Hardcover diaries. Pens. An eraser installed into the end of a paintbrush holder for easy handling by artists. Scraps of leather folded into various animal shapes and sold at ridiculous prices. More action figures, this time dinosaurs and unicorns.
We left from a different exit and walked past an external display of discount books (only after crying through a photograph book about rescue dogs) and meandered through a series of cafes and ever-present snack shops—yogurt, waffles, red bean shaved ice (팥빙수/pat bingsu). We stopped briefly to look inside an imported foods shop, where I got overly excited about a package of Rocky Mountain fruit-flavored pastel mini marshmallows (pink, mint green, and white) that I hadn’t eaten since I was about five, as well as about a package of Japanese sweet chewy dried seaweed snacks that I haven’t seen elsewhere in Korea.
We were starting to get hungry again (this tends to happen a lot), so we took a detour to the Hyundai Department Store in hopes of raiding its food court. We were not disappointed. As we traveled down the escalator we were graced with an extensive fiesta of myriad food stations, including several bakeries, dumpling and chicken sellers, salad bars, sandwich shops, cafeteria-style Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and fusion restaurants, and dozens of dessert oases—ddeok, mochi, gelato, cheesecakes, pastries, even a Mrs. Field’s and a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Oh, yeah, and a full-on grocery store. My boyfriend, ever the fan of European-style food (like many of the other pretzel-chowing coffee-guzzling Korean food court guests, it seemed), bought some unprecedentedly soft and chewy whole-grain-walnut-cranberry-date bread at the bakery and a modest sampling of imported sausage and cheeses at the grocery store. I chose a small seltzer water and a bottle of kiwi-kale juice, and we sat for a bit on a cafeteria bench near the Vietnamese restaurant to nurse our newfound treasures.
I checked my watch—time to go home. We had spent a thoroughly entertaining four hours inside the mall and had only partially covered two of its four zones. Granted, my boyfriend and I might share a greater affinity to food than the average mall-crawler and COEX is certainly dominated by more than its share of delicious snacks, but isn’t that precisely part of the mall’s charm? Whether you’re a money-laden fashionista, an exposition enthusiast, a book fanatic, movie aficionado, budding marine biologist, or just a window-shopping food-shoveling pig like me, COEX, enabled by its size to offer a high density of attractions appealing to all sorts of different people, is a justifiably recommended destination for anybody with a free afternoon and a thirst for some novelty.
On Saturday I took a rare trip to Gangnam with my boyfriend for a leisurely stroll around COEX Mall, the largest underground mall in the world—nope, sorry, just Asia (darn you, Canada). Short for COnvention Centers and EXhibition Halls, both of which populate its higher floors, COEX also boasts an aquarium, a movie theater, a Hyundai Department Store—with all the food court goodness it implies, as you, dear reader, shall soon see—and a kimchi museum.
Every time I muster up the energy to take the long subway voyage down to COEX (which is not often, given the high density of great shopping and, more importantly, food, elsewhere in Seoul), I swallow a laugh as I remember my first visit to the mall last summer. Mistakenly believing that it was “the largest mall in Asia” and (in)conveniently failing to realize that it was underground, I spent an hour wandering around outside Samsung Station wondering why all I could see were a bunch of hotels, some statues, and an exhibition hall. A shameful peek at my tablet confirmed my folly—and the importance of at least Googling a place before you (try to) go there.
We entered from Samsung Station on Line 2, following the throngs of people marching steadily through the labyrinthine tunnels between the subway and the mall proper. Along the way we passed several signs apologizing for the current construction, which had begun last summer. According to a large display near the mall entrance, the building is being remodeled to make it more environmentally sustainable, a process that apparently involves the installation of large, swooping skylights over much of its area. I imagine that these windows are somehow layered and glazed to provide “sustainable” insulation, but the display did not offer that kind of important detail.
Our first stop was Bandi and Luni’s (반디앤루니스) bookstore, a sprawling maze of literature that (almost) gives the Kyobo Mungo (교보문고) in Gwanghwamun a run for its money. I had just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and was looking to escape the empty lost-friend feeling that comes from leaving the world of an incredible story, so I wandered over to the fiction section and picked up 노르웨이의 숲 (Norwegian Wood) and 스푸트니크의 연인 (Sputnik Sweetheart). Even though the latter was a locally published paperback it still cost over 10,000 won. I had forgotten just how expensive some stores in COEX can be, I mused as I sadly put the book back on the shelf.
Outside the bookstore was a small exposition on new games for the Nintendo DS, complete with several rows of consoles loaded with games for trial by the public as well as a large display of Luigi’s Castle trailers being presented by two women with microphones. I tried out a game called 동물의 숲 (Animal Forest), which, at least for me, involved a lot of running through different buildings and hitting townspeople with a butterfly net. Then I played through a level of Mario Brothers 2 DS, with graphics that were almost depressingly better than the original despite being run from a computer about a tenth the size. After a while the swarm of children, mostly boys, pushing and shoving around me started to jostle my activation energy of annoyance, so I managed to tear my boyfriend away from what was apparently a life-or-death match of Mario Tennis and be on our way.
We started to get a bit hungry, so we strolled over to a sign that promised 中国料理 (Chinese food) at a stand-alone restaurant not seemingly attached to any food courts. Surprised at the 6000-won 짜장면 and similarly inexpensive boiled and fried dumplings (水饺/물만구 and 煎饺/구운 만두, respectively) my boyfriend and I took a booth and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup (牛肉汤面/우육탕면) and dumplings. The beef soup was standard—big slices of meat with scallions and mushrooms, salty, tangy base, noodles cut from dough. The fried dumplings were nothing like the ones I had seen during my nearly three years in Beijing–larger, crispier, and more reminiscent of deep-fried American-Cantonese crab rangoon than the lightly pan-fried Northern fare to which I am accustomed—but still delicious. The food came out with kimchi, pickled daikon, and a bottle of cold water. One of the downsides to eating Chinese food in Korea is that it lacked both China’s complementary looseleaf teas and Korea’s generally extensive banchan services.
After lunch we wandered through rows of small brand-name clothing shops, looking but not thinking to purchase anything. I remembered my dad storming out of a Great Outdoors in COEX the summer before after having seen the 120,000-won price tag on a spandex shirt that could have cost anywhere from $20 to $60 in the United States (and, admittedly, elsewhere in Seoul). The prices in the mall were really hit-or-miss; you could easily be put off by $11 paperbacks and $100+ undershirts, but then, the two of us had just enjoyed a delicious and filling $15 lunch at a clean and comfortable restaurant.
At one point we found ourselves inside Asem Hobby (아셈하비), a hobby store selling puzzles, action figures, and all manner of wooden and diecast model. I curled my lip at a few $50 puzzles, played a bit with a set of (really cool) predatory animal action figures outfitted as some kind of fantasy MMORPG-esque warriors, and marveled at the predesigned do-it-yourself (sort of) model cars, planes, boats, and buildings—and at the swarms of boys, slightly older than the Nintendo DS crowd but still male in depressing proportions, inspecting the merchandise. I thought back to my own childhood days building popsicle stick boats and scrap wood dollhouses in the basement and wondered whether hobby shops in the United States saw a similarly homogeneous demographic.
We wandered a bit more, finding ourselves back at the other end of the bookstore (it really was huge, with multiple entrance points) looking at various non-book items. Hardcover diaries. Pens. An eraser installed into the end of a paintbrush holder for easy handling by artists. Scraps of leather folded into various animal shapes and sold at ridiculous prices. More action figures, this time dinosaurs and unicorns.
We left from a different exit and walked past an external display of discount books (only after crying through a photograph book about rescue dogs) and meandered through a series of cafes and ever-present snack shops—yogurt, waffles, red bean shaved ice (팥빙수/pat bingsu). We stopped briefly to look inside an imported foods shop, where I got overly excited about a package of Rocky Mountain fruit-flavored pastel mini marshmallows (pink, mint green, and white) that I hadn’t eaten since I was about five, as well as about a package of Japanese sweet chewy dried seaweed snacks that I haven’t seen elsewhere in Korea.
We were starting to get hungry again (this tends to happen a lot), so we took a detour to the Hyundai Department Store in hopes of raiding its food court. We were not disappointed. As we traveled down the escalator we were graced with an extensive fiesta of myriad food stations, including several bakeries, dumpling and chicken sellers, salad bars, sandwich shops, cafeteria-style Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and fusion restaurants, and dozens of dessert oases—ddeok, mochi, gelato, cheesecakes, pastries, even a Mrs. Field’s and a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Oh, yeah, and a full-on grocery store. My boyfriend, ever the fan of European-style food (like many of the other pretzel-chowing coffee-guzzling Korean food court guests, it seemed), bought some unprecedentedly soft and chewy whole-grain-walnut-cranberry-date bread at the bakery and a modest sampling of imported sausage and cheeses at the grocery store. I chose a small seltzer water and a bottle of kiwi-kale juice, and we sat for a bit on a cafeteria bench near the Vietnamese restaurant to nurse our newfound treasures.
I checked my watch—time to go home. We had spent a thoroughly entertaining four hours inside the mall and had only partially covered two of its four zones. Granted, my boyfriend and I might share a greater affinity to food than the average mall-crawler and COEX is certainly dominated by more than its share of delicious snacks, but isn’t that precisely part of the mall’s charm? Whether you’re a money-laden fashionista, an exposition enthusiast, a book fanatic, movie aficionado, budding marine biologist, or just a window-shopping food-shoveling pig like me, COEX, enabled by its size to offer a high density of attractions appealing to all sorts of different people, is a justifiably recommended destination for anybody with a free afternoon and a thirst for some novelty.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Putting the “Pa” in “Pajeon”: Korea’s Onion Pancakes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_33u8KZ--oI
My first brush with Korean food was in 2007, at a small restaurant on the outskirts of Harvard Square, sandwiched between an Indian buffet and a boba tea shop. The restaurant was infamous for being expensive and not extraordinarily tasty for the price (a criticism that could admittedly be applied to many dining establishments in the area), but I was pleasantly surprised by both the variety and amount of food that was served.
I don’t recall everything that I ate that night, but two dishes stand out against the rest like onions over a pancake. Both were banchan (飯饌/반찬) appetizers served before the actual meal: The first was kongjaban (콩자반), salty, smoky soybeans in sauce that I continue to encounter at less than ideal frequency even in Seoul; the second, slices of steaming pajeon (파煎/파전).
To those familiar with Chinese food (or its Cantonese-American variant), a pajeon may be likened to a scallion pancake (cóng yóu bĭng 葱油饼): large slices of green onions cooked into a soft, thin cake of doughy rice flour, though rendered into a product perhaps not quite as thick or greasy (the Chinese version is, after all, called “onion oil cake,” while the Korean version is simply “onion cake”) and often with more and larger onion pieces than the Chinese variety. But unlike the Chinese scallion pancake, which is, as its name implies, made with the scallions (대파/daepa) of leekspin fame [1], the Korean jeon is generally cooked with smaller, thinner green onions (실파/silpa; English speakers might call them spring onions or chives) [2]. And, unlike a scallion pancake, a pajeon often prominently features ingredients besides onions: peppers, carrots, kimchi, ham (or spam), mushrooms, beef, or, in the case of a seafood pajeon (海物파煎/해물파전), squid, shrimp, mussels, oysters, clams, and other seafoods [2, 3].
Dissimilar to a pancake as it may be envisioned in some regions of Europe and the United States, the dough of a pajeon is simply a light crust meant to bind the various vegetables and proteins together instead of the main focus merely to be decorated by blueberries, walnuts, or a pat of butter. This often results in a thinner and more organically shaped cake than the monster carbohydrate frisbees to which some may be accustomed when they hear the word “pancake.” In this way it might be likened more to a latke or hash brown patty than a dough hotcake destined for being drowned in sauces and toppings less boring than itself.
As mentioned in our post about soju and makgeolli [4], pajeon are sometimes eaten on rainy days with a bowl of makgeolli. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious link between rain and green onions except that both might be sketched with long and skinny lines, and there certainly seems to be little relationship between rain and makgeolli over that with any other potable liquid, so an examination into the origin of this tradition promises an interesting story.
The word on Naver street seems to be that the putative link between rain and pajeon is not visual but, rather, auditory, as the sound of pajeon frying in oil resembles (or should resemble—-all you novice Korean cookers take note) the sound of rain pattering down on a roof [5]. Where the makgeolli comes in is still unclear. But hey, I’ll take it.
So the next time someone asks you, “What’s round, yellow, and green (and sometimes red, brown, orange, and pink) all over?” you will now know that the obvious answer is “a pajeon rolling down a hill.” And the next time you chance across a pajeon rolling down a hill, you will now know a little bit about the culture that makes it more special than just a gyrating lump of dough with some onions hiding inside. But with great knowledge comes great responsibility: So go, now, and use your newfound awareness to make friends with onion pancakes and their creators across the world.
My first brush with Korean food was in 2007, at a small restaurant on the outskirts of Harvard Square, sandwiched between an Indian buffet and a boba tea shop. The restaurant was infamous for being expensive and not extraordinarily tasty for the price (a criticism that could admittedly be applied to many dining establishments in the area), but I was pleasantly surprised by both the variety and amount of food that was served.
I don’t recall everything that I ate that night, but two dishes stand out against the rest like onions over a pancake. Both were banchan (飯饌/반찬) appetizers served before the actual meal: The first was kongjaban (콩자반), salty, smoky soybeans in sauce that I continue to encounter at less than ideal frequency even in Seoul; the second, slices of steaming pajeon (파煎/파전).
To those familiar with Chinese food (or its Cantonese-American variant), a pajeon may be likened to a scallion pancake (cóng yóu bĭng 葱油饼): large slices of green onions cooked into a soft, thin cake of doughy rice flour, though rendered into a product perhaps not quite as thick or greasy (the Chinese version is, after all, called “onion oil cake,” while the Korean version is simply “onion cake”) and often with more and larger onion pieces than the Chinese variety. But unlike the Chinese scallion pancake, which is, as its name implies, made with the scallions (대파/daepa) of leekspin fame [1], the Korean jeon is generally cooked with smaller, thinner green onions (실파/silpa; English speakers might call them spring onions or chives) [2]. And, unlike a scallion pancake, a pajeon often prominently features ingredients besides onions: peppers, carrots, kimchi, ham (or spam), mushrooms, beef, or, in the case of a seafood pajeon (海物파煎/해물파전), squid, shrimp, mussels, oysters, clams, and other seafoods [2, 3].
Dissimilar to a pancake as it may be envisioned in some regions of Europe and the United States, the dough of a pajeon is simply a light crust meant to bind the various vegetables and proteins together instead of the main focus merely to be decorated by blueberries, walnuts, or a pat of butter. This often results in a thinner and more organically shaped cake than the monster carbohydrate frisbees to which some may be accustomed when they hear the word “pancake.” In this way it might be likened more to a latke or hash brown patty than a dough hotcake destined for being drowned in sauces and toppings less boring than itself.
As mentioned in our post about soju and makgeolli [4], pajeon are sometimes eaten on rainy days with a bowl of makgeolli. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious link between rain and green onions except that both might be sketched with long and skinny lines, and there certainly seems to be little relationship between rain and makgeolli over that with any other potable liquid, so an examination into the origin of this tradition promises an interesting story.
The word on Naver street seems to be that the putative link between rain and pajeon is not visual but, rather, auditory, as the sound of pajeon frying in oil resembles (or should resemble—-all you novice Korean cookers take note) the sound of rain pattering down on a roof [5]. Where the makgeolli comes in is still unclear. But hey, I’ll take it.
So the next time someone asks you, “What’s round, yellow, and green (and sometimes red, brown, orange, and pink) all over?” you will now know that the obvious answer is “a pajeon rolling down a hill.” And the next time you chance across a pajeon rolling down a hill, you will now know a little bit about the culture that makes it more special than just a gyrating lump of dough with some onions hiding inside. But with great knowledge comes great responsibility: So go, now, and use your newfound awareness to make friends with onion pancakes and their creators across the world.
Korean Apartment Life in a (Very Small) Nutshell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMsl5UhAwec
Cram half the population of a country of 50 million people into a single metropolitan area of a mere ten thousand square kilometers, and personal space becomes a precious commodity [1]. So precious, in fact, that some people go to shocking lengths to protect it, as in the case of a Seoul resident who stabbed his two upstairs neighbors to death in 2012 because their footsteps were too loud [2].
Early-morning shivvings by space-starved neighbors did not number among my concerns before I moved to Seoul, but I did envision a densely packed city thronging with people pouring out of every subway car and hole-in-the-wall restaurant, every treasured square meter accounted for with sky-high apartment buildings of infinitesimal partitions populated with doll-size furniture, rollout mats and mattresses, and lots of vertical cabinetry. I fancied myself living in something akin to the cupboard-under-the-stairs of Harry Potter yore—except without the large, wasteful stairs. Perhaps the only symbol of tight space missing from my mental portrait of South Korea’s capital was capsule hotels, probably because they were exclusively filed under “Japan” in my hippocampal world map along with weird vending machines, excessively cute women, and Hello Kitty Cafés.
I was wrong about a lot of things before coming to Seoul—including the lack of weird vending machines, excessively cute women, and Hello Kitty Cafés—but about refrigerator-sized rooms furnished with shoebox-sized refrigerators, I was right.
Of course, the fact that I spent my first eight months here living in a room the size of my college dorm’s bathroom—not a joke—wasn’t quite as much due to the sheer unavailability of other real estate options (as our video demonstrates, Seoul does boast its share of relatively expansive living spaces) as to the fact that I was a poor student living in a fairly expensive part of Seoul (Sinchon, where real estate prices are seasonally driven up by the decidedly non-poor students of Yonsei and Ewha Universities). However, I had been a similarly poor student in several other cities across the United States and China, and the same income bracket was able to rent out something in which I could safely sneeze without hitting my head against a wall. Okay, that is an exaggeration—but only a small one.
But at least the urban Korean real estate market, while comparatively expensive and plagued with often forbiddingly high deposits (the “key money” mentioned in our video) for even the most unassuming apartments, is a forgiving one, as it offers quite a few options for the penny-pinching individual, provided that she or he is not morbidly claustrophobic.
The first is the one-room (원룸), which is technically, as its name implies, a one-room studio. The choice of the name “one-room” over “studio” (which is also occasionally used) in a room listing, however, can imply very tight and spartan living quarters. As small as two dozen square meters or less, one-rooms can take tight living to the max, with a bed (or mattress space) abutting the stove against the bathroom door… you get the point. This makes constant cleanliness an imperative, as nobody wants to live with a roach-infested kitchen when your kitchen is also your bedroom. One upside to the tight space, however, is that it takes little more than a nice fan to cool in the summer and very little heat (which usually radiates from the floor) for a comfortable winter.
Second is the hasukjib (下宿집/하숙집), which can be even smaller than some one-rooms, but, unlike private studios, are generally associated with common kitchen areas and therefore tend to consist only of a sleeping space and a bathroom. More like a long-term hostel than an apartment, hasukjibs do not require key money but may ask for a deposit of one or two months’ rent. They tend to cluster around universities as they cater to a primarily student clientele, but single young professionals, especially those whose families are from outside their city of residence, can and do also live there. They are sometimes run by kindly ajummas (older women) who may provide meals, or at least staples like rice, ramen, kimchi, and eggs, with rent. One blogger makes the excellent point that they are not always easy to locate online as the older Koreans who tend to manage them are not always the best about keeping up with technology [3].
Finally is a goshiwon (考試院/고시원) or the ostensibly-higher-end-but-actually-not-really goshitel (考試텔/고시텔). Both are similar to the hasukjib but generally without the friendly ajumma and free homecooked food that may be associated with her. They can be as large as a one-room or even small apartment, but, like the hasukjib, generally ask for only a small deposit rather than the ubiquitously bothersome key money. The most inexpensive of goshitels, like the smallest hasukjibs, can be extremely small, providing the very minimum amount of space—and fresh air, as some have only very small or absent windows—needed to live and almost none for storage. They can also be strict with their noise and visitor policies given the high density of exam-cramming students who might live there.
So that’s budget Korean apartment life in a nutshell—which is about the size of some elegantly designed real estate offerings here. But in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, we’re all probably better off with smaller and closer living spaces—as long as we keep our footsteps quiet enough for the neighbors.
Cram half the population of a country of 50 million people into a single metropolitan area of a mere ten thousand square kilometers, and personal space becomes a precious commodity [1]. So precious, in fact, that some people go to shocking lengths to protect it, as in the case of a Seoul resident who stabbed his two upstairs neighbors to death in 2012 because their footsteps were too loud [2].
Early-morning shivvings by space-starved neighbors did not number among my concerns before I moved to Seoul, but I did envision a densely packed city thronging with people pouring out of every subway car and hole-in-the-wall restaurant, every treasured square meter accounted for with sky-high apartment buildings of infinitesimal partitions populated with doll-size furniture, rollout mats and mattresses, and lots of vertical cabinetry. I fancied myself living in something akin to the cupboard-under-the-stairs of Harry Potter yore—except without the large, wasteful stairs. Perhaps the only symbol of tight space missing from my mental portrait of South Korea’s capital was capsule hotels, probably because they were exclusively filed under “Japan” in my hippocampal world map along with weird vending machines, excessively cute women, and Hello Kitty Cafés.
I was wrong about a lot of things before coming to Seoul—including the lack of weird vending machines, excessively cute women, and Hello Kitty Cafés—but about refrigerator-sized rooms furnished with shoebox-sized refrigerators, I was right.
Of course, the fact that I spent my first eight months here living in a room the size of my college dorm’s bathroom—not a joke—wasn’t quite as much due to the sheer unavailability of other real estate options (as our video demonstrates, Seoul does boast its share of relatively expansive living spaces) as to the fact that I was a poor student living in a fairly expensive part of Seoul (Sinchon, where real estate prices are seasonally driven up by the decidedly non-poor students of Yonsei and Ewha Universities). However, I had been a similarly poor student in several other cities across the United States and China, and the same income bracket was able to rent out something in which I could safely sneeze without hitting my head against a wall. Okay, that is an exaggeration—but only a small one.
But at least the urban Korean real estate market, while comparatively expensive and plagued with often forbiddingly high deposits (the “key money” mentioned in our video) for even the most unassuming apartments, is a forgiving one, as it offers quite a few options for the penny-pinching individual, provided that she or he is not morbidly claustrophobic.
The first is the one-room (원룸), which is technically, as its name implies, a one-room studio. The choice of the name “one-room” over “studio” (which is also occasionally used) in a room listing, however, can imply very tight and spartan living quarters. As small as two dozen square meters or less, one-rooms can take tight living to the max, with a bed (or mattress space) abutting the stove against the bathroom door… you get the point. This makes constant cleanliness an imperative, as nobody wants to live with a roach-infested kitchen when your kitchen is also your bedroom. One upside to the tight space, however, is that it takes little more than a nice fan to cool in the summer and very little heat (which usually radiates from the floor) for a comfortable winter.
Second is the hasukjib (下宿집/하숙집), which can be even smaller than some one-rooms, but, unlike private studios, are generally associated with common kitchen areas and therefore tend to consist only of a sleeping space and a bathroom. More like a long-term hostel than an apartment, hasukjibs do not require key money but may ask for a deposit of one or two months’ rent. They tend to cluster around universities as they cater to a primarily student clientele, but single young professionals, especially those whose families are from outside their city of residence, can and do also live there. They are sometimes run by kindly ajummas (older women) who may provide meals, or at least staples like rice, ramen, kimchi, and eggs, with rent. One blogger makes the excellent point that they are not always easy to locate online as the older Koreans who tend to manage them are not always the best about keeping up with technology [3].
Finally is a goshiwon (考試院/고시원) or the ostensibly-higher-end-but-actually-not-really goshitel (考試텔/고시텔). Both are similar to the hasukjib but generally without the friendly ajumma and free homecooked food that may be associated with her. They can be as large as a one-room or even small apartment, but, like the hasukjib, generally ask for only a small deposit rather than the ubiquitously bothersome key money. The most inexpensive of goshitels, like the smallest hasukjibs, can be extremely small, providing the very minimum amount of space—and fresh air, as some have only very small or absent windows—needed to live and almost none for storage. They can also be strict with their noise and visitor policies given the high density of exam-cramming students who might live there.
So that’s budget Korean apartment life in a nutshell—which is about the size of some elegantly designed real estate offerings here. But in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, we’re all probably better off with smaller and closer living spaces—as long as we keep our footsteps quiet enough for the neighbors.
The Love That Some Love to Hate: Aegyo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNWQP3s6TJw
Does this warm your heart? Or make you sick to your stomach?
aegyo (애교) /āgyō/ (noun): The act of being overly cute [1]
Several Korean friends have asked me how one might translate aegyo into English, and I have never been able to give them a satisfactory one-word response. The easy answer is “cuteness,” but this barely scratches the surface of the complex expression of childish charm and effeminate grace that aegyo actually constitutes. The closest single word to aegyo comprehensible to the average English speaker seems not to be homegrown English at all, but a loan word from Japanese: kawaii, literally 可爱, able to be loved. For many, “kawaii,” unlike simply “cute” or “adorable,” may bring to mind images of pigtailed girls holding up double V signs and grinning like Cheshire cats. This at least more accurately expresses the negative side of aegyo so often reviled by foreigner and Korean alike than does the concept “cute,” but the hitch here is that aegyo is most properly understood as a noun, while 可爱 is usually an adjective in both Japanese and Chinese.
Even though the concept is hard to cleanly translate into English, it can still be understood in its own right through an examination of its composition and usage. The first character ae (爱) means “love,” while the second character gyo (娇) can be applied to a number of concepts, including “beautiful and adorable,” “pamper with affection,” and “precious.” [2]Some semantic mix of “loving” and “precious” might indeed be a correct first step to understanding this term, as a Korean blog [3] and Urban Dictionary [4] alike describe the concept as “a manner of speech or behavior that elicits the favorable interest of others“ and “winsome… ‘generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence,’” respectively. The origin of the Korean compound word aegyo is unclear, at least to me, but according to the Chinese Wikipedia Băidù Băikē (百度百科), an early mention of the term is found in a 1932 Chinese work by fiction writer Máo Dùn (茅盾, meaning “contradiction,” the pen name of Shĕn Déhóng 沈德鴻) 《字夜（Zì Yè）》 [5] in which a character’s grandmother is described as having “a gaze still so full of radiance and lively movement, each glance shining with infinite wisdom, infinite aegyo.” [6] So it seems that in 1932, at least the Chinese understanding of aegyo justified its use to describe the radiant wisdom of an elder woman, hardly the cutesy affectation with which we might associate it today.
Aegyo is generally understood to be most appropriately expressed by females. Females delicately covering their teeth while they laugh [7]. Females praising their male friends in elaborate language for performing an act that they are seemingly too helpless to do themselves, like opening a soda can [3]. Females with pouting lips and impossibly wide eyes snapping selfies in the coffee shop. And, of course, females begging their oppas for ice cream [8]. Girls, however, hardly have a monopoly on this trait. Males can and do use it too, and while they generally confine their expressions of aegyo to baby-talk with significant others, a close Korean friend once informed me that she has met a number of Korean males who use aegyo in other contexts as well. Some, she reported, even go as far as to pronounce the conjunction go (고) as the more childish and presumably more endearing gu (구) (a behavior usually restricted to female speech patterns) and reference older female friends as eonni (언니), the Korean title for “big sister” used between females, instead of the ostensibly more gender-appropriate nuna (누나) expected to be used by males (funnily enough, I encountered my first such male on the subway not four hours after this conversation; talk about our propensity to filter out what we do not fully understand). Not only is aegyo not gender-specific, but it is apparently also not the exclusive purview of humans. Type the search term into Naver.com and be prepared for a barrage of puppies [9], kittens [10], rabbits [11], and, my personal favorite, a group of curious wild seals [12] declared to epitomize the elusive trait.
Multiple online sources, foreign and Korean alike, make a distinction between “natural” and “fake” aegyo, with the implication that the latter is somehow less praiseworthy than the former. While I will not deny that aegyo, like any behavioral expression that may call extra attention to oneself, can be abused with an intent to manipulate, the black-and-white distinction between “real” and “fake” aegyo and their respective associations with “good” and “evil” is precisely the kind of misunderstanding that I hope to correct. For even though aegyo can be unnatural and affected, it can still express genuinely benevolent intentions. In other words, not all so-called “fake” aegyo is “bad” aegyo.
As an example, every night my roommate comes home from her office job she walks past my room and emits a high-pitched “Kaelli an-NYEONG!” while striking an extravagant girlish pose that all but beams unicorns and rainbows into the rose-scented air around her. At first, I tended to feel perplexed, and then ever-so-slightly miffed, at this action, for I felt that she was greeting me as though she would a child or house pet rather than the self-aware human adult that I consider myself to be. And, according to some written and filmed material on Korean aegyo, I might have been justified in my frustration. My roommate’s behavior took calculation and effort, and was therefore, affected, artificial—the sort of fake aegyo that others might teach us to revile or mock. But isn’t the calculated effort behind this aegyo its very purpose in our interaction? Even after a grueling twelve-to-fifteen-hour day at the office, my roommate musters up the thought and energy to slip on an exaggerated smile and crow a happy greeting into my room. Should it really matter that this thoughtfulness happens to take the shape of a cloying, childish, fake manner that, all told, probably results more from her natural absorption of the images with which she is daily presented in the media than from any malicious desire to put on a manipulative one-woman show? Her nightly performance is the epitome of so-called “fakeaegyo,” and yet one would not be justified in condemning her for it.
I Dig Culture’s raison d’être is to bring diverse people together in mutual understanding. As such, we do not stop at attempting simply to purvey a body of objective knowledge about various cultures, which may be perniciously interpreted in ways counter to our final goal of human connection. Instead, we strive in addition to unpack and underscore the mutually intelligible logic that stands behind the wildly different cultural practices on which we report. In this way, we hope to provide evidence for our shared humanity rather than just create a spectacle of our surface differences.
We hope that our treatment of the Korean concept aegyo (爱娇) is no exception. As a type of behavior that might stand counter to standards of mature social intercourse in some other countries, it serves as an apt example of a cultural phenomenon that can be, and often is, misunderstood and/or interpreted in an unnecessarily negative light. We hope, therefore, to provide a more positive spin on aegyo, one that highlights the rational and universally comprehensible motivations behind its practice in Korean society.
So we may have a love-hate relationship with aegyo, one that might weigh more heavily toward the latter in the case of those for whom aegyo is an ambiguous and foreign concept. However, as with any human behavior, especially one that might stray so far from one’s own approach to social interaction, it is important to grant others the benefit of the doubt. So whether it is wrapped up in the endearing smile of a shy male friend or a girl in combat boots and a leather miniskirt who drops her cigarette and bottle of soju to emit porcine squeals at her approaching oppa, let’s not forget that an important component of aegyo is 爱, the elicitation and expression of love, an emotion that we can all understand and share.
Does this warm your heart? Or make you sick to your stomach?
aegyo (애교) /āgyō/ (noun): The act of being overly cute [1]
Several Korean friends have asked me how one might translate aegyo into English, and I have never been able to give them a satisfactory one-word response. The easy answer is “cuteness,” but this barely scratches the surface of the complex expression of childish charm and effeminate grace that aegyo actually constitutes. The closest single word to aegyo comprehensible to the average English speaker seems not to be homegrown English at all, but a loan word from Japanese: kawaii, literally 可爱, able to be loved. For many, “kawaii,” unlike simply “cute” or “adorable,” may bring to mind images of pigtailed girls holding up double V signs and grinning like Cheshire cats. This at least more accurately expresses the negative side of aegyo so often reviled by foreigner and Korean alike than does the concept “cute,” but the hitch here is that aegyo is most properly understood as a noun, while 可爱 is usually an adjective in both Japanese and Chinese.
Even though the concept is hard to cleanly translate into English, it can still be understood in its own right through an examination of its composition and usage. The first character ae (爱) means “love,” while the second character gyo (娇) can be applied to a number of concepts, including “beautiful and adorable,” “pamper with affection,” and “precious.” [2]Some semantic mix of “loving” and “precious” might indeed be a correct first step to understanding this term, as a Korean blog [3] and Urban Dictionary [4] alike describe the concept as “a manner of speech or behavior that elicits the favorable interest of others“ and “winsome… ‘generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence,’” respectively. The origin of the Korean compound word aegyo is unclear, at least to me, but according to the Chinese Wikipedia Băidù Băikē (百度百科), an early mention of the term is found in a 1932 Chinese work by fiction writer Máo Dùn (茅盾, meaning “contradiction,” the pen name of Shĕn Déhóng 沈德鴻) 《字夜（Zì Yè）》 [5] in which a character’s grandmother is described as having “a gaze still so full of radiance and lively movement, each glance shining with infinite wisdom, infinite aegyo.” [6] So it seems that in 1932, at least the Chinese understanding of aegyo justified its use to describe the radiant wisdom of an elder woman, hardly the cutesy affectation with which we might associate it today.
Aegyo is generally understood to be most appropriately expressed by females. Females delicately covering their teeth while they laugh [7]. Females praising their male friends in elaborate language for performing an act that they are seemingly too helpless to do themselves, like opening a soda can [3]. Females with pouting lips and impossibly wide eyes snapping selfies in the coffee shop. And, of course, females begging their oppas for ice cream [8]. Girls, however, hardly have a monopoly on this trait. Males can and do use it too, and while they generally confine their expressions of aegyo to baby-talk with significant others, a close Korean friend once informed me that she has met a number of Korean males who use aegyo in other contexts as well. Some, she reported, even go as far as to pronounce the conjunction go (고) as the more childish and presumably more endearing gu (구) (a behavior usually restricted to female speech patterns) and reference older female friends as eonni (언니), the Korean title for “big sister” used between females, instead of the ostensibly more gender-appropriate nuna (누나) expected to be used by males (funnily enough, I encountered my first such male on the subway not four hours after this conversation; talk about our propensity to filter out what we do not fully understand). Not only is aegyo not gender-specific, but it is apparently also not the exclusive purview of humans. Type the search term into Naver.com and be prepared for a barrage of puppies [9], kittens [10], rabbits [11], and, my personal favorite, a group of curious wild seals [12] declared to epitomize the elusive trait.
Multiple online sources, foreign and Korean alike, make a distinction between “natural” and “fake” aegyo, with the implication that the latter is somehow less praiseworthy than the former. While I will not deny that aegyo, like any behavioral expression that may call extra attention to oneself, can be abused with an intent to manipulate, the black-and-white distinction between “real” and “fake” aegyo and their respective associations with “good” and “evil” is precisely the kind of misunderstanding that I hope to correct. For even though aegyo can be unnatural and affected, it can still express genuinely benevolent intentions. In other words, not all so-called “fake” aegyo is “bad” aegyo.
As an example, every night my roommate comes home from her office job she walks past my room and emits a high-pitched “Kaelli an-NYEONG!” while striking an extravagant girlish pose that all but beams unicorns and rainbows into the rose-scented air around her. At first, I tended to feel perplexed, and then ever-so-slightly miffed, at this action, for I felt that she was greeting me as though she would a child or house pet rather than the self-aware human adult that I consider myself to be. And, according to some written and filmed material on Korean aegyo, I might have been justified in my frustration. My roommate’s behavior took calculation and effort, and was therefore, affected, artificial—the sort of fake aegyo that others might teach us to revile or mock. But isn’t the calculated effort behind this aegyo its very purpose in our interaction? Even after a grueling twelve-to-fifteen-hour day at the office, my roommate musters up the thought and energy to slip on an exaggerated smile and crow a happy greeting into my room. Should it really matter that this thoughtfulness happens to take the shape of a cloying, childish, fake manner that, all told, probably results more from her natural absorption of the images with which she is daily presented in the media than from any malicious desire to put on a manipulative one-woman show? Her nightly performance is the epitome of so-called “fakeaegyo,” and yet one would not be justified in condemning her for it.
I Dig Culture’s raison d’être is to bring diverse people together in mutual understanding. As such, we do not stop at attempting simply to purvey a body of objective knowledge about various cultures, which may be perniciously interpreted in ways counter to our final goal of human connection. Instead, we strive in addition to unpack and underscore the mutually intelligible logic that stands behind the wildly different cultural practices on which we report. In this way, we hope to provide evidence for our shared humanity rather than just create a spectacle of our surface differences.
We hope that our treatment of the Korean concept aegyo (爱娇) is no exception. As a type of behavior that might stand counter to standards of mature social intercourse in some other countries, it serves as an apt example of a cultural phenomenon that can be, and often is, misunderstood and/or interpreted in an unnecessarily negative light. We hope, therefore, to provide a more positive spin on aegyo, one that highlights the rational and universally comprehensible motivations behind its practice in Korean society.
So we may have a love-hate relationship with aegyo, one that might weigh more heavily toward the latter in the case of those for whom aegyo is an ambiguous and foreign concept. However, as with any human behavior, especially one that might stray so far from one’s own approach to social interaction, it is important to grant others the benefit of the doubt. So whether it is wrapped up in the endearing smile of a shy male friend or a girl in combat boots and a leather miniskirt who drops her cigarette and bottle of soju to emit porcine squeals at her approaching oppa, let’s not forget that an important component of aegyo is 爱, the elicitation and expression of love, an emotion that we can all understand and share.
Drinking in Korea: Soju and Makgeolli
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PksPNM0GzHA
One can hardly presume to understand much about Korean culture without knowing at least a little about its alcohol. And one can hardly proclaim an understanding of Korean alcohol without knowing some about the basic characteristics, history, and uses of its two staples: soju (燒酒/소주) and makgeolli (막걸리).
Though these two alcohols are radically different in taste and use, they do present some important similarities. Perhaps the most obvious of these is that they are both traditionally made from rice, like many—but, of course, not all—alcohols found across East and Southeast Asia: míjiŭ (米酒) and sometimes báijiŭ (白酒) in southern China, tapuy in the Philippines, sato in Thailand, sake or shōchū (the latter of which shares the characters 燒酒 with Korean soju) in Japan. A less obvious similarity is that despite their traditional origins in rice, both liquors are also sometimes made with other grains: Soju with barley, wheat, or even corn [1], and makgeolli with wheat or a mix of unidentified or “other” grains [2], though “100% rice” is still trumpeted by some producers of these liquors as a sign of their quality. Third, both beverages can be purchased very cheaply, for around 3000 won (about $2.60) for a 750 mL bottle at most convenience stores.
Soju, a dry, clear alcohol that was traditionally up to 35% alcohol by volume (ABV) but is now generally sold as much weaker 15-20% ABV drinks [3], is popular. Incredibly popular. So popular, in fact, that Jinro Soju (진로 소주) is the top-selling alcohol in the entire world[4]. Yes, top. As in number one. On the entire planet Earth. Not bad for something produced in a country of 50 million, eh?
Perhaps soju’s wild popularity the world over is due in part to that fact that it is well suited to enjoyment in company. Less shocking than some varieties of Western liquor or Chinese baijiu, it can be weak enough to drink in greater quantities than other hard-liquor equivalents (thereby showing off one’s prized 酒量/주량, or alcohol tolerance), but it is cheap and, er, effective enough to serve in a casual setting where one might loosen up with coworkers after—or, more often than not, during—a grueling eighty-five-hour work week.
So how did this versatile social drink work its way into the Korean, and then global, consciousness? The sixteenth-century Ming dynasty text Běncǎo Gāngmù 本草綱目 refers to a soju-like beverage cooked, as its modern character name 烧酒 ”burned liquor” implies, above a fire to refine and strengthen the taste; in this source it is accorded a number of different names, most notably “Yàcìjī” 亞刺吉, which suggests origins in the Middle Eastern liquor arak [5]. Mentions of 亞刺吉 similarly abound in other texts across a wide swath of history and geography, including the fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty Yĭn Shàn Zhēng Yào 飮膳正要, the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty Shìwù Gànzhū事物紺珠, and even the seventeenth-century Tokugawa Japanese 吾吟我集 (loosely supporting, perhaps, the common origins of Korean soju and Japanese shōchū). According to the Korean Alcohol and Liquor Industry Association, soju does indeed trace its roots to western Asian and Middle Eastern liquors, as do, also, the brandies first distilled in Europe after the return of the Crusaders from the same region in the twelfth century [1]. Its entry into Korea as the arak-linked 亞刺吉 was facilitated by the invasion of Mongol forces during the Yuan dynasty under the name “araki” (아라키) [6]. The exact origins of the connection between araki and its modern character name soju 烧酒 are unclear [7].
Compared with its dry and relatively serious cousin soju, makgeolli is sweeter, thicker, and weaker, generally weighing in at less than 10% ABV [2]. It is a favorite party drink among college students, who sometimes mix it, like soju, with clear soda like Sprite or the local equivalent Chilsung Cider (칠성 사이더), as well as a beloved comfort drink for calmer settings, served warm and accompanied by onion pancakes (파전/pajeon) during rainstorms. According to the website “Mister Makgeolli” (which offers wonderfully detailed instructions for making your own makgeolli at home), this thick rice beverage has been associated with the earthy, unrefined stereotypes of farmers due to its connection to the similar but stronger dongdongju (동동주), and has thus traditionally been considered an alcohol that one does not want to be caught drinking in public [8]. Even so, like soju, its range includes not only uber-cheap chemical cocktails drunk from plastic bottles or even cans but also more upscale, and generally stronger, products sold in gracile frosted glass, like the line sold at the upscale Jahihyang (자이향) makgeolli bar in Seoul’s Seodaemun district [9].
Unlike soju, the origins of makgeolli are considered to be wholly Korean, beginning sometime during the Three Kingdoms period from 57 to 668 A.D. when the peninsula was divided into the Goguryeo (高句麗/고구려), Silla (新羅/신라), and Baekje (百濟/백제) kingdoms, as a fermented rice drink that would later evolve into yakju (藥酒/약주) and takju (濁酒/탁주), the precursor (some say equivalent [8]) of makgeolli, sprang up in households across the country [10]. In accordance with its abundance of unclear local origins, makgeolli has gone by several different names according to time and region, including moju (母酒/모주), wangdaepo (왕대포), takbaegi (탁배기) on Jeju Island, takjubaegi (탁주배기) in Busan, and the already-mentioned takju (濁酒/탁주) in Kyeongbuk [11].
So the next time you meet a Soju on the street or a Makgeolli in the checkout line, you’ll know a bit more about what it’s all about. Not simply generic “rice wine,” these two Korean alcohols have distinct personalities, origins, and functions within a shared—and expanding—cultural ecosystem.
One can hardly presume to understand much about Korean culture without knowing at least a little about its alcohol. And one can hardly proclaim an understanding of Korean alcohol without knowing some about the basic characteristics, history, and uses of its two staples: soju (燒酒/소주) and makgeolli (막걸리).
Though these two alcohols are radically different in taste and use, they do present some important similarities. Perhaps the most obvious of these is that they are both traditionally made from rice, like many—but, of course, not all—alcohols found across East and Southeast Asia: míjiŭ (米酒) and sometimes báijiŭ (白酒) in southern China, tapuy in the Philippines, sato in Thailand, sake or shōchū (the latter of which shares the characters 燒酒 with Korean soju) in Japan. A less obvious similarity is that despite their traditional origins in rice, both liquors are also sometimes made with other grains: Soju with barley, wheat, or even corn [1], and makgeolli with wheat or a mix of unidentified or “other” grains [2], though “100% rice” is still trumpeted by some producers of these liquors as a sign of their quality. Third, both beverages can be purchased very cheaply, for around 3000 won (about $2.60) for a 750 mL bottle at most convenience stores.
Soju, a dry, clear alcohol that was traditionally up to 35% alcohol by volume (ABV) but is now generally sold as much weaker 15-20% ABV drinks [3], is popular. Incredibly popular. So popular, in fact, that Jinro Soju (진로 소주) is the top-selling alcohol in the entire world[4]. Yes, top. As in number one. On the entire planet Earth. Not bad for something produced in a country of 50 million, eh?
Perhaps soju’s wild popularity the world over is due in part to that fact that it is well suited to enjoyment in company. Less shocking than some varieties of Western liquor or Chinese baijiu, it can be weak enough to drink in greater quantities than other hard-liquor equivalents (thereby showing off one’s prized 酒量/주량, or alcohol tolerance), but it is cheap and, er, effective enough to serve in a casual setting where one might loosen up with coworkers after—or, more often than not, during—a grueling eighty-five-hour work week.
So how did this versatile social drink work its way into the Korean, and then global, consciousness? The sixteenth-century Ming dynasty text Běncǎo Gāngmù 本草綱目 refers to a soju-like beverage cooked, as its modern character name 烧酒 ”burned liquor” implies, above a fire to refine and strengthen the taste; in this source it is accorded a number of different names, most notably “Yàcìjī” 亞刺吉, which suggests origins in the Middle Eastern liquor arak [5]. Mentions of 亞刺吉 similarly abound in other texts across a wide swath of history and geography, including the fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty Yĭn Shàn Zhēng Yào 飮膳正要, the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty Shìwù Gànzhū事物紺珠, and even the seventeenth-century Tokugawa Japanese 吾吟我集 (loosely supporting, perhaps, the common origins of Korean soju and Japanese shōchū). According to the Korean Alcohol and Liquor Industry Association, soju does indeed trace its roots to western Asian and Middle Eastern liquors, as do, also, the brandies first distilled in Europe after the return of the Crusaders from the same region in the twelfth century [1]. Its entry into Korea as the arak-linked 亞刺吉 was facilitated by the invasion of Mongol forces during the Yuan dynasty under the name “araki” (아라키) [6]. The exact origins of the connection between araki and its modern character name soju 烧酒 are unclear [7].
Compared with its dry and relatively serious cousin soju, makgeolli is sweeter, thicker, and weaker, generally weighing in at less than 10% ABV [2]. It is a favorite party drink among college students, who sometimes mix it, like soju, with clear soda like Sprite or the local equivalent Chilsung Cider (칠성 사이더), as well as a beloved comfort drink for calmer settings, served warm and accompanied by onion pancakes (파전/pajeon) during rainstorms. According to the website “Mister Makgeolli” (which offers wonderfully detailed instructions for making your own makgeolli at home), this thick rice beverage has been associated with the earthy, unrefined stereotypes of farmers due to its connection to the similar but stronger dongdongju (동동주), and has thus traditionally been considered an alcohol that one does not want to be caught drinking in public [8]. Even so, like soju, its range includes not only uber-cheap chemical cocktails drunk from plastic bottles or even cans but also more upscale, and generally stronger, products sold in gracile frosted glass, like the line sold at the upscale Jahihyang (자이향) makgeolli bar in Seoul’s Seodaemun district [9].
Unlike soju, the origins of makgeolli are considered to be wholly Korean, beginning sometime during the Three Kingdoms period from 57 to 668 A.D. when the peninsula was divided into the Goguryeo (高句麗/고구려), Silla (新羅/신라), and Baekje (百濟/백제) kingdoms, as a fermented rice drink that would later evolve into yakju (藥酒/약주) and takju (濁酒/탁주), the precursor (some say equivalent [8]) of makgeolli, sprang up in households across the country [10]. In accordance with its abundance of unclear local origins, makgeolli has gone by several different names according to time and region, including moju (母酒/모주), wangdaepo (왕대포), takbaegi (탁배기) on Jeju Island, takjubaegi (탁주배기) in Busan, and the already-mentioned takju (濁酒/탁주) in Kyeongbuk [11].
So the next time you meet a Soju on the street or a Makgeolli in the checkout line, you’ll know a bit more about what it’s all about. Not simply generic “rice wine,” these two Korean alcohols have distinct personalities, origins, and functions within a shared—and expanding—cultural ecosystem.
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