Article about North Koreans in the LA Times

Thursday 12 Jan 2012   //   No Comments
Category: News/Activism
Tags: , ,

Wary of notice and trying to fit in (North Koreans)

There are sev­eral things I noticed in this LA Times arti­cle about North Kore­ans in the Los Ange­les area and their rela­tion­ship with the Korean Amer­i­can com­mu­nity at large.

The reporter writes, “Their skin is a lit­tle darker and they are maybe a lit­tle shorter than the aver­age Korean.” This is becom­ing com­mon­place — a kind of racial­iza­tion of North Kore­ans that dif­fer­en­ti­ates their phys­i­cal traits from South Kore­ans. The height thing also alludes to the reports indi­cat­ing that due to mal­nu­tri­tion, North Korean kids are shorter than their coun­ter­parts in South Korea. But we’re talk­ing aver­age, and clearly the well-to-do and well-fed in North Korea wouldn’t fit in this pic­ture. Iron­i­cally, the pic­ture accom­pa­ny­ing the arti­cle (see above) fea­tures a North Korean man who looks pretty tall and pale to me.

Also, too bad the arti­cle doesn’t men­tion the fact that post-Korean War emi­grants from North Korea accounted for a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of immi­grants who arrived in the US. Includ­ing their chil­dren, it is said that “North Kore­ans” account for nearly a quar­ter of the immi­grant Korean com­mu­nity in the US. The arti­cle could have been entirely about the dynam­ics between the two camps of North Kore­ans: the ones who left long ago and live with a long­ing and nos­tal­gia for a home they can’t visit, and the ones who left recently and live with a very dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship to their “homeland.”

And of course, it wouldn’t be a story about North Korean refugees if it didn’t fea­ture sev­eral pas­tors and churches…


I miss Letterbox…

Sunday 1 Jan 2012   //   1 Comment
Category: Tech
Tags: , , ,

This may seem triv­ial (because it is), but I’m _dying_ for an update that would make Let­ter­box (Mac OS Mail plug-in) com­pat­i­ble with Lion. Mail Act-on and Let­ter­box (or the recently dis­con­tin­ued Wide­mail) have been the most essen­tial enhance­ments to Apple’s default Mail app, and I get annoyed just look­ing at my email these days.

Yes, the lat­est Mail on Lion (10.7.3) does offer a 3-column view for the first time. But take a look at the dif­fer­ence below:

Mail on Lion. Only 16 emails are shown. I love the new “orga­nize by con­ver­sa­tion” fea­ture, but there’s a ridicu­lous amount of wasted screen space here.
Letterbox2

Here’s the much more effi­cient Let­ter­box, pre-Lion. That’s at least 40 emails shown at once.
Letterbox1

With Let­ter­box, the list col­umn in the mid­dle also shows the from, name, and date columns (columns within columns), which are all eas­ily sortable. But more than any­thing, I just want to be able to look at a lot of emails at once…


kimbap street vendors vs. department stores

Thursday 10 Nov 2011   //   No Comments
Category: News/Activism
Tags: , ,

A mad­den­ing story in the Chris­t­ian news­pa­per, Kuk­min Ilbo. In the photo below, you can see at least five depart­ment store employ­ees sur­round­ing a cou­ple of street ven­dors to block them from sell­ing kim­bap. They placed those planters and ban­ners as well in order to obscure the ven­dors from passersby. A cor­po­rate depart­ment store who claim loss of busi­ness due to ONE pair of street ven­dors who work nearly 20 hours a day to make at most 300,000 KRW or $300 per day. A lot less on most days. Really makes me want to go there just to buy kim­bap in support.

NewImage


Mac Lion upgrade

Wednesday 9 Nov 2011   //   No Comments
Category: Tech
Tags: , ,

Well, I finally upgraded to Mac OS 10.7, a.k.a. Lion, and so far these are the prob­lems encoun­tered. And solutions.

  1. Lion killed Quicken 2007. SOLUTION: I planned ahead and moved every­thing over to Mon­ey­dance before upgrad­ing. I tried export­ing and import­ing every which way, but the trans­ac­tions still lost their cat­e­gories and every­thing needs to be rec­on­ciled again. And my trans­ac­tions date back to 2002. Maybe there was a way to avoid this, but I’m just glad that all the data migrated over, and Mon­ey­dance looks good enough for my basic bank­ing needs. Good rid­dance, Quicken!
  2. Lion killed the Korean word proces­sor, Hangul 2006 for Mac, also known as HWP. I use this fre­quently to open doc­u­ments from South Korea where this pro­gram is very widely used — far more than Microsoft Word — so this was a huge bum­mer. There doesn’t seem to be any plans to update this to be Lion-compatible, either. SOLUTION: I down­loaded the new and free Han­com Office Han­word Viewer from the Mac App Store. It does exactly what I need it to do — open and view Hangul files (file exten­sion .hwp) — but does not export or “save as” another for­mat. Good enough.
  3. Lion crip­pled the Mail app, and the search func­tion doesn’t work prop­erly. At first I thought Lion ate some of my mail, which would have been a night­mare. It sounds like there’s a prob­lem with rebuild­ing the index, and lots of oth­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing sim­i­lar prob­lems. SOLUTION: Pending.
  4. Lion killed Wide­Mail and Let­ter­box, Mail add-ons that pro­vided the much-needed three-column view. SOLUTION: I can live with­out them for now since Lion’s new Mail finally offers a built-in “widescreen lay­out” that pretty much does the same thing. Let­ter­box was bet­ter since it let me view single-line mes­sage lists so I can view lots more at once, cus­tomize which columns appear in the list, and the alter­nat­ing row colours were nice. RIP Wide­Mail, but I hope Let­ter­box returns soon with an update. Thank god Mail Act-On still works on Lion. And by the way, I LOVE the con­ver­sa­tion view in the new Mail. But the new colour flags are hokey and the icons are ugly.

    5. To be continued…


1.5 generation North Korean migrants (in South Korea)

Tuesday 8 Nov 2011   //   No Comments
Category: News/Activism
Tags: , , , ,

An inter­est­ing bit in a Radio Free Asia (RFA) arti­cle today:

탈북 1.5세대. 이것은 부모를 따라서 남한에 입국한 젊은 탈북자들을 말하는데요. 이들 젊은 탈북자들은 부모 세대들과는 달리 남한 정착과 적응 속도가 빠르다고 합니다. 입국한지 1–2년만 되면 이들의 말투나 옷 모양은 남한에서 태어난 젊은이들과 구분할 수 없을 정도고 또 새로운 문화에 대한 적응도 부모들보다 빠르다고 합니다. 그렇지만 직업이나 진로 문제에 있어서 이들 젊은이들은 부모 세대와 같은 고민을 한다고 합니다.

1.5 Gen­er­a­tion North Korean migrants. This refers to young North Korean migrants who fol­lowed their par­ents to South Korea. These young North Korean migrants set­tle and adapt faster com­pared to their par­ents. In 1 to 2 years, you can’t tell their speech or cloth­ing apart from youth who were born in South Korea, and they adapt to new cul­tures faster than their par­ents. But when it comes to employ­ment or career issues, these youth face con­cerns sim­i­lar to their par­ents’ generation.

This is the first time I’ve heard ref­er­ences to “탈북 1.5세대” or 1.5 gen­er­a­tion North Korean migrants. In my expe­ri­ences, “1.5″ typ­i­cally refers to Asian Amer­i­cans who arrived in the US as chil­dren and came of age in the US. Between first-generation immi­grants and US-born second-generation Asian Amer­i­cans, 1.5 gen tends to be more bilin­gual and bicul­tural, and soci­ol­ogy of immi­gra­tion lit­er­a­ture is rife with stud­ies of their “iden­tity cri­sis” and “neither-here-nor-there” dilem­mas. Has this term been used to describe North Korean youth in the past? Is this a Korean Amer­i­can influ­ence on the discourse?

1.5 gen North Koreans


Lost in Paradise — 2011 Vancouver International Film Festival

Friday 30 Sep 2011   //   No Comments
Category: Film/Arts/Media
Tags: , , ,

Lostinparadise

I watched this film tonight: Lost in Par­adise at VIFF. Tony Rayns’ luke­warm film notes say it all, and I did grunt every time the duck­ling sub­plot showed up, but I’m glad I saw it. I had never seen a cityscape of Saigon like this, turned upside down by mas­sive rural-to-urban migra­tion and con­struc­tion and devel­op­ment projects. The once-a-hooker-always-a-hooker moral­ity tale was a bit hard to take, but the visu­al­iza­tion of con­stant mon­e­tary trans­ac­tions that take place espe­cially in the first 20 min­utes was fas­ci­nat­ing. Espe­cially because the Viet­namese cur­rency runs so high (USD$1 is like 20,000 đồng), the scale of both com­mer­cial and illicit trans­ac­tions seemed out of this world, e.g. “I stole 27 mil­lion đồng” and “sex with me for 500,000 đồng,” etc. I’m kind of glad I don’t speak Viet­namese, actu­ally. The act­ing looked bad with sub­ti­tles and it’s prob­a­bly much worse in Vietnamese.


Time mag: Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

Tuesday 27 Sep 2011   //   No Comments
Category: News/Activism
Tags: , , ,

Inter­est­ing read. Well-written and witty.

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

By Amanda Rip­ley / Seoul
Sun­day, Sept. 25, 2011
TIME Mag­a­zine

On a wet Wednes­day evening in Seoul, six gov­ern­ment employ­ees gather at the office to pre­pare for a late-night patrol. The mis­sion is as sim­ple as it is coun­ter­in­tu­itive: to find chil­dren who are study­ing after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addic­tion to pri­vate, after-hours tutor­ing acad­e­mies (called hag­wons), the author­i­ties have begun enforc­ing a cur­few — even pay­ing cit­i­zens boun­ties to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureau­crat at Seoul’s Gang­nam dis­trict office of edu­ca­tion, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. “There was no place to hide,” Cha recalls. In the dark­ness, he tried to reas­sure the stu­dents. “I told them, ‘It’s the hag­won that’s in vio­la­tion, not you. You can go home.’”

Cha smokes a cig­a­rette in the park­ing lot. Like any man try­ing to undo cen­turies of tra­di­tion, he is in no hurry. “We don’t leave at 10 p.m. sharp,” he explains. “We want to give them 20 min­utes or so. That way, there are no excuses.” Finally, we pile into a sil­ver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul’s busiest hag­won dis­tricts. The streets are thronged with par­ents pick­ing up their chil­dren. The inspec­tors walk down the side­walk, star­ing up at the floors where hag­wons are located — above the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Kraze Burg­ers — look­ing for tell­tale sliv­ers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, fol­low­ing a tip-off. They enter a shabby build­ing and climb the stairs, step­ping over an empty chip bag. On the sec­ond floor, the unit’s female mem­ber knocks on the door. “Hello? Hello!” she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, “Just a minute!” The inspec­tors glance at one another. “Just a minute” is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his col­leagues down­stairs to block the ele­va­tor. The raid begins.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html#ixzz1Z8cCCbql

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