Advent of the Korean shoebox eatery™

I've never been to Western Massachusetts, but the NYT's description of this restaurant caught my attention:

The Pioneer Valley, home to a whole mess of Western Massachusetts’s finest higher-education operations, is not a bad place to eat per se. But I know from friends who live or have lived there that the options can feel limited. So I was stoked, when passing through last week, to be taken to a restaurant that I hadn’t heard of and actually liked: Gohyang Korean Restaurant, a shoebox of a place on Route 9. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t be a good Korean restaurant there, but I was quietly thrilled about it.

Gohyang is probably best known as “that Korean place in Hadley,” because the English-language signs one can read from the road identify it as “Korean Restaurant” and it is in Hadley, Mass. It’s housed in a smallish, bluish building with three doors: one for Gohyang’s Singing Rooms, a karaoke parlor; one for the restaurant; and one for Kim’s Oriental Mart, a place piled high with Korean kitchen supplies.

The last two Korean places I ate at in Orange County were a small but very tastefully decorated former Italian restaurant turned Korean and the Kogi Taco Truck, while the Korean places I frequent most in Honolulu are a shop at the end of an isolated strip mall near Ala Moana Center and a makeshift add-on in the Manoa Valley, so I'm liking the "shoebox eatery" description.

Not only is it a cool name, I think it's a cool concept. It doesn't take a lot of space to create a Korean restaurant, as any denizen of any Korean city will tell you. Of course, that doesn't mean you should skimp on the decor: If you hope to expand outside an AA clientele (and I don't mean AlAnon), you will need to make it look as if the place passes code with ease.

And that's another thing: Try to put a name in English on the outside (preferably an accessible name, but that's another post for another time) other than a descriptive signboard. It's going to be a bit troublesome when Korean-speaking locals are referring to "Kohyang" (the name in Korean), while non-Coreaphones are referring to it as "Korean Restaurant."

And maybe offer a ch'obo beginner's menu (à la Pho Hoa when they first came to Korea).

There. I've done my part for round 2 of the Korean Wave.

South Korean boat held by North Korea

I guess if the US is cracking down on your financial resources abroad and hold joint military exercises with South Korea aimed at stopping your subs, then I guess the best course of action is to kidnap some South Koreans and try to extract concessions from the ROK.

From BBC:

Authorities in the boat's home South Korean port of Pohang said the Daeseung had stopped sending signals after a fishing trip in the Sea of Japan, known in Korea as the East Sea, on Saturday.

The South Korean coastguard said in a statement: "We have found out that our fishing vessel is being investigated by North Korean officials in the presumed North Korea exclusive economic waters in the northern East Sea.

"The South Korean government, according to international law, wants the swift resolution to the matter and the safe return of its vessel and its fisherman."

The vessel has four South Koreans and three Chinese on board.

Media reports in the South say the Daeseung is being towed to the Northern port of Songjin.

North Korean media has so far made no comment on the latest reports.

The story is also in Yonhap, the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, the Christian Science Monitor, and even Xinhua (since the North Koreans are also holding a few Chinese).

In the past, South Koreans held by the North (as in Kaesŏng workers or Korean War POWs) were largely forgotten by the media, which wouldn't bode well for the crew of the Taesŭng (Daeseung). But this may have changed, ever since President Lee Myungbak bowed deeply to the nation for the sinking of the Ch'ŏnan and discovered a pair of cojones while he was looking down.

While the South Korean media is only slightly more predictable than their counterparts in the North, if I were a betting man, I'd wager that this incident will be highlighted to some degree in the press, if only because it drives home the point that the North Koreans are still up to no good.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus 65

above: Hiroshima's so-called A-Bomb Dome. 
Reuse permitted with citation.

I've been busy with family matters the past few days, so I missed the sixty-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima two days ago and I may not be posting tomorrow on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.

These unspeakably heart-wrenching events have long been near and dear to my heart, and I'd rather just point you in the direction of an old post of mine, "The Unluckiest Town on Earth," about a South Korean hamlet very adversely affected by the attacks, and a post at The Western Confucian that may influence you to rethink what you believe about the necessity to drop these two weapons of mass destruction on what actually were civilian targets, and this post on the recent death of the only official "double A-bomb survivor" (a man who was in both cities when they were bombed).

Kogi truck

It was a spur of the moment thing (sorry, Wangkon), but my best friend's wife ("M3") said the Kogi Taco Truck was in the next town — we being in Anaheim and the Kogi Taco Truck being in Fullerton — so with their kid and dog in tow, we were going to get in the Expedition and track it down. Of course, from their part of Anaheim, "Fullerton" could mean it's 200 yards away, but it could also mean ten miles away, and it was closer to the latter.

As promised by their Twitter feed, they were at 303 N. Placenta Placentia Avenue in Fullerton, which is just on the other side of the Orange Freeway (the 57) from Cal State Fullerton. READ MORE...

Made-up in America

As I struggle to polish up some important papers, the New York Times has a couple articles on people in US colleges and universities who may not be trying as hard as I am to come up with original work.

The first, "Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age," talks about, well, how a lot of today's students just don't get it when it comes to the importance of creating one's own work and citing the work of others:

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

These are anecdotes, of course, and I will say upfront that they do not reflect my own experience when I have taught courses and graded students as a lecturer or a teaching assistant at two public university systems. I was instructed by my supervising professor and the TA who came before me to spend half of an entire lecture on what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, and how hard we will come down on your ass if you get caught doing it. It also helped that the type of assignments we gave were very heavy on creating one's own work and didn't rely too much on compiling the information of others.

But the article suggests that this is a more widespread problem than I've experienced:

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Wikipedia is the bane of professors, as you may well know. I have explained more times than I care to remember — always proactively, before someone hands something in from the encyclopedia made by Wiccans — that Wikipedia should never be a citation in your paper unless you're doing a paper on Wikipedia itself; on the other hand, however, it can be useful as a starting point for finding resources if you look at the links down at the bottom.

Still, it's disappointing that I should have to spend so much time with this. I guess it's not surprising, though, given the "foot-out-the-door" approach many schools have toward their students, pushing them along so they at least pass onto the next level. (By contrast, Korea has a "foot-in-the-door" approach where the main goal is doing whatever you can to ensure you somehow make it into whatever top school or top company you're trying to enter, even if just barely. But once someone is in college, the foot-out-the-door attitude sometimes takes over.)

The above article and its companion blog piece, "Are you part of 'Generation Plagiarism'?," suggest that this is a Millennium Generation (or Gen-Y) problem, but I think no small number of my fellow Gen-Xers are equally as ethically challenged, if not more so. When I was in college in the 1990s, there was a lot less of a looming threat that Teach will go online and find out that, say, you didn't theorize the micro-macro dichotomy of Social Science inquiry on your own, and that meant greater temptation.

But again, that's anecdotal. And for more of my anecdotal impressions, I'll say that I didn't really run into too much plagiarism in my academic encounters in South Korea, both as an instructor and a grad student. For the former, it may have been the type of assignments, and for the latter, it may have been due to the quality of the student body and the clear expectations about plagiarism.

That's not to say that I don't think cheating exists in South Korean colleges. Far from it, I witnessed in first hand in a big way when I took regular Yonsei undergraduate courses one semester way back when. In fact, it was clear I was being used as an obstacle to obstruct the TA's view of two co-eds who were sharing answers on a final exam. One was cute, so I didn't object.

And I'm guessing that story is more in line with what many NSETs in the K-blogosphere claim is rampant in Korean schools. Again, though, I'm not so sure. Like the NYT article, we run the risk of using an egregious incident as a representative case in a given population of students, thus smearing a whole lot of people who not only did nothing wrong, but worked their asses off to get what they achieved.

Work their asses off in South Korean schools, you derisively ask? Yes. Many South Korean colleges are no longer the four-year picnic that came as a reward for getting into college in the first place, particularly because of increasingly intense competition for post-baccalaureate jobs and grading quotas designed to eliminate grade inflation. In my brief stint as a lecturer in Korean academia, I could give no more than 30% of my students an A, and no more than 40% of my students a B. Regardless of how well they performed, at least 30% would get a C, D, or F. I wrote about that at Korea Beat:

My one stint at teaching undergrads in Korea was nothing like that. We were forced to give weekly updates on attendance, for which there was an automatic F if one received beyond, I believe, three in that semester.

And this:

Passing is not failing, but neither is it doing well. In the 30-40-30 system that is becoming the new standards, no more than 30% of the class can get an A (including A- and A+), no more than 40% can get a B (including B- and B+), and at least 30% must get some form of C, D, or F.

Yeah, if someone shows up and takes the exams, they are guaranteed at least a C, a passing grade. That allows them to move on to graduate, but in today's competitive job market, that might as well be an F.

The four-year picnic is a thing of the past in many schools.

Whoops! I just plagiarized myself.

Apple gets approval to sell iPhone 4 in Korea

Hey, those of you in Korea who stood in line for hours or waited weeks or months to get your grubby little hands on an iPhone 3Gs, guess what? Be prepared for people who weren't huge fanboys to get their grubby little hands on the iPhone 4, now that South Korean regulators have approved its sale in the Republic of Korea.

From AFP:

Regulators Tuesday authorised the sale of Apple's iPhone 4 in the lucrative South Korean market, after the firm's decision last month to delay sales in the country upset consumers.

The Korea Communications Commission said in a statement it had granted Apple a technical certification to operate in the country, four days after it applied for the approval.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced last month the iPhone 4 was going on sale in 17 of 18 new markets. He said at the time it would "take us a little longer to get government approval" in South Korea.

The remarks sparked concern among tech-savvy South Koreans, who still remember regulatory barriers that kept the previous version of the iPhone out of the country for more than two years.

KT Corp., Apple's South Korean partner, said at the time the delay was needed for further testing and there were no regulatory hurdles.

KT said Tuesday it hoped to get the iPhone4 on the market next month.

In case you're wondering if the iPhone 4 is worth it, the answer is yes. But if you're wondering if the iPhone 4 is worth it when you just bought yourself an iPhone 3Gs, the answer may be maybe. In a couple weeks, when "M" has a chance to see my iPhone4 side by side with the iPhone 3Gs she bought in October, I'll let you know if she pulls her hair out, screams, and/or throws things at the wall.

He is not the droid you're looking for

Whoops! According to matt of Popular Gusts, it turns out the Mr Lee in the now infamous Itaewon-is-a-modern-day-Sodom-and-possibly-Gomorrah online "news" article, is not the Mr Lee who founded Anti-English Spectrum and is the scourge of the NEST universe.

But that doesn't make this message any less valid, as past activities speak for themselves.

Talks to get Aijalon Mahli Gomes released?

NOTE: Prepare yourself for the Ultimate Aijalon Mahli Gomes Link Fest™!

UPDATE (August 24, 2010):
Jimmy Carter is reportedly headed to North Korea to gain Mr Gomes's release.

ORIGINAL POST:
UPI is reporting that Washington and Pyongyang (and Sweden) are in talks over the possible release of Robert Park follower Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who also walked straight into North Korea with a martyrdom-inspired message of peace.

It has been just over six months since he was arrested and just under four months since he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Based on the past cases of Evan Hunziker, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and Robert Park, it's past time to call out Howie and play "Deal or No Deal." Especially since Mr Gomes is (like Robert Park) reportedly suicidal (and as much as it pains me to say it, I give a lot of weight to KCNA reports on the foreigners North Korea imprisons).

[source]

It's no secret that I don't like what he did and I want others to stop following in Robert Park's messianic footsteps (and post-release antics), but I still hope Mr Gomes can come home soon (even fellow skeptic Joshua Stanton agrees).

Just don't write a book. I'd hate to have to launch a preemptive boycott, only to let down my opposition when you send my mother a free copy.

Asian players in MLB favored over Latin American players?

Ozzie Guillen of the Chicago White Sox thinks so:

Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen thinks Asian players are given privileges in the United States that Latinos are not afforded.

In his latest rant, the outspoken Guillen also said that he's the "only one" in baseball teaching young players from Latin America to stay away from performance-enhancing drugs and that Major League Baseball doesn't care about that.

He said MLB cares only about how often he argues with umpires and what he says to the media.

Guillen said it's unfair that Japanese players are assigned interpreters when they come to the U.S. to play pro ball, but Latinos are not.

Echoes of the tensions in LPGA? A little? Sorta? Not at all?

Anyway, Mr Guillen doesn't actually mention Koreans (the article doesn't mention it anyway), but his comment would seem to include Koreans (and Taiwanese and others). Heck, maybe Mr Guillen also means Koreans when he says Japanese.

But if what he's saying is correct, then perhaps he has a point. And that point should not be to yank — heh heh, yank — the interpreters (and teachers) from the Asian players, but make sure that the Spanish-speaking players have them if they need them.

Christine Ahn at TMH and OFK

above: Christine Ahn.
Well, the glasses don't look KJI-like.
I think North Korea sympathizers should
be required to wear Dear Leaderhosen.

Both One Free Korea and The Marmot's Hole have posted about Christine Ahn's piece in the New York Times in which she uncritically parrots Pyongyang's party line on actions taken by Washington and Seoul. Ms Ahn is a favorite target of Joshua at OFK, and one has to stop and wonder at the resilience of her willful ignorance at the nature of the DPRK regime.

In fact, I've been wondering if she is not a bought-and-paid-for chinboista, part of a deliberate campaign by North Korea to soften views in the West and get people to question a hard-line approach to this murderous regime, à la Song Duyul (송두율, Song Tuyul in M-R), who was seen by many progressives as a fair-and-balanced critic of both North and South but who eventually admitted he had received $150,000 from Pyongyang, though he denied the intent of the money.

Of course, that's just speculation. I have no reason to believe that's true except for the uncanny way in which she sounds like she's getting her talking points from the KCNA. Being a Berkeley liberal can lead one to question media sources from one's own country, but geez, it should call for you to do the same with the press elsewhere, no?

To beat or not to beat

Korea Beat is one of my favorite blogs for the simple reason that the blog owner and some of his hench(wo)men take a good cross section of typical or prominent news items from the Korean-language press and translate them into English. It can provide a decidedly different view from many English-language blogs, which focus so strongly on English-language articles about expat-related issues (like English teachers, etc.), that they contribute to cognitive distortion about how much the Korean media actually focuses on native-speaking English teachers in Korea and their problems (or triumphs). The only downside to his blog is that he facilitates my laziness about reading Korean-language news items directly, but that's my problem.

above: Corporal punishment from long ago. 
I did a Google image search of 체벌 (corporal punishment), but a lot of the things I found were highly inappropriate for a family blog. [source]

Today he has the English translation of an interesting Korean-language article on the prospect that kids are more likely to receive physical punishment in hagwons (of which there are a whopping fifteen thousand in Seoul) than in public schools. An excerpt:

After the Seoul Office of Education announced its decision to eliminate corporal punishment, discussion has also focused on the use of corporal punishment in the hagwons of Seoul. Unlike public schools, which practice whole-person education, hagwons use corporal punishment solely to produce higher test scores, so parents tend to tolerate a certain level of it. That makes it all the more difficult to eliminate corporal punishment from hagwons.

Park Bu-hui, head of consultation with the parents' organization 참교육을 위한 전국학부모회, said, "there are an increasing number of complaints over corporal punishment in hagwons... corporal punishment in hagwons is much more serious since it has no relationship to punishment." However, "there are parents who don't believe corporal punishment is escapable if a good environment for schoolworks is to be created.... some hagwons are popular because they are rumored to have very severe corporal punishment."

I'm going to deliberately leave aside the prospect of whether one wants their child hit or beaten into a good student (I imagine some of these teachers see themselves as forging metal into a sword or useful implement of some kind), which I suspect will be discussed in the comments section at Korea Beat. I have reservations about using corporal punishment (체벌, ch'ebŏl), but I also have reservations about removing it from the school's toolbox as well.

Instead, I want to point out that this article represents some of the common things that annoy me about Korean media articles (and there are a lot of things that annoy me about Korean media). The first and most prominent one being the headline in quotes: "학교보다 학원 가선 더 많이 맞아요," which Korea Beat translated as "Korean kids say more beatings at hagwon than at public school."

But did they really say that? Did anybody really say that? A quote should be used to represent something someone actually said. In English, however, many people sloppily use them as "scare quotes" (Metropolitician, for example, did this in response to my comments in a way that made it look like I'd said something I actually hadn't, an odd practice for a self-described watcher of Korean media falsehoods). Meanwhile, many Korean headline writers or newspaper editors use them to sum up what they or the reporter think the main person (or one of the main persons) in the article might be thinking. When they do this with a direct quote from a single person, it really amounts to putting words in people's mouths by people trying to avoid taking ownership of their own speculative observations. Scary quotes, indeed.

above: Okay, I guess this choice of picture is sort of innocuous, but you do have to wonder about the teacher's motivation.  Maybe I'm the one being a pervertedly prurient pyŏnt'ae. [source]

My second common beef is that the headline's conclusion is simply not backed up with any solid data. We see this in some of the Korean- and English-language articles about native-speaking English teachers, but it happens with other issues as well. Indeed there are beatings at hagwons, or at least kids receiving corporal punishment. And it might be happening more than in public schools, but we don't know from anything provided in the article.

It is basically anecdotal evidence to demonstrate the author's point. It might be true, but it might just as easily be true that kids are more likely to receive corporal punishment from public school. It could even be possible that some hagwons are particularly bad, while most mete out little or no corporal punishment. The article doesn't explore it because there are no means with which to explore it. That's lazy, sloppy, and dishonest journalism. (And it's not the realm of just the Korean media, but that's another post for another time.)

Finally, there is the problem of translating 맞다 as beat or beating in English. As I learned it (which could be entirely wrong; I learned Korean from people who thought North Koreans had horns), the word can mean hit (as in one strike or smack, light or hard) or beat (as in repeated hard strikes), but the choice of "beatings" suggests kids are being taken into a room and struck repeatedly, perhaps until injury occurs, but the article doesn't really go into such detail to come to that conclusion.

Don't get me wrong, though: I am glad Korea Beat did this article and my beef is primarily with the bad habits of the Korean media which it exposes. Our man in Indianapolis and his occasional minions do a fine job and I hope they keep it up for a very long time.

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that this article sounds like it got the seal of approval from the government sector that is trying to take down the hagwons. For years, administrations left, right, and center have seen the hagwons as an enemy. In short, they:

• sow the seeds of class conflict by helping to put admission to a top school out of reach for those who can't afford to attend them, 
• underscore perceptions of inadequacy by formal school system while taking money away from efforts to fix those perceived problems, and
• create a sort of brain drain from formal teaching and other productive work, while also preventing money from going to other important parts of the economy.

By pointing out that hagwons may be as bad or worse than public schools, perhaps they are employing a tu quoque argument that they hope will resonate with the general public.

The pornification of Korea

We already have the pornification of America, but the pornification of Korea (YouTube video at 3:00) is well underway. (See The Grand Narrative for further examples; no specific post, just the blog in general.)

Geez, I'm not that old and I remember when Korean TV networks wouldn't even show people kissing.

Is there an Exxon-Valdez on the other side of the Yellow Sea?

A former University of Alaska expert on marine conservation is warning that China's recent oil spill in the coastal city of Dalian, which is only a hop across the Yellow Sea from the fishing grounds and coastal areas of the Korean Peninsula, may actual be dozens of times larger than China is letting on.

From AP, via the Washington Post:

China's government has said 1,500 tons (461,790 gallons) of oil spilled after a pipeline exploded two weeks ago near the northeastern city of Dalian, sending 100-foot- (30-meter-) high flames raging for hours near one of the country's key strategic oil reserves. Such public estimates stopped within a few days of the spill.

But Rick Steiner, a former University of Alaska marine conservation specialist, estimated 60,000 tons (18.47 million gallons) to 90,000 tons (27.70 million gallons) of oil actually spilled into the Yellow Sea.

"It's enormous. That's at least as large as the official estimate of the Exxon Valdez disaster" in Alaska, he told The Associated Press. The size of the offshore area affected by the spill is likely more than 400 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), he added.

That's a thousand square kilometers in a shallow sea (an average depth of 44 meters and a maximum depth of 152 meters) that itself is only 338,000 km in size. Who knows if that slick will eventually hit the South Korean EEZ with its important fishing grounds? If North Korean landmines in wooden cases can get washed out to the Yellow Sea and then float to South Korean islands, why not tar balls?

above: In 2004, fifteen years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Dr Rick Steiner shows how oil is still present at Rua Cove in Alaska.

Though Dr Steiner is obviously an activist working with Greenpeace and has been a vocal critic of BP for progressive institutions, the foundation of his claims rings true:

Steiner said his estimates came from the fact the oil storage tank that was destroyed had a capacity of about 90,000 tons (27.70 million gallons) and reportedly had just been filled by the tanker.

He said his lower estimate of 60,000 tons (18.47 million gallons) came from the rate of oil recovery by thousands of fishing boats dispatched for the cleanup.

"They've already collected more oil than the official estimate of the spill size," he told The Associated Press.

He praised the makeshift cleanup efforts: "Very low-tech. The thing is that it worked."

But he said the thousands of cleanup workers face possible health concerns after being told to help out, receiving no protective gear and being coated in crude.

If it is even close to accurate, this report is disturbing and alarming, but wholly unsurprising. China has a history of strenuously trying to keep unpleasant things under wraps (including previous major environmental disasters), even when the deliberate failure to disclose important information to the public leads to health risks, injury, and even death.

China has already tried to remove the spotlight from this nasty incident, with the mayor of Dalian declaring victory over the oil spill. I guess they had a bunch of made-in-China "Mission Accomplished" banners left over, and they had to use them for something.