Hyon-Joo’s Everyday Life

- Moon Geun Young in traditional Korean Costume, handbok

It was freezing cold in Korea on the last lunar new year day - Jan.26, 2009 - not only because the temperature was way below the freezing point, going around -5C to -10C ( 23F to 14F), but because the world has become more harsh to those who already don’t have much. On their biggest holiday, Koreans were shivering, thinking of those who got displaced or had to give up their means of living due to the government re-development plans, and got killed while searching for fair treatment.

But there were a couple heart-warming news during the holiday that would melt the frozen and dangerous roads. People got together at the main stations of the major cities and lit candle light, showing that they wouldn’t forget the tragedy and requesting the government investigate it impartially and legitimately. Those who were about to catch a busy train to their hometown stopped by and gave them warm cheering.

Another heartening news was “Korea’s little sister” Moon Geun-young’s donation to an Australia Korean community. After sending Korean books to a local library in Sidney over the years through her uncle, she donated 100 million won (about 80 thousand dollars) for constructing a newer and bigger library.

The amount may not be that impressive to some people, but what’s important here is not the amount, but her warm heart. Her kindness looks sincere and genuine. She had sent books there first for a long time and donated the chunk of money later when she could “afford” more.

Majority of people, including me, who manage to live month by month, might think, only if I had money, I could help needy people that much, but it might not be that easy as we think. It’s probably not effortless for the haves to think about the have-nots - the more you have, the more you need. Ms. Moon is definitely such an angel that she could be so considerate for others in need when she is a huge star in her twenties and can have everything!

This is not her one and only time of donation. She’s made multiple contribution for the poor, the hungry and even for North Koreans.

Last November in 2008, it came to light that Ms. Moon had donated a big amount of money to South Korea’s Community Chest for the last seven years, totaling six hundred thousand dollars. This really made me question if I could do the same thing if I had much money. It also made me think that I should do my portion of good deeds even when I don’t have a lot.

Generally, I would insist this kind of encouraging news should spread out, especially in this difficult time, giving people hopes and cheers. All we hear is bad news like family committing suicide because of job loss, government gone dogmatic, congress people sawing the closed conference door, or Minerva arrested for having his own opinions. It would be nice that this news got some attention from the press.

But this time, I wouldn’t want Koreans to make a fuss. If possible, it would be delivered secretly through messengers or emails. I’m just afraid that some radical conservatives would accuse
her again of being a communist just like last time only because her grandfather was.

- Moon Geun Young, the Nation’s Little Sister

My family’s seollal* events have been gradually scaled down since my mom started to go to church twenty years ago. Her church argues that religious service to the deceased -a big part of seollal - is superstitious and my relatives didn’t appreciate it much. My mom decided to follow her church rules and eventually our seollal has become more of family-gathering, not a huge holiday gathering with relatives. We still keep the good elements of the tradition that is irrelevant to any religious beliefs and doesn’t have patriarchal poison of the holiday. We have tteokguk, play yutnori and do other fun stuff.

* Seollal(설날), Korean New Year, also known as sullal, seolnal, gujung, gujeong, the first day by the Korean lunar calendar is the most important Korean holiday. Families and relatives get together to celebrate the first day of the year and to wish the best luck. The adults honor the deceased with jesa, semi-religious practice, the children do sebae, traditional saluting practice to show respects to parents, grandparents and elderly relatives, they all eat tteokguk, rice-cake soup, play folk games such as yutnori, gegichagi and visit more relatives and close neighbors.

Not that I don’t miss all relatives getting together, cooking, preparing, eating, playing games, and talking about their lives, but I’ve outgrown. It’s always fun as a kid because you earn pocket money, have lots of delicious food, get together with cousins, get adored by the adults, overhear adults’ life stories, all that without working! But it changed and I kind of like the changes that my family made.

This year’s lunar new year day is Jan. 26, 2009 and it’s been eight years since I celebrated it with my Korean family. What I miss the most is yut-nori, along with time that I spent with family and delicious tteokguk that my mom makes.

Yutnori(윷놀이) is a very simple traditional Korean board game originated from an old folk game at the time of the Three Kingdoms (57BCE - 668 CE). You just need a board, mal-pan, four wooden sticks, yut, and small tokens, mal.

If you don’t have mal-pan, you can easily draw it on a piece of paper or card board. The yut sticks replace dice of most board games. One side of the yut sticks is flat and the other side is round, so the scores are determined by the counts of the sticks of which side is up or down. For example, four-up is mo, and four-down is yut.

The sticks are cast to determine how many steps they can move. Each score has its own name, do(pig), gae(dog), geol(sheep), yut(cow), mo(horse) and dwitddo(backward do), depending on the count of sticks that are up and / or down.

It’s so easy that anyone can learn within 1 minute, yet people with any age can play it together and get engaged. People try to get smart in moving their mal in the best possible route to finish it first, but your calculation is not always suggesting the best way. Sometimes, they come up with their own skills or arts in casting the yut sticks, but most of the times, these are not predictable.

I love throwing the yut sticks high up and hearing the sounds of those getting bumped to one another or falling on the floor one by one. I also love the fact each step has its name so that I can move my mal while chanting, i.e. do gae geol yut mo do gae geol! Of course, I love that people get together, shout for each other and give cheers. So much fun!

Yut-nori has never become a kind of gambling. It’s remained as a family / neighbor game.

Special Commandos Needed for Protesters in Yongsan Seoul

Six people, including one policeman, were killed and 23 injured on Jan.20, 2009 after Seoul’s special police commandos moved in to the top of the building to quell a strike against Yongsan re-development project. A shipping container carrying about 100 commandos was landed on the roof top of the building where the protesters built a 16 feet - about 5 meter - observation tower. About 40 minutes later, a fire broke out in the watch tower, soon engulfing the whole area.

The protesters, who once were tenants of the building, opposed to the plan because they didn’t believe that the compensation from the government was fair to them at all. Compared to what was paid to the owners of the buildings, the haves, in the re-development zone, the compensation given to the tenants, the have-nots, was just a shallow trick.

The tenants, most of whom ran a business there for a long time, in some cases for decades, were forced to give up their only way of living. The government paid them only for living costs of three months, moving costs and about twenty to forty thousand dollar compensation for their business.

Are the government officers so ignorant that they don’t know it takes hundreds of thousands dollars to start a business like theirs in another place in Seoul, let along their time and efforts to establish business reputation? Or are they just so ruthless that they don’t care their tax-paying citizens are facing motel living in this difficult time, with all their dreams they’ve held for years gone? I mean, regular people’s dreams to send their kids to colleges, to buy a 1000 SQ apartment, or to retire at 65, not like some top 2 percent people’s dreams to buy a mansion near a beach or to spend the rest of their lives cruise-traveling.

The government is simply taking the bread out of their mouths and doesn’t care. Yes, as they argue so strongly, it’s not right for the protesters to use violent methods such as Molotov cocktails and it’s not desirable for them to ally with a rather aggressive group National Displaced Tenants Association. But would they have wanted to throw Molotov cocktails and prepare paint thinners near them if they had had an idea that at least their living wasn’t threatened?

It was the government that decided the development plan and approved that a private company would take care of all the details including compensation. Did the government try to stop the private company when their contractors destroyed the stores of the building and got violent with the tenants on the sly?

If the Lee government cares about these people at all, they should have tried to talk to them first or to negotiate with them first. The fact the protesters prepared Molotov cocktails doesn’t give the government a good reason to send specially trained commandos only 25 hours after the protest began, especially when they were aware of the risks of the operation.

The bigger issue is that there are so many projects like this on the road. They plan them without listening to Koreans and they don’t mind being violent when they’re blocked by protesters. As the representative of the Blue House said after the Yongsan incident, maybe this will set an “example” against people’s protests.

They’re repeating this nonsense of re-development plans that they pay the tenants for a few months of living costs, moving costs and a prior right to move into the new building / or a little compensation money. We all know a few months of living costs, moving costs or compensation money for business are almost a joke.

What about the prior right to move into the newly built complex? Well, easily guessed, a lot of times, this thing doesn’t work for the tenants who don’t have money, by money I mean, sitting-in-the-bank capital. Usually, the deposit money, which could be hundreds of thousands dollars, and / or the rent soar in the newly developed complex, and many tenants don’t have that much money to afford. They end up selling their priority cheaply, even long before the project completes because they can’t find a job or a place to live in after they were forced to give up their business or to leave their place. So the riches buy these prior rights and make much profit by selling them to those people who can afford the loan. It’s a vicious cycle.

The re-development plans that I understand is the “legal” way to make the riches richer and to kick out the have-nots from their base, only to generating more slums.

No doubt Koreans criticize that they’ve got sneakier, more violent, and more dogmatic since they went into the underground bunker! When they heard about the delay of the “fancy” city re-development plan caused by some no-name Koreans, the best method that the government came up with from the bunker was sending highly-trained commandos. Indeed it’s a “War-Room” carrying a war against its people.

Underground Bunker

During the Korean War, when North Korea occupied about 70 percent of South Korea, my late grandfather, who lived in a small city Kumi, had to hide himself in an underground bunker not to be caught. He stayed there for a while and was able to avoid being a bullet bait for the North Korean army.

That’s how I understand of an underground bunker. You hide yourself or your loved ones from enemies. Or a bunker can be a place where you make top secret strategies in urgent circumstances such as war-time as the name suggests. Usually you don’t have a lot of communication here with outside people, especially with regular people. You command and they have to follow.

War Room or Show Room?

So, I heard about the President Lee’s underground bunker first time a couple of weeks ago around Jan. 8, 2009, I just figured Lee Myung-bak couldn’t get settled with “Castle MB”, or better known “Myungbak Barricade” or “Myungbak Sansung”. He needed a more secure place where he could hide himself and come up with commands with which he could protect his friends, the haves and fight against his enemies, the have-nots.

They call the bunker the “War-Room” because they want to take “pre-emptive” actions against this global economic “war”. Well, should I try to understand his intention? Maybe it’s good in the sense that at least he has realized the economic crisis is real, unlike last year when he was still in denial.

I mean, the place isn’t a matter here. You can call it a war-room or an emergency economy situation room, and you can locate it underground or on the rooftop of Blue House, Chung Wa Dae, wherever, as long as they come up with vital, efficient, and “legitimate” plans through “legitimate procedures” that will create jobs, stimulate economy, and benefit all Koreans, not only the riches.

But sadly, I have a serious doubt on their war-room. I can’t help it but it looks like a “Show Room” to me. He used to dig the land to build buildings in his previous job, why not now go underground?*

* Lee Myung-bak ran Hyundai Contruction for years.

Anyway, still I wasn’t that upset at the president’s eccentric idea about the bunker at the beginning. My worst comment was: oh, it was time for another joke, nothing surprising there.

So what strategies have they come up with?

Soon after they went into the bunker, they started to strangle Koreans, I mean, ordinary Koreans, such as Minerva who merely expressed his idea and opinions about the country’s economy on the Internet or teachers who wanted their students to have real education, not test-is-everything-type education. And now, it includes people who are forced to leave their lifelong business or grounds because of the city’s fancy development plans.

No wonder they don’t allow any outsiders including reporters to come inside the bunker.

Highly Trained Commandos against Protesters in Yongsan, Seoul

Jan.20, 2009, about 1500 special commandos on 40 citizens, a shipping container, freezing water from firetruck hoses, dark night, yet no ambulance…

Six people, including one police person, were killed and twenty three injured after Seoul special police commandos moved in to quell protest against the city’s re-development project.