The City of Abandoned Coffee Cups

In this update I write about my new hobby snapping photos of abandoned coffee cups (I can explain), forgetting the unknown value of a dollar, and the godfather of Korean hip hop. Thanks for reading! 즐겁게 읽어 주셨으면 좋겠습니다!

Doing

• I went on a walking tour last Saturday with the Royal Asiatic Society of Korea to learn about Seoul's underground music scene. We walked the rainy streets of Hongdae and Sinchon with our expat guide, who led us past venues I'd read about only in books. Unfortunately many of these had closed their doors (such as Club Drug, where Crying Nut and No Brain got their starts), or had transformed into new venues.

Punk-themed street art representative of Club Drug's heyday in the early 2000s, finds itself buried beneath modern graffiti.

• Observing the presidential campaign.
• Korea held its presidential election this year, and the campaign held all the hullaballoo I'm familiar with from the US, and then some. Strangely, the banners I saw after election day interested me the most, more so than even the campaign activities. The losing candidate displayed banners that read, "I wasn't enough. I sincerely thank you," while the winning candidate hung posters promising to herald in a united Korea, accompanied by his smiling headshot.

The presidential candidates' post-election posters.

• Another interesting election detail came by way of Heo Kyung-young, an eccentric individual who announced his presidential bid in traditional amour, and included an IQ of over 400 and supernatural abilities among his recommending qualities. However, even these attributes proved insufficient against Yoon Seok-yeol, who won the election on March 9th.

A campaign truck promoting Heo Kyung-young. The screen on the truck displays a photo of Heo in traditional clothing.

• Abandoned coffee cups 
• I began a photo series with abandoned coffee cups last November. These cups are a common sight in a city where waste rose exponentially during the pandemic, and after snapping photos of every cup I saw I decided to be more selective. Beginning in 2019 the Korean government fined cafes that provided take-out cups to dine-in customers, but lifted the restriction after the pandemic began. The government plans to reimplement the fines on April 1st but cafes and customers prefer take-out cups for their convenience and seeming safety when compared with reusable mugs. The excessive use of disposable products sometimes comes to mind when I take pictures, but the world's growing waste problem's not the real reason I began this photo project.

Joining a family portrait

• The sight of single-use cups in unexpected places simply amuses me. Those cheeky cups have the audacity to end up somewhere they were never meant to be! 😂Individuals build store fronts, art displays, public use facilities, etc. with particular appearances in mind, but once someone discards their cup the landscape changes. The cup seems to say, "Hello! My presence wasn't planned–it just happened! Sure, someone will come sweep me away when the time is right, but for now this place belongs to me!" I suppose this is the reason I love graffiti. Graffiti and used cups both reflect an individual's ability to influence the structures around them in ways that are often silly, sometimes thoughtless, and always refreshing.
• I included some of my favorite captures both above and below, and you can find my growing album of Abandoned Coffee Cups here.

Hanging out above street art by Leodav

Balancing on a kiosk

Watching

Twenty Five, Twenty One (스물다섯, 스물하나)

This nostalgic, feel-good drama currently airs on Netflix. Set within the backdrop of the Asian Financial crisis of the 1990s, the drama follows a high-school fencer and a young journalist through the ups and downs of life.

Hadestown

I saw the musical, Hadestown, in early February and the singing was FANTASTIC. Good singing gets me every time. During the show, my friend mentioned Korean productions rotate multiple main casts rather than highlight a single actor for each role. Many main cast members mean performances have various combinations, and the most devoted audiences buy tickets to them all. K-pop stars often join these casts, both because of their exceptional performance skills and because big stars fill auditoriums with idol fans.

Below, one of Hadestown's trailers.

Korea's Queen of Drag

Nana Youngrong Kim is one of the top drag performers in Korea. The Korea Herald interviewed Nana about Korea's emerging drag scene and his path to becoming a performer.

Listening

Thama-København

Thama won best R&B and Soul Album at the Korean Music Awards 2022. This new music video for one of the album's songs, "København" includes phenomenal dance performances, such as that from Mr. Woo/ Young Woo, and a saxophone solo by Kim Oki.

Tiger JK

Many consider Tiger JK the godfather of Korean hip hop. The rapper was born in Korea in 1974 but spent his childhood in both Miami and LA, where he learned English, rap, and how to deal with the difficulties of cultural and ethnic differences. The challenges Tiger faced when he was young and his emergence into the hip hop scene are stories fit for the big screen, but the rapper's humility inspired me even more than his story's exciting details. When Tiger spoke about someone who scammed his company and left him homeless, the rapper chose to put the experience behind him rather than retaliate. "We (Tiger and his labelmates) decided that at the end of the day, clear conscious, we're gonna go to sleep well. We didn't do nobody dirty. God gave us this talent...let's start over."

Below, a clip from an interview with DIVE Studios about the scam incident. You can find the full interview here. 

Tiger JK released the track, "Love Peace," in 2021, as a response to rising violence against ethnically Asian communities. Tiger encourages love and unity but doesn't promote those qualities lying down. The video's violent language and images reflect the Asian community's solidarity and their long history, seeming to suggest as long as people groups don't acknowledge those histories, those ties, and the full humanity of other people groups, peace and unity will remain out of reach.

Reading

Though Flowers Fall I Have Never Forgotten You by Jeong Seung Ho, translated by Brother Anthony of Taize and Susan Hwang

I bought this collection of poetry from Seoul Selection, a little bookstore nestled in Jongno. The basement bookstore houses everything from early 2000s guidebooks about Seoul's hotspots, to postcards depicting the peninsula a century ago, to video tapes of old Korean films. 

City of Ash and Red, written by Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Published in Korean in 2010 and in English in 2018, this eerily well-timed book sets itself within a country all but incapacitated by a pandemic. The book details characters in hazmat suits, apartments in quarantine, and health screenings at airports. Despite the exciting environment the book passes in a haze as the reader follows the thoughts of an untasteful protagonist navigating life in a virus-stricken foreign country. I'm always glad to read more translations of Korean literature, but found the novel difficult to finish while I simultaneously experienced Korea's intense omicron wave. After a long day, I prefer pastimes that lift me out of the pandemic haze.

Writing

During a subway ride

Learning

Growing up in the US, I found everything around me pretty mundane, and never thought international students who asked about my culture truly cared about my experience. How can you be interested in such a boring, normal place? I'd wondered. It was Korean culture that offered endless excitement and novelty, not the US. After a few years living abroad, however, I see each country a bit differently–Korean culture doesn't seem so novel anymore, and the US looks odder and more interesting than ever before.

I realized this most acutely when I visited home 2 years after the pandemic began. I felt confused about how the US government and even my friends and family decided to handle the virus, and they, in turn, asked lots of questions about Korea's response. We both expressed similar levels of confusion and fascination toward the other. The unfamiliar side proved difficult to wrap our heads around.

If I'd been in the US those two years my approach to pandemic life would certainly look different, but my environment affects more than my level of social distancing. Learning about Korean history and religion has revealed just how much I move within the systems laid out for me. These systems, traditions, and social norms dictate how I understand and react to situations in ways I don't realize and will never realize. The "path" these set me on looks familiar and natural, while other roads look unintuitive, incorrect, and sometimes even dangerous. How could any path be better than the one I walk? This, most certainly, is the correct way to live! I wonder which of my "natural" day to day activities seem unintuitive or dangerous in the eyes of someone who's used different traditions, and I wonder which ones future generations will hold in distain as the structures that seem so natural to me buckle under the weight of new ideas. As long as the memory of my generation remains, individuals will grumble at our ineffectiveness or criticize our inhumanity, or perhaps they'll laud a sainthood positively alien to us. Maybe this has happened since the beginning of time.

All my life I've swallowed opinions and perpetuated systems that aren't truly natural. I learned how to spot danger and forgot the freedom of giving freely; I learned of money and forgot the unknown value of a dollar; I learned to feel passionate and forgot my inability to distinguish between political parties. I twist to fit the social structure and then get used to my new shape. Perhaps this is the reason I love anthropology, which teaches me about different cultures and shocks me out of complacency. I hope this interest, and anything else I do in life, will always keep me in a state of wonder and imbalance.

Seeing (Click on images to enlarge)

Notable Noms: Ddeokbokki (떡볶이) with a friend.

A beautiful, hanok-styled café in Jongno. Walking around the garden in the back I almost felt I was in the mountains rather than the city. Almost.

The hanok cafe's coffee.

    

My birthday came and went! Melting candles and loving friends in tow.

A stationary store in Yeonhui-dong that also offers pen-pal services.

A bit of home! All 3 cats in a surprising display of civility.

A trendy new café named Hunk Junk, located between Yeonhui and Yeonnam.

A subway tribute to Byun Hee-soo, a transgender soldier and activist who died by suicide last year. The sign reads, "We will never forget Byun Hee-soo's dream nor her courage."

끝까지 함께 해 주셔서 고맙습니다. 다음에 또 만나요!

(Thanks for reading to the end. Let's meet again next time!)

(Bonus: I've been playing a cute game called Cookie Run Kingdom. 😁🍪Korea famously churns out skilled gamers and exciting video games, the latter of which boomed across the world as people took up home-friendly hobbies during the pandemic. (Video games don't face the same cultural and linguistic barriers to international appeal as do dramas, films, and music.) I still have little experience with Korea's gaming culture, having not yet stepped inside a PC Bang, but recently I played this cute RPG series for mobile. Cookie Run is more a feast for the eyes than a test in logic or skill, but it's fun to play something that let's my mind rest.)