Musings on a Korean Winter Day

The Prize

You are now reading words written by the winner of second prize in the Korea National Writing contest. Actual money is awarded, making it the first time I have ever won anything in my life. It’s funny how a little, out-of-the- blue event like that can perk you up. Not the money, but the fact that a bunch of strangers looked at your stuff and thought it was pretty good. It’s not The New Yorker, but hey, we bottom feeders take what we can get.

Name Game

It is a well-known fact that you can elevate the status of any product by placing the modifier “-star” after the name. A van can be called the “AeroStar”, a train the “SilverStar”, but leave it to our friends at Hyundai Motors (motto: We Own Everything) to devise the ultimate name for their new automobile: The CarStar.

On the way to and from work I pass a store that for a while was called “Black and White”, a name that provided only the barest clue as to its purpose (the sale of formal wedding clothes). I was waiting for some clever entrepreneur to shorten the name to “Gray”. Recently the business was sold and the name changed to just “White”. The new business is the sale of skin lightening cream. I now refer to this building as The Store Formerly Known as Black and White.

Becoming pale seems to be an objective of women throughout Asia, a compulsion apparently implanted by cunning epidermal marketing droids. These are the same folks who have convinced Western women that ‘tan’ and ‘brown’ are the ideal colors. I think of these people as ‘mind brokers’ — whichever way you jump, they take their cut.

Anyway, in keeping with our local tradition of efficiency, the giant picture of the blushing bride on the building’s facade has been reused, her blush replaced by a ghostly pallor reminiscent of rock stars or the recently departed. The problem with this particular makeover is that the models’ face has become nearly the same color as her dress, leaving her eyes to float like raisins over her neck, like a Michael Jackson video gone horribly wrong.

Tie Died

I like to think that I’m a reasonable person in most areas, but I seem to have met my Waterloo when it comes to Nooseolgy – the science of wearing ties properly. I am but a foreigner caste upon the shores of TieLand, communicating with grunts and hand signals.

My excuse is that I spent much of my early working years in Hawaii, where donning a tie can result in laughter, good-natured ribbing, and ultimately, shunning. But then my best friend, The God of Irony, decided that I should work in Asia in jobs where the tie is considered a necessity for membership in the human race.

Let’s see: Tie? Go work at a bank. No tie? Send him to the mutant farms.

Striped or solid? Diagonal or checked? Muted pastel or a splash of red? Metal or cardboard? So many choices, so little fashion sense. I also find that my ties are of different lengths making it difficult to know exactly where to start the left and right halves. Starting the thin side too long results in a stubby little clump of fabric stuck to your chest. Starting it too short creates a long looping rope that keeps getting caught in your zipper.

A badly worn tie can negate the entire ensemble and destroy your carefully crafted image. Think of the Titanic but with greater loss of life. My choices are often alarming enough to create a kind of fashion singularity in the Armani space-time continuum. Accordingly, I have mastered a single tie tying methodology called “Knot” and a pattern-matching algorithm called “Ask Young”.

Equatorial Cold

The weather has taken yet another turn for the worse I’m afraid. Like the Korean people, once the course has been discussed and set, everything is geared to achieve the goal. Winter is wearing that look of grim resolution as it moves threateningly passed Fall, who has turned out to be something of a wimp, practically tripping over itself to get out of town.

Ex-warm weather dwellers retain the genetic inability to dress properly when the weather turns fickle, insisting on too many layers of clothing. We are attempting to keep the air next to our skin a comfortable 92 degrees F, ignoring the fact the just inches away, the air is 32 degrees F. Hence, you can easily spot us, the tropical refugees, by the little tornadoes being spawned in our wake.

Millenial Blues

In order to test our readiness for Y2K, the bank has devised a series of Dress Rehearsals denoted DR1, DR2 and so on, giving the whole thing a war room persona. But then I thought, what if these tests are infinite, DR1 … DRn, approaching the millennium in an endless series of trials, each one more maddening than the last? We near the terminus but never broach it, living the end of days in a kind of bureaucratic purgatory, faces pressed to the glass.

I’ve GOT to get out more.