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Once upon a time I remarked that the Koreans love using English in their advertising - any English at all, no matter how nonsensical - to proudly wear as a badge of white supremacy. I am, of course, referring to Seoul and not the fishing village boonies: the outlying folk of this fine nation want nothing at all to do with English and will serenely ignore Westerners while plotting to kill them from behind with a kimchi rake. But the city trend-walkers eat the language up like soy sauce, and it was in advertising that I first noticed Korea's cultural schizophrenia.

It began with hilarity. Seoul is teeming with businesses, a sea of signs begging to be noticed. My first encounters with "Happy Time x10" massage chairs and "Everybody Loving Black Music" hip-hop clubs left me snickering like a little girl, but before long it took a whole lot more than a simple typo or racial incongruity to pull my eye. Okay, so they don't realize that Athlete's Foot is our name for a rather unpleasant fungus. I didn't know that a Members Only Club is a place full of overused whiskey harlots and fungi-businessmen and not much else. Nobody's perfect, right?

English is everywhere in the city, intertwined with hangul in some kind of twisted parasitic relationship. It's a vampire of a language, holding on for dear life until hangul begins to waver and the lifeblood of a new generation chooses the cool-factor of English instead. English invites translation, interpretation, assimilation, codependency. It waits until it's a staple, until it owns the menus and telephone directories and subway stations and then...

Well, we'll see. But with English comes scientific reasoning and ideology and I can't see how scientific reason could possibly come to the conclusion that two languages are better than one. But I was talking about hilarity, and Lingual Armageddon doesn't really fit that bill. English is still weak in Korea at the moment, crippled by misuse and hobbled by retardation and basically only fit for looking worldly and amusing foreigners. In Meong-dong, a popular shopping district, I saw the following sign at a lingerie store:

Hey, June!! Didn't you see my panty and brassiere?
well... Is that yours? NO!
How about this one?
It's mine!! My underwear!!
why don't do to yes? yes? yes!! yes
let's do to yes!!!!

The store was called yes. I stood, totally fucked up, staring at this dialogue looking for some kind of meaning. Endless lines of shoppers split and flowed around me with an occasional backward look of concern. And... nothing. It haunts me still, a black abyss of chatter and Paris Hilton-esque mayhem. Sometimes I cry into my pillow and dream of Korean valley girls.

One department store had an army of tiny headless mannequins, all lined up beside their juggernaut general, the Full-Sized Headless Mannequin. They were stylish, they were adorned in the very latest in miniature Calvin Klein fashion, but they were incomplete. They felt the loss of their craniums sorely. I got the feeling that they were plotting a jailbreak, working up the gumption to crash through their glass prison and scurry over, under and through screaming shoppers in search of their misplaced heads. We left that department store post-haste.

Alongside the Korean penchant for misusing English (and weird shit like tiny headless mannequins) lies an odd racial ratio of fashion models. Typically, four out of every five posters in big-name outlets feature Western models: blondes and brunettes of the whitest variety. Even Lotte, Korea's biggest corporation, uses mostly foreign models for its clothing catalogues. What's more perplexing is that whenever a Korean is depicted, they tend to look far more Western than the average Korean. Their eyes are wide and their hair is fake.

This country is in the throes of a love-hate relationship in the strongest sense of the word; a fascination with foreign culture accompanied by a revulsion for the people borne of it. You can see the paradoxical confusion in the streets, in the skyscrapers, in the advertising, and this childlike, dogged mimicry is sometimes too much to bear. I suppose this is what watching a teenager grow up might be like. I see a fragment of little-brother Canada in every tantrum, in each blatant act of worship, and I can only hope that like all phases, this one too will pass with time and wisdom and a growing confidence in who we really are.

Posted by Chris at 09:13 AM >> Commentations (2)