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It's a bit surreal, ringing in the New Year and then doing it a second time roughly one month later but the vacational rewards are paramount. Another bonus was some mad cultural expose in the form of little kids in silk pajamas bowing their noses to the floor.

Traditional Korean clothing is called hanbok. For women, an acceptable hanbok look for the 2006 Winter Collection is a long, billowing silky skirt which isn't too flattering and generally makes its inhabitant look quite plump. The hanbok is adorned with ribbons and intricate baubles, presumably to draw attention away from the fatness of the dress. The younger girls get to wear rad little hats too. On the testosterone side, a hanbok suit consists of a satin shirt, a vest and an over-jacket, most featuring some kind of ornate pattern in gold or silver. The pants are like kung-fu pants and wearing them seems to make kids want to high-kick each other in the face. Young boys also wear hats with this ensemble, but they look like pirate hats. Pirates are so totally in right now.

So I've seen these get-ups before, for Chusok, but this time around I was waylaid and forced into a suit myself which was cruelly purloined from Molly's dad. I guess most adults have several hanbok outfits: "Hmmm... what am I doing for 2006? The red salamanders or the dancing blue monkeys smoking opium pipes?" Apparently what Molly's dad wasn't feeling this holiday season was PINK, because a full set of pink pajamas laid in wait for me and I was hustled into my silk pig-suit before the terror had time to set in.

I kicked around a bit and complained, even though I got a blue vest to put over top, but there wasn't much time to whine because the kids quickly came pouring in and there were ribbons to be tied and tassles to admire and little hats to steal. For girls, the predominent colours seemed to be red and white while boys wore the regalities of gold and deep cyan (and pink). Every child had a little waist pouch in which to keep their booty.

In Korea, major holidays are cherried by children receiving cash swag from their grandparents and family, which the little gnomes promptly stash away in their secret bags. From what I know, the homestead routine goes like this: Kids bow their faces to the floor in a show of respect, elders chuckle and dispense the goods. Younger bows to older, inferior to superior. It's a telling ritual, a rare visible inbreak into the hierarchical pyramid scheme that dominates Korean society just beyond Western eyes.

Following the New Year, I compiled class data regarding just how much currency was collected. It was sorta like "What did you get for Christmas?" where the poor kids sit sadly in their hand-knitted Christmas socks and the rich kids try to one-up each other with just how materially their parents love them. Oh the gloating: "Teacher, teacher, I get many moneys!" No, you dumb donkey... you got lots of money. Past tense! Last weekend! Not many! Lots!

I think having multiple words for excess really confuses them. It confuses me too, now that I really think about it. Why did we bloat English so gluttonously? Probably because our forefathers weren't blessed with the wonderous sensations of silky pink pants like the Koreans had, and the Olde English were wearing itchy burlap codpieces and thought, "Man this fucking sucks, let's make up some new words for suckage. Horrific! Terrible! Intolerable!" And it was so, and so forth and so on until there was a word for every kind of discomfort known to man, but nobody knew how to stop inventing new words and now here we are, overflowing. Ubiquitous.

But anyway, sorry I'm insane, and the point was that the kiddie cash intakes were typically between 50 and 150 thousand won, with SuperSmartSally coming out on top with a cool 250 grand. That seems like a lot until you realize that you drop 3 zeroes in conversion and it's only 250 dollars and also it's not really hers to spend on violent manga comic books or Korean boy band CDs or whatever she wants; the money is usually squirreled away by the parents for further education or a nice dinner (for them) in Seoul. So yeah, even the poor kids on Christmas have a sweeter deal than this, but nobody knows it and the gloating continues accordingly.

Now let's return to way back when I was wearing those pink pants and learning to bow in a traditional Korean manner: right hand over left, palms planted on the floor, gracefully face down. I was not graceful and I bashed my knee and my kids tried to pull my hair, but goddamn if I didn't make an effort. And then the grand hierarchy came into play and all the children bowed to us teachers and we solemnly presented them with a crisp, new, unfolded 1000 won bill which is the custom. Except mine were folded because I had kept them in my pocket.

Finally the teachers lined up to bow to our director who presided, grinning hawklike, over the fealty and thankfully it was over fast. We were compensated with an envelope containing naked pictures of Kim Jong-Il, which is not, in fact literal but a brand-new English metaphor and slang for "money" - we got money in the envelope of course - and I just made up my own diction because that's what English is all about: fucking around and making serious foreigners pay to glimpse at the rules.

Posted by Chris at 06:53 AM >> Commentations (1)