Watching these kids from North Korea, who looked just like any other South Korean boys and girls and who spoke just like any other South Koreans, it brought me to think that the North Koreans are all victims of insanity of their government. Thus, watching this clip, it made me think again about reunification, a thought that has not been visited for quite a some time now. I even felt guilty as I realized that such an important issue was ignored beacuse I was too busy watching baseaball or playing games when I boasted around that I was a patriotic to my country. Anyway, as I watched how same these kids were, I was once again possesed by the thought of reunifying the nation and rescueing the North Koreans who are being mistreated and suffering under North Korea’s oppressive government.

Will Korea unify anytime soon? Probably not. Will there be many negative consequences of reunifying? Of course. But should the two Koreas unify anyway? YES, not only for the betterment of the country’s economy and power but for the families who have been split with their loved ones and have been burdened by such a heavy disaster.

Junjoo City Hall by Kioong Kim

This building from 1981 blended the traditoinal Korean building styles and the modern styles of building, creating a unique mixture of the past and present in one building.

2.

Flower

This piece of sculpture called “Flower” displays creative ideas of modernism

3.

Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso

This painting by Pablo Picasso is an example of Modernistic art, which rejected the traditional perspectives of structural paintings.

Cormac McCarthy

1. What authors or genres of writing are cited as influencing McCarthy’s writing style?

In the very beginning of the article, it mentions Joyce someone who has influenced MacCarthy, as Cormac MacCathy has practiced “Joycean virtues of silence, exile, and cunning more faithfully than any other contemporary author”. It’s also clear that Faulkner was another writer who has had great influence on MacCarthy’s writing as his name pops up just about everywhere in this article. The article also implies that MacCarthy was influenced by Mark Twain and Larry McMurtry.

2. How does McCarthy treat human characters in his story as opposed to landscape and animals like horses?

 It seems quite cleary that McCarthy puts much more emphasis on landscapre and animals in his story than human characters and their behaviors. In fact, human thoughts and activities seem almost unncessary in his story. Although characters like John Grady Cole does show some important characteristics like intergrity that are relevant to the story, even those main characters’ important characteristics seem very trivial compared to the whole scenary that is depicted in the story. Instead of humans, animals like horses replace the importance of characters that are found in just about any other stories, putting more focus on horses than humans. In essence, MacCarthy views human as a small part of world that are less important.

3. What type of dialogue does the article state McCarthy uses?

 The article states that MacCarthy’s dialogue is  ”difficult as it may sometimes be, it is also overwhelmingly seductive”. It is “Powered by long, tumbling many-stranded sentences, his descriptive style is elaborate and elevated, but also used effectively to frame realistic dialogue”. I found this to be quite accurate when I read the story myself. The dialogue indeed was very complicated, long, and realistic, as MacCarthy purposefully used profanity and incorrect grammars to portray more realistic dialogue between people. Also, as stated in the article, the dialogues and the whole book itself was very difficult and complex, which made this book quite a hard, boring story to read.

4. What is notable about his diction (word choice)?

According to the article, MacCarthy “seems to be pulling the language apart at its roots” when it comes to diction. In fact, the article says that some of the words MacCarthy uses are so odd and OLD, that they appear to be neologisms. It says that his diction comes from all over the history of English which invents itself as the story unfolds when combined into a prose- a resemblence of Elizabethan langauge.

All the Pretty Horses

Introduction

             As Korean audiences ourselves, we realized that most Korean dramas have certain stereotypical ideas and values in their basic storylines. It is apparent that most of Korean dramas implement stereotypical formulas because those formulas usually guarantee success, as certain things are more likely to attract audiences proven by ratings of different dramas and stereotypes that were shown before. Although Korean drama industry has remains very conservative and reserved compared to many Western, American, or even Japanese dramas, we could cleary see that the Korean drama industry did make quite a bit of progress, becoming much more expressive. While many of the ideas and genres for a certain fixed audiences will continue to prevail in Korean dramas, with the sign of progress that has been shown, it is fair to expect innovative, more expressive, and exciting themes to be introduced in Korean dramas for a wider range of audiences for the future.  

Writing Prompt #1

                We thought that while most of Korean dramas were essentially stereotypes of something, as most dramas’ storylines are very similar, it is still hard to distinguish which are archetypes and which are stereotypes, as there are so many copies within Korean dramas. As Korean dramas are mostly shown to Koreans, we thought that primary target audience of Korean dramas is the Koreans themselves. However, since so many Asians such as Japanese and Chinese have become fans of Korean dramas, we could see that there is increasing number of dramas that targeted Asians in general. We thought that in Korean dramas, young female adults were most represented by Korean dramas. There were also many dramas that represented young male adults and mothers (“ajummas”) well. We thought that children, either boys or girls, were least represented by the Korean dramas. Older men were also not represented much in dramas as well. Other things relevant in images and videos we found was that as time progressed, more “touchy” subjects such as affair or high school dating were presented more often in dramas, possibly representing the current trend of the Korean society.

Writing Prompt #2

             After this project, we were able to observe some of things that became the norms in Korean dramas, such as the “bad guy image” and “Cinderella stories”. It was clear that once a new genre or idea introduced in a drama became a hit, many other dramas after it tried to incorporate similar ideas to repeat its success. We believed that while creating such stereotypical dramas to repeat the success of an archetype was not necessarily a bad thing to do. However, making such stereotypical dramas was a reason why so many Korean dramas had essentially same story lines, with very little progress made in Korean dramas. While stereotypes exist even in American dramas, we thought that in the US, there were more innovative ideas or themes incorporated into dramas than in Korea. Thus, we thought that Korean entertainment industries should heed less to the public’s opinion, and try new things for the development of Korean dramas.

Fortunately, we did notice that Korean dramas have become more expressive and liberal, trying new things like American entertainment industries did. Things like bath scenes, fusion-historical dramas, and affair scenes that were limited in the conservative Korean society were shown more and more, indicating that the Korean society has been opening up to such things, becoming less conservative. While some might be concerned that Korean dramas are increasingly becoming Americanized, we thought that by dealing with such “touchy” subjects, Korean dramas will develop more and more to make more interesting and entertaining dramas for the public, enough to make people wait eagerly for what new things will be introduced with every new drama released.

Stereotypically, bad boys in Korean dramas are more attractive and popular than other male protagonists. Although the bad boys are never generous to women, female characters fall in love with them. Bad boys usually dress very tough and talk more directly than other male character. There are some family reasons that make bad boys become bad. However, they mostly do not have happy endings, perhaps warning young men away from this type of behavior.

In the picture, Ye-Jin Park is a fashionable, wealthy, and well-educated, alpha-female, but like similar characters in other dramas, she cannot get the man. Characters like her may ultimately de-motivate women from seeking success.

In Korean dramas, Stereotypical Korean middle-aged women, or ajumas, are very strong and stingy. They do not spend money on their appearance and sacrifice their lives for their family. The mother in the image has a very curly perm because it lasts over 6 months, therefore requiring only 2 trips to a hair salon per year. Also ajumas wear very cheap and comfortable clothes because they feel no need for expensive and pretty clothe, preferring to save their money. This image persists in dramas to this day, usually for supporting roles.

In the past, Korean dramas only represented women as fragile and dependent on men. Eunha Sim in “Trap of Youth” represented the fight against men. She planned to get revenge on the man who dumped her and her child. She is dressed a little sharper than other women in dramas in order to show her strength. Her make-up is more prominent and her facial expression shows strength not weakness.

In this photo from "Boys over Flowers", the male character is saving the female character from a dangerous situation, which is little cliche in Korean dramas. In Korean dramas, the so-called Cinderella story often appears. Cinderella story contains the storyline of where a rich, handsome, tall, talented and basically perfect male character falls in love with a poor, bright, normal-looking, and very honest female character. The male character often abandons prettier, wealthier, more talented, and more suitable second female character. This often forms love triangle, but at the end, the male character always stays with the normal girl. This storyline is popular because women or girls who are watching the TV drama can often relate themselves to more "real" and normal female character.

Unlike Korean dramas in the 90s, thesedays Korean dramas explicitly illustrates the theme of love affair. This scene is from "First Wives Club" where the male character is running away from his home with the woman he is cheating with. In modern dramas, the ones who cheat are more audacious and brazen, and they even blame thier husband or wife for their acts. Love affair storyline in Korean dramas might have emerged from the reality nowadays, where it is found that more than 60% of married men or women have cheated.

In Korean dramas, the weak and innocent female charater often gets some kind of lethal disease, mostly cancer or leukemia, which are hard to cure. In the 1990s, these female characters often died, despite the male character's care and support. However, in modern Korean dramas, these female charaters in one way or another miraculously survives which leaves hope within the atmosphere. This scene is from "Your are My Destiny" where the female character who has leukemia imagines herself dead, but at the end she survives through implementation.

Lastly, another typical storyline of Korean dramas is "Secrets of Birth." It is often the main plot of the whole drama. In these scenes from "East of Eden," the two babies were intentionally switched out of a angry woman's revenge. Because this secret of birth was unrevealed when the babies are already adult, it was more traumatizing. But in the 1990s dramas, the babies were usually swapped by an accident. This shows how modern korean dramas are more dynamic, calculated, and violent.

Wordle

Cinderella Story

Secrets of Birth

Stereotypical

Korean Drama

Cliché

Love Triangle

Target Audience

Social Difference

Romance

Entertainment Industry

Bad Boy Image

Bad Girl Image

Historical Drama

Gender Role

Comical Drama

Expressive

Conservative

Unrealistic

Revenge

Family

Single Mother

Death

Touchy Subjects

Media

Western Influence

Role Model

Our Wordle on Korean Drama stereotypes and archetypes

 Resources and Links

www.youtube.com/

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

www.naver.com

www.daum.net

The probelm is… since it was about Korean dramas, you would have to research in Korean…..

My group members’ blogs:

http://ninalim0717.wordpress.com/

http://christinabc.wordpress.com/

Though the clip Growing Up Online on Frontline portrays mostly the negative outcomes of internet use, I didn’t really buy it.

#1 In what ways would you need to change your routine in order to disconnect yourself from all media (i.e. no TV, no Internet, etc.) What problems would you encounter if you unplugged for one day? One week? One month?

As of now, I’ll have to move to some island with no internet connection or kill myself to disconnect myself from ALL media. And I can’t really see that happening. As I have recently experienced, one day of no internet frustrated you, because you want to be updated with news, chat with friends, play some games, look at some Wondergirls pictures and watch TV shows that Wondergirls came out in. And as I have been looking up stats for almost every single game of all kind of sports since when I was 3rd grade, I was dying to know the results of matches, especially when it involved the last week of NFL’s regular season game. Thus, one day without an internet connection frustrated me very much. Spending a week without internet would probably have caused so much stress that I would probably start yelling at people for no reason, and as for going for a month without internet… I don’t want to imagine. I would probably in a grave.

#2 How many hours per week do you estimate you spend on Facebook or similar personal networking sites? What are the benefits and disadvantages of using these sites?

I think I spend about 2 hours a week on Facebook. Facebook and other personal networking sites are good in that you can get in touch with friends that you no longer can see, as well as getting updated on those friends’ life as you can see pictures and videos that the friends put up on facebook. As for disadvantages, it can lead students (the majority of facebook users) away from homework.

#3 To what extent are you aware of viral marketing, the use of “advertorials” (presenting advertisements as editorial content), or direct marketing on Facebook and other social networking sites?

I don’t know much about viral marketing at all. All I know is that there are some random advertisements on Facebook and other social networking sites, and that I don’t think it’s very useful anyway.

#4 Personal response based on your individual viewing of “Growing Up Online”.

I agree that internet has corrupted many people, especially the young ones. However, it’s already been damaged and can’t be taken back. Yes, many have used interent networking systems wrongly and became so and so, but many also use those the right way and benefit from it. There are just too much good involved with internet to abandon internet at all, the only possible solution I see as “undoing” the damage done. I think we have to live with it, and leave kids alone to choose their own decisions. Many will go the wrong way but oh well, they are responsible for their decision so I wouldn’t really feel sorry for them for the consequences they get. 

On the bright side, internet networking systmes have made people more expressive and outgoing, even if that is only on-line. Even if it is only on internet some people socialize, they at least now get to socialize in some mean, as they probably wouldn’t have much socializing outside of internet. I think socializing with friends and other people are as important as studying calculus or science, as it is probably more useful in the future careers than the stuff we learn in school.

Having lived in Korea long enough, all the news about hagwons and plagiarism issues weren’t new to me.  Probably, students in cities (unless they are VERY VERY poor) have all been received hagwons assistance, including myself. Hagwons have become a haven for Korean students, who feel they are not getting proper teachings from their own schools. So it is not a surprise that Korean students struggle when they reach American universities, having to adjust to entirely new teaching styles and culture, without the usual hagwon assistance. And when education is the biggest resource in Korea, made up of one of the most competitive, smartest and ambitious people in the world, it is no surprise they are going to try just about everything to stay on top of their game- so they build hagwons now in Flushing, New York.

Flushing, New York or Seoul, Korea?

 I’m not really a big fan of all these hagwons. They are expensive and they raise students the wrong way. Even though there are growing number of hagwons that do actually try to enhance students’ creativity and all, but the majority is still the same traditonal hagwons- memorization and short cuts to get better grades. However, the thing is, we can’t really blame hagwons for everything. It’s actually become a very good economic source for Korea- it has created many jobs, and some times it really do help! The root of the problem is Korean schools. I have attenended- and was very successful in- Korean schools. From 6 years of elementary schools I have attended, I dominated the system. Cramming, memorization, solving… I almost always was ranked 1st in school (yes, most Korean schools rank students in public). When I moved onto middle school, in U.S., I was also very successful due to all the knowledge I stored through the competitive school environment in Korea. However, as time progressed, I started to fall behind. When I moved onto high school in SIS, I really struggled, when my “stored” knowledge was caught up by the curriculums. With increasing number of creative essays, class discussions, presentations, and other “speaking-out-aloud-in-class” activities, my grades plummeted. Although I have now adjusted to this Western style of learning quite a bit, I still have some problems here and there. Anyway my point is, it is the Korean schools and the lack of teaching done in there that increases the importance and reliance to hagwons. I mean, what would you trust more? Teachers at school who have graduated from an unknown college 20 years ago or “foreign” teachers who have graduated from Harvard or Princeton? I say the latter.

By hiring teachers who have graduated from Ivy League and other high profile schools, hagwons are attracting students more than ever

Article #2

I have seen many Korean students cheat and lie. However, since American/Canadian/New Zealand/etc teachers at our school all asserted that they’ve never cheated or seen their friends cheat becaues they were very honest and all, I never knew Americans were cheating so much. To be honest, I thought, other than people who actually cared about learning, which is not very big number in the US compared to in Korea, most American students would not really care about their grades and just do as they wish to. So coming across the news that A LOT of American students cheated was quite a shock.

tsk tsk... Cheating is bad, but at least you can try to make it less obvious;;

Now as for lying and stealing, I can understand the absurdly high rate in the U.S. In three years of my life in the American schools, I have seen more cases involved with stealing and lying than in the other 15 years of my life in Korea. I guess all the freedom and liberty sometimes can back fire huh? What was even more ironic was that with 83% of students attending religious schools, lying to parents was quite a bit higher than the 78% of students attending non-religious schools (This is why I never liked obssession over religions!). Yes, statistics can be deceptive and all, but it is still very shocking anyway.

Cheating, lying, stealing, killing, harassing, drinking, whatever other negative actions students can do seem much higher in the U.S. than schools in other countries. So, it really begs a question: “are American schools the cause of all these?”

First, the stance and the fighting style. In Woman Warrior, the woman warrior learns and encorporates her own fighting style by observing the behaviors of the animals. Also, in many movies, we see warriors using animal-like fighting style as in the movie Kung Fu Panda.

Not just from animal behaviors, there are other unique fighting styles that belong unique to the warrior. Such example is the drunken fighting style shown in the movie Druken Master. These unique fighting styles often are learnt by their masters, of whom are so respectable that enemies can recognize who the master is just by looking at the routines and styles of the opponents.

Along with the fighting styles learnt by the animal behaviors, warriors and natural world relates to each other very often. We often see people fighting in woods or near water, where warriors sometimes use the surrounding environment for their advantage. In many cheesy and lame B movies in China, such as the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers, it seems like an open space with tall bushes or in a forest full of bamboos are favorite place for duels.

As impossible it may seem, bamboo forest seems to be one of the favorite places for warriors to fly and fight

 Women were also another element about warrior tradition that stood out. Normally, when we think about warriors, these kind of people come to mind:  

 Yet, in those same Chinese warrrior B-movies mentioned above, the main warrior is surprisingly a woman. Not just in those Chinese B-movies, we see women being portrayed as warrriors very often!

So yes, the warrior traditions are very complex and deep. But would I want to be part of that warrior tradition? Hm… I think I’m okay with my normal, non-warrior life.

I will be honest. So far, this book has been the WORST book I have read so far, to a point where I got to miss old Huckleberry Finn. After reading the first paragraph, actually not even the whole first paragraph of Woman Warrior, I fell asleep and woke up three hours later. The force of the book was that great- it could have been a great cure for people suffering from insomnia. And when I battled through first two chapters of the book, which by the way was painfully long, the first thing that came into my mind was: “what exactly is this book about?”

In the article The Woman Warrior at 30 by Jess Row it says:

Yet the most remarkable, and often overlooked, quality of The Woman Warrior is that it is a book without a genre. At various times it has been described as a memoir, an autobiography, a novel, a manifesto; yet anyone who spends 10 minutes with it understands that none of these labels really apply. Not because Kingston sets out to exaggerate the “facts” of her own experience, à la James Frey, but because she deliberately acknowledges that to write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention. Like the “ghosts” in its subtitle (the word refers to the white Americans around whom Kingston grew up in Sacramento), The Woman Warrior stubbornly refuses to be either entirely fictive or entirely real. Perhaps the second most remarkable thing about the book is that in its wake, the American literary world still seems to regard the tissue-thin boundary between memoir and fiction as absolute and inviolable.

Now, this is from a very positive opinion of the book (which I think is a rare occasion), who is probably a Chinese him/herself. In my point of view, which I’m pretty sure almost everyone in world literature class would agree with, this book is not only lacking a genre, it is also lacking focus. Kingston writes, without any focus, about her life, a fictious life a fictious warrior character Fa Mu Lan, and about her mother, about China, about anything. Like my writing, the book was all over the place. At least my post so far has been bearable.

Young and Restless

3. In what ways do you think Ben Wu, the entrepreneur launching the Internet cafe, is representative of the “new” China?

             To be frank, the idea of internet café itself is very new to China. In a heavily conservative country like China where government censors much of internet, having a café where customers can use internet freely is a bit absurd. However, as it is for most other countries as well, internet itself is targeted mostly for the younger generations, and China isn’t exception. Considering that most customers use internet to play online games, which is targeted mainly for young men, it will draw attention from younger Chinese. Also, as Ben Wu received financial supports from the foreign investors in New York, he’s mingling China and foreign nation in its economy, a method that was not possible years back when China was much more restrictive.

7. To what extent are the struggles of the rapper, Wang Xiaolei, unique as a Chinese artist? Do you think that his life is typical of artists elsewhere? Explain your position.

             Xiaolei is unique as a Chinese artist by being a rapper alone. Because China is so conservative and has been isolated for a very long time, foreign influences has not yet reached very far, including the hip hop culture. Thus, because hip hop has not been around in China for a long time, there are not that many rappers in China, which can be proved by the fact that there is only one hip hop club in Beijing, the capital of China. Not to mention, hip hop includes a lot of anti-government and anti-society views, which would have been unthinkable in the past in China and still is a very touchy subject there. I think the life of Xiaolei as a rapper is similar in many other countries for some parts. It is true that hip hop culture has been criticized in many countries and many conservative Asian countries still do not fully accept hip hop music yet. It is true that many artists, especially rappers, tend to be poorer and tend not to get enough credit and go unnoticed for the most part. Like Xiaolei, being a rapper leaves stereotypical negative marks on themselves and unless they become a celebrity like Eminem or 50 Cents (which by the way is like a one in million chance) they tend to stay poor, because they just do not get the credits they fully deserve.

8. Who do you think is the happiest of the young people profiled in this documentary and why?

             I think Ben Wu, the internet café owner, is the happiest of the young (and few not so young) people shown in the documentary. With the success of his café, he has earned a lot of money and has become a man with a notable status within the Chinese community. Also, his wife, who has been parted away from him since he has come back to China, is planning to join him in China soon, which will then amend one thing he lacked- family. With money, social status, and a wife he actually loves to live with, Ben Wu, in my opinion, was the happiest of the young people in the documentary.

1. What does Kim say is the most likely explanation for the high dropout rate among Koreans?

A+ and 100%. Those are the two things that have become an expectation for Korean students. In order to get those grades, students study hard, day to day, sleeping three hours a day. Parents support these students, pouring money into hagwons, healthy foods, and some even to briberies! With so many time designated only to studying, many Korean students are not spending enough time on extra curricular activites which is a must for students’ education!

Another possible factor is that Korean students, until they become college students, live and study in an already well-planned schedules. Their life has been already scheduled out by parents before they were born. Because they live in a way that has been already set up to get into great colleges, with hagwons and tutors that assist their progress, students are left clueless when they get to university. No longer with hagwons and tutors to receive “help” and parents to schedule out their yearly plans, it seems almost inevitable that these students fail.

2. How does the dropout rate among Koreans compare to the dropout rate among other groups?

The drop out rate among Koreans of 44% is far greater than the 34% of American, 25% of Chinese and 21% of Indian students. Considering that more Americans, Chinese, and Indians have larger student body than that of Koreans, it is obvious that this drop out rate is quite serious.

3. What are you currently doing to increase your own college readiness? Is there anything you think you should do before you graduate from high school to be better prepared for university?

Unlike most Koreans, I did not depend too much on hagwons and parents. Because I lived in Suji, too far away to go to hagwons (which are mostly located in Apku or Gangnam) I did not have the opportunities to get help from hagwons too much. Also, as both my parents could not speak English or knew very much about American education, I had to study and work independently, setting up plans on my own. Thus, I think I’m more ready to become an independent university students tha many Korean students. However, although I work independently, I know that I’m not working hard enough and that I’m not using my time very wisely. Thus, before graduating, I should work on managing time wisely and conveniently.

4. What else do you think about this article?

First thing that came to my mind when I read this article was “why now?” After the release of this article, reputations of Korean students are surely going to go down. It is definitely a bad timing for us seniors who’s going to apply to many of those 14 schools researched. On the otherside, it may tell the Korean parents to stop forcing their children to spend all their time studying and start doing more extra curricular activities and so on.