kangmi: learning korean

-Humor stands out in a movie that is is seldom heartwarming and mostly sad. In one brief bedroom scene, Tae-Jung interrupts the lovemaking when he answers a telephone call from Seung-Yong. In the background, Ji-Hae sits up, pulls out a mirror, and begins to primp.

-Several scenes were long (five minutes or more), one-camera takes (the best of the lot took place in what looked like a hallway). Yoon said that some of those long shots took up to thirty takes, which must have been grueling for the actors.

-Quite a few audience members asked about Korean military service. In his most amusing answer, Yoon said that Korean soldiers do a lot of cleaning up, and laundry, and typing, and other mundane tasks, so much so that he used to forget why he was in the army. (North Korea, take note.)

-The subtitles were both a blessing and a curse. I would not have made it through without them, but sometimes I missed them completely because I was so intent on listening. Some of the dialogue reinforced some vocabulary and patterns I have just learned this week, which was immensely satisfying.

You can find more information about The Unforgiven at the Korean Film Council, Koreanfilm.org, and Variety .

I went alone (octaviuz is MIA, Insun is in North Carolina, and no one else wants to see a Korean movie with me), but after the Q&A I recognized the son of our former Korean tenants. Chatting with him eventually led to an invitation from Aaron Magnan-Park, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre to a local Korean restaurant for the after-party, where I briefly wowed one waiter with my 안영하세요 ability and no one at all with my karaoke rendition of Edelweiss. The food and the conversation were great, and I left with a signed poster and ticket, the name of the movie written by Yoon, and a few new film contacts.

More images to follow. But not any singing or eating ones. No one looks good like that.

Around this point in the shoot, an older Korean man started filming. He told us that his hobby was to visit a palace once a month to tape someone’s wedding shoot. He later sent us an edited copy that included footage not in the shoot, some of a small farm, as well as a flock of birds taking flight. The video survives, and when I get it, parts of it are going up on YouTube.

The scanner wasn’t large enough to get all of this photo, but in the original there are two other shoots going on behind us. You can see the one on the left, and the edge of one on the right.

These are the friends that accompanied us to the shoot. I don’t know who the men are, as they were his students. Hye Jin* was a friend of mine, and Tiffany and June were two of my roommates.

We married a couple of months later in the States.

*Through moving, divorce, moving, remarriage, and moving, I lost touch with some old friends. Over time, I’ve been able to reconnect with some of the non-Koreans. Hye Jin is one of two Korean friends I haven’t been able to track down. I welcome any suggestions readers have on finding her (and the other) again.

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students—25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese—to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

“They literally are seeing the world differently,” said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

“Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do,” he said in a telephone interview. “They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can’t afford it.”

The findings are reported in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.

Read the rest at Wired.

Often in China, I was embarrassed by my own difficult grasp on the language. For me, fluency and eloquence—these are the staples of my life. The thing I care most about is language. And I care very much about how words fit together and which ones I choose and other people choose. Grammar mistakes light up in my mind, as in Word. And so in China I just felt powerless in that regard. I had no nuance, and I had no ability to communicate subtleties, and I felt crippled by that. And in a way I’m grateful, because it was so humbling. Anybody who’s self-loving needs to take a trip out of his own language and try to communicate. It taught me more about the power of language and it taught me something about my own capabilities, the limits of my own competencies.

If I can still be taken down a peg or two, I’m not yet humble enough. 덕수씨, 고마워요.