» Accidental innuendo

Korean student mistakes
I work for an ESL website based in Korea, where Korean students post their writing online and I correct all their mistakes. Over the last couple years I've saved all my favourite unintentional ones.

-"i can be a person who kills two births with one stone" (Obviously meant "two birds," but this metaphor works even better.)

-"There are foreshore. We caught small crap. My children played so hard. But there was not many crap." (about a trip to the beach, where you can see carp.)

-"Today was raining. I don't like rain so much.
Because I feel not so good about that day's humidity. My jeans are wet. My bag and pipe is wet, too." (Bag and pipe? I hope this person is a Scotsman.)

-"There is a small garden in their back side."
(Koreans live in apartments and are unfamiliar with the concept of a "backyard.")

-"I stole the chickennuggit from my roommate. While I fled from him I choked on chicken."
(This was a translation drill. The original phrase was, of course, "I choked on the chicken nugget.")

-"Ironically, the most expensive things in my car are my Methmatics books, which are not stolen. That thief may not be a budding Mathematician." (This was also a translation drill. I would imagine a methmatics book would be valuable. Oddly, the student didn't have any trouble spelling "mathematician.")

-"I work more than 40 hours a week, take an evening course. Meanwhile, my bone is growing." (I really can't explain this one.)

-"This is the incontinent truth that we don't even feel like thinking about." (Inconvenient truth?)

-"Sometime, some testes will be come to them." (The student was talking about tests. This is a very common Korean error.)

-"Today wasn't a very good day because I have 4 testes today." (I warned you, didn't I?)

-"In a computer game, you will have to manage a group of slacker employees at a reproduction shop." (This was a translation drill. The "reproduction shop" was supposed to be a copy shop, not some sort of sex venue.)

-"I have a dream. Actually serevral dreams.
Those are the followings. My dreams of 2008!! There are 4 goals. First, lose my weight about 7kg to be able to wear mini skirt. Second, enter the graduate shool for English translation. Third, meet my ideal half who make true and pure love with me." (I didn't think she could top the Martin Luther King quote, but that last line made it all worthwhile.)

I hope these were amusing enough for you.
(Fri 13th Jun 2008, 10:46, More)

» I witnessed a crime

Technically I wasn't the witness...
This just happened a few weeks ago and my wife is still furious. What follows is a tale of child abuse, foreigners, sensationalist reporters, and a belligerent drunk Mrs Traitor.

It all started about three Fridays ago, when I was just about to go home for the weekend. On a message board for ESL teachers in Korea, a Kiwi girl made a frightening report. Behind her apartment is a daycare. She was home for the day because her mom was visiting, and they both heard the sound of a small child screaming. Looking out the back window, they saw this:
daehanmindecline.com/digital/20080125kindergarten/99.JPG
daehanmindecline.com/digital/20080125kindergarten/98.JPG
A little girl standing naked at the back door on a metal fire escape, in a temperature around freezing. She was out there for 15 minutes, until the door opened and an angry woman yanked her inside. The Kiwi assumed that this was a punishment for the little girl wetting her pants.

This was not the first time she'd witnessed this; it had happened with an even younger boy back in December. And usually she's at work during the day, so who knows how many other times it happened? So this time she took a picture and decided to do something about it. Problem was, as a foreigner in Korea, she had no idea what to do.

I was the first to reply, and I said with my wife's help I could get these pictures spread all over the Korean Internet. Korea has a vicious Internet vigilante community, and are known for regularly destroying human beings.

When I showed my wife the pictures, she knew we had to do something. We decided our first step should be to phone the police, because if we went to the media first we'd look kind of like media whores.

So my wife called the police station and spoke to an uncooperative detective. The detective told us that we couldn't report the crime as we weren't actual witnesses. The fact we had the pictures (uncensored originally; blur added by me) wasn't enough--only the Kiwi could report the crime. Moreover, the right police department was closed for the weekend, and we had to bring the Kiwi in on a weekday between 9 and 6. The cop then started asking my wife why she was involved; she didn't have kids at the daycare, she didn't know anyone who had kids there, and she hadn't witnessed the crime. She claimed she was friends with the Kiwi and just helping her out, which was basically true.

So we decided to go to the media. First my wife contacted an investigative TV programme with SBS, a major Korean broadcaster. They were very interested, and planned to sneak hidden cameras into the daycare. Next, we contacted a reporter from the online Korean newspaper ohmynews.com, who also was on duty when the cops weren't. By the way, keep in mind that all our progress was being reported back on the ESL site by me.

The ohmynews reporter scooped the story. He contacted the daycare owners, who belligerently told him where to stuff his allegations. It was quoteworthy enough to make them look like bad guys, so he ran the story with the abuse pictures. Right after it went online, the daycare people called him back and confessed that they had abused the kid, but only that one time (despite the fact the Kiwi's insistence she'd seen it twice).

By Monday, the shitstorm had begun. The Kiwi reported to me that there was a circus of people outside her apartment, and furious parents were physically pulling their kids out of the daycare.

The daycare turned out to be government-funded, and was intended for low-income families who couldn't afford anything else. The owners selected their youngest employee and claimed that she had locked the little girl out in the cold (although the Kiwi claimed the employee she saw was much older). Ah, Confucianism.

Believe it or not, the parents of the little girl identified in the pictures chose not to take action, after the daycare worker was shown on TV bowing to them and apologising for torturing their daughter. In order for further action to be taken, the Kiwi had to file a complaint with the police, which she did.

The story made it to the front page of every Internet news site. The entire country was furious. For once, a foreigner was in the headline news, and she was being called a hero. But since no reporter in Korea seems to know any English, they had to go through my wife to contact her, set up interviews, etc. So my wife's phone was ringing nonstop, although she was mostly kept out of the news.

One thing we'd been talking about on the ESL website was the initial poor response of the police. Of course now that 40 million Koreans were paying attention they were a lot more responsive. Then the shitstorm widened.

An anonymous Korean woman, I'm assuming the wife of another ESL poster, called the police herself. She claimed that she was friends with the Kiwi, and the two of them had contacted the police together on Saturday. Not true, as it was my wife and I who contacted the police, and the Kiwi wasn't with us. Anyway, this anonymous woman hurled abuse at the police and hung up.

The police didn't get her name, but they knew how to find her. They called up the ohmynews reporter and asked him "Who's that Korean woman who's been helping you out?" The reporter told them my wife's name and gave them her phone number. So the police started calling my wife nonstop about "her" complaint, saying that they would begin an investigation and punish the detective she spoke to. She said she made no such complaint, but they didn't believe her. She had to go down to the police station to sort it out, and she told me the police were furious that she was causing trouble for this detective. But, she sorted it out and promised she would not make any sort of complaint against them. The police also told my wife that the Kiwi was angry at her, because she didn't want to go to the media. Of course, meanwhile, the Kiwi was enjoying the attention of several million Koreans, and thought no such thing.

Then, a new interview came out with the Kiwi, who was quoted saying that my wife physically went to the police station (the wrong police station, mind you--she gave the name of a police box rather than the appropriate headquarters) and the police didn't help at all. This was written by the ohmynews reporter, who knew full well my wife phoned, not visited, the police. My wife called the reporter, who, keep in mind, had already betrayed her by giving her over to the police, and demanded he take that part out of the story before the police see. Oh yeah, and while the Kiwi's identity was kept secret, the reporter had no trouble running a quote of her thanking me personally (by username).

Of course, the police had seen the article as soon as it came out, and they were even more angry at my wife now. They accused her of breaking her word. She did her best to sort things out, but they didn't trust her. Even the reporter believed that she was the anonymous caller, and now just didn't want to back up her words.

The media got a whiff of this, and they started calling her nonstop to get a quote about how the police mishandled the situation. I got a couple propositions for interviews, but I just told them someone had made a big mess of things and now my wife looked bad.

We managed to get all the new articles out to remove all references to the police doing a bad job, and immediately the story went from top of the headlines all the way to the bottom. Now that police incompetence was out of the picture, nobody cared.

I came home on Friday, a week after it started, to find my wife had skipped work and had been drinking all day. Everyone had been praising the Kiwi for standing up, but they were mad at my wife for not having the balls to take down the police. By this point my wife wished she had never gotten involved.

Anyway, sorry for length, but it took you less time to read this than it did for the daycare workers to let that poor little girl in out of the cold.
(Fri 15th Feb 2008, 2:59, More)

» Unexpected Nudity

Hated in Korea
I've got one that probably affected 10 000 times as many people as all of your stories combined. It involves full frontal nudity, election tampering, Japanese imperialism, and good old fashioned punk rock.

Where to start? I moved to South Korea in December 2003, and found a place immediately in the local punk scene. It's small, young, and has more than enough to rebel against. The earliest band, Crying Nut, played some very patriotic concerts during the 2002 World Cup, and have become a household name, AKA sellouts. The crop of bands at the time were very opposed to this, especially when one band broke rank and appeared in a very retarded cell phone commercial.

I was briefly unemployed in 2005, giving time to dedicate to photography and making zines. One day I was hanging out with the lead singer of Rux, who also managed all the punk bands, including pogo punk bands Couch and Spiky Brats, both who at the time had the requisite spiked hair and studded jackets. He got a call from Casio, who wanted Couch to appear in a TV commercial, but was having trouble reaching the lead singer. Finally he answered, welding torch in one hand, cell phone in the other, high up in a construction site. He listened to her offer, and replied (in Korean of course), "Fuck it, I won't do it." I later interviewed him for the zine, where I concluded with "You won’t see Couch on TV anytime soon." Couch's singer was quoted saying "If that commercial makes us clowns, I don’t want it." Keep that in mind.

Months passed, and Rux was invited to appear on Music Camp, a "live" music performance show on MBC, one of the main broadcasters in Korea. It's live in the sense it's broadcast live, but the musical elements are mainly prerecorded so it's more like air guitar karaoke. Music Camp mainly featured trashy pop acts, but occasionally would spotlight an underground band. There was probably some opposition to this among the punks, but I don't remember.

On the morning of the show, Rux found out they were allowed to do whatever they wanted on stage. They being typical Korean punks, this meant inviting as many of their friends on stage with them to wave flags and raise banners. I really wanted to go along so I could try taking pictures of how pop stars act backstage. Just before I was out the door, Mrs Traitor started complaining how I always prefer the punks to her. I stayed home and we sorted it all out. Otherwise I would've been on stage at the performance, on live television broadcast nationally.

We turned the TV on but missed the Rux performance, but we watched the rest of the show hoping they hadn't shown it yet. The pop acts were all amateur, awkward. One act which featured some pop star after her return from Africa featured some very awkward dancing in which she was clearly supposed to dryhump some black guys. Their hearts weren't in it. The emcees kept apologising for technical problems earlier in the show.

After it ended, I called Rux's guitarist, to see how it went, and my wife got online. We both found out at exactly the same split second, and shouted "Holy shit, they got naked!"

Here's the moneyshot (NSFW).
www.daehanmindecline.com/transfer/musiccamprux.asx

Or you could watch it on Youtube (but don't judge Rux based on that performance).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX8AuyjDAw4

Note that at the time, the Korean punk scene was having a love affair with the Adicts, so the lead singer of Couch was wearing white face. He was literally on TV, being a clown. With his cock flapping around for hundreds of thousands to see. He was joined by the guitarist from Spiky Brats.

And so began the shitstorm, and our story is far from over. Why the performance wasn't aired with a few seconds delay, I don't know. That would've assured that only the minds of the middle school girls in the audience would be poisoned, and not the entire nation's TV audience. I had the Rux guitarist on the phone, and he sounded like someone had just made love to his dead grandmother. The two flashers were arrested, along with the lead singer of Rux, though he was released. For the next few weeks, the media tried to prove that the lead singer put them up to it, so he would be sent to jail too.

Before this performance, nobody in the country knew that punk existed. Now they knew, and they hated us. You'd think that this would've brought out a ton of support from new people, but it didn't. The Korean punks warned me it would be dangerous to wear any kind of punk clothes (not that I particularly do anyway). If you watched the YouTube video, there's one guy with a brightly coloured mohawk and a Clash shirt which features the Japanese Imperial flag. Reports speculated that he was some kind of anti-Korean Japanese imperialist. He shaved the mohawk off and held a press conference to basically tell everybody not to jump to crazy conclusions.

The then mayor of Seoul (now president of Korea) remarked that perhaps the government should run a blacklist of lewd performers, harkening back to the '70s when musicians were routinely jailed.

Music Camp was cancelled (but possibly brought back later. MBC, the network, had been engaged in a very important legal battle against Samsung and the Joongang newspaper. Recordings had been leaked to MBC of the presidents of both companies trying to rig the 1998 presidential election to try and revive the military dictatorship. Evidence had been illegally obtained, but fortunately the CEOs were losing the battle. Then the tables turned thanks to this incident, and it was MBC who was on the wrong side of the law. Some people even speculated that Samsung paid the punks to show their dicks to the country. Traitors walked free, and reporters were jailed.

Then the media shitstorm moved on. There was news that girls 12 years old and younger were being raped at a a kids' summer camp. What's more, the camp was run by the daughter of the previously mentioned '70s dictator. She remarked to the media "What are you so upset about? It's not like they're old enough to get pregnant." I think for once, us punks implausibly had a bit of sympathy for the dictator's daughter and her rape camp.

Shortly after, all lawsuits against Korean punk were dropped. The two flashers were released from jail after having spent three months inside. The lead singer of Couch told me jail was awesome, and the food was so good he gained weight. They were on some kind of probation that forbade them from performing for a year, and they waited a couple months before breaking it.

Things went back to normal, with our small scene struggling to keep afloat in a city of 10 million, and we all faded back into obscurity. But these days if you mention Couch loud enough, you still might get somebody yelling at you.
(Fri 29th May 2009, 4:49, More)

» Tales of the Unexplained

Psychic Medium
I know there've been a few stories on here about people who claim to be able to speak to the dead. Some positive, some negative. Well, I had an extraordinary experience with a psychic a few years ago, and I'm going to share it with you only if you promise not to poke holes in it, as I still have strong feelings about it.

There was a group of people around, and the medium was up on a stage. "Okay, I have contacted a spirit," she said. "I'm getting a name. Something that starts with M or N."

Nobody responded, so she went on.

"Or R."

I immediately leapt to my feet, as my dear grandfather's first name started with R. "Robert?" I cried.

"Yes," said the medium. "Okay, I'm getting the impression that Robert is someone you look up to. Possibly an older relative, or teacher..."

"Robert was my grandfather's name!" I exclaimed.

"And I'm getting that your grandfather has passed on?" the medium asked.

"Yes!" I cried, to gasps and applause from the audience.

"Was his death very sudden?" the medium asked.

"No, he suffered for several years," I replied.

"-Because he's telling me that he suffered for quite some time," the medium continued. "I'm getting that your grandfather was a very humorous man. He really was full of life."

"He was a miserable old man when he was alive," I replied. But I was glad to hear that in death, he had finally found happiness.

"He says he's okay now," the medium told me. "He is very happy, and he is proud of you. Okay, over here now. I'm getting a J? G? John. Joe. George..."

Laugh all you want, but you can't answer this: how did she know that my grandfather was happy? How could she find out he was proud of me if she can't really speak to the dead? I rest my case.
(Tue 8th Jul 2008, 8:28, More)

» The Weird Kid In Class

I went to school with a superhero
The story starts back when I was in grade nine, the final year of Canadian middle school. There was this big fat kid a grade younger than me who was one of the many laughing stocks of the school. Matt was easily the fattest person in the school, spoke with a lisp, and had a high temper. It was pretty often you'd see him fighting someone, though he always lost and always looked like a fool. Once I passed by the wrestling room and saw a kid half his size wrestling Matt. The guy was winning simply by staying out of Matt's reach and taunting him to chase him around the wrestling mat. Oh, did I mention Matt was so heavy, he had to use a walking stick to get around? A walking stick being unavailable, he would often use a ski pole or fishing rod.

Let's fast forward two years. I've switched to high school and already finished off one year, so now Matt is entering my high school.

People started talking around the school about "Powerman." They all had stories like "Powerman ran into my science lab today and threatened to punish all evildoers" or "Powerman made me pay homage to his superpowers." I heard these stories for a month before I finally saw him for myself, and yes it was giant Matt, wearing a (Canadian) football helmet, welding gloves, a cape, and a crystal visor. He would waddle through the school coming out with all sorts of comical phrases, "Up up and away! Oh yeah, forgot--can't fly!" Everyone in the school had a story about him.

Around that time I decided to approach him for an interview. I found him in the lunch room, and when I asked him, his eyes lit up. "Is it for the student paper?" I shrugged. "Sure." Later I took the interview to the student paper, but they refused to publish it because it would encourage him.

Powerman was a great person to interview. He told me his weight and all his speech and social problems are due to some ADHD prescription drugs he's on (maybe Tom Cruise was right). He used to get beaten up every day of his life, but since he started wearing the Powerman costume, nobody had touched him; they must have all thought he was doing a good enough job of humiliating himself without their help. He told me "Power Day is coming," which the guidance counsellor stepped in and told him he could never do.

Powerman and I became friendly toward each other. I still laughed my ass off at him, but that's what he wanted. He graduated a year after me, and I heard the teachers were planning on not letting him walk across the stage for his commencement because they were afraid what he would do. After he graduated he went through a series of job placement programs for the physically disabled. He got a job at a lollipop factory or something and I didn't see him for a while.

Then he tried to become a street performer at the annual Fringe festival. He revealed to the world that, despite being enormous, he is extremely flexible, and billed himself "The world's fattest contortionist." A year later, he got into stand-up comedy. The only two times I saw him on stage he cracked me up so hard ("Do you think a dentist dies a little inside every time he gets a gummer from a hooker?") Shortly after he was voted "funniest working man in the city."

With his contortion abilities, he was recruited into the Jim Rose Circus, a famous American travelling freak show. He has toured England, Ireland, Iceland, Australia, and all through the US. Today, he is probably the most famous person I know from school. You can have a look at his website here. fatbend.com/

So I want to take the time to say "Hey guidance counsellors! You were wrong!"
(Tue 23rd Jan 2007, 2:36, More)