In the mid-1990s, a massive seismic shift took place under the cultural landscape of South Korea, almost immediately causing a phenomenon known as the “Korean Wave”, or Hallyu (한류).
The Wave – believed by some (Korean) experts to be the most powerful force on earth – has swept outwards from the peninsula, engulfing whole nations, and sparing nobody… Nobody but you, America.
That is, until now.
There’s the romantic side of getting married, and then there’s the ‘wedding’ itself…
When I’m nervous I yawn, and the more nervous I am the more uncontrollable my yawning becomes. Right now I’m not tired, but I’m yawning once every twenty or thirty seconds
The man behind the desk is smiling at us and stamping papers. There are hundreds of papers and he’s stamping either side, in carefully chosen places, without looking down. The speed is incredible. He looks about seventy and I wonder for how many years he has been here, stamping these same forms in the same places.
I’m getting married today. Like, right now. Right this minute. It’s happening now, after months of planning, of waiting. There is no priest, no vows, no dress… Just a guy stamping papers quietly and smiling while I yawn like an idiot.
China isn’t really what I expected. It’s better, in many ways, and also worse. In other words, it’s unique. It’s its own strange place which really doesn’t match well with the western view. For example, where’s the communism? Aside from the portraits of Mao, I can’t see anything “Red.” All I see is McDonalds, KFC, Hilton hotels… Everyone is trying desperately to sell something, to make some money.
It’s dirtier than a porno theatre, too. The streets are quite literally coated in shit. Some places are too dirty for cockroaches, and others are too swamped by roaches for dirt to settle. Trash piles threaten not only an array of diseases, but the possibility of collapsing and crushing a passer-by. The skies are an orangey-yellow colour, thick with the exhaust fumes from millions of overcrowded buses and motorcycles driven by small children and even smaller old men and women.
K-pop is inexplicably popular. I’d never heard of it before coming to Korea, but according to the frighteningly nationalistic Korean press, it’s a world sensation. All across the global, people are dancing to the startlingly derivative nonsense that is contemporary Korean “music.”
But maybe I’m being too cynical.
Maybe K-pop will conquer the globe.
In the unlikely event that these derivative “musicians” take the West by storm – and given some of the bands that have achieved stardom in the English-speaking world, that’s not hard to imagine – here’s a guide for the uninitiated. Something you can use to seem hip when the time comes, or to bag yourself a young Korean lover…
Rain
Who?
Probably the one Korean singer that you may already know, thanks to an appearance on the Colbert Report. He is known as a great dancer, and an actor.
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