Don’t get your panties in a twist redux

This has got to be the fifth or sixth time since I came to Korea when I’ve read about some guy getting busted for stealing women’s panties. This time it’s an office worker in his 40s who was caught for stealing over 200 pieces of women’s underwear.

According to one of the English-language dailies in Korea, the suspect identified only as a 48-year-old Yang (there the newspapers go again, only using the person’s last name), snuck into a house on Nov. 14 and took some 11 pieces of women’s undergarments, worth around 500,000 won.

I guess if you are going to steal some panties, you want to steal the best.

The article went on to say that after Yang was detained, the police discovered that besides his latest theft he had stolen an additional 274 pieces of female underwear, worth some 3.5 million won on 30 occasions.

When the police searched his house, they found a large quantity of underwear and shoes.

“Yang is married and stated that he stole female underwear to fulfill his personal desire,” a police officer said.

What that desire is, the police did not say but I am guessing that his wife wouldn’t be too thrilled about it.

The police suspect that Yang committed more thefts, saying that he was often seen roaming near universities where students live alone.

Creepy.

“With every Christmas card I write…”

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, well maybe not too much, but with November almost over, and with the holidays just around the corner, it is time to think about shopping, Christmas trees, decorations, and Christmas cards.

Although these days it doesn’t seem that as many people send Christmas cards as they did in the past (to be sure, it’s been a few years since I last sent out Christmas cards) I have always been one of those firm believers that what you write inside the card is just as important as the specific card you choose for a family member, friend, or colleague. Indeed, the message itself became my own special present to that person and hopefully it would be something that he or she would remember long after Christmas had come and gone.

It’s probably true that most people who are caught up in the hustle and bustle of the season may not take the time to sit down and carefully compose a “Christmas message.” Instead, they rely on the card’s message, sign one’s name and leave it that.

On the contrary, writing a message does not take that much time and depending on who you are going to send that card to, the message is important and thoughtful. In fact, one of the things that I have always enjoyed about sending Christmas cards was spending an afternoon or two writing those special and thoughtful Christmas messages. For some of the recipients of those cards it might be one of the few times that we have corresponded over the year and as such, that Christmas message becomes all the more important.

Of course what you write also depends on the person and how well you know that person. Aside from the usual “spirit of the season” fanfare, in the messages that I have written, I have tried to capture not only the holy nature of the season with the birth of Christ but also extending best wishes for spirit of the season in giving and spreading good cheer. After all, that is what the holiday season is all about.

(For non-Christian holiday revelers–Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindi—it goes without saying to choose those generic, non-Christian holiday cards but that doesn’t mean your message has to be a generic one. It is a good time to reflect on why this person you are sending the card to is important or special to you.)

If you have been out of touch with the person for a while now would be a good time to catch up on things but not too much. The most important thing to remember is that this is a “Christmas card” and you don’t want to stray too far from the spirit of the season. Talk about their family and wishing everyone happy holidays but don’t talk too much about the problems you have been having this year.

I know that when I receive a Christmas card from someone I really appreciate the effort that went into the message they wrote inside the card. If someone just signed their name I would think that he or she doesn’t think that much of me to write just a sentences. I might even think that by not writing anything or just a word or two that the person is just going through the motions of sending cards.

Finally, I believe that what we write in the card is just as important as the special card we pick out for that person. It’s part of the spirit of the season and makes that Christmas card all the more special for the person who reads it.

iPod, therefore I am

Picked up the new iPod Nano yesterday in Daejeon. Don’t ask me which generation; I’ve already lost count. Talk about a sweet little music machine though with its video camera, pedometer, and 8GB of space.

 

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Apple. They make some cool gadgets that make life easier, albeit when it comes to enjoying music.

Serving up Chicken, Korean-style

From the moment I had my first taste of Korean food—a hearty bowl of that famous vegetable and rice medley, Bibimbap—when I first arrived in Korea, I have been a big fan of Korean cuisine.

Over the years I have come to enjoy a variety of Korean food especially some of the spicier chigae (pronounced chee-gay) dishes and those perennial favorites of foreigners, kalbi and bulgogi. Of those chigae dishes (which are a spicy stew with lots of kimchi and red pepper), my favorite has always been Budae chigae (Budae [pronounced boo-day] is Korean for military camp). This zesty stew, which first became popular during the Korean War, is a hearty concoction of kimchi, onions, small rice cakes, Spam, hot dogs, and ramen. It is generally believed that the origin of this dish started when ROK soldiers scrounged for some of the ingredients (the Spam and hot dogs) from their American counterparts.

While Korea might be famous for some of its more traditional dishes like bulgogi, kalbi, and bibimbap (bee-bim-baap) as well as its chigaes, it is perhaps equally famous for some of its chicken dishes. To be sure, when it comes to some of the more sumptuous culinary delights in Korea, chicken dishes like ddak-kalbi, buldak, or samkaetang (sam-kay-tawng)are without question the tastiest dishes you will find in Korea bar none.

Like those two foreigner’s favorites—bulgogi and kalbi—ddak-kalbi is also grilled right at your table. You’ll never have anything more delicious when you can grill up your own food at your table. It is like having your own mini-barbecue inside (though, you might end up smelling like the meat you just grilled at your table).

While you can find ddak-kalbi restaurants almost anywhere you go in Korea, Chuncheon a few hours from Seoul is famous for its ddak-kalbi and even has a street named after this hearty dish. Although some ddak-kalbi purists dislike the excessive use of sweet potatoes in the dish, its chunks of chicken in a zesty, spicy sauce remains a culinary delight. It can get a little messy and many places provide “chicken bibs” to catch the sauce dripping off these tasty morsels of chicken.

On the other hand, if you are one of those people who believe that variety is the spice of life, for the spiciest chicken you’ll ever eat in Korea (and perhaps anywhere else in the world) there is no match to buldak or as it perhaps better known as, “fire chicken.’’ Just a couple of bites and you will find out why. It is so spicy, even some of my Korean friends have admitted that they cannot eat too much of it. Maybe that is why it goes down better with massive quantities of beer.

Then there’s samkaetang, the popular chicken, rice, and ginseng dish, which is usually enjoyed during the hot summer months. This hearty dish is one that you don’t want to miss out on while you are in Korea. And you don’t have to wait until summer to enjoy it, though. It is good any time of the year and very nutritious for you.

Traditional dishes aside, where chicken is big in Korea, especially the fried or barbecue variety, is the chicken served up in all these mom and pop chicken joints scattered across the country. You can’t go 50 meters in Seoul, Pusan, and other cities without coming across one of these shops. Most of them are some just some hole-in-the-wall operation cramped with as many tables and chairs that can be squeezed inside. If you don’t mind literally bumping elbows with the people eating at the next table, these small chicken joints are a great place to get together with friends or colleagues for beer and chicken.

Other than the mom and pop variety of these chicken joints, some of the names of the larger chain ones can be a little misleading, but not when it comes to some the barbecue and fried chicken that you can enjoy at them. You have your Pinocchio Chicken, Donkey Chicken, and Pelicanna Chicken to name but a few. One of my favorite ones—either an obvious rip-off (of that formidable fried chicken giant Kentucky Fried Chicken) or just a case of bad spelling—was “Kenturkey Fried Chicken’’ that I once came across near Myongji University in Seoul.

One of my favorite chicken places was Yoo Jin Chicken located in Yonhui-dong just a

short walk down from the West Gate of Yonsei University. When I started teaching at Yonsei, it was a favorite among the other language instructors and myself. Come every Tuesday night after work, and sometimes on the weekends that is where you would usually find us. It was our equivalent of a neighborhood bar or pub which one would find back in their own country.

In recent years, there has been a surge of upscale chicken places, which have taken fried chicken to the next level and offer a pretty decent delivery service but a little pricey. However, I still prefer the smaller chicken joints. What I always liked about them was that they are a great place to unwind with a couple plates of chicken and some cheap suds. They have always been the perfect complement to a night on the town or an alternative to noisier haunts.

It takes a while to get used to how some of this chicken is prepared and served up. It’s nothing like back home, in my case stopping in at John’s North Star on St. Vincent’s Avenue for an order or two of chicken, a quarter light or a quarter dark that usually comes with fries, salad and some bread. Here, you order a plate or a box of chicken and aside from the legs and wings, the rest of the chicken is cut up with these industrial-sized scissors—meat and bones together. You’ve got to be careful when eating these chunks of chicken as not to get a piece of bone lodged in your throat.

So, if you happen to find yourself in Korea one day—either on business or pleasure—and you’ve had your fill of kimchi and rice, don’t worry. At the signpost up ahead or in humming red or yellow neon, there’s a chicken place open for business and ready to satisfy whatever fried chicken pangs of hunger you might be experiencing.

Investigators Probed over Free Drinks and Sex

There are some times when the way the news is reported in Korea that it reads like a Franz Kafka short story or novel. Take for example this news tidbit about the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office internal affairs division investigating two officials on suspicion of receiving entertainment at a room salon (a “legal” bordello where women entertain men, serve them drinks and offer sexual services) in southern Seoul.

“According to the office, an employee of the room salon recently filed a petition with the office, claiming the two, identified only as ‘S’ and ‘K,’ frequented the bar and drank pricey whiskeys that totaled at least hundreds of millions of won for free by using their status as members of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office. The petition added that they received sexual entertainment, the prosecution said.”

It is common in Korea, at least when a Korean has committed a crime to never divulge the full name—usually just the last name and in some instances, like this article, to only use an initial. Pretty Kafkaesque, huh?

It gets weirder when it comes to dishing out possible punishment when a prosecutor familiar with the case said, “If the allegations are confirmed to be true, we plan to penalize them.” Gee, not to sound too opinionated, but do you think so?

Then there’s the guy from the room salon who filed the petition initially. I doubt he was being a concerned, law-abiding citizen doing his civic duty by blowing the whistle on S and K. If anything he was blowing the whistle on them for being deadbeats and not paying their bill.

Rats

The names have been changed to protect the innocent

You meet a lot of interesting people when you’ve been living overseas for as long as I have, which if you count this month is now 20 years and five months, not counting the two years I was stationed in Panama and subtracting the two months I was back in the States in 2006.

You meet people from all walks of life, some with colorful personalities others with a checkered past hoping to escape whatever ghosts or neuroses are after them. By and large though, most the people I have met, worked with, partied with and traveled with have been some genuine folks that I was glad to make their acquaintance.

Without question, many of the people we meet when we are living and working in another country oftentimes define who we are; other times these individuals make up the rich tapestry of this shared experience.

I first met Mike M. not long after I had arrived in Korea to teach English at what was then, back in 1990, one of the three top English language institutes in Seoul. I had been in country since early December and Mike arrived shortly thereafter. The school had four-week terms so there was always someone rotating in and rotating out. There were peak periods in winter and summer when university students were on vacation and had nothing better to do than spend those vacation days studying English. The rest of the year was relatively quiet, enrollment-wise and that’s when Mike arrived.

There were two teacher’s offices on the second floor and Mike ended up in the office I shared with around 15 other teachers. It was a bit cramped, especially before morning and evening conversation classes with everyone hustling to get lesson plans done and copies made before those classes started and all the more hectic during the last week of the term.

That’s when I met Mike, during the last hectic week of the term while I was getting ready to go to class. All new teachers had a week of orientation before they started teaching and Mike was waiting for a teacher to observe that teacher’s class.

We didn’t have much time to talk then, but when we had the chance later, I found out he was an Asian old hat courtesy of Uncle Sam and the draft that sent him to Vietnam in the late 60s. After his tour of duty in Nam, he bounced around Asia for awhile, went back to the States got a college degree and bounced right back to Asia teaching English in Taiwan, Thailand, and eventually Korea.

He was a quiet man. Never said much at school and about the only time we really had a lengthy conversation was when we talked about living in Seoul one day and other time when he asked to borrow my Traveling Wilburys’ cassette tape. There was a song he wanted to use in one of his classes. I don’t think too many people knew he had been in Nam and I felt that he wanted to keep it that way.

We were supposed to have our photos taken when we arrived at this language institute and every teacher would have a framed 8×10 photo of them in the stairwell for all the students to see. Mike, who was already in his late forties wasn’t too keen on this idea and stuck a photo of some Russian pianist he had ripped out of a photo magazine in the frame instead. It was a glossy photo and none of the students were the wiser; indeed, they asked the information desk in the lobby who that teacher was in the photo.

Mike was also a bit of loner and did not hang out with the other teachers too much. There were some teachers who were quite vocal and outgoing and I could tell, by the way he rolled his eyes when one of these teachers started talking about what he or she had done the previous weekend, how much he sort of resented that kind of bravado.

He just liked to keep to himself. One time, when we combined our classes during The Great Korean Pumpkin Carve-off Contest, the staff wanted to take a picture of the pumpkin the students had carved as well as the students and Mike and I. When it came time to take the photo, Mike held the pumpkin up over his face so no one would recognize him.

He must have felt pretty bummed though the day the new schedule came out and his name wasn’t on the schedule.

“Did I get fired or something?” he asked the scheduling coordinator.

Mike was so quiet that some people didn’t even know who he was until someone told them that he was a teacher.

That scheduling gaffe was the first of a series of events that pushed Mike over the edge.

The second was the rats.

Most of the staff was housed in old, but rather spacious apartments in a housing complex one subway stop down from the Olympic sports complex. Two teachers shared a furnished five room apartment that was near the Han River and about a ten-minute walk to Lotte World, this sprawling entertainment and shopping complex in southern Seoul.

When I moved into mine in December of 1990, they were already more than five years old and showing the worst of wear and tear; not rundown, but just looking a bit old and drab. And there was also a bit of a rodent problem. At night, you could hear these rodents (hopefully they were just large mice) scurrying back and forth in a crawl space between floors.

I never saw a live one in my apartment, but outside, I passed just as many squished dead rats on the road as I did vomit landmines (in Korea it is quite common for people, who have consumed more than a lions share worth of beer and soju, Korean rice wine, to throw up anywhere they want when coming home from the bars and clubs). Better to be a dead rat on the street than a live one at home.

I bet if I asked Mike what he’d prefer, it would have also been a dead rat on the street.

One morning, Mike came in the staff room pretty shaken up about something. He seemed a bit flustered as well as agitated. He started to prepare for his class, but everyone could tell that something was really bothering him.

“What’s the matter Mike?” a teacher asked.

Mike didn’t say anything at first as though he hadn’t been listening, but then looked up from his desk.

“There was a rat in my apartment last night,” Mike said slowly.

“Damn, did you kill it?” I asked.

Mike shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Where was it?” another teacher asked.

Mike turned around in his chair to face a handful of teachers who had gathered to hear about his rat problem. “I went to bed early last night, but sometime in the middle of the night, I heard this sound, a scratching sound and then I felt something on my chest. I opened my eyes and in the light from the streetlight outside my room, shining in through the window, I saw this rat sitting on my chest looking at me.”

“Damn Mike, that’s terrible. I would have freaked,” the first teacher said. “What did you do?”

“The rat wouldn’t move. It just kept on sitting there staring at me,” Mike continued. “I thought for sure as soon as I moved it would move. It was like it was hypnotized or something. Finally I grabbed a book near my bed, swatted it and it ran away.”

“Are you okay Mike?” I asked.

Mike nodded and went to class.

By the end of the day, everyone in the institute was talking about the Mike’s rat and how freaked they would have been had it happened to them. His apartment mate, Alex confirmed the story and added one more crucial detail: how he and Mike had spent the rest of the night turning the apartment upside down trying to find that rat.

“Finally, we gave up, but we did locate where it had gotten into the apartment,” Alex said.

“Where was that,” I asked.

“In the kitchen, inside one of the cupboards,” Alex explained. “Our rat or the former rat had gnawed a hole in one corner of the cupboard and that is where we suspected it came in. We plugged up that hole good. If the rat did get in through that hole, it’s not going to get back in again.”

The next day, when Mike came into the staff room, he was just as visibly shaken as he had been the day before.

“Well, did your plug job do the trick?” a teacher asked.

Mike shook his head. “The rat pushed the plug out. He was in my room when I went home last night. Alex and I chased him around the apartment for an hour but he escaped again.”

Mike grabbed his class folder and muttered something about how he wished he had a baseball bat to smash the rat’s head in the next time he came back as he walked out of the staff room.

He was never the same after that rat incident. He had a hard time sleeping at night because he was worried the rat would come back. Many mornings, when he shuffled into the staff room after another sleepless night, wouldn’t say much to anyone other than a few grunts when someone asked him how he was that morning.

After two more terms, Mike had had enough of Korea and left. No one ever heard from him again.

Armistice Day

“The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month”

When I was a young boy growing up in America’s Midwest back in the 1960s, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who lived about a mile east of LaSalle, Illinois a town approximately 90 miles southwest of Chicago.

I was there first grandchild and as all grandparents do with their first grandchild they spoiled me a lot. Not just with presents and money, but also getting to spend a lot of time with them. However, one thing that they didn’t spoil me with, as far as all those times I got to spend with them, were many of the values and traditions they instilled in me like remembering Armistice Day, or as it is also called Remembrance Day.

This date on November 11 commemorates the armistice signed by the Allies of World War I and Germany in Rethondes, France for the cessation of the hostilities on the Western Front which took place at 11:00 in the morning—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. (Although the war might have ended on the western front, fighting still continued in other regions, especially in the former Russian Empire and parts of the Ottoman Empire.

This date was declared a national holiday in many of the allied nations to remember those who had died in “the war to end all wars.”

One of my earliest memories of commemorating Armistice Day—my grandparents always referred to it as Armistice Day—was one of those days when I was visiting them. I must have been six or seven at the time when my grandmother told me about the holiday and what I should do to commemorate it.

A few minutes before 11:00am, my grandmother and I walked outside and then exactly at 11:00, we heard a whistle blowing from the Alpha Cement Mill (it was located just outside of LaSalle) and looked to the east, toward Europe) and observed two minutes of silence for the roughly 20 million people who died in the war. (It wasn’t a holiday for my grandfather who was a refuse collector and worked six days a week.) After two minutes we went back inside and my grandmother did whatever she had been doing before, most likely fixing lunch.

Then of course there was wearing the paper red poppies handed out by Veteran’s groups. The poppies were made by disabled veterans and donations were given to veteran’s organizations.

In later years, I wouldn’t always observe those two minutes of silence exactly at 11:00am on Armistice Day which would be changed to Veteran’s Day after World War II, but I still took time out on the day to remember my nation’s war dead.

These days, Veteran’s Day in the US is similar to Memorial Day (which used to be called Decoration Day). Nonetheless, the day’s historical significance is not lost on its original intent to remember those who had given their lives in the service of our country.

One of the day’s more interesting symbols both in the US and countries like Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand are the red poppies. The poppies significance to Armistice Day was the result of Canadian military physician John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” When I was in the seventh grade, we had to keep a notebook with poems we had read and liked. One of the poems I wrote in my notebook was this one.

In Flanders Fields

By John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The poppy emblem was chosen because of the poppies that bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I; the red color symbolized the bloodshed of that war.

This Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, or Veteran’s Day I take time out again and remember all those brave men and woman who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. And for the men and women of our armed forces serving around the world today, God Bless you all and watch over you to keep you safe and out of harms way and to come home safely to your loved ones and friends.

The Iran Hostage Crisis – 30 Years After

For 444 days, from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, 53 Americans were held hostage by militant Iranian students in the U.S. Embassy in Teheran that would soon be part of the American vernacular as the Iran Hostage Crisis.

It wasn’t America’s first major policy blunder in the Middle East that allowed the Embassy to be taken over, but it did call attention to how foreign policy in the Middle East was not always understood or addressed regional issues effectively. Most of the crisis centered on two individuals the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Ayatollah Khomeini. Although The Shah had been overthrown earlier in the year, when he journeyed to the United States for medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic (a journey discouraged by the U.S. Embassy in Teheran) The Shah’s visit intensified Anti-Americanism among Iranian revolutionaries and spawned rumors of a U.S.-backed coup.

The seizure of the embassy was planned as early as September. Interestingly, Khomeini did not know of the plan beforehand. Initially, the students only wanted to occupy the embassy for a few hours or even a few days to have their message heard around the world.

Around 6:30am on November 4, the ringleaders assembled approximately 500 students. At first, they only wanted to make a symbolic gesture, but when it became clear that the guards inside the embassy were not about to use deadly force, the plans changed and the students broke through the gates.

One of the more disturbing photos to quickly emerge from this takeover was the photo of the bounded and blindfolded embassy workers and military personnel who were parade in front of photographers.

In November of 1979, I was a sergeant serving in the United States Air Force at George Air Force Base in the High Desert region of the Mojave Desert, just outside of Victorville, California. I had been in the Air Force since June 1976, and it had been a rather peaceful military service—in those three years, there had only been one major international crisis that affected the U.S. military, the August 18, 1976 Panmunjom Ax Murder Incident.

There were a lot of rumors circulating on base that we might be the first Air Force units deployed, if the crisis escalated given that the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing, known as the Wild Weasels was an important fighter wing that had proven itself in the Vietnam War.

Every night, after the crisis erupted many of us watched Ted Koppel and ABC’s Nightline for the latest updates of the crisis.

It also created a surge of patriotism in the States, but at the same time it would also come to symbolize America’s mishandling of Middle East diplomacy that still resonates today. Although the U.S. sought a diplomatic solution to have the hostages released an ill-fated rescue mission—Operation Claw Eagle on April 24 (just two weeks before I was discharged)—that ended in disaster when a helicopter crashed into a C-130 tanker aircraft only intensified the vehement Anti-Americanism.

The hostages would finally be released, on January 20, 1981—twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. It is thought the hostage takers waited until Reagan was president to punish President Jimmy Carter’s support for The Shah.

When the hostages were finally released and arrived back in America, they were given a hero’s welcome and a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes in New York City. That didn’t sit too well—this hero’s welcome—with some Vietnam veterans I knew. In January 1981, I was a student at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, Illinois. When it was announced that there was going to be this hero’s welcome for the hostages, the owner of the American Tap, a popular bar in Carbondale decided to have a Veteran’s Party to honor Vietnam War veterans, many who were attending SIU.

The aftermath of the Iran Hostage Crisis reads like a Tom Clancy novel with a number of conspiracy theories (like how it was a secret CIA plot), not to mention a actual historical events like the Iran-Iraq war (with the U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein), the Iran-Contra Affair (Iranians, Contras, and Ollie North) and in many ways, that takeover 30 years ago, still resonates loudly today with the current and sometimes shaky U.S.-Iran relations.

If you don’t succeed at first, try, try again

According to a story by AP, a 68-year-old woman in South Korea who tried to pass the written exam for a driver’s license almost daily since 2005 finally got a passing grade on her 950th try.

Cha Sa-soon persevered and passed, not with flying colors, but squeaked by with the minimum score 60 out of 100 points at a drivers’ license agency in Jeonju, 130 miles (210 kilometers) south of Seoul. Since her first attempt back in 2005, Cha has shelled out more than 5 million won ($4,200) for application fees.

Now she must pass a driving test before getting her license. Let’s hope she doesn’t have to take the driving test as many times to get behind the wheel of a large Korean automobile. You got to hand it to the woman for her determination to keep on taking the test until she passed.

According to local media she needed the license for her vegetable-selling business.

I was about to say (until I read that she hadn’t taken the road test) that she might have been the woman driver in a Hyundai Sonata who cut across three lanes of traffic on a busy street in Seongnam earlier this evening to make a right turn (she was in the far left lane) and turned right in front of the city bus I was on. The bus driver was forced to slam on the brakes and swerve into another lane to avoid hitting this Sonata—which just stopped in the middle of the road.

As such, let’s hope she does better on the road test. Korea’s highways and city streets can do with one less bad driver.

Want to prevent H1NI? Wear Red Underwear

Back in 1993, I knew this one Korean woman quite well who had just gotten a job. One night, not long after she had just started working, she stopped over my apartment with a small gift for me: red underwear.

“What’s with the red underwear?” I asked her.

Actually, they were red long johns, but underwear just the same. I had this thing about underwear in Korea, ever since that December Sunday in 1990 when I was trying to buy underwear at the Lotte Super Store (Lotte is a very department store in Korea) and found out that in Korea, at least back then, underwear for men were also called panties. Now, my Korean lady friend Suk-won was giving me a present of red long johns.

“In Korea, it is customary for people to buy their parents or their boyfriends and girlfriends red underwear when they get their first paycheck,” Suk-won told me.

“Why red?”

She couldn’t tell me exactly why it had to be red and how the custom got started.

Now it seems that in Korea, that old-fashioned red thermal underwear is back in vogue this year as winter sets in. And not only are these long johns keeping people warm, the “the traditional body-hugging winter wear is becoming a popular choice again as consumers want both good luck and protection from the fast-spreading H1N1 flu” according to an article in one of the English-language newspapers in Korea.

”Red is a color of good luck and success,” said Kim Eun-hyuk, a merchandiser at Lotte Department Store, “So shoppers seem to be choosing the color over other options to chase away the flu and bring in money during tough economic times like now.”

In this past month Long John underwear sales have soared by 40% largely due to the influenza A virus. According to experts (which ones, the paper did not say) wearing thermal underwear raises the body temperature by an average of three to four degrees Celsius, which works as a good protection against the flu.

As for why underwear is a traditional gift when someone gets a new job, I asked my students, but they could not come up with a valid reason. One suggestion was that back in the 1950s and 1960s when times were rough in Korea, red clothing; at least dyed clothing was more expensive than traditional white and brown clothing.

Another possibility is when sons and daughters moved to Seoul and found work, they were worried about their moms and dads in the country so they sent them underwear when they got their first paychecks. As one of my students suggested, underwear was given because it would protect their parents’ bodies on cold winter nights.