Just came back from the local South Korean grocery store. PURE PANDEMONIUM! It's a one story building with square footage not much bigger than you'd find in an average residential home in the US or Canada, but despite the fact that you could walk from one end of the place to the other, in any given direction, in just a few minutes, for some TOTALLY NUTBALL reason... the management thinks it's good to have some guy in the meat department SCREAMING... I mean... SHOUTING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS over an EVEN LOUDER SPEAKER, to get people to come and buy this or that "special" item. Of course, I've been to noisy summer carnivals back home in the US before, but those events are usually OUTDOORS, and they naturally want people from far and wide to come and buy their crap, but... these little grocery shops in South Korea ARE NOT OUDOORS!
On the contrary, these otherwise handy little local "marts" are mostly indoors in Korea, where the noise level just about makes your blood curdle and your brain boil and threaten to explode like the latest North Korean nuke test! Man, I hope the people in this region don't start EXPORTING the kind of senseless, polluting NOISE they routinely subject their own citizens to, because if they did... there really would be a third world war of epic proportions.
And the most frustrating thing is... if you do talk to most of the locals about disheartening, demoralizing and grossly mind numbing stuff like this... lo and behold, you find out that... THEY HATE THE NOISE, TOO! When I taught English in Taiwan, I used to ask so many of my adult students and other acquaintances, "Then... if you feel the same, why don't you do anything about it? Why don't you complain? This is your country! Get things changed! You know, DEMOCRACY! You pay taxes, don't ya?"
"DON'T COMPLAIN! You Americans just like to complain! I don't like it either, but what can we do about it?" WHAT? The pathetic sound of pure futility is deafening when you're forced to listen way too hard. I mean, who would say such a totally impotent, gutless, idiotic thing? Most East Asians, actually. Instead of actually having a voice or any sort of genuine human rights (yes, the kinds of violations you hear about in the news all the time, where China is concerned), people here tend to be totally stifled and quite often, socially pent-up and just plain toothless. Even forlornly passive aggressive too.
I mean, where do you think the term "paper tiger" came from in the first place?
It's neither democratic (as their token political systems usually attempt or even pretend to be) nor especially progressive in "modern" Asia, but a total and complete real world social failure. Self expression doesn't really even exist in most Asian countries (or most other developing countries, for that matter). And if it ever did, it's become something resembling the Borg Collective of Star Trek fame, a rotting, putrid, collection of zombie corpses that are just waiting to burst up from where they dangerously lurk just below the sod, to become an army of pseudo-human bipeds with only one thing on what's left of their rotting minds; the consumption of the healthy brains of those still yet living!
So, even if a western style "free market economy" has been put in place in countries like Japan, South Korea and China (and Taiwan, or what I like to call "South China"), and people actually "technically" elect their own leaders, it's still not worth all that much at the end of the day because the people don't always have much of a voice. Although things are changing little by little, as of yet, most human rights in East Asia are strictly on paper.
So, it's all, like so many aspects of modern Asia... a façade; a cheap cardboard cutout meant to represent something that simply isn't really there. It doesn't really exist in any truly tangible form beyond the simple ideal. Like a lot of K-Pop songs, it's got a catchy tune... sometimes, but it's usually pretty derivative and typically shallow and not really all that substantial when held up to any kind of serious scrutiny or comparison to other forms of music.
So don't believe everything you read or hear about how the homogenity of so-called "modern" Asia makes people placid, wise and cooperative. Oh no it doesn't! Rather, it tends to rob people of their very identity, in favor of "keeping the peace." But when you keep human beings down like that, you don't really get inner peace. You get a deep seeded passive aggressive RAGE that just won't quit. Oh, they try to hide it. Like their emotions, they try to suppress it, but it tends to ooze out while they are doing even the most mundane of activities, such as when driving or dealing with one another on interpersonal level. All that pent up rage and frustration just tends to manifest in all sorts of bizarre ways, such as habitual "lying to save face" and, worst of all, SELF DENIAL of what they are truly thinking and feeling.
So, if you're thinking of teaching English in an Asian country, my advice is DON'T. There really isn't all that much money to be made and the grass definitely ain't greener on this side, let me tell ya. Hell... there isn't even any grass over here in most parts of the vast neon scarred shanty town anyway.
Worst yet, the grass they do grow, isn't even maintained properly! You very seldom see a lawn mower over here in South Korea. What they do in most places that are even lucky enough to have a wretched little tract of greenery, is let the grass grow knee high, until a bunch of poor, over-worked city workers come in and mow it all down with hand held weed eaters.
Yep! They chop what little lawn there is all down to the dirt so they won't have to come back and do it again too soon. So, as a result, there's a lot of soil erosion in still developing South Korea. The grass simply cannot take hold for long enough to keep that precious topsoil in place, so every time it rains, the sidewalks (where you can even find them, 'cause they don't even exist in many places in Asia) are often awash with mud, and you can see that topsoil just draining gradually off into the city sewer system, where the right of every individual to free thought and speech also apparently goes to languish in the putrid muck.
It's all just so mind numbingly pathetic and just plain sad. But whatever you do, "Don't complain!" That might actually accomplish something! But we don't want THAT, now do we?
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