South Koreans LOVE Their Booze! But Apparently NOT Michael Douglas...

My first month in Korea, way back in the bitter cold winter of 2008, I knew ABSOLUTELY NOBODY. So, one evening, after ducking into a convenience store to get out of the frigid Korean winter night, I was lucky enough to find a nice store owner who could speak some English. He invited me to come back any time, so I made a point of going in to see this kind elder gentleman most evenings after work.

But then, I realized that if I stayed too late, the odd little troops of three Korean men would always come in.

See, the drunks usually travel in threes in Korea. The two loud, obnoxious drunks on the left and right are always the ones holding up (dragging, quite often) the stupid drunk Korean man in the middle! Well, that's swell. Except that they would almost always get up in my face (though they were total strangers) and slobber all over me! That was fun.

NOT.

One night, in this nice old fellow's Korean convenience store (where I would actually buy "hot choco," as Koreans call cocoa, or hot chocolate, and sit at this tiny table in the corner, one of the drunks from the middle of one of the smashed trios hobbled on over and got up in my face.  I stood up, and then he spit a whole bunch of rancid breath at me, and promptly (well, as promptly as he could slur it in his condition) told me, "You look like Michael Douglas!  Yo-ung My-kell Dooglas-a."

Uh... yeah. I've heard that before a few times. But hey, maybe ALL us white folks just look alike!  Especially when you're drunk as a skunk. He continued, "I HATE MICHAEL DOOOGLASS-A!"

Okay, buddy. Well, psst! I'm not really Michael Douglas. But... uh... why do you hate Michael Douglas?

"Be... be-cooze... he is FACKING that young garl!"

Oh! You mean, Catherine Zeta-Jones? Michael Douglas' lawfully wedded WIFE?

"YA-SA! He is FACKING that young girl!"

And then I tried like hell to get him to take his filthy, drunken hands off me. Boy that was a real nice "welcome to Korea" moment.

NOT.

Actually, now that I think back, his eyes got really wide when he heard the name Catherine Zeta Jones. He licked his lips, rolled his eyes, and slipping to about my chest level ('cause remember, the other two drunks were holding him up), he slobbered, as his eyes got big as half dollars.  "YA-SA! He is FACKING that young garl! Catherine Zedar Jon-sa!"

So, I guess the moral of this story is: PLEASE, people, don't EVER get drugged up around me. I'm nobody's punching bag, no matter how "nice" I look. Oh, I'm nice, but I'm not stupid. And though you most likely won't remember any of it, I must tell you quite frankly that I have got a memory like a wasp.

Ain't gonna hate ya after you make yourself look like a total idiot, of course, but my grandmother reportedly put up with way too much of that kind of thing from my old Scottish American "pap." So Will don't go there. EVER.

There area always excuses for everything, but there is no good excuse for a genuine lack of self control.  Not ever.

But here's the real moral of the story:  Life is hard. It's real, real easy to hurt people in this cold, cruel world - even when you're not even trying. If I do hurt someone, I want to be able to remember it, and if possible, ATONE for it later.  If I even get the chance. And I don't want to EVER be able to fall back on the "drunk" excuse.

Ever.

And hey!  Look!  Honestly, folks, she's really not that much younger than him.  She's just got those great (sometimes baby faced) Welsh genes (that I also have a few of myself).  And hey, the man didn't always have gray hair!  They probably both have gray hair nowadays, God bless 'em.  I'm getting a few gray hairs myself these days.

And dammit, I LOVE Michael Douglas AND Catherine Zeta Jones.  And I don't care how old either of them gets!  Like... ever!

And what's wrong with gray hair anyway?  What's wrong with getting older, Koreans?  Oh... that's right.  Age discrimination (among other kinds of discrimination) is HUGE in Korea.  Think about that before you head to Korea to teach English, potential expats.  Well... if you're twenty something, naïve as hell, and get drunk with other expats often enough (to kill the pain, it often seems), you'll probably be A-Okay.

But whatever you do, don't get caught looking like "young Michael Douglas."  And... PSST!  He's much better looking than I probably ever will be anyway.  :)

The Real Expat "Life" in South Korea

The computer's right next to this sliding door/window thing in this tiny box of an "apartment." Another pent up Asian slum hole, really.  And I've lived in these "shoebox" sized dumps in three different major cities in Taiwan, Shanghai, China and now, unfortunately, South Korea.  It's fall. The weather has finally started to cool off a bit. Now, we can save a little money on air conditioning. Crack that sliding window/door to the tiny patio open, and get some fresh air in this place, right?

UNTIL... yet another addicted macho Korean dude starts puffing smoke into the apartment from God knows where. Pretty damn quick, I feel like I can't breathe. And I DON'T smoke.  And I mean... I honestly thought that was my CHOICE as a human being.  Smoke that shit.  Or DON'T.

So, for the umpteenth time, I or my wife go to the window. Sometimes, she goes down to see if she can catch whatever black lunged bastard keeps making our clothes hung to dry on the porch smell like a cigarette factory.  But neither of us can ever find 'im. But he and his cronies leave their lighters and cigarette butts in the stairwells. Often, along with discarded food and all sorts of other things that people in this region just carelessly DROP at their feet. There aren't any public trash cans in Korea, Taiwan OR China.

And it's no use trying to hunt the wormy bastards down anyway. They're everywhere in Asia.  See, the nearest I can figure it, the tobacco companies couldn't sell quite as much after several Marlboro men died in America, and then all those warning labels had to go on all the cigarette packages.  So get the Asians addicted! That's one BIG ASS market over there in Asia, huh?

Well, it worked.

Just like opium worked on the Chinese in the 19th century. Yet ANOTHER root cause for the current, almost total stagnation of Chinese "CULTure" (or lack there of).  Imagine what kind of successive generations you get from a country where, in some places, most of the population once spent days and days lying prostrate in opium dens... not taking care of their own kids. Selling them to get more drug money, when necessary. And then... you MIGHT just get some idea of what happened to Chinese CULTure.

But seriously, folks. If there's ANYTHING you really should have learned in the 90s, it's that the world simply cannot blame everything on the British!  Or now, US Americans, for that matter.  Read your Chinese history, kids.  Most of the nails in the typically gaudy, lavish Sino-centric coffin had been quite thoroughly driven down into place in that lavish imperial dynastic box in the deep, dark, cold hole the Chinese had long been digging all by themselves, for themselves, by the time the British were poised to annex Hong Kong.   Long, long, that is, before that particular British diplomat (that I admire immensely, by the way) refused to "kowtow" before the then currently reigning, corrupt, inept emperor who was yet the latest in a long line of greedy fools who were worshiped as petty gods in a pathetically medieval 19th century China.

I'd have told the bastard where he could stick his "kowtow," too.

Of course, my own, clearly idealistic, mostly well meaning mother once countered, "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink." She never has had to try to sound like the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live.  It just always came naturally.  Haven't seen her in years, but I assume she still comes off that way.  I grew up with that.

Actually, dear mummy, I think you CAN, more or less, make a quite possibly neglected, thirsty horse eventually drink any old rancid water you choose to lead him to.  I mean, you're the master, right?  You broke his poor back a long time ago, just so you could ride him around anywhere you want, right?  Tell 'im when to stop.  When to go.  When to eat.  And when to drink.  Heck, he'll even run till he drops for you, right?  Good horsy, that he is.  And you ARE the master, after all!  When the most powerful navy in the entire world (at the time) trounces your army in not one but two wars, and then FORCES your government to allow the import of a highly addictive DRUG, you pretty much just have to drink what you're given, right.?

But that's history for ya, huh?

But then, back "home" in Missouri, somebody was always saying something stupid like, "Hell! I don't know what the hell you's talkin' 'bout! My grandmother smoked her whole life. She lived to be 97!"  Sure.  Sure, she did, you hillbilly bastard.  And she coughed her ass off every damn day until she finally did drop dead, too.

As Far East Asia Continues to Burn

My home desktop computer just happens to be right next to this sliding glass door/window type thing in this tiny shoebox of an "apartment" my wife and I currently live in here in South Korea. Yeah, it's a place to live, but then again, if most people from most Western countries were to see the place, they'd more than likely just think that it's yet another filthy, humiliating, pent-up little concrete cell in the heart of yet another neon-scarred Asian slum hole.

Autumn has finally fallen and the weather has mercifully just begun to start to finally cool off a bit. Thank God that we can now save a little money on air conditioning. At last, we can crack open that big, glass window/door which leads to the tiny, horrifically narrow excuse for a patio/balcony and finally get some fresh air in this stifling, claustrophobic little crap-hole for a change, right?

Until, that is, yet another addicted Korean dude and his college age cronies all start puffing smoke into the apartment. And then, pretty darn quick, as a non-smoker yourself, unused to the harsh effects of tobacco consumption, you can hardly breathe, the noxious stench is so unbearable. Thank goodness my wife doesn't smoke either. Funny thing though; I honestly thought that it was actually our choice, a matter of our very own free will as a human beings, as to whether or not to become addicted to an overpriced, hyper-addictive weed that most people start sucking on when they've barely even entered puberty.

So we keep going to the window. We lean out and look up, down, and all around, but where on earth is the incredibly invasive stench of tobacco smoke even coming from? Yet try as we might, we can't quite locate those pathetically self-centered, orally fixated tobacco addicts anywhere. Well, we're pretty sure that they tend to stand out on the balcony of the apartment directly above us, puffing away and shout-talking at close range with one another in the usual, terribly obnoxious East Asian fashion, but they never actually have the guts to show their rude, inconsiderate, thuggish faces.

Huh. How terribly typical.

But we sure do have to step over all the lighters and cigarette butts that these idiots tend to drop in the stairwells leading up to our fourth floor apartment. And unfortunately, that's hardly all we are forced to step around on our way up or down the back stairs. There are also discarded bits of half-eaten food (banana peels with part of the banana rotting in the late summer/early fall heat, fast food containers, etc.) and all sorts of other things that people in this part of the still very much developing world just tend to carelessly drop at their feet on a daily basis.

You see, there aren't any public trash cans in South Korea. But then again, when I taught English in Taiwan and Mainland China, it was pretty much the same in those awful places too. Or actually, back then, it was a whole lot worse. I mean, what is it with Asians and their sorry excuse for public hygiene anyway?

Worst of all, it's often no use at all to try to hunt down the very worst of the filthy littering bastards anyway. Because littering is a huge problem in most countries in East Asia. In fact, it often seems like Asians are actually encouraged to litter indiscriminately. I mean, there may be laws on the books against illegal dumping and littering in general, but there's very little in the way of law enforcement and the fining of lawbreakers, so the poor hygiene and pathetic pollution in East Asia just continues to go on and on and on, day after day for years and years with no end in sight.

My God! Are Asians really that immune to omnipresent public litter? Are they really not bothered by all the filth and poor hygiene in their various countries. I often wonder.

And then there's the fact that the global tobacco companies suddenly couldn't sell near as much product after several prominent "Marlboro men" started dying of cancer in the US and other western countries. Apparently, even those often devastatingly handsome male models that used to appear in all the major western magazines, newspapers, and even on television ads and gigantic billboards, weren't immune to the ravages of lung cancer. Go figure.

And then it finally became illegal to openly advertise tobacco products. And then all those warning labels started to finally go on all the cigarette packages. What was left for the big drug pushing companies in the west to do then? Well, we'll just get the Asians addicted, they apparently said. Sure. Great idea. I mean, think about it. Asia; that's one huge market for tobacco products right there. Yeah.... Well guess what? It worked. It worked really, really well. Too well. Much, much too well.

That's also pretty much how opium smoking, which had already been a more or less tolerated habit in China for centuries, eventually became so totally out of control. But only after the British fought not one, but two major wars with the Chinese in the 19th century, just for the right to continue to be able to traffic a highly addictive narcotic. Okay, sure, it was a matter of "national pride" for the British, right? I mean, that's why Queen Victoria eventually approved of the British going to war in China, isn't it? And that right there, kids, is just one of the many reasons for the almost total stagnation of Chinese (and greater pan-Asian) "CULTure" (or lack there of) as we know it today.

I mean, just imagine what kind of successive generations you get from a country where, in some places, 75% of the population once spent days on end lying prostrate in opium dens, not taking care of their own kids. Or worse yet, some even resorted to the selling of their children, or some other family member such as a wife, to get more drug money to support the filthy, disreputable habit. But then I'm pretty sure that Chinese CULTure was already in a pretty sorry state even before the Opium Wars broke out between Great Britain and China, which is a story for another time.