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.