The True North, Woo... Big.

Korea has become Woo Big's home. There are things about this place I may never know... things so hard to know I may never even know I never even knew... And yet...

I came from Canada, where there were likely as many unknowable things, if not more. In Korea, there is one very difficult language to learn. In Canada, I saw streetsigns in Sushwap, college courses in Halkomelem, films in Kwakwakawakwa, house parties in Tagalog, bus conversations in Mandarin, Bollywood movies in Hindi, Junior High classes in French, Christmas parties in German...

The thing I like about Korea that marks it as a superior living experience in the Life and Time's of Woo... is that when I meet other white people here, most of them have a pretty good idea just how out of touch they are with the culture. By contrast, the wonderous land of my birth is filled with ignorant honkies that have no clue just how much goes on around them.

Every time I go back to Canada, I walk down Broadway in Vancouver and realize how many of those "Asian" restaurant signs I can actually read - because they're in Hangeul, which I can now distinguish from the ones that are in Chinese or Japanese.

Don't get me wrong. I love Canada. It has a lot of potential. One suggestion I have is that, anyone who is born on Canadian soil should be sent abroad to work or study in a non-English environment; preferably somewhere in Asia or Africa. This is the only way they are going to realize what the first-generation immigrantas already know, which is just how much they DON'T know.

Of course, some people will never learn. They're THAT content to remain... well, STUPID. I know an Auzzie who was married for about a year to a Korean lady, and barely knows any Korean. But he LOVES Korea. He studies the history and the art and architecture voraciously, as though his life depended on it... or more specifically is life WERE it... which it is... that is... life is what you make of it. He's making much of his life. On the other hand, I've met people who spent a year here, learned even less Korean, and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pagoda and a pavillion... sigh.

Then there are the soldiers. What good could possibly come from putting a gun in the hands of someone that STUPID? Most of these kids don't appear to have finished highschool. I am reminded of a kid I once knew in Vancouver, who had made a career of being a thief. He was very competant in dealing with contingencies and company in which such a path tended to land him, but he stalwartly thought I was lying when I tried to explain that Christianity was not the oldest religion in the world. Yet he was still marginally more intelligent than most of the soldiers I've met.

So. What is Woo Big's point? I guess my point is, if you were born in Canada, and you love your country, and you want it to fulfill its potential of becoming one of the best places in the world... stay in school. Then, get out of Canada. At least for a little while...

Wheel Bugs and Eye-coo

Woo Big is drunk now. Drunk on special Korean plum wine. Maechwisun... sweet and sour, with a 14% undertow. One little bottle is all it took, because Woo Big does not drink like he used to. It used to be that only vast amounts of alcohol could sooth Woo Big's rampant insomnia... but now Woo Big has Extra Fantastic Girlfriend, who blows his mind and makes him sleep the sleep like lettuce.

Woo Big's girlfriend is 200 proof - we are secret cockroaches. When Koreans see an annoyingly cute couple, the kind with matching outfits, or that talk to each other in those cuddly-wuddly voices that are best confined to the apartment or other semi-private situations... like any other culture, Koreans find this pukogenic. They call such ignorant morons "Pakwi bollae", which is the Korean way to say "cockroaches".

I don't like vomit, and neither does Extra Fantastic Girlfriend... so we keep it on the down low, hushhush, incognito... Woo Big is conspicuous enough, being a honkytonk superhero, and Extra Fantastic Girlfriend also has a rough time avoiding a legion of stalkers... so we do the eye-coo. That's where you get to say all the boldly giddy romanticisms one's heart can muster, but conveyed through the secret language of the eyes. Only people who know eye-coo can understand it - like Zulu or HTML, so it is a pretty safe way to speak. And since each couple tends to have it's own dialect of eye-coo, secret cockroaches can eye-coo without fear of eavesdroppers... birds, for instance, show very little interest in cracking eye-coo.

Reaping the Benefits

They kept saying to me, just accept it Seonwu (except my name wasn't Seonwu then so they called me something else); accept that you are Woo Big. I don't want to be Woo Big... why didn't you cut out the closeup with the disco mask and the shiney pucker? Why you make me look like greasey-lipped pegboy? I hate you.

So now I'm in Korea and it is a funny place. I like it because there are very few white people. I don't hate white people. I am in fact white. But you know how you feel when you eat the same goddamned leftovers day after day? I needed a break from the turkey stew... it had grown tiresome.

I like Korea. I can't understand what anyone is saying, so I just pretend they all like me. I feel so loved wherever I go. And I am not a big slow-moving whitey, so I am able to sneak under the radar and surprise the Koreans. I find the most amusing way to do this is... learning Korean. The best part is where you actually pronounce the words like a Korean, instead of like Billy Bob Thorton playing the character of an inbred uncle-raper TRYING to speak Korean. It's not that hard... it's like imitating Yoda or Prince... you have to get outside yourself a little... feel the Force... because Prince definitely feels the Force.

Sometimes Korea is scary, like on the bus, or in a cab... or even worse... OUTSIDE of a bus or cab that's headed straight for you. And sometimes it is just strange. Like after the first freeze when you see the man in the frozen rice paddy with the pruning saw making the fire. What are you doing, Mr. Man? Out there in the icey ricey, sipping the smoke, swingin' the sickle? I wonder if you're a cereal killer... but seriously, what are you burning? I chuckle my cityguy chuckle and chalk it off... chalk it off to Farmer Business, which is a collection of archaic practices practiced for the sake of, well, bread and meat... by Farmers. But who really KNOWS? He could be burning his porno collection or photos of his ex-wife or a box full of GI Joes.

Korea has Tradition... which is a thing that you accumulate when your country is more than a few hundred years old. That means that they get to pretend that problems like broken marriages and affairs with one's spouse's relatives and homosexuality are a Western inventions. Really Korea is FULL of broken marriages and affairs with one's spouse's relatives and homosexuality... but just like in North America and other parts of the world, people act really horrified when they find these things, and cry and pray and carve their skin with sharp pointy objects, or booze up and wrap the Kia around the front end of a bus.

Mostly what I like is, Korea has JOBS; jobs for over-educated lazy whitey slobs like me, where I get paid better than I EVER did in my own country, despite the fact that minimum wage is less than HALF what it is there. If you are a native English speaker with a Bachelor's degree in ANYTHING, and you are waiting tables in Vancouver or washing cars in Ontario or wiping windows in Quebec, then you are STUPID. I hate to be mean, but sometimes Woo Big must be mean. Don't be sad; Woo Big was once stupid too.

Greetings. I am Woo Big. I was born in an art school video project gone horribly awry, and rose to unwanted notoriety following an unfortunate closeup of me in a glittery mask puckering my lips like a disco pegboy. I wish I was making this up but it's all so horribly true.

To escape my horrible checkered (and paislied) past I've fled to Korea where I live a secret life as an English teacher. Again, I can assure you, I'm not making this up...????... I can't promise that I'll never pull your leg, but I do promise that everything I say COULD be true if reality conformed to the rippling idiosyncrasies of my imagination. I also offer the tenuous guarantee that I am highly unlikely, at any time, in this web log or any other of my emissions (nocturnal or otherwise) to make any real sense. There is little likelihood of any regularity, pattern, or reliability emerging or becoming discernable by any means from within the muck that I am heretofore likely to spew.

Huh-huh... "horribly true" and "likely to spew" kinda rhyme...