Seems like the chuds won’t leave you guys alone lately, just know you aren’t alone and we have your back.

Just checking in on you guys really

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    My wife is a Korean. She's doing fine but I'm pretty upset (I'm wh*te). Our kids are half-Korean. I met my wife while I was working as an English teacher in South Korea. Back then, I was a lib, but now I feel that I participated in the imperial project in South Korea and it upsets me. We live in America now because as a lib I really wanted to raise a family here. Big mistake moving back here a few years ago. I radicalized after our return. My wife has to put up with racist microaggressions all the time. We live in an extremely liberal area. She's a Berner, not an ML, and she was complaining a lot yesterday about the reaction to the murders on the South Korean internet. It's overrun with chuds and bourgeois dickheads, of course, which means that they were saying the typical bullshit, like who the fuck cares, they were just sex workers, whatever. Fuck 'em. South Korea is actually way more leftwing than you might think though. North Korea is very popular there. A lot of the most rightwing South Koreans now live in the USA but post in Korean on Korean forums.

    • summerbl1nd [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      in the asian diaspora communities i hung out in as a kid, being poor was close to being a moral failure, second to being uneducated.

      i can only speak for the chinese communities with regards to chud/based ratios, but they say that tiananmen essentially turned all the students who were in a position to care at the time either into maoist ultras or gigachuds, with very few in between. i figure the people who would willingly emigrate are pretty self-selecting.

      • duderium [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I've known younger second generation Korean Americans who were cool but since moving back every single thirty- or forty-something Korean immigrant we've spoken with has been like a fucking creationist. These people exist in South Korea but they are generally viewed as absurd there. Like I said, my wife is a Berner and that's pretty moderate in South Korea.

        • congressbaseballfan [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          Like all countries, the bourgeoisie diaspora isn’t reflective of the population overall, but I remember being in college (this was a long time ago) and all the Korean students whether they grew up here or in Korea were super religious psychos. This is mostly women in my experience certainly isn’t reflective; but there always seemed to be more diversity of thought with other nationalities. It always just struck me as unique and interesting

          • duderium [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            There is probably much more diversity of thought in South Korea itself. Proportionately it actually has a shitload of atheists as well as a huge number of cultural Buddhists who also participate in pretty frequent Confucian / shamanistic cultural rites. The regular Buddhists are pretty "normal" but I spent a lot of time around the monks and found them to be pretty bizarre. They made excellent conversational partners but their ideas were, uh, let's say, hmmm...I once spent an entire semester arguing about the importance of astronomy with a monk who said that it was unimportant because the Buddha had never really mentioned it. I said it was important if we want to, like, not get wiped out by an asteroid, but she didn't care. Still, we were friends.

            • congressbaseballfan [she/her]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Yeah, of course. I’ve met Koreans outside of the US when I’ve been abroad and found them to be normal and interesting to talk to. It’s my experience inside the US lol.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]MA
      ·
      4 years ago

      For real, South Korea's a whole lot fucking nicer to live in than the U.S. then again I think nearly anywhere else is nicer than the U.S.

      But shit, the food's cheap and nutritious, healthcare's cheap and high quality, the booze is damn near free-flowing although it's hard to find any good liquor over there, folks there tend to be polite and honest, and there's always a place to hike or stroll leisurely just a stone's throw away.

      My only gripes that their state actively persecutes communists, their perception of western food's like way too fucking sugar filled - like shit I thought American food was filled with sugar and shit but their American food's literally tooth rotting sweet but without the heart clogging oiliness and the dumptrucks worth of saltiness.

      Also their national sport is gaming, and you know how I feel about gamers.

      • duderium [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Yeah I couldn't stand eating American food while I was there. There was no Mexican food, either! I actually really got into the Korean-style pizzas though. Pizza with potatoes, corn, even mayo—that shit is fucking amazing. (The mayo love is my whiteness talking.) I ate almost nothing but Korean food though while I was there since it's so good, healthy, and cheap.

        • Alaskaball [comrade/them]MA
          ·
          4 years ago

          For real for real. I loved eating over there but I missed treating my body like utter dogshit with American processed foods once in a while lmao.

          Y'know the only pizza I had over there was this sorta Frenchy styled pizza that said it used a sweetened red wine reduction as the marinara and used brie cheese, garlic, and some other French shit to balance out the sweetness, and other than the fact I think they just used grape jelly that pizza was fucking lit. It all balanced out and made a great harmony of sweet and savory that a normal pizza joint could make casually.

          Did you get a chance to go to the fish markets? Or even to the coastal villages/towns? Last time I went I got to go see the eastern sea and got to pick out fresh fish to make sashimi out of. Like I thought I've had fresh good fish before, living in Alaska and catching my own shit lol, but fuck me there's a literal whole ocean of flavors out there that you can only experience when you're downing a glass of makgeolli and breathing is the fresh salty air.

          • duderium [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Yes, I lived in Gyeongsangdo so we ate all kinds of fish, raw and otherwise, all the time. Going on a hike and drinking makgeolli at the top of a mountain in a little shack with pajeon was just the best. And yeah, we went to all kinds of smaller towns with amazing restaurants. Generally the shittier they looked, the better the food was. As a lib I was actually desperate to leave Korea because I couldn't stand the mild annoyance of being a privileged ethnic minority but now of course I miss it.

            • Alaskaball [comrade/them]MA
              ·
              4 years ago

              Lmao you know when I came back I tried to bring some makgeolli with me, but because of how their bottles are designed they all exploded in my bag and I found out they don't like being stored sideways. Thankfully that all happened the day before I had to take the flight back so I had another drinking party with my family over there.

              Shit one of the finest and weirder things I did was hiking through Sinheungsa temple at the base of Seoraksan mountain and finding a little coffee shop that's home to one of the world's internationally recognized masters of coffee brewing. Just spending the half hour watching him make a cup of coffee and enjoying it was one of the highlights of that day, besides hiking up the trails and seeing the clear reflecting ponds surrounded by those spikey mountains.

              • duderium [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Damn. I never made it out there. But I did know a cafe owner who was unusually obsessed with coffee. He had like a bunch of special and unique roasting machines which were made in Germany and he also planned to expand his business all over the world, even though my wife said that he owed everyone in town a lot of money. He would slurp his coffee so quickly it would almost make a whistling sound. His cafe was good but expensive. Two people could go through more than $50 there just drinking a few cups of coffee and eating some bread. We were supposed to tutor his entire staff in English which would have been an amazing gig but after meeting with him and seemingly having a decent time he never followed up with us.

    • Poison_Ivy [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      A lot of the most rightwing South Koreans now live in the USA but post in Korean on Korean forums.

      This is like super fucking common among PoC communities living in the USA who recently immigrated into the USA lmao

      • duderium [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        We discuss it all the time but we don't really want to work there again. Overall, quality of life is better than in America, but working conditions are intense, let's say. We would die to go to Vietnam or Cuba but even if those countries would accept us there's issues involved with displacing or exploiting the people who already live there. We might give China a try. Actually, the only thing really holding me back from applying to some jobs there is the pollution. We would love to go almost anywhere, but since Americans are plague rats it's not so easy to move around. On a "Racism in Korea" facebook page I follow I just saw that a Vietnamese student I knew posted a picture of a gym which said it isn't accepting foreigners now because of covid.