Korean Quarantine Origins

I learned the origin story of Korea today. According to legend, there was a she-bear and a tigress living together in a cave. They both prayed to the divine king Hwanung to be made human. He told them to stay out of the sunlight for 100 days eating only 20 cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort herbs.

The tigress got hungry and left the cave after only 20 days, but the she-bear stayed put. Deciding she was the more responsible one, Hwanung made the she-bear a human in the spring. They copulated and she gave birth to Dangun, the founder of the first Korean kingdom.

I thought it apropos that the country was founded because a she-bear followed social distancing guidelines. Apparently, I wasn't the only one to notice the parallel either. This story was actually referenced by the government when attempting to persuade people to follow the guidelines.

Nevertheless, I think crediting Confucianism or origin stories with the success of the Korean COVID-19 success is mistaken. Perhaps things were different when the outbreak started, but as long as I've been here, people don't seem to adhere to the social distancing guidelines much. I see a lot more tigresses than she-bears on the subway.

Instead I would credit effective government policy. Not only is testing free and widely available, but if you do need to self-isolate, the government will deliver food to you for free so you don't have to leave the house to eat. People who can't earn money because they're in isolation get a government subsidy to stay home. And all of this is relatively affordable to do because the policies were enacted swiftly before a large caseload built up.

Korea has a population of over 50 million, and yet there have only been around 11 thousand cases since the outbreak started. For comparison, last month New York had 11 thousand cases in a single day. It's a lot cheaper and easier to use these subsidies when the numbers are so small. Now that the number of cases in the US is in the millions, I don't know if it's even possible to emulate these policies.

Rare Pepe

You might know Pepe the Frog from racist alt-right memes on the internet. Memes of Pepe killing jews or dressed as a klan member ruined the memory of what was originally just a regular web-comic character and the anti-defamation league labeled it a hate symbol. So I was surprised to see this on the subway.

Was this Pepe-toting Korean woman somehow a white nationalist? It didn't make sense. At first I thought it was a fluke and then I stumbled upon another rare Pepe, this one singing Karaoke. Is 4chan taking over Seoul's karaoke bars?

Confused, I did some research and discovered that in Asia, most people don't know that Pepe is a hate symbol. Instead, he's associated with the Hong Kong protests against Chinese authoritarianism. Why? The best explanation I can find is that someone used Pepe in some protest memes not knowing it's considered a hate symbol, and it got some modest popularity. People in the west started reporting on the use of a hate symbol in Hong Kong and protesters saw the media attention as beneficial, so they doubled down.

So Pepe has gotten a kind of redemption. He gets to live on in the east as a symbol of freedom rather than hate. Although after talking to a few Koreans who didn't seem to know anything about Pepe as a symbol, either for nationalists or for protestors, I think the main reason he's popular here in Seoul is that he's a cute frog.

Thank You: A Phonological Breakdown

There's a word I say several times a day here which I've been working on pronouncing better. It's the Korean formal word for thank you, the IPA transcription for which is /ka̠msʰa̠ɦa̠mnida̠/. It's difficult because there are many phonemes in it which don't exist in English, but which sound similar to phonemes that do.

The first phoneme in the word, /k/, actually sounded to me like the American English /k/ as in 'kite': a voiceless velar plosive consonant. However, I was wrong.

Korean actually has 3 different pronunciations of /k/, each with a different degree of aspiration and force of closure: lax, tense, and aspirated. These are represented as /k/, /k͈/, and /kʰ/ in IPA or ㄱ, ㄲ, andㅋ in hangul.

Because English features a relatively high degree of aspiration, Americans sound like they're always using the most aspirated /kʰ/ no matter which one they're supposed to be using, and at first we actually can't tell the difference between the three at all. So I try to say the lax /k/ or ㄱ, which is a soft, voiceless stop followed by light aspiration. What comes out instead is much closer to the aspirated /kʰ/ or ㅋ.

I've been practicing and it's getting better, but I still can't do it consistently. Also, confusingly, voiced versions of these consonants seem to show up sometimes as allophones depending on placement, so /k/ can become /g/. Normally this only happens intervocalically, but I think sometimes it happens in initial position as well. The revised romanization even transliterates this word as beginning with 'g'. Perhaps it just seems this way because the voice onset time is much longer when the plosive is phrase-initial than when it is word-initial, making it easier to identify as voiceless when phrase-initial than when word-initial.

Next, the vowel /a̠/ which seems pretty close to an American English open back unrounded vowel /aː/ as in 'bra', but it's actually retracted. That was a pretty easy adjustment to make, perhaps because vowels are easy to adjust, or perhaps because the difference was too subtle for my speaking partners to bother correcting, especially given how poor my articulation was on the consonants.

Then comes /m/ which appears to be the first phoneme in the word that exists in English. It's a voiced bilabial nasal just like in the English word 'mom'.

The hardest phoneme in the word for me is the sibilant phoneme for the hangul character ㅅ. It's represented as /s/ but this is misleading because it is articulated very differently from the American English /s/ as in 'sea'. I produce this consonant as a voiceless alveolar fricative, which native speakers seem to identify as being closer to /s͈/, the tensed version written as ㅆ in Hangul.

To make matters worse, the IPA transcription I'm working with doesn't use either /s/ or /s͈/. Instead they're using /sʰ/, seemingly trying to shoehorn this sound into the same categorizations used for the Korean plosive triads by calling it aspirated.

Sibilants are fricatives, not plosives, and I'm not sure how it's possible to aspirate fricatives in the first place. But even if I knew how to do that, Korean speakers have been queuing me to aspirate less rather than more when pronouncing this phoneme.

From imitating them, it seems like it's supposed to be palatalized somehow. Perhaps normally the phoneme is the same but in this case it's substituted for an allophone of some kind, I'm not sure. Apparently, there's some controversy about this phoneme in the field, and I haven't been able to find an explanation.

So that's about as far as I've gotten. It's a little more than one syllable into a five-syllable word. I'm pretty stumped by this sibilant issue. My working theory right now is that because it's word-medial and occurs between two voiced phonemes, some Koreans are voicing it instead of aspirating, making /ka̠msʰa̠ɦa̠mnida̠/ into /ka̠mza̠ɦa̠mnida̠/. We have that same sonorization in English, pronouncing 'whimsical' with a /z/ instead of an /s/.

I wish I knew a Korean linguist.

Sauna Eggs

I accidentally bought sauna eggs instead of baked eggs at the convenience store again. The packaging is nearly identical so it's an easy mistake to make if you can't read Korean. Every time this happens I try to force myself to eat it, but I've always failed up until today.

Sauna eggs are eggs that are pressure-cooked for a long time until the whites turn brown and take on a nutty, roasted, vaguely medicinal taste. They apparently serve these in Korean saunas for some reason and sometimes are seen in k-dramas. The first time I tried them I had to spit it back out.

Today I finally crossed over into actually wanting to finish two. Strange how things taste better the more familiar they are.

Kim Jong-Un

People keep asking what people here in Seoul think about whether Kim Jong-Un is dead. The people I meet haven't really been talking about it. I brought it up yesterday, and a Korean friend said he's just desensitized to that kind of news story because Un's father, Kim Jung-Il, had so many health rumors for so long.

When Kim Jong-Il finely did die, nobody knew for more than two days, so it's not like the rumor mill eventually proved reliable either.

No one I've talked to here seems to think Kim Jong-Un's dead, although they said if he did die, that would be bad for South Korea. Apparently, he's seen as very peaceful, for a North Korean dictator at least, being young and having studied abroad in Switzerland. If he dies with no heir apparent, there will be a power struggle and one of the older generals might come to power. Those guys might be crazy enough to try to invade South Korea, so there is reason to worry. It just doesn't seem very likely at the moment.

Social distancing at the Gym

People seemed curious about what the gym is like in Korea so I thought I'd provide some insight. The first thing you do when you walk in is to get your temperature scanned. Then you write down your name, number, address, and temperature on the log.

If anyone who turns out to have COVID-19 went to the gym, contact tracers will use this information to notify everyone who's been to the gym since then that they need to self-isolate.

Once you're in, you need to stay 1.5 to 2 meters away from other guests, which this sign announces. You also need to wear a mask the whole time, and if you take it off someone will come and scold you. This feels a little like high altitude training because the mask makes it harder to breathe so you get less oxygen.

Every other treadmill has a sign on it saying it's been decommissioned to help maintain social distancing. This is true for all the cardio equipment in the gym. There are also bottles of hand sanitizer all over the gym.

I'd say overall the gym is doing a pretty great job. The one challenge is dealing with competition for equipment like the squat rack. It's harder to maintain distance, as you can see here, particularly at popular times like 7pm.

The gym does have limited hours, closing at 8pm on weekdays and not opening at all on weekends. I'll be curious to see what things look like in the US when gyms start to open back up.

Cat Cafe

Seoul is famous for its cat cafes, and I wanted to peek inside to see how they looked. I'm normally highly allergic to cats and as soon as I get a whiff of them my nasal passages close up like a clam, but the owner beckoned me inside and I thought I'd get a few photos. I sanitized my hands, slipped on the specially provided slippers, and sat down at a table, hoping that the cats would respect the 2 meter social distancing guidelines.

As soon as I was seated, a few cats sidled on up to me. Uh oh. I braced myself for the sinus attack as one of them proceeded to crawl up my chest towards my face.

But it didn't come.

At first I thought maybe it'd just take a minute to kick in, but then I remembered my face mask. It must be blocking the dander.

What a lucky break, I guess I can come to cat cafes now. If you've never been to one because you're allergic, once local ordinances permit it I definitely recommend taking advantage of the fact that it's now socially acceptable to rock an N95 in public and check out a cat cafe.