For the Love of Peppers

Here's a quick post before the long Chunhyangdyun movie review coming up.

We here at Manga Meditation love K and J dramas almost as much as we love manga. And true to MM form, we also (lovingly) criticize those very dramas for their sometimes-more-than-campy qualities. It's part of their charm, after all!

The following video is a great K-drama parody titled Gochu (or "pepper" in Korean) by Unit 5 Films, submitted for a contest held by the magazine KoreAm. Think of this post as Manga Meditation's introduction to future K-drama critique. Enjoy!

--Blackbird

Intensive Korean Study: Week 1

And so ends my first week of intensive Korean study! Sort of. I only started Wednesday, and the whole process is taking a lot longer than I expected. Also, I just got the textbook’s accompanying workbook in the mail Thursday or Friday, so I haven’t gotten a good look at it yet.

Before I start my review of this week's progress, though, I should probably describe my previous experience with Korean. As a kid I was taken to Korean school to learn the basics of the language. To be honest, the only information I really retained was the reading and writing aspect which, if you know anything about Korean, is not that difficult in the first place. Basically, a dedicated person can learn Han’gul in a week. The rest of Korean that I know is thanks to the Korean I heard as a kid. Even though I don’t understand a lot of it or the actual grammar, it doesn’t sound unfamiliar to me, and I already understand sentence structure.

Anyway, this is what I've been up to...

Wearing the Hyphen

Growing up as a "hyphenated" American is a unique experience, and one that can cause one to constantly feel that they are living at the margins of society. As a Korean-American, I had trouble reconciling both labels of my identity as something singular rather than as separate parts. There was the Korean side of me, which consisted of my family and the celebration of special traditions that I assumed other people would not understand or accept. The other half of my identity, however, constantly yearned to be accepted as not the "other," but someone as legitimate as anyone else in the United States.

Though I wanted to feel "American" in my own right, whatever that meant, the racial stereotypes in the media, the blatant stares, the simple tugging at the eyes, told me that I would always be different. Of course, as a child I didn't think of it in articulate terms.

It has only been recently, however, that I've begun to accept my identity as a combination of two elements. I realized that there were people outside of my family that were like me, and in that way I felt less isolated in my experience. But in trying to shape my identity as an American, my "outer" identity, the one I felt I had to exclusively wear, I neglected to also fully develop that related to my ancestry, the "inner" Korean identity that I used to think I could only show to my family. One might even say that I, myself, marginalized my own Korean half.

Chunhyang Filler a.k.a. Thank Goodness for Wikipedia

Hello readers!

This is just a little heads up (and filler, since we suck at regularly updating) to talk about an upcoming post series!

Ever heard of Chunhyangga? Depending on your knowledge of Korean folklore and/or pop culture, you may know that it's one of five remaining pansori performances. Pansori (판소리) is a Korean musical storytelling performance consisting of a singer and drummer. Chunhyangga in particular is interesting in that, according to some interpretations (maybe I'll post a link or two if I can find any) the main character Chunhyang supposedly represents the ideal Korean woman.

Chunhyangga is a sort of Cinderella story (sorry for the ethnocentric comparison; it makes it easier to describe); Chunhyang, daughter of a lower class kisaeng, and Mongryong, son of a high-class magistrate, fall in love and eventually marry in secret. However, after Mongryong is called to Seoul, he is replaced by an evil magistrate who forces Chunhyang to become his mistress. She refuses and remains loyal to Mongryong despite the consequences, and eventually love triumphs and the two live happily ever after.

But enough background info. The point is that Chunhyangga has been recreated many times over the years in various formats. This coming post series, then, will be my various mini-analyses of these adaptations! What I'm looking at right now are Chunhyangdyun, a movie made in 2000 that pretty much sticks to the traditional telling; Delightful Girl Choon-Hyang, a very popular k-drama that gives a modern retelling of the folktale; and finally Legend of Chun Hyang, a very, very loose manga interpretation by CLAMP.

Anywho, it'll be nice to spread our critical wings to Korean dramas and cinema. Look for it sometime beginning in December or January; get excited yo!!

Until then,


Blackbird

PS: And muchos thanks to Wikipedia since it's easily the easiest/laziest way to get information. For more information on the original Chunhyangga pansori, just look at the Wiki page I got it from! And, of course, Google.

Score One for the Anti-Twilightists

Just a short video to share. It's been around, but it deserves a thumbs up. To quote a friend, "It's what Bella should have done when she met Edward."

Dewey Decimal be my Valentine!

I gobble up scanlations at such a rate these days that I'm continuously browsing for the next, but the browsing process is labor intensive. OneManga has more than 900 separate manga while MangaFox has upwards of 2000 with more added all the time. There's a lot of overlap, but there's no denying the swamp of available scanlations.

Now when I'm in the mood for manga, my craving is often very specific. For example, I might be looking for a plot about a love triangle in the entertainment industry. It's not an uncommon plot; I could read Skip Beat, Ashita no Ousama, or Cat Street to name a few. How do I find these manga? I use the search terms shoujo, josei, or romance and I wade through the slew of results for the next couple hours.

MangaFox has 36 genre tags. They describe the publisher's idea of the target audience (shoujo, seinen), basic plot ideas (romance, adventure), special interests (sports, mecha) and broad literary categories (tragedy, comedy). My first pick today, Skip Beat, is tagged as Comedy, Drama, Romance, Shoujo, Slice of Life. Comprehensive? Hardly! This list covers the bare minimum. A search with the same list returns Gokusen and Fruits Basket. What do a yakusa school teacher, a shape-changing family, and an aspiring actress have in common? Well, aside from those search terms not much. Considering the number of recycled plot devices in the average manga, it should be relatively easy to establish very specific sub-genres, but starting with categories like Romance, it's hard to see where to start.

An Ode to Anime Conventions, or My Disillusionment

WARNING: The following is a long post that is long overdue. But it's finally here! The Animazement report thing! Please don't be discouraged from reading. Or skimming. Or commenting.

Quite an impressive spread.

Back in Manga Meditation's blog drafts are two entries detailing Polecat's and my (Blackbird) recent adventure to Animazement, a now twelve-year-old convention newly located to the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC. These posts, however, haven't been published like we had promised earlier. The reason? To be honest, they were a little boring to write. That, and the descriptions were becoming a little mean.