(Formerly Ten Essential Korean Oddities; title changed because I could use $300,000.)

JEJU-DO—Calling another culture’s products or practices strange is always risky business—one man’s emetic is another’s hors d’oeuvre. I always cringe at shows like Fear Factor, not because it pains me to see women with plastic boobs heave said boobs at the prospect of eating grubs and such, but because it promotes a fear of the unfamiliar that contributes to cultural alienation and prejudice. (“Like, eew, Iraqi Camel Spiders—those crazy Arabs will eat anything!�)

So the following list is given with this proviso: most of these things are odd strictly by North American standards, in much the same way that certain North American products would seem disgusting or even appalling to many global citizens. They’re funny and fascinating because of our rigid ideas about what flavours go with what, what makes an acceptable foodstuff or gift, or simply because we haven’t thought of them yet. Most Koreans love them, and I, myself, have come to like many of them, and can certainly appreciate that they have a rightful place in a universe in which things are only as weird as we are isolated from each other’s histories, ideas, emotions and taste buds.

Except for number six. That’s just nuts.

10. Pat Bing Su

The Korean version of the ice cream sundae is fundamentally different from Dairy Queen’s, in that beans are the staple ingredient. Pat, or sweet red bean, will be familiar to anyone with more than passing acquaintance with Asian desserts, since it’s used extensively in dumplings, cakes and other sweets. Pat Bing Su, however, takes red bean cuisine to another level. The dish starts with a pile of plain crushed ice, which is then flavoured with milk and a variety of syrups. On top of this, one dumps a heaping mound of gelatinous red bean goo, in which whole beans are intact and smothered in a sweet, starchy maroon fluid—think placenta parfait, and you’ll get an idea of the dish’s visual appeal. This is the basic Pat Bing Su, which was originally served by street vendors as a cheap summer snack. These days, come the hot months, elaborate variations pop up on hundreds of restaurant menus, usually including ice cream or yoghurt, fruit and fancy toppings. At the Ramada hotel’s high-end buffet in Seogwipo on Jeju’s south side, there is a Pat Bing Su station at which you can garnish your bowl of icy beans with cereal flakes, gummy bears, cherry tomatoes and kernels of steamed corn.* The dish is so popular, even Western chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks offer single-serving versions—although by far the most popular way to consume it is to get a small crowd together and order one so big you could ski down it.

* Note: a supplementary oddity is putting corn on stuff in general. Pizza, scrambled eggs, coleslaw—all well acquainted with our old friend, corn. Yet I have never once been served a helping of plain steamed corn. For whatever reason, it seems to be more accessory than independent foodstuff.

9. Bosintang

What will for many readers undoubtedly be the most off-putting item on this list is actually one of the least unusual, at least to look at or taste. Indeed, I’d wager that if I put a bowl of Korea’s infamous dog stew in front of most people and told them it was beef, they’d gobble it up without a second glance. Which answers the first two frequently asked question about the dish: yes I’ve eaten it, and yes it’s pretty good. Here are the answers to a few others:

• No, it doesn’t taste like chicken. The flavour is reminiscent of dark beef, with a hint of game and oil, and the texture is flaky, like that of corned beef.

• No, I didn’t feel guilty eating it, at least not because of any perceived code about the chummy relationship between dogs and humans. There are legitimate concerns about the treatment of the dogs used for the stew; some activists claim the dogs are beaten or skinned alive to increase the dish’s affect on the eater’s virility, which it’s supposed to improve, and since dogs aren’t considered livestock, their slaughter isn’t governed by the same rules as those applied to cows and pigs—although there are moves being made to amend the law.

However, rules or no, we tend to treat most animals we eat pretty poorly, and since there’s no concrete proof that the dog I ate was treated any more cruelly than a debeaked chicken destined to be McNuggetized, I’m sleeping pretty soundly. (A good piece on the arguments surrounding eating dog here.)

• Yes, I’d eat it again, although I’d probably do it in China, because it was tastier there, anyways.

For the record, although dog meat still has devotees in the millions, most of the younger Koreans I’ve spoken to about it think I’m a deviant for eating it, just the same as I’m sure many of you do. It’s a good joke among Korean friends for me to claim that because I’ve sampled what they wouldn’t consider touching, I’m more Korean than they are.

8. Milkis

I’ll happily drink a cream soda, but there’s something much more disturbing about milk soda, especially when it proclaims on the label to be “new feeling of soda beverage.� This delicious treat is produced by Lotte, one of Korea’s chaebol, family-owned mega corporations that pretty much run the Korean economy. According to Wikipedia, a major selling point is that, “Due to its creamy taste, it is the soft drink chosen by martial arts expert, Jonathan Kuhns.� Google this guy, and you’ll see just how impressive this delicious liquid version of cataracts really is.

7. Magic Hangover Elixir

No shit. Anyone who’s ever woken up with a headache from listening to too much Bruce Springsteen and deciding that Tanqueray and wine sounds like a recipe for thrills absolutely needs to know about this stuff. Why? Because it works. Which is not to say that, if you drink it, you won’t have any hangover. But guzzling a little medicinal bottle of this pungent syrup before and after you binge means you can mix any number of potentially toxic liquors and wake up with no more than a mild headache. Favourite brands include “Morning Care,� “Power,� and “Dawn 808,� the latter of which is meant to be the most potent. Warning: do not attempt to drink Dawn 808 in the morning, as it tastes a lot like motor oil infused with Cap’n Crunch, and is almost guaranteed to make you barf even if you’re not hungover in the least.

6. Fan Death

Perhaps the single most misguided pseudo-scientific belief held by the majority population of any otherwise reasonable nation, the myth of Fan Death suggests that, if you sleep in a room in which a standard electric fan is running and the doors and windows are closed, you will die. In Korea, this belief is not a fringe thing; mainstream Korean media outlets cite fan death as the primary cause of summertime deaths, and medical professionals have attempted to back up the urban legend with research. Even the government endorses the idea; in 2006, they issued a report claiming fan death was among the top five causes of death during the summer months. The explanations for death by fan range from semi-plausible theories regarding hyperthermia (aka overheating) to utterly bizarre explanations involving the shredding of oxygen molecules and the creation of air-sucking vortices that create vacuums and cause asphyxiation by siphoning air to nowhere. When an exasperated Australian friend of mine told a teacher at my hagwon that he’d slept with fans on for his entire life, she looked grave and told him, “You’re very lucky.� The whole thing is totally implausible, unless you’re talking about a fan that’s been possessed by Gozer, or a North Korean spy fan.

5. Deer Antler Liquor

If you visit Samseonghyeol, a shrine in the center of Jeju City where it is said the three gods who founded the Tamna Kingdom were belched up from three holes in the earth, you will find a little theatre that, several times a day, shows the most incoherent educational video I have ever seen. It tells the story of the three gods and how, after being shipped a trio of crates containing princesses from a nearby kingdom, they started civilization on Jeju. I’m sure that in Korean it makes perfect sense, inasmuch as any creation legend can be said to do so; however, in English, it is best enjoyed as an example of just how badly it is possible to mangle a foreign language while still speaking in a confident, radio-announcer voice. Near the end of this video, a propos of nothing, the narrator triumphantly proclaims, “One day, the white deer will reign again!� and a majestic-looking animated buck canters up onto the screen to thrust his chest out in agreement.*

There must be something to the white deer legend, since statues of such an animal exist in various places around the island. But I have no idea what it is. Still, when I found this bottle of White Deer Special Reserve Feeling Island Liquor—which claims to be both “specially blended� and “pure deer antler�—I felt obligated to buy it and drink it in honor of the three hole gods and their crate women. It tasted sort of like anise and sort of like Brio and sort of like soap. I have yet to finish the second, cheaper bottle that I bought, which is a different brand and tastes the same, minus the anise and Brio parts. I think the best thing to come out of it is the startling realization that you can distill just about anything, which has led me to the decision that, when I die, I want my bones ground up and distilled so that everyone at my wake can drink a big old shot of J. McLiquor to toast my life. Konbei!

*To be fair, this is an oddity particular to Jeju, and not necessarily to Korea in general. For more on weird things people drink everywhere in the country, see next entry.

4. Makkolli

Confirming Korean’s love of suspiciously milky beverages is this rice-based booze guzzled in quantity by Korean farmers everywhere. Sold in litre-sized bottles that cost less than a package of gum, makkolli gets you totally, hopelessly wasted, more so than any other booze I have ever ingested, save maybe Chinese baijiu or king cans of Mongoose. When I arrived on Jeju, you could still enjoy it at several traditional makkolli bars, where it was served in large bowls and ladled into smaller ones to drink. These days, however, its sour-sweet taste and rural associations have fallen out of favour with the kids, so most of the establishments I knew of have closed down, replaced by dollar-a-beer joints and fried chicken places. It’s a shame, because slurping it out of a bowl gave it some semblance of ritual, however bogus; chugging it out of a white plastic magnum doesn’t quite have the same exotic mystery. Still, though: milky. Boozy. Sour. Odd.

3. Dog Lockers

When you go to one of the big-box department stores in Jeju—old standard Emart or new contender Lotte Mart—and you need to store your purse dog, there are convenient lockers in which you can do so for 100 won, the equivalent of ten cents. I’ve already covered, in the Bosintang entry, why some dog enthusiasts would think this appalling, but I suppose it’s better to stash the little yappers than have some hungry dude itching for the kind of erection only fresh dog fillet can provide snatch it out of your basket and start snacking right there in the kimchi aisle.

2. Canned Meat Gift Sets

Imagine this: you wake up on Christmas morning, wracked with anticipation over what excellent toy your parents have chosen to reward your 365 days of good behaviour, only to find under the tree… twelve tins of Spam, packed in an attractive cardboard box with cellophane window. Realistically, these giant boxes of canned ham or tuna aren’t intended for the kids, and they’re more common around Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving, usually sometime in September) than Yuletide. They’re interesting in that they’re gifts for the family rather than the individual, concrete reflections of this Confucian society’s deference to the clan over the North American Mega-Me. Also, the Spam ones are part of a national love for fake meat held over from the Korean war, when the product descended on the country along with the U.S. military. So I suppose you could consider them to be enmeshed with the torrid history of the Korean identity. Alternately, you could consider them inedible. Either way, I’d still rather get a nice bottle of Scotch as a gift.

1. The Shit Needle / National Scatology

One of Korean school kids’ favourite games is 똥침, or “ddong ch’im,� which translates roughly as “shit needle.� It’s not complicated; all you do is run around with your two index fingers in the steeple position, find vulnerable anuses and jam your “needle� up them as hard as you can. (Find a digital version of the game—a kind of excremental Asteroids—here. ) For the foreign receiver, this is rarely funny or enjoyable in any way. However, the activity is indicative of a much larger national relationship with turds.

In the West, we have plenty of juvenile toilet humour, but when it boils right down to it, there’s not much we like less than shit. We think shit is gross. We equate it with moral filth, degeneracy, everything in society that we would like to flush into the sewer along with our deuce bombs. As Erik D’Amato points out in his “Mystery of Disgust,� “in most cultures the same word used to describe feces and decay [‘disgusting’] is also applied to morally-dubious acts.�

In Korea, however, shit is cute. It has somehow been adopted as a kind of cartoon mascot, a harmless and even adorable little character that takes the form of a coiled, anthropomorphized pile of poop. You’ll find this little guy on stickers, notebooks and other school supplies, and even used on signage for restaurants; currently, by my count, there are at least three “Ddong� bars in Shi-cheong, the student pub area of Jeju City, each of which is adorned with a glowing pile of shit to draw carousers in for a few shitty beers.

In Seoul, there is even a pair of public sculptures of the peaked forms done in colourful mosaic. The forthright appreciation for crap goes even further in Jeju, where indigenous black pig, traditionally raised in pens that doubled as toilets for Jeju villagers and therefore fattened on the droppings left therein, is among the most coveted and expensive meats used for Korean barbeque. This is not only undisguised—it is advertised in the very name of the animal: “ddong dwaeji,� literally, “shit pig.�

The Korean fondness for feces probably has roots in Confucianism, wherein the individual is always part of a larger group, thereby rendering Western notions of privacy moot. This ideological base also dictates that standards of shame are based more on concepts of social dishonor than fear of the body. It could also have to do with the much more direct relationship Koreans have with the sources of their food—there is no equivalent in Korean for the English words “beef� and “pork�; here, you order “so gogi� or “dwaeji gogi,� “cow meat� or “pig meat,� and the animals that provide the meat appear alongside the little turd as cartoon ambassadors for the restaurants in which they are served as dinner. Maybe recognizing the stuff you are eating makes it easier to face the stuff you are excreting, which is, after all, the same shit in a different form.

Whatever the explanation, the discrepancy between our fear of shit and Koreans’ tendency to want to cuddle it points to the same difference in perspective that I mentioned oh, about six million words ago in the introduction. What is important when looking at these differences, be they to do with food or shit, is not to fall into the trap of grafting our moral judgments about things we deem “disgusting� onto cultures that haven’t absorbed our inherited cultural attitudes. As D’Amato points out, “by relishing something we consider gross, an otherwise well-regarded culture can be instantly relegated to barbarian status.� The fear factor is a big one in forming our opinions of people from other places. The empathy of taste—trying to wrap your head around enjoying those fried toad balls, rather than just eating them on a dare—is something we all need a little more of when developing our global palates.

Tags: international, korea

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Posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 10:25 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.