Happy New Years from Auckland, and plans for the blog in 2008

(Photo by Jae Sern)

(Update February 29 2008: For various reasons, in the end all the plans for the blog I mention here will be..ahem…2 months late. I’ll also probably spend two months on each instead of one. But at the very least, I’ll still stick to the original order of subjects I described!)

This is actually a photo off the net from last year, but I’m in a prime spot downtown to take pictures like the above myself when the fireworks go off in a couple of hours. I can also see the beds of most of the occupants in the dorm-like hotel next door, but then I can only watch them watching TV and eating potato chips for so long, and so far nothing they’ve done has quite compared to the professional lingerie photoshoots in the expensive apartment building behind us a couple of nights ago. No, I’m not kidding, but sorry, no I don’t have photos: despite what some people might think I’m not quite accustomed to hiding in the dark staring into people’s homes at women in their underwear, my wife (probably) even less, and it didn’t occur to her or I to take them. Besides which, if we had, the flash would probably have drawn the photographer’s attention to the fact that his curtains weren’t drawn.

(We’re in the building on the right, at the top and on the right)

Shortly before we saw that, I discovered that one of my best friends died back in August. Naturally I’ve been a bit upset, but I’m trying not to let the news put a pall over the entire trip, and the lingerie shoot certainly helped (my friend would have appreciated the sentiment). But traveling with a bubbly young toddler has of course been a great boost, and what’s more she’s even finally started calling me “Daddy” after 18 months of me trying. Sure, it turns out that she still calls me “어마” or “mum” most of the time, and runs up to every bald guy with a shaved head she sees and calls them Daddy too, but it’s a start.

Still, even without my friend dying, being back home after so long away has put me in a melancholy, reflective mood, but…well, apart from seeing friends and family, that was the whole point of coming. Blog-wise though, that’s made if difficult for me to get back into my groove and come up with actual posts (sorry, but I’ll be back in less than 2 weeks), but it’s meant I have been thinking about my motivations for having and spending so much time on the blog. It is New Year’s after all, and I need to figure out how the blog will fit into all my other resolutions that I won’t stick to.

Of course, this blog will remain primarily a means to show the world…ahem…how smart I am, and give me some material to show future interviewers for that mythical non-ESL job in the sky. But everybody and his or her dog has a blog these days, so I really need to guest-contribute on other, more popular blogs and sites, and especially need to have some work published, and in 2008 I’ll be spending just as much time on both as I do on this blog.

Don’t worry, I didn’t say I’ll be spending less time on The Grand Narrative™, but I do want to make working on it as enjoyable and rewarding as possible. That’s difficult to do without specific plans and goals for a blog, which is common-sense but which I had to read blogs about blogging such as this and this say to figure out myself. With that in mind, and remembering that if you can’t explain something to someone else then you don’t understand it yourself (the best thing my high-school physics teacher ever taught me), here are what I plan to post about on the blog in the next 3 months or so:

January: Explaining what exactly a “developmental state” is, of which Korea has been described as the prototypical example. Sure, that might not appear very thrilling at first glance, or even second and third, but trying to understand present-day Korea without knowing what it is would be like trying to understand postwar European social-democracies without knowing who Keynes was, or sexual liberation since the 1960s without reference to the contraceptive pill. It’s by now a huge concept, with an extensive literature, and so reading different books may mean that your notion of what a developmental state is may be completely unlike mine, which can inhibit discussion. But regardless of specific policies and circumstances, for me its ethos is fundamental and is what I’ll concentrate on, for it pervades all aspects of Korean life today: not just in obvious areas such as politics and economics, but with a no-less palpable role in things like consumer behaviour, the education system, and even cultural expression too.

February: You don’t need to be a regular reader of my blog to know that Korean society is rapidly changing, in a much shorter time-frame than for Western countries. This is what makes it so interesting to study, and I’ve recently blogged about some aspects of Korean sociology such as premarital sex, cohabitation and flatting, and said that I would look at histories of the same in Western countries to judge if Korean society is ”converging” towards those as its economy further develops. I’ve never technically studied sociology though, and in hindsight a few chats with my parents about their flatting days while they’re driving doesn’t really cut it for filling in those blanks, so although this is a blog about Korea I need a decent grounding in the subject before I can study Korea properly. With that in mind, I’ve just bought the following books:

Choices and Constraints in Family Life by Maureen Baker. Oxford University Press, USA (2007), Paperback, 216 pages

The New Zealand Family from 1840 by D. Ian Pool. Auckland University Press (2007), Paperback, 342 pages

The first is very basic, and reads like a sociology 101 textbook. Come to think of it, seeing as I got it from the textbook section of the University of Auckland bookstore, that’s precisely what it is. But despite it’s simplicity, it does give a good introduction to the subject and covers a lot of countries, and is a lot more reliable than my own vague notions of the subject from my own experiences and episodes of Friends. It’s still not adequate for the subject by itself of course, so I was glad to also find the very thick, detailed tome underneath that (and very annoyed that I couldn’t get it at Whatthebook? in Korea). Sure, it’s just about New Zealand, but seeing as how that’s the only Western country I’ve ever flatted in then it’s a good place to start, and of course much of it will be relevant to other countries.

March: With that out of the way, I can’t make meaningful judgments about Korea without contrasting and comparing it to other developed Asian democratic and capitalist societies, namely Japan and Taiwan, but also maybe semi-democratic Hong Kong and Singapore. Much of that month will be spent getting a handle on what English language material is available, and in the case of Korea, using my by then hopefully much better Korean skills to use Korean sources to get some detailed statistics. But reading Korean academic sources is still some way off unfortunately.

I do have some plans for after that too, but 3 months ahead is a wise place to stop. And I won’t exclusively be posting about those subjects in those periods, other things will come up from time to time of course (no pun intended), and with the TOPIK test being in March I’ll be blogging a lot about learning Korean too. But that is the gist of things to come in the next few months, and I hope you enjoy them.

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