About
Like the tagline says, The Grand Narrative is about discussing Korean sociology through gender, advertising and popular culture, and in the process has become one of the leading internet sources for information on Korean gender issues, even getting a mention in TIME Magazine recently.
Ironically, this focus was not my original intention, but with Korea having such dubious honors as: the lowest birthrate in the world; the largest wage gap between men and women in the OECD; the lowest percentage of working women in the OECD; and actresses being sued by companies they endorse for being beaten by their husbands, then what soon emerges as the virtual gender apartheid that exists here renders those topics essential to understanding Korean society.
More surprisingly perhaps, I also cover the Korean advertising and popular culture for much the same reasons that I cover gender, as given that Korea’s accelerated development has rendered one’s generation here just as much a marker as, say race is in the US, then not only do both best represent and capture the uniquely fleeting Korean zeitgeist that I’m so in love with, but with young Koreans’ parents’ experiences often being so irrelevant to their own then they provide a source of identity for them that shouldn’t be underestimated either.
As for me, unfortunately I am the sole wage-earner for a family of four, and so any time that isn’t spent working or looking after my daughters is spent either working on this blog or trying to improve my perennially only intermediate Korean ability. Now that the blog is established though, and having thought a great deal about my skills, job-options, and long-term goals in the process of getting it to that stage, I’ve recently decided to try and start a freelance writing career, and naively hope to be writing full-time within 3 years. But still blogging of course!
Other than that, I arrived in Jinju in May 2000, and moved with my Korean girlfriend to Busan in September 2003, and have been here ever since. We got married in May 2004, and we had Alice in June 2006 and then Elizabeth in August last year. Before that, I was born in England in 1976, and spent most of my adolescence being repeatedly dragged between England, Australia and New Zealand by my parents, and I just so happened to be in the latter when they got divorced and so I graduated high school and went to (Auckland) university there. For the sake of my daughters’ education, safety, and just having parks for them to run around in and so on, my wife and I plan to return there to live within the next 5 to 10 years or so.
(Last updated: August 18, 2009)
