Fighteeng!

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's... Ace and Gary?

These guys crack me up!  As I was walking towards Yuldong Park in Bundang last week, I noticed these two fellas that looked like they were showing off their Halloween costumes.  They were zigzagging up and down the street, giggling, grabbing and chest bumping each other on the way.

Huh? What’s going on here?  I was thinking… is this the Korean version of Saturday Night Live’s cartoon, The Ambiguously Gay Duo?

Turns out, I was not so lucky to see one of my favorite SNL sketches come to life.   They were just pizza delivery guys posting  flyers on doors around the neighborhood, while being general goofballs to attract attention from bored, hungry people like me.

They were moving along at a pretty fast clip for me to get a conversation in, but I was just wondering if their names might have been something similar to Ace and Gary in Korean.  Guess I’ll just have to order out some Super Pizza to find out for myself.

The exports of Korean pop entertainment, curiously called the Korean Wave, have apparently devolved into such a slow simmer that national competitiveness is at stake, so what does Kim Chul-Joong, news columnist for the Chosun Ilbo suggest?

The next Korean wave: we should see more of this girl on the right than the girl, er I mean guy, on the left. Thank YOUUU!!!

Plastic surgery.  Yes, he thinks the next Wave should be making Korea’s infamous reputation in Asia of carving out double-eyelids with an x-acto knife famous across the globe. (Well, it’s not all that bad… I usually can’t tell, unless a Korean friend of the opposite sex explicitly points out to me how that girl had this or that part done.)

The Korean brand of beauty has evidently grown into a source of power for Korea’s national competitiveness. All of this has contributed to a 33 percent rise in the number of foreign patients in Korea this year.

The disdain some women have for other women with plastic surgery obviously haven’t dampened the growth of the industry, especially to Korea’s neighbors, and it sure hasn’t deterred Kim from advocating that cutting up faces and enhancing breasts should be a source of national pride, not that I have a problem with the latter.

The country must tap into the potential offered by this industry. It needs a strategy to link this trend to its beauty industry as a whole, much as the Champs Elysees in Paris evokes images of haute couture and is the source of new fashion trends and luxury goods exported around the world.

Hollywood, too, is world famous not only for its movie studios but for cosmetic surgery, dermatology clinics and stores selling luxury goods. The new cosmetic surgery techniques and beauty products that are created there are exported around the world.

Hmm… so what part of Korea can compare to Champs Elysees or Hollywood to flex its beauty muscles?

The posh stretch of Seoul connecting Sinsa-dong, Apkujeong-dong and Cheongdam-dong is home to dermatology and plastic surgery clinics, fitness centers and other beauty-related businesses. Fashion designers also own boutiques there, while other high-end stores sell accessories and cosmetics. It can very well be called the Korean beauty district. If this area can be developed into a symbol of Korea’s beauty industry, it has the potential to become an internationally recognized location.

Garosugil in Sinsadong probably comes to mind as anything remotely close to Champ Elysees.  If we stretch this belt of beauty all the way to Itaewon’s gay neighborhoods, then maybe this posh stretch will have more of a Hollywood feel to it, because isn’t it really the gay guys that validate women’s claim about what is fashionably beautiful or not?  And the reference to “other beauty-related businesses”? Well, that’s probably those where the non-gay men pay a lot of money to appreciate that beauty up close and personal. And by some accounts, that seems to already be internationally recognized. But I digress…

Right now, the Pusan International Film Festival is in full swing. Many movie stars and fans from across Asia have converged on the city also spelled Busan to enjoy the festival, enabling the port to reap the benefits of its image as East Asia’s movie capital. By the same token, Seoul’s beauty district could become the center of the Asian beauty industry if businesses can compete and thrive there, creating new products and trends.

OK, so I get what he’s saying… it’s feasible I suppose, but the government has already beat him to the punch.

The South Korean government designated the area from Apgujeongdong to Cheongdamdong — home to luxury brand fashion shops and two massive department stores — the country’s new fashion district last year, aiming to create “Korea’s own Champs-Elysees” after the famed boulevard in Paris.

But that may not be a great start, because Korea appears to have some serious competition to be the plastic surgery capital of the world… The Hungarians recently held a beauty contest for those with plastic surgery.  Well, to a regular guy like me…  fashion, plastic surgery, beauty… it’s all the same.  Whatever gets the ladies to come out in their mini-skirts in the winter as much in the summer is a positive step in the right direction.

A few weeks ago, I blogged half-jokingly about widening the pipe for foreigners to marry Korean women or men in order to put a dent in the low birth rate problem, in addition to government policies that protect pregnant women in the workplace.  But the presumed context of that discussion was married women who have the choice of whether have to kids at all.

In reality, life is not that simple or straightforward.  Accidents happen. Lack of planning happens.  Mistakes happen.  Women get pregnant outside of marriage too, so what does the Korean government do for those that choose to carry to term?  Well, apparently not much but a mere $42 monthly allowance per kid, which is about half of what the kid would get if he/she were adopted, according to a recent, gut-wrenching New York Times article.

Ironically, for a country whose leaders lament that they have one of the lowest birth rates among the OECD nations that might trigger a population decline by 2018, Korea has the infamous reputation as a baby exporter for foreign adoptions and of having high abortion rates.   So I decided to do a little math to figure out what the opportunity cost was, or more precisely, the number of kids that would have been born and lived in Korea had the government actually done more to help unmarried women, instead of just the socially acceptable married ones.

The article reports 96% of all unwed pregnant women choose abortion (although illegal, but not enforced), which means that if the reported 7,774 babies born out of wedlock in 2007 (representing the 4% that are not aborted), then 194,350 babies were aborted that year.  (And I use the word babies for lack of better word. I am not advocating for or against abortion on moral grounds in this post.)  And if the reported 70% of those who choose to have the baby give them up for adoption, then there were 5,441 of them, with nearly 90% of them (or 4,896) going abroad.

So in 2007, that leaves about 2,877 kids remaining in korea, adopted or not, according to my fuzzy math.  Of these that stay, the Korean government has made some progress:

For years, the South Korean government has worked to reduce overseas adoptions, which peaked at 8,837 in 1985. To increase adoptions at home, it provides subsidies and extra health care benefits for families that adopt, and it designated May 11 as Adoption Day.

While it’s certainly laudable that the government has taken over a decade to nearly half the number of kids being sent to other countries, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of kids that would have been born if not aborted due to enormous social strain of being a single mom.

I’m not suggesting the government is capable of saving the entire 96%, but its policies should be weighted towards those that are likely to be aborted and not those likely to be shipped away, because of the obvious fact that those numbers are just staggeringly higher to work with, and thus could make a bigger, positive impact on the low population problem.

The two support groups of unmarried mothers that the article mention argue on the basis of discrimination and human rights for the government to do more for them.  To add my two cents, I’m arguing on the basis of economics as well, that providing social incentives and financial support for unwed pregnant women will compel more of them to choose to have the baby and keep them, rather than terminate.

So if hypothetically these new programs were to drop the 96% abortion rate to say 75%, that’s a gain of 21% , or 40,813 in additional kids born out of wedlock.  And I suspect that the adoption rate would lower as well because a mother who opts for the baby to live under a more tolerant society will more likely keep it as her own rather than give it away.  For argument’s sake, let’s suppose the 2007 adoption rate of 70% drops to 60% with the same 90% going abroad, then that’s a net gain of an additional 18,773 kids residing in Korea a year, adopted or not, to add to the nation’s future productivity.

Presumably, those babies that are fortunate enough to be adopted are taken well care of by more financially and socially secure parents.  So please give these two worthy groups that represent single mothers who raise their own kids on their own dime a visit.

Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea

Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network

The Korea Herald reports today that police are casting a wider net on those who fudge medical records:

“As of Saturday, police in Ilsan, Gyeonggii Province, summoned about 60 people who are suspected of having evaded military service by receiving operations on their shoulders which were normal or intentionally damaged.  A total of 203 people are under probe on the same charges. They include a pro-football player, a pro-gamer and a member of the national volleyball team, police said.”

Now offering services to draft dodgers!

Intentionally damaged? OUCH!! How does one even go about doing that?  (Why does the movie Saw come to mind?)

At least these 203 fellas didn’t get out the same way these 10 did, as mentioned by the Chosun Ilbo a few days earlier, who were exempted from military service due to a female-to-male sex change.  To be clear, Chosun Ilbo does not report anything criminal or find out why these 10 individuals performed the change for reasons other than a genuine gender reassignment.  I suspect that a large majority of conscripts fulfill their duty admirably.

This article simply states that female-to-male persons will no longer have to subject themselves to the indignity of a physical exam that violates human rights.  They only need to declare the change in the family registry. I suppose the shame of documenting the procedure for all to see at your local “gu” office ought to be enough incentive not to game the system.

Peculiarly enough though, the article states that male-to-female transsexuals are already exempt and the policy change only applies to female-to-male persons.  Hmm.

So what is the military’s verification system or rationale for male-to-female individuals that made them exempt from the humiliation that their counterparts endured?  Does that mean they never had to undergo inspections of genitals, and were trusted just by superficial appearances?

In other words, does that mean a guy could just put on a lipstick and a wig and get away with it? If so, wouldn’t that appear to be less painful than having a buddy slam your collarbone with a sledgehammer, jackass-style?  What are the numbers for male-to-female exemptions?