Fighteeng!

No, it's not a prop for Japanese porn. It's Korea's cheap and healthy rice wine, now being served by the foxy stewardesses of Asiana Airlines.

I could never imagine this happening on Southwest, but then again, Asiana Airlines does have a highbrow reputation to maintain.  The Chosun Ilbo reports that Asiana will begin serving a special alcoholic drink on all 22 flights to and from Japan.  Score!

But don’t get too excited, cuz it’s not Guinness or Hefeweizen.  It’s makgeoli, or Korean rice wine, a thick, milky white liquor made of specially fermented rice, which requires an acquired taste over time to enjoy (at least for me).  This is all part of a promotion of Korean food to Japan, which is not surprising following the recent face stuffing of kimchee from the wife of Korea’s president to the wife of Japan’s prime minister.

If you don’t like it at first, at least do it for the sake of protecting Korea’s rice market, because according to this political editor at the Korea Times, the prices have dropped due to a surplus arguably caused by the halt of aid to North Korea.  So how do we solve this?

Development of more food products made from rice is needed to reduce the rice stockpile. Measures include eating rice noodles and making more rice-based items for meals in the military and at schools.

Don’t exclude rice from your meals in the morning from tomorrow! It will help not only reduce the stockpile but also prevent rice prices from falling further.

So if you ever happen to fail the breathalizer at sobriety checkpoints, just tell the K-popo that you drank lots of makgeoli for the sake of the country’s economy.  You’ll probably get off easy.

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

Anyone who’s been to a family home in Korea might possibly notice a plastic bag , located in or near the kitchen sink, that contains food scraps from cooking and unfinished meals.  Well, it usually just sits there for a day or two until someone in the household has the pleasant job of routinely tying up the bag and tossing it into a special bin at the community garbage area.  Or until the stench or size of the leftovers in the plastic bag becomes unbearable.

Could the Coway WM03 be Wall-E's great great great grandfather?

Garbage disposals and composting in backyard gardens are virtually unheard of for city dwellers in Korea.   So what’s a geeky guy with a little extra cash and a clean freak wife supposed to do?  Enter the Coway WM03 Food Waste Treatment System, which I discovered from Red Ferret, a tech website I frequent while on the throne.

It not only crushes your leftovers up to 10% of its original size but also bakes and deodorizes it.  Sounds pretty cool to me… no more foul odors and eyesores that would embarrass your guests, less nagging from wifey to take out the garbage, and one less thing for ajumahs to complain about when it comes to germs around kids.  Plus, it looks like it’s Martha Stewart compliant.

Red Ferret poo poos the machine because it apparently uses up 800 watts of power.  But wouldn’t shrinking your garbage landfill to 10% of what it could have been good for the environment too?

In light of all the fuss and overzealous efforts to protect everyone against the flu, I read from the New York Times a  study that confirms what our moms always knew.

“In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.

Boy, how would you like to be a participant for this study by being sleep deprived, quarantined and exposed to viruses?  But in Korea, parents submit their kids to a very similar environment that is popularly known as the “hagwon”.  According to the Korea Times, teenagers sleep an average of 5.4 hours  a day, which is not surprising to anyone who has stepped foot on this country, but in the same article, there was apparently a bill backed by Lee Myung Bak last year to let hagwons stay open as long as they want.

According to Choi Byeong-hwan of the Grand National Party: “Society is mature enough to handle such liberty. Regulation is worse.”

Uh, I don’t think so, because according to a representative of the Korean Teachers & Education Workers’ Union, Korean parents already ignore the laws to slave their kids away at hagwons.

“… many of the institutes in Seoul run all night already, and the revision will just proliferate their ‘obnoxious’ actions. ‘Do we really have to see children sleep in the classrooms and study at night in hagwon?’ he said. Hyun added that the revision is almost ‘violent” to students and warned that too much liberty could be disastrous.”

Enjoy it while you can, little grasshopper. That's my second boy, taking a nap.

Clearly, this guy does not underestimate the pack mentality of Korean parents, who’d rather cover their kids with hand sanitizer from head to toe as they push them into all nighters.  However, well-intentioned efforts like these may be futile, because according to this report by MedPie, lack of sleep prevents the flu vaccine from even working.

Ironically, the government flip flops on the issue earlier this year by trying to impose a 10PM curfew on hagwons, not so much for the sake of childrens’ health, but to reduce the cost of private education.  Either way, it’s an implicit admission that Korean society is certainly not mature enough to handle education deregulation on its own.

I think a valuable study would be to compare the academic and health metrics of students in Korea who get 8 hours of sleep versus those who get less.   I suspect the results will favor more sleep and shake some sense into parents like myself, because this report shows that while Korean youth study the most, their scores are lower.