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The Korea Times

Entertainment & Arts

SCMP
Asia

The Korea Times

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Columnists

Jason Lim

Of course Gwen Stefani can be Japanese

Gwen Stefani caused a minor ruckus recently when she proclaimed in an interview that she identifies as Japanese. She was referring to the time in her childhood when she lived in Japan due to her father's work with Yamaha. “That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me,” Stefani said.

2023-01-29 16:50

Nepo babies into 'Neo' babies

Nepo is short for nepotism, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as, “the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives, friends or associates, especially by giving them jobs.” Nepo babies, therefore, are the children of the rich, famous and powerful who are given exposure, opportunities and oftentimes jobs, which form the platform upon which their respective wealth, fame and power can grow.

2023-01-08 16:50

Certainty addiction

My family was driving to Vermont to ski for a few days now that the kid was out of school for winter break. It was one of those hazy shade of winter days as the sun struggled to break through its own ennui to care barely enough to shed some light with only grudging warmth. While plowed, the roads were still slippery, decorated with the brilliantly white remnants of a furious snowstorm that passed the region less than 24 hours ago, with tree branches laboring under a late-term pregnancy of frozen snow. In short, this wasn't northern Virginia where we drove up from or even New York City where ...

2022-12-26 16:50

Taking refuge in self-absorption

In the World Cup, the best footballers in the world, at the top of their game, are intently focused on getting a ball somehow past their opposition and into the net. Put it this way, it seems absolutely ridiculous. However, as they say, it's a beautiful game when it all comes together. The beauty is not in the win or loss. It's in the process, the build-up, the near misses, the key opportunities and the goals. Moreover, the beauty is in the passionate but innocent focus of the moment that is etched on the player's faces as they wince in pain, disappointment and even despair until that one br...

2022-12-11 16:55

World Cup and affiliations

Being a Tottenham and Son Heung-min fan (who isn't), I found the scene of Son embracing his English Premier League teammate from Uruguay, Rodrigo Bentancur, before their World Cup match familiar but interesting. Son is well-known for being a team player and having warm relationships with his teammates. However, no one bats an eye when a player recalibrates his allegiance and does his best to beat his teammate who is now on the opposite side of the turf.

2022-11-27 15:13

Korean Weltschmerz

It was the mid-1990s. It was the first time that I ever went to Korea by myself. It was right after college graduation, and I hadn't been back to Korea since I had left when I was nine years old. Since my family didn't go to church, I hadn't even had a lot of contact with Korean Americans while growing up. But there is something akin to a pilgrimage for a Korean American in wanting to visit Korea as an adult - a desire to validate some part of the identity, an unexplained hollowness that yearns to be filled. Looking back, this is probably pretty common for someone who has lived his entire li...

2022-11-13 14:03

Deadly crowd crush in Itaewon

As I write this, the body count keeps going up. It's now 154 people confirmed killed and 133 injured in Itaewon where tens of thousands of young revelers showed up to party on the last Saturday before Halloween. Exact details of what happened are still weeks away, but the rough story is no mystery. Too many people showed up to party in too small a space. There was no crowd control. People were hemmed in, pushed, crushed, and suffocated from the weight of the unthinking crowd that got jammed in at the first bottleneck or fall.

2022-10-30 15:52

Korea and Kakao: '503 service temporarily unavailable'

My elderly parents moved into an apartment condo in New Jersey a few years ago when they found that they couldn't upkeep a single-family house any longer due to increasing frailty. Before they moved in, they had some renovations done to their kitchen and bathrooms to make them modern, clean and stylish. Recently, however, they started smelling a foul odor coming from their bathrooms. Despite multiple tries, they couldn't diagnose the source of the problem. In short, while the outside of the apartment looked spic and span, the underlying infrastructure was shoddy.

2022-10-16 14:41

Everything everywhere all at once

It seems as if everything is going to hell all at once. You have the Russia-Ukraine war, with the always constant threat of a catastrophic nuclear exchange just below the horizon. You have Iranian women and young people violently pushing back against the suffocating rule of a fundamentalist theocracy. You have the Chinese being locked up in their own houses for months at a time, often not able to provide for their basic necessities, at the mercy of a central government hellbent on an unrealistic “zero COVID” policy. In the same country, you have the ongoing suppression and destruction of the...

2022-10-02 15:06

I look at myself but I can't see me

A few years ago, my little boy and I were talking over dinner about how our respective days went. He was trying to narrate a story and was differentiating himself from the other kids in his class. He used a word that I never forgot. He said, “Not me, that was for the real American kids.” I feebly protested, “But you are a real American, too.” He nodded, somewhat impatiently. “I know, but you know.” And I did.

2022-09-04 15:37

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