Monday 31 December 2012

(Day 163) Seoul Nambu Correctional Facility-day 68 D-88

sit-upschair-lifts
1000
Breakfast, lunch & dinner = December 2

Last Sunday of the year... I wish it was the last Sunday I was spending here. Sundays are fucking boring. At risk of repeating myself-- no paper, no exercise period and shitty TV options--  not options-- there's only one channel, so if you don't like it, too fucking bad.

The first show of the day is a drama about a rural family. Like The Watsons or Little House on the Prairie except Korean and in modern times, but it's so fake and shitty. If it were truly reflective of Korean rural life than the actresses, or at least one out of every three, would be Vietnamese Thai or Cambodian. They're all Korean. In Korea, in real rural life, one out of four women is a foreigner. On this drama every single person is a Korean with a perfect upturned nose and double eyelid surgery. Where do farmers get the dough for those C cup 34 inch busts? Rice and soy beans must be a lot more lucrative than I thought. These farmers even have cows! Where the fuck do cows graze in a country barely bigger than Vancouver Island, with a population of 50 million people? There's not a square inch in this country that isn't, or about to be, developed. The idea of Korean cowboys on the open range is ludicrous. What open range?

There's another drama on that's just as ridiculous. A girl is married to this guy after disowning her gambling, alcoholic dad and doctor brother. The dad works as a security guard at the office of the husband. The husband’s sister is also a doctor, dating the disowned brother of her sister-in-law, and no one is aware of anybody else's relationship to each other because they've never met. The doctor sister has never introduced her boyfriend (the brother of her sister-in-law) to her brother, so she's unaware she's actually dating her brother-in-law and the husband’s totally unaware that he's employed the father of his wife as a security guard-- although after 20 episodes he's finally starting to suspect something’s up and the doctor brother has broken up with his sister-in-law because he finally figured it out, but the now ex-girlfriend (sister-in-law) has no idea why they split... I am not making this shit up. This is an actual Korean drama. And of course all the actresses have the Gangnam nose, double eyelid surgery and factory standard bust lines. In a city of 50 million people, the only group of people a family knows is one other family, yet they don't know they're all members of the same family... it's the stupidest plot I've ever seen. I have to turn off the TV when it comes on before I turn into a deer caught in the headlights trapped by the horror that is about to be inflicted on my psyche.

It wouldn't be so bad if there are alternatives like a cop show or sci-fi or even sitcoms, but there aren't. Almost every Korean fictional TV show is this kind of melodrama. When they talk about the Korean wave or Hallyu, k-pop and Korean drama, this is what they are referring to-- these over the top melodramas that are over-acted with the same plot lines. The men are always angry and the women are always pining after unobtainable men or crying about the men they have. And for some reasons other Asians love this shit, especially Chinese men. All I want to do is gouge my eyes out slowly with a dull object.

On the flip side of the coin, Korean must think we're all sex-starved criminals because the only American shows they see are Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives or one of three versions of CSI or Law and Order and lots of Hollywood movies that are all fantasy by design.

I started writing another novel. A murder mystery this time. Why limit myself to one genre?

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