Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

In spite of it being up for download online, I decided to cave in and buy My Girl on Amazon:

It has a 4.5/5 rating on Amazon, which bodes well, and my girlfriend swears to heaven it’s the best drama she has ever seen. I was able to get one at a used price of $40, which is also good! It was produced in 2005 / 2006, so it’s fairly new, and assorted ratings around the net put it 90% or higher. Here’s a plot summary from IMDB:

The story concerns a young hotel magnate whose grandfather lingers near death, depressed of having never met his granddaughter, having dismissed her mother from his life years earlier. The manager, unable to locate his long lost sister, instead hires a young con artist who has tried to scam him to act as his sister for the benefit of his grandfather. Romantic and comic entanglements ensue between the two as their plan takes hold all to well. But what will happen when the grandfather makes a miraculous recovery and the two are forced to act as brother and sister, perhaps forever?

It’s worth pointing out that in Korea a girlfriend will call her boyfriend “older brother,” so typical American feelings might not get the joke!

The guy has so many names: Jung Ji-Hoon and 鄭智薰. I didn’t particularly like it, but some might.

Harisu, the famous male to female transgender singer, model and actress, married her boyfriend on May 19, 2007. Her boyfriend Mickey Jung is four years younger than her, as Harisu was born in 1975. He’s an aspiring Korean rapper.

Here are the photos from their wedding:

It doesn’t make sense to most people why someone would want to become a girl–Harisu was an average-looking boy before she had surgery–given the life of complications, surgeries, drugs, and emotional trauma it would bring. However, for Harisu and her new husband, I wish them the best of luck!

This is non-news, but Korea is pondering installing a nude beach to stimulate tourism. Unfortunately, this is probably too radical, and too silly to ever be implimented. The proposal puts a bad light on tourism in the country, and has little internal support:

Residents and fishermen on the east coast are expected to protest strongly against it, citing the possibility of the beach creating an environment unsuitable for local adolescents.

I was in Korea this Spring Break and I noticed one of my younger cousins was memorizing a 19*19 multiplication table. I don’t know about North America, but when I was in Korea, I had to memorize 9*9 multiplication tables almost religiously. I wasn’t the most mathematically gifted student and I didn’t particularly like memorizing in general, so it was especially tortuous for me. So I sympathized with the youngsters of today who had to memorize 19*19 tables. A lot of people agree with me.

19*19 table seems to be a bit of an overkill, even in the educationally competitive country like Korea. A lot of people think that children are tortured enough with education as it is. Keep in mind, a lot of these kids are 1st and 2nd graders. Plus, memorizing more will just reinforce the notion that math is blind computation rather than concepts to be grasped and applied. The proponents of the new mulitiplication table argue that 19*19 table allows for faster computation and higher levels of confidence among students.

I think faster computation is a perk, but not a necessity. If you pursue math long enough and far enough, faster computation comes with the territory. As for higher levels of confidence, if it helps the students feel better about themselves because they have a slight edge over other students or because they can finish problems faster, then sure, go ahead. But if the 19*19 tables become widely used, which seems to be the trend, then the average speed of computation will settle at a higher level than before and the new tables will just be another tool to edge out people who are not inclined towards memorizing long list of numbers and more interested in solving problems creatively.