Yeol Shim Hee

Tell me something interesting about Korea.

All I can say is, Koreans take this whole “speech formality levels” stuff quite seriously.

So, for example, in France, Quebec, etc., you have “ca va?” (informal) or “comment-allez vous?” (formal). Well, Korean is the same, maybe more strict. It’s “annyong?” to friends, family, and clasmates, but “annyong haseyo?” to everyone else. Remember George Bush? Someone thought that he was rude to a Korean dignitary, that he’d said “annyong” to them. I doubt it. My point is that in Korea, like Japan, they know who is above, equal to, or below whom. You have the combined influences of Confucianism and the country’s military past. I think that’s a big part of how they became successful in business in just two generations. So yes, that IS a “miracle.”

Not to mention, Uncle Sam let them run a huge trade surplus and provided security in exchange for those army bases.

But Asia is also capitalism on steroids. Adam Smith would love this place. So you have almost pure capitalism and pure communism on either side of the DMZ, the south with extremes of wealth and poverty, and then the more socialist north. Sound familiar?

What’s the Asia connection?

You know my mother and her family were living in China as British expats when the Japanese invaded. Mom and her family were in the POW camp in Weishen. When America and its allies liberated China from Japan, my family got packing. Grandfather sent his wife and kids on ahead, setting sail from what the British called “Tientsin” (天津) in those days for San Fransisco. I guess we’ve always been Asiaphiles, if that’s the right word. But wer’re Anglophiles too. We love English culture, Chinese culture, all cultures of the world.