결혼식에서 여자는 공주가 된다. 결혼식 후에 여자는 하녀가 된다.*

* = At her wedding, a woman becomes a princess.  After her wedding, a woman becomes a servant.

Midterms are over, having concluded with today's speaking interview exam; having taken four of these since I arrived in June and six of them total so far, they're starting to have less of an impact on me.  I don't know if that's because I've become partially desensitized to the whole process or if it's because I have enough confidence in my speaking abilities to carry me through most things.  It's probably a little bit of both.  Today, I was asked to talk about premarital cohabitation, the Yeonpyeong-do incident, and what Korea might look like today if not for the Korean War.  I blanched a little on that question, because it implies that the Korean War is essentially what made Korea what it is today - which, obviously it had a huge part in it, but so did a bunch of other things.  Oh well.  My teacher probably wasn't expecting me to give a dissertation-level analysis anyway.

So far, the Korean winter has been...wintry, I guess.  There's some snow on the ground (nothing like the 87 blizzards that have hit the American northeast, as I've heard), but temperatures have not risen above -7 degrees Celsius in awhile.  Last Saturday was -14 Celsius (~5-6 degrees Fahrenheit).  I did not leave my apartment once the following day.  Going outside hurts.  People say it's supposed to be "warm" this weekend, but I think that just means that it's finally going to not be in the teens or low twenties.  Everyone, including some of my ajumma-aged teachers, agree that this is the coldest winter SK has seen in awhile; I heard that last week's low temperatures were record-breaking, and that it hasn't been this cold since the Japanese occupation (1905 - WWII, for all the unknowing).  Jesus Cristo.  It's cold.  But like I said, my complaining about the cold comes with the caveat that I strongly prefer this to the summer.  I think fall is my favorite season here...but I have yet to see spring, so I guess I'll have to wait til I've seen the full cycle to judge.

I thought, now that I finally don't have midterms or presentations or anything hanging over my head, that I might try to address two questions that Kelly posed in an earlier comment.

1) Any further thoughts after SK conducted the drill and NK backed off? Do you think that SK's drill in the face of potential attack actually helped keep NK in check or was it needlessly dangerous?

Hmm.  With NK, it's really hard to concretely draw cause-and-effect relationships, but as I mentioned in an earlier comment, I just don't think NK needed to see the full display of SK's military might in order to fully understand the consequences of a potential attack on another civilian target.  The average farmer living in not-Pyeongyang probably knows nothing about the rest of the world (or, really, his own country, for that matter), but that doesn't mean that the bigwigs running NK are naive enough to believe that they could win a clean victory in any military standoff against SK/USA forces.

If the drill accomplished anything (and I'm still not entirely clear that it did - recall that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson was in NK at the time and I would probably say that he has more influence than any other outside factor in changing NK's behavior), it might be that it proved that SK was not bluffing when it said it would retaliate.  In past incidences, it seemed as though Pyeongyang could get away with anything because they were reasonably certain that the South would do nothing in response for fear of provoking a war that would ultimately be good for no one.  Killing civilians, though, was one step too far, and the outrage of SK's population following the "weak" military response to Yeonpyeong-do prompted SK's military to take a tougher stance.  So yeah, it's possible that the military drill proved to NK that SK was not afraid to fight back as they might have been in the past.  But I still maintain that getting that across to NK could have been (and probably was, thanks to Gov. Richardson) accomplished without firing a bunch of missiles into disputed waters.

That answer probably wasn't a very good one, and if you out there reading that thought so, too, then I'd ask you to patiently wait and hope with me that I get into a graduate program that will enable me to intelligently address these sorts of queries.

2) Do you have a read on younger Korean women's view of the perfect boyfriend/husband (and vice-versa)? Or what the ideal dynamic is in such arrangements - is it "50/50" with clearly defined roles and duties? Is it still 'man as the person who succeeds outside the home' while 'woman succeeds inside the home'? This stuff was really taking an obvious turn when I was there, so curious what it's like now among your friends. 

This question is one that I am probably more qualified to answer [hah].  I've been exposed to both sides of the coin; most of the adults (read: parents) that I interact with are firmly ingrained in traditional gender roles and nobody seems discontent or prepared to challenge that.  But interestingly, aside from the consistent nagging of any girl over the age of 21 to hurry up and get married (not unique by any means to Korea), parents do not seem to project the gender-stereotypes that they grew up with and currently live under onto their children.  In other words,  parents may subscribe to the gender roles because that's what they grew up with, but they don't seem to be trying to make sure their kids stick to these roles.  To use an example, I am quite close to a family that is rather conservative, and the parents almost perfectly fit into defined categories; my friend's dad has always worked and provided for the family, while my friend's mom definitely fits the bill of the model Korean housewife: she has never held a job (as far as I know), entered into an arranged marriage at a young age, had children, assumed chief responsibility for raising/educating/caring for them, does pretty much all of the cooking and housework (but they have a housekeeper come weekly to fill in the gaps), and is expected to be dutiful and reverent of her husband at all times, but especially in front of her mother-in-law.  But despite the fact that both of her children are daughters, she hasn't (as far as I can tell) projected any of this onto them.  Rather, she fully expects them to achieve advanced degrees and have careers.  She hasn't pushed them into learning any sort of domestic tasks (my friend does not know how to cook and has 0 interest in learning; she says she hopes her husband can cook, and quite frankly so do I, or she is going to starve).  She doesn't nag about boyfriends and I don't think she's even attempted to arrange marriages for either of them.

That being said, however, I think the expectation is there that they fulfill both the traditional gender roles ascribed to womanhood AND careerhood.  This is a dilemma faced by women everywhere, not just in South Korea; but in Korea, I think the idea of not getting married or getting married and not having children is far less acceptable as a path for women here than it is elsewhere (THIS IS JUST MY OPINION.  DON'T EAT ME IF I AM WRONG).  Like, if I announced to my father that I wasn't planning to get married, or that I wasn't planning to have children, he probably wouldn't be devastated or fight me on it; it's my life and women can do everything that men can do and blah blah blah.  But I feel like if one of my friends approached their parents with that plan, the parents would be very, very disappointed - some might even be heartbroken.  Some might even try to force their children into marriages (this is getting increasingly less common, but was not that unheard of just one generation ago - like I said, my friend's parents entered into an arranged marriage and they were far from the only ones.  It still happens today, albeit with less frequency).  Most of my friends have expressed a strong desire to get married, and the sooner the better; in the US, it's totally fine to be 30+ and single, but that scenario seems to be among a Korean girl's worst nightmares.

Case in point: I have a friend (I'll call her HM), and I made her acquaintance in summer 2009 during my first Light Fellowship run.  Back then, she was either 28 or 29 and was absolutely desperate to get married.  I remember that she kept going on 소개팅 (blind-dating), hoping to meet the man of her dreams.  She expressed to me that she wanted to get plastic surgery because she thought it might help her get married faster.  I told her not to do it and that who cared if she didn't get married right away because she should do things on her own timeline.  She had and still has a really, really amazing job and I saw no reason why she should force herself to settle down just because of some stupid societal expectation.  I said goodbye to her in August; she wasn't dating anyone at the time.

I arrived back in Seoul in June 2010, and promptly met up with some work colleagues and friends of HM.  To my complete shock, they told me she was engaged to be married.  I was all, "what the WHA?" because in America, it is really rare to see people go from no boyfriend --> engaged in about 8-9 months (unless they are crazy Hollywood celebrities or planning to have a shotgun wedding).  But as a friend of mine shared with me, this is the norm in Korea.  You meet a guy, you decide if he's acceptable, and then you get married.  I am not sure where love or forever after come into play here, but I think they become secondary as a person gets older.  That might be true in the US and in other places as well, but I'm speaking just on my impressions of Korea.

To finally (after all that mess) give an answer to Kelly's question: most of my friends are still young (85-87년생), and I think that impacts what they are looking for in a boyfriend or future spouse since they are still firmly entrenched in their education and not looking to get married immediately.  My friends who have boyfriends have, for the most part, loving and caring relationships built on a strong foundation and I think that this is enough to impact how tasks would be divided in the marriage; while their boyfriends future careers and present occupations play a role (I've had many a friend fret to me that she didn't think her boyfriend would amount to much), the bottom line is that these girls are with their guys because the guys love them and vice versa.  I think their ideal marriage would include or be wholly based on this love and trust.  However, I have some older friends (82-83년생) and sometimes I get the impression that they would marry a bookcase if they thought it would make a suitable spouse.  Once you start "aging" in the eyes of the Korean population, marriage becomes less about the dating and the stars and hearts and fairies that go along with it and more about the practical reality that you need to get married because your biological clock is ticking and what will your parents (and their friends) think of you (and your parents) if you don't make a good marriage with a man of good standing and become a wife and mother RIGHT NOW?

Kelly's right, the climate is changing, but I think that that change won't really be firmly accepted by a majority of the population until JM's and my generation sit in the position of judgment of the next generation.  In other words, while young Korean women may be changing their minds, they are still subject to the pressures and standards of an older, more conservative generation.  While my friends' parents may not specifically embody this pressure and the conforming to gender stereotypes, they still seem to pervade society and my guess is that it's expected eventually of all women (and they know this) to be women who marry good men and who make good families and raise good kids.

Although, to be fair, the one universal complaint I hear from ALL OF MY FRIENDS of their boyfriends is, "I wish he were taller!" or "I want a tall boyfriend!"  So maybe height trumps everything else?