UNSRC Korean Cultural Society

KOREA HERALD

Alex Grange, from England, is a member of Arirang Taekwondo Club, near Samgakji Station, Seoul. [Photo by Allison Furlong]

It’s no secret that Korea is the birthplace of taekwondo. As you wander this country’s streets, children with boundless energy sport belts from all colors of the rainbow. And while there are numerous opportunities to watch demonstration teams as well as even attempt some moves of your own throughout many destinations around Korea, most are geared towards tourists and not long-term residents. For expats looking to regularly practice the sport Korea calls its own, it’s proven to be a little difficult.

But Jin Sang-eun — the founder of Arirang Taekwondo Club — would like to change that.

Jin, known to Arirang members as Jin, started learning taekwondo at age 13. While in college, he studied English at a language institute. It was during this time he met several foreign English teachers and realized the demand for a foreign, English taekwondo club in Seoul.

“I would see many foreign teachers who were interested in taekwondo. Some joined local Korean clubs but couldn’t really grasp the concepts very well because of the language barrier. They were also training with kids who were very young. So many, even though they were still interested in learning more, stopped training within a few months.”

The demand for a foreign club, combined with Jin’s previous experience teaching taekwondo in Australia, led to the creation of a unique taekwondo club located in the War Memorial of Korea, Samgakji station.

Arirang began with help from a local club, Jayang Taekwondo. Sam Kim, the club’s owner, allowed Jin to use his space to get his foreign club off the ground. In June 2007, an Irish expat named Patrick became Arirang’s first member. He also gave the club its name.

“I wanted Arirang to be an international friendship club for people from different countries,” said Jin. “A place where members could exchange cultures and languages through training in the Korean martial art of taekwondo.”

Some two years later, Arirang now has more than 40 members who are as diverse as the colors they sport. The youngest member being 20, the oldest over 40, hailing from such countries as America, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Japan, Philippines, South Africa and of course, Korea. There are numerous ESL teachers, an architect, a Korean Air pilot as well as many students from Seoul’s numerous post-secondary institutions, just to name a few.

“Taekwondo is a way for me to have fun, socialize and let off some steam from the week,” says Nikia Noel, 24, an America ESL teacher. “There are times that I’m challenged and times that I look a little silly, but I’m always learning.”

Noel joined Arirang in April. She’s now a blue belt and would like to keep training towards receiving her black belt.

Arirang’s first member to do so hailed from Japan. She studied Korean at a local university, began as a white belt and received her black belt within a year and a half.

“It was a very impressive thing — to tie her belt by myself, the day before she left Korea,” said Jin. “She cried in front of many club members, which in turn made me cry. We still keep in touch with each other.”

It’s quite common to see striped belts among Korean children but adult belts only run in solid colors. A taekwondo beginner starts by wearing a white belt, symbolizing innocence or lack of knowledge. Next comes yellow, representing the earth in which a plant can grow, or the foundation of your martial arts knowledge. After that is green, symbolizing the plant itself and its growth as you continue to learn. Next is blue, which represents the sky or the heavens, to which the plant matures. The one before black, red, symbolizes danger, warning the student to be cautious with the knowledge they now have.

But colors, or how quickly you move up the ranks, shouldn’t be your main focus.

Alex Grange, 31, from England, started taekwondo at age 5 and is a member of Arirang.

“I have been training now for 25 years,” said Grange. “I received my first dan belt in 1992 at the age of 14. And yes, it took me nine years to get a black belt. The grading system outside of Korea is actually very different and much harder … but you can’t beat learning taekwondo in its home country. The level of knowledge of the masters here is amazing and I am taking full advantage of that fact, learning as much as I can while I’m here in Korea.”

A typical class begins with warm-ups and covers basic movements, poomsae and stretching. Poomsae is a unique taekwondo pattern that covers all basic movements while fighting an imaginary opponent. There are also opportunities to spar — getting outfitted in protective gear and practicing the movements you’ve been learning by physically kicking and punching each other.

But there’s no need to be fearful. Violence certainly isn’t the main focus of taekwondo.

“I don’t want to hurt people … I just want to test myself,” said Jeyhun Lee, 36. Lee practiced taekwondo many years ago as a child. He received his black belt, for the second time, in August.

More than 70 million people around the world are currently practicing taekwondo in over 188 countries. If you’d like to as well, Grange has some advice.

“Just come along and join in. But remember to bring your sense of humor, and be willing to laugh at yourself. If you don’t try you will never know, and regret is the worst feeling. If you do come and join our amazing group, I promise you will never regret it.”

(allison.furlong@gmail.com)

By Allison Furlong

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Korea Herald

Sa Lang Korean restaurant in Paris [Lee Yong-sung/The Korea Herald]

PARIS — The early-morning air of the French capital was cold, but the last thing you want to do is waste time seeking shelter during a visit to this romantic city.

For efficiency’s sake, I decided to get on the first “hop-on hop-off” tour bus I saw — the easiest way to get around in most major tourist cities of the world.

Sightseeing for a good half-day on an open-air double-decker bus was rewarding, but the chill was deep inside my bones, kicking in an urge to have hot, steamy “kimchi jjigae.”

Quickly I changed buses to reach the Opera Garnier, the neo-baroque-style opera house at the heart of the city. A five-minute walk from the landmark is a collection of Asian restaurants. Without hesitation, I walked into the first Korean restaurant I found and ordered kimchi jjigae.

The smell of properly fermented kimchi soon pervaded the small yet cozy restaurant, which was named “Sarang,” or love. The spiciness from the stew melted the coldness from my body.

I wondered if French people have ever known this feeling. Probably not. (Hot Korean stews are popular among Chinese and Japanese diners, not so much among Westerners.) But as I found out, Korean cuisine, or “hansik,” is gaining in popularity — even in the world’s culinary capital.

Gilles Eeckhoudt, a designer who came to enjoy dinner with his friend at the restaurant, said that he loves Korean cuisine because of the wide range of tastes it contains.

“Korean dishes have so many different tastes: sweetness, saltiness and spiciness. Compared to Korean food, Japanese food is too simple in taste and flavor,” he said.

Dominique Torres, another customer at Sarang, said that she feels at home whenever she comes to the restaurant, although she cannot eat authentic hot and spicy Korean delicacies. “The gentle smile and kindness of servers here makes me want to come here again and again,” said the director of a local cosmetic company who likes bibimbap and Korean-style fried dumplings.

According to Jeon Pyeong-hwa, a waitress at the restaurant, over 80 percent of the restaurant’s customers are non-Koreans.

“Many of the restaurant’s French customers are office workers from nearby banks, travel agencies and department stores, but recently we have had an increasing number of college students studying the Korean language as well,” said Jeon, a student of Ecole Ferrandi, one of France’s most prestigious cooking schools. Jeon has been working part time at the restaurant for two-and-a-half years.

She added that two of the most popular items on the menu at Sarang are “bulgogi” ($25) and “bibimbap” ($20). “We serve soy sauce mixed with sesame oil for bibimbap. A bowl of ‘gochujang,’ or hot pepper paste is served alongside the dish for those who don’t mind authentic Korean spiciness.”

Its bulgogi was closer to Gwangyang-style Korean barbeque, for which beef slices are dipped into sauce before being grilled, than Seoul-style bulgogi, which is on the border between barbeque and stew.

French customers here find this version of bulgogi goes with a glass of red wine, as the restaurant also serves some 30 different wines. But the recession is forcing people to be especially thrifty.

“It is not that French people drink wine all the time, for lunch or dinner, as many Koreans imagine. I’ve seen more French customers eating with a glass of water since the global financial crisis began,” said Lim Nam-hi, the owner of the restaurant. “But under any circumstance, they do enjoy food as fully as possible.”

Because average French diners often spend two hours eating, one can hardly expect to be successful in Paris with a high-volume, low margin approach, Lim said.

Interviewees said it is great to see more Korean restaurants catering to the tastes of Parisians, considering what one had to go through to get Korean food in Paris years ago.

Only three years ago, a handful of Korean restaurants were struggling with over-capacity eateries. Making matters worse, food was too expensive. (A bowl of “yukgaejang,” or spicy beef soup, was $26.)

Such situations have improved slightly with increased accessibility to Korean groceries in Paris, and the efforts by Korean restaurant owners to make their business more sustainable — Sarang, for example, serves about 20 entrees.

Consistency

Still, there are other problems hampering further growth of Korean cuisine’s popularity in the city.

“Quite a few French diners at our restaurant have asked me why the same Korean food tastes different at different restaurants,” Bae Sang-heum, the owner/chef of Guibine, another popular Korean restaurant in the area.

Bae, who used to be a manager of an upscale Korean restaurant in Silim-dong, southern Seoul, pointed out that a lack of qualified human resources is a major reason behind low standardization of recipes at Paris’ Korean restaurants.

“There are over 100 Korean restaurants in Paris, but only about 10 hire Korean food experts as chefs,” he continued. “The rest are mostly run by students who have chosen the restaurant business to make some money,” he said.

Encouraged by the success of his 20-year-old restaurant — customers line up by the dozens to get a seat — Bae opened a second restaurant in the southern resort city of Nice a few years ago. But it has been put up for sale, because Bae said he was not able to find the right personnel to manage its food quality.

“I hired two young professional chefs from Seoul, but their food was far from satisfactory. Actually their specialty was Western, not Korean. They told me very few culinary students want to specialize in traditional Korean cuisine,” he continued in a somewhat skeptical tone.

He originally planned to open Korean restaurants in every major French city. Faced with such challenging conditions, however, he has changed his mind and will focus on the Paris restaurant instead.

“Talking about the globalization of Korean food, media and food experts always comment on the status of Chinese and Japanese cuisines,” he said. “But before thinking about the position of Korean food in other countries, we have to think about its position in our own country.

“It is nonsense for us to expect other people would love what we ourselves don’t quite like.” (danlee@heraldm.com)

By Lee Yong-sung /Korea Herald correspondent

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JoongAng Daily

	“Smoking Tiger” by Suh Gong-im was completed in 1997 but is based on old folk depictions. Provided by Lotte Gallery

In the late 19th century, the American missionary William E. Griffis wrote in his book “Corea, the Hermit Nation” that Korean aristocratic ladies carried jewelry and mementoes in a small pouch fastened to their waists. One of these charms was sometimes the claw of a tiger, to deter evil spirits. They believed the ferocious animal had a mysterious power and that even its claw could stop bad luck.

Tigers have long been part of Korean life. The fierce creatures used to live in the wild on the peninsula, but in the 20th century habitat loss and poaching - much of it by Japanese civilians and imperial forces - killed them off. The last wild Korean tiger was seen in the 1940s.

	Left, a Joseon official sits in front of a tiger pelt in an early 20th-century postcard. Right, this statue is part of a zodiac cycle from 2002. Provided by the National Folk Museum of Korea

But before modern times, Koreans were frequently attacked by tigers, records show - lending the creature a fearsome yet powerful cultural aura. Though Korean tigers today can only be seen in the flesh at zoos, they are still alive in many legends, proverbs, tales, folk crafts and paintings. Curators are taking advantage of 2010, the year of the tiger, to show off some of these beautiful depictions.

The oldest documentary record in Korea that mentions the tiger is the history book “Samguk Yusa,” or “Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms,” written by the monk Ilyeon during the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). In the most important myth recorded in the book, a tiger and a bear pray to become human, and the son of the heavenly king says if they live in a cave and eat nothing but garlic and mugwort for 100 days, they will succeed. Only the bear holds out long enough. According to Lee Yong-ju, former professor at the Academy of East Asian Studies at Sungkyunkwan University, the tiger in this story is “a symbol of life and wild nature that refuses to become civilized.”

It was said during the later Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) that tigers too old to catch prey often came down into villages and attacked people. According to “Joseon Wangjo Sillok,” or the “The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty,” hundreds of people died due to tiger attacks in one year in the Gyeongsang provinces. There was even a military unit formed to catch tigers by Joseon.

Gu Mun-hoi, curator of the small exhibition “Tiger: From Myth to Everyday Life” at the National Folk Museum of Korea in Seoul, says, “Tigers were feared so much that people made special tombs for those who were slain by tigers.” The enclosures were meant to prevent the victims’ spirits from being enslaved by tigers after death.

	Left, this stamp was used for talismans in the late Joseon period. Right, this ornament with a talisman in the shape of a tiger claw was used to ward off evil spirits. Provided by the National Folk Museum of Korea

The tiger is the third of the 12 animals that comprise the Chinese zodiac. Its domain is the first month of the lunar calendar, or the hours between 3 and 5 a.m.

The tiger is also a traditional guardian deity. During the Joseon era, village shrines contained paintings depicting mountain gods, often accompanied by tigers, considered divine messengers.

Specifically, 2010 is the year of the white tiger, a creature that has its own mythology attached as one of the guardian gods of the four compass directions, the others being the azure dragon, the vermilion bird and the black tortoise. The white tiger guards the west.

Tigers also appear in the murals on the walls of a tumulus from the ancient Goguryeo period (37 B.C.-668).

“There are always stone statues of white tigers standing in the royal tombs of the Joseon,” Gu said. “The tiger was held as sacred.”

The ferocity of the animal led to a belief that the image of a tiger could fend off evil spirits. The tiger was featured with the falcon in many talismans designed to deter the “three years of misfortune” said to come every nine years.

Beyond the tradition of wealthy females carrying tiger’s talons or accessories shaped like them to fight off evil spirits, during the Joseon period tiger pelts were laid on the roof of bride’s palanquins, children wore tiger-shaped hoods, and tiger patterns were sewn onto pillows.

Tigers are also featured in many folk paintings. In Joseon, during the first 10 days of the first lunar month, one such painting or a piece of paper with the Chinese letter for tiger would be posted on the main gates of both palaces and even the homes of ordinary people.

One genre of folk painting, called jakhodo, features a tiger and one or two magpies. People also hung these on the wall at the beginning of the year. The two animals were depicted together because it was believed tigers fend off evil while magpies invite good luck, although in reality, Gu says, “Tigers would never be seen together with other animals, including magpies, because most would run away,” Gu said.

In these folk paintings, tigers are friendly rather than scary. Some are even smoking tobacco pipes. “Although tigers are vicious creatures, they are portrayed humorously,” said Sung Yun-jean, curator of an exhibit of tiger folk paintings by Suh Gong-im at the Lotte Art Gallery at the Avenuel department store in Seoul.

A contemporary artist, Suh has been replicating and modernizing folk paintings for the last 30 years of her career. She enjoys painting tigers in particular. “Tigers mean a lot to Koreans,” Suh says. “I personally like their tenacity and wanted to imitate their nature.”

In one old Korean fable, a woman’s grandson refuses to stop crying. She warns him, saying a tiger will come if he continues to cry, to no avail. But when she says she will give him a dried persimmon, he stops crying. Meanwhile, a tiger lurking outside hears the whole thing. The tiger thinks, “These ‘dried persimmons’ must be something even scarier than me!” And it runs away.

Tigers have remained popular in modern Korean iconography. The mascots for the 1988 Seoul Olympics were tigers, and they’re often seen in corporate trademarks.

Zoos still offer a chance to see the majestic beasts. The Everland theme park in Yongin, Gyeonggi, has 13 white tigers, the largest number in the country. The theme park opened a white tiger safari last year. Tigers are usually orange with black stripes, but white tigers have a recessive genetic trait for their differing coloration. Most white tigers are Bengal tigers from India, not the Siberian tigers that once inhabited Korea. The Seoul Zoo in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, formerly known as Seoul Grand Park, has 23 Siberian tigers. The Seoul Zoo also has a white tiger born there in 2000. Seoul Children’s Grand Park in Gwangjin District, Seoul, has five Siberian tigers.

By Limb Jae-un [jbiz91@joongang.co.kr]

*The Tiger: From Myth to Everyday Life at the National Folk Museum of Korea continues through March 1. Admission is free. For more information, call (02) 3704-3114 or visit www.nfm.go.kr.

“Folk Tiger Paintings,” Suh Gong-im’s solo exhibition at the Lotte Art Gallery inside the Avenuel Department Store, continues through Jan. 27. For details, call (02) 726-4428 or go to www.avenuel.co.kr.

For details on the Everland Zoo, call (031) 320-5000 or visit www.everland.com. For the Seoul Zoo, call (02) 500-7335 or go to
grandpark.seoul.go.kr. For Seoul Children’s Grand Park call (02) 450-9311 or visit www.sisul.or.kr/sub05/.

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