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Asia

Entertainment & Arts

Qatar 2022

SCMP
Asia

Opinion

Columnists

Jason Lim

World Cup and affiliations

Being a Tottenham and Son Heung-min fan (who isn't), I found the scene of Son embracing his English Premier League teammate from Uruguay, Rodrigo Bentancur, before their World Cup match familiar but interesting. Son is well-known for being a team player and having warm relationships with his teammates. However, no one bats an eye when a player recalibrates his allegiance and does his best to beat his teammate who is now on the opposite side of the turf.

2022-11-27 15:13

Korean Weltschmerz

It was the mid-1990s. It was the first time that I ever went to Korea by myself. It was right after college graduation, and I hadn't been back to Korea since I had left when I was nine years old. Since my family didn't go to church, I hadn't even had a lot of contact with Korean Americans while growing up. But there is something akin to a pilgrimage for a Korean American in wanting to visit Korea as an adult - a desire to validate some part of the identity, an unexplained hollowness that yearns to be filled. Looking back, this is probably pretty common for someone who has lived his entire li...

2022-11-13 14:03

Deadly crowd crush in Itaewon

As I write this, the body count keeps going up. It's now 154 people confirmed killed and 133 injured in Itaewon where tens of thousands of young revelers showed up to party on the last Saturday before Halloween. Exact details of what happened are still weeks away, but the rough story is no mystery. Too many people showed up to party in too small a space. There was no crowd control. People were hemmed in, pushed, crushed, and suffocated from the weight of the unthinking crowd that got jammed in at the first bottleneck or fall.

2022-10-30 15:52

Korea and Kakao: '503 service temporarily unavailable'

My elderly parents moved into an apartment condo in New Jersey a few years ago when they found that they couldn't upkeep a single-family house any longer due to increasing frailty. Before they moved in, they had some renovations done to their kitchen and bathrooms to make them modern, clean and stylish. Recently, however, they started smelling a foul odor coming from their bathrooms. Despite multiple tries, they couldn't diagnose the source of the problem. In short, while the outside of the apartment looked spic and span, the underlying infrastructure was shoddy.

2022-10-16 14:41

Everything everywhere all at once

It seems as if everything is going to hell all at once. You have the Russia-Ukraine war, with the always constant threat of a catastrophic nuclear exchange just below the horizon. You have Iranian women and young people violently pushing back against the suffocating rule of a fundamentalist theocracy. You have the Chinese being locked up in their own houses for months at a time, often not able to provide for their basic necessities, at the mercy of a central government hellbent on an unrealistic “zero COVID” policy. In the same country, you have the ongoing suppression and destruction of the...

2022-10-02 15:06

I look at myself but I can't see me

A few years ago, my little boy and I were talking over dinner about how our respective days went. He was trying to narrate a story and was differentiating himself from the other kids in his class. He used a word that I never forgot. He said, “Not me, that was for the real American kids.” I feebly protested, “But you are a real American, too.” He nodded, somewhat impatiently. “I know, but you know.” And I did.

2022-09-04 15:37

We are all toxic

When I first landed in Queens, New York City, as a 12-year-old immigrant, the only time I saw the word, “toxic,” was on a warning label affixed to a drain opener plastic container in a supermarket. In a similar vein, the imagery that I associated with “toxic” was the skull and crossbones icon used to denote something as poisonous. In a word, “toxic” was something that was serious, lethal and rare. Moreover, things were toxic, not humans.

2022-08-21 14:13

Brain freeze in two languages

I was born and raised in Seoul until I was nine years old. Then we emigrated to Asuncion, Paraguay and spent about two-and-a-half years there before landing in New York City where I grew into young adulthood. So, that means that I was immersed in three different languages in the first twenty years of my life with little exposure to the other languages when submerged in the culture of the dominant language. Naturally, I have been fascinated by how different languages play within my own brain.

2022-08-07 16:31

North Korean fishermen or murderers?

The first legitimate political bombshell of the new Yoon administration is here. It's about the forced repatriation of the two North Korean squid fishermen who confessed to killing 16 of their fellow crew members after being captured by the South Korean Navy in November 2019. After a three-day investigation by South Korean authorities, the two North Korean men were sent back to North Korea for having committed “heinous crimes.”

2022-07-24 15:21

In his Friday article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Shinzo Abe Shooting Recalls Japan's Prewar History of Political Violence,” Peter Landers writes, “The shooting recalls Japan's turbulent pre-World War II era, when assassinations occurred more frequently and were used as a political tool.

2022-07-10 16:54

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