Caveat: Pet Pop Star

We were in the 4th grade class. We were practicing the following simple dialogue pattern: “Who is he/she?” “He/she is ___. He/she is my ___.” For example: “Who is she?” “She is Mary. She is my sister.”

My co-teacher has put up some possible “people” and some possible “relations”: for the “people,” there were pictures of various famous people or characters the kids were sure to know the names of, including Einstein, Hermione (as in the Harry Potter character), and others; for the “relations,” she provided “aunt” “uncle” “brother” and “sister.”

So there is a 4th grade girl who has the English name of Hannah. The teacher pointed at the picture of 정지훈 (Jeong Ji-hun), a Korean pop star and actor who sings under the pseudonym of “Rain” but also uses his real name for action movies. He’s considered quite handsome in Korea. The girl’s English is excellent – probably the best in the class.

The teacher asked, “Who is he?”

Hannah said, unhesitatingly, “He is Jeong Ji-hun. He is my pet.”

정지훈

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Caveat: Waiting for the secret police

How long until they come knocking on my door. I was online last night, and I was following a trail of articles about North Korea’s soccer team, which is playing in the World Cup in South Africa this year, in the championship for the first time since 1966. We had been talking briefly about it in my 6th grade after-school class yesterday afternoon.

정대세This got me onto the subject of 정대세 (Jeong Dae-se), the North’s star player (see picture). He is, in fact, Korean-Japanese, and has never lived in North Korea (except for recent stints training with the national team). He plays for a pro team in Japan, has done television ads and product sponsorships for South Korean media, and is very publicity-savvy. A fascinating member of the “Chongryon,” which is a weird semi-for-profit pro-North-Korean organization in Japan, that runs everything from businesses to schools to functioning as the North’s de facto embassy to the Western world (since the North has few formalized diplomatic relations). I guess this soccer player grew up attending Chongryon schools.

So I was looking at Chongryon in wikipedialand, and getting all fascinated. And so, curiously, I decided to follow a link to Korea University, which is the Chongryon-run university in Tokyo (hence a training-ground in the North’s official ideology of Juche, among other things. Juche has always fascinated me.

And there, instead of viewing the Korea University website, I was looking at a very scary “police warning” page (in Korean, of course), saying the site was deemed dangerous and banned. Hmm….

One doesn’t run up against the Korean national police firewall very often (at least in my experience). I wonder if they’re going to come looking for me, or open a file in Seoul? Will they come knocking on my door?

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