Korea Culture

The first time I experienced a Korean spa, I was a youngster, visiting my grandparents in Taegu, South Korea. The shallowness of the oval tub reminded me of our local kiddie pool, except everyone was female, not a bathing suit was in sight and there wasn't an ice cream stand. In recent months, I have started visiting the mogyoktang , or Korean spa, in Los Angeles' Koreatown. Korean is the preferred language at the spa, but I don't speak it, despite my Korean roots.

The first time I experienced a Korean spa, I was a youngster, visiting my grandparents in Taegu, South Korea. The shallowness of the oval tub reminded me of our local kiddie pool, except everyone was female, not a bathing suit was in sight and there wasn't an ice cream stand. In recent months, I have started visiting the mogyoktang , or Korean spa, in Los Angeles' Koreatown. Korean is the preferred language at the spa, but I don't speak it, despite my Korean roots.

Six-hour traffic jams, nine-hour lines, five-deep crowds at crap tables and a mad dash for slot machines. Gambling fever has hit South Korea in a big way with the arrival of the nation's first casino for locals. "This is phenomenal, unbelievable," said Lee In Sung, manager of the new Kangwon Land Casino Hotel, which opened Oct. 29 here in Kangwon province. "I'm just delighted. We're breaking every record in the book."

To any Korean worth his salt, life without kimchi--the spicy pickled vegetables that appear at every Korean meal--is unthinkable. "Like marriage without sex," says Tong S. Suhr, a Los Angeles attorney and Koreatown gourmet whose love affair with kimchi spans more than six decades. "You just have to have it." Kimchi, unique to the Korean peninsula, has been around for centuries.

Ever the proper businesswoman, Yuka Sakamoto is poised for that moment late in the night when the bankers and international trade executives who are her regular customers fish into their pockets for business cards. Dutifully, Sakamoto produces her own: "Yuka Sakamoto--Mama." It is the appropriate job description for her line of work.

To any Korean worth his salt, life without kimchi--the spicy pickled vegetables that appear at every Korean meal--is unthinkable. "Like marriage without sex," says Tong S. Suhr, a Los Angeles attorney and Koreatown gourmet whose love affair with kimchi spans more than six decades. "You just have to have it." Kimchi, unique to the Korean peninsula, has been around for centuries.

Ask any Korean-American who has ever visited here, and you will learn that Koreans have definite ideas of how Korean-Americans should live, what they owe to their mother country and--if they have any doubts on the subject--who they really are. "You're Korean; you should learn to speak Korean," cabdrivers here often admonish Korean-American visitors.

Carnival lights twinkled, meat sizzled and dancers twirled Friday as the 1991 Korean Festival of Orange County kicked off for the weekend in what is now the third-largest Korean commercial district in the nation. In fact, the festival itself--held on Garden Grove Boulevard in a shopping complex between Brookhurst and Gilbert streets--has helped to attract more than 1,000 Korean-owned businesses to the boulevard, organizers said.

Beginning this fall, a yearlong festival of Korean culture will bring to Los Angeles and six other U.S. cities an array of major artworks, performing companies, film series and family programs, representatives of the Asia Society announced Friday at a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel. Planned as the largest sampling of Korean culture ever presented in the United States, the Festival of Korea will kick off in New York City the week of Sept.

On a recent warm afternoon, members of Hae Kyung Lee & Dancers splashed through the waterfall at downtown's California Plaza--for a reason. They were rehearsing for Saturday's performance of "Ancient Mariners." The troupe will incorporate the fountains of the plaza into the performance, which will include a full-sized boat, 300 floating balloons and fish. "Mariners" is billed as a meditation on the powers of water to transform one's life.

Six-hour traffic jams, nine-hour lines, five-deep crowds at crap tables and a mad dash for slot machines. Gambling fever has hit South Korea in a big way with the arrival of the nation's first casino for locals. "This is phenomenal, unbelievable," said Lee In Sung, manager of the new Kangwon Land Casino Hotel, which opened Oct. 29 here in Kangwon province. "I'm just delighted. We're breaking every record in the book."

On a recent warm afternoon, members of Hae Kyung Lee & Dancers splashed through the waterfall at downtown's California Plaza--for a reason. They were rehearsing for Saturday's performance of "Ancient Mariners." The troupe will incorporate the fountains of the plaza into the performance, which will include a full-sized boat, 300 floating balloons and fish. "Mariners" is billed as a meditation on the powers of water to transform one's life.

To Zbigniew Dabek, 45, a Polish auto worker, globalization means learning not only to make Korean cars but also to eat fiery kimchi with chopsticks. He will pass on the half-cooked octopus. And his lip could not but curl when asked about the vivisected, still-wriggling fish dish. "But I like very much this kimchi," said the diplomatic Pole of the spicy pickled cabbage that is Korea's culinary passion.

Ji-Hye Kim sits scrunched on the floor of the packed auditorium in Koreatown, listening intently as Harvard Law School graduate Simon Lee gives pointers on how to succeed in college. Her son, Jason, is only a seventh-grader. But already she is preparing him--for Harvard. Jason, an honor student who plays the cello and reads Chinese for fun, recently completed Lee's seven-week course on study habits in anticipation of a long academic journey. Now, it's his mother's turn.

Suzanne Buchanan is a newcomer to the world of cross-cultural adoptions. She and her husband adopted a Korean baby only last spring. With James Hyun Soo Buchanan about to turn 1, the couple wanted to celebrate their son's birthday with some of the customs of his homeland. So on Saturday, the Buchanan family joined the hundreds of guests jammed into the Bethel Korean Church in Irvine for a dose of Korean tradition tailored for Americans who have adopted Korean children.

Imagine the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Kent State student slayings, the McCarthy hearings and a couple of major business scandals all rolled into one and you begin to get a sense of the political convulsions shaking South Korea.

When state game wardens raided Ki Won Kim's K.S. Trading Co. in Rowland Heights recently, they called his business "the most sophisticated case of wildlife commercialization in animal parts uncovered in Southern California." Officials carted away packages of sliced elk, deer antlers, animal horns, canned and pickled rattlesnakes, frozen goat meat, bottled snakes cured in vodka and bear gallbladders, skins and paws.

Suzanne Buchanan is a newcomer to the world of cross-cultural adoptions. She and her husband adopted a Korean baby only last spring. With James Hyun Soo Buchanan about to turn 1, the couple wanted to celebrate their son's birthday with some of the customs of his homeland. So on Saturday, the Buchanan family joined the hundreds of guests jammed into the Bethel Korean Church in Irvine for a dose of Korean tradition tailored for Americans who have adopted Korean children.

Jang Song Hyon is a master at swimming the treacherous seas of South Korean corruption. The business consultant knows that a $100 "transportation expense" to journalists will buy goodwill; a 10% "commission" to doctors will help sales of his firm's pharmaceutical products. He once paid a ministry official about $7,000 for a legal interpretation favorable to his U.S. client, although he generally counsels Americans to offer "scholarships" or gifts of office equipment instead to avoid violating U.

Oh Chol Hwang beholds the handcuffs and fetters, the clubs and swords, the gruesome wax dolls depicting Japanese military police torture techniques and declares himself a witness to history. "All these things I saw here today, I experienced myself," says Oh, 79, as he recalls life under Japan's 35-year colonial subjugation during a recent visit to South Korea's Independence Museum southwest of Seoul. "No matter how much the Japanese try to deny it, they can't erase the memories of Koreans."