Looking for Mexican Food in Seoul (or, the Strange Case of Hoover Taco)
By Colin Marshall I, like anyone else who has lived in Los Angeles, hesitated to leave the city for one reason above all others: where would I get decent Mexican food? This might sound like a trivial...
View ArticleWhy Is Korean So Hard?
By Colin Marshall The summer after my freshman year of high school, I took a short computer programming class. Getting up to speed in C, the programming language of the day, looked like a daunting...
View ArticlePaju Book City, the Korean Town All About Reading (and Publishing, Printing,...
By Colin Marshall Twenty to one — you often hear that ratio brought up in discussions of Paju Book City, in which, so the legend has it, twenty books reside for every human being. That exact number has...
View ArticleLiving the Vertical Life in Seoul
By Colin Marshall My friend Darcy Paquet, who preceded me to Korea by almost twenty years and in that time became a famous film critic here, once wrote a piece in the Hankook Ilbo (한국일보) about having...
View ArticleMy Favorite Kind of Korean Podcast: The Book-Reading Show
By Colin Marshall Just before moving to Korea, my girlfriend and I bid farewell to the United States with two road trips, one north from Los Angeles up past the border to Vancouver and back, and...
View ArticleCoffee Life in Korea
By Colin Marshall When last I lived in Los Angeles, I met a Korean friend for coffee every week. After a few months of doing so, I noticed that she always, without exception, ordered an Americano, so...
View ArticleMulticultural Love and Its Discontents
By Colin Marshall I watch television here in Seoul, but I watched even more Korean television back when I lived in Los Angeles. My girlfriend and I got satellite TV installed especially for the small...
View Article‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’: a Vivid Crowdsourced Portrait of an Unromanticized City
By Colin Marshall Even the least well-traveled Americans have a mental image — no matter how fantastical, outdated, or simply inaccurate — of cities like London, Paris, or Tokyo. But bring up Seoul,...
View ArticleWays of Seeing Korean Plastic Surgery
By Colin Marshall The first morning of my first visit to Seoul, I went out looking for coffee and came back with a stereotype seemingly confirmed beyond all expectations. After I found the nearest...
View ArticleFinding Korea in Osaka
By Colin Marshall My friend Nick Currie, the musician, artist, and writer best known as Momus, has enjoyed a variety of roles in his career, most recently that of the Japan Times‘s Unreliable Food...
View ArticleThe Adventures of Percival Lowell, Famed Astronomer and Early Writer on Korea
By Colin Marshall Just before moving to Korea, I took a road trip across America, from southern California to North Carolina. An early overnight stop came in Flagstaff, Arizona, a city overlooked by...
View ArticleAn Ajeossi and His Robot (or, How Korean Film Dramatizes Disaster)
By Colin Marshall “Even better if you see it as a family,” exclaimed the ads for a movie that opened a couple weeks ago here in Seoul and has now made it to Los Angeles. The posters showed a...
View ArticleAmong the Korea Vloggers
By Colin Marshall A few weeks before moving from Los Angeles to Seoul, I went to a show at the Downtown Independent put on by Eat Your Kimchi. The word “show” doesn’t quite capture the nature of the...
View ArticleA Korean Literary Superstar Tells His Countrymen Why to Read
By Colin Marshall When I started reading Korean novels seriously, I started reading Kim Young-ha — going on, in fact, to produce a profile of his work right here in the LARB. The world of modern...
View ArticleHow Has Korea Become a “Silent Cultural Superpower”? The BBC Sends a...
By Colin Marshall “I’ve been to China and I’ve been to Japan,” says Rana Mitter at the beginning of his BBC Radio 3 documentary South Korea: The Silent Cultural Superpower, “but I’ve never got off at...
View ArticleBetween Boring Heaven and Exciting Hell: Kim Soo-yong’s ‘Night Journey’
By Colin Marshall This is the first in a series of essays on the important pieces of Korean cinema freely available on the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel. You can watch it here. By day, Miss...
View ArticleSex, Surreality, and Social Conformity: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian Sprouts...
By Colin Marshall Friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances often ask me if they should make a trip to South Korea, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to all of them — all of them except, perhaps,...
View ArticleThe Real Life of Seoul, as Seen by Street Photographer Michael Hurt
By Colin Marshall How do you convince someone to spend their limited travel time and money in Seoul? The officials tasked with promoting South Korea abroad have racked their brains over that very...
View ArticleLearning from the Korean City
By Colin Marshall Few books have changed the way I see cities Eastern or Western as much as Barrie Shelton’s Learning from the Japanese City. Were I an urban-planning academic, I’d want to write its...
View ArticleWe All Had a Hard Time Back Then: Lee Seung-U’s ‘The Private Lives of Plants’
By Colin Marshall This is the first in a series of posts on the Library of Korean Literature, a series of modern novels and books of short stories in English translation published by Dalkey Archive...
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