I first met Geri in Seoul in 2006 when she was the ASACS (Adolescent Support and Counseling Services) counselor at Seoul American High School on the Army Base, USAG-Yongsan, and I was teaching at Dongguk, the Korean Buddhist University. Since then, she and her husband Christopher have moved from Okinawa, where she was a Behavioral Health Counselor for the Marines at Camp Foster, to Gulf Breeze, Florida in retirement with yearly visits to their property in Teos, Turkey. Currently, they are living in Florida, south of Pensacola in a beautiful spot on an estuary. Geri said she didn’t know … Read More
Category: Korea
Expat Cats –Part 1, Korea
When I moved to South Korea in 1988, the country was recovering from the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. In a week it would host its great coming-out party, the Seoul Olympics, which despite being well organized would be temporarily mired in controversy, with the national inferiority complex exposed.
My first impression of Seoul was that it was as militaristic, as nationalistic, as drab and as prudish as post-revolutionary China could be. and far more misogynistic. Pro-democracy student demonstrators battled with riot police, although it was clear from their own organizations that they didn’t know what democracy meant. … Read More
Hungary, or ESL after Korea
Five years ago, Steve and I had an interview about his early days in the Peace Corps, starting in 1973, and his then current gig at Yeungnam University near Daegu, where he taught from 2012-2017. We called it “Korea Forty Years Later (Link)
In this recent interview he talks about this past year he and his wife Marsha spent teaching in Hungary, which he sees as a possibility for other teachers after they leave Korea.
Steve’s story
How was it teaching English in Hungary? When did you go and what was your experience?
My wife and I arrived … Read More
Author Interview: Human Rights Violations in North Korea, Part 3
Recently, Dr. Sandra Fahy and I had three interviews about her second book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record. Our first interview deals with four categories of human rights abuses (Link), our second with the history of the development of the DPRK police state (Link), and this final one with the international dimensions of rights violations: overseas workers, treatment of foreign nationals and state representatives and rhetoric. Her first book was based on her interviews with North Korean famine refugees. (Link)
We spoke over Skype when Sandra … Read More
Author Interview: Human Rights Violations in North Korea, Part 2
Dr. Sandra Fahy holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of London and is now teaching at Sophia University in Tokyo. In our first interview she discussed the North Korean famine of the 1990s, the subject of her first book. (Link) Recently we talked about various human rights abuses treated in her second, forthcoming book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Link) Here she provides a historical context for the development of the DPRK police state.
We spoke over Skype while Sandra was in Japan and I was in … Read More
